The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  22 The following lines are based chiefly on Corti’s Von Kind bis Kaiser (Graz, 1950), a work for which the author went through the Archduchess’s diary and letters with a magnifying glass. It is by far the most detailed and most authentic account of these family relationships.

  23 Corti, op. cit., p. 166.

  24 Id, p. 244.

  25 For the legend of her alleged lapse in 1848, see below, p. 325.

  26 Charmatz, op. cit., p. 12.

  27 Francis’s pliability on this point is said to have been due to the eloquence of Reviczky, who persuaded him that a concession here would produce the recruits.

  28 In Galicia there were 325,029 deaths (from all causes) in 1831, against only 157,855 births. The cholera reached Vienna, but there it was stamped out fairly quickly. Its effects in the other Lands were not serious, although it reached Moravia and Bohemia.

  29 In fact a considerable number of refugees from Congress Poland had sought shelter in Hungary and there had been a good deal of enthusiastic talk.

  30 This was partly also a calculation: just before his suicide he said to an Austrian (Crenneville): ‘Hungary can exist only in Austria. In German arms she may feel herself squeezed, but in Slav arms, she would certainly be crushed’ (Corti, Mensch und Herscher, p. 253).

  Interesting also is a letter which he wrote to Rechberg shortly before his death, that his programme was:

  (1) Loyalty and devotion to the Dynasty and the person of the Emperor.

  (2) Loyalty and devotion to Hungary in association with the Hereditary Provinces.

  (3) Reasoned approval of Constitutional institutions.

  31 It is no less curious that he should have been unique in this respect, but he was in fact the only Hungarian of his age to occupy himself seriously with questions of the national economy.

  32 A third, more repetitive, work, Stadium, appeared in 1834.

  33 Berthalan Szemere, Kálmán Ghyczy, the brothers Madarász, Menyhért Lónyay, László Szalay, and many other figures prominent in later Hungarian politics, were among them.

  34 His mother’s family were Germans from the Szepes.

  35 The word must be emphasized, for up to 1849 Kossuth was completely loyal to the dynasty.

  36 It should be mentioned that in this year the two Roumanian Bishops, Leményi and Moga, sent in a petition on roughly the same terms as the ‘Supplex Libellus Valachorum’ of 1791. This was, however, refused.

  37 A friend, Count György Károlyi, had presented him with a small estate in County Szathmár for that purpose to qualify him.

  38 Što and kao are the dialectical forms of the word meaning ‘what’ used in various Southern Slav districts. A third form, the ča, was used in Istria, on the Croat littoral, in Northern Dalmatia and on the Dalmatian islands.

  39 See above, p. 225.

  40 Three if Bulgarian is included.

  41 According to R. W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, p. 27, the author of this pamphlet, which was long attributed to Kollar, was A. Vakanović, at one time Vice-Ban of Croatia; but Wendel, Aus dem Südslavischen Risorgimento, p. 53, writing much later, still attributes it to Kollar, and says that it was ‘originally only intended for Slovaks’, which makes sense, because its whole argument was directed against linguistic enactments which the Hungarians themselves were not trying to introduce into Croatia.

  7

  The Vormärz

  On 24 February 1835, Francis was seized by a sharp fever, and in the small hours of 2 March he died. His peoples had grown so accustomed to his hand that when it was removed, leaving poor Ferdinand nominal ruler of the Monarchy, not only grief was felt, but deep anxiety over what the future would bring. A year before, Kübeck had prophesied that the Emperor’s death would be followed by anarchy.

  But the first sequel was merely an unseemly scramble for power. As Francis lay dying, Bishop Wagner had extracted his signature to two documents, both addressed to his heir. In the first he enjoined Ferdinand ‘not to displace the bases of the structure of the State, to rule1 and not alter’, to hold fast to the principles by which Francis had guided the Monarchy through the storms of hard times. He was to preserve unity in the Imperial family and ‘in important internal (innere) affairs’2 to take counsel of the Archduke Ludwig. ‘Bestow on Prince Metternich, my most faithful servant and friend,’ the document concluded, ‘the trust which I have reposed in him during so many years. Take no decision on public affairs, or respecting persons, without hearing him. I enjoin him, for his part, to show you the same sincerity and faithful devotion as he has always displayed towards me.’

  The second document enjoined Ferdinand to continue the task, still incomplete, of correcting and modifying those parts of the Josephinian Law which impeded the free activity and other rights of the Church, and conflicted with the doctrines, constitution or discipline of the Church, and in particular with the decisions of the Council of Trent. Here, too, he was to listen to the advice of Metternich, and of Bishop Wagner.

  The second of these documents had been literally composed by Wagner; the first had, except for the sentence relating to the Archduke Ludwig, not been actually dictated word for word by Metternich,3 but very nearly so. Metternich’s opponents naturally could not accept such a shameless jumping of claims, so transparently designed, not only to put Metternich in, but also to keep Kolowrat out. An embittered struggle set in, the details of which have little historic importance;4 it ended on 12 December 1836, with the establishment of what amounted to a Council of Regency. A Staatskonferenz5 was set up under the nominal presidency of Ferdinand; but in his absence (which, it was assumed, would be the rule), the Archduke Ludwig was to preside. Its other permanent members (it called in consultants ad hoc at will) were the Archduke Franz Karl, Metternich and Kolowrat. Metternich was to preside in Ludwig’s absence, but his sphere of action and Kolowrat’s were exactly defined: Metternich was in charge of foreign policy and Kolowrat, of domestic.6 Only Ludwig could override either of them (Franz Karl was there simply to keep the place warm for his young son, and was not expected to play a much more active role than Ferdinand himself).7

  The Staatskonferenz was advised, in certain of its functions, by a Staats-und Konferenzrat (the latest avatar of the old Staatsrat), now composed of the three heads of the Departments of the Interior, Defence and Finance, seven Privy Councillors and seven rapporteurs (Referenten) on special subjects. Metternich’s proposal to create a Reichsrat had, however, been defeated, so that the whole Government machinery remained essentially bureaucratic and, except as regards Hungary, strongly centralist.

  Thus anarchy was averted, and a regime restored the avowed purpose of which was to perpetuate the stability which Francis had regarded as the end of government; but it was an incomparably less effective instrument for achieving this than Francis’s personal will had been. The only two members of the Conference who performed their duties quite adequately were Ferdinand himself, and Franz Karl; they had nothing to do, and that was what they did. Ludwig was not such a fool as he is often described, possessed of considerable experience, and not a null, and there was nothing obscure about his intentions; he was as conservative by temperament as Francis himself, and in any case regarded it as an injunction of piety to fulfil his brother’s dying command and ‘not to alter’ (according to some writers, he had actually sworn to do so); but he did not possess Francis’s personal authority. He remained a weak ass couching between two burdens. If the effect of the labours of the two really important members of the Conference, Metternich and Kolowrat, was indeed to produce a high measure of immobility, it was not the purposeful immobility imposed by a single will, but the stalemate which results from equal and opposite forces. If one of the two tried to move in any direction, the other painstakingly thwarted him if he saw a chance; and the opportunities arose often enough, for no ingenuity could assign the questions of highest policy exclusively to the competence of one man or the other.

  This however was only an immobility of the institutions and
machinery for dealing with affairs; not of the affairs themselves. The old freezing apparatus – if the metaphor is permissible – was still there, but the radius of its effectiveness diminished year by year. The Vormärz was in fact a period big with change. While – to change the metaphor again – the structure stood unaltered, only growing visibly shabbier and losing a brick or a tile here and there, new forces, national, economic, social and political, were accumulating and surging round its foundations, threatening alike its internal stability, and its defences against the outer world.

  Chief among the subjects on which Metternich and Kolowrat pulled in opposite directions was the old question whether Austria should follow an ambitious foreign policy such as the one desired, or should, as the other maintained, cut her coat according to her cloth. The issue was really a financial one, and in general, the state of the national finances affected so powerfully almost every development of the period that we shall only be paying the subject its due if we devote to it the first of the pages which follow.

  In this field, stability had really been achieved in one respect. The National Bank had succeeded in withdrawing from circulation the great mass of State paper money, of various issues, leaving in circulation (besides the metallic Konventionsmünzen) only its own notes, which up to the very eve of the revolution were convertible against silver and accepted at their face value, both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, the Achilles’ heel remained. Rigid economy in expenditure had kept the normal annual budgetary deficits to a relatively low figure,8 but revenue, too, had remained low. Largely owing to the delays in introducing the new land tax, the yield of direct taxation in Austria had risen only fractionally;9 while in Hungary, where noble land remained tax-free, it hardly rose at all.10 That of indirect taxation, the most productive item of which was the unpopular ‘consumption tax’ (octroi), had risen faster, but still hardly more than the growth of the population,11 so that revenue never matched even ordinary expenditure, and almost every year the State borrowed afresh, sometimes in the form of lottery loans, which had become a very favourite device, sometimes by borrowing directly from the small ring of private banking houses (Rothschild, Sina and a few more) which specialized in the operation.12 Alternatively, the State borrowed from the National Bank, which, given the composition of the shareholders of that body, came to the same thing.

  The two men who were in charge of Austria’s finances during the period – Peter Eichhoff, who succeeded Klebelsberg as President of the Hofkammer in 1835, and in whose favour Kolowrat, whose protégé he was, then renounced the charge of ‘high finance’, and Kübeck, who took over in 184013 – devoted their chief efforts to keeping Austria’s credit good, so that the loans could be floated on reasonable terms, and were not unsuccessful. These loans, however, were hardly ever devoted to developing the national resources and increasing taxable capacity; nearly always, they were simply used to cover deficits in ordinary current expenditure, so that the chief result of them was simply that the indebtedness of the State went on rising, and an increasing proportion of its revenues had to be devoted to payments (interest and amortization) on the debt. It was calculated in the 1840s that the State debt had more than trebled in twenty-five years (by 1847 it had reached the figure of 1,131 million gulden)14 and the service of it multiplied tenfold, not counting payments on lottery loans; by 1847 the interest was 45 million gulden, plus 6 million gulden for amortization – almost as much as the total yield of direct taxation. It may be added that the political effects of this development were not inconsiderable, for to the oversimplifying popular eye, the State was becoming simply a gigantic machine which milked the many for the benefit of the few.

  Meanwhile, even the convertibility of the bank notes was precarious. The public had not forgotten the experiences of its fathers. The scare of 1840, when the development of the Eastern crisis made war with France an apparent possibility, brought a run on the National Bank which reduced its metal coverage to 1:11.

  In 1841 the State burdened itself with a new item of expenditure. Among the things to which the logically-minded Francis had objected had been railways, which, he said, ‘would only bring revolution into the country’. If, nevertheless, Austria had boasted the first railway on the Continent, a line between Budweis and Linz opened in 1832, neither the freight nor the motive-power of this had been alarmingly newfangled: salt the former, the latter, horses. But meanwhile an imaginative engineer named Riepl had worked out, single-handed, plans for a complete network of railways to link Vienna with Galicia. He had succeeded in interesting Salamon Rothschild, and hardly were Francis’s eyes closed when Rothschild persuaded his patron (or client) Metternich to give him a concession to build a line from Bochnia, in Galicia, to Vienna. After prolonged initial difficulties, the stretch between Vienna and Brünn was opened in 1839. After this the network extended rapidly, the lines in the north being constructed chiefly under the auspices of the Rothschilds, while their rival, Baron Sina, secured the concession for a line to connect Vienna with Budapest and for the Südbahn which was to link Vienna with Trieste; the line from Vienna to Gloggnitz was opened in 1841, by which time 473 kilometres of line in all had been constructed.

  For various reasons, among which the clever propaganda carried on by the Rothschilds was not the least, the public had not extended to the railways, in spite of the low yields on their shares,15 its aversion to investing in private enterprise, but unfortunately for it, there were many irregularities and much money was lost. The State then decided to expand the railway network itself, as a matter of public interest. It carried on the work with some vigour, so that by the end of 1847 the length of the line had reached 1,401 kilometres,16 478 of which was State property. It was indeed obviously a necessity for the Monarchy that it should possess a railway system, but meanwhile, the construction cost the State considerable sums which, again, were largely raised by borrowing. Economies were partly achieved by underpaying the civil servants, whose position became steadily more difficult as prices rose (to the detriment of both their efficiency and their integrity) and partly, at the expense of the army, which, after the untimely death in 1837 of its competent Adjutant-General, Count Clam-Martinitz, had no influential champion to speak for it in high circles. On this point Kolowrat defeated Metternich. The annual army budget was kept down to some fifty to sixty million gulden annually. To achieve this, in spite of the rapidly increasing population of the Monarchy, the nominal peace strength of the army at the beginning of 1847 was still only a little over 400,000 (war strength about 630,000) and the number of men actually with the colours ranged between 210,000–230,000; it was, moreover, still composed largely, perhaps mainly, of elements whom local authorities found undesirable and rid themselves of by the simple expedient of handing them over to the recruiting sergeant. Both the moral and the physical condition of the men were low. Its equipment had been little modernized for thirty years.

  *

  In spite of this essential weakness in his position, if it should ever be challenged, Metternich retained unmodified his old vision of Austria (and himself) as guardian of order in Europe, and it must be said that he exercised this with all his old diplomatic expertise. He was further supremely fortunate in having as his immediate negotiating partners men who sympathized with his ideas of order, and in many cases, were ready to accept his leadership. Nicholas of Russia remained loyal to the pledge given by him at Münchengrätz, and if there were considerable differences between Russia and Austria during the Eastern crisis of 1839–40, they were bridged over and the former friendship restored without Austria’s interests on the Lower Danube, or in the Balkans, having been seriously impaired. Frederick William III of Prussia continued until his death in 1840 to obey faithfully his motto to work, not indeed under Austria, but always with her; and his romantic son and successor, Frederick William IV, readily acknowledged the supremacy of the ‘Archhouse’ of Habsburg. Up to almost the last days of the Vormärz the great majority of the Princes of Italy gratefully accepted that Austr
ian support to which, as they were well aware, they owed their thrones; even Charles Albert of Piedmont hid his true ambitions so well that when, in 1842, he married his son to a Habsburg Princess, Radetzky, commanding the Austrian army in Lombardy-Venetia, referred to the Piedmontese army as ‘the advance guard of the Imperial forces’.

  But this was pre-eminently a pool on which the ice was growing thinner year by year. In Germany and Italy both liberal and national feeling were growing apace, and to the votaries of both goddesses, Metternich’s Austria now appeared as the arch-obstacle to the realization of their dreams. His ‘system’ was now resting solely on the goodwill of the Monarchs, and would find it difficult to survive, either if the peoples as a whole combined to overthrow his allies, or if one of them changed sides and put himself at the head of a national movement. And in both Germany and Italy the possibilities of either development increased in the 1840s. Although Frederick William IV’s loyalty, and also his own exceedingly mediaevalist mentality, kept him aloof from the German movement towards unification, yet the continued extension and consolidation of the Zollverein was inexorably turning Prussia into the de facto leader of Germany. In 1841 Austria was given one more chance to reverse this process. Quarters in South Germany, to which the growth of Prussian influence was unwelcome on both economic and political grounds, invited Austria to join the Zollverein, or perhaps to place herself at the head of a rival grouping, but the Staatskonferenz, after long discussion and against the wishes of both Metternich and Kübeck, rejected the offer, partly owing to very strong objections from the Austrian industrialists, and partly because the mouthpieces of the Austrian producers were not prepared to renounce the protection which they still enjoyed against Hungary, as would be necessary if the Monarchy as a whole came into a German customs unit, while to leave Hungary outside would have weakened still further the links between her and the rest of the Monarchy, and been a blow to Vienna’s own allies in Hungary. A year later, as is described elsewhere, the Staatskonferenz decided that Austrian production could face Hungarian competition, and tried to introduce inter-Monarchic free trade, but now the offer was rejected by the nationalists in the Hungarian Diet,17 and Prussia, too, objected very strongly. When, eight years later again, Schwarzenberg, having crushed Hungary’s resistance, tried to import the entire Monarchy into the Zollverein, it was too late.18