The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The changes in the dynasty’s religious attitudes, however, are more striking than the continuities. Those changes are visible at both symbolic and practical levels. Symbolically, Maria Theresia retreated from the earlier ideology of clementia, which she associated with the Baroque tradition of extravagant display. She blamed such traditions for the spendthrift ways and lackadaisical management that had put the monarchy in such a bad financial state under her father. Though Maria Theresia was herself devoted to many of the old rites, she and particularly her successors encouraged the decline of the Marian cult and the excessive religious feast days. An example of the practical changes that Maria Theresia wrought is her curtailing of the dynasty’s formerly close identification with the Jesuits. While in the earlier part of her reign her personal confessor was a Jesuit, by the end it was a priest of somewhat Jansenist leanings. She also took away the Jesuits’ control of censorship, which the two Ferdinands had given them in the previous century. This action went along with the breaking of the Jesuits’ monopoly on education and intellectual life, and led to the greater opening of the Danubian domains to intellectual trends from abroad. Joseph, who was far more concerned than his mother to promote a religious practice based on reason, furthered many of these trends, including expelling the Jesuits completely from Habsburg domains.

  As religion declined as an ideological support for the dynasty, notions of the state and particularly of service took its place. Divine right became less of a legitimation, and instead the dynasty believed it was entitled to rule based on its service to its subjects. Again Maria Theresia embodies the transition. She wrote that “an almighty hand singled me out for this position without move or desire of my own,” obviously alluding to her authority as God-given. Yet she added that “my duty was not to myself personally but only to the public,” and that she hoped to be worthy of her special position not just for her own sake, but for those whom God “has set under me.”8 She here plainly expressed the belief that her success as a ruler should be judged on the basis of how well she worked for the public. Joseph went a step further in this conception of the monarch serving the subjects by insisting that the subjects themselves must serve for the benefit of the whole polity. No longer treating the mass populace as an inert producer of wealth, the state that grew under Maria Theresia and Joseph worked earnestly for the benefit of the population as a whole, as seen in the many agrarian, public health, and education reforms. In return, the rulers expected that the population would be loyal to and work for the state.

  It was Joseph who sought to replace the archaic personal monarchy with the impersonal state. He declared in a political memorandum of 1761: “Everything exists for the state; this word contains everything, so all who live in it should come together to promote its interests.”9 In this quotation, the monarch himself has been elided. This suggests how the dynasty in the eighteenth century embarked on a campaign of securing a new loyalty based on an identification of the subjects with the governing structures that served the dynasty and the polity. The attempt to bind the heterogeneous peoples together by transferring their loyalties to the overarching state institutions, with the dynasty at their head, was never fully thought through, and certainly never fully realized. But to some extent, the institutions successfully fulfilled this goal. The bureaucracy and the military did integrate people from across the territories into the service of the state and dynasty. The expansion of primary education was also supposed to inculcate a sense of loyalty among the subjects: it was a very concrete example of the state serving them, and therefore deserving their allegiance. Intellectuals such as Joseph von Sonnenfels, who advised both Maria Theresia and Joseph, argued that the state could indeed generate patriotism, and would thereby create a people. Religion was no longer central to this justification of the dynasty’s rule, which was now predicated more on good governance and state service. Admittedly the state during this time was still small, and its integration of its subjects into a new relationship of loyalty and legitimacy with the dynasty was fragmentary. Nonetheless, a major change in thinking had taken place.

  One part of the integration process that could create a loyal populace was, in Joseph’s vision, an overarching public culture in the German language. German was not adopted specifically to benefit the native German speakers of the monarchy, but rather because it was already the primary language of the dynasty, many of the elite, and of the most educated parts of the monarchy’s population. As Joseph himself said, “The German language is the universal language of my empire. Why should I negotiate laws and business with one of my provinces in their own language? I am the ruler of the German Empire and therefore the other states which I possess are provinces which must form one complete state, of which I am the head.”10 This quotation reveals that Joseph’s motivation for “Germanization” was not nationalist but rather centralist; it was pragmatic, in his view, to standardize and centralize his rule by promoting the German language. It also reveals the personal and patrimonial residues in Joseph’s conception of his monarchy. It was not a unified state, since what bound “the other states which I possess” was himself, the monarch. But it was also evident to him that German culture should become one of these unifiers. Hence Joseph throughout his rule promoted German art, such as the German national theater in Vienna, as part of his desire to inculcate a unified and unifying public culture in German. A famous example is that Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail was written at Joseph’s behest, thereby giving rise to what has been called one of the first German operas.

  Vienna and the court still acted as the monarchy’s unifying cultural center, but the court’s lavishness declined from its Baroque peak. Ostentatious display glorifying the monarch diminished precipitously. Instead, the court was more commonly supposed to demonstrate the ruler’s enlightened characteristics, not just through symbolic artistic representations, but through tangible achievements such as reformist policies. There was thus an image of Enlightenment that served to configure legitimacy, an image that was very different from the Baroque’s over-the-top religiosity. The court became more of a private matter for the family. Maria Theresia downsized court staff and functions as part of her cost-cutting inclinations. In her reign the court was almost bourgeois in some ways, much less pompous than under her father. Joseph then very intentionally further downsized the court as part of his simplification ethos, retaining just 92 people in his household as archduke.

  Cultural patronage reflected this scaled-down conception of the court. The musical culture of the court also became more private; for instance, Joseph played three times a week in private concerts with the court composer Salieri and a few other musicians. Another example of how the function of court life changed can be seen through portraiture. By the middle 1700s, the portraits of Habsburg family members are less allegorical or self-important, more likely instead to depict the ruler in private life, surrounded by family members. There are several rather domestic portraits of Franz Stephan, Maria Theresia, and their large brood. The 1769 dual portrait of Joseph and Leopold by Pompeo Batoni is likewise somewhat modest in its style (despite the Roman allusions to Joseph’s status as emperor). The two young brothers are depicted not with great majesty, but rather with a restrained, uniformed dignity. There was of course more self-consciously impressive cultural sponsorship. Maria Theresia’s rebuilding of Schönbrunn Palace forever associates her with Rococo style. For Leopold’s coronation in Prague, Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito was commissioned and performed. The reference to clemency in the opera’s title also shows how aspects of the traditional dynastic ideology retained some life. On the whole, Vienna during this time enjoyed its most glittering cultural era yet. It had a population of over 200,000 in 1785, and much of the high nobility continued to build extravagant palaces both inside and outside the city.

  The legitimating idea of service also largely redefined the function of the ruler in the era. Just as religion lost much of its earlier utility for the dynasty, so too, in a com
mon contemporary trend, did the monarch become desanctified. The older supernatural conceptions of rulership receded, partially replaced by notions of a contract between ruler and ruled. Where Maria Theresia still relied on some idea of divine right, it was only vestigial to Joseph and Leopold. Characteristically, Joseph sought to rationalize this religious exaltation of the ruler by exalting the state instead. He wrote that “serving God is inseparable from serving the state,” conflating divinely given authority with that which comes from being the highest servant of the state.11 In his formulation, the supremacy of the dynasty was supplanted by the supremacy of the state, but the ruler was still deserving of strict obedience because he (and by extension the dynasty) was responsible for the welfare of all the public. This contractual conception was clearer in Joseph’s rule than in Maria Theresia’s: very Hobbesian, it held that the sovereign’s power should be absolute, based on his great responsibility of serving his subjects. Joseph’s overriding principle of efficiency further justified unitary rule.

  There was also a change here in the old idea of the Habsburg mission. Less grounded now in religious duties of ensuring confessional homogeneity and combating Islam, the ruler and his dynasty took on instead another burden, namely sacrificing themselves for the state and for the well-being of their subjects. Maria Theresia alluded to this idea with her motherly lament at having to marry her daughters off for political reasons. So rather than the dynasty incarnating the realm, as in previous centuries, the realm was now conceived as separate, served not just by the dynasty but by the subjects too. Even its members thought of the dynasty as less unique (in comparison to other European ruling families) and less holy (in comparison to centuries past), yet it was still elect because of its work for the public. Like that public, though, the dynasty’s members in the eighteenth century understood themselves as having private lives that they sometimes had to subjugate in service.

  Maria Theresia was certainly new in the Habsburg imagery of the ruler since she was the first (and only) paramount sovereign in the dynasty who was female. This naturally explains her iconographic presentation as the mother of all her subjects, an idea that she herself adopted. She claimed in her Political Testament that “I belong to my peoples,” and called herself the “first mother” of her realms. This motherly conception was not purely tender, since it came with the idea that she had the authority to command her peoples for their own good, “raising” them in their best interests, which she identified. As an obvious feminization of the medieval representation of the king as father, Maria Theresia’s ruling image still presumed a personal relationship between sovereign and subjects. Joseph, again exemplifying contemporary trends, depersonalized the monarchical image via his emphasis on the ruler as the servant of the state. The family metaphor attenuated, replaced instead by the figure of the rationalist sovereign whose governing ideals were utility and efficiency. The change in the ruler’s role was thus the move from parent rearing children under Maria Theresia, to supreme administrator directing dutiful citizens under Joseph.

  In many though not all ways, Joseph and Leopold consciously jettisoned the hoary traditions of kingship. Joseph in particular believed that reason led one to reject the older, Baroque ceremonial, which he detested. He therefore did away with many of the pretentious court functions of earlier Habsburgs. This is one reason why he refused to have himself crowned king in Bohemia and Hungary. He not only had a personal distaste for ceremony, but believed that it was inappropriate for the monarch as state servant. After 1787 he in fact forbade people to kneel before him, proclaiming that no man should kneel before another, but only before God. His modest style can be seen in that he chose to live not in one of his palaces, but in a relatively simple house in Vienna’s Augarten park. Leopold likewise believed that nobility was only a social construct and that all people were truly equal by birth. He, too, espoused the necessity of a social contract, declaring that the sovereign must share power with a legislative body, and would forfeit his position if he broke the contract. Leopold’s ideas of humanity and equality were expressed in his instructions for the education of his own children, which included the ideas that “princes must above all be convinced of the equality of people,” “that everyone has the same rights,” and that princes must have as “their sole passion [. . .] the humanity, compassion, and desire to make their people happy.”12 Regardless of Joseph’s and Leopold’s insistence on equality, they did not remake the social order by trying to erase noble status; again, they were reformers, not radicals.

  Achieving this ideal of ruling in the best interests of all the subjects consequently required making the institutions of that rule as effective as possible. Maria Theresia and Joseph have thus been called by some the true founders of the Austrian state. The burst of “modernization” in the middle decades of the eighteenth century gave the Habsburg monarchy institutions reasonably advanced for their time. Centralization of power was achieved in large part through the growth of a central bureaucracy, in the Habsburg lands as elsewhere. One estimate has 6,000 members of the state bureaucracy in 1740, 10,000 in 1762, and 20,000 in 1782.13 These numbers increasingly came from people of non-noble classes, which helped expand the regime’s base of support. Joseph’s travels around the monarchy convinced him that the professionalism of local officials was often low, which inspired his mission to improve the bureaucracy. Thus training was improved, pay increased and tied more to merit, and a pension system introduced. These bureaucrats were not personal servants of the monarch, as in previous eras, but instead served the state. This idea is unequivocal in Joseph’s so-called Pastoral Letter of 1783 in which he gave instructions to all state officials. Here again he stressed the idea of service, writing that “he who does not have love for the fatherland and his fellow citizens, who does not find himself inspired with a special zeal for preserving the good,” would not succeed in the bureaucracy.14

  Additionally, the growth of the bureaucracy formed part of the movement from indirect rule via other power elites to direct rule by the central state. For instance, the expanded bureaucracy and judiciary, as well as the peasant reforms, all went some way to reducing the nobility’s administrative authority even on their own demesnes. Eroded also were the powers of the estates and the particularistic constitutions of the monarchy’s various realms. The dynasty during this period was gradually moving away from its older supports, the nobility and the Church, instead relying increasingly on the bureaucracy and the military. This was a trend with roots in the previous century, and it would continue into the subsequent one. Direct rule helped the state extract more resources, as in Maria Theresia’s taxation schemes by which the estates would grant taxes in ten-year intervals. She also reorganized the middle levels of administration to improve tax collection and reduce the estates’ influence over it. Taxes in general increased on all classes including the nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie, and peasantry. The reduction of the nobility’s and clergy’s special tax privileges is another example of the unification and homogenization of the polity and its institutions. Thanks to such measures, the state’s income roughly doubled in the first decade of Maria Theresia’s reign.

  Higher incomes naturally gave the state more resources for expanding its competencies, a development easily traceable with the military. The monarchy could field around 150,000 men in 1740 and some 300,000 in 1790. Military expenditures at the end of Joseph’s reign accounted for 65 percent of the total state budget, though characteristically for Habsburg history there was never enough money to pay for it all.15 Nonetheless, the reforms undertaken in Maria Theresia’s and Joseph’s reigns made the Habsburg army the second largest in Europe after Russia’s. The increased tax revenues in turn supported massively larger conscription. That conscription itself symbolizes the augmented institutions of the dynasty’s rule, since it depended on the bureaucracy to keep track of the population eligible for military service. The army was also one of the most successful engines of centralization. More than ever before, the central s
tate was responsible for recruiting, training, and financing the military, sidelining the estates’ former authority in those activities. The military grew to perform the crucial integrative role within the heterogeneous realms that it would fulfill until the monarchy’s end. An example is that after the 1740s Hungarian generals started rising through the ranks of the army, and Hungarian soldiers began fighting for the monarchy outside the borders of Hungary. In this way one of the least integrated parts of the monarchy became more tightly bound to the center.

  It is important to affirm nonetheless that this centralization was partial, and that it had some negative consequences. Centralization was largely limited to the military and the still modestly sized bureaucracy. It affected Austria and Bohemia much more than it did Hungary. And while the court in Vienna did encourage the growth of an aristocracy that belonged to the Gesamtstaat, the nobility’s interests could remain local as well, such that an aristocrat in Lombardy would have little affinity for, nor interest in, an aristocrat from Transylvania. Similarly, though an ideology of belonging to the supranational state did germinate during Joseph’s reign, his aggressive push for centralization stimulated particularistic and localist resistance. So while Joseph held out a model of what a more unified Habsburg state might look like, he also encountered the beginnings of what resistance to that unified state could look like, namely nationally based movements for autonomy. Regardless, even if the vision of a central state subsuming the different realms into one monarchy remained an aspiration rather than an achievement, Maria Theresia and Joseph established a lasting credo by which the dynasty recognized that it had to protect the welfare and interests of the peasants, in addition to those of the magnates. This was part of the attempt to broaden the social supports for the dynasty’s legitimacy.