Membership in the Estates

Two other, landmark decisions early in the reign were to have a profound impact on the composition of the intermediary powers. Both concerned religion. First, the government famously began to appropriate the economic resources of the monasteries for what Joseph II considered more useful purposes. This occurred, on the one hand, through outright suppression and, on the other, through the imposition of an outside administrator known as a “commendatory abbot” after the death of the head of a religious house allowed to survive.Footnote ²⁸ Far more than the castles of the nobility, splendid Baroque monasteries had dominated the Counter-Reformation landscape of Lower Austria. In 1780, twenty-six prelates—seven Benedictine, six Augustinian, five Cistercian, three Carthusian, and two Premonstratensian, as well as the provosts of three collegiate churches—belonged to the Estates. The opulent Benedictine abbot of the Melk monastery was their permanent president as well as the ranking member of the Estates with the right to speak and vote first in the diet. Neither the mendicant orders nor the Jesuits until their abolition (1773) had attended the Estates. Likewise, no convent for women had enjoyed representation, as had been the case in Tyrol. In their exceedingly rare appearances, the various bishops with Lower Austrian jurisdictions sat by custom with the lords.

The first prelates to disappear from the Lower Austrian Landhaus were the three Carthusians (Mauerbach, Gaming, and Aggsbach) who fell under Joseph's early ban (1781) on purely contemplative orders. In succeeding years, ten other monasteries represented in the Estates were eliminated that likewise did not meet the emperor's utilitarian standards. Among them, the Augustinian canons were hit hardest, with only two of their houses (Klosterneuburg and Herzogenburg) enduring. In contrast, all but two of those of the Benedictines were saved. Only one dissolved monastery, the Cistercian abbey of Lilienfeld, was reestablished in previous form soon after Joseph's death. In the course of the reign, the Lower Austrian Estate of prelates permanently lost just under half its members.Footnote ²⁹ Those who survived were generally from the wealthier and more venerable foundations. In the intervening years, however, the long-standing corporate existence of the prelates had largely been undermined. Beginning in 1785, they ceased to meet as an Estate as they had regularly done since the Thirty Years' War.Footnote ³⁰ This was in turn connected to the death in that same year of the abbot of Melk, their customary presiding officer, and his replacement by a commendatory abbot. Responsible for running the temporal affairs of the monastery to the benefit of the state Religious Fund, commendatory abbots did not acquire the precedence at assemblies of those whom they replaced. In some places, though not apparently in Lower Austria, Joseph attempted to exclude them from the Estates (1786).Footnote ³¹ Thus, the prelates lost their permanent president and the diet its senior member. By 1790, nearly a quarter of the surviving foundations (Melk, Heiligenkreuz, Zwettl, and Geras) had commendatory abbots.Footnote ³² On Joseph's death, only about one-third of the religious houses extant in the Estates in 1780 still had regularly elected heads.

Despite the push for institutional symmetry, Joseph's closure of monasteries produced very different results in the Estates of his various realms. Several Inner Austrian lands were practically denuded of monastic houses. In the duchy of Carinthia, major corporate abbots, including Ossiach (Benedictine), Arnoldstein (Benedictine), and Viktring (Cistercian), vanished. Indeed, all houses are reported to have been eliminated there.Footnote ³³ In the emperor's last years, the relatively insignificant provosts of the collegiate churches in Völkermarkt and Gurnitz were the main prelates still in attendance at the diet.Footnote ³⁴ In neighboring Carniola, eleven of fifteen religious institutions disappeared between 1782 and 1786, apparently including all of those in the Estates such as Sittich (Cistercian) and Landstraß (Cistercian).Footnote ³⁵ In Moravia, the prelates had been the strongest presence among the four Estates at key sessions of the annual diets in the late Theresan and early Josephian periods. By 1784, the liquidation of many important foundations such as Cistercian Velehrad and Premonstratensian Hradisch had already changed the situation dramatically. In the reign's last years, the heads of only two monasteries—Benedictine Raigern and the mendicant Augustinian Hermits in Brünn—turned up with some regularity at assemblies. Neither dignitary had earlier been especially senior. Between 1780 and 1790, the heads of religious houses who habitually attended the margravate's Estates thus diminished by some five-sixths.Footnote ³⁶

The depletion of the Estates of prelates had a variety of consequences. In Lower Austria, we find commendatory abbots, including Melk, who attended the diet beginning in 1786.Footnote ³⁷ They ranked behind the regularly elected prelates. The heads of dissolved houses also turned up at meetings in some places.Footnote ³⁸ In others, the accession of new members was permitted. At the Upper Austrian Estates, the incorporation of three dignitaries of Linz's cathedral chapter did little to make up for the loss of six monasteries.Footnote ³⁹ To staunch the bleeding, Joseph reversed himself and allowed commendatory abbots to take part in assemblies where it had not been permitted.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was obviously relevant only where foundations rooted in the Estates continued to exist. On the other hand, the simultaneous formal delineation of those clerics entitled to seats—commendatory abbots, provosts of collegiate churches, regular heads of still-extant religious houses previously represented, and professing knights of the Maltese and Teutonic Orders—failed to take into account certain dignitaries who had previously attended the Inner Austrian diets, such as the parish priest of St. Egid in Klagenfurt. This interestingly did not alter established practice. More generally speaking, the monastic abolitions of the 1780s heightened the noble profile of the Estates. No doubt unintended by Joseph, this notable shift occurred at two levels. First, reform removed a large number of abbots who had been peasants or townsmen by birth. Second, the surviving corporate clerics—such as the cathedral canons of Laibach (Carniolan Estates) and Olmütz (Moravian Estates) or the prince-bishop of Gurk (Carinthian Estates)—were disproportionately noble by background.Footnote ⁴¹ In Hungary, by contrast, the extensive reorganization of the Catholic Church barely affected ecclesiastical representation in the diet. The only three religious houses with places there were “completely overshadowed” by the bishops.Footnote ⁴²

The second major religious initiative of Joseph's early years, the toleration granted non-Catholic Christians (namely Lutherans, Calvinists, and Greek Orthodox), which was promulgated in most territories including Lower Austria in 1781, had less immediate impact on the Estates' makeup. Ideologically, however, it was a marked break with the Counter-Reformation past. The new legislation permitted the accession to the Estates of members of those confessional groups, though applicants were required to secure a dispensation from the government beforehand.Footnote ⁴³ In the Austrian duchies, the corporate nobility (lords and knights) had managed to preserve autonomous control over admission to its ranks; in the Bohemian lands, the ruler formally exercised the corresponding power, the grant of the so-called incolat; and in Hungary, the bestowal of the same honor was a matter for joint resolution by king and diet.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, where Joseph became relatively free in 1781 to raise non-Catholic Christians into the Estates of some lands catholicized during the Counter-Reformation, the nobility's formal approval remained necessary in others.

Given the conurbation of Vienna with its religious minorities, the Lower Austrian nobility was the first group to deal with toleration's impact on the Estates. In 1782, the Lutheran Jacob Friedrich von Stockmayer (died 1788), a south German diplomatic envoy with local ties, applied for admission to the knights, the lesser consortium of the Estates' nobility. They not surprisingly showed acute reluctance to abandon guidelines that forbade the accession of Protestants and that had been enforced by the dynasty with the greatest implacability since the 1620s. This unwillingness mirrored sentiment in other official provincial circles. The survival of Lutheran nobles in the archduchy below the Enns River thanks to a special provision of the Peace of Westphalia (1648)—an altogether exceptional circumstance in the central Habsburg lands—was ironically likely to have reinforced the reluctance. Unlike in the other Austrian duchies and Bohemia, the question of the nobility's religion had remained a live political issue at the monarchy's center deep into the eighteenth century. Successive rulers had made advancement at court and in the civil administration dependent on belonging to the Church of Rome. The consequence had been the steady depletion of a group that in the mid-seventeenth century had still numbered about a third of the local nobility.Footnote ⁴⁵ Among the numerous later Lower Austrian converts, the Zinzendorf brothers, both of whom became prominent reform statesmen, stand out. Ironically, the last remnants of the archduchy's native Lutheran nobility were to vanish around the time of the patent of toleration.Footnote ⁴⁶

After dragging their feet for more than a year, the knights finally admitted Stockmayer through sleight of hand. On the suggestion of Aulic Councillor von Keeß, one of their members and a leading advocate of toleration, they agreed to accept him while simultaneously banning him from their assemblies as long as he remained the agent of a foreign prince.Footnote ⁴⁷ Less than a handful of other Protestants were accepted during Joseph's reign. Only in 1820 was the first Greek Orthodox incorporated.Footnote ⁴⁸ Jews, in contrast, never gained admission. Toleration for them was provided for by a separate law that came into force in the archduchy below the Enns River in January 1782. While it relieved some of the more humiliating aspects of discrimination and provided them with new opportunities in education and employment, it did not make them eligible for the Estates.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, no Jew had theretofore been ennobled and thus there were no “candidates in waiting” at the time of the law's enactment.

Two noteworthy concessions near the end of the reign transformed the situation. First, in September 1789, Joseph permitted “well-to-do Jews” to buy state-owned land at public auction in Lower Austria. Israel Hönig (1724–1808), a Jew whose family had acquired a fortune in the Bohemian tobacco monopoly, thereupon purchased the manor of Velm northeast of Vienna on which to establish a factory.Footnote ⁵⁰ Previously, Jews had been forbidden to own real property. Second, only a few days later, in October 1789, Joseph ennobled Hönig with the title Edler von Hönigsberg. He became the first Habsburg Jew so honored. At almost a stroke, the emperor thus eliminated insuperable obstacles to the admission of a Jew to the Estates. Hönig not only possessed a letter of nobility issued by an aulic chancellery of the Habsburg hereditary lands, a prerequisite for access mandated decades earlier by Maria Theresa, but also owned noble land with the right to exercise the associated feudal rights.Footnote ⁵¹ Though such landholding was in practice no longer required to enter the Estates, it nonetheless remained a preeminent marker of nobility. In the later eighteenth century, its importance was ideologically enhanced by physiocratic theory, which emphasized agriculture as the principal source of a state's wealth.

Many at the Landhaus saw the grants to Hönig as a disgrace that made him their “quasi member.”Footnote ⁵² Whether Joseph would actually have tried to force him into the Estates must remain a matter of speculation. The emperor died only a few months later, while neither Hönig nor any other Jew became a corporate noble before 1848. Joseph had shown no interest in abrogating the admissions' autonomy of the nobilities in the Austrian duchies, which had been reconfirmed by his mother after the Seven Years' War. He also did not try to homogenize entrée to the Estates by arrogating the right of bestowal in the Austrian territories that he and his ancestors had enjoyed in Bohemia since 1627. Perhaps Joseph was simply indifferent to a matter that he regarded as of little consequence. He repeatedly granted the traditional incolat for his Bohemian lands, effectively creating members of the corporate nobility there.Footnote ⁵³ The Estates of Lower and Inner Austria are all on record as having inducted new members during the reign. Changes in customary admissions procedures in these years were a by-product of other factors: fewer assemblies; dwindling numbers of attendees at those meetings that did take place; and the autocratic role played by provincial governors, who occupied the chairs at the Estates.Footnote ⁵⁴ The situation, again, varied from place to place.

Organization: Presiding Officers

The question of the governors brings us to the major administrative reforms initiated in the early years of the emperor's sole rule. Here, the discussion of events in Lower Austria will be embedded as far as possible directly in that of the larger process of provincial reform across the Habsburg lands. The changes had far-reaching, if little understood and hardly uniform, consequences for the Estates. As a result of war, two major waves of governmental reorganization had occurred under Maria Theresa, the second of which Joseph had witnessed as a young man in the early 1760s. His changes in the early 1780s, it is worth noting, were less the result of international rivalry and the necessity of maintaining a large standing army than of an enlightened desire to rationalize, even as hopes of administrative cost-savings remained a vital consideration in view of the vast state debt piled up in earlier conflagrations. As in the empress's time, the guiding issues behind reform were whether certain affairs—“political” and “cameral” or “administrative” and “judicial”—should be combined in the same agencies.Footnote ⁵⁵ Consolidation again became the watchword. At the highest level of government, the institutions to which the Estates in the various territories had been subordinate were transformed. The Hungarian and Transylvanian aulic chancelleries were merged in 1782. At the beginning of the following year, the Bohemian-Austrian Aulic Chancellery, which had handled the ruler's relations with the Estates in the central lands, was combined with other major bodies to form the United Offices (die Vereinigten Hofstellen). With respect to the Estates, the new institution assumed the responsibilities of the chancellery, which maintained a recognizably separate existence within the larger organization.

At the provincial level, Joseph originally foresaw sweeping changes that would have abridged the monarchy's long-standing territorial organization. The plan involved merging the Estates of different lands to correspond to a lesser number of provincial administrations. There was no talk of actually abolishing the intermediary powers. The Council of State's objections, based in part on the systems of public credit run by the various corporate institutions, led the emperor to abandon the idea of combining them (November 1781).Footnote ⁵⁶ But the concentration of the monarch's own provincial authorities also proved less extensive than the older literature suggested.Footnote ⁵⁷ In one respect, there was none at all. When Joseph assumed sole power, eight major provincial administrative bodies managed the central lands: Bohemia; Moravia; Silesia; Inner Austria (Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Gorizia); Lower and Upper Austria; Trieste; Tyrol and the Further Austrian territories; and Galicia. The number of such institutions rose by one during Joseph's reign: Bohemia; Moravia-Silesia; Inner Austria (Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola); Lower Austria; Upper Austria; Trieste-Gorizia; Tyrol; Further Austria; and Galicia.Footnote ⁵⁸ The organizations in Moravia and rump Silesia were amalgamated, while Upper Austria was separated from Lower Austria, and Tyrol from Further Austria. Gorizia was transferred from the responsibility of the Inner Austrian authority to that of Trieste. The concentration of power was visible in the disappearance of a number of subordinate royal bodies such as the rather elusive “governments” (Regierungen) in Inner and Further Austria as well as the Inner and Upper Austrian Landeshauptmannschaften. The separate administration of Bukovina disappeared with its annexation to Galicia in 1787.Footnote ⁵⁹

Joseph's streamlining was more successful with respect to the relationship between governors and Estates. Picking up on an initiative from his mother's reign, he combined the offices of governor and Estates' president in the same person. Maria Theresa had imposed such an arrangement in Moravia, Tyrol, and the Further Austrian lands, but had failed in Styria because of the Estates' protests.Footnote ⁶⁰ This practice had the advantage of establishing a single source of civil authority at the head of both the provincial administration and Estates. But it had two disadvantages. First, in several territories, there was no longer an adequate representative of monarchical authority on hand much of the time. In several Inner Austrian lands, the Empress Maria Theresa had addressed this problem by having separate heads of the Estates who bore the title Landeshauptmann and functioned as her permanent agents at the diets. Joseph now dispensed with separate holders of these offices. The Inner Austrian governor with his seat in Graz became simultaneously president of the Estates (and Landeshauptmann) in Klagenfurt and Laibach, as well as in the Styrian capital itself.Footnote ⁶¹ Second, as head of the Estates, the governor was also responsible for directing the diet as well as committees and certain other bodies that continued to exist. The problem was particularly acute in Inner Austria, but typical of what Joseph expected from his administrators otherwise. Of the roughly two dozen recorded sessions in 1788 of the Carniolan Estates' committee, the Inner Austrian governor is known to have presided at only one.Footnote ⁶² His presence in the corresponding body in Carinthia was no less scarce the following year.Footnote ⁶³ Even where distance played little role, as in Lower Austria, the press of business would account for Pergen's frequent absence from the Estates' bodies he chaired ex officio.Footnote ⁶⁴

A little-remarked feature of the new arrangements was that the governor did not always become president of the Estates. In several key territories, it was vice versa. Maria Theresa had appointed Count Johann Anton Pergen Landmarschall and thus head of the Lower Austrian Estates in 1775; seven years later, Joseph made him additionally “president of the [Lower Austrian provincial] government” (Regierungspräsident), the equivalent of governor elsewhere. He bore both titles between 1782 and 1790.Footnote ⁶⁵ A similar solution was found in Prague, where the grand burgrave was appointed governor. Pergen, as well as his counterparts in other provinces, including Count Franz Anton Khevenhüller (Inner Austria), Count Ludwig Cavriani (Moravia-Silesia, later Bohemia), and Count Aloysius Ugarte (Moravia), belonged by birth to the aulic aristocracy, the group of dynastically oriented, titled families from which the ruling house had drawn most of its leading servants since before the Thirty Years' War. The fact that many governors were landed in the areas over which they exercised authority did not inevitably make them hidebound particularists. Pergen and Khevenhüller both represented the aristocracy that had come of age in the Theresan era as a prop of strengthened Habsburg government and themselves enforced many unpopular Josephian measures at the Estates.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the same token, they were hardly the slavishly dependent “bureaucrats” shorn of birth, background, and outlook sometimes depicted in the literature.Footnote ⁶⁷ As so often in its history, the aristocracy was in the process of reinventing itself.

Joseph originally intended that his governors wear three hats. In addition to directing the provincial government and diet, they would chair the law courts that exercised jurisdiction over the Estates individually and collectively (the so-called Landrechte). Because the principle of the separation of administration and justice that had been an axiom of reform since the 1740s would thus have been compromised, his advisors persuaded him to discard that plan, at least in some places.Footnote ⁶⁸ Only partly abandoned, too, was the idea of amalgamating Landrechte in the same way that the Estates of certain provinces were to have been merged.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Lower Austria, Joseph eliminated an anachronism going back to his mother's reign when he deprived the Landmarschall of the Landrecht's honorary presidency (1782). This step severed the last of the historic bonds between the head of the Estates and the court.Footnote ⁷⁰ It also further removed justice from administration, given that the Landmarschall, as chairman of the Estates' directorial committee, was also an administrator. The appointment in the late 1780s of Baron Johann Friedrich Löhr (1734–95) as president of the Landrecht—he bore the title Oberster Landrichter (chief provincial judge)—was a further notable departure from custom. Unlike his predecessors, Löhr was by background neither Lower Austrian nor aristocratic. In some areas, organizational consolidation won out over the separation of powers. In Upper Austria, Tyrol, and Further Austria, the governors all presided over the local Landrechte, while the Moravian-Silesian governor presided over the provincial court of appeal (Appellationsgericht).Footnote ⁷¹

Two other reforms of the law had far-reaching consequences for the Estates. First, the privileged jurisdiction reserved to them in the Landrechte was diluted. Although the emperor did not scrap the distinction between noble and non-noble civil jurisdiction at the primary level, he simplified the court system by assigning the Landrechte additional bailiwicks that themselves had earlier been distinct. In Lower Austria, groups that had fallen under the legal authority of ecclesiastical, academic, and other forums now came under the Landrecht, which simultaneously continued to be responsible for the Estates.Footnote ⁷² Similar arrangements were made in other territories. The courts that constituted the two levels of appeal (provincial and central) above the tribunal of original jurisdiction were not defined, by contrast, according to social standing. Second, in 1787, Joseph abolished privileged criminal jurisdiction.Footnote ⁷³ Place of residence became the sole determinant of which court had competence in a particular case. The nobility regarded this change as a major violation of its liberties and filed repeated, futile protests down into the reign of Francis II.Footnote ⁷⁴

Organization: Committees and Financial Officers

The consolidation of provincial government initiated in the early 1780s also extended to the standing directorial committees of the Estates. Though their histories—like their names—differed from territory to territory, these bodies had all developed over time mainly in response to the fiscal and military exigencies of dynastic warfare and been firmly institutionalized in most cases by around 1700.Footnote ⁷⁵ They operated simultaneously as the diets' executive arms and as pivotal administrative links between central power in the guise of the aulic chancelleries and local authority (magistrates and manorial officials). Just as her ancestors had done since the Thirty Years' War, the Empress Maria Theresa managed with considerable skill to integrate them into her political dispensation. But the frequent assertion that she “bureaucratized” them is anachronistic, not least given that the Estates still elected their members, that the educational requirements imposed elsewhere in government did not apply to them, and that they otherwise hardly functioned according to the definition of bureaucracy later formulated by Max Weber. Under the empress, their scope of business underwent considerable change and was more closely coordinated, but early in Joseph's reign it still encompassed key areas of state activity such as administering direct taxation, managing debt incurred by the Estates on the government's behalf, and military provisioning.Footnote ⁷⁶ The peculiar circumstances of individual territories operated on and supplemented this work. The Estates furthermore paid large support staffs that invariably included syndics, bookkeepers, tax receivers, agents, secretaries, clerks, scribes, and many others.

The hoary notion that the emperor's eradication of these panels destroyed intermediary authority is not unfounded—the Lower Austrian Estates themselves spoke in that connection of the “complete overthrow” of their “constitution.”Footnote ⁷⁷ For it had been through these bodies that their influence had been brought to bear in daily affairs of government. In direct connection with the decision to combine the offices of governor and Estates' president, Joseph resolved to amalgamate a much-reduced form of the Estates' directorial committees with his own administrative apparatuses in the central lands. In this way, all business apart from justice was to be united in each territory under one agency directed by the newly enhanced local chief executive. The literature contains at best perfunctory reference to the resulting transformation. Often dated to 1782–83, it is generally portrayed as the knockout blow to already enfeebled “feudal” institutions. Though first mooted in the Council of State in January 1782, the merger was not completed in some places for years.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Galician Estates are reported to have been excluded from the new arrangements, while the directorial committees in Silesia and the Further Austrian territory of Breisgau both survived.Footnote ⁷⁹ The new system took effect first in the Inner Austrian duchies (1782); followed by Upper Austria (1783); then Lower Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia (1784).Footnote ⁸⁰ In Tyrol, the situation was more complex; though initial consolidation occurred in 1784, the surviving panel was discontinued only in 1789.Footnote ⁸¹ Joseph's better-investigated reorganization of the Hungarian county system, which likewise infringed traditional forms of local authority, came at the reign's midpoint (1785). He amalgamated some Hungarian counties, with their notoriously recalcitrant assemblies, in a way that was notably not possible with the Estates and diets of the central lands.Footnote ⁸²

The merging of the Estates' directorial committees with provincial government allowed for some continuing corporate sway in affairs. What forms did this take? The original plan for Lower Austria called for four noble delegates (Verordnete) chosen by the Estates to sit on the provincial government's council, where they would handle business previously expedited at the Landhaus but also assume other responsibilities as needed.Footnote ⁸³ The delegates would have made up a third of the council's planned membership of twelve.Footnote ⁸⁴ Given that the old Estates' directorial committee—known as the “college of delegates” (Verordnetenkollegium)—had included two prelates in addition to four nobles (two lords and two knights), the new disposition meant to end the clergy's historical role in territorial government as well as reduce the number of officeholders in charge of Estates' business. The cooption of prelates into the provincial branches of the aulic commission created to oversee monastic suppression (Geistliche Hofkommission) around this time must conversely have been regarded as virtual mockery.Footnote ⁸⁵ The houses of both Lower Austrians chosen (the abbots of Säusenstein and Montserrat) would themselves be broken up.Footnote ⁸⁶ While the emperor continued to allow the nobility to elect its delegates under the new system, he curtailed its room for manoeuvre. Candidates for office had to be vetted ahead of time by central authority and were required to be in possession of vaguely defined “required attributes.” Professional or educational prerequisites were not specified.Footnote ⁸⁷

In the event, the plan of 1782 was not fully realized in Lower Austria. The college of delegates continued to meet and conduct business into 1784, even as its new noble members elected at Joseph's instigation in 1782 also took part at Pergen's bidding in the provincial council.Footnote ⁸⁸ Furthermore, the abbots of Säusenstein and Montserrat remained active in the committee, though no longer in a remunerated capacity. This solution would be typical of those in other crown lands where it was easier for Joseph to abolish paid offices than regulate the business they had overseen. Several circumstances help to explain the time lag. First, the authorities were busy adapting district-level authority (the so-called Kreisämter, or “circle offices”) to the needs of reformed government. This project received Joseph's approval only in summer 1783.Footnote ⁸⁹ Second, Pergen himself expressed reservations about dissolving the committee. Initially these bordered on the principled—under his direction, he expostulated, it had operated to the “all-highest satisfaction.”Footnote ⁹⁰ At the same time, he was concerned about undermining the system of public credit based on the Estates' borrowing power.Footnote ⁹¹ For this reason, he objected not only to allowing provincial councillors who did not belong to the Estates to deliberate on matters in which they had no personal stake, but also to excluding the prelates. Because of the traditional weight of Lower Austria's corporate clergy within the Estates, two of its number had countersigned Estates-issued bonds. At another level, Pergen regretted losing the services of the abbot of Säusenstein, whose “industry” and “honesty” he praised and whose expertise in cadastre revision he would miss.

With an important exception, these objections were brushed aside and the resulting solution proved considerably more disadvantageous to the Estates than that announced two years previously. The emperor instead imposed a scheme similar to those already operating in the Upper and Inner Austrian lands. Under its provisions, only two rather than four Estates' delegates acquired seats on the provincial government's council, where they now constituted less than one-fifth rather than the planned one-third of the members (reduced in number from twelve to eleven).Footnote ⁹² The Estate of lords provided one delegate, the Estate of knights the other.Footnote ⁹³ The prelates remained excluded. Two delegates thus managed business previously reserved to six—on annual pay moreover reduced from 4,000 to 2,500 florins. In contrast, repeated official efforts to eliminate the council's corporate profile—with separate benches for lords, knights, and the “learned”—ran into predictable difficulty in a highly stratified society. As late as 1789, the lords (who included one Estates' delegate) still enjoyed precedence in its sessions.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the event of his absence, Pergen had also foreseen an Estates' delegate rather than a regular provincial councillor as presiding officer.Footnote ⁹⁵ When his failing eyesight required the formal appointment of a delegate in 1789, the choice fell on Count August Auersperg, a Catholic convert and former Estates' delegate serving at that time as Stadthauptmann of Vienna.Footnote ⁹⁶

The attempt to introduce uniform structures throughout the central lands again did not produce uniform results. Given that the Estates of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola at first furnished two delegates each, the council of the Inner Austrian Gubernium had a disproportionately high number of them in relation to total membership. In 1785, Joseph altered this by allowing each group of Estates only one delegate. This reduced corporate weight, but in the end also made it socially top-heavy. The three diets predictably chose to send lords rather than knights to the council in Graz.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Upper Austria, the reorganization of 1783 had a similar impact. Not only did it reduce the number of Estates' delegates from eight (two prelates, two lords, two knights, and two townsmen) to two (one lord and one knight), but it also cost the Fourth Estate the only places it had possessed on a directorial committee in the Austrian duchies.Footnote ⁹⁸ The less-privileged were similarly disadvantaged in Moravia. As early as the winter of 1782, a non-noble Carthusian prelate whose monastery had been suppressed forfeited his place on the still-extant directorial committee (Landesausschuß). The bishop of Brünn, Count Chorinsky, replaced him.Footnote ⁹⁹ In both Moravia and Bohemia, the clergy, petty nobles, and townsmen again lost out when the directorial committees were disbanded. The Estates in both Prague and Brünn appear to have chosen only lords as their “representatives” to the local Gubernia.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Although the new “amalgamated” Lower Austrian provincial government took up its work in early May 1784, a complete fusion of business did not occur.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Most significantly, Joseph conceded that corporate credit could be dealt with outside the council's plenum by those the Landmarschall designated.Footnote ¹⁰² Pergen regarded only members of the Estates as qualified for that job. Otherwise, the Estates' “delegates” handled Estates' affairs, as the surviving correspondence shows. Even where central authority insisted on absolute merger—as in respect to record keeping—custom proved tenacious. Under the new regime, the Estates' business continued to be registered separately, setting one of those dreaded early modern precedents.Footnote ¹⁰³ The assumption that corporate financial officers previously subordinate to the Estates were fully incorporated into the ruler's agencies is also not borne out by the evidence. In Lower Austria, the two principal such officers had been the bookkeeper, who had maintained the land records on which tax assessments were based, and the receiver general, who had taken in direct taxes and generally managed the Estates' accounts, including bond issues. Historians have invariably followed the nineteenth-century legal scholar Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth, who noted the merger of corporate bookkeeping with equivalent provincial departments.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The emperor indeed issued such a directive for Lower Austria.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The consolidation of bookkeeping also involved the long-standing disbursement treasuries (Kassen) of the “three upper Estates” (prelates, lords, and knights).Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Neither Luschin nor subsequent writers have had much to say about the Estates' tax receiverships, whose history does not conform to ideas of bureaucratic state-building. The data for Lower Austria, the Inner Austrian duchies, Tyrol, and Moravia indicate that Joseph failed to integrate corporate and cameral finances in a fundamental administrative way, even as monarchy and intermediary powers remained inextricably intertwined financially. In Lower Austria, the arrangements of 1784 provided that the receiver general (Obereinnehmer), a non-noble officer elected by the “three upper Estates,” be demoted to a “paymaster” (Zahlmeister) with a salary of 1,500 rather than 3,000 florins annually.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He was to be subordinated to the “provincial disbursement treasury” (Provinzialkassa). Even the name change did not take place, however. Joseph Rohrwürth (died 1794), the receiver general elected by the Estates in the early 1780s, retained his post (and title) and continued to act in an autonomous capacity to the end of the reign.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Public patents mandated the payment by manors and local magistrates of regular direct taxation and extraordinary war levies into “the office of the Estates' receiver general” (ständisches Obereinnehmeramt).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By 1787, reference to the Estates' delegates again adorned tax patents (von der k.k. n.ö. Regierung und denen mit selber vereinten Ständischen Verordneten) for the first time since the dissolution of the directorial committee in 1784.

But also with respect to bookkeeping, the evidence points to operations fused rather more on paper than in actual fact. The ruler himself provided for two separate departments in the “provincial disbursement treasury,” the one encompassing cameral, the other Estates' business. As late as 1786, Count Pergen disputed central authority's right to name a bookkeeper for the department that managed the Estates' affairs.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Apart from the institutional infighting that may have informed this clash, the position of the Estates as large-scale borrowers under their own name who consequently needed their own financial apparatus will have influenced his thinking and also have found an echo in the councils of state. Similar contention is documented for Moravia, where the record into the late 1780s—including aulic pronouncements—shows the continued existence of the “Estates' bookkeeping department” (Landschaftsbuchhalterei), the “Estates disbursement treasury” (Landschaftskassa), and Estates' tax receivers (Landschaftseinnehmer).Footnote ¹¹¹ Customary practice with respect to the receiverships in Inner Austria and Tyrol is no less noticeable. Under Joseph, their assemblies continued the long tradition of electing noble receivers general, who, as in Lower Austria, had immediate charge of the corporate credit systems.Footnote ¹¹²

The empress's restructuring after the Seven Years' War had eliminated all standing committees of the Estates in Upper and Lower Austria with the exception of the colleges of delegates. As a consequence, the reforms of her son in the 1780s threatened to deprive them of any entity capable of preparing material for their assemblies or offering considered advice either to them or on their behalf. If diets were to continue to exist (and Joseph's assurances seemed to leave no doubt about that), such bodies were regarded as imperative. The situation was comparable in Bohemia and Moravia. The emperor therefore allowed the Estates there and in the archduchy to maintain what was called a “committee” (Ausschuß) that was nonetheless specifically denied the character of a proper office (Stelle) with staff, regular sessions, and pay.Footnote ¹¹³ Joseph seems to have regarded the new panels as irrelevant consultative organs at the disposal of provincial governors.

In Lower Austria, Pergen took little exception to the idea that the committee might eliminate the need for the “holding of so many diets.” He pointed out that it could, in fact, take care of some matters “just as well” as the full assembly.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The emperor left the issue of its membership relatively open, specifying only that the two delegates to the provincial government must belong ex officio. He notably did not require the induction of burghers in a territory where they had been excluded from standing committees at the Landhaus since the sixteenth century, just as he made no provision for giving them stronger representation in the diets themselves. Though the full consequences would only become clear in time, Pergen's provisions for the new board incongruously revived the traditional Estates' executive committee (confusingly also called Ausschuß) disbanded by Maria Theresa.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1784, the three upper Estates (prelates, lords, and knights) each elected its own representatives, with the significant difference that the prelates chose only two as opposed to six each by lords and knights. Until 1764, in contrast, each Estate had been allotted four members, for a total of twelve. With the reduction in the number of prelates and the exclusion of townsmen, the new committee became yet another Josephian corporate body heavily and improbably weighted in the nobility's favor. Pergen felt the need to justify the inclusion of even two prelates with reference to the financial good name of the Estates. He stressed the public expectation that the signatures and seals of two corporate clergymen appear together with those of two lords and two knights on Estates' bonds. Though his worries were dismissed in the notoriously arrogant and condescending tone of Josephian officialdom, clerical participation endured.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Lower Austrian committee remained largely dormant until fall 1789 except in one respect: its members countersigned Estates' bonds.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In granting its elected members precedence over its ex officio ones (namely the delegates to the provincial government), Pergen moreover tried to ensure that the bonds would bear the marks of men more affiliated in the public mind with the Estates than with monarchical authority (in the guise of the provincial government) and its historically shaky credit. In Prague, the situation was similar. Members of the ad hoc panel that was allowed to the Bohemian Estates after the disappearance of their directorial committee were likewise needed to endorse bonds but otherwise played little role.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Inner Austria, their counterparts had the same task, but the story was otherwise different. In Klagenfurt and Laibach, active Estates' committees (Ausschüße)—not to be mistaken for the directorial committees (Verordnetenstellen) there—survived reform. These bodies had earlier constituted control organs composed of senior prelates, lords, and knights; their advice had been sought especially in weighty matters before the diets, and they had exercised oversight over the directorial committees. With the latter's disappearance, the boards that endured—more heavily noble than before—assumed responsibilities that could not be (or were not) handled by the delegates to the Gubernium in far-off Graz. This is readily apparent in the steadily expanding minutes of the Carinthian committee through the later 1780s. In Carinthia, the diet chose the members; in Carniola self-recruitment appears to have occurred as well. In both places, the lords predominated and the governor confirmed appointments. As in Lower Austria, there was no pay for those who served.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Given the absence of governor and Estates' delegates from Klagenfurt and Laibach for all but a few weeks of the year, the immediate personal connection between government and intermediary powers such as existed between Pergen and the Lower Austrian Estates in Vienna was lacking most of the time. In Carinthia and Carniola, the committees stepped into the void, keeping open the lines of communication to Inner Austrian (and thus central) authority and attending as needed to the business in which the Estates remained involved. At the simplest level, these bodies channeled decrees coming from Graz to the Estates. In 1785, an official edict on the standardization of procedures in the three Inner Austrian receiverships general reached the Carinthian committee, where it was brought to the attention of Receiver General von Litzelhofen.Footnote ¹²⁰ At another level, the committees were consulted for information and advice. In 1787, the Inner Austrian Gubernium requested a detailed report from the Carniolan committee on Estates' assets and liabilities in the previous year, including the issue and repayment of bonds.Footnote ¹²¹ That the government had no direct access to such material long after the supposed merger of Estates' with provincial financial offices is again revealing.

At the same time, the committees dealt with matters that arose both from Estates' obligations to the ruler and other binding contracts previously supervised by the directorates. To maintain roads and bridges in Lower Carniola, the Estates in Laibach had leased out the collection of tolls to third parties. The administrative shake-up of 1782 did not invalidate such agreements and the surviving Carniolan committee continued to run the system.Footnote ¹²² It even appears that the Carniolan branch of the Bankal Administration, a central financial agency, subleased some if not all of those tolls from the Estates. During the Turkish campaigns of the later 1780s, the committee hired a local entrepreneur, the merchant Joseph Desselbrunner, to organize large deliveries of wheat on behalf of the Estates to the Office of Military Supply in Laibach (k.k. Militärverpflegsamt). Such provisioning continued to be governed by agreements between the Estates and court known as “recesses.” Desselbrunner was in turn reimbursed by the Estates' receivership general, which furthermore soaked up local credit through bond emissions on behalf of the war effort.Footnote ¹²³ Such activity recalls the better-known revival of Hungarian counties under the impact of the Balkan conflict and the state's need for recruits.Footnote ¹²⁴ Like Hungary, Carniola was geographically comparatively close to the field.

Toward the end of the reign, the committees met on average twice a month, usually under the presidency of one of their own members rather than the governor. The committees included one or more Referenten who prepared material for consideration, provided counsel and clarification, and saw that decisions were carried out. In Carinthia, several members are known to have undertaken this work more or less simultaneously, while in Carniola, Count Georg Jacob Hohenwart performed this function alone between 1787 and 1789. He owed his appointment to the Inner Austrian governor.Footnote ¹²⁵ Near the end of the reign, administrative overload led Hohenwart to ask for an assistant. The approval of the request apparently occurred without reference to Graz.Footnote ¹²⁶ In combination with the long-standing centralization of Inner Austrian government in the Styrian capital, Joseph's abolition of the Estates' directorial committees shifted much of the administrative burden, which was undertaken in part on the state's behalf, onto unpaid, largely under-resourced, and increasingly demoralized boards.

Organization: The Diets

Diets were the principal corporate gathering to survive under Joseph. Many assertions (and assumptions) to the contrary, those in the central lands were summoned on a regular basis to the reign's end.Footnote ¹²⁷ As had been usual, they met in the fall around the beginning of the fiscal-military year (November 1) and dealt first and foremost with the annual royal demand for the so-called Contribution, the territorial grant based on hearth taxes and a tax on landed income. The demand was specifically prepared for each territory. But the meetings of the diets did not remain unchanged. Here again the emperor little appreciated the meaning his contemporaries attached to pomp and circumstance. Procedures were simplified, much as at court. In Lower Austria, the abolition of the personal handover made necessary a new modus by which the Estates might officially come by the postulation. Here Joseph adapted the custom in other territories, where specially appointed royal commissioners were used. Unlike in the Inner Austrian duchies, Bohemia, and Moravia, the choice in Lower Austria consistently fell on the Landmarschall. But the use of a commissioner largely adjusted the Lower Austrian practice to that elsewhere and at the same time deprived the Estates of a cherished privilege: receiving the demand out of the ruler's own hands.

The postulation had traditionally prompted deliberations by the individual Estates, whose “votes” were then combined into the diet's formal “declaration.” The resulting draft was then approved by the larger assembly, which would also be convoked later to deal with the government's response. Having already reduced the number of sessions the previous year, Count Pergen decided in 1785 to eliminate “voting” by Estate. By that time, neither prelates nor knights had a proper presiding officer. The incumbent of Melk had died, to be replaced by a commendatory abbot who did not enjoy his predecessor's precedence, while the office of president (Präses) of the knights had been abolished by Joseph on the reasoning that the individual Estates did not need distinct heads, given that interests apart from those of the state were not to be allowed.Footnote ¹²⁸ For the rest of the reign, meetings of the Lower Austrian diet were confined to a mere one day annually.Footnote ¹²⁹ This radical pruning paradoxically occurred in the year after the ruler's widely publicized “Pastoral Letter” in which he had proclaimed that “the monarch himself [is] accountable to each subject for his management of public money.”Footnote ¹³⁰ That accountability required a political forum evidently did not occur to him as it did to contemporary reformers in France.

Whether Pergen was acting on Joseph's direct orders or only in the spirit of Josephian government is unknown. In Moravia, the emperor explicitly approved “abbreviated” observances at the opening of the annual diet.Footnote ¹³¹ Later, he abandoned Czech as a language of formal communication with that body, to the evident dismay of the Estates.Footnote ¹³² Previously, official documents such as his commissioners' credentials and the tax demand itself had been transmitted to the full assembly—under the emperor's own signature—in both German and Czech. Joseph's concern with efficiency and his impatience at having to sign matching documents in different idioms, rather than the Germanizing tendencies sometimes attributed to him in connection with having made German the administrative language of Hungary, will have dictated this decision. One can easily imagine his annoyance at stacks of papers on his desk concerning institutions that he would have preferred to have eradicated. In Bohemia, a Czech version of the diet's closing articles (in German the so-called Landtagsschluß) ceased to appear beginning with the assembly summoned in fall 1787 (for the military year 1788). The German ones were not published until 1789, which places the change in the final year of the reign as well.

On the other hand, no general reform sought to homogenize procedures and rites of the diets generally. The “votes” by the individual Estates on the royal tax demand in Prague, for instance, remained customary. Likewise, the diets of Bohemia and Moravia, with one exception, continued to publish closing articles whose preparation required additional exchanges with the government and consequently further gatherings across the year.Footnote ¹³³ Such articles had not been, and did not become, usual in the Austrian duchies. Only one example of an attempt at cross-border standardization has come to light. In late 1787, Joseph decreed that Estates' registers of member families (Matrikel) rather than aulic honors were to determine precedence at assemblies.Footnote ¹³⁴ Previously, possession of the chamberlain's key or the rank of privy councillor—both bestowed by the monarch—had offered a privileged position at some gatherings, though practice across territorial boundaries had been far from integrated. Even so, regularization was not achieved. The complexities associated with such a change in an early modern setting made outright implementation difficult, as the Moravian case showed. In the consultations to which his decree gave rise, Joseph decided that the privileged bench for his own privy councillors there (the so-called Fürstenbank) was to be preserved. Among the lords attending the diet in Brünn, chamberlains of more recent noble vintage such as Count Peter Blümegen continued to outrank grandees who were not vested with that charge, such as Count Joseph Dietrichstein.Footnote ¹³⁵

Recent research has broken down the sharp distinction formerly made between what was thought of as the relatively insignificant “ritual” surrounding early modern representative bodies and the real “substance” of their negotiations.Footnote ¹³⁶ In fact, the highly personal nature of authority lent questions of status, hierarchy, and observance intrinsic political importance. Thus it would be mistaken to dismiss Joseph's ceremonial reforms at the diets as trifles. Anachronistic comparisons with modern legislatures have in turn helped to reinforce the older dichotomy between “form” and “content” and made those bodies that had no law-making power appear irrelevant even before Joseph II appeared on the scene. But this was to misunderstand the nature of early modern representative assemblies in the central Habsburg lands, where the privileges of gathering, remonstrating, being consulted on matters that touched their own and broader provincial interests, and participating in the territorial exercise of authority constituted their essence. Here, too, Joseph set increasingly narrow limits to their activity. In the archduchy, the ancient, ritualized connection between approval of the annual tax demand and the freedom to present grievances had loosened noticeably by the late 1770s. During the emperor's sole reign, it failed there altogether, at least to fall 1789.Footnote ¹³⁷ But both Maria Theresa and her son continued to seek advice and assistance from the Estates. The reform of the tax regime in connection with the introduction of an excise charge on drinks near the end of the empress's reign and Joseph's notable personal appeal to the Estates regarding cadastre revision constituted the principal such occasions in Lower Austria around 1780. The emperor obviously regarded the results of his demarche as unsatisfactory, and the practice of consulting the Estates became rarer, though it never ceased altogether. In 1788, he directed that they be sounded out only on express instruction, a disposition that has led to some misinterpretation.Footnote ¹³⁸ The disappearance of their working committee in 1784 likewise reduced opportunities for regularly constituted representatives of the Estates to offer counsel. Where such committees survived, as in Carinthia and Carniola, confabulations of the earlier sort—between those bodies and the Inner Austrian governor—continued.

Given that the diets endured, a certain amount of ceremony—trumpet fanfares and formal speeches by royal commissioners who stood on a dais beside Joseph's portrait—was unavoidable. The question thus remains: why did Joseph II, who deplored pointless ritual, continue to call tax diets in his central lands and why did presumably sound-minded clerics, nobles, and burghers turn up at events that generations of scholars have dismissed as charades (at least as they occurred before and after Joseph)? Let us consider three possible explanations. First, there is the argument from customary political legitimacy. Regular diets had been a fixture of Austrian political life at least since the Thirty Years' War. But Joseph's refusal to be inaugurated or crowned (or take the associated oaths) makes this argument, for which moreover no evidence exists, extremely doubtful. Second, and more intriguingly, the Court of Vienna had through the judicature of the Imperial Aulic Council been a leading force in the preservation of Estates in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire.Footnote ¹³⁹ This socially conservative stance guided the council's rulings in Maria Theresa's time as well. It is striking that the diets regularly summoned by Joseph lay within the Holy Roman Empire's boundaries. The sole exception was the Galician one, which had nonetheless been modeled on those in the central lands.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Here again, however, it seems most unlikely that Joseph II was guided by the policy of his Imperial ancestors, which had not strictly applied to the Habsburg lands, as they had been largely exempt from the council's jurisdiction. Furthermore, the emperor's fixation on unitary government and distaste for political fragmentation led him to express the hope that he could “get rid of the Reichstag,” the Holy Roman Empire's principal assembly.Footnote ¹⁴¹

There can be little question that Joseph also regarded the diets in his hereditary territories as a bother to be stamped out if possible. That he did not do so was, third, a simple matter of financial imperative. Yet he did not need the Estates' sanction of taxation per se and we can safely assume that he would have dispensed with them if that had been their sole purpose. In Hungary and Transylvania, both he and his mother taxed without the consent of the Estates of those realms. Rather, corporate assent to regular direct levies formally underwrote the provincial credit systems upon which the government heavily relied. Run by the Estates of the individual territories, these systems remain little explored even as their financial importance in the Theresan period has become clear thanks to the pathbreaking work of the historian P. G. M. Dickson. The case of Lower Austria itself shows that Estates' loans to the government grew immensely in significance under Maria Theresa. In the famous agreement (Rezess) she concluded with the Estates in the wake of the War of the Austrian Succession, the debt incurred by them on the state's behalf was placed on a more organized and permanent footing.Footnote ¹⁴² That arrangement together with similar ones in the other central lands welded the core areas of the Habsburg Monarchy into a more coherent fiscal-political whole without depriving the Estates of control over their credit. Indeed, the trustworthiness of the bonds they issued depended upon a measure of autonomy from the center, a phenomenon familiar in other parts of early modern Europe as well. During the ruinously expensive Seven Years' War, the Lower Austrian Estates' receivership general absorbed further millions in (partly forced) loans on behalf of central authority, its accounts more than doubling in size between 1756 and 1762—from roughly thirteen million to twenty-eight million florins.Footnote ¹⁴³

At the end of the conflict, the amount of treasury debt held by the Estates of Lower Austria was exceeded only by that of the Bohemian Estates (24 million as opposed to 28 million florins). The little duchy of Carniola shouldered, in contrast, 1.7 million florins.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Dickson has shown that the Estates of the central lands emerged from the Seven Years' War as the state's principal creditors. Under various headings, they were owed nearly one-half of the government's total debt of 285 million florins.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ By the time Joseph assumed sole power, state debt exceeded that of 1763 thanks to the Potato War debacle of 1778–79. After falling in the fifteen years after the Peace of Hubertusburg, the treasury liabilities guaranteed by the Lower Austrian Estates again rose sharply. In 1781, they amounted to nearly seventeen million florins, bond-issues worth nearly two million having taken place in the previous three years.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The link between direct taxation (the Contribution), the standing army, and state debt remained as explicit in Joseph's annual tax demands as it had been in his mother's. The “security and welfare of our state,” he reported to the Moravian Estates in 1786, depended on maintaining both an “adequate armed force” and the “system” for servicing the “large debts” left from past wars. Almost identical language was standard in the postulations to the Estates elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Corporate approval of the Contribution was in essence a regularly recurring guarantee of that debt. In the last years of Joseph's reign, the Ottoman conflict forced the government to call on the good offices of the Estates once again. It is an irony of history that expressions of gratitude for the loans they raised in a financial crisis exacerbated by the loss of the Austrian Netherlands were among the last official acts of Joseph's government.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

In contrast, the Hungarian and Transylvanian diets were insignificant creditors of the Habsburg state.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Thus, the conventional picture of Habsburg “absolutism” appears turned on its head: Joseph II could afford not to call the Hungarian diet, the body to which staying power is usually attributed, whereas he could hardly afford not to summon what have long been regarded as the relatively inconsequential representative assemblies in his central lands. By the same token, the corporate elites in these territories could scarcely afford not to consent to the annual tax demands. On the contrary: consent served their interests. Had consent been withheld, the system of public debt they themselves guaranteed threatened to come crashing down around them, and with it, their own privileged positions.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The Estates of the central lands thus found themselves “united” in the same predicament. Under Joseph II, monarchy and Estates remained locked in a fiscal embrace that served both parties, however imperfectly. In the absence of taxable large-scale manufacturing and trade comparable to that in the Atlantic states, it is hard to see how the standing army of an agrarian great power was to be financed if not partly by the institutions of intermediary authority enmeshing the central lands. The Estates furthermore provided a comparatively secure investment for what must have been thousands, if not tens of thousands, of bondholders (many women), who represented the more prosperous parts of the landed population that extended beyond immediate corporate circles.Footnote ¹⁵¹ None of this much conforms to the venerable image of the Estates as centrifugal forces of little public relevance that pursued their own selfish ends at the expense of the Habsburg state and the rest of society.

The Estates in the Reign's Last Years

Tensions peaked in the emperor's last years as he launched what was seen by the nobility as an attack on its core material interests with his famous tax and peasant labor services reform while he simultaneously conducted a costly armed conflict in which the largest Habsburg army to date would be fielded. As one scholar has cogently put it, “only an ideologue would risk a major war while carrying out a controversial reform programme.”Footnote ¹⁵² The departure from government in February 1788 of Joseph's most distinguished domestic minister, Count Karl Zinzendorf, inaugurated that last phase. As the head of a special commission set up in 1784, Zinzendorf had managed what was surely one of the reign's worthiest projects—the rectification of the provincial cadastres in the Bohemian-Austrian lands in combination with the revision of manorial dues and services.Footnote ¹⁵³ The aim was the more equitable and efficient distribution of the tax burden and other charges. As the work neared completion, Zinzendorf advised that an assembly of the monarchy's landowners be consulted about the allocation of direct and indirect levies.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Joseph, already highly impatient, refused to countenance further delay and fired him. Early the next year, another key domestic advisor was lost through the unprecedented resignation of the Bohemian Aulic Chancellor Count Chotek, who found he could no longer support the proposed revision.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Though he and Zinzendorf have sometimes been portrayed as narrowly noble in motivation, both had been proponents of strong Habsburg government and belonged to families associated with that goal. They had been heavily influenced by enlightened ideas, and no less significantly, had grounded official policy in politically relevant circles in the central lands. The fact that State Councillor Eger replaced Zinzendorf did not bode well for the project's ultimate success, which Joseph remained determined to realize.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ With no constituency behind him other than the Imperial will, the radical, influential, and non-landed Eger would ill-serve his master's cause as the reign drew to a close.

Publication of the tax and labor services patent of February 10, 1789, provoked provincial dissent months before its provisions were due to come into force (November 1, 1789). This arose against the background of growing unrest in Hungary and especially the Austrian Netherlands, where a fronde erupted in the fall. To what extent were the Estates in the central lands involved institutionally? Thanks to their still-active committees, those of the Inner Austrian duchies were the first to be heard. As early as April 1789, the Carinthian body presided over by Baron Sigmund Schoberg raised objections to be passed onto Vienna through the Inner Austrian governor.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In deferential and conciliatory language, exception was taken mainly to the expected loss of manorial revenue from the cap placed on fees and services. The influence of physiocratic thinking shimmers through the defense of private (landed) property. Governor Khevenhüller appears to have hesitated to pass the protest along, or at least played for time, and only when the committee learned that he had approved a later remonstrance by neighboring Carniola was the appeal renewed. Khevenhüller himself presided over a Carniolan diet in May 1789 at which complaints about the new system were given written form.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ By early summer 1789, the Styrian Estates had become active as well; the expression of their dissatisfaction is reported to have “captured the imagination of contemporaries” far beyond provincial or even the monarchy's borders.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Joseph summarily rejected the Inner Austrian protests in fall 1789 at a time when the Estates of Lower Austria, whose meeting hall was a few hundred feet from his desk, had yet to commit themselves.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Indeed, they had had no formal opportunity to do so. No assembly had met in the months before the diet was convened on October 26, 1789, to consider the regular tax demand, now based on the revised cadastre. The remarkable reduction of the direct tax burden on the archduchy below the Enns River—by nearly a quarter—by no means reconciled the Estates to the limit placed on peasant dues and labor services. The sharper Lower Austrian reaction also reflected the mounting unease as the patent's effective date approached as well as what was felt to be a further blow from the center. At State Councillor Eger's urging, Joseph determined in late summer 1789 to exclude manors and magistrates from their long-standing role in tax collection. To this purpose, a network of state receivers was established at the local level, thereby seeking to replace the regime's traditional base in the countryside with what would have been a large new administrative class.Footnote ¹⁶¹ No consideration appears to have been given as to what impact this might have on the Estates' creditworthiness.

In approving the new Contribution, the Lower Austrian Estates asked to be relieved of any responsibility for ensuring that the peasantry paid its taxes. They readily abandoned Joseph to his new and untried administrators, a demarche to which he acceded with alacrity. Given that Maria Theresa had made the prelates and nobility financially liable if the peasantry did not pay, this was a major change. That the emperor was also losing the support of his own appointees was clear here again. Landmarschall Pergen, who by this time also held the portfolio of police minister, personally presided over both the diet and the committee that polished the final draft of the Estates' response to the postulation.Footnote ¹⁶² The associated remonstration remained firmly within traditional political bounds, but its principal claim was nonetheless remarkable in Joseph's Austria: they objected to the fact that “they had so far not even been asked for their advice about this new tax system.”Footnote ¹⁶³ And they also requested a delay in changes to manorial fees and services for “at least another year,” a typical old-regime delaying tactic. While the Imperial response was more propitiatory in tone than that to the Inner Austrian Estates months earlier, no concession of substance was made.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

In his last weeks, the emperor obviously did not feel he was losing control of his central lands and refused any retreat there, quite in contrast to his collapse before the elites of Hungary and the southern Netherlands. His resolve prompted a notable demarche by a group of Bohemian “cavaliers,” who of their own accord appeared in Vienna on February 11 to protest the labor services reform.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ They in effect filled a vacuum left by the Estates' institutions, which played no oppositional role. For reasons that remain unclear, Joseph had in July 1788 abolished the ad hoc panel permitted the Bohemian Estates after the disbandment of their directorial committee.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Thus, they lacked a body for channeling and giving form to grievances. And the diets in Prague and Brünn that met in late October 1789 appear to have remonstrated in no meaningful way; their records contain nothing comparable to the protest filed at that time by the Lower Austrian diet. The uninvited appearance of Bohemian nobles in the Imperial residence, which perhaps had its roots in the “secret” meetings of nobles in Prague in the preceding months, constituted at all events a grave breach of custom. The government regarded it as unlawful, but the emperor's death nine days later resolved the worst of the tension.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

The European Context and Joseph's Legacy

Joseph had achieved, in Derek Beales's words, “the remarkable feat of totally alienating the upper classes” of his territories.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ That the widespread dissent in his central lands, or even in Hungary and Galicia, did not erupt into rebellion, as it did in the southern Netherlands, is attributable to the political accomplishments of the emperor's ancestors, including his mother, rather than to his own dexterity. By revoking the traditional constitution of Brabant, he in fact brought the contradictions of the regime into the open, for he abolished his own creditors, the Estates there having lent large sums to the Court of Vienna since Charles VI's reign. Successful early modern monarchs, such as Louis XIV of France, Joseph's idol Frederick II of Prussia, but also Maria Theresa, had generally been those able to coax and coordinate their elites in the interest of workable solutions, rather than those who had flouted them.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

But of course Joseph II has been admired as a perceived modernizer and for having embodied progressive philosophical and political tenets.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In the question of representative assemblies, however, he did not conform to the advanced ideas of his time. While it would be anachronistic to reproach him for not having been a democrat, other European rulers were trying to place their authority on a broader and firmer basis by creating such bodies to deal with the increasingly entangled knot of problems involving taxation, public finances, state debt, and political legitimacy. In France, the issue of representation had by the 1780s become the burning issue. Determined to ensure a politically meaningful expression of public opinion (which meant more than lifting censorship), Director-General Necker had persuaded the king to create provincial assemblies of landed proprietors in some places [Berry (1778) and Haute-Guyenne (1779)], experiments that flourished. His successor Calonne modified and extended the scheme to those parts of the kingdom that lacked Estates. But time ran out before the crown could escape its political isolation. In Tuscany, Joseph II's own brother, the ruling grand duke (the later Emperor Leopold II), drafted a basic law that provided for Estates based broadly on the propertied rather than on the old society of orders. Even in autocratic Russia, Catherine II reconciled her claims to absolute power with the devolution of administrative and judicial tasks onto newly fashioned provincial chambers of the nobility. Precisely at a time when the incorporation of politically articulate opinion into the decision-making process was coming to be seen as one answer to the ever more complex problems of government, Joseph II was becoming ever less willing to discuss, consult, or compromise.Footnote ¹⁷¹

The French and Tuscan initiatives were inspired by the physiocrats, who advocated free markets and the dominance of agriculture in the state's economy. The Austrian monarchy's most enlightened statesman, Count Zinzendorf, had likewise shown interest in physiocratic thinking. Though such ideas influenced Joseph II, too, he (unlike Zinzendorf) completely blended out the associated political implications: broadening the basis of representation and invigorating local political life.Footnote ¹⁷² A cautious opening of the old corporate world had occurred under his mother, who had taken the rise of new wealth into account by encouraging the admission of rich Viennese wholesalers and other moneyed parvenus to the Lower Austrian Estates.Footnote ¹⁷³ A number of Joseph's own measures pointed in the same direction. He abolished the so-called Einstandsrecht, the Estates' right of first refusal in the sale of manorial property, and dispensed non-noble buyers of land that had previously belonged to monasteries from the usual tax penalty.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ He also allowed Protestants and other religious minorities to join the Estates and outfitted a wealthy Jew (Israel Hönig) with attributes of corporate nobility, both noteworthy precedents. Yet the emperor made no organized effort to widen representation by making property rather than status the prime basis for attending the diets—a move entirely conceivable in the context of the time. To the contrary: his reforms shut out many of the lesser privileged and made the assemblies more heavily noble in composition and assuredly less representative of agricultural wealth as monastic holdings passed into the hands of people who were not part of the Estates. A good case can be made that the more streamlined corporate bodies in the Habsburg central lands left behind by Maria Theresa resembled in important ways those envisioned by the physiocrats. Indeed, the Theresan plan for Galician Estates would bear closer comparison to the almost contemporaneous creations in France. With the notable exception of its implementation, the emperor diminished rather than built on this inheritance—despite the crucial importance of the Estates in his central lands to the stability of Habsburg state finances and public credit.

The new ruler Leopold II overturned many of his brother's changes (and benefited from his backtracking in Hungary) in what would be a successful effort to restore the regime's political footing and quell the widespread unrest. In particular, the tax and labor services' reform was dropped, together with the scheme for state tax receivers at the local level, while the Estates' directorial committees were restored throughout the central lands. The browbeaten diets also revived. But the impact of the suppression of monasteries on the Estates was not easily reversed and there was no real attempt to do so. It has been argued that Joseph's thinning out of religious houses modernized the monarchy in a significant way as it entered the revolutionary era. But the wisdom of abolishing institutions that had underwritten credit on the government's behalf at a time when money was about to become more vital than ever, as well as been “universalist,” cosmopolitan bulwarks of the multilingual (and later multinational) monarchy may be questioned. The emperor's political legacy is more ambivalent still: a valuable chance at modernizing representative assemblies had been missed that would only recur under less promising circumstances following a generation of revolution, war, and political paranoia. The momentum was in favor of change, the Estates having repeatedly accepted modifications to their organization and composition over the previous generation with remarkably little open protest. Joseph had also possessed advisors, most notably Carl Zinzendorf, who, while rooted in the provincial Estates, had supported reform to ensure a strong and viable monarchy. But the emperor chose instead to rely on administrative fiat, which, in combination with the weakened representative tradition, would weigh heavily on a Habsburg future under a succession of more preoccupied, less energetic, and sometimes less able rulers.