Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg Peter Höyng Scott Berg, Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2022. 345 pp. Beginning to review Scott Berg's Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 from its back end quickly indicates its forte: the thirty-page-long bibliography divides into six sections: archival sources in Austria and Hungary (1 page), published primary sources (4 pages), separated from a brief but pertinent list of consulted newspapers as printed material, unpublished dissertations (1.5 pages), articles (11 pages), and, at last, books (11 pages). In sum, Berg has accomplished an impressive scope of thorough research in both quantity and, given that he used archival material in German and Hungarian, quality. As a result of Berg's stupendous thoroughness, the accompanying and often detailed notes take close to 100 pages. Given this depth, Berg can authoritatively proclaim his central thesis, one that demystifies the premise that the Habsburgs relied throughout history on Catholicism as a political pillar. Instead, Berg demonstrates that the reigns of Francis II/I (r. 1792–1835) and his son Ferdinand (r. 1835–1848) "marked the only era" (203) when the Habsburgs actively pursued tolerance toward confessional diversity to maintain stability within their multiethnic empire. In fact, his research leads him to the bold thesis that "the idea of authoritarian or nondemocratic regimes, such as the Habsburg Empire, pioneering human rights is an uncomfortable one today but one that is rooted in historical reality" (14). Starting with Joseph II's enlightened policies, Berg guides the reader in six chapters through the institutionalization of toleration that took place in the "much-maligned regime (1792–1848) that followed Joseph II's brief, unsuccessful reign" (13). Yet Joseph II's decade-long reign was not as futile as Berg insinuates here. After all, he himself shows that, despite many opportunities to overturn Josephism "and to promote an alliance of throne and altar," [End Page 101] Francis "remained under the influence of his Josephist advisors" (37). While recognizing these limited attempts at Catholic revivalism in reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, therefore, Berg largely follows and supports Pieter Judson's line of argument in The Habsburg Empire: A New History (2016) that the Empire provided, thanks to Josephism, a common imperial citizenship that for stability's sake respected its multiethnic and religious diversity. In 1846, the monarchy counted 26.3 million Catholics, 6.8 million Orthodox Christians (Greek Catholic and non-united Orthodox), 3.3 million Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists), and 729,000 Jews, "making non-Catholics nearly a third of the monarchy's population" (6). Despite the admiration that Berg shows for the conservative emperors Francis and his son Ferdinand, he is not shy to see the shortcomings of this relative tolerance in dealing with religious diversity, as is evident in Chapter 5, where he canvasses the limited success of integrating Jews, predominantly living in the colonized Galicia, into the monarchy. While Jewish emancipation was still far away, Berg emphasizes that the government was able to ward off anti-Semitic violence. In Chapter 6, Berg focuses on the emergence of popular Catholicism after the 1848 revolution, as cemented first in the counterrevolution and then in the 1855 concordat, after the Josephists, according to Berg, had been removed from the government. Convincingly though Berg masters his narrative on how the government diligently promoted policies of relative tolerance toward religious minorities in an empire with a majority of Catholics, the book would be even more compelling if the plentitude of historical details did not lead the reader to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Too often, terms, persons, organizations, geographic information, and political maneuvers obscure a more thorough discussion of a given issue. Whereas Berg beautifully starts each of his six chapters with a vignette of cultural history by taking us to a specific location within the Empire to frame the forthcoming focus of the given chapter, he then leaves this interpretive approach behind. Instead, he moves quickly to a blizzard of granular details without further or...