But if in one sense this attitude was simply that of the traditionalist kuruc squires, in another it was the opposite of theirs, for Kossuth wanted national liberty in the cause of reform, not of stability, and while believing that full social and political liberty must wait on national liberty, yet he also believed that internal reform, besides being desirable in itself, would bring national liberty nearer. Thus the emancipation of the peasants, itself a postulate of liberty, was also in the national interest because it would multiply twenty-fold the forces fighting for the national cause. The fiscal prerogatives of the nobles must go, not only because they constituted a negation of equality, but also because their chief beneficiaries, the magnates, were the allies of Vienna, and no true Hungarians.
Thus Kossuth made radical social and political reform a national postulate; and the greatest service which he rendered to his country (and he rendered it much service, as well as much disservice) was that he won over for the cause of internal reform many who would have rejected it had he not convinced them that it was desirable in the national interest. ‘Vienna’ argued that a thing must be bad because Hungary wanted it. Kossuth persuaded his fellow-countrymen that it must be good because ‘Vienna’ opposed it.
He was able to do this because if his thought was neither profound nor original, his facility in expressing it in convincing terms was unique. He was one of the most persuasive men ever to be born. He was of notably handsome appearance, with brilliant blue eyes under a magnificent forehead, a most winning manner and a beautifully modulated voice. As a speaker he possessed an unfailing readiness and gift of impromptu and an inexhaustible fluency which seldom failed to carry his audiences with him, at any rate if they were large. He was no less gifted with his pen, having an extraordinary gift of enlisting his readers’ sympathy for whatever cause he was pleading, by emotional appeal rather than intellectual, but not the less strongly for that. He was a superb player on the heart-strings of the Hungarian people, because they were also his own.
With such gifts he was bound, given equal opportunities, to outdistance Széchenyi in popular appeal, for ‘the Count’s’ literary style was involved, his oratory halting and even his command of the Magyar language imperfect. But the opportunities were at first not equal. Kossuth had no money to publish works of his own, and when he came to Pozsony in 1832 was gagged by the terms of his mandate. Soon, however, he was offered, and seized with both hands, an unexpected chance. The Opposition had for some time been urging, and the Government refusing, the issue of a printed record of the proceedings of the Diet. Someone hit on the idea of having a handwritten record made. Jurati took down the speeches and Kossuth was given the job of editing them.
What emerged under his hand was no verbatim transcript. The speeches of the reformers were given at length, and in eloquent periods which sometimes owed more to the genius of the editor than to that of the speakers; those of the other side were dismissed in a few colourless or sarcastic lines. But – or rather, consequently – the ‘Gazette’ quickly achieved an enormous popularity. It circulated from hand to hand over Hungary, spreading everywhere the ideas of reform and the arguments in favour of them, and marking out Kossuth as the leading hope of Young Hungary. Naturally, too, it inculcated, by suggestion but most deeply, Kossuth’s point of view of the priority of the political struggle.
And this had been underlined by the meagre results of the Diet itself. Even reformers whose positive programme did not go nearly so far as Kossuth’s were bound to agree with him that ‘Vienna’ was the obstacle in chief to even moderate progress. Thus the close of 1835 found the cause of progress little advanced in Hungary, but the forces determined to achieve it strengthened immeasurably.
*
Simultaneously with the developments in Inner Hungary, Transylvania suddenly burst into political life. Even more than in Inner Hungary, this change was the work of a single man, Baron Miklós Wesselényi. Wesselényi had accompanied Széchenyi on some of his travels and had gathered much the same impressions as the other man, but he had none of Széchenyi’s philosophical restraint or of his attachment to the Crown. He was a passionate character, big in every way: tall, with a great voice, tempestuous of soul, a vehement nationalist, very conscious of the need to defend the Magyars, both against the local Germans and Roumanians and also against the danger, of which he was acutely conscious, of Pan-Slavism, and a born rebel, of the type to see the root of all evil in ‘Vienna’. His opportunity came in 1831, when the Gubernium began impressing recruits without having obtained from the Diet the vote which the Constitution required. Under his influence several Counties refused to supply recruits and announced that they would not obey the Gubernium until a Diet had been convoked and the administration reconstituted as the Constitution demanded.
The Crown sent down General Wlassics, the Ban of Croatia, as Royal Commissioner, but Wlassics himself reported in favour of remedying the grievances of the province. The Crown yielded, and convoked the Diet for June 1834, but took the precaution of packing it with no less than 231 official members, as against only ninety-two elected, and of replacing Wlassics by Archduke Ferdinand d’Este, sent down for the purpose from Galicia. Weeks of barren recrimination followed, the Opposition denying the legality of the Government majority; then on 6 February 1835, the Crown dissolved the Diet, suspended the Constitution, forbade the Congregations to meet and left the Archduke in charge with unrestricted plenipotentiary powers.36
The waves of this disturbance spread to Inner Hungary, for Wesselényi had been given an estate there and was thus entitled to attend the Diet as a Hungarian magnate.37 In December 1834 he had made a typically forceful speech in a Hungarian town, denouncing the Crown’s reactionary attitude over the peasant question. The Crown issued writs against him, both in Hungary and Transylvania, for subversive agitation. As he could not be arrested while the Diet was in session, he remained at large, a popular idol, while the Hungarian nobles fumed at what they described as an unprecedented and illegal infringement of their right of free speech.
*
Simultaneously with this again, the political atmosphere in Croatia was undergoing a transformation as sudden and as spectacular as that in Hungary itself.
If we seek any special cause for the extraordinary developments in these years in what had previously been perhaps the most rigidly backward-looking corner of the whole Monarchy, we may perhaps find it in the reincorporation in Civilian Croatia, in 1824, of areas (no small part of the country) which had passed fifteen years first under French, then Austrian, rule, so that men now walked the streets of Zagreb and Karlovac who had been instructed in revolutionary principles by French masters, and rubbed shoulders at German high-schools with romantic Slavomanes. Here was, as it were, a tinder impregnated with the spirit of the age; but as in Hungary and Transylvania, the spark to set it ablaze was struck by a single man, who was actually of a younger generation still.
This man was a certain Ljudevit Gaj, who had been born as recently as 1809, in Krapina, in the Zagorje, son of a village apothecary (who, incidentally, like his wife, whose name was Schmidt, was of German stock). The young Gaj’s parentage was thus humble, but not so humble as to deny him education, and after leaving gymnasium in 1826, he attended University courses in Vienna, Graz and Pest. His months in Pest were crucial, for here he came under the influence of Kollar, who encouraged his political, literary and philological ambitions and largely shaped his ideas.
The nationalism which Gaj brought back to Zagreb, when he returned there in 1831, was totally different from that rigid defence of noble privileges which thitherto had constituted the sum of Croat politics. This is not to say that it was revolutionary in the social or inner-political sense: Gaj and his friends were almost all students or honoratiores, whose minds were too full of higher things to trouble about the grievances of the Croat peasants. But they were also without positive interest in the maintenance of noble prerogatives: the object of their enthusiasm was their people as a whole, without distinc
tion of class, and their goal the cultivation and satisfaction of everything which was ‘national’ – language, customs, tradition and the political ambitions devolving from them. In this sense their nationalism was modern, and total.
It was total also in its disregard of political boundaries: what mattered to it was the nation to which a man belonged, not whether he lived in Civilian Croatia, in the Frontier, in Dalmatia or even in Bosnia. But it was a curious fact, and one of considerable importance for the history of the next five years, that Gaj, the catalytic agent who released the modern Croat national movement, was not a Croat nationalist at all in the narrower sense of the term. He had learned, especially from Kollar, to hold that all Slavs were members of one family, but within this he discerned a closer relationship between the members of its Southern Slav branch – Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Bulgars. These he regarded as forming a single ‘Illyrian’ nation in posse, and his first activities were largely devoted to trying to bring these peoples to adopt the common language which was the pre-condition of their becoming a nation in esse. This, in the end, had highly peculiar results. Gaj succeeded in swinging the entire literary language of his own Croat people from the kay dialect of Southern Slav native to them to the Što dialect spoken in Herzegovina and Southern Dalmatia, and already adopted by the Serb linguistic maestro of the day, Vuk Karadžić, for his own people,38 written in an orthography modelled on the Czech; but he was unable to persuade the Serbs to adopt the Latin alphabet (which the priests denounced as a devilish machination of Rome’s to seduce them from the true faith), nor the Slovenes to abandon their own spoken forms.39 The net result was thus the survival of two40 distinct although related spoken languages, Slovene and Serbo-Croat, and of two alphabets, the Latin, used by Slovenes and Croats, and the Cyrillic, used by Serbs; literary (and ultimately, spoken) Croat becoming the same language, in its forms, as Serb, but being written in the same orthography as Slovene.
But Gaj’s linguistic manipulations were unimportant compared with the extraordinary stimulus which he – a totally unoriginal thinker, a poor writer, a man without birth or connections, and to boot, only in his early twenties – succeeded in giving to national feeling in his country. This was, indeed, awakening all round him, without his intervention: in 1832 one of Croatia’s own magnates, Baron Rukavina, had addressed the Sabor in Croat, and in the same year a fiery pamphlet had appeared (in German) under the title Sollen wir Magyaren werden?.41 But Gaj possessed an almost magical gift for making disciples and also securing patrons, and in 1833 he brought off two extraordinary coups in the latter respect.
He had decided to ask permission to publish a periodical. On this quest he travelled to Vienna, passing through Pozsony, where he called on the Croat delegates to the Long Diet, and one of these, Count Janko Drašković, he converted completely to his ideas. This was an event of extraordinary importance, for Drašković was no obscure young honoratior; he was a Count, a member of one of Croatia’s most illustrious families, a member of the Hungarian (or Hungaro-Croat) House of Magnates, an Imperial and Royal Chamberlain and an Army Colonel. If he pointed to a road, a large proportion of those Croats who counted would follow it.
Gaj’s second success was in Vienna. He saw Kolowrat, whom he told that his purpose was:
Primarily, to influence opinion among the Croats and Slovenes against Hungary’s purpose of achieving independence through the Magyar language, and to strengthen their (the Slavs) attachment to the throne; further, to influence in favour of attachment to Austria the Slav peoples bordering on the Austrian Monarchy, the Serbs, Bosnyaks, Herzegovinians, Montenegrins and Turkish Croats, who appear to be chained to Russia through the influence which it exercises in their favour.
These purposes seemed to Kolowrat admirable. Gaj got his licence, and in January 1835 his daily paper, the Novine Hrvatska (Croat News) began to appear, with a weekly literary supplement, the Danica (Morning Star).
The new militant Croat nationalism was now fairly launched, and it was, as we have said, something totally different from what had previously passed under that name. It was an orgy of ultra-chauvinistic self-glorification, which claimed for the Croats every virtue, and every reward of virtue, which fantasy could think up. And first and foremost, it was almost hysterically anti-Magyar. As Kossuth attributed every evil in Hungary to the domination of ‘Vienna’, so Gaj, even more vehemently, ascribed all Croatia’s troubles to her association with Hungary. The following effusion, from Gaj’s own pen, is an example of the pabulum dished out to the Croat public by its new leaders:
The hour of triumph strikes for us! Only unity! Hold together, be one! All is morning, all is astir, from the Adriatic to the Balkans. Slavs, born heroes, unfurl your banners, gird you with your swords, mount your steeds! Forward, brothers, God is with us, against us the Devil. See how the wild Tatar race, the Magyar, tramples on our tongue, our nation: but before he crushes us, let us cast him into the pit of Hell. Forward, brothers, God is with us, against us the Devil. The heroic Slav of the North clasps the hand of the Illyrian of the South in the heroic dance; the trumpet sounds, the swords clash, the cannon roar. Let us wash our honour clean in the blood of the enemy; let each cleave one skull and our suffering will be at an end. Forward, brothers, etc.
1 The question of freer trade between the Monarchy and certain German States had come up on many previous occasions, and Metternich, to do him justice, had regularly been in favour of the more liberal policy, especially with regard to food-stuffs. A strong consideration behind the rejection of all these opportunities had been the political one, viz., the fear that foreign ideas would slip in with the foreign commodities. The obstructionist in chief in this respect was probably Francis himself.
2 One authority puts the number at five hundred, twenty-six of them Counts.
3 Kübeck, Tagebücher, I. ii p. 438.
4 Id., p. 508. It is not clear from Kübeck’s wording exactly how far Chotek’s proposals went.
5 Id., p. 439.
6 Metternich said that he had piles, which rose to his head.
7 Kübeck claimed the credit for himself (Tagebücher, p. 479).
8 Beer, p. 141.
9 The Emperor had issued another ruling that 40 m.g. was to be the absolute limit for ordinary expenditure on the Army.
10 Its introduction gave rise to riots in Vienna and Prague. The ‘revolution’ of 1848 in many country towns took almost the sole form of committal of mayhem on unfortunate excise-men.
11 Beer, p. 172.
12 The estimates had provided for 149·323 m.g. revenue and 148·195 m.g. expenditure.
13 They were 40·3 in 1831, 28·5 in 1832, 25·0 in 1833, 26·5 in 1834, 31·5 in 1835. In these years the State debt rose by another 250 m.g., with a further annual charge of nearly 12 m.g.
14 Very interesting in this connection is a note by Kübeck of a conversation between himself and Kolowrat in January 1831 (op. cit., p. 315). Kübeck said:
‘To get money, there are only the ways of taxation, force’ (by this he appears to mean a repudiation of obligations: cf. id., p. 316) ‘or credit. The first two ways can hardly be chosen because they would be neither undangerous, nor productive of big results. Credit, on the other hand, is always there, only one must fulfil its conditions.’ Kolowrat preferred the issue of paper, as did the Emperor (id., p. 470), but Kübeck was adamant for keeping the credit of the State good, and borrowing on favourable terms. On another occasion, in November 1832, the Emperor, according to Kolowrat, when warned that the excessive army expenditure and the repeated loans would lead to State bankruptcy, answered indifferently: ‘What of it? Bankruptcy is a tax like any other. Only one must arrange it so that everyone loses in equal proportion, as when an honest tradesman goes into liquidation’ (id., p. 593).
15 Id., p. 626. The date is 1833.
16 He had also been granted Hungarian Indigenat in 1826, and had become a titular Hungarian magnate, a distinction of which he was vain.
17 Her father was Ferdinand IV of Naples-
Sicily, brother of Francis’s mother, while her mother was Leopold’s sister, Marie Caroline.
18 Ferdinand der Gütige. This was the more official version: the more popular one was Nanderl-Trotterl (Ferdy the Simp).
19 Thus, incidentally, becoming his father’s step-brother-in-law, since Francis’s own fourth wife was the King’s elder daughter by another wife.
20 Hungarian history contained several precedents, the first of them as early as the eleventh century, for the coronation of the king’s designated successor in his predecessor’s own life-time. It was a convenient way for a dutiful father to secure his son’s succession in times when the succession law was not yet fixed.
21 There was also a daughter, Anna, born on 27 October 1835, who, however, died in infancy.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 40
