26 This body was now divided into three geographical sections, the Bohemian, the Austrian and the Illyrian. The Gubernia were: in the Bohemian section, Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia; in the Austrian, Lower Austria, Upper Austria with Salzburg (these were treated as one Land until 1826, when Salzburg was separated off), Tirol-Vorarlberg, and Styria; in the Illyrian, Carinthia (to which the Klagenfurt Kreis was re-attached in 1825), Carniola (the ‘Illyrian Government’), the Littoral (Gorizia-Gradisca, Trieste, Istria, the northernmost Dalmatian islands, and until 1822, when they were returned to the Hungarian Crown, those portions of civilian Croatia and of the Hungarian Littoral which had belonged to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Illyria – the military portions had been immediately re-incorporated in the Military Frontier) and Dalmatia (the historic province minus its northernmost islands).
27 In 1816 the Estates of Carniola complained against certain administrative abuses. The document was simply sent back to them, and an investigation against its authors set on foot.
28 See above, p. 160.
29 The last Hungarian Diet had been the disastrous one of 1811/12. The Transylvanian had not been convoked since 1810.
30 The appointment was first offered to the Archduke Anton, but after he had refused to take up a post which carried no authority with it, Rainer was sent down instead. The Viceroy was, indeed, a purely decorative figure: the Gubernia corresponded directly with Vienna, without showing him their reports. Rainer occupied himself chiefly with holding modest Courts in the two capitals, organizing certain charitable institutions, and with laying out the truly beautiful ornamental gardens of Monza outside Milan.
31 I.e., there were no Patrimonial Courts in the Kingdom. The law, both civil and criminal, was Austrian.
32 Many of them were chosen from among men who had proved their capacity in the ‘difficult’ province of Galicia (H. Benedikt, Kaiseradler, p. 114).
33 An attempt to introduce the Austrian paper currency had evoked such strong protest that the order had been withdrawn. The same concession was made to the Tirol.
34 Other members were Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, Metternich, Wallis, von Dube, von Lederer, von Hamer and von Pfleger.
35 Until that date he had used the Kanzlei for his secretariat, but his title had been only ‘Minister of Foreign Affairs’.
36 Charmatz, Das Politische Denken in Oesterreich, p. 10, records one case: the lower age limit for admission to a gymnasium was ten. The parents of one exceptionally precocious boy wanted him to enter a school earlier. They had to put in a Majestätsgesuch, which went right up to the Staatsrat, which referred it back to the relevant Hofstelle for a considered report.
37 These words were the work of Gentz.
38 Sedlnitzky became wirklicher Präsident only on 17 May 1817, but had been in effective charge since 16 August 1815.
39 An unexpected by-product of this was the foundation of a Protestant theological faculty in Vienna, to obviate the need for Protestant students to go abroad.
40 The only authority for this famous speech is a newspaper.
41 Here the objection was that the national susceptibilities of the Czechs might be hurt.
42 Pope Pius VII had allowed the Order to reconstitute itself in 1814.
43 See Bibl, Tragödie, p. 129 and the literature quoted by him in his n. 40.
44 See below, p. 230.
45 M.K.P., III. 88.
46 The Society itself had been founded as early as 1784 – under Joseph II – by a group of aristocrats.
47 It is interesting that Kübeck, who at this time was serving as a minor official in a Moravian Kreisamt and kept a fairly voluminous diary, never once mentions the national question in it.
48 In making these distinctions, I follow Denis, op. cit., II. 52. This work contains a far more detailed account than it is possible to give here of the Czech revival. For a shorter account, see R. W. Seton Watson, History of the Czechs and Slovaks, pp. 170 ff.
49 Safarik was in fact a convert, and rather an unwilling one, to Czechdom. He was born in Hungary of a Protestant Slovak family which wrote its name as Šafáry and spent many years teaching in the Serb lycée in Ujvidék, which he had to leave because the Orthodox clergy objected to a Protestant’s teaching there. He was then in difficult circumstances, from which Palacký rescued him, but insisted that he should in return write his name Czech fashion, and his books in the Czech language. He was always a good Slovak at heart.
50 See the remarkable testimonies quoted by Denis, op. cit., pp. 176–7.
51 The text of this Decree is given by Fischel, Sprachenrecht, p. 54. Denis, p. 96, writes that its opponents ‘got it repealed’, but I can find no authority for this statement.
52 The Archduke retired to Styria after his disgrace, when Tirol was forbidden him. He settled down, made a morganatic marriage with the daughter of a Styrian postmaster, and devoted himself to raising the cultural and economic standards of the province. Before him a certain Baron Cojz had played the Maecenas in a small way, to the local culture (German as well as Slovene). The earliest at all memorable figure of the Slovene renaissance, a priest named Vodnik, owed much to his encouragement.
53 See above, p. 111, n. 5.
54 Wendel, Kampf der Südslawen um Freiheit und Einheit, p. 128.
55 To make things worse, many copies of these products had been burnt as heretical.
56 Theology was, however, taught in Slovene at the Laibach Lyceum and students of theology there were compelled to learn Slovene.
57 See below, p. 252.
58 Grammatik der Slawischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steiermark (1808). Like all Kopitar’s work, this was written in German, as was Palacký’s history.
59 See below, p. 299.
60 When Poniatowski’s Polish Legions entered Galicia from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1809, the Ruthene Bishop, Mgr Angelovitch, called on the Ruthenes to rise against the Poles.
61 This does not mean that the entire educational system was Polonized. Instruction in religion had always to be given in Ruthene where the children belonged to the Greek Catholic Church, and all instruction in schools where all the children were Greek Catholics was also to be given in Ruthene, but here Polish was to be taught as a subject. In mixed schools all instruction, except in religion, was to be given in Polish, but Ruthene children were ‘as far as possible’ to be taught to read and write in their own language.
62 Prokopowitch, pp. 65 ff. One consequence of this policy was that a large number of Roumanian priests and monks had emigrated to Moldavia (id. p 36).
63 The Scotsman, Turnbull, travelling in Bohemia in 1839, notes (II. 112) that ‘the Crown, after attempts to Germanize, seemed to throw itself into the opposite extreme. An official patronage was extended to the popular dialect which it had not enjoyed before.’
64 The Königinhof MS. was ‘discovered’ in 1817; the Grünberg, a year later.
65 Denis, op. cit., p. 193.
66 R. W. Seton-Watson, op. cit., p. 151.
67 Quoted by Seton-Watson, l.c., from Werstadt.
68 Another reason for the relative indulgence of the authorities towards the Czech and other Slavonic movements was simply the imperfect linguistic equipment of the censors. Cases were recorded of literature which appeared in German and Czech; the Czech version purported to be a translation of the German but in fact contained subversive passages which were absent from the German text. The censors read only the German version, and passed both. Other cases are recorded in which mss in Russian, or even in Czech, written in Cyrillic
69 In 1815 and 1816 there were some riots against the high prices, the shortages and the increased taxation, but they were not repeated after conditions improved.
70 The decline of the wheat trade was less Austria’s fault than Prussia’s. After the annexation Austria had exempted Galicia from the operation of her tariff, in order to allow the trade to continue, but when Prussia introduced a duty on wheat (in order to damage Danzig), the exemption was useless, and was cancelled. So
me exportation of wheat still went on, but on a greatly reduced scale.
71 According to a traveller, it was a frequent habit of the nobles to leave their taxes unpaid until the officials distrained on so much corn as they calculated corresponded in value to the amount due. When it was put up for auction, the owner would buy it in himself. This often cost more than punctual payment would have entailed, but the spiritual satisfaction was counted as worth more than the money.
72 See above, p. 57.
73 Another proposal, that the County salaried officials should remain in permanence at the County centres and transact all public business without calling on the Congregationes at all, only reporting to them retrospectively every three years, had had to be dropped owing to the opposition of the Counties.
74 This figure was afterwards slightly reduced.
75 Zalán was the legendary Bulgarian king who, according to the romantic Hungarian chronicler ‘Anonymus’, was put to flight by Árpád and his paladins when they entered and conquered Hungary.
76 The Orthodox Popes described Karadžić’s alphabet as ‘the Devil’s claws’. It was largely their hostility which drove Safařik, who had been a teacher in the gymnasium in Novi-Sad, to throw up his job there in 1832 and migrate to the kindlier atmosphere of Prague. Yet Karadžić himself was a strong Serb nationalist, and in particular, no friend of the Croats.
77 Bárándy, Ueber Ungarns Zustände (Pressburg, 1847), p. 8.
78 The following paragraphs are based chiefly on Gogolak, op. cit.
78 Rudnay is, however, a typical example of the ambiguous state of ‘nationality’ in North Hungary, for his remote origin was in fact Magyar.
79 The word ‘start’ is not strictly accurate, for Bernolak had had fore-runners, notably another Catholic priest named Josef Ignatius Bajza. Bernolak, however, thought Bajza still too ‘Czecho-Slovak’.
81 Gáldi and Makkai, op. cit., p. 322.
82 In 1789 the nobles of Croatia-Slavonia formed only 2·9% of the total population, while the figure for Inner Hungary was 4·8%. This, it is true, was due mainly to the conditions in the Slavonian Counties, where the figure was only 0·45, owing to the complete absence there of sandalled nobility. In at least two of the three Counties of Croatia proper (Zagreb and Körös) the figure was much higher.
83 It is fair to point out that some Hungarian Counties expressed themselves in the same sense, at even later dates.
84 The Slavonian Counties, it will be remembered, sent their representatives direct to Pozsony.
85 Croat magnates could also sit among the Magnates, but the Croat magnate class was so intermarried with the Hungarian that most great families could sit there as either Croats or Hungarians.
86 Turopolje (in Hungarian, Turmezö) was a community consisting of fifteen communes of sandalled nobles (according to Damian, about five hundred families) in the vicinity of Zagreb. They enjoyed self-government under their own ‘Count’, who sat in Pozsony ex officio. As we shall see later, this tiny community became in the 1840s one of the storm-centres of the Hungaro-Croat relationship. Another community, in the Kalnoki mountains of Körös (this of 600 families), gave, oddly enough, no trouble.
87 In 1787 there had been 9,782 male nobles in Croatia-Slavonia against 155,519 in Inner Hungary.
88 As has been said (above, p. 65, n. 1), the urbaria of Maria Theresa’s reign had not extended to Transylvania. A rough survey was carried out in 1819, but the landlords succeeded in getting nearly half the land cultivated by peasants entered as dominical. The robot was not legally limited, and the customary stint was four days a week.
89 See above, p. 91.
90 Massimo d’Azeglio wrote: ‘The Austrian government has for many years ruled Lombardy through the Scala, and it must be said, with a certain success.’ (Cf. Benedikt, Kaiseradler, p. 114.)
91 Only twenty-four death sentences were pronounced in Lombardy, and not so many in Venetia.
92 A large number of these were, indeed, Italians from the Trentino. It is true that they generally returned to their homes Italian nationalists.
6
The System on the Wane (1830–1835)
Austrian historians count the Vormärz – the years in which the revolution of March 1848 was being gestated, and the Franciscan-Metternich system in obvious decay – as opening with the death of Francis in 1835; but in fact, the first challenge of the new age came earlier than that. Even by the late 1820s, the great economic depression whose weight on the Monarchy had paralysed resistance to the political stranglehold was lifting, allowing new economic and social forces to emerge which fretted against the vis inertiae of the ‘system’.
Moreover, by Metternich’s own philosophy, stability within the Monarchy could be assured only if ‘order’ reigned everywhere in Europe, and by the same date the European ‘order’, too, was cracking dismally. Britain had very soon repudiated Metternich’s tutelage, insisting on a strictly limited interpretation of the Quadruple Alliance, as also of the Quintuple Alliance (set up beside it with the inclusion of France) in 1818. When Alexander tried to replace the Holy Alliance (which had never been more than a pious scrap of paper) with an effective instrument for maintaining the European ‘order’, neither Britain nor France would give its signature. The ‘Protocol of Troppau’ reduced itself to an alliance between the three despotic Powers of Eastern Europe, with an authority which never extended west of the territories under the effective control of one of them, and it had very quickly become plain that Alexander did not interpret the maintenance of order as excluding changes to Russia’s advantage in the South-East European status quo. Metternich had persuaded the Czar to draw back in 1820, but he had not been able to prevent Russia from agreeing with Britain in 1826, and it was even more humiliating for him when, in 1829, the Peace of Adrianople had brought freedom to the rebellious Greeks and further foretastes of it to the other Balkan peoples, further enfeebling the Porte and dangerously strengthening Russia’s power-position in the Balkans.
But the real turning-point had come in 1830, with the July revolution in Paris and its sequels in Belgium, Italy and Poland. Metternich had collapsed at his desk when he received the news from Paris, moaning ‘my whole life’s work is destroyed!’ He had recovered his poise, and afterwards had shown all his old diplomatic expertise in retrieving from the wreckage far more than any lesser man could have salvaged. He sent Austrian troops into the Papal States, Parma and Modena, and after some dangerous moments when a clash with France seemed possible, ‘restored order’ also in Italy, an order which left Austria again the ruler, direct or indirect, of most of the peninsula. He re-established solidarity with both Prussia and Russia, agreeing with both at Münchengrätz, in September 1833, on the principle of mutual support against revolutionary agitation, smoothing over the differences which had arisen between Austria and Russia over both Poland and Turkey (which both Powers agreed to support, or to concert over the reversion if maintenance of it proved impossible) and most important of all, extracting from the Czar, Nicholas I, a promise to stand by Francis’s son, Ferdinand, when he should succeed to the throne.
Nevertheless, Metternich himself could no longer see Europe as a system of ordered States obeying his direction. The Emperor’s own advisers had been obliged to oppose his first wish to ‘restore order’ in France by a military expedition on the grounds that Austria’s financial and military resources were simply not adequate for the task: in any case, the Archduke Charles had said, sensibly, foreign bayonets could not conquer ideas. So France had followed Britain in slipping right out of his grasp, and even in Germany Austria was steadily losing ground to Prussia as that State’s real power increased with the extension of the Zollverein. That Austria missed her chance of adhering to the Zollverein in 1834 was not Metternich’s fault; her refusal to moderate her tariffs was taken against his advice, in the interests of Bohemian industrialists, but it was one which enormously weakened her influence in Germany, where Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and half a dozen other smaller S
tates all joined the Zollverein in 1833–5.1 Only the Czar had reappeared as a real friend; and Russia’s friendship, if better than her hostility, was by no means an unmixed blessing.
At home, the danger-year had, on a superficial view, passed over very satisfactorily for Austria. Of all the Kingdoms and Principalities of Italy, Lombardy-Venetia had been the most tranquil; there had hardly been a whisper of sympathy for the revolutionaries beyond its frontiers. The organizers of the Polish revolt in Russia, encouraged by Lobkowitz’ arrival and his avowed programme, and seeing visions of getting Austrian support against Russia, had not included Galicia in their plans, nor even attempted to make trouble there. The province had in fact remained quiet, although a Committee had formed itself in Lemberg to organize the dispatch of arms, ammunition and medical supplies to the Polish forces in Russia, and a few volunteers, but only a few,2 had crossed the frontier to join the fighting. After the failure of the rising the refugees, several thousand in number, who took shelter in Galicia, caused some trouble to the authorities, whose desire it was to combine a sympathetic attitude towards the Poles with a correct one towards Russia. They disarmed the refugees and returned their arms to Russia, but gave the men asylum. The consequent emotional outbursts made it seem advisable to replace Lobkowitz, who was superseded by the more imposing figure of the Archduke Ferdinand d’Este, brother of the late Empress Maria Ludovica, with a vigorous second in command (the Archduke himself was a very easy-going man) in the person of one Baron Krieg, who introduced a severer regime. It was to become apparent later that this had only driven Polish disaffection underground, not extinguished it; but at the time, the position in Galicia looked as satisfactory as that in Lombardy-Venetia.
Nevertheless, the events outside the Monarchy had produced among the people inside it a very widespread feeling that the ‘system’ was the enemy of their happiness, and moreover, that it was a weak and moribund enemy, which a determined effort could overthrow. A ripple of impatience swept over them, like the sudden gust which precedes the storm. The men at the top could no longer pretend that everyone was contented with things as they were: they had to decide whether to resist the demand for change, or to make concessions to it.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 37
