Western History 112: Who was Marie Theresa?

Queen Marie Theresa was together with Frederick II and later Catherine the Great one of the influential monarchs of the 18^th century. She blended together a strong centrist authority with the spirit of rationalism during a forty year long reign over Austria and Hungary/Bohemia between 1740-1780.

Marie Theresa Source: daily.jstor.org

Marie Theresa was the eldest daughter of Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor. Her controversial ascendancy was assured by her father through the mechanism of the Pragmatic Sanction that allowed her to take the throne despite the fact that she was a female. However this met with opposition from various quarters culminating in the War of the Austrian Succession during her early reign.

Domestically Marie Theresa worked to reduce the tax system in the Austrian Empire by abolishing exemptions for the large landowners. She separated the judiciary from the executive, championed higher education and increased the size of the civil service. The church hierarchy was also organized to make it answerable to the state.

Politically she threw her weight behind France in the Seven Years War in the hope of recovering Silesia  which had been lost to Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession . However her action her resulted in a great amount of debt accumulation for Thersea’s Hapsburg regime with minimum territorial gain.

In 1765 her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine died and this seemed to have negatively impacted her. The couple had 16 children together. Two of them – Joseph II and Leopold II would become Holy Roman Emperors after her death. One of her daughters Marie Antoinette would become Queen of France.

Austria under Marie Theresa source: erenow.net

Later on she supported the partition of Poland in 1772 but expressed some reservation to the more ‘extreme’ ideas of the enlightenment. In this regard she differed from Frederick II. Austrian attempts at further expansion  was also curtailed during the War of the Bavarian Succession( 1778-79)

Overall she is regarded as a capable of ruler within the benevolent dictatorship framework.