Revolutionary ruler Joseph II

 Joseph II Austria (1780-1790)

Joseph II came to the throne in 1780 and during his reign pursued the ideas of an Enlightened ruler in his love for reason and reform. He said - ''I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire, its logical principles shall transform Austria''. He had the supreme Courage of practising what he believed in. 

Joseph II, who had been associated with his mother since 1765, became sole ruler of the Austrian empire upon her death in 1780 and henceforth for ten years he gave unrestrained pursuit to, ''enlightened'' despotism. For Joseph II unlike Maria Theresa, was thoroughly ''enlightened''. He surpassed Frederick the Great in devotion to reason and reform and believed in the despotism if not in the divine right of monarchs.

It is a pity that Joseph II cannot be judged simply by his good intentions, for he was quite unfitted to carry out wholesome reforms. His policy both domestic and foreign, was often statesmanlike in conception, but manned by a recklessness and impatience which characterised his whole carrier. He undertook tasks beyond human strength and ''his history is therefore only the long and sorrowful story of a prince animated. He was permeated with the ideas of the century, and fascinated with the permeated with the ideas of the century, and fascinated with the prospect of carrying out large, comprehensive and beneficent projects for the good of his subjects. His scheme of domestic policy was, 'no less than to consolidate all his dominions into one homogenous whole; to abolish all privileges and exclusive rights: to obliterate the boundaries of nations and substitute for them a mere administrative division of his whole empire: to merge all nationalities, and to establish a uniform code of justice, to raise the mass of the community to legal equality with their former masters: to constitute a uniform level of democratic simplicity under his own absolute way'.

These drastic changes which amounted to a revolution Joseph resolved to carry out with the utmost haste, and to alter the administrative government, education, religious constitution legislation and legal procedure of states ', without any regard for the prejudices and traditions of the people for whose benefit these changes were to be made. He attempted within five years to transform the semi-feudal loose knit monarchy into a modern, religious reform were set on foot simultaneously.

Joseph overhauled and centralised the entire machinery of administration, civil and military. ''In the field of administration'', Francois Fejts Joseph's latest biographer, has claimed'', he is in the same category as Diocletian, Charlemagne, Colbert, Frederick II and Napoleon''.  He invariably helped the poor against the rich and the underprivileged against the privileged. He abolished serfdom in all his dominions proclaiming , ''reason and humanity demand the change'', He taxed the land of the nobility and he assured the peasant full liberty and security of tenure.

Joseph commissioned a new civil and penal code. Everyone was to be equal before the law. Aristocrats like other people, had to sweep the streets for certain offences. Although Austria was in many ways still backward compared with the contemporary England, Joseph abolished the death penalty, at a time when there were still two hundred crimes punishable by death in England. Joseph provided, too, for religious toleration. His toleration Educt, published on October 13, 1781, 'the Magna Carta of Austrian religious liberty', checked the proselytising tendencies of the Catholic clergy, permitted Protestants to erect churches and schools, allowed various sects to acquire property and improved the condition of the Jews. The power of the hitherto dominant religion was abrogated, the idea of episcopal independence in opposition to the pretensions of Papal supremacy was fostered, and the legal freedom of the Dissidents was rendered secure.

The mainspring of his reforming zeal was a compound passion and practical state interest, he was deeply moved by all he saw and learnt of ignorance, intolerance and injustice but the impulse to do something about them also came from his horror of waste which these iniquities represented for the state. He wanted to transform the Hapsburg dominions. But his impatience the fact that he would brook no delay in the wholesale application of his theories made him plant fully grown trees instead of saplings, in the Augarten. The frenzied, uncoordinated way in which he applied himself to his reforming mission led Frederick the Great to remark that, ''He takes the second step before the first''. Indeed it is very true that he launched on his various ambitious schemes even before one was completed. However Joseph II will go down in history as the most Enlightened Despot. In ten years he introduced more reforms than Frederick could in forty-six years. Several reforms of Joseph survived his death and helped to make Hapsburg Empire a modern centralised state