Joseph II tried to rule Austria by reason alone, and ran into everyone
Joseph II wanted a state run on Enlightenment logic: religious toleration, a weaker church, freer trade, and peasants released from feudal burdens. He is ranked with Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great among the era's enlightened monarchs, yet opposition stalled much of his programme and his attempt to free the serfs did not outlast him.
Joseph was born in Vienna's Hofburg on 13 March 1741, the eldest son of Maria Theresa and Francis I and brother of Marie Antoinette. Pope Benedict XIV was one of his godfathers, and sixteen prelates helped the papal nuncio baptize him. Hand-picked tutors drilled him in Latin, mathematics and above all history. He became Holy Roman Emperor in August 1765 when his father died, but the imperial title carried little real power, and while his mother lived she kept the final word as co-ruler of the hereditary Habsburg lands.
His private life was marked by loss. At nineteen he married Isabella of Parma, a match built on the new alliance between the Habsburgs and France, and he adored her, though she seems to have preferred the company of his sister Marie Christine. Isabella died of smallpox in 1763, soon after a premature birth, and their newborn daughter died too. Pressed to remarry, he wed Maria Josepha of Bavaria in 1765 but kept away from her almost entirely; she also died of smallpox, and he skipped her funeral, later regretting his coldness. He never married again and left no surviving legitimate children.
As co-regent he attacked waste. He demanded systematic, transparent accounts from departments, trimmed the court's servants and ceremonies, argued that the monarchy should serve the state rather than the reverse, and pushed for fairer taxation. He encouraged the swift enforcement of the pope's 1773 dissolution of the Jesuits, helped absorb Galicia after the First Partition of Poland in 1772, and backed the 1774 ordinance creating a standardized state school system.
What set him apart was the intensity of his faith in reason wielded by an unchecked ruler. He could not grasp why anyone might reasonably resist his plans. Frederick of Prussia thought him capable of setting the world on fire, and the French minister Vergennes called him ambitious and despotic. His reckless foreign policy left Austria isolated. Still, he patronized Mozart and Salieri, and his reforms gave the name Josephinism to an era. He died on 20 February 1790 and was succeeded by his brother Leopold II.
Source: Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor
