The Opposition’s second victory was one which, although hailed with immense jubilation, ended by bringing it little profit. At the elections in Zagreb which determined which delegates should be sent to Pozsony, the President, who was an ‘Illyrian’, had queried the right of the Turopolyans to vote, saying that he must ask Vienna for a ruling whether the Order of 181994 applied to Croatia. Meanwhile, he succeeded by an ingenious trick in getting the vote taken when the Turopolyans were absent. At Pozsony the Turopolyan Count, who sat there ex officio, queried the legality of the President’s action, and consequently, the validity of the mandates of his elected colleagues. The question became entangled at the Lower Table with that of the language of debate there, and that again, with the linguistic question generally, and the heated nationalists produced a Bill to make Magyar the sole language of the legislature, administration and education in the central instances and in Inner Hungary, and of all communications between Hungarian and Croat authorities. The Croat delegates to the Diet had to use Magyar there. Only the three Counties of Zagreb, Várasd and Körös were allowed to rank as Croatia; the Slavonian Counties and Fiume were reckoned as Inner Hungarian. After violent scenes in the Lower House and unsuccessful attempts by the Magnates to mediate, the Crown eventually produced a compromise95 which in fact gave the Hungarians almost all they asked, with the sole reservation, as regards Croatia, that the Croat delegates, if they did not know Magyar, might continue to use Latin in the Diet for another six years, and the Slavonian Counties and Fiume, which the measure counted as part of Hungary, were allowed the same grace before Magyarizing their administration. Croat authorities were to continue to use Latin among themselves, but Magyar when corresponding with the central or Inner Hungarian officials.96 The Crown promised that all instruction in Inner Hungary above the elementary level should be in Magyar; elementary education would be the subject of a further enactment. In Croatia Magyar was to be taught as a subject in upper and secondary schools.
After this, Metternich changed his Hungarian policy once again. The turbulent course of the Diet had convinced him that Hungary was standing ‘a pace from the Hell of revolution’, yet true spiritual pupil of Francis as he was, he rejected as both wrong in principle and impracticable the Josephinian nostrum of suspending the Constitution. On the other hand, even he had come to see that the policy of pure negation was no longer possible. Instead of following it, he allied himself with the ‘Party of Considered Reform’, or, as they now called themselves, the ‘Progressive Conservatives’, on a plan which amounted to carrying out through them, and through a ‘reformed’ Parliament, a programme of political authority and economic reform.97 The Föispáns were to reside in their Counties and themselves to take direct charge of the administration; if unable or unwilling to do so, they were to be replaced, as in the 1820s, by ‘administrators’. The Föispáns or administrators were to see to it that the Counties sent right-minded Deputies to the Diet, and these were no longer to be tied by binding instructions from their constituents. The ‘reign of terror of the jurati’ was to be abolished, a proper procedure instituted for the tabling of Bills, and the Government was to submit its own proposals in the form of draft Bills. Other suggestions for strengthening the hands of the central authorities (it is not clear from which side these emanated) included increasing the constitutional weight of the German element by giving more power to the towns and strengthening the garrisons and police.98 On the economic side, the programme, reflecting the interests of the big Hungarian landowners, scornfully denied the need for factories in Hungary or the utility of them, but stressed the importance of a flourishing agriculture and efficient communications. It accordingly accepted the customs union with Austria, with its consequences, including the introduction of the tobacco monopoly. There was to be a big programme of public works, carried through with the help of Austrian financial houses.
This programme seems to have been worked out while the Diet was still in session, and as soon as it rose (on 13 November 1844) the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, the young and energetic Count György Apponyi (Dessewffy had died suddenly in 1842), was appointed Vice-Chancellor (under Mailáth), to put it into effect. It was not an easy commission, for neither Mailáth nor the Palatine approved of the new policy, but Apponyi went ahead boldly. Administrators were put in in eighteen Counties (in most of the rest the Föispáns were already safe Government men). A special section for communications was created in the Consilium and put under the charge of Széchenyi (about whom Metternich had changed his mind, and Széchenyi was magnanimous enough to forgive him), who succeeded in interesting Viennese banks in a number of his pet projects, including the regulation of the Tisza and the development of the railway system along rational lines.
The bright prospects of economic development along the Government’s lines were in striking contrast with the failure which was attending Kossuth’s endeavours to make Hungary economically autarkic. A ‘buy Hungarian’ campaign launched by the Védegylet and its sister ‘Hungarian Commercial Association’ had enjoyed some popularity for a little while, especially among the ladies, but had soon broken down. A few really sound enterprises had been started in connection with it, but most of the Hungarian products had proved shoddy and expensive. The biggest material gains had gone to unscrupulous traders who smuggled in Austrian products, labelled them ‘made in Hungary’ and sold them at a profit.99 The Government’s economic policy seemed to many more practical, and was not ill-received. Deák wrote bitterly to Kossuth that: ‘Hardly had the Government begun to come forward with practical proposals, and to tempt our fellow-citizens with well-paid jobs … and our former adherents are swarming over to range themselves under the Government’s banner.’
Nor, it must be said, did the ‘swarms’ consist solely of place-hunters. Many honest Hungarians felt that it was better in their country’s own interest to accept the half-loaf offered by Vienna than to continue an exhausting and quite possibly barren struggle for the whole quartern.
On the other side, however, stood the authoritarian character of the regime and the increased closeness of its connection with, and, it was felt, dependence on, Vienna. These were completely intolerable to the general body of Liberal and nationalist opinion, and it would have required courage to prophesy lasting success for Metternich’s latest experiment.
Meanwhile, in Croatia, the ‘Illyrians’ had driven their opponents out of the field, for in September 1845, the Ban, General Haller, had formally excluded the ‘sandalled nobles’ from the meeting of the Congregation General in Zagreb, thereby at a stroke reducing the Magyarone voters in Croatia to a handful of landlords and high officials; when challenged to justify the legality of his action, he had produced a Rescript from Vienna authorizing it.100 And by now the anti-Magyar front in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown could number other national components. The end of Stratimirovics’ long reign over the Hungarian Serbs had brought no great immediate changes, for his successor was a somewhat passive and easy-going figure. But his successor again, Rajačić, who was enthroned in 1842, was another politician, ‘Illyrian’ in the sense of being prepared to combine with the Croats against Hungary, and also a stout champion of the particular Serb cause. A sign of the new activity to be expected from this quarter was that the Synod which elected Rajačić asked for the convocation of a General Assembly of the Serb ‘nation’ to consider the problems which had been adjourned in 1792.101
Other developments important for the later course of events had taken place in the Balkans. Old Miloš Obrenović had at last been deposed in 1839. His elder son, Milan, died only a few weeks later; his brother, Michael, was deposed in his turn in 1842 in favour of Alexander Karageorgević, grandson of the old hero, Black George. Alexander brought with him into Serbian public life a new set of men, the most important of them his Minister of the Interior, Ilja Garašanin. In 1844 Garašanin worked out a plan (which was based on a draft composed by the Polish émigré, Prince Adam Czartoryski) for the realization, when opportun
ity offered, of a Great Yugoslav State, which was to include all territories inhabited by Serbs, Croats and Bulgars, including Croatia and South Hungary. In certain respects this represented another version of the Illyrian idea, but Garašanin’s variant definitely envisaged detaching the Serb and Croat territories from Austria and Hungary and placing them under the rule of Belgrade. Agents of the Serbian Principality were beginning to make cautious propaganda in favour of this idea in 1846 and 1847 among the people of Hungary.
Finally, the Slovaks were stirring, partly in response to the effusions of Kollar and his friends and disciples, partly in reaction to the unwise zeal of the Magyarizers, which, owing among other causes to the bogey of Pan-Slavism which the Slovak extremists had conjured up, was directed particularly against this people. The lead was taken here by a local magnate, Count Károly Zay, who in 1840 was elected Superintendent of the Hungarian Lutheran Church. Zay has secured himself a place in the history-books as one of the most fanatical Magyarizers on record. Magyarization, he announced in his inaugural address, was the ‘sacred duty’ of ‘everyone who fights for freedom and common sense, every loyal subject of the House of Austria’, and to hinder it, or to foster the spread of any other language ‘would be tantamount to severing the vital artery of intelligence, of constitutional principles, of Protestantism itself’. The triumph of Magyarization was ‘the victory of reason, liberty and intelligence’.102 A particular project of his was to bring about the administrative unification of the Calvinist and Lutheran Churches, which would have been nationally disastrous for the Slovaks, for while the Lutheran Church in North Hungary was largely Slovak, the much stronger Calvinist Church was purely Magyar. Some two hundred Slovak Lutheran pastors, headed by their Superintendent, petitioned the Crown, furthermore complaining bitterly of the intolerant Magyarization of their schools and of public life in their homes. Zay’s plan was dropped, but Slovak nationalism was now awake, and was further promoted by another of Zay’s activities. In 1843 he succeeded in getting the Pozsony chair abolished, on the ground that the assistant lecturer there, Ljudevit Štur, a pupil of Kollar’s, was spreading Pan-Slav doctrines.103
This had the rather unexpected effect of promoting the development of an independent Slovak language, because Štur became convinced that it was impossible to maintain Czech as the language of Slovak culture, and after considerable debates, the Slovak intellectual leaders, Protestant and Catholic, agreed to adopt for the national language the purest of the Slovak dialects, that spoken round Turócsszentmartón. But even this was another step forward for the Slovak national movement. Štur and his collaborators, the chief of whom, Josef Hurban and Michael Hodža, were both Lutheran pastors, founded a newspaper in the agreed language, the Slovenský Narodný Novine,104 and in it developed a vigorous activity which, although primarily literary, contained many political undertones. On religious grounds, the group did not aim at separation from Hungary, where their faith enjoyed much more freedom than in Austria, but they now constituted, within Hungary, a vigorous national opposition to the Magyars’ ambitions of creating a unitary Magyar State.
The situation in Transylvania was meanwhile developing on lines parallel to the Hungarian. The Diet which the Crown perforce convoked in 1837, for its members to swear loyalty to their new Monarch, showed in various ways that it had not forgotten recent events: it refused to submit the Archduke’s name for Governor and wrangled hard over most of the other appointments. At the same time, many of its members were inclined to think that Wesselényi had gone too far, nor did they want to see extended to Transylvania the legislation in favour of the peasants enacted in Hungary. Accordingly, a quiet three or four years followed, but then feeling among the Magyar nobles began to change: the demand for union with Hungary grew stronger again, outweighing calculation, so that a small Liberal party appeared, and simultaneously, a strong demand emerged for the extension of the official use of the Magyar language. This had been raised in 1837, but rather half-heartedly; however, in 1841 the majority wanted Magyar made the sole language of all official transactions, and of all education, except that the Saxons might for ten years continue to correspond with the authorities in Latin, if they preferred, and might use German in their own schools and internal affairs
The Saxons protested vigorously against this proposal, which the Crown, on this occasion, refused to sanction, and the new Vice-Chancellor appointed in 1844, Baron Samuel Josika, who was a member of Apponyi’s group and a man at once of determination and of strong aulic sympathies, was able to restore surface calm. But by this time Transylvania had reached the stage already achieved by Inner Hungary, of cold war between the component nationalities. The Saxons had found a leader, a village pastor named Stefan Ludwig Roth,105 to rally them to a vigorous resistance to the Magyar unitary State; their natural remedy was the continuance of Transylvania’s separate status, in the closest possible connection with Vienna. The Roumanians could be relatively indifferent to the language of an administration in which they did not participate, and an education which they did not receive. Moreover, Bobb’s successor, Leményi, was another like him, practical, non-combative, an administrator rather than a politician. On the other hand, Roumanian nationalism in Transylvania was now in its turn being fed from the Danubian Principalities, become virtually independent of the Porte in 1829 and genuinely left to their own devices when the Russian troops evacuated them three years later. The Règlement Organique bestowed on them was exceedingly conservative, but it did provide them with national institutions of a sort, and within their framework the national consciousness of the Roumanian people developed mightily. The very fact that a large number of the teachers and civil servants in the Principalities were of Transylvanian origin ensured that that consciousness would always include an awareness of the unity of the Roumanian people,106 and now, as the pupils began to emerge from the schools, the emotional and intellectual current reversed itself, or at least, became two-way. Roumanian books and literature from the Principalities entered Transylvania and stimulated the consciousness of the Roumanians there. By 1840 the younger generation was already in revolt against the ‘Magyarone’ tendencies of its elders.
It was, of course, impossible to express irredentism openly; a Roumanian political programme had to be set within the framework of the Monarchy, and it went for the time no further than the old demands of 1791, for recognition of a Roumanian ‘nation’ and of the Orthodox Church. But it also included, or implied, strong hostility to the union with Hungary.
In Bohemia – as before, the movements now to be described did not extend to Moravia – opposition to the existing state of things was developing along two distinct lines which seldom coincided, but each to some extent cleared the way for the other; so long as both were against the Government, each found the other a useful ally.
The work of the linguistic pioneers, which had been carried on with great vigour and in complete freedom since 1835, was now complete; Czech had become a mature language, capable of use in any field, and thanks to the density of the schools in Bohemia, and to the important edict of 1815, now widely spoken well above the peasant level. Palacký, Hanka and others had created the national mythos.
A new stage opened about 1840, when a young generation, calling themselves the ‘patriots’ (Vlastenci), hurled themselves into the task of carrying further their elders’ work. As the philologists’ task was complete, the ‘patriots’ saw their task in securing for their language, and for the speakers of it, the place in education and public life to which they felt it, and them, to be entitled. At that time they asked, indeed, no more than equality with the Germans, but many of them were certainly dreaming of superiority, or complete predominance, and as even equality could obviously not be achieved without a struggle, a note of Germanophobia began to creep into their utterances.
It should be added that this younger generation had shed a good deal of the mystic Pan-Slavism of its elders. Few of them felt for Russia more than a certain sentimental veneration and that was
weakened by the memories of 1830. There was still some general Austro-Slavism, but most of the young men were primarily interested in the Czech people, and in Bohemia. Even their interest in the Slovaks was relatively lukewarm.
The second movement was that of the Bohemian Estates. Here the Czech national motif was, indeed, much less strong, for a high proportion of the aristocrats who dominated the Estates did not even speak Czech. The movement was one for provincial rights; its participants wished to secure for themselves and their Land the same amount of independence from Viennese centralism and bureaucratic control as was enjoyed by their Hungarian counterparts, and although a relatively small Liberal party, led by Count Albert Dehm, evolved within it in the 1840s, the majority were arch-Conservatives; their constitutionalism looked back to the days before the Vernewerte Landesordnung and was more retrogressive than progressive.
The Bohemian Estates, after long years of almost total quiescence, began to stir in the late 1830s, when they caught the Oberstburggraf, Count Chotek, out in a technical irregularity,107 and persecuted him until he resigned in July 1842. The Staatskonferenz replaced him by the young and agreeable Archduke Stephen, to whom they attached as assistant, Robert Altgraf in Salm, but the Estates discovered that Salm, whose lands lay in Moravia, did not possess Bohemian Incolat and was therefore ineligible for the office. A relative lifted Salm over this hurdle by giving him an estate, but the Estates had now got the bit between their teeth, the more firmly because the hand on the reins had slackened: the old Oberster Kanzler, Count Mittrowsky, who had been a strong man who stood no nonsense from provincials, had just died, and the new Chancellor, Count Inzaghi, was an amiable nonentity, easily over-awed by truculent opponents.108 The Estates now utilized certain complicated and in themselves trivial incidents to assert a claim of principle, their right to approve the Government’s budgetary estimates, and then, in May 1845, sent a deputation to Vienna, commissioned both to put forward certain specific requests, many of which were non-controversial, and also to establish the principle that the Vernewerte Landesordnung of 31 July 1627 was still the public law of the land, so that all diminutions of their rights and privileges suffered by the Estates since that date were legally null and void, and must be rescinded.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 46
