The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)
Page 43
It is, indeed, not easy to form a judgment on the material conditions of the villein peasants, and unsafe to adopt as universally true the Jeremiads which may be found in the works of some Left-wing writers. It is true that while the Bestiftungszwang was, according to the best authority on the subject,36 fairly well observed where it was the law37 (outside Galicia, where it was admittedly disregarded) so far as genuine farming land was concerned (permission to subdivide was freely granted, and even encouraged, where a family had other means of subsistence, such as home-spinning or weaving), this rule seems generally to have been understood only as forbidding the sub-division of a holding below the limit on which a family could live off the land, and this was now generally taken at much less than when the size of a Bauerngut was first laid down (on the basis, of course, of different standards of cultivation, as well as different population conditions). Thus whole Bauerngüter were by now a rarity almost anywhere, and even half-holdings not very common: the most usual size for a peasant holding was a quarter Gut or even smaller. So ‘Tebeldi’38 tells us that in Lower Austria, in the mid-1840s, there were 133,048 rustical holdings, of which 20,442 were whole, 27,119 half, 23,556 quarter and 62,131 smaller than a quarter. In Styria there were 11,302 full holdings, 21,080 half, 25,725 quarter and 91,273 smaller.39 In Moravia-Silesia there were 6,766 full holdings, 3,242 three-quarters, 26,935 half, 38,425 quarter and 132,493 smaller.40 For Hungary no two sets of figures agree, but what appears to be the most reliable list shows that about 1848 there were then in Hungary, exclusive of Transylvania and the Military Frontier, 624,134 sessionati peasants, with holdings divided as follows: whole, 40,380; three-quarters, 6,458; half, 281,264; quarter, 254,160; eighth, 41,872.41 In Transylvania there were 63,940 sessionati peasants, with an average holding of 10 Magyar hold. In Galicia in 1842 only 8·4% of the peasants were occupying holdings of 20 yokes or more; 23·4% of the holdings were of 10–20 yokes, 29·3% of 5–10, 16·7% of 2–5 and 26·2% of under two.
It is also true that the villein peasant was still taxpayer in chief to the Monarchy, as well as income-provider in chief to his landlord, and that while the level of State taxation, and of the landlords’ dues, had remained stationary for half a century, payments in local and communal services had risen substantially. Family budgets reproduced by various writers generally agree that a peasant’s total payments under these headings amounted to anything between 50–70% of the assessed value of his land.42
The assessed value, however, like the English rental value, was not much more than one-third of the land’s actual yield, so that if the peasant paid no more than what could legally be required of him, this was no very crushing burden by twentieth-century standards. And in calculating the value of his acres to a holder, we must not leave out of account the value of the counter-services which he received from his lord, nor, above all, the benefits which he enjoyed from common rights where, as was the case in most parts of the Monarchy, his commune possessed extensive common lands.43 Many writers found little wrong in the condition of the peasants in the Western half of the Monarchy. Bisinger wrote that ‘the fleshy faces of the Austrian peasants, their houses, which are usually built of stone, their clean clothes, their rising consumption of coffee, testify to a prosperity of which most European States cannot conceive’.44 Sealsfeld, uniformly hostile critic as he was, yet found the villages of Upper and Lower Austria to enjoy a prosperity ‘without equal elsewhere on the Continent’.45 He thought the German-Austrians better off than the Czechs, which is the usual view. But Demian had found Bohemia (including its peasantry) the most advanced Land of the Monarchy.46 Turnbull, who travelled extensively in the Western half of the Monarchy in the late 1830s, had an eye for social conditions, and made careful notes of what he saw, not only reports favourably of conditions in the Alpine Lands, but notes also the ‘stout and healthy’ look of the Bohemian peasants, who lived chiefly on ‘rye and various forms of swine-flesh, with beer’ while their clothing was ‘warm and substantial’. He warns travellers against ‘an ill-required compassion’ for a people ‘whose material conditions are probably better than those of the corresponding class in the observer’s own country’.47 Wilde thought them ‘some of the happiest and most contented peasantry in Europe’.48
It was in those days – and for that matter still is today – a fixed article of faith among all German-Austrians that conditions in Hungary were always far inferior to those in their own homes in every respect, and especially the social, and that in consequence all Hungarian peasants were half-starved and pitilessly exploited wretches.49 But even this is not altogether borne out as a generalization by those foreign travellers who braved the plunge into the land of terror and looked at it with their own eyes. Bendant found the condition of the Hungarian peasants ‘not inferior to that of many farmers in France’.50 Paget, who had been fed full with horror-stories by Austrian friends when he told them that he was going to Hungary51 and ‘expected to find among the peasants nothing but misery, attended by the most abject submission or stifled hate,52 was agreeably surprised to be shown by one of his hosts, a nobleman owning an estate near Pest, a village whose inhabitants were indubitably both prosperous and contented and their relations with their landlord excellent.53 Most striking of all is Le Play’s analysis of the budget of a family which, be it repeated, he chose as typical. Many a middle-class family in the Western Europe of today might envy this ‘typical’ Hungarian peasant’s material standards of living, and for that matter, the lightness of his payments to assorted bloodsuckers.54
It is not, however, to be pretended that such happy conditions were universal, or even general. Other travellers,55 and also many progressive Hungarians themselves, found the situation of the Hungarian peasants profoundly unsatisfactory (on this point, Széchenyi, Kossuth, Deák and Eötvös were completely at one).
Paget himself visited another village which lay in a remote and infertile part of North Hungary, and belonged to an absentee landlord who lived in Vienna and let his estate ‘to a greedy Jew who ground out of the people every possible profit, no matter how injurious such conduct might prove to them or their master’. The peasants ‘loved the brandy-bottle and hated their master’, and lived in such filth and squalor that Paget could not bring himself to enter any of the rude timber shacks which served them for homes, such was the stink of the accumulated filth in front of them.56
Exacting and tyrannical landlords and corrupt and unscrupulous bailiffs on the one hand, and drink-sodden, slothful and brutalised peasants on the other, were undoubtedly no rarity in the Monarchy. In some parts of it, especially Galicia, they were perhaps rather the rule than the exception – although, as Tebeldi’s calculations show, everything was not perfect even in the West – and where these existed, they produced grinding poverty. Yet gross as these evils sometimes were, they could be expected to diminish with time as the rule of law spread, the landlords grew more enlightened and other interests began to compete with the brandy-bottle in the peasants’ minds. In these respects conditions were probably improving during the Vormärz, although very slowly in the backward areas. On the other hand, it was during these years that the less tractable curse was emerging which was to plague the economic life of the Monarchy for the next two generations and more, the pressure of a fast-growing population on means of subsistence which were expanding less rapidly.
The productive area of the Monarchy was, indeed, somewhat larger than it had been half a century earlier. The great vacant spaces of South Hungary and Eastern Galicia had been organized for cultivation, and in many communes elsewhere more marginal land had been made productive. These areas, however, did not even take up their proportionate share of population, for the larger spaces reclaimed were chiefly owned by great landlords, and while it was not uncommon for them to turn parts into leaseholds, and not unknown for them to dedicate parts as rustical land, more often they farmed them directly, keeping on them only as many hands as were needed for the purpose.57 The great majority of the enlarged population
had to find its living on, or away from, an only slightly enlarged area.
In this the villein peasants, sheltered as they were by the Bestiftungszwang, formed, after all, something of a privileged class, and the very existence of the measure meant that in most parts of the Monarchy this class was already outnumbered by the small and dwarf-holders, by the cottagers who owned only a cottage with an acre or so of allotment, or by the Innmänner, házatlan zsellerek, etc., who did not even own a roof of their own. Thus in Lower Austria, as we saw, the holdings of less than a quarter Gut were already as numerous as those of a quarter or larger, and if we equate the rural population with that living outside conurbations of 5,000 plus and take the usual calculation of five members to a family, we find about 65,000 families – over one-third of the total – who were entirely landless, or practically so. In Styria the same calculation gives us 40,000 landless families, besides the 91,000 smallholders; in Moravia-Silesia, besides the 130,000 smallholders (themselves nearly twice as numerous as the holders of quarter-Guts or more), twice as many again landless families. In Hungary, Tebeldi gave 783,000 zseller families; the land reform calculation, 913,962 zsellers (heads of families), of whom 32,120 held some land and 773,528 their houses only, while 108,314 were ‘houseless’. 193,421 families of ‘servants’ were counted separately. In Transylvania there were 137,421 families of zsellers, i.e., there were twice as many zsellers as villein peasants.
These figures include, at least in Hungary, the lease-holding farmers, a number, large in some areas, of small vintners and market-gardeners, and also the fairly substantial class who lived from rural occupations other than the tilling of the soil (carriers, lumberjacks, quarrymen, etc.); also the regular estate employees, farm-hands and domestic servants.58 Above all, they include those families which, while ranking in the statistics as Innleute, etc., supported themselves mainly or entirely by industrial homework. But when all these are deducted, the number of agrarian families without regular means of subsistence was growing terrifyingly large. Many of them were now living chiefly from seasonal labour on the big estates, whence they took home a share in kind of the crops harvested by them. Of others, it is hard to say how they existed at all, where they could be said to exist – death from diseases of under-nourishment, or from sheer starvation, were common enough. The regional incidence of the distress varied widely: it was worst in German Bohemia, North Hungary, parts of Silesia and Galicia, and the Szekel areas of Transylvania. In these it was endemic, and acute.
*
In the Alpine districts, and perhaps in some others, and in the old-established industries, wages and conditions of industrial labour seem to have been tolerable, and the system easy-going and patriarchal, even in the 1830s. Turnbull found wages in Styria and Upper Austria to range from twenty to thirty kreuzer up to forty to fifty or more for a male adult worker. On this, he was able ‘to eat, drink and smoke to his heart’s content’,59 especially as he usually got his cottage with attached vegetable plot thrown in. These wages compared, in fact, not unfavourably with the earnings of the lower-grade civil servants and professional men60 and Turnbull tells us that even the agricultural labourers, who got only ten kreuzer a day plus food or twenty kreuzer without it, ate meat three times a week.
He also tells us that the Austrian workers ‘were never made to feel the immense value of time’. The industrial revolution had not yet reached Austria. When it did, ‘it would increase the national wealth, but introduce unemployment and pauperization’.
But the conditions which Turnbull described were already passing – in some parts of the Monarchy they had perhaps never existed. By the mid-1830s the homeworkers for the Bohemian cotton-mills were earning no more than five, sometimes only two to three kreuzer a day. Up to that date homework was the rule in all branches of the textile industry. Then, in the late 1830s, came the sudden change-over to the factory system, and the increase in the number of enterprises. This did indeed increase the national wealth, and brought some monetary benefit also to the workers who found employment in the factories, for in them they could earn perhaps three times as much as by homework. Adult male workers in employment earned a living wage (as the case quoted above shows), while even the much smaller amounts earned by women and children were at least large enough to tempt the women into the factories.61
But the machine age brought with it all the social evils which attend most industrial revolutions. Women and children were employed very extensively,62 the latter no longer for philanthropic reasons, but out of the less worthy motive that their work cost less than a man’s. The lower age limit of nine years set by Joseph n was raised to twelve in Hungary in 1840 and in Austria in 1842, but was often evaded. A child’s working day was usually about 12½ hours, with a 1½ hour’s break at midday, but Marx quotes a case where children in a factory were working 13–13½ hours a day for a weekly wage of one and a half florin Wiener Währung (52 kreuzer C.M.). Children over twelve counted as adults. Hours and conditions for adults were entirely unregulated. The average working day for adults in either half of the Monarchy was 13–16 hours in factories or 12 in mines, with only the shortest of breaks. There was no legal Sunday rest.63 The Hofkanzlei three times (1843, 1844, 1846) suggested introducing some social legislation for the factory workers, but was forced each time to retreat before the objections of the employers.
Housing conditions were particularly bad, worst of all in the big towns, into which, especially Vienna, workers were now flocking in great numbers,64 and in which the growth of accommodation lagged far behind that of the population.65 The workers huddled together in dank cellars or stifling attics, for which the landlords exacted exorbitant rents, often one-third of a family’s earnings, for the most miserable accommodation. Often two or three families shared a room, and the institution of the ‘Bettgeher’, where a person simply hired the use of a bed for a few hours out of the twenty-four, was not uncommon. In many factories the workers slept by their machines; the lot of those who did so, thus saving rent, was often envied. Immorality was naturally rife, and the lives of most workers were entirely devoid of any spiritual or intellectual interest.
But the greatest of all the evils brought with it by Austria’s industrial revolution was that of technological unemployment. The new machines required much less labour than the old, so that the introduction of them made many of the old handworkers redundant; they were able also to undercut the craftsmen in the trades which they invaded, ruining large numbers of the old practitioners. In so far as they created a new demand they were, of course, able to give new employment to some of these (although at the cost of transforming them from independent men into wage-slaves), but as it happened, the years of precipitate mechanization were also difficult ones for Austrian industry. First the Eastern Crisis of 1839–40, then the development of the Zollverein, put not the textile industry alone into great difficulties. Even Kossuth’s ‘buy Hungarian’ campaign, small as was its success in Hungary, caused a lot of damage to the Austrian producers. British competition was a permanent threat. The factories were therefore not so much creating new markets, as struggling to maintain themselves in existing ones. Many of them were under-capitalized, and therefore exceptionally vulnerable to even minor changes in trading conditions; not a few, actually fraudulent. But even the more solidly established enterprises found their capacity to employ labour at a profit fluctuating wildly. The average factory worker was out of work for at least three months in the year. The older, semi-patriarchal businesses usually tried to see their workers through bad times, but others simply dismissed them out of hand when sales fell off. Jewish employers, who were particularly numerous in the cotton industry, had an especially bad name in this respect; this was one of the causes of the widespread anti-Semitism of 1848. And to add to the difficulties, the shrinkage of the number of jobs coincided with something of a population explosion which, as we have said, was particularly violent in the Bohemian Lands, already densely populated. In bad years Bohemia, in particular, was filled with
a great army of destitute men.
It is not surprising that the mechanization soon produced its obvious reaction in the form of machine-wrecking. This occurred sporadically in 1842 and 1843, and in 1844, when some of the mills introduced more machines which threw many thousands of workers out of employment, the wrecking was on a major scale. A mass of the unfortunate men then flocked to Prague to beg for help, only to be met with fire from the muskets of the police and the military, whom the panic-stricken authorities had called in to their help.
The labour problem in this latest form was still almost confined to a few areas in Lower Austria and Bohemia, but this does not mean that labour conditions elsewhere were much better. The homeworkers in other parts of the Monarchy were still toiling for pittances which it is almost shameful to record, and the apprentices and journeymen in the remotest villages were labouring all day and far into the night for the barest subsistence.
Finally, prices rose steadily from the late 1830s onward, although the rise up to 1844 was still relatively slight.
The problem of real poverty in Austria made, at the time, little impact except on its immediate victims. Andrian drew attention to it in moving words,66 but generally, it passed so unnoticed that a modern writer has been able almost to deny its very existence.67 When a harvest failed badly in some area, there might be some distribution of relief, possibly a remission of taxation, but the idea that rural congestion was a condition which needed, and might be given, remedy occurred to no one. Official theorists still regarded the population as below the optimum. For industrial unemployment the only remedy was, again, relief or the organization of public works. This was left to Land and Kreis officials, whose plans were usually quite futile and were often wound up precisely when the need was greatest, because funds ran out, or to private charity. The authorities also intervened from time to time with various devices to counteract sudden sharp rises in the prices of articles of prime necessity. For the rest, the Austrian authorities, like those of most European countries of the day, regarded the proletariat chiefly as potential revolutionaries, forbade them any kind of association or organization,68 and had the police keep a close watch on them. Society as a whole regarded the problem in the same light.69