The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Steinwender’s Parliamentary followers numbered only a score or so, but their programme, including its repudiation of Parliamentary rule, undoubtedly expressed the feelings of a very much larger number of the Germans of Austria than would have been gathered from the Press, standing as that did still almost entirely in the service of the old Liberals and their Jewish backers.

  The Germans as a whole were, indeed, still reluctant on principle to step down from the position of a Staatsvolk to that of a ‘national group’, and still very open to economic or cultural considerations. Only a small fraction of the Liberals had yet left them for either Steinwender or Schönerer, and still fewer Clericals. Of the two big Parties which came into being at the end of the 1880s, the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats, one of which was entirely German in membership and the other mainly so, both were in theory a-national in philosophy and at least Pan-Cis-Leithanian in scope. Both gained far more adherents from among the newly-enfranchised classes than did the German Nationalists, and even more of the deserters from the Liberals. But it should be remembered that the strongholds of both these Parties were in Vienna, that untypical city with its special super-national tradition and its abnormally high proportion of inhabitants who were ‘German’ only by recent linguistic assimilation; and as we shall see, the Christian Socials never succeeded in becoming other than German in composition and ended by becoming it in philosophy, while the Social Democrats found themselves forced a long way along the same road. Similarly, practically all the other Parties, even if the main substantive in their titles was social or cultural, came to prefix it with the adjective ‘German’, and to include some dose of German nationalism in their nostrums. Their prescriptions were, indeed, astonishingly various.

  II FROM TAAFFE TO KOERBER

  1890–1903

  It was over the Bohemian question that Taaffe’s position was first seriously shaken. As we have said, the Germans had not ceased to protest against the language decree of 1880, and this had also brought the Czechs less than their full wishes; but every attempt to reach agreement had broken down on the intransigence of one side or the other. In 1890, the Emperor having expressed serious alarm over the Germans’ discontent, Taaffe persuaded leaders of both nationalities to meet in Vienna, and both sides made concessions. The Germans yielded a comparatively small point on schools for ‘immigrant’ populations,133 while the Czech negotiator in chief, Rieger, gave way on the much bigger issue of the administrative unity of Bohemia. Kreise and Bezirke were to be re-delimitated, as far as possible, on national lines; when this had been done the Stremayr Decree was to be reconsidered. Only twenty-six of the forty-one Judges of the Supreme Court needed to be bilingual. Fifteen could get by without Czech.134 The Bohemian Landeskulturamt and Landesschulrat, and possibly also the Landed Proprietors’ Electoral Curia, were to be divided into national sections. Reasonable compromises were promised on several other points.

  This was one of the most sensible and equitable agreements ever reached on the Bohemian question, but the account had been drawn up in the absence of one of the hosts. Whoever was responsible,135 the Young Czechs had not been invited to join in the negotiations, and they seized this chance to declare the results unsatisfactory and to denounce the aged Rieger as a ‘traitor’. There were tempestuous scenes, so violent that even Czechs who privately approved of the agreements were afraid to say so, or to counsel moderation. In the end, only the division of the Cultural and School Councils ever came into effect.136

  This would have been just another of the innumerable failures to solve the Bohemian problem, but the elections to the Reichsrat were due. These took place in February–March 1891. They brought little change in the numbers of the Conservative parties, the Poles, or the representatives of the smaller nationalities, but the German Liberals lost nearly a quarter of their mandates, being left with only 109 representatives: seventeen seats went to Steinwender’s followers, who had taken the name of ‘German National Party’,137 and fourteen to the Christian Socials. Much more important still was the change in the composition of the Czech Club, for the agitation of the Young Czechs, which made a special appeal to the newly enfranchised ‘little men’ (those whose German opposite numbers had voted Christian Social and German National) had been so successful that they emerged with thirty-seven mandates, leaving the Old Czechs with only twelve.138 The foundations of Taaffe’s majority were shaken, for there was clearly no hope of making the Young Czechs into a Government Party. The only alternative possibility was to reconcile the Germans, and in that hope Taaffe had, even before the elections, dismissed Dunajewski, whom the Liberals, and the Germans in general, regarded as a particular enemy of theirs,139 replacing him by a permanent civil servant, Emil Steinbach. After the elections he took into the Cabinet a German Liberal, Count Khuenburg, as Minister without Portfolio,140 and sanctioned the establishment of a German Landesgericht in Trautenau (Teplice) in a mixed District of Bohemia. On this, however, Prazak resigned, and the Young Czechs initiated the practice, soon to become general, of frustrating the work of the Reichsrat by organized obstruction. In Bohemia, there were new demonstrations of friendship for France, and anti-dynastic riots in Prague, which led the Government, in September, to proclaim a state of emergency in the city and its environs and to arrest over seventy persons, members of a Left-wing organization known as the Omladina, on charges of subversion. A number of organizations were dissolved and papers closed down.141 In view of this, Plener’s Liberals began fishing for office, but this was not the turn events took. The workers were now demonstrating repeatedly, and vociferously, for franchise reform, and this was also being pressed in the Reichsrat by its radical members. Taaffe himself thought that something would have to be done to meet this demand,142 but the real moving spirit in the developments which now followed was Dunajewski’s successor, Steinbach.

  Steinbach was a highly intelligent and progressive man, whose sympathies, in spite of his origin (by birth, he was a Hungarian Jew), were strongly with the Christian Socials: he had been the real author of the social legislation enacted in the preceding years. It was his view that the ‘national’ struggle was essentially a middle-class one, and that democratization of the suffrage would reduce it to reasonable proportions by opening the gates to social and economic forces which were of their nature far less centrifugal than the national ones; the ‘lower, politically uncorrupted classes’, he argued, ‘were sound; they would make social, not national politics; they were dynastically-minded, not irredentist; they were reliable, appreciative and easy to rule.’ He did not find it difficult to convince Francis Joseph, to whose emperor’s-eye-view the small bourgeois was no more remote than the large, but the Monarch was still unwilling to dispense with the traditional Habsburg bodyguard. The Bill which the Emperor authorized Steinbach to prepare thus kept the curia system intact, and did not alter the proportion of representatives elected by each curia; but it extended the suffrage for the third and fourth curias to practically every male tax-payer who had reached his twenty-fifth year and was able to read and write his locally current language. The electorate was increased from about 1,725,000 to nearly three times that number.143

  Prepared in deep secrecy144 and launched without previous announcement in October 1893, the Bill had a disastrous reception. Of all the major parties, only the Young Czechs approved it.145 That the Left (in the British sense of the term) found that it did not go far enough was no matter, from the Parliamentary point of view, but precisely the parties on which Taaffe was counting were horrified for the opposite reason. The Poles saw their traditional representatives outnumbered by Polish and Ruthene peasants. The Clericals and Feudalists cried out that the farm-hand would be made as good as his master. The German Liberals rightly saw half their former mandates going to Christian Socials and Social Democrats. The three parties united to reject the Bill, and on 10 November, Francis Joseph relieved Taaffe of the Minister Presidency.146

  Francis Joseph’s own inclination seems to have been to app
oint as the new Minister President another ‘Emperor’s Minister’, and his mind had already turned towards Count Casimir Badeni, Statthalter of Galicia, a Polish aristocrat who had made a name for himself as a strong and efficient administrator, and had particularly earned the praises of the military authorities for his ‘highly patriotic’ and able handling of the local situation during the war scare with Russia in 1877–8. But the leaders of the three Parliamentary Clubs which had compassed Taaffe’s fall insisted on their claim to his heritage, and the Emperor, reluctantly, consented. He still could not bear to give the Minister Presidency to the German Liberals, and after Hohenwart himself had declined the office on the plea of his advanced years (drawing from the Emperor the bitter comment, ‘you are too old to build up, but you weren’t too old to pull down’) he gave it to a member of his party, Prince Alfred Windischgraetz, grandson of the hero (or evil genius) of 1848, who then formed a Ministry composed of representatives of the three ‘Coalition Parties’.147 The parties agreed between themselves to relegate political and national questions to the background and to introduce no measures ‘altering the national status quo’.

  In the event, however, the Coalition Government, although several of its members were brilliant men, proved one of the worst ever endured by Austria. It did get the essential legislation (the Budget, etc.) through Parliament, but almost all the other measures which it tried to introduce were thwarted by obstruction from the Opposition, the Young Czechs and Christian Socials leading the field in the application of this device. On the Emperor’s insistence, a Parliamentary Committee debated extension of the franchise, and here, while the Opposition pressed for reforms, the Government sabotaged them. After only two years of this inglorious existence, the Government fell on a ‘national’ question of absurd triviality. The Slovenes had been pressing for more secondary education in their own tongue, and had asked for a Slovene Untergymnasium in the little South Styrian town of Cilli – a German outpost in a Slovene countryside – or alternatively, parallel classes in Slovene in the German Gymnasium there; as things stood, Slovene children had to attend the German classes there.148 The Germans, while not denying the justice of the Slovenes’ claim to more education in their own language, insisted that the school must not be in Cilli, the Deutschtum of which it would endanger. In 1895 Plener, as Minister of Finance, sanctioned the Budgetary appropriation for the parallel classes, whereupon his party disavowed him and withdrew from the coalition on the plea that the inter-Party agreement had been broken, and on 19 June the Government resigned.149

  The Emperor now reverted to his earlier plan and after a stop-gap Government of permanent officials, under Count Kielmansegg, had bridged the interval for a few weeks,150 after all, appointed Badeni, who formed a Ministry which was in effect non-Party, although the Polish element in it was conspicuous.151

  Badeni, who was by no means lacking in ability (German writers are uniformly unjust towards him), made a beginning which was not at all bad. He was civil enough towards the Germans to secure their support in getting the Budget passed, and placated the Czechs by lifting the state of emergency; soon after which, the Emperor amnestied some of the persons sentenced in connection with the Omladina affair, and Count Thun, who had been closely associated with the repressive measures, was relieved of his post of Statthalter.152 The Left accused Badeni of reaction, a charge which his attitude towards the Christian Socials, in particular, seemed to justify, for it was largely on his advice that Francis Joseph so long refused to allow Lueger to become Burgomaster of Vienna.153 On the other hand, he attacked the question of franchise reform seriously – and the fact that this now went through without difficulty, although the Parliament of the day was the same which had overthrown Taaffe for introducing it, shows how far the Emperor’s will was mandatory. Taaffe’s draft was, indeed, modified, the four existing curias being left intact, except that the property qualification for the third and fourth of them was lowered slightly;154 but a fifth curia, electing seventy-two members, was added, the voters’ qualification for this being simply a lower age limit of twenty-four, literacy, and six months’ residence in the constituency. When this had gone through in June 1896, after a debate in which the chief criticisms came from the Left, who objected to it as insufficiently radical,155 Badeni dissolved the Reichsrat, and in March 1897 new elections were held, on the extended franchise. It goes without saying that these resulted in a more complicated position than ever, from which the only conclusion to emerge clearly was that both social and national radicalism were on the increase. The Great Landowners were sheltered by the retention of the Curia system, so that they came back with their absolute numbers undiminished (although these, of course, now constituted a smaller proportion of the total), but their thirty ‘Constitutional’ members (all Germans) formed, as before, one group, the nineteen ‘Bohemian Federals’ another, while the Poles continued to sit with the Polish Club. The Hohenwart Club had dissolved, most of the German members joining either the Constitutional Landowners, or a new (German) Catholic People’s Party which got thirty-one mandates, while its eleven Croat and fourteen Slovene members marched under national flags. The Czech Club had retained its unity, but within this, the Young Czechs had swept the board, with sixty mandates out of sixty-two. The Polish Club lost nine members to dissident Poles, and the eleven Ruthenes left it. The German Liberal Party had collapsed completely after the Cilli fiasco and the Freie Deutsche Vereinigung, as the little band who remained faithful to Plener called themselves, numbered only fourteen, almost all elected by Chambers of Commerce. Steinwender’s followers, figuring now as the ‘German People’s Party’, numbered forty-one, a ‘Progressive Party’ under a certain Funke, thirty-three; and there were five Schönerianer. Finally, the Christian Socials, with twenty-eight Deputies, were now a considerable force, and the Social Democrats, with fifteen, a perceptible one, and there were a few splinter parties and independents.156

  Up to this point, Badeni, although on presenting himself to Parliament he had announced that his Government ‘was preserving a completely free hand vis-à-vis the parties’, had yet succeeded in getting essential legislation through Parliament without invoking Para. 14, which at that time was still an expedient from which Austrian Ministers shrank. Now, however, a new situation confronted him, for the decennial revision of the Compromise with Hungary was due.157 Badeni needed a trustworthy Parliamentary majority, and expediency, if not inclination, led him to approach the Young Czechs, who laid down as their price a new ‘Bohemian settlement’. Badeni, it is true, consulted also the German leaders, but took little account of their wishes and seems not to have understood the full complexity of the problem. On 5 April 1897 he issued, by Ministerial Enactment (i.e., as orders interpretative of the Law of 1867), two language decrees, for Bohemia and Moravia respectively. These followed the general pattern of the Stremayr ordinances, but extended their scope considerably. As regards the outer language of service, the rule that a member of the public must be answered in the language in which he made his first application, in any District of either Land, was extended from the administrative and judicial services to cover also those operated by the Ministries of Commerce, Finance and Agriculture, and complete equality was introduced also in respect of the inner language by a ruling that all correspondence connected with any case should be in the language in which it had started. As from 1 July 1901, no person was to be employed in the services covered by the first order who was not acquainted with both languages, and even before that date all offices were, as far as possible, to be held only by persons conversant with both languages.

  It was now the Germans’ turn to revolt, and they did so with a violence such as Austria had not seen since 1848: a violence which went on crescendo throughout the entire spring and summer. Extremely tumultuous scenes took place, not only in Prague and German Bohemia, but also in Vienna, where there was severe rioting, and in Graz, where passions had already been whipped up by the Cilli affair, and whose Germans feared that the Slovenes would
demand that the Bohemian precedent should be taken as valid for Styria. In the Reichsrat, the Germans took up and improved on the example of obstruction which had been set by the Czechs, utilizing to the full their great tactical advantage of the Government’s need to get the negotiations with Hungary through Parliament.158 The Government, in despair, threatened to use Para. 14, whereupon the Christian Socials and Social Democrats, who had not obstructed on the language issue, did so on that of Parliamentary rights. The Government, by a trick, amended the Standing Orders of the House to provide a remedy against the rowdiest filibustering,159 but this simply poured oil on the flames. On 28 November, after the rioting in Vienna had reached near-revolutionary dimensions, Francis Joseph accepted Badeni’s resignation, making the unfortunate Pole one of the three Austrian Ministers, in the whole 128 years covered by our narrative, to be unseated by public opinion.160

  Many writers take the fall of Badeni as marking a turning-point in Austrian history: the end of Francis Joseph’s attempts to govern Austria ‘against the Germans’.161 But even if we allow for exaggerations in the terminology (for it is unfair to Francis Joseph to represent him as ever deliberately trying to rule ‘against’ any of his peoples: he tried to mete out justice and to create contentment among them all, and on his insistence, the ‘pro-Czech’ governments always, if possible, included a German, and vice versa) it was not the end but only, at most, the beginning of the end. The only immediate fruit which the Germans’ agitation brought them was the head of the unfortunate Pole. Francis Joseph seems also to have accepted the impossibility of maintaining the Badeni Ordinances. But for the rest, his reactions to the Germans’ demonstrations, and to the indiscreetly sympathetic echoes to them coming from the Reich (the nationalist Press raged and there were even street demonstrations in Saxony), was rather to irritate him and harden his heart against them than to incline him to take them into partnership. As a first step he appointed a stop-gap government of permanent civil servants, headed by Gautsch, which carried on for three months without a Reichsrat, enacting legislation (including a six-months’ budget and a short-term prolongation of the economic relationship with Hungary) under Para. 14 and then, on 5 March 1898, produced a new, tentative answer to the German-Czech linguistic problem by issuing new decrees (described as ‘provisional and pending legislative settlement’) for Bohemia and Moravia, making the language in which any case should be handled that of the Bezirk in which it originated, the Bezirk ranking as Czech, German or mixed, according to the census figures. Two days later, Gautsch gave way to Count Franz Anton Thun.