132 Jedlicka, Gestalter, p. 355.
133 For details, see Plener, Erinnerungen, pp. 47 ff.
134 It was, indeed, a modest one: 20 million thaler indemnity plus 5 million for the cost of maintaining the Prussian troops.
135 Kleinwächter, op. cit., p. 196.
136 The first articles setting out these ideas appeared in the Autonomists’ organ, the Grazer Telegraf, early in 1867 (Molisch, op. cit., pp. 71–2).
137 M.K.P., III. 219.
138 I should like to quote here the penetrating comment by Eder (op. cit., p. 151) that the (German) Austrian masses ‘still regarded war and its events, politics and political happenings, as something which was not their concern, but that of ‘the people above’. It was, at bottom, the attitude of the audience in a theatre, applauding or hissing the play and the actors.’
139 Even after their Landtag had been restored in 1861, the Poles had put off building premises for it, because they had hoped shortly to be sending their representatives to a Parliament of united Poland in Warsaw (Bienaimée, p. 129).
140 It had been calculated ‘that the Slovenes would have to be sacrificed to the Germans, if Austria was to receive the desired Federal Constitution (M.K.P., III. 209).
141 A group of volunteers, led by Klapka, had entered North Hungary, but the Slovak population had been hostile to them and they were forced to retreat.
142 The text of this is given in Wertheimer, Andrássy, I. 224.
143 Much the best account of the Empress’s part in these negotiations is Corti’s in his Elisabeth, pp. 138 ff. (Wertheimer’s references to it are little more than incidental). Elisabeth seems to have taken a liking to the country on her first, personally tragic, visit to it in 1857. In 1860, on her return from Madeira, she ‘took it up’ seriously, perhaps out of opposition to her horrid mother-in-law, who was strongly on the other side, learnt the language, and got attached to herself a Hungarian lady-in-waiting, Ida Ferenczy, to whom she became warmly attached. The Hungarians soon noticed her feelings, and played on them, but they were also, no doubt, genuinely touched and delighted. Elisabeth accompanied her husband to Buda in February 1866, where she had a succès fou and struck up a warm personal friendship with Andrássy, who called her ‘our lovely Providence’. She really played an important part in the following months, not in the sense of finding solutions to specific problems, but in that of making her husband well disposed towards the Hungarians. This was perhaps the only case during Francis Joseph’s long reign when he let his political judgment be influenced importantly by a woman.
144 On one occasion he talked of ‘a common front of Germans and Hungarians against Pan-Slavism’ (Corti, Mensch und Herrscher, p. 386).
145 Deák refused the post for himself, and recommended Andrássy for it.
146 For example, Francis Joseph’s Austrian advisers wanted the whole railway system of the Monarchy made a central service.
147 This fact needs to be emphasized, in view of the practice of most Austrian and almost all foreign historians of representing the Compromise as a near-total surrender to Hungary’s wishes, and complete satisfaction of them. But the whole political history of Hungary from 1867 to 1918 is unintelligible unless it is realized that by no means all of the men representing Hungary in 1867 regarded the Compromise as acceptable at all, and many of those who did so viewed it, not as an ideal settlement, but as a pis aller which Hungary’s difficult situation forced her to accept.
148 This was, at the time, Deák’s and Andrássy’s own view.
149 The original resolution provided that ‘common’ affairs should come before a single Parliament, but a fortnight later modified this phrase to ask for no more than ‘constitutional treatment’ of these subjects (Patzelt, op. cit., p. 18).
150 As Belcredi afterwards reported the scene, the Emperor had tears in his eyes when he made the decision.
151 The Tirol escaped because, as Beust frankly confessed, new elections would not have altered the composition of the Landtag.
152 The chief members of this were Count Eduard Taaffe, who was made Minister of the Interior and of Cults and Education on 7 March and promoted to be Deputy Minister President on 27 June; Frh. von Becke, Finance (later also Commerce and Economic Affairs); Frh. Hye (Justice, later also Cults and Education); and F. M. L. John (War). Of these, von Becke was a permanent civil servant; Hye, a University professor who had played a Liberal role in 1848 but had since seen the light; John, a serving soldier who had held his post since September 1866, having previously served as Chief of Staff to the Austrian armies in Italy. Taaffe, who was later to play a very large role in the government of Austria, was the descendant of an Irish family settled in Bohemia since the seventeenth century. As a young boy he had been one of Francis Joseph’s selected playmates. Later, he had been Landespresident of Salzburg, then Statthalter of Upper Austria.
153 Its composition was: Andrássy, Minister President and Minister of Defence; Eötvös, Education and Cults; Count Menyhert Lónyay, Finance; Balthasar Horváth, Justice; Baron Béla Wenckheim, Interior; István Gorove, Trade; Count Imre Mikó (a Transylvanian), Communications; Count György Festetics, Minister a latere to the Crown.
154 It will be remembered that the Diet of 1790/1 had extracted from Leopold II a promise not to use this device.
155 He sent his brother, the Archduke Karl Ludwig, to Prague and Brünn to tell the Bohemian nobles ‘that he wished an electoral result favourable to the Government’ (Beust, op. cit., II. 111).
156 This meant that the Party stood for the existing Constitution against any federalist, etc., amendments: the contrast was not with absolutism.
157 There should have been 203 Deputies, but three seats were vacant through death.
158 The party included a few Croats, Slovenes and Ruthenes, but the great majority were Czechs.
159 Officially, they were visiting the Ethnographic Exhibition there.
160 Von Becke and John had already been acting as ‘common’ (in the terminology of the year, ‘Reichs’) Ministers since the previous July. Beust, in his capacity of Foreign Minister, had, of course, always represented the Gesammtmonarchie.
161 The Austrian counterpart to the Law did not contain these words.
162 In view of the terrific controversies which afterwards raged round the language question in the armed forces, an explanation of this term is desirable (this has been kindly supplied to me by the Austrian Kriegsarchiv). No official definition of the term ‘language of service’ (Dienstsprache) was, in fact, ever given, but from the days of Maria Theresa onward the rule prevailed that all written communications between the military authorities and ‘commands’ in the Army (with exceptions which afterwards lapsed, and need not concern us here) must be in German; after 1848 the same rule was extended to the Navy. How far downward and outward this compulsion applied was never defined, but all officers had to know German; this was officially made compulsory in 1876 for all officers and cadets of the k.k. forces and the Austrian Landwehr. The language of instruction in the Military Academies was German, and German ‘Rhetoric’ was also taught there as a subject. Some other languages of the Monarchy were also taught as subjects.
The ‘language of command’ (Kommandosprache) which in any unit was the same language as that of service, consisted only of a few score words, which every recruit had to learn by heart. Otherwise, a private soldier was not compelled to learn a foreign language, but O.R.s were enjoined to acquire a knowledge of German ‘as soon possible’. If they aspired to non-commissioned rank, they were well advised to do so, for a man not knowing the language of service was unlikely to gain promotion. German was taught as a subject in the schools for N.C.O.s.
Every regiment had also its Regimentssprache, which was the language of the district in which it was recruited (by custom, when a regiment was recruited from a mixed district, a twenty per cent minority qualified to rank as a subsidiary Regimentssprache). This was the language in which instruction was given to the rank and file, and
other purely internal regimental business transacted. It was obligatory for every officer to know the regimental language of his regiment, and such knowledge was a condition for his promotion in it. When, later, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand took such mortal offence because the officers and men of the Hungarian regiment talked Magyar in front of him, he was in the wrong; Magyar was their regimental language, and if he had not been an Archduke, he could not have held a commission in the regiment without learning it.
163 Croat in Croatia-Slavonia.
164 For the Archduke’s position, see below, p. 578, n. 1.
165 See below, p. 735, n.
166 See below, pp. 690, 696.
167 Only the Ban and the Bishop of Zengg attended, and three towns sent deputations.
168 66 Unionists (including 34 officials) and 14 Opposition.
169 That is, after the provincialization of the Military Frontier: before it, twenty-nine.
170 When the document (in both Magyar and Croat versions) was presented to Francis Joseph for ratification, a Croat translation of the Magyar version was pasted over the Croat text. R. W. Seton-Watson (The Southern Slav Question, p. 81), following Croat authorities, waxes very indignant over this; but if the two texts are examined carefully, there is little difference of substance between them, and I do not know that it has been proved that the Magyar text is a ‘falsification’. It is not impossible that the Croat text misrepresented what was agreed in the negotiations.
171 From about 1860 onward they held back the rising flood of Croat nationalism by allying themselves with the local Serbs. For the later developments, see below, p. 645 f.
172 They had put up thirty candidates, but not one had been elected. The ‘Slovaks’ in the Diet, and their representatives on the Committee, were all moderates. The Slovak nationalists’ case was represented for them in the Committee by a Ruthene named Dobriansky, not to their advantage, for Dobriansky was currently believed to have been the man who guided the Russian armies across the Carpathians in 1849, and was consequently intensely unpopular among the Magyars.
173 These included the Slovaks on the Committee and the Bunyevac. The Swabians, if they were represented at all, do not seem to have spoken.
174 This Bill would have reconstructed Hungary as a multinational State in its machinery, as well as its theory. The languages of all six recognized Nationalities were to enjoy equal status in the central Ministries and Parliament. Counties were to be delimited on national lines, and in each the language of official business was to be that of the local majority. Each nationality was to be entitled to create a corporate organization for the regulation of its own cultural and ‘national’ life, and although this self-government was to apply nominally only to cultural questions, the ‘national’ organizations were to be empowered to make representations to the Government also on political questions.
175 The 1861 draft had, probably out of haste, left this field untouched.
176 It was unfortunate that historical usage compelled Deák to use for this phrase the words ‘Magyar nemzet’. It is, however, a fact that the correct translation of these words here is not ‘Magyar nation’ but ‘Hungarian nation’. We have seen that Eötvös counted the Magyars as a ‘Nationality’ (nemzetiség).
177 R. W. Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, p. 148, unfortunately, in what was for long the only English version of this Law, mistranslates this essential phrase, writing: ‘Since, moreover, this equality of right can only exist with reference to the official use’, etc., ‘only’ (not ‘and only’) ‘in so far’, etc.
178 These, in 1867, were the Catholic (Roman and Greek rites), Evangelical, Greek Oriental, Evangelical Fraternities, Lippovan and Armenian.
179 As a matter of curiosity, it may be remarked that books which do not reproduce this text, even where they write about it for scores of pages, include Hantsch (both in his Geschichte and in his book on the National Question), Hugelmann, Taylor, Kann and Fischel (Sprachenrecht). May mistranslates it. Fischel gives it incidentally in his Materialen, when reproducing a speech by a Deputy who was criticizing it. It may be found, with the rest of the Law, in Bernatzik’s Verfassungsgesetze, p. 370.
180 As in Stadion’s Constitution, ‘recognition’ was preferred to ‘guarantee’ because it was objected that a guarantee would be unenforceable.
181 This paragraph was added at the wish of the German-Bohemian Deputies to celebrate the interment of the Sprachenzwanggesetz (see above, p. 540) which was then expressly repealed by the Bohemian Landtag on 5 October 1868. German in fact remained official (outside the Army) as the language of the Delegations of the Supreme Court and of the seal of the National Bank – the German test of laws was the authentic one. German was also the language of the service of the State-owned railways.
182 The Law also made it possible for a couple, under certain conditions, to contract a marriage without any religious ceremony at all.
183 The Law provided, however, for compulsory religious instruction in the pupil’s religion. It was a very advanced Bill, providing for eight years compulsory primary schooling, and for a largely increased number of schools, not all of which were in the event constructed in the remoter rural areas.
184 It had actually been drafted in 1866 and parts of it enacted by decree in the following spring.
185 The Landwehr was to include a contingent of Schützen from the Tirol.
186 The Leitha is the somewhat insignificant stream which then formed the frontier between the two halves of the Monarchy
187 I cannot find the point discussed in any source which I have consulted, but Ferenczy, III. 225, writes that at a meeting held on 9 January 1867 between Beust, Belcredi and some Hungarians, at which a draft (which was word for word Deák’s) of the proposed agreement was discussed, the participants ‘included in the sphere of competence of the Foreign Minister international commercial (Italics mine) treaties’, with the stipulation that both Ministries must communicate them to their Parliaments. This text seems to have been what afterwards emerged as Art. 8 of Law XII, and I cannot attribute any significance of intent from the omission from the final text of the word ‘commercial’. Deák at the time was exclusively interested in delimiting the ‘common’ subjects from the ‘interna’; not at all in defining the limits of the regia potestas.
188 Corti, Der alte Kaiser, p. 196, records that Bánffy, as Hungarian Minister President, counter-signed the appointment of Goluchowski, fils, as Foreign Minister. Francis Joseph objected to this as irregular.
As a matter of convention the Foreign Minister was alternately an Austrian and a Hungarian (although Kálnoky was only very nominally a Hungarian, his estates lying in Moravia, and by no means Hungarian in sympathies) and all three Common Ministers at any given time did not come from the same half of the Monarchy. This practice was not, however, compulsory in law.
189 The Hungarian Parliament did force Kálnoky to resign in 1898, but that was because he had been interfering in Hungary’s domestic affairs, and when Francis Joseph accepted his resignation, this was as a matter of policy, not in virtue of a constitutional obligation. He ignored a vote of non-confidence in Andrássy passed by the Reichsrat in 1878. The end of that conflict was that the Government went and Andrássy remained.
190 See above, p. 530, n. 2.
191 The minutes of all these Conferences were published, with a long introduction on the prehistory of the ‘Common Ministerial Council’, by M. Komjáthy, Protokolle des Gemeinsamen Ministerrates’, etc., Budapest, 1966.
192 Burian, op. cit., p. 151.
Much depended here on the personal factor. Stürgkh seems seldom to have volunteered an opinion on foreign affairs, but Tisza insisted on seeing, and expressing his opinion on, all papers, including top secret ones (Singer, Czernin, p. 26).
12
Intermezzo 1868–71
The structure of the Monarchy established by the Compromise and its accompanying instruments was destined to stand, substantially unaltered, until the Monarchy’s o
wn last days: in the summer of 1918 the constitutional relationships between the Crown and Hungary, and between Hungary and ‘Austria’, were still those of 1867, and if in ‘Austria’ the relationships between the central and Land authorities, legislative and executive, had been adjusted, the changes had been slight, the essential dichotomy was still there and the components themselves unaltered. The only structural change in the Monarchy had been the inclusion within it of the formerly Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In these respects, the Dualist Era constitutes a distinct and well-defined chapter in the internal history of the Austrian Monarchy, and it was also one during most of which the foreign political relationships of the Monarchy followed a straight course, the dominating feature of which was Austria’s friendship, later, her alliance, with the German Reich. But this position, domestic and foreign, was reached only after an intervening period in which Francis Joseph was within an inch of committing himself, in his foreign policy, in a very different direction, and during that period it turned on a hair whether Dualism would survive at all, or whether it would prove to have been simply one more in the long line of unsuccessful experiments. This was because the allocation of power-positions within the Monarchy seemed to depend on its foreign political orientation, and in 1868–70 this was still uncertain. If foreign political considerations, either of offence or of defence, required it, Francis Joseph was prepared to carry through, in their interest, another political reconstruction of the Monarchy which would have modified radically, if it did not entirely destroy, the Dualist system. It was only when he accepted as final the relationship of Austria to the new Germany, and with it, the thought of internal reconstruction – the appointment of an Austrian Minister President committed to the spirit of Dualism and of a Foreign Minister devoted to a policy of reconciliation with Germany occurred within a fortnight of one another – that Dualism could be said to be firmly established, in so far as anything in the Monarchy was ever firm.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 91
