







































29 
 

Austrian High Enlightenment 

Josephinism, Literature, and State Building 
 
 

Joshkin Aziz Sezer 
University of Minnesota 

 
 

Abstract  
This article examines state building under Joseph II in the Habsburg Empire between the 
period of 1780-1790 and considers the intellectual successes of Josephinism. It analyzes 
the context of his targeted intellectual audience and focuses in particular on the work of 
Austrian author Johnn Pezzl who was a contemporary of Joseph II and a member of 
Masonic and other Enlightenment era groups.  
 
 
Article  

The reign of Joseph II was at the peak of Enlightenment sensibilities, and in many ways, he 
personified the ideal of an enlightened monarch. To be an enlightened monarch was to 
embody the state in your every action and be dictated not by the church or emotional 
sentimentality but by logic and reason; Joseph certainly worked towards this ideal. After 
the death of his mother Maria Theresa in 1780, Joseph oversaw a number of reforms in the 
Habsburg realm. From his Edict of Tolerance in 1781 to his lifting of censorship on the 
press to his attempts to modernize agriculture in the Empire, Joseph was a figure of 
modernity. This is not to say Austria was the backward land that it is often portrayed as in 
popular history; its many different legal systems, languages, and lack of centralized 
structures were not dissimilar to France, England, and even Prussia.1 Yet Austria and 
Joseph II were subtly different in this era and marked by continual contradictions. Joseph II 
liberalized censorship laws, yet at the same time, he went against theatre and ballet, 
pushed for greater “Germanization” throughout his empire, and took part in the 
dismantling of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Joseph II clearly embodied the 
contradictions and transitions that Austria and much of Europe underwent at the end of 
the eighteenth century.  
 
Historical scholarship on his rule gives much attention to his role in the creation of the 
bureaucratic state and to how he focused his energies on reforming the Habsburg 
Monarchy with his policies of state building, such as state schools, agricultural reform, and 
abolishment of serfdom.2 The culture of High Enlightenment Vienna is also given attention. 

                                                 
1 Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 2016), 49.  
2 Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 2, Against the World 1780-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 
307-315, 363. 

 



30 
 

Much of the scholarship on the reign of Joseph II is about the culture of music in Vienna 
during the late classical and early Romantic era. A major gap that is missing from this 
period is material on literature during Joseph’s reign. While one of Joseph’s primary 
biographers, Derek Beales, wrote extensively on the Joseph’s reign, he does not give much 
attention to the literary culture of the era, devoting only a chapter or article to it.3 This 
article examines the function of the Enlightenment in Austria through a little known novel 
from the era. The text, Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhundert (Faustin or the 
philosophical century) by Joseph Pezzl, was composed during Joseph’s reign. While work 
such as Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhundert does not carry the same weight in the 
so-called canon of western literature as its French counterpart, Candide, Pezzl clearly saw 
Austria as part of the Enlightenment—and even the center of it.4 Therefore, historians 
should also recognize that Austria was an essential part of the Enlightenment.5 
Unfortunately, much of the historical literature gives very little attention to the interaction 
of literature with the public sphere, instead preferring to look at either newspapers, 
periodicals, or even works of theater. This article therefore focuses on this interaction 
between the public and relevant literature.  
 
The study of the Enlightenment in Austria is complicated by its chronology and nature. 
While it can be solidly argued that Joseph was a figure of enlightened absolutism, it 
becomes more problematic when one looks at the achievements of the Enlightenment and 
Josephinism in the Austrian context. While the era following Joseph was marked by greater 
levels of conservatism and sometimes reactionary responses to the French Revolution, 
figures such Joseph Rohrer and Charles Sealsfield actively engaged the Enlightenment in 
their writings and actions.6 While not an exhaustive study of the era, this article intends to 
shine some light on the historical origins of the Enlightenment in Austria and how it relates 
to the culture of tolerance, censorship, arts, and contradictions that were part of the era of 
Josephinism. It focuses specifically on the period of 1780 to 1790 when Joseph reigned as 
sole Emperor. It looks at the effects that Joseph had on the book and printing industry and 
his enlightened ideas towards the state and the church. This serves as a springboard to 
examine the effects on literature that his reign had, along with other activities related to 
the culture of the Habsburg Monarchy. The article further examines how literature of this 
period interacted with and affected the developing Austrian public sphere. 
 

                                                 
3 For example, see Ibid. See also Derek Beales, “Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?,” in The Austrian 
Enlightenment and its Aftermath, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press, 1991). 
4 Johann Pezzl, Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1982), 380-381. 
Originally published in Zürich in 1783. 
5 Beales, “Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?,” 13-15. 
6 Ritchie Roberson, “Joseph Rohrer and the Bureaucratic Enlightenment,” in The Austrian Enlightenment and 
its Aftermath, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 1-
42. Hartmut Steinecke, “Charles Sealsfield and the Novel as a Means of Enlightenment,” trans. Ritchie 
Robertson, in The Austrian Enlightenment and its Aftermath, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms 
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 132-144. 

 



31 
 

When discussing the concept of “Austria” before 1804, one has to be careful with the 
meaning of the word. Austria as a state did not exist until the Napoleonic Wars, with the 
destruction of the Holy Roman Empire. Before 1806, it was simply a duchy that the 
Habsburgs controlled. Figures like Joseph II or Pezzl would not have seen themselves as 
Austrians. Pezzl was a Bavarian by birth and Viennese by his adopted city of Vienna. 7 While 
Joseph attempted to create an Austrian state, his efforts were largely limited by the size 
and scope of the Habsburg Monarchy and the inability of one man to alter the course of 
several million people. Despite these challenges, it should still be noted that there was a 
growing sense of identity within the Empire, even if it was limited to the upper echelons of 
society.8 For the sake of simplicity, this article defines Austrian literature as that which was 
written in German and published in the German-speaking sections of Central Europe that 
the Habsburg Monarchy ruled directly. 
 
While Central Europe is often overlooked by historians in favor of France or England, it is 
especially egregious to do this with the Enlightenment. Vienna was a major cultural and 
intellectual center for Europe, especially during the reign of Joseph II. He was clearly 
engaged in a dialogue about the state and the role of the ruler with the rest of Europe, 
modeling himself after the enlightened despotism that characterized Frederick the Great, 
Peter the Great, or Louis XIV. Joseph grew up in a court dominated by Jesuits, who censored 
most information and practiced large amounts of religious pomp.9 This in part led to 
Joseph’s wishes to undermine the powers of the Jesuits and, at the same time, maintaining 
his Catholic orthodoxy. The Enlightenment itself can be defined as a movement in 
opposition to the restrictions placed on intellectual freedom by the Catholic Church.10 
Joseph’s policies when he came to power can easily be perceived as part of an enlightened 
viewpoint on state and church relations. Once on the throne, Joseph enacted major policies 
of toleration, and lifted much of the censorship built up by the baroque institutions of his 
predecessors. Joseph saw himself as a servant of the state, which he claimed in his last will 
and testament.11 Therefore, for Joseph, it made perfect sense to change the course of the 
monarchy in the direction of other European states through abolishing much of the 
censorship that his mother had created and allowing progressive voices to rise within the 
Empire. Under Joseph, the list of banned books decreased from five thousand to under nine 
hundred, and over a thousand brochures were published within the first eighteen months 
of his rule.12 He went so far in abolishing censorship that he even allowed works that 
criticized his leadership, though he did not allow works that criticized foreign leaders or 
anti-Christian pieces. However, Joseph did this largely out of a fear that they would be 
taken negatively by the uneducated public. He wrote: 

                                                 
7 Similarly, figures like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would be considered a Salzburger at the time and not 
Austrian. 
8 Lucjan Puchalski, Imaginärer Name Österreich: Der Literarische Österreich-Begriff an der Wende vom 18. zum 
19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 140. 
9 Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1987), 32. 
10 Beales, Joseph II, 2:69. 
11 T.C.W. Blanning, Joseph II (New York: Longman Group, 1994), 56. 
12 Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 64. 

 



32 
 

 
Come down strongly against works that contain unbridled obscenities, from which 
no learning or enlightenment can ever arise, and to be all the more indulgent in the 
case of those in which learning knowledge, and coherence are to be found, since the 
former are read … by the multitude and by the weak souls, while the latter come 
into the hands only of those with well-prepared minds and well-established 
principles.13 

 
Yet this did not stop Joseph’s wishes to create a society in which almost anything could be 
published, as Joseph was trying to reform Austrian society into a model of the 
Enlightenment. He was not without his critics; even Joseph’s friend, Princess Eleonore 
Liechtenstein, wrote: “Everything is to be feared from the Emperor’s spirit in this field, 
from his love of novelty, his perversity, his mania for rousing subordinates against their 
chiefs, and still more from the hardening of his heart and, finally, abandonment of God.”14 
 
While Joseph lifted much of the censorship within the Empire, he ruled the state as an 
autocrat at the same time. The Habsburg Monarchy under Joseph II was characterized as an 
“enlightened police state: everything for the people, nothing by the people.”15 Thus in some 
ways he sought to liberalize the empire in ways that he thought would make it run more 
efficiently, such as the lifting of censorship, while still maintaining control over the matters 
of state. This paradox of despotism in the age of the Enlightenment continued not only 
within the Monarchy but throughout Europe. During this time, a figure like Joseph wished 
for the betterment of his state and sought to accomplish such goals through policies such as 
mass education, tolerance, and freedom of the press. Yet, at the same time, he ruled the 
affairs of the state with an iron fist, treating the state as more of a military institution rather 
than something run by civilians.  
 
In line with this paradox, Joseph had complete and utter disdain for hereditary institutions, 
yet he was the inheritor of a dynastic power that had maintained control over Central 
Europe for three-hundred years.16 Unlike his peers, Joseph lacked the patience for slow and 
steady reforms. This desire for the state to change immediately to his liking is illustrated by 
the way Joseph presented his court. His court was described as “the meanest, most 
masculine, and least attractive in Europe.”17 In contrast to his mother, he shunned the 
luxury of the Schönbrunn Palace and instead preferred the simplicity of his villa, where his 
bed quarters were spartan and he wore his military uniform at nearly every opportunity.  
 
For many, Joseph’s schemes seemed almost quixotic in their scope, from his plowing the 
fields in Moravia to his “incessant traveling” to his Edict of Tolerance.18 The criticism of his 

                                                 
13 Beales, Joseph II, 2:91. 
14 Ibid., 95. 
15 Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire: 1526-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1974), 184.  
16 Paul B. Bernard, Joseph II (New York: Twaine Publishers, Inc, 1968), 91. 
17 Beales, Joseph II, 2:56. 
18 Blanning, Joseph II, 72-75. 

 



33 
 

policies by figures such as Princess Eleonore Liechtenstein did not do much to slow Joseph 
down, as he was single-minded in his goals for the Empire. Joseph thus continued his 
mother’s practice of mass education. Joseph regarded the goal of achieving mass literacy to 
be of the utmost importance in developing society. He wrote that mass literacy was “as one 
of the most important objects of my concern for the general good.”19 Here again Joseph is 
engaging in concepts from the Enlightenment, with not only the correct terminology but 
also the same intent that was originally used by Rousseau when he wrote about the general 
or common good. 
 
Joseph would thus make sure his state followed the models set out by the Enlightenment. 
The state was to be logical and standardized, which itself explains his affinity for the 
military and his disdain towards the Catholic Church as a political actor. For Joseph, the two 
things he disliked most in the world were privilege and insubordination.20 Both of these 
attributes were embodied by the Catholic Church, who rationalized their function to society 
not through utility (at least in the mind of Joseph) but through existing as a continuous 
institution for so long. Inevitably, Joseph would try to curb their power, as he also saw 
them as a force for fanaticism. Joseph sought to combat the excesses of the church and 
specifically their unfiltered power and privileges in several different ways. Most notably, he 
asserted sovereign control of the clergy, whom he viewed as subjects subservient to him. 
For Joseph, the church was to have the same role in society “in just the same way there is 
an army to defend the state, courts to administer justice and a bureaucracy to deal with 
political and economic matters.”21 To this end, Joseph sought to utilize the church as an 
institution of the state through re-educating the clergy along the lines of secularism and 
making them beholden to him and the world around them. 
 
All of this is not to say that Joseph was anti-clerical along the lines of a figure like Voltaire 
or even Frederick the Great of Prussia. Joseph believed in the Catholic Church, but he 
ultimately saw himself as a servant of the Austrian state first and as a Catholic second.22 
Joseph was also highly influenced by his advisor, State Chancellor and Foreign Minister 
Wenzel-Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg, better known as Kaunitz.23 Kaunitz and Joseph 
had a similar worldview about what the Habsburg Monarchy should look like. Both 
ultimately disdained the confessional state that had been created in Austria since the 
Counter-Reformation. It was Kaunitz in his function as Chancellor who worked radically 
against the Catholic Church as an institutional structure and instituted policies, such as 
requiring those who wish to join a convent to live outside of it for two years or his 
opposition to holy days and pilgrimages.24 Most radical of all his policies was the abolition 
of approximately seven hundred monasteries and convents throughout the Habsburg 
Monarchy.25 

                                                 
19 Ibid., 68. 
20 Ibid., 92-93. 
21 Ibid., 95. Quote from Joseph II from a letter to Baron Kressel in June 1783.  
22 Ibid., 98. 
23 Bernard, Joseph II, 106. 
24 Franz A.J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism: 1753-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1994), 236-240. 
25 Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 191. 



34 
 

 
Kaunitz was not the only figure in Joseph’s government that worked towards establishing 
his vision of an enlightened Austrian state. Gottfried van Swieten was the son of the Dutch 
physician Gerard van Swieten, who himself was not only Maria Theresa’s personal 
physician but also her most trusted advisor and confidant. Swieten first served as a 
diplomat to Berlin in the 1770s and, due to the close connections of his father to the 
government, became a trusted and favorite advisor of Joseph. In 1781, Joseph made 
Swieten a councilor of state and director of the State Education Commission. The following 
year, he appointed him as the director of the new Censorship Commission. Due to his close 
ties with the Habsburg Monarchy, Swieten was by far the most influential and important 
figure of the Austrian Enlightenment with notable political clout.26 
 
However, the Austrian Enlightenment was not a movement strictly limited political reform 
and state crafting, with many different members of Austrian society having their own take. 
Partially because of Joseph’s reforms towards censorship and the press and partially due to 
his educational reforms, there was a growing revolution in reading. When Joseph lifted 
much of the censorship that had dominated creative and intellectual activity within the 
Empire, people began to feel that they could have a say over the course of the Empire. It is 
not likely that Joseph would have listened to them, but they were nevertheless allowed to 
voice their opinions.27 
 
Under the reforms that Joseph instituted, the middle class in Austria began to take on a 
greater role in society, most notably as part of the burgeoning Austrian bureaucracy. This 
growing middle class started to see themselves less as subjects of the Monarchy and more 
so as citizens. The role of the bureaucracy in the Habsburg Monarchy was meant to 
promote the best and brightest minds in the Empire. To accomplish this, it did away with 
the hereditary institutions that had previously dominated the Monarchy. The bureaucracy 
contained not only members of the middle class but also members of the aristocracy, thus 
forcing these two groups to interact with on a professional basis.28 Johann Pezzl remarked 
in 1787 that “an army of ca. four and half thousand men marching; it is an army of 
bureaucrats. After these follow three hundred wagons … All of these headed for the 
Department of State, the imperial Chancellery, the Department of War, the Austrian-
Bohemian Chancellery, etc.”29 In theory, these bureaucrats were promoted based on merit. 
In as early as 1763, Joseph had written that personal merit was what mattered and the 
hereditary system hid talent from the monarchy. 
 

                                                 
26 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (London: Faber 
and Faber Limited, 1992), 100-101. 
27 Franz M. Eybl, “Enlightenment in Austria: Cultural Identity and a National Literature,” in German Literature 
of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility, ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino (Rochester: 
Camden House, 2005), 252-253. 
28 Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich 1780 bis 1848 (Vienna: Böhlau, 
1991), 165. 
29 Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 60. 

 



35 
 

It was not only middle-level bureaucrats who enjoyed a booming effect from Joseph’s 
reforms; the freemasons also became more widespread throughout the Empire, with 
Vienna seeing the greatest development. In 1742, only one lodge existed there. By 1780, 
there were six different lodges in the city, with some 200 people as members. Freemasons 
made up a great number of the cultural elite in Enlightenment Vienna, with its members 
including figures like Mozart, Aloys Blumauer, Michael Denis, Joseph Hadyn, Pezzl, 
Emmanuel Schickaneder, and Swieten.30 Nineteenth-century novelist Karoline Pichler 
remarked on the prevalence of freemasons in her formative years, stating, “The order of 
freemasons carried on its affairs with a publicity and ostentation that was almost 
ridiculous. Freemasons’ songs were printed, composed, and universally sung. Masonic 
insignia were worn as pendants on watches … ladies received white gloves from 
apprentices and craftsmen.”31 While freemason lodges had begun to grow in the 1740s 
under the guidance of Joseph’s father, Francis Stephen (who was also a freemason), it was 
with Joseph’s reforms that lodges boomed in numbers and freemasons were able to 
organize and participate without fear of repercussions. By 1784, there were sixty-six 
lodges in the Habsburg Monarchy, and the lodges had voted to secede from the leadership 
of the Berlin-centered lodge, Grosse Landesloge (Grand Landlodge), to have their own 
national lodge in Vienna.32 Interestingly, despite their deistic tendencies, freemason lodges 
throughout the Habsburg Monarchy saw a large number of ex-Jesuits join their ranks under 
the reign of Joseph. This waning of the Counter Reformation was yet another signal of the 
rise of civil society under Joseph. The Freemasons operated as the middle ground between 
secular and religious society. 33  
 
Outside of his literature, another notable way that author Johann Pezzl interacted with the 
public sphere was through his membership of the freemasons. The society interacted in the 
public sphere in numerous ways, most notably with their periodical Journal für Freymäurer 
(Journal for freemasons). This journal was published quarterly by Christian Friedrich 
Wappler between 1784 and 1787, and allowed for freemasons to publish not only 
academic and journalistic endeavors but also their creative works. This journal was 
associated with the lodge Zur wahren Eintracht (True Harmony), which was led by Idnaz 
von Born.34 
 
Throughout Vienna, there were numerous printing presses releasing different works of 
varying levels of seriousness. Some discussed day-to-day occurrences of chambermaids, 
while others tackled more significant issues such as the papacy or the state. What these 
publications all had in common was that they showed that the public had a growing 
eagerness to read what was being published, no matter the content. The growth of the 
publications under Joseph II came to be known as the Broschürenflut (pamphlet flood). This 

                                                 
30 Ibid.  
31 Ewan West, “Masonic Song and the Development of the Kuntslied in Enlightenment Vienna,” in The Austrian 
Enlightenment and its Aftermath, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press, 1991), 72-73 
32 James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2001), 257. 
33 Ibid., 264. 
34 Eybl, “Enlightenment in Austria,” 253. 



36 
 

environment allowed Johann Pezzl to thrive as an author. Pezzl was born in Bavaria in 
1756 and grew up in the Benedictine monastery in Mallersdorf where his father was the 
chief baker. Between 1768 and 1775, he was a novice at the monastery but left to study law 
in the Archduchy of Salzburg in 1776. After publishing Briefe aus dem Noviziat (Letters 
from the noviate), an inflammatory work of antimonasticism (something that nearly all 
Enlightenment figures would support in one way or another), he was forced to leave the 
Archduchy in 1780 and moved to Zürich. Here he continued to write and published 
multiple scathing critiques of monasticism and the Catholic Church. In 1783, he published 
the semi-autobiographical novel and panegyric for the reign of Joseph II, Faustin oder das 
philosophische Jahrhundert. In 1784, Pezzl moved to Vienna, where he lived for the rest of 
his life. During his early years there, he worked as a freelance writer and became involved 
in the freemason lodge, Zur Wohltätigkeit (For Charity). Through the lodge, he came into 
contact with figures such as Mozart, van Swieten, and Kaunitz. By the next year, Pezzl had 
become the personal librarian of Kaunitz. Through Kaunitz, he was able to come into close 
contact with other Josephinist statesmen and philosophers. Following the growing 
discontent with Joseph’s reforms and his tendency towards absolutism, Pezzl began to 
work on a more critical and cynical piece of writing, Skizze von Wien (Sketch of Vienna). In 
1791, after the death of Joseph, Pezzl worked as a public employee for the Geheime 
Ziffernkabinett (Secret Cabinet of Numbers), which was chiefly concerned with spying and 
the monitoring of letters. 
 
While Pezzl remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world, during his lifetime 
Faustin was one of the most successful works to come out the Holy Roman Empire. Pezzl’s 
book received the distinct honor of being translated into French and was thus able to reach 
a wider reading audience throughout Europe. Furthermore, the work was reprinted 
numerous times, both legally and illegally, testifying to the popularity of the book. It was 
the only book that Mozart had in library upon his death.35 
 
The novel can be described as the Austrian answer to Candide and, in many ways, feels like 
a direct copy of Candide. Yet this is hardly surprising, given Voltaire’s status as one of the 
greatest figures of the Enlightenment; Pezzl’s copying him can consequently be viewed as a 
form of flattery. Overall, one gets the sense from Pezzl’s work that he is partially driven by 
a desire not necessarily to prove Austria’s greatness in literature but, at the very least, add 
his contribution to the Enlightenment project through an Austrian viewpoint. 
Fundamentally, both are works of social critique, but while Voltaire criticized the 
prevalence of barbarism and the lack of Enlightenment, Pezzl critiques the perceived sense 
of Enlightenment that the West thought it had. Overall, Pezzl’s work does deserve note for 
his prose which, while mildly sentimental at times, is well conceived. The plot itself is the 
standard eighteenth-century picaresque, but Pezzl delivers the plot with both force and 
feeling. 
 
The hero of the novel, Faustin, grows up in a Bavarian monastery and is taught that he lives 
in an age where reason reigns supreme. His teacher, Father Boniface, clearly a nod to St. 

                                                 
35 Georg Knepler, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart¸ trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1997), 116-117. 



37 
 

Boniface, the patron saint of Germans, instructs Faustin at the start of the novel on what 
virtues an enlightened monarch should embody: “Each monarch tries with others to 
promote tolerance, enlightenment and freedom of thought in his own state, and to banish 
superstitions, barbarism, fanaticism, stupidity, chicanery and misery from his people.”36 Yet 
as one would expect, this statement does not hold true when put to the test of reality. 
Shortly after, Faustin and Father Boniface leave the monastery to travel the world in search 
of countries that represent the Enlightenment as Father Boniface describes it. Throughout 
their journey, they constantly come to people who are the antithesis of the Enlightenment, 
finding only pain and misery. They travel throughout both the Americas and Europe. 
During their travels, they are beaten by workers who are angry that feast days have been 
abolished; their anger stems not from any sense of piety but because they no longer have a 
holiday. In France, they are imprisoned for possessing the works of Voltaire, Claude Adrien 
Helvétius, Pierre Bayle, Montesquieu, and even Frederick the Great. In another chapter, 
they come across a crowd being entertained by a Catholic priest and exorcist, Johann 
Joseph Gaßner, who is based on a real Austrian priest from the eighteenth century. The 
crowd attacks them. They later insult monasticism and are forced to flee from the Holy 
Roman Empire to Venice. In Venice, they are attacked and robbed by bandits, and once 
there, they meet the magistrate in Venice to tell of their ordeal. However, they end up 
criticizing the constitution and are banished from the city. In Spain, they find some respite 
in the court of Charles III and his settlement project of Sierra Morena. They eventually 
make toward way to Portsmouth in England and then to London. Once there, they find 
themselves in the middle of the Gordon Riots. Father Boniface is killed by the rioters, and 
Faustin is appalled not only by their barbarous attitude but also by the intolerance and 
fanaticism in a country that is supposed to be the embodiment of the Enlightenment. 
Disgusted by the English, Faustin volunteers to go to America as a soldier but is tricked into 
becoming a slave. Once in Port Royale, he is sold as a slave and forced to work on a 
plantation. Pezzl here launches into a tirade against the evils of New World slavery. 
Eventually, Faustin escapes slavery and returns to Europe. 
 
Near the end of the novel, Faustin makes his way to Prussia and the court of Frederick the 
Great, where he thinks that he has at last found the place that truly embodies the 
Enlightenment. Upon his arrival, he prays at an altar and praises that the works of Voltaire 
are respected in Berlin and that tolerance is the chief virtue of the land. Unfortunately for 
Faustin, his beliefs are shattered when a conflict between churches arises over the use of 
hymns by Paul Gerhardt, a composer of the seventeenth century. Frederick the Great 
declares, “The Priests must not forget tolerance, because no persecutions will be 
tolerated.”37 
 
Dejected, Faustin again leaves in search of the land that Father Boniface had described to 
him at the beginning of the novel. At last, he reaches Vienna, where Joseph II reigns 

                                                 
36 Pezzl, Faustin oder das philosophische Jahrhundert, 15. “Eifert ein monarch den andern vor, Toleranz, 
Erleuchtung und Denkensfreiheit in seinen Staaten zu beförden: Agberglauben, Barbarei, Fanatismus, 
Dummheit, Schikane und Elend ferner von seinen Völkern zu verbannen.” 
37 Ibid., 321. “Die Priester müssen die Toleranz nicht vergessen, denn ihnen wird keine Verfolgung gestat tet 
werden.” 



38 
 

supreme. At first, Faustin is unsure what to make of the place, but the more time he spends 
there, the more he realizes that Joseph’s Vienna is the embodiment of the Enlightenment. 
He declares: 

 
The creation of free thought, cleansed of religion; the right of the Throne against 
Roman influence; the right of reason against pedants, against stiff schoolbooks and 
apostles of superstition the right of mankind from the harassment and oppression of 
tyrants.38 

 
Clearly Pezzl would like the readers to connect Vienna with how Father Boniface described 
the perfect enlightened place. No longer are people slaves to the Catholic Church; instead, 
in Vienna, they are their own masters motivated by reason and rational thought. Pezzl goes 
on to compare Joseph to Sesostris—the first Chinese Emperor—as well as Orpheus, Titus, 
and Marcus Aurelius. The last sentence declares that under Joseph II, there will truly be a 
“philosophical century.”39 Ultimately Faustin is a tale of optimism triumphant, unlike 
Candide. The story not only serves as a panegyric ode to the greatness that is Joseph II but 
also illustrates the uniqueness of Vienna in the eighteenth century. While other states 
might have writers and philosophers writing texts on the nature of mankind and what the 
most just state is meant to look like, it is only in Vienna that such a thing is possible.  
 
Fundamentally, Pezzl portrays an optimistic worldview that came with the accession of 
Joseph as the sole ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy. While Pezzl was not the only author to 
declare glory from Joseph’s reign, he is by far one of the most vocal and successful authors 
writing in his favor. Furthermore, Pezzl wrote this work as a counterpoint to the attitude 
towards the Enlightenment in the Protestant parts of the Holy Roman Empire. While Pezzl 
was a deist, with very little love of Catholicism, he was still culturally Catholic and thus 
sought to prove that Catholicism was not incompatible with the Enlightenment. For Pezzl, 
Protestants were just as capable of intolerance as Catholics. The death of Father Boniface at 
the hands of an angry Protestant mob can be seen as a direct parallel to the death of Doctor 
Pangloss at the hands of the inquisition in Candide. Pezzl also expresses his numerous 
discontents with the Catholic Church and the Jesuits in particular, which were shared by 
Pezzl’s fellow freemasons and superiors. Throughout the book, there are several of 
references to the Jesuits practicing pederasty on their students. 
 
Following the death of Joseph in 1790, Pezzl wrote a biography of him in which he 
characterized the emperor as being both the root of the liberalism that had taken hold in 
Vienna and within the Monarchy but also as the cause of the repression and 
authoritarianism that tried to stamp it out.40 It is likely that Pezzl suffered much of this 
resentment towards Joseph due to not only his failings but also his misplaced trust in 

                                                 
38 Ibid., 378-379. “Dem Hersteller der Denkenfreiheit, der gereinigtern Religion; der Rechte des Thrones 
gegen die Römischen Eingriffe; der Rechte der Vernunst gegen Pedanten, steife Schulsüchse und Apostel des 
Aberglaubens; der Rechte der Menschheit gegen die Schikane und Unterdrükung der schwelgenden 
Untertyrane.” 
39 Ibid., 283. 
40 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 223-224. 

 



39 
 

Joseph. By creating an almost saint-like figure in Joseph, Pezzl sets himself up for 
disappointment. Nevertheless, Pezzl expressed in his work Skizze von Wien that, following 
the reign of Joseph, nobles in Vienna no longer stood along the walls, waiting for the 
attention of the monarch. Instead, they worked to gain the respect of the sovereign and the 
public through service to the statement.41 
 
What Pezzl’s novel succeeds in doing is taking the Enlightenment and demythologizing 
much of the traditional aspects of Central European culture. The problem here is that Pezzl 
tries to rationalize the paradox of being an Enlightenment thinker who believes in ideals 
like the equality of mankind and religious tolerance, yet at the same time, he is forced to 
confront the fact that he supports a hereditary monarchy that is an anathema to the 
concept of equality. Fundamentally, Pezzl’s critique of the European system does not push 
the reader hard enough, which leads the reader to either conclude that Pezzl was willfully 
ignorant of his own paradoxical thinking or that he simply did not conceive his thinking as 
contradictory. Despite Pezzl’s rosy portrait of Austria as compared to the rest of Europe, 
much of what he describes as happening to Faustin throughout the novel could also easily 
happen to his protagonist within the Habsburg Monarchy. One can easily imagine Pezzl’s 
Hungarian counterpart pointing out the flaws of his thinking by looking at conditions that 
Magyar speakers were experiencing. One could also see Pezzl retorting that the Hungarians 
oppress the Slavic speakers just as readily. The further you go, the more myopic it becomes. 
 
While some liberal thinkers thought Joseph’s reforms did not go far enough, others who 
agreed with him became alienated due to his dictatorial tendencies. For instance, although 
he was an ally of Joseph, Kaunitz expressed frustration at Joseph’s inability to negotiate or 
slow down his reforms. Kaunitz was largely able to pursue policies in the way that he 
wanted because of his venerable position as state chancellor.42 However, he expressed 
bitterness due to Joseph’s inability to handle criticism and that his state building had 
alienated the Habsburg Monarchy from much of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, when 
Kaunitz learned of Joseph’s death, his response was “[t]hat was very good of him.”43 Yet, 
within a few weeks, Kaunitz had tempered his criticism of Joseph, and expressed that he 
had been a “great man.”44 It was only the ardent defenders of the Old Regime that truly 
were happy with his death. 
 
Figures ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to pamphleteers honored the reign of Joseph 
and his role as an enlightened monarch.45 They praised him for such things as his 
willingness to innovate agriculture, his reformation of censorship, and his concern for the 
poor and social outcasts. He was praised for not only being a devoted Catholic but also 
advocating and enacting toleration. Even Protestants sang the praises of Joseph. For 
instance, the evangelical Lutheran theologian, Johann Georg Fock, eulogized the monarch in 
a sermon: 
                                                 
41 Blanning, Joseph II, 103. 
42 Ibid., 61. 
43 Ibid., 198. 
44 Ibid. 
45 For example, Beethoven’s Cantata on the Death of Joseph II was written when the composer at the age of 
nineteen but would not be published until the late nineteenth century. 



40 
 

 
Through Joseph, God raised the glory and prestige of the house of Austria, together 
with the fortunes and prosperity of its extensive provinces: through Joseph He gave 
an improved organization to the internal structure of the state and administration of 
justice and a greater strength to the military… he purged from religion the many 
abuses and accretions which prevented its beneficent power from reaching the 
hearts of men.46 

 
While his successors would be far less radical than Joseph—and in some cases were 
outright reactionary, like Francis II—Joseph’s reign nevertheless altered the course of the 
Habsburg Monarchy. His creation of the merit-based bureaucracy would see itself 
continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The culture of liberalism that arose 
around his court and followers would endure and the print industry would continue to 
grow, despite the Monarchy attempting to roll back the clock in the face of the French 
Revolution. The reforms instituted by Joseph proved to be incredibly vital to the 
development of the public sphere in Austria, reaching its apex at the turn of the nineteenth 
century. The coffeehouse—which became so inseparable from later historiographical 
memory of Vienna and the Habsburgs—as a public institution originated under Joseph and 
allowed for the intersection between reform, the state and literature. 
 
Fundamentally, it becomes a rather flawed point of view to try to ascribe the 
Enlightenment of a country to one man. Yes, Joseph certainly was a highly influential 
person who sought to reorganize his country along the lines of the Enlightenment, but at 
the same time, this narrative leads to undervaluing the contributions of figures such as 
Pezzl. Pezzl does himself a disservice by creating an almost mythical figure in Joseph, 
leading him to largely ignoring the fact that the Enlightenment is happening because of 
people like him and his colleagues. It is through this lens that the Enlightenment ceases to 
be an intellectual movement. Once historical figures become mythologized, it makes it seem 
almost impossible for anyone else to contribute to the Enlightenment idea. So, 
fundamentally, the reader has to take what Pezzl is saying with a grain of salt and realize 
that he himself is too self effacing of his own successes.  

                                                 
46 Blanning, Joseph II, 199-200. 


