During his very long tenure of office (he died only in 1847) Joseph did much to raise cultural and economic standards in Hungary, but his supreme value was that of mediator. Again and again he smoothed over difficulties and mediated understandings; that during all these years an open breach between the nation and its kings was always, somehow, averted was due in no small measure to this one man’s devotion and honesty.
The Hungarians had much need of such a mediator, for the Palatine was the only man with direct access to Francis who was at all sympathetic to them. Baldacci hated them, and the Hungarian ‘Referent’ in the Staatsrat, Hofrath Izdenczy, whose function it was to report on all matters referred to the Council from the Consilium in Pest, was, although a Hungarian by birth, very hostile to his own country, and almost invariably reported unfavourably to its wishes, especially if he could smell Protestantism in the papers. All the representatives of the Gesammtidee at the Court saw in Hungary primarily a country which was contributing less than its share to the common burden, and setting a bad example to others by insisting on its right to speak. And these feelings grew stronger as the wars went on and Austria found herself increasingly pressed for money and manpower. Francis simply left the Diet unconvoked in 1799, thus violating, indeed, his oath but still avoiding the clash which increased demands on the country would inevitably have evoked; but the Peace of Lunéville produced conditions which made it impossible to leave the status quo undisturbed any longer. Count Kollowrat, in practice the Minister of the Interior, argued that the Lands of the Holy Crown were the only part of the Monarchy which was more prosperous than before the war, and suggested getting an increased contributio of two million florins out of them. While the rustical peasants could, admittedly, hardly shoulder this increased burden, it could be raised by taxing the peasants cultivating dominical land,51 and the nobles themselves should be required to contribute to the fundus domesticus, or taxation for internal purposes.52 The Archduke Charles, who had just completed his plans for reorganizing the army, said that it was vital for them that the peace-time strength of the Hungarian contingent should be raised to sixty-four thousand53 and conscription introduced into the country. He, too, pleaded for a higher contributio.
Some of Francis’s advisers wanted him to send in troops and collect by force the men and money which he needed. He decided not to do this, and convoked the Diet in May 1802, but conducted its proceedings in a way which could obviously not satisfy the Hungarians. The traditional procedure was that a Diet opened with consideration by the nation of the royal postulata; when agreement had been reached on these, the Crown considered the nation’s gravamina. In practice, what qua were to be given for what quibus was hammered out behind the scenes, usually before the Diet even opened. This time the Hungarians had got together a long list of wishes: for the attachment of Dalmatia to the Hungarian Crown, for ‘wider use of the mother-tongue’ in public life, and above all, for facilities to export Hungarian grain and cattle via Fiume, thus enabling those products to escape the stranglehold imposed on them by the ruling system, which as it stood, practically prohibited Hungary from exporting to them anywhere but Austria, and imposed a discriminatory tax on them on the frontier if harvests were good.
In the preliminary negotiations, Francis refused some of these demands flatly, and ignored the rest; and when the Diet opened, simply put his demands for men and money. The Hungarians dug their toes in. Instead of two million florins, they voted only 700,000, and they flatly refused to allow the war tax to be levied on any houses on dominical land, or to contribute to the fundus publicus. After long resistance, they agreed that the Hungarian contingent to the standing army might be raised to 63,264 for a trial period of three years, during which 6,043 men might be conscripted every year (if war threatened, twelve thousand men were to be conscripted ‘once and for all’). But they refused obstinately to make the arrangement permanent, or to allow a war-time strength above sixty-three thousand. As soon as the agreement had been reached on these points, Francis dissolved the Diet, without allowing any formal consideration of the gravamina at all.54
Monarch and nation parted thoroughly out of temper with one another. The Crown had got much less, in terms of both manpower and money, than it had wanted, and less than it would have obtained if it had been able to apply to Hungary the methods which it was using in the Western Lands; moreover, the mere fact that the Monarch was obliged to ask, and might suffer, a refusal, was offensive to the principles of Francis himself, and of his circle. The Hungarians had got nothing at all out of their own demands.
The Diet of 1805, held after the outbreak of the Third Coalition War, promised no better. The preliminary bargaining had begun in 1804, when the Coalition also was being negotiated, and Francis, ignoring the Palatine’s advice, had insisted on asking only for ‘sacrifices’ in men and money, instead of taking the initiative in promising reforms. The Hungarians were at first inclined to regard the war as none of their business, and even to sympathize with Napoleon. Afterwards, when the French armies were nearing, and presently even crossed, the Hungarian frontier, they grew frightened and were prepared to offer not only the insurrectio but a large number of recruits towards the army, but the abrupt ending of the hostilities made the recruits unnecessary. The insurrectio had been proclaimed, but too late: it was obviously incapable of facing the disciplined French army, and Count József Pálffy, its commander (under the Palatine), was sent to the French commander, Davoust, to say that Hungary was not being defended. Francis’s mistrust of the Hungarians, and even of the Palatine, was enhanced when Pálffy, misunderstanding his instructions, told Davoust that Hungary was declaring herself neutral.
Meanwhile the Hungarians had utilized the short period at their command (for the Diet itself was dissolved after only ten days, when the news of Mack’s surrender arrived) to extract from Francis one linguistic concession: Hungarian was to be used, in parallel columns with Latin, in addresses to the Crown and might (not must) be used by local authorities in communications with the central authorities.55 The economic grievances, however, remained unremedied, and so long as this was the case, and the Diet was treated so cavalierly, and clearly only regarded as a milch-cow, the nation could not be satisfied with its position.
If the Hungarians were not more restive than they were, this was chiefly because the period was a very prosperous one for the magnates and well-to-do nobles, whose voices were those which counted in the Diet and in the Counties. When the wars began, the demand for wheat and oats for the army rose sharply, while at the same time, the competition of ‘Odessa wheat’56 ceased. The price of wheat rose from a pre-war average of 30-40 groschen per Pozsony bushel to forty-five groschen in 1800, 143 in 1806, 152 in 1809. The Hungarian landlords who had successfully maintained their own exemption from taxation, while their fields and vineyards were untouched by the ravages of war, cashed in on this boom. Many of them accumulated substantial fortunes, and were able also to enlarge their estates by enclosure (which went on apace during the period) or by purchase, paying off their debts in the gradually depreciating currency.
In these conditions the question of industrialization became less acute. The landlords could employ all their own labour in the fields and were positively opposed to its being drawn off into the towns. The economic clashes with Austria were less over industrialization than over agricultural markets, Hungary wishing to exploit those of all Europe, while the Court wanted to keep Hungary’s produce for Austria.
It was unfortunately true that in this respect the Palatine Leopold Alexander’s thesis of the community of interests between Crown and Estates proved well-founded. There was one conflict – over manpower, which was still short in Hungary; and this shortage is one explanation for the tenacity with which the Hungarians resisted the Court’s requests for more soldiers. But the Hungarian landowners heartily agreed with the Court on the desirability of keeping the peasants in their places, and they maintained social stagnation in Hungary as completely as Francis’s officials en
forced it in the Western Lands. Even the Robot law was often disregarded, since it was in the landlords’ interest to extract the last ounce of labour from their subjects. It is with good reason that Hungarians count these years, with the decade that followed them, among those lost to their country in respect of reform.
There was, indeed, one other respect in which Hungary – that is to say, the Magyar element in it – contrasted strongly with the rest of Francis’s dominions, in that there, and there alone, the interest and enthusiasm for the national language which had been so powerfully stimulated by Joseph II’s attempted Germanization in many Lands had remained alive and active. As we have seen, the Diets of 1796, 1802 and 1805 had continued to press for more use of Magyar in administration and education, and in the country at large, a genuine linguistic and literary revival was beginning. In particular, young Kazinczy – the most important figure in the movement when Bessenyey grew older – when he emerged from the prison in which he had spent six years for his share in the Martinovics conspiracy, set himself the enormous task of ‘renewing the language’ purifying it from foreign corruptions, rationalizing its grammar, and enriching its vocabulary; and he and the little band of fellow-enthusiasts who had joined him in the task were achieving remarkable success in it.
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Meanwhile, there was one thing which had resisted all efforts to keep it stable: the State finances.
These had been deteriorating since well before Francis’s accession. Joseph II was, notoriously, parsimonious to excess, but although he underpaid his officials, his new administration was expensive, and the Turkish war sent things right over the edge. The cost of the army rose between 1787 and 1789 from 33 to 66 million gulden, the war cost in all 218 million, and the deficit in 1789 was 20 million, with a hangover of 27 million to be met in 1790. The national debt was up to 399 million. Moreover, Joseph had taken a step towards inflation. After making another public issue of Bankozettel in 1785, he had made a further, secret, one in 1788, bringing the real total in circulation to over twenty-eight million: still a relatively small sum, but growing nearer to the amount which it would not be easy to cash in case of a run. In addition, the provisioning of the army in Hungary had been paid largely in assignats.
Here again Leopold had effected some improvement: extraordinary military expenditure had been cut from 41·8 million gulden in 1790 to 16·4 million in 1792 and the circulation of Bankozettel slightly reduced. But the abandonment of the projected land tax had been an expensive luxury, and the national debt had risen a little further still during his reign, to 417 million.
The war with France involved fresh expenditure. The Minister of Finance reported himself unable to suggest either cuts in expenditure or new sources of revenue within the Monarchy: there was no help but to try the foreign bankers again, although they would probably make harder conditions than before. In fact, the foreign loans and subsidies received by Austria in the following decade never covered her needs, and became increasingly difficult to obtain when she fell into arrears with the interest and amortization of the first numbers of the series.57 Little more was brought in by a few internal loans, some voluntary, some forced. Francis was always extremely reluctant to impose internal taxation,58 more especially since he always persuaded himself that each war would be the last, and that after it he would be able to start a period of reconstruction; the remedy to which the Government regularly resorted was therefore the renewed issue of paper money.59 By 1795 35·5 million fl. Bankozettel were in circulation; by 1796, 46·8 million.
Up to that year the public had accepted the Bankozettel without question, and it is likely that they had rather helped the economy by easing the monetary stringency. But now confidence in them began to waver. The Government issued a Patent ordering that they must be taken at their face value in payment of all State taxes and dues, and similarly, all employees and creditors of the State were obliged to take them at face value, and in theory, they could still be exchanged for silver at any public counter (there were a dozen such in the Monarchy). In fact, however, during the panic when Napoleon was expected to march on Vienna in the spring of 1797, there was such a run on the counters that they had to be closed. After that silver vanished in practice from circulation, and Augsburg began to quote the Bankozettel at a discount.
Meanwhile, a series of exceptionally good harvests had kept the cost of living fairly stable from 1792 to 1794, but from 1795, prices began to rise, more or less pari passu with the increases in the currency.
After the Peace of Campo Formio (which itself was concluded largely on grounds of financial stringency) it was hoped that things would improve, but the deterioration recommenced when war broke out again in 1799. The Government resorted to an extraordinary number of expedients which it would take too long to describe here:60 most of them were devices for persuading holders of State papers to exchange them into newer forms, and while sometimes bringing in small amounts of ready money, they increased the long-term State debt. Taxation, too, was raised by the introduction of a so-called Classensteuer (in reality, a graduated income-tax), but the deficit could never be met. More Bankozettel were issued, bringing the figure in circulation up to 200 million by 1800. They were now no longer convertible against silver, and the Government ordered that they must be taken at their face value in private transactions as well as public, but this could not be enforced in practice, and the Augsburg quotation rose to 115 in 1800, 117 in 1801 and 135 in 1804. The cost of living nearly trebled between 1801 and 1805.
Some classes of the population did very well out of a situation which left obligations to the State (even if these had been increased) payable at their old face value, while prices increased. Landowners and primary producers, big and small, prospered greatly; reports of the day were full of shocked comment on the luxurious living of the peasants, especially, of course, those who had commuted their services for cash (this was no doubt one contributory reason to the hostility of the landlords and the authorities to commutation). It was said also that many large fortunes were being made by Jewish speculators. On the other hand, State employees, pensioners living on State rentes, the clergy and other fixed-income classes were reduced to great distress.61 Many of the lower-grade employees were carrying on second professions in the evening, some even, with the permission of their employers, in working hours. Some blamed the Jews, some the peasants, who were said to be sending up the cost of living by sabotaging the robot, but no one could devise a remedy.
After the disaster of Austerlitz, the Archduke Charles, who had warned his brother that ‘the Monarchy was shaken to its foundations’, renewed his representations, begging Francis to make a clean sweep of ‘the obscure quacks gathered round the deathbed of the Monarchy’, and to reorganize the conduct of affairs under younger and more energetic men. Up to a point, Francis listened to him. Colloredo and Cobenzl were dismissed62 and Count Philipp Stadion placed in charge of Foreign Affairs, with full Ministerial rank. On 10 February 1806, Charles himself was made ‘Generalissimus’, a special title, rarely bestowed, which exempted him from any control by the Hofkriegsrat.
These changes were to the good. It was in every way profitable that Colloredo should have gone, especially as the post of Kabinettminister was abolished, so that one insulating layer between Francis and his executives disappeared. Charles’s own promotion was also beneficial, as well as popular. Stadion, a Rhinelander and ‘Imperial Knight’, thus of the same class, and almost of the same local origin, as his famous contemporary Stein, who had, however, passed all his adult life in the Austrian diplomatic service, was a well-educated and intelligent man. And he had one idea which, for Austria, was revolutionary. He had been appointed, quite undisguisedly, in order to prepare a war of revanche, a task for which his strong personal hatred of Napoleon, who had confiscated his estates, his German national feeling and his connections, both in Germany and in the capitals where he had served which included London, Berlin and Petersburg, eminently qualified him; and he was convinced that to car
ry this through with success, more was needed than diplomatic alliances and army reform: it was necessary also to awaken national enthusiasm among the people, and for this, not only propaganda but also political and social reform were necessary. He favoured administrative decontrol, more power for the Estates (for the somewhat unexpected reason that this would form a counterweight to ‘the influence of the Third Estate and the power of money, which is increasing in geometrical progression’)63 and liberation of the peasants.
It was beneficial, too, that Francis now began to draw the sensible and popular Archduke John into his councils, although not, for the moment, giving him any important official part. (Technically, he was employed at the time on supervising the fortification of the Alpine passes.) Yet another brother, Rainer, whom Francis also frequently called in, showed much common sense; the remarks credited to him in the records are always reasonable, and usually enlightened.
Yet to describe the period which now opened, as a recent Austrian historian has done, as one of ‘great reforming activity, which reached its climax in 1808’,64 is simply to divest words of their meaning. The one person who in 1806 and 1807 carried out any effective reforms at all was Charles himself, who dismissed twenty-five Generals, straightened out a number of administrative tangles, humanized the discipline and introduced the important change of keeping only part of the standing army permanently with the colours, the rest being organized as reservists, two reserve battalions being attached to each regiment. He also persuaded Francis to accept the idea65 of a second reserve, or people’s militia, for home defence service in case of invasion; the Archduke John was entrusted with the working out of the details.
But for the rest, the years were as stagnant as any which had preceded them. Stadion succeeded in getting the Emperor’s signature to a proclamation promising the nation a freer intellectual life and Government support for ‘all worthy and useful literary products’, and rumours circulated that the censorship was to be abolished, but they proved unfounded. Francis refused to agree to a recommendation by Stadion – although both Charles and Rainer backed it – that the police should be demoted and placed under a man (Count Rotenhahn) ‘whom the people believed incapable of resorting to the base methods of slandering, espionage and prying into family secrets in order to acquire in the Monarch’s eyes a reputation for loyal vigilance, at the price of his integrity’. The police remained an independent service, and precisely in these years its activity increased rather than decreased. No move was made to enlarge the self-government of any representative body – on the contrary, it was precisely on 1 April 1808 that towns and marketplaces in Austria were deprived of their right to elect their own burgomasters and aldermen; these were now to be appointed by the authorities. The central administration was actually altered again for the worse, for on 4 January 1807, the remarkable decision was taken (on Baldacci’s advice) secretly to limit the competence of the Staats-und Konferenzministerium to internal affairs. Thus all machinery for the wider co-ordination of policy disappeared, while the new organ for co-ordinating internal policy was even less efficient than the old Staatsrat had been. No important changes of personnel were made beyond those mentioned above; Francis insisted on retaining Zichy (who cheerfully admitted his own incompetence in the field) at the head of finances, in preference to Charles’s candidate, Chotek; Baldacci remained his chief confidant in internal questions.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 28