The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Otherwise, a destitute man had no resource at all outside the meagre parish relief which Joseph II had instituted, and the parishes in which unemployment was highest were, of course, precisely those least able to provide relief. No one else was under any obligation to provide for the destitute, and the usual remedy of any local authority, if a factory falling within its jurisdiction dismissed its hands, was to order any unemployed workers from outside it to return to their native communes – a measure which was usually quite ineffective, for the deportee was told to make his journey on foot,70 was unescorted, and was often back where he had started from a couple of days later.

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  When revolution broke out in 1848, fear of the workers played, as we shall see, a considerable part in its developments, at least in Vienna. But the precautions taken against them in the Vormärz were hardly necessary. The proletariat did not even regard itself as a distinct social class, and no socialist or communist leaders appeared among it. Employment, a living wage and relief if factory work was unavailable, were the most for which they asked, and they asked for that only as individuals.71

  One social class, however, was succeeding in drawing attention to its grievances qua class. These were the villein peasants. Towards them, as in general, the Staatskonferenz was trying conscientiously to maintain the position as Francis had left it, which, as we have seen, was, with small modifications, that which he had found on his accession. But it had been unable to enforce unchanging acceptance of an unchanged law. While Austria stood still, other countries had advanced, and from being in the vanguard in her treatment of this problem, where Maria Theresa and Joseph II had placed her, she was now among the laggards, and the fact could not be concealed. For all the censorship and carefully supervised schooling, the peasants had become aware that subjection was not everywhere the inevitable and immutable lot of the tiller of the soil. Writers recorded mournfully that the peasants had lost belief in the justice and reason of the nexus subditelae and did not even believe that they were occupying their lands by grace of the rightful owners of them, and that their dues and services were a legitimate return for that grace. And by the 1830s the peasants were giving practical expression to their scepticism. Wherever the law allowed appeal from a decision of a Patrimonial Court, the appeal was made. Dues in kind arrived late, and then the quality of them was inferior: chickens stringy, eggs aged, honey mouldy. In their performance of the robot, the peasants had developed the arts of slow motion and passive resistance to a pitch of high virtuosity, against which the bailiff was powerless when his unrestricted use of the whip was gone.72 Széchenyi’s calculation that a free man’s hired labour was worth three times that of the robot has been quoted: other writers put the ratio at one to four, or more; one, as high as one to thirteen.

  In respect of the manorial authority the peasants had long had a considerable proportion of the landlords themselves on their side, for they were finding the Patrimonial Courts and their manorial duties in general much more of a burden than an advantage. The salaries of the men whom they now had to employ to conduct the Courts, meagre as they were, yet added up to perceptible sums, when the incidental expenses of them were added in,73 and the advantage which they derived from the tilting of the scales in their favour when a case was first heard was largely nullified by the cost and time-wasting of the inevitable appeal, which might well go against them. Their general administrative duties, too, were becoming increasingly burdensome and expensive. Consequently, they, too, would have been glad to see the manorial system replaced by a State-paid administration and judicature. As early as 1833 the Estates of Lower Austria petitioned to have this change introduced.

  Opinion among the landlords in respect of the robot had not changed so generally. The landlord in a remote district into which money had hardly penetrated, even into his own household, let alone his peasants’, where the population was so sparse that he could not have found free labour to hire if he could have afforded to hire it, where if his lands did yield an abundant harvest he could not take it to market for lack of roads – such a man simply clung to the sheet-anchor of his robot and took advantage of the absence or complaisance of authority to disregard the legal limitations on it. But the most conservative among them were impressed by the consideration of sheer fear. The nobles of Transylvania still quaked at the memory of the Hora rising, which had been followed by several others on a smaller scale.74 Those of Inner Hungary had been uneasy since the beginning of the century,75 and particularly since the outbreaks of 1831. Many landlords believed that even if the peasants did not use violence against them, they would one day occupy their lands in a movement so general that there would be no recourse but to accept the fait accompli. We hear of similar opinions expressed in Bohemia and Galicia.

  The landlords who were producing for the market, especially in those districts in which hired labour, regular or seasonal, was easily available, were turning against the robot system for its economic inefficiency, as practised by the peasants – an inefficiency which every improvement in methods of cultivation made increasingly flagrant. They wanted the whole system of services and dues in kind replaced by money payments which they could invest in better implements and improved breeds of animals, used and tended by workers whose services were always available. Their problem was how to get the cash replacement for the robot. Where the peasant could raise the cash to commute, this could be done, despite the official discouragement, but he often had practically no cash at all, and where he had, he was seldom willing to pay what the landlord considered a fair price. The solution of letting him buy himself out by ceding part of his land was often considered and indeed strongly favoured by many landlords, but generally dismissed in view of the peasants’ opposition, besides the formidable difficulty of deciding what piece of land would constitute a fair price for the rest. It would, moreover, have necessitated altering the law which forbade the conversion of rustical land to dominical, and this, like any other change, was opposed by the Government. The solution which the reformers came generally to favour was that of letting the rustical land go altogether in return for a monetary compensation in which the State should act as intermediary, the peasants buying themselves out through payments to the State, which would then pass the compensation on to the landlords in the form of bonds.

  The movement among the landlords for peasant liberation first took shape (in the fashion described above76) in Hungary, which was, in the 1830s, the only part of the Monarchy affected by the problem where such a question could be raised publicly, and where the reform party was also interested in it for national reasons. It made, as will be seen, small progress: the Government was willing to allow the conditions of the Hungarian peasants to be brought up to the level of the Austrian (this was roughly what the reforms of the Diets of 1832–45 amounted to), but not beyond, as that would have set a precedent for the Austrian Lands. In none of the latter could the question be raised officially (although a considerable pamphlet literature was appearing) until the Lower Austrian Diet got its chance in 1843, over a question of taxation. The reform party in that body then persuaded it to adopt a petition to the Government asking it to carry through redemption, facultative for five years and compulsory thereafter. In 1845 the same Estates further petitioned to be relieved of a number of their manorial duties, on the ground that these involved them in much unpaid work and heavy actual outgoings.

  The Estates of Styria, Moravia and even Galicia sent in petitions to similar effect in the same year.

  The movement was held up by the Government, for various reasons. One was the old, ineradicable conservatism of the men at the top, for while the younger officials, who were in touch with conditions on the land, mostly agreed with the reformers, their superiors regarded this change, too, as smacking of revolution. Constitutionally, they objected to the Estates extending their interests beyond the narrow limits prescribed for them. Finally, their financial advisers held that the operation of financing the reform would overstrain the Governmen
t’s credit. They therefore returned the Estates a series of snubs, telling them, none too gently, to mind their own business. Permission was even refused, except in the single instance of Galicia, for the foundation of agricultural credit banks, on the ground that these would compete with the State’s demands for credit. The movement was, however, gaining ground rapidly in many of the Lands of the Monarchy in the years following Francis’s death. Meanwhile, it is relevant to note that, whichever side was right in the social argument – whether the servile condition in which they were kept was the reason why the peasants produced so little, or whether to keep them in it was the only way to make them work at all – in any case, between their reluctance to work the demesne land and the primitive methods used by them in working their own, agricultural production in the Monarchy as a whole was in a most unsatisfactory condition. With nearly three-quarters of their populations still gaining their livelihoods from agriculture, the Western Lands still had to import foodstuffs, while Hungary’s surpluses too often simply went to waste.

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  The peasant problem, however, was sui generis. It affected almost every part of the Monarchy, and in much the same way, but everywhere its solution would have required nothing more than an adjustment of class relationships which need not have entailed any modification of the structure of the Monarchy (a question to which no peasant devoted a thought). It was otherwise with the movements to which we now turn. These were mainly middle class in the sense that their chief inspirers came from the representatives of the new bourgeois interests, or from the new intellectual proletariats (with whom, indeed, some progressive aristocrats and civil servants associated themselves), but none of them was a class movement in the most exact sense of the term. They sometimes included in their programmes desiderata special to their own class or deriving from its interests – sometimes also measures of wider social reform – but primarily they were national, and subordinated all class interests to national considerations. It was these national movements that in the Vormärz dominated the political life of all parts of the Monarchy, with the single and qualified exception of its German-Austrian provinces.

  As in the ‘pre-Vormärz’, so in the Vormärz proper, the parts of the Monarchy in which national feeling was least apparent were those from which the most danger might, a priori, have been expected. Lombardy was still the most nationally passive of all parts of Italy except one, and Venetia, the most passive of all. Even those of Austria’s Italian subjects who fretted against the rule of Vienna were by no means all enchanted with the possible alternatives to it, and particularly not by that of rule from Turin, where d’Azeglio himself described the atmosphere as less free than that of Milan. The historian of Austrian affairs, as distinct from Italian, may pass over developments in the Kingdom up to 1846 with no more words than these.

  Galicia, too, presented a picture of almost complete surface calm, but here the appearance was deceptive, for the Polish Committee in Paris was now engaged in feverish plans to retrieve the reverse of 1830, and in these new designs, Galicia was assigned a part. Every second Polish noble was more or less initiated into the plans, and the province was honeycombed with secret societies (the conspirators were even thicker on the ground in Cracow, which Austrian troops occupied in 1836, when they found over 2,000 émigrés living there under false names; they abated the nuisance, but as soon as they left, it began again). A man well qualified to judge77 has described the years as ‘the quarter-century of conspiracy’ and the Polish nobles as ‘one vast band of conspirators’. The authorities, however, were never able to come on more than individuals or small groups, and most of the officials, exceedingly handicapped by their ignorance of the local languages, entirely failed to perceive that anything very serious was wrong. The Archduke-Viceroy, in particular, a kindly but not over-intelligent old gentleman, who had surrounded himself with plausible Polish nobles in order to form the nearest approach to a Court which he could compass, reported complacently to Vienna that all was well, and was not to be convinced to the contrary.

  The plotting was in fact directed rather towards preparing the ground for future operations than organizing the operations themselves – the plans of campaign were worked out by the émigré headquarters in Paris, and it was thence that the signal for action would come. This preparatory activity was, however, considerable in one direction. In 1830 a number of the younger and more democratic Poles had wanted the call to arms to be accompanied by a proclamation emancipating the peasants, and they attributed the quick collapse of the rising largely to the refusal of the aristocratic party to accept this advice, with the consequence that the peasants had given little or no help to the Polish arms. A large number of the refugees in Galicia belonged to this party, the Towarzystie Domocratyazne, which also had its adherents among the born Galicians, and they initiated a social propaganda which was so active that for once it reached the ears of the authorities, who arrested a number of them. The Polish landlords complained also, and the democrats agreed to drop the agitation, but it went on in secret, and meanwhile the peasants’ disaffection towards their lords had become so obvious that in 1843 a party in the Galician Diet itself asked the Gubernium to sanction the appointment of a Committee of the Estates (who would thus be seen to be taking the lead) to take steps towards abolishing the peasants’ servitudes, against compensation for the landlords. The Government raised difficulties – the same as it was advancing in other Lands, but was frightened to put the Estates into the position of being able to claim that they had wanted the reform, and the Government had refused it. The Committee was duly appointed in 1845, but by the next year, when the events described on another page took place, had not got beyond preliminaries.

  Another important development in Galicia was the tentative re-emergence of a national movement among the Ruthenes, who, however, were handicapped by the difficulty which haunted them down to the end of the Monarchy, and, indeed, after it, of deciding what they really were – Russians, Ukrainians, or something different from either. In the 1840s the most influential figures in the movement were a group of Uniate priests attached to the Metropolitan Church of St George in Lemberg, and consequently known as the ‘St Georgites’.78 This group held that the Ruthenes were indeed a distinct nationality, which was the thesis most pleasing to the Austrian authorities, who therefore gave them such patronage as they could spare for any Ruthenes; in 1844 they gave the group permission to introduce instruction in Ruthene in the schools. The St Georgites, however, hampered their own cause by trying to impose as the national language the so-called Jasisze, a dialect which they had evolved in their own circle, consisting of an Old Slavonic basis, helped out with local, Russian, and Polish words. It was incomprehensible to the people, with whom the St Georgites had, in general, little contact.

  Another group, composed generally of younger men, had begun to interest themselves in the language actually spoken by the local peasants, which was unmistakably a dialect of Ukrainian, and in their native culture. They were collecting folk-songs79 and doing all the other usual work of national pioneers. They had, however, no friends in high places except only the Suffragan Bishop of Premysl, Mgr Joachimowycz, and the Austrian Government and the Poles combined against them, as they had against the earlier apostles of the same creed.

  Yet a third group, which was supported by the Poles, but included a number of Ruthene country priests and also the Ruthenes’ single local monastic Order, the Basilians, favoured bringing Ruthene into a closer relationship with Polish by various devices, including the substitution of the Latin alphabet for the Cyrillic.

  Finally, the Ruthenes’ national nest contained a cuckoo’s egg. The famous Russian Pan-Slavist, Pogodin, had visited Galicia to spy out the land in 1835, and returned several times later, and had interested Government circles in Petersburg for the thesis that the Ruthenes were Russians manqués, who could one day be converted into real Russians. The egg, was, however still in process of incubation.

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  In strik
ing contrast to the surface (and in the former case largely real) calm in Lombardy-Venetia and Galicia were the complex and tumultuous developments in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown.

  The Staatskonferenz, in which Kolowrat seems to have directed policy towards Hungary in the first years after Francis’s death, began by showing the iron fist. Thanks to Francis’s forethought in getting Ferdinand crowned during his own lifetime, there had been no need for a special Coronation Diet, and the Long Diet ended quietly. But as soon as it rose, which was on 2 May 1836, Reviczky was replaced as Chancellor by Count Fidél Pálffy, an extreme exponent of aulic politics who did not even speak Magyar (incidentally, Kolowrat’s son-in-law). The other key offices were filled with men of the same kidney. Several young jurati were arrested. In May 1837 Kossuth’s turn came; he was arrested for a Press offence (he no longer enjoyed Parliamentary immunity) and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Wesselényi’s status entitled him to remain at liberty until convicted of an offence, but charges against him were prepared, and in 1839 he was sentenced to three years in prison; he was, indeed, allowed to remain at liberty, although under surveillance, in an Austrian spa.

  There was great popular indignation at these sentences, especially at that on Wesselényi, who had made himself a national hero by daring work in saving life during great floods which devastated Pest in 1838, and the Staatskonferenz was in a difficult position when the Eastern crisis grew acute in the spring of 1839 and another Diet had to be convoked in April to receive demands for recruits and subsidies. The elections took place in a heated atmosphere, and a considerably increased number of reformers were returned to the Lower House. In the House of Magnates a group of some thirty-five aristocrats, including Counts Lajos and Kázmer Batthyáni, Baron J. Eötvös, Count L. Teleki, and Z. Perényi, constituted themselves a ‘Liberal group’, and another group, headed by the gifted Aurel Dessewffy, formed themselves into a part of ‘considered reform’, which admitted the desirability of change in many fields, but wished it carried through in concert with the Government, expressly disclaiming the name of opposition.