The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  But Hagen grew old, and in 1815 the charge of the police and censorship was put in the hands of Count Sedlnitzky,38 who appears, indeed, to have been by no means the terrorist as which he figures in the literature of 1848. According to sober observers, he was strict, not out of sadism but out of an excess of timidity. The effect, however, was that under his regime that criteria of what could safely be published became narrower than ever. A second police service, numerically smaller but still extensive enough, was under the direct control of Metternich. The agents of this service operated also outside the Monarchy.

  Metternich, although he complained of the stupidity of the censorship and was annoyed when his own movements were spied upon, was second to no man in the Monarchy in his readiness to use espionage against others or in his fundamental obscurantism; and it was probably the reports of his spies from abroad, and his own glosses on them, that were chiefly responsible for the intensification of the anti-intellectual drive which set in after 1815. Not without reason, Francis regarded most of his own peoples (Hungarians, Poles and Italians excepted) as fundamentally innocent, provided they were not corrupted through infection from abroad. But the world abroad, and especially Germany, was full of dangers. If the camisards of the French Revolution were a bogey of the past, Liberalism was not, in Metternich’s eyes, essentially any better than Jacobinism, and more dangerous when it was German; for, as he said, ‘the French play with liberty. It is a more serious matter when the Germans couple perseverance with enthusiasm.’ So students attending German Universities were particularly suspect in the years immediately after the Congress of Vienna, when some of those institutions, especially those of Jena and Weimar, in fact became foci of national and social unrest, and the Wartburg Fest of 17 October 1817 produced something of a crisis, for the Austrian authorities discovered to their consternation that student movements and organizations parallel to those in Berlin and Jena had come into existence in Vienna and Prague, Innsbruck and Graz. Duels were being fought, long pipes smoked, country walks undertaken, suspiciously hearty choruses sung. A swoop followed. The peccant students, except for a few ringleaders, got off relatively lightly, but not so their teachers, for as Sedlnitzky rightly pointed out, things would never have reached this pitch if the professors had been doing their duty.39

  A grand inquisition accordingly set in against this professional class as a whole. A number of them, the best-known the famous Bolzano (who had particularly offended the Court Chaplain, Frint, by refusing to use his works as textbooks) lost their chairs; some of them emigrated. An order was issued enjoining that the strictest watch should be kept on the behaviour and utterances of professors and anything at all objectionable reported immediately. Lists of the books taken out by them from the libraries were sent to the authorities. Among other rules laid down were that foreigners might not be employed as teachers, even as tutors in private families; that in selecting teachers for State schools as much attention must be paid to their political views as to the ability in their subjects; that teachers must do three years probation before their appointments were made definitive.

  It was soon after this (1821) that, if the reports are true,40 Francis made his famous remark to the teachers of the Laibach Lyceum: ‘I do not need savants, but good, honest citizens. Your task is to bring young men up to be this. He who serves me must teach what I order him. If anyone can’t do this, or comes with new ideas, he can go, or I will remove him.’

  With this, the last traces of liberalism vanished from the Austrian educational system, as they vanished also from the conduct of the censorship. Here the regulations themselves were not altered (they remained, indeed, unchanged until 1848), and purely scientific or purely artistic work was still permissible. But the accepted criteria of what was purely scientific, or purely artistic, were devastatingly narrow. One serious medical work was forbidden because it contained a passing reference which criticized the state of the roads in Carinthia. Grillparzer narrowly escaped dismissal from the Civil Service for a romantic poem bewailing the fate of ancient Rome. His König Ottokars Glück und Ende only just reached the stage.41 Schiller’s Piccolomini could not be played, and his Wilhelm Tell only after it had been heavily cut.

  Meanwhile the army of police spies multiplied enormously (at great public expense), the police pryed ever more closely into the details of the ‘subjects’ lives and the list of activities in which a ‘subject’ might engage without police permission dwindled almost month by month.

  If the ‘system’ changed at all in these years, it was in one direction only, that the Roman Catholic Church regained part of the political influence which it had lost since Maria Theresa’s death. Francis became a widower for the third time in April 1816, and on 29 October of the same year took a fourth wife, the Bavarian Princess, Caroline Augusta. A pupil of the Jesuits42 and herself extremely devout, the new Queen became the nucleus of a ‘pious party’ at the Court, and Metternich associated himself with this, partly for political reasons, to secure for Austria the sympathies of Catholic Southern Germany against Protestant Prussia,43 and partly, it seems, under the influence of the romantic attachment which he conceived for Dorothea Schlegel’s friend, Countess Julie Zichy, née Festetics, a fountain of piety.

  Under the Empress’s influence, and that of Bishop Wagner, the Court Chaplain, a devotional air began to pervade the Court, and various concessions were made to the pious. When, for example, the reconstituted Jesuits were expelled from Russia, they were given asylum in Galicia. There were, however, few changes of substance even in this field. In 1816 the Secretary of State to the Holy See gave the Austrian Minister a list of points on which the Vatican wanted Austrian law and practice changed; if this were done, a Concordat might be concluded. Francis appointed a Committee to consider the question, and it reported unanimously against a Concordat. When Francis visited Rome with his bride in 1818 the list was re-submitted to him, but again, under the influence of his Josephinian advisers, Francis made no concession, except that mentioned below,44 to his Italian Bishops.

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  These were not propitious conditions for vigorous intellectual or artistic life, although modern Austrian writers are justified in repudiating the exaggerations of their predecessors who represented the era as completely barren of any cultural achievement whatever. Beethoven had, after all, not yet ceased to write, and Schubert was in his short-lived prime. Some of the Benedictine Monasteries were producing serious historical and other works, and Klemens Maria Hofbauer stirring consciences with his preaching. Fortune placed the charge of the Burgtheater in the hands of an exceptionally talented director, Joseph Schreyvogel, under whose auspices Grillparzer, a great literary figure by the standards of any age and any country, was able to get his plays produced. On a more popular level, the Hanswurst satirical farces, of which Ferdinand Raimund’s comedies are a sort of sublimation, flourished greatly. But all cultural life was heavily overshadowed by the official control. Even the medical school of Vienna grew torpid under the restraints imposed by Francis’s physician, von Stift. And the author who writes that Hofbauer ‘raised Vienna to the position of the cultural centre of Catholic Germany’45 might have mentioned that Hofbauer began his career in Vienna by being put in prison, and only just escaped ending it by being expelled.

  Another restrictive influence was that of the financial stringency, or perhaps it should be said, the new attitude towards it. Shortage of money was, of course, a condition familiar to Austria, but it had been gloriously disregarded in the rollicking days of High Baroque. In Francis’s day, the convention ruled that bills had to be paid, and the very buildings of the age reflected his staid and upright personality in a style which was economical, domestic and unpretentious, the style of an imposed discipline which was not even resented.

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  Curiously, however, the period was one of vigorous springtime for the national cultures of some of the non-Germanic peoples of Austria, particularly the Czechs of Bohemia. Deprived of other outlets for their energies
, some of the great families who dominated Bohemian society adopted the role of patrons of the local culture. Prince Schwarzenberg founded a national museum in Prague in 1818. Particularly important was the foundation, in 1822, by Count Kaspar Sternberg, of a ‘museum of the homeland’ (Vaterländisches Museum) and a ‘Society of Friends of the Museum’ to reinforce the already existing Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences.46 Sternberg, and most of his colleagues in this field, were not playing at Czech nationalism: they were Bohemians, not Czechs or Germans, and interested in raising the cultural and economic standards of the poor people round them, not concerning themselves with ‘national’ questions.47 But they were not anti-Czech, and it was largely as employees of Sternberg’s or similar institutions, or as tutors in the houses of great families, that the scholars and writers found a living who came to form the advance-guard of the Czech national-cultural revival. The doyen of them all, Josef Dobrowský (1753–1829), who was, indeed, born in Hungary, but passed most of his life in Bohemia, had produced a History of the Czech language as early as 1792; a revised edition of this came in 1818, and a detailed Czech grammar. In 1820 he founded the first Czech scientific periodical, the Casopis Musée. Josef Jungmann (1773–1847) produced a History of Czech Literature (1825) and a great dictionary, besides translations into Czech from English and French. This severe, painstaking and rationalist work, which drew its inspiration from Voltaire and Lessing,48 had as its chief object to make it possible for the Czechs to think, read and write in their own language, and in this it was notably successful; when Dobrowský and Jungmann handed on the torch, the form of the Czech language had been standardized, its grammar regularized, its vocabulary enriched. It was now fit to serve as a language of instruction at all levels, and as a medium of administration. The harvest of this work was reaped by a generation of ‘romantics’, the leading figures of which were two Slovaks who wrote in Czech: Jan Kollar, author of an extraordinary heroic epic, Slavy Dčera (The Daughter of Slava), the first part of which appeared in 1824 and its conclusion in 1832, and Paul Josef Safarik,49 author of a History of Slav Languages, published in Buda in 1826; although both of these men were far more Pan-Slav than Czech in inspiration. But by 1830 a third generation, embodying the more methodical and practical spirit characteristic of the true Czech, was beginning to emerge. Its leader was the man destined to be the most famous of all, František Palacký, a Moravian by birth, who had received his education in Hungary and come to Prague only in 1823. In 1827 he was appointed editor of the two periodicals which commenced publication in that year under the auspices of the Museum, and now began to work on his great History of Bohemia, the first volume of which was published in 1826.

  At first, these men had appeared to be swimming against the tide: the evidence of contemporaries is that – contrary to the usual belief – German had been gaining steadily on Czech since the beginning of the century, and had not yet ceased to do so.50 But the tide was turning, and that – again contrary to common belief – with explicit and effective official encouragement. A decree was issued in August 1816 introducing lessons in Czech (for Czech speaking students) in the gymnasia in Czech or mixed districts. The headmasters and teachers of the humanities in these schools had to be acquainted with the language. Further, students were to be informed at the beginning of each academic year that in appointments to the administrative services ‘of the Bohemian Lands’ preference would be given, ceteris paribus, to candidates who knew Czech.51

  In all this, as it is necessary to emphasize, as a point relevant to the developments both of this period and its successors, even down to 1918 (and very strongly in 1848), the word ‘Bohemia’ used on a previous page was operative. With the southward economic orientation given it by geography (unlike that of Bohemia, whose waters, proverbially, flow north), Moravia had always felt closer to Vienna than had Bohemia, and its Estates were actually decidedly hostile to the Bohemian political movement, regarding Prague as a potential oppressor quite as dangerous as Vienna. National feeling among the Moravian Czechs was still little developed and even uncertain, so much so that many Moravians held their nationality to be a distinct one. In any case, national antagonisms were far less acute in Moravia, than in Bohemia. The two peoples lived, not in separate territorial blocs, but closely intermingled, spoke each other’s language, and had grown accustomed to peaceful co-existence.

  The Czechs of Silesia were only a minority of peasants, among whom national feeling was still quite primitive.

  The local magnates among the Slovenes were less enterprising than the Bohemian, partly because they were less wealthy, but some of them played a similar role of patrons (characteristically, one of the men who did most for Slovene culture was the Archduke John, the ‘German Archduke’, whose ‘Johanneum’ in Graz is a worthy counterpart to Sternberg’s foundation in Prague).52 But the Slovene national culture had been given a strong stimulus by the French administrators of the ‘Kingdom of Illyria’, which they had deliberately designed to make into a Slovene national State. They had drawn up blue-prints for an advanced system of general education, with an elementary school for boys in every commune and one for girls in every Canton, twenty-five gymnasia and a lycée, and a High School of University standing in Laibach. Instruction was to be in the ‘local language’ in the elementary schools; in the secondary and higher schools, partly in that language, partly in French and Italian. A weekly newspaper was published in the same language.

  They had not got very far, for they had had to plough an almost virgin field; before they came there had been, as we said before,53 no instruction at all in Slovene, and very little in any other language (when they took over Carniola and Istria, they found that only 3,000 of the 419,000 inhabitants of the two Lands had attended, or were attending, school)54 and hardly any printed literature in Slovene except one or two devotional books including a Bible, which had been printed in Germany in the sixteenth century.55 And they were only there for five years, after which the Austrians returned and in 1817 restored the status quo in almost every respect, including instruction in German in the schools.56 But they had left behind them a new interest and pride in their nationality among the younger Slovenes, and, incidentally, had settled what had until then been an undecided question, what the Slovene language was to be. They had at first thought of making the language of instruction and public life the Što dialect of Southern Slav, spoken in Ragusa, the dialect which, as described below,57 was afterwards adopted by both the Croat and the Serb linguistic reformers, and thus became the ancestor of the present Serbo-Croat literary language. But a Slovene philologist named Kopitar, the Keeper of Slavonic Books at the Court Library in Vienna, who was generally regarded as the leading authority on the subject, persuaded them to adopt the ‘local language’, of which he had himself just published a grammar.58 Later intellectuals thought of reversing the decision, but were never able to do so,59 and Slovene remained thereafter a separate language; it may even be true to say that the decision settled the question whether the Slovenes were to remain a distinct people.

  There were even shy stirrings of a cultural movement among the Ruthenes. Joseph II, whom nothing in his Monarchy escaped, had not overlooked this people. He had ordered that Ruthene should be taught as a subject in the elementary schools of East Galicia, and at least religious instruction given in the language, had founded a seminary for Ruthene clergy in Lemberg, the counterpart of that established by his mother in Munkács, and had instituted courses in theology and the humanities at Lemberg High School. The seminaries developed into the foci of a modest national movement, the leaders of which belonged to a little group which had caught the infection of the Ukrainian national stirrings then perceptible in Kiev, shared some even of its political emotions60 and emphasized the identity of the language then spoken on both sides of the Austro-Russian frontier.

  The Ruthenes did not, however, get far in this period, for they encountered opposition from every quarter. The Poles insisted that the language spoken in East Galicia was a m
ere dialect of Polish, while the Russians denied the existence of Ukrainian language or nationality. They feared that the development of a Ukrainian movement in Galicia would strengthen separatism in the Ukraine, and even accused the Austrian Government of fostering the movement to that end. The Austrians, on the other hand, became frightened of the attraction of Russia on their own subjects. They therefore inclined to support the Polish view, and in 1816 allowed the reintroduction of Polish into all the primary schools of Galicia:61 a concession prompted not entirely by political considerations, but partly also by the primitive condition of the local language and the lack of primers in it. The courses in Lemberg had already collapsed in 1808 for lack of interest.

  The Roumanian national feeling already stirring in Transylvania had not yet spread across the Carpathians into the Bukovina. A Roumanian historian has described intellectual conditions in the province at that time as ‘a desert in which any spring of spiritual inspiration must dry up’. Two Roumanian journals founded in Transylvania failed to find a single subscriber in the Bukovina.

  It may be remarked that the Roumanians were under at least as heavy a cultural yoke as the Ruthenes. In 1815 the Roman Catholic Consistorium in Lemberg had been put in charge of the entire educational system of the Bukovina. Thereafter all Greek Orthodox teachers were gradually replaced by Roman Catholics, almost all of whom were Poles (a few were Germans), and few of them even acquainted with Roumanian. It was not until 1844 that the Studienhofkommission proposed that this abuse should be remedied, and not until 1851 that the Orthodox schools were actually transferred to the Orthodox Consistory in Czernowitz.62

  The strong encouragement which was undoubtedly given by the Austrian authorities to the Czech and Slovene national cultures63 had been prompted, partly by their belief that purely cultural or practical studies would take men’s minds off politics, partly because local Slav cultural movements seemed to them less dangerous than the more spacious visions of inter-Slav solidarity (not confined to the Monarchy) which appeared to be their strongest rivals; also less dangerous than the liberalism to which the German-Austrians were susceptible. But they were, of course, entirely wrong in supposing that any cultural development could fail to give birth, ultimately, to political aspirations – in this respect such men as the Palatine-Archduke Alexander and his advisers in Hungary showed a much juster appreciation of the facts of life, or at any rate, of Central European life. These Czech and Slovene ‘cultural revivals’ thus marked a further very important stage in the gradual transformation of the Monarchy from something which could be ruled as a non-national State to something the multi-national nature of which had to be admitted.