All this was extremely embarrassing to the Government, which could appeal to nothing except long-standing ‘usus’ in support of its claim that the Estates were not entitled to query its estimates. On the second question, it replied that both Ferdinand II and his successors had always reserved themselves the right ‘to enlarge, alter, improve and treat in accordance with the jus legis ferendae’ the Landesordnung. As this answer amounted to a claim by the Crown of a free hand, it left the Estates angry and disappointed, and they and the Hofkanzlei embarked on an acrid feud, thwarting each other in every way that their respective imaginations could devise.
The Slovenes, as before, were still lagging far behind the Czechs. Even the linguistic question had been thrown back into the melting point in the 1830s by Gaj’s ‘Illyrian’ propaganda. After a good deal of controversy, the literary leader of the day, Dr Johann Bleiweiss (in spite of his name,109 an enthusiastic Slovene and later revered as the ‘father of the nation’), ended by adopting Gaj’s orthography for the language in which he issued his little paper, a weekly appearing in Laibach, but insisted on the independence of the Slovene language.
In the 1840s the name ‘Slovenija’ began to appear (first in Bleiweiss’s paper). Once the Slovenes had got the bit between their teeth, they were as chauvinistic as anyone else. ‘From now on’, wrote one of Bleiweiss’s circle, ‘let no Slav maiden give her hand to a German husband, unless to draw him over to her nationality’.110 But lacking as they did any ‘historic rights’ to which to appeal, divided between four or five different Lands and possessing no aristocracy and only a minute bourgeoisie, they could do no more than chafe for more cultural freedom and more representation in local government; looking for both nowhere but to the Emperor.
It would be false to deny the German-Austrians of the Vormärz a national feeling, in the modern sense of the term. In particular, the younger ‘intellectuals’, headed by the High School students, among whom no less than nine more or less ostentatiously Germanic associations now existed, were by no means unaffected by the romantic nationalism of the day. They read the poetry of Schiller and Heine, the prose of Herder and Fichte, and thrilled to the thought that they belonged to a great, unspent people with its future in front of it. But to translate these enthusiasms into a political programme was a different matter. Even those few of them who felt a desire for unification with the other German States, an aspiration which in most of the smaller of those States synthetized so easily with Liberal aspirations, usually did so on grounds which were political rather than strictly national: they felt that in an united Germany they would obtain those Liberal institutions for which they could not hope in Austria as it stood. And those who wanted an united Germany achieved at the price of the disintegration of Austria were few indeed. The feeling of the vast majority was, as it has been well said,111 that ‘Austria and Germany needed one another’: the ‘Austria’ of that phrase being, if not necessarily the Gesammtmonarchie, then at any rate those parts of it of which they were accustomed to think as truly ‘Austria’, viz., the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands. But for these they had no ‘national’ programme, cultivated no ‘national’ movement, because they saw no need for one, since it was axiomatic for them that in the Monarchy (at least, this part of it), the German element was not only entitled to play the leading part, as the only one qualified to do so, through its possession of a cultivated bourgeoisie, but would automatically do so.112 Those of them who truly deserved the name of Liberal which has often been given, rather indiscriminately, to the whole class, accepted national liberty as one of the faces of the goddess of liberty at whose shrine they worshipped, but in their own way. They were able to approve of the separatist movements in Lombardy-Venetia and Galicia, and to sympathize with Hungarian Liberalism; they were even able to bestow patronizing encouragement on the cultural aspirations of the Czechs and Slovenes,113 but their benevolence was due to the fact that they simply attached no political importance to those movements, and therefore had not troubled to work out the political consequences for themselves if they did become political. The very few among them who even conjured up the picture of Austria as a multi-national State did so only to dismiss with ridicule the picture of a polity ‘in which the sovereign people of the Slovak besom-binders and the Galician schnapps-peasants had a role to play’.114 But the great majority never even played with such visions. They simply assumed that the political changes which they desired would come about without any alteration in the structure of the State, in the same way that they had come about, or might do so, in France or England. It has been well said of them that the European ideas of reform reached Austria, but were not given there ‘a specifically Austrian stamp’.115
The Viennese Liberals’ criticisms of the Monarchy as it then stood were thus not nationalist, but political, social and economic.
On the other hand, Vienna contained by far the largest and most powerful bourgeoisie, with its own class interests and consciousness, in the entire Monarchy.
Consequently, the Vienna of the Vormärz had its reform movement, as Pest, Prague and Milan had theirs; but its programme was not national, but political, social and economic.
This movement is generally described as a ‘middle-class’ and ‘Liberal’ one, but neither of those adjectives is entirely accurate. The greater part of the reformers were indeed middle class by origin and in outlook, but there were also aristocrats among them. It is, however, true that the ‘feudal’ character of the existing regime was, in the eyes of nearly all of them, one of its worst defects, and their attacks on it are often accompanied by vicious diatribes against the general personal qualities of the class.116
‘Liberal’ is a more doubtful description. All the would-be reformers were agreed in their dislike of the antiquated, obscurantist and inefficient regime, but when we come to suggested remedies, we can distinguish two trains of thought among them. The one, with which many men then actually serving the Government sympathized, really represented the old Josephinian tradition. What its adherents chiefly disliked in the regime was its inefficiency, and their true hearts’ desire was to see a modernized, efficient bureaucratic State, run by themselves. This demand entailed, in their eyes, a number of reforms which in a later age would have earned them the name (only it had not yet been invented) of Right Radicals; and it did not exclude among many of them, a complete readiness to see the structure of the Monarchy as centralist as Joseph n himself could have wished.
The representatives of the new business and intellectual classes (but this group, too, contained many civil servants) were ‘Liberals’ of a more conventional type. They wanted all the popular freedoms generally desired by European Liberals of their day: intellectual freedom, including freedom of the Press and the abolition of the censorship (these were very strong demands) and freedom of conscience, although since the Jewish element among them was then still small, the anti-clericalism which later obsessed Austrian Liberalism was still embryonic; most of them were Catholics, and in the religious field, went no further than Josephinian Erastianism. They wanted the relaxation of bureaucratic control over business life, a small and cheaper Civil Service, and above all, control by the tax-payer over the public purse. All these things were to be achieved through effective constitutional institutions, in which their own class should be fully represented.
So long as the State was neither free nor efficient, no one needed ask to which of these two groups – which had, indeed, much in common – he belonged, and they combined happily enough. It was not long after Francis’s death that they began to acquire mouthpieces and a certain measure of organization.117 1839 saw the foundation of the Niederösterreichischer Gewerbeverein, a body in which both the aristocracy and the leading figures of the new industrial and commercial world were represented; 1840, that of the ‘Concordia’, a society of artists, writers and actors whose members included Nestroy, Grillparzer, Endlicher, Baumgartner and others, and in 1842 followed the most important of all, the Juridisch-Politischer Leseverein,
an exceedingly heterogeneous body, the members of which were mostly higher officials or army officers, but included also, on the one hand, such men as Count Leo Thun, the Bohemian aristocrat, afterwards the most uncompromisingly clerical Minister of Education ever possessed by Austria, and on the other, business men, writers, lawyers, University Professors and doctors. The future Ministers Bach, Schmerling, Doblhoff, Hornbostl and several others all belonged to this association, which became the meeting-place for all leading representatives of the ‘bourgeois opposition’, and, as one writer has called it,118 the ‘General Staff’ of the movement.
Although frowned upon by Metternich and Sedlnitzky, the Leseverein was, no doubt largely for that very reason, patronized and protected by Kolowrat, and was consequently able to allow itself a good deal of freedom. It even listened to lectures by J. N. Berger on constitutional history, in which the desirability of constitutional institutions for Austria was openly argued. Moreover, although it had itself no official standing, its membership partly overlapped with that of a body which had such a standing, the Lower Austrian Estates.119 In the meetings of that body Schmerling, Doblhoff and others developed a reform programme which included in its political demands, besides the abolition of the robot and the tithe, such reforms as the broadening of the composition of the Estates by adding to them equal representation for the burghers and peasants, extension of their competences, and the institution of a sort of general Parliament (Allgemeine Reichstände) composed of representatives of the Estates of all Lands, to meet annually in Vienna, vote the budget, audit the State accounts and consider and advise on draft legislation. Other suggestions included the reduction of the length of military service, reformed taxation (including a general income-tax) and reform of the manorial system of communal government.
Some of the same requests were sent in by the Estates of other Lands – Bohemia, Moravia and Styria – and local associations similar to the Leseverein were founded in Graz and Prague (which at that time was a German town, so far as its propertied classes were concerned).
We should be flattering the honest Viennese bourgeois if we represented them as in any way seething with unrest during these years. The vast majority of them remained as insouciantly a-political as ever. For that matter, the ‘Opposition’, such as it was, was entirely loyal to the Crown; if its members wanted the ‘system’ overthrown, it was because they believed that it was undermining the solidarity of the Monarchy. But few and moderate as they were, their position at the heart of the Monarchy’s economic and social life gave them an importance disproportionate to their numbers, and they were destined, as we shall see, to play a large, if somewhat reluctant, part in the revolution of March 1848.
As the Viennese bourgeoisie occupied a special position, so did the High School students studying in Vienna, who constituted a not inconsiderable body – in 1846 Vienna University had 3,719 students on its books. Some of these were, of course, proto-bourgeois, coming from staid and respectable homes and destined to graduate into props of the regime. But they were a minority, and the sons of nobles a still smaller one, for both the nobles and the richer bourgeois preferred to have their sons educated at home, by private tutors. The majority of the students were sons of peasants, artisans or struggling Jewish professional men, whose best hope was one of the meagre careers open to a honoratior. Many of them were desperately poor. According to a contemporary writer,120 they often subsisted for weeks together on a diet of bread and water, huddling by night in cellars, if they could afford so much; the writer knew of one who slept in the winter in barns and stables, and in the summer, in the open air. The poorest of all were the Jewish students, who had less easy access to the resource by which many of their Christian colleagues kept body and soul together, of giving private lessons.
The students were usually the most fervent nationalists of their peoples: in Vienna and Graz they were the strongest German nationalists, and their opposite numbers were equally fanatic Magyars and Czechs. Further, the material circumstances of many of them and the generous enthusiasms of more, predisposed them to social radicalism. As we shall see, they were largely responsible in 1848 both for touching off the spark of revolution, and afterwards for keeping its flame burning. In particular, they filled the indispensable role of liaison officers with the workers. Their chief demands for themselves were in the intellectual field: for freedom of teaching and learning, abolition of the censorship, etc.
*
As time went on, the resistance of the Konferenzrat and its servants to all these challenges to its authority grew increasingly ineffectual, even increasingly half-hearted. The Archduke Ludwig’s conservatism was rooted in piety, but he was not intelligent enough to make it systematic. Metternich was himself too cultivated a man not to have a certain indulgence towards the things of the spirit, and in any case, too non-combative to impose his will against stiff opposition. Kolowrat, as we saw, posed as a Liberal and in fact undermined much of the work of his colleagues. An interesting tribute to the relative mildness of the Vormärz regime was paid by no less a person than Grillparzer, who wrote in his Erinnerungen aus dem Jahre 1848:
All these statesmen, however vigorously they carried on the old system, of free will or under compulsion, were yet at the same time much too good-natured and too humane to want also to carry on the old police pressure. And that was their ruin. Their feeling of decency, thinly as it flowed, yet brought down the March Government in Austria. The Emperor Francis’s system of government could only be carried on if accompanied by his police system. As the pressure relaxed, the springs shot up automatically.121
The censorship, in particular, while still applied fairly strictly to works printed inside the Monarchy – in 1845 Metternich personally rejected a petition from a group of writers, headed by Grillparzer, to relax it, saying that ‘to do so would frustrate the good intentions of the Government’ – had become almost nominal in relation to works printed abroad, which easily entered the Monarchy and were widely read. Persons in society read them openly and without fear, and even the students, for whom the nominal penalty for such an offence was perpetual exclusion from any academic institution in the Monarchy, clubbed together to buy them and passed them from hand to hand. Austria thus got the worst of both worlds, for attacks on her system and institutions were published abroad, chiefly in the Protestant States of North Germany, and these writings, many of which were the work of political refugees and correspondingly malevolent,122 achieved a two-fold circulation, wide in each case: in the place of their origin, and in Austria.
How lax the pressure had really become may be judged from Turnbull’s experiences. It is hard not to think that Turnbull’s spectacles were somewhat roseate, and that he did go rather far in describing conditions in the Monarchy as ‘combining unrestricted individual liberty with the most perfect public order.’ But he was no fool; he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and took the trouble, not only to study statistics, but to see for himself how peasants were fed and what wages were earned by industrial workers. And his own experiences entirely bear out his description of the regime. He passed the frontier without having his baggage opened. He seems hardly to have encountered a policeman in the whole course of his travels, and he found ample provision of English, French, German and Italian newspapers in the reading-rooms of Carlsbad, Graz and Trieste. His description of ‘the real indulgence of the Austrian Government which often tempers its nominal severity’ is, after all, a fair enough anticipation of the definition of the same system given three-quarters of a century later by the Socialist leader, Viktor Adler: ‘absolutism tempered by slovenliness’.
1 i.e., to confine himself to high policy, not to meddle with details of administration.
2 It will be remembered (see above, p. 239) that Ludwig had for several years been the only one of his brothers whom Francis still consulted. The designation of him as adviser in chief to Ferdinand was therefore, although unfortunate, logical enough, and should not be regarded as a piece of Macchiavellian intr
igue by Metternich to increase his own influence. It was, in fact, the one part of the document which was Francis’s own work.
3 It reproduced practically verbatim a draft which had been composed by Metternich as early as 1832 (Bibl, Kaiser Franz, pp. 387–8).
4 The most interesting feature of the prolonged intrigues is the warm support which Kolowrat received from the Archduke John.
5 Sometimes called by contemporary writers the Staats-und Konferenzministerium.
6 He gave up his direct official position, but all reports from the Staatsrat came to him for comment and report. He was in direct charge of high finance, including secret credit operations, with power to call on the advice of the financial sections of the Staatsrat and the President of the Hofkammer. He also was given charge of the police, subject only to the obligation of reporting to Metternich police business which touched on foreign affairs.
7 His wife, the Archduchess Sophie (not, of course, an unbiased witness), represents his role as having been rather less passive than is usually supposed. ‘Uncle Ludwig’s modesty and timidity’, she writes, ‘need my husband’s support whenever a decision has to be taken’ (Corti, Von Kind bis Kaiser, p. 165).
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 47
