Since the two serious threats of impending collapse that faced the Habsburgian Empire—first at the time of Maria Theresia in 1740, and later with the re­vo­lu­tion of 1848—political culture in Austria has always strived for a consensus-aiming policy in the setting of a kind of enlightened despotism. First with the Maria-Theresian enlightenment (carried on by her son, Joseph II, dead in 1790, who lent his name to the term “josephinism”) and later with the biedermeier-culture, styled by a conservative spirit of enlightenment, of Franz Joseph I.