The Emperor Incognito

The first complete account of Emperor Joseph II’s undercover journey through his kingdom

It is the middle of the eighteenth century, and across Europe signs of crisis are everywhere. Travelling incognito, and without the customary pomp and entourage, the young emperor Joseph II journeys through the Holy Roman Empire and his Habsburg lands to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve.

Moving between the world of kings and queens and that of ordinary people in their hospitals and factories, he is persuaded by Enlightenment ideas of progress and liberty. Visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette in Versailles, he senses the French Revolution looming and realises that reform is imperative if he is to build a modern state.

The Emperor Incognito tells the story of an extraordinary man in an age of great upheaval, who spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign on the road. The result of his radical ambition and titanic efforts, despite his own admission (as inscribed on his tombstone) that he ‘failed in everything he undertook’, was the foundation of a more modern Austrian monarchy, in a Europe in which progress would no longer be determined solely by its rulers.