So far as Hungary’s ‘interna’ were concerned, things went smoothly and swiftly, their progress being accelerated by the news which had arrived from Pest. Some time before, Kossuth had asked his friends there to arrange for pressure to be put on the Diet through a petition, and his friends had entrusted the preparation of this document to a group of young men calling themselves ‘The Youth of Pest’, whose spiritus rector was the poet, Petöfi. The petition was soon ready. Entitled What does the Hungarian Nation demand?, it summed up those demands in twelve Points, which included, besides the social and internal political demands which were already the commonplaces of the Opposition,28 an independent Ministry in Buda-Pest with a Parliament meeting annually, in Pest, a National Guard, a provision that Hungarian soldiers should take their oath to the Hungarian Constitution, a National Bank, and the Union with Transylvania.
This should have gone to Pozsony with only a few signatures under it, but when the news of Metternich’s fall arrived on the 15th, brought with the steam-packet, the Youth organized a vast meeting, which adopted the proclamation by acclamation. Plans were also made for Petöfi to address another meeting on the Rákosmezö, an open space outside Pest on which peasants coming in to the big markets were accustomed to camp. One such market was due, and several thousand peasants were in fact congregated on the field; and reports reached Pozsony that Petöfi was marching on the city at the head of a host armed with scythes and flails, like that which had done such dreadful execution in Galicia. The rumours were unfounded, but they completed the intimidation of the Magnates and the conservatives in the Lower House, who now did little more than assent to the programme of the Opposition, as dictated to them by Kossuth.29 In a few days the Diet was thus ready with a corpus of Bills which transformed the entire administrative and social institutions of the country. There was to be, as before, a bi-Cameral Parliament, and the composition of the Upper House was left unchanged, but the franchise for the Lower House (which was to be elected for a three-years’ term) was extended to all males of the age of twenty or over, subject to certain, fairly modest, property qualifications; the lower age limit for the passive franchise was twenty-four, and knowledge of the Magyar language was obligatory. The franchise for the Counties and municipalities was extended correspondingly; the institutions themselves, and their competences, were left unchanged.
All ‘received’ religions (among which the Unitarian was now included) enjoyed complete freedom and reciprocity.30 Taxation was to be borne ‘equally and proportionately’ by all inhabitants of Hungary, without distinction. The Patrimonial Courts were abolished; the law was to be equal for all. All dues and servitudes attaching to ‘peasant’ holdings were abolished, the villein peasants thus becoming, at one blow, the freehold owners of their lands. The compensation of private landlords was left to ‘the honour of the nation’; the Church renounced the tithe altogether.31 An agricultural credit bank was to be established to help landlords over their difficulties. The aviticitas was abolished. Other laws authorized the establishment of a National Guard, and guaranteed the freedom of the Press, trial by jury for Press offences and freedom of instruction and learning.
Another Bill enacted the incorporation, with immediate effect, of the Partium, and another, the union with Transylvania, subject to the Transylvanian Diet’s voting to that effect when it met. The Ministry was to collaborate with the Transylvanian Diet in preparing legislation of a nature to preserve ‘all special rights and liberties of Transylvania which are favourable to national freedom and equality without hindering the complete unification’.
Besides all this, the Diet framed Bills to regulate the relation of Hungary to the Crown, and its position within the Gesammtmonarchie. These had to be agreed with Vienna, and here agreement proved very difficult.
The Diet’s main proposals were ready by the 22nd. The Monarchy was, of course, retained, the Palatine representing the King in the latter’s absence from the country, and in such case, enjoying plenipotentiary powers; but the Monarchy now became a limited, constitutional one in every respect, for no enactment by the King or the Palatine was valid unless countersigned by the appropriate responsible Minister. The Cabinet was to consist of the Minister President and Ministers a latere (for Foreign Affairs), Interior, National Defence, National Finance, Justice, Public Works and Communications, Cults and Education, and Agriculture, Trade and Industry; the previous organs of Government (the Chancellery, Consilium and Camera) disappeared.
By this time Batthyányi had composed his provisional Cabinet, a Ministry of all the talents; the designated holders of the eight portfolios, in the above order, were himself, Prince Pál Esterházy, B. Szemere, Colonel G. Mészáros, Kossuth, Deák, Széchenyi, Eötvös and G. Klauzál.
But the Staatskonferenz, then still in being, had already taken fright. When the Palatine appeared in Vienna with the proposed legislation, and the provisional list of Ministers, the Staatskonferenz objected, with reason, that the proposed laws would reduce the connection of Hungary with the rest of the Monarchy to a simple personal union. On the 29th Staatthaltereirat Zsedényi was sent to Pozsony with a Rescript which agreed to the appointments of Széchenyi, Szemere, Deák, Eötvös and Klauzál, but proposed four important amendments to the Hungarian draft. The Palatine’s plenipotentiary powers to act for the Monarch in the latter’s absence from Hungary were to be restricted to the existing holder of the office, not enjoyed by every holder of the office. The Court Chancellery was to continue in being as a sort of overlord, standing above the Ministers and responsible only to the Crown, not to the Hungarian Parliament. The Monarch wished to retain his control over tariff and commercial policy, and further, the financial resources thitherto used to meet the expenses of institutions serving the whole Monarchy were not to be handled by the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, but, as thitherto, paid into the ‘Common Treasury of the Monarchy’. The Monarch reserved his rights in respect of the organization of the army and of national defence, and these rights were not to be exercised by the Palatine in the Monarch’s absence.
A second Rescript ordered that the peasants’ servitudes were not to be abolished until the Parliament had made effectual provision for compensation for the landlords.
When these documents were read out to the Diet, a great storm arose. Batthyány himself wanted to resign; Kossuth shouted that ‘the fatherland was in danger’, and there were rowdy demonstrations in Pest. Batthyány, Deák and Eötvös went back to Vienna to argue the case, and the Court, fearing open revolution, conceded practically all their points, only stipulating that, since Hungary was now to have complete control over her own Camera, the next Diet must make proper provision for the upkeep of the Court and other expenditure previously met from their source, and that adequate provisional arrangements must be made for the intervening period.
The new Royal Rescript, which the Palatine brought back to Pozsony on the 31st, limited the Palatine’s powers, when representing the King, only by the stipulation that his exercise of them must not impair ‘the unity of the Crown and of the Monarchical association’. The King promised that he (or his representative) would exercise his executive powers only ‘through an independent Hungarian Ministry, and that no enactment, appointment, etc., made by him was valid without the counter-signature of the appropriate Minister, each Minister being responsible for his official actions’. The list of Ministers was that proposed by the Hungarians, thus including the Ministries of National Finance and National Defence, and the competence of the Ministers extended to ‘all questions which hitherto fell, or ought to have fallen, within the competence of the Court Chancellery, the Consilium, and the Camera, including the Department of Mines’, and in general, ‘to all civilian, Church, fiscal (aerarial) and military questions’. The Minister a latere represented Hungary ‘effectively’ (befolyván) and ‘with responsibility to the country’ (sc. Hungary)32 ‘in all questions of common interest to the Fatherland and to the Hereditary Provinces’ and his counter-signature was required for all Royal
enactments in this field, which, however, was not more nearly defined.33
The Monarch reserved for himself certain rights which were either the usual prerogative of Royalty or special rights enjoyed by the wearer of the Holy Crown (appointments to higher ecclesiastical offices and to some State dignities, and the conferment of titles of nobility), and also specifically reserved to himself ‘the employment of the Hungarian armed forces outside the frontiers of the Kingdom, and appointments to military offices’. Even for these a counter-signature was necessary, but it was that of the Minister a latere.
The Diet, having accepted this Rescript, not without considerable grumbling from the Left, duly voted a provisional contribution of 3 million gulden towards the common services, and agreed to consider the regular contribution at the next Diet. It did not, however, meet the Staatskonferenz’ wishes on the very important question of Hungary’s contribution to the accumulated State debt. The Rescript had passed this question over in silence, but on 7 April a letter reached the Palatine asking for an interim assurance (since it was now too late to settle the matter by legislation) that Hungary was prepared to take over a quarter of the total debt, paying an annual contribution of 10 million gulden. The Hungarians’ official reply was that the question would be submitted to the next Diet; the decision of the Ministers, which was unanimous – even Széchenyi and Deák concurred – was that the request was unacceptable.
Finally the Crown dropped its condition on the prior consideration of the landlords’ compensation, contenting itself with the general promise contained in the relevant draft law. No other points of dispute having arisen, the Diet completed the drafting of its laws, and on 11 April Ferdinand himself, accompanied by Franz Karl and Francis Joseph, came to Pozsony and formally sanctioned the corpus of legislation (thereafter formally known as the ‘April Laws’)34 enacted by the 1847–8 Diet, which he then declared closed.
We may now turn back to the West. Vienna itself had simmered down quickly enough after the appointment of the Ministry. Most of the bourgeoisie wanted little more than what they had already received, or been promised: assurance that there were going to be no more expensive adventures to keep foreign places in order, a guarantee of some control by the tax-payer over the public purse, freedom to grumble without the risk of going to prison for it, protection against the workers. The workers, for their part, had been driven back into their rookeries, after a considerable number of trouble-makers had been arrested; but they had not been subjected to repression. The Government, as we have said, had taken off or lightened some of the taxes which bore particularly heavily on the poorest classes. Then, when the news arrived that the ten-hour day had been introduced in Paris, many of the Austrian employers, the railway companies taking the lead, agreed between themselves to introduce the same reform. In establishments where this was impracticable, wages were raised in compensation. A tenants’ strike forced the landlords to reduce rents all round. Unemployment fell, for the simple reason that employers whose machinery had been wrecked took on hand labour again, and public works were organized for those still unable to find employment.
According to the one contemporary authority who has left a serious account of this side of 1848,35 the factory workers and journeymen were, at this juncture, content with what they had gained, provided these gains could be consolidated.36 At any rate, April was a peaceful month on the labour front. Thus only the students and a handful of Left-wing intellectuals remained in their self-cast role of guardians of the new public liberties.
The students were, however, in a powerful position. The arrangement hurriedly reached on the 14th had been that all the paramilitary forces should be under the command of one man, F.M.L. Hoyos. The Civic Guard retained its autonomy, but the Academic Legion was to be part of the National Guard, although forming a separate unit of it. In practice, the Civic Guard carried out the duties assigned to it in orderly fashion enough, but the National Guard was from the first something of a shambles. There was a great initial rush to join it, but Hoyos, who was an old man with little real military experience (for many years he had performed only Court duties – he was Master of the Royal Hunt) proved unable to introduce order in the force. The Guard came to comprise a large number of ‘companies’, under officers elected by themselves, with ill-defined duties37 and most varying sympathies, some siding with the Court, some with the more sober elements among the bourgeoisie, others with the radicals.
The Academic Legion formed a compact body of 5,000 members, by no means all of them students, but organized as such, by Faculties. Their Commander, Count Colloredo-Mannsfeld, was even more elderly than Hoyos.38 He was not unpopular with the Legionaries, but he left them largely to their own devices, and the orders which they obeyed were concocted by a ‘Students’ Committee’, a little group chosen by themselves.
The students carried out their self-appointed tasks in the appropriate spirit. When, on 1 April, Pillersdorf issued a provisional Press law, they made such a fuss because they had not been consulted first (although the law itself was by no means illiberal) that Pillersdorf weakly withdrew it for re-drafting. They organized rowdy demonstrations outside the houses of unpopular persons; it was their behaviour that caused Kübeck, Kolowrat and later, Taaffe to resign.39 Above all, they amused themselves with concocting and publishing a vast flood of inconceivably cheap lampoons, the abundance of which was matched only by their vulgarity, against their pet Guy Fawkeses: the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the Church, etc….40 They were, however, already somewhat isolated, even among their own fellow Germans.
The Alpine provinces had quickly got over such social and purely political unrest as they had ever experienced, which had not been much. In the few centres where there was a bourgeoisie of perceptible dimensions, that class had shown pleasure at the fall of Metternich, but more anxiety for the safety of its own persons and property: the demand for a national guard came high on every list of desiderata submitted to Vienna. The only counterpart to the students’ agitation in Vienna was among their opposite numbers in Graz, and they were not numerous enough to have much even of a nuisance value. The organized political requests were uniformly modest; none of them asked for more than some democratization of the Estates in the shape of increased representation in the Diets for the burghers and peasants; none of them even touched on the question of new institutions for the Monarchy as a whole, or for parts of it. There was little social unrest. The workers were too few to create it (only in Linz was there some rioting) and the peasants did not need to. They knew that the robot was on the point of disappearance, and simply stopped doing it, and nobody tried to force them.41 The national conflicts in these Lands were mostly a pale reflection of the more powerful movements elsewhere which will be described later. There was considerable, but not universal, unrest in the Italian South Tirol. The German Lands were mildly German National: both Graz and Innsbruck petitioned to ‘join Germany’. The Slovene leaders in Carniola, on the other hand, and the Slovene students’ organization, asked for the constitution of all Slovene-speaking areas in one Land, in which Slovene should enjoy the same status ‘as German and Italian in their Lands’. It is true that they opened their mouths wide enough: their Slovenia was to include all Southern Carinthia (including Klagenfurt) and the entire Littoral. The leaders of the Carinthian Slovenes, indeed, protested against the demand. The German majorities in the Lands of mixed population – Tirol, Styria, Carinthia – opposed any suggestion directed against their integrity, but did not object to some administrative decentralization and wider use of the local languages in the non-German areas.
But outside the Hereditary Lands, it was a different picture. In Italy, as soon as the news of Metternich’s fall crossed the Alps, tumult had broken out in all the main cities under Austrian rule, most clamorously in Milan. On the 18th the Vice-Governor, O’Donnell (the Viceroy and the Governor were both away) published the Imperial manifesto of the 15th, but it made no impression. O’Donnell himself was taken prisoner. Street fighting bro
ke out, and in the next few days, the little garrison lost nearly one-third of its numbers in casualties and desertions. On the night of the 22nd/23rd Radetzky withdrew the survivors and retired on the Quadrilateral. The Milanese formed a provisional Government. Meanwhile Venice had fallen on the 21st, without a shot fired, for the military governor, Count Zichy, simply capitulated to the insurgents, who thereupon proclaimed a Republic with Manin its President.42 About one-third of the land forces and three-quarters of the fleet declared for Italy. The land forces which remained loyal set out to join Radetzky and a few naval units escaped to Trieste. On the 23rd Charles Albert issued a proclamation declaring his sympathy with ‘the heroic struggle of the people of Lombardy and Venetia’ and crossed the frontier. The smaller cities rose in succession. Meanwhile Papal troops were assembling at Bologna, the Duke of Modena had fled, Leopold of Tuscany declared for the Italian cause, and even Ferdinand of Naples was bullied into sending an expeditionary force northwards. Disorder broke out also in the South Tirol, where local insurgents were reinforced by volunteers from across the frontier.
All Radetzky could do was to concentrate the remnants of his army, reduced by the desertion of many of its Italian components to about 50,000,43 in the Quadrilateral, from which vantage point he was at least able, with the help of local German Tiroleans, to restore order in the Trentino. He appealed urgently to Vienna for reinforcements, but unless and until these arrived, he could at best hope to repel attack on his southern front, but not to take the offensive.
It was not even certain that he would be asked to do so. Liberal opinion in Vienna was at this time, on grounds of principle, in favour of allowing Lombardy-Venetia self-determination; many papers advocated this eloquently.44 The financial circles to whom Austria owed much of the national debt were for letting the provinces go on the grounds that a campaign to recover them would cost more than the country could afford. Other Viennese business interests feared for their trade or their investments.45 The Government itself inclined towards cutting its losses in Italy. As early as 20 April Pillersdorf suggested to a Ministerial Council that Austria should recognize the independence of Lombardy.46 Then Ficquelmont thought the proposal ‘premature’, but it was, as we shall see, only a month before he was taking diplomatic steps in the same direction.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 54