Of great importance to the development of a group of like-minded, Enlightenment reformers immediately after her death is Maria Theresa’s legacy was the education and religion of her subjects. The original transformation of education in the first wave of Theresian reforms sought to cultivate good bureaucrats. Gottfried Van Swieten was the major reformer of the University of
17 Idem, p. 440.
18 Idem.
19 At court and in the governmente circles Maria Theresa was referred to as the empress, but she had succeeded her father as archduchess, because the former title was granted de facto only to men. It wasn’t until 1741, when she had her first son, that she was acknowledged by the Hungarians as their queen and crowned queen of Bohemia on 12th March 1743. To be assured of controlling the imperial title which had been a privilege of the Habsburgs for centuries, she had her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on 13th September 1745. Christopher Duffy, Instrument of War, The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War (Rosemont, USA, 2000), pp. 16-17.
Vienna, wresting control from the Jesuits and overhauling the various academic departments to make the University more competitive with Protestant universities. History, geography, science, civics and natural law were newly nominated as separate fields of study, providing more secular opportunities for future students.20 In this section I point out that some choices in the educational and State field are the fruit of choices made before Joseph II’s ten-year reign (1780-1790). Far from judging the efficacy of the educational methods of the Jesuits or of the new Theresian system, the intention here is to briefly describe these reforms which show the contrast between the Habsburgs and the Papacy. In spite of this, these legal-institutional overlaps between the State and the Church and the following fights for the emancipation of the latter, were a common reality among the Papacy and some Catholic States in the second half of the 18th century.21 Some scholars, like Umberto Dell’Orto and Beales, believe that the religious reform process carried out by Maria Theresa and then by Joseph II, is the reason why Pius VI went to Vienna in 1782.22 A brief summary will show that the legal process in the religious field had already started with Charles VI (1685-1740). Joseph II’s Edict of Toleration that extended religious freedom to other faiths (1781) of, instead, a new event and a legal twist. In my opinion, it was also one of the main reasons that brought Pius VI to Vienna.
By 1770, Maria Theresa’s concerns began to focus on the ignorance of her populace. Fearing that without education subjects could not be sincere, believing Catholics, she turned to the ideas of her newly created education commission.
Calling themselves the “Party of the Enlightenment”, Swieten, Karl Anton
20 Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618 – 1815 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 166.
21 Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, pp. 358-63; Chadwick, The Popes and the European Revolution, pp. 412-15.
22 Dell’Orto, La nunziatura a Vienna di Giuseppe Garampi, pp. 291-335; Beales, Joseph II. II, pp. 214-38.
Martini, and Sonnenfels controlled the Studienhofkommission. They favored a complete reform that would involve relieving the monarchy’s current teachers of their duties in favor of secularly educated instructors. The court incorporated two strains of thoutght on the issue of education; fortunately the two frequently complemented each other. The jurist Martini and the queen viewed education as the opportunity to be trained to help create good Catholics while Sonnenfels envisioned a popular literacy that would reinforce morality and strengthen the work ethic.23
The pope’s abolition of the Jesuit order forced on the monarchy the complete overhaul of the system in 1773, until then the Society of Jesus constituted practically the whole of the monarchy’s teaching force. The new system developed three sets of schools for the monarchy. The primary schools, univerally compulsory, would train good, working Catholics in rural areas and in cities might provide the foundation for later academic instruction. The more exclusive middle schools provided vocational instruction for the middle classes while also providing another avenue for the opportunities for advanced education. Finally, the Gymnasium was the school for in-depth intellectual preparation for those going on to the universities. For the uniform training system of the new teachers for the Habsburg lands, were erected teachers’
colleges, or Normalschule.24
The state even transformed the basis of study in theology under Maria Theresa. Franz Stephan Rautenstrach designed a new plan for the study of theology in seminary and other thological schools that went into effect in 1776.
23 James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, 1984).
24 James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, pp. 217-21; Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, pp. 188–91.
He placed special emphasis on developmental fields, and “At the foundation of every year of study belongs next to a Latin, Greek, and also a German dictionary; in the same way we find names like Herder… and Gellert’s Lectures on Morality, mandated as required reading for certain grades”.25 Study also included learning economics, biology, and chemistry as priests could be called on as economic and social authorities as well as spiritual advisers. Franz Rautenstrauch created a new strain in the study of theology, known as pastoral theology, that ensured the men most able to form the minds of the entire population would create a population meeting the need for an increasingly secular, broadly-educated public while also developing morality and spirituality in line with that of the reformed Catholics.26
The school reforms under Maria Theresa exposed for the first time to education all levels of society.27 Rather than the rote memorization imposed by Jesuit teaching, schools stressed a type of learning that might better complement the Enlightenment ideals of reason and criticism. The reforms of the first half of Maria Theresa’s reign further supported the development of a new class of teachers, formed by the secular educational program of the state: these teachers would quickly replace the Jesuits when, towards the end of the reign, the pope’s abolition of the order necessitated it. The speed of this transformation is representative of the speed with which the reformed system of schooling would affect subjects. Thus, many of the Aufklärers active in the 1780s, especially
25 Werner M. Bauer, Fiktion und Polemik, Studien zum Roman der österreichischen Aufklärung (Innsbruck, 1976), p 22-23. See also Eduard Winter on the priest Rautenstrauch, his position vis a vis the two types of enlightened reformers Sonnenfels vs Eybel. In Der Josephinismus: die Geschichte des ôsterreichischen Reformkatholizismus 1740-1848 (Berlin, 1962), p. 374.
26 Beales, Joseph II, II., pp 290 – 91.
27 Education had to necessarily involve everybody within the Empire given that compulsory secularization was seen by the Habsburgs as a model of social control. James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, p. XX.
those in their twenties and thirties, had already been touched by the in corporation of secular state sciences and cameralist ideology.28
Secularism increased under Maria Theresa for various pragmatic reason, including the decreasing power of the papacy and the increasing influence of the state; the model of Prussia provided the benefits of reason to politics and government also stimulated reform.29 However, the Queen herself was a devout Catholic and was eager to use state institutions to impose her view of morality on the populace. Secularization did not entail toleration. The state and the queen were openly prejudiced against and the repressive towards the Jews and Protestants, expelling or relocating whole communities, and instituting harsh punishment for anyone caught with vestimenta of their religion.30
Austrian Catholicism underwent various stages of reform under Maria Theresa. Some historians stress the dominance of the Jesuits under Maria Theresa; the Society of Jesus did control education in the early part of her reign.
However, Maria Theresa’s aspirations were antithetical to those of the Jesuits.
Historian Robin Okey suggests that the empress was closer to Jansenism then to the Jesuit party.31 The Piarists also influenced education reform with their focus on German language and natural sciences.32
28 “[…] The cameralists were a series of German writers, from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, who approached civic problems from a common viewpoint, who proposed the same central question, and who developed a coherent civic theory, corresponding with the German system of administration at the same time in course of evolution. To the cameralists the central problem of science was the problem of the state. […]They saw in the welfare of the state the source of all other welfare. Their key to the welfare of the state was revenue to supply the needs of the state”. Albion Small, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of Social Polity (Chicago, 1909), pp. 4-5.
29 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 165.
30 Crankshaw, Maria Theresa (New York, 1969). This biography articulates the extent of influence religion had on the queen and her decision of state.
31 Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (London, 2002) p. 9.
32 “It is in the fusion of a reconceived piety and up-to-date intellectual motifs, drawn in part from Protestant models, that an Austrian Catholic Enlightenment may be seen emerging in 1760s”.
Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 27.
Three successive wars against Prussia proved Austria could militarily hold its own against the reforming militaristic Hohenzollerns. However diplomatic losses and Austria’s failures to achieve more extensive compensation ensured the Habsburgs emerged without a clear indications of their victories. The loss of Silesia, and the important role the Hungarians played in the war of the Austrian Succession further ensure that the monarchy after the 1748 would demand more proof of loyalty from the German-speaking lands while acknowledging the greater importance of and some autonomy for the Eastern territories. Further, the war-induced reforms of Maria Theresa in the military, finances, and bureaucracy permanently changed the monarchical power system.
The inability of the monarchy “to put the Prussians in their place”33 turned the newly forming public’s attention to that potential source of competition at time when a contradictory trend stressed the importance of language and the cultural ties between Austrians and North Germans. It was under Maria Theresa’s reign that the suggestion emerged that Catholicism had stunted the monarchy’s intellectual and thus cultural and even political and economic development in contrast to the Protestant faith’s tendency to foster progressive development.
Despite the queen’s aversion to Enlightenment, she brought in ministers and top officials who would employ their rational, enlightened ideals in the reform they pushed within the state. Chief among the powerful followers of the Enlightenment was Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. The Dutch doctor, Gottfried Van Swieten, was also essential to the rationalization of censorship and education along Enlightenment ideals.34
33 Daniel Marston, The Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 2001), p. 90.
34 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 179-85.
The press under Maria Theresa’s reign alternated between harsh suppression and relaxed censorship. Drama was one of the ways to express criticism, as censorship rarely touched it. Ironically, ecclesiastical history was also allowed more free expression of criticism. Religious criticism could under no circumstances pass censors, nor could most of the work of the French and English philosophes. Johann Pezzl a resident of Vienna in the eighteenth-century, stated that:
the fine arts, the light literature, the life philosophy in popular form…
would be disclaimed and denounced through the hypocritical representation of Dame theology, as bastards of the muses, as unruly, disorderly, insolent children. One feared in every epigram a double meaning, in every novel a hail of stones against the Church, in every philosophical thought piece an attempt upon the stability of the state. For that reason, one still read in Vienna the Robinsons, the Grandisons, and the speeches from the realm of the dead; while one in the rest of Germany readers had long before committed Voltaire, Wieland, Lessing, Bayle and Helvetius to memory.35
Despite the unfavorable comparison with her son’s reign, Maria Theresa reigned over a remarkable expansion in literacy and publishing. Pezzl provided a history of publication in Vienna, stating: “Up until Maria Theresa’s reign one hardly knew in Vienna what literature was. A theological compendium, a commentary about the Pandects, a prayer book, were almost the only items occupying the very badly equipped contemporary publishing houses”.36 At this
35 Johann Pezzl, Skizze von Wien (6 vols., Vienna, 1786-1790), vol. 4 pp. 474–75.
36 Pezzl, Skizze von Wien, vol. 4 p. 473.
point it is worth reflecting on the strong changes that occurred in the market and in the production of published material in the latter years of the old regime, in censorship administration, in police activities, and in the function of the law courts relative to the selling of published books, as well as in the overall relations between the main institutions that controlled late eighteenth-century society. These institutions were placed in a critical situation.37 From the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the territories belonging to the Habsburg monarchy, censorship was the aspect on which the ecclesiastic and secular factions were most strongly opposed to each other. The criteria controlling published material was based on a chaotic system of standards and conventions without any general regulations, among which it became possible to recognise the signs of a slow process of secularisation destined to take control over the ecclesiastic authorities and gradually taking the form of State censorship.38 Certain attempts at reform dating back to the reign of Charles VI (1711-1740) had not produced any particularly important effects except to limit the preventive control of publishing to a smaller number of offices located in the main cities of the monarchy, like Vienna, Prague and Graz. Diffusion was entrusted to members of the Society of Jesus and secular clergy. It was by no means accidental that in order to organise these offices, censorship was applied to religious subjects, as shown in the structure of the archives still today.39 Both in Vienna and in lesser cities, publishing was still dominated by very questionable
37 Mario Infelise, I libri proibiti, p. 121.
38 G. Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorität im 18. Jahrhundert. Zum problem der Zensur in der theresianichen Reform (Vienna, 1970).
39 The documents on censorship from the period of Charles VI and Maria Theresa have been incorporated in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht (Vienna).
use of publishing privileges conceded by the sovereign or the censorship authorities often in favour of a preferential clientele.
It was only on the initiative of Gerard van Swieten, the Jansenist chief court physician of Maria Theresia and at that time Prefect of the Imperial Library that the panorama began to change and the first central censorship commission was created in 1751. It was composed of van Swieten himself and some of the teaching staff of the Theresian Academy and the Savoysche Ritterakademie, the jurists Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, Christian August Beck and Paul Joseph Riegger, who were appointed to set up the total reorganisation of the regulations in force.40 This was the first strong signal against ecclesiastic supervision of censorship and publishing which opened up the road to the gradual removal of the control of published material by the Church of Rome. The measures for publishing authorisation were redefined and rationalised; the various sectors were divided, separating literature from scientific and philosophical disciplines which could have been under a major influence of the Church. Theology and philosophy remained under the direct control of the Jesuit censors, and in fact, two members of the Company were nominated to head the respective offices.
The attempt to reduce their influence was achieved by making general consensus obligatory for all decisions which had been made individually up till that time, and by establishing an index of prohibited books. In December 1759 van Swieten complained of the fact that two members of the Company were still included among the revisers in Vienna, and that following the death of one member, another Jesuit had been nominated on the orders of the Bishop of Vienna, Migazzi, without van Swieten having been informed.41
40 Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung, p. 161.
41 Idem., p. 186.
After the death of van Swieten (1772), the Jansenist positions gradually became weaker with the ultramontane tradition gaining greater strength; shortly before his death, van Swieten had criticised the attitude of provincial censorship offices which opposed the central office, and the fact that the dispositions of the literary Index were continually disregarded. At the end of the 1770s it was obvious that the Austrian clergy still conditioned the censorship offices to a very large extent, both in Vienna and throughout the Empire.42 However, in spite of the efforts of the Austrian clergy, publishing production and the translation of
“dangerous” texts increased over time and as a publishing centre among German language countries, between 1750 and 1800, Vienna moved from forty-third to third place for its level of importance, outranked only by Leipzig and Berlin.43 The publications of the 1770s provided the foundation and legacy for late Austrian reformers.
Successively, also because of certain individual personal initiatives in favour of Toleration, Joseph upset the balance that his mother had achieved by the hard stance she took against religious toleration. Drawing on documents and secondary literature, the following sections discuss the action of the empress and then the emperor, focusing on religious tolerance and the diplomatic responses of the Holy See.
2.2. Limits of Theresian religious reformism: Maria Theresa and