In the Rescripts, the membership of the Reichsrat was fixed at one hundred, the numbers being brought up by increasing the representation of the Crownlands, and a large number of special concessions to Hungary were made. The validity of the main Hungarian ‘fundamental laws’ (i.e. the Leopoldinian corpus) was reaffirmed, the effect being, broadly, to reestablish in Hungary the status quo ante 1848, except that the validity of the April Laws enacting noble taxation, general admissibility to public office, and the emancipation of the peasants, was confirmed. The other April Laws, however, being incompatible with the Diploma, were ‘reserved for revision and cancellation through the Diet’. The Hungarian Court Chancellery was re-established, Baron Vay, until recently in prison for sedition, being appointed Chancellor. The Chancellor was to be a member of the central Government, into which Szécsen was also taken as Minister without Portfolio. Magyar was restored as the central official language, and that of the ‘inner service’ and of higher education, but adequate facilities were to be given to non-Magyars to use their language in elementary education and local administration. Immediate elections were to be held for the County and Municipal Diets, after which the old system of autonomous local government would be resumed. The old Hungarian judiciary system was reinstated. The Diet was to be convoked in 1861, to submit further proposals for recasting the relationship between Hungary and the Crown.
The Transylvanian Court Chancellery was restored and the Chancellor instructed to consult with qualified representatives of the different local nationalities, religions and classes, and then to submit proposals for a genuinely representative Diet. The Ban of Croatia was required to convoke the Sabor, and to submit proposals for a new internal Constitution, and for the relationship between Hungary and Croatia. The Voivodina was re-incorporated administratively in Hungary, with immediate effect; but a Commissioner was to be sent down to report on the wishes of its peoples as to their future.
In Cis-Leithania the government was to work out statutes for the Landtage, assuring them ‘representation adapted alike to their historic development, their present requirements, and the interests of the Empire’.
The central Ministries of the Interior and Cults were abolished, since these questions now fell within the competence of the Land authorities. Goluchowski became Minister of State, Baron Mecséry, Minister of Police, and Degenfeld, Minister of Defence.
Unhappily for its authors, the Diploma was ill-received almost everywhere. In spite of its federalist nature, it failed to satisfy even the Czechs or the Poles: the Czech politicians, suddenly re-emerged, complained that they, alone among the peoples of the Monarchy, had not been represented on the Reinforced Reichsrat (they did not count Clam-Martinic as a Czech), and were aggrieved that the Diploma did not recognize the Böhmisches Staatsrecht, while the Poles organized a deputation to Vienna to demand a separate status for Galicia as complete as that given to Hungary.
These were reactions based on national feeling, and the most ominous sign of all for the regime was not that such feelings should find the Diploma unsatisfactory, but that they should exist at all; for this meant that the most fundamental of all the suppositions on which Francis Joseph’s and Schwarzenberg’s State had rested – that it was possible to de-politize the national consciousnesses of its peoples – had now proved false in the West, as it had from the outset in Hungary. The thesis that Austria was not an a-national State but a multi-national one had been restated, and was to be reasserted, from this date onward, with increasing cogency, until it drove its rival almost – never, indeed, quite – out of the field. It is true that every step in its advance made more clear the difficulties of finding a solution for it compatible with the existence of the Monarchy.
The Germans of the Monarchy themselves did not escape this resurgence of national feeling Nationally-minded. Germans cried out that the Diploma handed over the Germans of the Bohemian Lands to Czech rule. The centenary of Schiller’s birth, which was commemorated on 8 November, was made the occasion for fiery speeches of purely Germanic national self-exaltation in which the students’ Burschenschaften were particularly vocal.35
But the German and German-speaking bourgeoisie was hostile to the Diploma also on other grounds. The bureaucrats à la Bach saw the control over Hungary slipping out of their hands, while the Liberals saw landlords and clericals installed as the masters of Austria and genuine control by the tax-payer over public expenditure still not guaranteed (if the Diploma did not make things worse than ever in this respect; for it seemed possible that Hungary might use her new freedom to cut down her contributions to the exchequer). The Liberals’ discontent was increased when Goluchowski began publishing the Statutes for the Landtage, four of which, for Styria, Tirol, Salzburg and Carinthia, he produced between 30 October and 13 November. Except that the towns gained a little more representation – and even this was counter-balanced by the restoration of a separate Curia for landed property, as such – these were little more than re-hashes of the old Estates, and to emphasize the continuity, the members of the higher Benches were to be allowed to wear their old uniforms. The Landtage were not even given free choice of their representatives to the Reichsrat: they were to present lists, from which the Emperor would make the final choice. The German Liberals and nationalists formed a loose common front (another precursor of 1867) united by the slogan that ‘Austria must be treated as favourably as Hungary’, i.e., if Hungary had a central constitutional Parliament, the West must have one also.
The Government was particularly sensitive to these political (and in the last resort, financial) reactions, because public confidence in Austria’s financial stability had received another shock in the preceding April when, largely, it would seem, as the result of undeserved calumny, Bruck had committed suicide, his act releasing another cloud of rumours.36 His successor, Ignaz von Plener, had various ideas for restoring the position, but had not had time to put them into effect when, in the autumn, the international situation erupted again. Garibaldi took Naples in September and Piedmont sent troops into Umbria and the Marches. The Warsaw meeting had ended in nothing more than fairly hollow words, while it had infuriated Napoleon, who saw in it an attempt to isolate him. When the question of sending troops to Italy, or to the Rhine, was discussed, Plener replied, like so many of his predecessors on analogous occasions, that the money simply was not there, and that it could not be raised through increased taxation. Credit would be the only resort, and the outer world was unapproachable.
Thus Francis Joseph, who only a few months before had flattered himself that he would be back in Lombardy in a year or so, had had to watch the unification of Italy almost completed under his nose, because he had not the money to prevent it.
Meanwhile, the biggest disappointment of all had come from Hungary. Szécsen had assured Francis Joseph that the country would accept the Diploma, but even he and his colleagues had admitted that time would be necessary to prepare public opinion, and had been horrified when the documents were published almost before the ink on them was dry. In any case, it quickly transpired that the Old Conservatives had, as usual, totally misjudged opinion in their country. It was quite true that practically the whole of Hungary was now anxious to find a settlement with the Crown: Villafranca had at last convinced all but the most incorrigible dreamers that anything else was impracticable. But no one except the Old Conservatives themselves were willing to accept any octroied settlement at all, nor even so much control as the Diploma allowed to the Reichsrat, let alone the institution itself, in those dimensions and on those foundations, which gave it, after all, the character of a central Parliament of the Gesammtmonarchie, and one which enjoyed the cardinal right of voting taxation; not to mention the continued separation of Transylvania and the continued treatment of Hungary as one ‘Crownland’ among many, even if it was to be, in many respects, a privileged one.
Being genuinely anxious to find a settlement which Hungary would accept, Francis Joseph received Deák and Eötvös in audience on 27 December,
but Deák37 told him flatly that Hungary could never accept a common ‘Reichsrat’ or Parliament, nor any enactment which denied the validity of the April Laws. He agreed, indeed, that the Laws might be amended, and he afterwards persuaded a conference of the Hungarian law officers to admit the possibility, even the desirability, of such amendment; but this could be done only by agreement between the Crown and a legally constituted Hungarian Parliament. Less inhibited spirits demonstrated noisily. The first action of the Congregatio of Pest County (which, in the absence of a Diet, set the tone for the whole country) was to reaffirm truculently the validity of the April Laws, to ask the Chancellery to have the Diet convoked on the basis of those laws, and pending this, to suspend the collection of arrears of taxes. Other Counties elected to membership of their Congregationes such figures as Kossuth, Louis Napoleon and Cavour.
*
With practically everyone against it, the Diploma would clearly have to be revised to meet one set of objectors or the other, and this time, the Hungarians had overshot the mark. Francis Joseph and his advisers believed that any more concessions to them would lead straight to separation, and their reply to the agitation was therefore simply to reinforce the garrisons in the country. But this was no answer to the financial problems of the Monarchy, which were more pressing than ever. During the international crisis of the autumn, quotations of Austrian bonds sank to a new level, and the premium on silver rose to the record figure of 164. As for the domestic market, when, in January 1861 the Government floated a new loan for the modest sum of 30 m.g., it had to pay the subscribers nearly 9%.
Plener maintained that given time, he could put things straight, but only if the world of finance recovered confidence in Austria’s credit-worthiness, and for this, not only abstention from adventures abroad was necessary, but also more constitutionalism at home. And as it happened, this course seemed also to be that required for the realization of those foreign political ambitions which now lay closest to Francis Joseph’s heart. If he had not yet finally renounced all hope of recovering his Dynasty’s position in Italy, yet he had been forced to realize that this could not be done quickly. But the renunciation, even if only temporary, of the Italian prize made the German all the more desirable, and it was impossible to deny the truth of poor Bruck’s thesis that a relatively liberal and German-minded Austria would command more sympathies among the smaller German States than a near-autocratic one with Magyar, Polish and Czech magnates playing all the chief instruments.
So Francis Joseph switched his policy again. On 14 December Goluchowski, who had been the target of particularly vehement and scurrilous attacks by the Liberal Press (who hated him alike as an aristocrat, a federalist, a clerical and a Pole) was abruptly and ungraciously dismissed38 and replaced next day as Minister of State by Anton von Schmerling, generally regarded as the white hope of the German centralists (although, interestingly enough, the decisive backing for his candidature seems to have come from the Hungarian Old Conservatives).39
The arguments which went on behind the scenes on the nature and extent of the move occupied some weeks,40 for there was still a big gap between what the Liberals thought necessary for political pacification and financial consolidation, and what Francis Joseph was willing to grant. Von Plener, the Liberals’ representative in the inner ring, argued that the confidence which he regarded as essential for the success of his financial plans could not be assured by anything short of a genuinely representative system, and wanted the 1849 Constitution restored. Francis Joseph, however, was implacably opposed, not only to many features in that instrument,41 but on principle to any Constitution of popular origin. All that Schmerling was able to extract from him (and that with great difficulty) was his consent to the halfway house of a relatively conservative document, issued by himself in the form of an octroi and thus bearing no stigma of popular sovereignty. After agreeing with the Emperor on the limits which the new instrument must not exceed, Schmerling rapidly worked out its details with the help of Lasser and Perthaler, whom he had attached to himself as a sort of one-man brains trust (although he seems, strangely enough, then to have been unaware of Perthaler’s authorship of the Neun Briefe) and having meanwhile avoided the Charybdis of his other colleagues’ objections by keeping them in the dark as to his preparations, bullied them into accepting the result.
Meanwhile, the Ministry had been reconstructed, the appointments being announced on 4 February 1861. The Archduke Rainer became Minister President,42 Rechberg remained Foreign Minister, and Schmerling, Plener and the Hungarians retained their portfolios. Lasser became ‘Minister for administration’, Frh. A. Pratobevera taking over Justice from him.43 Then, on 27 February, there appeared the series of enactments known collectively as the ‘February Patent’. In form, these were enactments putting into effect the October Diploma, with certain modifications of detail – a device which met Francis Joseph’s objection to anything but an octroi, and also avoided the absurdity of revoking what had been described only four months earlier as a ‘permanent and irrevocable instrument’. In fact, too, they made no changes to substantial parts of the Diploma (the common description of the Patent as a complete reversal of the Diploma is erroneous). The powers of the Crown were further restricted in one respect only, although that was, indeed, an important one: the consent of the Reichsrat was now required not only for taxation, but for all ‘legislation’. Even this concession, however, to which Francis Joseph agreed only with extreme reluctance,44 was partly counter-balanced by a provision that ‘taxation, once voted, remained valid until superseded’, and by the resuscitation of the ‘emergency paragraph’ (now paragraph 13) from the 1849 Constitution, enabling the Government to enact legislation when the Reichsrat was not in session. The Reichsrat, although it now had the right of initiating legislation, remained, technically, an advisory body, and there was no mention of Ministerial responsibility. The Monarch appointed the Ministers, as his officials, responsible to him alone; he similarly appointed the Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the Reichsrat and the heads of the Landtage, and retained the right of convoking, proroguing and dissolving the Reichsrat and the Landtage. Foreign Affairs and defence were, as in the Diploma proper, assumed ex silentio to fall outside the field of ‘legislation’ and within the exclusive competence of the Crown.
The composition of the Reichsrat was, however, altered radically, and its relationship to the Landtage put on an entirely different footing. The new body was to be bi-cameral, consisting of an Upper House (Herrenhaus) composed of the adult Archdukes, the Princes of the Church, the adult male members of aristocratic families ‘distinguished by their extensive landed properties’, on whom the Monarch conferred hereditary membership of the House, and life members nominated at his discretion by the Monarch for their distinguished services to the State or Church, learning or the arts; and a House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus) composed of delegates, 343 in all, sent to it by the Landtage in proportions reflecting their different populations, taxable capacities and certain other factors; the numbers ranged from eight-five for Inner Hungary and fifty-four for Bohemia to three for Salzburg and two each for the subdivisions of the Littoral and Vorarlberg.45 All questions relating to ‘rights, duties and interests which are common to all Kingdoms and Lands’ came, as in the Diploma, before the full Reichsrat: the list of such questions was enumerated in the words of the Diploma, and was not extended. Again as in the Diploma, the representatives of the non-Hungarian Lands could be convoked without the Hungarians when ‘objects of legislation which are common to all Kingdoms and Lands with the exception of the Lands of the Hungarian Crown’ were under discussion; in that case the Reichsrat sat as a ‘Narrower (engerer) Reichsrat’. There was, however, an important difference in the Patent’s allocation of competences between the Narrower Reichsrat and the Western Landtage, inasmuch as all questions not specifically assigned to the competence of the Landtage fell within that of the Reichsrat, and the former category of questions was defined very narrowly: it comprised only loca
l cultural questions (Landeskultur); the local application of central laws relating to the Church, schools, the provisioning of troops, etc.; public works executed at Land expense; welfare institutions maintained at Land expense. For these objects the Landtage were entitled to levy rates up to a 10% surcharge on the direct taxation, but no more, except by special permission.
An appended document contained new statutes for the Western Landtage. Their membership ranged from 241 in Bohemia and 150 in Galicia (which was once again divided into a Polish and a Ruthene Statthaltereiabteilung) to 20 for the Vorarlberg. For their composition, the system of ‘Curias’ was kept, but the structure was more progressive than that of Goluchowski’s drafts, although more conservative than Stadion’s and Bach’s. While there were a few variants to allow for special local conditions,46 the general rule was that each Landtag was composed of four Curias, each elected, by open suffrage, by its own constituents, and each being allotted a fixed number of seats in the Landtag (these proportions were retained in the delegations sent by the Landtage to the Reichsrat). The first was reserved for the ‘great landlords’, the qualification being, normally, ownership of an estate registered as landtäflich and of an annual taxable value of 250 gulden. This Curia usually included also one or two ‘virilists’ or ex officio members (high-ranking prelates and Rectors of Universities). Wealth other than that based on real property was given a separate Curia, its representatives being elected by the Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The third and fourth Curias went, as usual, to the urban and rural communes, the voters’ qualification for these being payment of at least ten gulden in direct taxation,47 or the possession of certain professional or educational qualifications.
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