Meanwhile, various efforts had been set on foot to bring the Orthodox peoples of the Monarchy into the Catholic fold as ‘Uniates’.253 They were completely unsuccessful with the Serbs, but the Hungarian Ruthenes accepted the Union definitively in 1692, and in 1698 the Roumanian Bishop of Gyulafehérvár accepted it in the name of his people, so that for a time all the Transylvanian Roumanians counted as Uniates (Greek Catholics). Their attachment to the old faith was, however, very strong, and even the sincerity of the nominal converts doubtful. In 1761 Maria Theresa gave up the struggle, and while retaining the Uniate Bishopric, re-appointed a Roumanian Orthodox Bishop (this time, autonomous). His jurisdiction, however, extended only to Transylvania; all members of the Orthodox Church in the other Lands of the Hungarian Crown, whatever their ethnic origin, came under the Serb Metropolitan of Karlóca.
The membership of both the Uniate and the Orthodox Churches was reinforced when Austria acquired Galicia and the Bukovina, for the former Orthodox population of Eastern Galicia (in practice, to be equated with the Ruthene ethnic element) had accepted Greek Catholicism in 1596, under the Union of Brest Litovsk.254 The Orthodox Roumanians of Bukovina were in 1780 still provisionally under their old ecclesiastical superiors in Moldavia.
Hungary contained a few more small Churches, including a Uniate Armenian community; the Armenians possessed another community, which even ran to a Bishop, in Galicia.
On her accession, Maria Theresa had very few Jews in her dominions. The thriving and important Jewish communities which had existed in mediaeval times in most of the Hereditary Lands had been liquidated in a series of expulsions.255 In these Lands Jews were now to be found practically only in Vienna, where, although the community had been dissolved there also (although rather later than elsewhere)256 some individuals had afterwards been admitted under special permit. In 1776 there were about 300 of them. There were about 1,500 in the Vorlande, and a colony (of Sephardim Jews) in Trieste. In Bohemia-Moravia there were many more – about 40,000, most of them concentrated in Prague, where an old and famous community had contrived to maintain itself throughout the Middle Ages, and 20,000 odd in Moravia. In the Lands of the Hungarian Crown only twelve thousand had been counted at the end of the Turkish wars, but by 1775 the number had increased, chiefly by immigration from Bohemia-Moravia, or (illegally) from Galicia, to some 75–80,000, nearly all concentrated in the North-Western or North-Eastern Counties. The Jewish population of the Monarchy had then been more than doubled with the annexation of Galicia-Bukovina, where the Jews had constituted an appreciable proportion of the population, numbering, in the annexed areas, something like 200,000.257
Since the Counter-Reformation the Jews had had an unhappy time in the Austrian dominions. They were confined to ghettoes, made to wear a distinctive dress and subjected to a special Cameral tax, the Judensteuer,258 on top of the usual taxation. They were, as a rule, forbidden to reside in towns (the Prague community was exceptional) and many occupations were forbidden to them. In Poland most of them earned their livings on the estates of the richer noblemen (almost all of whom kept a ‘Hausjude’) as estate managers, corn-brokers or licensees of the village inn. For the rest they were mostly small tradesmen, and most of them lived in extreme poverty.259
Maria Theresa was personally strongly prepossessed against the Jews, whom she described as ‘an unparalleled plague, with their swindling, money-making and usury’. One of her earliest actions as Queen had actually been to expel them from Prague (as prelude to their total expulsion from the Lands of the Bohemian Crown) and it had taken strong representations from the Estates and the Hofkammer (and also from the tradesmen and artisans of Prague) to induce her to rescind the order; she extracted from them, however, a ‘voluntary gift’ of 150,000 fl., and later, a heavy annual tax.260 She had maintained nearly all the restrictions on them throughout most of her reign; only towards the end of it was she allowing them to enter economic life in a larger way, for example as licensees of factories. It was, however, reserved for her son to confront the real problem presented by the huge sudden increase in the Monarchy’s Jewish population entailed by the annexation of Galicia-Bukovina.
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In the partnership between the Crown and the Catholic Church both sides played their parts loyally, with the rarest deviations. If the Crown lavished wealth and honour on the Church, the latter both practised and preached the strictest loyalty to the Crown. It was no accident that the foci of rebellion, or at least, of contumelious self-assertion, had always lain among the Monarchy’s Protestant subjects, and even in 1780, where such feelings (outside the special case of Galicia) were almost extinct, if they lingered on at all, it was among the Protestant middle nobles and yeomen farmers of Central Hungary.
Meanwhile, it is worth emphasizing that while nearly all the Habsburgs were themselves personally extremely pious, they guarded for themselves jealously the position of senior partner in the association.261 Maximilian I had himself refused to allow the promulgation of a certain Papal Bull in his dominions, and his successors had repeatedly exercised the placetum regium in respect of Church appointments. Ferdinand II had confined the authority of the Church to pura spiritualia and had forbidden the spiritual arm, under pain of punishment, to intervene in the field of competence of the Landesfürst, for which he claimed, inter alia, jurisdiction between priests and laymen, and the right to supervise religious foundations. Church lands were treated as ‘Kammergut’ and taxed accordingly. Several of the Habsburgs intervened in what, under many definitions, would have been ecclesiastical questions, such as the determination of the feasts of the Church. And it is remarkable how few Churchmen figure in history as playing prominent parts in the political life of the Monarchy.
Maria Theresa, personally one of the most pious of her line, was as firm as any of them in this respect. She invoked her right as suprema advocata ecclesiarum to initiate pertinent inquiries into the management of Church properties and revenues; abolished Church punishments and restricted pilgrimages and Church feasts, and she advised her children not to make donations to the Church, ‘which had enough’ and misused its wealth. She hesitated at the last moment to allow Febronius’ work, banned by the Vatican, to circulate freely in the Monarchy, but its doctrines permeated the educational system, which under her became strongly Erastian.
Up to a generation or so before 1780, all education had been in the hands of the Churches, who had conducted it through their own establishments, maintained out of their endowments, or out of subscriptions from their congregations, which were not always generous.262 The Crown had exercised its influence only indirectly, through its generosity or otherwise in conferring endowments, and its severity or otherwise in imposing restrictions. This influence had nevertheless been extensive, and it says much for the devotion and self-sacrifice of the Hungarian Calvinists and the Lutheran Saxons that in spite of their poverty263 and of great administrative pressure they had succeeded in maintaining an efficient school system, both primary and secondary.264 For the Catholics, all schooling was controlled by their Church and almost all instruction given by persons holding official positions in it; as a rule, only law and medicine were taught by laymen, and that within the framework of the Church-controlled Universities. This instruction was, incidentally, on a low level, and serious students often went abroad to complete their studies. Most higher and secondary education was mainly in the hands of the Jesuits (to a lesser extent, the Benedictines) whose secondary schools were nearly all gymnasia. Teaching in them was mainly in Latin, and was chiefly directed towards inculcating the true faith; the brighter pupils were trained on to become in their turn militant priests.265 Primary education, where it had any pretensions at all, was to a large extent in the hands of the Piarists. Village schools were entrusted to the local parson, or not infrequently, the sexton-verger; they were thin on the ground, for one point on which the authorities and the adult peasants concurred was that it was useless, or actually harmful, to give a peasant-child book-learning.266
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The first changes in this system had been inaugurated largely by Van Swieten, the Belgian doctor who came to Vienna in 1745, was appointed physician in chief to Maria Theresa and soon came to exercise an extraordinary influence over the entire educational system of the Monarchy. He was at first chiefly concerned to introduce the practical reforms which turned the medical faculty of Vienna into one of Europe’s leading institutions in its field, but he was also a leading exponent of the Jansenist philosophy which now came to dominate educational thought in the Monarchy. The philosophical justification for reform was then furnished largely by that extraordinary figure, Josef Sonnenfels, who wrote a number of books expounding the doctrine that it was for the State to control closely the spiritual and intellectual lives of its subjects, the function of the Church being to assist it to do so.267 But the changes were in any case rendered inevitable by the emergence of the autocratic-bureaucratic State, with its need for trained civil servants and its insistence on devotion to the Monarch as hardly less important than devotion to God. Education was now, as Maria Theresa told Cardinal Migazzi in 1770, when he objected to State supervision of confessional schools, a ‘politicum’, i.e., a matter for State regulation. It had still to produce good Catholics, but it was even more important that it should produce good, loyal and civically useful ‘subjects’.
Under the impact of these new ideas, the Jesuits were driven out of one stronghold after another, until in 1773 the Order was dissolved altogether by the Pope (incidentally, against Maria Theresa’s deeper wishes). By this time a Commission was already considering the whole question of education in the Monarchy, and some of its members favoured complete laicization. After long hesitation, the Empress decided against this, partly owing to the difficulty of finding (and paying) enough lay teachers, so that the bulk of higher and secondary education was left in the hands of the Orders; but some further faculties at the Universities were entrusted to lay teachers, and in the gymnasia the curricula were broadened by the introduction of more practical subjects, and Latin largely replaced by modern languages as the medium of instruction. A considerable number of technical schools were also founded. The whole system was placed under State supervision.
At the same time, Maria Theresa took up the question of elementary education for the people, which, unlike some of her advisers, she thought useful and even necessary. She borrowed from Frederick of Prussia the famous educationalist, Felbiger, who worked out blue-prints for the establishment of a primary (‘Trivial’) school in every village, with grammar schools (Hauptschulen) in the larger centres and a sufficient number of training colleges (Normalschulen). An Allgemeine Schulordnung to this effect was issued in 1774 for the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, where primary education now became (in theory) compulsory. As the Hungarian members of the Commission had objected that a scheme suitable for Austria would not fit Hungary, with its different conditions, a Hungarian counterpart, in the preparation of which several Hungarians had participated, and which took into account the entire educational system from the primary school to the University, was published in 1777 under the name of Ratio Educationis, although it did not receive official sanction until 1781.
It should be emphasized that these changes represented no victory for the principles of freedom of thought or instruction. Maria Theresa herself was no friend of abstract knowledge; in this, as in several other respects, the contrast between her and her grandson, Francis I, has usually been much overdrawn. It was on her hostility that the proposal to create an Academy of Sciences in Vienna foundered, to be realized only a century later on Metternich’s motion. The goal of usefulness to the State was followed at least as rigidly as the Jesuits’ objective of moral virtue. If some subjects, such as history and geography, were given a larger place in the latter system than in the former, this was simply because they appeared more useful for the new purposes, than for the old. Departures from the prescribed curricula, teaching methods, etc., were visited with heavier displeasure by the new civil authorities than they had been by the old ecclesiastical directors of studies.
It was in Maria Theresa’s reign that the censorship, too, was for the first time institutionalized: characteristically, in a form which extended its supervision also to ecclesiastical works.268
It was utilitarianism, not German national feeling, that was responsible for one very important feature of the educational reorganization in Austria: its strong emphasis on the teaching of German. Maria Theresa and even Joseph II were not on principle hostile to non-German languages as such: early in her reign (in 1747) Maria Theresa had rebuked the Jesuits in Prague for giving too much instruction in Latin and too little in Czech. In 1763 officials in Bohemia had been enjoined to devote more time to learning Czech, and as late as 1774 a chair of Czech had been established in Vienna. But in the latter years of her reign, and especially, perhaps, under the growing influence of Joseph II, the idea of the centralized, bureaucratic State gained in strength and it was taken as axiomatic that this could only be run efficiently in German. Knowledge of the German language was thus one of the necessary accomplishments of a ‘useful’ subjectum, and the school curricula were adapted accordingly. The Allgemeine Schulordnung of 1774 made German an obligatory subject in all elementary schools in Bohemia, and in 1776 it became the language of instruction in the gymnasia; Czech was allowed to be used in only four of the sixteen Bohemian gymnasia, and that only for a grace-period of three years. Similarly, an Imperial resolution of 1774 ordered that ‘children from the Illyrian districts should be taught German’; at first they were to be allowed to learn the catechism in their own tongue, but even this concession was to be withdrawn gradually ‘as the German language made headway’. In 1775 and 1776 orders were issued that the elementary schools in the Slovene districts and even in the Military Frontier were to be Germanized.269
These measures did not apply to Hungary, where, as has been said, the proposals for the reorganization of education were still on paper when Maria Theresa died; and they did not go so far in the direction of Germanization as the orders enacted in the Western Lands. They provided that elementary education should be given in the pupil’s mother-tongue – and most interestingly, they gave Magyar no preference over the six other languages (German, Slovak, Croat, Ruthene, ‘Illyrian’ and Wallachian) which they described as current in Hungary. But they still declared it especially important that every elementary school-child should be taught German. The basic language of instruction in the higher establishments was to be Latin, but the greatest weight was to be attached to the teaching of German in the gymnasia, and the Ratio actually expressed the hope that this would gradually lead to German developing ‘as the Court had long wished’ into the ‘national language’ of Hungary.270
These innovations had, of course, not got far beyond the blue-print stage by 1780. The German-Bohemian Lands possessed at that date, in all, fifteen training colleges, eighty-three grammar schools, forty-seven schools for girls, and 3,848 elementary schools. Bohemia was the most advanced of any Land after Lower and Upper Austria, but even in Bohemia, only about half the children of school age were attending the State schools. In Vienna itself the figure was only twenty-four out of one hundred (although here there were also many private schools); in Lower Austria, outside Vienna, only sixteen; in Silesia, only four.271 In Inner Hungary only about forty-five per cent of all rural communes possessed schools at all – some 4,000 of them; 4,437 teachers were employed in them, giving an average of seven and a half teachers per ten thousand inhabitants.272 These general figures cover very wide local variations; in West Hungary and in the area between the Danube and the Tisza, with its big, concentrated urbanizations, almost every commune had its school, but they were much rarer in the Serb, Roumanian and Ruthene districts. In Transylvania the Saxons kept up, out of their own resources, the most complete system in the whole Monarchy, but that of the Roumanian Orthodox Church was still embryonic. In Galicia, when Austria took it over, conditions were worse still. In the whole District of Lem
berg, with a Christian population of half a million, there had been only ten elementary schoolmasters, and the learning of eight of them had not got beyond the ability to read and write Polish. The Bukovina, we are told, had no educational establishments at all when Austria annexed it. The nobles kept private tutors (usually Greeks, who also acted as their secretaries) for their children. Otherwise, reading and writing were taught only in the monasteries, and few people except the monks and cantors were able to read or write.273 When the Austrians took over Dalmatia they found conditions there, outside the Croatian coastal towns, equally backward.
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In 1780 it was already a full half-century since Austrian ‘culture’ had reached what many regard as its apogee: that already slightly over-blown Hochbarock of Charles VI’s reign which has been described as ‘the outward and visible sign of the inward union between a high-aristocratic form of devotion and a Church no less hierarchic and very little less worldly’ which
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 15