The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Perhaps one-third of the total area of the Monarchy was parcelled out among the few hundred great families of which this class was composed. In Bohemia, which was their stronghold, there were in 1792 only just over 950 manors, of an average size of 9,300 yokes (13,100 acres) each. Many of these were in the hands of one person. There were fifty-one princely families, whose property was valued at 465 million gulden, seventy-nine counts, worth between them 119 millions, and forty-four barons, worth 10·1 millions. In Hungary fifty-eight per cent of the cultivated land in Transdanubia, forty-one per cent of that in North Hungary, thirty-four per cent of the Great Plain consisted of latifundia. Some of the individual estates were enormous. The Prince of Liechtenstein held the Duchies of Troppau and Jägerndorf in Silesia, as well as great estates in Lower Austria, Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia – in that Land alone, forty-two square Austrian leagues – over 450 square miles – not to mention Liechtenstein itself. He, and some others, were feudal princes in their own right, entitled to mint coinage, to confer common nobility and to exercise other prerogatives of near-sovereignty. The Prince Esterházy owned something like ten million acres of Hungary, with over one hundred villages, forty towns or markets and thirty castles or palaces. His annual income was put at over 700,000 florins. That of Count Batthyány was estimated at 450,000 florins. Two other Hungarian magnates topped the 300,000 mark. The great Bohemian magnates, the Lobkowitz, Schwarzenbergs, Windischgrätz, etc., were probably richer still.

  A great preservative of the wealth of these families was the institution of the fidei commis, introduced into Austria in the seventeenth century, but not used extensively before the eighteenth century. This was a form of entail, usually, although not necessarily, in primogeniture.104 It could be instituted only with the Monarch’s permission, which was given only in the case of the largest estates. The effects of this institution were very important. Vast estates had existed in almost all parts of the Monarchy at earlier periods in their history, but they had hardly ever been very long-lived; one writer has calculated that up to the seventeenth century, the Hungarian latifundia had changed hands, on an average, every fifty years.105 The glory of the families owning them had been equally transitory, especially before the introduction (which came only in the sixteenth century) of hereditary titles. It was the fidei commissa that created the great families whose names are bound up with the history of Austria from generation to generation.

  The political function of the high aristocracy was to act as the Monarch’s lieutenants in the government of his dominions. Their members constituted the second ‘Bench’ of the Estates of the Austrian and Bohemian Lands; in Hungary they, with the Lords Spiritual and chief dignitaries of the realm, formed the ‘Table’ of Magnates. The highest administrative offices, central and local, such as the Presidencies of the Hofstellen and the Gubernia, were reserved for them by law. In other services such absolute rules did not exist, but the practice was not very different; thus the highest commands in the Army were – greatly to the detriment of its efficiency – stocked almost entirely with members of the highest families, and the position in the Church was not very different.106

  The Hochadel thus formed, under the Crown, a hereditary ruling class in the Monarchy. How far the magnates were actually more powerful than the Monarch himself, and how far they used their power in their own interests, rather than his, are questions on which much argument took place, at various times. The distinguished Austrian historian, Professor Josef Redlich, paints a very glowing picture of the relationship. According to him, the great nobles had developed by the end of the eighteenth century into a sort of ‘pan-Austrian’ class, with no ‘national’ attachment except that which expressed itself in complete subservience to the Monarch, absolutely devoted to him and possessed of ‘a practical appreciation of the value of the firm and unitary association of all Lands’ and of ‘a very clear and fruitful conception of the “statehood” of the entirety of the Habsburgs’ hereditary dominions.’

  This is certainly going too far. It is probably true of the innermost ring of all, those in the immediate service of the Monarch and in daily contact with him, but of those who were chiefly based in their own Lands, the very fact that those bases were so broad, their interests deriving from them so large, tempered very noticeably their ‘appreciation of the firm and unitary association of the Lands’, at least if that ‘association’ was to express itself in the autocratic-bureaucratic government to which it naturally led. Monarchs who over-bent the bow in this direction found the great aristocrats opposing a very vigorous resistance to them.

  But Redlich’s picture, exaggerated and over-generalized as it is, is by no means imaginary. Except for the disastrous year of 1742, Maria Theresa had found no reason to complain of disloyalty among her Austrian and Bohemian aristocrats, and little even of lack of subservience. Confident of her favour, they were fulfilling their side of the bargain honestly enough, and especially since the abolition of a distinct Bohemian nobility in 1752, they had grown very largely into a homogeneous class, ‘pan-Austrian’ within these Austro-Bohemian limits, and largely denationalized in any other sense, even the linguistic: not only Czech but even German was less fashionable among them than French or Italian. These were the fruits of seed which had been sown a hundred years before; in Hungary the growth was less advanced, for it was only Maria Theresa herself who had seriously undertaken the assimilation of the Hungarian magnates to pan-Austrianism. But she had been very remarkably successful, and already a substantial proportion of the Hungarian magnates were almost completely denationalized in the personal sense. They had forgotten their Magyar (or the younger generation had not learned it), taken to regarding Vienna as their spiritual home, learned to look down on the ‘native savages’ of their own country as loftily as any Anglicized Irishman on his bog-trotting cousins, and begun to intermarry with Bohemian or German families. Politically, where not actual centralists (for the special advantages attaching to Hungarian nobility were not lightly to be sacrificed) they were at any rate staunch upholders of the Gesammtmonarchie and often extremely hostile to any Hungarian particularism.

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  Constitutionally, the middle nobility – the Ritterschaft of the German Lands, the Ryttersgwo of Bohemia-Moravia, the nobiles bene possessionati of Hungary – stood one step below the Hochadel: their political forum was the third Bench of their Estates, or in Hungary, the Lower Table (in all these, however, they were represented only by delegates elected out of their own number), their field of service, the secondary offices.

  But the step was a long one.

  It was the middle nobles, rather than the bourgeoisie or the lower orders, against whom the Habsburgs’ league with the magnates had chiefly been forged, and since the consummation of that alliance, their position had deteriorated steadily in every respect. Even their numbers were in decline in the West of the Monarchy: in all Bohemia there were only fifty-one families of knights. They were numerous only in Galicia and in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown, where the families reckoned as belonging to this class (for which no technical definition existed) may have numbered some 20–25,000. Their wealth, too, was modest. The total property of the fifty-one Bohemian knights was valued at only 7·5 million florins. A Hungarian noble ranking as bene possessionatus usually owned 750–1,000 hold, and this, given the low return yielded by land, hardly did more than enable him to live comfortably on his own acres and visit or entertain his neighbours. An Austrian squire probably made even less out of his acres.

  The restricted life of the middle nobles imposed on them a more provincial, or parochial, outlook than the magnates, but also brought them into closer touch with their own peoples. They were thus far less denationalized, and in so far as any national feeling at all existed in the eighteenth century among any of the Habsburgs’ peoples,107 it was in this class, rather than in the cosmopolitan magnates or the passive peasantry, that it was to be found. But their positive political importance, as a class, was small. Only in Hungary did they s
till represent an appreciable political force, for here the Lower ‘Table’ of the Diet had maintained its parity of status with the Upper;108 the same principle of parity existed in all the main governmental offices (although this did not extend to the Presidencies of them); and most important of all, the middle nobles had succeeded in keeping in their own hands the machinery, and with it, a large part of the control, of the Counties, which, as we have said elsewhere, had been able to preserve a large measure of independence.

  Even here, however, that independence had grown somewhat fictional in the eighteenth century: the Counties largely obeyed the dictate of the local magnate or of the Court Chancellery. In Galicia, where the equality of all nobles was, on paper, even more complete than in Hungary,109 the de facto supremacy of the higher nobility was still greater, and in German Austria the middle nobility as a class played no political role whatever. Increasingly, its members were leasing their estates and moving into Vienna to take service under the Crown. As the successful Briefadel, for their part, had usually no more ardent ambition that to buy a country estate, the two classes of nobility were here becoming fused beyond distinction. The product played, indeed, a very important part in the public services, and although the plums and distinctions did not fall to them, it was probably on their shoulders that the Monarchy was really carried.

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  Every Land contained also its quota of small nobles. In the Vorlande there were ‘manors’, ownership of which entitled their holders to rank as landsässiger Adel, which consisted of a single house, or even half a house, and similar freaks were not uncommon in the Littoral, and even elsewhere.110 Vienna and other Western ‘towns’ contained impoverished nobles in plenty, eking out miserable existences on pittances from Court sinecures, or surreptitiously, in employment from which their rank should have barred them. But the real haunts of the small nobles were Hungary and Galicia. In the former they constituted about 35–40,000 of the total of 65,000 noble families; in Galicia, there were about 30,000 families of them.111 Even they, again, were no homogeneous class: there were some who were comfortable yeoman farmers; some who tilled no more than a single peasant holding;112 others who were entirely landless, and whose ‘liberty’ was only quoad personam. In Hungary, not all of the ‘sandalled’ or ‘seven-plumtree’ nobles even enjoyed to the full the most treasured of all the Hungarian noble’s privileges of exemption from all forms of taxation: there were categories of them who had to pay their quota towards the fundus domesticus.

  Their political privileges were more apparent than real. Any Hungarian noble, if he possessed any land at all, in theory enjoyed the franchise, both active and passive, for the County Congregatio, and was entitled to attend and speak at its business meetings. In practice, the passive franchise was confined to those whom public opinion recognized as bene possessionati, and while there were no fixed rules of procedure for the Congregationes, nor, for that matter, for the Diet, a generally accepted usage laid down that votes were ‘weighed, not numbered’: i.e., the President of a meeting announced its decision on any point in accordance with what the debate had shown to be the opinion of its ‘senior pars.’. A small noble’s opinion thus hardly counted, even if he had been allowed to express it. As a political factor, the ‘sandalled’ nobles came into their own only at the triennial electoral meetings, which ensured them a week’s feasting at the expense of one or both candidates.113 The highest social grade among the non-nobles was that of the ‘burghers’, a burgher being a man entitled to practice a burgerlich trade in a town, to own real property in it, to exercise the active and enjoy the passive franchise for its council, share in its administration and grant or reject applications by others for the same status.114

  The burgher’s was a status which in some respects was not unenviable. Even where a town was not a Royal Free Borough, its obligatons towards its lord were usually light, and it enjoyed a good deal of self-government. In a Royal Free Borough this was almost complete. The City Fathers in such communities had their own dignities and ceremonies, to which were added those of the guilds and merchant corporations, with which citizenship of a town was usually closely connected, most master craftsmen and licensed tradesmen in a town (when not Jewish) being burghers of it, while conversely, the ranks of the burghers were mainly composed of these elements.

  They had, also, their own rights and privileges, including that of being tried by their own Courts.

  Its burghers, however, constituted only a very small proportion of the population of the Monarchy. The total urban population was small enough, and full burgher rights were enjoyed by only a small fraction even of this. In 1780 there were only 80,000 full burghers in all industrialized Bohemia, 4,450 in Styria, 2,013 in Carinthia. Hungary contained only fourteen towns with more than one thousand burghers. Highest came Debrecen, with 3,919 civites, a status enjoyed in virtue of ancient privileges. The proportion of the burghers to the total population of a town ranged from one in three in Sopron to one in ten, or in some cases, one in twenty or even thirty. The majorities were composed of domestic servants, apprentices, and humbly situated or casual workers.

  With these small numbers, the burghers clearly could not constitute an important social, political or economic factor in the life of the Monarchy. We have seen how meagre was the representation even of the Royal Free Boroughs on the Estates, and even where allowed to attend those bodies, they were made to feel their inferiority. In Lower Austria, the most urbanised Land of the Monarchy, outside Bohemia, the burghers’ representatives were allowed only to stand and listen in silence to the Government’s postulata; then they withdrew, and signified their assent in writing. Boroughs which were not Royal were not represented on the Estates at all; it was taken that their lords spoke for them, as they did for their peasants. A craftsman or tradesman outside a town counted as a peasant, except for the personal advantage that he was usually exempted from military service.

  It is, of course, true that the representation of the Royal Free Boroughs on the Estates was anomalous in so far as those bodies were representing the interests of the Land vis-à-vis the Crown.

  The political and social weight of the burghers in Bohemia and Hungary was, where they were Germans (as was often the case), further diminished by national antagonisms between them and the Czech and Magyar country nobles.115

  It is probably safe to say that only one burgher in the Central Monarchy enjoyed, as such, real importance and dignity: the burgomaster of Vienna.

  Where they held the money-bags the towns could, indeed, exercise a de facto influence which the law did not give them; more than one Prince in mediaeval Austria had discovered this to his cost. But the trend of the economic developments of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century had worked against the towns in this respect also, as had the Habsburgs’ ineradicable partiality for the high aristocracy. Most of the big fortunes in the eighteenth century were made out of the land, in the form of rent-rolls or large-scale demesne farming; even the big industries, where not State-run, were more often than not founded by rich nobles, who worked them with their own unfree labour, sometimes supervised by foreign foremen and specialists.116 Financial fortunes, where any, were made by ‘privileged’ Jews, chiefly by those who acted as Court moneylenders – a position which was, indeed, apt to end disastrously for all parties.

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  Writers on modern States tend naturally to include the members of the civil service and of the professions with the traders and industrialists as the ‘middle classes’. So far as the State services were concerned, this classification was hardly applicable to the Monarchy of 1780, where those services were still mainly in the hands of nobles or their employees; the development of a special mentality of its own among this class was still to come. The modernizing State of the enlightened despots naturally needed more professional men than had sufficed for its simpler predecessors, and made them more important; above all, the rivalry described elsewhere117 between State and Church for the ultimate spiritual allegiance of the
people had put the teaching profession into something of a key position. Some individual members of it played roles of the highest importance in the councils of the Monarchy. This did not, however, bring the profession as a whole much increased prestige. Its two or three highest-ranking members enjoyed ex officio certain remarkable privileges,118 but the rank and file were usually humble enough servants of the State, the lord of the manor, or the Church; the village schoolmaster usually doubled his post with that of sexton-verger, and was often made to act almost as the local priest’s body-servant.119

  The other professions, which, like that of teaching, were mainly staffed by honoratiores, enjoyed no more consideration. They were, incidentally, thin on the ground, especially in the more backward parts of the Monarchy,120 which had little need of lawyers, except for complicated cases involving title to land, and tended to regard physicians as a superfluous luxury. The lists given by Damian of the occupations of the inhabitants of a number of towns in South Hungary hardly contains a single doctor. According to Damian, the almost universal remedy for any disease among the Croats was a draught of strong liquor laced with pepper (sometimes with other herbs) or, occasionally, a concoction of black hellebore. Thus even apothecaries were rare. The apothecary in Zirc, West Hungary, in 1938 exhibited a notice (and for all I know, may still do so) that it had been founded in 1784, on orders from Joseph II: before that date, the local wine had been considered the best remedy for any disease.