It was, in fact, in Italy that the first armed uprising of the year took place – the Sicilian revolt of January – and in the following weeks the situation in the Peninsula grew steadily more threatening. Ferdinand of Naples’ promise of a Constitution was followed by a spate of similar concessions from the rulers of the Principalities. Charles Albert began moving troops up to the Lombard frontier and the Piedmontese Press clamoured for war. On 22 February, Radetzky proclaimed martial law in Lombardy-Venetia.
Nevertheless, it was in Paris that the fuse was lit that touched off revolution in the Habsburg Monarchy. Vague rumours of unrest in the French capital reached Vienna on 26 and 27 February; the definitive news of the abdication of Louis Philippe and the proclamation of the French republic, on the 29th, when the Augsburger Zeitung bearing the news arrived.
The reaction of the honest Viennese bourgeoisie was unromantic, but unhesitating. It was convinced that Metternich meant to launch another crusade, involving more heavy expenditure and another inflation. When the rumours first reached Vienna,1 the big holders of Austrian Métalliques began selling them heavily. On 25 February they still only stood just below par, but on 29 February they were down to 92¼. When the rumours were confirmed, there was a run on the banks and savings banks which cleared them out of metallic currency and forced some of them to close their doors. Some shopkeepers were refusing to take paper money. The scenes in Vienna were repeated in every big city of the Monarchy.
Metternich had, in fact, been doing, or trying to do, exactly what the genius of the people suspected. His reaction to the news, which was first brought him by his friend, Rothschild, had been to set on foot a grand diplomatic campaign. Prussia was to be asked to send an emissary to Vienna to discuss the situation in France, Switzerland and Germany; Russia, to concert ways of preventing France from flooding her neighbours with revolutionary propaganda, and perhaps attacking them; Britain, to hold Piedmont back from attacking Lombardy-Venetia and to thwart the anti-Austrian activities of the ‘sects’ in Southern Italy. Although he had fainted on the first receipt of the news from Paris, he had quickly recovered a reasonable measure of confidence and did not, apparently, believe the situation in the Monarchy, outside Italy, to be dangerous.
It may, however, be said at once that none of these plans came to anything. Palmerston rejected the idea of intervention flatly, accompanying his refusal with harsh words on the folly of Metternich’s past refusal to make timely and necessary concessions and reforms. The Czar had already sent some money – six million roubles in silver; it was all he was prepared to sacrifice for Austria – and was all for repressing revolution, but he thought Austria too weak in ‘the moral absence of an Emperor’ to take charge of the operation, in which he could not himself take an active part, on account of the slowness of mobilization in Russia. It was therefore the King of Prussia whom he exhorted ‘to be the saviour of Germany and the good cause, show himself worthy of the good cause, and shrink not from the task laid upon him by destiny’. Prussia’s own emissary, Radowitz, who arrived in Vienna on 4 March, brought proposals for immediate action, even an offer to guarantee Austria’s possessions, including those in Italy, against attack by France. But these offers were conditional on ‘an open and generous settlement of Germany’s national needs’ through a reform of the constitution of the Bund in a sense which brought about that German union under Prussian leadership which Metternich had made it his life’s work to thwart. And by the time Metternich and Radowitz had agreed on a Conference of Princes, the plan had been swept away by events. Developments in Germany were taking a wholly different course, which drew its inspiration from Heidelberg and Frankfurt.
Meanwhile, one man in the Monarchy had perceived how to transmute financial panic into political capital. That man was Lajos Kossuth. On 3 March he delivered in the Lower House in Pozsony the speech which afterwards was generally hailed as having constituted the inaugural address of the revolution. Putting his finger unerringly on the sore spot, the memory of the financial crisis into which Hungary had been plunged a generation before through operations over which she had had no control, and appreciating, with equal acumen, that the remedy lay in the Centralists’ programme, he denounced in ringing tones ‘the pestilential air which breathes on us from the charnel-house of Vienna, an air which dulls our nerves and paralyses our spirit’. From this Hungary could not be guarded until she controlled her own finances. He therefore proposed that the Diet present to the Crown an Address, a draft of which he laid before the Lower House. Broadly, it comprised the Oppositional Declaration in toto, but the kernel of it was the demand for ‘the transformation of our present system of government by committees2 into a responsible and independent Hungarian Ministry’.
Hardly less important than this demand for Hungary was another passage in Kossuth’s speech, in which he declared that constitutionalism in Hungary could never be safe so long as absolutism prevailed in the rest of the Monarchy, which could only remain united if it were linked by ‘general constitutional institutions, with respect for the different nationalities’.
The Hungarian reformers had as we have seen voiced this proposition before, but rather among themselves,3 and the public enunciation of it by Kossuth at this point was very important, in encouraging the Austrian constitutionalists and in making them feel that their cause was linked with that of the Hungarian Opposition; and we may add here that when the issue was reopened a decade later, the Austrian constitutionalists again owed a great deal – far more than their historians usually admit – to Deák’s quiet but invincible insistence on the same principle.
It is certain that not all the Lower House was ravished by these proposals,4 but in the excited atmosphere, no one liked to oppose them, and the House duly adopted the draft. An odd pause then followed.
An Address to the Crown had to come from both Houses, and the adhesion of the Magnates was far from certain. Further, on 29 February the Hungarian Chancellor, Count Apponyi, who was confident that if allowed to hold new elections, he could produce an amenable Diet, had won the consent of the Staats- und Konferenzrat to the dissolution of the assemblage; only at the last minute had Metternich objected that the Palatine ought to be consulted. The Archduke arrived in Vienna on 1 March, and in his turn insisted that the other great dignitaries of the realm, the Tavernicus and the Judex Curiae, must be heard. They, too, were summoned to Vienna, and their absence was used as an excuse not to convoke the House of Magnates. So for some days an extraordinary impasse prevailed. The House of Magnates did not meet. The Lower House adopted draft Laws in the sense of the Address, the text of which it also had printed. The Rescript dissolving the Diet was drafted but got lost somewhere in the Staatsrat. When it was rediscovered, Apponyi had fallen sick and nobody else much seemed in favour of dissolving the Diet; Apponyi’s deputy, Szögyény, advised against it. The Palatine was, however, urged not to allow the Address to reach Vienna, and accordingly, delayed his own return to Pozsony.
Reports of Kossuth’s speech, however, reached Vienna, where they combined with the further news from Paris and from Germany (where by this time half the States were demanding constitutions and demonstrating for German unity) to put heart into the Liberals and constitutionalists, who were further encouraged by the belief that the Archduchess Sophie and her husband were on their side. Rumours to this effect had sprung up, suddenly and mysteriously, round the turn of the year 1847–8; and they had circulated round all the salons of Vienna, and had even reached Hungary, as certain broad hints in Kossuth’s speech show. Actually, although the belief acquired such vitality that the legend has survived to this day, there was little or no foundation for it;5 but its existence was a most important factor in the situation, through the stimulus which it gave to the courage of those who held it. Meanwhile, there was now staying in the Hofburg one man who was a genuine reformer and a real opponent of Metternich’s and partisan of Kolowrat, the Archduke John, the most sensible as well as the most popular of the older generation of Archdukes, w
hom Count Colloredo, President of the Lower Austrian Gewerbeverein, had persuaded to come up from Graz to use his weight in the family councils. The Archduke in fact several times urged his brother to make concessions, but in vain.
In the first days of March several institutions, including the Booksellers’ Association and the Juridical-Political Reading Circle, submitted petitions to the Emperor asking for the redress of various grievances. One meeting, that of the Lower Austrian Gewerbeverein, although it produced nothing more than an assurance of loyalty to the throne, was lent significance by the fact that both the Archduke Franz Karl and Kolowrat attended it, and the former promised to convey its wishes to the Emperor. None of these bodies had any official standing, but the Estates of Lower Austria were due to meet on 13 March, and their preparatory Committee met on the 3rd to draw up the agenda. Thirty-three of its members signed an Address, destined for the plenary session, strongly claiming more powers for the Estates, as against the bureaucracy. Another memorandum was drawn up by the poet Bauernfeld and the later Minister Dr Alexander Bach. It asked for immediate publication of the Budget and State debt, periodical convocation of corporative assemblies, representative of all Lands, classes and interests in the Monarchy, with the right to vote taxation, control the budget and participate in legislation, a modern system of local government and such civic liberties as freedom of the Press and public trial. It was circulated for signature among the most influential bourgeois circles, and after a large number of signatures had been collected, handed to the Committee of the Estates on the 11th. It was to be formally presented on the 13th.
The Archduke Ludwig and Metternich took all this calmly enough, having been reassured by Sedlnitzky that the agitation was unimportant, and that he had the situation in hand. A communiqué issued on the 10th by the Staatskonferenz denied any intention of intervening in France, but declared that the Government would be on its guard against any attempt to overthrow law and order, and would be strong enough to do so. This was taken as an indication that the Government would refuse any reform, and instead of allaying unrest, aggravated it. The radicals warned the Estates that unless they acted vigorously, they, too, would be swept away. Then, on the 12th, which was a Sunday, the students of Vienna met and resolved to present to the Emperor a petition, which some of them had drafted on the previous evening, the main demands of which were for freedom of the Press, instruction and religion, and general popular representation. Two liberal and popular Professors, Hye and Endlicher, persuaded them to let them deliver the petition in their names. They had a prolonged interview with the Archduke, but were obliged to report back that they had ‘received no positive answer’.
Actually, the Staatskonferenz did on that day decide to make a concession: the Estates ‘of all Lands whose Estates’ rights rested on old, hitherto unmodified Constitutional Charters’ were to be invited to meet and consult with a Committee to be appointed by the Crown on ‘possible measures appropriate to the requirements of the moment’.6 Instructions to the effect were issued to the Oberster Kanzler, Inzaghi. But the forlorn attempt by Metternich, who talked the reluctant Archduke into accepting it, to apply his favourite nostrum, was not publicized – by the next morning few members even of the Estates had so much as heard of it; if it had been, it would certainly have been dismissed as derisorily inadequate.
But excitement was now running high. The word had gone down the grapevine that ‘the morrow was going to be the day’. All the salons had it, and the students had passed it to the workers. Early on the morning of the 13th the streets of the Innere Stadt began to fill with sightseers, including several hundreds of workers from the suburbs, for whom Monday was the best day of the week,7 some of them obviously bent on mischief.8 By the time the members of the Estates reached their assembly hall in the Landhaus, in the Herrengasse, a dense crowd was filling the street outside. While the crowd waited for the Estates to emerge, a great body of students arrived, marching in formation from the Aula. They forced their way into the courtyard of the Landhaus, and a young doctor named Adolf Fischhof addressed the multitude in support of freedom of the Press and of instruction, and of trial by jury. The crowd broke into tumultuous cheers for Fischhof, the Emperor, the Archduke Franz Karl and his wife. Another young man, a certain Goldmark, called on the crowd to enter the Landhaus and force the Diet to carry their demands to the Court. It was decided to send a deputation on this errand, and while the members of this body were being chosen, another student, a certain Maximilian Goldner, arrived waving a bundle of leaflets. They were printed copies of a hurriedly-prepared German translation of Kossuth’s speech in Pozsony, which a Tirolean named Patz read aloud to the cheering crowd. The excitement was now indescribable. Feeble attempts by spokesmen of the Diet to suggest half remedies were swept aside, and in the end a deputation of their number willy-nilly carried to the Hofburg the demands of the excited crowd for a Constitution and the fall of Metternich.
These representations, too, looked like achieving ‘no positive results’. Metternich, who had been fetched over under an armed escort from the Ballhausplatz, where he had been consulting with Radowitz, informed the deputation of the Konferenzrat’s decision of the previous day and told them that when the Committee’s report was ready, the Emperor would take the necessary action on it. The Archduke Ludwig said that he was not entitled to make any concessions impairing the Emperor’s absolute sovereignty without Ferdinand’s own consent.
But all this took time, and meanwhile, the situation in the streets was getting out of hand. Few precautions against disorder had been taken;9 and although the garrison of Vienna had been alerted and issued with live ammunition, and a fairly strong guard placed outside the Palace and pickets at one or two other strategic points in the Innere Stadt, the bulk of the force, in any case a small one,10 commanded, unfortunately for all concerned, by the Archduke Albrecht,11 had been kept in their barracks outside the glacis.
The various civilian authorities had, however, been authorized to call in the military if necessary. About 11 a.m. the crowd in the Herrengasse grew restive; rowdies broke into the Landhaus and began wrecking the furniture, while others gathered in the Ballhausplatz and raised a clamour for Metternich’s resignation. The President of the Landesregierung sent a message to the Archduke. A couple of hours later the troops arrived. Some reinforced the guards outside the Palace; some took up positions outside the gates leading into the Innere Stadt, these being closed against further intrusion from the suburbs; others formed a ring round the centre of disturb ance, and began clearing the streets round the Landhaus. Repeated adjurations to the crowd to disperse quietly proved less than effective,12 and eventually one patrol – a detachment of Italian pioneers – opened fire. The first volleys killed four persons, and wounded many more, while an old woman was crushed to death in the panic.
The shots, far from restoring order, precipitated the reverse. The soldiers were hooted and pelted with missiles, and mobbed by bands many of which were headed by those workers who had got into the Innere Stadt before the gates were closed. There were many ugly affrays, and more mortal victims. In the outer suburbs, the rookeries of the wretched proletariat, shops were looted, factories wrecked, better-dressed persons molested. One exciseman was thrown living into a bonfire.
The menacing eruption of the submerged tenth introduced a new element into the political struggle. The bourgeoisie were as hostile as the Court itself to the proletariat. The Burgomaster of Vienna, Czapka, who was titular O. C. the Civic Guard,13 approached the Archduke asking that the preservation of order should be entrusted to his Corps, which should be expanded into a full-scale National Guard, adequately armed. But this demand, conservative in one sense, was revolutionary in another, for the Guards were not prepared to act simply as auxiliaries to the military, being rightly convinced that in such case the soldiers, after crushing the workers, would simply turn on the burghers themselves. They therefore demanded that the troops be withdrawn and the preservation of order left solely to their own
body.
If the burghers mistrusted the Court and the military, the converse was equally true, for a National Guard in control would be simply the arm of the bourgeois revolution. Still less reassuring was a clamour which now arose from the students, that they too should be given arms and allowed to form an Academic Legion. But from another point of view, both demands were difficult to resist. The military were so detested that the mere sight of a soldier’s uniform was a red rag to the people, whereas the crowds trusted the students, whom they felt to be on their side, and did not too much mind the Civic Guard.
Up to the late afternoon, the ‘party of resistance’ at the Court was still in the ascendant. It was felt by all, himself included, that Albrecht must, for the sake of the dynasty’s popularity, be taken out of action, but F.M.L. Prince Alfred Windisch-Graetz, Military Commander in Bohemia, a man equally devoid of fear and pity, happened to be in Vienna on private business. On Metternich’s suggestion, he was called to the Palace early in the afternoon and asked whether he would be able to restore order. He replied that he could do so provided that the unrest did not spread to the provinces, and was then asked to come back again after dinner. When he did so, about 6·30 p.m. (having dined with Metternich), he was told that he was going to be invested with plenipotentiary powers, civil and military, to carry out the task. He went to his home to change into uniform, but when he got back later in the evening, he found that feeling in the Palace had changed. Another deputation, bringing the ‘burghers” petition, had arrived and declared that while the burghers regarded the satisfaction of all their demands as indispensable, one concession would ‘comprise all the others within itself’, this being the dismissal of Metternich. The Rector of the University appeared, pleading for the students to be armed, as the only way of pacifying them. A deputation of the Civic Guard said that the Guard would guarantee order on three conditions: that the troops were withdrawn, the students armed, and Metternich dismissed. But these conditions must be fulfilled by 9 p.m. These successive representations broke the will even of the Archduke Ludwig. First the arming of the students was conceded, then the demands of the Civic Guard: the organization was to be expanded into a full-scale National Guard, and meanwhile the present members, and the armed students, were to take over the preservation of order from the military. The change-over began immediately, each detachment of troops retiring to the barracks in the Josephstadt as its relief took over, and with the disappearance of the uniforms, the temper of the crowds cooled perceptibly. But the key concession had still to be made. Reluctantly, the Archduke Ludwig himself now told Metternich that he must resign. The old man, in reply, treated his audience to an hour and a half’s oration. Then the Archduke John took out his watch and said: ‘Prince, we have only another half hour, and we have not yet decided what answer to return to the people.’ ‘Your Imperial Highness’, said Kolowrat, ‘I have been sitting in this Conference with Prince Metternich for twenty-five years, and I have always heard him talk like this, without coming to the point.’ Ferdinand made one of his rare but pithy utterances: ‘After all, I’m the sovereign and the decision lies with me. Tell the people that I agree to everything.’
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 52