The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)
Page 38
For Francis, the choice presented no problem. His abhorrence of change had by now become pathological indeed. Only in the religious field was it not absolute; in 1833 negotiations for a Concordat were opened with the Holy See, but even they broke down on Francis’s refusal to surrender the prerogatives enjoyed by the lay arm over the ecclesiastical. For the rest: ‘I want no change’, he said to the Hofkanzler, von Pillersdorf, in 1831. ‘Let the laws be applied justly. Our laws are good and just. Justice is all in all.’ Pillersdorf suggested that change was sometimes necessary, but Francis replied: ‘This is no time for reforms. The people are like men who have been badly wounded. One must not keep touching and irritating their wounds.’3
On another occasion, Count Chotek, Oberstburggraf of Bohemia, suggested reviving the commutation of the peasants’ services. Francis said to Kolowrat, now his adviser in chief on internal affairs: ‘Count Chotek, too, seems to me to have got infected with liberal ideas. What has happened to him?’ Kolowrat ventured to remark that the Bohemian landlords, on the whole, favoured the change, but Francis broke off the conversation, saying: ‘No! No! Leave well alone!’4 And Metternich sang his old song of not being really an obscurantist, seeing that advances were necessary, but they must always be gradual; the present was ‘no time for innovations’.5
Nevertheless, Francis himself was not the man he had been. He had been severely ill in 1826, and when he recovered, much of his old industry and determination were gone. As it happened, moreover, the change in public opinion coincided (there was more coincidence in it than sequence of cause and effect) with the appearance in the innermost councils of the Court of a man professing Liberal sentiments; a single individual, but one who from his position at the heart of things was able to influence the destinies of millions.
This was Count Francis Anton Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, a Bohemian magnate of famous family and great estates, who, after serving as Burgomaster of Prague and Oberstburggraf of Bohemia, had been called to Vienna by Francis in 1826 and made head of the Political Section of the Staatsrat, with the rank of Staats- und Konferenzrat, to fill the place of Zichy, who had died; as such, he controlled appointments and promotions in the administrative services. The next year he was made, in addition, head of the Financial Section, which gave him supreme control over finances, for when Stadion died in 1824, although Count Nádasdy, President of the Hofkammer, succeeded to his title of Finance Minister, finances came under the Staatsrat, ceasing to be an independent Ministry.
In 1829 Kolowrat was appointed head of a special Committee to investigate the falling-off in State revenues, and in April of the same year Francis signed a document reserving to himself only a limited sphere of activities: the formal functions of Head of the State, including Acts of Grace, appointments to the highest offices, changes in existing legislature, and decisions on questions of the highest importance, or questions on which the Hofstellen had failed to agree. To help him perform these last duties, he appointed in 1830 a ‘Permanent Inner Conference’, consisting of Metternich, Kolowrat and Nádasdy with himself as President. His decision of the previous year had already meant that nearly all the business of State except that falling within Metternich’s field, or that of the Hofkriegsrat, was now dealt with by Kolowrat, and furthermore, as the committee of investigation was found to be performing in effect the functions of a Ministry of Finance, Francis in 1830 made it permanent, Nádasdy becoming de facto only Kolowrat’s subordinate.
Again in 1829, Francis made Kolowrat head of another Committee, nominally under the Presidency of the Archduke Ferdinand, for clearing up the arrears of business which had accumulated on his own desk. As these promptly accumulated again, yet another Committee, again under Kolowrat, was appointed in 1832 to deal with the fresh arrears.
Kolowrat left no memoirs. What we know about him comes chiefly from his enemies, above all, the garrulous Metternich (and his equally verbose biographers) and Kübeck. These sources are obviously biased, and against them must be set the high opinion of him which was held by Francis and by the sensible Archduke John. Yet he cannot at best have been an easy character. He was ruthless in shouldering aside those who stood in the way of his ambitions, but fractious and nervous in the face of real opposition. Thus he excused himself from that important part of his duties which involved Hungarian affairs because he could not bear arguing points with the temperamental Hungarian Chancellor, Count Reviczky. When he failed to get his way, it was his habit to tender his resignation, or pleading ill-health, which may have been been real,6 to retire to his Bohemian estates. Somehow or other, these expedients always worked, for he held his position up to the outbreak of revolution and through the first days of the revolution itself.
Whether he was really a financial genius, may be doubted. His fame in this respect derived from his (or (Nádasdy’s) achievement – if it was really due to either of them7 – in having produced Budget estimates for 1830 which allowed for the smallest deficit within living memory, one of something under 10 million gulden.8 This had been achieved partly by a further pruning of the army estimates (to 38 million gulden, ordinary expenditure,9 partly to the introduction of a new consolidated tax on consumption in the form of a general excise, collected by levying an octroi on meat, wine, beer, and various other commodities. Although highly unpopular,10 this tax had brought in 11 million gulden, or 7 million gulden nett, since certain other taxes had been remitted when it was introduced.11 The estimates for 1831 had actually provided for a surplus, although a minute one.12
That these calculations were promptly upset by the outbreak of the July Revolution, so that the deficits recommenced,13 was, of course, not Kolowrat’s fault. The deficits were occasioned almost entirely by the increased military expenditure, and Kolowrat always maintained that this was due to Metternich’s extravagant policy of keeping order in Europe by bayonet. But neither he, nor, for that matter, his critic and rival expert, Kübeck, had any real nostrum for Austria’s financial condition. Both ruled out equally any substantial increase in direct taxation, and both rejected the drastic remedy of another ‘State bankruptcy’. The only real difference between them was that Kübeck was content to go on raising loans ad infinitum, regarding the most important duty of policy to be that of keeping the State credit good, so that the loans could be floated cheaply, while Kolowrat – and on this point he was surely right – saw that the loans only increased Austria’s ultimate expenditure.14 He would have risked issuing more paper money, which in fact had to be done in 1831, when the paper currency doubled and its cover in silver sank from 1:5 at the beginning of 1830 to 1:10 at the end of 1831.
Kolowrat’s own liberalism did not really go very deep. As a great Bohemian aristocrat he sympathized with his fellow-nobles’ objections to the dictates of the bureaucracy, but he once told Metternich that the latter was mistaken in supposing that the two men’s principles differed. He (Kolowrat) was himself ‘an aristocrat by birth and conviction’, and entirely agreed with Metternich ‘that one must have conservative aims and must work systematically towards them’. But he disagreed with Metternich’s methods of ‘a forest of bayonets and rigid adherence to the status quo’. This only exhausted the Government’s resources, made the masses wretched and discontented and provoked the middle classes to hatred of the aristocracy, which they would end by destroying, in alliance with the masses. The way to avert the otherwise certain revolution was to make concessions to promote the material well-being of the people, bringing them well-being as reward for their industry.15 But he did, at least, succeed, if only once, in producing a balanced budget. That, after all, was something; the fact that he detested Metternich personally, and took every occasion to thwart him out of personal spite, if not principle, was even more. This, combined with the fact that he had Francis’s ear, made him the hope of all liberals, even of anyone who on any ground was against Metternich, and this mere fact probably often led him into supporting policies more liberal than he would otherwise have approved. And he must have been a competent ad
ministrator in his way. The confidence reposed in him by Francis would alone give proof of this, for Francis was an excellent judge of men. His supporters also included at least two members of the Imperial family, the Archdukes Charles and John, both of whom both agreed with his principles and regarded him as more capable than Metternich of creating internal order in the Monarchy. It was the combination Charles-Kolowrat (effectively backed, on this occasion, by Salamon Rothschild) that quashed Metternich’s plan of intervening in France and Germany in 1830, and it was John, who had a high opinion of his abilities, who secured him his place as dictator of Austria’s internal affairs after 1835 and worked with him in 1848 to bring about the dismissal of Metternich.
Apart from their difference of views on the prime question of priorities (international order or internal consolidation), Metternich and Kolowrat disagreed on a number of other points. Kolowrat was a pronounced Josephinian in his views on Church questions, whereas Metternich inclined even further to the ‘Party of Piety’ after he had, on 30 January 1831, taken as his third wife the young Countess Melanie Zichy-Ferraris, who shared much of the piety of her step-aunt-in-law, Metternich’s earlier Egeria.
The Zichys were also one of the great Hungarian families, and his affection for his young wife, combined with his memories of the elder lady, may well have contributed towards strengthening his predilection for Hungary’s aristocracy and confirming the view of the virtues of its Constitution which he had adopted from Francis.16 On these points there was a profound and most important difference between him and Kolowrat, who would in any case have regarded the Hungarian Constitution with disfavour as an obstacle to the efficient government and financial equilibrium of the Monarchy and a shield for disloyalty. But in addition, he was an enthusiastic Czechophile, and beyond that, a warm Slavophile. In his days in Bohemia he had been an active patron of the Czech cultural revival, and when he became head of personnel affairs in Vienna, it was said of him that an applicant had only to say ‘My name is Wenzel and I’m a Czech’ to get his appointment.
Sentiment and reason worked together to make him further in every way at his disposal (and they were innumerable) the cause of the Slavs in both halves of the Monarchy: of the Czechs in the West and far more actively, since the opportunities were greater, of the Croats in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown. The following pages will give examples of this.
The two men differed also on other points. Kolowrat, essentially a bureaucrat, found Francis’s system of direct rule through civil servants eminently suited to his genius. He was also, even apart from Hungary, a centralist. Metternich was impatient of ronds de cuir, and also held that, even apart from Hungary, a highly centralized system was incompatible with the special nature of the Monarchy. Finally, while entirely accepting the principle that the Monarch’s will was absolute, he thought it wise that a machinery should exist which might restrain the Monarch from hasty and ill-considered moves. His prescription was an advisory Reichsrat, which should include, besides Archdukes and elder statesmen, also assessors, nominated by the Crown, from the Estates of each Land. Soon after being appointed Chancellor, he expounded these proposals in a reasoned memorandum to Francis, who promptly put it into a drawer unread. He revived them unsuccessfully in the struggle for power which followed Francis’s death, and once again on 12 March 1848, when they were again swept aside. It was reserved for the experimenters of 1860 to call into being an institution which in its functions and its composition recalled strongly Metternich’s proposals of forty years earlier. It is true that the result was speedy failure.
Apart from Metternich and Kolowrat, Francis, in his last years, tended to lean chiefly on his youngest brother, Ludwig. Ludwig was, by all reports, the least talented of the whole family (most of whose other members disliked him), and Metternich’s enemies accused him of having pushed Ludwig forward because he could dominate him, as he could not his more experienced and self-confident brothers. It is, however, true that, given Francis’s predilection for employing members of his own family, he had little other choice, since the other brothers were either in disgrace, or embedded in other occupations. That later developments were to place Ludwig in a position of key importance for the destinies of the whole Monarchy was, in part, unintentional.
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Ludwig’s promotion arose, ultimately, as a result of a definitive decision taken by Francis, again in 1830, in respect of another family problem, that of the succession to his thrones. Francis’s second wife, the mother of all his surviving children, was not only his first cousin twice over,17 but also came of infected stock. One or both of these facts had rebounded on Francis’s eldest son, Ferdinand, who was clearly incapable of becoming an effective ruler. Physically, he was subject to epileptic fits, and in general, extremely frail, while mentally, if not idiotic, he was on the verge of idiocy. This simplicity went hand in hand with an extreme goodness of heart, which earned him the deserved soubriquet of ‘Ferdinand the Goodhearted’18 and the effect of the combination was that he could never be got to see that the way to remedy any grievance was not promptly to grant the petitioner whatever he asked – a formula in any case genuinely inappropriate for dealing with the complex affairs of the Monarchy, and nothing short of terrifying to his entourage, whose general prescription for ruling was, it is hardly unfair to say, the precise contrary.
Ferdinand’s younger brother, Franz Karl, the only other of Francis’s sons to survive infancy, was no genius and took little interest in politics, but he was a man of average capacities. In him, moreover, there rested what seemed to be the only hopes of the Crown’s remaining with Francis’s heirs, for Ferdinand, up to 1830, had been judged unfit to marry. Franz Karl, on the other hand, had taken a wife, Princess Sophie Wittelsbach, a younger daughter of King Maximilian of Bavaria,19 and although by 1830 Sophie, in spite of several fausses couches, had not yet become a mother, she might clearly still become one: things were pointing that way again in the spring. There was obviously something to be said for passing Ferdinand over altogether, but Francis was reluctant to do this, partly out of affection for the poor young man, partly out of respect for the principle of legitimacy, and on this point he was supported by Metternich, nominally at least on the same ground of legitimacy, although his enemies maintained that his stronger motive was the calculation that if Ferdinand came to the throne, Metternich himself, as the hapless youth’s mentor, would be the real ruler of the Monarchy. At any rate, the decision was taken in Ferdinand’s favour, and Metternich arranged to have it made irrevocable by having Ferdinand crowned King of Hungary at the next Hungarian Diet.20
This still left the further succession with the younger branch of the family. In 1831 Ferdinand was, after all, given a bride, Princess Marie Anne Caroline of Savoy, a lady who bore her truly unenviable lot with Christian fortitude, but with so little interest in public affairs that she never even learnt to understand German. It was, however, soon known that the poor epileptic was never to be a father. Sophie, on the other hand, had, on 18 August 1830, given birth to a son, Francis Joseph, to whom she afterwards bore two brothers, Ferdinand Maximilian (b. 6 July 1832) and Karl Ludwig (b. 30 July 1833).21
This is the place to kill a couple of widespread and persistent legends.22 Sophie was a very ambitious and very bossy woman – a famous description of her, in 1848, called her the only man in the Imperial family – and she certainly fretted against the position of inferiority to which the principle of legitimacy relegated her menfolk, but it is quite untrue that either she or her husband (who is usually held, probably with some exaggeration, to have been mere wax in her hands) in any way resented the decision that Ferdinand should succeed his father: their own respect for the principle of legitimacy forbade this. Sophie was, indeed, aghast when Ferdinand married, but calmed down when assured that there was no prospect of her sons’ being supplanted in the succession. Still less did either she or her husband bear Metternich any shadow of resentment for his part in the decision, or side with Kolowrat against him. Franz Karl wa
s, on the contrary, the staunchest supporter whom Metternich had in the Imperial family during the next fifteen years, taking his side more consistently even than Ludwig, while Sophie had for him the deepest personal devotion. The Chancellor and his family were practically members of the Archducal family circle, and her distress when he fell sick was almost passionate.23 Corti’s book contains, on the other hand, not a single passage showing that she was aware of Kolowrat’s existence.
Metternich was also the Archduchess’ political Bible. She was in fact a silly woman who had no political ideas, in the true sense of the word, whatever, and the emotions which served her in place of ideas were entirely primitive. If the thrones of her menfolk and her in-laws were undisturbed, that was good; if they were threatened, it was bad. She swallowed whole Metternich’s pontifications on ‘order’, entirely agreed with his recipe for preserving it (by bayonets) and accepted everything he laid down about the sinfulness of democracy, nationalism, etc. As Corti points out,24 the best proof of her faith in his wisdom is that when the time came for Francis Joseph to be taught statecraft, it was to Metternich that she sent him to learn it.25
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The stirrings of new life were not, in fact, very vigorous in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands. In 1831 ‘Anastasius Grün’ published his mildly political Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten, often hailed as the first blossom of the Vormärz; as a great aristocrat (the pseudonym covered the identity of Count Anton von Auersperg), he could afford the risk, and in any case, the book was published in Hamburg. The Rheinische Merkur reported during March that ideas of reform and of a Constitution had found their way into Austria and were widespread among the middle-classes; and private diaries show intellectuals envying the French their courage. But history does not record them as imitating it. Some riots which took place in Vienna had (as usual) material origins; they were against the new consumption tax. Sedlnitzky reported reassuringly that only the worshippers of novelty were interested in the new-fangled ideas; most people were quite content with things as they were.26