by Will Durant
Serfdom was abolished by a series of decrees, 1781-85. The right to change residence or occupation, to own property, and to marry by mutual consent was guaranteed to all, and special attorneys were provided to protect the peasants in their new liberties. The barons lost criminal jurisdiction over their tenants, but, lest baronial manors remain unproductive, the lords could require some customary services from their former serfs.
Convinced that guild regulations hampered economic development, Joseph encouraged capitalist industry, but he opposed the multiplication of machines for fear “it would deprive thousands of their livelihood.”59 He exempted industrial workers from conscription, but they grumbled at his reduction of workless holydays. He elevated merchants, manufacturers, and bankers to aristocratic titles and national honors. He abolished or reduced internal tolls, but retained high protective tariffs on imports. Domestic manufacturers, so shielded from foreign competition, raised prices and produced shoddy goods.60 Resenting the tariffs, Prussia, Saxony, and Turkey closed their gates to the products of the Empire; the Elbe, the Oder, and the Danube lost some of their trade. Joseph tried to increase overland traffic with Adriatic ports by cutting a new road, the Via Josephina, through the Carniolan Alps; he set up an East India Company, and hoped to develop commerce with the Orient, Africa, and America through the free ports of Fiume and Trieste. In 1784 he negotiated a commercial treaty with Turkey, but three years later his war with Turkey closed the Danube’s exits to the Black Sea, and the Danubian merchants followed one another into bankruptcy.
To promote the circulation of capital he removed from the statutes the old prohibition of interest, legalized loans at five per cent, and raised a Jewish banker to the baronetcy. He offered state loans and temporary monopolies to new enterprises. He adopted the physiocratic idea of a single tax falling only upon land, varying with location and fertility, and paid by landowners great or small. The proposal required a survey of all the lands of the Empire; this was carried out at a cost of 120,000,000 gulden, paid by the proprietors. The new law decreed that the peasant was to keep seventy per cent of his produce or income, give twelve per cent to the state, and divide the remainder between feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes; previously he had paid thirty-four per cent to the state, twenty-nine per cent to the landlord, and ten per cent to the Church, keeping only twenty-seven per cent for himself.61 The nobles protested that this new division would ruin them; in Hungary they rose in revolt.
The population of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia rose from 18,700,000 in 1780 to 21,000,000 in 1790.62 A contemporary reported that brick cottages were replacing the old rural hovels, and that brick was replacing wood in urban housing.63 Poverty remained, but an Imperial rescript of 1781 established Armeninstitute (Institutes for the Poor) where any person unable to earn a living could claim support without sacrificing his self-respect.
Though Joseph was officially “Vicar of Christ,” “Advocate of the Christian Church,” and “Protector of Palestine … and the Catholic Faith,” he set about, soon after his rise to absolute power, to reduce the role of the Church in his “hereditary” lands—i.e., Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia. On October 12, 1781, he issued an Edict of Toleration: Protestants and Greek Orthodox were to be free to have their own temples, schools, and conventions, to own property, enter the professions, and hold political or military offices. The Emperor exhorted the people to “forbear all occasions of dispute relative to matters of faith, … and to treat affectionately and kindly those who are of a different communion.”64 In a directive to van Swieten Joseph frankly revealed the sources of his inspiration: “Intolerance is banished from my Empire, [which can be] happy that it has not made victims like Calas and Sirven. … Toleration is the effect of the propagation of the enlightenment [les lumières ] which has now spread through all Europe. It is based on philosophy, and on the great men who have established it. … It is philosophy alone that governments must follow.”65
There were limits to this toleration, as there had been in Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration (1763). Some councilors warned Joseph that if all restraint were removed there would be a rank growth of wild creeds, even of outright atheism, and that this would eventuate in warring sects, social disorder, and the breakdown of all authority. So when he was told that several hundred Bohemians had publicly declared themselves deists (1783), he ordered that any man so professing “should, without further investigation, be given twenty-four lashes on his buttocks with a leather whip, and then be sent home,” and that this operation was to be repeated as often as such public profession was renewed.66 Some persisting deists were transported to military colonies. We shall see later how far Joseph went in his efforts to liberate the Jews.
One result of the Edict of Toleration was a rapid rise in the number of professing Protestants in the realm, from 74,000 in 1781 to 157,000 in 1786. Free thought grew, but remained confined to private circles. The Freemasons, who had long been established in Austria, organized in Vienna (1781) a lodge which was joined by many prominent citizens, and (despite its implicit deism) was protected by the Emperor himself. “The aim of the society,” said one member, “was to give effect to that freedom of conscience and thought so happily fostered by the government, and to combat superstition and fanaticism in the … monkish orders, which are the main supports of these evils.”67 Masonic lodges multiplied to the number of eight in Vienna alone; it became fashionable to belong; Masonic emblems were worn by both sexes; Mozart wrote music for Masonic ceremonies. In time Joseph suspected the lodges of political conspiracy; in 1785 he ordered the Viennese lodges to merge into two, and allowed only one lodge in each provincial capital.
Joseph appointed a commission to revise the laws of censorship, and in 1782 he promulgated its results in a new code. Books systematically attacking Christianity, or containing “immoral utterances and unclean obscenities,” were prohibited; but so too were books “containing fabulous miracles, apparitions, revelations, and such things, which would lead the common man to superstition, [and] arouse disgust in scholars.”68 Criticisms and lampoons were allowed, even if they assailed the Emperor, but they must bear the author’s real name, and were subject to the law of libel. Books listed in the Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum were to be open to the use of scholars in libraries. Scientific works were to be entirely exempt from censorship; so were learned works, provided some recognized authority vouched for their scholarly character. Books in a foreign language might be imported and sold without hindrance. Academic freedom was enlarged. When fourteen students at the University of Innsbruck denounced their teacher to the authorities for contending that the world was older than six thousand years, Joseph handled the matter summarily: “The fourteen students should be dismissed, for heads so poor as theirs cannot profit from education.”69—The new regulations elicited indignant protests from the hierarchy; Joseph responded by allowing Vienna complete liberty of publication (1787). Even before this liberation the Viennese printers took advantage of the lax enforcement of the 1782 code: pamphlets, books, and magazines flooded Austria with semiobscenities, “revelations” of nuns, and attacks upon the Catholic Church, or upon Christianity itself.
Joseph felt that he should also regulate ecclesiastical affairs. On November 29, 1781, he issued a decree that closed a great number of monasteries and nunneries, such as “neither operate schools, nor care for the sick, nor engage in studies.” Of 2,163 religious houses in the German dominions (Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola) 413 were closed; of their 65,000 inmates 27,000 were freed with pensions; and a similar reduction was effected in Bohemia and Hungary. “The monarchy,” said Joseph “is too poor and backward to allow itself the luxury of supporting the idle.”70 The wealth of the dismantled institutions—amounting to some sixty million gulden—was declared a patrimony of the people, and was confiscated by the state. The surviving monasteries were declared ineligible to inherit property. The mendicant orders were commanded to cease begging, and were forbidden to take novices. Religious brotherhood
s were abolished. All ecclesiastical possessions were to be registered with the government, which prohibited their sale, alienation, or exchange.
Joseph proceeded to bring the Catholic episcopate under state control. New bishops were required to take an oath of obedience to the secular authorities. No papal regulation or decree was to be valid in Austria without the government’s permission. The papal bulls of 1362 and 1713, condemning heretics or Jansenists, were to be ignored. On the other hand Joseph organized new parishes, built new churches, and provided stipends to support candidates for the priesthood. He opened new seminaries, and prescribed for them a curriculum stressing science and secular knowledge as well as theology and liturgy.
These measures aroused the Catholic clergy throughout Europe. Many prelates begged Joseph to rescind his anticlerical decrees; unheeded, they threatened him with hell; he smiled and kept his course. Finally the Pope himself, Pius VI, handsome, cultured, kindly, vain, took the unusual step of leaving Italy (February 27, 1782), crossed the Apennines and the Alps in winter, and arrived in Vienna (March 22) resolved to make a personal plea to the Emperor; this was the first time since 1414 that a pope had set foot on German soil. Joseph, with his fellow skeptic Kaunitz, went out from the city to escort the pontiff to the apartments that had been used by Maria Theresa. During the Pope’s stay in Vienna immense crowds gathered almost daily before the royal palace to seek the papal blessings. Joseph later described them:
All the passages and stairs of the court were crammed with people; despite redoubled sentries it was impossible to protect oneself from all the things they brought him to be blessed: scapularies, rosaries, images. And for the benedictions which he gave seven times daily from the balcony he had a throng of people so great that one can form no idea of it unless one has seen it; it is no exaggeration to say that at one time there were at least sixty thousand souls. That was a most beautiful spectacle; peasants and their wives and children came from twenty leagues around. Yesterday a woman was crushed right beneath my window.71
Joseph was moved less by the Pope’s eloquent exhortations than by this evidence of religion’s power on the human mind; nevertheless he continued to close monasteries, even while Pius was his guest.72 The Pope warned him prophetically: “If you persevere in your projects, destructive of the faith and the laws of the Church, the hand of the Lord will fall heavily upon you; it will check you in the course of your career, it will dig under you an abyss where you will be engulfed in the flower of your life, and will put an end to the reign which you could have made glorious.”73 After a month of honors and failure Pius returned sadly to Rome. Shortly afterward the Emperor appointed as archbishop of Milan a Visconti unacceptable to the Curia; the Pope refused confirmation, and Church and Empire neared a break. Joseph was not ready for so drastic a step. He hurried to Rome (December, 1782), visited Pius, professed piety, and won papal consent to the appointment of bishops—even in Lombardy—by the state. Prince and prelate parted amicably. Joseph scattered thirty thousand scudi among the Roman mob, and was hailed with grateful cries of “Viva nostro Imperatore!”
Back in Vienna, he continued his one-man Reformation. Having defied the Pope like Luther (with whom many Protestants gratefully compared him), and having attacked the monasteries like Henry VIII, he proceeded like Calvin to cleanse churches by ordering the removal of votive tablets and most statuary, and by stopping the touching of pictures, the kissing of relics, the distribution of amulets … He regulated the length and number of religious services, the clothing of the Virgin, the character of church music; the litanies were hereafter to be recited in German, not Latin. Pilgrimages and processions were to require the consent of the secular authorities; ultimately only one procession was allowed—for Corpus Christi Day; the people were officially informed that they need not kneel in the streets before a procession, even if it carried a consecrated Host; it was enough to doff their hats. University professors were told that they need no longer swear belief in the immaculate conception of the Virgin.
No one could question the humanity of Joseph’s aims. The wealth taken from dispensable monasteries was set apart for the support of schools, hospitals, and charities, for pensions to displaced monks and nuns, and for supplementary payment to poor parish priests. The Emperor issued a long series of ordinances for the promotion of education. All communities containing a hundred children of school age were required to maintain elementary schools; elementary education was made compulsory and universal. Schools for girls were provided by convents or the state. Universities were supported at Vienna, Prague, Lemberg, Pest, and Louvain; those at Innsbruck, Brünn, Graz, and Freiburg were made into lycées to teach medicine, law, or practical arts. Medical schools were established, including the “Josephinum” at Vienna, for military medicine and surgery. Vienna began to be one of the most advanced medical centers in the world.
VI. THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE
The difficulty of Joseph’s revolutionary enterprise was doubled by the diversity of his realm. He knew Austria well, but, despite arduous travels, he had not realized how deeply entrenched were the Hungarian magnates in the economic and political life of their nation, and how the patriotism of the Hungarian masses could outweigh class interests. On acceding to power he had refused to follow tradition and go to Pressburg to be crowned king of Hungary, for in that ceremony he would be required to swear allegiance to the Hungarian constitution, which sanctioned the feudal structures of society. He had offended every Hungarian by ordering the crown of Hungary’s patron St. Stephen to be removed from Buda to Vienna (1784). He had replaced Latin with German, not Magyar, as the language of law and instruction in Hungary. He had angered Hungarian businessmen by impeding with tariffs the export of their products into Austria. He had shocked the Catholic Church by interfering with traditional rituals, and by allowing Hungarian Protestant communities to multiply from 272 to 758 in one year (1783-84). Hungary fell into a turmoil of conflicting classes, nationalities, languages, and faiths.
In 1784 the peasants of Wallachia (between the Danube and the Transylvanian Alps) broke out in a violent Jacquerie against their feudal lords, set fire to 182 baronial châteaux and sixty villages, slaughtered four thousand Hungarians,74 and announced that they were doing all this with the blessing of the Emperor. Joseph sympathized with their resentment of long oppression,75 but he was seeking to end feudalism peaceably by legislation, and could not allow the peasants to rush matters by arson and murder. He sent troops to put down the insurrection; 150 leaders were executed, and the rebellion halted. The nobles blamed him for the uprising, the peasants blamed him for its failure. The stage was set for national revolt against the Emperor in 1787.
In November, 1780, Joseph came in person to study the problems of the Austrian Netherlands. He visited Namur, Mons, Courtrai, Ypres, Dunkirk, Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde, Antwerp, Malines, Louvain, Brussels. He made a side trip into the United Netherlands—to Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Spa (where he dined with the philosophe Ray nal). He was struck by the contrast between the prosperity of Holland and the relative stagnation of the Belgian economy. He attributed this to the activity and opportunities of Dutch businessmen, and to the closing of the River Scheldt to oceanic trade by the Treaty of Münster (1648). He returned to Brussels, and entered into conferences seeking to improve commerce, administration, finance, and law. In January, 1781, he appointed his sister Maria Christina and her husband, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, governors of the Austrian Netherlands.
Now for the first time he perceived how opposed to his reforms were the traditional privileges of the upper classes in this historic land. One province, Brabant, had a charter of liberties dating back to the thirteenth century, and known as the Joyeuse Entrée; any ruler entering Brussels was expected to swear fidelity to this charter, and one clause declared that if the sovereign violated any article his Flemish subjects would have the right to refuse him all service and obedience. Another clause required the sovereign to
maintain the Catholic Church in all its existing privileges, possessions, and powers, and to enforce all the decisions of the Council of Trent. Similar constitutions were cherished by the patricians and clergy in the other provinces. Joseph resolved not to allow these traditions to defy his reforms. After a brief visit to Paris (July, 1781) he returned to Vienna.
In November he began to apply to these provinces his Edict of Toleration. He made the Belgian monasteries independent of the pope, closed several of them, and confiscated their revenues. The bishops of Brussels, Antwerp, and Malines protested; Joseph passed on to extend to “Belgium” his regulations on votive tablets, processions, and ritual. He withdrew control of the schools from the bishops, saying that “the children of Levi should no longer have a monopoly on the human mind.”76 He abrogated the exclusive privileges long enjoyed by the University of Louvain. He established there a new seminary free from episcopal dominance, and ordered that all Belgian candidates for the priesthood should study for five years in this institution.77 Eager to improve provincial government, he replaced (January, 1787) the provincial Estates, or assemblies, and the old aristocratic privy councils, with a single Council of General Administration under a plenipotentiary appointed by the emperor; and he substituted a unified and secular judiciary for the existing feudal, territorial, and ecclesiastical courts. All persons, of whatever class, were declared equal before the law.
