History
Influenced by the Enlightenment, Emperor Joseph II, who became sole ruler of the Habsburg lands after Maria-Theresa’s death in 1780, decreed a series of large-scale reforms in the Austrian Netherlands designed to radically modernize and centralize the political, judicial and administrative system.
Characteristically, the well-intended but autocratic Emperor abruptly imposed his reforms without even a semblance of consultation with the population, including the influential urban intelligentsia and other segments of the ruling classes that were highly receptive to such innovations. His Edict of tolerance of 1781 established religious freedom. Another edict in 1784 took away from the Catholic clergy responsibility for the civil registry and civil marriage was introduced. Contemplative religious orders, deemed useless, were dissolved and diocesan seminaries were abolished and replaced by general seminaries in Louvain and Luxembourg. Feudal and trade corporation regulations and jurisdictions were modified or abolished and, to the stupefaction of all segments of the population, the ancient provinces of Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg were abolished and replaced by 9 circles, subdivided in 64 districts. Seigneurial jurisdictions and rights, including the corvée, were abolished. As in Hungary, Joseph II attempted to introduce German as the language of administration for the sake of efficiency.
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“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)