The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  At the same time, Metternich’s attempts (in which, again, he was supported by Kübeck) to counter the growth of Prussian influence by establishing a closer economic connection between Austria and Italy, especially through the development of railways from Central Germany to the Austrian ports, was one of the factors which stimulated Piedmont to greater activity and marked out its ruler as the future leader of united Italy.19

  The end of all the talks was a decision to maintain the existing system of prohibitions and high tariffs, although modifications might be introduced in individual cases.20

  There remained Russia; and not everybody was glad of it. The popular view that Metternich’s Austria had sunk into the position of the Czar’s European outpost and police-agent was certainly exaggerated; but it was true that the leading role in the partnership was passing, inevitably, to the partner which was in fact the stronger, and its perception, and resentment, of the fact was one of the causes of the suspicion with which Liberal opinion in the Monarchy regarded Metternich and his ‘system’.

  And the relationship with Russia itself became heavily overclouded at the end of the period.21 The Czar conceived the idea of cementing it by marrying his beautiful daughter, Olga, to an Austrian Archduke, but when the Archduke Albrecht was sent to Petersburg in 1839, the young Grand Duchess would have none of him. In 1845, then, her father thought of marrying her to the more attractive Stephen, son of the Palatine of Hungary and his father’s successor-designate in that role, and to this she consented, but the Catholic party at the Court of Vienna insisted that the prospective bride must be received into the Catholic Church. Metternich, fearing that the marriage would have unfavourable repercussions in Hungary, fomented the opposition, and the Czar had to call the plan off. He was deeply wounded, and carried away from the visit to Vienna at which the snub was admistered the most unfavourable view imaginable of the Monarchy and its rulers; a tottering, ramshackle edifice, which was ‘sick, very sick’, and must soon perish, while the existing rulers were either born incompetents, or senile.

  At home, the Staatskonferenz obeyed the injunctions contained in Francis’s political testament with scrupulous loyalty. At the outset of the new regime certain gestures were made to popularize it, among them, an extensive amnesty for political prisoners, under which a large number of Italians, in particular, benefited. These, however, were not followed by any modification of the nature of the regime, which, so far as the western half of the Monarchy was concerned, remained one of bureaucratic rule, censorship and police supervision. In some few aspects, the rules were even more severe than before; thus it was made more difficult than ever for Austrian students to attend foreign universities, or vice versa. The only question relating to the nature of the regime on which there was any serious debate for or against the status quo was how far Francis’s second set of injunctions were to be carried out. The ‘Pious Party’ had become very strong at Court, especially since the arrival of the Archduchess Sophie. Metternich had attached himself to it unreservedly. Other leading members of it were Metternich’s secretary, Jarcke, and most important of all, the young and highly intelligent Joseph Othmar von Rauscher, who provided the movement with its theory. This was that while the authority of the Crown should be made unshakeable by any revolutionary force, the Josephinian system was not conducive to that end. The Church was the natural ally of the Crown against their common enemy, the subversive forces of enlightenment and godlessness, but it could not play its part in a condition of semi-servitude to a Government itself tainted with enlightenment. It must enjoy complete freedom, which should be ratified by a Concordat.

  Rauscher is one of the most important figures in the history of the Monarchy, for in 1844 the Dowager-Empress got him appointed tutor in philosophy to the Archduchess Sophie’s three sons, and the influence which he thus acquired over the mind of Francis Joseph largely determined the latter’s policy in the field of Church-State relations when he came to the throne. In the 1840s the forces were still evenly matched, and the struggle ended in a characteristic draw. The Pious Party registered certain successes. The Society of Jesus was re-admitted to all parts of the Monarchy, and the Ligurians allowed to establish themselves there. In 1837 a small group of Protestants which had managed to survive in the Tirol were forced to emigrate.22 But continued negotiations with the Holy See for a Concordat foundered on the opposition of the Josephinian Party, with which Kolowrat associated himself. In 1841 the Vatican made one concession, on mixed marriages – a question which events in Germany had made actuel: it recognized as illicita sed valida marriages contracted in Hungary before a non-Catholic Minister, but in Lands belonging to the German Bund such marriages were valid only if a Catholic Minister had attended the ceremony, and only if safeguards were given that the children of the marriage would be brought up in the Catholic faith. The concession did not apply at all to Galicia, Lombardy-Venetia, or Dalmatia.23 The Vatican refused to go further, and put forward, on its side, wishes24 which the Government declined to accept; a Commission established to consider them had not completed its work by 1848.

  A less easily perceptible, but not unimportant feature of the period was the recovery made during it by the great feudal aristocracy of much of the political and other influence lost by that class in the years when Francis’s absolutism was at its height. The tide had already begun to turn again when Francis grew old and left the conduct of internal affairs to Kolowrat, for Kolowrat was a strong and systematic supporter of the class to which he himself belonged.25 It came in with a rush when Kolowrat got an entirely free hand during the ‘despotism without a despot’, as poor Ferdinand’s ‘reign’ has been called.

  This does not mean that the State bureaucracy re-ceded any of the functions which it was now carrying out to the ‘self-governing institutions’. That would have meant changing the political structure of the State, which was a noli me tangere like all its institutions; for that matter, it was only when the High Vormärz was nearly out that the Estates themselves began asking for any such concessions. Nor does it mean that there was any reduction in the numbers of the bureaucracy, the size and expensiveness of which continued to elicit endless complaints from the malcontents of the day (Andrian’s famous pamphlet, Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft, is full of them),26 but in vain, nor even that its composition as a whole became more aristocratic. Indeed, the proportion of non-nobles in it rose steadily during Ferdinand’s reign, as it had during that of Francis. But the influx of non-nobles was almost all at the bottom end, into the obscurer and less well-paid posts, and the difference in salary levels between these and the higher grades was very large indeed.27 These men were, moreover, kept for years, sometimes for a lifetime, before they even became established, against which the device of ‘supernumerary service’, which had been relatively rare in earlier times, now became almost the rule for the fortunate. It was even rarer than a generation before for a man of humble origin to reach an important post.28 Thus the aristocrats dominated the Civil Service itself, and if they could not get the centralist system altered, they ruled the Western half of the Monarchy from inside it probably more completely than they had since the days of Charles VI.

  So far as this recovered power of the aristocracy went, it was another factor operating against change, for the aristocracy lived in an even more remote past than the bureaucracy.

  *

  Meanwhile, however, life had not, after all, left the Monarchy untouched since 1792. The population, the growth of which had been slow in most Lands during the wars – in some, it had actually declined – had increased very rapidly after the return of peace. Still relatively modest in certain of the Alpine Lands, such as Upper Austria and Carinthia, and in North-Western and Northern Hungary, the growth had been almost precipitate in the Bohemian Lands and Galicia, and in those parts of the Monarchy such as Central and Southern Hungary into which internal immigration was going on. By 1843 the total population of the Monarchy was some 37·5 millions – 17·1 in the Western Lands, 15·6 in the Hu
ngarian and 4·8 in Lombardy-Venetia, an average over-all increase on 1792 of some forty per cent.

  Most of the absolute increase had still been on the land, but relatively, the growth had been much faster in the towns. Vienna had now a population of nearly 400,000, Milan, nearly 150,000, Prague, over 100,000 and Venice little short of it, Pest, 80,000 (with Buda, across the river, another 40,000), Lemberg and Trieste each over 50,000, Graz 44,000, etc.

  While agriculture was still the largest single industry in the Monarchy as a whole, and in nearly all parts of it, other occupations were creeping up on it. Even during the last years of Francis’s lifetime, the advocates of economic liberalism and of industrialization had been gaining ground, and after his death, practically all restrictions on the foundation of new enterprises, at least those falling within the category of Kommerzialgewerke, had been removed. The Government had still little positive economic policy except that represented by the maintenance of import restrictions and high tariffs (which, as always, were largely evaded by smuggling, which had developed into a major national industry) and measures which cost it nothing, such as the ennoblement of successful entrepreneurs, and especially under Kübeck’s regime it had largely counteracted even these by its rigid restriction of the note circulation, its own repeated applications to the money market, resulting in the issue of an unending stream of State obligations, and its insistence that its own demands for any available credit must have priority.29 The little ring of professional bankers found that it earned them both better marks, and more profit, to take their rake-off from Government loans, than to invest in agriculture or industry: this was so much the case that although the National Bank’s original statutes had empowered it to make advances on real property, it had never made use of this power, which was actually omitted when the statutes were revised in 1846. The unofficial sources of non-exorbitant credit were the various foundations, and they, too, tended to put their profits into State papers, as did the big majority of small savers.

  The investing public tended to follow the bankers’ lead, with the single exception which, as mentioned above, it made in favour of railway shares when the first private railway companies were floated. After its unfortunate experiences in this field, it returned to its old habits, while the nationalization of the railways turned the cost of their construction again into a responsibility of the exchequer.

  In spite of all these handicaps, the passing of the great post-war depression had after all been accompanied by a considerable amount of industrialization. The old-established industries of silk-weaving, leather goods, furniture, brewing, etc., which were chiefly centred round Vienna, expanded largely, as did the woollens industry of Moravia and Upper Bohemia. In the late 1830s the cotton industry of Lower Austria and, in particular, Bohemia, made a phenomenal spurt which was accompanied by a sudden change-over from relatively old-fashioned methods to highly mechanized modern ones, involving the use of labour-saving machinery operated under factory conditions.30 The number of enterprises in the cotton-spinning industry (exclusive of Lombardy-Venetia) rose from 110 in 1829 to 135 in 1841 and 149 in 1843, some of these being really large: the Pottendorf works outside Vienna, which had been founded in 1803 by two foreign entrepreneurs, one of them an Englishman, had nearly 47,000 spindles. By 1847 the total had risen to 204 mills, with 1,356,000 spindles. The import of cotton yarn into the Monarchy multiplied eight-fold between 1835 and 1842 and that of raw cotton, three-fold. Where the cotton-spinning had led, other industries followed. The first steam-driven machine in the entire Monarchy (for a cloth factory in Brünn) had begun work in 1816, the first in Lower Austria, ten years later. The figure in 1841 was 219 (79 in Bohemia, 77 in Moravia-Silesia, 56 in Lower Austria, three in the Littoral, one each in Styria and Tirol) with 2,939 H.P.

  These were also the years in which the first railways began operating, an event which laid the foundations for the true development of Austrian industry in a modern sense, especially of its heavy industries, the establishment of which on a large scale had previously been prevented by the impossibility of bringing fuel to them, or carrying their produce away from them. A considerable number of such industries sprang up (or old ones expanded) in connection with the railway programme itself, for which it was decided to use home-made products. In particular, a great stimulus was given to the production of iron and coal. The production of coal rose from 2 million Zentner in 1820 to nearly 10 million in 1848,31 that of iron in the Bohemian Lands alone rose from 300,000 to 900,000 Zentner, and that in Styria was almost as high.

  Counting factory labour and the old handicraftsmen together, it was estimated that in 1846, 16·73% of the population of the Monarchy was deriving its living from industry and mining, against 73–74% from agriculture, a small figure compared with that of the England of the day, especially when it is remembered that in the less advanced Lands most of the ‘industrialists’ were still simply village smiths, cartwrights or cobblers, but still an appreciable change compared with half a century earlier. The stage of development varied, indeed, largely from Land to Land. The most highly industrialized part of the Monarchy was the Lombardy-Venetian kingdom. Then came Lower Austria and the Bohemian Lands, whose heavy industry was still in the womb, but which now led in respect both of woollens and of cotton, the latter, in particular, employing a very large number of home-workers; it was calculated that one-quarter of the population of German Bohemia did spinning, this being the sole occupation of half of them. Hungary was further behind, since, other difficulties such as bad communications and primitive credit facilities apart, the old customs line between the two halves of the Monarchy was still standing. There were only eight steam-driven machines with 80 H.P. in Hungary and Transylvania in 1841. Nemes gives, for 1848, only 23,000 factory hands, 35,000 miners and 78,000 handworkers.32 The figures for Galicia-Bukovina, were they available, would probably be lower still.

  Meanwhile, the pattern of agriculture itself was beginning to change. As markets for their products increased, and as improved communications made them more accessible, more producers, large and small, but especially the former, were going over to production for profit. Besides the old staple crops of cereals, vegetable, wine and cattle, sheep-farming for wool had become an important industry, especially in Hungary, and industrial crops such as sugar beet and flax were being produced in the Bohemian Lands and Galicia.33

  These developments brought with them a big increase in the propertied (outside the landed) and bourgeois classes of the Monarchy, especially in its larger centres, and above all, of course, in Vienna. Besides the landlords and State employees who had previously dominated these classes, there was now a whole society of persons connected with the production of the new manufactures, or as traders, with the exchange of them, and in their train a growing multitude of lawyers, doctors, teachers, architects, artists. A few members of this society, the financiers above all and some of the manufacturers, who made vast profits in good years, had accumulated great wealth; many more enjoyed competencies which the exceedingly low cost of living made reasonable.34 It is on the agreeable and, so far as its elite was concerned, praiseworthy existence led by these classes that the panegyrists of Austria’s good old days love to dwell, and Viennese ‘culture’ in these days in fact experienced a revival which was not profound, but nevertheless brought with it much that was attractive. As both the extreme financial stringency and the extreme political repression relaxed, something of the old, irrepressible light-heartedness crept back into Viennese life. In furniture and decoration, a breath of rococo, another of the indefinable local genius, softened the austere Franciscean pseudo-Empire into the intimate and graceful Biedermeier style. Caroline Pichler held a salon which did not attempt to imitate the extravagances of the Congress, but had its own elegance. It was no age of giants: the best painter of the day, Schwind, emigrated, and Waldmüller went unrecognized. The popular musicians, Lanner and Johann Strauss, were turners of valse tunes, not to compare in genius with the generation which had perished
with Schubert, and most of the best-known writers of the day, Raimund, Nestroy, Bauernfeld, were the authors of comedies (the greatest figure of them all, Grillparzer, was, of course, more than that). But the comedies were very witty, and the valse-tunes more than catching. It was not even the case that, as later romanticists would have us believe, the life of the day exhausted itself altogether in light music, wine and society gossip. There was plenty of all of these, and it is probably true that there are few societies which have obeyed so generally, and with so little reluctance, the order of authority to ‘run away and play, and don’t meddle with what is not your business’ as the Viennese bourgeoisie of the Vormärz. But it is only fair to record that a minority of its members performed distinguished work in many fields. The medical faculty of Vienna University regained its old standards when von Stift ceased to direct it; it now produced two figures of European calibre in Rokitansky and Skoda. Three Austrians, Prokesch-Osten, Hammer-Purgstall and Fallmerarer, were among the leading travellers and orientalists of their day. 1846 even saw, at long last, the foundation of an Academy of Sciences in Vienna which was destined to become one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world.35

  Yet wishful memory, and the ecstasies of tourists so dazzled by the slick charms of Viennese life as to be unable to appreciate how much in them was bogus, should not blind us to the truth that for a substantial and growing proportion of the population of the Monarchy the Vormärz was a period of material hardship, and for considerable numbers, of naked destitution.