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Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, issued a hand-held ticket on January 2, 1776, stating that torture had been abolished in criminal trials.
However, this initially only applied to the German hereditary lands, Galicia and the Banat.
In the Hungarian half of the empire, however, torture continued to be used as a means of administering justice.
This was a difficult decision for the monarch.
She was against the abolition of torture, "because I don't like innovations," she admitted in a letter.
At the same time, she herself was a symbol of a profound change.
Maria Theresa as a widow with her family, on the right her son and co-regent Joseph II.
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images /
Since the eldest daughter of the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI, born in 1717.
(1685–1740) was actually excluded from succession under Salian law, after the death of his only son, her father did everything in his power to secure the crowns of his house for Maria Theresa with the help of the “Pragmatic Sanction”.
Although most of the European powers recognized the document, they no longer saw themselves to be bound by it after Charles' death in 1740.
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In the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), Maria Theresa was finally able to enforce her claims to power against overwhelming odds.
She was confirmed as Empress, her husband Franz I Stephan as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Only the rich province of Silesia, which Frederick II (the Great) had conquered from Prussia, was not to be regained in two further wars.
The consolidation and modernization of the Austrian imperial state is above all their work.
However, she remained stuck with the values of Baroque and Catholicism, according to which “the well-being of one's own house ... is the highest value that cannot be further legitimized”, writes her biographer Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger.
In 1756 she terminated the alliance with England in order to go to the Seven Years' War with France and Russia against Prussia.
Conservative worldview and progress in the spirit of the Enlightenment also shaped their reforms in administration and the legal system.
In order to codify the criminal law, in 1769 it enacted a “neck court order”, which differed in form but hardly in content from the jurisprudence of earlier centuries.
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The "Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana" also provided for the tearing out of the tongue in the case of blasphemy, the chopping off of the hand in perjury, the death by fire in a pact with the devil and the tearing with glowing pincers, wheels and quarters in the case of crimes of majesty.
However, some convicts were lucky enough to be pardoned by the empress in time.
The abolition of torture was preceded - once again - by a violent conflict with her son and (since the death of her husband) co-regent Joseph II (1741–1790), who was an ardent supporter of the Enlightenment.
In the end she left it to him to “decidirn this work without my consilia”.
Her subjects were enthusiastic and praised the benevolent "spirit of the best country mother".
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