Limits of Reform
When enlightened absolutist leaders introduced reforms, they often ran into resistance from groups threatened by the proposed changes. Joseph II tried to remove the burdens of serfdom in the Habsburg lands. After 1781, serfs could move freely, enter trades, or marry without their lords’ permission. Joseph also abolished the tithe to the church, shifted more of the tax burden to the nobility, and converted peasants’ labor services into cash payments.
The Austrian nobility furiously resisted these far-reaching reforms. When Joseph died in 1790, his brother Leopold II (r. 1790–1792) had to revoke most reforms to appease the nobles. Prussia’s Frederick the Great, like Joseph, encouraged such agricultural innovations as planting potatoes and turnips (new crops that could help feed a growing population), but Prussia’s noble landlords, called Junkers, continued to expand their estates at the expense of poorer peasants and thwarted Frederick’s attempts to improve the status of serfs.
In France, a group of economists called the physiocrats urged the government to deregulate the grain trade and make the tax system more equitable to encourage agricultural productivity. In the interest of establishing a free market, they also insisted that urban guilds be abolished because the guilds prevented free entry into the trades. The French government heeded some of this advice and gave up its system of price controls on grain in 1763, but it had to reverse the decision in 1770 when grain shortages caused a famine.
A conflict with the parlements (the thirteen high courts of law) prompted French king Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) to go even further in 1771. He replaced the parlements with courts in which the judges no longer owned their offices and thus could not sell them or pass them on as an inheritance. Justice, he hoped, would then be more impartial. The displaced judges of the parlements succeeded in arousing widespread opposition to what they portrayed as tyrannical royal policy. The furor calmed down only when Louis XV died in 1774 and his successor, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792), yielded to aristocratic demands and restored the old parlements.
Louis XVI tried to carry out part of the program suggested by the physiocrats, and he chose one of their disciples, Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), as his chief minister. A contributor to the Encyclopedia, Turgot pushed through several edicts that again freed the grain trade, suppressed guilds, converted the peasants’ forced labor on roads into a money tax payable by all landowners, and reduced court expenses. He also began making plans to introduce a system of elected local assemblies, which would have increased representation in the government. Faced with broad-based resistance led by the parlements and his own courtiers as well as with riots against rising grain prices, Louis XVI dismissed Turgot, and one of the last possibilities to overhaul France’s government collapsed.
REVIEW QUESTION What prompted enlightened absolutists to undertake reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century?
The failure of reform in France paradoxically reflected the power of Enlightenment thinkers; everyone now endorsed Enlightenment ideas but used them for different ends. The nobles in the parlements blocked the French monarchy’s reform efforts using the very same Enlightenment language spoken by the crown’s ministers. Where Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, and even Joseph II used reform to bolster the efficiency of absolutist government, attempts at change in France backfired. French kings found that their ambitious programs for reform succeeded only in arousing unrealistic hopes.