The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  In the last decade of his rule, Franz became ever more rigid and paranoid. He essentially pretended that the social forces contributing to the revolutions of 1830 did not exist. There was however one major change he had to prepare for, namely his succession. He knew that his disabled oldest son Ferdinand was not capable of rule, but characteristically both he and Metternich opted for the principle of legitimate primogeniture, that the rightful line of succession had to be honored regardless. Thus in the late 1820s, when he was about 36 years old, Ferdinand began to be invited to key council meetings. In 1830 he was crowned king of Hungary to succeed Franz. In 1835, as Franz was on his deathbed, he composed a set of instructions for Ferdinand. They read like a note a parent leaves a teenager before going away for the weekend—yet Ferdinand was nearly 42. Franz wrote, “Rearrange nothing of the state edifice; rule and do not change; hold firm and steadfast to the principles by constant adherence to which I not only led the monarchy through the storms of hard times, but also assured the lofty position that it occupies in the world.”6

  Metternich gave his input to these instructions, and in the note Franz also advised Ferdinand to trust Metternich, “my truest servant and friend,” implicitly. Franz’s worldview is crystallized in these words. Change nothing; hold rigidly to one’s principles; resist all contrary forces. Though he was not always so intransigent, the lesson he learned from the trials he endured was not to adapt but to remain immobile. That obduracy helped him outlast Bonaparte, and his and Metternich’s leadership deserves much credit for leading the charge against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. That leadership also brought a good deal of stability to his lands after 1815. Though Franz cannot truly take credit for this, it is even a testament to the relatively mild repression that there was such a cultural efflorescence during his reign, seeing the late apogee of Haydn’s, the sum total of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s careers, and the literary creativity of Franz Grillparzer, Nikolaus Lenau, and others. But Franz ultimately kept looking backward, to an impossible vision of monarchical authority before the age of revolution. That reactionary illusion was perhaps to be expected of the man who was the last Holy Roman Emperor, but it was not a recipe for adaptive leadership.

  Ferdinand I (1793–1875)

  Ferdinand was purely a figurehead to preserve the appearance of monarchical rule. The true rulers in his reign were his uncle Archduke Ludwig, Metternich, and in domestic matters Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat. This regency triumvirate disliked each other, and largely held the monarchy in stasis until the 1848 upheaval. To his credit, Ferdinand, who is often portrayed as an empty vessel, in that year did recognize that it was time for the old system, and Metternich himself, to go. Thus though Ferdinand was unquestionably unfit, he was not an idiot. In his younger years he suffered from periodic epilepsy, and his normal development was delayed; he learned to walk and talk quite late. His infirmities retarded his progress at school, but he eventually learned five languages, played the piano well, and developed an interest in botany. Nonetheless, the family kept him out of public view for many years. When he did have to appear, such as at his coronations in Prague in 1836 and Milan in 1838, the affair was carefully stage-managed to protect the authoritative image of the king. That image was unprotected within more intimate circles, however. The tsarina of Russia met Ferdinand in Teplice and penned this portrait of him: “Good Lord, I had heard a lot about him, of his little, ugly, feeble form and his big head with no expression other than stupidity, but the reality surpasses all description.”7 Even within his own family Ferdinand received the unkind nickname of “Nandl der Trottel” (roughly, “Ferdy the fool”).

  Although the sovereign was incapable of rule, the dynasty asserted itself by dictating the composition of the State Conference that actually governed. This body thwarted Metternich’s hopes for unfettered power by giving Count Kolowrat significant control over purse strings, and allowing influence from Archduke Ludwig along with Ferdinand’s rather dim brother Franz Karl. This was all a recipe for lackluster rule. Kolowrat was somewhat more liberal than Metternich, and their many disputes included his protests about the latter’s intransigent attitude toward government reforms. Metternich complained that Kolowrat was so financially stingy that the military was starved. The basic system of government centering on the police, the bureaucracy, and the Church remained intact. Economic advance continued; signs of progress were further railway building, stricter child labor laws in 1842, the foundation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1847, and the first telegraph connection between Vienna, Prague, and Brno in the same year. However, some initiatives that even Metternich and others of the regency supported were stymied by interests elsewhere in the monarchy, such as the plan to join the Zollverein or introduce a customs union between Austria and Hungary. Metternich’s abiding attitudes dictated the monarchy’s foreign policy: hostility to liberal and nationalist ferment, the defense of monarchical legitimacy, and the preservation of the balance of power.

  By the 1840s, however, the Habsburg regime was losing authority at home and abroad. A number of vulnerabilities together explain the outbreak of revolution in 1848. Internationally, Metternich’s system was behind the times; Britain under Lord Palmerston called for all European states to adopt constitutional regimes, and even Prussia adopted more liberal reforms. That Austria’s pivotal position in European politics had deteriorated was shown by it being mostly ignored in British and Russian machinations over Turkey in 1839–40. Domestically, though there was by no means a deep, coordinated popular anger at the monarchy, there were widespread grievances. Economic conditions slumped in the years before 1848. Harvest failures started in 1845, which caused sharply rising food prices and widespread hunger. Decades of rapid population growth led to a shortage of jobs. Complaints about high taxes were heard across the class spectrum.

  The monarchy’s finances were precarious, with nearly 30 percent of its budget swallowed by debt service in 1847. This helped precipitate a run on banks because of fears of a state bankruptcy. The estates in Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower Austria had for a number of years been calling for increased power over government budgets, the end of censorship, and the establishment of a more equitable income tax. Conservative nobles not surprisingly objected to pressures from the diets and the Vienna government for further land reform, while liberal nobles were pushing for a more constitutional regime. Elements of the bourgeoisie also wanted to see an end to the more intrusive and autocratic aspects of Metternich’s police state. Conspicuously absent in this percolating discontent were calls for overthrow of the regime—most people remained loyal to the dynasty, even if desires for political change were building.

  The other factor unsettling the monarchy’s politics was the growth of nationalism. In the decades before 1848 groups of elites became increasingly enthused by ideas of national self-assertion. The Hungarians had the most forceful and broadest-based movement. It was still mostly a preserve of the nobility, and even within that class there were conflicts over what the proper attitude should be toward Vienna, and toward Hungary’s own national minorities. The moderates included men such as István Széchenyi, a patriotic noble who promoted economic and intellectual reform, a parliamentary government along English lines, and the cultural development of the Hungarian language. Lajos Kossuth was the most prominent member of the radical wing, which insisted on a much looser connection to Austria and possibly even outright independence. The radicals were also typically more vocal in asserting the primacy of the Hungarian language in administration and education, an end to the feudal aristocratic regime, and Hungarians’ right to rule over all the minority peoples within the Hungarian kingdom.

  Slovaks and particularly Croats objected to the latter claim especially; the modest numbers of Croat noble and bourgeois nationalists insisted that Croatia was a historic state with its own right to rule itself, equal to Hungary. Among the monarchy’s Slavs, the Czechs had the most robust nationalist movement, led by principled intellectuals such as František
Palacký. Czech nationalism had progressed from its earliest, cultural phases at the turn of the century into a burgeoning political movement appealing to the members of the educated, Czech-speaking middle classes. Though it contained a strong anti-German sentiment, there were few voices repudiating Habsburg rule. Among the smaller peoples of the monarchy, such as the Slovaks, Slovenes, or Romanians, nationalist sentiment remained restricted to tiny coteries of educated people including priests. Separatism was somewhat stronger in the Italian areas, where radical secret societies were active, and grievances about Vienna’s high taxes and autocratic rule were more widespread.

  In the years before 1848, these movements were still emergent—but their basic assumptions about the nation as the legitimate basis of political community would come to inform the revolutions in that year. A common denominator was the identification of liberalism with nationalism. These ideas fused claims for equal political rights for all classes, and the possibility of cooperation among those peoples with Vienna, as long as Vienna respected their rights. Nationalism at this time was not inherently antithetical to dynastic monarchy. The problem for the Habsburgs was that since their scattered, multi-ethnic dominions were only weakly connected culturally and institutionally, the dynasty itself formed the main connection. There was only a flimsy sense of unity between Hungarians and Italians or Germans and Poles, beyond sharing the same sovereign. As nationalist movements over the course of subsequent decades came to insist on rights of self-determination, that conflicted with the dynasty’s insistence on its historical right to rule.

  This confluence of liberalism, nationalism, and material grievances burst into the 1848 revolutions. In some ways, it is incorrect to call them “revolutions,” since apart from Hungary and Italy the revolts did not attempt to depose the dynasty. Though demands for change were extensive, they were often also contradictory, as one national group’s claims could be incompatible with what another national group demanded. The revolutionary movements were on the whole an amorphous, shifting coalition of interests among the moderate liberals (often doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals), more conservative liberals (who might come from the nobility or the clergy), and radicals (who were mostly students and sometimes workers).

  The revolution in Paris in February 1848 was the original spark for similar uprisings across Europe. After some protests in early March, the earthquake struck Vienna on 13 March when large parts of the city rose up and marched on the Chancellery. Soldiers fired on the crowd, and to appease the mob and forestall a further escalation, the Habsburg inner circle decided that Metternich had to go; he fled that same day. The escalation continued regardless: a number of citizens’ committees organized themselves to exercise authority in areas such as justice, and to press for a constitution. Kolowrat, still running the dynasty’s government, found himself forced to share power with these committees. On 15 March some 20,000 people marched on Buda’s castle, symbol of the Habsburg regime. In Prague there were demands for a separate ministry for Bohemia, just as Hungary had. The monarchy’s Polish domains saw riots among liberal intellectuals in Kraków and Lviv.

  In most of these revolts the demands were similar: trial by jury, freedom for political prisoners, freedom of speech and the end of censorship, abolition of serfdom and tax exemptions for the nobility, plus the creation of legislative assemblies that would represent national groups’ interests. Over the next month the royal government developed a constitution for the Hereditary Lands to try to answer some of these demands, but because it did not include wide suffrage and a unicameral house it was rejected. This led to fiercer riots in Vienna in mid-May, and the royal family fled to Innsbruck. In halting response to popular pressure, the dynasty advanced a second proposal for a parliament, for which elections were held in June in the Hereditary Lands. This assembly eventually sat in the town of Kroměříž in Moravia, and is known as the Kremsier Parliament after the town’s German name. This was a multinational, cross-class body, but it was never particularly effectual. The court by this point was ensconced in the nearby city of Olomouc. Archduke Johann was now officially the regent, but the various members of the dynasty including the Archduchess Sophie closely coordinated on rule.

  The dynasty agreed to a separate government for Hungary in April. According to the so-called April Laws, Hungary was to be governed as a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch’s power would be strictly limited. The dynasty soon paid the price for this concession, though, when calls for a similar arrangement for Bohemia raised the possibility of the entire monarchy breaking up. Kossuth was leading the new Hungarian parliament toward creation of a separate budget and currency. Meanwhile, the various non-Magyar peoples objected to the Hungarian radicals’ calls for independence from the monarchy, and so started threatening independence from Hungary. The Croats led the charge, naming the general Jelačić their leader. Demands for autonomy from the Slovaks, Serbs, and Romanians followed in May. Kossuth used these events as a pretext for a mass mobilization to defend the integrity of the Hungarian state. By summer’s end, radicals in Vienna and Hungary were each other’s only remaining allies. The Czechs were not supporting the Hungarian revolutionaries because of the latter’s treatment of Hungary’s minority populations.

  In Bohemia, the revolution split along multiple cleavages. Besides the schism between Czechs and Germans, among the Czechs there was also a split between the pan-Slavists and the radicals. The most influential were moderates such as Palacký, who wanted to preserve the Habsburg monarchy as an association of equal peoples. Indeed, it was he who famously commented that if Austria did not exist, it would have to be invented. In June, Palacký convened in Prague an international Pan-Slav Congress that called for a federal structure in the monarchy, respecting the rights of the historic kingdoms. In this proposed arrangement, Bohemia would have its own parliament on an equal status as Austria or Hungary. Though the Czechs’ assertion of their rights was more measured than that of the Hungarian radicals, even the call for a federalization of the monarchy was more than the dynasty was willing to stomach. This congress, and the Prague uprising, was crushed in June by an army led by General Windischgrätz.

  Events in Germany ran headlong into the problems of the monarchy’s multinational nature. Austro-German liberals looked to the Frankfurt Assembly in their hopes for a more unified Germany. That assembly had as its goals the creation of a federal, constitutional system, with strict observance of the rule of law and individual rights, under a hereditary emperor. For a time the hope was for a stronger confederation that would include certainly Austria and possibly Bohemia. Archduke Johann was chosen as the regent of this embryonic German state in June 1848. The problem with the entire project, from the Habsburgs’ point of view, was that if the monarchy’s Germans were in any way affiliated with it, then how would the rest of the monarchy’s peoples (and institutions) relate to each other if the Austro-German areas belonged to a federated German polity? Though there was a residual identification of the Habsburg monarchy with the old German empire that had expired in 1806, the uprisings of the Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, and Croats all made obvious that the Habsburg monarchy was by no means mostly a German state. The nationally minded political weight of the non-German parts of the monarchy now complicated more than ever before the Habsburgs’ pretensions to leadership in Germany.

  Secessionist pressures immediately came to the surface in Italy, driven largely by the aristocracy. Elsewhere in the monarchy nobles for the most part supported the monarchy. In the Italian lands, however, they wanted to overthrow it, typically because they felt that the Habsburg state had excluded them from power. Austrian troops were forced to withdraw as Milan and Venice rose in revolt. Then in late March, Carlo Alberto, the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, launched an attack to drive Austria’s forces out of the peninsula. His stated goal was to unify northern Italy under his constitutional rule. The Italian uprising and war were short-lived, as Field Marshal Radetzky restored Habsburg control by defeating the
Piedmontese army at Custozza in July, and then again at Novara in March 1849. By the end of September 1848 the dynasty was also moving toward war against the Hungarian revolutionaries to stop their moves for independence. The Hungarian rebel army had several indecisive skirmishes with royal forces, but the final battles would not take place until new leadership was directing the dynasty’s affairs.

  Ferdinand’s role in these revolutionary events was mostly that of a spectator. He did not like Metternich and was not sorry to see him go. Ferdinand was also predisposed to greater concessions in the revolution’s early days, to which the other members of his family would not agree. Hence he was taken out of Vienna to Innsbruck, to be further away from where decisions were being made. He later returned to the capital, but then his war minister Latour was murdered on 6 October by a mob. That mob stormed the arsenal, taking weapons and pledging to aid the Hungarian revolutionaries. Ferdinand was angry and disappointed that his subjects had committed this murder, and soon left again for Olomouc. Vienna fell fully into the radicals’ control, though not for long. General Windischgrätz arrived with his army, and with the assistance from Jelačić’s force of peasant soldiers, Habsburg forces recaptured the city by the end of October.