The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  The Croat question was certain to come up. Haller had resigned in December 1845 and the office of Ban was still vacant (a fact that was to be important a few weeks later). Pending the appointment of a new Ban, Croatia was in charge of Mgr Haulik, the Bishop of Zagreb, a man close to the councils of the Court. Under his benign gaze, the Sabor had cast restraint to the winds. It passed a Resolution ‘to work for the unification of Croatia-Slavonia with Dalmatia, the Military Frontier, Fiume and the Littoral’. As interim measures, Vienna was asked to establish a Croat section in the Court Chancellery and a separate Croat Consilium, to elevate the See of Zagreb to an archiepiscopate and to introduce Croat as the sole language of administration and education (as which it was in fact already being used) in Croatia. The Croat Counties returned unread communications addressed to them by Hungarian Counties, and Croat officials addressed their opposite numbers in Croat, refusing even to append a Latin translation.

  On their side, nearly all the Hungarian Counties had instructed their delegates to raise the linked questions of the Turopolyans’ grievances and the legality of Haller’s action in 1845.

  When, on 7 November, the Diet met, it was not at all certain how its proceedings would end. The elections had left the two parties very evenly balanced. The Liberals had emerged with a small advantage at the Lower Table, but were in a clear minority among the magnates. Their unity, moreover, was still only very superficial. Deák had declined his mandate on grounds of ill-health, and in his absence, the Opposition was led by Kossuth, now sitting in his own right, as Deputy for Pest County, which had elected him by a large majority; but his authority over his colleagues was far from firm. In fact, when, the election of the new Palatine having been affected, as tradition demanded, by unanimous acclamation, the Government put forward its ‘Proposita’ (now in the form of draft Bills), these went such a long way towards realizing the Liberals’ own programme of social legislation as to fill Kossuth and his fellow-radicals with well-founded fears that their more lukewarm colleagues would be satisfied, and the Diet end with the political side of the Governments’s programme endorsed, and a number of three-quarter social reforms enacted on which it would be difficult to go back later.

  Kossuth tried to reunite the Opposition and to reassert his own authority, which was really in danger, by proposing a formal complaint to the Crown against the system of administrators, as contrary to Law X. To this he proposed to add the rest of the Opposition’s demands, as set out in the Declaration. The question of the administrators was one which the Crown and the Government Party were bound to take as a direct challenge, and the considerable number of men on both sides who were anxious to avoid a head-on collision proposed this and that concession in return for the dropping of the crucial demands. Proposals and counter-proposals flew about like young swallows just out of the nest, and under strong pressure from Széchenyi and other moderates, the Government gave a great deal of ground. Municipal reform, the abolition of the aviticitas, and the re-incorporation of the Partium had already figured among the Proposita. The Government now agreed to extending taxation for the cassa domestica (although not for the contributio) to noble land, and in principle, to the abolition of the nexus subditelae. It agreed that the Consilium Locumtenentiale should be answerable to the Diet, which would have meant that, while foreign affairs, defence and finance remained under central control, Hungary would have been almost completely autonomous in respect of her ‘interna’. On 1 February it even suddenly produced a Royal message promising that the system of administrators should be regarded as an emergency measure only, which would not be maintained when conditions became normal.

  It seemed possible that this last, very big, concession, would satisfy enough of the Opposition and make it possible for the Crown and the Diet, after all, to resolve their differences peaceably, for on 5 February the Lower Table voted to accept the message, thus inflicting on Kossuth his first Parliamentary defeat. But it had done so only by a majority of a single vote, and that cast by a Croat, so that the prospects of peace were obviously extremely precarious. Meanwhile, Magyars and Croats had been wrangling with great acerbity over the Turopolyan vote, the language of communication between the two countries, and much more serious, the question to which of them the Slavonian Counties and Fiume belonged. The Croats for their part were displaying great irritation, not only against the Hungarians, but also against the Crown for its hesitancy in backing their demands.

  *

  The situation in Italy had, quite suddenly, become the most dangerous of all. The elevation of the supposed Liberal, Pio Nono, to the Holy See in June 1846 had opened the sluices to an enormous rush of pent-up national and Liberal feeling throughout the Peninsula. While the inhabitants of the Papal States looked to the new Pope, with almost idolatrous veneration, to lead Italy in casting off the Austrian yoke, agitation against their rulers grew in all the Principalities which ranked, directly or indirectly, as Austrian dependencies, while the one Italian Prince not tarred with the foreign brush, Charles Albert of Savoy, prepared almost undisguisedly to place himself at the head of a Crusade for national unification.

  Metternich was practically helpless in the face of all this. His one intervention outside the frontiers of the Monarchy – the occupation of Ferrara in July 1847 – did Austria more harm than good, for it evoked added resentment against her in Italy, besides drawing down on her the disapproval of Britain.25

  And now Austria’s own subjects caught the infection. Even in Venice, whose passivity had made her a by-word,26 the authorities had to imprison two agitators, Daniele Manin and Nicolo Tommaseo, in the autumn of 1847. On 31 December there were street riots in Milan, the first for a generation. The nationalists organized a boycott against the Austrian State lottery and tobacco monopoly. Bands of young men strutted through the streets, knocking cigars out of smokers’ mouths. Riots followed, in Milan itself, Padua and Pavia. There were signs of irredentism even in the Trentino.

  Radetzky, commanding the Austrian army in the Kingdom,27 had kept his forces excellently trained and organized, but their numbers had been reduced in 1832, on grounds of economy, to 62,000, approximately one-third of them Italians,28 although this last circumstance seems, strangely enough, to have caused the Austrian authorities, military and civil, no misgivings.29 With this force, the Field-Marshal had to keep order in Lombardy-Venetia, garrison Ferrara, and guard against a possible attack from Piedmont; and he might have had also to garrison Naples, for when trouble broke out there in January 1848, King Ferdinand appealed to Austria for help, invoking a secret treaty of 1819, but the Pope refused to allow the troops passage. Radetzky’s men were, moreover, scattered over the length and breadth of Lombardy-Venetia, since the civilian governors of every town reported that they could not do without the garrisons. The troops in Milan numbered only 9,000. There was a small naval forcebased on Venice, but it consisted only of a few vessels used for coastal patrols,30 and was even less reliable than the army, since the big majority of the officers and practically all the ratings were Italians.

  Radetzky sent repeated appeals for reinforcements, saying that he could not guarantee the safety of Lombardy-Venetia without at least 150,000 men. Between December 1847 and February 1848 the Hofkriegsrat, grudgingly, sent him down (in driblets) another 20,000 men31 and Metternich promised him that the required figure should be at his disposal if war broke out32 – a promise which, in the event, could not be honoured, since when the unrest did break out, it was not, as Metternich had complacently anticipated, confined to Italy. Meanwhile, Radetzky had already decided that, failing adequate reinforcements, he would have to withdraw his forces into the Quadrilateral if war broke out with Piedmont.

  *

  By this time it was, indeed, clear that the demands of the military could no longer be resisted absolutely, and the allotment for the army had been increased: in 1847 it was 62·96 m.g., an increase of 10 m.g. in two years. But the State finances were even less able than ever before to stand an additional strain. In 18
45 there had actually been a small budget surplus, of 7 m.g., but the suppression of the Galician revolt had not been cheap, and the new paid administration there was another big item. In 1847 the Government spent nearly 10 m.g. on constructing new railway lines and 24 m.g. on buying out lines from private holders. On the other side, the bad harvests resulted in a falling-off of revenues. Thanks to this, and to a compassionate reduction in the excise duty, the budget deficit rose in 1847 to 51 m.g. Another loan of 80 m.g., underwritten by four Viennese banking-houses, was raised at the beginning of the year, part of which was meant to go on buying out the railway shareholders, but the Treasury needed the money for current purposes and the operation had to be suspended. Fears were widespread that another ‘State bankruptcy’ was round the corner – fears and hopes, for the Left believed that this would be the spark to touch off the political revolution for which they were hoping.33 In the event, they were not far wrong.

  1 Russell, op. cit., II. 217–18.

  2 Turnbull, op. cit., II. 226.

  3 Id., p. 323.

  4 So G. Marx heads the second section of his book. The heading is surprising, for the contents of the section read to the unsophisticated reader like a fairly unrelieved category of tribulations, but Marx gives it, and stands by it (see his p. 143).

  5 See above, p. 283.

  6 According to Sacher-Masoch, op. cit., the landlords in East Galicia, with one or two exceptions, had held aloof from the movement. There was to have been a rising in Lemberg. The local officers were to be invited to a grand ball and asked to stand up with the Polish ladies in a dance for which they would have to remove their daggers. They were then to be massacred on a given signal. The plan, however, was betrayed and the ball called off. Similar balls were to have been given in other centres, but it does not appear that any of them were held.

  7 Sacher-Masoch writes that the Poles employed double agents to feed the Austrians with misleading reports.

  8 This version was propagated at the time from Paris, and was widely credited. Some Polish writers go so far as to suggest that the whole incident was instigated by the Austrians (this is the plain sense even of the account in the Cambridge History of Poland, II. 353, written nearly a century later). This is certainly ridiculous. The lesser charge may have been justified in certain individual cases: Namier, The Revolution of the Intellectuals, p. 16, quotes (from Polish sources) an alleged instruction from a high official in Lemberg which, if authentic, would prove him personally guilty of it. Even so, it is hard to see the Poles’ grievance, since on their own admission they had been preparing to do exactly what they found so scandalous in the case of the Austrians: set peasants to attack unsuspecting men. The text of one of their instructions for the rising, quoted by Sacher-Masoch, op. cit., p. 46, contains the words: ‘On a certain day, and at a certain hour, the whole realm will rise in the following way: the associates will massacre the oppressors …’

  9 The details are given conveniently by Srbik, Metternich, II. 149–66.

  10 It is interesting that in April 1848, when the Cracow Poles were giving the Austrian Government so much trouble, Pillersdorf said that the acquisition of the Free City had been ‘the root of all the trouble’ and ‘its separation from the Monarchy would be desirable’. Ficquelmont, indeed, objected that Cracow would then immediately be occupied by the Russians, and although this would indeed put a stop to the revolutionary agitation, it would put Russia militarily in a position from which ‘it could operate in the heart of the Monarchy easily and almost unimpeded’ (Walter, Zentralverwaltung, III. I. p. 67).

  11 This was, in essentials, another of the innumerable cases in which the financial considerations championed by Kolowrat proved decisive. Metternich wanted to send troops into Switzerland, or at least to grant the Sonderbund an armaments credit. He succeeded with difficulty (both Kolowrat and Kübeck objecting) in persuading the Staatskonferenz to grant the Seven Cantons a non-interest-bearing loan of 100,000 g., but his other proposals were rejected as financially impracticable. Lacking as it did any financial sinews, the ‘moral support’ which the Chancellor gave the Seven Cantons proved to be worth exactly nothing.

  12 Schlitter, pp. 39 ff. 13 The Patent was dated 12 November and promulgated in Galicia on 25 November.

  14 This had been proposed as early as March 1846 and agreed in principle by the Conference but not carried through.

  15 On the Commission’s inquiries see Grünberg in L. U. F., I. pp. 32 f.

  16 There were a few other minor modifications which need not be enumerated here. They are described in Grünberg, l.c.

  17 I have been unable to trace a single case of advantage’s being taken of this concession.

  18 Grünberg, p. 37.

  19 Fischer, op. cit., p. 33.

  20 Havliček had spent a couple of years in Russia, and had come back convinced of the unrealism of Pan-Slavism.

  21 See above, p. 279, n. 3. According to Helfert, l.c., Şaguna actually kidnapped the agitatrix in chief from the middle of a gathering and bore her away in his carriage to a near-by fortress.

  22 A provisional survey made in 1819 was to be taken as the basis for determining what land was urbarial and what allodial. If land was shown by the survey as being cultivated allodially, the onus was on the peasant to prove that it had been taken from him unlawfully; if shown to be cultivating land registered as allodial, he had to restore it within two years. The size of a sessio was fixed at the minute figure of 4 hold arable and 2 ley for the best land, ranging to 14:6 for the worst; yet the robot was to be the same as in Inner Hungary, where a sessio was four times as large (52 days haulage or 104 hand). The tithe and the landlords’ other dues were left unchanged or extended.

  23 Some of them had been considering these points as early as 1845.

  24 For the influence exerted on later developments by this declaration, see below, p. 323, etc. Although it was Kossuth who was normally the most persistent advocate of the thesis, others, including Eötvös, also held the view more strongly. It was actually put forward by one speaker in the debates of the 1825 Diet.

  25 The diplomatic crisis was smoothed over by a compromise under which the Austrian troops were withdrawn from the city of Ferrara, but a small garrison left in the fortress.

  26 Two young Venetians who toured Italy in the autumn of 1847 experienced to their shame that toasts were drunk to all the other Italian cities, only not to Venice, which was mentioned only with ‘contempt and abuse’ for its passivity and lack of sympathy with the Italian cause (Helfert, I. 121).

  27 There is a first-class account of the military position in Lombardo-Venetia on the eve of hostilities in R. Kiszling (ed.), Die Revolution im Kaisertum Oesterreich, 1848–9 (Vienna, 1948. 2 vols.), I. 86 ff.

  28 So Kiszling, p. 87. Twenty-four of the sixty-two infantry battalions in Radetzky’s army were Italian (ten of these ended by deserting, although not all of them immediately) and two Friulian. There were few Italians in the artillery, which was mostly German, or the cavalry, which was mainly Hungarian. Hain in his Statistik writes that in 1846 there were then in all 53,000 Italians (plus 4,000 Friulians) in the armed forces of the Monarchy, the total of which he puts at 492,000.

  29 See Hartig, p. 65, n. ‘The greatest part of the Austrian forces (sc., in Lombardy-Venetia)’, writes Hartig, ‘consisted of Italian troops; but almost up to the very commencement of the revolution their loyalty had not only not been doubted, but every allusion to such doubts which are said to have been not wanting in the Cabinet, was looked upon as a violation of military honour. This prejudice was so extensively prevalent that even in the month of February, when martial law against high treason and rebellion was proclaimed in the Lombardy-Venetian Kingdom, and the military were made subject to it, this latter circumstance was even in the highest circles of Vienna looked upon with displeasure, as an attack upon the honour of the soldier, although the Field-Marshal himself had consented to the measure.’

  30 On acquiring Venetia, Francis, with his typical
blend of parsimony and realism, had decided that Austria did not need a big fleet, since England would look after the seas in time of war. The bulk of the Venetian fleet had therefore been sold to Denmark.

  31 For details, see Hartig, l.c.

  32 Kiszling, I. 90.

  33 Violand, one of the radicals of the 1848 Reichstag, writes in his Enthüllungen (p. 6) that he and his friends did not expect revolution to come in 1848, ‘but were convinced that it must come when the State bankruptcy, towards which Austria had long been tottering, occurred. For that reason we were overjoyed when Lombardy and Venetia, in the autumn of 1847 … did everything in their power, even abstaining from the enjoyment of tobacco, to bring this State bankruptcy about, since, as I said, we were convinced that this would bring about a general rising and the end of absolutism.’

  It should be noted that the figures on the State finances were never published. This was a precaution which defeated its own end, for rumour usually exceeded even the truth.

  9

  1848

  In the opening weeks of 1848 there was a widespread feeling that a conflagration was imminent, but the quarter in which it was most generally expected to start was Italy. It was towards Italy that Violand and his friends were looking, and when Austrian papers took one of the downward turns which, although small, were frequent during these weeks, this was usually in reply to some disquieting items of news from the Peninsula.