The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Characteristically, the stimulus produced not only action but also counter-action among the Slovaks themselves, whose particularists and ultra-Catholics objected to the Czecho-Slovak programme on both ethnic and religious grounds (since every Slovak sniffs a crypto-Hussite in every Czech). The old quarrel broke out again and could not be resolved, although one effect of the argument was that the Pan-Slav and pro-Russian movements died away, leaving in the field only the Czecho-Slovaks and the Slovak particularists. The latter found a way out by allying themselves with the recently founded Hungarian Catholic People’s Party, which agreed to support moderate Slovak demands in return for Slovak support against the laicizing policy of the Government. In 1901 a Slovak People’s Party constituted itself, and, supported by the larger People’s Party, got four representatives into Parliament, on a programme which was, indeed, moderate, asking for little more than honest application of the Nationalities Law. Meanwhile, with the two fractions engaged in noble rivalry, a real national revival had set in. Slovak literature, both periodical and other, multiplied, some of the Slovaks entering the professions and business retained their national consciousness, and a systematic ‘self-help’ movement was inaugurated with the customary apparatus of co-operatives, savings-banks, etc. This received valuable help from the Slovaks in the USA, whose remittances helped to finance the new institutions.

  IV CROATIA

  The history of Hungaro-Croat relations was somewhat similar to that of the nationalities question, or indeed, the Austro-Hungarian; initial storms were followed by a long period of comparative calm, at the end of which clouds were again gathering.

  As we saw, the Sabor had had to be packed before the Nagodba could be got through at all, and the majority of Croat political opinion, whether adhering to Starčević’s extremist doctrines or to Strossmayer’s more moderate ones, was against it. Rausch simply ignored the opposition for a couple of years, but when, after he had been compelled to resign in January 1871 in consequence of accusations (which were probably, but not quite certainly, justified) against his personal financial integrity, his successor, Bedekovics, held elections in which he applied somewhat less pressure, the National Party (the former ‘Illyrians’) secured fifty-one out of sixty-five elected mandates and the Unionists (the former ‘Magyarones’) only thirteen.93 The Government adjourned the Sabor as soon as it met, whereupon the National Party issued a very bellicose memorandum denying the legality of the Nagodba and demanding the constitution of Croatia as a quasi-independent State, linked to Austria and Hungary alike only through the person of the common Monarch.

  Fresh elections, in 1872, still gave the National Party forty-seven seats, with twenty going to the Unionists and eight to a group of ‘Independent Unionists’, who disapproved of Rausch’s methods. The new acting Ban, Vakanović, packed the Sabor with Virilists, thus securing a majority in favour of the Nagodba. This, of course, did not appease the National Party, but they were now discouraged by the failure of the Hohenwart experiment in Austria, while the extremists had been discredited by a lunatic attempt by Starčević’s Lieutenant, Kvaternik, to raise a rebellion in the Lika.94 Lónyay, in Hungary, professed himself anxious to meet the Croats’ genuine grievances. The Archbishop of Zagreb, Mihailović, succeeded in gathering the moderates of both sides into a centre party which kept the name of ‘national’ but dropped the old National Party’s clearly unrealizable demands. The Hungarians, on the other hand, agreed to a revision of the Nagodba which satisfied some of the Croats’ more reasonable wishes,95 and after the Sabor had voted the revision, in September 1871, a widely respected Croat, Ivan Mažuranić, was appointed Ban.96

  Mažuranić, the first non-noble ever to hold this office, and generally known, in consequence, although with some exaggeration (he was actually a professional civil servant of some standing), as ‘the peasant Ban’, was popular with his countrymen, for whom he did a good deal, especially in cultural respects; himself a poet and author of a famous epic, he did much to foster education – it was under his aegis that the University of Zagreb was founded. Apart from this, his years of office saw the introduction of many administrative and judicial reforms, the counterparts of those being introduced during the same years in Austria and Hungary. The Hungarians kept their side of the new compact, and peace reigned for some years.

  The respite, however, was short-lived. The dark side of Mažuranić’s regime was his intolerance towards the local Serbs,97 and the considerable ill-will already existing between the two peoples was enhanced by the outbreak of the Bosnian insurrection of 1875 and the tumultuous developments which followed it, for both nations had their eye on Bosnia. Serbia’s ambition to annexe the province for herself was enthusiastically supported by the Serbs of Hungary,98 while the Croats wanted it annexed to the Monarchy and then combined with Croatia (and Dalmatia) into the Great Croatia of their dreams; each party maintained a one hundred per cent claim to the nationality of the Bosnians with superb disregard of the other’s case.99 The Croats’ ambitions brought them into conflict, not only with the Turcophile public opinion in Hungary, but also with official Austro-Hungarian policy, and when, in February 1879, Mažuranić, irritated by delays over the incorporation of the Military Frontier, offered his resignation in a moment of pique, the Hungarian Government hastened to accept it.

  The new Ban, Baron Pejačević, although much less of a Croat backwoodsman than his predecessor, was a correct enough man, but under his regime there occurred one of those absurd incidents which, trivial in themselves, raise points of fundamental principle and end by rocking empires. The new Director of the Financial Department in Zagreb, a Magyar named David, introduced courses in Magyar for his staff. Then he made their promotion dependent on their proficiency in the language. Finally, on one August night in 1883, he had the escutcheons with inscriptions in Croat over his office (and some others) taken down and replaced with others bearing inscriptions in Croat and Magyar; his argument was that some of the services performed in these buildings were ‘common’ ones. The moves were legally defensible, but the Croats took them, probably with reason,100 as part of a planned campaign from Budapest to Magyarize the common institutions. Riotous mobs tore down the new escutcheons, and troops had to be called in.

  The Hungarian Government made reparation of a sort, but it was tardy and ungracious, and feeling ran high on both sides. Twenty-three Deputies resigned from the National Party, to form a new ‘Independent National Party’; even more recruits went over to Starčević. Pejačević, whom David had not consulted, resigned, thereby earning for himself the nickname of ‘the Cavalier Ban’. Eventually Tisza decided to use the strong hand. The Croat Constitution was suspended and the country administered by a Royal Commissioner until order had been restored. Then Tisza appointed as Ban a cousin of his own, Count Károlyi Khuen-Hedérváry, a man who was Croat (or rather, Slavonian) only technically, and in spirit, a true Tisza man.

  Khuen-Hedérváry was only thirty-three at the time of his appointment, and his rule was destined to last for twenty years. During these he proved himself his cousin’s equal as a political tactician. He combined the Unionists with the remnants of the National Party in a new National Party which had nothing in common with its predecessor except the name; it now consisted of a clique of men dependent on the Ban, who were rightly given by the people the same name of ‘Mameluks’ as had been bestowed on Tisza’s followers in Hungary. Strong administrative pressure and corruption regularly secured the return of a big quota of Mameluks to the Sabor, and a revision of its Standing Orders in 1884 (in which Zagreb preceded both Vienna and Pest) enabled them to put through the business entrusted to them. As, however, he could not even so count on an absolutely safe majority, Khuen provided his bow with a second string in the shape of the Serbs, who since the total reincorporation of the Military Frontier, had come to constitute nearly a quarter of the population of Croatia-Slavonia. If his predecessors had given the Serbs much less than justice, Khuen made up for this in full measure. Their culture w
as strongly encouraged: they were allowed to maintain as many schools as they wished, and these received their full share of subsidies. The Cyrillic alphabet was admitted to full equality with the Latin, and taught obligatorily in all schools. Serbs were admitted in generous numbers into the civil services and professions, while a Serbian Bank, founded in Zagreb in 1895, helped them to develop their own economic life. They were allowed a newspaper in Zagreb, and although it was an open secret that the organ was subsidized from Belgrade, it was allowed more freedom than the Croat Press. The Serbs were allowed to fly the red, white and blue colours which were, indeed, the colours of their own Church, but also those used by the Prince of Serbia.

  This was the side of Khuen’s policy which has been most bitterly attacked by all Croat writers (and many others) who have invariably refused to see in it anything except a Macchiavellian device for ruling the population by dividing it. It is fair to point out that justice alone would have required any man in authority to protect this important minority against what would otherwise have been the unbridled tyranny of an ultra-chauvinistic majority. But the political motive was, of course, present also, and the political harvest was reaped, for the Serbs regularly supported Khuen in the Sabor101 and thus ensured its smooth functioning.

  For the rest, Khuen was a competent administrator. A peripheral area, and not rich in natural resources,102 Croatia did not enjoy the more rapid economic development which came during these years to some other, more fortunately situated, parts of the Monarchy. As we have seen, it lagged behind the Kingdom of Hungary in respect of industrialization and urbanization. There was the same problem of rural over-population which was cursing Hungary, with the same effects of agrarian rioting103 and of emigration, which seems to have been even higher from Croatia than from the Kingdom.104 But Khuen did much to improve communications (it is true that the new railways were directed towards Budapest, and communications between Zagreb and Cis-Leithania deliberately neglected), raise technical standards of agriculture and in general, to modernize the country as far as could be done with limited resources.

  It may be added that Khuen – most properly – made no attempt to interfere in Croatia’s cultural affairs. The University and Academy of Zagreb flourished and Croat literature enjoyed something of a floraison during the period.

  Khuen’s tactics met with considerable success, even among the Croats. His enemies complained that he ‘corrupted the soul of a whole generation’; what they meant was that he induced a considerable proportion of the Croats to accept the relationship with Hungary in principle, if not in every detail. The national opposition was further weakened by Starčević’s habit of pouring intemperate abuse on everyone (Strossmayer not excepted) who refused to follow him blindly. In 1895, however, the Party of Right succeeded in fusing with the Independent National Party in a ‘United Opposition’, and two years later, under the influence of Dr Josef Frank, a highly intelligent Jew who was becoming the spiritus rector of the Right, it revised its programme, dropping the idea of complete independence in favour of a new Compromise, under which the Nagodba was to be replaced by a Treaty between Hungary and a Great Croatia, as two equally ‘immediate’ parties. In 1896, Starčević died and another split followed. The moderates, who kept the title of Party of Right, asked for little more than a relationship of strict equality between Hungary and Croatia, while Frank and his followers, who now called themselves the ‘Party of Pure Right’, produced a programme asking for the ‘erection of the Unified Kingdom of Croatia by the incorporation of Slavonia, Dalmatia, the town and territory of Fiume, the Littoral, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Istria, Carniola, Carinthia and Styria, within the bounds of the Habsburg Monarchy’. All questions deriving from the Pragmatic Sanction and the unity of the Monarchy were to be handled by the Kingdom of Croatia ‘on equal terms with the Kingdom of Hungary and the other Lands of the Monarchy’. This demand, with its fantastic geographical extensiveness, was justified as ‘the realization of Croat constitutional law and of the natural rights of the Croat nation’.105

  It is not surprising that this programme elicited vigorous protests from the Serbs. The Slovenes were able to comfort themselves with the thought that their homes were in Cis-Leithania.

  1 A közjogi kérdés.

  2 As Gratz writes (A Dualiszmus Kora, I. 90), ‘In the years after the Compromise, practically everyone, except the small group of Conservatives, Deák Party, Left Centre, Extreme Left and Nationalities alike, called themselves Liberals. Even those who were not Liberals in their hearts dared not confess it.’

  3 In 1867 there had been only five banks in Hungary; 126 new ones were founded in the next five years.

  4 There is a full description of this law in R. W. Seton-Watson’s History of the Roumanians, pp. 392–3. Hungary also took over the Statutes already enjoyed by the Unitarians and Transylvanian Lutherans. The latter thus retained their separate organization.

  5 The Holy See had already sanctioned this, for Hungary, although not for the rest of the Monarchy, in 1841 (see above, p. 263).

  6 The Roman Catholic Church of Transylvania, however, retained the autonomous organization (the ‘Status Catholicus’) which it had acquired in the seventeenth century.

  7 1867, 110 m.g.; 1870, 277 m.g.; 1871, 282 m.g.

  8 2 February 1871.

  9 29 January 1876.

  10 Thirty-one banks went into liquidation in 1874–5.

  11 In November 1872, when Parliament was debating the municipal unification of Buda and Pest, a Deákist Deputy (himself a German) proposed to his Party that the sole language of proceedings in the new Municipal Council should be Magyar, although only a very few inhabitants of Buda, and a minority of those of Pest, understood it. Only Deák and one other, the ex-Minister Gorove, opposed the motion in the Party conclave, and both the Party and Parliament adopted it. The next year Magyar was made the exclusive language of service on the Hungarian railways. For a lively account of this, see Rogge, op. cit., I. 101 ff.

  12 In coming to this view, Tisza had been strongly influenced by a book of the writings of the well-known publicist, Béla Grünwald, which took a very rosy view of the prospects of such a policy, especially among the Slovaks.

  13 Twenty-six of these took the name of ‘Party of Independence’, while D. Irányi and six others retained the old name of ‘Party of 1848’.

  14 Two constituencies in Transylvania had only one hundred electors each; one, only sixty-nine.

  15 There was a moment before the fusion when a Conservative Government had seemed a serious possibility, but this passed when the fusion was successfully consummated.

  16 After 1882 these were, indeed, rather less numerous, for in that year the important change was introduced in the organization of the Army that, in order to reduce delays during mobilization, regiments were normally stationed in that area of the Monarchy from which their rank and file were recruited. An officer was, however, often posted to a regiment of another nationality than his own, and many Austrian officers were thereafter still serving in Hungarian regiments.

  17 This was in 1886, when General Jansky, commanding the garrison in Budapest, had a wreath ceremoniously laid on the grave of General Hentzi, the officer who had defended Buda for the Monarchy in 1849 against the Honvéds and had made his name hated by bombarding Pest, which the Hungarians were not defending. Things were made worse by the Archduke Albrecht, who publicly supported Jansky’s action.

  18 The only specific request which it was making at this time was for a Hungarian military academy. Otherwise it was asking only for more ‘Hungarian spirit’ in the common Army.

  19 The position in this respect was still awaiting legal definition in 1918. In practice, the initiative was exercised almost exclusively by the Lower House.

  20 The name of the ordinary police force was Rendörség. Örség means guardians, rend, order and csend, quiet. Why quiet should have required a special force to maintain it in the country, and order, in the towns, is a question to which I have never succeeded in
obtaining an answer.

  21 One of these, although obscurely worded, was thought to limit Parliament’s right to control the number of recruits supplied by Hungary to the Common Army, in that the number was not to be voted decennially, but to remain fixed until further notice. The other imposed on the ‘one-year volunteer reserve officers’* an obligation to pass an examination in German at the end of their year, under pain of serving a second in the event of failure. The same measure, when brought forward in the Reichsrat, evoked strong protests from the Czechs (Kolmer, V. 470).

  22 The occasion was a Bill for depriving Hungarians living abroad of their citizenship after ten years, unless they registered at an Austro-Hungarian Consulate. Tisza tried to get an exception made in favour of Kossuth, and resigned when he was outvoted in the Ministry.

  23 After Kálmán Tisza’s death in 1902, Francis Joseph conferred the title of Count on his sons.

  24 The Bittó Government was actually obliged to withdraw a Bill which it had been going to introduce, as Francis Joseph refused his preliminary sanction to it.

  25 Five main Bills eventually reached the Statute Book (in 1894 and 1895). (1) Civil marriage became compulsory. (2) All births, deaths and marriages had to be State-registered. (3) Any person was free to register himself as having ceased to be a member of any Confession, or to have joined another, or to have become a member of no Confession. (4) Parties to a mixed marriage were authorized to agree in advance that all issue of it might be brought up in the Confession of either parent (but not as members of no Confession). (5) The Israelite Confession was made ‘established’. The established Confessions were now the Catholic (Roman, Greek and Armenian), Calvinist, Lutheran, Unitarian, Orthodox (Serbian and Roumanian) and Israelite. The Moslem was added after the annexation of Bosnia in 1908.