The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  From the long-term point of view, and from that of realism, the Dresden Agreements were a heavy defeat for Austria. The Presidency, regained by her, of the futile Bund, brought her no real advantage whatever,12 and her treaty with Prussia, no enduring one, for all Prussia was smarting under the ‘humiliation of Olmütz’ and determined to avenge it at the earliest opportunity. Furthermore, if it was possible to tolerate the political anomaly of including one half of a unitary State in another organization, while excluding the remainder, this fiction could not be maintained in the field of economics. Hanover and Schaumberg-Lippe had already, in 1851, adhered to the Zollverein, leaving outside it only Austria and the members of the Steuerverein, Mecklenburg, Holstein, the three Hanse towns and Limburg. Austria now failed to gain admission to the Zollverein, with which, on the other hand, the Steuerverein fused in 1854, leaving Austria the only German State outside it. Prussia’s leadership of this great economic bloc was worth far more to her than the Presidency of the artificial protocol-world of the Bund was to Austria.

  Her only real profit was that the treaty with Prussia gave her a few years’ breathing-space before the struggle should be resumed.13 Meanwhile, it had been a gain that the tension which had marked much of the diplomatic manoeuvring had never quite reached such a pitch as to interrupt the internal political reorganization which had been proceeding during the same years. By the time of the Dresden meeting this was nearly complete, although the course followed by it had, inevitably, been far from straightforward.

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  Under normal conditions, the publication of the March Constitution should have been followed by the issue of enactments putting it into force immediately, and throughout the Monarchy, but with the best will in the world, this could not have been done in March 1849. Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia were still theatres of war, and the introduction of constitutional institutions in those areas would clearly have to be postponed until a later date. The situation there also affected the position in the Western Lands, for it would hardly have been practicable to convoke a Rump Parliament consisting of representatives of those Lands; nor were conditions, even there, yet those of peace, for important centres and areas – Vienna, Prague, Galicia – were still subject to military regimes of one type or another. Here, however, the competence of the military extended only to the maintenance of security and jurisdiction over offences dangerous thereto; in other respects, the writ of the civilian government ran. Moreover, the Constitution itself specifically allowed parts of it to be put into force ‘provisionally’, subject to scrutiny, and perhaps revision, by the Parliament when it should meet. The course which the Ministers were entitled to, and did, follow was therefore to issue a wide range of ‘provisional’ enactments, with immediate application to the Western Lands, the extension of all or part of them, perhaps in modified form, to Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia being deferred until the establishment there of civilian government. Many of these enactments were, however, in fact applied immediately in Hungary and Transylvania, where the heads of the civilian administration mentioned below were from the first directly responsible to the Ministry in Vienna.

  The reader of the following pages will be struck by one odd feature of the record: the far-reaching thoroughness of those measures which could equally well have been carried through by a dictatorship, compared with the extreme paucity of those which provided for any form of popular representation, in which latter field comparatively few measures – none of them above the lowest level – ever became effective. This was not the course which most observers would have predicted, or what the public expected, in the spring of 1849, for Stadion had begun his work with a speed and energy which made it seem probable that constitutional life in Austria would soon be a reality. While drafting the Constitution he had already, simultaneously, been working out the statutes for the ‘free commune’ which was to replace the previous manorial system and to be the foundation of the ‘free State’, and his proposals had been agreed by a Ministerial Council, presided over by the Emperor, in February, with the result that the Patent embodying them could be issued as early as 17 March. The term by which this measure is usually known, the ‘Communal Autonomy Law’, gives a misleading impression, for Stadion’s ‘communes’ (Gemeinden) consisted not only of communes as ordinarily understood: the local communes (Ortsgemeinden) formed only the lowest stratum, and above them were ‘District’ (Bezirk) and Kreis communes, to which the law also applied. The law defined the sphere of the autonomy, which was a wide one, to be enjoyed by the communes of each category, and laid down the procedure for the composition of their Councils. Those of the local communes were to be elected by their inhabitants, on a fairly wide franchise; those of the Bezirk by the local communal Councils, and those of the Kreis, by the Bezirks.

  The larger towns were to have their own statutes, the issue of which was promised for the near future.14

  Stadion also began drafting the Statutes of the Landtage, which would have been genuinely representative bodies, distinctly democratic by the standards of the day.15

  But in April Stadion’s reason, which for some time past had shown signs of tottering, began unmistakeably to give way: Venus was taking her revenge on him, as she did on so many figures of the period. Bach then took over his portfolio provisionally, while retaining his own. On 28 June, when it had become clear that Stadion was not going to recover,16 Bach became definitive Minister of the Interior, ceding the portfolio of Justice to Schmerling; at the same time, education was promoted to an independent Ministry, and entrusted to Count Leo Thun (who, on his own insistence, also took charge of ‘Cults’, i.e. questions relating to religion).17

  It is easy to judge Bach too harshly for what followed. His situation was very difficult. He knew that his own position, despised as he was by the aristocracy and the military for his bourgeois origin and hated for his revolutionary past, was precarious in the extreme; he knew also that the great nobles, headed by Windisch-Graetz, were agitating with all their might to get the emancipation of the peasants revoked, and he may well have felt that unless he showed sufficient pliability to retain his post, the reforms which he thought to be of key importance might never be put through at all. It may also be guessed that he was influenced by the consideration (which could not have escaped Stadion himself) that freedoms granted to Austria could not be withheld indefinitely from Hungary, and, strong centralist as he was, he was convinced that a free Hungarian was a rebellious Hungarian. However all this may have been, it is reasonable to suppose that had Stadion retained his faculties, he would have pressed for some further early steps to be taken to put into force a further substantial part of the self-government for which his Constitution provided, and given his great authority, would most likely have been successful. No such pressure came from Bach, and so far as can be told from the sources, all the other Ministers seem to have felt that it would be time enough to call in the people when they themselves had straightened out the tangles left by their predecessors. The fact thus remained that Stadion’s Communal Autonomy Law proved to be the last, as it had been the first, measure taken by the Schwarzenberg Government to introduce any effective self-government into any part of Austria, and even it suffered emasculation. Elections were indeed held in most of the Austrian Lands at the beginning of 1850, but immediately thereafter, on 7 March, Bach issued a new statute which reduced the autonomous powers of the local Councils to a shadow and suspended altogether the elections to the Bezirk and Kreis Councils, of which nothing more was heard thereafter. Similarly, a blueprint for the Landtag Statutes was issued at the turn of the years 1849–50,18 with an announcement that the Landtage were to be convoked in the autumn of 1850 and the Reichsrat itself in the spring of 1851. The Statutes for the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands were actually promulgated in the spring of 1850, and that for Galicia in the following September. But elections for them were never held; instead, all persons still holding office by virtue of election19 were declared to be government servants, and all places falling vaca
nt were filled by appointment. The entire administrative system had thus become purely authoritarian.

  Meanwhile, however, there had been other chapters in the Constitution – the reshaping on a unitary basis of the administrative and economic structure of the Monarchy, and the introduction of the principle of ‘national’ and linguistic equality, which Schwarzenberg and Francis Joseph were positively anxious to see introduced; others, such as the liberation of the peasants, which they were prepared to accept. These reforms could be put into effect without prejudice to the question of popular representation or self-government, and, in fact, the work on them went forward at speed, from the outset, and in a straight line.

  The blueprint for the new administrative structure (of the Western Lands) was announced on 14 June 1849. The plan bore Bach’s signature, but in fact it simply reproduced Stadion’s proposals, with the single exception that Bach gave Galicia three Statthaltereiabteilungen20 for Stadion’s two. It was to come into effect in December, when the additional officials which the extended apparatus required, had been selected and trained – a task into which Bach threw himself with great energy.

  The corresponding reorganization of the judicial hierarchy had been announced in another Patent, issued on 26 June, and embodying the separation of the judiciary from the executive which the Constitution had promised. At the top of the new pyramid stood the Ministry and the Supreme Court of Justice; under these came Courts on the Land and Kreis level, and under these again, Bezirks-Gerichte, some fifteen judicial Bezirke going to each Kreis. These constituted the lowest judicial instance, taking over all the work formerly carried out by the Patrimonial Courts, which now disappeared.

  The pattern, here again, was Bach’s work; the further tasks, in this field, fell on Schmerling, who had many modern ideas, and took the occasion to introduce a number of important reforms, including trial by jury for all criminal and major civil offences, and the substitution of public and interlocutory examination of witnesses for the old system of written depositions taken in private.

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  Our statement that Francis Joseph and Schwarzenberg were anxious to introduce the principle of inter-national and inter-linguistic equality will seem surprising to those who have been brought up in the traditional view that the ‘Bach era’ was one of ‘ruthless Germanization’, and are able to quote, in support of that view, many measures extending the use of the German language in administration and education. It is nevertheless true in this sense, that according to the fundamental philosophy of the system, the State was a-national. National feeling was to be de-politicized completely, and this ban on any political aspirations based on national feeling applied to German feeling as much as to any other. Conversely, all national cultures were to be allowed equal and complete freedom of non-political development, and this again applied to the German as to any other, no more and no less.

  The administration, however, was to be unitary, and the same pragmatic necessity which had governed the decisions of Maria Theresa’s advisers dictated that it should be conducted in the German language. The administrative solution adopted drew a sharp distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ languages of the administration. The inner language of all public services was German, but the outer language treated all languages currently spoken in the Monarchy equally. Any citizen was entitled to use his own language in addressing the authorities, and they were expected to reply to him in it. Officials were enjoined to familiarize themselves with the local language, and to make this easier, the Kreise of multilingual Lands were, as far as possible, delimited along ethnic lines. The Official Gazette was published in all the ten major languages of the Monarchy, every version being equally authentic, and other official communications, in the ‘locally current’ language or languages.

  The rules governing the use of the different languages in education were analogous. The ‘Draft Statute of Education’ published on 16 September 1849, laid down the principle that primary education should be given in the pupil’s mother tongue; secondary and higher education, in that tongue, subject to ‘need and possibility’. The pupil’s mother tongue was always to be taught as a subject, as were all languages current in the Crownland concerned; and German was always to be taught as a subject ‘because it is a necessity for a great Empire that at least the educated classes of all parts of it should be able to understand each other, and this is most easily achieved by their learning that language which is already most widely current among the educated classes’.21

  The Government was busy translating these principles into action as early as the summer and autumn of 1849, although it proved not at all easy to introduce even so much instruction as the draft Statute provided, in the more backward languages of the Monarchy. For several of them, there was a grievous shortage of primary teachers, and for some, the primers themselves had to be written, and fundamental questions of orthography and vocabulary decided. On this level, the Ministry had further to contend with a special difficulty, arising out of the land reform: many landlords who in the bad old days had kept up village schools as part of their obligations towards their peasants simply let them go when bought out, and the communes often took their time about replacing them. On the higher levels, it was often necessary to go on teaching a subject in German for the good reason that there existed no books on it in the local language. Nevertheless, the records of the Ministry prove that (contrary to the general belief) a genuine attempt was made during these years to honour the principle of linguistic equality, as thus understood.

  In general, it is probably true to say that the 1849 system came as near as was humanly possible to establishing inter-national equality in principle. But it also introduced more linguistic Germanization than ever before by virtue of the simple fact that the German-speaking bureaucracy was larger, and its tentacles reached further. The system was therefore, in spite of its principles, a real instrument of Germanization, because the man who entered the public services and spent his career speaking and writing German usually ended by feeling himself a German. It was inevitably resented by the non-Germans, and while it is true that some nationally-minded Germans also resented it (seeing what they felt to be their preserves invaded by an army of ‘new Germans’ from the Bohemian gymnasia),22 it probably confirmed more of them in the tacit and comfortable belief that they were the chosen people of the Monarchy. The resentment of the German Liberals against the absolutist regime sprang from quite other considerations, and the fact that they regarded its political and economic drawbacks as outweighing its national advantages to themselves is due largely to the obdurate under-estimation with which, as before 1848, they viewed the importance of the national feelings of Austria’s non-Germans.

  There was also another set of transactions of the highest importance the first results of which were promulgated without waiting for the completion of the regime’s other moves in Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia. The intellectual leaders of the Catholic Church, like those of the nationalities and social classes, had seen in the 1848 revolution the opportunity to press their own claims; but their ideal was, of course, different from those of the national and social leaders. Rauscher, who was the moving spirit in everything which followed, saw in the situation the opportunity to realize what he had long been urging, the establishment of a common front against subversion composed by a Crown unhampered by Constitutions and a Church freed from the fetters of Josephinism.

  As early as 19 April 1848, a Committee of priests had petitioned Pillersdorf to include complete liberty for the Church in his Constitution,23 but Pillersdorf’s draft had contained little more than a guarantee of freedom of conscience and of worship (for recognized religions). The Reichstag’s draft still left the Churches under the supreme control of the State, and could for many other reasons not be acceptable to Catholics; neither was Stadion’s Constitution. Meanwhile, anti-clerical feeling in Vienna had been running so high that the Church had not dared to move publicly, but in January 1849, the Minister President’s brothe
r, Cardinal Schwarzenberg, who was an old patron of Rauscher’s, had (with Rauscher in attendance) been pressing his brother, and the young Monarch, to conclude a Concordat with the Vatican, a preliminary whereto a Bishops’ conference should be held in Vienna, similar to the Würzburg Conference of the German Bishops of the previous November.

  The Archbishop of Vienna, Milde, although a convinced Josephinian, left all the arrangements to Schwarzenberg,24 and the Conference duly opened in Vienna on 30 April. It set up a permanent Committee, which in practice consisted of Schwarzenberg and Rauscher, to frame its demands. The Committee’s memorandum re-stated the thesis that the revolution had been due, essentially, to the godlessness of the people, which set them whoring after such false idols as enlightenment and nationalism.25 To avert repetition of it, and to enable the Church to throw its whole weight into the struggle against the forces of evil, it should be reinstated in the position from which Joseph II had ousted it. All restrictions imposed by Joseph should be removed, and the work crowned by the conclusion of a Concordat.

  When this memorandum came before the Ministerial Council, some of its demands were opposed by Schmerling and a few even by Bach, devout Catholic as he was, and the discussion of them lasted over many months. Most of them were, however, strongly supported by Thun, and the young Monarch himself insisted that some of them should be met. The concessions which it was agreed to make were eventually published in the form of two Rescripts, dated 18 and 23 April 1850. The Placetum Regium disappeared: thenceforward communication between the Bishops and their congregations and the Holy See was free, and all restrictions on the publication of Papal Bulls and Encyclica were lifted. Bishops recovered their right to impose disciplinary penalties on their clergy, whom they could even have imprisoned, being required only to notify the lay arm, which was bound to carry out the sentence if it was in conformity with Canonical Law. The powers assumed by Joseph to regulate Church services or calendars vanished. The Church became exclusively competent for promotions and appointments within its own ranks, except appointments to Bishoprics, on which the Emperor promised to take the appropriate ecclesiastical advice, and was given exclusive control over the seminaries and the decisive voice in the appointment of teachers of Catholic religion in all educational establishments, and in all questions relating to theological studies. In July 1851 the Society of Jesus was reinstated in ‘its former position’. Finally, the Emperor invited further representations on these wishes of the Church which the Patents did not satisfy, and promised to make the necessary preparations ‘in so far as an agreement with the Holy See is necessary’.