The Emperor Incognito

Joseph II's Journey through Enlightenment Europe

Monika Czernin, Jamies Bulloch, Jamie Bulloch

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781914979446
• Print ISBN:
  9781914979439
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

An emperor meets his people: the extraordinary journeys of Joseph II.

It is the end of the eighteenth century, and the European royal houses are beginning to falter. The young Habsburg emperor Joseph II realizes that reform is inevitable, and he eagerly soaks up Enlightenment ideas. Incognito, and without the usual pomp and entourage, he travels through his vast empire to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve.

Along with princes and kings, he meets ordinary people and visits hospitals and factories in his search for new insights that will help him build a modern state. When he visits his sister Marie Antoinette in Versailles, he can see the French Revolution looming on the horizon. By the end of his journey, he had spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign on the road. With an introduction by Dominic Lieven and based on countless sources, Monika Czernin's The Emperor Travels Incognito tells the story of an extraordinary man in an age of great upheaval, who was far ahead of his time.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1764 Frankfurt: No more courtly travels
• 1768 The Banat: Countless petitioners change one’s outlook
• 1769 Italy: A Marcus Aurelius of the Enlightenment
• 1769 Neisse: The first summit between enlightened rulers
• 1771 Bohemia and Moravia: Famine and serfdom
• 1773 Transylvania and Galicia: Increasingly unfamiliar, increasingly different
• 1777 France: ‘The revolution is going to be terrible’
• 1781 The Austrian Netherlands: Impatience makes one blind
• 1787 Russia: A Mephistophelian pact
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Index