Birthday Greetings #34

Happy birthday to Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor.  After an apparently endless series of mediocre Habsburg rulers it is refreshing to find one with genuine talent and real intelligence.  By comparison with most of his Habsburg fellow emperors Joseph was a glittering tower of intellect.  Surely he would make a great emperor.  Actually he came close to being a complete freaking disaster.

Joseph was the eldest son of Maria Theresa one of the greatest Habsburg rulers, she had a husband who knew his place and kept discreetly out of the way.  Once that husband died (his name was Francis of Lorraine if you must know and for what is was worth he was Holy Roman Emperor since a woman couldn't actually hold the title) Maria Theresa got Joseph elected emperor in his place.  Joseph had the title but the real power was in the rule of the Habsburg hereditary lands and these Maria Theresa hung on to with Joseph acting as her advisor (or secretary if you prefer).  He got married for political reasons but then screwed it all up by actually falling in love with the woman which was slightly awkward as she much preferred the company of his sister.  Then she died.  Joseph was heartbroken.  Forced to marry again for political reasons he treated the poor girl so badly that she contracted smallpox and died, possibly in self defence.

With his mother sitting firmly on the throne(s) Joseph travelled, dropped in on his sister Marie Antoinette in Paris and helped her out with her "marital difficulties".  He drew her husband (Louis the About to be Executed of France) aside and discreetly murmured that if Louis wanted his wife to get pregnant he was going to have to have sex with her or at least somebody was.  He also dropped in on the Greats, Frederick and Catherine and found time to have a war with Frederick over Bavaria which nobody could quite believe at the time and still takes a lot of accepting now.  Once Maria Theresa finally died Joseph was an experienced, reasonably well educated, highly intelligent young man who felt his time had come.  Totally wrong.

Joseph was certainly a man of talent, what he wasn't was a man of compassion, understanding or it would seem much common sense.  Utterly convinced that he knew what was best for his people (to be fair he quite often did) he treated any objections or opposition as treason and rode roughshod over the opinions of the people in whose interest he was supposed to be ruling.  He wanted to increase religious tolerance, relieve the feudal burdens on the peasantry, foster trade, abolish serfdom, abolish the death penalty and improve the quality of the civil service.  As an election platform that sounds pretty good.  However when it is rammed down your throat all at once by a monarch who refuses to listen to a word you say the beneficial impact is somewhat muted.

The trouble was that the benefits of most of these policies were long term while all of the problems were immediate.  To take feudal duties for example.  These were a throwback to the middle ages when peasants were obliged to work on their lords land in return for their holdings.  Joseph converted it to a simple cash rent payment on the theory that with the extra time the peasants would be able to work more for their own benefit and thus pay the rent and improve themselves simultaneously.  It worked in a lot of other countries.  Unfortunately a good deal of the empire was so backward that the rural areas were still largely on a barter system and converting their obligations to a cash payment was a disaster for peasants who didn't have any cash.  It was also a disaster for the landlords who were used to getting free labour and knew perfectly well that the peasants didn't have any money to pay the rent even if they wanted to.

Religious tolerance didn't go down very well in the religiously intolerant parts of the empire (quite a bit of it) and pretty much everyone agreed that extending religious tolerance to Jews was just turning the whole thing into a farce.  Reorganising the empire so that it ran more efficiently sounds great but ran face first into the simple fact that if people have been doing things in a certain way for centuries they're going resent being forced to change.

Joseph skilfully coupled these internal reforms with a foreign policy which was little short of disastrous.  He wanted Bavaria (why for gods sake?) but only succeeded in pissing off the Prussians.  He wanted his Belgian subjects to have freedom to navigate the Scheldt river (which they were barred by treaty from doing) but only succeeded in pissing off the French.  He fostered closer ties with Russia which was a good idea but led him into a war with Turkey which he lost.

By the end of his reign it is fair to say that the only people among his subjects who didn't dislike him were those who positively hated him.  He gave up.  He revoked all his reforms, turned his face to the wall and died.  His brother Leopold who inherited the mess spent most of his brief reign reassuring everyone who would listen that he didn't plan any reforms at all.