transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:01] Want to walk the halls of Anberlin's childhood home, or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past, alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hello, I'm Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais. Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage, and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Maria Theresa was 23 years old when, in 1740, she inherited the Habsburg Empire, a vast power that stretched from the Netherlands to Croatia. As the first female Habsburg ruler, her succession was, however, contested, and her reign was immediately characterized by war as she sought to defend her inheritance. Taking her position and her dynasty very seriously, she considered herself to be entrusted by God with a sacred mission. She reigned with an almost inexhaustible energy, devoting herself to the mastery of every detail. Hers was an uncompromising life, and her engagement as a military leader who gave birth 16 times, has given her a cherished place in the hearts of the Austrian people to this day. In death, she was held up in memory as a fairy tale figure, not only a mother to a vast brood of children, but a maternal embodiment of imperialism. An empress whom we're told was constantly accessible by her subjects, the founder of the modern state, a munificent, enlightened ruler who introduced schooling for all, the Mutter der Nation, Mother of the Nation. But what if this mythical picture doesn't accord exactly with the evidence that emerges from a meticulous combing through the archives? That is what my guest today has done. Through a monumental act of scholarship, she has written what I would venture to call the definitive biography, Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Empress in her time, published in English by Princeton University Press. Its author is Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Munster, and Rector of the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. I'm Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Professor Stollberg-Rilinger, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:
[02:52] Hi.
Speaker 1:
[02:53] So good to have you on. What an amazing book this is, and I'm so delighted having read it over the summer to have a chance to talk to you about it. One of the striking things is this mythology around Maria Theresa, the appeal of a masculine soul in a fertile female body. Tell me about this picture and when and why this kind of image of her was created.
Speaker 2:
[03:19] I mean, the image emerged, I think, in the very beginning when she ascended to the throne, as you said, at the age of 23 only, already had given birth to a couple of children, and everyone expected her to give regency to her husband and not practice rule herself, which she didn't. She, from the very beginning, responded to this challenge, and she was, her enemies, immediately started to wage war against her and wanted to distribute her lands among themselves. So she took this challenge seriously, and she did not even think of leaving this to her husband. So this was, of course, extremely surprising for her contemporaries. Some didn't like that, of course. Some thought that was against the gender order of the time while all of them found this a kind of break of the contemporary gender order. So that was surprising and also in a way scandalous, but being in the long run quite successful in defending her territories. Of course, everyone or not everyone, but many changed their minds. And since she was a person who was extremely, must have been extremely charismatic and extremely skilled in communicating, practising the contemporary style of patronage and court culture and so on. She was very talented in all these respects, also very religious according to the rules of the time. So this for many, many people who met her was really something admirable, extremely admirable. But I think the crucial thing was this combination, as you already mentioned, of on the one hand being beautiful woman, lovely woman. That was also something that everyone mentioned, that she was really beautiful on the one hand, and on the other hand had what they called then a masculine kind of stamina and courage and so on. This very unusual combination, I think, was what caused her very special charisma.
Speaker 1:
[05:46] You mentioned there that it was expected that she would allow her husband to govern. So she had married a relatively young bride in 1736. Tell me about the choice of her husband and what the V&E is made of him.
Speaker 2:
[06:03] Yeah. Her husband had been chosen by her father because her husband would never be a rival to the powerful Habsburg family because he was prince without a country, without a territory because he had to give up his inherited territory of Lorraine. So he was a king without a land or not even a king, a prince without a land, without a country. He seemed to be the perfect husband for the powerful heirs of the Habsburg territories. One expected him to take up government, but he would never be a real rival because he had no country of his own anymore. So this was the idea of Maria Theresa's father when it became more and less likely that she would be the heiress to the throne, which is very remarkable. Usually a female heir would not become the ruler herself. I mean, there are a couple of exceptions, but that was quite unusual at the time and was, of course, a problem for her legitimacy. So she married this powerless husband. I mean, in the in matters of rank or in categories of rank, he was almost appropriate, but not in, yeah, as I said, he would not be a rival to the Habsburg power. And he was, in his youth, he already spent some years at the Hartford Court in Vienna. So he was, that was also very unusual, that they knew each other already since they were young. So usually you would marry a princess, would marry someone whom she had never seen before. That was the regular case. In her case, they knew each other, they knew each other quite well, and they were even in love with each other. Although this is something seems to be some, in some way anachronistic, you know, because love was not a relevant category at the time. It was all a matter of dynastic strategy. But in this case, very unusual case, she fell in love with him, which we know because there are a couple of very heartbreaking love letters she wrote to him. So you can read this and you can find them in the archive, and it's very nice how she addresses him with nicknames and so on. So in this respect, they were really an exception to the rule. They also were an exception when they were married in, as they had a common bedroom and they usually slept in the same bed, which was very unusual. And contemporaries commented on that saying, they do it like the peasants do. They sleep in the same bed. This is something that peasants do, but never princes. So this shows that the relationship between the two was very exceptional at the time.
Speaker 1:
[09:03] That's so interesting. And we'll probably come back to thinking a bit more about that as we go on. But you mentioned Maria Theresa's father, he dies unexpectedly early, only 55 years old on the 20th of October 1740. And as we've seen, he doesn't have a male heir. He hasn't arranged the election of a successor. And so Maria Theresa inherits the Habsburg Empire, but being a woman could not be named empress. So could you give me some ideas both of the sort of size of her inheritance of the Habsburg lands at this time, and the problems that her gender caused?
Speaker 2:
[09:41] Yeah, I mean, the two things have to be distinguished. The title of emperor or empress referred to the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and not to the Habsburg lands. So you usually speak of the Habsburg Empire, which is not correct in a way because there was no Austrian emperor at the time. No, that was only the case in the 19th century. So at the time, the emperor was not identical with the head of the Habsburg territories. Yeah, actually, they all were, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was elected by the so-called prince electors. And they usually almost always elected a person from the Habsburg family. So it is easy to confuse these two things, but we have to take these two things apart. So she was the heiress of the Habsburg lands, which means Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, the Austrian lands, the so-called Erpländer, and so on, a couple of lands, as you said, from the Netherlands, what is today Belgium, to Italy. But this did not make her the empress. She became empress later because her husband was elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. So these are two different things. But as the heirs of the Habsburg territories, she was the ruler. She inherited this rule because of the so-called pragmatische Sanktion, the statute of inheritance of the Habsburg house. The problem was, of course, that contemporaries did not accept a female ruler so easily. So to compensate for this, and this caused the so-called War of Austrian Succession, the contemporaries tried to correct this kind of lack of legitimacy in having her crowned as King of Bohemia and King of Hungary. Explicitly so. In performing a completely male ritual, as she had to ride on a horse, she had to hold the sword and play the role of the defender of Christendom, which was a completely male role, only exclusively formed by male rulers before. So they tried to distinguish between her female body and the male role she had to play, which is in my eyes a remarkable way of differentiation between person and role, or person and rule. This did not really help. I mean, her enemies were not very impressed by this, but it is a remarkable way to try to compensate for this problem. And interestingly so, because on the other hand, she also cultivated her being the mother of her lands, as you already mentioned, she had 16 kids, not all of them becoming adult. But anyway, she was a very, I mean, she enacted her role as a mother, on the other hand, but her role as a ruler was a male role. So this very, very unique combination was also part of her charisma, I would say.
Speaker 1:
[13:19] That's so interesting. Thank you also for clarifying that. Looking in on the 18th century, it is very helpful to have someone explaining these details. Without wishing us to get two-way laid by the war or the series of wars that was the Austrian Succession or indeed the Seven Years' War because we could obviously speak about those for hours. One of the ways in which those have been characterized is as a kind of jewel between Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great of Prussia, because he takes the opportunity of her accession to grab Silesia. How should we see their relationship and their interactions?
Speaker 2:
[13:58] I mean, this is of course the ideal couple, so to speak, because they're almost at the same age, they inherited the rule, they impersonate in a way or embody the age-old rivalry between the dynasty of Hohenzollern on the one hand, Prussia and Habsburg Austria on the other. But he was by far not the only enemy in this war of succession. First was the Elector of Bavaria and the French in France. So he only stepped in and took the opportunity. But of course she, in many respects, he was the perfect counterpart to her. Also in the later historiography they were depicted as the dichotomy of male and female Protestant Catholic or maybe Atheist and Catholic, Atheist and Religious, and many other dichotomies with which they were identified. It's the eternal opposition of the female and the male principle, as they put it in the 19th century when the gender dichotomy became more and more pronounced and highlighted much more than it had been the case in the 18th century itself. I would say that, although they were very different in many, many respects, they were also similar in that they both were very convinced of their rule, their right to rule, their also conviction of their task to defend or to aggrandize in their respective territories, and so and so. Although he was the aggressor and she was the defendant, so of course, this was a crucial difference between the two. But once the war had started, she was as tricked in and had the same stamina in defending herself as he had, and she wasn't less, how are your hands? It's difficult to say, because now you don't have to neglect the differences of character, but they were really on the same level, I would say, of self-confidence. Maybe I could put it that way.
Speaker 1:
[16:29] Yes, it's so interesting to think about them as actually being much more similar than different despite this way that they have been characterized over the centuries. Now, the outcome of the Wars of Austrian Succession were perhaps not quite what Maria Theresa would have wanted, although she did prevent the Habsburg territories being broken up. But I'm very interested in what you write about, the fact that given that she was a female ruler, operating as a military leader in a culture that valued chivalry, and never being able to get anywhere near a battlefield, she had something of a challenge. How could she act and present herself as a warrior?
Speaker 2:
[17:08] Yeah, she did. I mean, she suffered from the fact that she could not herself personally wage war against her enemy, because Frederick II really was his own Philip Marshall, which was not regularly the case. So that is something that made him, of course, famous later. And she wasn't able as a woman to do so. So this is something she really suffered from. And she expressed that she also suffered from the fact that she was almost always pregnant, you know, giving birth to 16 kids, you can imagine. Her husband died in 1765, so she was almost always pregnant. And this, of course, made many, many things impossible for her. But in her self-representation in the arts and so on, she would be depicted as, for example, as goddess Athena, as a goddess of war and military, just to give one example. And she regretted that she wasn't a man to be on the same level of playing field as Frederick II and all of her other male enemies.
Speaker 1:
[18:24] And we need to remember that for most of this war, she was in her 20s and not only bearing children at a rate of knots, but also losing some of them, and she's extraordinarily fertile. What impact did all this childbirth and child loss have on her?
Speaker 2:
[18:42] Yeah, I mean, at the time, it was not that unusual to have 12, 13, 14, 16 kids. One of her daughters had almost the same number of kids, so that was not that unusual, especially for princesses because you had to have enough offspring for dynastic reasons, dynastic continuity, so that wasn't that unusual. But in her case, on the one hand, she, as I said, she celebrated her being the mother of not only her kids, but of the lands. There was this metaphorical or this analogy between the family and the lands, because this was a patrimonial kind of rule, and continuity of the dynasty was essential for the stability of the rule. So giving birth to many, many kids was a metaphor, but also a factor of dynastic rule. And on the other hand, one has to be aware of the fact that a mother, at the time, an aristocratic mother would not really take care of her kids herself. They would have a wet nurse. So of course she had wet nurses for all of her kids. And that was absolutely natural, so to speak, for aristocratic women, noble women. And interestingly, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought up the idea that also noble women should breastfeed their kids themselves, she told her daughters not to do so. That was completely impossible for a noble woman to breastfeed her kids. So it's clear they would have governesses and nurses and so on. So she was not very much inhibited in her government, everyday government activities by these many kids. She would visit them maybe twice or three times a week in their kinderzimmer, in their kids' apartment, but that was it. The kids were, first of all, the capital of the dynasty. And that was, of course, that was crucial. Interestingly, if I may tell you that story, in the 19th century, just to show how the general mentality had changed, in the 19th century, she was depicted not only as the mother of her lands, but also as a kind of bourgeois mother to her children. And there was a legend, a very popular legend, saying that she once upon a time came across in Schönbrunn, in the garden of Schönbrunn, to a beggar woman with a whining child. And she, according to this legend, breastfed that child of the beggar woman, which is absolutely ridiculous. Because she never breastfed her own children. And of course, she would never have had such a close relationship to any beggar. That was, it's ridiculous. But on the other hand, it is very telling about the way she was depicted. Her image was depicted in the 19th century, when gender relations had changed completely. And she was looked upon as a bourgeois family mother.
Speaker 1:
[22:13] And so interesting because so much has been made of her as a maternal figure. But you're saying she's distanced from them when they're young. What sort of mother is she in practice when they're older?
Speaker 2:
[22:28] Very good question because, I mean, with an anachronistic term, I would call her a control freak. She, because the children were the social capital of the dynasty, finding the right mates for them was at the heart of her dynastic strategy, of course. And as you know, she married her daughters to not only the future French king, but also the king of Naples and so on. And she distributed her kids all over Europe and by that stabilizing and expanding the power of the Habsburg dynasty. And she controlled her daughters, especially her daughters, also her sons, on a daily basis. I mean, they exchanged letters almost daily, or at least three times a week or so, to instruct them about almost everything, how to educate their kids, how to behave, how to treat the courtiers, how to practice religion. This was at the core of her ruling practice. They were almost everything she tried to control. And that was tragic, of course, in the case of poor Marie Antoinette. As you may know, she did not get pregnant in the first years of her marriage. And that was a constant problem in the correspondence between Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette. Imagine poor Marie Antoinette. She once wrote to her mother that she would prefer a miscarriage to not getting pregnant at all. So you can imagine how desperate Marie Antoinette must have been. And her sexual life was public. The chamber staff would report every detail about what was going on in the bedchamber, and her mother would be informed by her invoice in Versailles about each and every detail. So you can't imagine how horrible this marriage must have been for Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 1:
[25:07] Absolutely. Yes, I mean, the picture you paint is very much of a woman in Maria Theresa, who's very critical, putting her children under intense scrutiny, very happy to humiliate them. I mean, you do point out that corporal punishment is not used much in their raising by comparison to contemporary standards, but all the other things that we might identify as abuse appear to be present.
Speaker 2:
[25:34] And she was very well aware of the fact that she sacrificed her daughters to the glory of the dynasty. So she explicitly said, I know you are a victim to Carolina of Naples, who had to marry a really insane person. And Maria Theresa was well aware of that. And she called her a victim. You are a victim. You have to sacrifice you for the honor of the dynasty.
Speaker 1:
[26:03] After peace was made in 1748 for the War of Austrian Succession, her husband became homely Roman Emperor. And am I right in thinking that Maria Theresa refused to be crowned next to him as Empress? If so, why is that? And also, given that Frantz Stefan had become elevated to this, the highest secular office in Christendom, why did it do little to change his status in Vienna?
Speaker 2:
[26:32] Yeah, at that time, in the middle of the 18th century, the Holy Roman Empire had already lost a lot of not only glamour, but also imperial power. And there was already this dichotomy between North and South, between Prussia and the Austrian lands, and so on. And so the imperial bond had already lost a lot of importance and significance at the time. And everyone was well aware of that. She did not really take the title of emperor seriously anymore. And that was one point. The other point was that she did not want, I mean, she became empress when her husband was emperor. But it was clear that this was a title that she owed to her husband. And it was not her own title, because you could not be elected empress, that was a completely male title. So contrary to her being the king of Bohemia, king of Hungary and so on, she was as empress early, she had this role only as the emperor's wife. And this was something she detested in a way. And so she refused to be crowned as empress. That was very often the case that when crowning the emperor, his wife would also be crowned empress. But she preferred to be crowned only in the cases where she was the ruler and not just the wife to the ruler.
Speaker 1:
[28:12] Her reign sees various reforms. But you hesitate to call it, as has long been suggested, the beginning of the modern nation state. Why is that?
Speaker 2:
[28:23] I mean, it wasn't a nation state. First of all, it was just a bundle of territories. She, I would not underestimate the reforms, the significance of these reforms, to which she was forced more or less because of the war. And it became clear that the Austrian lands weren't able to really defend themselves unless they had a reform, financial reforms, military reforms, and so on. Following the Prussian model, the model of the enemy in a way. So I wouldn't underestimate that. But it is also, on the other hand, I think wrong to say this was the foundation of the modern state because the reforms were important because if you imagine that there wasn't a regular tax system, for example, now that if you needed taxes or if you needed money as a prince, you had to ask the estates and they could give you the money you needed, but they decided about who had to pay what and so on. There was no central administration, no central tax system and so on that did not exist yet. She took the very first step, I would say, to introduce a kind of centralized tax system, but only the very first step. The problem was that once the reforms had started, it became clear that they didn't work as expected, and so there was the reform of the reform, and then the reform of the reform of the reform, and so on. A series of continuous reforms that made things even worse, I would say, even more complex, and so on. So it is a very idealistic image of the Austrian, or not the Austrian, but the Habsburg administration, to say that was the foundation of the modern state. In the early 20th century, someone like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, praising her, said she gave birth to the Austrian state as she gave birth to her kids, which is also telling, and I'm taking this maternal figure as a metaphor for the foundation of the modern nation state, which it was not.
Speaker 1:
[30:51] Yes, it's so interesting to listen to the use of rhetoric in that regard. You note that after the war of Austrian succession, her demeanor, her character seems to have changed. What do you think caused this?
Speaker 2:
[31:06] I would say the most important change was after she lost a lot of illusions, of course, and she became much more realistic. But the more important change took place, I would say, after the death of her husband, whom she had really loved. And now when he died, she lost her self-confidence. She lost her sovereign way of handling things, her relationship to the court, her style of communicating with all these clients, and so on, her openness, her accessibility, and so on. So she retired more or less from the court. She fell into a deep depression. I would say this was the much more, the much deeper change in her life after the death of Francis Stephen. And then a time started where she got into horrible conflicts with her son, Joseph II, who became emperor then as successor of his father, and it was never clear who was the regent of the Habsburg lands, and so on. It was a constant conflict. I think this was the deepest change in her life.
Speaker 1:
[32:28] That's very interesting. So her husband dies in August 1765, and as you say, she's in this period of co-regency with her son, and they are often coals apart, even at loggerheads on so many political and religious matters. It feels like a sort of battle of wits, a trial of strength. How does it play out?
Speaker 2:
[32:47] Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine that they corresponded in letters, although when they were staying in the same place, in the same castle even. So you can imagine how conflict laid in the other relationship. She was extremely, as I said, a kind of control freak. She couldn't leave the government to her son. Although she always explicitly told him that he was now a co-regent, but actually she couldn't really let government go, so to speak. And you can trace this into the finest details. And the most interesting example for me was the fact Joseph is known as the enlightened monarch, the enlightened despot in a way. And he was educated by natural legal scholars and so on very much in the spirit of enlightenment, late enlightenment. So everyone expects him to be the one to have the idea to abolish serfdom. Actually, that was not that, the picture is not as simple as that, because when her mother had a couple of very influential enlightened officials who explained to her that serfdom was a catastrophe for the peasants that were starving and so on, so at one point in time after there had been a huge period of hunger in Bohemia, she thought about abolishing serfdom in Bohemia in her own dominions. And at that very point, all of a sudden, Joseph decided to be much more careful and he told her, no, we shouldn't, I mean, we should be very careful, we should first of all ask the landlords what they think about it and so on. It was very clear that at the very moment when his mother adopted the enlightened ideas, he took the opposite position all of a sudden. And this is really interesting. And his biographer, Joseph's biographer, says this is an enigmatic situation. Why did he change his mind completely? That very moment, when it became possible to really abolish serfdom. And this shows that the relationship to his mother was such a problem. It had an even greater impact in what he did than his ideals, than his enlightened ideals. So this is the most significant episode, not very well known episode, in the relationship between her and her son.
Speaker 1:
[36:01] I mean, that particular episode might give us to think that Maria Theresa herself was swayed by Enlightenment ideas as a whole. Would that be accurate?
Speaker 2:
[36:14] Yeah, this is very ambivalent, I would say. I mean, you could neither call her an enlightened monarch nor a Baroque monarch. She was, that was extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, she pursued a kind of confessional religious policy in spelling the Jews, trying to convert the Protestants or even expel the Protestants. And so on a very old fashioned Catholic denominational policy in terms of religion. On the one hand. On the other hand, for example, she was not at all what we would call superstitious also. I mean, this is an anachronistic term, but she fought all kinds of superstitious practices that were common at the time and so on. So it was a very, it's very special mix of enlightened ideas and very, very religious belief and faith. And I would say, I mean, the religious faith or trust in God was the very abundant or the basis of her whole reign or the way she practiced her reign because she was convinced that God had given her the mandate to rule and so God must have given her the skills necessary to perform this rule. So that was, I think, the very basis of her being such a self-confident ruler. But on the other hand, she was also very young in her relationship to the Catholic Church. She was also convinced that she was the sovereign and that she was the head of the church in her territories, not the Pope. I would say that the word sovereign is the right word for her because she's in the double meaning of the word, not only as a ruler, but also sovereign in her attitude, in her self-confidence. I don't know if the English word sovereign has this double meaning as it has in German, souverain. Souverain in German also means not just being the prince, being the head of state, but also having a self-confident attitude. In German, the word expresses these two levels of meaning.
Speaker 1:
[38:42] Yes, that helps us understand her enormously. So thinking about her Catholic faith then, and her treatment of Protestants and of Jews, what should we make of her policies? Were they in line with or harsh by the standards of the time?
Speaker 2:
[39:03] I would say that was already anachronistic at the time. The times of confessional Catholic policy were more or less over. But in the Habsburg lands, she still followed such a very strict recatholization policy. And what was really anachronistic at the time, the time of religious tolerance and so on, was the fact that she expelled the Jews from Bohemia, all Jews from Bohemia. And Prague was the largest, that was the largest Jewish community in all of Europe. So tens of thousands of Jews were expelled in the middle of winter. They were starving, they were afrieren and so on. Yeah, so they died on their way out of Prague. And that was really anachronistic and remarkably so. That was the last mass expulsion of Jews before the Holocaust. And this is not very well known, not very broadly known. So and it shows that she was extremely religious, that she followed the path of her ancestors, who had already followed such a kind of re-Catholicization policy. But at the time, in the later 18th century, that was anachronistic, I would say. Although anti-Judaism was very common, very normal, very usual, but you wouldn't expel the Jews, and she did. And interestingly, the Jews themselves could not believe that it was that sovereign, Maria Theresa, who was the one who expelled them. But they tried to get access to her and ask for mercy, and they would never have expected her to be the one to give this order. And they would always think that her evil advisors would be to blame for that. That was not the case. On the contrary, her advisors, also the Bohemian estates, and everyone, the governor of Bohemia, everyone, warned her and said that this would be detrimental to the Bohemian, and not only Bohemian, economy, and so on. Which was the case. It happened exactly as predicted, but she did not learn from this. And it took a couple of years. I mean, the Jews returned step-by-step. The bureaucracy was not as efficient as it should have been, so it wasn't really possible to expel all of them. In the end, they were permitted to return. And ironically so, or I mean, cynically so, they had to pay for their return. And the amount of money they had to pay was exactly the amount of the damage, the financial damage, the expulsion had cost.
Speaker 1:
[42:14] Goodness. Gosh. Yes, no, that certainly should be much better known. The other thing that strikes me is, from your book, one doesn't get much of a sense that she had respect for her subjects, but the one thing that she celebrated for in Austria is her introduction of universal elementary education, 1774. How do we resolve this tension?
Speaker 2:
[42:41] Contemporaries were quite convinced that she loved her subjects. What that really means, nobody knows what that means. She loves her subject and she was loved by her subjects. What does that really mean? It was a kind of image that was how she was presented in the propaganda and so on. How she was depicted, she was the merciful mother of her subjects. I don't think that she detested the simple subject. I think she herself was convinced to love her subjects in a way. When she learned from her officials that, for example, peasants in Bohemia were really suffering, that was heartbreaking for her. She really, as I said, she thought about abolishing serfdom. So in a way, she really was a merciful mother of her lands. But when it came to the concrete policy, that was of course another thing. And she did not really know, usually she did not really know what was going on in the territories far away. Bohemia was an exception because there had been missions investigating what was going on and so on. So it is not easy to say what was the relationship to our subject was because how should you judge that? It is very difficult to say. I mean, the rhetoric of rule, you cannot really distinguish the rhetoric of rule from what was really going on in her head. You cannot look into the ruler's head. And it is such a strange foreign time that is for us historians very difficult to reassess what was going on in a mind like Maria Theresa's. So I'm always very, very careful to say anything about the emotions of historical persons. But there was a rhetoric of love to, you have to love your subjects. There was, I mean, in the 19th century, there was also the myth about her giving access to everyone, each and everyone, even the lowest of subjects. This is obviously a myth. Access to her, to get access to her was extremely difficult, and she made it even more difficult than under the government of her father. And it was not at all easy to get access. But there were a couple of important figures, like writers like Lessing or Father Mozart or Gottschied, also important German writers, who got access to her and afterwards praised her for her lovely way of communicating, her kindness, her charisma and so on. And that these information was spread all over Europe and consolidated her reputation of being a loving mother of her subjects.
Speaker 1:
[45:57] What do you think we should make of her in the last decade of her life?
Speaker 2:
[46:01] Yeah, in many respects, as I said, I mean, she fell into a deep depression after the death of her husband and always showed up dressed in black and restricted the access to her even more than before and retired from the court and so on. But at the same time, I mean, she had this constant quarrel with her son. But on the other hand, she also had a couple of young enlightened public servants or officials who had a great influence on her, I would say. And so she developed kind of radical ideas in her latest later years. Now, the Bohemian Serfdom is one example for that. And also, you asked about school reforms or the introduction of elementary schools. This is also something that can easily be misinterpreted in our times. It was not so much about enlightening the pupils or so, it was about religious education. First of all, the kids had to be educated to become religious, to be informed about the religious dogmas. That was the very first goal of the education reforms. And writing and calculating and all these things were much less important for her. It was all about religious education.
Speaker 1:
[47:28] Yes, which I suppose in the end is about obedience rather than thinking for oneself.
Speaker 2:
[47:32] Obedience on the one hand, of course. I mean, religious subjects are obedience subjects or more obedience subjects on the one hand. But it was also because she was convinced that it was her God-given task to take care of the eternal salvation of her subjects. It was not only about their secular wealth or well-being, but also about their eternal well-being.
Speaker 1:
[48:02] To end then, we noted how much her sex had been an impediment at her accession, or seen as such by others. How did that change over the course of her reign? How was her gender seen later?
Speaker 2:
[48:17] She remained an exception, of course. It didn't change gender relations in general. I mean, she was and remained an exception, but the very fact that she was an exception to the rule consolidated the gender order of the time. Everyone could say, this is the great exception, all-time exception, which in a way, in a dialectical way, reinforces the conviction that regularly women cannot rule, are not fit for rule, but she was the exception. A wording, a very significant wording is that everyone said, or many writers wrote something like, she is the only man in the Habsburg family. She was the only man. This is also something that Frederick the Great allegedly said. In a way, she stabilized the gender order because she was the great exception. I don't think that she had an impact on the way contemporaries conceived of the gender order.
Speaker 1:
[49:35] Yes, that often seems to be the case. It's like Elizabeth I in Tudor England. Yes, their exceptionalism has to be confirmed in order to explain their place. Well, this has been a remarkable introduction to a long and complicated reign. So thank you so much for taking the time to share the fruits of your research and all your years of work with us. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 2:
[50:03] Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:
[50:06] Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thanks also to my researcher, Max Wintle, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at NotJustTheTudors at historyhit.com. And I look forward to joining you again for another episode next time on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit.