*
Our narrative will be largely concerned with the awakening of the national spirit among the peoples of the Monarchy, and with its impact on the structure of the State. The problem at issue was really a two-fold one, although there was inevitably much overlapping of the two elements. One was the fundamental question whether the philosophic basis of the Monarchy was to be the national principle in any form, or whether the State was to be an a-national or supra-national one. One leit-motif of our story will be the slow and reluctant retreat from the latter position of its supporters, the Monarchs themselves and a band of their servants which, while never reduced to complete extinction, yet dwindled steadily from decade to decade. The second problem, which emerged increasingly into the foreground, was that of adjusting the rival claims of the different nationalities so as to form a multi-national State satisfactory to enough of them to be viable. This would hardly be possible if national aspirations were asserted to the limit, since the extreme claim of nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalism was that all members of every nation ought to be united in a single sovereign national State; and it was the fatality of the Monarchy that in no single case was one of its political frontiers also an ethnic frontier. There were Germans inside the Monarchy, and Germans outside it; Italians inside it, and outside; and so too with the Poles, the Ukrainians (when the Ruthenes of the Monarchy came to feel themselves Ukrainians), Roumanians, Serbs and Croats, and in each case, except that of the Croats, the numbers outside the Monarchy exceeded those inside it. Only the Czechs, Magyars, Slovaks and Slovenes had no ethnic kinsmen outside the Monarchy, and if the Slovenes chose to regard themselves as Yugoslavs, they would drop off the list. If the Croats took the same view, they too would form part of a nation with its centre of gravity outside the Monarchy.
The history of the development of national feeling in the Monarchy is not, however, simply one of the growth of irredentism, even among those peoples who could be irredentist. Irredentism was hardly ever more than a last stage, and one which some of them, owing to their geographical situation, never reached at all; others, not until the clock had warned for the twelfth hour. Up to that moment, the centripetal forces in the Monarchy were still very strong, but the problem of producing general national satisfaction was extraordinarily difficult, partly owing to the history-produced stratification of national cultures which we have described. The peoples whom the developments of past centuries had left in positions of social, economic and cultural inferiority could not be satisfied until the leeway had been made up, and they had received political institutions which put them on an equality with those who had before led in the race. The latter, naturally, defended positions achieved by them in history and usually legitimized by historic rights. These, of course, were not only Germans, although the problem of the Germans affected the whole Monarchy in a way that no other did, but also, in their respective local spheres, the Magyars in Hungary, the Poles in Galicia, even the Croats and the Italians of Dalmatia.
These struggles came to turn largely round the eternal central problem of the Monarchy, the relationship between the whole and its parts. We have emphasized how very strong, both constitutionally and sentimentally, was the tradition of the separate entities of the different Lands. But these traditions conflicted with ethnic considerations. Hardly any Land in the Central Monarchy was ethnically homogeneous, and conversely, hardly any nationality was confined to a single Land. Of all the Lands with which this history will be concerned, other than incidentally,238 only Austria (Lower239 and Upper), Salzburg and Vorarlberg were uni-national, being in each case purely German. The Tirol contained a German majority and an Italian minority; Styria and Carinthia, German majorities and Slovene minorities; Carniola, a Slovene majority and a small, but important, German minority; the Littoral, Italians and Southern Slavs; Bohemia and Moravia, Czech majorities and German minorities; Silesia, Germans, Poles and Czechs; Galicia, Poles and Ruthenes; the Bukovina, Roumanians and Ruthenes. Inner Hungary contained eight sizeable peoples, besides Jews and gypsies; Transylvania, Roumanians, Magyars and Germans; Croatia, Croats and Serbs; the Military Frontier, these two, besides Germans and Roumanians.
Germans were found in every Land of the Monarchy, in perceptible numbers in thirteen of those considered here; Slovenes in five; Italians and Croats in four each; Czechs, Serbs and Ruthenes in three each and Magyars and Poles each in two. Only Slovaks were in one alone,240 and if they identified themselves with the Czechs, the number of Lands in which Czecho-Slovaks were found would be four.
When the national struggle did develop, it turned largely round the Lands. Only a few very bold spirits ever advocated abolishing the Lands altogether, and the infinitely numerous arguments fall into two categories: those advocating, or resisting, adjustment of the boundaries of the Lands to agree with national distribution, these ranging from minor proposals for boundary revision to enormous schemes for dismembering Hungary or uniting all the Southern Slav areas of the Monarchy in one great unit; and those which concentrated rather on the relationship between the Lands and the central authority, these again taking innumerable forms of centralism, dualism, trialism and federalism. It should be added that it would be misleading to represent the struggles in the simple form of a battle between the new force of nationality and the antique forms of the historic-political individualities. In certain cases, as when the Slovaks demanded and the Hungarian Parliament refused an autonomous Slovak territory, this was true, but very often the new nationalism identified itself with the historic traditions, and tried to utilize them to its own advantage.
*
In 1780 there were still few signs that within a short term of years the Monarchy would fall victim to national convulsions which would not leave it until they had destroyed it. The administrative centralization thitherto carried through had gone off quite smoothly; whereas the earlier transference of the seat of the Bohemian Court Chancellery to Vienna had evoked the liveliest protests from Prague, no objections at all had been raised to the amalgamation of the Austrian and Bohemian Chancelleries; still less to the educational reforms described below.241 These had, indeed, themselves sown the seeds of the later Czech and Slovene national revivals, for although the schooling which was now being administered to all pupils who got past the elementary stage was in German, it was nevertheless schooling, which did not preclude and might even stimulate interest in the national pasts. But the shoots which this seed was bearing had hardly yet begun to pierce the surface, and looked entirely innocent. Meanwhile, the Germanization of the schools had been rather welcomed than otherwise, as opening the doors of the public services to boys of Czech or Slovene mother-tongue.
As for the Austrian-Germans, they were quite content with the position of Austria in Germany, and of themselves in Austria. They did not feel this threatened, and there are no signs that they regarded it as conferring on themselves any ‘national’ mission in the Monarchy. Even in introducing non-Germans to the German language and way of life, their officials were not furthering their own national cause, but serving and helping to consolidate the State.
Thitherto, however, the application of these measures had been practically confined to those parts of the Monarchy which were controlled by the Vereinigte Hofkanzlei, where Germanic cultural domination was a long-established fact; no attempt had been made (outside the special case of the Military Frontier) to extend them to areas unused to that domination, and it was not intended ever to apply them to the Netherlands or the Milanese, which would remain, administratively, corpora separata. But it would hardly be possible so to leave Galicia, where the Polish nobles were already nationally awake in a high degree, smarting under the loss of their sovereign national State, entirely unreconciled to being under Austrian rule and certain to resent and resist any attempt to consolidate that rule. Up to 1780 Galicia had simply been ruled as a conquered country, but the problem of integrating it into the Monarchy would have to be faced one day.
Then there were the Lands of the
Hungarian Crown. The Magyars’ own historians count the years of Maria Theresa’s reign as the most slumbrous, nationally, of all their history, and we can even understand Joseph’s belief that they would not resist Germanization when we recall the recommendation of the Hungarian Ratio Educationis in favour of far-reaching Germanization of the schools, a measure which was, for that matter, urged also by the ardent young patriot, Kazinczy, the father of the later Magyar linguistic revival, himself. But Kazinczy’s motive, and also that of the Hungarian co-authors of the Ratio, was not to further assimilation of Hungary into the Gesammtmonarchie, but to strengthen the Magyar people by making the works of Western civilization available to it and thus raising its cultural level.
It is true that Hungarian nationalism was still essentially political, a defence of noble privileges whose benefits to those enjoying them were mainly financial, and entirely unconnected with what language they spoke. The identification of them with Magyardom was still mainly presumptive. It would, however, require only a touch to turn the presumption into a conscious feeling.
And a national revival in the modern sense of the term was already setting in, this also owing something, indirectly, to Maria Theresa, for its first stirrings began among the young men who had studied at the academy founded by the Queen in Vienna for the sons of nobles (the famous Theresianum) or had served in the Noble Hungarian Bodyguard. It was young Guards officers who produced the first modern poems and dramas written in the vernacular. In 1776 the most famous of these, George Bessenyei, struck a genuinely modern note in his pamphlet ‘Magyarság’, which was an impassioned plea for the Magyar spirit, free from all political and class considerations, and for the Magyar language; for, he wrote, ‘never, anywhere on earth, did a nation acquire wisdom and depth until it had introduced the sciences into its own tongue. Any nation can become learned in its own language, but not in an alien one.’ The pamphlet, incidentally, raised and faced Hungary’s future problem by recommending the linguistic Magyarization of Hungary’s non-Magyar peoples.
And many of these were not even so nationally passive as the Magyars. We have described the active nationalism still, or again, alive among the Serbs and Roumanians, and should not omit mention of the Transylvanian Saxons, who throughout all their history had ever found eternal vigilance the necessary price of their hard-earned religious freedom and advanced social and economic positions, and were in 1780 probably the most conscious German nationalists in the world.
VI CULTURAL CONDITIONS
The Dynasty’s main prop in spiritualibus, and recipient in chief of its rewarding favours, was the Catholic Church. The connection had been a peculiarly intimate one in all the main groups of Lands in the Monarchy since their very foundation, Christianization and the establishment of kingship (in the German Lands, delegated Imperial authority) going hand in hand as two aspects of a single transaction. The association had, of course, known its troubles in later centuries. The great mediaeval contest between Empire and Papacy had not spared the Danubian lands; in the fifteenth century, the Hussite movement had split the Lands of the Bohemian Crown from top to bottom in a devastating struggle which had ended in the Utraquists’ securing recognition of equality of their faith with the Catholic;242 later, the doctrines, first of Luther, then of Calvin, had conquered the majority of the populations both of German Austria and of Hungary. Some of the Habsburgs themselves, notably Maximilian II, had inclined personally towards Protestantism. But Maximilian’s successors had returned to the old alliance, enforcing the Counter-Reformation with their swords, so far as the range thereof reached. By the end of the religious wars, Catholicism had been re-established as ‘the only ruling faith’ in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands. In them, Protestants were not even tolerated, except under licence, outside Silesia (where the intercession of the Protestant Powers at the Peace of Westphalia had obtained some protection for them) and, to a limited extent, Lower Austria.243 Maria Theresa had not relaxed these general rules; as late as 1752 the profession of Protestantism had been declared a capital offence in Bohemia, equal to treason and rebellion,244 and later still, unmasked crypto-Protestants in Upper Austria, Styria and Carinthia had been forced to migrate to Transylvania, or to leave the territory of the Monarchy altogether.245
In all these Lands, the Catholic Church occupied a position of great influence and dignity. The Prelates formed the first ‘Bench’ of the Estates,246 and their princes ranked with the highest lay dignitaries. The Archbishop of Olmütz ranked as Prince and Duke: he possessed his own mint, Court and bodyguard, his estates covered twenty-six Austrian square leagues, and when he attended a meeting of the Moravian Estates, all other members of the Estates, including Princes and Dukes, walked on foot in procession before his carriage from his residence to the Landhaus. The state of several other dignitaries of the Austrian and Bohemian Church (five of whom, not counting Salzburg, ranked as princes) was only a little less magnificent, and in all these Lands the Chapters and monasteries, which were extremely numerous in most of them,247 were among the biggest landowners. More than half Carniola and at least three-eighths of Moravia and Silesia (and that the most fertile parts) belonged to monastic Orders some of which were ‘little principalities’. The Carthusians alone owned property worth more than 2,500,000 gulden. It is true that many of the Orders were heavily indebted.248 The structure of the Church, like that of the temporal nobility, was, indeed, extremely hierarchical. The parish priests, most of whom were peasants’ sons, lived poorly enough; their average annual stipend was usually around three hundred florins.
In Hungary the power and position of the Catholic Church were not quite so total. They had, indeed, once been even greater than in Austria. The Kingdom founded by St Stephen had been almost a theocracy, and while in it the wearer of the Holy Crown had enjoyed powers which made him the supreme head of the spiritual, as well as the temporal, arm of his nation, he had in return specifically exalted the former over the latter. The Crown itself was ‘holy’ and could not be born by any non-Catholic. The head of the Hungarian Church, the Cardinal-Primate of Esztergom, enjoyed extraordinary powers both vis-à-vis Rome (he usually ranked as a Legate of the Apostolic Church) and within Hungary itself. All bishops had from the first been ex officio members of the King’s Council, and both St Stephen and several of his successors had endowed sees and monasteries with extraordinary generosity.
The Habsburgs had favoured the Catholic Church in Hungary as warmly as elsewhere, and here, too, it still enjoyed great power and wealth. The Cardinal-Primate was the highest dignitary in the land, after the Palatine. All bishops, including suffragans and bishops in partibus, of whom considerable numbers could be created if necessary,249 and the prelates with independent Chapters, sat in the House of Magnates. The landed estates of the Church comprised nearly six million hold. The income of the Primate was estimated at 360,000 florins, that of the Archbishop of Egér at 80,000 and the Bishop of Nagyvárad at 70,000, the collective income of the other eight diocesan bishops at about 300,000.
In Hungary, however, the Turkish conquest had followed hard on the Reformation. The Turks, while on principle indifferent to the religion of their non-Islamic subjects, had tended to regard Protestantism as less dangerous than Catholicism, and had allowed it to exist unmolested in the territories under their direct rule, while in the vassal Principality of Transylvania, Catholics and Protestants had been so equally balanced that they had ended by agreeing on a regime of legal equality and mutual ‘toleration’ between themselves.250 The Calvinist Princes had then repeatedly intervened to protect their co-religionists in Royal Hungary, forcing the Habsburgs to bind themselves by treaty to respect their rights;251 and even apart from these obligations, the Habsburgs had not dared press the Hungarian Protestants too hard, for fear of driving them into the arms of the Turks. Thus Leopold I, on recovering Transylvania, had promised to respect its liberties, so that in 1780 the 350,000 or so Protestants of the Grand Principality252 still enjoyed toleration, and were fairly well situated
in most respects. The Protestants of Inner Hungary had been less fortunate, for their liberties had been steadily reduced as the Habsburgs’ grip on the country tightened. The latest legal enactment on the subject, the Carolina Resolutio of 1731, had confined the public celebration of their services to a few specified places, and under Maria Theresa’s regime (which became known to its victims as the ‘Babylonian Captivity’) many vexatious restrictions had been imposed on them. They had to observe Catholic feast-days, their clergy were subject to visitations by Catholic priests; a Catholic oath was required of all persons entering the public services, so that conscientious Protestants were debarred from such careers. In Croatia (where they numbered, indeed, only 3,500), they were explicitly debarred either from holding office or from owning land. Nevertheless, they were not forbidden to exist, and the census of 1782 recorded about 975,000 Calvinists and 600,000 Lutherans – a quarter of the total population – in Hungary-Croatia. It may be remarked that of these, the Calvinists were almost entirely Magyars. The Lutherans were either Slovaks from the North (where Lutheranism had succeeded Hussitism) or newly-arrived German colonists.
The Monarchy contained also a fair number of adherents of faiths outside these two main bodies of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Nearly all the ‘Vlachs’ or Roumanians found in, or immigrating into, Transylvania, had belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, as, originally, had the Ruthenes who infiltrated into North-Eastern Hungary from East Galicia. These schismatics had been ‘tolerated’, i.e. allowed to live and to practise their religion unmolested, but the Orthodox Church had not been admitted to the status of a ‘received’ (established) one, nor included in the Transy lvanian inter-confessional agreement of 1572. A bishopric had been established for the Orthodox Roumanians in the seventeenth century at Gyulafehérvár; it had been dependent on the Archbishopric of Târgoviste, in Wallachia. Meanwhile, numbers of Orthodox Serbs and Vlachs had been infiltrating into the Military Frontier, where also they were tolerated (being needed as soldiers), and in 1692 the Orthodox Church received a powerful reinforcement when, as described elsewhere, the Patriarch of Ipek led his great body of followers into Hungary and was granted a Privilege guaranteeing his community their religious freedom and autonomy.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 14
