Yet by now, sentence of death had already been passed on constitutionalism in the Monarchy, and by its Monarch himself. It is not our task to reconcile Francis Joseph’s actions at this juncture with the punctilious sense of honour which his biographers ascribe to him, nor do we know just whose voice persuaded him that if his tongue had sworn, his mind had remained oathless. But it is quite certain that by 1850 at the latest he had convinced himself that whatever words Schwarzenberg had put into his mouth on his accession, it was both his right and his duty to ignore them, and to make himself absolute ruler of his dominions.
The carpenter of the ladder up, or down, which Francis Joseph climbed to his objective was Kübeck, whom, as the years advanced, various psychological reasons among which may be reckoned snobbish pleasure at the deference with which he, the provincial tailor’s son, was being treated by Metternich, with whom he had struck up a close friendship, Windisch-Graetz, and the Imperial family itself, and an inordinate vanity which had been deeply wounded when Schwarzenberg had preferred Krausz to him40 when composing his Ministerial team, had turned from the enlightened youth which he had once been into a devotee of the most complete absolutism. Already in Olmütz he had opposed Stadion’s plan for a Constitution, recommending instead the proclamation of a state of siege throughout the Monarchy, with Windisch-Graetz as dictator,41 and he was now pleased to regard Bach as a dangerous revolutionary, and Schwarzenberg as little better, ‘since he depended on Bach, while supposing himself to lead him’. He was no kinder to the other Ministers, and wanted to see the whole Ministerial system abolished.
The recorded history of the carpentry begins on 19 October 1850, when Kübeck, who had just returned to Vienna from Frankfurt, where for some months past he had been representing Austria on the Federal Council, was summoned to the Imperial presence, told by Francis Joseph that he had decided to call into being the Reichsrat, or Advisory Council, for which the Stadion Constitution provided, and instructed to produce draft statutes for that body, defining its competences, and proposals for its membership.42When, after talking to Schwarzenberg, Kübeck came back on 1 November with his first blueprint, he was told that he was himself to be President of the new body.
We do not know what considerations, nor whose voice, had led the Emperor to these decisions,43 and it is possible that at this juncture Francis Joseph had still nothing more radical in mind than to bring into being an institution, headed by a figure, which would give the foreign moneylenders that confidence in Austria’s credit which Krausz was arguing to be essential, without Krausz’s remedy of a Parliament (we shall find the Emperor thinking and acting along very similar lines ten years later). If this was the object, Kübeck, who was in any case the obvious man to draft the blueprint (it was he who had secured the insertion of the provisions for a Reichsrat in the Constitution, and had then written a memorandum on the subject), was also, apart from the fact that he was at the time Austria’s principal elder statesman outside the Ministerial ring, a particularly suitable candidate for the Presidency of the new body, for he had the reputation of being a financial wizard, and of being on good terms with the financial world.
If, however, Francis Joseph’s thoughts were still halting at this point on 1 November, they soon advanced beyond it. As early as the 19th he told Kübeck, at another audience, that the Reichsrat was to ‘supersede, and in a certain sense replace, the Constitution’, and Kübeck got the impression that ‘they’ (man) wanted, and wanted strongly, to be rid of the scaffolding of 4 March, and did not know how to do it. He showed them. In memoranda which he now submitted to the Emperor, he attacked the very root of the constitutional principle by arguing that responsibility belonged to the Monarch alone. Ministerial responsibility must therefore be abolished. The Ministers were not even to be the Monarch’s direct advisers. There was to be no Ministerial Council; Ministers were to forward all proposed legislation, in any field, to the Reichsrat, which was to be composed of eminent elder statesmen, and only after that body had given its advisory opinion should the file go up to the Monarch for his decision. The Ministers would thus sink to the position of Departmental heads, similar to that occupied half a century earlier by the heads of the Hofstellen and Hofkanzleien vis-à-vis the Staatsrat, of which Kübeck’s Reichsrat was, in fact, a simple re-hash.
The Reichsrat was duly called into being in April 1851 and some of its members appointed, but prolonged and envenomed argument, with which the reader need not be troubled, went on between Kübeck on the one hand, and the Ministers on the other, over the relationship between the Ministry and the Reichsrat, with which the question of Ministerial responsibility, and thus, that of constitutionalism versus absolutism, was taken as bound up. In the course of this, Schmerling and Bruck resigned (24 January and 23 May), their places being taken by Karl Krausz (Philip Krausz’s brother) and Baumgartner respectively. On 17 August, Francis Joseph gave his decision – of the significance of which he was well aware44 – on the point of principle in favour of Kübeck, whereupon Philip Krausz resigned also, although consenting to remain in office provisionally (his resignation became effective on 31 December, when Baumgartner took over his portfolio also). The other Ministers, to Kübeck’s malicious enjoyment, bit on the bullet and swallowed their scruples. The Constitution had not yet been formally abolished, but the conclusion of the Dresden Agreements had already removed one of Schwarzenberg’s arguments for further delay, and when Louis Napoleon brought off his coup in Paris on 2 December, Francis Joseph refused to wait any longer. On 31 December 1851, he issued what was generally known thereafter as the ‘Sylvester Patent’,45 although it consisted actually of three documents, all addressed by the Emperor to Schwarzenberg. In the first, Francis Joseph informed his Minister that the March Constitution was cancelled, except that the provisions enacting the equality of all citizens before the law, and the liberation of the peasants from servile dues (subject to equitable compensation for the ex-landlords), remained in force. The Emperor now assumed full and exclusive political responsibility for the conduct of all public affairs. The second cancelled the ‘fundamental rights’ guaranteed to the peoples of Austria in March 1849, with the saving clause that all ‘recognized’ Churches and religious communities were still guaranteed freedom of worship and the enjoyment and management of their own property.46 The third, consisting of thirty-six paragraphs, described what was to be the future political, administrative and judicial organization of the Monarchy, and the principles on which it was to be governed.
This last document represented the purest embodiment of reaction, in the strictest sense of the term, which its authors could devise. A Commission presided over by Kübeck had been painfully going through the entire public law of the Monarchy, marking down for elimination not only anything which allowed for any popular representation or control, but anything (the two measures mentioned in the first Patent excepted) which, even if free from this taint and prima facie beneficial, yet owed its origin, directly or indirectly, to the abominable revolution of 1848. Consequently, the administrative and judicial hierarchies promulgated in July 1849 were to survive, above the lowest level; but since the principle of the separation of the judicature from the executive was a product of revolutionary thought, the separate political and judicial Bezirke were to be replaced by ‘mixed Districts’ (Gemischte Bezirke) and the administration and justice alike, on the lowest level, to be entrusted to Bezirksämter acting in both capacities.
The other change in the pattern was that large noble allodial estates could, under conditions to be determined in each land, be taken out of the communal organization and brought directly under the Bezirk. The nobles were, incidentally, promised favourable treatment in the formation of entails.
The Landtag Statutes were cancelled; there were to be no representative bodies on any level – Central, Land, Kreis or Bezirk (only the Communal Councils, being a traditional institution, and no product of revolution, remaining in being, but without autonomy). The hereditary landed nobles, the larger and
smaller landed proprietors and representatives of ‘industry’ were, however, to be allowed to furnish advisers to the Land and Kreis authorities.47
Another casualty was the principle of ‘freedom of national development’ and of inter-national and inter-linguistic equality, although the practical effects which would result, in administration and education, were not described.
Practically all Schmerling’s reforms, including trial by jury and interlocutory procedure, were abolished. Austrian law, both civil and criminal, was now definitely extended to the Hungarian Lands.
*
The Patents thus inaugurated a period of true personal absolutism, and an event which occurred soon after made it more personal still. On 5 April 1852, Schwarzenberg died with extreme suddenness. Francis Joseph, who mourned him very deeply, at first thought of making Bach Minister President, but the Minister’s aristocratic and military enemies, with whom Kübeck associated himself, raised strong objections, and after hearing them, Francis Joseph, who felt that ‘he could not rely on anyone as he had on Schwarzenberg’,48 decided to dispense altogether with a Minister President, and keep the supreme control and co-ordination of policy in his own hands. He did, indeed, appoint a Foreign Minister, in the person of Count Buol-Schauenstein, a career diplomat, but the Emperor insisted, and made it clear, that the direction of foreign policy (which, as he then saw it, was not only the prerogative of Princes, but most efficiently conducted by personal communication between them) lay with himself. The next year, when Csorich resigned, his post, again, was not filled: Francis Joseph was his own Minister of War, the agenda of the Department being conducted chiefly by his Military Adjutant, Grünne.49
As Kulmer’s post, too, had been abolished in January 1852, this left as Ministers, besides Buol, Bach, Thun, Karl Krausz, Baumgartner and Thinning;50 with one quasi-Minister, for on 11 April the police was made once again into an independent instance, reporting directly to the Emperor. The blow to Bach was severe, especially as the new Chief of Police, von Kempen, was his old rival and enemy. In another respect, however, he, with the other Ministers, came off better than had looked likely when the Patents were issued, for Kübeck’s Reichsrat proved as much of a fifth wheel as the old Staatsrat had been. While Kübeck lived, he was often called in to give advice, especially on financial questions, but the Reichsrat as such never had the slightest effect on policy. When Kübeck died suddenly, on 11 September 1855, it was put into cold storage. The name, as will be seen, was revived five years later to preserve the appearance of historic continuity, and even survived until 1918 as the official title of the ‘Austrian’ Parliament, but the bodies which it designated in its later avatars differed essentially from Kübeck’s creation. Meanwhile, the Ministerial Council behaved as though no Reichsrat existed.
In spite of the loss of the police, Bach was still the man in charge of most of the internal services of the Monarchy, even if the principles which he now had to put into execution were not of his devising, but Kübeck’s. In this sense the decade of absolutism deserves the name by which it is commonly known, of the ‘Bach era’. In another sense, the term flatters him, for his role was in any case confined to internal affairs, and even there it was rather to devise the machinery for carrying out the Emperor’s will, than himself to dictate policy (it is true that then as later, Francis Joseph concerned himself little with the details of internal affairs, concentrating on foreign policy and defence as the Monarch’s traditional field, and at home, insisting only on the principle of absolutism).
More important, ultimately, than Bach were those persons whose influence over Francis Joseph was strong enough to mould his outlook on affairs, and his will. After Schwarzenberg’s death, three persons appear to have exercised such an influence. One was his mother, with whom (and with his unimportant father) he still shared his family life up to his marriage, and even, disastrously, after it; her influence, however, was mainly indirect: she did not intervene on specific issues of policy, unless where the Church was concerned. The second was his old tutor, Rauscher; the third was Grünne, who contrived to make his office much more than a military one, and between whom and the Emperor there soon developed a relationship curiously resembling that between Francis I and his old tutor, Colloredo; it had even begun in a similar way, for Grünne, before his military appointment, had for a couple of years been Francis Joseph’s ‘Head Chamberlain’ (Kammervorsteher), an office closely resembling that of tutor.51 Much the older man of the two (he was born in 1808), Grünne quickly acquired a strong ascendancy over the younger man’s mind, and soon not only made himself dictator of the whole military machine of the Monarchy, but much more; for since, as one of Francis Joseph’s biographers has written,52 the Emperor himself ‘regarded his monarchic office as primarily a kind of military command’, and therefore actually preferred that many political questions should be settled through military channels, Grünne became Francis Joseph’s real private secretary, and his voice became from month to month more decisive in determining his young master’s views, decisions and dispositions in all possible fields.
Like Colloredo, Grünne was an extreme conservative, permeated with pride of birth, for whom the ‘common people’ meant simply nothing. He also represented in extreme form the military mentality of his own day, which regarded, and depicted, the army as (outside the Catholic Church, of which he was a devout member) the only reliable support of the dynasty; and he strongly encouraged Francis Joseph in this view, already implanted in him by Schwarzenberg. Unhappily, he also shared with Colloredo an extreme mediocrity of brain, with which, it must be said, he coupled great diligence and a genuine devotion to his young master.
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Actually, once the ‘mixed Districts’ had been established, there was little to be done to the internal services, except in two respects. Firstly, German was now the official language of the Monarchy, and although communications to the public in non-German districts were still accompanied by translations into the local language, the German text was the official one. Corresponding changes were made in the language of education. Primary instruction was still given, in principle, in the pupil’s mother tongue, but even here, ‘mixed’ schools multiplied. German became a compulsory subject of instruction in all secondary schools in the Monarchy, including Lombardy-Venetia, and outside those provinces it became the predominant language of instruction in all secondary schools, and almost the exclusive one in High Schools.
Secondly, the last remaining geographical leak in the system, outside Lombardy-Venetia, was plugged. On 19 January 1853 the Provisoria in the Hungarian Lands were turned into Definitiva. This made no practical difference in Inner Hungary, Transylvania or the Voivodina, but Croatia was now brought into line with other Lands. It was divided into six Regierungsbezirke, each under a head nominated from Vienna. German became the inner language here also. A Commission arrived to screen the officials, and those found not up to standard were sent to learn German or dismissed, the same army of foreign replacements (in this case, chiefly Slovenes from Carniola) arriving as had already flooded other Hungarian Lands. Jellačić was made Count and left as Statthalter of the Crownland, but his position was as empty as that of other holders of the office; he devoted the greater part of his remaining years of sanity53 to the composition of poetry.
Meanwhile, the promised negotiations for a Concordat had been taken up, Archbishop, as he now was,54 Rauscher acting as negotiator in chief for the Emperor. They lasted unexpectedly long, since some of the Holy See’s demands were too extensive even for Rauscher, not to speak of the Ministers, and there were other difficulties.55 Eventually, however, agreement was reached, largely through Austria’s giving way to the Holy See,56 and the instrument was signed on 4 August 1855,57 and promulgated by Patent on 5 November. It confirmed and extended considerably the concessions previously made to the Episcopate. The Roman Catholic religion, with all its rights and prerogatives, was to be ‘maintained for ever’ in the whole Monarchy and all its components. The freedom of comm
unication between the Holy See and the Austrian bishops, etc., was confirmed. The freedom of the Church in ordering its own affairs became practically unlimited. All instruction given to Catholic children, in public or private schools, had to be in conformity with the doctrines of the Church and approved by it; only men approved by the Church might teach theology in secondary or higher establishments. All teachers in Catholic schools were subject to supervision by the Church. The Church had the right to designate a book as objectionable on religious or moral grounds, and the lay arm would then prevent its circulation. The jurisdiction of the Church was restored for all questions relating to the faith and its observance, including questions of marriage law, on which the State Courts were competent only for their ‘civil consequences’, as was the disciplinary jurisdiction of the Bishops over their clergy, although the lay arm was entitled to arrest and punish a priest for an offence against the civil law. The Emperor promised not to tolerate any utterance derogatory to the Church, or its faith or institutions. The property of the Church was declared sacrosanct and inviolable, and the funds derived from Maria Theresa’s and Joseph’s confiscations were transferred to its keeping. A secret annexe contained further concessions, including the Emperor’s promise not to change any confessional or inter-confessional law without the previous consent of the Holy See.
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