The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  If the Landtag of any Land refused to carry out the elections, the Crown could order direct elections to the Reichsrat to be carried out in it. These were still by Curia, and the proportions were unchanged.

  Venice was allowed to retain its traditional ‘General Congregation’ for Diet, and a Rescript instructed the Hungarian Court Chancellor to submit proposals on how the Hungarian representatives to the Reichsrat were to be selected.

  Finally, the original small advisory body which had swollen to such considerable proportions, and had assumed such large new functions, reverted to the name of Staatsrat and to its earlier numbers and duties of examining and reporting on all proposed legislation, central or local.48

  The Patent was thus a far more centralist instrument than the Diploma, even in respect of the position of Hungary in the Monarchy; for while it did not extend the range of subjects in which Hungary might have to submit to the will of an extra-Hungarian majority, it made that subjection more apparent and altered its nature. The Reinforced Reichsrat could still conceivably be regarded as a consultative assemblage of notables meeting to discuss a limited number of subjects of interest to them all; the Patent’s Reichsrat was, for all its limitations, a recognizable Parliament expressing the will of its constituents, a majority of whom would always be non-Hungarians.

  But the main effect of the Patent, and its principle object,49 was to increase the influence over the affairs of the Monarchy, directly over those of the West, but indirectly also, through the composition of the Reichsrat, over those of Hungary, of the German bourgeoisie. To describe it, as many writers have done, as ‘enshrining the domination of the German haute bourgeoisie’ is, indeed, something of an exaggeration. The class which, by modern standards, was even now greatly over-represented was that of the big landlords; for even if the Upper House, which was largely composed of men of this class, was left out of account – and it was in fact a powerful and effective body – the Curia system, and the key adapted for it, was still inordinately favourable to them. In Bohemia, for example, they had 70 seats out of the 241, in Galicia, 44 out of 150, in Moravia, 30 out of 100, in Lower Austria, 18 out of 66, in the Narrower Reichsrat, as a whole, 59 out 203.50

  Incidentally, but importantly, it was precisely the big representation allowed to this class that made it possible for the Government, or the Crown, to influence elections one way or the other by putting pressure on a very small fraction of the electors. For the irremediably Germanic and the irremediably non-Germanic Crownlands balanced out fairly evently, leaving the balance to be tipped by the two great ‘mixed’ Crownlands of Bohemia and Moravia. And in these again, the German and the Czech constituencies were fairly evenly balanced, so that the majorities in their Landtage, and consequently, in the Reichsrat,51 depended on the voters in the Great Landlords’ Curias, of whom the wealthier were often open to personal persuasion and the poorer (many of whom were heavily indebted to the banks) to arguments of another nature.52 That influence did not have to be, and in fact was not always, influenced in favour of the Germans; there were occasions when the Crown exerted it against them.

  It was, however, true that the bourgeoisie, with sixty-five seats in the Narrower Reichsrat, had gained a long stride on the Feudals, and if they in their turn had lost much ground to the rural communes (entirely unrepresented before 1848, outside the Tirol), yet they were still over-represented, proportionately to their numbers. In Bohemia, for example, there was one representative for every 11,000 urban constituents and only one to every 49,000 rural. Furthermore, the Germans undoubtedly came off better than most of the other nationalities, and not only through the advantage enjoyed by them in virtue of their higher economic level. The German Lands on the whole sent proportionately larger delegations to the Reichsrat, while the over-representation of the towns automatically favoured the Germans. In some mixed Lands, in addition, the German constituencies, rural as well as urban, were smaller than the non-German.

  The Patent thus really opened the door for the entry on to the scene of Austrian political life, as a recognized and effective factor, of a class and creed which was destined to play a leading role in it for a long generation to come: German ‘Liberalism’ and its representatives. Some words on this force will therefore be in place here, and we may fittingly prefix these by some lines on the changes in the composition of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie which were beginning to come about as the result of the large-scale infiltration now commencing into its most important groups, especially in Vienna, of the Jewish element.

  One must write ‘large-scale’, for individual Jews had, as we have seen, played a most important part in the life of the Monarchy even in the earlier years covered by this history. We have ventured the statement that Salomon Rothschild had been in many respects the most important figure in the Austria of the Vormärz, and although he had towered above the rest, he had not been alone. The salon kept by the brothers-in-law von Arnstein and Eskeles (both had been ennobled) and their consorts, of whom Fanny von Arnstein had been known as the ‘Viennese Récamier’, had been one of the most brilliant in the glittering Vienna of the Congress. There had been other important business men besides Rothschild; a recent writer has said that ‘a large part of Austria’s economic life got into Jewish hands during the Vormärz, all restrictions notwithstanding’,53 although those restrictions had been really formidable; it had taken Rothschild himself twenty years to get permission to operate a mine. The retail trade of the Monarchy lay already largely in Jewish hands. Nor had the role played by the often impoverished and radical intellectuals who then constituted the other element in Viennese Jewry been unimportant. The often-heard gibe that the Viennese revolution of 1848 was made by Jews is an over-simplification and an exaggeration, but it is not difficult to make out a superficial case for it. Thus the three first speakers to address the masses on that memorable morning of 13th March were all Jews, and Hungarian Jews at that.54 The fourth, a bull-voiced Tirolean named Patz, was only put up to read out Kossuth’s speech because the crowd could not hear, or could not understand, Goldner’s German. Afterwards Fischof and Goldmark were members of the Constituent. Fischof was President of the Committee of Security. Most of the men who kept up the vital link with the workers were Jewish students, and three out of the four Presidents of the Aula at the end of October,55 were Jews. Again, Jewish influence was certainly one of the two main internal factors (Hungarian nationalism being the other) which brought about the abandonment of absolutism in the Monarchy in 1859. In this decade, however, the Jewish influence was chiefly exercised from outside. In the Monarchy itself the Jews, after their total liberation in 1849, were again subjected to various restrictions after 1851.56 They were still not numerous outside Galicia, Bukovina and the old-fashioned but curiously self-contained and static community of Prague; before 1848 there had never been as many as two hundred ‘tolerated’ families in Vienna, and even a considerable influx after 1848 had only brought these numbers there up to 6,200 in 1860.57 They were moreover, still a corpus separatum. The operations of the National Bank, even more the hidden influence exercised by Rothschild on Metternich’s foreign policy, were conducted on the highest level, and remained a secret from 99·9% of the population of Austria.

  But all this then changed, with increasing speed. While after 1859 Francis Joseph’s Governments had removed the most important restrictions, they had done so under pressure, reluctantly, and piecemeal; but it was otherwise when the Liberals came into office, for they were committed, on principle and out of conviction, to complete religious and civic equality for all citizens. The constitutional laws of 1867 abolished all civic inequalities, and the inter-confessional legislation 1868 crowned the work. Now practically all doors were open to Jews, just at the moment when the railways were completed which gave them physical access to Vienna (few of them went beyond the capital).58 The influx began: most of it direct from Galicia, a smaller stream, of the same ultimate origin, from Hungary. By 1870 the Jewish population of the capital had risen
to 40,200 (6·6% of the total); in 1880 it was 72,600 (10·1%) and in 1890, 118,500 (8·7%).

  Most of the immigrants arrived poor, and some remained so, but their successful members soon acquired a position of extraordinary importance in the economic, intellectual and even the political life of Vienna, and hence of the whole of Austria. They practically dominated the entire central credit system (only the provincial banks were less wholly in their hands), and they owned a big part of the large-scale industry, most of its wholesale and much of its retail trade. The central Press was almost entirely in their hands; of all the big Viennese newspapers of the Francis Joseph era, only the Christian Socialist organ, the Reichspost, was not almost entirely owned and staffed by Jews – this giving them an extraordinary power, which was by no means always wisely, or even reputably, used, of influencing public opinion. They were also particularly strongly represented in publishing and in the theatre business. They had long been allowed to practise medicine, and by 1881, 61% of all doctors registered in Vienna were Jews. Up to 1862 they were in practice excluded from the Bar, but by 1888, 394 out of the 681 advocates in Vienna were Jews and 310 out of 360 articled clerks (Konzipienten). They were only beginning to enter the teaching profession (the lower levels, which were mostly staffed by clergy, hardly at all), but already constituted a substantial proportion of the University professors. The student of Austrian history who takes his information at second-hand, from the best-known native works, will not do ill to remember that Redlich, Friedjung, Pribram, Kolmer and many others, were Jews. So, for that matter, were many of the leading figures in the artistic and literary world of the day.

  In Galicia, the Jews had lived in a spiritual ghetto. When they came to Vienna their religion was all that they wished to keep distinctive: in social and political life they attached themselves to an existing faction. It was natural, even had calculation not enjoined it, that practically all Jews in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands should line up with the Germans in ‘national’ respects,59 and they did so most completely, often sincerely feeling themselves ‘Germans’ and being accepted as such by others. Fischof, for example, in his correspondence with Rieger, regularly speaks of ‘us Germans’. Friedjung and Viktor Adler, both Jews, were among the authors of the ‘Linz Programme’ for a ‘German People’s Party’.60 These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum, and non-Germans as well as Germans thought the attitude natural. Rieger, in his replies to Fischof, never accused him of false pretensions. Earlier, in the Vormärz, when a single Jew, one Siegfried Kapper, had gone Czechophile, Havliček himself had told him that ‘the Jews should go with the Germans, since German was already their second mother-tongue’.61

  In politics, accordingly, the Jews associated themselves almost exclusively with two parties, the Liberals and the Social Democrats, both of which they provided with most of their brains, while accentuating certain of the characteristics of each which were most antipathetic to its opponents: in the former, its doctrinaire anti-clericalism and its intimate and often unfortunate association of politics with financial interests; in the latter, its international tenets and its extreme anti-clericalism.

  Their influence on the policies of each of these parties was most important, but perhaps more important still was the reaction which set in against it, especially after the 1873 Krach. For the last forty years of Austria’s existence, the Jewish question was a major issue in the politics of Vienna and of German-Austria as a whole, and anti-Semitism was a chief plank in the platforms of practically all the parties in those areas which were not themselves ‘Jew-run’.

  The German Liberals were drawn from the German and Jewish upper and middle bourgeoisie of Lower Austria (i.e., Vienna and its environs), the Bohemian Lands, and, to a lesser extent, Styria and Upper Austria. Both components, the German and the Jewish, contributed essential elements towards the final synthesis, although on different planes: the ‘Liberal’ Ministers and Deputies were, at this stage, all Germans by blood; while the Jews supplied the finance, the Press and most of the brains. Politically, the Liberals were up to a point the heirs of the men who had carried through the bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Vienna, and they were ‘constitutionalist’ and ‘Left’ in that they demanded limitation of the Monarch’s authority, especially in financial matters: he who paid the piper should call the tune. They also stood for the most complete liberty of the citizen vis-à-vis the State: liberty of Press, of association, etc., equality before the law and liberty of religion. They were ‘Left-wing’ also in their hostility to the ‘feudal’ landlords, this partly on material grounds, representing as they did industrial and commercial interests against agrarian, partly as their rivals for political power.

  It is important for the history of the Monarchy that their feelings on two points were almost fanatically violent. Their invariable and embittered opposition to the military estimates was not due only to tenderness for their own pockets. The military’s own claim to have saved, not only the integrity of the Monarchy, but also the authority of the Crown, in 1848, and Francis Joseph’s acceptance of it, had produced their own reaction. The Liberals regarded the army as the pillar of absolutism, and as such, as their deadly enemy, and their hatred of its internal role led them to oppose, year in and year out, even estimates barely sufficient to defend the Monarchy against obviously imminent danger from foreign Powers.

  Their second Guy Fawkes was the Church. This feeling was no doubt sharpest in the strong Jewish element in their ranks, but by no means confined to them: it, again, was a reaction to the position which the Church had claimed for itself in the Concordat era. The anti-clericalism of the Liberals, like their anti-militarism, was almost obsessive: as we shall see, a large part of their energies while they were in power were spent on undoing the Concordat and all its works.

  In other respects they had, indeed, shed any revolutionary ardours which they had ever possessed. They were at least as hostile as the feudalists to allowing any political power to the classes below them. Their economic philosophy was one of pure Mancunian laissez-faire (except on the issue of free trade versus protection, on which they divided according to their particular interests), and allowed and approved the most ruthless exploitation of the economically weak.

  There were nuances of difference between them in their attitude towards the structural problem of the Monarchy; their Styrian wing, in particular, which took shape as Kaiserfeld’s ‘Autonomists’, had a strong local tradition. The other two groups, however, were strongly centralist, the Viennese as citizens of the capital of the Monarchy, the Bohemians, for protection against the Czechs (very much of the political struggle of the Monarchy was the struggle between Czechs and Bohemian Germans, fought out in Vienna). The Jews, for economic reasons, wanted the largest and closest unit possible. Taken as a whole, the Liberals represented the most powerful centripetal force in the Monarchy, outside the Monarch himself and his direct servants, and were thus in some respects the natural allies of that latter group, as in others they were often its most vociferous opponents.

  Their attitude towards the State was, indeed, curiously ambivalent. While strongly attacking many of its policies, they admitted a sort of self-identification with it which went even beyond their own description of themselves as staatserhaltend. At this stage they were even able to make their attitude towards their own Germanic nationality a function of their attitude towards the State. ‘The interests of the Monarchy as a whole’ was a maxim of their leaders, ‘were also the interests of the Germans in it’, and, at least on paper, the former were to take the precedence; their purpose, as it has been well said, was not to make the Austrian State German, but ‘that Deutschtum should adapt itself to the requirements of the State and subordinate its specific national life to them’.62 Thus not only had they no room for irredentism: they even refused to adopt any specifically German national policy, as degrading them from the position of a Pan-Cis-Leithanian party to that of representatives of a single element in it.

  It is true that in pract
ice they often, perhaps unconsciously, reversed the maxim, assuming that what were the interests of the Germans must also be the interests of the Monarchy as a whole; but also true that in this period they were thinking more in terms of liberalism (and of economics) than of nationalism – so much so that the Liberal Party, besides freely admitting Jews, usually contained one or two Italians and even Slovenes.

  The practical effect of this ambivalence in 1862 was that in calling the German bourgeoisie, as led by Schmerling, to office Francis Joseph was on the one hand, yielding ground in the economic and financial fields, and even in the constitutional field, meaning by that term the relations between the Crown and the representatives of the subjects, as such. From the structural point of view, on the other hand – from the angle, that is, of centralism versus regionalist aspirations, especially those of Hungary – he was concluding an alliance with a partner who, on this issue, took the same view as himself.

  The alliance, on this tacit understanding, was possible in 1862, because it harmonized well enough with the assumptions – perhaps unconscious – on which Francis Joseph was still basing his policy, both foreign and domestic. He still regarded its German element as the natural ‘cement’ and main prop of his Hausmacht, and Austria itself, primarily as the leading German State, his chief foreign political objective being, at that time, to make that position a reality again. Later developments – the exclusion of Austria from Germany and the advance of the non-Germans of Austria to political, social, economic and cultural maturity – were to make the position untenable, and the Liberals’ gradual retreat from it will be a leading motif in the political history of Austria during the next decades. It may perhaps even be argued that the Patent itself, in establishing in Austria for the first time a genuine (if limited) Parliamentary system, marked the first stage in the downward path of its Germans. For once the principle had been established that the destinies of Austria lay in the hands of its peoples, its Germans had to take their place among those peoples, and it would be impossible for them to keep it indefinitely a privileged one. It was the Liberals’ tragedy that their decline and ultimate fall were due to the developments which they had themselves done so much to bring about.