Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

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  On the night of the 19th to the 20th of February 1790, Joseph II slept for a few hours, helped along by painkillers. At five in the morning he woke and asked for his confessor. Five minutes later he was dead, just shy of forty-nine years old. He was Holy Roman Emperor from the 18th of August 1765, and sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy from the 29th of November 1780 until that final morning. In his last years he had issued over 6,000 edicts and 11,000 new laws, each meant to reorder some corner of his empire. He wanted, in his own phrasing, to make his people happy, but strictly by his own criteria. So why did so many of his subjects come to loathe him? How did a man ranked beside Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great end up isolated, defied, and forced to undo his own work before he could die? And why do letters he never wrote still shape how the world remembers him?

• 2. A Son Of Maria Theresa

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  At two in the morning on Monday the 13th of March 1741, in Vienna's Hofburg, the principal house of the Habsburg dynasty, Joseph was born. The following day a child named Joseph Benedict Augustus Johann Anton Michael Adam was baptized by the papal nuncio, assisted by no fewer than sixteen other prelates. His godfathers were Pope Benedict XIV and Augustus III of Poland, both represented by delegates. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I, and he had fifteen siblings, six of whom died before adolescence.

  Maria Theresa selected a careful slate of teachers for her heir, among them Pater Anton von Weger and Karl Joseph Batthyany, who served as Joseph's Hofmeister. Johann Wilhelm Holler Franz and Bernhard Weickhart handled Latin and the classics, grounding him in historical and philosophical texts. A Frenchman, Jean Brequin, taught him mathematics, while State Secretary Christoph von Bartenstein led a heavy course of history.

  His siblings tied him to the courts of Europe. He was the brother of Marie Antoinette, of Leopold II, of Maria Carolina of Austria, and of Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma. Because his father came from the House of Lorraine, Joseph was the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the combined Houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine.

• 3. Two Marriages

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  In 1760, when Joseph was nineteen, he was handed his first wife, Isabella of Parma. The match grew out of the Diplomatic Revolution, the Austro-French Alliance of 1756, brokered by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, and the Austrian chancellor Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. Louis XV had proposed that his granddaughter Isabella marry the Austrian heir to bind a Habsburg-Bourbon alliance. Joseph, who admired Isabella's portrait before meeting her, was thrilled, and the wedding was lavishly celebrated in June 1760, with the service led by the papal legate Borromeo at the Augustinian church.

  Isabella, well educated, dreaded pregnancy and an early death, a fear rooted in losing her own mother young. She suffered depression during pregnancy, and though Joseph tried to comfort her, she preferred the company of his sister Marie Christine of Austria. In 1763 she caught smallpox and went into premature labor. The child, Archduchess Maria Christina, was born on the 22nd of November 1763 and died shortly after. Isabella died soon afterward, leaving Joseph reluctant to remarry.

  Under constant pressure, in 1765 he relented and married his second cousin, Princess Maria Josepha of Bavaria, daughter of Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor. Maria Josepha loved him, but felt timid and inferior in his presence, and he confessed he felt no love or attraction for her. He avoided her almost entirely, seeing her only at meals and at bedtime. She died of smallpox in 1766; Joseph neither visited her sickbed nor attended her funeral, though he later regretted his coldness. He never married again. The union did carry one prize, a possible claim to part of Bavaria, a claim that would later drag him into the War of the Bavarian Succession.

• 4. Sharing A Throne

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  Maria Theresa made Joseph co-regent from 1765 because she felt she could no longer run the government alone. The arrangement was tightly leashed. He held real authority only in the army, the treasury, and court administration, and even there his mother had the final say on every significant question. Aware of her temper, he avoided pressing the little military influence he had and deferred to her constantly. As the nominal head of the venerable but inert Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, his imperial title carried little true power.

  He turned first to the monarchy's finances, which were notoriously inefficient and burdened by a sprawling court, a vast bureaucracy, and a large standing army. The accounts were a patchwork of regional ledgers with no standard method. Joseph pushed for systematic bookkeeping and regular reports, cut the size and cost of the imperial household, trimmed officials and servants, and curbed the lavish ceremonies that had marked his father's reign. He argued that the monarchy should serve the state, not the reverse.

  He also pressed against the Church. When Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Society of Jesus in 1773, the Habsburg monarchy moved quickly to enforce the papal brief, with Joseph's strong encouragement, since he saw the Jesuits as a barrier to reform in education. The same years brought the 1774 General School Ordinance, the Allgemeine Schulordnung, which set up a standardized, state-controlled school system. In 1772 Joseph helped negotiate the integration of Galicia into the monarchy in the First Partition of Poland.

  The men who met him took his measure. Frederick II of Prussia, after their first interview in 1769, called him ambitious and capable of setting the world on fire. The French minister Vergennes, meeting him incognito in 1777, judged him ambitious and despotic. Joseph met Frederick privately at Neisse in 1769 and again at Mahrisch-Neustadt in 1770, where Kaunitz's conversation with Frederick marked the starting point of the First Partition of Poland.

• 5. The Potato War

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  In December 1777 the sudden death of Maximilian Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, opened the succession Joseph had long coveted. Bavaria, or even a slice of it, would bridge the gap between Bohemia and the southern Austrian provinces, and colorable claims could be made to the empty inheritance. His disastrous second marriage had been arranged largely to secure exactly this. When Austria moved to occupy parts of Bavaria, Frederick the Great, fearing a shift in the balance of power, mobilized his army.

  Maria Theresa was cautious and deeply opposed to a major conflict, but Joseph pressed for territory and personally led the negotiations and military planning. When war broke out in 1778, he took field command and joined the troops in Bohemia. The campaign sank into maneuver and attrition with little real fighting, earning the nickname the Potato War, since both armies spent more time securing supplies than fighting. Joseph's logistical limits showed, and his hopes for a swift, glorious conquest faded.

  Behind the scenes, Maria Theresa kept up secret correspondence with Frederick and sought a way out, helped by the mediation of France and Russia. Their efforts prevailed in the Treaty of Teschen in 1779, which handed Austria only a narrow strip of land, the Innviertel, and forced Joseph to drop his larger Bavarian ambitions. Six years later, in 1785, he tried again, hoping to trade the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, only to provoke the Furstenbund, a league of German princes organized by Frederick.

• 6. Edicts Without End

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  After Maria Theresa died on the 29th of November 1780, Joseph was finally free, and he poured out edicts and laws by the thousand to regulate every aspect of the empire. He built a centralized, uniform government as a hierarchy beneath himself as supreme autocrat, staffing it by merit rather than class or ethnic origin. To force uniformity, he made German the compulsory language of official business, ordering in 1784 that instruction switch from Latin to German, a step that struck hardest in the Kingdom of Hungary, whose Diet was stripped of its prerogatives and never even summoned. Count Karl von Zinzendorf, his privy finance minister, introduced a uniform system of accounting for the crown's revenues, expenditures, and debts.

  His legal program ran far beyond tweaking punishments. He kept the Oberste Justizstelle as the supreme court, independent and answerable only to him, cut the number of lower courts, capped appellate courts at six, and required all judges to hold university legal training. He abolished noble privilege in court and insisted on equality before the law. In a confidential directive of August 1783, he ruled that the death penalty would remain on the books but in practice be commuted to imprisonment, believing harsh prison conditions deterred crime more than execution. In January 1787 the new General Code of Crimes and Punishments, the Allgemeines Gesetzbuch uber Verbrechen und deren Bestrafung, appeared, effectively abolishing the death penalty while making imprisonment deliberately miserable.

  He redefined marriage as a civil contract, allowed divorce for non-Catholic couples under certain conditions, and granted sons and daughters equal inheritance rights. Elementary education became compulsory for all boys and girls, with scholarships created for talented poor students and schools permitted for Jews and other minorities. He abolished serfdom in 1781 and freed serfs, though the change did not survive his death.

  His drive to centralize medicine produced the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the great Vienna hospital that opened in 1784. The concentration backfired, worsening sanitation and producing epidemics and a 20% death rate, though Vienna still rose to prominence in medicine the following century. He also tried to simplify his patchwork realm, abolishing the separate administration of the Duchy of Mantua in 1786 and merging it with Milan, a move his successor Leopold II reversed in 1791.

• 7. Reason Against The Altar

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  Inspired by Enlightenment ideals, Joseph pushed religious reform far past his mother. His Edict of Toleration granted Lutherans, Calvinists, and Greek Orthodox Christians the right to worship openly, though their churches could have no bells, towers, or direct street access. Protestants could now hold public office, learn trades, and attend universities, with religious affiliation removed as a barrier to civic life. So many people moved toward Protestantism that he required a six-week Catholic conversion course before anyone could switch faiths.

  In 1782 he turned to the Jewish population, issuing an edict that let Jews enter various professions, attend schools and universities, hire domestic staff, and rent city apartments, undermining the old ghetto system. Discriminatory clothing laws were abolished. His motives were humanitarian and economic at once, aiming to make existing Jewish communities more useful to the state rather than to enlarge them. In 1789 he issued a charter of toleration for the Jews of Galicia, a region with a large Yiddish-speaking traditional population, though that charter also abolished communal autonomy and promoted Germanization and non-Jewish dress.

  His most consequential religious act struck the monasteries. He closed houses that did not teach or heal but lived only for contemplation and prayer, reflecting a utilitarian belief that only those serving the common good held value. Within a few years about one third of Austrian and Hungarian monasteries were dissolved, their assets redirected to a fund for religion and charity. His anticlerical innovations drew Pope Pius VI to visit him in March 1782; Joseph received him politely, showed himself a good Catholic, and refused to be moved. He was friendly to Freemasonry, which he found compatible with his philosophy, though he apparently never joined a Lodge. His attitude survives in a quip he made in Paris, when an archivist apologized that a dark room kept him from reading the religious documents inside. Ah, Joseph replied, when it comes to theology, there is never much light.

• 8. The Reckoning And The Myth

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  By 1789 unrest had broken out across his lands, and his interference in the smallest details of daily life had turned ordinary people against him. In the Austrian Netherlands the Brabant Revolution drove out imperial officials and briefly set up the independent United Belgian States. In Hungary, his push for German and his attacks on noble privilege met large-scale protest and passive resistance, forcing him to withdraw many reforms shortly before his death. Abroad he had allied with Russia and declared war on the Ottomans in 1788, but the poorly prepared campaign of the Austro-Turkish War of 1787 to 1791 brought little success.

  He returned to Vienna in the autumn of 1788 already ill, writing to his brother Leopold, I cough, I spit, and I have difficulty breathing. He noted he was drinking seltzer water and goat's milk with no improvement after eight months. It is now believed he suffered from exudative pulmonary tuberculosis. Dressed in the uniform of a field marshal, he was buried three days after his death in a plain copper coffin at the foot of his parents' grand Baroque tombs in the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna. He left no known surviving legitimate offspring and was succeeded by his younger brother Leopold II.

  His afterlife proved as contested as his reign. Letters now called the false Constantinople letters, long thought genuine, painted him as a radical philosophe in the mold of Voltaire and Diderot, more extreme than he probably was. Scholars have argued ever since. Henrik Marczali made him a Liberal hero in an 1888 study, while Pavel Pavlovich Mitrofanov in 1907 called his liberalism a myth and named him a despot driven by power politics. Saul K. Padover's The Revolutionary Emperor of 1934 celebrated him as a great liberator of humanity, even as Nazi historians twisted him into a precursor of Hitler. Through all of it ran one stubborn truth the source affirms plainly: known as the Musical King, Joseph genuinely appreciated Mozart's music, admired his operas, and commissioned from him the German-language opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.