But Maria Theresa, that remarkable woman, had a strong sense of the practical, and was keenly interested in economics from the day of her accession.78 One of the first acts of her reign was to reactivate the semi-dormant planning offices set up under her father. Then the loss of Silesia, the most highly industrialized of her all provinces, increased this interest, under the dual stimulus of the need to make good the loss of the province (which had also disrupted the economy of Bohemia), and to revenge herself on ‘the Prussian’. Industries were encouraged to move over from the lost province into the Monarchy (which they did on a considerable scale and with extraordinary rapidity), and entrepreneurs and skilled workers brought in, sometimes by morally questionable devices, from other countries, being then given facilities in the shape of exemption from taxation, subsidies, monopolies, etc., for the employers, and for the men (and also for workers inside the Monarchy) exemption from military service and from all restrictions on domiciliary rights in towns. Important was the classification, introduced in 1754, of industrial enterprises into Kommerzialgewerbe and Polizeigewerbe. The former, which were trades working on a large scale, and for a wide market (these included textile and metal works, glovemakers, opticians and jewellers, but also sculptors and painters) were as a rule freed from all guild restrictions, which continued to apply only to the second category, of establishments working for purely local markets (butchers, bakers, etc.).
As early as 1746 a central body, the Universalkommerzdirektorium, had been called into being to deal with the reform of tariffs,79 the development of communications by land and water, the importation of industrial plant and the conclusion of trade agreements for the whole Monarchy. In 1753 tariffs were imposed against Prussia, with the avowed object of ‘ruining Prussian Silesia economically’. In 1764 a tariff wall was erected round the whole Monarchy (except the Tirol, which was exempted owing to the importance to it of its transit trade) and in 1775 this wall, which was afterwards extended to take in Galicia,80 was raised further, to an average of thirty per cent, the importation of many foreign articles being forbidden altogether. Now the internal tariffs between the Austrian and Bohemian Lands were abolished. Attempts were made to find new markets for the Monarchy’s products in Russia and Turkey, and Trieste and Fiume (already declared free ports by Charles VI) were expanded to handle the trade.
Many of Maria Theresa’s early experiments were no more successful than those of her father and grandfather, and both the governmental machinery and the methods used by it were changed repeatedly. The old difficulties had not yet been overcome, nor the basic economic structure of the Monarchy in any way transformed. The ‘factories’ themselves, where at all sizeable (when many of them were State enterprises, since few private entrepreneurs possessed the capital to start a big factory81) worked chiefly for the army; the smaller ones, largely for the Court and its hangers-on. Most luxury goods were still imported, in the face of numerous prohibitions made in the interest of the balance of payments, perhaps the chief effect of which had, indeed, been to give birth to a flourishing smuggling industry, which was often winked at by the authorities. The guild craftsmen still provided most of such more modest products for the wider market as could not be home-produced, but in most peasant families the womenfolk spun and wove the clothes and the men were their own masons and carpenters, and agriculture, much of it carried on by methods which differed little from those of the Middle Ages, with viticulture and forestry, was still the main occupation of by far the largest part of the population.
During the last years of Maria Theresa’s reign an appreciable amount of industry was nevertheless growing up in the areas towards which the Government’s mercantilist policy was mainly directed, these being chiefly the Bohemian Lands, Lower Austria, and the iron-fields of Styria. With it, trade was expanding. Agriculture, too, was growing more progressive, at least on the big estates, the advances here, too, owing much to government initiative and assistance. The economic picture was growing more diversified, and brighter.
*
It varied, indeed, widely from one part of the Monarchy to another. Vienna had been largely rebuilt and splendidly adorned since the retreat of the Turks had carried the frontier away from its vicinity. It was now the biggest city of Central Europe, with a population of over 200,000, and presented a magnificent picture. The spire of the grand old Stefansdom in the heart of the city looked down on fifty other churches, some of ancient construction, many of them new, but nearly all alike tricked out inside in the pompous baroque of the day. It looked down, too, on the splendid palaces of the Dynasty, the old Hofburg, newly rebuilt and enlarged, in the Innere Stadt and the great recent construction of Schönbrunn, three miles out, set in its vast formal gardens; both of them surrounded by great complexes of adjuncts, courtiers’ quarters, Guards’ barracks, and the sumptuous residences of the great aulic nobles, Prince Eugene of Savoy’s enormous Schloss Belvedere and the magnificent palaces of the Schwarzenbergs, Liechtensteins, Starhembergs, Kinskys, Esterházys, Pálffys and a score more. There were museums, picture galleries, pleasure-grounds. The wider streets and squares were adorned with fountains and statuary. There were shops to supply the Court ladies with their finery, artisans’ quarters in which some of these articles were manufactured (although more were still imported). Further out, there were big new industrial suburbs, containing many factories, and beyond these, the adjacent hills were studded with the country houses of the rich, the more modest resorts where the tradesmen and artisans took their pleasure, and the homes of the farmers and vintners who prospered by supplying the needs of the capital.
But Vienna was a special case. It owed its splendour, less to the productivity of its own inhabitants, than to its position as capital and residence of the House which was ruler, not of Austria alone, but of Bohemia and Hungary, of the Low Countries and Lombardy, and not least, in its Imperial capacity, of the German Reich. Its growth did not even reflect a long accumulation of wealth in the Monarchy, for Charles’s reign had been extravagant and unsystematic, and the first half of his daughter’s, darkened by the Prussian wars, which had brought Austria to the verge of bankruptcy again; it had only been since the Peace of Hubertsburg that there had been a real recovery. Outside its immediate environment, the signs of prosperity soon died away. Upper Austria still made a good showing – far better than the Western half of Lower Austria itself.82 Distinguished alike for the independent spirit of its peasants, which had secured for them the best social conditions in the Hereditary Lands, outside the Tirol, and for the progressive outlook of its larger landlords, who led even Bohemia in the introduction of modern methods, and favoured by nature, with stores of iron and salt in the hills and its plains open and fertile – lying, moreover, on the main highway from Vienna to the West – it could show comfortable farms and flourishing market centres, while Linz, its capital, contained a large cloth factory and Steyr, important iron works. Riesbeck found Linz so prosperous ‘as to make the Bavarian cities appear like poorhouses in comparison’.83 But in the Alpine Lands proper, there was little to tell of new times. Graz with twenty-five thousand inhabitants and Innsbruck with about twenty thousand were the only important centres until Trieste was reached, and both of them owed their dignity rather to the past, when they had been the residences of the Princes of considerable polities (Graz, not long before, had been the capital of an area larger than that directly controlled by Vienna itself). None of the other Alpine towns, except perhaps Laibach and Klagenfurt, and in the Tirol, the archiepiscopal sees of Brixen and Trent, which were only half inside the Monarchy, were more than small local centres; Marburg, the second town of Styria, had only five thousand inhabitants. Outside them, the pattern of life was still that of the scattered farm or hamlet, and such trappings of magnificence as these Lands could show were not in the villages but in the baronial castles which dominated them (and on which many of their owners bankrupted themselves, having overbuilt out of ostentation) and still more, in the great monasteries which held a considera
ble part of the more desirable ground. The Styrian iron works were, indeed, beginning to recover after a long depression, and there was some textile industry in Vorarlberg, but the big majority of the population lived from agriculture, pasturing herds in summer on the mountain alps and in the autumn, either driving them to market in Vienna or Italy, or slaughtering them and salting down their flesh. While the thrift and industry of the Alpine Germans still enabled them to maintain fair standards of comfort, under normal conditions, even they found the struggle against nature a hard one: devastating famines were not uncommon even in the richest of the Lands, such as Styria, while in the Tirol pressure of population was already forcing a considerable proportion of the menfolk to spend much of their time away from their homes, as itinerant journeymen or masons. The less advanced Slav populations of South Styria and Carinthia lived in poverty and squalor, their diets consisting of some form of pottage and their homes, of a single cabin, which was often shared with the poultry.
Bohemia and Moravia were economically more advanced than the Alpine Lands. Industrially, they had been able to build on more extensive ancient foundations. They had been the chief recipients of the immigrant industry from Silesia. The Bohemian landlords, too, had, for whatever reason, shown themselves far readier to engage in industry than their colleagues of the Alpine Lands, who, we are told, ‘had, out of ancient caste spirit, shown themselves very unreceptive towards this new wish of the Crown’s.’84 Thus the two provinces were developing into the industrial workshop of the Monarchy. Bohemia now contained no less than 244 towns, of which Prague, with a population of 80,000, ranked after Vienna as the second largest city of the Monarchy. Ten years later (it is true that the intervening decade had seen a big spurt), 400,000 persons in Bohemia were employed in industry, and the value of their production exceeded that of the local agriculture – and that was the most progressive in the Monarchy after that of Upper Austria: the big landed proprietors who dominated it were among the first in the Central Monarchy to organize large-scale production for profit by modern methods, including modern rotation of crops, the introduction of fodder plants and the cultivation of such new products as potatoes.
But even here, the picture contained many shadows. The new industrialization had, after all, been a curative measure to make good the damage inflicted on the Monarchy by the rape of Silesia, and itself an operation of cold war, which had entailed many casualties. The new manufactures had arisen on the ruins of many of the older industries, and the enforced autarky had been extremely detrimental to what had once been a flourishing trade with Germany. When faced with demands for higher taxation, the Estates complained bitterly of their poverty, and if the landlord class was, nevertheless, prosperous on the whole, the same could not be said of their subjects. When Maria Theresa sent a Commission of Enquiry into the Bohemian Lands in 1769, its report revealed that the bulk of the peasants were living under really appalling conditions of squalor and near-starvation which in bad years became real starvation; in 1771 and 1772 there had been famines which had carried away fourteen per cent of the entire population. The sums earned by the spinners and weavers of the mountain districts, when they were able to work for money (much of their labour was performed gratis for their lords, as robot) were mere pittances, bare compensation for the infertility of their holdings and for the small size of them, for small plots were already frequent in these areas.
Across the Leitha, the economy was more primitive still. When the new industrial policy was inaugurated, it had been deliberately confined to the Western half of the Monarchy. This decision was destined later to have momentous political consequences, to which we shall have to return repeatedly, but it was not originally taken – at least not overtly – for political reasons, but out of simple economic calculation. Vienna was the seat of the Court and the headquarters of the army (and the Court and the army were easily Austria’s chief consumers of manufactured goods), while in Bohemia and Moravia there already existed a considerable domestic industry, a relatively dense population accustomed to industrial work, and natural sources of power; moreover, to transplant thither the industries migrating from Silesia (and much of the new industrialization was effected by this method) involved only a short journey. In view of the contrast between these conditions and those in Hungary, with its sparse and rude population, its deplorable communications and its immense potential agricultural wealth, it had seemed only natural to divide the roles, allocating to Hungary that of producing the raw materials, and to Austria, that of turning them into manufactured goods. This division of roles was in any case meant at first to be only temporary, until Hungary should have reached a stage of development which made industrialization there practicable. Meanwhile, Government subsidies to Hungarian agriculture were to match those given to Austrian industry.
The Austrian industrialists, however, were not slow to argue that the Hungarian noble, paying as he did no taxation, could undercut his Austrian competitors under otherwise equal conditions, and Maria Theresa herself, although she always insisted that there must be no discrimination between her different dominions, admitted the force of this contention and agreed that Hungary should not be given facilities which enabled her to compete dangerously with Austria. As time went on, the Austrian and Bohemian magnates whose interests were bound up with the new establishments (and these were precisely the classes whose voices were heard on the Economic Council) consolidated and systematized their advantage. In 1763 the Council got the principle established that the State should not found factories in Hungary.85 Five years later, it tried to introduce a rule that even private individuals should never be given licences to establish factories there. This Maria Theresa rejected, but the Council, through whose hands applications for licences and other facilities passed, was usually able to reject those coming from Hungary. Further, when the internal tariffs between the Austrian Lands were abolished, that between Austria and Hungary was maintained, and so manipulated by discriminatory assessment of the commodities crossing it as to constitute another heavy handicap on Hungarian manufacturers.
Thus the remarkable situation was produced that industrialization was being deliberately held back by governmental policy in a part of the Monarchy which in area and population constituted nearly half of it; and not even industrialization alone, for the discrimination was often applied also against Hungarian agriculture. The Hungarians themselves were partly unwilling, partly unable, to counter this by self-help. All the weaknesses in their constitution to which Széchenyi later drew attention were in fact already operating against them. The nobles’ privilege prevented the accumulation of public funds to mend their communications; the aviticitas86 made it almost impossible for private individuals to obtain credit. To all this had to be added the potent congenital prejudices of the Hungarians themselves. The noble still could not be induced to think any career worthy of him, except that of landowner; nor the peasant, to do more work than he must, to escape the bailiff’s whip.
Thus Hungary stood economically a step below Austria itself. One of its own writers testified in 1797 that its common nobles ‘lived much worse than Austrian peasants’.87 Ninety per cent of the entire population lived from agriculture, and nearly the same proportion, in villages or on scattered farms. There were in 1782 sixty-one Royal Free Boroughs, besides sixteen episcopal, mining or other ‘towns’, but their total population was only about 350,000. Not one town in the whole country had a population of thirty thousand, although Pozsony, the acting capital, came near it. Debrecen, Buda, Pest, Szeged and Szabadka were round the twenty-thousand mark, but of these Debrecen, Szeged and Szabadka were ‘village towns’, not truly urban at all. Many such smaller towns as there were lived primarily from their viticulture (Buda’s own chief occupation) or from servicing the garrisons quartered in them. ‘Factory’ industry was practically non-existent.88 The non-agricultural needs of all but the wealthy, where not produced by their own womenfolk, were met by craftsmen, working entirely for the local market and protected against
competition by the insuperable tariff of impenetrable roads. Of these, the Royal Free Boroughs between them contained in 1782 only 17,074 master craftsmen, 14,612 journeymen and 6,102 apprentices. Their products were bought in the town square on market day, or hawked round the villages by Jewish, Greek or Slovak itinerant pedlars. But even craftsmen were rare: most peasants were their own carpenters and wheelwrights, while their womenfolk spun and wove the family’s clothes.
Naturally, in a country so vast as Hungary, conditions varied widely from one region to another. Those parts of the old Royal Hungary which had escaped the worst devastations of the Turkish wars had recovered a measure of prosperity. The great magnates of this area, the Habsburgs’ favourites, drew enormous rent-rolls, and some of them had accumulated great wealth, the outward and visible signs of which were the sumptuous palaces which they took delight in building. The greatest of these, Prince Esterházy’s at Esterháza, contained two hundred rooms and stabling for as many horses. It had cost sixteen million florins to erect. There were many other palaces which, if less magnificant than this, still answered every requirement of pride and luxury, and smaller manor-houses galore. The local towns, Pozsony, Sopron, Nagy-Szombat, wore an air of decent comeliness; even many of the villages were neat and clean, and housed a reasonably well-to-do peasantry.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 6
