A supplementary Patent on marriage law, dated 6 October 1856, made the ecclesiastical Courts competent in this field also where both parties to a marriage were Catholics, or one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. A Bishop was empowered to prevent a marriage ‘if he feared that it would give rise to serious dissension, offence or other scandal’.
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The other important event of these years was Francis Joseph’s marriage. This romantic story has been told too often to need detailed retelling here. Scores of readers know how the young Emperor’s mother invited her sister, Ludovica, wife of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, to bring her daughter Helena to a family party in Ischl, in August 1853, the intention being that Francis Joseph should marry Helena. But Ludovica included her second daughter, Elisabeth, a young girl of only sixteen, wild and tomboyish but exceedingly lovely, in the party, and Francis Joseph lost his heart to her at first sight. Bearing down all opposition, he insisted that she, and only she, should be his bride, and they were duly married on 24 April 1854, the pompous ceremonial inaugurating a tragic human relationship in which the happiness of Francis Joseph’s love – deep, enduring and astonishingly romantic, in such a pedestrian nature – was constantly thwarted by his own conscientious pre-occupation with duty, Elisabeth’s inexperience and waywardness, and above all, the jealous bossiness of the intolerable Archduchess Sophie.
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The Concordat is usually taken as the high-water mark reached by the Austrian ‘reaction’, and its conclusion forms a convenient point at which to halt and look back on the achievements of the absolutist regime up to that date. They had been very large in many fields. Bach was an excellent organizer, as well as a devoted one. (Eisenmann has written of him, with justice, that while for Schwarzenberg bureaucratic absolutism was a means to an end, for Bach it was an end in itself.58) The instructions which he issued to his staff in respect of keeping in touch with the ‘public’, finding out their real needs and wishes and treating them humanly and sympathetically, are a model of their kind. Where so many new recruits had to be found and trained, it was inevitable that some mistakes should have been made, but nearly all writers testify that in the Austrian Lands the instructions had appreciable results, and that the standards of the new bureaucracy were in almost all respects noticeably higher than those of the old. This was helped by another of Bach’s reforms: he secured better pay and conditions for the civil servants themselves, thereby reducing the temptations to which many of the older generation had succumbed, of taking bribes and of engaging in secondary occupations after, or even during, their office hours.
It also seems to be generally agreed that Schmerling’s new magistrates were more efficient than their predecessors, and although his more modern reforms in the field of procedure were retracted, he had done good work in clearing away a jungle of antiquated backwoods Courtlets whose proceedings had not always borne much recognizable relationship to the law.59
Judgments of Thun’s personal merits as a Minister vary greatly,60 but whatever his opinions (or the view taken of them) he was certainly no fool, and he had at his right hand several very keen and able assistants. Partly owing to the very real difficulties mentioned above, comparatively little was done for the primary schools, but the Ministry carried through reforms, based on Prussian models, of the secondary and higher establishments, on which later Ministers found little to improve during the remaining half-century of the Monarchy’s existence. Some of the institutions now founded, including the Austrian Institute of Historical Research, achieved enduring fame. In the wider field, the years of Thun’s regime were something of a blossoming-time for several of the more backward national cultures – especially, of course, those which the regime wished to encourage as counterweights to others which were politically more dangerous.61
Bruck, besides the considerable feat of making the Monarchy into an economic and fiscal unity, had carried through a great amount of useful work in a number of fields. He created a network of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, whose statutes empowered them to offer the Government advice on economic questions.62 He reorganized the postal services (concurrently concluding a postal union with Germany), developed shipping, both seaborne and on the Danube, and pushed on with the expansion of the railways, which, under his regime, were nationalized as far as possible: all new lines were constructed at State expense and run as State enterprises, and the owners of the old private lines were bought out as occasion presented itself.
In 1849 and 1850 he had also been busy preparing for the creation of the ‘seventy million Reich’ (of which the economic assimilation of Hungary would have been the essential preliminary). Schwarzenberg’s retreat at Dresden had put paid to these larger hopes, and negotiations which Bruck then initiated with several individual German States brought no immediate result, but in connection with them he had begun preparations for a general simplification and reduction of Austrian tariffs.
After Bruck’s resignation, Baumgartner carried forward, almost unaltered, his predecessor’s policy, which must have seemed to Francis Joseph (from the encouragement which he gave it) to be conducive to the strengthening of Austria’s political and strategic position. The construction of the railways was pushed on: railway mileage had risen by 1854 to 2,240 kilometres, an increase of nearly forty per cent on the 1848 figure of 1,620 kilometres; they included the remarkable railway over the Semmering Pass. All the lines in the Monarchy except two (the Rothschilds’ Nordbahn and Sina’s Vienna-Raab line) were now nationalized.
The import prohibitions vanished altogether, except for a few maintained on moral or medical grounds; the number of tariff duties was reduced from 614 to 338; the maximum possible duty was lowered by over 66% and the duties on a number of important articles, including pig-iron and cotton, reduced in the same proportion. Then, in 1853, although the hope of Austria’s entering the Zollverein and eventually constituting a vast free trade area with Germany was off for good,63 Buol (or rather Bruck, who conducted the negotiations for him) concluded with Prussia, and thus with the rest of the Zollverein, a commercial treaty providing for another big reduction of tariffs and mutual m.f.n. treatment for the duration of the treaty, which was fixed at twelve years.
The biggest of all the operations carried through by the Government was the implementation of the law emancipating the peasants. The recognition of the principle of equality before the law and the abolition of manorial authority had been dealt with by the reorganization of the administrative and judicial systems; it remained to determine how much the former ‘subject’ should pay, and how much his ex-lord should receive, in return for the abolition of payments and services formerly rendered by the former to the latter in virtue of the nexus subditelae.
The problem was examined in each Land by a Commission, consisting of two or three officials with assessors representing the landlords and peasants respectively, and local conditions and usages were found to vary so greatly that no two of the Patents eventually issued were quite identical; nor, for that matter, was the work completed (in so far as it was ever completed)64 simultaneously in all Lands; thus the Patents establishing the funds into and out of which the compensation was to be paid were issued on 11 April 1851 for all the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, but not until 2 March 1853 for Hungary and Croatia, 29 October 1853 for Galicia and the Bukovina, and 28 June 1854 for Transylvania.65 But in very brief outline, what was done was this:
All occupants of any piece, however small, of rustical land became freehold owners of it. The dues, payments and services formerly attaching to such holdings were divided into three categories. Those payments or privileges formerly received or enjoyed by the lord in virtue of his legal position and supposed to compensate him for the legal or administrative duties carried out by him in that capacity were simply cancelled; neither did the peasant pay compensation for his release from them, nor the lord receive it for the loss of them. The lord was, however, himself released from the expenses entailed by his former duties.
For the real rents in money, kind and services paid by the peasants for the usufruct of their holdings (this was far the most important of the three groups)66 the principle of ‘equitable compensation’ (billige Entschädigung) was followed. In the Western Lands, the money value of these rents was assessed, the value of a day’s robot being taken at one-third of that of a day’s free labour, and that of the dues in kind, proportionately low. Of the resultant sum, one-third was retained by the State in lieu of the taxation formerly paid by the lord out of his rentals; the other two-thirds were paid to the lord in the form of four per cent bonds. In the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, half of this sum (i.e., one-third of the total) was paid by the peasant, from whom the State collected it in annual instalments, half by the Land exchequer.
In Galicia and the Bukovina, the peasant paid nothing, so that the full two-thirds fell on the Land. As this burden proved too heavy for the Land exchequer, the landlords’ compensation here was eventually paid by the State.
In Hungary a different method of assessment, based on the quality of the land, was adopted. In general, the landlord received about one-third of the market value of the land. Here, too, the rustical peasants paid nothing, and the whole compensation came out of the State budget.
In all cases, the landlord was released from his countervailing obligations towards his ex-tenants.
Thirdly, payments made by the peasants for communal services of value to themselves were ‘redeemed’ (abgelöst) at their full assessed value, the payment now going to the State, in the form of mortgages.
As the reform was concerned only with the liquidation of the nexus subditelae, these arrangements did not apply to ordinary lease-holding tenants of former allodial holdings. But peasants holding their land on the Raab system and other ‘emphyteutic’ tenures on allodial land got their land freehold, but paid both the two-thirds.
It is impossible to say exactly how much land passed into new ownership under this reform, or how many persons were affected by it in one capacity or the other. In the West (the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands and Galicia-Bukovina) 2,625,512 persons are listed as having ‘made payments’,67 but many of these were probably only small redemption payments for communal dues.68 Here there were 54,267 recipients, about half of whom received their payments under the heading of ‘equitable compensation’, the other half as ‘redemptions’.69 In Hungary, excluding Transylvania, about 625,000 peasants (i.e., all sessionati urbarial peasants, including holders of eighths of a sessio), received land, an average of 12 hold each; to which must be added a considerable number (although the area affected was small) of small vintners.70 I have not traced the number of recipients of payments. In Transylvania, 63,940 villein peasants received between them 670,500 Magyar hold. In Galicia, 527,875 peasant holdings were liberated.
The total cost to the State of the reforms is put at 297 million gulden in Austria and 203 million gulden in Hungary-Croatia.
In Hungary, although not elsewhere, the authorities seized the occasion to carry through a much-needed consolidation of the holdings allotted to the peasants. It is true that within a few years the curse of Streusiedlungen was back in as virulent form as ever.
The abolition of the nexus subditelae was an act of inestimable importance. It was the first and indispensable preliminary to the modernization of the social and political structure of the Monarchy. It is greatly to Bach’s credit that in the early months he insisted on it in the face of all opposition from Windisch-Graetz and his fellow-thinkers; but in the event, that opposition could not be long maintained: it soon transpired that the ex-‘subjects’ appreciated so widely their promotion to full citizenship as to exclude any serious thought of re-establishing either the nexus subditelae, or the rustical system of land tenure.
The economic effects of the land reform were less uniform. The first accounts of them were enthusiastic.
‘The ex-villein,’ wrote Czoernig, ‘now become freehold owner of his land, is able to devote his whole labour to the cultivation and profitable exploitation of his land, while the woodlands formerly owned by him, which had been deteriorating progressively, are now preserved and rationally exploited. Capital … is interesting itself in real estate and fructifying big areas which were formerly insufficiently cultivated, or not at all; industry is entering into close touch with agriculture, and the improved communications provide the increased work and give the capital secure prospects of remunerative return.’71
This rosy picture was undoubtedly true for the thrifty and enterprising ex-villeins, especially those whose holdings were favourably situated for marketing. Such men indeed worked for themselves as they had never worked for their masters, and found the new order to offer them opportunities to enrich themselves which the old had denied them.
The change was not, however, an unmixed blessing even to the peasants. The truth soon emerged that the old landlord-peasant relationship had been less one-sided than the peasants had admitted, or perhaps even realized, since like most people, they had been more perceptive of what they gave, than of what they received. The loss of the easements which they had enjoyed on their masters’ lands, and of the services which they had received, proved unexpectedly heavy; and even where, as happened in some cases, they received monetary compensation for lost rights, this was usually inadequate. Other intensely complex questions, some of which had not been finally sorted out by 1918, involving disputes not only between peasant and landlord, but also peasant and peasant, were connected with common rights and various forms of shared usufruct. Most of the common lands, which had been very important for the economy of many peasants, were now largely reduced. Some benefits here went to big peasants, more, as a rule, to the ex-landlord. The smaller peasants were the sufferers in either case.72
A particular difficulty for almost all the peasants was that almost all their transactions with authority, and in increasing measure, also those of everyday life, had to be transacted in money, to which many of them were unaccustomed, and in which they were almost regularly overreached. Even where used to small sums, they could nearly always be dazzled by large ones, not appreciating what a short way money went off the farm.
This arose particularly over the question of credit, which few of them had required in money before 1848, since it had been the landlord’s obligation to see them through crop failures or extensive damage due to catastrophes of nature.73 Now they needed it for a number of purposes: for working and improving their farms, for paying their taxes (which rose inexorably), and outside Hungary and Galicia, for paying off the purchase of their lands. They were, indeed, partially protected during the absolutist period by a law which limited the rate of interest chargeable to 5% for a mortgage, or 6% for a commercial transaction, but this law was too easily evaded, and where applied, resulted in a financial stringency which restricted the efforts precisely of the more enterprising peasants to expand.
Credit, other than surreptitious, was practically impossible for the peasant to obtain. In 1855 the National Bank was allowed to set up a mortgage department, but it was not allowed to make loans of less than 5,000 gulden. In most Lands the only other sources were the few savings banks and private bankers, and even the charitable foundations now usually preferred – or were pressed–to put their funds into State papers. The Galizischer Ständischer Creditverein existed, as the name implies, exclusively for the benefit of the big landowners.
In the more backward parts of the Monarchy the peasants were not money-minded at all, and their reaction to their liberation was, as we have said, to raise what they needed for themselves from their plots, and then go to sleep.74 Nor should we underestimate the addition in human happiness that thus accrued to them; but the demands of the taxpayer drove them, after all, to earn cash, and since the local markets could not absorb more than a limited amount of their produce, they were presently back again at work on the fields of their old masters.
The picture of the general fate of the class after the reform may well contain more lights than shadows;
but honesty cannot deny that it was less uniformly bright than perhaps anyone had expected in 1848, and it owed a good many of its comforting features to two provisions which in fact left their complete ‘liberation’ imperfect: one the law mentioned above, limiting the legal rate of interest; the other, the maintenance in force, in all Lands, where it had previously existed, of the old Bestiflungszwang, which the Law of 1848 did not affect.
The effects of the reform on the landlords are closely bound up with those of the development of communications and above all, of the abolition of the internal Austro-Hungarian customs barrier. Here, again, the picture is full of contrasts. Those landlords who were already operating a market economy were only too glad to exchange robot for compensation (which in their case was usually paid promptly and often amounted to large sums),75 which could be usefully employed on modernization. The big Hungarian wheat-growers and cattle-farmers scored doubly, since they were now able to place practically all their produce on the Austrian market, where it did not go abroad. Many of them took advantage of the situation to develop their estates into very efficient and profitable enterprises. Many of the big German-Austrian and Bohemian landlords answered this intensified competition from Hungary by reducing their acreage under cereals, dropping altogether the farming of their marginal lands, and concentrating on cash crops, such as sugar-beet, raised on their best lands, and on the exploitation of their forests; and these, too, proved profitable devices.
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