Maria Theresa’s Enlightenment: The Habsburgs, Generational Challenge, and Religious Indifference

A recurring debate in enlightenment studies is the relationship between ideas and socio-political change. In his 1972 essay on the European enlightenment, Franco Venturi argues for research methods that ground the enlightenment, as a movement, in particular historical contexts with the goal of illuminating what it all “meant.”¹ Scholars like Venturi investigate enlightenment coalescence, namely the ideas and the historical realities that cohered the increasingly self-aware cadre of writers, philosophers, statesmen, and others around particular notions of tolerance, reason, progress, and individual or national edification. By contrast, the cri de coeur of anti-enlightenment—of those who perceived their world to be under attack—emphasized the manifold dangers and terrible consequences of these new ideas. The struggle over whether to perceive intellectual ferment as hopeful evidence of progress and renewal or a threat to the stability of all that was good in the world played out not only among writers but also within influential households. In eighteenth-century royal families, intergenerational struggles could be and sometimes were grafted to the new language of the enlightenment, thereby setting up new locations for enlightenment ideas and for the passionate pushback against them.²

The eighteenth-century Habsburgs had their fair share of drama between couples, as well as among parents and children. The conflicts in Habsburg relationships reveal the ways in which familial struggles shaped and were in turn shaped by political and intellectual change. Empress Maria Theresa, who embraced an ideology of both beneficent government and fecundity, has a mixed reputation. While her sons Joseph and Leopold are invariably styled as enlightened monarchs, or at least as enlightened absolutists, historians have at times placed Maria Theresa on both sides—sometimes portraying her as a conservative and, at other times, as an (accidental) enlightenment reformer. Both views have ample evidence to support them. Maria Theresa rejected ideas that she thought posed a threat to power, patrimony, and salvation. She pursued reform for the good of the state, but she viewed some of the intellectual challenges of the eighteenth century—religious toleration and new social principles among them—as fundamentally corrosive of individual and social morality. At times, she loathed and feared the “acrid ferment of enlightenment” and defended her intolerance of religious plurality, but she did so out of the deepest of religious and political convictions that evinced her love of her people and dynasty.³

Maria Theresa’s impact on the Austrian state was profound, but, with a few exceptions, she resisted using the grand canvass of the Habsburg realm as a political laboratory of the enlightenment. In the last decade of her life, her desire to address the miseries of the Habsburg peasantry, and her repugnance for and dread of warfare were tied to her disquiet over her own (and others’) salvation. In the first years of her reign, however, war had been the only way to protect her patrimony and have a chance to regain the territory of which she had been robbed. But, by the late 1760s, after the enormous cost of the Seven Years’ War and herself a widow, she began to see in war only the potential for loss (both territorial and human). She perceived her legacy partly as the dynasty itself, in both personal and political terms. It was within the family that she sought to shape political identities and control ideas, and it was within the context of imperial mothering that she expressed a religiously-informed political worldview that was, at the same time, a throwback to baroque culture and vibrantly new. She understood that a renewed Habsburg realm, which included the Austrian Netherlands, Central Europe, and the Italian peninsula, could influence events and people to create a more just world, but it should not be a secular world. In her mind, the empire would not thrive if it was unmoored from its critical anchors in dynastic power and Catholic hegemony, and she lamented the new statecraft of rulers like Frederick II who drew energy from secular enlightenment principles.

It is worth reflecting on the intersection between the personal and the political in the...