which her ministers shared, against the pretensions
of the papacy. The anti-papal tendency, known as Febronianism (_q.v._), had
made immense headway, not only among the laity but among the clergy in the
Austrian dominions. By a new law, papal bulls could not be published
without the consent of the crown, and the direct intercourse of the bishops
with Rome was forbidden; the privileges of the religious orders were
curtailed; and the education of the clergy was brought under state control.
It was, however, only with reluctance that Maria Theresa agreed to carry
out the papal bull suppressing the Society of Jesus; and, while declaring
herself against persecution, she could never be persuaded to accept the
views of Kaunitz and Joseph in favour of toleration. Parallel with the
assertion of the rights of the state as against the church, was the
revolution effected in the educational system of the monarchy. This, too,
was taken from the control of the church; the universities were remodelled
and modernized by the introduction of new faculties, the study of
ecclesiastical law being transferred from that of theology to that of
jurisprudence, and the elaborate system of elementary and secondary
education was established, which survived with slight modification till
1869.

[Sidenote: Joseph II. and "Josephinism."]

The death of Maria Theresa in 1780 left Joseph II. free to attempt the
drastic revolution from above, which had been restrained by the wise
statesmanship of his mother. He was himself a strange incarnation at once
of doctrinaire liberalism and the old Habsburg autocracy. Of the essential
conditions of his empire he was constitutionally unable to form a
conception. He was a disciple, not of Machiavelli, but of Rousseau; and his
scattered dominions, divided by innumerable divergences of racial and class
prejudice, and encumbered with traditional institutions to which the people
clung with passionate conservatism, he regarded as so much vacant territory
on which to build up his ideal state. He was, in fact, a Revolutionist who
happened also to be an emperor. "Reason" and "enlightenment" were his
watchwords; opposition to his wise measures he regarded as obscurantist and
unreasonable, and unreason, if it proved stubborn, as a vice to be
corrected with whips. In this spirit he at once set to work to reconstruct
the state, on lines that strangely anticipated the principles of the
Constituent Assembly of 1789. He refused to b