It was, moreover, not even true that most of the products of the age were non-political. Among the Czechs, in particular, there were few – possibly, among the better-known figures, only Dobrowský – whose nationalism was not already intensely and belligerently political. The Slavy Dčera is an allegory representing the sufferings of the Slav nation under its German and Magyar oppressors; it is full of the most megalomaniac glorifications of the greatness and virtue of the Slavs, and its last cantos depict a Paradise in which true Slavs and their friends enjoy their glorious reward, while their enemies and, in particular, renegades from Slavdom, are submitted to disgusting tortures. Another ‘literary’ production of purely political intent (and great political significance, since it enormously enhanced the Czechs’ national self-esteem) was a collection of poems, known from the sites at which they were ‘discovered’ as the Königinhof and Grünberg MSS., which depicted a glorious Czech civilization allegedly existing in the Dark Ages. In fact, the ‘discoverer’ of them, a certain Hanka, had forged them.64 One of the warmest admirers of Palacký (who, incidentally, was deceived by these fabrications) has written of him that ‘his essential merit was to have understood very early that political liberty was the necessary condition of national independence.65 In his history, as another admirer has written, there are two closely-interwoven guiding threads, which run all through it: ‘the racial conflict between Czech and German, the spiritual conflict between Rome and the Reformation’,66 Czech nationalism appearing as ‘enriched and hallowed by the ideals of humanity, justice and rectitude,’67 while the Germans are shown as interlopers and tyrants. The Magyars are condemned, not only for oppressing the Slavs, but for their very existence, since they are reproached with the historic sin of having cut off the southern from the northern branch of the West Slavs (in point of fact, the accusation is misplaced; the separation of the two branches of Slavs may or may not have been historically unfortunate, but it was not the work of the Magyars but of their predecessors, the Avars). So blatant was the political purpose behind much of this work that it is difficult to believe that it really escaped the eye of the authorities. We shall see in the next chapter that one man at least who after 1830 sat at the very heart of things made no bones whatever about encouraging Czech nationalism for political purposes. During most of the period which we are now describing, that man, Count Anton Kolowrat, was not a member of the central government, but since 1809 he had already occupied a key post in Bohemia as Oberstburggraf of Prague, and it is more than likely that already in that capacity he was actively furthering the cause for which he afterwards did so much. The decree reintroducing instruction in Czech into the gymnasia could not have been issued without his recommendation. And it is hard to think that Sedlnitzky, who was also a Czech, did not look the other way when the Czech cultural pioneers went so happily picnicking in political fields.68 Palacký, for example, never received more than a ‘hint’ that he should modify his anti-German effusions. He never got into any sort of trouble for them.
None of this activity, however, reached the surface of political life. The narrow basis of the composition of the Bohemian and Carniolan Estates would have excluded the young nationalists from membership of them; and in any case, the Estates never met except to give a purely ritual assent to the Government’s ‘proposals’. And once the small intellectual ferment among the Germans had been neutralized, the picture throughout the German-Bohemian Lands, from 1815 to 1830, was one of unbroken calm. Not a single political trial of an Austrian subject took place in the Hereditary or Bohemian Lands during the last twenty years of Francis’s reign.69
More activity might have been expected from the Poles, who had certain real causes for complaint, apart from the loss of their independence. Viennese writers stress the benefits conferred on Galicia by Austrian rule, especially on the peasants, and it is probably true that those unfortunate beings were brought a long way nearer to humanity by the protection afforded them by the Kreis officials; later events were to prove that the peasants generally in fact regarded the local officials as their friends and protectors. Some local economic resources were developed: the yield of the salt-mines, for example, rose by 400%.
But against this, as Polish writers point out, taxation, both direct and indirect, rose enormously (by over 400% between 1773 and 1817), and against such active items as the considerable development of the linen industry, which was largely in the hands of immigrant Germans, had to be set such debit items as the increased cost of living and the almost total disappearance of Galicia’s old export trade in wheat.70
The same writers accuse Austria of hostility to Polish culture and of ‘Germanization’, and the latter accusation has this much of substance that, besides the fact that administration and justice were conducted in Latin or German, which was also the language of all secondary education, both Joseph II and his successors had brought in numerous German artisans, etc. into Galicia; Lemberg had become almost a German town, and remained so up to 1848.
Nevertheless, the Polish nobles did not revolt during these years. They script were passed because the censors could not read them. Many of the leading Czech and Slovene literary figures were themselves censors, and happily let through writings with which they sympathized. simply maintained their passive resistance to the regime, boycotting the Austrian officials and avoiding their own civil obligations as far as they dared,71 but not attempting more.
Their hostility was even beginning gradually to weaken. In 1826 the Austrian Government sent up a new Governor, Prince Lobkowitz, with the avowed object of conciliating the Poles, and he was meeting with some success. The Roman Catholic Church, a very powerful local factor, was in any case more favourable to Catholic Austria than to Protestant Prussia, or Orthodox Russia.
Politically all was quiet among the Ruthenes. The Roumanians of the Bukovina resented its attachment to Galicia, the influx of foreign administrators, the Polonization of the schools and the control imposed on the Orthodox Church, but they submitted to their fate with sufficient philosophy.
*
In Hungary, as always in this half-century, things were much livelier. The Magyar national and cultural revival was by now in full spate. The work of Kazinczy and his circle of correspondents was already transforming the Magyar language into a vehicle capable of expressing deep poetry, high abstract thought and all practical requirements of public and private everyday life. An abundant literature in the ‘renewed language’ was coming into being, much of it still crude and imitative, but some of it fit to challenge comparison with all except the most advanced national literatures of the day. This pioneer generation included one man of real genius, Mihály Vörösmarty, whose grandiose epic Zalán Futása (The Flight of Zalán), which appeared in 1825, was at once hailed as a national achievement of the highest order. In fact, the linguistic and literary renaissance among the Magyars already possessed an immediate political significance which the corresponding Czech and Slovene movements had yet to achieve; for since the eventual replacement of Latin and German by Magyar in public life was already one of the nation’s political demands, every new epic or drama in the native language whetted the national appetite for further concessions and was hailed as further justification of them. Thus the cultural movement itself helped stiffen the national resistance to Francis’s absolutism.
But the Hungarians had also another weapon in their armoury, in the shape of their constitutional rights and de facto nuisance power in respect to their contribution to the common services of the Monarchy, and it was over this point that Francis’s attempt to rule the country absolutely ended by breaking down.
In 1813, when the Government needed recruits, to the considerable number of 60,000, for its new wars, it simply announced that in view of the urgency there was no time to convoke a Diet, and sent the demands straight to the Counties, sending down Royal Commissioners when these proved recalcitrant. This did not even prove necessary except in one or two Counties; most of them accepted the Government’s case. Whe
n the Government tried to repeat the procedure in 1815, asking now for 30,000 men, there were more objectors, since another Diet was by then overdue, and by 1816 28,420 of the total 90,000 had still not been supplied. But after the unexpectedly quick close of hostilities, the recruiting campaign was called off and no recruits were asked in 1816, 1817, 1818 or 1819. Meanwhile, Hungary had accepted the inevitable and had paid her contributio in Einlösungsscheine.
Thus a certain breathing-space had ensued which, incidentally, the Court had used to strengthen its hand by the issue (in February 1819) of a ruling which formally conferred on the sandalled nobles, whom it could hope to find more amenable to influence than the economically independent bene possessionati, the right, which usage, rather than any written rule had previously denied them72 of voting at the meetings of the County Congregationes.73
But in 1820, when Metternich felt the call to intervene in Naples and Piedmont, the Court announced that the Hungarian regiments must again be brought up to war strength, and told the Hungarian Court Chancellery to instruct the Counties to produce another 30,000 men. This elicited strong protests, whereupon the Court ingeniously said that it would content itself with the number in arrears from 1815 (a figure, in fact, only 1,580 smaller than its original demand but one which, it could maintain, had already been accepted). But on 13 August 1822, it further demanded payment of the contributio in silver, or, if made in Einlösungsscheine, at the new rate: 13½ million instead of 5¼.74 This time there was tumult indeed. Many of the Counties flatly refused to obey either order, and the Royal Commissioners found the task of getting in the men and money by force to be beyond their powers. Representations went to and fro for three long years until at last, constrained to realize that a single national body, one of whose two ‘Tables’ was safe to be on his side, was after all a more manageable proposition than fifty-two County Congregationes, some of them situated in almost inaccessible townlets, Francis yielded and convoked the Diet for 11 September 1825. Here he met with criticism so acrimonious and so prolonged – the Diet held 271 sessions, spread over very nearly two years – that he was obliged to make something of an apology for his recent behaviour and to swear all over again the respect for the Constitution to which he had pledged himself in 1792. The Diet further resolved to appoint a new set of Committees to prepare for its successor a re-edition of the national gravamina, bringing up to date, for the purpose, the reports of the 1792 Committees.
This Diet, by its successful defence of its own rights and of the Counties’, had thus imposed the first check ever inflicted in the Monarchy on the steady advance of absolutism which had been proceeding since 1792. In this respect it deserves the place assigned to it by most Hungarian historians as the first Diet of the ‘Reform Era’. It reflected the new spirit also in one other respect: in the increased extent of the linguistic demands which were put forward, as well as the vehemence with which they (and indeed, all the Diet’s wishes) were pressed. This time, the Crown was asked to make Magyar not only the language of administration throughout Inner Hungary (in some branches, after a period of grace), but also that of instruction, even in elementary schools. It is true that the demands met with the accustomed refusal, and the only notable result of the Diet’s work in this field was a non-contentious one: after one speaker had been enlarging on the need for a National Academy, and the difficulty of raising funds for it, a young man of whom much was to be heard in the near future, Count István Széchenyi, electrified the House by rising to his feet and offering a year’s income from his estates for the foundation of the institution.
In other respects, however, the Diet hardly deserved the name of ‘reform’. Ninety per cent of its energies were spent simply on defending the national Constitution against infringement or innovation – i.e., in practice, against the Crown’s attempt to get money or recruits from the country without the Diet’s consent. In all the instructions given by the fifty-two Counties to their representatives, not one contained any mention of social reform. On this issue, the Diet was fully as reactionary as Francis himself, or Metternich.
Nor was there any difference here between the ‘Court party’ and the ‘national opposition’; the division between them was exclusively on the question of greater or less centralist control. If anything, the so-called ‘Opposition’ was the more reactionary of the two.
The literary and cultural revival was itself anything but reformist on social issues. Bessenyei himself had argued:
Thanks be to Providence that we Magyars have always remained to this day a nation of landlords! Knowest thou why the multitude of peasants may not appear to speak for themselves at my nation’s Diets? Because they are not landowners or landlords, but the nation’s hereditary tenants living within the noble system. The noble cannot take the peasant’s land from him, but neither can the peasant do ought but serve and support his lord.
A few of the young literati looked to the uncorrupted peasantry as the reservoir of the nation’s strength, and even to their language as the pure well-spring from which a linguistic revival must derive; but not one of them (since their prison sentences had cured Kazinczy and his young friends of their revolutionary ardour) interested himself publicly, or even in private, in social reform. This was, indeed, the natural result of the social structure of the country, for the Hungarian noble class was so broad that most educated men belonged to it by birth, and the pride in membership of it so great that the honoratiores who won a half place in it (the number of those who did so had, indeed, been growing rapidly since Joseph II’s reforms) almost always at once adopted its outlook, often in exaggerated form. And Hungarian history being what it was, it was inevitable that, especially when the waves of romanticism reached Hungary, the young poets and playwrights should, even more than in most countries, seek their inspiration in the national past, and sing the glories of a day when the Magyars were indeed a nation of warrior-conquerors, holding their land by the sword, and by constant vigilance against the foreigner; Zalán Futása itself is an outstanding example of this.75 Thus the cultural renaissance, in this stage of its development, tended actually to reinforce the conservatism of the purely political movement.
During these decades Hungarian nationalism had occupied itself no more with the non-Magyars than with the peasants; each had been regarded as irrelevant to the problem of the day, which was the struggle against Vienna. And in fact, none of the nationalities of Inner Hungary made any impact on its political life during the period. This was, perhaps, remarkable in the case of the Serbs, who had demonstrated so vigorously against the Hungarian State in 1790, and were still under the leadership of the extremely bellicose Archbishop, Stepan Stratimirovics, who had presided over the ‘Illyrian Congress’. Nor did Stratimirovics alter his political views with advancing years; when the Serb revolution broke out under Kara George in 1804 he wrote secretly to the Czar, asking him to establish a Protectorate, if possible under a Russian Grand Duke, to include not only Serbia and Bosnia, but also the Serb districts of Hungary.
Moreover, this was the age of the first real Serbian cultural rebirth, and since the terrain for this was extremely unfavourable in Serbia, where Miloš Obrenović could not write his own name, and mistrusted all education, and most of the Bishops, until 1830, were Phanariote Greeks, who were strongly hostile to Serbian culture, it was chiefly outside the Principality that the new movement developed, and not least, in Hungary. Hungarian Serbs founded a gymnasium in Ujvidék in 1816, and in 1826 a literary society, the Matica Srbska, which soon moved to the same town, which became known as the ‘Serbian Athens’, and was perhaps the chief centre of Serb culture of the day.
But the younger generation failed to fuse with the older. Stratimirovics was so intensely conservative that he opposed any new development whatever. He refused to allow a modern Serb liturgy to be used in place of the Old Slavonic, and petitioned the censor to forbid publication of a new grammar by Vuk Karadžić in his new orthography; throughout his long life (he died only in 1836) he imposed on h
is people, as far as he could compass it, a spiritual standstill as complete as that which Francis was enforcing on the Monarchy as a whole.76 Thus the seed scattered from Ujvidék fell not in its own neighbourhood, but in the Principality. Meanwhile, in the new situation, with the canny Miloš installed in Belgrade, Austria supporting the integrity of the Porte and Russia turned discreet, Stratimirovics had no chance to go on playing at international politics.
It may be added that the decay of the Serb element in Hungary outside its strongholds in the South was already setting in. A writer who occupied himself with these questions noted in 1847 that ‘for the past twenty-five years the Serb Orthodox communities in Transdanubia and west of the Tisza have been dwindling steadily, because many Serbs are migrating to Serbia’. Many parishes, including Székesfehérvár, Györ, Komárom, Miskolc, Tokay, etc. were closing down, for lack of funds to pay the stipends of the priest, and the Serbian shopkeepers in the villages ‘had vanished completely, and now one hardly finds any shopkeepers except Jews’.77
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 35
