The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  163 A Hungarian compositor in Vienna who had set up the proclamation told Pulszky of it, and Pulszky advised the Diet (Pulszky, II. 207).

  164 Latour had circularized the forces in Hungary releasing them from their oath to the Hungarian Constitution.

  165 An eccentric watchmaker named Swoboda had founded a sort of credit institute, based on highly idiosyncratic financial principles: a subscriber could get an assignat entitling him to considerable credits, on the sole security of his own future industry. The idea had in it certain beguiling aspects, and Doblhoff himself gave it his official blessing and subscribed to it, although he did not draw on it. In September Swoboda, after collecting a large number of subscriptions, opened his institute and began issuing his assignats. The subscribers rushed to draw their chits, but no one would honour them. The disappointed holders then clamoured that Doblhoff should recognize the assignats as official currency, and the rioting began when he refused to do so.

  166 The take-over took place only on 23 September, but Schwarzer had resigned after the August riots.

  167 A private contest had, indeed, developed inside the agrarian population, for the dwarf-holders and landless men had asked to be given holdings by enclosure of common land. The possessing peasants opposed these claims vigorously, denouncing the unfortunate claimants as ‘communists’, and joined forces with the authorities, under that banner.

  168 There is a very detailed and vivid description of the events of this day in Kiszling, op. cit., I, 239 ff. Extracts from the subsequent inquiry into the murder of Latour are given by Hartig, op. cit., pp. 335–461.

  169 The National Guard had been divided, some units taking one side and some the other.

  170 According to Hübner (op. cit., p. 224), he had, after his narrow escape from the mob, first tried to disguise himself as a woman, until someone pointed out the incongruity of this dress with his luxuriant moustache. He then disguised himself as a lackey. He first went to Salzburg, surfacing in Olmütz on 5 November.

  171 Hübner gives a vivid description of his experiences on his own flight, op. cit., pp. 231 ff.

  172 M.K.P., III. 143, puts the number of refugees at a hundred thousand.

  173 Stadion seems to have been first approached by the Czech Deputies of the Reichstag but he was supported also by Schwarzenberg, and, very strongly, by Wessenberg.

  174 The date was changed afterwards to the 22nd.

  175 The choice is said to have been made on Palacký’s suggestion.

  176 The best of the many accounts of these days is that by Ehnl, ap. Kiszling, loc. cit.

  177 Krausz’s position was a very odd one. He stopped in Vienna, partly because he believed the regime there to be lawful (he acquired much popularity by refusing to countersign Ferdinand’s Proclamation of 7 October, on the grounds that it was illegal), partly to save the Treasury from being plundered. In this cause he periodically made small douceurs to various more or less illegal bodies of the Left. But he kept in touch with Olmütz, which he visited frequently, for the train ran between Vienna and Olmütz, quite placidly, until the capital was invested, and the purity of his motives and the value of his services were appreciated there. Hübner, who admired him greatly, has some interesting remarks on him (op. cit., pp. 251 ff., 259 ff.). He was on good terms with the students, and probably did a lot to calm them down.

  178 Its President was a certain Awrum Chaizes, calling himself Dr Adolf Chaizé, a Jew of unknown origin.

  179 Zenker writes bitterly that the peasants, ‘far from helping Vienna, everywhere welcomed the Kaiserliche enthusiastically’ (op. cit., p. 185); and see the Archduchess Sophie’s description of the Imperial family’s triumphal procession through Moravia (Corti, pp. 314–15). Kudlich went on a crusade to try to stir the peasants up and only got arrested for his pains; he was, indeed, allowed to go unmolested.

  180 They had made a small advance a few days earlier, but then had retreated again.

  181 For his curious later career, see below, p. 535.

  182 Pulszky, II. 301–2.

  183 Rogge, Oesterreich von Vilagos bis zur Gegenwart, I. 92.

  184 Some outbreaks of unrest in Silesia and the Bukovina were purely social in character.

  185 Fischel, Sprachenrecht, No. 1177. The date of the decree was 29 September.

  186 In fact, the peasants, mistrusting the unaccustomed device, had taken little part in them. In one constituency, only five votes were cast.

  187 Not, however, very many (see above, p. 381, n. 2). It was characteristic that the Ruthenes retorted by raising a ‘legion’ to hold the frontier against them. It was they who afterwards guided the Russians across the passes.

  188 The man to whom the Ministry of Education had been offered, Freiherr von Helfert, had declined Ministerial rank on the score of his youth, so Education was made a department of the Ministry of the Interior, under his charge. Helfert survived many years, to become in his old age one of the best historians of the Monarchy.

  189 For the various estimates which have been made of Felix Schwarzenberg’s abilities, see Adolf Schwarzenberg, op. cit., finis.

  190 Bruck was in some ways the most interesting of the whole team. Born in Elberfeld in 1798, son of a Protestant book-binder in modest circumstances, he had started out for Greece in 1821 to fight for liberty, but got stranded in Trieste. There he married the daughter of a rich merchant, founded the Oesterreichischer Lloyd, and soon made a considerable fortune. His abilities had already attracted the attention of Metternich. See R. Charmatz, Minister Freiherr von Bruck, Leipzig, 1916.

  191 Till, Gestalter, p. 384.

  192 See Walter, op. cit., pp. 260 ff. Even Redlich (Franz Joseph, p. 43) takes the other view, but Walter seems to me to prove his point conclusively. It is worth noting that Hübner described Schwarzenberg in his diary ad 1–5 October 1848, as ‘a man of authority but not at all an absolutist’.

  193 These particular words, it is true, did not spring from Schwarzenberg’s heart. They came from Hübner, who drafted the programme, and on his own admission (op. cit., pp. 311 f.) put in the phrase about ‘taking the lead’ knowing it to be a piece of hypocrisy, but inserting it ‘ad captivandam benevolentiam of the Liberal faction of the Cabinet’ and Schwarzenberg smiled at Hübner as he read it out. Schwarzenberg had not deleted certain phrases ‘the hollowness of which had struck him’, because some of his colleagues asked for them.

  194 Srbik, II. 182. Contrary to the usual belief, all these preliminaries to the abdication seem to have been arranged, so far as the Court was concerned, exclusively by the Empress. The Archduchess Sophie was not initiated for many weeks, presumably because the proposals involved passing over her husband; according to her diary, she discussed it with him for the first time in mid-June, this because the Archduke John had then been pressing for the abdication to take place on Francis Joseph’s birthday (Corti, p. 296). It was only then that Francis Joseph himself was initiated into the plans (id., p. 297).

  195 He retired to Prague, where he lived in seclusion until his death in 1875.

  196 It is told of him that once, when he had been taken seriously ill in the night and his doctor, roused from sleep, rushed into his room unceremonially dressed, Francis Joseph, struggling as he was for breath, found enough of it to send him back with the gasped work ‘Frack!’. Characteristic of his regard for the attributes of Monarchy was his insistence, when ceding Lombardy in 1859, on retaining for himself, for his own lifetime, the Grand Mastership of the Order of the Iron Crown.

  197 As mentioned below (p. 455), Francis Joseph in 1852 even abolished the post of Minister of War, restoring it only when he renounced absolutism. Eisenmann (p. 155) rightly emphasizes the psychological importance of this step, which made the contact between the Monarch and his armed forces direct, without the ‘intervention’, which had irritated the Army, of a third instance.

  198 Margutti, p. 223. Francis Joseph always shook hands with a noble at the end of an audience, never with a commoner.

  199
Margutti, op. cit., p. 252; and see below, p. 749.

  ‘I am first of all an Austrian,’ he told the Fürstentag in Vienna in 1862, ‘but I am decidedly (entscheiden) German.’

  200 See Walter, pp. 262 ff. The breach of faith was a very bad one. A piquant touch is that Windisch-Graetz did not become aware of it during the ceremony, because he did not listen attentively to the declaration; he only noticed that it seemed a little short. He only became aware – to his fury – of the deception which had been practised on him when he read the Declaration in the Wiener Zeitung.

  201 This speech also seems to have been drafted by Hübner, but subjected to amendments by some of his colleagues, among whom Bach, in particular, found the first draft ‘insufficiently constitutional’ (Hübner, p. 310).

  202 The President of the Reichstag, Smolka, had been left out because, having remained in Vienna after 6 October, he was – most unjustly – regarded as a revolutionary.

  203 Under the form of words chosen, these appointments derived from Francis Joseph’s sovereign authority. The appointment of Rajačić involved him in a dispute with the Czar, who denied his right to appoint a Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

  204 Matters had been made worse by Kossuth’s interference. Perczel, commanding a small independent force south of Görgey’s, had also been retreating on Buda, and Kossuth, anxious to raise the spirits of the population, had ordered him to join battle. He did so, at Mór, on 30 December, and was heavily defeated.

  205 Suplyikać had died suddenly on 22 December. After this, Stratimirovics was appointed acting Vice-Voivode, in charge of civilian affairs, but Thodorovics, an officer from the Frontier, took over the miiltary command.

  206 To do him justice, he seems to have been misled by reports from his intelligence service which led him to believe that if he waited, the Hungarian resistance would disintegrate spontaneously.

  207 Except in this respect, that it spared later individuals and bodies much work. In general, when peoples and politicians came to discuss constitutional problems again, they took up their arguments exactly where the Reichstag had laid them down.

  208 ‘The right to preserve nationality, and in particular, national language, is inviolable, and guaranteed by the State. Every person is entitled to present his case to the competent authority in his own language, if it is in local usage (landesüblich), and to be judged in it. The detailed rules for the execution of this principle by the organs of the State will be laid down in separate laws. Provincial languages (Landessprachen) are to be given equal treatment in the establishment of schools and of higher educational establishments.’

  209 The Ruthenes had petitioned the Crown for the division of Galicia as early as 26 October.

  210 His other proposed ‘groups of Lands’ were the German (Upper and Lower Austria, North Tirol, North Styria, North Carinthia, Salzburg, Vorarlberg, and the German districts of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia); the Polish (Galicia, North Bukovina, North-Eastern Hungary – he did not dare offend the Poles for the sake of the Ruthenes); the Illyrian (South Styria, South Carinthia, Carniola, the Littoral); the Italian (Lombardy-Venetia, South Tirol); the Southern Slav (Dalmatia, Croatia-Slavonia, South Hungary); the Magyar; and the Wallachian (Roumanian).

  211 Löhner. He made the proposal very early, on 26 July 1848. It appears, however, that while his was the only voice raised in this sense in the Parliament, the idea was not unpopular among his fellow-countrymen; see the letter from Palacký, quoted by Burian, op. cit., p. 78, n. 152, complaining bitterly enough that the Germans wanted to dismember Bohemia and get rid of Galicia, thus ensuring a majority for the Germans in the rest of Austria. According to the article in Bauernbefreiung quoted above (p. 350, n. 2), n. 40, a meeting of German Bohemians on 28–30 August had drawn up a programme which called for the abolition of provincial frontiers and the establishment of Kreise delimited ethnically.

  212 See below, p. 419 seq.

  213 Geist-Lanyi, op. cit., pp. 171–2. The Roumanian Deputies in Kremsier, all but one of whom, as has been said, were peasants, do not seem to have been vocal on the point. But when the Court passed the Roumanians’ memorandum (see above, p. 346) on to the Parliament, it was argued in detail by others. The Ruthenes, whose very existence in the Bukovina the Roumanians had ignored, counter-petitioned for the province to be divided on ethnic lines, or alternatively, left with Galicia, and they were supported by the Czechs, but the Germans and Poles took the Roumanians’ side.

  214 Galicia was to have 10 of these, Bohemia 9, Moravia 4, Lower Austria and Tirol 3 each and Styria 2.

  215 Another offence of theirs was to have re-elected as their President Smolka, who had remained in Vienna.

  216 When told of the Government’s plan, the Reichstag offered to accept Stadion’s draft in place of their own, but the proposal was rejected, because it would still have left the authorship of the Constitution with the Reichstag.

  217 Those who fled were Violand, Goldmark, Füster and Kudlich. All landed up eventually in the USA. Three (including Fischof) who refused to flee were arrested. They were detained in prison for many months awaiting trial, but eventually acquitted.

  218 Although, as will be seen, most of the Stadion Constitution was never translated into practice, and the whole instrument was cancelled less than three years after its issue, it is worth while summarizing these provisions at some length, since they were taken over almost verbatim in the Constitution of 1867 (see below, p. 561).

  219 Its numbers were fixed afterwards at twenty-one.

  220 As suggested by the Reichstag, Vorarlberg remained attached to the Tirol, while the Bukovina became an independent Crownland, in token whereof it was promoted to the status of a ‘Duchy’. Galicia was divided into two Statthaltereiabteilungen, with their centres in Cracow, which now became a Duchy, and Lemberg respectively. Bohemia was divided into seven Kreise, Tirol-Vorarlberg and Styria into three each, Moravia and the Littoral each into two.

  221 Deputies from Dalmatia were to negotiate with the ‘Congregation’ of Croatia-Slavonia on the attachment of Dalmatia to that unit, and the result submitted to the Emperor for his sanction.

  10

  The Decade of Absolutism

  It is never easy to say where one chapter of history ends and its successor begins; it is certainly quite impossible to designate any single date or event in the history of the Monarchy in 1848 and 1849 as marking the end of the revolution and the beginning of the years of absolutism, at first unconfessed and afterwards open, which followed it. A case could be made out for any of half a dozen, from the appointment of the Schwarzenberg Ministry in November 1848 or the abdication of Ferdinand in December, to the capitulation of the Hungarian armies at Világos in August 1849, or for that matter, the surrender of Komárom in October. If, in preference to any of these, we take the dissolution of the Kremsier Reichstag and the proclamation of the Stadion Constitution, the choice is certainly too early from some points of view, too late from others, but it is convenient, for these events really signalized the victory of the Counter-revolution in the Western Lands of the Monarchy and provided it with a base – one, indeed, which its architects were soon themselves to demolish – from which to conduct its final operations elsewhere.

  In fact, the consolidation of the Counter-revolution in the West was now immediately taken in hand, simultaneously with the establishment of it, and the securing of acceptance of it, elsewhere, but it is easier to deal with the latter operations first, before returning to pick up the threads of the developments nearer at hand.

  *

  There were three quarters from which the March coup could be expected to evoke reactions which its authors would have to take into account: the Austrian Constitutionalists, Hungary, and Piedmont; and to these three Schwarzenberg immediately added a fourth by announcing to Frankfurt that he was now ready to negotiate on a settlement of the German question, but, of course, on his own terms: there could be no question of splitting up the unitary Austrian State. Unofficially it was
intimated that he would consider a Bundesdirectorium under Austrian Presidency, the division of Germany into Kreise, of which Austria (viz., the new centralized Monarchy) should constitute one, Prussia a second, and the smaller States the other four, and a ‘Staatenhaus’ appointed by the various Governments in numbers proportionate to their populations (which would give Austria thirty-eight seats and the other German States together, thirty-two).

  Another message, which arrived on 5 April, stated categorically that Austria would never allow ‘a foreign legislature’ to extend its influence over Austria.

  Reactions came indeed from all four quarters, but in three of the four cases the story is quickly told. The unfortunate Charles Albert had been deeply mortified by the rage and contempt with which the people of Milan had greeted his surrender in the previous August. He burned to prove that he was neither a coward nor a bad Italian, and further believed that his army was in fighting trim again, and that France would help him. He therefore answered Francis Joseph on 13 March by denouncing the armistice, which provided for a truce of eight days before the resumption of hostilities.

  But Louis Napoleon was not yet ready to embark on the intricate Italian policy which he was to pursue some years later. The French Cabinet’s reply to Charles Albert’s request for help was that ‘they were not going to offend Austria for the sake of pleasing Piedmont’. They refused even to lend a Field-Marshal to command the Piedmontese troops; the post was given to a Pole, Chrzanowski, who knew neither the people, the language, nor the terrain. The Lombardese themselves showed little enthusiasm for the enterprise. On 23 March the Piedmontese army was defeated by Radetszky at Novara so crushingly that Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel, who signed a fresh armistice on the 26th and opened negotiations for a definitive peace. Pending the conclusion of this, Lombardy remained under Radetszky’s military administration. Venice still held out, but a small force sufficed to contain it. The final peace was concluded at Milan on 6 August; to save international complications, Schwarzenberg demanded nothing more than confirmation of Charles Albert’s abdication, and an indemnity.