The haughty European empress who turned diplomacy into a dance

Telegraph

21-02-2025

In October 1762, six-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna to play before the Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresa. At the end of his performance, to the court's delight, he sprang into the arms of the Empress and 'vigorously kissed her'. It was an auspicious sign.
The Empress supported the Mozart family until 1773, just one of many patronages that saw music, sculpture and architecture thrive in Austria during her various reigns. 'Various', as from 1740 until her death in 1780 she was Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Queen of Croatia – only a few of the many European titles which are often grouped together as the hereditary Habsburg Kingdoms. By 1745, after a brief interregnum, she had regained control of the crown of Bohemia and become, in addition, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, which, at that time, comprised most of central Europe.
Richard Bassett's biography, Maria Theresa: Empress, examines the life of the most powerful female ruler of the 18th century. Her legend emerges in three parts addressing the crisis of her succession, her navigation of the turbulent seas of inter-imperial conflict, and her lasting impact on European culture. It's a bold undertaking, and one that starts strong as a conventional military history. When Maria Theresa's father Charles VI died in 1740, her accession to the thrones of the Habsburg Kingdoms was contested by the surrounding great powers, ushering in eight years of war. Maria Theresa's lifelong rivalry with Frederick II of Prussia, who wanted to challenge Habsburg supremacy in northern Europe, led to three bitter defeats and saw Silesia – a historic region that mostly falls in modern Poland – wrested from Habsburg control.
The decades that followed were a dance of shifting allegiances known as the 'Stately Quadrille', presided over by Maria Theresa's diplomatic right-hand, Wenzel von Kaunitz-Rietberg. And it's fortunate that she had such gifted statesmen at her disposal, balancing as she did the business of statecraft and military reform with a wince-inducing 16 pregnancies. It's hard to reconcile the assertive political operator with the emblem of pious Catholic femininity. In a 1762 gouache by her fourth daughter, one of many images reproduced in Bassett's book, we see the Empress pouring coffee for her husband Francis I, while the children play at their feet.
Mock-bourgeois domesticity won't convince anyone who has visited the Schönbrunn Palace, their immense summer residence, but it does reflect the Empress's strictly traditionalist views. Later in life, she would write to her daughter, Marie Antoinette, that 'the wife must completely submit to her husband and must have no business other than to please him and obey him.'
Bassett is very fond of Maria Theresa. We constantly hear of the Empress's 'poise and dignity', or her 'vigour and insight'. Enemies such as Frederick II, or the gout-ridden Charles VII (who held the seat of Holy Roman Emperor from 1742 to 1745 and the crown of Bohemia from 1741 to 1743), are portrayed respectively as 'careworn… [and] slovenly' and a 'broken man'. This sort of partisan history is, for the most part, no worse than anodyne.
But it becomes unforgivable in Bassett's clumsy attempt to justify the expulsion of the Jews of Prague, Bohemia and Moravia in 1744 as an 'exceptional' act that was 'never racially or ethnically inspired' but merely a response to reports of Jewish collaboration with foreign governments. Such an interpretation is hard to reconcile with Maria Theresa's own statement in 1777 that the number of Jews in the Austrian heartland should be reduced as a matter of policy, and that she knew of 'no more dangerous plague than this race'. Bassett cites the special privileges granted by Maria Theresa to Jews living in cosmopolitan Trieste, and a fond eulogy written shortly after her death by the city's leading silk-manufacturer, a prominent Ashkenazi Jew. Bassett's instinct is to try and capture the 'complex' character of Maria Theresa in this regard, but it seems to me that this does little to soften the Empress's ugliest side.
I noticed, too, the occasional factual slip: for example, Bassett writes that Mozart was seven years old in his famed court performance. But on the broader scale, for the most part, Maria Theresa: Empress is a robust overview of the imperial conflicts that shook Europe in the mid-18th century. The latter half offers a Rococo flourish of short chapters tracing Maria Theresa's legacy in everything from porcelain to monetary policy. This is a consistently interesting whistle-stop tour of cultural and economic life in the period, even if it tips the book further into hagiography.
The Empress only managed to recoup a portion of her beloved Silesia in 1772 as part of a deal that saw Prussia, Russia and Austria carve up Poland. Bassett argues that this was 'largely benign' for those absorbed into Austria, but Maria Theresa herself railed against it. She saw clearly that three empires had elected to 'rob an innocent nation' of its sovereignty. This didn't stop Austria taking its fair share. As Frederick II acerbically noted: 'She cried, but she took.'
Moments such as this call into question Bassett's insistence that Maria Theresa 'far exceeded in achievements, legacy and, above all, virtue'. While it's clear her reign is well worth examining, particularly for those with an interest in the rise and fall of great empires, it's almost impossible to get a glimpse of the woman at the centre of the pomp and finery. When you do, it's not always a picture of virtue.