13

THE JOAN OF ARC OF THE DANUBE

Amid war and all the political difficulties, life at home had its compensations. Both Maria Theresa and Francis delighted in attending plays and dances. They often spent evenings playing cards in her apartments, sometimes for high stakes. Maria Theresa, however, knew when to stop and never incurred huge gambling debts. Yet for all their compatibility, like other royal husbands before him, Francis strayed from the marital bed and acquired a number of mistresses, much to his wife’s chagrin. But like Isabella of Castile, Maria Theresa of Austria forgave her husband’s infidelities and remained faithful to him. These liaisons may have resulted from Maria Theresa’s possessiveness; she greatly disliked being separated from Francis and admitted as much in a letter she wrote to her sister Marianne. Here, she relates a quarrel over Francis’s wish to pursue his military obligation: “I was sick with anger and chagrin and made the old one [Francis] ill with my wickedness … . At first I only made light of the idea, but finally I saw that he was serious. I resorted to our usual instruments, caresses and tears, as much as one can do with a husband of nine years, but I got nowhere although he is the best husband in the world. I finally resumed my anger which served only to make both of us ill … . I gave up fighting him, but shilly-shallied from day to day to win time, but if he does go I shall either follow him or shut myself in a convent.”¹ Maria Theresa won this round: Francis stayed at home.

Certainly, the queen’s early illusions about Francis had been stripped away. Much as she loved her husband, Maria Theresa found she needed additional support. Francis could not give his wife unbiased advice on matters regarding herself. That unenviable task fell instead on Count Emmanuel da Silva-Tarouca, a Portuguese nobleman who enjoyed an unusual relationship with Maria Theresa. She had known him since she was a child, as Tarouca had served in her father’s court. Upon her accession, Maria Theresa asked her old friend to take on the role of mentor.

Tarouca, a man of eminent discretion, was to give his candid and sage advice on many matters. It was a thankless task, one that could easily invite jealousies or suspicion from other courtiers. Nevertheless, Tarouca accepted. As the queen’s mentor, he took on the role of “disinterested spectator … [who] helped to develop the latent powers of her nature.”² Tarouca put order into Maria Theresa’s life by devising a regimented schedule: she would rise from bed at eight in the morning, dress, breakfast, and attend Mass, followed by half an hour with the children. At the count’s direction, she devoted the hours between 9:30 to 12:30 to the minutiae of ruling. This included audiences, conferring with ministers, studying, and signing documents. Maria Theresa was then to eat her lunch at 12:45. Even when it came to eating, Tarouca urged the queen to follow a regimen: she must eat her food while it was warm and drink coffee before it became cold. After luncheon Maria Theresa was to spend time with the children and her mother. From 4:00 to 8:30 she was to work again, then have dinner at 8:45, after which she must spend the rest of the evening in some kind of relaxation, but never to an extreme. Years later, Maria Theresa noted how Tarouca “brought me to a true understanding of affairs and men.” She wrote that she owed the count “a great debt, which I will always seek to repay to his children and enjoin my successors to do likewise.”³

In her personal life, Maria Theresa had more than her share of tragedies. In 1744, less than a year after her sister the docile Archduchess Marianne married, Charles of Lorraine, Marianne died in childbirth. Her sister’s premature death was a terrible blow to Maria Theresa. To Gerhard van Swieten, her new physician, who had also cared for the unfortunate Marianne in her dying days, Maria Theresa stated: “God could have permitted no more terrible trial to befall me than the death of my sister. Every day increases my love for the members of my family. Time, they say, heals griefs of this kind. Time will only make me feel more keenly the greatness of my loss … . I believe that God has purposes to fulfill through me. By His great grace I shall be upheld on the path He wills me to tread—a path of disappointment, sorrow, and weeping. I submit to what He has ordained and look for no reward in this life … . To Him let me offer in sacrifice all that I ever craved for myself.”⁴

One of Maria Theresa’s enemies, Charles Albert of Bavaria, exited the international stage the same year Marianne died. Austrian troops occupied Bavaria but were eventually driven out, prompting Charles Albert to return to his capital. Yet a mere three weeks later, he fled Munich after Austrian forces defeated the Bavarians. He died in 1745, after only three years as Holy Roman emperor. The death of Maria Theresa’s Bavarian nemesis meant not only a possible easing of trouble from that part of Europe but also that the Holy Roman Empire’s crown was again vacant. Charles Albert’s successor in Bavaria recognized the Pragmatic Sanction and agreed to vote for the election of Maria Theresa’s husband as the next Holy Roman emperor. Francis was duly elected and attended his coronation in 1745 in Frankfurt. Maria Theresa declined to be crowned at his side, using the excuse that she was pregnant. She did, however, watch the coronation procession. From the balcony where she watched her husband pass by, she exclaimed excitedly: “Long live the emperor Francis I!”⁵

Francis’s election as Holy Roman emperor was one of the few happy events of the 1740s for Maria Theresa, for the War of the Austrian Succession continued to dominate Europe. The conflagration started by Frederick the Great engulfed the Continent’s powers. The war “was in reality a coalition against the House of Austria on the part of France, Prussia, and Spain, and was the first round in the great struggle of Austria and Prussia for the leadership of Germany. It was, at the same time, one round in the greater battle of France and Britain for mastery of America and India and the world’s commerce.”⁶ Frederick’s conquest of Silesia emboldened Maria Theresa’s enemies to make a bid for her other territories: the Saxons coveted Moravia, Sardinia tried to wrest Milan, Bavaria succeeded in obtaining the Bohemian crown, and Spain coveted all the Habsburg lands. France, meanwhile, sought to weaken the Habsburgs by trying to break up Maria Theresa’s empire. The empress, in turn, harbored strong apprehensions about the French.

Great Britain, which had signed the Pragmatic Sanction and initially pursued neutrality, now sought action. England’s King George II, who was also Elector of Hanover, went to war in defense of Maria Theresa’s authority in 1742, at the head of a “Pragmatic Army” consisting of British, Hanoverian, Hessian, and Dutch soldiers, and won a victory at Dettingen against the French. After the Peace of Breslau, the French found themselves in more trouble. Only two years after the French had moved into Prague, French Marshal Belle-Isle and his troops fled the city with Maria Theresa’s forces putting on the pressure. Cardinal Fleury then wanted to negotiate peace. But the empress was not easily taken in, replying: “I will grant no capitulation to the French army. I will receive no proposition, no project from the cardinal: let him address himself to my allies.”⁷ As to Belle-Isle, Maria Theresa remarked: “I am astonished that he should make any advances; he who, by money and promises, excited almost all the princes of Germany to crush me … . I can prove, by documents in my possession, that the French endeavoured to excite sedition even in the heart of my dominions; that they attempted to overturn the fundamental laws of the empire, and to set fire to the four corners of Germany; I will transmit these proofs to posterity, as a warning to the empire.”⁸

After the French withdrew, Maria Theresa’s troops marched into Bohemia victoriously, and she was crowned Queen of Bohemia amid much applause and cheering. Silesia may have been lost, but Maria Theresa now had a firm hold on three important territories—Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary—and her troops occupied Bavaria. The empress had accomplished the seemingly impossible, holding on to most of her domains.

By this time, Lord Carteret (Earl Granville), the British prime minister, had taken a decidedly sympathetic view of Maria Theresa. Soon, in England, the thought took hold that, with the addition of British might, “Maria Theresa could conquer the whole Continent. The British press was calling her the ‘Joan of Arc of the Danube,’ and chanting her beauty, cleverness, and virtue in harmonious refrains.”⁹ Like Joan of Arc, Empress Maria Theresa was courageous and a born leader. These qualities overcame the impression that she did not have “a shred of intellectual brilliance … . But she had three things even more important in a ruler: sound judgment, a generous spirit, and an enormous store of physical and spiritual stamina.”¹⁰

The War of the Austrian Succession was fought on many fronts, including the Italian Peninsula, where Maria Theresa had been at war since 1741. Fighting continued after she moved her forces from Silesia to the Italian front. Spain’s ambitious queen consort, Elizabeth Farnese, sought to seize Maria Theresa’s domains in the peninsula, prompting the empress to side with King Charles Emmanuel of Sardinia for help. In return, Maria Theresa had to cede some of her territory to Sardinia. The empress still needed the British as allies, but their support unexpectedly proved dodgy. Great Britain’s recent enthusiasm for her suddenly cooled, since they feared that Austria might become too powerful on the Italian Peninsula. Britain’s primary enemy was France, and they wanted Maria Theresa’s Austria to focus on that front, not on Italy, or on Prussia. The British supported Charles Emmanuel’s request that Austria cede territory to Sardinia. They forced her hand. All this had the effect of souring Maria Theresa’s views of the British.

France was still Austria’s enemy, but now Prussia supplanted the Bourbons as the Habsburgs’ enemy number one. When war in the Netherlands in 1744 and 1745 went badly for Maria Theresa, the British urged her to make peace with Prussia. This further infuriated the empress, who was looking to come to terms with the French. A significant shift was taking place in the complicated diplomatic landscape of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a shift that would have tremendous consequences for one of Maria Theresa’s daughters. As the empress began to rethink international strategy, she concluded that, to gather strength, she would have to deal with the dreaded Prussians. A temporary peace with Frederick II would allow Austria to fight Prussia again later, from a stronger position. Maria Theresa accordingly, in 1745, signed the Treaty of Dresden, whereby Frederick II, in return for keeping Silesia, recognized Francis I as Holy Roman emperor. For the time being, Austria and Prussia stopped fighting each other.

Elsewhere, three more years of battles exhausted the European powers financially and politically. Talk of a cessation of hostilities began again. Maria Theresa understood that this period of peace was essential to Austria. She sent Count Wenzel Kaunitz, who was to make his mark in the empress’s service in the coming years, as envoy to the negotiations in Aix-la-Chapelle. Kaunitz had his hands full. As he jockeyed to secure as good a deal as he could for Austria, France, Britain, and Spain secretly met in the hope of gaining the greatest advantages for themselves. France and Britain dominated the congress, which met for nearly six months. The empress resented the manner in which the British cajoled her to do as they wanted. When the British ambassador to Vienna urged her to accept the terms imposed on Austria, she indignantly retorted: “Why am I excluded from transactions which concern my own State? My enemies will give me better terms than my friends … . All I ask is to have the land which I had before the war in Italy … Yes, truly, all these circumstances tear old wounds and inflict new ones into the bargain.”¹¹ In the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which was signed in October 1748, Maria Theresa was compelled to sacrifice Silesia to Frederick II of Prussia; to cede territories in western Lombardy to the King of Sardinia; and to cede the northern Italian duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla to Spain.

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession. It may have rewarded Frederick II’s belligerence by granting him Silesia, but Maria Theresa could still count herself fortunate. For one “must take into account not only what was lost, but what was snatched from the very brink of perdition, and by comparison with what its enemies had intended, and all but achieved in 1741, the condition in which the ‘House of Austria’ emerged in 1747 was well-nigh miraculous. The great bulk of its territories were, after all, still intact. It had recovered the Imperial Crown. It stood an undisputed Great Power, and for another 150 years there was to be no more talk of dismembering it. And this was very largely Maria Theresa’s personal achievement. Alone, she had stood firm when all around her counselled yielding to the Prussians.”¹² And “to Maria Theresa herself belongs almost the sole credit of accomplishing what she did in this long, bitter struggle.”¹³

Like Isabella of Castile, Maria Theresa of Austria possessed a conquering spirit. Both were contemptuous of weakness. Neither woman, in the darkest days of her reign, sank to self-pity, self-doubt, or defeatism. Faith in their causes and in their God sustained them, as did their understanding of the significance of their actions—or inactions, for Isabella and Maria Theresa were visionaries too. War to them was an unavoidable and sometimes necessary tool, for only through strength could either monarch hope to bring peace and other benefits that accrue with that strength. Maria Theresa admitted that, in these first years of her reign, “I acted boldly, shrank from no risk, and spared no effort,” driven as she was from “the conviction that no more unhappy fate could befall my poor dominions than to fall into Prussian hands, indeed, had I not been nearly always enceinte, no one could have stopped me from taking the field personally against my perjured enemy.”¹⁴

During this time Count Otto Podewils, the Prussian envoy to Vienna, wrote to his master, Frederick the Great, his impressions of Maria Theresa and left a vivid portrait. “She has a sprightly gait and a majestic bearing … . She has a round, full face and a bold forehead. Her pronounced eyebrows are, like her hair, blond without any touch of red. Her eyes are large, bright, and at the same time full of gentleness, all accented by their light-blue color. Her nose is small, neither hooked nor turned up, the mouth a little large, but still pretty, the teeth white, the smile pleasant, the neck and throat well formed, and the arms and hands beautiful. She still retains her nice complexion, although she devotes little time to it. She has much color. Her expression is open and bright, her conversation friendly and charming. No one can deny that she is a lovely person.” As for Maria Theresa’s popularity, Podewils noted, “Full of enthusiasm, everyone stood by her and rushed to sacrifice himself for this best of all princesses. People deified her. Everybody wanted to have her picture. She never appeared in public without being greeted with applause.” ¹⁵

Maria Theresa may have gained some breathing space on the international level; however, on the domestic front, a whole different set of challenges awaited. The empress had largely weathered the diplomatic and military storm that threatened to annihilate her and, in so doing, emerged as the recognized sovereign of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and many other lands scattered across Europe, whose subjects spoke ten different languages.ⁱ With no strong central authority overseeing her realms, ruling was extremely challenging. The three main kingdoms—Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary—had competing chancelleries and differing laws. Ever active and desirous of ruling well, Maria Theresa also turned her attention to resolving internal problems.

The empress’s first set of reforms—directed at streamlining and centralizing the state apparatus, which was an unmanageable mass of confusion—occurred between 1746 and 1756. To Maria Theresa, whose main preoccupation was protecting the integrity of Austria and her other realms, success in developing an efficient state meant that the vast Habsburg territories could be more easily defended and kept intact, especially when it came to what the empress described as “two so mighty enemies, Prussia and the Turk.”¹⁶

She implemented administrative reforms that eliminated some of the rivalry between the Austrian and Bohemian chancelleries. These reforms included forming a supreme court and according criminal law with the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, named after the empress. Maria Theresa also ordered the creation of a General Directory of Economic Affairs in 1746, to promote economic growth in Austria and Bohemia. With the aim of inspiring business, the government sponsored tax privileges, subsidies, and loans as well.

Throughout the Continent, including within Maria Theresa’s realms, an outmoded feudalistic system of governance was still in place. Petty jealousies between nobles were common, and a great chasm divided the aristocracy from the peasants, who often lived in primitive conditions. Most of the peasants were “still serfs in the sense that they formed the matrix of a feudal society and were bound to provide services in work and kind to their landlords, but not chattels to be bought and sold as, under Catherine II, they came to be in Russia.”¹⁷ For the most part, the nobles were unsympathetic toward the peasants, many of whom toiled on the land of the great magnates. Peasants were“attached to their landlords in widely varying degrees of servitude, illiterate and often brutish, liable for conscription on a quota basis, and, until Maria Theresa’s first reforms, bearing the whole weight of taxation. The attitude of too many of the landowners was summed up in the saying: the peasants should be cut down like grass, they spring up the stronger for it. It was this attitude that Maria Theresa set herself to change, at first for purely economic reasons (the system was too wasteful of potentially first-class human material), increasingly, as she grew older, from humanitarian motives too.”¹⁸ She took a profoundly serious view of her role as sovereign, always mindful of the fact, as she once put it, that the monarchy was “entrusted to me by God.”¹⁹

The selfish ministers who wanted to keep the empress ignorant of what was really happening lingered on. Only Bartenstein was of any real help. The verbose baron and the empress never enjoyed an amiable relationship, but he was loyal and offered sound advice. He was instrumental in convincing the empress of the dire need for reforms. Meanwhile, Maria Theresa sought more information from a coterie of trusted men. These included her husband, Francis, the indispensable Count Tarouca, and her secretary, Ignaz von Koch.

Fortunately for Maria Theresa, by the mid-1740s, many of the old ministers had died off so that she could bring in new blood to address her ponderous obligations. She relied on three men of action to help carry out her ambitious reforms. These were Count Wilhelm Haugwitz, Count Rudolf Chotek, and Count Wenzel Kaunitz. Haugwitz devised the plans for instituting legal reforms. A native of Silesia, where he was governor, Haugwitz was dull and unpolished but clear-sighted, incorruptible, courageous, and a first-rate worker. Maria Theresa assigned the Bohemian financier Chotek (who did not get on with Haugwitz) responsibility for financial reforms. Kaunitz, meanwhile, a tall, haughty hypochondriac in his forties with a penchant for composing long but trenchant memoranda, was recognized early in his career for his sharp mind. One of Maria Theresa’s advisers, Count Ulfield, read the young Kaunitz’s first dispatch from Turin, where he was envoy. It had been “drawn in so masterly a manner” that Ulfield sent the dispatch to Maria Theresa’s attention with the striking words “Behold your first minister.”²⁰ Ulfield was correct in his prediction. Maria Theresa’s trust in and reliance on Kaunitz would grow through the years, for as a servant of the dynasty, he was not only intelligent and loyal but also skilled in negotiation, tireless, and honest.

Together, they pushed through reforms that suppressed the nobility’s nearly unchecked influence and power. By increasing the crown’s power and influence, Maria Theresa planted the seeds of what was “the political ideal of the time—the establishment of a benevolent despotism, the increase of the powers of the central state, and the supremacy of the sovereign over the local noble.”²¹

For a long time, the burden of taxation had fallen on the peasants, but military campaigns were costly, so one of the first areas that underwent reform was revenue collecting. Efficient collection of taxes meant increased revenues to the state. The reforms sought to tax the nobility and the Church. Many of the nobles fought fiercely for their feudal privileges and disdained their empress’s new plans. Maria Theresa’s tenacity paid off, though. The nobility (with the exception of those from Hungary) backed down. There was no doubt that Maria Theresa’s reforms had curtailed their financial privileges, but the reforms did not “entail a dethronement of the aristocracy as a class … [the reforms] did, however, transform the holders of these offices from servants of their Province and their classes into those of the State, and this was an enormous change, the most important internal development of Maria Theresa’s reign. They also proved enduring.”²²

With an improved method of revenue collecting implemented, a new army could emerge. Again, Maria Theresa’s foresight and determination proved beneficial. The number of soldiers increased to some 180,000, far more than the 108,000 Maria Theresa originally was advised to have as a standing army capable of fending off attacks from other powers. The empress and her advisers used the Prussian model for professionalizing her army. Confusion and disorder gave way to professionalism and discipline. The regiments were rearranged to be of uniform size. Officer training became more rigorous, while maneuvers were entrenched in training. Maria Theresa herself visited many of these maneuvers, often on horseback. Military reforms did away with inefficient practices such as disparate training among regiments, irregular pay, and appointments and promotions based not on merit but on purchase or favors.

The civil service was also reformed. Merit became the main reason for promotions within the branches of the government, which doubled to ten thousand individuals by the early 1760s. A centralizing and more orderly set of reforms stopped the chaotic governing that had made ruling her realms difficult.

In education, Maria Theresa sought to raise able future generations, taking advice from the Dutch physician van Swieten, who advocated sweeping changes. Instruction in schools improved, while the teaching profession benefited from higher salaries. The empress agreed to the creation of the Collegium Regium Theresianum, where students were taught foreign languages, history, and military matters. Both Maria Theresa and van Swieten were devout Catholics, but van Swieten advised the empress to reassign control of education from the Church to the state. This move not only laicized the system but also reduced the power of the Jesuits, who had enjoyed sweeping authority. These changes did not introduce a new age of free and spirited inquiry, either in the educational system or in general society. On the contrary, state censorship grew. In 1753 Maria Theresa, watchful for heresy, ordered that all works be scrutinized for unacceptable thoughts and words. She even rejected the founding of an academy of sciences, out of concern that it would come to promote heretical thinking. Here again were shades of Queen Isabella of Castile.

The empress “had no use for abstract learning, nor for the humanities as such.”²³ Two other noted monarchs of the time, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, were enamored of the Enlightenment, the movement that dominated eighteenth-century European thinking; not so Maria Theresa of Austria. A letter she wrote to one of her sons years later reveals Maria Theresa’s thinking on the Enlightenment:

Nothing is more pleasant, nothing more suitable to flatter our egos as a freedom without restrictions. “Freedom” is the word with which our enlightened century wants to replace religion. One condemns the whole past as a time of ignorance and prejudice, while knowing nothing of that past and very little of the present. If I could see these so-called enlightened figures, these philosophes, more fortunate in their work and happier in their private lives, then I would accuse myself of bias, pride, prepossession, and obstinacy for not adjusting to them. But unfortunately daily experience teaches me the opposite. No one is weaker, no one more spiritless than these strong spirits; no one more servile, no one more despairing at the least misfortune as they. They are bad fathers, sons, husbands, ministers, generals, and citizens. And why? Because they lack substance. All of their philosophy, all of their axioms are conceived only in their egotism; the slightest disappointment crushes them beyond hope, with no resources to fall back upon.²⁴

As unimpressed as she was by the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality and science, Maria Theresa’s reforms were permeated with the Enlightenment ideals of “government by the humanitarian spirit.” This meant that the “practical application of the humanitarian tendencies appeared in Austria earlier than in many of the philosophically ‘more progressive states.’ Many historians have argued that in terms of the humanitarian ideal Theresian Austria was more enlightened than any other European country of the eighteenth century. The vital characteristic of the Austrian Enlightenment was its empirical bent: reforms were not based on a rationalized concept of the ‘popular will’ or on the assumption of a ‘social contract,’ but on the recognition of observable need … . The pragmatic and humane dimensions of Austrian government in the mid-eighteenth century were as much if not more reflective of [Maria Theresa’s] personality than of the new wisdom of the age.”²⁵ The empress converted ideas into action while at the same time possessing a “flexible pragmatism that always knew exactly when and where to push for change.”²⁶

Maria Theresa was a dynamic force and the leading light in introducing much needed changes. Thus, by the mid-1750s, the empress “had already earned an honored place in Austrian history. In less than a decade she had virtually doubled state revenue, restructured the administrative and military system, and begun the process of entrusting it to a more competent, professional elite.”²⁷ Her reforms managed to engage the elites, gaining their cooperation, rather than strictly imposing her absolutist rule on them.

Certainly when it came to taxing the very wealthy and easing the tax burden on the poor, the Theresian reforms were far-reaching, so much so that “it is difficult to exaggerate the importance” of Maria Theresa’s “victory in this contest. She did exactly what Louis XV neglected to do in France, and what Louis XVI tried later and failed to accomplish. By her clear statesmanship and dauntless courage she obviated the destruction of the monarchy, or at least a bloody revolution, which otherwise could hardly have been delayed longer in Austria than in France.”²⁸ It was, instead, to be the destiny of one of her daughters to feel the full impact of the revolution that would engulf France in the next few decades.