The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  What Kállay really wanted was not to favour or ‘rule through’ any one of the local nationalities, but to call into being among them all a specific local ‘Bosnian’ nationalism which should transcend their particularist loyalties. Here, indeed, he failed. The Moslems came nearest to feeling themselves simply ‘Bosnians’, for until the Young Turk revolution of 1908 they had no alternative (those with a strong national feeling emigrated18), but even they did not feel themselves one with the local Orthodox or Catholics; simply a special local community. The Catholics from the first adopted a strongly particularist – and militant – attitude. Towards the end of the century, under the influence of their very combative Archbishop, Mgr Stadler, they were immersing themselves completely in the Great Croatia movement, clamouring for the unification of Bosnia with Croatia and Dalmatia and propagating the other Croat extremists’ thesis that the Orthodox population of the Provinces were Croats converted to Orthodoxy (unless, indeed, they were immigrant Vlachs19). A speech made by Stadler in September 1900 expounding these views drew down on him an official rebuke. Nevertheless, the Party founded by him to express them was the most influential Croat Party in the Provinces.

  Serbian nationalism seems not to have been very widespread among the Orthodox population in 1879, but, being an emotional and irrational feeling rather than a materialist or logical one, it grew steadily as the years passed. Towards the end of the century the chief complaint, at least as voiced, of the intellectuals was the denial of self-government, and this created a vicious circle, for it was precisely because of his mistrust of the Serb element that Kállay thought it impossible to introduce institutions which would give it any influence over the Provinces. Thus his regime developed more and more into one of opposition to the Serbs, with the inevitable result that the other grievances, just or unjust, of the population – the conscription, the high taxation, the perpetuation of the kmet system, and the rest – came to be represented, and felt, as national injustices.

  It should be added that Kállay’s regime seems to have deteriorated in its latter years. The reins were slipping out of his hands. A competent observer, visiting the country in 1908, wrote:

  When I was here for the first time, in 1892, the atmosphere was one of energetic progress, well-considered and full of eager hopefulness in the future; today, inactivity, doubt, apprehensiveness are the note. Gone is the organised and conscious activity I admired so much.20

  1 Stöller, op. cit. We do, however, hear of quite wealthy Christian merchants in some of the towns.

  2 The title ‘beg’ was really a much higher one.

  3 Two thousand families. It is interesting that the figures are almost exactly the same, proportionately, as those given by Südland (p. 211) as correct for ‘his day’ (he wrote in 1916); he said there were then about 80,000 kmet holdings, of which 58,845 were held by Serbs, 17,116 by Croats and 3,653 by Moslems.

  4 There was also a military garrison, whose commander possessed a civilian adlatus. I have been unable to make clear to myself the exact relationship between this official and the Joint Ministry.

  5 Count Welfersheimb, the Austrian Minister of Defence appointed in 1880, held his portfolio for twenty-five years.

  6 Including messengers and porters, subordinate employees on the railways, etc.

  7 Haumont, op. cit., p. 427.

  8 According to Haumont, l.c., they were not readily admitted because they were suspected of Pan-Slavism.

  9 The most notorious of these was the expenditure of some £400,000 on a ‘river fleet’ to compete with Serbian shipping on the Drina. The boats proved too large for the river and had to be sold off at a heavy loss.

  10 This included unnecessarily sumptuous public buildings in Sarajevo, a race-course which no Bosnian ever went near, and the well-meant construction of a watering-place, with modern amenities and diversions, which failed to attract the tourists for whom it was meant.

  11 One of the great complaints made against the regime by its opponents was that the budget for the public safety services was larger than that for education, but in view of the long-ingrained local habits, this was perhaps necessary.

  12 This figure does not include private lines built purely for the carriage of timber.

  13 Drage, op. cit., p. 630.

  14 There was also some feeling in the Provinces against the considerable influx into them of Jews, who, it was alleged, exploited the natives.

  15 Turkey in Europe, pp. 381, 382.

  16 Not qua temporal head of the Ottoman Empire, but qua Khalif.

  17 This was the figure given by Kállay to the Delegations. Haumont puts it higher (240 churches and twenty-four monasteries, risen from two).

  18 A large number of them did emigrate after 1878, but most of them came back, saying that conditions were worse on the other side of the frontier. After this some emigration took place, but less than was going on from Serbia, Bulgaria or Greece.

  19 There is something more to this theory than is generally admitted. The sceptical reader should note the frequent references to ‘Morlachs’ (Mavrovlachs) in travel-books of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries relating to the Western Balkans.

  20 Baernreither, Fragments of a Political Diary, p. 21.

  17

  The Last Years of Peace

  When an organism consists of so many components, each with so much separate life, as the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century, no single event is likely to mark a caesura in the history of all of them. In fact, nothing occurred in 1903 in the inner developments of Cis-Leithania to give them any pronounced new twist.

  In that year, however, the long-accustomed cavillings of the Hungarian ‘national opposition’ against the Compromise developed into a storm so intense and so widespread as to call in question the very existence of the Compromise itself, and thus of the whole internal structure of the Monarchy. Almost simultaneously with this came changes in Serbia which proved the prelude to the emergence of a new international situation fraught with danger to the Monarchy’s very existence. The combined effect of these two major events, and of certain others of less obvious significance which, again, occurred almost simultaneously with them – a change of regime in Bosnia, an alteration in the commercial policy of the Monarchy – were weighty enough to justify the treatment of the decade which began with them as a chapter of its own in the history of the Monarchy.

  There is another, very important, difference between this period and its predecessor. So long as the reins were in Francis Joseph’s hand, it was certain that there would be no radical change in either the foreign or the domestic policy of the Monarchy. He had long since given up all thought of conquest, content to keep what he had, and looking to the German alliance to enable him to do so, and in respect of the central internal problem of the Monarchy, that of its structure, he had also decided to take as final the settlements reached in and immediately after 1867. We have seen that by this time no one was daring so much as to suggest to him any modification of the structure of Cis-Leithania, and he was equally rigid on the still more fundamental issue of Hungary.

  It is often said that his unswerving insistence on honouring to the letter his side of the Compromise sprang from grounds of conscience: that he felt himself bound by his Coronation oath. This may well have been one of his reasons, but it is unlikely that it was the deepest of them. In his youth he had often enough found pretexts to break what to most men would have appeared as a pledged word, and he might well have done so again now, if he had seen advantage in it. The deeper explanation probably lies rather in the mental outlook which he had acquired in earlier years, and could no longer alter. He simply did not appreciate the nature and strength of the new forces which had grown large since he was a younger man. Margutti has written that Francis Joseph ‘never really understood the political aspirations of the Slavs’. ‘He seemed still to regard them for what they had been at the beginning of his reign, a quantité négligeable. It often seemed to me that he though
t of the Czechs simply as a pendant to the Germans of Bohemia, the Slovenes, to the Germans of Styria and Carinthia, the Slovaks and Serbs as standing in the same relation to the Magyars.’1 This does not mean that he wanted human injustice done to any of these peoples; but it is probably true that, psychologically, he regarded the political problem of Hungary in the terms of 1866–7. The threat to his rule in Hungary came then from the Magyar ‘Independence’ Parties, and the effective counter-weight to them lay in the Magyar loyalists of the Deák and Andrássy type. The Compromise was the price which he had paid for the support of these men, and they had in fact, to use a colloquial term, delivered the goods. The results having thus proved at least more satisfactory than those of any other combination tried by him, he proposed for his part to keep his side of the bargain exactly. He demanded, indeed, an equally punctilious observance of it from the other side, but so long as he could compel this, the Compromise was safe.

  But in 1903 Francis Joseph had passed the Psalmist’s statutory limit of years, and his Crown, with all the immense power wielded by the wearer of it, must by all human reckoning soon pass to another. By now the Archduke Karl Ludwig was dead,2 and the Heir Presumptive in law, as he had been in the general expectation since Rudolph’s death, was Karl Ludwig’s elder son, Francis Ferdinand.

  By this time Francis Ferdinand had left behind him a youth and early manhood which had not been in all respects happy, especially as he had been troubled by ill-health. The year before his father’s death he had shown such alarming symptoms of incipient tuberculosis that he had had to spend a long time abroad. He recovered physically, but the natural morosity of his nature was accentuated by the fact that certain circles had assumed his coming death prematurely, and had transferred their flattery to his younger brother, Otto.

  But it had not needed illness to make him a very nasty man. One of his passions was to collect objets d’art, but he was exceedingly stingy, and there are many tales of how he practically terrorized dealers into giving him articles cheap. His second great passion was ‘sport’, and his idea of sport was to have stags driven in front of him or pheasants put up which had been fattened until they could hardly fly, while he slaughtered the wretched creatures, beaters handing him a fresh gun when that which he was using became too hot to hold. He was an ill-tempered bully in dealing with men, and in his social outlook, a black reactionary. The one redeeming feature in his personal character was, paradoxically, that which involved him in his most serious conflict with his uncle. He fell deeply in love with a lady, a Countess Sophie Chotek, who, although a member of the highest Bohemian aristocracy, was not ebenbürtig by Habsburg family law, so that if he married her, the union would be morganatic. Enormous pressure was put on him, from the most various quarters, to renounce his love. This he obstinately refused to do, and at last Francis Joseph gave way. The marriage was celebrated, on 1 July 1900, but first Francis Ferdinand had had to sign a solemn declaration renouncing the right to the succession of any issue of the marriage. The Emperor conferred the title of ‘Princess’ on the bride, but this still left her inferior in rank to any Archduchess. Francis Ferdinand’s enemies at Court, who were many, saw to it that the ceremonial in this respect was exactly observed. This was another iron that entered into his soul, and not a few of his sympathies or antipathies towards foreign rulers derived from their attitude towards his bride. Two men who treated her with full deference were the German Emperor and the King of Roumania, and Francis Ferdinand repaid both with attachment.

  For the rest, he remained a devoted husband and was an affectionate father to the three children of his marriage.

  Francis Ferdinand’s foreign political conception was already formed. His object here was the obvious one, to maintain the integrity of the Monarchy, and it must be said for him that he was no imperialistic land-grabber; even a man of peace. Thus although disliking and despising the Italian people, and sharing to the full the general (and entirely justified) mistrust of Italy’s intentions, in consequence of which he was a strong advocate of the development of the fleet, and also paid much attention to the strengthening of the Monarchy’s fortifications on its southern frontier, he was opposed to the idea of preventive war, against either Italy or Serbia. He regarded the Monarchy’s alliance with Germany as the king-pin of its foreign relationships: it is entirely untrue that he wanted to alter its orientation. He did, however, attach great value to friendship with Russia; what would have pleased him best would have been a restoration of the Dreikaiserbund. ‘Russia-ourselves-Germany’, he said once to a Russian visitor in 1907: ‘What a power! The whole globe would be at our feet!’3

  By 1903 he had not, apparently, evolved any specific domestic programme, but the prejudices and predispositions which would govern any such programme when it appeared were already there, and they were no secret. He was profoundly undemocratic: he had not for the common people even the kindness which years had brought to Francis Joseph, still less any sympathy for their wish to have a say in their own concerns.4 If he never, apparently, played with ideas of bureaucratic autocracy, this was out of no respect for popular institutions, or for those who represented them; he was immeasurably impatient of any opposition to his own will.

  Like his wife, he was an extreme Catholic; his only public intervention in internal affairs before 1903 had been a condemnation of the Los von Rom movement, made in his capacity of Patron of the Catholic Schools Association (a position granted him on his own request) so intemperate as to raise a storm in the Liberal Press, and even to draw on him a rebuke from his uncle.

  His views on the national question (this was the most important part of his political creed, because of its relationship to the fundamental question of the structure of the Monarchy) were the product, partly of calculation of the usefulness or otherwise to the Monarchy of each nationality, partly of personal prejudice. It is completely untrue that he ever thought of ‘remodelling the Monarchy so as to rest it on its Slav elements’, internally any more than in respect of foreign policy. Although no emotional German nationalist, he regarded the Germans of the Monarchy as its ‘natural cement’, to which the leadership in it (under himself) must naturally fall, if only for the sake of efficiency. He had not even any sympathy for any of the Slav peoples, except perhaps the Croats, whom he appreciated for their military qualities, their Catholicism, and, above all, their antagonism to the Magyars. He looked with some favour on the Slovaks, as possessed of the two last-named qualities, the latter of which tended to endear the Roumanians to him. These feelings were, however, essentially political.

  Deeply as he loved his wife, he found the Czech people, as such, unsympathetic. He had, indeed, a certain fellow-feeling for the Bohemian feudalists, with whose economic interests his own coincided in his capacity of landowner, for his own biggest estates lay in Bohemia. But this feeling, which his marriage perhaps rather weakened than the reverse (for the ultra-snobbish Bohemian super-magnates were jealous of the Archduke’s wife and vented their spite by sneering at her origin – her family was not quite in the innermost ring of all, although very near it – and she retaliated with a natural resentment), did not in any case breed in him any sympathy for the doctrine of Bohemian State Rights, for which he had as little use as for the claims of Hungary.5

  He disliked the Poles strongly, as a subversive and arrogant people, as well as an obstacle to an understanding with Russia. But easily the dominant feeling in his gamut of national sentiments was a real loathing of the Magyars, or at least, of their politicians.6 How this feeling originated, it is difficult to say. It may have begun with his somewhat humiliating defeat at the hands of the Magyar language, for unlike most of his family, he was a poor linguist, and found that language beyond him,7 and it seems to have taken firm root during a tour of duty which he did at Sopron as Colonel of a regiment whose officers talked Magyar in front of him and otherwise treated him with insufficient deference, while even the N.C.O.s reported to him in syllables which he did not understand.8 Later, this resentme
nt was to grow into a real obsession which coloured all his thoughts.

  *

  Francis Joseph had been slow to admit his nephew to any share in the business of the State, or even to take him into his confidence. In 1898 the Archduke had been given a sort of roving commission, which he had carried out with great zeal and considerable efficiency, to interest himself in all aspects of the defence of the Monarchy, and he had represented his uncle on some ceremonial visits, including one to Petersburg in 1902, but he had held no post, if we except his unfortunate patronship of the Catholic Schools Association, which gave him any locus standi for intervening in the internal politics of the Monarchy.9 The only influence he had so far been able to exert in these fields had thus been indirect; he could press his views on the Emperor or on his servants, individually. But even by 1903 that influence was perceptible, for there were few public men in Austria quite indifferent to the wishes and intentions of the man who would presumably soon be able to put behind them the whole immense authority of the Crown, and many who actively sought his favour; he already had ‘his’ party, to which a considerable, and increasing, number of holders of key posts belonged. It is true that Francis Joseph was not of the party, and when the two men’s views differed, as was not infrequent, insisted on his own. His influence grew steadily during the years with which this chapter is concerned, especially after 1906, when a new man, Captain (later Lieut-Colonel) von Brosch took charge of the little ‘military Chancellery’ which Francis Ferdinand had established in the Belvedere Palace to help him carry out his official duties.10 Von Brosch was an extremely able and energetic man, and under him and Col. Bardolf, who succeeded him in 1911, the Chancellery expanded into a regular shadow government. Through it, the Archduke was supplied by correspondents in all parts of the Monarchy with information which was certainly far superior (since less tactfully discreet) to what was reaching the Emperor. By now he also possessed his wider political contacts. In Cis-Leithania these were closest with the Christian Social Party; in Hungary, with leaders of the ‘Nationalities’, notably the Slovak, Milan Hodža and the Roumanian, Vaida Voevode, but he was close also with the Hungarian Minister President of the Féjérváry Cabinet, Kristóffy.