The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  8 In 1836 it had been 13·5 m.g.; in 1837, 8·5; m 1838, 15·5. The figures for the next decade were similar.

  9 Beer, op. cit., p. 172, gives the figures of 43·8 m.g. in 1831 and 47·9 m.g. in 1847. For the delay in introducing the land tax, see above, p. 203.

  10 In 1846 Hungary, with seven-eighteenths of the population of the Monarchy, was only yielding less than one-seventh of its total direct and indirect taxation (23,227,333 g. out of a total of 164,236,758).

  11 Here Beer’s figures are 62·92 m.g. in 1830 and 79·03 m.g. in 1847. These include the yield of customs and excise.

  12 For a list of these loans see Beer, pp. 159 ff.

  13 Eichhoff had resigned under suspicion of irregularities, which may have been unfounded; see Beer, pp. 149 ff.

  14 A. Gratz, op. cit., p. 250 gives a slightly lower figure: 984 m.g. at the beginning of

  15 The Nordbahn shares paid only 2½%. Nevertheless speculation in them drove them up to great heights.

  16 1,048 in Austria, 161 in Hungary and 182 in Lombardy-Venetia.

  17 See below, p. 261.

  18 See below, p. 433 f.

  19 It is, however, noteworthy that in Lombardy, unlike Hungary, there was no national feeling against the Zollverein.

  20 The Emperor’s decision to this effect was delivered on 9 May 1844.

  21 On this see Srbik, II. 138–9; also Corti, pp. 164, 218 ff.

  22 This was a little group inhabiting the Zillertal, which had been transferred in 1816 from Salzburg, where the practice of Protestantism had been allowed, to the Tirol, where it was forbidden. They were given the customary choice between renunciation of the faith and emigration. Most of them chose the latter. The King of Prussia gave them asylum.

  23 It was, however, extended to Galicia in 1842.

  24 These were, roughly, those for which it asked after 1848; see below, p. 458.

  25 Not, however, of the lesser nobility, which, according to Beidtel (II. 228), he thought too numerous. But by now the lesser nobility had in any case lost its footing on the land almost everywhere, and most of such of its members as had escaped ruin had merged in the Beamtenadel.

  26 To us, indeed, the figures appear modest enough. Springer (Statistik II. 9) gives for the whole Monarchy when he wrote (1842) a total of 34,350 Grade A civil servants, of whom 27,430 were established, 5,190 ‘Praktikanten’, or probationers, and 1,630 Diurnisten (extra hands, often ex-officers, who were taken on when there was a rush of work) and 91,880 Grade B. 16,000 of the Grade A and 84,000 Grade B were employed in the financial services; in other words, most of them were douaniers or excisemen. The strength of the central administration was 100 Hofräte, 95 Hofsekretäre and 105 Hofkonzipisten. The staff of a Kreisamt in the 1840s still consisted only of one Kreishauptmann, two to four Kreiskommissäre, and a handful of copyists, messengers, etc. In the Monarchy as a whole, one person in every 1,030 of the population was an official. The proportion was naturally highest (1:298) in Lower Austria, where the central Ministries had their headquarters; in Styria it was 1:950, in Bohemia 1:647, in Transylvania 1:2,361 and in Hungary only 1:2,730. The total salaries paid amounted to 38,249,879 fl., while pensions, etc., cost another 6,758,250 fl. This, as will be seen, was substantially less than the cost of the armed forces, and less than that of the service of the public debt. The figures given by Turnbull (I. 371) are practically identical; those of the Statistische Tabellen for 1828 somewhat smaller (32,157 and 78,614), but the proportion to the total population is practically the same.

  27 The President of the Superior Court in Verona, for example, received 20,000 fl. a year, the Hungarian Országbiró, 14,000, etc., while a minor official might be getting only 3–400. For an interesting picture of the financial vicissitudes of an official family (which fared, indeed, far better than the average) see the biographical introduction to Beidtel, op. cit.

  28 The case of Kübeck, the provincial tailor’s son who rose to be President of the Hofkammer, is often quoted as proof that promotion was not impossible for a man of lowly birth. But Kübeck’s case was conspicuous precisely because it was so exceptional. Incidentally, it was Francis who first raised him out of the ruck, and according to Beidtel (pp. 224–5), he owed his further advance largely to his connections with the financial world.

  29 In 1840 117·8 of the 170·8 m.g. transactions carried through by the National Bank were with the Government (Beer, p. 157).

  30 This was largely due to a freak of natural conditions. Up to the late 1830s the cotton-spinners of Bohemia, among whom the process began, had depended largely on small machines driven by water-power. Two abnormally dry years put many of these water-wheels out of action, and the cotton-masters went over in a hand’s turn to steam-driven machines. (See G. Otruba in Bohemia, II. pp. 153 ff.) Whence they suddenly acquired the cash or the credit for this operation is a question to which I have vainly sought the answer. Zenker, however, quotes the following figures for imported machinery and parts (in m.g.):

  machines parts

  1836 93 40

  1837 298 54

  1838 345 46

  1839 350 50

  The figures remained on approximately this level for the next ten years.

  31 This was partly because coal was replacing charcoal. The first trains used wood, but they soon went over to coal.

  32 Forradalom és Szabadsághárc 1848–9, p. 273.

  33 The first sugar-beet factory was established in 1830; Francis gave it a ten years’ exemption from the Erwerbssteuer.

  34 Turnbull met ‘a gentleman attached to the University in Graz’ who told him that he lived on 400 fl. a year, out of which he was able to buy books. Many bourgeois families ‘lived well on 1,000–1,200 fl. a year’ (op. cit., p. I. 265). Graz was, it is true, an exceptionally cheap town. Wilde met an enterprising Jew who ran a kindergarten in Vienna, and was able to give his charges a solid midday meal for a kreuzer apiece.

  35 We remarked above that the Academy was founded on Metternich’s motion, and in fact, after opposing it before, he himself proposed its foundation in 1846. It is a curiosity of history that Ferdinand signed the order exempting the proceedings of the Academy’s proceedings and publications from the normal censorship on 13 March 1848, the day of the outbreak of the revolution.

  36 Grünberg in L. u. F., I. 24. Grünberg records, however, that in the 1840s there were complaints that the authorities were applying the rule laxly.

  37 For the exceptions see above, p. 160, n. 4.

  38 ‘Tebeldi’, p. 200. Extraordinary as it may seem, no one in Austria had been able to tell me where ‘Tebeldi’ got his figures from.

  39 Cit. Blum, op. cit., p. 172.

  40 Blum, p. 202.

  41 This list (which is quoted by Ember, Forradalom, p. 198) was drawn up in 1849 by the statistician, Fényes, for the then Hungarian Government, in preparation for the planned land reform. Fényes published the first edition of his Statistics in 1843, brought up to date in 1847; his figures are probably from the latter year. Merei, op. cit., p. 173, quotes a nearly identical global figure for ‘just before 1848’–619,725 sessionati peasants, holding between them 234,629 sessions. Tebeldi gives nearly the same global figure, 643,215 holdings, of which, however, he reckons 226,000 as full or half, and 417,215 as quarter, etc. Finally, Merei quotes Austrian figures from the early 1850s, not covering quite the entire country. Of 552,252 peasants who by then had benefited from the reform in the areas covered by him, 17,262 had received holdings larger than one session; 28,599, one session each; 43,865 between a half and one; 173,119 a half each; 239,692 between a quarter and a half; and 22,715 less than a quarter.

  One difficulty with Hungary is that no two sets of figures cover exactly the same area; Tebeldi’s, for example, presumably exclude the Partium, which Fényes’ include. The figures for the 1850s probably include former dominical land held by peasants on lease.

  42 ‘Tebeldi’, pp. 204, 217, calculates that a peasant in the Western Lands paid 13·2% of the assessed value of h
is yield to the State in direct taxation, and 4·25% in dues in kind and services, 24% to his lord plus 3% to the manorial officials for illegal exactions, 6% to the Church and 5·25% to the commune (includng school fees and insurance). A Lower Austrian smallholder’s budget reproduced by Bach, op. cit., pp. 368–9 gives the assessed value of the holding (of 17·2 yokes) at 83 fl., out of which he paid 12·24 in State and Kreis taxation, 1·18 for billeting soldiers, 24·04 to the landlord and 17·15 in various dues and services. The list however, includes 5·43 on a laudemium and 2·51 on a mortuary. Zenker, op. cit., p. 54 quotes a Silesian peasant whose holding, of thirty yokes, was assessed at 120 fl. a year, on which he paid 23·24 in State taxation, 1·44 in ground rent, 0·7 in ‘spinning money’ and services and dues to his landlord of a cash value of 61·40.

  On the other hand, Le Play (II. 272 ff.), taking the budget of a Hungarian peasant family selected by him as typical, holding a quarter session, and calculating his real income and outgoings, converted in each case into cash values, puts the former at 1,179 fl. 60 kr. and the latter at 66·72 in dues in kind to the landlord and priest (these presumably include the tenth and the ninth), 35·24 in value of robot (thirteen days by the head of the family and two by the eldest son), 2·60 in house tax, 4·16 in payments to the Church and 2·34 in school fees for his children.

  43 In Le Play’s commune the area of common land was nearly five times that of the rustical arable land, and he notes this figure as typical.

  44 Op. cit., p. 208.

  45 Sealsfeld, pp. 91 f.

  46 Op. cit., p. 44.

  47 Op. cit., I. 89.

  48 Op. cit., p. 9.

  49 When the Prussian, von Stein, wrote in 1809 that ‘the condition of the peasants in (the Austrian) Monarchy, except in Hungary, is much happier than in Prussia’, it is fair to note that his travels did not take him into Hungary.

  50 Op. cit., p. 27.

  51 Op. cit., I. 2.

  52 Id., p. 285.

  53 Ibid.

  54 For the payments, see above, p. 270, n. 1. The family consisted of husband and wife, three children (one adult) and a grandfather. It spent 44·35 fl. on ‘amusements’, including drink in the village inn. Its consumption included 1,096 lb. of rye, 57 lb. of fat bacon, 57 of beef and mutton, 213 of pork, 100 of poultry, 23 of fish, 684 of vegetables, 505 litres of wine and 12 litres of brandy. The amount spent by the family on ‘amusements’ and on alcohol consumed in the house equalled almost exactly the entire expenditure on taxes and dues of all kinds.

  55 So, for example, R. Bright, op. cit., pp. 111 ff. It should, however, be noted that Bright, like many others, finds the root of the trouble in the ‘system’, which, oppressive to the peasants, is also unremunerative for the landlords.

  56 Paget, l.c.

  57 Where rustical peasants reclaimed land previously uncultivated in an old-established commune, the lord usually claimed it as his own and charged them rental for it, but sometimes they succeeded in getting it classified as rustical. Law-suits over this point, and also over enclosures of common lands, were very frequent.

  58 It will be of interest to quote Le Play’s analysis of the social structure of his ‘typical’ commune (in the Hungarian plain). It consisted 355 jobbágy families, of whom 5 held two sessions each, 35 one each, 70 halves and 245 quarters; 160 ‘masters’ (17 smiths, 27 joiners, wheelwrights and other workers in wood, 30 masons and other workers in stone, 40 weavers or tailors, 6 millers, 18 merchants, 15 Jewish pedlars, 17 various); 80 cottagers, some of whom lived by hiring out horses for the post, others by working for the villein peasants; 40 houseless men (how they lived is not stated); and 5 manorial employees.

  In Hungary, at this time, Le Play found that where there were several sons, the eldest usually went into the army, the second inherited the farm, and the others either established new farms on land previously uncultivated, or became artisans.

  59 Op. cit., I. 186.

  60 A primary schoolmaster in a country district got 130–150 fl. a year, his assistant, usually 70; in Vienna, about twice as much. An excise-man got 200 fl., a State official of medium grade, 400. A disgruntled man employed on public works in Vienna in June 1848, at 24 kr. a day, which was the top rate for unskilled labour, complained that he ought to be getting 36, which was what he had been earning in his factory. On that ‘he had been able to afford three good meals a day, with coffee, wine and beer, and a decent lodging’ (Violand, Soziale Geschichte, p. 131). Dr Fischof, President of the Committee of Public Security, before whom the complaint came, was not very sympathetic; he himself was getting only 40 kr. a day as consultant in a Viennese hospital, a post which allowed him hardly any time for private practice.

  61 Wages varied so widely from trade to trade that there seems little purpose in giving figures, especially in the absence of figures on the cost of living. Some figures are given by Bach, pp. 217 ff., M.K.P. III. 85, Zenker, pp. 66 ff. and Marx, passim. M.K.P. gives for a skilled machinist in Vienna, up to 80 kr. a day, for a silk weaver, 40–50 kr., for a textile weaver, 30–40 kr.; about thirty per cent lower in the provinces. Women earned 20–30 kr., juveniles, 7–8. Bach’s figures are for Bohemia. The highest (excluding compositors, who earned really good money) is 50 kr. plus food and lodging; the lowest, 2–8. Zenker gives an average of 5·22 fl. weekly for a man, 2·58 for a woman. For wages in country districts (especially Upper Austria and Styria) see Turnbull, vol. 1, passim.

  62 Zenker, p. 61, writes that in 1845 in the cotton and paper industries of the Western half of the Monarchy, 433 of every 1,000 workers were men, 420 women and 147 children.

  63 There were, however, a large number of public holidays, and the peculiar Austrian institution of the ‘Blue Monday’, when a worker slept off his Sunday night hangover on Monday, was widely observed. One left-wing historian of the 1848 revolution in Vienna, which broke out on a Monday, explains the large number of workers who flocked into the city that morning with the simple words: ‘since it was not usual to work on a Monday.’ A worker in regular employment usually worked about 300 days in the year. Brügel, Sozialdemokratie I. 44, says that the absence of the Sunday rest was not one of the grievances resented by the workers, and Nemes, p. 255, says the same of Hungary.

  64 In 1846, 131,116 persons living in Vienna had been born outside it. In 1820 the figure had been only 13,552.

  65 In Vienna, including the outer suburbs, the population increased by 45% between 1827 and 1847, while the increase in housing was only 11·4%.

  66 Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft, p. 24.

  67 Marcel Brion, Daily Life in the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert (English tr., London, 1959, p. 14), writes that ‘entire poverty was practically non-existent in Vienna’.

  68 The guilds were, of course, trade associations, and ‘brotherhoods’ existed among the miners and in some other trades. When the crisis in Bohemia grew acute in the 1840s, a number of ‘factory funds’ (Fabrikscassen), which acted as strike funds, were founded, but new foundations were forbidden in 1845.

  69 The chief exception was the circle round Clemens Maria Hofbauer, who preached social reform through the Church; but his doctrines seem to have had no effect whatever on official policy, and his own approach was religious rather than social.

  70 Local authorities on the roads were obliged to provide a night’s shelter and a meal for those making the journey.

  71 All writers are agreed on this point. It is interesting to note the opinion of Wilde, the Irish doctor who visited Austria in 1840. Wilde not only found the Viennese artisans (as also the bourgeoisie) better off than their opposite numbers in England, but expressly praised the absence of discontent or agitation among the workers, contrasting it most favourably with the attitude of the English workers. He greatly praised the prudence of the Austrian authorities for insulating the workers against subversive doctrines (op. cit., pp. 8 f.).

  72 The famous peasant tribune Kudlich, whose parents were villein peasants on a big estate in Silesia, has recorded that the local peasants
used to keep a specially weak horse and even a specially small cart expressly for their robot services (op. cit., I. 50). It was a common landlords’ complaint that the peasants sent their youngest son, a child, to do the service.

  73 Inter alia, the landlords had to pay for the upkeep of the village jail and for the maintenance of the prisoners in it. This may partly explain the predilection of the Courts for passing sentences of corporal punishment, rather than imprisonment.

  74 One of these occurred as late as 1845. For a description of this curious incident, in which the chief figure was a woman (incidentally, a Magyar of Inner Hungarian origin), see Helfert, Geschichte, I. pp. 68–9.

  75 When the insurrectio was called out in 1809, the women of many noble families had moved into the towns, because they dared not stay on the land unprotected by their men-folk.

  76 See above, p. 246.

  77 Anon., Polnische Revolutionen, p. 24.

  78 The name ‘St Jurists’, applied in some books to this party, is an attempt to reproduce for Western ears the Ruthene form of the name George.

  79 Interestingly, the first collection of Ruthene folk songs was published (in 1833) by a Pole, Zaleski, the later Statthalter of Galicia.

  80 I can find no authority for this statement (nor, for that matter, for saying that Kolowrat had handled Hungarian affairs from 1836–8), either in Metternich’s own papers, in the biographies of him, or any other source. But it is a fact that from 1839 we find the threads of Vienna’s Hungarian policy running together in Metternich’s hands. In 1841 a mixed Austro-Hungarian Committee (the Hungarian members of which were all reliable centralists) was set up to devise means of coping with the Hungarian Opposition (see Hock-Biedermann, op. cit., p. 680).

  In 1837, however, Metternich had been entirely in favour of the policy of the strong hand; see his letters to the Czar of April and May of that year, published by E. Andics (op. cit., annex, pp. 187–96). The documents do not reveal just why he became less rigid from 1839 onward; probably simply his urgent desire for recruits and the knowledge born of experience that he would be unable to get them out of fifty-two recalcitrant Counties. He was also sick in the latter half of 1839.