Life
As the first-born son of Franz Stephan of Lorraine and Maria Theresa, Joseph was from a very early age brought up and educated as the heir to the throne. The young archduke enjoyed a close relationship with his mother, though they soon had their political differences. At the age of twenty, he wrote a memorandum based on radical ideas which horrified the conservative empress. His energy and drive were misunderstood by contemporaries as dangerous impulsiveness. One of his models was the Prussian king Frederick II, his mother’s arch-enemy.
For a monarch of his times, Joseph travelled widely, visiting not only the Habsburg lands but also France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and Russia.
A traumatic event in Joseph’s life was the death of his beloved first wife, Isabella of Parma, in 1763. The two daughters born to this union also died in infancy. His second marriage to Maria Josepha of Bavaria was unhappy and remained childless.
Joseph died after a lengthy battle with tuberculosis.
Achievements
Joseph only became sole regent upon the death of his mother in 1780. In the ten remaining years of his life he threw himself into implementing a comprehensive programme of reforms under the watchwords of progress and utility. He defined himself as a ruler informed by the spirit of the Enlightenment, seeing himself as the foremost servant of a centralized state committed to the wellbeing of his subjects. He abolished serfdom, dissolved monasteries and gave Protestants, Jews and Orthodox a greater degree of freedom to practise their religion. With the Josephinian Code he laid the foundations of a uniform legal system, while sciences and the arts were promoted, fiscal law reformed and a comprehensive health policy initiated. However, many of these measures were destined to be short-lived under his successors.
His military campaigns against Prussia in 1778/79 and the Ottoman Empire in 1787 were largely unsuccessful.
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The reception Joseph II has been accorded by his contemporaries and later generations has always been ambivalent and mainly viewed in the light of his reformist endeavours. Although he was fiercely attacked by the secular and ecclesiastical elites, representatives of the Enlightenment saw in him the hope of a better society. Opinion was particularly divided on his religious policies, which were a clear affront to the Catholic Church. Some saw in them a hateful attack on divine order, others the abolition of unacceptable privileges. An anonymous author commented: ‘Only Joseph the destroyer of superstition had the courage to attack the monster in its own lair, and to kill it at the foot of the altar where it sat enthroned’.
His deeds sprang from a deep sense of mission. Nonetheless, his attempts to control and rationalize all spheres of life undeniably betray a tendency towards despotism.
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