The evolution toward a more democratic state and society was fitful. The monarch, the bureaucracy, and the military remained the key central institutions. Freedom of association, assembly, religion, and the press were guaranteed by law after 1867 but limited in practice. Libel and sedition laws restricted press freedom, and groups that the government considered subversive—which could be anything from nationalists to anarchists—could be broken up and their members jailed. Article 14 in the constitution allowed for emergency powers for the executive, which enabled Franz Joseph to impose his will when necessary. In general, governments in Cisleithania were more liberal than those in Hungary, and the latter was also more strongly centralized. As nationalists, the middle classes, workers, and peasants became more politically assertive in the two decades prior to 1900, each produced their own fracturing tensions on the monarchy’s governments. There were a number of long-serving prime ministers in Cisleithania, including Adolf Auersperg from 1871 to 1879 and Eduard Taaffe from 1879 to 1893. In years thereafter, though, prime ministers’ tenures were much shorter, typically undone by disputes in the centrifugal politics of nationalism. The principal mode of governing the monarchy became “muddling through” (fortwursteln), as Taaffe said.
Franz Joseph grudgingly acceded to these developments. To the end of his days, he disliked the idea of being a constitutional monarch, but he did rule according to the law, helping inculcate a strong legal culture in his monarchy. He adapted to the rising tide of liberalism by emphasizing his position as sovereign above all classes, ruling in the interests of equal application of the laws and an efficient bureaucratic administration that would serve all his subject-citizens. He retained a firm hand over the military and foreign policy, and he could hire and fire ministers at will. However, by the 1880s, as he had already been on the throne for nearly 40 years, he became less directly involved in politics. He tended to let his ministers take the initiative while he still stood at the top of the entire state, for better and for worse. Final decision power rested with him, but as he himself acknowledged when he met Teddy Roosevelt in 1910, he was stuck in his ways and something of an anachronism. Some of his ministers complained that Franz Joseph was too resistant to change, unreceptive to the most audacious ideas for solving the monarchy’s structural problems, such as through an increasing federalization. By 1900 the dynasty’s primacy in most spheres of politics had receded because of rapid changes in economic modernization, the growth of mass politics, and increasingly assertive nationalist movements. Other elements of long Habsburg practice also faded, such as the privileged place for the Catholic Church, regional elites, and provincial diets.
The emperor’s ultimate response to transformations in society and his own political role was simply to soldier on. He was defined by his sense of duty to fulfill the role of monarch and incarnate the supranational politics his monarchy aspired to. He hoped that economic advances, increased public services, and expanded suffrage might weaken the most intransigent nationalist groups. He resisted not only such intransigence but also those voices in the ruling circle who urged him to crack down more strongly on the Hungarians. For example, around 1905 he rejected plans supported by his appointed successor Franz Ferdinand for a military coup against Hungary. His nearly unbreakable routine—reading governmental reports by 5:00 a.m., taking meetings with various officials for several hours after 8:00 a.m., several times a week giving audiences in the afternoon and performing ceremonial functions—left him with an austere life. His son Rudolf wrote of his father in 1881, “He stands lonely on his peak; he talks to those who serve him of their duties, but he carefully avoids any real conversation. Accordingly he knows little of what people think and feel, their views and opinions. Only those people now in power have access to him . . .”8 Still, the old, bewhiskered emperor symbolized authority, legitimacy, and links among the peoples of eastern central Europe in a way that the vast majority of his subjects respected, despite whatever grievances they may have had about the regime.
As turbulent as were the changes in society, Franz Joseph’s domestic life was no more serene. A series of tragedies took their toll on him, until the very last one, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. An underlying misfortune to his whole family life was his unfulfilling marriage to Elisabeth, known as Sisi, a Wittelsbach who became his bride when she was 16 years old. Sisi has been romanticized into a treacly caricature. In actual fact she was an intelligent, self-absorbed, unstable woman who never reciprocated the deep love Franz Joseph offered her. His outwardly stolid demeanor broke completely in his letters to Sisi, addressing her as “my dear, only angel,” “my dear, heavenly Sisi,” and signing himself, “your little man” and “your poor little one.”9 Sisi, however, deeply resented life at court, especially the early years of their marriage when Franz Joseph’s mother Sophie exercised a domineering control. Thus Sisi came to spend much of her time traveling, whiling away her days in Madeira and Corfu. Even then she was not happy, and probably became anorexic.
She did occasionally play an important role in politics, most remarkably when she actively pushed Franz Joseph to conclude the Ausgleich in 1867. She had conceived a love of the Hungarians, advocated for their interests at court, and was rewarded with their love in return, such as at the festive ceremony that same year when she and Franz Joseph were crowned king and queen in Hungary. Because she knew she could not satisfy Franz Joseph’s emotional needs, she arranged for him to develop a relationship with a Viennese actress, Katharina Schratt. This became a platonic but very intimate liaison, with Franz Joseph writing to her frequently and confessionally, sharing his heart’s concerns, and even matters of state. It was nonetheless a terrible blow for the emperor when Sisi was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1898. He commented bitterly, “I am spared nothing in this world.”10 Katharina Schratt broke off her own holiday to come console him.
Sisi’s violent death was the third such in Franz Joseph’s family circle. In 1867 his brother Maximilian, who had become Emperor of Mexico, was executed by a firing squad. Maximilian had a difficult relationship with his older brother. After serving as governor in Lombardy, Maximilian bought into a French plan to create a Catholic monarchy in Mexico, though Franz Joseph did not approve. He lasted only three years on the throne. Once Napoleon III pulled his troops out, support for the Mexican monarchy collapsed. Maximilian was shot and his widow, the Belgian princess Charlotte, reportedly went insane. Franz Joseph learned of his brother’s death just a few days after his and Sisi’s coronation in Hungary.
A still crueler blow came 22 years later. The marriage with Sisi had produced one son, the crown prince Rudolf, who inherited much of his mother’s character. He was highly intelligent but emotionally troubled, moreso as the years went on. Though Franz Joseph had first tried to educate Rudolf as a conservative military man, that was clearly at odds with the boy’s character, and Sisi intervened to further Rudolf’s education in a more progressive mode. Rudolf came to sympathize with liberal ideas, even to an extent with the aspirations of the monarchy’s non-German nationalities. He chafed against his father’s stern traditionalism. Franz Joseph excluded him from most leadership roles, so Rudolf dabbled in journalism—writing some articles critical of the monarchy’s governance—but also devoted his energies to debauchery. He seems to have contracted gonorrhea, and evidently convinced that he would never amount to anything, in 1889 at the family estate of Mayerling he shot 17-year-old Mary Vetsera (one of his various mistresses) and then himself. The royal family tried to cover up this scandalous murder-suicide, and Franz Joseph tried to remain stoic at the shocking loss of his only son and successor. But this succession of tragedies is one reason why Franz Joseph took on the aura of such an impassive drone, working hard on behalf of the monarchy while retreating into an unfeeling aloofness.
Perhaps in keeping with the dark cloud of such tragedies, Austria- Hungary’s last decades are often seen as a textbook case of a state crippled by nationalist dissension
. Certainly the growing assertion of nationalist politics, and the mobilization of masses for those politics, posed problems. Yet these developments were neither definitive nor irremediably destructive. Though only about a quarter of the population was Germans, they made up 75 percent of the bureaucracy, and they paid some 65 percent of the direct taxes in Cisleithania, demonstrating their relative preponderance within the Habsburg state.11 The Polish elite worked to ensure its control over the Ruthenian minority in Galicia, which control the Ruthenians understandably resented. Czechs consistently argued for a restructuring of the political system that would allow them an autonomy comparable to the Hungarians’. There were also often tensions within Bohemia between Germans and Czechs; Germans tended to regard the Czechs as uncultured upstarts. Hungarian leaders pursued a policy of Magyarization to centralize control of the state and restrict the rights of the Romanian, Slovak, and South Slav minorities. Those South Slavic groups of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes occasionally squabbled and occasionally collaborated. Irredentism among the Italian and Romanian groups was also a concern.
This increasing division of the society along national lines resulted in a complicated, sometimes dysfunctional politics in the Reichsrat. In particularly contentious periods, it could seem as if nationalism was sabotaging the whole monarchy. One example is with the language ordinances proposed by the prime minister Badeni in 1897. These would have required all government officials in Bohemia to learn Czech, which caused a huge uproar among Germans. There were riots in Vienna, Graz, Prague, and other parts of Bohemia, and violence in the Reichsrat itself, which was subsequently closed down for a period. In response, Franz Joseph appointed bureaucrats rather than parliamentarians to run the government, and used Article 14, the emergency clause of the constitution, to pass decrees. After the political firestorm, the language ordinances were revoked in 1899, but then the Czechs began obstructing parliament. For much of the remainder of the reign, the Reichsrat was controlled by bureaucrats rather than elected representatives, undermining the entire parliamentary system and leading to frequent brinkmanship among the national groups. In 1906 there was a parliamentary crisis in Hungary as well, as Magyar politicians advanced revisions to the Ausgleich that Franz Joseph could not accept. The military occupied the parliament in that year and formally dissolved it. There were continuing disputes in the next several years over such matters as Hungary’s quota of annual army recruits, which further stressed the monarchy’s basic governing institutions. In 1908 the Bohemian diet was dissolved because of obstructionism again over Czech/German language rights there.
But these tensions have to be set in context alongside instances of cooperation, overarching unity, and other societal developments. For example, in Bohemia there were practices such as the Kindertausch whereby a Czech family would send its children to live with a German family, and vice versa, so that they could grow up learning each other’s languages.12 An elite, German-centric culture also served as a source of unity. The army, as well, fairly successfully fused the diverse peoples into a functioning body. Rarely were nationalists, no matter how extreme, disloyal to Franz Joseph. Very few voices were calling for the breakup of the monarchy. In many places, too, rural people remained relatively unmoved by nationalist agitation. This was at first a phenomenon of a usually small number of political entrepreneurs, even if its appeal grew by 1900 to embrace mass political parties. The increasing nationalist mass mobilization toward the end of Franz Joseph’s reign was by no means unique to Austria-Hungary. It mirrors similar developments in other European societies, including the incorporation of other previously excluded groups into politics such as peasants and industrial workers.
The positive aspects of nationalism should also not be forgotten. For much of this period, nationalism was closely linked to liberalism, and so emphasized ideas such as legal equality and the rule of law, the expansion of education, and social progress more generally. In short, though the politics of the monarchy’s national groups grew increasingly contentious, this was still a fairly free society. Parliamentary politics were reasonably democratic (albeit on a restricted franchise), the bureaucracy was for the most part efficient, the press mostly free and the judiciary independent. The Habsburg monarchy was a passably prosperous, modern, functioning constitutional regime with very little likelihood of splintering. According to the 1910 census, which included Bosnia-Herzegovina, the monarchy had a population of 51,390,000, greater than that of France. Of that total, 28,572,000 lived in Cisleithania, 20,886,000 in Hungary, and 1,932,000 in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some 45 percent of the monarchy’s total population were Slavs (see Table 11.1).
Table 11.1 Ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary
The monarchy’s foreign policy was almost as fraught as its domestic politics, and the two often intertwined. Thanks to skillful leadership by two foreign ministers, Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust and Gyula Andrássy, Austria-Hungary remained neutral in Prussia’s war with France in 1870, and then achieved a rapprochement with both Germany and Russia. Their objective was to restore the monarchy to its great power status by improving relations with France, cultivating influence in southern Germany, and acquiring territory in the Balkans. In general terms, the Austro-Germans looked toward the German Empire and wanted a strong alliance with it. The Hungarians were more worried about Russia, but saw a German alliance as an important security guarantee. The Czechs and the other Slavs tended to be much more sympathetic to Russia, in its ostensible role as protector of Slavs, and opposed to Germany. The Poles, however, were caught between their eternal rock and hard place, and so were wary of both Russia and Germany.
While Franz Joseph jealously guarded his foreign policy prerogatives, those did not go unchallenged. As in much of the Dual Monarchy’s politics, Hungary often had a disproportionate influence here, in part thanks to the astute diplomacy of Andrássy between 1871–9. But the German liberals also tried to assert parliamentary control over foreign policy after the 1878 Berlin Conference, which Franz Joseph strongly rejected. Both Andrássy and the German liberals got what they wanted in 1879 in the form of the firm alliance Austria-Hungary signed with Bismarck’s Germany. This alliance bound the Habsburgs’ state to the rising Germany, which brought with it growing conflicts with most of the other European powers. For example, France and Russia allied in 1894, and then Britain compacted with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907. All of these moves were motivated by worries about German ascendancy. Thus the web of alliances was woven that constricted Austria-Hungary into its alliance with Germany, and which would contribute to the outbreak of war in 1914.
The monarchy’s moves in the Balkans amounted to its wished-for colonial enterprise. They represented compensation for territorial losses in Italy and elsewhere, and a faltering attempt to imitate the imperialist expansion practiced by the larger European powers. Austria-Hungary faced friction in the region with Russia, which regarded the Balkans as within its sphere of interest especially because of the many Orthodox Slavs there. At the Berlin Conference, it was agreed that Austria-Hungary would occupy the formerly Turkish possession of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was in part a gambit by Germany, Britain, and France to frustrate Tsar Aleksandr II’s desire for domination of the Balkans. Bosnia-Herzegovina was so poor that occupying it brought few tangible benefits to the monarchy. Instead, it heightened tensions with Russia and eventually Serbia. The fact that Franz Joseph made this flawed calculation about the value of this addition to the monarchy suggests that his imperialistic ambitions clouded his judgment.
Domestically, German liberals as well as the Hungarian elites were wary of the venture because it added more Slavs to the population. The Hungarians, moreover, did not want the new territory to fall under the jurisdiction of Cisleithania, since that would have reduced Hungary’s overall leverage in the dualist structure. Neither did the politicians in the Austrian half want Bosnia-Herzegovina to go to Hungary. The compromise was to administer it under the Joint Finance Ministry, so that it became an anomalous third part within t
he Dual Monarchy. For a time, Austria-Hungary worked with Russia to try to define spheres of influence in the Balkans to avoid conflicts. This was reasonably successful until 1908. Serbia at first settled into a somewhat acquiescent role as a satellite of Austria-Hungary. After 1903, however, under its new Karađorđević dynasty, Serbia began pursuing a more strongly nationalistic and Russophile course. There was a trade war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia already in 1906. It originated in a dispute over a customs union between Bulgaria and Serbia, which Franz Joseph’s foreign policy advisors regarded as threatening moves toward a potential unified South Slav state. In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina outright, but without sufficient diplomatic preparation to smooth acceptance by the other powers. Franz Ferdinand and the foreign minister Lexa von Aehrenthal were intent on pursuing a more assertive foreign policy to demonstrate independence from Germany, and affirm the monarchy’s vitality as a great power. They also had the idea of creating a South Slav union within the monarchy that would counter the Magyars’ prevalence in the dualist structure.
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 37
