Josephine Reforms

Josephinism was the collective domestic policies of Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1765–1790). During the ten years in which Joseph was the sole ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy (1780–1790), he attempted to legislate a series of drastic reforms to remodel Austria in the form of the ideal Enlightened state. This provoked severe resistance from powerful forces within and outside of his empire, but ensured that he would be remembered as an "enlightened ruler."

Born in 1741, Joseph was the son of Maria Theresa of Austria and Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. Given a rigorous education in the Enlightenment—with its emphasis on rationality, order, and careful organization in statecraft—it is little wonder that, viewing the often confused and complex morass of Habsburg administration in the crownlands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, Joseph was deeply dissatisfied. He inherited the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1765, on the death of his father, but ruled the Habsburg lands only as "joint ruler" with his mother, the matriarch Maria Theresa, until 1780.

It was on the death of his mother in 1780 that Joseph II had the opportunity—free of any dominating hand—to pursue his own agenda. He intended a complete remodeling of Habsburg society in several different arenas. Issuing decrees and Patents, Joseph's reforms were a conscious attempt to reorder the rule of his lands using Enlightened principles. At the heart of this "Josephinism" lay the idea of the unitary state, with a centralized, efficient government, rational and mostly secular society, with greater degrees of equality and freedom, and fewer arbitrary feudal institutions.

For many centuries, the majority of the population of Central Europe had lived as serfs, laboring under feudal obligations to Lords. On November 1, 1781, Joseph issued two Patents pertaining to Bohemia, which changed the serf-Lord relationship there by abolishing the use of fines and corporal punishment on serfs, and abolishing Lords' control over serfs' marriage, freedom of movement, and choice of occupation. The patents also allowed peasants to purchase hereditary ownership of the land that they worked. The nobility were hesitant to support Joseph's edicts, however, and they were inconsistently applied.

Throughout his reign, Joseph's ultimate goal was one shared originally with his mother regarding policy toward the serfs. Robin Okey, in The Habsburg Monarchy, describes it as the replacement of the forced serf labor system by the division of landed estates (including the demesne) among rent-paying tenants". In 1783, Joseph's advisor Franz Anton von Raab was instructed to extend this system to all lands owned directly by the Habsburg crown in Bohemia and Moravia.

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