Josephinism

thumb|Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor|Joseph II by [[Anton von Maron, 1775]] Josephinism is a name given collectively to the domestic policies of Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1765–1790). During the ten years in which Joseph was the sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy (1780–1790), he attempted to legislate a series of drastic reforms to remodel Austria in the form of what liberals saw as an ideal Enlightened state. This provoked severe resistance from powerful forces within and outside his empire, but ensured that he would be remembered as an "enlightened ruler" by historians from then to the present day.

==Origins== Born in 1741, Joseph was the son of Maria Theresa of Austria and Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. He was given a rigorous education in the Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, order, and careful organization in statecraft. Viewing the often confused and complex morass of Habsburg administration in the crownlands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, Joseph was deeply dissatisfied. He inherited the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in 1765, on the death of his father, but ruled the Habsburg lands only as the junior co-regent to his mother, the matriarch Maria Theresa, until 1780. During the co-regency the deeply pious Maria Theresa acquiesced to numerous reforms, especially when pushed by Joseph and her trusted chancellor Kaunitz. These included the suppression of 71 of the 467 monasteries in Lombardy, then an Austrian possession, an increase of the minimum age for monks to 24, a prohibition of further gifts of land to the Church unless permitted by the government, the effective dissolution of the Jesuit order by seizing their properties and removing their long held dominance in education, and an Urbarium law limiting some of the feudal obligations of peasants to their lords in Bohemia. These measures, although influenced by Joseph, were largely directed by Maria Theresa and Kaunitz, demonstrating that Josephinism as a political force predated its eponymous creator, albeit in a less radical form.