The Emperor Incognito

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

It is the end of the eighteenth century, and the European royal houses are beginning to falter. Incognito, and without the usual pomp and entourage, the young Habsburg emperor Joseph II travels through the vast Holy Roman Empire to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve. As well as kings, queens, and the European political and social elite, Joseph engages with and observes ordinary people and their hospitals and factories, eagerly soaking up Enlightenment ideas of progress and liberty. Visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette, in Versailles in 1777, he sees the French revolution looming and realises that reform is inevitable.

Written in Monika Czernin’s vivid style, The Emperor Incognito tells the story of an extraordinary man, far ahead of his time and in an age of great upheaval, who spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign on the road in search of insights that would help him build a modern state. The result of his titanic efforts, despite his own admission (as inscribed on his tombstone) that he ‘failed in everything he undertook’, was the foundation of the modern Austrian state, in a Europe in which progress was no longer determined by its rulers.