The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  This naturally did not satisfy the peasants, especially as the year was one of extreme distress for them. In the previous autumn there had been disastrous floods in the basin of the Vistula, the seventh in ten years, and the worst of any; these had destroyed the homes of no less than 60,000 peasants, besides ruining their fields and drowning many of their cattle. Much of the country was on the verge of starvation. Hunger typhus broke out and thousands of men, women and children perished. In many places, especially in West Galicia, the peasants refused to perform the robot and some villages more or less repudiated all authority.

  In November13 the Government ventured another Patent, which placed all rustical land in Galicia on the ‘bought-in’ basis and reduced the robot to the Bohemian level, but did little more, leaving, in particular, the peasants’ dues in money and kind unaltered, and bringing the cottars and landless men no alleviations whatever. This naturally only increased the peasants’ impatience, while the landlords complained that their incomes were being docked without compensation.

  At this stage Rudolph Stadion resigned, and on the following 21 April (1847) the Staatskonferenz (against the votes of many of the Konferenzrat, who regarded him as a dangerous progressive) appointed his brother, Count Francis Stadion, at that time Governor of the Littoral, Statthalter. Soon after arriving in Lemberg. Francis Stadion, who was in fact a very progressive man, and also a highly competent and intelligent one (the brothers were probably the best senior administrators in the Austria of the day), sent in a report urgently recommending a number of reforms: further improvements in the position of the peasants, an amnesty for political prisoners, combined with the expulsion of the chief agitators ‘to Algiers, America or somewhere’, a drastic purge of the administrative services and the reinforcement of them, and the transference of the judicial work of the Patrimonial Courts to a staff of paid magistrates dependent on the Gubernium.14

  Effect was given to the two last-named recommendations, and public security was improved by the organization of a special para-military force, but the other reforms were still hanging fire in the early spring of 1848. By that time, order was indeed, prevailing in Galicia, but it was a precarious one. Inside the province, the peasants on the one side, the nobles on the other, were alike seething with discontent, and no one could suggest how to satisfy the one group without alienating the other irretrievably. The Polish emigration, not, apparently, in the least discouraged by the fiasco of its latest enterprise, was gaily laying plans for another.

  It was, moreover, relevant to Austria’s position that the garrisoning of the province was putting a heavy strain on the Monarchy’s meagre military resources, and the administration of it, with the new paid judiciary, a further burden on its groaning finances.

  Meanwhile, the peasant unrest had in fact spread to other Lands, many of whose authorities were pressing the Government to take prophylactic measures. Here, again, the Staatskonferenz moved only reluctantly. Its first answer was a Rescript from the Emperor to the Oberster Kanzler, dated 26 May, ordering him to institute a general inquiry into the position in respect of robot and tithe, and expressing the wish that everywhere in the Lands under his authority where the nexus subditelae existed, the redemption of these items ‘by agreement’ should be facilitated and accelerated. The officials entrusted with this inquiry decided to extend it to all dues and servitudes, but practically the only point on which they agreed was that the peasants would have to pay for any relief received by them.15 The Decree issued on 18 December simply informed the Land authorities that a peasant was entitled, if his landlord agreed, to commute his dues against a money rental, or to buy himself out. The one major innovation which the Decree introduced16 was that, breaking with the old-established rule forbidding any conversion of rustical land to dominical, it made it legal for a peasant to buy himself out by ceding part of his land, but this concession (if it deserves the name, for it rather advantaged the landlords) had, given the peasants’ mentality, no practical effect whatever.17 Otherwise, since the peasant had already enjoyed the rights enumerated for over half a century, it left the legal situation unchanged, so that its sole effect was psychological. This, however, was great. Grünberg describes it as having had ‘an enormous immediate effect’ and as having been ‘immensely important for the future political developments in Austria’18 – but the effects were the opposite of those desired by the Government. The peasants became convinced that the Government would not help them, whereas if they insisted they would be able to enforce their liberation without paying for it at all. In 1847 they were refusing robot more often than they performed it, and even threatening to burn down the homes of blacklegs. Even in Lower Austria, troops were sent out against them. It is safe to say that only the larger revolution of 1848 forestalled a separate peasant revolution (unless the Government yielded the whole way) in most Austrian Lands.

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  As it happened, the landlord-peasant crisis coincided with the outbreak of a very severe social crisis in other fields. As we have said, prices had not risen greatly before 1844 (the economy having recovered fairly quickly from the war scare of 1840), and it was only in the latter year that the development of the Zollverein, Kossuth’s ‘Buy Hungarian’ campaign, and a variety of other causes, plunged Austrian industry into renewed difficulties. It was a bad year, with widespread unemployment and machine-wrecking, but still not so disastrous but that, at the end of it, the authorities were expecting that things would be back to normal by the end of it. But the 1845 harvest was bad, and in the autumn came the disastrous floods on the Vistula and others in Hungary and Lombardy, where, too, several successive harvests were ruined. In 1846 there was cattle plague in Hungary, and in Silesia the potato harvest – the only crop to grow at all plentifully on the thin soil of that province – was ruined by blight. While waiting for the next season thousands of people, we are told, ‘had nothing to eat except grass and nettles, coltsfoot, or a mess concocted of chaff, clover and blood’. Even in Vienna the bread was mixed with maize. People ‘were spending all their money on food and not paying their debts’. Of 30,000 persons in Vienna liable to the earnings tax, the State in 1845 could get the tax out of half only by sending soldiers to collect it, and out of one-third only by distraining on their effects.19 In the autumn it became clear that the cereals harvest had failed again, as did the hay harvest, on which the cattle should have been fattened. Prices of food had doubled in two years, firewood had risen 250% in the year. There were shortages in almost every Land, hunger typhus in Styria, Bohemia and Silesia.

  In 1847 prices were higher still, being driven up largely by conscienceless speculators who bought the peasants’ crops off the field and hoarded them, or sold them on to Bavaria, where there were also shortages, and more money. And now, into the bargain, the worst crisis to date broke out in the Bohemian cotton mills. Several factories went bankrupt and the banks were chary of advancing loans. Unemployment rose to unprecedented heights just at the moment when a full-wage packet was most essential. Then the potato harvest was smitten by blight again and the cereals harvest was bad for the third year running.

  The worst foci of distress were in Bohemia and Silesia, but things were bad almost everywhere. In Linz one-third of the population was living below the destitution level. In Salzburg bread was being mixed with clover. Vienna presented a special problem, for great numbers of starving people had flocked into it, especially from Bohemia, in search of work on the railways or other public works. This movement had, indeed, been going on for some years, but it had been chiefly from the German districts, whose inhabitants were unable, at least psychologically, to accept the cut wages for which a Slav had still been willing to work. Now it was joined even by Czechs from the plains.

  The railways did provide some employment for heavy manual workers, and for a while, public works were organized on a considerable scale by the Estates of Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower Austria. These, however, were abandoned as the Estates’ money ran out, and the relief of distress was
left to the parishes, or to private charity. The misery of the starving masses huddled together in the outer suburbs of Vienna was indescribable. There was, naturally, much murmuring against butchers, bakers, millers, peasants, Jews, who were regarded as the profiteers in chief, even against the Imperial family itself. The incidence of common crime, too, rose alarmingly. The police reported that the situation was dangerous.

  The general awareness of imminent social danger lent to all the familiar national and constitutional oppositional movements a touch of hectic urgency, and imported new elements of radicalism into most of them. Galicia, as we have said, was simmering. In July 1846 the Estates of Lower Austria submitted to the Government a strongly worded memorandum, insisting on their right to approach the Crown direct with petitions, representations and complaints. The Bohemian Estates were frightened in that year into accepting the Government’s taxation estimates, but they did so only with a rider re-affirming their constitutional case, as stated in the previous year. Meanwhile, the more radical popular movement had received an extraordinary stimulus for which the Czechs, like the Croats, were indebted mainly to a single individual: in this case, an exceedingly brilliant and intrepid young journalist named Karel Havliček. Appointed editor of the biggest paper then appearing in Czech, the Pražké Noviný, Havliček had the inspiration of filling its columns with what purported to be reports sent from Ireland of the progress of the ‘Repeal’ movement there, but were in fact transparent enough descriptions, written by himself, of the sufferings of Bohemia under ‘Viennese’ rule. Inspired by him, the radicals of both local nationalities (for although an extreme Czech nationalist in the particularist sense,20 Havliček contrived to make his agitation acceptable to both) grouped themselves loosely into a movement calling itself by the Irish name of Repeal. Representing as it did the small man, and led by men who were themselves sons of the people, the Bohemian Repeal movement was strongly democratic. It took up the cause of the peasants, artisans and industrial workers, and some of its leaders seem to have found contact with the underground world of extreme social radicalism the centre of which was Paris, and its exponents, some of the Masonic Lodges.

  In so far as ‘Repeal’ meant Home Rule for Bohemia, its programme agreed well enough with that of the aristocrats, and widely as the attitudes of the two movements differed on social issues, certain threads were spun between the two. Dehm’s Liberal group, in particular, gave the ‘Repeal’ movement all the support in its power.

  In May 1847 the Estates recovered their courage and again rejected a demand from the Government for an increased land tax, which they declared that they would not pay unless given detailed information on how the money was to be spent. The Government simply sent the demand to the Gubernium, with instructions to collect the money, and relations between Vienna and Prague reached a new record of tension. The situation was rendered a little more uneasy still when, as described below, the Archduke Stephen was called away to succeed his father as Palatine of Hungary. He had not taken a big part in affairs, but the presence of an Archduke in any provincial capital always lent its atmosphere a certain benignity.

  The Moravian Estates, too, began to stir, although the movement here was more pacific than in Bohemia and seems to have been purely constitutional, with no admixture of Czech nationalism.

  Transylvania – to get its affairs out of the way at this point – was a wheel within a wheel, and its spin was individual, but here, too, the pace of the rotation increased. In 1847 the Magyars won a victory on the linguistic issue, for the Crown issued a ruling which gave them most of their wishes in that field, leaving German only as the language of inner administration in the Saxon districts and that of correspondence between the Saxon Nation and other jurisdictions. The Saxons were infuriated, and Roth got into trouble with the authorities for an inflammatory speech.

  The Roumanians had found a new and important leader, Mgr Şaguna, later to become their Orthodox Bishop, who in June 1846 had been appointed Vicar-General to the Orthodox See on the belated death of Bishop Moga. He was a strong Roumanian nationalist, and had also endeared himself to the Austrian authorities by his skill in coping with a threatened peasant rising.21 Meanwhile, the social grievances of the Roumanian peasants of Transylvania were as bad as ever; indeed, called upon by the Crown to review and revise the status of the peasants, the Diet of 1846–7 had produced proposals which would actually have aggravated still further the miserable conditions of this class. It was perhaps fortunate for all parties, lords included, that the law never came into force, for although the Crown accepted it, with minor amendments, it had not been promulgated when it was superseded by the new laws of 1848.22

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  The scenes in Galicia had a direct and important effect on political developments in Inner Hungary. They convinced Apponyi, who had now got a comparatively free hand, for Majláth had been sent on indefinite leave and the Palatine was falling into his last sickness, that the programme agreed with Metternich in 1844 was no longer adequate to the situation. He therefore added to it a number of items which, if not meeting all the Opposition’s demands, went a considerable way towards many of them. They included the extension of taxation to noble land, the abolition of the aviticitas, facilities for peasants to buy in their holdings, the foundation of an agricultural bank, the reform of the penal code, and others.

  He also took the important step, new to Hungarian history, of organizing his followers in a political party. The ‘Government Party’, as the new organization styled itself, was much wider than Apponyi’s original group, and contained many men whose conservatism hardly deserved the epithet ‘progressive’, but the shock given to the Hungarian landlords by the fate of their Galician cousins had been very general, and a large number of them had come round to the view that a measure of reform was not only inevitable, but desirable, provided that the question of compensation was settled satisfactorily, and in March 1847 they adopted Apponyi’s draft as their programme for the Diet when it should next meet, in the following autumn.

  The Opposition politicians, for their part, felt the need both to step up their own social programme (partly because opinion in their ranks, too, had been affected by the events in Galicia, partly to avoid being outbidden by the Government), and also to match the Government Party with an organization of the same type.23 Given the wide differences of opinion on many points which existed between the various factions, the problem of producing a generally acceptable programme was not easy, but the Centralists magnanimously allowed the Pesti Hirlap to be used as a common organ for all branches of the Opposition, and after protracted conversations, all the chief men constituted themselves an ‘United Opposition’, pledged to an agreed programme, which was issued in June 1847 under the title of an ‘Oppositional Declaration’. This document, which had been chiefly inspired by Kossuth, but revised by Deák, declared that its authors stood, legally, on Law X of 1790, and objected only to such features in the system, as then practised, as infringed that law; those, however, it condemned as ‘foreign and non-national’ and unconstitutional, and demanded their repeal. For the rest, the Declaration covered the special wishes of all the groups of the Opposition. To satisfy the Centralists, it asked for a genuinely national Ministry, exercising effective control over the collection and expenditure of revenue; to please the democrats and social reformers, it demanded extension of representation in the Counties and municipalities to non-nobles; general equality before the law; religious freedom and equality; complete and compulsory redemption of all peasant servitudes, against compensation for the landlords; noble taxation, abolition of the aviticitas and the establishment of an adequate credit system; freedom of the Press, and the abolition of the censorship on books. The Partium were to be incorporated unconditionally, Transylvania, if its Diet voted for the union. On the tariff question, Hungary was prepared to negotiate amicably with the Austrian Lands.

  Another important passage in the Declaration laid down that while it was essential that Hungary should have t
hese Constitutional institutions, these would not be safe unless similar reforms were introduced in the Austrian Lands.24

  The Diet would have before it at least two more questions. The old Palatine had died on 13 January, shortly after celebrating the completion of half a century’s tenure of his office, and his successor would have to be elected. The real choosing in this respect had already been done: Ferdinand had personally insisted that the candidate proposed to the Diet must be Joseph’s thirty-year-old son, the Archduke Stephen, then figuring at the head of affairs in Prague. The candidature was agreeable to the Hungarian nationalists, for Stephen, who had been born and brought up in Hungary, and spoke its language, was known to be deeply attached to the country. The Staatskonferenz and the Hungarian Conservatives regarded it with corresponding misgivings, and in fact, Stephen’s enthusiasms were somewhat uncritical, and although genuinely loyal to the head of his family, he lacked his father’s understanding of the dynastic interests, and also his extraordinary knack of making Hungarians content with receiving less than they had asked for. They had, however, perforce bowed to Ferdinand’s decision.