After the brutality and waste of the Seven Years’ War, reformers in the Habsburg Monarchy set about creating a state rigorous, and compassionate enough, to endure and triumph in future wars. Inspired by the French and German Enlightenment, and the convenience of natural law theory in conveying the justness of state-building, the Monarchy's jurisprudence experts and military intellectuals sought to create selfless, virtuous, and content citizens ready to sacrifice for the only polity which secured the peaceful and natural order of man: the state.

As this paper shows, the Monarchy’s reformers used natural law to imagine people's heavenly-defined relationship with the state to transform servile subjects of local manors into active, contributing citizens. Through enlightened emancipatory laws, proclamations, military reforms, toleration edicts, and interventions in subject-landlord relations, serving the state was narrated as the way in which people achieved moral goodness and human perfection.

By examining the changes to concepts of soldiering and experiences of martial honour in the Monarchy after the Seven Years’ War, this paper argues soldiers understood fighting for the Habsburgs as their way of achieving moral goodness. Honour elicited the morally good actions of a soldier, which frontline combatants believed made them citizens. The sign, in the political culture of the Habsburg Monarchy, of their humanity.