The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Lueger was at this time still in friendly relations with the German nationals, with whom he succeeded in 1888 in forming an association of ‘United Christians’. But this was the year of the great Schönerer scandal,93 and after it, Schönerer’s way and Lueger’s parted forever, although Lueger was still able for many years to co-operate from time to time on an ad hoc basis with the more moderate German national groups. Now, however, he met Vogelsang himself and accepted his programme, and on this basis, the Christian Social Party was formed, in time to fight the 1891 elections, and to secure in them fourteen mandates, seven of them in Vienna. Its programme, which Prince Liechtenstein then expounded in the Reichsrat, was one of protection for the ‘little man’, in the town and the country. It emphasized the importance of the Jewish problem, but declared this to be a social one: it rejected racial and religious anti-Semitism. For the rest, it was strongly and even demonstratively dynastic, and ‘Great Austrian’ in its attitude towards the State, preaching a ‘black and yellow’ dynastic loyalty which should transcend national feelings; it was thus, in theory, not even a specifically German party, although, as we shall see, it ended up as one, owing to the refusal of non-German sympathizers with its social ideas to dissociate themselves from their national movements.

  In spite of their loyalty to the Dynasty and the Church, the Christian Socials were, in these first years, something of political outcasts. Their social radicalism not only alienated their declared enemy, the Jewish capitalists, but made them suspect in the eyes of the Court, the aristocracy and the higher circles of the Church itself: a Pastoral Letter issued by the Austrian Bishops before the 1891 elections was strongly hostile to the movement. But the official Church’s own neglect of social issues was now reaping its harvest: denunciations from above could not kill a party which filled a vacuum with a programme that was at once Christian and socially progressive.

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  This work makes no pretence at being a Kulturgeschichte, and nothing is more boring to a reader unfamiliar with a subject than a catalogue of names of which the author simply tells him that they are distinguished without convincing him that they ought to be.94 It would, nevertheless, be unfair to leave unmentioned the big progress which Austria had made in the cultural field since 1848. Thanks first to Thun’s energy, and later to the Liberals’ persistence, the educational system had made up much of its arrears, especially on the middle and higher levels. The medical faculty of Vienna was again one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world, and several of the philosophical faculties not far behind it. The Viennese Institute of Historical Research, founded in 1855, had by the 1870s a list of members which would have done honour to any historical institution in the world – an astonishing achievement when it is recalled that in 1852, when it was desired to make several appointments to Chairs of history, no single native candidate of sufficient stature could be found; all had to be imported. The Viennese Opera and Burgtheater were the finest in Central Europe, if not the world, and there was a busy and productive musical, literary and artistic life. It is true that outside music, which produced Bruckner, Mahler, Wolf and Johann Strauss, jun., few of the figures in any field reached world celebrity status, but the number of Bs and B minuses was large. Typical of these is the painter, Markart, admired in his day in Vienna much as Frith and Landseer were in London. Modern taste finds the architecture of the day more grandiose than pleasing (one of Austria’s own historians has called it ‘the style of stylelessness’95) and probably prefers some of the unpretentious corners of Vienna’s Innere Stadt which have survived to the great Ringstrasse round it, which replaced the old fortifications and glacis, with its many spacious and costly buildings, of which no two are in the same style; but it can understand the pride with which Vienna saw it take shape.

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  Francis Joseph’s domestic life during these years had not been happy. As his letters to her prove, he had loved his young wife with a depth and passion which altogether belie the common belief that his nature was one incapable of deep emotion. But their relationship had been made difficult from the first by the pressure of his public duties, and above all, by the interference of the Archduchess Sophie, a regular caricature of a mother-in-law, bossy, jealous, unsympathetic, who lost no opportunity of showing her disapproval of the child-bride, whose talented but Bohemian father had brought her up in a very different atmosphere of unrestraint, which the stiff Archduchess regarded as supremely undignified.

  Left much to herself by her husband’s necessary preoccupations, Elisabeth had reacted strongly against the draconic discipline which her mother-in-law tried to impose on her. She developed, in particular, a passion for riding, which became an obsession, and spent more and more time on this and similar pursuits, less and less on ceremonial functions. Later, more serious difficulties developed. Although devoted, Francis Joseph was not faithful. Elisabeth’s health suffered, and she took to spending long periods abroad, in Madeira, in Corfu, where she had built for herself an extraordinary fantasy-palace, and in the hunting-fields of England and Ireland.

  Her husband suffered; but the estrangement was not the worst blow which fell on his family life. The couple had, besides their three daughters (of whom the eldest had died in infancy), one son, Rudolph, born on 21 August 1858. Rudolph had in him more of his mother than of his father. He grew up an intelligent, and in many ways a sympathetic youth, gifted with the family talent for languages, a lively interest in the world, particularly natural history, and a marked lack of exclusiveness. Like his mother, he rebelled against the stiff Court ceremonial, and he sought friends in artistic circles, among Liberals and even Jews. The Liberals pinned high hopes on him, but it may be doubted whether, had he ever come to wear the Crown, he would have been a successful reforming Monarch. In politics he was essentially a dilettante, a Prince Hal playing at opposition to his father, with whom he got on only moderately well, and who reacted to his son’s velleities by excluding him from any serious role in public affairs.96

  The direct cause of his tragedy seems to have lain in his love-life. He was married, on 10 May 1881, to the Belgian Princess Stephanie, a singularly plain young woman, who soon failed to satisfy his imagination. He consoled himself with a large number of mistresses, and on the morning of 30 January 1889 his body, disfigured with severe head wounds, was discovered with that of one of them, a young girl named Baroness Marie Vetsera, in his little hunting-lodge of Mayerling. The exact circumstances of the tragedy were, owing to the secrecy imposed on them, never cleared up beyond all possibility of conjecture, although it is practically certain that the simple explanation was the true one: Rudolph, in a fit of nervous depression, had resolved on suicide and had persuaded his unfortunate young lover to die with him.

  The effects of this tragedy on the Emperor’s spirit are discussed in a later chapter, but one consequence, of vast importance for the future of the Monarchy, must be recorded here. Rudolph and Stephanie’s only issue had been a daughter, so that his death left Francis Joseph’s brother heir presumptive to the throne; or should Karl Ludwig predecease the Emperor, then his eldest son, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, born on 18 December 1863.

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  It is a habit of modern Austrian historians, many of whom seem possessed by a nostalgia for the old Monarchy, to reproach their foreign colleagues with representing the last phase of its history too exclusively as that of a struggle between its component nationalities, devoting too little attention to the social and economic questions which, after all, formed the main preoccupations of most of its inhabitants, and also under-stressing the centripetal and supra-national forces which still existed, and the amount of friendly co-existence which still went on between individual members of nationalities which, as collectivities, were struggling bitterly against each other.

  It is, of course, true that many Austrian men and women cared much more for their bread and butter (and even for their music) than for the ‘national’ disputes which so excited the politicians; that plenty of
friendly intercourse went on between members of different nationalities; and that the real government of the country was still largely being carried on in a supra-national spirit.

  But it is also a fact that the attempt of the neo-absolutist era to de-politicize national feeling among the peoples as a whole had failed; that its failure had been apparent from the very hour that that feeling had been allowed to express itself; and that during the following decades nationalism grew steadily more intense and more widespread, not only as the classes to which it had not previously penetrated shrank with the spread of education, but as even educated men to whom their ‘nationality’ had previously been indifferent now found themselves definitely opting for one national allegiance or another.97

  Every decade, almost every lustre saw these processes carried a little further. Possibly Taaffe retarded the development by skilful application of his formula; at the beginning of his reign he was really able to keep national discontents ‘well-modulated’. But by the end of it, national passions were almost everywhere in full blast. There was no hope any more of using the soft pedal, only of finding some way of harmonizing them. The struggle was still, chiefly, as a distinguished Austrian has written, ‘for Austria’ (i.e., for position of supremacy in her body politic), not ‘against Austria’,98 but it had reached a pitch when some, at least, of the nationalities were beginning to think of turning ‘against Austria’ unless she found a way of satisfying them within her, and in 1890 she seemed further off than ever from doing so.

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  The national struggle κατ’ έξοχήν of the period was that waged between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia; and while it is true that from one point of view, the attention paid to it was excessive – quite ten books appeared on the subject for every one on the German-Slovene problem, a hundred for every one on the Ruthene, and the proportion of time spent on it by the Reichsrat was as great – yet in other respects it deserves its pre-eminence. More than any other people of the Monarchy, the Czechs sat at its very heart. Unlike any other, they could not dream of complete sovereign independence except in the case of the complete disintegration of the Monarchy, and as, at that stage, this was something which, in their own interests, they did not desire,99 their efforts had to be concentrated on achieving a status inside the Monarchy satisfactory to their ambitions. Conversely, the aim of Governmental policy must be to place them in that position, provided that this could be done without injury to other peoples. But this was extraordinarily difficult, since the second people in Bohemia, constituting well over a third of its total population, were Germans, whose interests were naturally backed by the other Germans of Cis-Leithania, and at times even by the Germans of the Reich; while the Czechs, although themselves numbering in all a mere five millions or so, were able to link their cause with that of the other Slavs of the Monarchy and at times, more remotely, also of Slavs outside the Monarchy. What made the struggle especially acute was the fact that in Bohemia and Moravia, alone of all Lands in the Monarchy, two developed national bourgeoisies were in rivalry.100

  In default of the hope of full independence, Czech national ambitions might have been depicted graphically in the form of three concentric circles. The furthest was to gain (with the help of allies) such a position in the Habsburg Monarchy as to swing its whole policy on to a Slav line. The intermediate aim, without which the other could not easily be achieved, but which was also regarded as an object in itself, was to bring about realization of the Böhmisches Staatsrecht, i.e., the constitution of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown as a quasi-sovereign unit within the Monarchy; the innermost, which would have been facilitated by achievement of the second, and would in turn pave the way for its achievement, but was again desirable for its own sake, was to remove the last traces of inferiority, de jure and de facto, under which the Czechs in Bohemia (again we particularize Bohemia, for the heart and nearly the totality of the struggle lay there) were still suffering vis-à-vis the local Germans, and ultimately to replace it by domination.

  We have seen how in the 1860s the Bohemian Feudalists had aimed straight at the second, perhaps even the first of these targets, and had come within measurable distance of achieving at least the former, and how the Czech nationalists under Palacký and Rieger had allied themselves with the Feudals in that campaign. In doing so, they had shown a sound enough appreciation of what were then the true power-factors in the Monarchy; but for the Feudalists, the Hohenwart experiment would never have been tried. But when it failed, the new generation represented by the Young Czechs operated a change of tactics. They were not in the least indifferent to the Böhmisches Staatsrecht, but they concentrated their activities within the innermost circle.

  This change was extraordinarily beneficial to the Czechs’ cause. They lost the half-hearted support of the Feudalists, few of whom had ever been real enthusiasts for the national cause, but the loss was easily outweighed by the recovery of the democratic quality which was natural to their movement, since the Czechs were still a people of ‘little men’, socially and economically, and now became its great strength.

  The purposeful national solidarity with which the Czechs worked is truly remarkable. No aspect of life was neglected, and the approach to each objective was organized systematically and efficiently. Schools and local culture were promoted through the Matice Školska; economic life through a variety of organizations at the head of which stood the very important Živnostenska Banka, founded in 1868, originally to finance the Czech co-operatives and the purchase of land by Czechs, but afterwards used also in the interests of Czech industry, and supported by a great network of co-operatives (in these the Czechs led all the peoples of the Monarchy), savings-banks, etc. There was even a great gymnastic organization, the Sokol (Falcon), founded in 1863 with objectives which were by no means purely athletic.

  The Germans, of course, retorted101 with their own Vereine, Turnverbände and local national organizations, such as the Böhmerwaldbund, etc.,102 and the Czech-German national conflict in the 1870s and 1880s was largely fought out in an unremitting Kleinkrieg – a cold war in which the adjective became increasingly inoperative as tempers became inflamed and radicalism increased on both sides – between these rival organizations and their supporters.

  The official battles turned round the rules for linguistic usage in public life. This question had more or less fallen asleep for many years after 1848, Ferdinand’s Majestätsbrief of 8 April of that year, although never officially retracted, having long been tacitly regarded by both sides as superseded by the numerous later enactments.103 Even in the 1870s both parties admitted that German must remain as the language of the inner service, while no one denied that Czech must be used as the language of the ‘outer service’ in the Czech districts. The conflict arose when the Czech claimed that the text of paragraph 2 of the famous Article XIX, enacting equality of rights to all landesüblich languages, gave Czech a right to be used in the outer services anywhere in Bohemia, even where there were only one or two Czechs in an entire district. The Germans, pointing out that paragraph 3 of the same Article used the word Landessprache, argued that a distinction was to be drawn between Landessprache and landesübliche Sprache, and that while Czech was indubitably a Landessprache of Bohemia, it was landesüblich only where it was currently spoken. The argument was possible because, as we have seen, the Article had only enunciated a general principle, and no interpretetive legislation had been enacted.

  If the Czech interpretation was adopted, it would clearly give the Czechs a big advantage, because if Bohemia was regarded as an indivisible whole in this respect, any person entering the public services in it would have to know both languages, and in practice, this favoured the Czechs enormously. For the Germans did not know Czech, and did not see why they should. It was, they said arrogantly, a language spoken by only a few million people, mostly peasants and domestic servants, in Bohemia-Moravia and nowhere else in the world, whereas German was a Weltsprache, the tongue of some seventy million persons, and also the lan
guage of the higher services in Austria itself. They contemptuously refused to learn it, and even reached the point of regarding it as national treason if one of their members did so. The Czechs, on the other hand, made no bones about learning German, so that any post for which knowledge of both languages was necessary automatically went to a Czech.

  The Stremayr linguistic ordinances were in accordance with the Czech interpretation, with which Stremayr explicitly agreed when challenged in the Reichsrat. After this, the Germans changed their ground. In 1884 Herbst submitted to the Landtag a formal resolution for the administrative partition of Bohemia into a Czech and a German sector. The central services (which would then be reduced to a minimum) would have to be bi-lingual, but knowledge of the second language would not be required where it was not landesüblich as the Germans interpreted the phrase. This, he said, was a demand from which the Germans would ‘never retreat’. The Czechs refused, equally flatly, to entertain it, and the parties were still arguing it in 1890.

  Another question which involved interpretation of the law – smaller than the other, but still argued with great bitterness – was raised by the influx of Czech workers into the growing industrial districts, which lay in German-Bohemia. The Czechs claimed that the law entitled the children of such workers, if their numbers reached the legal minimum,104 to schooling in their own language. But one ruling of the Courts had been that a commune or District was not obliged to provide a school in a language that was not landesüblich, and just when Stremayr had ruled both languages to be landesüblich for official use throughout Bohemia, had given an opposite ruling in respect of schools. The Germans claimed that the mere presence in a commune of immigrants who had not acquired Zuständigkeit in it and did not pay its local taxes could not make their language landesüblich in it; their children must go to German schools. This point, again, was still being disputed in 1890.