Joseph II Dies

JAN 01 1790 · 12:00

Joseph II on his deathbed, 20 February 1790, by Georg Conräder. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. He dies at forty-eight, having spent the last winter rescinding most of his own reforms in the face of Hungarian and Belgian revolt. Place: Hofburg, Vienna; news reaches Prague within four days Figures: Joseph II, aged 48 · Leopold II, his brother and successor · the Hungarian Diet, in open revolt over the language decree Joseph dies at forty-eight, ten years after his mother. He has issued, by the count of his secretaries, more than six thousand decrees: religious toleration, monastic dissolution, civil marriage, the abolition of serfdom in 1781, the abolition of the death penalty in 1787 (the second in modern Europe, the year after his brother Leopold's Tuscany), the German-language decree for the entire monarchy in 1784. He has redrawn parish boundaries, opened cemeteries outside city walls (Prague's old churchyards are emptied accordingly in 1784, the bones moved to Olšany), and tried to ban reusable coffins. He has done in a decade what his mother declined to attempt in forty years. By the time he dies, most of it is failing. The Hungarian nobility refuses to administer his decrees. The Austrian Netherlands have revolted (the Brabant Revolution of 1789). The Bohemian peasants, freed from serfdom, are confused about what their rights actually are. The war against the Turks, which he led in person in 1788, has gone badly. He has tuberculosis. He coughs blood into linen handkerchiefs through the autumn of 1789.