The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  The police were put back under the Hofkanzlei, and in connection with this change, Leopold liquidated a large part of Joseph’s extensive apparatus of secret police, contenting himself with a much smaller number of confidants.15

  Some import prohibitions were repealed, but Leopold had hardly touched the field of economic policy when he died.

  *

  All in all, Leopold had carried through a singularly successful emergency operation of pacification, and how fine had been his judgment of what were the maxima that one set of parties could be manoeuvred into conceding, and the minima which others could be induced to accept without revolt, is shown by the fact that no revolts worthy of the name occurred against it. Even the peasants, who should have been thought to be the chief losers, soon calmed down: the considerable unrest which manifested itself in 1790 had almost died away by 1791.

  But an emergency operation it was, and the position it created was certainly not that situation free from ‘injustice, conflicts and unrest’ which was Leopold’s ideal and which he had come near to realising in Tuscany. Fairly certainly, he did not mean it to be permanent. He was a very reticent man, who took no one into his full confidence; moreover, many of the documents relating to his reign were destroyed by fire, as lately as 1945. Thus the exact nature of his future plans is not known. We have, however, glimpses of some of them, and the general shape of others can be deduced from his record in Tuscany, for, as Herr Wandruschka has rightly pointed out, his Tuscan experiences set precedents which largely guided his actions in Austria. It seems certain that while willing to allow some limitation of the Monarch’s power through constitutional institutions, he was not prepared to let this be brought about by a simple abdication of the Crown’s authority in favour of that of the Estates, as then composed. He wished to see the introduction of a genuine representative system, giving more rights to the burgher class, and more political weight to the peasants, with many more alleviations of their social and political conditions; the concessions which he made in these respects to the landlords were probably more reluctant than any others made by him.

  Such changes would have meant reducing the powers of the Estates, and although Leopold had none of his brother’s pathological hatred of the nobility, yet he was almost certainly prepared to pit his strength against the Estates as soon as he felt able to do so. How to manage this was a problem, in view of his rejection, on both pragmatic grounds and those of principle, of the methods of violent and undisguised revolution from above which Joseph had tried to apply, with such disastrous results. Yet soon after his arrival in Vienna, he was engaged with certain secret agents in preliminary plans for what would have amounted to a real revolution from above in Hungary, the ‘general purpose’ being to introduce ‘a sure equilibrium between moderate monarchy and democracy and an unshakable obedience of the people to the laws of the State and its ruler’, while the ‘more secret object’ was ‘to fight against the aristocratism, in all its forms, which everywhere thwarts the ruler and his intentions; systematic prevention of its despotic plans and endeavours; capture of popular opinion in the interest of the Government’.16

  But although the conception of these plans was grandiose, the execution of them was amazingly unsystematic and even amateurish. So far as is known, Leopold got down to details only in respect of Hungary, and, oddly enough, Styria,17 and he dropped his Hungarian plans in the autumn of 1790, taking them up again (after an interval in which he had been occupied with much other business, including a visit to Italy) only a long year later, with different agents. By that time it was too late to give them serious shape, for death carried him away, with tragic suddenness, after only a few days’ illness. He died on 1 March 1792, and his eldest son, Francis, reigned in his stead.

  1 Silagi, Mitarbeiter, p. 30, quoted with approval by Wandruschka, II. 284.

  2 Wandruschka, l.c. Most European historians attach less weight to the part played by the Hungarian factor in determining Leopold’s policy, and for that matter, few Hungarian historians suggest that the danger was as acute as Leopold believed; but what mattered was not how big it was, but how big Leopold thought it.

  3 It is curious that not more was asked, but there seems to have been a fear that, in that case, the question of taxation would inevitably be reopened.

  4 For the sensational suddenness with which the Diet swung over from its previous demand for the restoration of Latin as the language of public life to the introduction of Magyar, see Silagi, Jakobiner, pp. 61 ff. To a large extent, the fashion had been set by the appearance of Dugonics’ historical romance, Etelka, which caught the public fancy in an extraordinary degree. It should, however, be remarked that for many years thereafter some Hungarian Counties still, like the Croats, regarded Latin as the bulwark of their liberties.

  5 The liquidation of the Bánát, although enacted, had not yet been articulated in the Hungarian Corpus Juris.

  6 Bobb (Uniate) and Adamovitch (Orthodox).

  7 On these see Wandruschka, II. 281 ff. They included the establishment in the towns of ‘burgher guards’, which were mostly composed of Germans, the organization, through Leopold’s secret agents, of petitions from the burghers and peasants, and the dissemination of a rumour that the King of Prussia had betrayed to Leopold the names of his Hungarian correspondents, who were going to be tried for high treason. Leopold had also replaced the garrison of Buda by Croat units.

  8 Law X of 1790.

  9 It will be noted that on this point the Hungarians gave way, in practice, to the Croats’ demand that legislation with which they disagreed should not be imposed in Croatia. They were prepared to make the same concession on the linguistic question, but owing to Leopold’s attitude, described below, the point did not arise. The difference of principle, however, remained unresolved, for although the Hungarians did not argue the point to a finish in the Diet (fortunately for the proceedings of that body) they did not commit themselves to acceptance of the Croat thesis, which a Hungarian publicist set himself to refute in a brochure published in 1791.

  10 Moving day was, however, only once a year (on St Gregory’s day) and notice had to be given (at Michaelmas).

  11 The uneingekauft peasants lost the concessions granted them in 1790, but the whole question of peasant inheritance was re-regulated in the direction of increasing the peasants’ security of tenure and their powers to dispose of their property. These were now almost unrestricted, subject to the Bestiftungszwang.

  12 According to a report by the Hofkammer in 1792, cit. Blum, p. 56, the landlords of 1,600 estates in Lower Austria had agreed with their peasants to commute robot services against cash.

  13 At the end of Leopold’s reign the Monarchy (excluding Galicia) contained 416 religious Houses.

  14 His Decree of 3 March 1792 ran: ‘Although the priest must be a shepherd of souls, as he should always be, yet he must be regarded not only as a priest, and as a citizen, but also as an official of the State in the Church, because the administration of the care of souls has unlimited influence on the sentiments of the people, and participates directly or indirectly in the most important political matters.’

  15 Silagi, Jakobiner, pp. 53 ff., points out that, contrary to the common belief, Leopold was no friend of secret police methods. He did organize his own service, but it was a small one, and he used it chiefly for purposes of information. This does not, indeed, apply to the conspiratorial activities of a small band of agents described on the next page. It is also worth pointing out that the purposes of Leopold’s ‘secret police’ (and, indeed, of his son’s also) were not political only. When informing the Austrian public of the establishment of the institution, he emphasized the criminal side of its work, emphasizing the necessity of ‘following criminals, who usually work in the dark, right into the most secret crannies where they seek to hide themselves’. He also declared that the police were ‘expressly forbidden to use methods the application of which is then more dangerous to public and private security than the disorders which th
ey seek to eliminate’. In particular, District Commissioners were strictly enjoined ‘not to pry with inquisitive looks into the interiors of honest households, nor to disturb the quiet of respectable families by impertinent inquisitions’.

  16 See Silagi, Mitarbeiterkreis, passim.

  17 He seems to have thought Styria a good subject for experiment, owing to its relatively small size and the sturdy character of its peasantry.

  4

  Francis I (II)

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM

  It is difficult to find words strong enough to convey the importance for Austria of the accident which set Francis II (or Francis I, as he was to become later)1 in control of its destinies in his father’s place at the unripe age of twenty-four. Francis does not altogether deserve the very harsh judgments which have been passed on him by many later Austrian historians, and adopted by their superficial foreign copyists. He was neither a bad man, nor a stupid one. The widespread popularity which he came to enjoy in his later years in Vienna (it was much smaller outside the capital) may have been somewhat fictitious: it was largely based on his affability and unpretentiousness – he received enormous numbers of his subjects in audience2 and often took the air with his wife, unescorted, in the pleasure-gardens of Vienna – and perhaps even more, on his habit of expressing himself in a broad Viennese dialect. But his private life was virtuous; he was an affectionate husband and father, and must have possessed endearing personal qualities, for he inspired in at least one of his four wives a really passionate and romantic devotion, and the other members of his family circle seem both to have liked and respected him. He was an upright and conscientious ruler, strongly conscious of his duty towards his peoples and tireless in his endeavour to fulfil it; few of his servants spent such long hours as he did over the business of government. He took endless pains to establish a system of laws which ensured that justice should prevail among them and himself observed it towards them according to his lights, not squandering their substance on a luxurious Court – on the contrary, the modesty of his Court was proverbial, and the cause of much grumbling among the pleasure-loving aristocrats of the time – nor their lives on wars waged for the aggrandisement of himself or his House. Unlike his uncle, he was no militarist. It is true that nearly half his reign was spent mainly in wars, but these were always, at least in his own eyes, defensive, undertaken in the cause of preventing revolution from spreading to the dominions for which he was trustee – it must not be forgotten that these included the Empire, and that the Austrian Hausmacht itself included substantial areas as far west as the Rhine – or repelling actual attack on them, or under the compelling necessity of preserving the Balance of Power. He never favoured intervention in France itself, à la Pillnitz or à la Metternich.

  He was shrewd above the average, with a disconcerting gift of drawing from any situation the conclusions which were correct by his own premises, and possessed, incidentally, of a sardonic sense of humour for which the shocked modern chroniclers of some of his apparently more outrageous sayings have made insufficient allowance.

  But he had in him no trace of his father’s genuine constitutional beliefs; he had rather absorbed from his uncle, under whose tutelage he had, as heir prospective to throne,3 spent several unhappy years in Vienna, Joseph’s unqualified faith in the doctrine of complete Monarchic absolutism – not merely, as Eisenmann writes, as a means, but as an end,4 and his basic conception of the proper relationship between himself and his peoples was completely egocentric. He was entirely convinced that God had placed him where he was, over them, and if his duty was to rule them justly, theirs was to be ‘good subjects’ to him. The art of government, in his eyes, was to ensure that they should so conduct themselves, and his criterion of political institutions and of social conditions was their aptitude to produce this result. Withal, he had nothing of his uncle’s social vision or imaginative power, or of his restless impatience with the imperfect. He was mentally near-sighted and unimaginative, incapable of appreciating large issues, or indeed, social issues of any kind. Actual distress – famine, pestilence, flood – shocked him, and he was willing that it should be relieved, but his mind simply did not reach to the consideration of underlying causes.5 He could thus never have been a reformer for reform’s sake, yet his absolutist tenets might have counselled him to attempt a revival of Josephinism, not as a means, but as an end in itself. But he was also quite lacking in Joseph’s combative readiness to take on, even to provoke, opposition. On the contrary, he was mentally timid and suspicious, shrinking instinctively from the unfamiliar or the unknown, and strongly predisposed in favour of conditions, institutions and even persons to whom he had grown accustomed, over any form of novelty whatever. He also, as one of his tutors reported of him, shrank from unpleasantness in any shape, and was, moreover, quite shrewd enough to appreciate the favourable contrast presented by Leopold’s policy of moderate concessions to the Estates, to the fearful hornets’ nest which Joseph’s impetuosity had brought about the family ears. His instinctive reaction to the situation in which he found himself on his accession was therefore to freeze it, at least until the return of quieter times. The tragedy for Austria lay in the fact that those times did not return for over half a generation, and by that time the enforcement of the freeze had become a fixed system from which Francis had no longer any willingness to depart. Fortune then blessed him with another twenty years of life, and fortune again decreed that his dead hand should continue to hold the reins of government for thirteen years more, so that March 1848 found Austria in all respects in which governmental ingenuity could prevail – and these were considerable – in the condition in which Francis had found it in March 1792.

  *

  The international situation when Leopold died was really one which called for the utmost caution. In the last months of his life Leopold had patiently pursued the rapprochement with Prussia, and after painful negotiations in the course of which each side had made a token of goodwill, Frederick William by dropping Herzberg, Leopold by appointing Philipp Cobenzl to relieve Kaunitz (who was, indeed, eighty years of age) of part of his responsibilities, a preliminary treaty had been signed on 25 July 1791, and a definitive one, on 7 February 1792.

  One motif in these negotiations had been the Polish question, on which, indeed, the two parties did not see eye to eye, Austria wanting from Prussia a guarantee of Poland’s independence, to save it from annexation by Russia, while Prussia wanted a door left open through which she might increase her own Polish possessions. The final formula here was vague: the parties agreed only to work for the maintenance of a ‘free’ constitution in Poland. But they also mutually guaranteed the integrity of one another’s territory and promised to help each other with twenty thousand men against any attack, or in the event of internal unrest.6

  Meanwhile, Leopold had been pushed by his obligations as Emperor into a defence of the rights of certain West German rulers, lay and ecclesiastical, which various enactments by the Assemblée Nationale had violated. The French in their turn were annoyed at the protection afforded to the French émigrés by some West German Courts. Mutual irritation mounted, and Leopold’s own originally favourable view of the French revolution became modified by its increasing radicalism, and by concern for his sister. On 6 July 1791, after the abortive Flight to Varennes, he had issued a proclamation to the sovereigns of Europe, inviting them to inform France that they regarded Louis’ cause as their own, and demanded liberty and security for the King. On 27 August, the preliminary treaty with Prussia having been concluded, he and Frederick William jointly issued the Declaration of Potsdam, which described conditions in France as a matter of common interest to all sovereigns, and expressed the hope that they would collaborate effectively to enable Louis freely to establish an order which took account both of the rights of sovereigns and of the welfare of the French people. The Declaration was cautiously worded: Austria and Prussia were prepared to mobilize the forces necessary to achieve the common end, but only if othe
r States participated. This reservation, which Leopold described as constituting for him ‘the law and the prophets’, took most of the reality out of the threat, since it was already quite certain that England would not participate. But it played its part, not in averting the crisis but in precipitating it, in inflaming opinion in France against both the foreign interference and its own dynasty, which had seemed ready to profit by that interference. From this date onward war between France and Austria became an increasingly imminent certainty.7

  The definitive Treaty with Prussia strengthened Austria’s position, but further inflamed her relations with France, who regarded it as an open threat. Less than a month after his accession – on 27 March – Francis was confronted with an ultimatum calling on Austria to dissolve all alliances contracted without the foreknowledge of France, or directed against her, and at once to withdraw her troops from the frontier. The demand was rejected, and on 20 April Louis, with tears in his eyes, announced to the Assembly that France was at war with ‘the King of Bohemia and Hungary’.

  Under these conditions, it would have been extremely difficult for Francis, in common prudence, to provoke those classes among his subjects who traditionally constituted the strongest forces in each of his Lands, and on whose goodwill the integrity of his Monarchy, and even his own throne, might be supposed to depend. He must ally himself with them, if they were to be had as allies; and this they were, for the cardinal feature in the whole situation of the Monarchy – that which really determined all its subsequent development – was the deep anxiety of the Estates in every Land for a permanent peace with the Crown, which should definitively banish the threat of revolution: revolution from outside and below, infiltrating from France, and even more formidable, revolution from inside and above, should the unquiet ghost of Joseph II not prove to have been well and truly laid. As proof of the identity of their interests with those of the Crown, they could point to the course of the French Revolution, so demonstrably the work of men of the middle class and of intellectuals, and in its actions identifying the Crown and the aristocracy as its common enemy. Given reassurance of the Crown’s conservative intentions, they were entirely willing, in effect, to accept the reality of central political control which lay behind Leopold’s recognition of their shadow-existence and to serve the Crown as junior partners in the common cause. Only the Hungarians were not ready to ratify the Leopoldinian compromise as it then stood; but even they wanted only amendments of detail, not destruction of the whole.