It was the remarkable destiny of the Habsburg monarchy, after passing, between 1780 and 1792, through the most changeful twelve years (in internal respects) of all its history, to pass the next fifty-six in most respects in a condition of suspended animation as near-complete as the considerable ingenuity of its rulers could contrive. The prime responsibility for this unquestionably belongs to its monarch, Francis, whom the Emperor Leopold's untimely and unexpected death on 1 March 1792 brought, at the unripe age of twenty-four, to a throne which his physical presence was to occupy for forty-three years and his ghost for thirteen more. Francis had inherited none of his father's constitutional beliefs. Like his uncle Joseph, who had had him brought to Vienna as a boy and educated there for his future duties, he was by conviction a complete absolutist. He believed that government should be the expression of the monarch's will, and that the proper vehicle for expressing it was a bureaucracy taking and executing the monarch's orders. The supreme, if not the sole civic duty of those over whom he ruled was to be good subjects to him, and the criterion of political institutions and of social conditions was their aptitude to produce this effect.

It would not, indeed, be fair to deny to his despotism at least a negative benevolence. Personally virtuous and unpretentious, and possessed of a high sense of rectitude, he held that a monarch had, in return, a duty towards his subjects to observe justice towards them and to enforce it between them, and that he must not squander their lives on an acquisitive foreign policy, nor their property on his pleasures.