There were in this system, even as Francis inherited it, three major defects. One of these lay in the peculiarity of the Dienstreglement which had been built up during previous decades or centuries, and laid down which questions could be decided on a lower level and which had to go up to the top, both in an extraordinarily capricious manner, and one which more often allowed for too little devolution of responsibility, than too much. As one later critic wrote:
Only the Emperor could exempt a single man from military service, whereas the determination of the size of the military forces lay in the unquestioned competence of the Hofkriegsrat. Crossing-sweepers and day-labourers employed on public works could receive a beggarly pittance only if the Emperor authorised it as an act of grace, while the Hofkammer carried out far-reaching financial operations independently. To deforest even a small piece of woodland required Imperial permission, while the Hofkanzlei issued decrees on important questions, which had the force of law, and no one cavilled.39
Given Francis’s personal character, too mistrustful to delegate responsibility – he mistrusted the judgment, where not the loyalty, even of his senior officials – too conscientious to neglect it, and at the same time, constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between the important and the trivial, this meant that an enormous volume of business, some of it of the first importance, accumulated on his writing table, where a report might lie, literally, for years. By the summer of 1802 two thousand reports were awaiting his decision.
Incidentally, the arrears in the Law Courts became almost equally unmanageable, thanks to a sytem, the reflection of the administrative one, which not only allowed appeal from almost any decision taken in a lower Court, but made it almost mandatory.
The second great weakness lay in the absence of any machinery whatever for co-ordinating the policies of the Departments which came under the Staatsrat, with the others. It was only in the Monarch’s hand that all threads ran together, and his Ministers had little idea of one anothers’ operations and no recognized way of taking them into account.
Thirdly, the Staatsrat itself had developed, probably unintentionally and even unconsciously, into a sort of supervisory body controlling the work of the Departments reporting to it. The heads of those Departments frequently complained that the Staatsrat exceeded its competence by acting as an executive, rather than an advisory, body; and where it did confine itself to advice, (a) its opinions were not necessarily any sounder than the Departments’ own and (b) at the best, the procedure caused further irritating and unnecessary delays.
On his accession Francis had, as we have said, taken over this machinery (with the men staffing it) unaltered except for the few changes which we have recorded. He listened, chiefly to Colloredo or to subordinate members of his Kabinett such as Schoissnigg or Baldacci,40 sometimes to his wife or his brothers, but without any attempt to co-ordinate their advice, or to let others do it for him.
Then, when, in 1801, the Archduke Charles was himself given an official post, as President of the Hofkriegsrat, he persuaded his brother to alter the system. Each of the chief Departments of State was to be placed under a ‘Real Minister’, genuinely in charge of and responsible for his Department. The Ministers, with the head of the Kabinett, were to meet weekly, or oftener if necessary, under the chairmanship of Francis himself. Questions touching on the work of more than one Ministry would be discussed at these meetings; otherwise, the Minister would report directly to the Emperor. The Staatsrat was abolished.
The Ministries were to be: Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Interior, the last-named to be a single gigantic Ministry dealing with all ‘interna’ (except the police, which would still report direct to Francis) throughout the Monarchy. The Ministers were the consortium Colloredo-Cobenzl for Foreign Affairs; Charles himself for ‘War and Marine’ (he received this appointment on 12 September) and the existing President of the Hofkanzlei, Count Kollowrat-Krakowski, for the Interior. Colloredo’s assistant, Count Trautmannsdorf, sat in on the Conference, as did three ‘Referendars’ for special questions. There was also a secretary.
Francis promised himself great things from this reorganization, which was to produce an administration which ran like clockwork, and result in
… the advance of the general welfare, to be effected by the application of religion, morality and general peace, the execution of laws and ordinances, the prosperity of the population, of industry and trade, respect for every class and every individual subject, the due levying of all taxes and excises, the most exact business-like conduct of all branches of the State economy and the best administration of the public funds.
But in fact, no one except Charles really wanted the reform. He wanted it in order to influence foreign policy, and his opponents were against it precisely because they did not want him to gain that influence. The sessions of the ‘Staats und Konferenzministerium’, as it was called, never frequent, grew rarer and rarer, and although Francis could not bring himself formally to abolish it, it soon ceased in practice to exist. The final blow to it was given when, in March 1805, the war party at the Court persuaded Francis to reinstate the Hofkriegsrat, under a new President, as an independent body subordinate only to the Emperor. Charles retained the title of Minister of War, but as he himself said, was now ‘no longer an effective Minister, but only a rubber stamp’.41
The conduct of high policy in the Monarchy was back on its old basis of personal decision by Francis, taken after consultation with whatever person – it might be Charles, it might be Colloredo, it might be Baldacci – he thought best. Even Count Zichy, one of the least exacting critics of the system, complained that:
The most important questions, on which issues of war and peace depend, have not always been discussed with the Ministries of War and the Interior. The Ministry of War has taken its decisions, which affect most directly the political and financial administration, independently.
Meanwhile, after only a year, the Ministry of the Interior (whose aged designated head had himself protested his incompetence to direct so vast a body) had disintegrated into component parts. Finance had been erected into a ‘Real Ministry’, competent for the whole Monarchy.42 For the rest, the Hungarian and Transylvanian Court Chancelleries had recovered their independence (against the loss of which they had protested) and the Vereinigte Hofkanzlei and Oberste Justizstelle43 had been reinstated in their old functions of administrative and judicial Ministries for the German-Bohemian Lands and Galicia.
It is, incidentally, worth emphasizing that none of the complaints against Francis’s rule during this period were on points of principle. In the inner ring, which was, necessarily, the arena of such argument as took place, no one questioned Francis’s right to rule absolutely. The only man to raise that point at all was Charles, and he did so, to urge, not the relaxation of absolutism in Austria, but the extension of it to Hungary.44 The other grumbles were all against the inefficiency of the system, and commonly reduced themselves to pleas that someone or other should be allowed less influence, and someone else (usually the writer), more. Charles, again, was the most vigorous advocate of administrative reform, but this was chiefly because he found himself unable to create an efficient army under an inefficient general system, although it is true that he condemned the general stagnation in agriculture and economic life generally, and would have favoured fairly radical reforms on Josephinian lines.
It should also be remarked that outside the special cases of Galicia, where the Poles were naturally unable to reconcile themselves to the loss of their independence and remained in a condition of sullen resentment which expressed itself in passive resistance to Austrian rule, and Venice, where the rising prices and mass unemployment which followed the annexation caused widespread discontent, the peoples to whom the system described above was applied, accepted it with perfect philosophy. The aristocracy did not greatly mind Francis’s rule being dictatorial, so long as it was conservative. On 26 January 1793, the Estates of Lower Austria sent in a complaint against the �
�Jacobin’ tendencies of Francis’s Government,45 but they enclosed with it a substantial sum of money for the prosecution of the war against France. More real opposition came from the Josephinian elements in the bureaucracy, but even here, the reform party was in the minority: it was permanent officials who advised against abolishing the robot, or encouraging the development of trade and industry.46
As to the ‘subjecta’, the picture drawn by some pamphleteers of the Vormärz, and by some Liberal historians of a later age, of a freedom-loving people fretting against its chains, is, to say the least of it, misleading.
The class from which it would have been natural to expect the most discontent was that of the peasants, but in fact we hear hardly anything of peasant unrest during the first years of Francis’s reign; a series of good harvests, coinciding with a time of high prices for agricultural produce, compensated them amply for the failure of the Government to carry through complete abolition of the robot and the Patrimonial jurisdiction. As for the ‘intellectuals’: while it is true that a small number of livelier spirits left the country altogether, the great majority wore their muzzles with most perfect grace. Such demonstrations of discontent as occurred during these early years were nearly all occasioned simply by anti-war feeling. The war of 1792–7 was clearly not popular, that of 1799–1801 even less so, but this was not because the peoples of Austria were ideologically opposed to fighting the champions of freedom. Neither, for that matter, were they interested in crusading against revolution; a people unschooled in the mysteries of the balance of power simply disliked seeing its sons dragged away to suffer and die on distant battlefields, and its own purses strained, in order that Cracow or Dalmatia should be added to the Emperor’s territories. Himself cut to the quick by the terms of the Treaty of Campo Formio, relatively favourable to Austria as these were, Thugut wrote with deep bitterness of
Map 3
… the scandalous degradation of our Viennese, who are drunk with joy at the mere word ‘peace’ – and nobody troubles to ask whether the conditions are good or bad. Nobody bothers about the honour of the Monarchy, or what will become of it in ten years’ time, provided that now they can run to the ball and eat their roast chicken undisturbed.
Significant, too, is the reason which Francis gave Thugut for his dismissal on 1 January 1801: that ‘all circles of the people are unanimously of the view that Your Excellency is holding up the conclusion of peace, and will always hold it up’.
There was thus, indubitably, popular feeling against the ‘war party’, but this was not directed against Francis’s ‘system’, nor against himself, for the good reason that he was known to be a man of peace. Similarly, the great popularity enjoyed by the Archduke Charles was due less to the fact that (unlike most Austrian Generals), when he fought battles, he sometimes won them, than to the general knowledge that he was against fighting them at all, at any rate, with armies not properly equipped and supplied.
One consequence of this feeling was that Austria experienced extreme difficulty in getting soldiers to fight her campaigns at all. She started at a disadvantage, for Leopold, on grounds of economy, had not made up the wastage incurred in Joseph’s Turkish wars, and at the beginning of 1792 only about 225,000 men had been under the colours. The Hungarian Diet had then denied the legality of introducing conscription into Hungary, and although, as we say elsewhere, they had agreed eventually to raise their quota to the standing army to 52,000, they had insisted that this must be done by voluntary enlistment, and the figure had seldom been reached. The Tiroleans were equally obstinate. In the ‘conscription Lands’ the numbers of exempted classes grew in such fashion that, according to the Archduke Charles’s calculations, only 83,199 persons had then been liable for conscription, whereas in 1780 the figure had been 256,053 (out of a smaller total population), and 127,605 in 1788. The 83,000 were 20,000 short of the figure then required to bring the army up to strength.
In fact, the effective strength of the army, which in these years had ranged between 250,000 and 300,000 men, had been maintained largely by recruiting in the smaller German States. Nearly half the rank and file had been drawn from this source, and a still higher proportion of the N.C.O.s, since literacy was higher in the Reich than in Austria.47
*
The only one of Francis’s dominions which was treated somewhat differently from the rest was Hungary; and here the differences were bigger on paper than in reality.
It is possible that Francis would have gone further than he did to meet the Hungarians, for he had after all taken part in the negotiations which had ended in the Leopoldinian Compromise, and only a year later had himself sworn to maintain the national rights, liberties and customs. The Martinovics conspiracy, however, awoke in him a mistrust of his Hungarian subjects even deeper than that which filled him towards his Germans and Czechs, and this was enhanced by an extraordinary memorandum sent in to him on 16 April 1795, by his brother, the young Archduke-Palatine Alexander.48 The Archduke wrote that the Leopoldinian Diet had already been working for the ideas afterwards found to be behind the conspiracy, and he recommended the most stringent precautions. Germans troops should be stationed in the country, a censorship introduced, propaganda instituted in favour of the Dynasty, the higher officials ‘taught obedience and be habituated to carrying out orders’. He further advised a policy of extreme social reaction. No reforms in the interests either of the towns or of the peasants were to be recommended. If any alleviations to peasants were found unavoidable, they should be confined to individual cases, not generalized; reforms in the interests of the peasants only unsettled them and disturbed ‘the relationships and links between subjects and lord on which the well-being of both classes was founded’. To ensure the continuance of this harmony, the Archduke advocated the abolition of all instruction for peasants. The only end of instruction was to teach persons their official and vocational duties, and to that end a system of secondary and higher education might be organized. But ‘more enlightenment and the multiplication of knowledge, especially for the common people, was altogether unprofitable’. The reading of newspapers only made the peasants neglect their work in the fields, education tempted their sons to desert that work for the easier existence of an honoratior. The clergy should instruct their flocks in morality, but in nothing else: all schools other than those for officials should be allowed to die away for lack of money.
On the other hand, the memorandum argued that the way to maintain the desired stability lay not through experiments, such as those in which Maria Theresa and Joseph II had indulged, but in working through the existing Constitution, for this safeguarded the rights of the Estates, and the Estates and the Crown had a common interest to exclude social instability. It should therefore not be abolished, but utilized as an instrument for achieving the desired effects.
The thesis that the Hungarian Constitution, if rightly utilized, was a guarantee of stability, was, as we have seen, already Francis’s own – and it is tempting to suppose that he had imbibed it when visiting Hungary in 1790 from the same sources as those who had obviously inculcated the Archduke with it – those Hungarian magnates (among whom the young Palatine had in fact found his friends) whose arch-anxiety was to prevent a return of Josephinian ‘revolution from above’. The question was whether the Hungarians would so behave as to justify these fair words about their national institutions. And it is not to be denied that their conduct during these years seemed to do so. The magnates and wealthy common nobles were as horrified as Francis himself at the developments in France, and the wider circle of lesser nobles had been frightened out of their wits by the Martinovics conspiracy, the wide-spread arrests which had followed it, the alarmingly general terms in which the indictment had been drawn up, and the glimpses afforded at the trial of sinister forces moving obscurely below the surface. Rumours ran round the country that the Court was planning a general extermination of the nobility and that the public hangman, escorted by the military, was making the round of nobles’ houses in Nor
th Hungary.
The Diet which Francis then duly convoked in 1796 was in a thoroughly chastened mood. It voted a cash contributio towards the wars of 4,400,000 florins, with very large quantities of wheat, oats and oxen (in fact, what was needed to provision the entire army) and while still denying the existence of any legal obligation, agreed that the strength of the Hungarian standing army should be raised to 52,000 men (on the strength of which, three new Hungarian regiments were raised in 1798).49 It consented without demur to the further postponement of consideration of the reports of the 1791 Committees and asked only for a few small immediate concessions: some facilities for the export of Hungarian wine to Galicia, and an assurance that the promises of 1792 regarding the national language, which the Court Chancellery had, to that date, succeeded in evading completely, should be honoured.
Meanwhile, one event had occurred, tragic in itself, which yet had most beneficent consequences for nearly half a century of relations between the Crown and Hungary. The unfortunate young Palatine perished in a dreadful accident (when experimenting with fireworks for a fête in Laxenburg) and his brother Joseph took his place. Joseph fell in love with Hungary. He left it as rarely as he could, adopting its traditional dress and moustachios (the language was too much for him)50 and developed a great sympathy and understanding for its people and their just interests, earning for his reward a real affection such as no other member of his family, before or after, ever enjoyed. Withal, although nicknamed ‘the new Rákóczi’, he was impeccably loyal to his brother and always scrupulously safeguarded his interests.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 27