It was not only on the political grounds of centralism versus federalism that the bureaucracy came to represent an opposition to the provincial nobilities, but also on social. Even Joseph could not change the composition of his civil service entire, but he brought into it many more non-nobles, and facilitated their promotion by insisting on the criterion of merit. The bureaucrats thus came to feel themselves a distinct factor in the State, and as they found their feet, a strongly anti-aristocratic one. Even the nobles among them acquired a different mentality, that of servants of the State, not of their Lands or their class.
This new class had indeed, its own problems. Intensely parsimonious as he was, Joseph paid his servants badly,4 worked them hard, and demanded of them high standards of integrity. He not only punished real corruption very heavily, but forbade many douceurs which had become so traditional as to be really harmless. They had very little independence, since Joseph decided everything himself, from issues of the highest policy to such problems as whether a zebra should be bought for Schönbrunn Zoo, or whether girls in State institutions should wear stays.
Moreover, the officials were under a constant galling, and even intimidating, supervision. Secret reports on their conduct were drawn up each year by their superiors, while spies reported on those in high offices. The secret police which was so notorious a feature of Francis I’s reign was really of Joseph’s creation. Before his day it had been a mere embryo; it was he who, in 1782, formed it into a separate service.5 The new force, which reported directly to Joseph, enlisted a vast body of informers whose special duty it was at first to watch civil servants and officers; only later did foreigners and suspicious elements come under the same close supervision. With the most casual movement, contact and conversation liable to be reported, most civil servants lost the taste to exercise such initiative as would have been allowed them, and the bureaucracy became as notorious for its timidity as it was for its officiousness.
The secret police had also the duty of reporting on the state of public opinion, and in particular, on how it was receiving Joseph’s various innovations. In this respect it must be said that Joseph personally showed great magnanimity, and the service, if not abused, could have been a useful substitute for the control by public opinion exercised in democracies by the people’s representatives. The same purpose should have been served by the famous ‘censorship edict’ issued by Joseph as early as 11 June 1781. This did not abolish the censorship altogether, for immoral works or works calculated to bring religion into disrepute were still forbidden, but the preventive censorship was abolished and the limits of what could be printed extended fairly widely. Constructive criticism of all kinds was permitted, and might even be directed against the person of the Monarch himself. It is true that this licence was so inordinately abused by the vulgar scribblers of Vienna (and Viennese vulgarity can sink as low as Viennese refinement can climb high) that it was soon progressively restricted, and almost withdrawn a month before Joseph’s death. But the years in which the importation of foreign works into Austria was relatively free undoubtedly brought new influences into the intellectual life of the Monarchy.
And these were, indeed, rather necessary, for while Joseph paid much attention to elementary schooling, which was already compulsory on paper and which he now extended in practice, by the foundation of many new schools, he had little use for higher education, except in specialist fields such as medicine, and in so far as it served to form efficient State officials. The number of gymnasia and humanist high schools was reduced, only Vienna, Pest and Liége being left with full University status. In particular, the axe descended mercilessly on all schools reserved for special social classes; even his mother’s famous creation, the Theresianum, was abolished (to be revived, indeed, after his death). The survivors were placed under close State supervision, and the curricula severely rationalized, the humanist faculties suffering very heavily. Even the medical school of Vienna had difficulty in maintaining its four-year course. The number of pupils attending secondary schools in Hungary fell by fifty per cent, and in the Hereditary Lands, by a quarter.
The judicial system, the organization of which was now entirely independent, was completely re-cast. A new penal code was introduced, which abolished the death penalty, while, however, retaining many barbarous forms of corporal punishment.6 The jurisdiction of the State Courts was extended to cover almost all cases above the Patrimonial Court level. The only separate jurisdiction to survive was that of the military; nobles and clergy became subject to the common law, although tried in separate courts.
Among the various changes in the civil law introduced in Joseph’s bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, which was promulgated in 1786, two in particular may be mentioned: one, that the Einstandsrecht tying the ownership of landtäflich estates to certain birth, etc., qualifications was abolished; any purchaser might now legally acquire any such estate: the other that the value of an inheritance, real and personal, had to be divided equally between co-heirs, male and female.
Joseph’s minor changes and reforms are too numerous to list, but it is fair to him to record that they included many of benefit to the helpless and unfortunate. Thus he was responsible for the establishment of Vienna’s great ‘General Hospital’ (Allgemeines Krankenhaus) which became the foundation of the city’s famous school of medicine; for a number of madhouses and institutions for the deaf and dumb; and for carrying on his mother’s work in the field of what was for the day a considerable body of social legislation, including the prohibition of the employment in factories of children under nine years of age, and a system of poor law relief.7
In his industrial and commercial policy, Joseph, whose economic doctrines were a curious blend of the mercantilist and the physiocratic, built on the foundations laid by his mother. A new tariff introduced in 1781 prohibited altogether the importation of no less than two hundred articles, including cotton stuffs, linen cloths, stockings, buttons, needles, nearly all metal goods, watches, jewellery, butter, cheese and salt fish, except under licence, when they were subjected to an ad valorem duty of sixty per cent. More facilities were granted to persons prepared to start ‘factories’, and free competition was strongly encouraged; some of the guilds were abolished altogether, others had their privileges restricted, and they were placed under State control. Trade and industrial monopolies were abolished.
According to Joseph’s own statisticians, these measures had remarkable effects. The number of masters doubled in Bohemia between 1781 and 1788, and that of factory undertakings increased by 150%. The progress registered in Vienna was equally rapid. At the same time, it seems likely that some of this progress existed chiefly on paper; many of the new ‘masters’ were relatively unskilled men to whom the earlier restrictions had denied the name. The new competition certainly ruined many of the old craftsmen, and the growth of home industry was made at the expense of trade. One authority8 has written that while Joseph hoped to speed up the economic evolution of his empire by a generation, he ended by setting it back by two. Nor was the planning always successful: for example, Joseph imported German stocking manufacturers into Galicia only to find that the peasants refused to wear anything but rags or straw inside their boots.
Perhaps the most economically beneficial of all Joseph’s measures were those which had only indirect economic effects: the Toleration Patent and the freedom granted to the peasants – the purpose of this measure was, indeed, directly economic – to apprentice their sons to a trade.
There was one other respect in which Joseph carried his mother’s economic policy further. The screw was tightened even more on Hungary, which was now practically unable to obtain from abroad any raw materials or manufactured goods except those which were produced in Austria. Further, in 1786, Joseph abolished altogether the duty on Austrian products entering Hungary, while retaining and even increasing that on Hungarian products entering Austria. Even Hungarian wheat and cattle entering Austria paid a higher duty than the same articles from other countries; and it
was almost impossible for Hungary to export her products elsewhere.
This was part of Joseph’s campaign to force the Hungarian nobles to pay taxation (‘cessante causa’, he replied to their expostulations, ‘cessabit etiam effectus’). But the nobles proved obdurate, and Joseph’s strength failed; thus his death left both cause and effect in being.
It would have been otherwise if he had lived to put through his reorganization of the land system, which was one of his most important fields of activity, but one in which he left his work uncompleted. A misleading impression of what he did in this respect, and even of what he meant to do, has, indeed, been created by the fact that one of his early Patents was entitled the ‘Serfdom Patent’ (Leibeigenschaftspatent), whence it has been concluded that Joseph transformed, or meant to transform, all the peasants of the Monarchy from serfs into free men. He actually never meant, any more than his mother, if as much, to abolish the nexus subditelae, but to establish throughout the Monarchy a condition of ‘moderate hereditary subjection’, such, as he himself wrote, already existed as in the Hereditary Lands. Most of the inhabitants of those Lands thus got no benefit at all under that particular Patent, and even those to whom it did apply9 could hardly be said to have been serfs before. They did, however, get some very real improvements in their status under it, for it now universalized the peasant’s right to marry, enter a trade or profession, or have his sons trained for one, without asking his lord’s permission, and also to sell, exchange or mortgage his holding (up to two-thirds of its value) or leave it, again without permission. Further, all personal servitudes were abolished, except that the lord was still entitled to impress his peasants’ orphan children for a term of paid domestic service.
Two other Patents, both dated 1 September 1781, improved the legal position of all peasants substantially. Under the ‘Subjects’ Patent’ (Untertanpatent) any Untertan requiring redress against his lord, or feeling aggrieved at any demand made of him by his lord (or the lord’s officials) and unable to obtain redress directly was given the right to appeal to the Kreisamt or equivalent State authority, when he could be given legal aid. The ‘Penal Patent’ (Strafpatent) limited further the penalties which a Patrimonial Court was entitled to inflict (it is true that these still included imprisonment on a diet of bread and water, forced labour in irons, and flogging, which, however, might not be inflicted by a professional) and laid down that only a legally qualified person might preside over a Patrimonial Court. If the lord of the manor was not so qualified, he had to provide a trained substitute at his own expense.
Some further alleviations of the peasants’ position appeared later, mostly in 1788 or 1789. They included the abolition of the lords’ remaining economic monopolies and other variants of the truck system10 and limitation of their hunting rights and of oppressive game laws. Joseph also extended to most of his dominions, as a rule of law, the principle that a peasant holding might not be subdivided without official permission, and not at all into units smaller than a quarter holding (in Hungary one-eighth), the purpose of this ruling being to prevent the multiplication of purely agrarian holdings too small to support their occupants. One heir should maintain a viable holding, while the other children should go into other employment. He was, however, equally interested in avoiding the other extreme, and actually gave premiums to peasants prepared to subdivide holdings which were too large for them to cultivate fully, and allowed subdivision into very smallholdings in areas where the smallholders spent part of their time on industrial homework.11
Meanwhile, the rule of equal inheritance had made the Bestiftungszwang often extremely onerous in practice, since the heir taking over the farm might be crippled financially by payments to his brothers and sisters. Later legislation sought a remedy in arranging that the payments should be made on the basis of an artificially low valuation, but the problem thus raised was, as we shall see, still acute a century later.
Joseph, however, was not so much interested in alleviating the peasants’ lot as in turning as many of them as possible into economically independent taxpayers and in reducing the area of thinly populated and lightly taxed demesne land. At the outset of his reign he tried to effect this in three ways; by extending the Raab and other emphyteutic systems, and by getting more peasants to buy in their holdings, and to commute their dues and robot for cash rents. He extended the Raab system to all estates under his direct control, and pressed private lords to follow his example; increased the inducements to peasants to buy in their holdings,12 and allowed all peasants on Crown estates the option of paying their rents in cash or in kind. None of these endeavours, however, met with very much success. A few landlords in Bohemia put out some of their land on emphyteutic tenures, but not many; the peasants, at least outside the German districts, could not be persuaded to buy in their holdings, and commutation also remained a rarity outside those areas.
But meanwhile Joseph had been evolving a really radical plan. This was to raise the whole contributio exclusively from a single land tax, which was to be levied equally on all land in the Monarchy, at a rate of 12·22%13 of its gross yield,14 as calculated on the average return from it of the preceding ten years. The rustical peasant was, in addition, to pay his lord in cash (or if in kind, at its value at current market prices) a further 17·78% in lieu of all dues and servitudes, including the payments to the Church and the commune, which the lord was to take over. As at first announced, this measure was to come into force on 11 November 1789; the date was subsequently postponed to 1 November 1790.
This was a typical Joseph n plan. If it had had the effect of lightening the peasants’ burdens at all – we have not the figures to be sure on this point – the alleviation would certainly have been small, nor was its purpose to confer benefits on the peasants, but simply to give the State a larger share of the fruits of their toil, which meant reducing the landlords’ part. For the landlords, the increased burden would undoubtedly have been heavy, especially since Joseph was asking for increased taxation to finance his military adventures. But the plan was made even more objectionable to the landlords by a provision that the tax was to rest on all land really existing, not on land the existence of which had been disclosed to the revenue authorities. In 1784 surveys had been instituted in all Lands except the Tirol, and it had emerged that something like one-third of all land in most provinces had been concealed. This would now have become liable to taxation, or might possibly even be declared not to belong to its present occupant.
Many of Joseph’s measures, enacted or proposed, naturally evoked acute discontent among the victims of them; the defenders of historic rights, above all in Hungary and Belgium, the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, from the Pope (who in 1782 took the unprecedented step of visiting Joseph in Vienna) downward, the landlords, the conscious nationalists among the non-Germans, and all others on whose interests or susceptibilities he had trampled. He might, however, still have convinced a majority of his subjects that the blessings of his regime outweighed its burdens, but for his military and foreign policy.
From his early youth Joseph was by temperament an ardent and inveterate militarist. He was the first of his line to appear for preference in uniform, and he devoted particular attention to the army, improving the material conditions of all ranks and greatly enhancing the social status of the Corps of Officers, although he brought into it many men of non-noble origin. He also raised its strength to a target figure of 295,711 men,15 which he tried at first to reach by putting pressure on the ‘Conscription Lands’ (most of which had, in the interest of their agricultural production, been boycotting the operations of the recruiting authorities by every device at their disposal, describing their labourers as skilled men or even concealing their existence) and by asking Hungary to raise her quota of ‘volunteers’ to 52,000 (eleven infantry and eight hussar regiments). Since, even so, the figure could not be made up, conscription was extended to Hungary and the Tirol in 1785–6.
These proved to be among the most unpopular
of Joseph’s measures, and among those hardest to enforce. They evoked a torrent of complaints, chiefly from the Tirol and Hungary, but by no means confined to those Lands.16 Many potential soldiers fled across the frontiers, or were hidden by their masters.
But worst of all was the fact that Joseph wasted this force in pursuit of a foreign policy which was over-ambitious and uniformly unfortunate. His heart’s project, of exchanging the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, would have brought Austria a great accession of strength had it succeeded, but the end of it was simply to estrange France so deeply that the Austro-French alliance ceased in practice to exist, and to draw the German Princes into a Fürstenbund under Prussian patronage; he had already estranged the Netherlands. Not altogether of his own wish, Joseph found himself back on the old duelling-ground with Prussia, and it was largely for their mutual defence against Prussia that in May 1781 he concluded a treaty with Catherine of Russia.
But with this he was drawn into Catherine’s schemes for expansion into the Balkans. In 1783, when a revolt, instigated by Russia herself, broke out in the Crimea, Joseph still preserved a measure of restraint. He mobilized to put pressure on the Porte, but rejected Catherine’s grandiose project for a partition of Turkey, under which Constantinople, with Thrace, Macedonia and other parts of Turkey in Europe, were to be constituted a Russian secundo-geniture, while Austria was compensated with Serbia, Bosnia and the Herzegovina.17 But in 1787, unwilling to see all the profits going to Russia (which had made large gains in 1784, while Austria got little), he forgot the circumspection which he had preserved on the earlier occasion. There was undoubtedly a casus foederis, for although all the real aggression was coming from Russia, it was the Porte that, skilfully egged on by Prussia, had declared war, and Joseph was only fulfilling his obligation when he in his turn declared war on the Porte on 9 February 1789. Even so, however, his treaty bound him only to provide an auxiliary corps of 30,000 men. Yet, although he spoke of the campaign with foreboding, a sort of madness seems to have seized him, and he sent an army of 200,000 men to the Turkish frontier.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 21
