The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  The first years after 1867 thus form a distinct sub-chapter of the Dualist Era; and the period which opens in about 1903 forms another. In this, although the Dualist system still stands, it is being subjected to increasing criticism, from both the parties between which the Compromise was concluded: the Hungarians themselves, and the Crown – less, indeed, the man who was then still wearing the Crown, than the man who by all human reckoning must soon succeed to it; and this encourages other enemies of the system, the oppositional forces and nationalities in Hungary, and even some circles in Austria. At the same time, while the Monarchy’s own foreign political orientation does not change, other forces appear, so aggressive that her alliances no longer safeguard her existence. Her foreign relations, too, thus enter on a new phase.

  In describing these three periods it is, however, not easy to follow the purely chronological method which was appropriate to our earlier chapters. The internal histories of Cis-and Trans-Leithania go such different ways after 1867 that it would be only confusing to treat them together, and during much of the period, the history of the Monarchy’s foreign relations, too, is so distinct from that of its internal developments that the two subjects are more appropriately treated in separate chapters. But this is not true of the whole period, and not always equally true of both halves of the Monarchy. From 1868 to 1871 the threads of the Monarchy’s foreign relations, and those of internal developments in Cis-Leithania, are so closely interwoven as to make separate treatment of them impossible,1 whereas there is practically no interconnection between foreign policy and internal events in Hungary. We therefore describe the years 1868–1903 under four headings: the ‘intermezzo’ of 1868–71, dealing simultaneously with foreign relations and with internal events in Cis-Leithania; foreign policy, 1871–1903; Cis-Leithania, during the same years; and Hungary, 1868–1903. After 1903, on the other hand, it is Cis-Leithania which goes its own way, while the foreign political developments, the internal struggle in Hungary and the relations between Hungary and the Crown form a single story the threads of which can no longer be disentangled. Then 1914 brings all the three stories together again for the final and fatal dénouement.

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  1868, then opened with Francis Joseph still smarting under his defeat at the hands of Prussia, and Beust, as his Foreign Minister, engaged in tangled negotiations with France, Italy and the South German States. These, however, were of their nature preparatory, and could not be expected to yield quick results, even if they were wanted to do so – and they were directed less towards creating a situation than meeting one which might arise through the initiative of others. Immediate developments could come only in internal affairs, where the Ministries in Vienna and Buda-Pest were savouring their first tastes of responsible Government.

  In Buda-Pest this was still the same team as had taken office in the previous March, but Beust had given up his internal charges when the December Laws were through, and Francis Joseph, while leaving him Chancellor and Foreign Minister, had, on 30 December, appointed a new Ministry for other business. It was characteristic of him that although the German Liberals were much the strongest Party in the Reichsrat, he could not bear to make one of them Minister President: he conferred that office on Prince ‘Carlos’ Auersperg, who had, indeed, Liberal leanings and something of a Liberal family tradition (he was a cousin of Anastasius Grün, the mildly progressive poet of the 1830s), and was now, as a Constitutional Landowner, allied with the Liberals, but was, after all, a very great aristocrat, member of one of the highest families of Bohemia, and nicknamed ‘the first cavalier of the Reich’.2 Taaffe remained Deputy Minister President, also taking over the portfolio of Defence (Austrian), and a third high aristocrat, Count Potocki, a Polish landowner of great estates and independent political views, became Minister of Agriculture. The rest of the Ministers, however – Eduard Herbst (Justice), Leopold von Hasner (Education), Karl Giskra (Interior), Brestel (Finance), Ignaz von Plener (Commerce) and Berger (without portfolio) – were all drawn from the German middle classes – largely from German-Bohemia3 – so that the team deserved its nickname of the Bürger-Ministerium. With its appointment the true history of Austria under Dualism begins.

  The Burgher Ministry was naturally concerned chiefly4 to carry on the work of the Parliament from which it had emerged. In 1868 and 1869 it took much of that work a long step further, largely in the form of enacting laws which put into effect general principles enunciated in the Fundamental Laws. The separation of the judiciary from the executive was implemented, the Gemischte Bezirke being replaced by a new dual structure of Bezirkshauptmannschaften and Gerichtsbezirke, and other judicial reforms enacted.

  Map 5

  The Ministry of Police was abolished. Two important measures reflected the Liberals’ faith in the virtue of economic laissez-faire: the legal maximum of interest which could be charged on a loan was abolished (although it was still illegal ‘to take advantage of the borrower’s frivolity, inexperience or imbecility’ to charge ‘a rate grossly disproportionate to that locally in use’), and all prohibitions on the sub-division of peasant holdings vanished, giving a peasant-holder free disposition, testamentary or otherwise, over his land.

  It was their confessional legislation which the Liberals pressed most strongly of all, and it was over this that they met with most resistance, for the representatives of the Church put up an embittered defence of their positions. But Francis Joseph had, however reluctantly, resigned himself to the inevitable: when the Bill on marriage law and the Schools Bill came before the Upper House he instructed his Marshal, Prince Hohenlohe, to vote for them,5 and they were passed (on 21 and 30 March respectively), amid scenes of immense jubilation. Vienna was illuminated and Auersperg given ovations. They were followed by a third law ‘on the regulation of inter-confessional relationships’ which laid down the principle of complete inter-confessional equality in questions relating to mixed marriages and their issue, conversions, etc.

  Once these laws had been adopted, the abolition of the Concordat could only be a matter of time. Beust asked the Holy See to renounce it, but Pope Pius IX replied only by denouncing the Austrian laws as ‘destructive, abominable and damnable’ and as ‘absolutely null and void’. Several Austrian Bishops refused to recognize the validity of the Austrian legislation. One (Bishop Rudiger of Linz) called on his clergy to resist it publicly, and was actually condemned to fourteen days imprisonment (which he was not, indeed, required to serve) for conduct detrimental to the public order. The Liberals, however (who were supported by a clamorous Viennese mob), set their teeth, and eventually won their main point – only, indeed, under Auersperg’s successor, Potocki; but this will be the most convenient point to mention that, when the Oecumenical Council of 1870 adopted the dogma of Papal Infallibility, Beust represented to the Emperor that the pronouncement had invalidated the Concordat by altering the character of one party to it, and on 30 July, Francis Joseph, accepting the argument, cancelled the Austrian legislation implementing the Concordat.6

  Much of this work was valuable, but much of it was also highly controversial. Even in the German Crownlands, the confessional legislation was bitterly opposed by the Clericals and by the bulk of the peasant voters, while the Tirol objected to the centralist structure of the new Cis-Leithania, as did practically all its non-Germans. The Polish Landtag, after a long argument between their different fractions,7 ended by producing, on 24 September 1868, a joint Resolution which demanded a viceroy for Galicia who was to be responsible to Galicia’s own Parliament, which was to be competent for all subjects except the most important ones affecting the whole Monarchy; when those questions were being discussed, Galicia would send her representatives to the Reichsrat, which otherwise they would not attend. A Polish Landsmannminister was to be attached to the Crown, and Galicia to have its own Supreme Court of Justice.8

  The Slovenes demanded linguistic and administrative concessions in the Lands inhabited by them, and a Slovene Congress in Gorizia, in October 1868, demanded t
he constitution of a Slovenia comprising all the Slovene territories of Austria, with its own Diet and Slovene for the language of administration and education. The Italians of the Littoral clung to Vienna for protection against the local Croat and Slovene majorities, but those of the South Tirol demanded complete administrative separation from the north of the Crownland.

  The Bohemian Czechs were infuriated that the Hungarians had succeeded where they, the Czechs, had failed. They boycotted a visit paid by Francis Joseph to Prague in July 1868, and on 22 August of that year eighty-one members of the Bohemian Landtag signed a Declaration which set out their constitutional claim in uncompromising terms. They affirmed, indeed, their wish for an equitable settlement with the Germans of Bohemia on a basis of equality; but they declared that the only constitutional basis of Bohemia’s position in the Monarchy was formed by the settlement accepted by Ferdinand I at his Coronation (even the Vernewerter Landesordnung was illegal, as having been imposed by force) and the Majestätsbrief of Ferdinand V (I) of 8 April 1848. The Bohemian Lands had never stood in a ‘real union’ with any Austrian State. The October Diploma and the February Patent were illegal, and the Deputies of Bohemia were neither obliged nor entitled to attend the meetings of the Reichsrat, whose decisions were not binding on Bohemia. They demanded the negotiation of a new settlement based on the rights of the Bohemian Crown.

  On the same day, the Czech members of the Moravian Diet subscribed to a declaration in similar terms. The Diets of Moravia and Silesia, it is true, immediately announced that they had no use for any closer connection with Bohemia.

  It was in these years that the Czechs initiated what afterwards became a permanent feature of their national campaign: its appeal to foreign sympathies. The ‘pilgrimage to Moscow’ has already been mentioned; now the Czech leaders turned their eyes towards France, initiating the special Czech-French connection which played so big a part in the disintegration of the Monarchy fifty years later. When Prince Jerome Napoleon visited Prague in 1868, he received Palacký and Rieger, and the Czech Press wrote proudly that ‘the eyes of Europe are fixed on Prague’. The next year Rieger went to Paris, where, indeed – France being then hopeful of agreeing with Francis Joseph – he failed to get an audience either of Napoleon III or of Jerome Napoleon; but the next year again, on the eve of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Rieger addressed a memorandum (the text of which leaked out) to the French Ambassador in Vienna, arguing the identity of France’s interests with those of the Czechs. ‘As soon as Bohemia’s independence is assured, it separates Northern from Southern Germany … A French army could reach Bohemia faster than a Prussian army advancing from Berlin could reach Frankfurt on the Main.’

  Characteristically, the only concessions to malcontents made by the Government in 1868 and 1869 were to the Poles. The Government rejected, indeed, the Polish Resolution, partly on principle, partly out of fear that Russia would disapprove. In January 1869, however, all education in Galicia below University level was entrusted to a Land Educational Council, which promptly Polonized all schools above the elementary level (an Imperial Rescript extended this to the Universities), the Ruthenes being told that their language was too primitive to be used in secondary education. In July 1869 Polish was made the ‘inner language’9 of the entire administration and judicature throughout Galicia, and German officials dismissed wholesale – the number is put at between 4,000 and 5,000 – in favour of Polish. It is equally characteristic that the concessions proved totally futile; the Galician Landtag merely reaffirmed its Resolution of the previous year. No similar softness was shown towards the other nationalities. In Bohemia the Germans declared the signatories of the Czech memorandum to have forfeited their mandates, and Prague and its suburbs were under a state of siege from October 1868 to April 1869.10 Severe measures were taken against the Czech national Press and associations. Auersperg, indeed, resigned over the Czech crisis (his place was taken by Taaffe, on 26 September), but this was not because he sympathized with the Czechs, but on the contrary, because Beust had tried to talk to Palacký and Rieger behind his back.

  The discontent was, however, so serious and so widespread that in December the Government itself split: five of its members (Plener, Hasner, Giskra, Herbst and Brestl) were for continuing the existing course, making this possible by amending the electoral law to make elections to the Reichsrat direct, while three (Taaffe, Potocki and Berger) thought some change of course necessary. Francis Joseph took the unusual course of letting both groups express their views in memoranda, having these published, and letting Parliament debate them. As the Houses decided in favour of the majority, the three dissident Ministers resigned and their places were filled by Germans, Hasner taking over the Minister Presidency. Thereupon, however, the Poles put in their Resolution again, and when it was again rejected, resigned their mandates en bloc, and when Hasner proposed filling the gaps by the emergency procedure, the Slovenes, Italians and some of the Roumanians walked out in their turn, as did most of the Clericals, thus reducing the active membership of the Reichsrat to the Liberals and the handful of faithful Ruthenes. The Emperor turned, after all, to Potocki, who, when he took office in April, decided to make a fresh start. He dissolved the Reichsrat and the Landtage, ordering the latter to meet again in the summer to elect their representatives to the new Reichsrat, which was to assemble in September.11 But before it met, the obvious imminence of war between France and Prussia in July 187012 faced Austria with the necessity of taking a crucial decision in the field of foreign policy.

  Historians today seem agreed that the conventional view that Francis Joseph and Beust spent the years 1866–70 in seeking to organize ‘a war of revanche for Königgrätz’ is an over-simplification. There was a powerful party at Court of which the description would be true: it was headed by the Archduke Albrecht, ‘Inspector-General of the Armed Forces’ since January 1868, and Baron Kuhn, Minister of War since the same date,13 and the ‘aristocratic Court circles’ were reputed to be of the same mind, not least because they believed that a victorious war would bring with it the fall of the Liberals in Austria. The Emperor and Beust were more cautious, because they took more account of foreign political realities, especially the danger of intervention by Russia, and much of Beust’s endeavours were really devoted to the harmless objective of building a defensive front against Prussia. But it is also an exaggeration to depict the two as wanting nothing more than the status quo. Both of them wanted to get Austria in a situation of which she could safely take advantage if Prussia became involved in war with another Power. If that could have been achieved they would have taken their revanche, even at the cost of war.

  Unfortunately for them, the situation was not easy to create. Beust got nowhere with the South German States (Bismarck had got there before him). Italy, when the question of an alliance with her came up, asked too high a price: the cession of the Trentino and Austria’s consent to the annexation of the Papal States, in return for no more than neutrality. Napoleon III, the dynamic factor in the Europe of the day, was anxious to commit Austria to active help against Prussia, and as early as April 1867 offered her an offensive and defensive alliance, out of which Austria was to have got Silesia as reward for her share in the victory; but Beust was frightened to commit himself. The Emperor might have gone further, but just when the rapprochement seemed to be in full swing, the news arrived of the tragic death of his brother, Maximilian, in Mexico, court-martialled and shot by his opponents on 19 June 1867. It was Napoleon III who had largely contrived Maximilian’s luckless venture, promising him military support which he had, then, not given, and Francis Joseph bore him a personal resentment for this which was certainly a factor in postponing agreement. Then, other difficulties apart, both parties had been largely preoccupied with internal affairs, and by the end of 1869 the only agreement between the two States was an understanding, reached in September of that year in the form of an exchange of notes between the two Monarchs, which pledged Austria to benevolent neutrality in cas
e of war between France and Prussia, and active intervention if a third party (under which Russia was understood) came to the help of Prussia.14 France promised to support Austria in the case of an Austro-Prussian war.

  Conversations in the spring of 1870 which might have made the understanding binding broke down,15 and Austria’s hands were thus still fairly free when a Crown Council – one of the most crucial in the history of the Monarchy – met on 18 July to decide how she should act. Those present were the Emperor, the Archduke Albrecht, Beust, the two Ministers President (Potocki and Andrássy), and the Ministers of War and Joint Finance (Kuhn and Lónyay16). The Archduke and Kuhn wanted Austria to mobilize quickly and to intervene in the decisive battle, which they expected to take place near the frontier of Saxony.17 Beust wanted her to arm, but not to intervene, but to impose her will on the belligerents when both were exhausted. Andrássy, however, strongly opposed even mobilization, arguing that it was essential for the Monarchy to avoid Russia’s intervention (reports had arrived from Berlin that the Czar had promised the King of Prussia to intervene if Austria moved), or at least to conserve its strength against such an eventuality. As both the ex-Minister of War, John, and Col. Beck, Head of the Emperor’s Military Chancellery, had, when consulted by Francis Joseph, represented to him most urgently that the Army was in no state to undertake another war, the Emperor decided on a neutrality accompanied by only the most long-term preparatory measures, and the subsequent course of the war excluded any thought of entering it later.