But the events of 1897–9 also had an impact, which was far more important, on those Germans in the Monarchy who took the view that it must be preserved, but that its shape must be one satisfactory to themselves. The Badeni Ordinances produced a very widespread and extremely strong feeling that the existing Austria did not answer this demand, and a great cry for an agreed German national policy. In November 1897 the German People’s Party, Progressives, Constitutional Landowners, Old Liberals and Christian Socials – thus, if we exclude the Social Democrats as being theoretically supra-national, all the German political parties except the Catholic People’s Party (who still refused to make their programme specifically national219) and the Alldeutsche, who condemned the others as lukewarm – agreed to form a ‘German Front’ (Deutsche Gemeinbürgshaft). At Whitsun, 1899, they issued a joint programme, which was in fact, with small modifications, that of the German People’s Party.220 This began by stating that the signatories had been forced to act by ‘the systematic thrusting back of, and increasing threat to, the German national group (Volksstamm) in Austria’. The national struggle in Austria could be eliminated only ‘by recognition of the position of the Germans won by them many centuries ago, the maintenance of which was a central necessity for the future of the State’, and consequently by ‘termination of the long-practised system of satisfying the claims of all other nationalities at the expense of the Germans’. For the Monarchy as a whole, the programme demanded the usual fidelity to the German alliance and closer cultural connections, and in speaking of Hungary it asked only for a reorganization of the Dualist system on the basis of ‘equality of rights’ with that country.221 For Cis-Leithania it was in some specific respects so modest as to allow Hugelmann to describe it as betraying a ‘far-reaching resignation’, and in fact, some of its proposals deserve that name. The greater part of it consists of detailed proposals for the regulation of the linguistic question, Land by Land. Nearly all of these proposals are fair, some of them (e.g. those for the Tirol) even generous,222 and some of the proposals suggest that the signatories were withdrawing on to the inner lines of the Linz Programme. Thus there is a rather obscure reference to the de facto autonomy enjoyed by Galicia, which the signatories seem prepared to admit provided that ‘the principle of reciprocity is applied and the Germans in Austria safeguarded from unjust influencing of their national life’; and the proposed Land linguistic rules do not make any proposals for Galicia or Dalmatia, and only very brief and vague ones for the Bukovina and the Littoral.
On the other hand, the official name of Cis-Leithania is to be ‘Austria’. In it German is to be ‘the general language of communication’ and the language of the Reichsrat and of all Ministries and central offices dealing with its affairs as a whole. All State officials must have a thorough knowledge of German and ‘educational establishments which prepare pupils for the State services’ must instruct them adequately in that language.
These demands largely nullified the implicit or explicit concessions made in other parts of the programme; and in any case its sting lay in its head, in the demand for the recognition for the Germans of a special position ‘as won by them many centuries ago’. This was a demand to which, it was quite obvious, the non-German peoples of Austria could never submit in 1899, and if those were its Germans’ terms for Austria, then Austria was lost indeed.
Given all the circumstances, it is probably no exaggeration to say that the Whitsun Programme was the most definitive death-sentence which had yet been pronounced on the Monarchy, by any nationality or any party.
*
The period also brought lamentable proof that Steinbach had been mistaken in thinking that the newly enfranchised classes would prove any less nationalistic than their betters. The party styling itself ‘Christian Social’, without any qualifying adjective, turned out to be a purely German one, and although it never produced any ‘national’ programme, it habitually took a German nationalist attitude on all national questions (we have seen that it was a signatory to the Whitsun Programme). The Czech, Polish, Italian and Slovene Christian Social parties which came into being during the decade habitually stood solid with their respective nationalities: no Austria-wide Christian Social movement or party ever came into being.
An even worse disappointment came from the Social Democrats. At the Hainfeld Conference the Party, in duty bound, adopted the Marxist slogan that the national struggle ‘was only one of the means by which the ruling classes ensured their domination and prevented the real interests of the peoples from finding effective expression’. At the Conference held by them in Brünn in 1899 they called for a sensible regulation of the national question in Austria on the basis of national equality, and advocated the reconstruction of Austria as a ‘federal State of nationalities’, to achieve which the Crownlands were to be replaced by autonomous territories, delimited nationally. All territories of one nationality should then form a single association, which was to be completely autonomous in ‘national’ and cultural questions. A separate law, enacted by the central Parliament, was to safeguard the rights of national minorities.
These ideas were afterwards elaborated by two important German-Austrian Socialist thinkers223 into more detailed blueprints for the reconstruction of the Monarchy, or at least, Cis-Leithania,224 as a supra-national State. Karl Renner, whose ideas had begun to take shape before he was at least an active Socialist,225 produced the idea of the dual organization of the State on administrative and national-cultural lines. For the former purpose, Austria was to be organized in eight Gubernia, corresponding to natural and geographic units,226 and these again into four main groups,227 with a central Government responsible for foreign and military affairs, common finance, economic life and social welfare and justice, and a central Parliament. Side by side with this, each nationality was to be constituted, on the basis of a national register, in a national ‘University’ completely autonomous in all ‘national-cultural’ affairs. Otto Bauer’s very brilliant study advocated, in substance, much the same ideas, supported by a wealth of historic background.228
Both men thus stood for the integrity of the Austrian State, and by no means simply out of considerations of personal prudence. They sincerely believed that a large multi-national State was a more suitable political form for an area like Central-Eastern Europe, with its multifarious and closely intermingled peoples, than a number of so-called national States; and they believed that Austria had a historic role to play, if only as defender of western civilization against Russia. But truth to tell, their ideas, and even those of the Brünn Programme, were never very popular in the Monarchy. The majority of the German-Austrian Social Democrats themselves only accepted the Brünn Programme as a pis aller; what they really wanted was a Socialized version of the Liberals’ programme – a centralized Austria basically run by its Germans. And most of their non-German colleagues did not want any German leadership at all. Their revolt was headed by the Czech workers, whose independent movement of 1867229 had already been strongly national. Their initial programme, as expounded in their organ, the Delnik, had attributed the misery of the Czech workers to exploitation by German capital, which was, indeed, pitiless – the condition of the Czech workers was far worse even than that of the German – and a banquet held to celebrate the inauguration of the movement had been attended by Palacký, Rieger, the two Gregrs, and several Czech manufacturers.230 A police report of 1870 said that when approached by the German Bohemians, the Czechs had, on the advice of the Young Czech leaders, refused, saying that ‘they preferred to go their own way until the Bohemian question was settled’.231 They had even for a time considered joining the Young Czechs.232 The party re-founded in 1878 had agreed to join the ‘Austrian’ party after Hainfeld, but had made difficulties from the first. To meet them, the Brünn Congress converted the Party into seven national sections,233 each largely autonomous, although there was to be a federal executive and the Party was to act in the Reichsrat as a united whole. But even this, while going too far for the G
ermans, did not go far enough for the Czechs, and as we shall see,234 further trouble soon broke out.
Thus of all the political parties in Cis-Leithania, only the ‘Christian People’s Party’ and the main Social Democrat Party were not yet, in theory, on a national basis. It was, of course, true that very few men – a fraction of the Italians and a very small proportion of the Germans and Ruthenes – were yet actively disloyal to the State, but for the others, their prime political interest now was not to advance the welfare of the State but to strengthen the position of their own nationality in it. And those circles in the innermost councils of the Monarchy which still retained the old spirit were by now small indeed.
*
The habitual public disorder of the period in Austria had, as the reader will have seen, called for increasingly frequent intervention by the Monarch, and this was perhaps something which he welcomed, not out of lust of power, which had left him, but because otherwise he would simply not have known how to occupy himself. Francis Joseph had not, it appears, felt any very deep devotion to his son. Nevertheless, the young man’s death, in such tragic and discreditable circumstances, was a blow from which he found it hard to recover. It was made far worse by the effect which the tragedy had on his wife. It brought her distraction to overflowing, and after it, she was seldom seen in Vienna. Always dressed in black,235 she wandered over Europe like an unquiet ghost, until on 10 September 1898, she met her equally tragic and senseless end, assassinated by an Italian anarchist on a quay at Geneva.
Now Francis Joseph was really alone. He was fond of his younger daughter, Maria Valerie, and a reasonably affectionate grandfather to his daughter’s children. But he had little use for the rest of his family. He did not care for his surviving brother, Ludwig Viktor,236 and seems to have been deeply mortified over the numerous cases in which members of his august House rejected its rules by entering on morganatic marriages, or even contracting out of it altogether.237 He had sympathies for some, although by no means all, of his fellow-Monarchs,238 but his contacts with them were, of necessity, rare. He was too conscious of his rank ever to have a real man friend not of royal blood since he outgrew boyhood. The only truly intimate human contacts which he had with any human being after his wife took definitively to her nomadic life was with a charming actress, Katherina Schratt, whose closer acquaintance with him Elisabeth herself arranged. Frau Schratt, whom for many years he visited almost daily, undoubtedly gave him much comfort and consolation, but even with her, he remained the Monarch. She never exercised, or even tried to exercise, the slightest influence over his political decisions. If she guided him at all – and here her recommendations were not always fortunate – it was on literary and artistic questions.
Uninterested as he was in literature – either serious or light – or the arts, Francis Joseph devoted himself after 1890 almost exclusively to the business of governing his Monarchy. Outside his visits to Frau Schratt, the shooting expeditions, principally after chamois, which still gave him great pleasure, and the ceremonial functions which he still performed punctiliously, but without gusto, he took little time off from his desk, rising at an unconscionable hour (a sore trial to his entourage) and spending long hours over his papers. The Court ceased to be a social centre, although the full ceremonial was maintained for occasions of State.
In these years he probably exercised little less personal control over the destinies of the Monarchy than he had in the years when he was in theory its absolute ruler. He now left, indeed, minutiae to his Ministers, reserving to himself only final decisions, but the impotence of the Austrian Parliament placed on his shoulders the burden of an inordinate number of these, and the cases were innumerable when he had to intervene and decide because everyone else had reached a deadlock.
The rule thus exercised by him was fundamentally conservative. The truth of this statement is not invalidated by the fact that he was, as we have seen, something like the prime mover in what might have been called the near-revolutionary innovation of suffrage reform. For his motive, even here, was basically conservative: it sprang from the belief that the working classes of the Monarchy would save it from the subversive nationalism of its bourgeoisies. Suffrage reform was for him an expedient like any other to keep the Monarchy ticking over. This had become the end of his statecraft, and he followed it with considerable skill, the fruit of an experience which had by now become unique.
1 Margutti, op. cit., p. 239.
2 Among the ideas which, according to Margutti (l.c.), no one dared even whisper in the Emperor’s presence were not only the revision of Dualism, but ‘the grant of autonomy to the Czechs of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia’ – i.e., precisely what Hohenwart would have carried through. The Czechs talked often enough of the ‘Bohemian State Rights’, and repeatedly made reservations that whatever they did was without prejudice to their continued affirmation of this principle, but they never brought Parliamentary life to a standstill in pursuit of them as they did over less fundamental linguistic issues.
3 According to Steed, op. cit., pp. 24–5, the Auersperg Cabinet was formed ‘on the basis of an express agreement with the Emperor that he would follow a constitutional policy provided the German majority should grant him the military credits which he might demand’.
4 The Landtage first dissolved were those of Upper Austria, Carniola, Bukovina and Moravia. Carniola then proved resistant, but the other three changed sides, and that was enough. The Bohemian Landtag was dissolved later. Thanks to strong intimidation and corruption, the Constitutionals won the majority in the First Curia, giving the Germans a majority in the Landtag. The Czechs refused to attend that body, which accordingly sent German representatives only to the Reichsrat.
5 This proved in the event practically ineffectual, since whenever such a situation arose, the person elected at the second poll invariably belonged to his predecessor’s party.
6 For a convenient description of these powers, see Hugelmann, op. cit., p. 736. The Polish Landsmannminister saw all proposed measures before they were enacted, and was able to object to any of them which seemed unfavourable to the Poles. ‘His influence’, writes Hugelmann, ‘went so far that no important decision or initiative could be taken by any Departmental Ministry without the Polish Minister’s first being given the opportunity to state his views on it.’ Every Ministry contained a number of senior officials of Polish nationality, who were regarded de facto as the exponents of the Polenklub; the Ministry of the Interior, for example, contained a special section under a polnischer Sektionschef.
7 At first there had been more absentees, including most of the Slovenes and many of the Tirolean Germans, but these reappeared in due course, as did the Moravian Czechs. The latter regularly attended their Landtag, which, unlike that of Bohemia, functioned throughout the period.
8 A. Gratz in 100 Jahre, p. 254. Gratz is most emphatic on the role played by this factor.
9 On 9 March 1868, Beust had concluded a treaty with the Norddeutscher Bund, which allowed free export of Austrian (in practice, Hungarian) cereals. The export of cereals (in Doppelzentner) was:
1866 8,436,786
1867 20,869,905
1868 27,817,158
10 1859 figures.
11 Kolmer, I. 236–7.
12 The figures, kindly supplied to me by the Austrian Statistical Office, were 9,354 km. in Austria and 6,219 in Hungary.
13 The production of pig iron rose from 6·31 million tons in 1861 to 8·63 in 1871 and 10·07 in 1873. The figures for coal are 81·30, 200·96 and 237.
14 Between 1868 and 1 January 1874, 1,005 concessions were granted for the foundation of joint-stock companies, 682 of which actually came into existence. These included 443 banks, 63 building companies, 38 industrial and 29 railway.
15 Cit. May, op. cit., p. 65.
16 1869, 22·7 m.g.; 1870, 23·25; 1871, 105.
17 The debt then amounted to 1,056 m.g. in paper and 275 m.g. in silver. 1,007 m.g. were owned abroad. The State had also been obliged to se
ll more of its properties, including the Eisenerz works in Styria.
18 Uhlirz, II. 2,945.
19 Those interested can find piquant details, both on the Krach itself and on the persons involved, in Rogge’s work; also in Schäffle, op. cit., passim, and in Tschuppik, p. 231. Of the 167 Reichstag Deputies (excluding the absentees), 46 held business positions. The 18 Deputies from Lower Austria included 12 Company Directors, holding between them 38 directorships. The Herrenhaus, which contained many newly elected peers, was no whit better. It is fair to point out, as Plener does in his recollections, that the corruption was not confined to the Liberals and was in full swing under the Hohenwart Government.
20 Later the House consented, with an exceedingly ill grace, and demanding budgetary cuts in return, to prolong the existing arrangements until 1889.
21 Czedik, I. 304.
22 Bruegel, Gesch., II. 257, quotes the Minutes of the Crown Council of 22 May 1879, at which the question of getting the Czechs into a future government was discussed. Francis Joseph said that it was necessary to have a majority ‘on which one could count in general questions’. Taaffe described the general attitude of the Left as ‘definitely directed against the power-position of the Monarchy’.
23 The ‘Feudals’ usually so called were safely on his side, and he now persuaded a section of the Constitutional Landowners to go over to them. Of the remainder, twenty continued in alliance with the Left, while a smaller number, mainly from Moravia, formed a centre Party, often known, after its leader, as the ‘Coronini Club’.
24 The break-away had begun in 1863, when the younger generation had objected to Palacky’s and Rieger’s endorsement of Russia’s repression of the Polish revolt. The group had, however, not split away so long as it seemed possible that the alliance with the Feudals might bear fruit, and had thus constituted itself as a Party only when the Hohenwart experiment had been irretrievably abandoned.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 107
