The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  To prepare for war against Prussia, Franz Joseph knew that he had to shore up his western and southern flanks, since he could not risk France or the young kingdom of Italy attacking at the same time. Here again he was out-maneuvered by Bismarck. Prussia signed a commercial treaty with Napoleon III that bought French neutrality in any Prussian-Austrian war, and then signed another treaty with Vittorio Emanuele, the king of Italy, since the latter wanted Venetia from the Habsburgs. Franz Joseph, meanwhile, had to buy French neutrality for himself but at a very steep price, namely agreeing to hand over Venetia even if Austria defeated Prussia. So he guaranteed beforehand an Austrian defeat in Italy, and yet he still sent troops to fight and die on that front. Finally, since Franz Joseph had alienated Russia in the Crimean War, he could count on no support from that quarter.

  When war came in June 1866, then, Austria was fighting on two fronts at once, which it could not afford to do. In the Veneto its troops defeated an Italian army, and in the Adriatic the Austrian navy easily bested the Italian. In Germany, Austria had the support of Hanover, Hesse, and Bavaria, but the Prussians overpowered their small combined army. The crucial encounter was between the main Austrian and Prussian forces in Bohemia, near the town of Sadová. Known as the Battle of Königgrätz, the victory that Prussia won was not overwhelming, but it amounted to a crushing defeat for Austria nonetheless. Though the two armies were comparable in size, the Prussians had better command, troops, and technology. They decimated the Austrian ranks with the needle gun while the Austrians were relying on antiquated rifles and bayonet charges. The multiethnic nature of the monarchy proved debilitating here, too: its military was less well-trained, hamstrung by the many languages of its recruits. Significant numbers of Czech and Hungarian soldiers deserted.

  Franz Joseph’s chief commander Benedek predicted what would happen in a pitched battle between Prussian and Austrian forces, and warned Franz Joseph in a telegram several days before Königgrätz, but the emperor, motivated by concerns of honor and prestige, insisted that he would not make peace before a battle had taken place. In the end, Napoleon III mediated, and Bismarck did not seek the maximum penalty against Austria. He wanted a quick war that forced Austria out of Germany but would not unduly weaken a future potential ally. This loss to Prussia was the result of long-running trends and the precipitant of others in the monarchy’s remaining decades. It signaled the Habsburgs’ final expulsion as arbiters of German affairs, bringing to an end roughly four centuries as the first family of Germany. It was a major blow to the dynasty’s prestige—though it was Franz Joseph’s clinging to such prestige that impelled him to seek the disastrous fight in the first place. Internationally, Austria for a time drew closer to France, since both regarded Prussia as their chief enemy. But after the French republic was declared in 1870, it was unlikely that Franz Joseph could seal a firm alliance with a state antithetical to the principle of dynastic monarchy. He could never get revenge on Prussia either, though he initially wanted it, since the monarchy’s financial situation was so precarious.

  In 1866 France, Britain, and Russia all abandoned Austria to its fate in a way that would have been unthinkable in the previous two centuries. The decline in the Habsburgs’ geopolitical standing continued such that by 1900 the monarchy was clearly no longer in the first rank of powers. The expulsion from Germany also altered the fundamentals of the monarchy domestically. It could no longer pretend to be a German power, and instead had to admit to its hybrid, heterogeneous makeup as never before. Ejected from Italy, shut out of Germany, Franz Joseph turned eastward, looking to the Balkans as the area where Austria could still throw its weight around. That course would draw the monarchy into the final cataclysm in 1914. More immediately, Franz Joseph was forced to acknowledge the limits of his power, and indeed the weakness of his position even at home. Liberals now had greater leverage to demand stricter constitutional government, and the Hungarians had greater leverage to demand more autonomy in that government.

  The Ausgleich (“compromise”) reached with Hungary in 1867 was a major concession for Franz Joseph, and it created the so-called dualist Austria-Hungary that existed until 1918. It was not purely a product of the emperor’s defeat at Königgrätz. In fact there had been ongoing negotiations with two key moderate Hungarian leaders, Andrássy and Deák, since 1865. In that year Franz Joseph had suspended the February Patent because it was proving unworkable as a basis of government. The Reichsrat, for instance, was usually blocked by the resistance of one national group or another. In 1867 his chancellor Beust reached an agreement with Andrássy and Deák on granting Hungary nearly all the powers of a separate kingdom, united with the Austrian “half” of the monarchy mainly through the person of the monarch. Franz Joseph went along with this because after the defeat to Prussia he felt he had to secure the Hungarians’ loyalty. For their part, Andrássy and Deák did not want to break up the monarchy, seeing union with Austria as Hungary’s best protection against Russia. But they did ruthlessly exploit their upper hand, so that Franz Joseph agreed to terms that increased the constitutional constraints on him.

  The arrangement was dualist because it was not federalist. Rather than parceling out the monarchy into a structure in which the Austro-German lands, the Czech lands, Galicia, and Hungary-Croatia would all have roughly equal weight, it was divided simply into two, the Hungarian half and the Austrian half. This latter was not really called “Austria” but rather “Cisleithania,” meaning “beyond the Leitha River,” which was the border between Austria and Hungary. The formal name of the Cisleithanian half was “the countries and realms represented in the Reichsrat,” which gives some indication of the insubstantial basis for common identity of those territories. The governmental link between these two halves was also minimal. Foreign and military policy belonged almost exclusively to Franz Joseph. He retained the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, who thus had only a partial responsibility to parliament, and he could reject laws passed by the Reichsrat. There was a joint financial ministry and tariff regime. But details such as Hungary’s share of the budget could be renegotiated every decade, which led to repeated political conflicts in the years ahead, so dualism’s division of powers was by no means entirely clear.

  Nearly everything else was separate. There were distinct parliaments for the Cisleithanian and Hungarian halves, and each half had its own administrative, legal, and school systems. The realm was designated as kaiserlich (“imperial”) for the Austrian Empire of Cisleithania and königlich (“royal”) for the Kingdom of Hungary. In practice, dualism meant that the Austro-Germans dominated the other peoples in their half, and the Hungarians the other peoples in theirs. In many ways, Hungary’s weight within the Dual Monarchy only grew after 1867, thanks to economic advances that in turn fed into greater assertiveness on the part of the Magyar elite. That elite asserted itself quite successfully not only against Vienna but also against the national minorities within Hungary. This was not an arrangement that could ever satisfy the Czechs in the Cisleithanian half nor the Croats in the Hungarian half. Franz Joseph was aware of this problem, but chose to ignore it. He said, “I do not conceal from myself that the Slav peoples of the monarchy may look on the new policies with distrust, but the government will never be able to satisfy every national group. That is why we must rely on those which are the strongest . . . that is, the Germans and the Hungarians.”5

  Ultimately, even the Austro-Germans and the Hungarians disliked dualism. The former resented Hungarians’ disproportionate weight in the monarchy, while the latter constantly pushed for more autonomy and resisted any changes that would reduce their weight. And virtually all the other national groups detested the arrangement because it unfairly excluded them. Franz Joseph initially made his acceptance of the Ausgleich contingent on the Hungarians coming to an agreement with the Croats and passing a nationalities law. So in 1868 the Nagodba (“Agreement”) was signed with Croat leaders. It guaranteed some autonomy within the Hungarian kingdom, but its provisions were grad
ually whittled away by centralizing Hungarian governments over subsequent decades. There was also an attempt at an agreement between Vienna and Prague in 1871, but it never came to fruition. The Austro-Germans were averse to sharing power in Cisleithania with the Czechs, and the Hungarians (led by Andrássy, who at this point was the foreign minister for the Dual Monarchy) opposed it because any moves toward federalism in Cisleithania would likely encourage similar pressures in Hungary, which would undermine Magyar domination of the other nationalities.

  The dualist system in sum was both a success and a failure. The failure is easy to pinpoint. After 1867 the two halves of the monarchy became less cohesive with each other, above all politically but also culturally to some extent. The dynasty itself provided the tenuous link. Dualism created as many problems as it solved, since it excluded so many other national groups from its ruling structure. This structure experienced continual tensions and occasional breakdowns. That it could be called a success at all may seem surprising, given the opposition it aroused at the time and the criticism it has received ever since. But the Ausgleich amounted to a constitutional formalization of Hungary’s special position in the Habsburg monarchy, a special position dating back to 1527. In that sense the Ausgleich was not new, but rather a codification of prior arrangements. Moreover, it sealed an end to the misguided experiment in neo-absolutism. The resultant Dual Monarchy would, for almost five more decades, provide a partially modernized legal and governmental structure for the political, economic, social, and cultural development of the various peoples bound under Franz Joseph’s sovereignty. These decades were a time of by no means constant progress. Still, the monarchy for the most part enjoyed peace abroad, and provided security for a number of smaller peoples who otherwise would have been vulnerable to predations from larger states. At home, while it did lag western Europe, Austria-Hungary was demonstrably more liberal and developed than states to its east or south. For all the political problems dualism engendered, then, the remaining decades of the Habsburg monarchy saw considerable advances as well.

  One of those advances was in the economy, which expanded solidly over the course of Franz Joseph’s reign. The 1850s saw fairly modest growth but some major projects such as building roads and railways; the Semmeringbahn, completed in 1854, was the world’s first mountain railway. Railways spread rapidly over the succeeding decades. It was in the years after the Ausgleich that parts of the monarchy really developed into modern economies. This is the period known as the Gründerjahre, or “founding years.” Most of the economic development of this time was concentrated in Bohemia and Moravia, Silesia, around Vienna, and in the Hungarian plain. Bohemia and Moravia were the most industrialized parts of the monarchy, accounting for nearly three-fifths of its industry, with Lower Austria coming second. The monarchy’s single largest industrial concern was the Škoda factories in Plzeň, which among other things produced most of the military’s armaments. Hungary in general grew faster than did Austria. One reason why it did so was the tariff regime making agricultural imports into the monarchy more expensive, which helped Hungary become the monarchy’s breadbasket. Overall agriculture formed the largest sector of the monarchy’s economy, but farming productivity did increase, especially in Hungary. Land ownership was also still quite concentrated, again especially in Hungary. Areas such as Slovakia, Galicia, Transylvania, and Bukovina remained backward. Many poor peasants from these lands sought to improve their lot by migrating to the monarchy’s cities, or to the Americas.

  There were also a number of detriments that retarded economic development in the monarchy. It was mostly landlocked, with its main port of Trieste located far from its main economic centers. Its peripheral areas such as Galicia and Dalmatia were poorly connected to the rest of the monarchy because of both a lack of rivers, and mountainous terrain difficult for overland transportation. A relative dearth of mineral resources, political elites entrenched in traditional economic and social structures, and nationalist jealousies that led to unstable politics were also all factors. Moreover, a serious stock market crash hit in 1873, leading to a depression that lasted until 1879, though in the 1880s growth accelerated. By 1914 the monarchy was not economically as large nor as modern as Britain, Germany, or France, but it was still the fourth largest economic power on the continent, significantly more industrialized than Russia. It was the third largest producer of coal, and the fifth largest of iron and textiles in Europe.6 It had grown soundly for decades, and become more economically integrated despite its political tensions.

  Perhaps more impressive than even the economic strides during Franz Joseph’s reign was the tremendous cultural bloom. As with the economic modernization that nonetheless left some regions distinctly backward, the cultural bloom, for all its richness and innovation, coexisted with nationalist tensions, political repression, and anti-Semitism. Some commentators have theorized that the monarchy’s troubled politics actually encouraged the feverish fecundity of its artistic production.7 Nationalism, for instance, certainly catalyzed art in a variety of media, as peoples throughout the monarchy strove to create a unique cultural expression for their community. Above the nationally inspired art, though, soared an aspirationally cosmopolitan artistic culture, typically based in German trends and precedents. Space prohibits any more than a woefully inadequate list of great names from this period. The monarchy’s eminent writers in German would include Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Trakl, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Talented visual artists such as Hans Makart and Tina Blau stand not far behind the heavyweights of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. Vienna continued to be a magnet for musical genius, with Johannes Brahms making the city his home from 1869 to 1897. Other Austrians such as Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner, Anton Schönberg, Alban Berg, and of course the Strauss family of waltz fame helped define musical culture. Austro-German intellectual life was particularly fecund, with such innovators as Ernst Mach, Gregor Mendel, and Sigmund Freud.

  The other nationalities also produced an astonishing array of talent, albeit usually less well-known in the English-speaking world. Hungarian writers such as Géza Gárdonyi, Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, and Dezső Kosztolányi elevated Magyar literature to new heights. A number of Hungarian painters made a mark, such as Mihály Munkácsy, Pál Szinyei Merse, and Jozsef Rippl-Ronai. Several excellent Hungarian architects, including Miklós Ybl, Imre Steindl, and Ödön Lechner created an impressive and influential built legacy. Among the era’s notable Hungarian composers were Imré Kálmán and Franz Lehár, plus the early careers of Béla Bartók, Ernő Dohnányi, and Zoltán Kodály. Czech literary output was also splendid, notably the contributions of Jan Neruda, Svatopluk Čech, Božena Němcová, and Jaroslav Hašek, among other writers. The Czechs as always punched above their weight in music, thanks to Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and the beginnings of Leoš Janáček’s fame. The less numerous nationalities of the monarchy each had their own artistic scene as well. Kraków, for example, was the Polish cultural capital, and it was crowned by the brilliant, multi-talented writer, painter, and designer Stanisław Wyspiański.

  The crucible of the monarchy’s fertile cultural stew was Vienna itself. It was transformed during Franz Joseph’s reign, from a modestly sized city on the eastern fringes of western culture, to a great, thriving metropolis and harbinger of modernity. Symbol of that transformation was Franz Joseph’s decision in 1857 to tear down the colossal fortifications—evidence of the city’s former position near the perilous frontier of the Ottoman Empire—and build the roughly circular boulevard known as the Ringstraße. Over the next several decades a series of imposing structures were erected along this street, in historicist styles that referenced the dynasty’s geographic reach and centuries’-old authority. The Votive Church was erected in gothic style as a thanksgiving for Franz Joseph surviving the 1853 assassination attempt. A permanent parliament was constructed to look like a Greek temple. The city hall echoed in an elephantine
fashion Brussels’ medieval city hall. The neo-Renaissance opera house, opened in 1869, was one of the most controversial buildings of the Ring; negative public reception drove one of its architects to suicide.

  While these historicist buildings reflected the dynasty’s own values, there was more daring architectural work by Otto Wagner, Joseph Olbrich, and Adolf Loos. Franz Joseph hated the latter’s building on the Michaelerplatz, across from the Hofburg, for its modern touches such as the lack of window ornamentation, whose lack led the Viennese to dub the building “the house without eyebrows.” All this construction was made possible in part by the growth of banks that provided capital to the monarchy’s growing economy; they often built their headquarters along the Ring. Noble families also built palaces along the Ring, such as the Colloredos and the Kinskys, but Vienna was growing out of its old character as primarily a seat for the Habsburg court. It was a magnet for people of lower social classes from all across the Habsburg realms. For Jews from the poorest lands such as Galicia, Vienna could provide a very climbable ladder: hence so many of the city’s lawyers, doctors, journalists, and intellectuals were Jewish. Many of these same trends applied on a smaller scale to Budapest as well, unified as a single city in 1873. Around 1914, after decades of rapid growth, the twin capitals Vienna and Budapest had populations of 2 million and not quite 1 million respectively.

  After 1867 Franz Joseph had to modify his dynastic vocation dramatically to accommodate parliamentary politics. The Reichsrat gained the power to introduce legislation, and its lower house as well as various municipal councils were elected. Suffrage expanded gradually, and with it, mass party politics. In Cisleithania, the Liberals dominated until the 1880s, when more sectors of society began to organize for elections, including the working class and peasant/rural interests. The Hungarian liberals remained predominant past 1900, thanks in part to a suffrage slanted in favor of the upper and middle classes and large landowners. National parties also coalesced in both halves of the monarchy. In Hungary, most parties were explicitly nationalist in that they represented the claims of Hungarian (or Croatian) autonomy. In both Hungary and Cisleithania, social democratic parties campaigning for workers’ rights grew stronger as the suffrage was widened. The 1890s in Cisleithania additionally saw the rise of the Christian Socials, a motley collection of peasants, clergymen, and the lower middle classes with a strong current of anti-Semitism. Their leader Karl Lueger was elected mayor in Vienna of 1895, but Franz Joseph, using his constitutional prerogatives, initially refused to appoint him. He was appalled by Lueger’s anti-Semitism and populism.