282 Chapter XII
The name of Joseph II, “the revolutionary Emperor,” has become a byword for
colossal failure. He was not inexperienced in affairs, having been coruler with his
mother for fifteen years before her death; nor did he labor quite alone, for many
devoted public servants, of all the Hapsburg nationalities, worked with him for the
modernization of the empire. They were and are called Freemasons and Jansenists,
but this is only to say that many believers in the Enlightenment joined Masonic
lodges, and that “Jansenists” were Catholics who thought the church too wealthy,
too much estranged from the true Christian religion, and too much dominated by
Rome. Joseph disliked the French philosophes and the philosopher king, Frederick
of Prussia, regarding them as smart- aleck littérateurs, but he was a philosopher
himself in the sense then current, a philosopher in a position of power, the very
type of the enlightened and educable prince to whom reformers looked to put
through legislation that they wanted. He was also a democrat in a way, “a democrat
from head to foot,” as his biographer puts it,^2 in the sense that he had no respect
for the established aristocracy whatsoever. He even had religious feelings, along
somewhat modern lines of social concern. A child’s parents give him only his body,
he once said; his mind and soul he draws from God alone, and the development of
this mind and soul depends on environment. A profound humanitarian, Joseph II
believed that his various peoples could be helped by government action. He hated
the past, the organized nobility, and the organized church as mere impediments in
the way of reforms which without them would be easy.
He had the outlook of the true revolutionary, far more so than most of the
democratic radicals so far considered in this book. He thought in terms of society
as a whole: there was a right form of society, knowable to science or reason, and
which the course of history was to bring about. The state—a just, strong, efficient,
and modern state, operated by men who knew what was right—was the instru-
ment to be used for social change. It would reorder society itself, emancipate the
small man from dependence on the great, enrich, educate, enlighten, and elevate
the people. To try to govern by agreement was a delusion, to seek acceptance of
policies in advance was a waste of time, for most people did not know what they
really wanted, and those who did wanted selfish ends. Joseph was a good deal like
Robespierre, cold in personal relations yet with a genuine sympathy for what com-
mon people had to endure, inflexible in his principles, and distrustful and suspi-
cious, easily ascribing the worst motives to those who opposed him. He saw no
need to compromise with those whom he regarded as merely selfish, backward, or
wrong- headed. And he saw no need to wait. He had waited long enough, he would
say; and his views were indeed the product of experience as well as of temperament
and enlightened philosophy. For fifteen years, as coruler, he had watched his moth-
er’s tactics of compromise. She had said that she “got to know people” from the
Hungarian diet of 1764, and Joseph, when he became sole ruler in 1780, at last free
from his mother, had formed a low opinion of the uppermost classes of his
empire.
A quick review of his decrees (most of them too short- lived to be called re-
forms) may begin with the struggle for the mind, which involved a contest with
2 Mitrofanov, 582.