On the 20th the Palatine himself sought a meeting with Jellačić, but the Croat refused to come to the rendezvous. Now the poor young Archduke lost heart; he posted to Vienna, where, on the 24th, he laid down his office.
On the 19th, meanwhile, the Diet, sacrificing legal principle to political expediency, had sent a deputation to Vienna with a request to be allowed to address the Reichstag. The Left wanted them received, but the Conservatives, headed by the Czechs, opposed the request tumultuously. It was opposed also by the Government, for whom Bach read out the Pipitz memorandum to prove the Hungarians’ position illegal, and they were refused admission by 186 votes to 108.
The Court tried one more expedient. General Count Lamberg, himself a Hungarian, a friend of Batthyány’s and a highly respected man, was to go to Hungary as Commissioner Extraordinary, with supreme authority over all troops in the country, Hungarian and Croat alike, to restore peace. Baron Vay, the Hungarian Government Commissioner in Transylvania, was to be appointed Minister President and the Diet adjourned until 1 December.
Lamberg went to Buda to get Batthyány’s counter-signature to these documents. But the news of his commission had leaked out,163 and the Diet issued a proclamation forbidding the troops to obey him. By a mischance, he missed Batthyány and could not get the papers counter-signed. They were in his pocket, still lacking the essential counter-signature, when a mob recognized him on the bridge between Buda and Pest, and lynched him bestially.
That was on 28 September. Now both sides finally lost patience. A manifesto by Ferdinand, issued on 3 October and counter-signed by a retired General named Retsey, appointed Minister a latere ad hoc, declared the Diet dissolved and its most recent decisions null and void, and appointed Jellačić representative of the Crown in Hungary and supreme commander of all troops there. On the other side, Kossuth had on 22 September persuaded the Diet to constitute an ‘Extraordinary Governmental Council’, under his own chairmanship, nominally to assist the over-worked Batthyány. Now, Batthyány having resigned for the last time, this Council was enlarged, transformed into a ‘Committee of National Defence’ and invested with emergency governmental powers which, in practice, made Kossuth dictator.
Already for a month past, Kossuth had been throwing all his superb energy and eloquence into the task of organizing Hungary’s army. Volunteers had been coming in in good numbers, and what was certainly no less important, the confusion of competences and loyalties between the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary, the Ministry of War in Vienna and that in Buda, had by now become so inextricable that a perfectly honourable officer could feel completely free to follow the promptings of his sympathies.164 Accordingly, nearly all the Magyar regiments, and a few others, had taken the Hungarian side, and the Hungarians had also secured possession of many of the fortresses, including the key one of Komárom.
Even so, the Hungarians might well have despaired, but two things came to encourage them. The first was that Jellačić proved a conspicuously incompetent commander. The relative speed of his advance up to the Balaton, near Székesfehérvár, had been due to the fact that it had been practically unopposed. But when, on the 28th, he met, for the first time, a considerable Hungarian force, he broke off the engagement almost before it had been joined, and retreated hurriedly to the Austrian frontier, sacrificing his entire rear-guard, some ten thousand strong, which surrendered to a Hungarian force half its strength. Thus by the time that the proclamation appeared nominating him Commander in Chief of all troops in Hungary, he was on the point of leaving the country ingloriously.
The second factor which gave the Hungarians at least the hope of a respite was a renewed outbreak of Left-wing unrest in Vienna
*
In spite of the temporary appeasement that had set in with the return of the Court, the situation in Vienna had remained uneasy. Trade and industry were still stagnant, prices of both foodstuffs and industrial articles rising. There were two severe outbreaks of social unrest. One was among the navvies, who had grown more and more unruly, insisting now on their dole on work-free days. When the new Government took office, it took over the control of the public works, the financing of which had previously fallen on the municipality of Vienna. On 2 August Schwarzer issued an appeal to any trained worker to return to his trade, when he would be given all possible help. Hardly anyone responded. Then, on 19 August, Schwarzer cut the rates for women and juveniles; it was understood that the men’s turn would follow. The workers invaded the city. They were dispersed, but returned in force on the 23rd. The National and Civic Guards could not cope with the situation. The troops were called out, and opened fire; before the crowds were driven back, they had lost eighteen dead and nearly three hundred wounded. On 11–13 September there were more demonstrations, this time by the artisans, whose situation had deteriorated steadily throughout the summer with the dwindling of demand, especially since the flight from Vienna of what had been their chief customers, the Court and the aristocracy. The artisans’ movement was in a sense a counter-revolutionary one, for one of their chief demands was for repeal of the ‘liberal’ industrial legislation of the preceding twenty years and restoration of the guild restrictions, but their chief immediate need was for credit, in default of which many of them were being forced out of business, and the actual outbreak was touched off by a curious incident, the collapse of a sort of private bank in which many of them had placed high hopes.165
They, too, had to be dispersed by a show of force, although this time, no shots were fired.
Each time the authorities won, and each time they used their victory to tighten the screw another turn. After the August riots they placed the National Guard under their own direct control and forced the Committee of Security to dissolve itself. The Ministry of Public Works was wound up and its agenda taken over by the Ministry of the Interior,166 which sent thirty thousand of the casual labourers to work on railway construction at a safe distance from Vienna, leaving in the capital only the relatively manageable figure of twenty thousand native Viennese. After the September riots, the University was definitively closed and a vacation proclaimed. Many students went home, and the membership of the Academic Legion fell to some fifteen hundred.
Thus first the proletariat, then the petite bourgeoisie, had been reduced to impotence. The peasants had deserted the cause of reform as soon as the law giving them their land and freedom (which in any case they believed themselves to owe to Ferdinand) had passed through the Reichstag. Constitutional issues and fundamental rights interested them not at all. The peasant Deputies in the Reichstag voted solidly with the Government, and in their homes, the peasants formed a solid conservative bloc.167
The bourgeoisie outside Vienna had long been conservative to a man, and now its surviving members in the capital who were able to do so moved out into the country, or to suburban retreats such as Mödling or Baden. Those who had nowhere to go ventured into the streets as little as possible, for fear of molestation at the hands of dubious elements.
The Reichstag acquired further odium (which, rather unfairly, extended to the whole body) when, on 13 September, it refused by a majority to vote an address of thanks to Radetzky’s army in Italy.
More and more, the Left was being reduced to a little band of German-Austrian intellectuals, nearly all of them Viennese, in the Reichstag, and to their sympathizers among the students and workers of Vienna; and they were looking more and more to Hungary as their sole remaining hope. Threads were spun between Buda-Pest and the Viennese Left, and the snubs dealt out to Hungary in September by the Government and the majority of the Reichstag were answered by warm demonstrations in Hungary’s favour from the Left.
It was over the Hungarian question that the powder-keg exploded. At dawn on 6 October a regiment ordered to Hungary to reinforce Jellačić refused to entrain.168 Troops sent down to the railway station fired on the crowd, or the crowd on them, causing considerable loss of life on both sides. Soon the whole city was in uproar. The popular rage was directed es
pecially against Latour and Bach, the two men particularly blamed for the Government’s policy. Fanaticized mobs started a hunt for them. Bach managed to evade his pursuers, but Latour was hunted down in the Ministry of War and lynched. Afterwards his body was stripped naked, hung from a lamp-post, and bestially mutilated. Another mob attacked the arms depot in the Innere Stadt and eventually got possession of its stock of thirty thousand muskets and some pieces of artillery.
The Students’ Committee (unlike the Academic Legion, which had taken a prominent part in the fighting169) did its best to restore order. It even persuaded the Reichstag to carry a petition to the Emperor which, while demanding the revocation of the Manifesto of 3 October, the banishment from the Court of ‘irresponsible advisers’ and the replacement of the Government by one enjoying the popular confidence, yet assured Ferdinand of the loyalty of his subjects and promised him their peaceful co-operation on the new conditions. Ferdinand actually promised to appoint the new Government. But the excesses of the day had been the worst to date, and had decided Lobkowitz to act on his orders. Early next morning Ferdinand and his family left Vienna for Olmütz under a heavy armed escort, leaving behind him a proclamation in which he announced his flight and called on ‘all men who loved Austria and freedom’ to rally round him.
This was the signal for a great turning of backs on Vienna. Of the Ministers, Wessenberg followed the Imperial family straight to Olmütz, where he was presently joined by Bach,170 and a whole company of public men who had either never possessed, or had lost, confidence in the way things were developing – Schwarzenberg, Kübeck, Stadion, Hübner171 and many others – took the same road. The Czech members of the Reichstag, except for two radicals, decamped en bloc, the Bohemian contingent reassembling in Prague, whence they issued a strongly worded proclamation denouncing the Left and declaring that ‘Vienna was not Austria, and was not entitled to impose order on the Assembly’. The Moravians went to Brünn. Practically all members of the bourgeoisie of Vienna who could do so left the city.172
On receiving the news, Windisch-Graetz set his long-prepared plans in motion. Leaving one-third of his command in their stations in Bohemia, he gave marching orders to the rest, sent to Moravia and Galicia for reinforcements, and himself made for Olmütz, where he arrived on the 15th. The next day an Imperial Manifesto went out from the city. It had been dictated by Field-Marshal (as Ferdinand now made him) Windisch-Graetz himself, with Hübner’s assistance. It condemned in the sharpest terms what had been done in Vienna and announced the despatch against the rebellious city of troops under the command of Windisch-Graetz, ‘whom I invest with the appropriate plenipotentiary powers to restore peace in My realm with all speed, by such means as he thinks fit’. Windisch-Graetz now set his troops in motion, having arranged to effect a juncture outside Vienna with Auersperg, when the total force at his disposal would amount to about seventy thousand men.
On his way he was, much to his annoyance, overtaken by a second proclamation, dated the 19th. Stadion had managed to extract this from the Emperor.173 It was much milder than the first. The Emperor, who expressly described himself as ‘constitutional’, promised to leave his peoples ‘in undisturbed enjoyment of the rights and freedoms conceded to them’, and although the Reichstag was prorogued, it was instructed to reassemble on 15 November174 at Kremsier, near Olmütz.175 Windisch-Graetz, however, ignored this document and continued his march, himself on the 20th addressing a proclamation to the capital summoning its inhabitants to submit themselves to his authority.
In Vienna, meanwhile, high confusion prevailed.176 Auersperg had withdrawn his garrison from the Innere Stadt, a move for which he was much blamed in some quarters, but one which probably saved a lot of bloodshed; for the first week they were camped just outside the city, in the Belvedere and Schwarzenberg gardens. The rump Reichstag elected a new President (the Pole, Smolka) and a Standing Committee of twenty-five, which declared itself in permanence and solely competent to exercise the legislative power in Austria. There were also, at first, three Ministers, two of whom – Hornbostel and Doblhoff – soon resigned. The third, Krausz, remained to the last, to represent the principle of legal continuity, and even persuaded the Reichstag to vote the Budget for 1849.177 But both Reichstag and Minister were operating in a vacuum. Even inside the city, no one much listened to them, nor to the Municipal Council. Such authority as there was in the city lay with the students, and with a self-constituted ‘Central Committee of All Democratic Associations’, which, since the conservatives and moderates had withdrawn into passivity, was composed almost entirely of elements of the extreme Left.178 They, while still maintaining that their cause was the lawful one, which they were defending against mutinous Generals, were under no illusion that what was developing was a death-struggle between Left and Right. They turned their energies to throwing up improvised fortifications round Vienna and organizing a force to man them. The kernel of this should have consisted of the National Guard, but that body, too, had been deserted by its more conservative elements, nor could any such man be found to command it. Eventually, after five successive nominees had either made no motions to take up their post, or had been driven from it, the command of the National Guard, carrying with it that of the Civic Guard and the Academic Legion, was, on 12 October, conferred on an ex-regular subaltern named Wenzel Messenhauser, a curious and innocent enthusiast for democracy who acted throughout in such complete good faith that after the fall of the city he voluntarily submitted himself to Court Martial, declaring, most mistakenly, that he had nothing to fear. Besides these forces, which were voluntary, a ‘Mobile Guard’ was set up, which, as it was paid, attracted many recruits, and became the largest single para-military force in the capital, although also the least disciplined. Appeals were sent out for help, and produced one individual who was a host in himself, the Polish soldier of fortune, Bem, who was afterwards to play so large a part in the fighting in Hungary; he was put in charge of the Mobile Guard. Otherwise, the appeals were almost totally ineffectual. A few volunteers from Graz, Linz and Brünn tried to reach the city, but most of them were stopped by Imperial forces. The peasants were indifferent or worse,179 the Czechs openly hostile. The Frankfurt Parliament sent two emissaries, the Deputies Blum and Fröbel, to Windisch-Graetz, who told them, in effect, to mind their own business, and that was all they could do: Frankfurt had no arms except words. The two then went on to Vienna, where, however, they could give nothing more than moral support. The only real hope lay in the Hungarians, and it seemed to be at hand, for as Jellačić beat his inglorious retreat, Hungarian forces, after a pause due to their own stupefaction, for they could not at first believe that Jellačić could have drawn such large consequences from so small a reverse, had followed them, and reached the frontier on the 13th. Now, however, the regular officers in the Hungarian army objected to crossing the frontier unless instructed to do so by lawful authority, while the Government was anxious not to present an excuse for further intervention. Messenhauser, on the other hand, refused to call on the Hungarians for help on the grounds that he was no rebel, and would not identify the cause of Vienna with that of the Hungarian rebellion. Meanwhile, Jellačić’s retreat had interposed the remnants of his army, with which that of Auersperg now joined up, between the Hungarian frontier and Vienna.
A deputation from the Municipal Council sent to Olmütz returned on the 20th with a simple answer from Wessenberg that all messages must be addressed to the Field-Marshal, who by this time had joined forces with Jellačić and Auersperg and encircled the city. Oddly, neither of the Imperial manifestos reached the capital until the 22nd, when that of the 19th appeared in the morning edition of the Wiener Zeitung, sending a sigh of relief through Vienna. But only a few hours later, the Manifesto of the 17th and Windisch-Graetz’s own became known in their turn, and deputations to the Field-Marshal came back with the answer that he recognized only the Municipal Council as lawful authority. The Council in its turn received an ultimatum on the 23rd to surrender unconditi
onally within twenty-four hours.
Fighting began on the 24th, although it was confined at first to the suburbs, and did not become heavy until the 28th. On the 29th the defenders decided that further resistance was useless, and sent a message to Windisch-Graetz agreeing to open the City gates on the following morning.
Most unhappily, that was not the end of the story. The Hungarians had, after replacing the recalcitrant officers by others who did not share their scruples, overcome their hesitations,180 and precisely on the morning of the 30th a detachment of their cavalry reached the suburbs, and the defenders, expecting relief, repudiated their promise. Windisch-Graetz, who afterwards told Schwarzenberg that this breach of faith ‘made mercy impossible’, now turned his guns on the city, while the Hungarians provided Jellačić with the single military success of his career by fleeing before him. The resistance in Vienna soon collapsed; it had cost, in all, about two thousand dead. Afterwards, another two thousand were arrested, of whom twenty-five were shot as ringleaders. Most of the minor offenders were drafted into the army and sent down to Italy. All Left-wing associations were dissolved, and the city was put under strict military discipline.
Among those shot were Messenhauser and one of the Frankfurt emissaries, Blum. The execution of Blum, in spite of his parliamentary immunity, appeared as a studied insult to Frankfurt, and seems to have been meant as such by Schwarzenberg, who specifically authorized it when consulted by his brother-in-law. Fröbel, too, was condemned to death, but reprieved because he had not taken any active part in the fighting.181 Bem escaped, to surface shortly after in Hungary. Chaize also escaped. He was seen in the Dresden Opera, alive and flourishing, a month later,182 but after this, history loses sight of him. He presumably assumed yet another identity.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 62