Democratic Enlightenment

Enlightened Despotism 295
pastoral work, and also building on the already substantial universal Catholic
primary education established by the general school ordinance, or Algemeine Schulordnung,
of 1774. 126 Many interpreted his actions as an attack on the Church, and
there was fierce opposition from among some clergy. But Catholicism’s dominant
role in Austrian society was vigorously remodelled rather than reduced.
Joseph undertook the most drastic, far-reaching monastic reforms attempted in
ancien régime Europe, suppressing around a third of all the male and female cloisters
in the Habsburg lands. He ‘secularized’ their resources, transferring their revenues to
support new parishes serviced by curates who were often former regular clergy,
created three new bishoprics, and both raised the number and improved the standards
of seminaries training priests. Following Sonnenfels and Von Martini, the
ecclesiastical commission created in 1782 to carry out these changes targeted only
monasteries performing no obvious social function whether of a welfare or educational
character. 127 Over 700 monasteries and priories were closed, setting in motion
one of the greatest social and cultural shifts of late eighteenth-century Europe. The
regular clergy fell from a level of around 53 per cent of all ecclesiastics in the core
Austrian lands to only 29 per cent by 1790. 128 The result was a substantial lowering of
the ratio of parishioners to parish priests, in Bohemia from 903 to 791, the total
number of secular priests in the core Austrian lands rising from 22,000 to 27,000. 129
There was a steep drop in numbers of nuns. In short, greater resources were now
allocated to the laity’s spiritual direction rather than less.
Joseph differed less in outlook from his younger brother and successor Leopold,
who ruled as grand duke of Tuscany from 1765 until 1790, when he, in turn, became
Austrian emperor, than has sometimes been supposed. Familiar with the work of the
Verri brothers and Beccaria in Austrian Milan, and an admirer of the French
économistes, Leopold too was committed to comprehensive change on the basis of
enlightened ideas, and in a few cases he may have been the more enlightened.
Leopold’s new criminal code, introduced in 1786, abolishing both judicial torture
and the death penalty, was noticeably influenced in its key provisions by Beccaria. 130
More generally, though, much the same qualifications apply here as with Joseph.
Leopold’s attitudes were rooted in a modified Jansenism more than the Enlightenment,
and while occasionally Jansenists and Aufklärer saw eye to eye, ‘at bottom, their
premises were different’. 131 Beyond Jansenist ideas on reforming and strengthening
the Church, it was especially the ideas of the French économistes and German
cameralists that appealed to these Habsburg rulers. During the 1770s and 1780s a
considerable number of Tuscan and Milanese monasteries, deemed superfluous by
126
Dickson, ‘Joseph II’, 97.
127
Hebeis, Karl Anton von Martini, 77; Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 193.
128
Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 194–5; Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 248–50; Dickson, ‘Joseph
II’, 98–101.
129
Dickson, ‘Joseph II’, 103–6; Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 194; Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment,
237–8.
130 131
Anderson, ‘Italian Reformers’, 66. Ward, ‘Late Jansenism’, 177.