The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Unpretentious and almost kleinbürgerlich as he was in his personal tastes, Francis had none of his uncle’s pathological hatred of the nobility. Nevertheless, easily guided as he was at this period of his life, he might yet have been led to question the wisdom of accepting this partnership if he had heard more arguments against it. But he was almost entirely surrounded by its advocates. There were, indeed, a considerable number of Josephinian-minded men in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy, and some men of this mental type had even given Francis lessons, at Joseph’s orders, in certain subjects. It was characteristic of Francis’s unwillingness to make any change that he never himself tried to replace a Josephinian civil servant, on grounds of principle, with the result that certain departments of the bureaucracy continued to work throughout his reign in a Josephinian spirit. But even Joseph had not altered the tradition under which the top positions in every Government department had been reserved for members of the leading aristocracy, nor the rigid Court etiquette which limited Hoffähigkeit, or social access to the Court, exclusively (with limited exceptions in the case of the military and the members of the Orders of Chivalry) to members of the higher nobility and persons bearing the rank of Geheimrat or Kämmerer. It was still rare for a non-noble to become a Geheimrat and by very definition he never became a Kämmerer (for which appointment sixteen quarterings were necessary; and failing possession of one or the other of these titles, he remained without access to the Court, however important his position in the administrative machine.

  And Joseph himself, again, had shrunk from appointing anyone outside the charmed circle to be tutor in chief to the young Francis. Instead, he had chosen for that all-important position, Count Franz Colloredo. Honourable, unselfish and devoted to his pupil, to whom he also had the courage, even in later years, to tell home truths whenever he thought it necessary, Colloredo was yet a man of mediocre abilities and of a mental outlook as un-Josephinian as could well be imagined: strictly clerical and extremely Conservative. According to some writers, some of Francis’s chief phobias, against the ideas of enlightenment and constitutionalism, against freedom of the Press and even against intellectuals in general, were directly inculcated into him by Colloredo. And his influence was most enduring, for in spite of his plain-speaking he inspired in Francis’s unindependent mind a great devotion. Francis’s very first official act as Monarch – done the day after his accession – was to appoint Colloredo head of his Kabinett or private secretariat, with the rank (previously unknown) of Kabinettsminister. In doing so, he told his old tutor, in touching language,8 that he was to be always with him, advise him in every decision, and replace him in his absence.

  Thus the road to the throne from every quarter except that of the Imperial family itself led through the office of Colloredo. From 1795 on he was also Head Court Chamberlain, in which capacity he controlled the giving of audiences. All important appointments were made on his advice, and he naturally nearly always recommended those of his own kidney.

  In the first years of Francis’s reign, when he was much occupied with his second wife, the Neapolitan Princess Maria Theresa, and with his rapidly growing family,9 and less diligent than he afterwards became, he left practically the whole conduct of public affairs to Colloredo, who was thus probably the most important man in the Monarchy, the next most important being his assistant, Kabinettsrat Schoischnigg (another of Francis’s old tutors).

  The sum effect of this situation and these influences was that Francis accepted the aristocracy’s thesis of the identity of their interests with those of the Crown – made acceptable as it was by their acquiescence in their subordinate role in the association – and the system which emerged was one which has well been called ‘one of aristocratic bureaucracy, or if you will, bureaucratic aristocracy’.10 It was absolutist and centralist in its institutions but usually aristocratic and ultraconservative in the conduct of them; not, indeed, quite invariably so, for no purge was carried through in the existing bureaucracy, the middle ranks of which were staffed largely with Joseph’s men, and now and then one of these would slip through some measure which was purely Josephinian.

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  The promotion of the Kabinett to Ministerial status, and the appointment of Colloredo to head it, were the only changes made by Francis immediately on his accession, either in the current machinery of Government, or in its personnel. He made one other change a year later, when he restored the police to the status enjoyed by it under Joseph II, of an independent Hofstelle reporting directly to himself. Joseph’s old Chief of Police, von Pergen, was put in charge of the office. Otherwise, the only changes of personnel in high places during Francis’s first years as Monarch were a series connected with the conduct of foreign policy. Although Francis, like Leopold before him, left the aged Kaunitz in enjoyment of the title of Chancellor, and thus nominally in charge of foreign affairs, the actual conduct of these, after August 1792, was given to Count Philipp Cobenzl, and under him, Baron Anton von Spielmann. After Prussia and Russia had concluded the Second Partition of Poland behind Austria’s back (January 1793), Cobenzl and Spielmann were dismissed, and in March Thugut was (on Colloredo’s advice) appointed ‘Director-General of the Haus-Hof-und Staatskanzlei’. When Kaunitz died in 1794, Thugut was given the additional title of Minister, although not that of Chancellor. He survived until 1801, but was inevitably retired after the Peace of Lunéville. Count Ludwig Cobenzl was now given the direct charge of foreign affairs, but placed under the tutelage of Colloredo, and these two men between them carried out such foreign policy as Francis did not keep in his own hands until their fall in 1805.11

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  In the event, Francis found it easy enough to reach an agreement with the Estates of all his dominions. The one problematic case had been that of Hungary, where final agreement between the Crown and the Diet was admittedly still to be reached, for the work of the Committees set up by the Leopoldinian Diet was still to be discussed and there was a possibility that some of the reports might contain far-reaching demands, political and even social. On the other side, there were influences in Vienna in favour of tightening up control over Hungary and even retracting the concessions made by Leopold.

  Francis, however, was not of this party. He was at that time personally well-disposed towards the Hungarians, and held a high opinion (which he never lost) of the Hungarian Constitution as a guarantee of social stability.12 As Crown Prince and co-Regent he had even played a part in mediating the settlement of 1791, and the Hungarians, knowing this, looked on him with confidence.13 For their part, the radicals in the national field had been largely disarmed by Leopold’s willingness to meet their chief demands, which the men then holding the highest offices – the Chancellor, Count Károly Pálffy, the Országbiró, Count Zichy, the Personalis Jözsef Órményi and Count József Haller of the Vice-Regal Council – all men who were able to combine attachment to their country with loyalty to the dynasty – held to constitute an acceptable settlement. In the social field, the conservative trend was growing rapidly stronger, as it was in Austria; the Committee dealing with the peasant question, in particular, was exclusively preoccupied with the preservation of the nobles’ privileges and of their right to exact the maximum of services from their peasants. In any case, the Committees were not yet ready with their reports, which they were making extremely detailed.14

  When Francis signified his intention of convoking a Coronation Diet, the Hungarians had not had time to prepare a detailed catalogue of wishes, and put forward only a short list, one of which was, indeed, of primary importance: the abolition of the Illyrian Court Chancellery. A second request was that Hungarian officers15 should be given preference in appointments as commanders or establishment officers in the Hungarian and Military Frontier regiments, and a third that, as a step towards carrying into effect the language law (Law XVI) of 1791, instruction in Magyar should be made a compulsory subject in the gymnasia of Inner Hungary and an optional one in the partes adnexae. The young Palatine recommended his br
other to accept all these, and Francis duly granted them on his coronation, which took place on 6 June. In return the Diet, while denying any legal obligation to do so, voted the war contribution asked of it, of five thousand recruits, one thousand horses and four million florins, and cheerfully postponed to a later date consideration of the reports set up by the Leopoldinian Diet.

  Prague gave even less trouble: here no concessions of substance were required at all, and the coronation was effected on 8 August. That in Frankfurt had meanwhile taken place, again without difficulty, and without even any attempt by the Electors further to extend the Electoral Capitulations, on 14 July.

  Francis was now able to devote his chief attention to the war with France; and while this work is primarily concerned with the internal conditions and developments in the Austrian Monarchy, it is, of course, necessary for the understanding of these to remember that for the next twenty-three years Austria was never really at peace. During nearly half of them she was actively at war; during almost all the remainder, either salving the wounds received in the last campaign, or preparing for the next. The wars further brought her repeated and important territorial changes, and also alterations in her status in relation to Germany. The essential facts of the first thirteen of these years are as follows:

  Austria’s first war with France lasted, with varying fortunes, for almost exactly five years. Then, having been deserted by Russia and by the smaller German States, she was forced to sign the Preliminary Peace of Leoben (18 April 1797) and on 17–18 October, the even less favourable definitive Peace of Campo Formio. Her armies had early been driven out of Belgium; now she ceded that province definitively to France and secretly promised to support the cession to France of most German territory west of the Rhine. She also lost Lombardy, being obliged to recognize the formation of a Cis-Alpine Republic, extending eastward as far as the Etsch (Adige). On the other hand, she acquired Continental Venice, east of the Etsch, with the Margravate of Istria and Dalmatia. Meanwhile, in 1793, Prussia and Russia, taking advantage of Austria’s preoccupation, had effected between them the second Partition of Poland, out of which Austria had come emptyhanded; but Thugut, who took over the Foreign Ministry from Cobenzl when Prussia’s treachery was revealed, had shown his teeth to Prussia and when the total partition of Poland took place in 1795, after Thugut had concluded a secret agreement with Russia, Austria secured Lublin, Cholm, Cracow and Sandomir (then collectively known as ‘West Galicia’).

  The peace established at Campo Formio lasted only eighteen months, for Thugut, the ‘War Baron’, unconcealedly regarded it only as an armistice and promptly opened negotiations for a new coalition against France. In March 1799, after agreement had been reached with Britain and Russia, as well as Naples and Portugal, Austria again declared war on France (having actually begun hostilities some weeks earlier). In this war, as in its predecessor, her armies won early successes, but the Russian Emperor, Paul, made his peace with Bonaparte, now in supreme charge in France, as First Consul, and in 1800 Bonaparte drove the Austrians out of Italy, following up this success with an advance which brought one of his armies down the Danube to within twenty leagues of Vienna, while another advanced on the capital from the South Tirol. On 2 February 1801, Francis had to conclude the Peace of Lunéville, the territorial provisions of which substantially repeated those of Campo Formio: only the Italian secondogenitures disappeared, the Grand Duke of Tuscany being promised compensation in Salzburg, and the Duke of Modena, whose territory was incorporated in the Cis-Alpine Republic, in the Breisgau (at Austria’s expense). Austria even got the small gain that the episcopal territories of Brixen and Trent were assigned to her in the subsequent reorganization of Germany, but in other respects her influence in Germany was greatly diminished by the reduction of the power of the Catholic States, her traditional supporters, in favour of the Protestant.

  This war had, moreover, been exhausting for her. The French armies had cruelly ravaged the territory through which they had passed, and some of the battles, notably that of Hohenlinden, had cost her a heavy toll in blood. The population had been at best lukewarm for the war; the Hungarians, large numbers of whom had gone over to the enemy, less than that. In view of the exhaustion of his dominions, Francis now hoped to remain at peace. Thugut was retired in favour of the consortium Colloredo-Cobenzl, and in fact Austria remained neutral when war recommenced between France and England in May 1803; the only international event worth recording in Austrian history in 1804 was the assumption by Francis, on 10 August, of the title of hereditary Emperor of Austria, and this was an act of purely dynastic significance. It was forced on Francis on the one hand by Napoleon’s assumption of the Imperial title, and on the other, by the obvious necessity of reckoning with the end of the Holy Roman Empire. If the Empire disappeared, Francis would find his own family inferior in dignity to the rulers of both France and Russia, unless he assured for it the Imperial style. But it had no further political significance: it did not signify any abandonment of Austria’s claims to leadership in Germany, nor in general (as the history of the next decades amply proved) any alteration in her conception of her role in the world. Neither did it create any new bond, either de jure or de facto, between Francis’s own dominions.16 The Hungarian Chancellery demanded and, after argument, received, explicit assurances on the legal point.

  This respite was again a short one. Francis changed his policy again: on 9 August 1805, Austria joined the Coalition with Britain and Russia. Hostilities broke out on the Danube in September, and this time the disaster was speedy and overwhelming. One of the main Austrian armies, thirty-three thousand strong, was lost when Mack capitulated at Ulm on 20 October; another was defeated at Caldiero ten days later. Napoleon advanced swiftly down the Danube, occupied Vienna and then, on 2 December, utterly defeated the chief remaining Austrian army, with a Russian army which had joined it, at Austerlitz, inflicting on the allies a loss of fifteen thousand killed and wounded and twenty thousand prisoners. On 26 December Francis was forced to sign the terrible Peace of Pressburg, which amply compensated for the relative leniency with which Austria had been treated at Campo Formio and Lunéville. She lost her recent acquisitions from Venice, these now going to the new Kingdom of Italy; Tirol and Vorarlberg to Bavaria, and her surviving possessions in West Germany to Baden and Württemberg. In addition, she had to pay an indemnity of forty million francs. Her only territorial compensation was Salzburg.17 Other articles of the Treaty declared Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden sovereign States, and on 6 August 1806, when Napoleon had in addition created the Confederation of the Rhine, under his own protection, Francis, at his behest, renounced the title of Holy Roman Emperor and released all Estates from their obligations to the holder of it.

  At this point we may return to pick up the threads of internal developments in the Monarchy.

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  The very fact that the war declared by France on Austria in 1792 was an ideological one, waged by Austria in defence of legitimate authority against revolution, would of itself have sufficed to prejudice Francis still further against innovations, even if his preoccupations had left him time to think them up. Nevertheless, he does not seem to have felt it necessary, during the first couple of years, to take any special measures against internal unrest: he was satisfied to let his agreements with the Estates take their effects.18 But his mind and spirit were soon hardened by two severe shocks. One came from the increasing radicalism of the French Revolutionaries, culminating in the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and of the Queen (Francis’s own aunt) in the following October. The second came when, in September 1794, the police reported the discovery of two ‘Jacobin conspiracies’, one in Vienna, the other in Hungary.19 The Viennese ‘conspiracy’ reflected a real discontent with the war, and one or two of the participants (several of whom were well-known Viennese figures)20 held genuinely treasonable views; but for the most part it was an almost ludicrously childish affair of a few men who had done nothing more than plant a ‘tree of liberty�
� in a sequestered valley outside Vienna and dance round it, singing tipsy catches in praise of liberty. The Hungarian was a little more serious, and a good deal more mysterious. The chief figure in it, a certain Abbé Martinovics, had been one of Leopold’s confidants in his plan for destroying the power of the aristocracy, and seems to have gone on conspiring after Leopold’s death, ignoring the fact that the aristocracy was now allied with the Crown. The affair was fairly widespread, involving such various figures as the poet Kazinczy, afterwards one of the leaders of the Hungarian literary and linguistic renaissance, one member (a youthful one, it is true) of the aristocracy – a certain Count Sigray – several more ‘intellectuals’, and some officers. No two of them, however, seem to have had quite the same ideas. Martinovics had evolved a marvellous dream of a republic run entirely by and for the benefit of the lesser nobility; the King and all his dynasty were to be deposed, the magnates swept aside, the property of the Church secularized, and although the peasants were to be personally free, they were to continue to supply the nobles with rents, dues in kind, and services. A second plan, revealed only to initiates, was more radical still. Others of the conspirators were pure national enthusiasts or idealistic reformers.