The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  When one reads the lucubrations, contemporary and later, pretending that everything in the Monarchy would have been lovely but for the accursed Dualism, one is reminded irresistibly of Saki’s story ‘Excepting Mrs Penberthy’. We must certainly beware of accepting the facile and frequent assertion that the Compromise ‘dealt the death-blow to the Monarchy’ because it ‘delivered over the other peoples of the Monarchy to the hegemony of the Germans and Magyars’, and thus drove them into irredentism. Even apart from the fact that what the Compromise was designed to do, and did, was to reconcile the Germans and Magyars to the Monarchy, there is no particle of evidence that the break-up of the Monarchy in 1918 was due to a dissatisfaction among its ‘subject peoples’ which would not have been there if the structure of the Monarchy had been different. Irredentism among those peoples was no stronger among those who were really ill-treated than among those, such as the Italians, who had no substantial grievance whatever. As for the Italian, Serb, Roumanian, etc. Governments which in 1918–19 demanded (and received) satisfaction of their ‘national aspirations’, they did not in the least do so (although some of them sometimes pretended otherwise) because their ethnic kinsmen in the Monarchy were ill-treated – some of them were, some not – but out of pure national determinism.

  Dualism was not the product of any sudden, thought-free and care-free inspiration. During the preceding twenty years, effort after effort had been made to find an answer to the problem which history had created, and all of them – Francis Joseph’s, Kossuth’s, Palacký’s, Jellačić’s, Széczen’s, Schmerling’s and the rest – had failed because the forces against them were too strong. Dualism, for all its defects, possessed the overwhelming merit that it satisfied sufficiently the strongest forces in the ring. That was why it could come into being, and why, when established, it did not share the fate of its many ephemeral predecessors. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the case for Dualism is that it lasted, and the Monarchy resting on it lasted, for fifty years. This is a long period of life for any Central European settlement. The life-span of its successor was a bare twenty.

  1 The dismissal of Buol is generally attributed (as it was by himself) to a desire to placate the Czar, who bore a grudge against him from earlier days. But the documents quoted by Corti (Mensch und Herrscher, p. 223) suggest that the cause was more general. Buol had shown himself quite fantastically incompetent during the preceding months, and Francis Joseph had at last awakened to the fact. The deciding voice was probably that of Metternich, who during these last months of his life seems to have recovered a good deal of his old influence over Francis Joseph: the Emperor had been consulting him frequently during this crisis. Rechberg was a pupil and old confidant of Metternich’s, incidentally, a Bavarian by birth, although he had passed his whole career in Austrian service. His principal qualification was his expertise, which was considerable, in both German and Italian affairs.

  2 Known from its place of origin as the ‘Laxenburg Manifesto’.

  3 The Manifesto also contained an extraordinarily ill-tempered dig at Prussia for having allegedly left Austria in the lurch.

  4 The Ministerial Council was not once convoked between 15 July and 23 August.

  5 Bach’s letter of resignation was dated 28 July; Kempen, even before that date, had in practice handed over his duties. Bach was then appointed Minister to the Vatican, an appointment which he held until 1870. He died, almost forgotten, in 1893. Grünne, the third special object of popular resentment, was not retired until 20 October, when he was given a Court position as Master of the Horse, being succeeded by General Count de Crenneville. In practice, however, de Crenneville had taken over Grünne’s duties some weeks earlier.

  6 On these, see W. Goldinger, Von Solferino bis zum Oktoberdiplom (Mitteilungen des oe. Staatsarchivs, Vienna, 1950, pp. 106–126). Goldinger, unfortunately, does not describe the course of the conversations after Clam’s retirement from them.

  7 On Clam see Denis, p. 424, and Höglinger, op. cit., pp. 10 ff. Clam’s own family was one of the most illustrious in Bohemia, and linked by marriage to the Schwarzenbergs as well as the Thuns, so that he was a member in virtue of several titles of the arch-Conservative ring of the highest Bohemian aristocracy.

  8 Reproduced in Charmatz, Bruck, pp. 241 ff. A version of it had been published as early as 1860 in pamphlet form, under the title Die Aufgaben Oesterreichs (Austria’s Tasks).

  9 The memorandum is summarised by Eisenmann, pp. 212 ff.

  10 For example, it seems likely that Francis Joseph was strongly influenced by the Archduke Rainer’s views; but the Archduke’s papers, if he left any, have never been published.

  11 He was succeeded in October by his brother Wilhelm.

  12 The grant of equality for the Protestants and both constitutional and industrial reform are specifically advocated for their effects in Germany; equality for the Greek Churches as a means of preventing Austria’s influence being outstripped by that of Russia in the Balkans.

  13 This (to Western eyes) contradiction between Francis Joseph’s willingness to grant a fair measure of self-government on certain levels and in certain fields, and his stubborn and repeated insistence on the maintenance of his absolutist power, must beyond doubt seem paradoxical. The insistence is on record: thus in June 1860 he told a Ministerial Council that ‘he would allow no curtailment of the Monarchic power through any Constitution; he would face any storm rather than that’, and he forbade his Ministers ‘even to discuss the possibility’. Yet this was nearly a year after the issue of the Rechberg-Goluchowski programme. In view of this, some historians have dismissed the programme as a piece of hypocrisy, but that view seems to me incompatible with the documents. The key probably lies rather in the tradition which had made it second nature to the Habsburgs to distinguish sharply between those questions over which they claimed absolute control, by virtue of their royal prerogative, and those which they left to their subjects. Communal self-government belonged to the latter category; Bruck himself argued in his memorandum that it was purely administrative. He was more doubtful about the Landtage, which he thought would be bound to stray into politics, which was why he wanted their influences counteracted by an enlarged and strengthened Reichsrat. Why Francis Joseph, while rejecting the enlarged Reichsrat, yet accepted the Landtage one cannot explain; someone must have persuaded him that the Landtage would be harmless so long as he retained the jus legis ferendae. On the other hand, he regarded foreign policy and defence as fields in which his absolute power was not to be questioned, and so long as they were safe, so was the essential. So when the October Diploma was issued, he wrote to his mother: ‘We shall, indeed, have a little Parliamentary government, but the power remains in my hands’ (Schürer, p. 302), and in conjunction with the February Patent he enjoined the Ministerial Council ‘to confine the activities of the Reichsrat strictly to the field defined, and to reject decisively any attempt by it to interfere in the conduct of foreign affairs, or army affairs, or the business of the Supreme Command’ (cit. Redlich, Problem, I. 808).

  There remained, of course, the ineluctable fact that the Monarch’s full control over his armed forces, and consequently, his freedom in the field of foreign policy, was illusory if his subjects could refuse him the sinews of war. This was the real issue, as was to appear even more clearly in the subsequent years, in the course of which Francis Joseph was driven back, step by step. His retreats were, however, always made under compulsion and with the worst of grace, and I find it impossible to believe that the ‘control of expenditure’ promised in the August programme meant anything more than careful supervision to guard, for example, against the extravagances and abuses for which the defence services and the army contractors, in particular, were then being pilloried.

  14 A French squadron had anchored outside Fiume on 6 July, and French troops had occupied the adjacent island of Lussin Piccolo for a few days.

  15 All they had done had been to secure from Francis Joseph the promise (which was
none too scrupulously kept) of an amnesty for the deserters from the Imperial Army who had joined the Hungarian legion, which was then dissolved.

  16 Almost all historians write the contrary: that Villafranca was followed by immediate concessions to Hungary. This is not the case: these came only at the next stage, in 1860. It is true that on 8 August a decree had appeared laying down that German ‘need not be employed so exclusively as before in the secondary schools and gymnasia of the Monarchy: it was enough if pupils, on leaving them, were able to read, write and speak German.’ But this order did not apply to Hungary alone, but to the entire Monarchy: it was issued by Thun, and seems to have been a sort of celebration by him of Bach’s retirement.

  17 Corti, op. cit., p. 247. Hübner resigned on 21 October. His successor was Baron Thierry.

  18 When the Hungarian Diet met in 1861, every single Deputy in it was in arrears with his taxes. In January 1862 the Minister of War said in a Ministerial Council that 45 m.g. of taxes in Hungary had to be raised by distraint by the military. He suggested that the Ministry of Finance ought to take over the costs of this operation (Regele, Benedek, p. 318).

  19 The details of these measures need not be given, since all of them were cancelled by Goluchowski’s successor a couple of years later.

  20 This measure finally abolished the guilds, in the place of which it set ‘craft associations’, which had, however, no authority over their members, although membership of them was compulsory. A licence of competence was required to practise a small number of trades to which special considerations applied, but these numbered only fourteen in all (among them were building, shipbuilding, chimney-sweeping, the making of firearms and the sale of poisons). Any other trade could be practised by any person legally qualified to administer his own property and with no criminal record. The measure was a revised edition of one drafted by Toggenburg in 1855. It had been re-drafted under Bruck’s supervision in 1857–8, but the influence of the Church had then still been strong enough to prevent its enactment. It was now specifically advertised, in accordance with Bruck’s recommendation, as proof that Austria was leading Germany in economic liberalism, and was in fact welcomed by the employers: a writer quoted by Charmatz (Bruck, p. 135) described it as ‘a payment on account which the absolutist State had to offer the bourgeoisie in its obscure thrust for political supremacy’. The weaker categories of workers, on the other hand, now lost all protection (such as the guild restrictions had still afforded some of them) except for the restrictions on the employment of child labour still existing under the general law. To describe it, as a recent English writer has done, as a piece of protective social legislation, is singularly mistaken.

  21 The history of all this is very obscure. Neither Charmatz (on Bruck) nor Beer had access to the archives, and Redlich, who summarizes the relevant minutes of the Ministerial Councils (Problem, I. 2· 179) for once does so only in a few lines, leaving it quite unclear how far Bruck was the attacker, and how far, as Uhlirtz suggests, the reform was forced on him. He actually resigned on 22 October, but apparently on a minor issue, and was retained in office (against the opposition of Thun).

  22 This announcement has been the subject of much derisive comment, but it had a reasonable purpose. It was designed as an indirect intimation that military expenditure was going to be cut.

  23 Redlich, l.c.

  24 The most important were two Patents of February 1860 which allowed Jews to own real property in various Lands. The restriction (imposed, as will be remembered, in 1853) was lifted altogether in Lower Austria, the Bohemian and Hungarian Lands, the Littoral and Dalmatia. In Galicia and the Bukovina the full concession was limited to Jews holding a certificate of higher education, although other Jews were still allowed to buy or lease certain categories of land. The Alpine Lands were presumably omitted because their Jewish population was then practically non-existent.

  Another measure repealed in Galicia was Joseph II’s Edict of 1789 forbidding Jews to manufacture or trade in alcoholic liquors outside the towns. The Statthalterei said this ban might as well be lifted, since it was notorious that in spite of it, the entire traffic in strong liquors had remained in Jewish hands.

  25 The spiritual authorship of it is generally attributed to Hans von Perthaler, a Tirolean awyer occupying the somewhat secondary post of Counsellor in the Supreme Court in Vienna, but a prolific writer on constitutional problems. At the beginning of 1860 he had published anonymously a series of articles (Neun Briefe über die Verfassungreform in Oesterreich) in which most of the ideas later embodied in the Patent were advocated. Bruck, however, had already proposed the move in his memorandum.

  26 The documents do not explain this strange fact; but Redlich tells us (op. cit., I. 490 n.) that Francis Joseph at this time was actually pressing his Ministers to get on with the statutes of the Landtage, and of the Communal Councils. It may well be that Francis Joseph was influenced by the conversations which he had been having with Metternich, who had also wanted the Lands represented on his Reichsrat.

  27 This change had been decided earlier, the Archduke having repeatedly expressed his wish to be relieved of his post.

  28 Redlich, op. cit., I. 489.

  29 The two others were the Archdukes Wilhelm and Leopold.

  30 Josika had just died, a week before Széchenyi.

  31 This was not a mere tactical move, for Eötvös, the brains of the Hungarian higher nobility, had endorsed exactly the same thesis in his Garantien der Macht und Einheit Oesterechs, published in 1859. Eötvös is even in favour of allowing the Lands of the Bohemian Crown to form a unit.

  32 A memorandum signed by nine of these gentlemen (four Princes and five Counts) is reproduced in extract by Redlich (and discussed, in Redlich’s typical manner, in words more diffuse than its own) in his Problem, I. pp. 642 ff. It is undated, but was written after the convocation of the Reinforced Reichsrat and before the issue of the Diploma. Large parts of it appear almost verbatim in the Federal Nobility’s report.

  33 Die definitive Feststellung, Sicherung und Vertretung ihres gemeinsamen staatsrechtliches Verbandes.

  34 In the voting, the Croat and Italian representatives had voted for the majority report, the Serb and Mocsonyi for the minority. Şaguna and the Ruthene Bishop had voted against both reports, while the other Ruthene had abstained.

  35 Students’ Turnverbande, etc., were now springing up in great numbers. The police thought them undesirable, but were afraid to prohibit them.

  36 Inquiries had been set on foot in the previous autumn into the irregularities in the commissariat during the Italian campaign. The culprit in chief, Q.M. General Eynatten, hanged himself in prison, leaving a confession. Among the other persons arrested were several Trieste contractors, former associates of Brack’s. Rumour linked Brack’s name with them. Although completely innocent, as was afterwards proved, Brack submitted his resignation, and the Emperor, after first refusing it in a gracious message which left Bruck completely reassured, wrote to him two days later that he was retiring him ‘temporarily’ and appointing von Plener ‘provisionally’ to take his place. No one knows why he took this step, which he seems not to have expected Brack to resent; but Brack was shattered by it, and cut his own throat in a fit of mortification.

  The real scandals were glossed over with conspicuous lightness.

  37 What passed between Francis Joseph and Eötvös has never been published.

  38 On entering his Ministry, he found his resignation lying on his table for his signature. This anecdote is told in relation to several Austrian Ministers, sometimes apocryphically, but seems to be authenticated in this case.

  39 Von Plener, the Finance Minister, invariably attributed the appointment to his own influence, but Schmerling himself in his recollections, which are still unpublished but were utilized by F. Fellner in an interesting and informative article, Das Februarpatent von 1861 (Mitteilungen des Instituts für oe. Geschichtsforschung, 1955, p. 549, ff.) most specifically attributes the decisive interven
tion in his favour to Rechberg, who in his turn was passing on the views of the Old Conservatives. This, of course, does not necessarily mean more than that Francis Joseph’s decision, already half-conceived, was clinched by the assurance that Schmerling would go down also in Hungary.

  40 On the genesis of the Patent, see Eisenmann, pp. 261 ff., Redlich, Problem, I. 672–701, and F. Fellner, op. cit.

  41 These included its chapter on popular rights, of which Francis Joseph would hear nothing. Schmerling bowed to his objections, although he may not have liked them, but he himself ‘did not believe that basic rights were of the essential of a Constitution’ (Fellner, p. 555). As Fellner remarks, both the Diploma and the Patent admitted the principles of equality before the law and inter-Confessional equality. These, however, had survived the cancellation of the 1849 Constitution and had figured in the Sylvester Patent.

  42 The appointment seems to have been made in order to spare the Hungarians from sitting under an ‘Austrian’ Minister.

  43 Replaced in December 1862 by F. Hein. The Ministry of Administration took over the administrative duties of the Ministry of the Interior, leaving the Minister of State to deal with the Reichsrat and the Landtage. He was also in charge of Cults and Education.