“I am madly in love with you, virtuously or diabolically, I love you and I will love you to the grave,” his wife, Isabella of Parma, wrote. Unfortunately not to him, Emperor Joseph II, but to his sister, Marie Christine.
Joseph had married Isabella when they were both 18. His mother, Queen Maria Theresia of Austria, had set up the marriage to fortify the bonds between the Austrians and the Bourbons of France. That was how Maria Theresia did business. She used her children – of which she had sixteen – as merchandise.
The royal wedding was a flamboyant spectacle, the last baroque festivity of its kind, designed to impress the people with both empires’ unlimited wealth and military strength. Joseph was smitten with his bride, Isabella with her new sister-in-law.
Joseph II was Maria Theresia’s third child but first son and therefore the desperately awaited successor to the crown. The queen herself had inherited the title from her father for the sole reason that there were no male successors in sight. Now her first son filled her with pride and joy – the promise that the empire would soon have a male leader. She famously presented the new-born to the kings of Hungary, who in sympathy for the young mother, immediately took to arms and defeated the Prussians, Maria Theresia’s archenemy.
Other than that, Queen Maria Theresia spoiled and pampered her first son. He grew into an arrogant young man, who not only Isabella did not find charming. The people of the empire were not taken with him either. They despised his taciturn intellect, his fascination with the Enlightenment and rationality and preferred his mother, who despite being a conservative, catholic fundamentalist, appeared like their loving mother-figure.
At 24, after his father’s death, Joseph II was crowned co-regent of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He immersed himself in state business. “A monarch must be the first servant of his people,” he said. He traveled, studied ways of improving the monarchy, socially, economically and militarily. Yet, his ideas of reforming and modernizing the state were stalled by his mother, who after her beloved husband’s death remained frozen in the past, clad in black eternally.
Young Isabella, intelligent and educated, did not enjoy her role as baby machine. She was said to be plagued with melancholy and depression, and despite her love affair with Marie Christine, she was pregnant five times. Three pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. One girl survived only to die from small pocks at seven years old, and one girl’s birth was so complicated, she took Isabella with her to the grave. Joseph was heart-broken. He never recuperated from the loss.
After his own mother’s, Queen Maria Theresia’s, death Joseph as a regent could finally realize his reformatory ideas: He installed the freedom of religion and limited the hitherto unlimited rights of the Catholic Church. He abolished serfdom and equalized the tax system. He abolished censorship and liberated the arts – Vienna turned into a heaven for musicians and Mozart and Beethoven settled in the city. He opened the universities to all religions, not only the Catholics, and the imperial theaters and parks to the public. He had general hospitals built and the world’s first asylum for the insane. And the people – still hated him. To the extent, that after his premature death at 49, most of his reforms were revoked. Not the serfdom, though, which could not be re-established.
His eulogy left no doubt:
“Der Bauern Gott, der Bürger Not, des Adels Spott liegt auf den Tod”
“On his deathbed lies the peasants’ God, the affliction of the burghers and the scorn of the nobility”
a popular satirical verse went.
Joseph II had been ahead of his time. A few decades later, he was indeed venerated and a multitude of monuments were erected in his memory. But there was more writing in his honor.
After Isabella’s death, and another unhappy and unconsumed marriage following mother’s wish, the widower Joseph remained single for the rest of his life, but frequented the whore houses of Vienna on a regular basis. One day in the year 1778, a prostitute refused herself to him and after some quarrel, the emperor Joseph II of Austria and Hungary was thrown out of a bordel in Spittelberggasse in the then suburbs of Vienna. Now, there was someone who wrote to the Emporer!
He came flying through this door
Joseph II, Emperor
Durch dieses Tor im Bogen kam Kaiser Joseph II. geflogen– 1778
