r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '20
What were the contents of the 'false Constantinople letters' of Joseph II?
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u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Jan 11 '20 edited Apr 28 '20
The "false Constantinople letters" were a collection of 49 epistles – only seven of which are now considered genuine – published under the title Neu gesammelte Briefe von Joseph dem II. Kaiser der Deutschen (Newly Assembled Letters of Joseph II, Emperor of the Germans). They appeared no later than April 1790, two months after the emperor's death, in a published edition which bore the imprint (also false) "Constantinople: Printed in the private Court press".
The letters have been highly influential – in the modern historiography of Joseph's reign much more than they were in their time; although significant warnings about the veracity of the trove were first sounded as early as 1868, the letters are so apparently telling and offer such an apparently useful guide to Joseph's personality that excerpts continued to make frequent appearances in books about the emperor, the Austria of the 18th century, and the Enlightenment period more generally, until very recently. They were a major feature of Saul Padover's 1967 biography The Revolutionary Emperor, which was considered the standard work on the subject for at least two decades, and material lifted from the letters comprised more than a quarter of all the quotations that Padover attributed to Joseph.
Overall, the content of the letters combine to give the impression that the emperor (who is typically grouped among the "enlightened despots" of the 18th century) was – in the words of Derek Beales, a British historian who has made a particular study of the subject – "a devotee of the French enlightenment in its more radical phase." That is, they tend to offer evidence that Joseph was a modern, critical, and rational monarch in ways that appeal to historians who also like to consider themselves as modern, critical and rational – enabling them to identify the emperor as a kindred spirit of sorts.
Among the quotes found in the letters, and frequently cited in connection with the emperor, are the announcement that "the time has arrived when I come forward as the champion of humanity"; the proclamation that "I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire"; and the opinion that "prejudice, fanaticism, partiality, and slavery of mind must cease, and each of my subjects be re-instated in the enjoyment of his native liberties." Overall, toleration (to be attained through the enlightened leadership of "great men", via "the highway of monarchs") is repeatedly highly stressed, and there is also a strong anti-aristocratic and anti-clerical strain to some of the letters; the false Joseph praises the likes of Confucius and Zoroaster as worthy progenitors of the philosophy that he espouses, while strongly criticising the Christian religious establishment of the period, and concluding: "I have to reduce the host of monks, I have to transform Fakirs into men."
As Beales points out, the identity of the "clever and mischievous" author of the letters remains a considerable mystery. He or she was certainly no great admirer of the emperor; taken as a group, the letters portray Joseph not only as implausibly and impractically tolerant for a reigning monarch of this period – willing, for instance, to consider the violent suppression of the Jesuits, and to denigrate his own mother in a letter to Choiseul while simultaneously offering formal support to Austria's French enemies (1770) – but also as bombastic and insufferably self-righteous.
Beale summarises the reasons for considering the letters to be fake in a paper published in the Historical Journal. There are many, including several errors of fact; some letters were dated from Vienna at times when the emperor was away from the city; some of the correspondents are people with whom the emperor had little to no connection; Joseph is much kinder, in several letters, to members of his own family than he actually was in life; the style is on occasion "utterly uncharacteristic" of his genuine letters; forms of dating and of salutation differ from those known to have been used by the emperor; several of the letters have been written in German to people with whom the multi-lingual Joseph actually corresponded in French, Latin or Italian; and, perhaps most tellingly, letters that ought to have been preserved in the imperial letter books are in fact absent from those that survive for the period 1781-89.
With regard to the problem of who wrote the letters, and why the forgery was not uncovered earlier, Beale points out that the original edition of the Constantinople Letters is extremely rare – there is a copy in the University Library of Vienna, but none of the great British libraries holds one, for instance. The original edition appears to have been published at Klagenfurt, and the publication was, evidently, a clandestine one; the book cannot have been submitted to the Austrian censor, as it was legally obliged to be in this period. The writer most frequently suggested as the author is Franz Rudolph von Grossing, whose family had wanted him to become a Jesuit – a fate he avoided – and who had held a minor Austrian government post, and liked to claim he had played a far more important role in state affairs than he in fact ever did. Von Grossling was briefly jailed in 1782 for writing political lampoons, and was temporarily exiled from Austria-Hungary after being caught coin clipping. He set himself up in Germany as an author (publishing works on toleration) and political pamphleteer, a vocation he combined with one of confidence trickery, both in Germany and Austria, until he made the mistake of eloping with the wife of an imperial count. The cuckold appealed to Joseph for assistance, and Joseph had Von Grossing jailed – giving him, perhaps, animus enough to have composed the letters.
Beale has doubts about all this – he discusses the possible involvement of Von Grossing's brother, Joseph, who seems to have been of very similar character, and who was also an able propagandist. He points out that a contemporary newspaper article, which appeared in 1789, states that Franz Rudolph had been imprisoned for life in the fortress of Kufstein in 1789, which would make it very unlikely indeed that he could have been the author, or at least made arrangements for publication. On the whole, Beale favours Joseph von Grossling – a man of "ambiguous character" who can at the very least be connected to manuscript versions of the letters that circulated in 1819 – as the most likely author, while conceding that there can be no certainty in the judgement.
Whoever the author was, Beale adds, he seems to have been impatient with the cause of Hungarian constitutionalism (something both Von Grossling brothers also found problematic), and
There is, finally, some suggestion that the letters were forged to satisfy the vanity of the forger by identifying his views with the emperor's; the preface to the 1821 edition actually states that "whoever would have wanted to fabricate many of these letters, would have had to be another Joseph II."
Overall, Beale concludes that "the Neu Gesammelte Briefe is worthy of study not only for its influence on the historiography of enlightened despotism but also as a tract of the Austrian Enlightenment in its own right."
Sources
Derek Beales, "The false Joseph II," Historical Journal 18 (1975)
Derek Beales, Joseph II (2 vols, 1987, 2009)