256 In 1670.
257 The census of 1776 (for Galicia only) gave nearly 150,000; that of 1785, which included the Bukovina, over 210,000.
258 This brought in substantial sums; in Hungary alone, 20,000 fl. in 1749, rising to 80,000 fl. in 1788.
259 The Prague Jews had welcomed the invading armies of Bavaria and Prussia.
260 ‘The Jews of Cracow’, wrote Russell in the 1820s, ‘are sunk still lower than the peasants in uncleanliness and misery, and appear to be less sensible to it’ (op. cit., I. 210).
261 Another phase in this rivalry, now almost closed, had been the struggle between the temporal and spiritual power for actual authority. In the earliest days the German kings and emperors had granted ‘immediate’ status almost as freely to the great missionary sees, as to Dukes and Margraves. After themselves achieving immediacy, the Babenbergs and Habsburgs had gradually brought most of the local Church lands under their own jurisdiction, until in 1780, in the Alpine Lands, only the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and, in a more qualified sense, the Bishops of Trent and Brixen, were exempt from it.
262 In 1723 the Jesuits had not enough money to maintain a Chair of history in Graz, let alone a medical or theological faculty.
263 In 1865, when the Churches in Hungary had already parted with much land, the Catholic Church still owned 2½ million hold; the Protestants, only 28,900.
264 For higher education Protestants had to go to foreign universities. For a time they were forbidden to do so.
265 Most noble families who could afford to do so kept private tutors for their sons.
266 In all the Slovene parts of Styria, there was not one single village school. A Commission reported in 1752 that the only reason why the parents of a Slovene child ever wanted him to receive schooling was that he should learn German, and in that case they sent him to a German school. Otherwise, ‘no children were sent to school, so no schools were needed’ (Pirchegger, Steiermark, II. 360). Even in the German parts many communes were without schools.
267 Sonnenfels is one of the curiosities of Austrian, and indeed of all, history. The son of a Moravian Rabbi who adopted Christianity, he had an extraordinary early career which included some years of service as a private soldier in a regular regiment, then took up teaching and became Professor and Hofrat. He had a great influence over Maria Theresa, and was largely responsible for her Penal Code. Joseph II liked him less, and Francis ended by losing patience with him. His central ideas are contained in his Grundsätze der Polizeiwissenschaft, first issued in 1765, which was used as a textbook in Austria up to 1848. The most recent addition to the voluminous literature on this unpleasant but interesting character is an essay in A. Kann’s Study in Austrian Intellectual History (1960).
268 There had previously been no State censorship in Austria, but as a Catholic State, Austria had admitted the control of the Holy See over the printed word. In 1753 Maria Theresa established a Committee of Censors, composed half of ecclesiastics and half of laymen, whose imprimatur was necessary before any work, religious or other, could appear.
269 The instruction for the Military Frontier schools declared the measure necessary, to enable the boys to acquire the linguistic equipment to become officers and N.C.O.s ‘without losing their time over the less necessary instructions in reading and writing in Illyrian’. To keep up ‘Illyrian’ schools as well as German was ‘an unjustified burden, oppressive to the military communes’.
270 Ratio Educationis, para. 102, De Singulari linguae Germanicae utilitate.
271 Ficker, Bericht über oe. Unterrichtswesen (Vienna, 1873), I. 18.
272 There were in Hungary in 1772 one University, with 42 teachers, 5 Roman Catholic seminaries, with 61 teachers, 58 Roman Catholic gymnasia, with 340 teachers, 51 grammar schools, with 329 teachers and 2,664 Roman Catholic elementary teachers. The Lutheran teachers numbered 629, the Calvinist, 1,600, the Greek Catholic, 40, the Greek Orthodox, 301.
273 Ficker, II. 560. Joseph II wrote (with a touch of exasperation) that the Serbs and Dalmatians of the Monarchy had no schools at all, and that not one in thousands could read or write even in their own language.
274 I.e., members of the Greek Orthodox Church. The Empress was not speaking in ethnographic terms.
2
Joseph II
As we have said, a detailed description of the ten years of Joseph II’s reign does not belong to the theme of this work. A brief account of them is, however, necessary, to show what it was that Leopold was summoned to alter, and, where he refused to do so, how the conditions which he left in being differed from those of 1780. The differences were very substantial, for outside the purely administrative patterns, Leopold could not have restored the status quo ante Joseph had he wished. For Joseph had a terrible genius. He touched not only the shape of things, but also the spirit within them; and even where the shape was restored, the spirit was found to have become different. The change was not always in the direction that Joseph himself had meant. In some cases the line which he laid down accorded with the spirit of the age and lived on after him; in others, it was in advance of, or contrary, to it, and evoked a counter-action, but even this was counter-action rather than reaction, for in resisting Joseph, it had changed its own shape.
*
Joseph II is perhaps the completest enlightened despot in European history, and the noun in the phrase is quite as fully operative as the adjective. His youthful reading had brought him certain doctrines of inherent natural rights of man, and had taught him that a ruler has duties towards his subjects: he even confessed the belief that he was there for their sake, not they for his. He certainly regarded his position as a charge, carrying with it a duty which he filled with scrupulous conscientiousness, and sparing himself as little as he spared others.
But he also believed that in all matters temporal, the ruler was absolute, responsible to no man. If he was bound to work for his subjects’ welfare, it was for him alone to determine what conditions answered to the term, and what were the means by which they were to be achieved. And he was personally exceedingly dogmatic, self-opinionated and impatient of opposition, and, to boot, as unconciliatory in manner as he was in principle. He was capable of generosity, but not of tenderness or consideration; on the contrary, there was in him a streak of sadism which caused him to take real delight in humiliating and wounding those who, by their personalities or their positions, seemed to him to stand in the way of the realization of his objectives: especially the representatives of historic tradition, and the aristocracy as a class. Not only did he refuse to make concessions to opposition: he brushed it aside with a studied rudeness which doubled his victims’ resentment. He could, indeed, probably have got far more of his reforms accepted, had he been more conciliatory in manner, but that was beyond him. His unpleasantness is sometimes excused as the effect of embitterment over the loss of his young first wife, whom he professed to have adored, and it probably does account in part for his really beastly treatment of her unfortunate successsor. But he was disagreeable even as a little boy; even his tutors complained of his manner. The fact is relevant to his history, and to that of his subjects.
In matters spiritual, Joseph professed himself a true Catholic, and even a champion of pure religion against its abuses, but he admitted the supremacy of the Church only in pura spiritualia, which he defined narrowly enough. In all other respects, he regarded his authority over the Church as no less absolute than over the lay arm. It may be remarked that this was the field in which the effects of his reign proved the most enduring of all. Leopold revoked a few of his measures, but not very many, and Austrian spiritual life at least up to 1847 remained dominated by a strong Erastianism which was rightly known as ‘Josephinism’.
It is perhaps fitting to describe these measures first, since Joseph himself, logical as he was, considered control of the spirit to be the true condition precedent of all political control. It must, however, be remembered that the applicability of them to the entire Monarchy was mad
e possible by the political enactments described later.
No complete list of them can be given here, for, as we said, he defined the phrase pura spiritualia in an extraordinarily restrictive sense; he even laid down, for example, the exact forms to be used in Church services, with the number of candles to be lit at each. But he also introduced some changes of the first importance in the relations of Church and State. He vetoed the publication of several Papal Bulls; abolished all foreign ordinariates and re-delimited the Austrian episcopal sees to make them coincide geographically with the administrative units (these boundaries are still in force in Austria today), forbade direct correspondence between the bishops and the Holy See, and abolished the episcopal seminaries and monastic schools (which he described as ‘nests of the fanatical hydra of ultra-montanism’), founding instead eight State-controlled ‘General Seminaries’ as the sole training-ground for intending priests.
An exceedingly important enactment, first issued as a Patent on 16 January 1783, and afterwards incorporated in the Code of Civil Law, made marriage a purely civil contract, the validity of which derived ‘exclusively from the law of the land’. It was, indeed, contracted in front of a priest, who had to be the person in charge of keeping the State register, but he was not entitled to refuse to perform the ceremony on account of any circumstances regarded by Canon law, but not by State law, as constituting an obstacle to it.
One of the most far-reaching in its effects of all Joseph’s measures was the ‘Toleration Patent’ of October 1781.1 This did not introduce complete ‘toleration’, for it left Catholicism as the ‘dominant’ religion of State, and treated the smaller ‘sects’ with extreme harshness. But the Calvinist, Lutheran and Orthodox Churches were allowed to build their own places of worship and schools, where their numbers justified it, and their members became competent to own land, to become burghers of towns or masters of crafts, and to hold posts in the civil service, the armed forces or the educational system, without having to take an oath contrary to their consciences or to attend religious ceremonies contrary to their beliefs. The Jews were relieved of the obligation to wear distinctive dress and of certain other restrictions and taxes, and were allowed to attend Christian schools, as well as their own, to enter academic life and the free professions, and to practise trades, although they still could not become burghers or master-craftsmen and were left subject to many other restrictions.
Another famous set of enactments was directed against the monasteries. Here Joseph went far beyond his mother’s tentative beginnings. First the mendicant Orders were dissolved, then the contemplative, and finally the teaching Orders, excepting only the Piarists, and their properties confiscated; in all, over six hundred Houses fell under the axe. The monasteries’ lands were sold, leased or exploited by the State, and after provision, in the shape of pensions or gratuities, had been made for the dispossessed monks, the remaining proceeds were paid into a fund, part of which was devoted to founding new livings, on the principle that no village should be left more than an hour’s journey from a church, while the rest was devoted to various welfare projects, notably hospitals and poor relief.
What Joseph set himself to create in the administrative field was a State entirely controlled by an efficient, smoothly-working machine which responded to and carried into effect his decisions in every field. The Monarchy, as he inherited it, obviously did not answer this description: even in the Austro-Bohemian Lands, absolutism was still only half in the saddle, and Hungary and the Netherlands still possessed constitutional organs entitled to a voice in the government of their countries. Had he accepted the usual conditions of a Monarch’s accession, Joseph would have been obliged to swear to respect the rights of the Estates in those Lands, and he showed his hand at the very outset of his reign by refusing to submit to coronation in Hungary (or in Bohemia), replying to the embittered protests of the Hungarian Court Chancellery with the wounding words pueri puerilia tractant. The Bohemian Crown, the Ducal Hat of Lower Austria, the Styrian Sword of Office, were brought to Vienna to be kept in the Imperial Treasury; and finally, the Hungarian Holy Crown itself, the venerated and mystical symbol of Hungarian kingship, took the same road. This time Joseph’s answer to the protest was: risum teneatis, amici.
In the Austro-Bohemian Lands the changes in the top-level administrative machine consisted only of adjustments. The financial Ministries (the Hofkammer and Banco-Deputatio) were united with the Böhmisch-oesterreichische Hofkanzlei under the name of Vereinigte Hofstelle; only the judiciary remained a separate instance. On the next level, the Gubernia were rationalized, Styria being amalgamated with Carinthia and Carniola under the name of Inner Austria, Silesia with Moravia, Gorizia and Gradisca with Trieste, Upper with Lower Austria, Vorarlberg and the Vorlande with the Tirol and the Bukovina with Galicia. These Gubernia now became all-competent (under the central Ministries); the Capi of the Estates were simply decorative figures, the posts being given to deserving officials past active work. Two ‘assessors’ representing the Estates sat in each Gubernium, but as State officials. The old ‘Committees of the Estates’ disappeared. The municipal Councillors were still elected, but their election had to be confirmed by the State, and they counted as State employees. The communal Councils were left with certain tasks, notably those of apportioning the prescribed taxation between the members of the commune, and collecting it, but with no freedom or discretion.
The only service newly extended to cover the whole Monarchy was the Hofrechnungskammer. Otherwise the Governments of Hungary, the Netherlands and Lombardy remained distinct, but their autonomy was reduced to the Austrian level.
Curiously, Joseph carried Austro-Hungarian dualism a long step further than Maria Theresa herself had done. Not only was the Hungarian Court Chancellery retained as a separate body directly responsible to the Crown, but its competence, now both political and financial (the Cameral agenda having now been transferred to it), was extended to all the Lands of the Hungarian Crown2 (except the Military Frontier, which was left untouched), the Transylvanian Chancellery being abolished and its agenda transferred to the Hungarian Chancellery. But under this, the entire governmental system of Hungary was re-cast in 1785. The former Inner Hungary-Croatia was divided into ten Districts, the delimitation of which ignored the old historic division between Hungary and Croatia. Each District was placed under a Royal Commissioner. In the Counties, the office of Föispán disappeared; the Alispáns were now appointed by the Crown, and became Royal officials; the Congregations were allowed to meet only once a year, and then to no purpose, since they lost their autonomy. In Transylvania the old Saxon and Szekel ‘territories’ disappeared. The entire area, including the Partium, was reorganized in ten Counties, under a single Gubernium, corresponding to the Hungarian Districts.
A similar absolutist regime was introduced in the Netherlands under two Decrees dated respectively 1 January and 12 March 1787; the Belgian Constitution, including the famous Joyeuse Entrée, which Joseph himself on his accession had promised to respect, was simply swept out of existence.
The offence to sentiment in the non-German Lands, except the Netherlands and Lombardy, was aggravated by the Germanization of the Government system. In Hungary the Consilium was informed, on 11 May 1784, that Latin, being a dead language, could not sensibly be used for official purposes. As Magyar was the language of only part of the population, the rest of which spoke ‘German, Illyrian or Vlach’, the only practicable language for official purposes was German, which was also the language of administration and the army in the Monarchy as a whole. German was therefore to become the official language, in the central offices as from that date, in the Counties after one year and in the lower instances after three. Officials unable to master the language within the prescribed periods were to be dismissed. Knowledge of German was to be a condition of admission to the Diet.
At the same time, German was made the sole language of instruction in all higher and secondary educational establishments, except that intending prie
sts might study Latin in the High Schools. In the primary schools, religion might be taught in the pupil’s mother tongue.
Similar orders were issued in respect of Bohemia, Galicia and Gorizia; in Galicia, it is true, it proved so difficult to find sufficient German speakers that Latin had to be re-instated provisionally (the question had not been officially settled by the time of Joseph’s death).
In reply to remonstrances, Joseph denied that he was guided by any theoretical preference for German (which was not even his own favourite language). German had to be chosen because it was the language of the most important of his dominions (among which he included the Holy Roman Empire) and already the language of educated usage, including business and the professions. He did not, however, deny that his purpose was to Germanize, not all his subjects, but all his machinery of State, and in some parts of the Monarchy he pressed on Germanization by other means. More German colonists were settled as free peasants, ‘privileged’ merchants or artisans in Hungary, others in Galicia, and a number in the Bukovina.
As we shall see, these measures never became effective in the Netherlands, were rescinded by Joseph himself in Hungary and were even modified by his successor in the Austro-Bohemian Lands. But the tradition of them, too, lived on in Austria-Bohemia and even, in shadowy fashion, in Hungary. Under Joseph, the peoples of Austria learned beyond all un-teaching to regard bureaucratic rule, directed from a lofty and invisible centre, as the normal and indeed the right form of government; and if Hungary at the time rejected the application of the system to itself, it did so chiefly because the centre was then in Vienna. When, long after, it became free to establish its own system, it constructed a similar (although less elaborate) one centred on Budapest.
It was also under Joseph that the bureaucracy itself (outside Hungary, where his reforms had not time to take root – here the change came only later) emerged as a distinct class and social factor. As we have said elsewhere, most of the administrative work of the Monarchy had been carried on up to his day by local nobles, or their employees, either in their corporate capacities as Provincial Estates, or their individual ones as manorial lords. In either case, the administrator identified himself with his own local or class interests, or his employer’s. Joseph’s organized, centralized civil service was entirely different: it was a central service like the Army, owing its allegiance to the Crown and thus absolutely centralist in its political outlook, joining the Church, army and aulic aristocracy as a fourth great centripetal force in the Monarchy. Most of its members also developed strongly despotic mentalities.3
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 20