The Political Evolution of the Old Regime, 1715–89 361grief: In a world of arranged, loveless marriages Maria
Theresa had been deeply attached to Francis. The
young, exuberant empress who had loved theatricals
and dances became a solemn, withdrawn, and increas-
ingly religious figure who gave more and more of the
government to trusted nobles such as Count Kaunitz.
The Habsburg Monarchy and the Enlightened
Despotism of Joseph II
Solving the postwar financial problems of the 1760s led
Maria Theresa into conflict with the aristocracy. In
1764 she tried to force the Hungarians to carry a fairer
share of imperial taxes, but the Hungarian Diet blocked
her plans. Resistance to tax reform led Maria Theresa in
a surprising direction—toward the emancipation of the
peasantry from the bondage of serfdom. Maria
Theresa’s most influential adviser in the emancipation
of the serfs was her son, Joseph, whose reign in Austria
would later provide the best illustration of enlightened
despotism in eighteenth-century European monarchism
(see illustration 19.4).
Joseph was Maria Theresa’s first son, born most in-
conveniently in 1741 when his mother was confronted
with the War of the Austrian Succession. His mother
ordered that he not be given a rigorous, military educa-
tion, and Joseph consequently acquired many of his
ideas from reading the philosophes, not from strict tu-
tors. Joseph came to see himself as the embodiment of
the Enlightenment, the person who could link reason
with absolute powers. When his father died in 1765,
Joseph became the Holy Roman Emperor and coregent
with his mother in Austria. Maria Theresa shared some
of her son’s reformist ideas but tried to keep tight con-
trol of him and his friends, whom she called the Aufk-
lärungs(Enlightenment) Party. After her death in 1780,
Joseph could enthusiastically write, “I have made phi-
losophy the legislator of my empire,” but the same was
not true of Maria Theresa. She had learned to rule in
tough circumstances, and her policies often showed
this. She believed in the use of torture, she was a brutal
anti-Semite who launched a pogrom to drive all Jews
out of Bohemia, and she often betrayed a startling in-
sensitivity to the life of a peasant nation. But her stern,
and sometimes cruel, policies created the stable, cen-
tralized government with a well-regulated army and
well-balanced treasury that would make the enlight-
ened policies of her son possible.
The mixed personalities of mother and son
launched enlightened despotism in Austria with a com-
promise version of emancipation of the serfs. Years of
famine and periodic peasant rebellion had shown that
the serfs needed relief. Joseph urged his mother to act,
and Maria Theresa accepted his arguments, writing,
“The lords fleece the peasants dreadfully.... We know,
and we have proof of the tyrannical oppression under
which the poor people suffer.” Maria Theresa hesitated
to act against the interests of the great landowners, but
the tax-resistance of the Hungarian nobles angered her
enough to proceed. The emancipation of the peasantry
in the Habsburg Empire began with an imperial decree
of 1767 named the Urbarium.This gave Hungarian peas-
ants a leasehold on the soil that they worked and the
legal freedom to leave the land without the permission
of the local lord. It did not, however, abolish the robot,
the compulsory labor tax that peasants owed to lords.
During the 1770s, mother and son slowly extended this
emancipation. Peasant obligations were separately re-
duced in Austrian Silesia (1771), then in lower Austria
(1772), Bohemia and Moravia (1775), and StyriaIllustration 19.4
Enlightened Despotism in Austria.
Joseph II, championed reform in Austria
for twenty-five years. In this illustration
(one of many versions of this theme)
Joseph teaches modern agricultural
techniques to peasants.