Among the Slovaks78 these were years of doubtful stirrings; years when the question – not to be answered finally for a full century, if then – what they were, or what they wanted to be, first became a subject of serious debate among them, as the similar question was becoming among the Ruthenes. We have already mentioned Kolar, Dobrowský and Safařik, who ended by writing works of Pan-Slav tendency in the Czech language, but they were individuals, who really outstepped the bounds of their nation. Round the end of the eighteenth century, however, the cause of Czecho-Slovak linguistic unity was also taken up by a group of Slovak Protestants (to whom the end of Maria Theresa’s ultra-Catholic regime and her son’s Toleration Patent had given fresh courage), to whom the idea came naturally, since the Bible used by them was a Czech one, introduced into Hungary by the Hussites. The leader of this group, a certain Juray Ribay, was a friend and correspondent of Dobrowský’s.
The growth of this movement inspired a Roman Catholic priest named Bernolak (who then received much help and support from the Cardinal-Primate of Hungary, Rudnay, himself a Slovak who always insisted on his Slavonic origin and sympathies),79 to start a counter-movement80 for stabilizing the existing Slovak, of which they took the Western dialect as representing the ‘national language’, as an independent language and developing it from that basis, precisely in order to save the Slovaks from the ‘Hussite tongue’ of Czech ecclesiastical literature. Bernolak and his friends founded a number of literary circles and associations, and this in its turn stimulated the opposition to found their own institutions. One of these, a ‘chair’ of Czecho-Slovak linguistics at the Lutheran Lyceum in Pozsony, established in 1803, was important, for Georg Palkovic, who occupied it for many years, expounded the thesis of Czecho-Slovak linguistic unity to a whole generation of students, among them the young Palacký.
Both these movements, by the very fact that they interested themselves in the Slovak national culture, contributed their mite towards creating something which was bound one day to come into collision with Magyar neo-nationalism. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, neither was yet politically dangerous to the Hungarian State. Bernolak’s and Rudnay’s was specifically ‘Hungarian’, and even the Slovak Protestants at that time contrasted conditions in Hungary favourably with those in Bohemia, where the Protestants enjoyed far less freedom.
As for the Roumanians of Inner Hungary, those in the south, who were Orthodox, had some national feeling, but saw their chief enemy in Stratimirovics, who treated his whole Church as a purely Serbian institution and refused to allow any liturgy in it except the Old Slavonic. The Uniate priests, further north, were so far Magyarized that, according to one authority, many of them spoke Magyar in their homes and voluntarily conducted service in Magyar.81
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None of these peoples had, indeed, any constitutional channel through which to voice their wishes or their grievances. The Croats had a whole hierarchy of them: their County Congregationes, the Zagreb Sabor, and the Hungarian Diet itself, in which they were represented. And in a sense, the Croat political case had been at odds with the Hungarian ever since 1790, for the Croat delegates to Pozsony never abandoned the Skerlecz thesis that laws passed there were not binding on Croatia unless the Croats had voted for them, when they were binding in virtue of that vote – a thesis which amounted in practice to a claim to exercise a liberum veto on any change in the existing order; whereas the Hungarians, as we have said, while not arguing the point out in full Diet, had yet never committed themselves to acceptance of the Croat thesis.
In 1790, however, it had been possible to evade the point of principle by confining the application of the legislation to which the Croats objected intra limites regni, and for a whole generation thereafter the point had hardly arisen; for the questions on which Francis did consult the Diet reduced themselves in practice to the supply vote, on which the Croats continued to follow the principle which they had adopted in 1790 of submitting themselves to the will of the majority in matters of common interest; while Francis’s refusal to consider changes in the fields in which a clash might have occurred, notably the language of the Diet and the central services, stifled discussion of them in the womb, although whenever such a question did arise, or showed signs of arising, the Croats always duly put in their caveat, so that the unsolved political issue did subsist. It was not, however, a national struggle between the Magyar and the Croat peoples. If it was true that the Hungarian delegates to the Diet were interested almost exclusively in maintaining the privileges of the class which they represented, the qualification can be omitted in the case of the Croats. They were totally uninterested in the Croat people, of which they formed an even smaller proportion than did the Hungarian nobles of the people of Inner Hungary,82 as such. They were fully as conservative as the Hungarians on social policy in general; the condition of the Croat peasantry was even worse than that of the Hungarian, and as late as 1825 the Croat delegates to Pozsony objected to a proposal to allow peasants easier access to settle in the towns, because this would promote the growth of industry, and they did not want industry to grow. While the Hungarians were from the first always entirely willing that the Croat language should enjoy the same position in Croatia’s interna as they were asking for Magyar in the interna of Inner Hungary, the Croats did not want even that. In 1805 the Congregatio of Várasd resolved that no other language than Latin should be used ‘in these kingdoms’, since if its use was abolished, ‘the culture and the nation must decay and in the end the nation would not understand its own laws’. The language against the introduction of which the Congregatio was protesting was not Magyar, but Croat.83
In 1810 an aspiring journalist got permission to publish a paper in Croat, but had to give up the plan because he could find no subscribers.
Finally, one must concede that the introduction of Magyar in place of Latin in the Diet and the central services would in fact have placed the Croats at a disadvantage in those bodies, compared with the Magyars; the Croats would now have had to use a second language, while the Magyars would have been relieved of the necessity. But while sympathy must always go out to a minority defending itself against the tyranny of a majority, it should in fairness be pointed out that the official representatives of Croatia among the Magnates numbered only five (the Ban, the Bishop of Zagreb and the Föispáns of the three Croat Counties proper, or eight if the Slavonians were counted),84 while the official representatives of Inner Hungary in that body numbered some 150.85 On the Lower Table, there were only three representatives of Croatia (the two delegates from the Sabor and the ‘Count of Turopolje’,86 plus the six from Slavonia. What their claim amounted to was that something like ten or fifteen times their own number should be debarred from conducting their national business in their own tongue, and should instead use a second language, to save this tiny minority from having to use a different second language.
For the central services the position was similar: the proportions were again about 1:15.87 Since a high proportion of the Croat ‘nobles’ were ‘sandalled’, or, as they were called locally, ‘seven plum-tree’ nobles, and another considerable fraction were already Magyar-speaking, the number of Croat candidates who would really have been affected by the Magyarization of the central services would have been minute.
Between 1809 and 1822 the disproportions were even larger because during those years a substantial proportion of Croatia was under foreign rule, first French, then Austrian.
Thus if the Hungarians’ wishes would have imposed a real inequality on the Croats, they could hardly be called unreasonable. The only real cure for the inequality would have been the drastic one of complete separation; and for that the Croats themselves was not yet asking.
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In Transylvania there was little political or national life. Not only did the Crown convoke no Diet after 1810, but it also ignored those clauses in the Transylvanian Constitution which entitled the ‘Three Nations’ to representation in the administration; vacancies wer
e simply filled with the Governor’s own nominees. The autonomy both of the Saxon University and of the Lutheran Church was further curtailed.
The peoples took this quietly. The Saxon ‘patricians’, after at first resisting the new regime, found in it features which made it tolerable and even enjoyable. The Magyar or Magyarized landlords, whom the haphazard developments of the Monarchic legislation had left in an exceptionally strong position,88 were ready to support any regime prepared, as the Gubernium seemed to be, to keep the Vlachs in their places. In any case, they were too few and too widely scattered over a number of small and remote Counties to combine against authority. Many Counties did not even trouble to hold their Congregationes.
Among the Roumanians, the ‘Transylvanian Triad’89 had produced their chief works by the early years of the century. Then they grew old, and found no successors of their own calibre. The Uniate Bishop, Bobb, managed the estates of his church well, and under his regime the number of Uniate priests, the leaders of the future, grew considerably, but Bobb himself was no crusader, and grew even more passive with advancing years (he died only in 1830, at the ripe age of ninety-one). The Orthodox Bishopric was vacant from Adamović’s death in 1796 until 1811, when Vasile Moga was appointed to it. His regime, again, was destined to be prolonged, for he died only in 1845. He was another such as Bobb, a good administrator, under whose hand both the number and the quality of the Orthodox schools increased, but a non-combative personality, who cultivated friendly relations with the authorities and the Uniate Church and discouraged political agitation.
Under these conditions the more active and enterprising Roumanians of the Grand Principality tended to seek their fortunes in the Danubian Principalities, where they came to enjoy a near-monopoly of the teaching profession and were among the chief inspirers of the Roumanian national renaissance when it reached the Principalities. This, however, was hardly before 1830, and during its first phase, the attentions of its leaders were entirely preoccupied with the problems of the Principalities themselves.
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In Lombardy-Venetia the population of the former ‘Kingdom’ had received the Austrians quietly enough in 1815, but there had been certain grievances from the first. The nobles of Milan, although they appreciated the Scala,90 found the Archducal Court insufficient compensation for the degradation of their city from its previous position of capital of the Kingdom of Italy; the Patricians of Venice were offended when a Heraldic Commission equated their rank only with that of the untitled nobility of Austria. The Italian clergy, although the Bishops were allowed the privilege of corresponding freely with Rome, were estranged by the Erastianism of the Austrian ecclesiastical system, which they described as ‘half-Lutheran’. The entire population disliked the Austrian conscription system, which was enforced more generally than north of the Alps; several categories exempted there, including nobles, were made liable for service in Italy. Then, in 1820–1, the Kingdom became the scene of that incident which, probably more than any other, brought the Austria of the day into international disrepute. A group of men, some of them belonging to the highest Italian aristocracy and conspicuous figures in the local society, became involved in a plot as the result of which they were arrested, tried before special Courts, and, after the sentence of death passed on them had been commuted by the Emperor, sent to pass long and, for those days, particularly barbarous sentences of imprisonment in the dreaded fortress of the Spielberg, in Moravia.
This had not been a revolt of Francis’s subjects against Austrian rule. Most of the persons arrested belonged to one or another secret society (of which that of the Carbonari was the most important) whose ramifications extended throughout Italy, and their main effort was directed against the regimes in Naples, Piedmont and the Romagna. It is true that the most prominent of the conspirators, Count Confalonieri, had worked out plans for risings in the chief cities of Lombardy, to break out when the revolt in Piedmont should have succeeded, but his plans seem not to have got much beyond the blue-print stage. In spite of the extreme efforts organized by Francis and Metternich, against the strong advice of wiser subordinates, to smell out every person tainted, however faintly, with the malodour of revolution, relatively few conspirators could be found in the Austrian Kingdom;91 certainly no part of it was the scene of unrest comparable to that which in those years ravaged Sicily and Piedmont. But a vicious circle had been started. The General and Provincial Congregations sank into the same impotence as the Austrian Estates. The Government became purely bureaucratic, and highly centralized: the Archduke, who was neither stupid nor unenlightened, was limited to representational duties; the executive power lay wholly with the Gubernia, and even more, with the Court Chancellery in Vienna. More and more non-local officials were sent down,92 and now the Italians themselves began to avoid the public service, complaining that the influential, lucrative and interesting jobs were reserved for outsiders. Large garrisons were quartered in the Kingdom and the network of police spies was spun ever finer – partly, indeed, in deference to the habits of the local population, among whom espionage was a national profession. Only the position of the Italian language was left untouched (and that not altogether, for correspondence with the Hofkanzlei had to be conducted in German). Otherwise, the Kingdom came to assume the aspect of a conquered land, ruled by its conquerors, and in it freedom slept as deeply as in Bohemia or Styria.
Administration and justice continued, indeed, to be efficient and uncorrupt, by local standards, taxation relatively low, and much was done for the material welfare of the population: roads were built, canals constructed, factories founded and trade with the interior of the Monarchy fostered. All this blunted the edge of the discontent, but it could not engender a genuine attachment for Austria in the bulk of the population. This remained passive, a fallow-land on which, when the spring winds came, the crop which would flourish would be that of Italian nationalism.
1 Here again, the Emperor’s personal wishes may have operated more strongly than is often recognized, for Francis always had a faiblesse for his Italian titles.
2 Too much importance has, indeed, been attached to this phrase, originally simply a bon mot coined by the spirituel Prince de Ligne. The Congress, of course, did much solid work.
3 A. Mód. 400 év kuzdelem az önálló Magyárországert (Bp. 1945), p. 88.
4 Stadion’s commission in 1814 was a special one, but in 1816 he was given an independent Ministry, the Hofkammer reverting to its original function of collecting and administering the revenues from the Crown properties, etc. Subsequently Stadion succeeded in making himself ‘overlord’ of all departments dealing with finance, although the ‘Kommerzhofdirektorium’ mentioned below remained de facto largely independent in its policy.
5 This plan, which was promulgated by Patent on 1 June 1816, allowed holders of paper money to exchange part of it against a new metal currency (Conventionsmünze) to the same nominal value, part into notes, again to the same nominal value, issued by a new National Bank, these notes again being exchangeable for metal, provided the holders also bought State bonds in the proportion of five bonds to two notes, and paid for these in metal; or alternatively, to buy shares in the bank, paying for them in the proportion of ten in paper to one in metal. The Government placed its stocks of metal currency and its payments from foreign Powers at the disposal of the Bank. There was, however, such a run on the metal currency that the Bank quickly exhausted its stocks and had to close its doors.
6 Even Dalmatia now imported its wheat from this source and so – so bad were communications in Hungary – did even some areas in Inner Hungary itself.
7 I Beidtel, II. 303–4.
8 See below, p. 265 f.
9 For some years the provinces were, indeed, heavily passive owing to the cost of winding up the French administration and installing a new one and to a series of disastrous harvests, in consequence of which much taxation was remitted and expensive public works undertaken.
10 Francis must, indeed, be credited also
with founding a number of technical schools and colleges.
11 Beer, pp. 170 ff.
12 It was first put into force in Lower Austria, in 1834, with the result that taxation there was heavier than anywhere else in the Monarchy.
13 Thus Prince Liechtenstein, who had 720,000 ‘subjects’, paid only 150,000 gulden a year in land tax.
14 Beer, p. 135.
15 See below, p. 236.
16 For details, see Helleiner, op. cit., pp. 147 ff.
17 Floating a loan at under par was actually a device invented by Austria’s creditors, on the pretext that they had to recoup themselves against the risk of default, but wished to avoid the odium of charging a very high percentage.
18 In fact, Austria paid back 38 m.g. for the 20 which she received as the first half of her 1820 loan, which was a lottery loan (at 6%) floated by the Rothschilds. Her loss on the second half was heavier still.
19 Beidtel, II. 310.
20 It was promulgated by Patent on 1 June 1811 to enter into force on 1 January 1812. This compilation, unlike the Penal Code, carried forward with little modification the principles initiated by Francis’s predecessors.
21 Bibl, Zerfall Oesterreichs, I. 44.
22 Sealsfield, op. cit., pp. 161 ff.
23 Beidtel, op. cit., II. 234 f.
24 Art. 13 of the German Bundesakte had laid down that ‘in allen Bundesstaaten wird eine landständische Verfassung stattfinden’. Art. 1 of the Final Act of the Congress had declared that ‘les Polonais, sujets respectifs des Hautes Parties Contractantes, obtiendront la conservation de leurs nationalité, d’après les formes d’existence politique que chacun des gouvernments aux quels ils appartiennent jugera convenable de leurs accorder’.
25 It is true that these Estates were now more democratic in form. There were four Benches, the Prelates, the nobles (higher and lower), burghers and peasants, each having thirteen voices. The representatives of the three lay Estates were all elected by their peers.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 36