Changing society through rule and government

This research project studies a time period characterised by a series of upheavals which, seen over the long term, changed 18th century society from a society based on class lines into an increasingly civic-democratic society by the 19th century. This change was initiated through the influence of the Enlightenment, which among the upper classes led to the spread of ideas regarding the equality of persons and the sovereignty of the people whose position in society would be newly defined on the basis of a new relationship with their ruler. The time was characterised by reforms. However, there is also a question as to what extent these reforms or attempts at reform actually reached the population, and whether this in fact brought about societal change. As long as the focus remained solely on the intention of the reforms, the picture remained incomplete, and made it impossible to derive statements regarding the actual effects on society. Using a political communication approach, this research project aims to combine both sides - the rulers and the ruled - by understanding the political as an additional space of communication, within which effects and intentions are not only coming from one side but rather change during the communication process, receive new impulses, prompting new messages to arrive at the centre as part of a feedback process and hence create a cyclical process. For this reason, rule and government must be understood as a process that cannot be separated. Only the procedure of the daily administration practice makes it possible to get an insight of the effect of and response to the decreed measures. The great duchy of Tuscany, the Salzburg electorate and the grand duchy of Wurzburg during the time period 1790 to 1824 form the geographic and temporal framework for the study. In this way, the research project follows the path of grand duke Ferdinand III. through his territories. He therefore is representative of rulers who were directly affected by the consequences of the peace treaties of Luneville 1801 and Bratislava 1805 as well as the "Principal Conclusion of the Extraordinary Imperial Delegation" (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) of 1803, with its accompanying shifts of country boundaries and changes to the status of individual territories.

The project stood within the context of the concept of Political communication. The aim was to concretize the up to then very vaguely defined so called Sattelzeit meant as a time span of fundamental changes from a hierarchical society of the eighteenth century to a democratic one in the nineteenth century. Only by this it was possible to say something about the sustainability of events and changes and their impact on the further nineteenth century. Therefore the researched period got narrowed down to the time span from 1790 to 1824 and the focus was on the reforms (especially the handling of privileges, criteria of access to public service and the dealing with religion and confession) in three territories Tuscany, Salzburg and Wurzburg. In order not to deal only with acts of rule and government of the rulers also the perception of the ruled persons was taken into account. Moreover, to cover the sustainability more profoundly the concept of space from the field of sociology was added. Space is meant as a construction made by every person through placing of (social) objects and their conjunction in the context of the social surrounding. If abrupt changes happen in this order of space, often conflicts follow, because of the fragility of the system. Within this historical project the concept of space helped to observe in a better way how the different reforms definitely changed the subjects order of space, how they had to change ways. Interventions in space order demanded reactions in the form of protest, resistance or appropriation resp. construction of a new space order.Crucial for the investigation was the category resp. the event change of reign. The first encounters between the new ruler and the new subjects basically took place along old rituals. However, the precise analysis of these encounters showed the exact negotiation and adjusting to the actual situations. Equally important were the first months resp. the first year, when rule and government got restructured. Looking at the actual impacts of the reforms on peoples acting in space made it possible to see their confrontation with and adjustments because oft he reforms.