by Will Durant
Haugwitz began by rebuilding the Imperial army. He believed that this had collapsed in the face of Prussian discipline because it was composed of independent units raised and commanded by semi-independent nobles; he proposed and created a standing army of 108,000 men under unified training and central control. To finance this force he recommended that nobles and clergy, as well as commoners, be taxed; nobles and clergy protested; the Empress braved their wrath and laid upon them a property and an income tax. Frederick praised his enemy as an administrator: “She put her finances in such order as her predecessors had never attained, and not only recouped by good management what she had lost by ceding provinces to the Kings of Prussia and Sardinia, but she considerably augmented her revenue.”14 Haugwitz went on to co-ordinate the law, to free the judiciary from domination by the nobles, and to bring the feudal lords under control by the central government. A new and unified legal code, the Theresianische Halsgericht-sordnung, was proclaimed in 1768.
Meanwhile Chotek strove to invigorate the sluggish economy. Industry was hampered by monopolies that favored nobles, and by guild regulations which remained in force till 1774; nevertheless Linz had woolen mills with a total of 26,000 employees, Vienna excelled in glass and porcelain, and Bohemia led the Empire in metallurgical operations. Both Austria and Hungary had productive mines; Galicia had great salt deposits, and Hungary mined seven million gulden’ worth of gold per year. Chotek protected these industries with tariffs, for Austria, frequently at war, had to be made self-sufficient in necessary goods; free trade, like democracy, is a luxury of security and peace.
Even so, the Empire remained agricultural and feudal. Like Frederick, the Empress, facing war, dared not risk social disruption by attacking the entrenched nobility. She gave a good example by abolishing serfdom on her own lands, and she imposed upon the haughty magnates of Hungary a decree empowering the peasant to move, marry, and bring up his children as he liked, and to appeal from his lord to the county court.15 Despite these mitigations the peasantry in Hungary and Bohemia was almost as poor as in Russia. In Vienna the lower class lived in traditional poverty, amid lordly palaces, elaborate operas, and magnificent churches dispensing hope.
Vienna was beginning to rival Paris and its environs in royal splendor. Schönbrunn (“Beautiful Spring”), just outside the city, included 495 acres of gardens, laid out (1753-75) in emulation of Versailles, with straight towering hedges, fanciful grottoes, symmetrical ponds, lovely statues by Donner and Beyer, a “Menagerie,” a botanical garden, and, on a hill in the background, a “Gloriette” built in 1775 by Johann von Hohenberg—a colonnaded arcade in chaste Romanesque. The Schönbrunn palace itself, an immense congeries of 1,441 rooms, had been designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach in 1695, but had been left unfinished in 1705; Maria Theresa engaged Niccolo Pacassi to remodel it; work was resumed in 1744, and was completed in the year of the Empress’ death (1780). Within was a Great Gallery 141 feet long, with a rococo ceiling painted by Gregorio Guglielmi (1761). Schönbrunn housed the court from spring till fall.
The court numbered now some 2,400 souls. Two hundred and fifty stewards and grooms were needed to care for the horses and carriages. Altogether the maintenance of the palace and its grounds cost 4,300,000 gulden per year.16 The Empress herself practiced economy, and excused the splendor of her palace as necessary to the histrionics of royal rule. She offset the luxury of her court with the extent of her charities. A generation later Mme. de Staël reported of Austria: “The charitable elements there are regulated with great order and liberality; private and public beneficence is directed with a fine spirit of justice … Everything in this country bears the mark of a parental, wise, and religious government.”17
Despite poverty there was hardly any begging, and relatively little crime.18 The people found their simple pleasures in exchanging visits, rubbing elbows in the squares, cooling their heat in shady parks, promenading on the tree-lined Hauptallee of the Prater, picnicking in the countryside, or, at their lowest, thrilling to ferocious fights arranged between famished animals. Prettier were the dances, and, above all, the formal minuet; in this the man and the woman rarely touched each other, every movement was governed by tradition and rule, and was performed with restraint and grace. Music was so large a part of Viennese life that it commands a chapter to itself.
By comparison literature was mediocre and immature. Austria, sacerdo-tally controlled, had no share in the Sturm und Drang movement that excited Germany. Maria Theresa was no patron of learning or belles-lettres. There were no literary salons in Vienna, no mingling of authors, artists, and philosophers with women, nobles, and statesmen as in France. It was a static society, with the charm and comfort of old and calculable ways, saved from the turmoil of revolution but missing the zest of challenging ideas. The Viennese newspapers, carefully censored, were dull impediments to thought, perhaps excepting the Wiener Zeitung, founded in 1780. The Viennese theaters were given to opera for the aristocracy and the court, or to coarse comedies for the general public. Leopold Mozart wrote that “the Viennese public, as a whole, has no love of anything serious or sensible; they cannot even understand it; and their theaters furnish abundant proof that nothing but utter trash, such as dances, burlesques, harlequinades, ghost tricks, and devil’s antics will go down with them.”19 But Papa Mozart had been disappointed with Vienna’s reception of his son.
Over this medley of actors, musicians, populace, serfs, barons, courtiers, and ecclesiastics the great Empress ruled with maternal watchfulness and solicitude. Her consort, Francis of Lorraine, had been crowned emperor in 1745, but his talents inclined him to business rather than government. He organized manufactures, provided the Austrian armies with uniforms, horses, and arms, sold flour and provender to Frederick while Frederick was at war with Austria (1756),20 and left the management of the Empire to his wife. Matrimonially, however, he insisted on his rights, and the Empress, loving him despite his adulteries,21 bore him sixteen children. She brought them up with love and severity, scolded them frequently, and gave them such doses of morality and wisdom that Marie Antoinette was glad to escape to Versailles, and Joseph flirted with philosophy. She plotted skillfully to secure cozy berths for her other offspring: she made her daughter Maria Carolina queen of Naples, her son Leopold grand duke of Tuscany, her son Ferdinand governor of Lombardy. She devoted herself to preparing her eldest son, Joseph, for the formidable responsibilities that she would bequeath to him; and she watched with anxiety his development through education and marriage, through the storms of philosophy and the bereavements of love, to the time when, in a transport of affection and humility, she raised him up, aged twenty-four, to sit beside her on the Imperial throne.
III. JOSEPH GROWING: 1741-65
She had entrusted his education to the Jesuits, but, anticipating Rousseau, she had asked that he be taught as if he were amusing himself.22 When he was four years old she complained that “my Joseph can’t obey”;23 obedience was not amusing. “He has already a high conception of his station,” reported the Prussian ambassador when Joseph was six. Maria Theresa resorted to discipline and enforced piety, but the boy found religious observances irksome, and resented the importance attached to the supernatural world; this one, being in part his patrimony, sufficed. He soon tired of orthodoxy, and discovered the fascination of Voltaire. Otherwise he cared little for literature, but he took eagerly to science, economics, history, and international law. He never outgrew his boyhood haughtiness and pride, but he developed into a handsome and alert youth, whose faults did not yet alienate him from his mother. On his travels he wrote to her letters of warm filial tenderness.
At the age of twenty he was made a member of the Staatsrath, or State Council. Soon (1761) he drew up, and submitted to his mother, a paper outlining his ideas on political and religious reform; these remained the essence of his policies to the end of his life. He advised the Empress to extend religious toleration, to reduce the power of the Church, to relieve the peasantry of feudal b
urdens, and to allow greater freedom in the movement of goods and ideas.24 He asked her to spend less on the court and its ceremonies, and more on the army. Every member of the government should work for his salary, and the nobles should be taxed like anybody else.25
Meanwhile he was learning another side of life. Louis XV, as part of the reversal of alliances, had offered his granddaughter Isabella of Parma as a fit bride for the Archduke. Joseph seemed fortunate: Isabella was eighteen, beautiful, and of good character except for a turn to melancholy. In June, 1760, she came across the Alps in a caravan drawn by three hundred horses; the marriage was celebrated with a sumptuous feast, and Joseph was happy to have so fair a creature in his arms. But Isabella took to heart the theology she had learned; dowered with all the gifts of life, she found no joy in them, but longed for death. “Death is beneficent,” she wrote to her sister in 1763. “Never have I thought of it more than now. Everything arouses in me the desire to die soon. God knows my wish to desert a life which insults Him every day.... If it were permitted to kill oneself I would already have done it.”26 In November, 1763, she was stricken with smallpox; she gave no encouragement to the physicians who tried to cure her; in five days she was dead. Joseph, who loved her deeply, never recovered from this blow.
A few months later he was taken by his father to Frankfurt-am-Main to be crowned King of the Romans—the traditional step to the Imperial throne. There, March 26, 1764 (young Goethe in the crowd), he was elected, and on April 3 he was crowned. He did not enjoy the prolonged ritual, the religious services, the orations; he complained, in a letter to his mother, of the “trash and idiocies which we had to listen to all day.... It costs me great efforts to refrain from telling these gentlemen to their faces how idiotically they act and talk.” Through it all he kept thinking of the wife he had lost. “With my heart full of pain I must appear as if enraptured.... I love solitude, … and yet I must live among people.... I have to chatter all day and say pretty nothings.”27 He must have concealed his feelings well, for his brother Leopold reported that “our King of the Romans is always charming, always in good humor, gay, gracious, and polite, and he wins all hearts.”28
On his return to Vienna he was informed that he must marry again; the orderly continuity of the government seemed to require the continuity of the Hapsburg family. Kaunitz chose a wife for him, Josepha of Bavaria, for Kaunitz was hoping to add Bavaria to the Austrian realm. Joseph signed the proposal of marriage that Kaunitz had composed for him, sent it off, and wrote to the Duke of Parma (father of Isabella) a description of Josepha as “a small squat figure without the charm of youth; pimples and red spots on her face; … repulsive teeth. … Judge for yourself what this decision has cost me. … Have pity on me, and do not fail in your love for a son who, although he has another wife, has eternally buried in his heart the image of his adored.”29 Joseph and Josepha were married early in 1765. She tried to be a good wife, but he abstained from her publicly and privately. She suffered in silence, and died of smallpox in 1767. Joseph refused to marry again. Now, with a tragic mixture of coldness and devotion, of idealism and arrogance, he gave the remainder of his life to government.
IV. MOTHER AND SON: 1765-80
When the Emperor Francis I died (August 18, 1765) Maria Theresa was for a time broken in body and mind. She joined his mistress in mourning him; “My dear Princess,” she said, “we have both lost much.”30 She cut off her hair, gave away her wardrobe, discarded all jewelry, and wore mourning till her death. She turned the government over to Joseph, and spoke of retiring to a convent; then, fearful that her impetuous heir should prove unfit to rule, she returned to public affairs, and signed on November 17 an official declaration of co-regency. She kept supreme authority over the internal affairs of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia; Joseph, as emperor, was to have charge of foreign affairs and the army, and, less fully, of administration and finance; but in foreign affairs he accepted the guidance of Kaunitz, and in all fields his decisions were subject to review by the Empress. His eagerness for power was tempered by his respect and love for his mother. When (1767) she nearly died of smallpox he seldom left her side, and astonished the court with the depth of his anxiety and grief. These three attacks of the disease upon the royal family at last persuaded the Austrian physicians to introduce inoculation.
The loving son troubled his mother with the urgency of his ideas for reform. In November, 1765, he sent to the Council of State a memorandum that must have startled its readers:
To retain more able men capable of serving the state, I shall decree—whatever the Pope and all the monks in the world may say—that none of my subjects shall embrace an ecclesiastical career before … the age of twenty-five. The sad results, for both sexes, often caused by early vows should convince us of the utility of this arrangement, quite apart from reasons of state. . . .
Religious toleration, a mild censorship, no prosecution for morals, and no espionage in private affairs should be maxims of government. … Religion and morals are unquestionably among the principal objects of a sovereign, but his zeal should not extend to correcting and converting foreigners. In faith and morals violence is unavailing; conviction is needed. As for the censorship, we should be very careful about what is printed and sold, but to search pockets and trunks, especially of a foreigner, is an excess of zeal. It would be easy to prove that, despite the now vigorous censorship, every prohibited book is now available at Vienna, and everyone, attracted by the veto, can buy it at double the price. . . .
Industry and commerce are to be prompted through the prohibition of all foreign goods except spices, through the abolition of monopolies, the establishment of schools of commerce, and an end to the notion that the pursuit of business is incompatible with aristocracy. . . .
Liberty of marriage should be introduced, even of what we now call mèsalliances . Neither the divine law nor the law of nature forbids it. Only prejudice makes us believe that I am worth more because my grandfather was a count, or because I possess a parchment signed by Charles V. From our parents we inherit only physical existence; thus king, count, bourgeois, peasant, it is exactly the same.31
Maria Theresa and the councilors must have smelled the breath of Voltaire or the Encyclopédie in these proposals. The young Emperor had to proceed slowly, but he advanced. He transferred to the Treasury twenty million gulden—in cash, shares, and property—bequeathed him in his father’s will, and he refunded the national debt at a charge of only four instead of six per cent. He sold the hunting preserves of the late Emperor, and ordered the slaughter of the wild boars that had served as targets for the hunters and as destroyers of peasant crops. Over the protests of nobles, but with the approval of his mother, he opened the Prater and other parks to the public.32
In 1769 he shocked Empress and court by going to Neisse, in Silesia, and spending three days (August 25-27) in friendly discussion with Austria’s most hated enemy, Frederick the Great. He had taken from the King of Prussia the conception of a monarch as “the first servant of the state.” He admired Frederick’s subordination of Church to state, and toleration of religious varieties; he envied the Prussian military organization and law reform. Both men felt that it was time to sink their differences in a protective accord against the rising strength of Russia. Joseph wrote to his mother: “After supper … we smoked, and talked about Voltaire.”33 The King, now fifty-seven, formed no high opinion of the Emperor, now twenty-eight. “The young prince,” he wrote, “affected a frankness which suited him well. … He is desirous of learning, but he has had no patience to instruct himself. His exalted position makes him superficial. … Boundless ambition devours him. … He has enough taste to read Voltaire and appreciate his merits.”34
The alarming success of Catherine II in Russia led Kaunitz to arrange a second conference with Frederick. King, Emperor, and Prince met at Neu-stadt, in Moravia, September 3-7, 1770. Joseph must have developed considerably during the year, for Frederick now wrote to Voltaire: “Brought up in a bigoted court, th
e Emperor has discarded superstition; reared in splendor, he has adopted simple manners; fed with incense, he is modest; eager for glory, he sacrifices his ambitions to filial duty.”35
These two meetings were part of Joseph’s education in politics. He added to it by visiting his dominions and examining their problems and possibilities at first hand. He went not as an emperor but as a common traveler, on horseback. He avoided ceremonies, and put up at inns instead of châteaux. Visiting Hungary in 1764 and 1768, he noted the extreme poverty of the serfs, and was shocked by seeing, in a field, the corpses of children who had died of hunger. In 1771-72 he saw similar conditions in Bohemia and Moravia; everywhere he heard reports, or saw evidence, of brutal landlords and starving serfs. “The internal situation,” he wrote, “is incredible and indescribable; it is heartbreaking.”36 Returning to Vienna, he fumed at the trifling improvements contemplated by the Empress’s councilors. “Petty reforms will not do,” he said; “the whole must be transformed.” He proposed, as a first step, to take over some ecclesiastical lands in Bohemia and build upon them schools, asylums, and hospitals. After much argument he persuaded the Council to issue (1774) an “Urbarian Law” reducing and regulating the amount of serf labor (which the Bohemians called robota) due to a feudal lord. The lords of Bohemia and Hungary resisted; the Bohemian serfs rose in disorderly revolt, and were put down by the military. Maria Theresa blamed her son for the turmoil. To her agent in Paris, Mercy d’Argentau, she wrote: