The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Dynastic strategies

  In its last decades of rule, the dynasty experienced multiple failures of reproduction in the form of succession crises. Ferdinand never produced a legitimate heir, so Franz Joseph’s accession had to be arranged since he was the emperor’s oldest nephew. Franz Joseph then had his own reproduction problems, given that his marriage to Sisi produced only one son, which led to succession problems after Rudolf’s suicide. Casting about to find a suitable heir led to the choice of Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination obviously resulted in another succession failure. When the mantle finally settled on Karl’s shoulders, the dynasty ended up with a monarch who was unprepared to rule, and who moreover was saddled with nearly impossible conditions in which to rule. Beyond the succession issues, there was a different kind of reproduction problem that afflicted the dynasty in these years. This was the reproduction of a ruling style and ideology, of maintaining the Habsburgs’ ancient (and archaic) vocation of rule and conviction that they were chosen to do so. Adam Wandruszka suggests that several of the family members’ morganatic marriages (including Franz Ferdinand’s and Archduke Johann Salvator’s) as well as Rudolf’s suicide can be read as the Habsburgs shying away from the duties and traditions of the dynastic calling.16 Johann Salvator renounced his title and his heritage in 1889, jettisoning the Habsburg name to call himself instead Johann Orth. Franz Joseph’s determinedly pedestrian inner life, as well as his obvious longing for simple domesticity as in his relationship with Katharina Schratt, also suggest that his dutiful demeanor as majesty was a role he played with no great relish. Against these problems must also be mentioned the deep ranks of the family, most of whom did embrace the privileges of nobility. There were five main branches of the family by the late 1800s, all of whom stemmed from Leopold II. There was the ruling line, a Tuscan line, and a Hungarian line, to name but three; several such branches persist today.

  At the outset of Franz Joseph’s rule, the dynasty went through many familiar motions of legitimation and loyalty strategies. There was an initial flourishing of courtly life, after the Biedermeier boredom of Franz I and the fallowness of Ferdinand, while Franz Joseph was still young and confident in his eager absolutism. One notable celebration from the middle of the reign was that for Franz Joseph’s and Sisi’s 25th wedding anniversary in 1879; it can be read as an attempt to configure dynastic legitimacy through longevity. The commemoration included a lavish pageant that paraded through Vienna representing great moments of Habsburg history. Individual family members dressed up as great Habsburgs from the past, so Rudolf donned costumes as Rudolf I and Charles V, for example. Rudolf was also entrusted with an interesting project to help construct a cohesive cultural whole out of the monarchy’s multi-national patchwork. This was the Kronprinzenwerk (properly titled The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image), a 24-volume encyclopedia recounting the historical, cultural, geographical, and natural attributes of the various lands and peoples of the monarchy.

  The claims to legitimacy and loyalty were impacted by many of the same changes that buffeted Franz Joseph as man and monarch. By the end of his reign the proud courtly style was almost entirely gone. The aged emperor, sorrowed by his numerous family tragedies, did not go in for spectacle, and so the commemoration in 1908 of 60 years on the throne was more somber. In any case, ostentatious royal celebration as a reminder of an older sociopolitical order was inherently anachronistic by this time. The decline of monarchical display is linked to the broader decline of the aristocratic society, which by the latter decades of the reign was no longer culturally nor politically dominant, even if many nobles retained significant economic clout. The nobility lost control of the regional diets as their personal preserve of political power, and the petty nobility saw the richer members of the bourgeoisie snapping up their old estates. Similarly, while Catholicism remained a basic ideological plank of the regime, and much of the population remained devoutly Catholic, the political relevance of the Church declined. The monarchy’s liberals in particular were solidly anticlerical, and worked to whittle away the Church’s influence in education and other fields. By 1900, legitimacy and loyalty could no longer be predicated on the small aristocratic slice of the population, nor on the supposedly divine and glorious origins of the ruling house. Franz Joseph correctly saw that his constituency was no longer the older Habsburg pillars of the aristocracy and the Church. He understood that he was responsible to, had to represent and ensure that the government represented, the interests of a much wider segment of the population.

  The movements for German and Italian unification naturally served as competitors to the legitimacy of the Habsburg state and the loyalty of its subjects. After the loss at Königgrätz, the Habsburgs could not look to one of their traditional sources of legitimacy, predominance in Germany. Instead, the dynasty had to recalibrate to a new basis of legitimation. This became a more explicitly supranational one, to protect and serve the smaller peoples of eastern central Europe. The equitable treatment of the various peoples was one of the dynasty’s duties—although some (the Germans and the Hungarians) were clearly more equal than others. Likewise, creating a well-functioning state that served its peoples and abided by the laws was another lasting source of legitimacy. Franz Joseph himself came to believe that this was the dynasty’s divine mission. Whatever outdated notions he carried in his head, Franz Joseph did recognize two developments that forced him to alter not only his dynasty’s legitimacy and loyalty claims, but also his own image and function. First, as the state became impartial and impersonal, it presided over a legally undifferentiated population that in theory enjoyed the same rights. Peasants, workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, industrialists, aristocrats—he had to represent them all. Second, as nationalist politics mobilized ever larger numbers, he had to stand above those divisions too. He learned to symbolize and serve all his subject-citizens. Until the war years these goals were often successful, and Franz Joseph was widely respected as a kind of benevolent (grand)father above the many social and political divisions.

  Still, those widening cleavages of class and nation necessarily complicated loyalty to the dynasty. Such cleavages were only exacerbated by the rise of mass politics. Old theses of dynastic sovereignty fell gracelessly on the ears of socialists or proletarian activists. Moreover, the justification for the Habsburg multi-national state was problematic to the Germans, Italians, Romanians, and eventually Serbs who could look outside its borders at consolidating national states in Germany, Italy, and so on. Hungarians’ insistence on national autonomy had of course long bedeviled the dynasty. For Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, and others, the problem became how the Habsburg state thwarted their aspirations to increased self-governance. The dynasty’s attempts to overcome these growing cleavages were only ever partial. The belated ideology of constitutionalism and supranational citizenship, of loyalty to the “imperial” Cisleithania and “royal” Hungary, was represented by the slogan Viribus unitis, “With united forces,” which was Franz Joseph’s personal motto. Not surprisingly, this idea of supranational patriotism for the imperial and royal Austria-Hungary found it hard to compete with Czechs’ or Italians’ patriotism for a sovereign Czech or Italian state.

  The emperor knew that his envisioned mission made the dynasty and its state anomalous in the contemporary context of large European nation-states. But his acknowledgment to Teddy Roosevelt that he was a throwback displayed admirable self-awareness. He did embody many monarchical traditions archaic in the context of the twentieth century. But he never became obsolete, since over the course of his reign he adapted. One aspect of traditional monarchy that he retained was his insistence that the government truly served him and not the state. This attitude is clearest in his treatment of his ministers as personally responsible to him, and not to parliament (or thereby to “the people”). Likewise, Franz Joseph insisted that he was ultimately responsible for policies, not his ministers. He could be ruthless in dismissing ministers for whom he no longer had any use. One example
was his finance minister Beck, who became tainted by an embezzlement scandal. Franz Joseph summarily sacked him, after which Beck cut his own throat. Franz Joseph’s paramount political authority, accountable in the last instance to no one but God, can also be seen through the constitutional clause reserving emergency powers to the monarch. However, when he used the emergency clause, in his mind it was to reboot the political system after narrow, self-serving party interests crashed it. This “reboot” would then restore the system’s adequate functioning in the broader interests of all. One of his most old-fashioned characteristics was his preference for a chivalrous culture of the officer corps, who almost like modern knights were bound by loyalty to their emperor-king. Franz Joseph regarded the army as identical with the monarchy, and represented this connection visually by nearly always appearing in uniform when he was in public. Though many state institutions had become impersonal, almost separate from the dynasty, the military had not.

  Franz Joseph was not completely traditional in that he participated far less in the Habsburgs’ old practices of cultural sponsorship. As a sober, unimaginative military man, he was not especially passionate about art, and the great cultural flowering of his reign came about with relatively little involvement from the dynasty. Another untraditional aspect is that he learned to operate in the constitutional system, and did so fairly effectively given that it was so foreign to his political ideals as a younger man. He even came to support the idea of universal suffrage. His motivations were a comprehensible mixture of benevolence—since he felt that universal suffrage would help incorporate the masses into the state—and calculation, as with his hope that universal suffrage might undermine some of the nationalists’ strength. The transition to a constitutional monarchy meant that Franz Joseph exercised power in the first instance because of his function in the governance system, and less because of his traditional dynastic right. That function was fundamentally to be the neutral, impartial overseer of the government’s operation. As such, the monarch’s powers became more tightly, legally circumscribed, apart from in military and foreign policy matters. It is true that by its nature, the monarchical system presumed Franz Joseph entitled to his function based on dynastic right. And thanks to those dynastic claims the monarchy still rested on an undemocratic basis, since the Habsburgs were obviously not chosen by a mass plebiscite.

  That undemocratic basis the dynasty finessed by holding to the Josephinist inheritance. Franz Joseph believed that his authority was justified by ruling for the benefit of his subjects, that he owed them a prosperous, orderly society, and that they in return owed him obedience. Even more than in the eighteenth century, though the monarch was still conceived as the top of the hierarchy, he was supposed to rule not in the interests of his family or his class but in the interests of all his subjects. As constitutional monarch, Franz Joseph performed his symbolic functions well. His scrupulous observance of protocol, of respect for his duties and those of his underlings, for the legal structure of those relationships, shows how he learned to unite the function with the image of the constitutional monarch. Though his own personal inclinations were often simple and frugal, he knew how to play the role of emperor-king, and so earned the admiration of virtually all his peoples. As the Hungarian Admiral Miklós Horthy remarked, “I never knew another monarch who was the personification of majesty in the way that he was.”17

  By 1900, the Habsburg state had come to serve its subject-citizens perhaps better than it served the dynasty. Though the bureaucracy could be slow, it was generally efficient, impartial, and honest. It compared favorably with the bureaucratic machinery of regimes further west, and was far superior to those further south and east. The state’s public benefits were notable, including housing, workers’ protection, industrial mediation, and social insurance. The civil service was a common means of incorporating educated people almost regardless of nationality into the state. It was thus one of the more effective centralizing organs of the entire monarchy. By employing not just Germans but members of most national groups, it was at least somewhat representative of the monarchy’s cultural and linguistic diversity. And while the bureaucratic structure inevitably broke down under the pressures of the world war, in many regards it actually survived the collapse of the dynasty, forming the backbone of the administrations of the successor states. In this sense the Habsburg bureaucracy has to be seen as one of the dynasty’s most enduring achievements. Nonetheless, in the end this respectable provision of public services could not overcome the dynasty’s broader problems of legitimacy and loyalty.

  Where Habsburg administration proved most rickety and inefficient, to the dynasty’s ultimate detriment, was with the state’s continuing inability to raise sufficient tax revenues to support its defense needs. The monarchy in these last decades—as often throughout the previous centuries—could not generate the resources to field an army that could adequately protect its vulnerable geographic position. In Franz Joseph’s time the culprit for this deficiency was not only the fragmenting force of regional and national privileges that underlie the monarchy, but also the Reichsrat’s cutting the military budget. Hence the military remained technologically backward as well as tactically outmoded in key conflicts. In 1849, with difficulty, it restored the dynastic order, and it could be used against any internal group that would threaten that order. But it proved inadequate in 1859 and 1866. It did manage to fight right up to the end of October 1918 as the rest of the state structure was crumbling. So even if the Habsburg military won very few major battles in World War One without German help, at the same time it was never decisively defeated, and it remained intact until the very end. More importantly, perhaps, the military acted as the most integrative agent of the monarchy’s patchwork of peoples. It was overwhelmingly Germanic in character: German was the language of command, and some 80 percent of the officers were Germans in 1906.18 Yet there were highly ranked Hungarian, Czech, Polish, and South Slav commanders too. Whatever its battlefield achievements, through its highly centralized, cross-class, multinational integration, the military was a vision of what the rest of the monarchy never became.

  Franz Joseph’s reign, and the stub of Karl’s, confronted the Habsburg dynasty with more momentous and comprehensive changes than ever in its previous history. The dynasty’s response to these challenges presents a mixed record. The failures are all too obvious. Habsburg monarchs still depended on old ideas of legitimacy that were deeply anachronistic for societies in processes of economic modernization, democratization, and nationalization. The governing structures the dynasty put in place never adequately accommodated these processes. Even though parliamentarism was well-developed—more so in Cisleithania than in Hungary—it was compromised by the defining political arrangement of dualism. The 1867 “compromise” with Hungary was a short-term calculation by Franz Joseph that brought enormous longer-term difficulties, above all in that it simply could not adapt to give national groups besides the Germans and the Hungarians a proportionate voice in governance. The dynasty could not reconcile its traditional, firmly held insistence on paramount power with a fully federal polity. The dynasty also never managed to create an alternative structure to personal union for its diverse territories. Those territories, and their many splintered, nationally coalescing communities therefore lacked both sufficient connection to each other, and a sufficient reason to preserve dynastic rule after enduring the disasters of World War One, a war that was itself triggered in part by dynastic rule. The decision to go to war was a result of the lack of separation between raison de dynastie and raison d’état. The Habsburgs’ own reputation required vengeance for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, even if that was not necessarily in the best interests of the polity and peoples they ruled. Franz Joseph gambled in 1914—as he had several times earlier in his reign, surprisingly for his conservative character—and as so often before, his luck was lousy.

  On the other hand, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs also failed the tests of societal change and world
war. Many other European dynasties, including such old Habsburg rivals as the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Bourbons in France, were no longer in power by the time 1919 came either. In that sense Habsburg failure is not unique. Additionally, during Franz Joseph’s time there were any number of positive developments in his monarchy. Besides the adaptation to constitutional and parliamentary politics, social progress was impressive. Economic growth, education, hospitals, running water, sanitation, railways, the public sphere, artistic culture, women’s rights, and the middle class all made great strides. There were even some integrative forces within culture and politics. Besides the army and the bureaucracy, there was the prestige of German artistic and scientific culture, relatively free movement across borders that brought people from the far corners of the monarchy to Vienna and Budapest, and a reasonably unified economic space stretching from the Adriatic to the Carpathian Mountains. Franz Joseph himself cannot take credit for all these improvements. But his dynasty’s rule—as backward-looking, resistant to change, and complacent as it was—nonetheless provided the stable social and political environment that made those developments possible. Habsburg rule came to an end in 1918 not because of the impossibility of adapting to the future, but because the war concentrated a disastrous storm of factors that simply ran out the dynasty’s clock.

  Conclusion

  The Habsburg monarchy did not have to die. It also could not have continued to live as it had been. Though it was not a failed state in 1914, doomed at the outset of the war, it did have grave problems. The responsibility for many of those problems falls to the dynasty itself, and so it must be judged that the dynasty played a major (though not the exclusive) part in the monarchy’s final dissolution. There were serious mistakes in leadership, from Franz Joseph and Karl on down, through the generals and prime ministers. Franz Joseph’s decision to go to war partly to preserve dynastic honor was, given the political circumstances in 1914, miscalculated in the extreme. Karl’s attempts to secure peace, while wise in theory, were clumsy in practice. The generals were too often wedded to outdated strategies and tactics, the prime ministers to policies that unjustifiably excluded certain groups and parties from adequate influence. The mistakes were thus both structural and individual: the flaws in the dynastic polity itself shaped the decisions its leaders made.