The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Thun was the man whom Francis Joseph had, it appears, had in mind from the first as Badeni’s real successor. He had long been regarded as the coming man among the Conservatives,162 and to some extent he had a foot in both camps. A member of one of the great Bohemian feudal families (Leo Thun was his uncle), he had, some years before, identified himself with the federalists by calling for Francis Joseph to submit to coronation in Prague. But he described himself as a German, spoke only a few words of Czech, had supported the alliance with Germany in the Delegations, and as Statthalter of Bohemia, had been responsible for the severe repression of the unrest there a few years earlier: his recall from that position had been one of Badeni’s concessions to the Czechs. Since then, however, he had partially made up his feud with the Czechs, whose support he hoped to enjoy, and his reason for delaying to enter on his post seems to have been a wish to escape the odium of superseding the Badeni Ordinances.

  The administration which he now formed was not unbalanced. Half its members were permanent civil servants, and to these he added, besides the usual Pole (Ritter von Jendrzewicz), a Young Czech (Professor Kaizl) and a German Constitutional Landlord, Dr Joseph Baernreither. Baernreither, indeed, resigned after a few months, but Thun succeeded in inducing Freiherr von Dipauli, Chairman of the Catholic People’s Party, to take his place, so that all three major nationalities of Cis-Leithania were represented in his Cabinet; and he made sincere efforts to get Czechs and Germans to agree.

  His efforts were, however, fruitless. Neither the Germans nor the Czechs were satisfied with Gautsch’s enactments. Bohemia was a scene of constant unrest, sometimes bloody. One side or the other was always making work in the Reichsrat impossible; it grew so rowdy that Thun was, or felt himself, forced to govern largely without it. He invoked Para. 14 no less than twenty-eight times, using it even to enact a substantial increase in indirect taxation, as well as a further prolongation of the economic Compromise. This completely illegal action brought the Social Democrats into the field against him. The Hungarians, who disliked him for his federalist past, made difficulties over the Compromise. The German parties (except the Clericals and the All-Germans) formed a hostile coalition.163

  Strong representations came also from Germany. The Kaiser himself had £ not always very tactful advice’ conveyed to Goluchowski that Germany might refuse to renew her alliance.164 This was in connection with certain aspects of Goluchowski’s foreign policy – the rapprochement with Russia described elsewhere,165 which the Germans seem to have taken far more seriously than it deserved, and need not have had any bearing on Austria’s internal policy. But the Czechs in the Delegations were indiscreetly advocating a reversal of Austria’s international alignments, and the German Ambassador in Vienna, Count Eulenburg, made really strong representations to the Emperor himself on the ill effects on German public opinion – effects which Wilhelm himself ‘would be unable to ignore, with the best will in the world’ – of ‘a Czech majority as Government Party’ [in Austria].165

  In the winter of 1898 and the spring of 1899, when most of these exchanges were taking place,167 Francis Joseph and Thun, who were extremely angry with the Germans, especially over the support which Schönerer’s Los von Rom movement was enjoying in Berlin,168 seem to have given as good as they got. But the Germans’ warnings cannot have left the Emperor unaffected, and for that matter, he himself, although more hostile to the ‘Schönerianer’ than to any non-German national movement, probably never felt it entirely natural to disregard the feelings of his German subjects in favour of those of Czechs or Slovenes.169 It was the situation of 1871 over again. What may have tipped the scales now in the Emperor’s mind was an incident at the end of July when Aehrenthal, then Ambassador in Petersburg, sought him out in Ischl. Kálnoky, who had died in the preceding February, had bequeathed his papers to Aehrenthal, who found among them a memorandum destined for the Emperor, urging him to base his internal policy on the Germans, thus cementing the alliance with Germany and securing the loyalty of Hungary. Aehrenthal took this memorandum to the Emperor, adding to it his own representations in the same sense and expressing the uneasiness of the Constitutional Landowners, to which group he belonged, at Thun’s policy.170 To whichever of the many considerations we assign the decisive role, it seems certain that in the summer of 1899 Francis Joseph experienced the decisive change of heart and decided, as he expressed it to Eulenburg, ‘to turn towards Deutschtum.171 After various attempts to form another Parliamentary or pseudo-Parliamentary Cabinet on a coalition basis had failed,172 he accepted Thun’s resignation on 2 October, and appointed Count Clary-Aldringen, Statthalter of Styria, with the avowed mission of repealing the Badeni-Gautsch Ordinances; which he duly did on 14 October.

  Clary’s short reign was only another period of confusion, for again, the Czechs were enraged and the Germans, who wanted the Stremayr Ordinances repealed also, unsatisfied. The representatives of the two peoples vied with each other in disorder, thereby creating a situation which was personally impossible for Clary, since in view of the great indignation aroused by his two predecessors’ abuse of Para. 14 to put through measures affecting the taxpayers’ pocket, he had promised not to invoke the paragraph, but found it impossible to govern without it. Being an honest man, he resigned on 21 December, and after an interim administration headed by Ritter von Wittek had carried on for a few weeks (during which it used Para. 14 extensively), the Emperor, on 18 January 1900, appointed to the Minister Presidency Dr Ernst von Koerber, another permanent civil servant with Ministerial experience.

  This was a real change, if only one of nuances and one which was easier to feel than to define, for, like his predecessors, Koerber composed his Cabinet chiefly of civil servants and called it ‘neutral’, and although most of its members were Germans, he included in it, besides the usual Pole, a Czech Landsmannminister (Dr A. Rezek),173 and again like his predecessors, he began by trying to mediate a German-Czech settlement in Bohemia, on the basis, to which all his successors adhered, that he would accept any settlement agreed between the parties, but not impose one. Like the rest, he failed: the Czechs, who now felt themselves on the defensive, announced that they would go on obstructing the work of the Reichsrat until they received ‘satisfaction for the crime of 17 October 1899’ (i.e., the repeal of the Badeni-Gautsch Ordinances), while the Germans retorted by making work in the Prague Landtag equally impossible. Neither side would listen to Koerber’s proposals, although they were sensible enough.174

  In 1900, meanwhile, an economic crisis had broken out; Koerber tried to meet this by economic treatment,175 and in September dissolved Parliament, which he accused, in a singularly outspoken manifesto, of having wasted its time on barren controversy over the use of the official language in a few Crownlands – an issue which did not even affect much of the Monarchy – and invited the electorate to choose a successor which would pay attention to its real social and economic interests.

  This it refused to do. When the elections were held, in January 1901,176 almost every nationality returned some Deputies representing class interests,177 but almost all (except the German Social Democrats) voted with the specifically national parties on national issues, whose trumpeters continued to make the Reichsrat’s work impossible, and, competent as he was – perhaps the most able Minister President in Austrian history – Koerber could do no more with that body than any of his predecessors. The public works and other measures initiated by him helped Austria to recover from the economic depression, and these and other of his measures, which included salutory reforms to the structure and spirit of the bureaucracy, made his five years of office in many respects the most fruitful which Austria had known for many years. But they were fruitful because, although Parliament still met during them, and although Koerber allowed the Press more freedom than it had enjoyed for many years, they were in effect another period of enlightened absolutism. All that the innumerable Party groups did was to howl and obstruct until bought off by some concession – a local railway here,
a subsidy to an industry there – thus even distorting and rendering irrational the public works programme. Meanwhile, the continued efforts which Koerber, like his predecessors, made to find a solution to the national controversies, particularly that between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia, were as unavailing as before. When, on 30 December 1904, he resigned, he had proved that Austria could still be governed, but only by non-Parliamentary methods, which could, of course, only be applied so long as she possessed a sufficient number of disciplined servants willing and able to carry them through.

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  We need not say much on the general demographic, economic and social developments of the period, since they were straightforward enough protractions of those of its predecessor. In spite of the continued emigration, the figure of which reached 93,000 in 1902 and 103,000 in 1903, the population registered another substantial increase, reaching in 1900 a figure of well over 26 millions. Thanks to, or in spite of, a new tariff policy which the Monarchy adopted in 1891, when it abandoned its autonomous tariff and adhered to the Caprivi system, with its high measure of freedom of interchange between Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland – experts are divided on the effects of this policy, as they were on those of its predecessor – industrialization had gone on at a pace which, if slower than that of Germany, was yet much faster than anything which Austria had known since the boom years before 1873. In 1900 7,004,000 persons, or 25·9% of the population,178 were deriving their livelihoods from industry or mining. These occupations were taking up the bulk of the increased population; agriculture, fisheries and forestry were barely holding their own in absolute figures, with 13,709,000 persons (52·1% of the total) deriving their livelihoods from them.179 Parallel with this process, the move into the towns was going on. By 1900 the population of Vienna had risen to 1,675,000. Prague had 201,000, Trieste 178,000, Lemberg 160,000, Graz 138,000, Brünn 109,000. There were 44 towns with populations of 20,000 +, with an aggregate population of 3,775,000, 74 of 10–20,000 (1,103,000), 198 of 5–10,000 (1,340,000) and 344 of 2–5,000 (3,874,000). Except in Galicia, the towns were taking up nearly the entire increase in the population; the rural population in the Alpine Lands and Central and Southern Bohemia was declining.

  It was, on the whole, a prosperous period. Industry enjoyed a continuous boom through the 1890s. This was interrupted in 1900 by the crisis mentioned on another page, which, breaking out over labour disputes in the Bohemian coal-fields, spread to industry and for a while, caused widespread unemployment; but its own resilience, aided by Koerber’s programme of public works,180 enabled it to weather the crisis better than had been expected, and the upward trend was resumed. It is true that this was mainly financed by the banks, who controlled an unhealthily large proportion of the Monarchy’s more important enterprises. Agriculture was still reeling under the impact of foreign competition, but was beginning to organize its defences. The foundation of agricultural colleges, the importation of improved strains of stock and seeds, and other measures of the kind, some of them the work of the Government of the day, some of their predecessors, had brought about a considerable rise in the yield of most main crops, and the improvement was helped, towards the end of the period, by a recovery in world prices.181 It was important that knowledge of the improved methods was spreading to the peasant cultivators, who were helped also by the growth of the co-operative movement, a feature of the period. There were, indeed, still black spots. If the curve of distraints and of more or less forced or fraudulent sales of marginal farms in the Alpine areas was flattening out slightly, this was simply a sign that the weakest members had been eliminated altogether; the declining population figures for these areas showed that the process was still going on, as was parcellization of the surviving peasant holdings. In other areas, notably Galicia-Bukovina, where the growth of the population was almost unrelieved by industrialization,182 rural congestion had reached terrifying proportions. Here social conditions were becoming extremely critical. The large-scale emigration, overseas or seasonal, to which the landless men were now resorting, saved some of them from death by starvation, but now the landlords complained that they were unable to get labour at all, at prices which they could afford to pay.183 It appears that regular wages had in fact risen considerably,184 although still not to an extent to give a decent livelihood to the recipients. On the other hand, the landlords had combined to drive down the share of the harvest paid in kind to the seasonal labourers, which by 1902 they had reduced to a maximum of one-twelfth.185 From 1897 onward harvest strikes occurred, which the landlords countered by introducing machinery and importing ‘foreign’ workers. In 1903 there was serious unrest; the houses of Jewish landlords were burnt and their lives endangered.

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  In 1892 Austria went over to the gold standard, establishing a new currency, the krone (2 kr. = 1 gulden) which was to be interchangeable with the notes of the National Bank.186 The success of the operation exceeded all expectation. For a couple of years the krone sank against gold, but the public had been so long accustomed to paper that it preferred the familiar notes to gold. Soon only 160 of the 416 million kronen originally minted were in circulation.187 The rest retired to, or remained in, the vaults of the National Bank, which thus found itself in possession of a very large gold reserve, with which it was able to keep the krone at parity (at which it remained until 1914) and to eliminate the speculation in the national currency which for nearly a century had bled Austria white for the benefit of a few dubious individuals. A 4% loan to acquire gold was taken up easily, and another, issued in 1895, actually reached a quotation of 119. The service of the national debt was now only about 15% of the total expenditure, compared with 32·7% in 1868, and most of it was held at home. With this, Austria’s financial connections had widened. Dunajewski is credited with having ‘emancipated Austria from the rule of the Rothschilds’ by calling in French capital. Afterwards, indeed, French financial interests in Austria were outstripped by German.188

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  As the reader will have gathered from the first section of this chapter, the period brought with it certain new developments in the nature and strength of the political forces in Austria. On the social plane, the emergent political forces were those of the Left. In spite of the terrorism habitually exercised at the polls in Galicia, thanks to which the landlords, who already possessed forty-four Landtag mandates as a Curia, usually managed to secure also most of the seats for the rural communes, a Ruthene ‘agrarian socialist’ priest named Stojalowski got into the Landtag in 1896 with five followers calling themselves ‘Christian Populists’, and he and one of his adherents even got as far as the Reichsrat. A Polish counterpart headed a group of three ‘Polish Populists’, and a third peasant party, the ‘Bojko Party’, entered the Landtag in 1901. A fair number of peasant representatives were now getting into other Landtage, and occasionally into the Reichsrat. The structure of the Monarchy, however, made it practically impossible for any peasant movement to develop on anything wider than a Land basis. Important advances were, however, made by both the Christian Social and the Social Democrat Parties.

  The Cardinal Secretary of State, Rampolla, was sympathetic to the Christian Social movement, and on his intervention the Pope, early in 1891, received Professor Schindler, one of the leading spirits in the Catholic revival, and on 13 May, in effect, gave his blessing to the Party and Papal authority to its programme in his Encyclical Rerum Novarum. In 1893 the Party received another influential supporter in Vienna in the person of the new Nuncio, Mgr Agliardi. The movement, however, still had to fight an uphill battle against powerful opponents. In 1893 the Government actually sent the Vatican a memorandum describing the Party as ‘both superfluous and subversive’, and Cardinal Schönborn, Archbishop of Prague, went to Rome to make the same points in the name of the Austrian Episcopate. The Hungarians, to whom Lueger was consistently and demonstratively offensive, also used their influence against him, as, allegedly, did the House of Rothschild. In 1895, when the Christian Socia
lists gained a large majority in the Municipal Council of Vienna and Lueger’s name was put forward, for Burgomaster, the Emperor, on Badeni’s advice, refused to confirm the appointment.189 In 1896, the Council having re-elected Lueger, the Emperor intervened personally and persuaded him to accept the post of Vice-Burgomaster under his Party colleague, Josef Strobach.

  But the Party was not to be denied, and when the Reichsrat elections of 1897 brought it 27 mandates, Francis Joseph bowed to the popular will. Strobach resigned, and Lueger became Burgomaster. His integrity, his handsome appearance and his homely humour won for him an immense personal popularity; he was also both an administrator of genius and an unscrupulous and ruthless political tactician. With the help of certain changes in the statutes of both bodies which he induced the Wittek Government to put through for him, he consolidated his Party’s position in Vienna and won for it a two-thirds majority at the 1902 elections for the Lower Austrian Landtag, when it won practically every seat in Vienna. Under his regime the administration of Vienna and its municipal services – transport, water supply, health services, public libraries, etc., became among the most progressive and imaginative in Europe, and those of Lower Austria came near matching them. The Party’s stronghold was still Vienna, but it now had a considerable following in many of the Alpine Lands, among the parish priests, for whose tastes the ‘Bishops’ Party’ (as the Catholic People’s Party was generally known) was too conservative, and for the same reason, among the peasants of the more advanced districts.