284 Chapter XII
The pope, dismayed, and fearing a complete schism, made a trip to Vienna. He
obtained next to nothing from Joseph, and Prince Kaunitz greeted the Holy Fa-
ther with no more than a civil handshake. The clergy itself, in the various Haps-
burg dominions, with the exception of Belgium, offered little effective resistance.
They had long been used to a certain subordination to the dynasty, and it was
characteristic, in most Catholic countries before the French Revolution, for Cath-
olic clergy to shy away from any exercise of authority on the part of Rome.
The Emperor also attacked the nobility, from a combination of humanitarian,
military, and fiscal motives. In the elegant Vienna of Mozart, he subjected noble-
men convicted of crimes to the same humiliating penalties that were inflicted on
lesser people. He gave free rein to burghers in his civil service, and he put Jews in
the army, and even made a few of them into nobles, as indeed his mother had
done.
“Feudalism” was more a reality in Eastern than in Western Europe, for the ordi-
nary country person was legally the subject of his lord rather than of the Emperor.
“Subjection” or “hereditary subjection,” Untertänigkeit or Erbuntertänigkeit, were
the accepted legal terms for the relation of lord and peasant, the more extreme
word for serfdom, Leibeigenschaft or “body property,” being usually avoided. The
agrarian regime bore a resemblance to the system in parts of America. The land-
owner, in return for granting precarious and often revocable tenures, might receive
payments in cash or kind, but he might also, as on American plantations, receive
uncompensated and compulsory labor from his “subjects.” He adjudicated disputes
with them in his own court, which was usually a sitting room in his own house; he
exercised police powers over them, and decided which of the young men should be
taken from agricultural labor and taught skilled trades and crafts. None of his
people might leave except with the lord’s permission; if they left, they could be le-
gally apprehended as fugitives. Nor could they marry off the premises without the
lord’s consent. Free neither to move nor to change occupation, they remained a
labor force that went with the land itself. The landed property or dominion carried
with it a local government over the local inhabitants. Great landowners with many
estates, such as the magnates in Hungary or the higher nobility in Bohemia, thus
enjoyed little subordinate monarchies of their own.
Joseph’s aim, in effect, in his agrarian program, though radical, was far from
Utopian; it was to convert the peasantry of his empire to the status of the peas-
antry in France or Western Germany before the French Revolution. Or, at least,
the condition of the most fortunate West European peasant was his model. The
peasant was to be a direct subject of the crown, something of a “citizen,” an eco-
nomic enterpriser, a taxpayer, and a potential soldier in his own right. While still
having a “lord,” he would pay what he owed to this lord not in forced labor but in
money; and he would enjoy secure tenure of a piece of land, a tenure which could
be inherited, sold, or mortgaged, and which would give ownership of the crop, in
such a way as to approach private property in the modern sense. There is no doubt
that this was what many peasants in the Hapsburg empire wanted for themselves.
When in 1786 an agrarian revolt broke out on the Moravian border against Prince
Liechtenstein, the rebels announced that they wished to be the emperor’s not the
prince’s subjects. And such a development filled the landed nobility with alarm.