The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  THE HABSBURG EMPIRE 1790–1918

  C. A. MACARTNEY

  ‘What statesman inside or outside the Empire knows anything at all of the facts of Austria? It is a science in itself, nay, it is half a dozen sciences.’

  MR GRANT DUFF IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 1869

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Preface

  1 The Monarchy in 1780

  i The Dominions

  ii The Political Structure

  iii Economic and Financial Conditions

  iv The Social Structure

  v Nationality

  vi Cultural Conditions

  vii The Monarchy in the World

  2 Joseph II

  3 Leopold II

  4 Francis I (II): The Development of the System (1792–1815)

  5 The System at its Zenith (1815–30)

  6 The System on the Wane (1830–1835)

  7 The Vormärz

  8 Before the Storm

  9 1848

  10 The Decade of Absolutism

  11 Eight Years of Experiment

  12 Intermezzo

  13 The Foreign Relations of the Monarchy (1871–1903)

  14 Cis-Leithania under Dualism

  i From Auersberg to Taaffe (1871–90)

  ii From Taaffe to Koerber (1890–1903)

  15 Hungary under Dualism

  i Political Developments

  ii The Face of Hungary

  iii The Nationalities Problem

  iv Croatia

  16 Bosnia-Herzegovina 1875–1903

  17 The Last Years of Peace

  18 The End of the Monarchy

  Appendix 1: Titles

  Appendix 2: Currency, Weights and Measures

  Appendix 3: Place Names

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  MAPS

  1 The growth of the Habsburg Empire

  2 The administrative divisions of the Habsburg Empire, 1780

  3 The Empire after the Treaty of Schönbrunn

  4 Hungary in the Absolutist period

  5 Austria-Hungary after 1867

  6 Ethnic and Linguistic map of the Empire, 1910

  Maps by Arthur Banks

  Preface

  When I was a very young man, just after the First World War had ended, I spent several years in Vienna. I became keenly interested in the past of the great Monarchy among whose still-smoking ruins I had arrived, and read up everything about it that I could get hold of. I found general histories going up to the mid-nineteenth century, and for the later period, some personal reminiscences, studies of particular episodes, and also histories of different provinces and nationalities. I also found essays on the weaknesses of the Monarchy which had led to its break-up, but I looked in vain for any adequate general history of the Monarchy telling in narrative form just how and why that break-up had occurred. When I was in Vienna, only one man – Bibl – attempted the task, and I could not regard his book as definitive, or even comprehensive.

  I conceived the ambition of writing the story myself.

  In 1925 (I think) I talked to the distinguished Austrian historian, A. F. Pribram, and told him of my ambition. I still remember his answer. ‘Yes, we all start with that ambition. I did myself, but gave it up because I did not know fourteen languages.’

  I did not myself know anything like fourteen languages, and felt rebuked for my presumption. In any case, the enterprise would then have been premature, for as regards the latter part of the period in question, the flow of necessary material, primary works or secondary works on many special subjects, had hardly yet started. I put my ambition aside and waited for someone better qualified than myself to produce the book which I wanted to see.

  But I have waited for forty years. So much material has appeared during those years that an attempt to write such a book as I had in mind would no longer be absurd. But the book of my vision has not yet appeared, and the prospect of its doing so in the foreseeable future seems actually to be receding, at least so far as the old Monarchy’s own historians are concerned. Even in the old days, no Czech, Pole or Magyar even made the motions of writing a history of the Monarchy as a whole: he simply described the sufferings of his own people in the Babylonian captivity of the Habsburgs. The present-day historians of those peoples seem to be adopting the same attitude, only more so. While the Monarchy still existed, its German or Germanized historians were often still able to take a less parochial view of its problems, and such great figures as Springer still wrote Gesammtmonarchisch history. But a change came as early as 1867: Charmatz and Kolmer are already not historians of the Monarchy, but of Cis-Leithania. If we except Luschin-Ebengreuth, who writes of institutions, it is fair to say that the last important work of the type which I have in mind to appear before 1918 was Friedjung’s unfinished Austria from 1848 to 1860. Since then, Pribram and others have investigated the Monarchy’s foreign policy, Redlich and Walter have described its central institutions, and the modern German-Austrian historians have carried on their work with a brilliance and erudition with which I cannot hope to compete. But with the single exception of the venerable Kiszling (himself not an academic) they have, as soon as they have gone outside these central fields, adopted the particularist outlook of the other nationalities; what they write on domestic politics and social and economic developments relates simply to German Austria, with an occasional side-glance at Bohemia. The Hungarians are for them simply lästige Ausländer, and one could hardly gather from their books that the Monarchy had ever contained Poles, Ruthenes, Roumanians or Southern Slavs.

  But the tribal histories which the local historians of today are now producing cannot be completely satisfactory even for their own tribes, for the political, social and economic development of each people was bound up with and largely conditioned by that of the others, without some knowledge of which it does not even make sense.

  They certainly do not meet all the requirements of the non-Austrian reader, unless he is a diplomatic historian pure and simple. If his interests are wider than this, he will want to know something of what went on in all parts of the Monarchy, who its peoples were, what were the differences between them, by what means and how far they settled those differences, how far and why they failed to do so, what were the cohesive forces which enabled the Monarchy to survive until 1918, and what the forces of disruption under which it collapsed in that year. And this Lebensfrage of the Monarchy apart, something of how its peoples lived.

  A man who by virtue of his birth and education stands at a distance from the countries which once composed the old Monarchy finds it perhaps easier than do their natives to take a wide-angled view of the subject, but it is, of course, far more difficult for him to acquire the necessary factual knowledge (which will certainly not have been imparted to him at school) and the no less essential psychological understanding. Thus very few non-Austrians have even attempted any major work on the problem, and of these, only Professor A. J. May, in his Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914, and his Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy has thrown his net wide enough, and dredged deep enough, to meet the needs of those who seek for more than interpretations; and May’s work, which is truly admirable as far as it goes, covers only a fraction of the period.

  So a gap is, in my opinion, still there, and I have, after all, set myself, not to fill it, but to put something into it. No one knows better than myself, how inadequately. I still do not know fourteen languages, and the flood of recent publications has been so copious, especially in the Iron Curtain countries, which have been rewriting their histories on principle, that the proportion of works which I have read to those which I ought t
o have read is probably lower today than it was forty years ago. But man cannot wait for ever, either on his own perfection, or on others, so I have decided to face the world with my effort, imperfect as I know it to be.

  This, then, is a history of the Monarchy, the Monarchy as a whole, and the whole Monarchy during what I regard, for the reasons which I give in my introduction, as the second great phase of its history, 1790–1918. It is primarily a history of domestic developments. These were, of course, constantly and strongly affected by the state and development of the Monarchy’s international relations, but in dealing with these I have, out of considerations both of space and of my own lack of learning, omitted all details of diplomatic negotiations and military campaigns, confining myself to recording shortly the principal events and pointing out their influence on internal developments. The details omitted by me can in any case easily be found in many readily accessible works by specialist historians.

  With more regret, but out of the same considerations, I have left out, except for the barest mention, all Kulturgeschichte proper, as distinct from literary, etc., activities which had their importance for the development of national movements. These sacrifices have left me more space, although still less than I should have wished, for the inner political, social, economic and national developments which I have taken as my main theme.

  My introductory chapters are designed to show the origin and nature of the problems with the development of which my narrative history is concerned. I have tried to include in them all those facts, and no others, which are relevant to the narrative. Should this book ever fall into the hands of a native of the Monarchy, he will probably complain that much of this is elementary stuff, but my experience as a teacher of many generations of inquiring undergraduate minds has convinced me that most non-Austrians need something like this if the story with which they are then presented is to have any meaning to them at all.

  Innumerable kind friends have helped me in various ways. It would be impossible for me to list them all, and I trust that those whom I do not now name will not think me ungrateful if I confine myself to expressing my especial gratitude to a few whom I have exploited with particular ruthlessness: Professor Hantsch, Director of the Historical Institute in Vienna, and his staff, especially Dr W. Bihl; Professor Hoffmann, of the Institute for Economic and Social History of the same University; Professors G. Otruba and Walter Knarr, also of Vienna, and Professor Fellner, now of Salzburg; the Director and staff of the Austrian Institute in London, and particularly its ever-helpful librarian, Frl. Erika Strobl; Dr L. Péter, now of the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a walking encyclopaedia of Hungary; Professor Skwarczynski, of the same School, for help regarding Poland. Last, but very far from least, the miraculous Mrs Pitt, the only person in the world who can read my handwriting and does not mind doing so, and no mere transcriber at that: a hawk-eyed detector to boot of mistakes in spelling and grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, omissions and non-sequiturs.

  Where any place has a name in common English usage, e.g., Vienna, Prague, Milan, I have used that form in writing of it. Otherwise I have used the name most likely to be familiar to the reader, i.e., the German form for places in the Western half of the Monarchy, the Hungarian form for the Eastern, except Croatia, where I have used the Croat form out of deference to the Nagodba. I give, however, at the end of the book a table showing the other names then or now current for the places which figure in my text. Exceptionally, I have referred to Treaties in the form in which they are familiar to readers of history books: the Peaces of Passarowitz, Carlowitz, Pressburg. For proper names, I have used the forms normally used by the bearers of them (except that I have not pandered to the Magyar habit of putting the surname first) except where a person is so familiar to English readers to have acquired a current English version of his name. This is certainly the case with the Monarchs with whom this book deals: Maria Theresa, Francis, Francis Joseph, Charles. I do not know why, but the Archdukes Charles, John and Francis Ferdinand seem to me to go better in English, and the rest in German. There would be a case for Anglicizing some more, such as Albert for Albrecht, but no one ever talks about Charles Louis, and one must draw a line somewhere.

  I apologize for the inaccurate title of this book. I have adopted it, well aware that it is inexact and offensive to the susceptibilities of many former subjects of the Monarchy, in order to avoid confusion with other books.

  1

  The Monarchy in 1780

  The history of the Austrian Monarchy falls into two phases. The earlier, and longer, is, from the point of view of the dynasties which styled and thought of themselves primarily as rulers of ‘Austria’, one of continued upward progress. The territories under their direct rule expand from a small, insecurely held marchland of forest and mountain to a vast agglomeration covering a large part of Central Europe, with outliers further afield; another area almost as great admits their titular supremacy. Their own title grows in dignity from Margrave, liege of the Duke of Bavaria, to Duke, Archduke, many times King, Emperor. This expansion outward goes hand in hand with an inner consolidation and an increase of their domestic power until it approaches the substance, if not everywhere the form, of absolute rule.

  Then the tide turns. New rivals appear in Europe. The territorial advance gives way to a retreat in which one outpost after another is lost. At the same time, the forces of absolutism and centralism are driven back on the defensive, then into retreat, by the new forces of nationalism and democracy, until at last the peoples of the Monarchy, allied with its foreign enemies, repudiate not only the character of the Monarch’s rule, but the rule itself. The end has come.

  Obviously, neither the advance nor the retreat is quite unbroken. The earlier phase witnesses territorial setbacks enough, some of them enormous in scale, and a hard-pressed or personally feeble ruler sometimes exercises less effective authority than his luckier or more resolute predecessor. The latter period sees reassertions of the central power, and territorial additions – some of these achieved only a few years before the final dissolution. But it is unquestionably correct to speak of an advancing and a retreating tide, and it is not even over-straining the historian’s licence to name a day as that on which the tide turned in Central Europe:1 28 January, 1790. On that day Joseph II, who had pushed absolutism and centralization further than any of his predecessors, admitted defeat at the hands of the Hungarian Estates and signed a Rescript revoking the bulk of the measures which he had imposed on Hungary since his mother’s death. In this historic document Joseph admitted that the advance of centralism and absolutism had been pushed beyond the line which it could hold, and with that admission the retreat, in fact, began.

  The subject of this study is the history of the retreat; its narrative proper opens only with the year 1790. But the forces involved are so complex and so special to the Monarchy that the author has thought it well to prefix his narrative with a comparatively detailed description of the condition of the Monarchy before the retreat began. And it has seemed to him better not to take the conditions of January, 1790, for the situation in that year was a highly abnormal one: it was the climax of ten years of revolution (although revolution from above), and the practical problem which confronted Leopold II was what to keep and what rescind of the changes introduced in those ten years. Our picture will therefore be one of the Monarchy as Joseph found it when he succeeded to the sole rule on his mother’s death in 1780. We shall follow this with a summary of Joseph’s own reign, but only a very brief one, before turning to our narrative proper.

  I THE DOMINIONS

  The possessions bequeathed by Maria Theresa to her son were the following:

  The so-called Hereditary Lands (Erbländer), consisting of the Archduchy of Austria, Below and Above the Enns; the Duchy of Styria; the Duchy of Carinthia; the Princely County of Tirol; the Duchy of Carniola, the Counties of Istria,2 Vorarlberg and Gorizia-Gradisca and the City of Trieste.

  The Lands of the Bohemian Crow
n, consisting in 1780 of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Margravate of Moravia and the Duchy of Silesia (this only a fragment of the much larger Duchy inherited by the family in 1526).

  The Lands of the Hungarian Crown, now divided into the Kingdom of Hungary, the Kingdom of Croatia, the Grand Principality of Transylvania, the Military Frontier and the corpus separatum of Fiume.

  A number of smaller fiefs in Germany, collectively known as the Vorlande.

  The United Austrian Netherlands.

  The Duchies of Milan and Mantua.

  Galicia and certain other areas formerly belonging to the Kingdom of Poland.

  The (later Duchy of) Bukovina.

  The Austrian Crown also exercised far-reaching rights over the episcopal sees of Brixen and Trent, which were, however, technically ‘immediate’. The other enclave in the Hereditary Lands, the archiepiscopal see of Salzburg, was more genuinely independent.

  These territories had come under Habsburg rule at dates extending over more than five hundred years, and as the result of very various transactions.

  The kernel’s kernel of the Habsburg Hausmacht, as Austrian historians usually take it (and Francis I agreed with them when in 1804 he assumed the title of ‘Emperor of Austria’) was the Land of ‘Austria’, the Eastern March, founded in the tenth century (on the ruins of an earlier formation which had been unable to maintain itself) as a Margravate of Bavaria, on the eastern outliers of the Alps, to defend the Danubian frontier of the German Reich and of Christianity against the pagan Magyars. The capable dynasty first entrusted with this task, the Babenbergers, extended its frontiers eastward to the Leitha, northward to what then became the permanent frontier with Bohemia, and westward halfway to Salzburg (this westward extension becoming the quasi-separate Land of Austria Above the Enns3), in 1156 compassed the promotion of its status to that of an ‘immediate’ Duchy (the document confirming this promotion, the so-called Privilegium Minus, is a major landmark in Austrian history), and in 1192 secured the reversion, for the Duke of the day and his heirs, of the sister Duchy of Styria, its neighbour on the south and of similar origin. The male line of the Babenbergers died out in 1246, and their heritage then passed to Ottakar, Crown Prince and later King of Bohemia, who, however, in 1278 perished in battle against Rudolph, Count of Habsburg, and of certain other territories in Central Southern Germany, who had been elected German King five years earlier precisely because his Hausmacht was not dangerously large. In 1282 Rudolph enfeoffed his two sons, Albrecht I and Rudolph II, with the Babenberg heritage, as an escheated fief of the Reich. Rudolph (whose line in any case soon died out)4 was forced to renounce his fief, but Albrecht’s heirs showed a remarkable skill, which was also rewarded by singular good fortune, in augmenting their possessions, chiefly through inter-family compacts under which the survivor in the male line inherited the possessions of both contracting parties. By such or similar compacts they acquired a number of further Reich-fiefs, of similar origin to Austria and Styria: Carinthia and Carniola (then in the same hand) in 1335, the County of Tirol in 1363, the County of Istria in 1374, the districts afterwards consolidated under the name of Vorarlberg from 1375 onward, Gorizia in 1500. Trieste had submitted itself voluntarily in 1382, to escape annexation by Venice, from which a few further districts of Friule were conquered in 1511.