Here Lies Pure Intentions: Joseph II and the Failure of ‘Benevolent Dictatorship’
Introduction
Wouldn’t it be easier if one good person were in charge? No more endless delays, petty factionalism, or counter-intuitive legal rulings. We’ve all thought it. Sometimes, ‘benevolent dictatorship’ just seems like common sense. Give a single individual of sense and reason the reins of government and let them get the job done.
We like to spend our time lamenting the deathly problems of our democracies. No matter how eloquent our rants, however, the fact is that those problems cut much sharper in the developing world, and the issue of benevolent dictatorship hits closer. Dictatorship seems to have delivered prosperity to China and South Korea while Africa is bogged down with red tape and infighting. President Paul Kagame offers an appealing model of African autocracy, having built up Rwanda from the ruins of genocide into a popular international tourist destination by practical, prudent policy.
But others say no, and they are right to do so. I think the history of Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, makes us ask some very salient questions about whether good intentions can really make good results.
Good Intentions
Benevolent dictatorship is no modern phenomenon. Back in the 18th century, they had ‘Enlightened Despotism’. One thing that makes that slice of European history so glamorous are those despots, with their larger-than-life personalities that shine through the dramatic events they set in motion. No petty conservatism for Catherine of Russia or Frederick of Prussia — each managed to be ‘the Great’ simultaneously with the other. The Enlightenment philosophy emboldened them with the idea that humans can understand and then re-engineer (‘improve’) the world for our own purposes. They promoted industry, science and agriculture, they built armies and bureaucracies, they cut out the dissolute nobles from government and put in the energetic and the enterprising, no matter their birth. Well, that’s the story, but it’s a good one, and many people at the time agreed. It’s not that ‘Enlightened Despotism’ was a coherent political theory. Rather, many groups, like the rising business class, were willing to support the man or woman with the power to get the job done.
We might not remember him much today, but if you’d asked any European in the late 18th century who they thought was an Enlightened despot, they definitely wouldn’t have missed out Joseph II von Habsburg.
To go by appearances, he really was a model statesman, exactly the kind of guy you’d want in the top job. Joseph stayed up late at nights working at his desk, a desk he’d moved from the baroque grandeur of Schönbrunn palace to the much more sensible city palace in Vienna. He dramatically cut back on pompous etiquette and courtly leisures — he especially hated hunting because game animals trampled crops. He promoted the able, not the well-born. Sometimes, in his letters, he’s even genuinely funny.
A positively likeable man, but what about his policies? Joseph got through myriad reforms, so I will summarise the ones that (I sincerely hope!) you, dear reader, will consider to be inherently good. On the rule of law, he promulgated a legal code (1786) that more or less amounted to a constitution for all his subjects, he practically abolished torture and the death penalty, and freed serfs from many of the legal controls landlords had over them. Some nobles, especially in Hungary, had been able to punish their serfs however they liked, and serfs even needed their permission to marry. On welfare, Joseph built schools, hospitals, and public parks. Vienna has Joseph to thank for all the green space. On rights, he relaxed censorship, massively expanded religious toleration, and whittled away at the special treatment of the aristocrats — he even once made a count sweep the streets as a punishment for forging banknotes.
Of course, no one is perfect. His personal attributes were far from spotless. For one thing, his passionate attention to detail was comically nannyish. Wherever he went, and he toured incessantly, he left behind a long letter of demands and recommendations for improvement, like when insisted that a backwoods school for officers’ daughters acquire two pianos as soon as possible. He’d have been unstoppable with TripAdvisor. Joseph was also very bad with women and very odd about sex. His marriages failed dramatically. Perhaps you’re already getting the impression that he was pretty arrogant. Joseph thought that Joseph had all the answers and got incredibly frustrated if you disagreed.
His policies weren’t perfect, either. That relaxed censorship wasn’t abolished entirely; among others, Voltaire’s books were banned. Those criminals who avoided the death sentence usually died anyway as they pulled barges on the malarial banks of the Danube. Religious toleration was instituted in the hope of attracting immigrants and because Joseph thought that if people were allowed out of oppression, this would improve their minds and they’d realise Catholicism was the best religion. The immigration bit worked out, the other bit less so. It’s also worth mentioning that, much to Austria’s long-term detriment, his Herculean efforts to improve agriculture were based on old-fashioned (‘Cameralist’) thinking when free-market economies like Britain’s were on the cusp of global domination.
Still, as flaws in dictators go none of this seems so terrible — with apologies to any Danube barge-pullers. You have an essentially benevolent man who is willing to work hard to bring about progress for the whole state. His intentions were certainly good. What went wrong? First, we need to understand the state he was trying to improve.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dynastic State
It’s impossible to briefly describe where Joseph ruled. It would need a deep intake of breath to list the modern countries, and parts of modern countries, that comprised the Habsburg lands. By hook and by crook, by which I mean by marriage and massive violence, the Habsburg family had put together a monster as large in size as it was in diversity. It wasn’t a modern nation and it wasn’t a modern state, with central institutions running the lot more or less the same way. Each limb, lump and joint of the monster had its own special laws, customs and government. For most, Joseph was only one ruler among many — and a distant one at that.
To protect you from in-depth discussions of Tyrollean landlords or the rights of Lombard guilds, I will just mention three areas of particular importance to this story: the Holy Roman Empire, Belgium, and Hungary.
The Crown of the Holy Roman Empire had long sat on a Habsburg head. This institution really has no modern parallel — once again, the Habsburgs make things hard to explain — but it was a little bit like the European Union. A series of semi-independent states, the princes, of greatly varying power, generally solved their disagreements peacefully through the institutions of the Empire. It worked as long as the Emperor (always a man, which made things difficult for Joseph’s mother) acted as a neutral arbitrator. The Emperor was a kind of guarantor who could protect the smaller princes from the bigger ones. By Joseph’s reign, the bigger prince was Prussia and the smaller princes were everyone else. The alliance protected the Habsburgs and everyone else from hungry, hungry Prussia.
Next up is Belgium. Not only does this highlight the unfinished jig-saw geography of the Habsburg empire, but also the massive diversity in sorts of government, because even this small chunk was really just a term of convenience for ten (!) separate states with their own constitutions. Each was ruled by an ‘Estates-General’, the traditional big-wigs of the area, who jealously guarded their dusty old laws and funny titles. The Habsburgs had acquired Belgium in one of the interminable 18th century diplomatic tangles that followed one of the interminable 18th century wars. The diplomats had no concern for the feelings and aspirations of the people who lived in the territories they exchanged so freely, but as it happened the Estates-General were quite happy to be ruled by a far-away Emperor so long as he remained just that: far-away.
Finally, you can’t talk about Austria without Hungary. This part was acquired not by the endless wars with Christian powers but by the endless wars with the Ottoman Empire, so long the greatest (and closest) enemy of the Habsburgs. To make a lot of wars short, the Ottoman Empire had swallowed most of the mediaeval Hungarian kingdom, then a couple of hundred years later the Habsburgs turned the tide and swallowed it instead. Yet even before the Hungarians had been swallowed by the Ottomans, they themselves had swallowed a lot of surrounding peoples (e.g. Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes). Thus, the Hungarian aristocracy was a tiny minority in a sea of mostly non-Hungarian serfs, and they were painfully aware of it. They never much cared for outside rule, but as long as it helped keep the plebs in line, they’d abide it.
The Road to Hell
Where I’m going with this is that Joseph alienated each bit of his realm with his well-intentioned policies. The history sometimes reads like he had a ‘people to piss off’ list stuck on the wall behind his desk. The trouble was treating all of these backwoods blue-bloods like they were already the well-oiled machine he dreamt of operating. Let’s look at them in turn.
The Holy Roman Empire was a too-warm committee meeting room full of egos and a massively overcomplicated rules-system. To chair this kind of committee you needed tact, patience and a keen sensitivity to what makes it tick. Joseph knew all this, but he didn’t care. His power-maximising, state-worshipping psychology made him use the Empire to serve the Habsburg state. For example, he wanted tight borders. So, he made sure that all the churches inside Habsburg lands were administered by bishops also on the inside, not by the Holy Roman Prince-Bishops whose dioceses (a bishop’s area of jurisdiction over churches) extended into Habsburg lands. Joseph also made the perfectly reasonable conclusion that Belgium was too far away and thus it would make sense to swap it for Bavaria, right next door. The bishops and Bavaria agreed but the princes panicked. Does Joseph, our supposed protector, have so little regard for our lands and titles? Do our ancient rights not matter to him? The answer was yes. Add his cost-cutting exercises that took away those sweeteners which persuaded officials in other imperial courts to argue the Emperor’s corner and you have a very sour recipe for relations between Empire and Emperor. In 1785, many princes actually allied with Prussia against Joseph.
That’s why Joseph was vulnerable when the crises struck. The first was in Belgium, where he’d tried to push things like standard taxation and courts on the patchwork of petty guilds, abbots, nobles and the like. Perhaps he did so with a particular vengeance, as if Joseph could be any more obsessive, because he thought the Belgians had betrayed him over his attempt to re-open the Scheldt river in 1783 , when the Dutch had forced him into a humiliating climb-down. In any case, he pushed these reforms, and the Beglian bigwigs didn’t care for it. The people didn’t either. All these arcane old customs protected them from arbitrary rule. You can practically hear them saying “What will Joe do once he’s dismantled all checks to his power?” When, in 1787, one of the states went on a tax-strike, the local Habsburg governor made concessions. Joseph went ballistic. You don’t just back down when you’re right. He vowed he would fight to the end, literally if necessary. In response, and inspired by the simultaneous French Revolution, the Belgians rose up. They proclaimed the free and independent United States of Belgium in 1790. The news reached the heartbroken Joseph on his deathbed.
Meanwhile, the Hungarians were also out for blood. Joseph hated the institution of serfdom. It was everything that pushed his buttons: inefficient, unmeritocratic, and giving powers that rightfully belong to the state to private individuals. As we’ve seen, he attacked it mercilessly, cutting down the rights of nobles over their serfs. Unlike in Belgium, the serfs were all for Joseph’s reforms. They unfortunately expressed it in the worst way possible. In 1784, Transylvanian peasants — these days, we’d say they were Romanian — rose up against their Hungarian landlords in favour of Joseph’s policies. So, Joseph did two things. First, he crushed them bloodily, because you can’t get away with breaking the state’s laws. Second, he fast-forwarded his reform programme, effectively proposing the abolition of serfdom. The nobles were furious but, so long as the army was in town, they couldn’t do anything about it. That’s why they colluded with the King of Prussia and pounced in 1790, when it went away to fight the Ottomans. Prussia would invade, they would rise up, and Hungary would break away from the Habsburgs.
It’s 1790 and everything has gone wrong. The Prussians are at the gates. The Belgians and Hungarians are in revolt. The Holy Roman Empire won’t help. The army is away. What do you do?
As it happens, the last year of Joseph’s life was perhaps his most glorious. Joseph saved the Habsburg empire through careful distribution of the forces available, clever diplomacy to get Britain on side, and a tactical postponement of his reforms. But it was a cat’s whisker away from utter collapse, and the price he paid was the end of his dream to abolish serfdom. That isn’t just how I see it, it’s how Joseph saw it too. With his special brand of flamboyant melancholy, he penned his own epitaph, which, in poetic translation, goes: ‘Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure, but who had the misfortune to see all his plans collapse’.
Final Thoughts
This story gives us three obvious reasons to distrust benevolent dictatorships:
- A well-meaning ruler isn’t always right. Joseph rejected the free market, burning out Austria’s peasantry while the invisible hand pushed Britain to the next century’s premier power;
- Arbitrary power, even when wielded for good purposes, is scary. 9/10 Belgian peasants agree;
- It’s all too much for one person. Joseph hastened his own death and met it as a broken man.
But there’s more: Joseph, the epitome of the enlightened despot/benevolent dictator, couldn’t get the job done. The whole argument is that they cut the crap and achieve results. Joseph was the century’s greatest crap cutter, yet much of his reform project still went down the toilet, and his whole state very nearly went with it.
That’s because Joseph never made any friends. The high-handed, dictatorial style made people distrust and dislike his policies. It provoked those who disagreed and alienated those who might have been persuaded. Sure, Prussia played its part, but Prussia couldn’t have threatened to split Hungary away if the Hungarians weren’t begging them to do it.
This is not just relevant for understanding Joseph’s reign. It goes to show that the true character of politics, behind all the official laws and institutions and so forth, is our relationship with it. A constructive relationship cuts both ways. To be receptive to what a government wants for us, it first needs to be receptive to what we want for our government. Otherwise, no matter how benevolent it thinks it is, we won’t agree. It’s a hard task for dictatorships to manage that relationship and there are serious doubts whether models like Rwanda can sustain it for long.
Look at Austria. Joseph narrowly avoided the death of his empire. Those who came after him retrenched and backed the old elites, shutting out the intelligentsia, who rose up in 1848. Once again the empire was only saved in a pinch when a Russian army came to help. Luck ran out in 1918. That was not inevitable but it was made more likely because the Habsburgs never managed to find a productive, peaceful way of working out disagreements between them and their enormous, diverse population.
So, the question isn’t whether our rulers are naughty or nice. Would Joseph find coal in his stocking for his domineering, or an orange for his conscientiousness? It’s about whether there are effective, durable ways we can influence our governments to address our needs and aspirations. Will benevolent dictatorship really deliver better results when all those achievements hang on a knife edge? It’s no guarantee but, on the whole, it’s democracy that gets the real job done.
