Joseph II Habsburg Reforms
Joseph II ruled the Habsburg lands alone from 1780 and issued around 6,000 decrees in ten years. He had spent fifteen years as co-regent with his mother Maria Theresa, disagreeing with her about almost everything and able to act on none of it. She died in November 1780 and he began immediately. The programme was Enlightenment absolutism in its purest form: reason applied from above, at speed, to a composite monarchy of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Croats and Romanians who had not asked for any of it. The Patent of Toleration in 1781 gave Lutherans, Calvinists and Orthodox freedom of private worship and access to office; an edict the following year extended rights to Jews. Serfdom was abolished in 1781, giving peasants the right to marry, move and take up trades without a lord's permission, and a land tax of 1789 taxed noble and peasant land alike. He dissolved some 700 monasteries that he judged did nothing useful — those not teaching or nursing — and used the proceeds for parishes, seminaries and hospitals, including the enormous general hospital in Vienna. He abolished the death penalty, reformed the criminal code, and permitted a press freer than anywhere in continental Europe. He also made German the sole administrative language, which enraged Hungary, and refused a Hungarian coronation. Almost everything was in revolt by 1789 — the Netherlands in open rebellion, Hungary close to it — and he revoked most of it on his deathbed in 1790. The serfdom decree survived. He wrote his own epitaph as a man who had failed in everything he undertook, which is harsh and is roughly what happened.
- Year: 1780 CE
- Category: Political
