Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire

Joseph II by Carl von Sales

Joseph II (March 13, 1741 – February 20, 1790) was an 18th-century Austrian Archduke and later Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790, King of Hungary (1780 -1790) and King of Bohemia (1780-1790).

His contemporaries admired him for his great culture and his ability to govern, even many modern historians considered him a genius.

Biography

He was the son of Archduchess Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I, brother of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, as well as who would be his successor Leopold II.

He was elected King of the Romans in 1764 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1765. He began to reign with his mother but did not obtain effective rule until her death in 1780, whom he succeeded as King of Hungary and of Bohemia.

Joseph II (right) with his brother Leopoldo, then Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1769.

Joseph II by Georg Decker.

Party organized to celebrate the marriage of Emperor Joseph II with Princess Joseph of Bavaria on January 23, 1765. Work of Johann Georg Weikert. The brother of Joseph II, the Archduke Maximiliano interprets Cupido, the archduke Fernando to the boyfriend and the archduchess Maria Antonieta to the bride.

He considers himself one of the representatives of enlightened despotism, since he governed supported and influenced by his State Chancellor Kaunitz. He showed interest in encyclopedic ideas. He tried to modernize, boost and rationalize the functioning of the administration with a reform program to build a centralized unitary state with German as the administrative language.

Initiated a policy of trade liberalization, fostered the development of "industry" and unified the tax system, initiatives based on mercantilist ideas with which he tried to boost the economy. He abolished serfdom and corporations by giving peasants guarantees of property, thus allowing their emancipation. He put an end to peasant labor benefits, laid the foundations of religious tolerance by ending persecution of Orthodox and Protestants, improved and secularized education, and created new universities. During the First Partition of Poland, in 1772, he annexed Galicia to the Habsburg domain, against the advice of his mother.

On November 29, 1780, he ascended the Hungarian throne after the death of his mother Maria Theresa. However, by his own decision, he did not have himself crowned and did not take the monarch's oath before the Hungarians. In this way, he was not committed to respecting the laws that protected the Hungarians from the absolute power of the monarch of the day. At this, he was nicknamed & # 34;The Amazed King & # 34; (Hungarian: & # 34; kalapos király & # 34;), since he did not wear the Hungarian crown, but only hats.

He soon extended his influence over the kingdoms under his control, carried out educational and ecclesiastical reforms, and in 1784 made German the official language of Hungary, causing great discontent among the Hungarian nobility and peasantry. Joseph II faced the Swedes and the Ottomans. From the latter, in 1785, he seized Bukovina. He planned the annexation of Bavaria, but Prussian resistance and the outcome of the War of the Bavarian Succession prevented him from doing so. He strengthened relations with Russia, which he supported against Turkey in a war in which Austria was invaded.

He spent a third of his reign traveling. To avoid cumbersome ceremonies, he often traveled under the name of Count of Falkenstein (his genuine title), with a small retinue, and staying in roadside inns.

He was a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the celebrated composer. Likewise, Beethoven wrote the cantata Auf den Tod Kaiser Josephs II in memory of him.

Marriage

Isabel de Borbón-Parma (1741-1763), her first wife.

Josefa de Baviera (1739-1767), his second wife.

Joseph II married twice:

The first with Princess Isabel de Borbón-Parma, daughter of Duke Felipe I of Parma and Princess Luisa Isabel de Borbón, with whom he was deeply in love and with whom he had two daughters:

• Maria Teresa of Habsburg (1762-1770). He died of pneumonia for seven years; his death greatly affected his father until his own.
• Cristina de Habsburg (*/† 1763). He was born premature and died shortly after his birth, just like the mother, who died shortly after the birth.

After the death of his first wife, he married her cousin, with whom he had no children; Josefa de Baviera (1739-1767), daughter of Carlos Alberto, Elector of Bavaria and Archduchess María Amelia (cousin of María Teresa I). He agreed to this second marriage very reluctantly since he would have preferred to marry the Infanta María Luisa de Parma, younger sister of his deceased Isabel, whom he physically resembled, but she was already engaged to the future Carlos IV of Spain.

As no children survived Joseph II, he was succeeded by his brother Leopoldo II.

Josephism

It was a political theory introduced during the reign of Joseph II, which altered the relations that had been maintained until then between the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy.

According to this vision, the Church only had powers over the dogmatic-moral field of its faithful; Consequently, matters of a secular nature in Austrian territory (including the administration of the Church itself with its large assets and income) should be subject to the laws and authorities of the State, thus establishing the foundations of a national Church, according to the early Enlightenment, leaving the state to take the direction and control of religious politics. Exemptions and dispensations granted by the pope in Austrian territory were also suppressed, because they were considered to affect the sovereignty of the monarch.

This system of government was very tolerant with the rest of confessions, which was reflected as a reality in the Patent of Tolerance of 1781; by means of which religious tolerance was granted to Protestants and emancipation, for the first time in Europe, to Jews.

Joseph II's reforms soon raised voices against him; It would end up failing because of the opposition of the bishops, who refused to lose their privileges, as well as because it was a system whose audacity did not fit well at the time in which it was developed.

The successor of José II, Leopoldo, had to give in, although he managed to save the fundamentals of the doctrine that as a tendency survived in the restoration.

Ancestors

Memory and legacy

The illustrated absolutism of Joseph II included the Tolerance Patent, promulgated in 1781, and the Tolerance Edict of 1782.

Joseph II has been ranked along with Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia as one of the three great monarchs of the Enlightenment.

The legacy of Josephism would endure through the Austrian Enlightenment. To some extent, Joseph II's Enlightenment beliefs were exaggerated by the author of what Joseph II historian Derek Beales calls the "false Constantinople letters." Long regarded as authentic writings of Joseph II, these forged works have wrongly augmented the emperor's memory for centuries. These legendary quotes have created a larger-than-life impression of Joseph II as a Voltaire and Diderot-like philosophe, more radical than it probably was.

In 1849, the Hungarian Declaration of Independence declared that Joseph II was not a true King of Hungary as he was never crowned, thus any act of his reign was void.

In 1888, the Hungarian historian Henrik Marczali published a three-volume study of Joseph, the first major modern scholarly work on his reign, and the first to make systematic use of archival research. Marczali was Jewish and a product of the Hungarian bourgeois-liberal historiographical school, and he portrayed Joseph as a liberal hero. Russian scholar Pavel Pavlovich Mitrofanov published a detailed biography in 1907 that set the standard for a century, after it was translated into German in 1910. Mitrofanov's interpretation was very damaging to Joseph: he was not a populist emperor and his liberalism was a myth; José was not inspired by Enlightenment ideas but by pure power politics. He was more despotic than his mother. Dogmatism and impatience were the reasons for his failures.

P. G. M. Dickson pointed out that Joseph II stepped over the old privileges, liberties and prejudices of the aristocracy, thus creating many enemies, who in the end triumphed. Joseph's attempt to reform the Hungarian lands illustrates the weakness of absolutism in the face of well-defended feudal liberties. Behind his many reforms was a broad program influenced by the doctrines of enlightened absolutism, natural law, mercantilism, and physiocracy.. With the aim of establishing a uniform legal framework to replace traditional heterogeneous structures, the reforms were guided, at least implicitly, by the principles of liberty and equality and were based on a conception of the central legislative authority of the State. The arrival of José marks an important break, since the previous reforms under María Teresa had not called into question these structures, but there was no similar break at the end of the Josephine era. The reforms begun by Joseph II were continued to varying degrees under his successor Leopold and subsequent successors, and were given an "Austrian" form. absolute and complete in the Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch of 1811. They have been seen as providing a basis for later reforms extending into the 20th century, managed by much better politicians than José II.^{[citation required]}

Medal commemorating the Austrian victory over the Ottoman Empire and the Belgrade Site of 1789.

Austrian-born American scholar Saul K. Padover reached a broad American audience with his colorful The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph II of Austria (1934). Padover celebrated the radicalism of José, affirming that his "war against feudal privileges" it made him one of the great "liberators of humanity". Joseph's failures were blamed on his impatience, tactlessness, and unnecessary military adventures, but despite all this Padover claimed that the emperor was the greatest of all Enlightenment monarchs. While Padover described a sort of of the Democratic New Deal, Nazi historians of the 1930s made Joseph a forerunner of Adolf Hitler.

In the sixties of the XX century, a new era of historiography began. The American Paul Bernard rejected the national, radical, and anti-clerical images of Joseph, instead emphasizing long-term continuities. He argued that Joseph's reforms suited the needs of the time. Many failed due to economic backwardness and Joseph's unfortunate foreign policy, and British historian Tim Blanning noted the deep contradictions inherent in his policies that caused them to fail. For example, Joseph encouraged small peasant farms, thus delaying the economic modernization that only large latifundia could bring about. French historian Jean Berenger concludes that, despite its many setbacks, Joseph's reign "represented a decisive phase in the process of modernization of the Austrian Monarchy". The failures were due to the fact that he "just wanted to do too much, too fast." in exhaustive searches in many files. Beales examines the emperor's personality, with his erratic behavior and his mix of affability and irascibility. Beales shows that José really appreciated Mozart's music and that he greatly admired his operas. Like most scholars, Beales takes a negative view of Joseph's foreign policy. Beales considers that Joseph was high-handed in the sense of violating established constitutions and rejecting good advice, but not high-handed in the sense of blatant abuse of power.

Popular memory

Estatua de José II en la Fortaleza Josefov, Czech Republic

The image of José in popular memory has been varied. After his death, the central government built numerous monuments to him on his land. The first Czechoslovak Republic tore down the monuments when it gained independence in 1918. While the Czechs credited Joseph II with educational reforms, religious tolerance and loosening of censorship, they condemned his policies of centralization and Germanization, which they blamed for causing a decline in Czech culture.

The Budapest District of Józsefváros was named after the Emperor in 1777 and bears this name to this day.

Patron of the arts

Like many of the "enlightened despots" From his time, José was a lover and patron of the arts and is remembered as such. He was known as the "King of Music"; and he steered Austrian high culture toward a more Germanic orientation. He commissioned the German opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail from Mozart. The young Ludwig van Beethoven was commissioned to write a Cantata on the death of Emperor Joseph II, but it was not performed due to its technical difficulty.

Joseph features prominently in Peter Shaffer's play and in the film Amadeus. In the film version, he is portrayed by actor Jeffrey Jones as a well-meaning but somewhat dazed monarch, with limited but enthusiastic musical ability, easily manipulated by Antonio Salieri; however, Shaffer has made it clear that his work is fictional in many ways and does not claim to represent historical reality. José was played by Danny Huston in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette.

José also turned Vienna's defensive glacis into a public park. The medieval walls that defended the historic center of Vienna were surrounded by a moat and glacis about 500 meters wide, which were kept free of vegetation and buildings for defensive purposes. Under Joseph's tenure, the moat was filled in and carriage ways and walkways were built across the glacis, and the area was planted with ornamental trees and provided with lanterns and benches. This green public space lasted until the second half of the 19th century, when the Ringstrasse and its associated buildings were built on it.

Pop Culture

Joseph II was played by Jeffrey Jones in the 1984 film Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman and centered on the fictional rivalry between composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, where he appears sporadically and as the highest authority figure.