If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe.Footnote ¹ Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.Footnote ²

The cases of Bohemia and Hungary illustrate how this norm could be temporarily suspended in the aftermath of rebellions, but could not be permanently dispensed without undermining the very foundations of monarchical power.Footnote ³ If Ferdinand II set a pattern for the Austrian-Habsburgs' intransigence in matters of religion, this was not matched by a similarly comprehensive and consistent effort at asserting the power of the center over the periphery comparable to the policy that lost the Spanish Habsburgs an economically valuable European province in the sixteenth century and core parts of their Iberian empire in the seventeenth century. In addition to the frequently noted Spanish influences on Austrian-Habsburg government, there was arguably a Burgundian tradition of government, too, which combined a lofty notion of the prince's power and a notable intransigence when confronting urban opposition with a capacity for governing a composite empire mainly by council and consent.Footnote ⁴

The following case study for the Austrian hereditary lands will argue that by the mid eighteenth century, the apparent revival of confessional absolutism was in fact a default mode of government adopted in response to external threats to the territorial and ideological integrity of the monarchy and to a corresponding need for enhancing the state's control over its human and material resources. The problems confronting this conservative modernization were thrown into sharp relief by the government's inability to guard domestic religious policy against foreign scrutiny and interference and to eradicate religious dissent as a manifestation of communal autonomy.

The Political Background: Austrian Protestantism and the Austro-Prussian Contrast

Among the external pressures that exerted a formative influence on Habsburg religious policy, the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia and the resulting Austro-Prussian conflict hold a special place. In the reign of Frederick William I, the Prussian invitation to the Salzburg emigrants of 1731–1732 pointed to areas of potential future conflict with the Habsburgs once crypto-Protestant enclaves in the monarchy itself had been revealed in the first half of the 1730s. In this, as in most other respects, the accession of Frederick II brought about the decisive change in Habsburg–Hohenzollern relations: henceforth, fears that domestic Protestantism could be mobilized by Vienna's enemies were to actuate Habsburg religious policy until the final decade of Maria Theresa's reign.

Frederick's attack on the monarchy and the loss of Silesia at the beginning of the young queen's reign and the Prussian king's overtures to the Silesian and Hungarian Protestants at various stages of the ensuing military conflicts persuaded Maria Theresa to stamp out religious dissent in the hereditary lands. In the process, a system of close surveillance was established; and this system served not only the purposes of religious policy, but also facilitated the imposition of social discipline over the remoter regions of the Austrian duchies, which traditionally enjoyed a high level of communal autonomy.Footnote ⁵ Toward the end of her reign, the empress began to accept that Protestantism in these communities was essentially a native and self-sustained phenomenon. Until then Prussian propaganda and foreign policy and evidence of positive responses from the Protestant populations of Silesia and Hungary seemed to prove the validity of the Counter Reformation assumptions about the political subversiveness of Protestantism. The resilience of a residue of Reformation Protestantism in the hereditary lands hence strengthened the empress's opposition to religious toleration.

In practice, this position became increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of massive criticism from an enlightened European public and in a climate of inter-confessional dialogue that was becoming more inclusive as the century progressed. The attempted summary expulsion of the Jewish population of Prague in 1745 for their alleged treasonable conduct in the war was to illustrate the difficulties and public embarrassments confronting those who ignored the signs of the time. In 1744, Maria Theresa had set an ultimatum for the summary emigration of Prague's Jews from all lands of the monarchy by 1 January 1745. The Jewish community of Prague responded with formal appeals for help to the Protestant governments in the Hague and London. Popular periodicals like the Edinburgh Scots Magazine, which received its news from the London press, drew their readers' attention to the plight of the Bohemian Jews, to which the Protestant powers responded by officially interceding in their behalf. The combined pressures of politics and the press persuaded Maria Theresa to first suspend her edict in 1745 and then in 1748 terminate this policy and tolerate low-level remigration. Given her strong religious convictions, Maria Theresa did not sway from embarking on an equally controversial confrontational policy toward her Protestant subjects, and as will be shown the empress was again to find that national religious policies were now exposed to discussion and judgment by an international public beyond the circles of courts and governments.Footnote ⁶

The problem of maintaining control over one's subjects in religious matters and repelling foreign interference under the guise of confessional protectionism had presented itself to the Habsburg rulers at an even earlier date. Since the late seventeenth century, Counter Reformation action in the Kingdom of Hungary had come under the scrutiny of a Protestant public that emerged in the European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁷ The draconian regime of confessional absolutism, which Leopold I established in the wake of the suppression of the conspiracy of Hungarian and Croatian magnates in 1666–1670, and Imre Thököly's rebellion of 1682 hence elicited a barrage of international protest.Footnote ⁸ The impact on the emperor's reputation with the German Protestant estates was increased by its coalescence with a broader patriotic movement in the Holy Roman Empire against French and Turkish aggression. The Habsburgs' carefully cultured self-image of conspicuous pietyFootnote ⁹ and their symbiotic relationship with the Counter Reformation Church now became a liability. A flood of German, Dutch, and English pamphlets reviled Leopold I as an inept political leader whose submissiveness to the counsel of his Jesuit advisers resembled the absolute obedience of a Jesuit novice and put the empire's peace and safety in jeopardy. At a time of national emergency, so the tenor of contemporary patriotic pamphlets, he was driving his Protestant Hungarian subjects to rebellion.Footnote ¹⁰

Although he joined the anti-French alliance and maintained his military support for the emperor, Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg exploited the prevalent mood of indignation for a propaganda coup. As early as 1670, he had tried to canvass support for a collective declaration of the Corpus Evangelicorum condemning the emperor's punishment of the Hungarian conspirators. His motion, however, had foundered on the Saxon council's opposition who initially showed themselves reluctant to intercede directly in behalf of the Hungarian Protestants and hence go beyond their legal brief under the terms of the Peace of Westphalia. Undeterred by this setback, Frederich William decided to take the initiative once more and thereby implicitly contest Saxony's claim to leadership. On 24 May 1672, he sent an aggressive intercessory letter that effectively charged Leopold I with jeopardizing the military safety of the empire by persecuting his Protestant subjects at a time of general peril. A fortnight after this, the Corpus followed suit with a formal collective protestation in behalf of their co-religionists in Hungary, hence apparently sanctioning the Hohenzollern coup.Footnote ¹¹

The case for Protestantism as formulated in the Prussian petition of 1672 and in Protestant pamphlets of the 1680s in defense of the oppressed Hungarians was once more advanced during the revolt of 1704–1711. In 1708, the authorities in Graz confiscated a libelous pamphlet in defense of the Hungarian rebels. The author of this rhymed German-language pamphlet presents the reader with “Astrea's” opinion of war-torn Europe. The main point is a plea for the exclusion of the clergy in general, and the Jesuits in particular, from positions of political influence.Footnote ¹² Such sweeping attacks on clerical power were, of course, ambivalent in having potential implications for the state-church arrangements in the Lutheran principalities of the empire; neither was this radical line of argument endorsed by Prussian confessional propaganda, which based its case squarely on imperial law. Membership of the empire's Corpus Evangelicorum gave Brandenburg-Prussia a forum for building up a reputation as champion of the Protestant cause, and it repeatedly offered opportunities for meddling with Habsburg domestic affairs in Austria.

The first of these chances presented itself in the years 1685–1690, when the archbishop of Salzburg, Max Gandolph von Khuenburg, evicted the remaining Protestant population of the Deferegger valley and triggered a wave of persecution. Related action was taken in Habsburg Tirol to extirpate the local heretical residue and clear out any suspect immigrants from Salzburg. Brandenburg and the Saxon privy council took the lead in the negotiations with the archbishop, Emperor Leopold I, and the Upper Austrian government in Linz, which focused on securing the “benefice of emigration” under the favorable terms of the Westphalian Peace.Footnote ¹³ The Protestant side in both cases scored only modest successes, but Brandenburg had established itself as the main Protestant combatant alongside Saxony, which, as previously mentioned, soon fell behind as a result of the Elector's conversion.

The next case arose from Archbishop Leopold Firmian of Salzburg's final Counter Reformation sweep-up in 1731, which resulted in the emigration of more than 20,000 Protestant subjects and met with vociferous protest from the Protestant princes of Europe. Charles VI was hard put to justify the intervention of Habsburg troops at the request of the archbishop, an action that he delayed as long as possible for fear of upsetting the agreement that had just been reached with Britain for the acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction.Footnote ¹⁴ In a shrewd move, the Corpus Evangelicorum invoked Charles's obligations as emperor and executor of the Westphalian Peace.Footnote ¹⁵

This move was adroitly countered by the archbishop's lawyer Hieronymus Christani von Rall, who based the case for expulsion on a charge of rebellion. This was the official reason cited in the decree of eviction, which, incidentally, was issued under the date of 31 October 1731 as a riposte to Protestant commemorations of the Reformation.Footnote ¹⁶ Though the crypto-Protestant enclaves in Salzburg and the hereditary lands were close-knit communities that kept in touch with each other, there is no evidence to substantiate the Salzburg government's charges of a clandestine organization planning armed rebellion. Nevertheless, Charles VI eagerly took up the defensive argument because it shifted the contentious issue from the sphere of religious policy to the political forum, where the prince wielded an undisputed right of punitive action.

Although considerations of political expediency partly account for Charles VI's defensive strategy, there is no indication of a purely tactical move. On the contrary, the emperor's stance in the Salzburg conflict was in line with his Counter Reformation policies in his own dominions, which raised the level of governmental action in religious matters at the expense of the ecclesiastical authorities. In Hungary, for example, a decree issued in 1731 aimed at cutting the roots of Protestantism by prohibiting future conversions. In Bohemia, Charles relentlessly pressed for the implementation of the draconian penal code that had been devised to stamp out heresy.Footnote ¹⁷ In spite of vigorous and extended opposition from the Bohemian archbishop who protested against this infringement of his jurisdiction, Charles entrusted the supreme court in Prague with full powers to carry out inquisitions and punish heresy. This involved him from the beginning of the 1720s in a long-drawn-out quarrel with the archbishop's consistory, but the emperor countered the latter's claims by stressing the political nature of the offense. Heresy was a “crimen publicum” and hence subject to the secular magistrates' jurisdiction.

The secular court was to judge heretical acts because these acts were directed against the sacred fundamental laws of the kingdom. Instructions to the secular authorities in 1721 and 1725 prescribed a range of punishments from fines, forced labor, confiscation of property, and expulsion, to galley sentences for obstinate and relapsed offenders. Capital punishment was reserved for cases involving foreign Protestant preachers and “seducers,” book sellers, and spies and all those who gave them shelter or joined secret conventicles. The emperor in fact showed a marked reluctance to enforce the full measure of the law against heretics who had no such connections. Charles was likewise loath to sanction the use of torture during inquisitions for fear of triggering ill-founded mass trials.Footnote ¹⁸ There is no detailed analysis of court practice in Charles VI's reign, but Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux's study of literacy and religious persecution in eighteenth-century Bohemia suggests that forced labor was the most common form of punishment. It was meted out in two-thirds of the 729 cases of heresy that were tried in Prague between 1704–1781. Death sentences were issued in forty-four cases, but it remains unclear how many of them were actually carried out.Footnote ¹⁹

In general, Charles's policy was aimed at containment and initially reflected his assumption that heresy was not primarily the result of outside interference, but of clerical neglect. Until the beginning of the 1730s, Charles was therefore confident that this evil could be rooted out by strenuous missionary exertions.Footnote ²⁰ His optimism was put to the test in the aftermath of the Salzburg emigration, when follow-up inquisitions in the neighboring hereditary lands led to the discovery of considerable crypto-Protestant enclaves among the peasants and miners of Upper Austria, Carinthia, and Upper Styria. For the remaining near-decade of his reign, the emperor's attitude toward unrepentant individuals and parish communities hardened, resulting in at least 800 deportations to Transylvania in the years 1734–1736.Footnote ²¹ The series of inquisitions and repressive legislation in the 1730s that culminated in these transmigrations was spurred on by reports from panic-stricken government officials in the provinces. In 1731, for example, in the mining town of Schladming in Upper Styria, a ducal clerk raised the alarm, claiming that peasants from Salzburg were trying to incite a Protestant uprising among the local population. By way of response, Charles issued orders to report suspect moves and tighten up government control in the border municipalities.Footnote ²² In the wake of the Salzburg emigration, he set up special government commissions in the Austrian lands to deal with cases of heresy and consult with the ecclesiastical authorities on the improvement of pastoral care.

Charles's primary concern was to isolate the heretical minority and to keep the problem from the public eye by preventing collective actions such as mass petitions and public confessions. In 1732, for example, the Inner Austrian government instructed the commission that the publication of any news on the Salzburg emigration and, in particular, of the emigrants' friendly reception in Protestant countries—meaning Prussia and England—was prohibited.Footnote ²³ In his decree of 7 August 1733, which was repeatedly reissued, Charles laid down guidelines for the proceeding against heretics. To forestall Protestant protests, Charles insisted that his Lutheran subjects had forfeited their title to the benefice of emigration by seditious preaching, teaching, and blaspheming against the Catholic Church, hence stirring up unrest among the population. Some of the exiled heretics had aggravated their offense by their clandestine return. Although first-time offenders were to be quietly dispatched as soldiers to foreign regiments, troublemakers and relapsed heretics faced corporal, and even capital, punishment.Footnote ²⁴

Charles was aware that some cloak was needed for his repressive policy to minimize its diplomatic and political impact, and suitable provisions were made when he repeated his orders for the forcible recruitment or deportation of heretics in 1736 and 1737. The Upper and Inner Austrian governments were enjoined to avoid any reference to religion and to cite sedition as the official cause for prosecutions.Footnote ²⁵ Charles's unremitting legislative activity in the final years of his reign bears testimony to his changed perception of the political nature of heresy and to his genuine fears of foreign Protestant interference.

Such anxieties, however, remained diffuse until Maria Theresa had to fight her way into power and defend her inheritance in particular against Prussian assaults.Footnote ²⁶ As will be shown in the following section of this article, the military and political crisis at the beginning of her reign made a lasting impact on the queen's religious policy, which was geared toward protecting the monarchy against any threats, both real and imaginary, of foreign invasion supported by religious unrest from within. To be able to achieve this, it was essential for the confessional state to tighten its control over the monarchy's material and human resources. This entailed controlling and checking the activity of autonomous agents, whether they were the church, the estates, or rural communities who, like the Protestant enclaves in Austria, enjoyed a measure of autonomy in running their economic affairs and enjoying customary rights such as selecting their contingent of recruits. Communities could sustain their communal autonomy because of their remoteness from the seats of provincial government. This was the case with the Protestant enclaves in the lower Alpine regions of Austria; these enclaves lacked direct seigniorial supervision for the same reason. As will be demonstrated in the next section of this article, residual religious dissent was in fact just one aspect of a distinct culture based on communal autonomy. As such, religious dissent became the target of repressive policies aimed at tightening governmental control and imposing social discipline.Footnote ²⁷

Confessional Politics and the Tightening of Governmental Control at the Local Level

As previously mentioned, Prussia's political rise among the Protestant estates of the empire was accompanied by religious propaganda that contributed to the developing rhetoric of Protestant German patriotism.Footnote ²⁸ In the context of the Silesian invasion and the Polish partition later in the century, this rhetoric acquired a distinctly confrontational tone and was deployed in defense of interventionism for specious religious reasons.Footnote ²⁹ During his raid on Silesia, Frederick hence tried to foment religious discontent in Hungary in hopes of triggering a Protestant revolt. However, he was unable to prevent the successful conclusion of negotiations between Maria Theresa and the Hungarian nobility; these negotiations led to her coronation in June 1741 and gained her a fervent pledge of loyalty from the Hungarian estates.Footnote ³⁰ The imperial election of the queen's consort Francis of Lorraine in 1745 reasserted the dynasty's position in the empire. Frederick responded to his adversary's recovery by stepping up his efforts to nurture and publicize the Hungarian Protestants' discontents.

In 1746, Prussian propaganda made the most of the persecution, arrest, and escape to Prussian Silesia of the Hungarian Protestant preacher Matej Bahil, who subsequently published a widely circulated account of the Hungarian Protestants' plight. Ironically, Bahil's prosecution seems to have been started by unsubstantiated charges from the Jesuits that he was a Prussian spy who maintained illegal communications with the enemy and tried to foment revolt from inside the kingdom. Maria Theresa eventually suffered a humiliating defeat in this propaganda war after Frederick II had managed to patch up relations with Pope Benedict XIV in 1747. The Pope's subsequent intercession forced the empress to abandon her ultraconservative Hungarian ally, the bishop of Vezprém, Padányi Bíro. Moreover, in February 1751, the Hungarian Protestants emulated the example set by the Jews of Prague in 1745 and appealed to the Protestant princes of Europe for intercession with the empress. When Maria Theresa met the Hungarian diet at Pozsony in May 1751, the British and Prussian ministers who attended duly took up the Protestants' cause, much to the embarrassment of the empress who gave them a polite but elusive reply. In the same year, papal intercession persuaded her to issue orders for the confiscation of Padányi Bíro's inflammatory “Enchiridion de fide.” The July issue for 1752 of the Edinburgh Scots Magazine reported that Maria Theresa had instructed the Hungarian clergy to relent pressure on the Hungarian Protestants.Footnote ³¹

Frederick likewise subsidized the publication and wide diffusion of the writings of a Silesian refugee cleric, Johann Liberda (1700–1742), erstwhile Lutheran preacher at Teschen and now pastor of the Czech emigrants' parish in Berlin. There is even some tangible evidence to suggest that the overtures that Frederick II made to the Silesian Protestants to gather support for his military invasion of the province met with some positive response. In June 1741, for example, the imperial administrator of the Herrschaft of Czechowitz in the duchy of Teschen, Ferdinand von Gallas, rather worryingly reported that the Lutheran population was not at all well disposed toward the House of Austria. The local Lutherans claimed to have received letters from Brandenburg through the Protestants of Pleß (which was permanently lost to the Prussians in 1742) and Bielitz, but the Lutherans steadfastly refused to disclose the subject of these communications. Gallas concluded his letter with an account of the local population's rejoicing at the King of Prussia's military successes.Footnote ³²

Gallas's report was all the more alarming as Teschen had a record of rural unrest starting with an uprising in 1707. Most recently, in 1736, the Lutheran peasants on the ducal demesnes had revolted on a large scale against the Catholic authorities' oppressive regime in religious matters. The latter conflict culminated in the forcible liberation of prisoners and the murder of a bailiff (Vogt) who had been in charge of arrests. The government's records include an instructive petition addressed to Franz Stephan, Duke of Lorraine, as sovereign Duke of Teschen, from the rebels and dated 6 May 1736. The rebels cited their right to untroubled exercise of their religion under the terms of the Peace of Osnabrück, which had been confirmed by the concessions of 1707 and 1709. They claimed to have enjoyed this privilege undisturbed until fairly recently, when the authorities' attitude had changed markedly as a result of the activity of the Catholic missionaries and the government's religious commission. Lutherans who refused to convert to Catholicism were now confronted with the prospect of arrest, forced labor, forcible recruitment, or expulsion.

The incident demonstrates how, in spite of their legal status, the Silesian Lutherans had been subjected to the same Counter Reformation regime that Charles VI had introduced in the Austrian duchies in the wake of the Salzburg emigration. The report by the government's representative, the Oberregent in Teschen, mentions that members of the estates had actually joined the peasant rebels. Their participation, albeit on the margins, suggested the possibility of a further escalation of the conflict, which may account for the government's decision to adopt a nonconfrontational stance in the aftermath of the rebellion.Footnote ³³

The impact of foreign policy, and more specifically the Austro-Prussian contrast, hence strengthened the bargaining power of Silesia's Lutheran community. Their resilience was reflected in the outbreak of further unrest in 1766. The switch from a confrontational Counter Reformation policy to a more prudent response is reflected in the educational activity directed by Ignaz von Felbiger in Austrian Silesia; the Viennese government backed this activity.Footnote ³⁴

Silesia remained, of course, the major unsettled issue for the Habsburg government after Frederick's invasion, and efforts for this valuable province's recovery dictated politics for the next two decades. Meanwhile, once the controversy over Hungary had subsided, the empress became embroiled in a quarrel with the empire's Protestant representatives at Regensburg.Footnote ³⁵ This time, the trouble was partly of her own making, because it arose from her treatment of the remaining crypto-Protestant population in the hereditary lands. The very harshness of Maria Theresa's response and the thrust of her penal decrees, however, are explicable only in the light of her traumatic experience of Prussian aggression. Policing and punishing religious suspects seemed a matter of political prudence.

From 1746 onwards, the empress developed a comprehensive system of control and intervention to eradicate Protestantism in Upper and Inner Austria. Her policy combined elements of persuasion and coercion. Permanent government-directed missions were maintained in the disaffected areas, and at the same time a range of severe punishments was prescribed for heresy, ranging from fines and imprisonment to deportation to Hungary and Transylvania.Footnote ³⁶ In March and August 1752, orders were issued for the forcible transfer of crypto-Protestants from Upper and Inner Austria to Hermannstadt (Sibiu).Footnote ³⁷ Government inquisitions in the village of Pürgg in Upper Styria in 1751 resulted in the public confession of 300 Lutherans who hoped to obtain permission to emigrate to some Protestant German town or principality.Footnote ³⁸ Maria Theresa had no intention of letting her subjects just slip away, but she wished to establish the full number and possible contacts of the local heretics before deporting them to the eastern parts of her empire. To bring this about, the local clergy employed informers disguised as Prussian spies to elicit incriminating statements from the remaining suspects.Footnote ³⁹

The government records make no mention of Prussian interference, but the empress remained convinced of its reality, perhaps understandably so against the background of the previously described Prussian overtures to the Hungarian Protestants. Prior to the change of alliances in 1756, there was also the prospect of Prussian expansion into Further Austria. Since 1751, French subsidies were channeled into southwest Germany to build up a Franco-Prussian clientele among the nobility of the German southwest. Württemberg was pivotal to these plans to create a counterweight to Habsburg predominance in this region, and the duchy's ambitious ruler Carl Eugen was in fact won over by French subsidies and prospects of a closer union with a collateral branch of the ruling Hohenzollern.Footnote ⁴⁰ Maria Theresa's increasingly harsh response to the possibility of subversive Protestant activity in the Austrian hereditary lands must hence be seen against the background of actual developments elsewhere in the empire and monarchy.

In August 1752, the empress issued a decree that instructed the provincial governments on follow-up action to the latest transmigrations. A substantial number of its clauses dealt with the prosecution of foreign agents, who were to be punished with utmost severity. If caught in the very act of religious proselytizing, or recruitment of Austrian subjects, foreign agents were to be executed straightaway. Suspects were to be court-martialed and hanged if a confession could be extracted. The empress's consent would have to be asked if their indictment rested on the evidence of two witnesses, and the delinquents were to be hanged within twenty-four hours of receipt of her consent. The application of torture, which Charles VI had shunned in Bohemia in the 1720s, was now expressly permitted to wrest confessions from suspects.Footnote ⁴¹ For all Maria Theresa's grim determination, it seems that the full measure of the law was never enforced as no Prussian agents were arrested. This again suggests that the empress's fears were largely imaginary, if explicable, against the background of events in Silesia and Hungary.

Instead, her repressive policy of surveillance and punishment became the subject of public political debate in the empire. In 1752 and 1754, the deportees fought back by petitioning the Corpus Evangelicorum at Regensburg, who took up their cause and repeatedly appealed to Vienna.Footnote ⁴² The empress's initial reply was defensive. Essentially denying any charges of maltreatment and spoliation, she denounced the petitioners as rebels and criminals who used the religious issue as a mere pretext. The Corpus reacted by supporting their next letter in November 1754 with details of individual cases, incriminating high-ranking government officials and clergy. The severity of the charges ruled out a dismissive response, and the reply from the Viennese government in April 1755 dealt in detail with each charge in a lengthy appendix of thirty-two documents.

Otherwise, however, the letter was a remarkably harsh rebuff, as well as a fairly straightforward attack on Prussia as the presumptive author of this plot. The same suspicion had been implied already in the empress's earlier response of 17 September 1753. The emigrants' reports and petition are condemned as slanderous, mendacious, and blasphemous; the “presumptuous diction” of their letter was injurious to her dignity and fully justified their previous arrest and punishment by the Austrian authorities. The empress then scathingly attacked “those political schemers, who have anything but religion on their mind.” These people would be delighted if proselytizers could invade the monarchy with impunity to foment religious dissent, which would “unfailingly” incite rebellion and hence ruin the hereditary lands. Education and persuasion were the means to effect the conversion of the simple folk who erred out of ignorance, but condign punishment would be meted out to agitators and organizers of clandestine meetings. Transmigration to Hungary or Transylvania was the appropriate recourse for those of her subjects who wished to practice their religion in public. This arrangement, so the reply concludes, should in fact be welcomed by all those whose design was not to entice away Austrian subjects “to populate their own country.”Footnote ⁴³

Prussia got the chance to retaliate in the following year, at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, which the Prussians were keen to present as a campaign in defense of Protestantism, whereas the Viennese government was no less anxious to deny any confessional implications and in particular to repudiate the Curia's project of a Catholic crusade.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the beginning of the war, Frederick II commissioned a pamphlet that vociferously denounced Habsburg religious persecution in the Austrian and Hungarian lands. Playing on long-standing fears of Catholic dominance and universal monarchy, its author argued that the attack on Austrian and Hungarian Protestantism was but the first move of an insidious Habsburg scheme for asserting absolute power over the Holy Roman Empire. The predicted next steps were the annihilation of Protestantism throughout Germany and, finally, the subjection of the Catholic princes of the empire. The author praised Prussia as the defender of the Protestant cause against Habsburgs' alleged aggressive designs. The pamphlet was published anonymously and circulated in several European languages in 1756, but there is little doubt that it was a commissioned work, written to elicit support for Prussia from the Protestant princes of Germany and Europe. Frederick II entrusted the irrepressible Matej Bahil with the diffusion of a Latin translation among the Hungarian Protestants. To enhance its authority in the eyes of the wider Protestant public, the author made an unsubstantiated claim that he was voicing the opinion of the Corpus Evangelicorum.Footnote ⁴⁵

The resumption of military and ideological warfare reverberated in the provinces of the monarchy, and the warfare did its share to keep fears of subversive Protestant activity alive. The Inner Austrian government in Graz, for example, alarmed the clerical authorities in October 1756 that Prussian spies were roaming Upper Styria, presumably, so the local officials surmised, to entice away her majesty's subjects. However, no evidence was produced to substantiate these allegations.Footnote ⁴⁶ Tensions eased with the cessation of military hostilities in November 1762, and the Protestant threat became a fading theme in official correspondence.

By contrast, the limits of the authorities' success in suppressing residual Protestantism and preventing its adherents from campaigning in public for official recognition were thrown into sharp relief in 1772, when a delegation of Protestant peasants from Styria turned up in the capital to petition the empress for religious toleration. The sheer audacity of this manifestation of communal autonomy and its apparent implication of commotion in the provinces caused considerable concern in Vienna. Further misgivings arose from the petitioners' secret correspondence and meetings with the Hungarian war agent Matolai von Zolnai in Vienna. Zolnai had given strategic advice to the petitioners and had created false hopes of an imminent change of policy toward religious toleration. Although such promises were premature, they had some basis in reality in reflecting the rising tide in favor of toleration among even high-ranking government officials. The movement received support from the provinces. In the wake of the 1772 peasant delegation, a government commission was sent to Styria to investigate the background to the petition. Proceedings quickly conformed to an established pattern of inquisitions, selective arrests, and limited transmigrations.Footnote ⁴⁷

The wider significance of this affair, however, lay in a notable change in the authorities' response, which focused on the social implications of religious dissent, and the problems it posed in terms of controlling rural communities in remoter regions of the monarchy's provinces.Footnote ⁴⁸ Against the background of economic change and the state's increased demand for revenues and human resources, failure to conform in matters of religion caused concern to the authorities mainly because nonconformance was seen as evidence of “an unbridled love of freedom of life and conscience.” This would have been unacceptable in any subject, regardless of estate, but its presence in the lower classes represented a potential threat to social order and public morals.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although interpreting this information from an inquisitorial mindset, even the clerical authorities were beginning to realize the social significance of religious nonconformity as one aspect of a regional culture that was characterized by a high level of autonomy and self-organization. Other characteristic expressions of this spirit of independence were the illicit production and sale of spirits, clandestine trade—one religious suspect revealingly stated during his interrogation that Lutheran literature was “just another sort of contraband”—high rates of illegitimate births that can be linked to local customs regulating youth culture and premarital relations, and labor patterns marked by seasonal migration and a high level of mobility among the unmarried servant population.Footnote ⁵⁰

On the eve of the Josephine transformation of religious policy, the authorities' perception and interpretation of “heresy” was hence undergoing a significant change. Although the shift of emphasis toward the practical implications of religious dissent paved the way for Joseph II's reforms, it did not signal the end of Counter Reformation policies in Maria Theresa's reign. The idea of general religious toleration remained anathema to the devout empress for both spiritual and political considerations; and although forced to make some concessions for pragmatic reasons, she remained throughout her life committed to saving the souls of her subjects. For Maria Theresa, whose public persona as Landesmutter reflected her genuine insistence on the identity of private and public morals, policing the subject was therefore as much a moral obligation as a political imperative.