288 Chapter XII
the empire; but they were not numerous enough, nor did they enjoy popular ac-
ceptance. There was a general repugnance toward men sent out from the capital. “It
is inconceivable,” said the estates of Lower Austria, “how such important matters
[as agrarian reform] could be taken from the gentry [the Adelsherren] and turned
over to a district chief who does not understand the local situation.”
Many of the officials were nobles, if only because there were not enough univer-
sity graduates or other trained persons from the middle class for the purpose.
Nobly born officials often disapproved or sabotaged the imperial orders. In Hun-
gary they resigned in droves. Joseph tried exchange of officials throughout the
empire, sending Germans to Hungary, or Hungarians to Bohemia, or the Italian
Martini to Belgium. He also created a political police, to watch over opposition
and make confidential reports on the work of officials. Indeed, police work of this
kind, in its modern form, seems to have begun with Joseph’s attempted revolution.
The word “police,” at this time, it may be said, still retaining connotations of “pol-
ish,” referred to the promotion of civil order in the sense of civilization itself.
Joseph also decided that, outside Belgium and Lombardy, there should be only
one language for official business, and that this should be German. Educated
Czechs already used German, and the Magyars used not Magyar but Latin as their
political language, so that the decision to employ German was less of an outrage
than later nationalist writers have sometimes made it seem; but as a sign of un-
wanted centralization, with connotations of German superiority, it aroused a good
deal of opposition, and in fact the Czech and Magyar renaissances of the following
generation were part of the reaction against Joseph II.
Lombardy was affected by Joseph’s reign only in certain ways. There was no
nobility with seigneurial powers, and no serfdom, so that the most fundamental
difficulties did not arise. The Italians took their Catholicism more lightly than the
Belgians, with ecclesiastics less potent and Jansenists more numerous than in Bra-
bant; so that the Emperor’s church policies caused no excessive consternation.
Nevertheless, the reign of Joseph followed the same pattern in Lombardy as else-
where. Attempts at reform in taxation, fiscal and economic matters, and legal and
judicial organization ran up against the usual resistance, in this case that of urban
magistracies and patriciates. It has been observed in Chapter IV, for example, that
although Beccaria had written in Milan a famous book against torture, and the
city was full of liberal thinkers, and although Maria Theresa had ended judicial
torture in her German- Bohemian states, torture could not be ended in Milan be-
cause the Milanese magistrates believed it necessary to public security.^8 Joseph,
here as elsewhere, ended up by crushing the local constituted bodies. He began to
replace them with new courts and a new and more modern administrative system,
manned by his own appointees and taking instructions from Vienna. His revolu-
tion reached its high point, in Lombardy, with the suppression, in 1786, of the
Council of Sixty and of the Senate, the chief indigenous bodies of the city and the
duchy respectively.
The reign of Joseph II thus presented for the whole empire the same dilemma as
in Belgium: reform with despotism, or constitutional liberty with firm resistance to
8 Above, p. 79.