The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  81 These included laws permitting the peasant to commute his obligations in perpetuity (although not to buy his freehold), limiting the hours of child labour in factories, improving the procedure on bills of exchange, and allowing Jews to settle anywhere in the country (outside the districts under Cameral control), lease (although not own) real property, and practise a trade or profession.

  82 One County introduced taxation for its nobles in 1842.

  83 The whole 1839–40 Diet had been overshadowed by a bitter conflict over this question.

  84 It must be remembered that no Party system yet existed in Hungary, and that the deputies of each County were rigidly bound by instructions given them by their Congregationes: if they wanted to depart from these, they had to go back to the Congregatio and persuade it to change its instructions. No Congregatio was in any way bound by any other. In so far as the leaders co-ordinated their ideas, this was by correspondence, or meeting if business took several of them to town at the same time.

  85 See above, p. 228, n. 3.

  86 See above, p. 222.

  87 The question of nomenclature is an awkward one, but important. The ‘Hungarian nation’ (magyar nemzet), in spite of the adjective (Hungary’s enemies often objected to it as unfairly identifying a part with the whole, but exactly the same usage was, and is, current in many other countries) had no ethnic significance, but a political one: up to 1848 it denoted the politically recognized class, i.e., the nobles (in Latin, the natio or populus). The ethnic groups composing the population of Hungary were known as ‘nationalities’ (nemzetiségek); when all of them were listed the Magyars also figure as a nemzetiség, but more generally, the word, in the plural, is used to denote the non-Magyar peoples of Inner Hungary. The Croats (of Croatia) were not a ‘nationality’; their nobles constituted the ‘Croat nation’.

  The word ‘nation’ was, however, sometimes used also of any body corporate enjoying extensive rights of self-government. The Serbs of Hungary constituted a ‘nation’ in this sense, as did the three privileged communities of Transylvania: the Hungarian nobles, the Szekels and the Saxons. This, again, was not an ethnic term, for a Roumanian acquiring Hungarian nobility became a member of the Hungarian nation, and a Saxon domiciled outside the Sachsenboden did not belong to the Saxon nation.

  88 See above, p. 56 f.

  89 The more extensive demand made in 1825 was an aberration, and not seriously pressed.

  90 The occasion was the Presidential Address delivered by him in 1842 to the Academy of Sciences which he had promised in 1825 to finance.

  91 The scenes in Zala had been so scandalous (inter alia, a mob of sandalled nobles discharged pistols into Deák’s house) that Deák announced that he would not accept a mandate if it could be got for him only through equal violence.

  92 See above, p. 261.

  93 Országos Ipárvédegylet, usually known for short as the Védegylet. The date of the foundation was 6 October 1844. Kossuth’s enthusiasm seems to have been due partly to the fact that, having lost the editorship of the Pesti Hirlap, he was without a regular outlet for his activities, or, indeed, a source of income.

  94 See above, p. 222.

  95 According to Srbik (II. 195 ff.), this compromise was largely Metternich’s personal production.

  96 Latin where they were corresponding ‘officially but in their own names’.

  97 The authorship of the programme is not entirely clear. Most of it is contained in two memoranda by Metternich to the Staatskonferenz, and Srbik (II. 198) gives as Metternich’s sources for these proposals Jarcke, Baron L. Ambrózy, L. von Wirkner and György Mailáth. But some of them must have come, if only indirectly, from Apponyi’s own circle: they were not the men to have a programme simply dictated to them.

  98 The programme frankly recommends the use of military force and corruption if Counties are recalcitrant.

  99 The death-blow to the Commercial Association came when its cashier absconded abroad with its funds. This, however, was not until 1846.

  100 This coup had been approved by Apponyi, who regarded the Turopolyans as radicals and potential allies of the Hungarian Opposition.

  101 The Government succeeded in pigeon-holing this request by referring it to a Committee which in the event never met.

  102 Extensive quotations from this address are given in R. W. Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, pp. 65–7.

  103 This was probably true enough. Štur was an unstable and inconsistent creature who held many doctrines successively and even simultaneously. Before 1848 he was Austro-Slav, sometimes even Hungaro-Slav à la Bernolak; then after 1848 he became a fanatical Russophile and Pan-Slav. See the study on him, Ljudevit Štur, his place in the Slavic World, by J. M. Kirschbaum, Winnipeg and Cleveland, 1958.

  104 This began publication in 1845. The Hungarians had tried to prevent it, but Sedlnitzky intervened. This was one of the few occasions on which he was able to get his will over a Hungarian question, for his direct authority did not extend across the Leitha. He used to make representations to the Hungarian Chancellery, but, as he used to complain, they were often ignored.

  105 On Roth, see the detailed study by Otto Folberth, Der Prozess Stephan Ludwig Roth (Graz, etc., 1958).

  106 Characteristic are the words used by M. Kogalniceanu at the opening of the Iaşi Academy in 1847:

  ‘I regard as my home the whole territory in which Roumanian is spoken and as my national history, the history of Moldavia as it was before they broke our brothers of Transylvania and Wallachia off from us.’

  107 He had been spending, on public objects but not always wisely, and without getting the Estates’ authorization, moneys from their domestic budget.

  108 Beidtel, II. 402–3, regards this change in the Chancellorship as having been a big factor in the rapid development of the Estates’ oppositional movements, not in Bohemia alone, but in all the Lands administered by the Vereingte Hofkanzlei.

  According to Beidtel, the real power in the Chancellery was now Inzaghi’s second in command, Pillersdorf (the later Minister President). But Pillersdorf himself, although a centralist, was no man of iron.

  109 It was, however, a corruption of the Slovene Blavec.

  110 Cit. Helfert, op. cit., I. 17.

  111 Molisch, op. cit., I. 24.

  112 There are some excellent remarks on this point in P. Burian, Die Nationalitäten in Cis-Leithanien und das Wahlrecht der Märzrevolution 1848/9 (Graz-Köln, 1962), pp. 15 ff.

  113 It is remarkable how many German-Austrian romantic writers of this period drew their inspiration from episodes of Czech history; Grillparzer’s Libussa and Lenau’s Ziskra are familiar examples. It is hardly necessary to refer here to the role played by Herder and other German writers in stimulating the Slav national renaissances.

  114 From Grenzboten, 1847, cit. Burian, p. 17.

  115 Charmatz, op. cit., p. 16.

  116 The case against the aristocracy is put with great vigour in many works, among which may be mentioned those of Andrian (himself a titled man), ‘Tebeldi’, Beidtel himself and Violand. Violand was an extremist, but the others say much the same thing in more temperate words. It may perhaps be remarked that if one-tenth of what Austrian writers of the old days used to say about their own society was true, it is inexplicable that fire and brimstone did not descend to destroy the whole contraption. If, on the other hand, the picture presented by many modern Austrian historians has anything in it, one cannot understand why angels did not waft the place up into heaven.

  But the Englishman, Russell, himself wrote that the Austrian aristocracy was ‘the least manly in sentiment and the least enlightened in mind of the German nobility’ (op. cit., II. 234–5.)

  117 A good account of these developments is given by Georg Franz, op. cit., pp. 17–41.

  118 Bibl, Zerfall Oesterreichs, II. 67.

  119 The Lower Austrian Estates had come to differ largely in character from those of most Lands, because although even there the towns, including Vienna itsel
f, enjoyed only very meagre representation as such, many of the landed estates were owned by bourgeois or by members of the Beamtenadel whose sympathies and interests were rather with the bourgeoisie than with the ‘feudal’ aristocracy.

  120 A. Füster, op. cit., p. 71. Füster, who acted as ‘Chaplain in the field to the Academic Legion’, was an extreme radical, but he knew how the students lived.

  121 Erinnerungen, Werke, vol. VIII, pp. 208–9.

  122 Schuselka’s various writings are good examples of such hostile products by malcontent émigrés; but Andrian’s famous Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft, which enormously affected opinion in both Germany and Austria, was also published abroad, although its author was working as a civil servant in Austria, as was Möhrings Sybillinische Bücher aus Oesterreich, by the tutor to an Archduke’s sons.

  8

  Before the Storm

  In spite of the considerable stresses which accumulated in most parts of the Monarchy during the decade which followed Francis’s death, the general atmosphere of the ‘high Vormärz’ (to coin a phrase) was curiously un-urgent. The spirit of Francis had reigned so long that it was difficult to imagine it as ever abdicating, and most men and women of the period did not nerve themselves to the imaginative effort. When their petitions were rejected, they shrugged their shoulders and left it at that. The proverbial Austrian who began his discourse on public affairs with the indignant exordium da muss etwas geschehen – and there were many who did – really ended it more often than not with the equally proverbial conclusion, da kann man nix machen. And the student of the period cannot escape the conclusion that he did so with a certain satisfaction. The devils he had learnt to know had ended by endearing themselves to him. Turnbull notes that the Viennese ‘dread any change, as fraught with evil’,1 and here again he is only confirming the judgment of Russell, who found the Viennese ‘more bitter enemies of everything like care or thinking … than any other (people) of Germany, or perhaps of Europe’,2 and the Austrian people ‘the most anti-revolutionary of Europe’.3 It would be easy to compile a whole anthology of quotations to the same effect from Austrian writers; Schuselka, for example, wrote that ‘the population of Vienna seemed to a serious observer to be revelling in a continuous state of intoxication. For them it was always Sunday, always Carnival.’ The more turbulent spirits themselves did no more than toy with the idea of revolution.

  Even economic conditions were not wholly unsatisfactory. Turnbull, as we have said, noted no signs of distress among any classes. Prices were rising, enough to cause some discomfort to the wage-earners and still more, to the fixed income classes, but the rise was still only slight. The most careful student of Austrian economic conditions of the day is still able to describe the years 1840–5 as ‘the last good period’.4

  But just as (we have suggested) the five years 1830–5 ought to be added to the beginning of the Vormärz, in its true spiritual sense, so the years 1846–7 should be lopped off it, as constituting a distinct historic period of their own. In them the atmosphere is quite unlike that of their easy predecessors. The complacent sense of security on the one hand and the only half-resentful acceptance on the other are both gone. In their place comes an anticipation of imminent change which is regarded with hopeful impatience by some, with anxious forebodings by others, but of which all are conscious.

  The transformation was largely wrought by a single event – an extremely curious one, and one where, as so often in Austrian history, the flint on which the spark was struck, and in part, the tinder on which it fell, lay outside the frontiers of the Monarchy. In 1840 the Liberals in the Polish emigration had reached agreement with the Conservative party, and the ‘national Government’ had included peasant emancipation in its programme. The Polish Left in Galicia (as in Prussian and Russian Poland) had thereupon developed a vigorous social agitation: emissaries toured the country, leaflets promising the peasants land and liberty passed from hand to hand, secret societies and conventicles sprang up. The Resolution of the Galician Estates,5 which itself owed something to the decision in Paris, lent colour to the propaganda.

  Absurdly optimistic reports reached Paris that the peasants had been won over to the national cause. They were so plausible that in the autumn of 1845 the Paris Committee decided that the time was ripe to strike again. This time the peasants were to be invited to join in, being promised land and liberty for their reward. The revolution was to embrace the territories of all three Partitioning Powers and Cracow, but it was to begin in Posen, Cracow and West Galicia,6 where the first objective was to be the Kreis capital of Tarnow. Zero day was fixed for 21 February 1846.

  It need hardly be said that the secret was ill-kept. Russia and Prussia got wind of it and nipped the preparations in the bud. The Austrians, too, received warnings, but the Archduke was incurably optimistic and Metternich, too, underestimated the danger.7 The Austrians therefore took next to no precautions. The garrisons were, indeed, brought up to strength, but left almost without ammunition.

  Meanwhile, their failures elsewhere did not deter the Poles of Cracow and Galicia. On 17 February the Kreishauptmann of Tarnow, Frh. von Breinl, received a message from Cracow that the revolt was about to break out (the date having been advanced) there and in Tarnow. Breinl was a man well-liked and trusted by the local peasants, and the next day a stream of peasants from the neighbouring villages arrived at his office, all with the same story: at 11 p.m. that night they were to assemble, armed with scythes and flails, then to march on Tarnow and ‘massacre the Germans there’. As reward they were to be allowed to loot the Jews’ shops and afterwards to receive their land and liberty.

  Breinl afterwards swore that all that he had told the peasants was that they were to obey only their lawful masters, i.e. the Austrian authorities. The Polish version, stubbornly maintained, was that he and other Austrian authorities had told them to attack their lords, and had even set a price on the heads of the Polish rebels.8 One inclines to believe Breinl, for it is certain that he afterwards saved many nobles from the peasants’ hands, but almost anything said in such a situation could easily be misinterpreted. In any case, it was on their lords that the peasants turned, and during the next three days a procession of peasant carts arrived in Tarnow laden with Polish nobles, some living, but others dreadfully mutilated corpses. They had done this, they said, ‘because the lords were against the Emperor’.

  Similar scenes, on a small scale, had taken place elsewhere in Galicia. Practically everywhere, where the peasants had moved at all, it had been to attack their lords, of whom 1,458 were counted afterwards to have been killed or wounded. With this the ‘rising’ was over in Galicia, before it had begun. In Cracow it lasted a few days longer. The Austrian General Collin had (at the request of the city Senate itself) occupied the Free City on 18 February with a little force of 750 men, but had withdrawn it on the 22nd, alleging a shortage of ammunition and supplies. The Poles then formed a ‘Government’, which sent detachments into the neighbouring country-side. Collin, assisted by an energetic young officer who won his spurs in this field, Lieut.-Colonel, as he then was, Benedek, drove them back with the help of primitively armed peasant auxiliaries. On 3 March, while these operations were still in progress, Russian troops marched into Cracow, followed on the 5th by a detachment of Prussians. Now the Poles outside the city agreed to call off any further moves in order to avoid waste of blood. They should rather complete their armaments and try again later. The ill-conceived and ill-starred enterprise was over.

  *

  This extraordinary episode had profound effects, direct or indirect, in almost every field of the Monarchy’s public life. One consequence was, on the surface, a gain for her, for on 6 November, after concluding the necessary negotiations with the two other Partitioning Powers,9 she announced the annexation of the Free City, consequently actually ending the Vormärz with wider frontiers than had been hers when the period opened. But this brought her perhaps the reverse of profit, even internationally. While the Czar had app
roved the annexation, it did not cause him to revise the feelings of dislike and contempt with which he was now regarding Austria’s rulers. Prussia had given way only very reluctantly, and the annexation enhanced the jealousy with which she and the other German States viewed Austria. Britain disapproved deeply, particularly since Metternich had informed the Foreign Office of the impending annexation only ten days before announcing it. Palmerston denounced the step publicly, with the significant comment that the Acts of the Congress of Vienna ‘constituted a single whole which, if not valid on the Vistula, can be declared invalid on the Rhine or the Po’. He was to give practical expression to this view in 1848, in a fashion which caused Austria great difficulties, when the settlement on the Po was really called in question. France swallowed the affront more easily, and in the autumn of 1847 Metternich reached an unwritten ‘entente’ with Guizot, but the event proved this worthless. In general, Austria’s moral credit was weakened everywhere by the odium which the Polish Committee in Paris succeeded in casting on her for her alleged commission of the social crime of instigating peasants to massacre nobles.10 How small her international influence had become was made dismally apparent in 1847, when Metternich’s support was unable to save the Swiss Sonderbund from defeat at the hands of the Federation.11

  In Galicia itself the massacres left the Polish nobles, almost to a man, bitterly resentful towards the Austrian authorities, while the annexation increased the complexity of her internal Polish problem by adding to the numbers of her Polish subjects a contingent which was not insignificant numerically, and qualitatively very important, since it contained a large intelligentsia, and one steeped in nationalist tradition. The Government had to take strong measures. A big garrison was stationed in Cracow, and the troops in Galicia reinforced. The unsuspicious old Archduke was induced to resign, and the able and energetic Count Rudolph Stadion, President of the Gubernium of Moravia-Silesia, sent to Lemberg as ‘Commissioner Extraordinary’. But the thorniest problem of all was that raised by the peasants, among whom the belief, right or wrong, had taken firm root that the Government had promised to reward them for their loyalty with their liberty, which they demanded vociferously; thereby placing the Government in a quandary. It feared that if it did nothing, the peasants would join hands with the Polish nobles (who, they claimed, had made them the same promise). On the other hand, it was anxious not to give the impression that it was rewarding massacre, nor to make a concession which would lead to further demands in Galicia itself (if the peasants stopped paying dues to their lords, the Staatskonferenz argued, they would go on by refusing payments to the State) and also set a precedent which would have to be followed elsewhere. Metternich was further afraid of incurring the displeasure of the Czar.12 The sole early fruit of these conflicting considerations was an Imperial Patent, dated 13 April, which abolished a few special abuses, most of them already illegal, and extended the peasants’ rights of complaint and appeal, but left the basic situation broadly unchanged.