“ The overweening character of the man was obvious to Frederick, who, after their first interview in 1769, described him as ambitious, and as capable of setting the world on fire. The French minister Vergennes, who met Joseph when he was travelling incognito in 1777, judged him to be “ambitious and despotic.”
Until the death of his mother in 1780 Joseph was never quite free to follow his own instincts. After the death of his father in 1765 he became emperor and was made co-regent by his mother in the Austrian dominions. ”

“ JOSEPH II. (1741–1790) , Roman emperor, eldest son of the empress Maria Theresa and her husband Francis I., was born on the 13th of March 1741, in the first stress of the War of the Austrian Succession. Maria Theresa gave orders that he was only to be taught as if he were amusing himself; the result was that he acquired a habit of crude and superficial study. His real education was given him by the writings of Voltaire and the encyclopaedists, and by the example of Frederick the Great. ”

“ Also he had inherited from his mother all the belief of the house of Austria in its “august” quality, and its claim to acquire whatever it found desirable for its power or its profit. He was unable to understand that his philosophical plans for the moulding of mankind could meet with pardonable opposition. ”