In his monograph, Scott Berg provides an impressive new narrative of toleration in the Habsburg Empire. He focuses on the period between the aftermath of Joseph II's reforms and the year of revolutions, 1848. Berg shows that Joseph II's policies led to a non-confessional state with a large degree of religious toleration. Administrators, clerics, and rulers sought to keep the peace by acting in an even-handed way towards a range of confessional and religious groups. In other words, there was no alliance between throne and altar in the half-century before 1848.
The author draws largely on administrative and normative sources, supplemented with assessments of their implementation and subversion on the ground. Berg does an excellent job of providing a narrative of Austria and also pays close attention to the other Habsburg lands, including Lombardy, Hungary, Venetia, and the military borders with the Ottoman Empire. This wide view is one of the great strengths of this monograph.
In the introduction, Berg sketches out some historiographical trends, focusing on questions of toleration and confessionalism in previous centuries. While Berg provides a useful framework for the following chapters, his characterisation of the period before the eighteenth century as one of persecution has been disputed in a crop of recent studies. Berg argues that the Enlightenment was the key moment when thinkers left behind religious differences in pursuit of knowledge and toleration, while the nineteenth century saw a second age of confessionalism. In what follows, Berg challenges this view by arguing that in the Habsburg Empire, there was significant toleration in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The first two main chapters give a chronological analysis of Catholicism in the Habsburg lands, first in the period between 1792 and 1820, when clerics and politicians grappled with the legacies of Josephinism, and a second period, stretching from 1820 to 1848, that saw a Catholic revival in large parts of Europe. The Habsburg Empire formed an exception to this strengthening of Catholicism. Instead, efforts to form an alliance between state and church and turn the Habsburg Empire into a major Catholic force were haphazard and piecemeal, if they happened at all. This was a deliberate choice intended to keep the peace in the multi-religious Habsburg lands. For instance, during the Kölner Wirren (1837), a conflict pitting Prussia against Catholic powers, Habsburg policies wavered and clerics and rulers in Austria did not take advantage of this opportunity to reaffirm Catholicism in the face of a Protestant adversary, unlike in Bavaria.
Not only did Habsburg rulers keep Catholicism out of the political space, but they did so with all religions. The following three chapters discuss these dynamics with regards to Protestants, Orthodox and Greek-Catholic groups, and the Jewish community in the Habsburg lands. In each case, Berg skilfully draws out similarities and differences in their treatment. Through the connections between Russia and the Orthodox churches, for instance, they were viewed with more suspicion than Protestants. And while official policies were tolerant towards the Jewish population, there was also wide-spread antisemitism. Mixed marriages and conversions were especially difficult to regulate, but here, too, attempts by Habsburg officials focused on limiting disruptions and the potential for religious conflict. The structure of Berg's monograph, focusing on different religious and confessional groups in turn, rather than approaching them chronologically or thematically, leads to occasional repetition in these chapters.
Berg brings together the different threads in the final chapter, which focuses on the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the resulting strengthening of Catholicism in the Habsburg lands. In this chapter, Berg's argument comes full circle, as he illustrates that the collapse of Josephinism after 1848 led to a Catholic renewal in the Habsburg Empire, as elsewhere in Europe. Through this development, the Habsburg Empire followed European patterns, which was not the case earlier. In subsequent years, Catholicism became a pillar of the state. In this way, Berg challenges a linear narrative of toleration, instead illustrating the ways in which the previously non-confessional Habsburg Empire turned into a Catholic state. This analysis provides a major new assessment of the impact of Josephinism on the Habsburg Empire.
In his conclusion, Berg places these findings in a broader context and expands the timeframe to show the long-lasting impact of these Habsburg policies. The central concept of order, mentioned in the title of the book, is spelled out most explicitly in the conclusion, when Berg states that toleration was a tool to spread and enforce a specific kind of political order, where religious and confessional conflicts were kept to a minimum through lenient policies. A more explicit engagement with contemporary ideas of (dis)order would have benefitted the monograph and added another layer to this discussion. When discussing the long-term impacts of religious toleration in the Habsburg Empire, Berg occasionally overstretches his argument. For example, the assertion that we can learn something about religious plurality and toleration in the twenty-first century from the Habsburg policies of the nineteenth century remains underdeveloped. These minor criticisms should not distract, however, from the merits of an excellent monograph that reassesses a crucial period in Central European history.
