Daughter of Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1711-1740) Charles VI (b. 1685 - d. 1740) and King of Hungary (r. 1712-1740), Maria Theresa was one of the great reforming monarchs of the 18th century. Upon her father's death, she acquired many titles including Archduchess of Austria (1740-80) and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia (1740-80). She had married Francis Stephen of Lorraine in 1736 who became Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (r. 1745-1765) through her influence. They had sixteen children including two future emperors, Joseph II and Leopold II, and Marie Antoinette, later queen of France. When Francis died, her son Joseph became Holy Roman Emperor and co-regent of the Austrian lands although Maria Theresa reserved the power to make the final decisions for herself. Consequently, there are many continuities between the reigns of Maria Theresa and Jospeh II. In general, he was willing to push the reforms further than his mother, perhaps because he understood that any reforms which he made might be undone upon his death.

      No woman before Maria Theresa had ruled the Austrian Duchy. As the last male of the Habsburg line, Charles wanted to ensure a peaceful transition to whichever child was available for the job. As early as 1713, four years before Maria Theresa was born, Charles was pressuring other royal families in Europe to support his Pragmatic Sanction, a treaty which set aside the Salic Law and allowed a female child of his to inherit his lands should he die without a male child but with a female child. Although many of the great powers of Europe, including Great Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and the Netherlands agreed to support Maria Theresa's claim to the throne while Charles was alive, when Charles died, she had to fight to keep her lands and her crowns. Three other claimants to the throne came forward and King Frederick II of Prussia precipitated The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) by invading and occupying Silesia, then part of the Grand Duchy of Austria. The war pitted Bavaria, France, Spain, Sardinia, Prussia, and Saxony against Austria, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the peace treaty of 1748 which ended the war, provided that all conquests made during the war revert to their original possessors, with some exceptions: Silesia was granted to Prussia and Austria ceded the duchies of Parma and Piacenza and other of its Italian holdings to the heir of the Spanish throne, one of the claimants for Maria Theresa's throne. Maria Theresa's right to rule was accepted by other European great powers and she gained her crowns with her lands essentially intact. With her right to rule recognized by the great powers in Europe, Maria Theresa turned to ruling and reforming her own country.

      Unlike the other states in Europe, the Habsburg Empire was a mixture of peoples: Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slavs, Reuthenians, Serbs, and Poles, just to name a few, each with its own language, customs, culture, laws, and traditional governing authorities. Most of the lands had been acquired not by war and conquest, but by peace and marriage. The polygot nature of the Habsburg Empire makes it hard to make general and sweeping statements about all parts of the Habsburg lands. Some areas were more advanced and urbanized than others and some areas had traditionally had more local autonomy than others. So when I say that Maria Theresa reformed the educational or legal or judicial system, I mean that the reforms mostly went in the direction demanded by the crown and took effect in various places at different times, in different ways, at different speeds, and with different amounts of resistance by the local nobles and different amounts of support by the peasants. And Maria Theresa, a pious Catholic empress who aspired to be an absolute despot and who was unsympathetic to the ideas of the Enlightenment was a fairly successful reformer. Her son Joseph II (r. 1780-1790), also a benevolent despot and ideologically attuned to the ideas of the Enlightenment, was an even more ambitious reformer than his mother, while, in the wake of the French Revolution, her son Leopold II (1790-1792), probably a reformer at heart, was forced to scale back their reforms to preserve those that remained of them in the face of fierce resistance by the nobles.

      The 17th and 18th centuries were times of transition: the feudal, mediaeval world was giving way to the modern era: capitalism was replacing feudalism; centralized nation-states were supplanting the local nobility; rural, agricultural-based economies were giving way to urban, industrial economies; superstition was giving way to the scientific method; and the Age of Faith was giving way to the Age of Reason. The 17th and 18th centuries produced some of the greatest philosophers of the western world, philosophers who laid the intellectual foundation for the democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

      Although the Habsburg reforms imitated in many ways the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers, Maria Theresa and her sons reformed their governments to centralize and strengthen the power of the Austrian court and to enrich their pockets: they were reformers because the reforms benefited not only the peasants but themselves. Indeed, the Habsburgs aspired to become absolute monarchs like many of the other European royal families, especially the French Kings. Yet, Kahn (p. 171) says of her reign, "Maria Theresa probably could not have taken a position more in line with the political theories of the Enlightenment if she had wanted to; that she did not even want to is another matter." Their broad sweeping reforms profoundly affected many institutions: government administration, law and the courts, the military, religion and the church, the educational institutions, the tax system, and the obligations of the serfs. The theory was: if the peasants were more productive, they would enrich all segments of society. To make the peasants more productive, policies were instituted which were intended to convince the peasants that they would benefit from working harder, to give them an education so they could work smarter, and to free them from the burdens imposed on them by the local nobility and the church. Further, unproductive activities, such as taking the vows of contemplative religious orders, were discouraged.

      The Habsburg's reforms included

Government
      Centralized decision making
      Established schools to train future government officials (Eventually Jospeh II would replace the system of appointing nobles to high government offices with a system of merit-based civil service.)
      Instituted a tax on the nobles
      Required all elected officials (mayors, town counselors, etc.) to have their qualifications to hold office checked by the central government
      Required magistrates to come from the civil service rank

Law
      Established gubernia to supervise town administration to curb the arbitrary and sometimes ruthless power of the local nobility and to create uniform laws throughout the Empire
      Prohibited local magistrates and liege lords from trying capital cases (In 1787 Joseph II would abolish the death penalty, replacing it with life at hard labor.)
      Instituted a system of appeals courts
      Reduced the number of courts which had jurisdiction in each area to one
      Abolished the use of torture to extract a confession, although the role of magistrate as judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney remained

Economy
      Restricted power of the guilds
      Abolished internal customs duties and private and public tolls
      Encouraged immigration with a temporary tax exemption, freedom from military service for the sons of immigrants, free building materials, and premiums for agricultural improvements
      Improved roads, navigation, and ports
      Encouraged private enterprise over state industry

Religion
      Instituted a tax on the Catholic Church
      Forbid the Catholic Church from sending money to Rome
      Prohibited visitation by apostolic delegations to the regular dioceses, specifically the inspection of monasteries by generals or their representatives of established religious orders
      Required government approval for the promulgation of papal encyclicals or diocesan pronouncements pertaining to other than religious issues
      Restricted clerical courts' jurisdiction to priests in ecclesiastical matters, forbid clerical courts from jurisdiction over priests in nonecclesiastical matters and over all laity
      Required governmental approval for any civic consequences of excommunication
      Dissolved the Jesuit order
      Required government approval for any land purchases by the church
      Restricted number of feast days
      Forbid the taking of permenant religious vows before the age of 24
      Instituted some religious freedom to Protestants (Joseph II would grant complete Religious Tolerance to Protestants and Jews in 1782)

Military:
      Established military training schools
      Instituted a system of regular conscription by the central government, as opposed to the previous system where local nobles provided troops, supplies, and money to maintain them upon request
      Abolished right of towns to control their own defense

Rural Life
      Created a system of obligatory, state supported public primary education for all male peasants, secondary education for selected students, and teacher training institutions
      Substantially decreased the obligations of the peasants toward the local nobility (i.e., substantially reduced the amount of time a peasant was required to work for the local nobility)
      Endowed the peasant with the status of a free tenant - the peasant could move from place to place, marry without the lord's consent, and choose his own occupation (Joseph would free the serf completely.)
      Restricted power of local nobles to sit on local courts
      Standardized the fees landlords could impose

      Sometimes we Americans take our rights for granted. In a short article like this, it is very hard to give a reader an adequate representation of just how monumental Maria Thersa's reforms were. To get some background information on the role of the Catholic church in catholic lands, read some of the following book notes files. Then understand that the reforms in other areas had just a big of an impact on the lives of the common person as her reforms in the religious area had.

      Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, c. 1860) [Harbor Press 1955]
      Henry Charles Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy (1867) [University Books 1966]

      For example, we forget that it was only 200 years ago that torture was routinely used to extract a confession from a person accused of a crime and that is the reason for the clause in the 5th Amendment to the American Constitution forbidding a person from being compelled to testify against himself. (Amendment 5: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.) As a feminist, I sometimes get frustrated at the status of women here in the US. But then I look back at how much things have changed in the last 20 years, the last 100 years, the last 200 years, and the last 500 years, for the better for both men and women and my faith in the future is restored. The common people lived abominably for eons and life is getting better for both men and women.

      The reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II strengthened the Austrian monarcy enough to allow it to withstand the turmoil in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleanic era. Although some of their reforms were rolled back during the backlash of the 1790s and during the Napoleonic era, many of the reforms remained. Later reforms, extending and deepening their reforms, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions could take root in the soil prepared by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Maria Theresa's legacy endures to this day for many people in the lands of the former Austrian Empire.

References:

      Kahn, Robert A., A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918, U. of California Press, 1984, pp. 156-200

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