Joseph von Sonnenfels, an Austrian jurist and novelist argued in his booklet 'Über die Liebe des Vaterlandes', published in defense of some of Maria Theresa's rationalising and centralising reforms to the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth century, 'one can turn a whole nation (volk) into patriots.'

For Sonnenfels a patriot was a man, whether he was a noble, an official, a scholar, a soldier or a peasant, who loved his fatherland and his monarch with equally the same devotion. The patriot strove to be a good citizen as informed by Natural law and embrace the communal group of the fatherland. For he and the fatherland were one and the same. The patriot was also expected to be a good subject who espoused his love and devotion for the monarchy. Sonnenfels borrowed from the early roman and greek republican states to inform the reader that a subject was to be both a good father, who would teach his sons to love the monarchy, and a good son, who would love his father the monarchy. The 'Pater Patriae'.

This new language of patriotism introduced after the end of the Seven Years War, insisted that all peoples were subjects and citizens, and that they were to come together for the 'common good', and equally take part in fulfilling their civic duties in and to Habsburg society. In order to appropriate such civic-patriotic-dynastic devotion, Sonnenfels argued the whole nation needed a national education (Nationalerziehung) which would cater to the diversity of the Monarchy. Though, Sonnenfels' work was not widely read during the reign of Maria Theresa, Joseph II her son consumed Sonnenfels worked voraciously and he and his allies used it as a basis to create a new secular curriculum to replace the local jesuit schools of the Austro-Bohemian lands from 1780 onwards. This new curriculum propagated the morality of obligation from the citizen and subject to his monarch, who in turn owed the same moral obligation back to the citizen. It was mandatory for all to attend up until their twelfth year.

This, though isolated to the Austro-Bohemian lands, is an example of state run curriculum in the eighteenth century promoting subservient attitudes from the people towards the state as embodied by the monarchy.

See

Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2000)

Henry E. Strakosch, State absolutism and the rule of law; the struggle for the codification of civil law in Austria 1753-1811 (Sydney, 1957)

Teodora Shek Brnardić, 'Modalities of Enlightened Monarchical patriotism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century habsburg Monarchy' in, Márton Zászkaliczky, Whose Love of Which Country? (Leiden, 2010)