Rule by mother and son: Joseph II and Maria Theresa

The birth of a male heir to the throne in 1741 was greeted with great rejoicing – a triumphal arch was constructed, allegorical depictions were composed, and the Pope despatched blessed swaddling clothes to the imperial capital. Joseph soon became aware of his importance as future ruler and developed a strong tendency to overestimate his own talents: when only ten years old he was observed by Maria Theresa to have ‘a number of premature ideas about his highness’. In his education, great store was set by the virtues proper to a future emperor: obedience, discipline, and piety.

Franz Stephan’s death in 1765 was followed by the accession of his son Joseph, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor as Joseph II and functioned in the Habsburg hereditary lands as co-regent with his mother Maria Theresa. However, right through to her death in 1780, Maria Theresa remained the dominant super-mother.

Just as present-day historians differ in their opinions of Joseph, he was also a contentious figure in his own day. His numerous reforms and the high-handed methods with which they were implemented did harm to his public name. Within the family there were frequent differences of opinion between Joseph and his mother, who considered his radical changes rash and misguided. This resulted in constant disputes – which are even said to have divided the court of Vienna into two factions. Joseph’s brother and successor Leopold II described him as a hard and pathologically ambitious individual who ‘would not suffer contradiction’ and was full of ‘arbitrary and brutal principles’.

In the nineteenth century there developed in certain sectors of the population a veritable cult of Joseph II, with most particularly republicans, liberals, intellectuals and the peasantry revering him as a reforming emperor and a model for their own concerns. Joseph was consciously portrayed as an emperor of the people. While Joseph, like his own model Frederick of Prussia, was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, revolutionary or democratic he certainly was not: his reforms were carried out to serve a political line that was aggressive and expansionist.