4.6 Enlightened and Other Approaches to Power

Enlightened absolutism (or enlightened despotism) describes rulers who kept absolute power but used it to make reforms the philosophes favored, such as religious toleration, legal codes, less use of torture and more schools. Voltaire and others hoped a wise king could reform society faster than any assembly.

Historians debate their motives. Some reforms reflected real belief in Enlightenment ideas. Others mainly made the state richer and stronger, a goal earlier absolutists shared. Rulers stopped where reforms threatened their power or the nobles they relied on.

Brandenburg-Prussia was a scattered, poor state. Frederick William, the Great Elector (reigned 1640–1688), built a standing army and struck a bargain with the Junkers, Prussia's landowning nobles: they gained full control over their serfs in exchange for supporting the army and taxes. His son became the first King in Prussia in 1701. Frederick William I, the soldier king (1713–1740), built an army of about 80,000 men, huge for so small a state, and an efficient bureaucracy. Westphalia had left the empire's states nearly independent, which gave ambitious princes like Prussia's Hohenzollern rulers room to grow. The Habsburgs, whose imperial title now carried little real power, turned east instead: after the Ottomans were driven from Vienna in 1683, Austria took most of Hungary in 1699 and built a large empire along the Danube. Maria Theresa (reigned 1740–1780) lost Silesia to Prussia but held the rest of the empire together.

• Frederick II, the Great, of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786): seized the rich Austrian province of Silesia in 1740 and held it through the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War. He called himself the first servant of the state, mostly ended torture, granted wide religious toleration, promoted schooling and the potato, and began a law code finished after his death. He hosted Voltaire. But he kept serfdom and reserved army officer posts for Junkers.
• Joseph II of Austria (sole ruler 1780–1790): son of Maria Theresa, who had already centralized the Habsburg state and started primary schools. His Patent of Toleration (1781) let Protestants and Orthodox Christians worship, and later edicts eased restrictions on Jews. He abolished serfdom as a personal status in 1781, so peasants could marry, move and learn trades without a lord's permission, though they still owed labor dues. He closed hundreds of monasteries and made German the language of government. Nobles, clergy and non-German regions like Hungary resisted, and his successor undid many changes.
• Catherine II, the Great, of Russia (reigned 1762–1796): wrote to Voltaire and Diderot and drafted an Instruction for a legislative commission in 1767 that borrowed from Montesquieu and Beccaria. After Pugachev's Rebellion (1773–1775), a huge Cossack and peasant uprising, she tightened control and gave nobles more power over serfs in the Charter of the Nobility (1785). She expanded Russia south to the Black Sea and took the largest share of Poland in the partitions.

By 1800 most states in western and central Europe tolerated Christian minorities, even if they still favored an official church. Jews faced special taxes, restrictions on where they could live and bans from many trades. Thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, a leader of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), argued for both Jewish participation in European culture and civil rights. Joseph II eased some restrictions, and in 1791 revolutionary France became the first major European state to grant Jews full citizenship.