*
The Constitution, as we have seen, had envisaged a special regime for Lombardy-Venetia. Pending the elaboration of this, a ‘Provisional Administrative System’, issued on 17 October 1849, made Radetzky military and civilian Governor of the Kingdom, with practically unlimited powers in almost all fields except those of taxation, which Vienna reserved for itself. Under him, each of the three main centres (Milan, Venice and Verona) was given a military Governor with a civilian co-adjutor. None of the centralizing measures described above were applied in the Kingdom in 1849–51, with the single exception that the Supreme Court in Verona was abolished, final appeals in law going to Vienna. All other enactments either exempted the Kingdom from their application or, at least, gave it special treatment.
The Lands of the Hungarian Crown, on the other hand, were to be made in every respect into an integral part of the new centralized Monarchy – this was, indeed, the principal object of the whole exercise.
There was one important field in which the Government could, and did, begin its work at once: this was the economic and fiscal integration of the Hungarian Lands into the Gesammtmonarchie. The biggest obstacle in the way of this operation had been removed by the Hungarian Diet of 1848 itself, when it renounced the nobles’ exemption from taxation. The next steps, which were directed by Bruck, were to extend the Austrian system of direct taxation to the Hungarian Lands and to introduce into them the tobacco monopoly and other excise duties from which they had formerly been exempt. This was done gradually in the course of 1849 and 1850, and in the latter year breaches were made in the customs barrier between the two halves of the Monarchy. By the spring of 1851 the fiscal assimilation had been completed, and on 1 July of that year the last remains of the customs line were abolished.26
The political integration was a more complicated business, and several intermediate stages had to be traversed before the final dispositions could be taken.
The first need had been to get round the inconvenient half-promise to the Hungarian Constitution contained in Stadion’s production. Guarded as this was, it still constituted a paper shackle on the Government’s working; but Bach snapped it for the paper that it was when the Debrecen Parliament pronounced the deposition of the Habsburgs, by announcing that Hungary had by this act herself rendered her Constitution null and void. Then Windisch-Graetz’s private experiment, which had proved a total failure (the Hungarian peasants were as hostile to the Old Conservatives as were the Austrian centralists themselves) was quietly liquidated, and when Haynau was given command of the forces in the field, he was also appointed Governor-General, but given a civilian colleague, Baron Gehringer, a respectable Transylvanian Saxon from the Hungarian Court Chancellery, who was the direct subordinate of the Ministry of the Interior. Gehringer was instructed to introduce the new system as quickly as possible. His subordinates took charge of the civilian administration behind the armies (including the Russian) as they advanced, and the reorganization was thus beginning to take shape in some parts of Hungary while the fighting in others was still in progress. This did not, indeed, yet apply to the machinery of government, including its internal language, but the equal treatment of languages in the outer services was introduced, teaching in some schools changed over to local languages, and preparations began for some other measures, including the realization of the land reform.
The ‘rebellion’ having been officially declared at an end by Haynau on 1 September (and his ‘pacification’ got under way), the Government, on 17 October (the day of the issue of the corresponding document for Lombardy-Venetia) issued a ‘Provisional Administrative System’ for Hungary. Haynau remained Governor-General, and Gehringer ‘provisionally’ head of the civilian administration, but Hungary was divided into six Military Districts, with their headquarters at Sopron, Pozsony, Kassa, Buda-Pest, Nagy-Várad and Temesvár respectively. Each of these was under a Military Governor, to whom, in some cases, a civilian ‘adviser’ was attached. The Counties and their subdivisions composing each Military District were similarly placed under Military Commissioners, to each of whom a civilian was attached. The rule was, of course, dictatorial, the County Congregationes having lost their title to exist with the abolition of the Constitution, but otherwise some attempt was made at this stage to respect the national traditions. The old administrative divisions were retained; the civilian officials were given their old titles (Föispán, Szolgabiró, etc.) and recruited, as far as possible, locally; German was required only for communications with the military authorities, and the Alispáns were allowed to prescribe their own ‘inner language’, for which most of them chose Magyar. A petition by the Slovaks for an independent territory of their own in North Hungary was rejected.
A similar system was introduced in Transylvania. The senior officer commanding the Imperial forces there, F.M.L. Wohlgemuth, was installed as Military Governor, with a civilian adlatus in the person of Eduard Bach, the Minister’s brother. Here there were six Military Districts.
As foreshadowed in the Constitution, the Partium were included in Transylvania, while the Muraköz and Fiume were assigned to Croatia.
The next step was to make the motions of fulfilling the promises made to the Serbs – a task which was not, indeed, accomplished easily, nor without acrimonious wrangling between the Government and Rajačić, and also between the Government and Jellačić, and between Jellačić and Rajačić; for Jellačić had tried to jump control of the area and had even installed a provisional administration of his own in it; while Rajačić wanted all Slavonia under himself. Meanwhile, the non-Serb populations of South Hungary, including its Swabians, had been protesting against being put under Serb rule, and Schwarzenberg’s advisers had themselves, after looking more closely into the problem, come to the conclusion that it was impossible to draw ethnic frontiers in that area, and that the best policy was ‘to create a unit which should as far as possible assign equal weight to all local interests, as well as those of the Austrian State, which latter demanded that as large an area as possible should be detached from Hungary’.27
Their answer was embodied in a Patent of 18 November 1849, which constituted the three Bánátal Counties, the Hungarian County of Bács-Bodrog, and the two easternmost Districts of Srem (Rum and Illok) a separate unit, with the status of a Crownland, under the designation of the ‘Bánát and Voivodina’.28 To mark its dignity, Francis Joseph himself assumed the title of ‘Grand Voivode’. This solution did, indeed, answer one of the Government’s conditions, for the area thus detached from Hungary was extensive enough; but it was not Serbian in either an inclusive or an exclusive sense, for on the one hand, it included inside its frontiers many more non-Serbs than Serbs, and on the other, it left outside them more than two-thirds of the Serbs of the Monarchy.29 Nor did the Patent give the Serbs any political self-government: it simply appointed an Austrian General30 Statthalter.
Soon after this (on 2 December, the anniversary of Francis Joseph’s accession), a formal announcement was issued that the March Constitution was now to be considered as in force in the Hungarian Lands, but although the Ministries in Vienna were now flooding all the Lands with orders and instructions (often causing acute conflicts of competence between the civilian and military authorities) the pattern was left unchanged until the following spring. Then the Croat ‘Banal Council’ forced the issue by refusing to promulgate the Constitution, on the grounds that it was invalid in Croatia unless and until it had been ratified by the Sabor, and in any case, violated Croatia’s historic rights by excluding from its territory Dalmatia and the Croat Districts of the Military Frontier. To this the goaded Government replied on 7 April with a Patent which, while thanking the Croats effusively for their past services, intimated to them that they must accept the frontiers they had been given and the other provisions of the Constitution, and dissolved the Sabor without providing for the election of a successor. The effect of this was to bring Croatia directly under the jurisdiction of the Viennese Ministries, although the Croats receiv
ed the concessions that the internal structure of their country was not altered, and that they were expressly assured the continued use of Croat in their inner services.
A Patent for the Military Frontier, issued on 7 June 1850, put the area back where it had belonged before 1848, and restored its internal institutions with little modification. The Government was still hesitant to touch the military regimes in Inner Hungary and Transylvania, but in June Haynau was dismissed, after a quarrel with his superiors of more than usual intensity. No suitable military successor to this thorny post presented himself, and the civilian Ministers were anxious to secure the unimpeded execution of their work. On 8 September, accordingly a new Provisorium31 was issued for Inner Hungary, which retained, indeed, martial law, thus leaving the military competent for jurisdiction over offences against security, but put the country in other respects under a civilian regime, and directly under the control of the central Ministries. Here, in contrast to Croatia, no concessions whatever were made. Lip-service was paid to the name of Hungary in so far as it was left nominally under a single ‘Governor’, who was even given his own staff, under the old name of Consilium Locumtenentiale; but the functions of this central office could easily be nullified, for the division of the country was maintained, the five surviving Military Districts becoming as many Provinces.32 Each of these was placed under a Provisional Governor, who corresponded both with the Governor and also directly with Vienna (his position thus corresponding to that of the head of a Galician Statthaltereiabteilung), and was the head of all administrative services in his Province. These were organized in a pattern corresponding to the Western Kreise and Bezirke.33 German was made the inner language of all administration.
For the judiciary, too, the Austrian pattern was introduced, with the same separation of the judiciary from the executive and consequent transference of the work of the old Courts to a new network of State Courts of the first instance. The Supreme Court in Buda was abolished, final appeal going to Vienna. The replacement of Hungarian law by Austrian could not be completed overnight, but a beginning was made in several fields.
Among the other institutions to disappear was the old Hungarian police force of Pandurs, who were replaced by the Austrian gendarmerie.
The only other change in Inner Hungary up to the end of 1851 was that Gehringer was replaced in August 1851 by the Archduke Albrecht.
In 1850, Wohlgemuth had resisted any change in the regime in Transylvania, but he died suddenly in April 1851, and the Grand Principality then in its turn received its Provisorium. Here the path was slightly cluttered by memories of inconvenient promises, or half-promises, which Francis Joseph had made at an earlier stage, when his position had been less secure, both to the Roumanians and the Saxons. The former had petitioned him in February 1849 for a national territory analogous to that promised to the Serbs, and in June, for the constitution of a Roumanian autonomous territory under Habsburg rule, comprising all the Roumanians in the Monarchy. Francis Joseph had never promised them a territory, but he had promised them ‘equal rights and organic institutions, in accordance with their needs and the unity of the Monarchy’. To the Saxons, he had promised the maintenance of their old liberties in words which, on their natural interpretation, would have implied full self-government in a territory which might even constitute a separate Crownland. The Government seems to have had no qualms about breaking its word to the Roumanians, for it made no motions whatever towards giving them any ‘organic institutions’ of a political nature, but it did, for a brief while, seem to feel itself obligated to the Saxons, for the first Transylvanian ‘Provisorium’ made the Sachsenboden into separate Kreis, and allowed the Saxon ‘University’ to meet. A revised edition, however, cancelled this politically scandalous arrangement, which, it must be admitted, was also inconvenient, since the Sachsenboden did not constitute a geographical continuum. The Kreise were abolished altogether and the country divided into twenty Bezirkshauptmannschaften, directly under the Gubernium, whose powers were thus equated with those of a Landesregierung. The Saxon University was dissolved, and the administration, here too, was made exclusively bureaucratic; and here, too, German was made (or rather, confirmed, following the practice already introduced by Wohlgemuth) the inner language. The centralization was even a little more complete than in Inner Hungary, for the Governor, Prince Carlos Schwarzenberg (the Minister President’s cousin) was also commander of the military forces.
The definitive Patent for the Voivodina came last of all, in July 1851. It confirmed the purely autocratic dispositions of its predecessor. The Serbs received no political self-government of any sort. The ‘Vice-Voivode’ doubled the offices of civilian governor and G.O.C. the military forces, the Government thinking the precaution necessary in view of the presence in and near the Voivodina of so many ‘dangerous elements’.
*
Since the fiscal and economic integration of Hungary into the Monarchy had now been completed, the Patent for the Voivodina made complete (except as regards Lombardy-Venetia) the ‘unification of the Lands and races of the Monarchy in one great body politic’ which Schwarzenberg had announced to be his programme.
The extension of the new regime to the Hungarian Lands had, of course, been a much larger task than the introduction of it into the Western Lands. There, few, if any, changes had been necessary among the professional civil servants, and to change Standing Committees of locally elected authorities, or magistrates paid by manorial lords, into Government employees, had required a mere stroke of the pen. In most of them, moreover, the designation of German as the inner language of administration had been no innovation, since it had long occupied that position in the Czech and Slovene areas, not to speak of the German.
But in the Hungarian Lands the substitution of autocratic-bureaucratic rule for the old self-governing institutions had meant a genuine change of system, and the linguistic requirements had also been a real innovation. To these difficulties had been added the reluctance of many Hungarians to serve under the new regime, and the suspicion with which the Government regarded those who professed themselves willing. To ask whether the reluctance begat the suspicion, or vice-versa, is to ask whether the hen preceded the egg, for while it is certainly true that Bach’s hand was often forced by the difficulty of finding Hungarians both willing and qualified to serve him;34 it is equally certain that he and his colleagues jumped at every opportunity to break the political influence of the old Hungarian ruling class. In any case, many Hungarians boycotted the new system; others who volunteered to serve it had their offers rejected out of doubts of their reliability; others, after the introduction of the Provisorium, were failed on the language test (which was rigorously applied in Hungary) or for inability to master their duties. Some of the gaps were filled by Swabians, a few by Slovaks, or, in Transylvania, by Saxons, but qualified and reliable Hungarian-born men were thin on the ground, and the regime, unreluctantly, resorted to importation, so that within a few months of the end of the Provisorissimum, a substantial proportion of the civil servants, high and low, governing Hungary and Transylvania for the regime, the magistrates judging them and the tax-collectors garnering (or trying to garner) their resources, were not only non-Magyars, but non-Hungarians: Czechs (these provided the largest contingent), German-Bohemians, Slovenes or even Poles.35
*
By this time Galicia had received, in practice although not on paper, a status of its own. Zaleski had resigned after the blamage which his policy had suffered through the November rising, and the province had remained for a little while under exclusively military control. The Government, however, still clung to the hope of conciliating the Poles, and on 9 April 1849, appointed Goluchowski civilian Governor of the Province. This was an important move, and one which proved in the event the first step towards the peculiar relationship which existed during the rest of the Monarchy’s existence between the Monarchy and its Poles, for Goluchowski, first of his nation, possessed both the will to sponsor a policy of activism and the
authority to enforce it. His task was not easy, for the idea of activism was still unpopular among the Polish nobles and its corollary, the relaxation of complete centralist control over Galicia, equally unpopular among the Viennese centralists. He was, however, a favourite both with the Archduchess Sophie and the Emperor himself36 and with their support was able to secure many concessions. He got the subdivision of Galicia cancelled and the province re-established as a single unit, centralized on Lemberg.37 The Ruthenes’ protests had obtained the revocation, on 4 December 1848, of Zaleski’s first attempt to effect the near-complete Polonization of secondary and higher education in Galicia,38 and Bach saw to it that the University of Lemberg should remain German, but Goluchowski resisted the Germanization of the University of Cracow, secured the establishment of a Chair of Polish at Lemberg, and kept secondary education in Eastern Galicia mainly Polish, even during the later period of Germanization.
*
The completion of the administrative pattern for the Lands of the Hungarian Crown should have made it possible for the Austrian Government to turn its serious attention to the putting into force of the political chapters of the Constitution, and there seems no doubt that up to the middle of 1850, at the latest, most if not all of the Ministers not only expected but hoped that they would soon be so engaged. Schmerling was a constitutionalist in principle, and both he and Bruck believed that a central Parliament was necessary if the Monarchy was to achieve political unity. Krausz thought that the foreign bankers would not give Austria credit without Parliamentary control of the Budget. Bach, willingly as he served autocracy later, was not pressing for its introduction in 1850, and there is no proof that he desired it. Even Thun, although anything but a democrat, held (as did Krausz) that Schwarzenberg’s promises, and Francis Joseph’s own, constituted obligations of honour which could not in decency be broken. It is never possible to say of Schwarzenberg himself when he was lying, but so far as can be judged, he had not yet turned against constitutional institutions on principle,39 and if he had done so, he certainly did not want them abolished in Austria so long as the issue with Prussia was undecided, and opinion in the strongly democratic States of South and West Germany wavering.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 71