The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  And after all, the Patent did not achieve its purpose. The course of 1:5 had been chosen because the last time at which the Bankozettel had still stood at par had been when the circulation was at that figure; but in 1811 the rate had been not 500, but 900. The Einlösungsscheine were at once quoted at 180, and as they had no backing, their course fluctuated widely. Prices, after generally remaining for a short time at one-fifth (nominal) of the pre-Patent figure, rose sharply in the autumn of 1811. In 1812 they fell again and the course went down to 139. But even the relatively small military operation which was all that Austria was required to undertake in that year – the despatch of an auxiliary force against Russia – strained her resources (it had been paid for out of taxation) and in 1813 the foundations of the recovery were again sapped by the demands of foreign policy, which now took a new turn. The failure of his attempt to invade Russia, and Wellington’s victories in the Peninsula, had weakened Napoleon’s position. The war party at the Viennese Court took courage again and Austria began to rearm in preparation for intervention on the side of Napoleon’s enemies. The armistice concluded on 4 June between France on the one hand and Russia and Prussia on the other placed Austria in a favourable position, for both sides were prepared to pay for her assistance. The alliance with France was discarded, in none too honourable fashion. By the Convention of Reichenbach (27 June) Austria promised to declare war on France if the terms, which she would offer, were rejected. Napoleon in fact rejected them; and fortified by a promise of subsidies from Britain (which came in on a fairly generous scale), Austria declared war on 11 August. Again she was involved in war, again without being able to afford it. As early as April 1813, when she had begun to rearm on a larger scale, the Government had been obliged to break its word, so recently pledged, and to announce the issue of another 45 million gulden of paper money, beautified with the name of Anticipationsscheine,91 for equipping the army. When actual war broke out, this figure proved hopelessly inadequate, and that although the Austrian army was conspicuously and piteously the worst equipped in the field: official reports admitted that many of the soldiers called up could not be supplied with overcoats, some not even with boots. The army fought courageously, playing its full part in the Battle of Leipzig, and in general, in the campaign which ended in Napoleon’s fall. But this was at a heavy cost, not only in blood to itself but in the tax which it imposed on the resources of the State. Conventional expedients all proved hopelessly inadequate: a loan floated for the 1815 campaign was under-subscribed, although bearing interest at 8¼%; a 50% surcharge on taxes other than the land tax (i.e., the Gewerbesteuer, Einkommensteuer and Personalsteuer) brought in only a few drops into the bucket. More paper had to be issued.92The fact was not admitted, and the ‘Oberster Kanzler’, Count Ugarte, who was then in charge of finances,93 hoped that the public would not realize what was happening, so that there would be no consequences.94 But the public smelled a rat, and the old story set in again of rising prices and a falling quotation; in October 1913, the new money stood at 169, in April 1814, at 238, in April 1815, after Napoleon’s return from Elba, at 408. Thereafter it was rarely below 300, often as high as 360. The circulation of the paper, new and old, was now, in reality, over 635 million ‘Wiener Währung’, as the Einlösungsscheine and Anticipationsscheine were collectively called.

  1 When Francis was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, he became Francis II, his grandfather having previously borne that crown. When he renounced the Holy Roman Crown and adopted that of ‘Austria’, he became, in that capacity, Francis I.

  2 It is calculated that he gave twenty thousand audiences on his visit to Lombardy-Venetia in 1825. He used to give about eighty a week in Vienna.

  3 At that time he had been designated for his uncle’s heir, since Leopold did not want to leave Tuscany.

  4 Op. cit., p. 54.

  5 An early essay of his is sometimes quoted as evidence to the contrary, but it is obvious enough that in this he was merely reproducing the views of one of his tutors.

  6 This obligation did not apply to the Austrian Netherlands nor to Prussian Westphalia or East Frisia.

  7 It is true that after Louis had temporarily agreed with the Assemblée, Leopold thought that the French question was ‘settled’, and he was prepared to await future developments (see his circular note of 1 November 1791).

  8 ‘I know well that the burden which has been laid on me is too heavy for me, since I am young and have so little experience. My only wish is to do good, and I hope that I may be so fortunate as to have my choice fall on righteous men to help me.’

  9 His first wife, Elizabeth Wilhelmina Louisa of Württemberg, who had been chosen for him by Joseph, had been married to him on 6 January 1789, but had died in childbirth on 19 February 1790, so that Francis had lost his bride and his uncle on consecutive days. The child, a daughter, lived only sixteen months. Francis’s second wife, Princess Maria Theresa of Bourbon-Naples, had been chosen for him by his father; he married her on 19 September 1790. In their sixteen years of happy married life she bore him twelve children of whom, however, only four need recording: Maria Ludovica, or Marie Louise, b. 12 December 1791, Napoleon’s bride; Ferdinand, b. 19 April 1793, the later Emperor; Franz Karl (Francis Charles), b. 7 December 1802, father of the Emperor Francis Joseph; and Leopoldine, b. 22 January 1797, who married the Emperor Pedro of Brazil.

  10 Beidtel, II. 45.

  11 See below, p. 181.

  12 A famous expression of this conviction of his is his address to a deputation from Pest County in 1820:

  ‘The whole world is crazy’ (totus mundus stultisat) ‘and leaving its ancient laws to go running after imaginary Constitutions. You have a Constitution which you have received intact from your ancestors. Love it: I, too, love it and will preserve it and hand it down to our heirs.’

  13 Wolfsgruber, II. 164 ff. According to Meynert (p. 15), Francis had also had a hand in persuading his uncle to restore the Hungarian Constitution and to send back the Holy Crown. Meynert does not, however, give his authority for this statement.

  14 When completed, the reports filled 96 volumes.

  15 i.e., Hungarian subjects: the phrase thus covered Croats.

  16 It is worth emphasizing that the title did not create any new ‘Austria’; Francis took it only from the Archduchy of Austria Below and Above the Enns, as ‘that one of my Dominions which has been longest in possession of my House, and most closely associated with it’. Proof of this may be found in the titles used by Francis’s successors, of which one or two may be found in the appendix. No Monarch was ever crowned ‘Emperor of Austria’.

  17 The ex-Grand Duke of Tuscany was transferred to Würzburg.

  18 This seems to have been largely a (somewhat paradoxical) effect of Colloredo’s influence; for that excellent but unperceptive man was firmly convinced that the French Revolution was the work of a few hot-heads and would soon burn itself out.

  19 There were some reports of similar stirrings in Prague, but they proved not to be serious.

  20 They included Josef Prandstätter, a Magisterial Councillor; Franz von Hebenstreit, a well-known author; Freiherr von Riedel, one of the Emperor’s old tutors, the Imperial Councillor Franz Gotthardy, and the youthful Count Hohenwart, a kinsman of the Archbishop of Vienna.

  21 For a lively description of the meetings of the Moravian Estates, see Beidtel, II. 60.

  22 In 1808 Count Saurau, formerly President of the Gubernium of Lower Austria and later Governor of ‘Inner Austria’ and one of Francis’s most outspoken and most intelligent critics, wrote to him:

  ‘Your Majesty’s Government has already issued twenty-four volumes of political (i.e. administrative) regulations alone. The most retentive memory cannot hold even the titles, let alone the contents of these orders, one of which often revokes another, nor combine the multifarious interpretations and modifications with the original orders.’

  23 This was promulgated by Patent on 3 September 1803. While reintroducing the death penalty, abolished
under Joseph II, for certain very serious offences, it reduced the severity of sentences for minor offences and introduced a clear distinction between genuinely criminal acts and civil misdemeanours. It was, however, still more severe than the code which Leopold had planned to introduce.

  24 See below, p. 167.

  25 Some local abuses in the Bukovina were corrected, but the robot was also raised to the Galician figure of 156 days. A Robot Patent on the conventional lines was issued for West Galicia in 1799.

  26 The report covered fourteen of the sixteen Kreise in Bohemia. Up to that date there had been complete commutation on 351 estates and partial commutation on 108 more. 117 of the 351, however, had been Crown estates. Only sixty-four private estates had commuted for perpetuity, the rest for terms of years which were often quite short, and in many cases the experiment had not been renewed.

  27 A peasant whose holding made him liable to haulage robot was bound to maintain the horses or cattle necessary for the service, or else to hire them.

  28 Grünberg, Bauernbefreiung, II. 490–1. Neither Grünberg nor any other writer has any satisfactory explanation for Francis’s decision to revert to the old fashioned pre-monetary economy, but it may well lie in the financial fluctuations of the time which, as noted elsewhere (p. 196), had involved many peasants in great difficulties.

  29 Kübeck records (Tagebücher, I. 537) that in 1831 Count Kolowrat, the virtual Minister of the Interior and himself a large Bohemian landowner, was under the impression that commutation was not even legal. When corrected by Francis, he replied that the authorities made it so difficult that it might as well be illegal. Kübeck’s wording (Ablösung) is ambiguous, but I think it fairly safe to assume that what was under discussion was commutation in perpetuity.

  30 So Turnbull, writing of his observations in 1837–8, says that ‘robot was practically unknown in Styria, Upper and Lower Austria, Tyrol, Carniola, Carinthia, etc. (with a few exceptions in Upper Austria, dues and services in those Lands having been either abolished or commuted against money payments’ (Austria, p. 88)). Sealsfeld, too, writes that the German Austrians did no robot (Austria as it is, p. 92). The statistics showing the large amount of robot under the 1849 land reform (see above, p. 67 and n.) would seem to contradict this statement, but I am informed that the landlords, when making their contracts with their peasants, insisted that the word ‘robot’ should be used even when its value was being paid in cash, in order to be free to exact the service in labour should some circumstances such as another fall in the value of money make this advantageous to them. For the same reason, they concluded the contracts only for ten years at a time.

  31 So completely, that the statistics of the reform did not even list them separately. Considerable quantities of cereals were, however, being paid as rents in kind in Styria, Carinthia and Upper Austria, as in the Bohemian Lands and Galicia.

  32 The areas relieved of the manorial system (and also of the Bestiftungszwang) were thus Venetia, Dalmatia, the Littoral, the Villach Kreis of Carinthia, the Innviertel of Upper Austria, and the Trentino.

  33 In 1806 Hofrat Ratschky pleaded strongly for limitation of the population of Vienna, and especially against the development of trade. ‘The example of England’, he wrote, ‘which has made the world its tributary by the immense preponderance of its commerce, is not applicable to Austria, which is an agricultural State and not in a position ever to become a trading State of any importance, which, even if it were possible, would not even be desirable, because where the spirit of commerce which is followed by riches, luxury and moral corruption gains the upper hand there – as we have seen in Holland and will perhaps see also in England – the national character is ruined and the people, greedy only for profitable speculation, becomes emasculated by soft living and sedentary work and at last quite unserviceable for defence’ (Wertheimer, Geschichte, II. 49). A year earlier, another bureaucrat, Della Torre, had wanted part of the factories in Lower Austria dismantled and their employees directed into agriculture. A compulsory costume, which women could weave at home, should be introduced (Meynert, Kaiser Franz I, p. 247).

  34 A memorandum on this subject composed by Francis in 1796 has often been quoted. ‘My especial heart’s desire’, he wrote in this, ‘is the early institution of an educational authority with the duty of occupying itself not only with the supervision of the moral and decent behaviour of the young students at the high and lower schools, but also, and most especially, with the teachers, since their principles also determine the ideas of their pupils and thereby either result in furnishing the coming generation with a happy foundation for the formation of high-principled, religious and patriotic citizens, or, if the principles of the teachers are bad, they can spread them through their pupils, to the greatest detriment of the State in future generations.’ The word here rendered by ‘educational authority’ (Schulpolizei) is often translated ‘school police’, which is misleading, for the word Polizei in Francis’s day had a much wider connotation than our ‘police’. In fact, he himself recommends that the supervision envisaged by him should be exercised by the Universities. The memorandum, however, shows both his conception of the purpose of education, and his mistrust of the teachers. But here again, Francis’s work, the principles of which had been laid down by a Commission under the presidency of the ultra-Conservative Count von Rottenhahn, marked a retrograde step compared with Leopold’s, in that it abolished the teachers’ committees which had been a feature of the earlier scheme and placed the whole system under bureaucratic control.

  35 See below, p. 230.

  36 Cf. above, p. 144, n. 3.

  37 The ‘Jacobins’ of 1794 had been freemasons.

  38 See above, p. 20.

  39 Hartig, Genesis, p. 25. These questions, it should be recalled, had first been considered by the Staatsrat, each of whose members had submitted a written report on them. Another writer quotes the following case: a certain cavalryman would have been entitled to a bonus of six florins if he had kept his horse for twelve years. The horse became a battle casualty after eleven years and ten months. The man asked for the bonus as an act of grace. The request had to go up to the Emperor, and passed through the hands of forty-eight officials, twenty-six on its way up and twenty-two on its way down.

  40 Baldacci, who for some time reputedly exercised an extraordinary influence over Francis, was an enigmatic figure of uncertain origin: he was believed to be the natural son of a Hungarian nobleman, who had induced a Corsican named Baldacci to assume the putative parentage. Nearly all historians write ill of him, and he must have been a difficult colleague, but those of his memoranda which I have read have seemed to me full of good sense.

  41 The excuse given was that Charles had been earmarked for command of an army in the coming war, and the Hofkriegsrat could not be left without a responsible head in his absence. The new President was Count Baillet-Latour. The real purpose was to make the new Q.M.G., Mack, who was Charles’s rival, independent of him in order to eliminate his opposition to the war.

  42 The President of this was Count Zichy. His technical title was President of the Hofkammer, but he was also in charge of the other financial services of the Monarchy, including the Hofrechnungskammer.

  43 This was now divided into two Senates, one for the German-Bohemian Lands, the other for Galicia.

  44 Charles advocated this eloquently in a memorandum which he submitted to his brother in November 1802.

  45 Their chief grievance was Francis’s refusal to reinstate the special Courts of Justice for persons of noble birth.

  46 It has been rightly remarked that fear of revolution, which was as strong among the bureaucrats as in other classes, had turned ‘Josephinism’ into little more than support of centralist autocracy against the alternative of government by the aristocrats through the aristocrats for the aristocrats.

  47 See E. von Glaise-Horstenau in K. Linnebach (ed.), Deutsche Kriegsgeschichte (1935, pp. 27 ff.); K. von Meynert (Gesch. der k. u. k. Oe. Armee), III. 47–9 a
nd 147 ff., IV. 15 ff.

  48 The text of this is printed in Mályusz, op. cit., pp. 808 ff.

  49 The contribution of five thousand men voted in 1792, which had meant agreeing to one more regiment, was included in this figure.

  50 His one attempt to speak Magyar in Parliament provoked such merriment that he never tried again. When Magyar was made the language of the Diet in 1847 a special law was passed exempting the Palatine from the obligation.

  51 A recent investigation had shown that of the 1,256,995 non-noble houses in the country, only 762,593 were paying tax, the remainder escaping as being ‘in noble service’ (see above, p. 73, n. 1).

  52 The most important of these purposes was the upkeep of communications. The local officials were also paid out of the fundus.

  53 At this time Bohemia, with a much smaller population than Hungary, was contributing 56,000 men to the standing army, Galicia, 54,000 and Moravia, 30,000. The Hungarians’ justification for their low figure was, of course, that Hungarian nobles were still subject to the ‘noble levée’.

  54 This practice of his, which afterwards became habitual, had the pragmatic justification that the contributio and recruits were not legally due until the Diet rose, when the points agreed during it were articulated as laws.