The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  In May of the next year Francis Joseph and Elisabeth began116 a similar tour of Hungary. Here, too, another amnesty was enacted and many confiscated properties restored.

  But these gestures implied no change in the principles of the absolutist regime, in respect of which Francis Joseph was still firmly convinced, not only that it was philosophically right (this was a faith which probably remained with him all his life), but also that it would end by proving itself – was, indeed, already doing so – a success in practice, an illusion which Bach not only encouraged, but seems himself to have shared. In 1855 Francis Joseph had written cheerfully to his mother that ‘a State which can mobilize two hundred thousand men without trouble and can raise an internal loan of five hundred million gulden is not sickening for revolution’. Before his journey to Hungary he ordered the authorities ‘to make it absolutely clear to the Hungarians that His Majesty is absolutely determined not to depart by a hair’s breadth from His principles’, and the arrangements for the trip were designed to make this absolutely clear: thus Francis Joseph refused to appear in the uniform of a Hungarian officer, wearing instead the dress of an Austrian Field-Marshal; streamers had to be black and yellow, the national colours being forbidden, and so on.

  Francis Joseph seems to have come back from his trip with his confidence unshaken, for he wrote on his return:

  ‘Resolved to uphold unswervingly the fundamental principles which have hitherto guided Me in governing My Empire, I desire that they be generally recognized and more particularly adopted for guidance by all organs of My Government.’

  But in fact the trip had done more harm than good. The ostentatious trampling on national susceptibilities had largely outweighed the effects of the amnesty, and in any case, it was not clemency for which Hungary as a whole was asking, but a change of system. The blow had been especially severe for the Conservatives, who had pinned high hopes on the visit, and had compiled another extensive memorandum, to which they had secured the signatures of 227 prominent members of various walks of Hungarian society, asking, once again (in most loyal terms) for the restoration of the status ante 1848. This had been given to the Cardinal Primate to convey to Francis Joseph, but means had been found to thwart his repeated attempts to do so, and the signatories threatened with dire reprisals if they tried to break through the cordon. The Archbishop eventually gave up the attempt in despair. The Conservatives’ embitterment over this ran very deep,117 and their position in Hungary also further weakened by the snub, to the advantage of that of Deák, who had refused to associate himself with the memorandum; for there was no point in compromising on 1848 if the Crown was unwilling to concede anything at all.

  Thus disaffection ran higher in Hungary after the visit, than before it, and it was accompanied by a similar growth of disaffection among the Croats.

  The Italian tour seems to have been less positively disastrous, although there, too, there were difficulties: for example, the projected balls had to be cancelled because the Italian ladies refused to dance with Austrian officers. And in any case, it was not the feelings of the Emperor’s Italian subjects that mattered now. Manin, now in exile in Paris, said frankly: ‘We do not want Austria to mend her ways in Italy; we want her to get out of it’; and it is recorded that Cavour actually asked his friends ‘if they could, to force Austria to re-impose the state of siege’.

  For by 1858 the international dangers which were the heritage of the Crimea were advancing from potentiality to imminence. In July of that year Cavour met Napoleon secretly at Plombières, and plans were laid on the basis that Cavour was to devise a ‘respectable’ pretext for war against Austria, after which Italy was to be constituted as a federation of four States: North Italy under the house of Savoy; the Papal States; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; and a new Kingdom of Central Italy. A calculated indiscretion by Napoleon on New Year’s Eve gave what was generally taken as an advance notification of the allies’ intentions.

  *

  The plan of this work allows for only the briefest registration of the results of foreign political negotiations; for no description at all of the course of either. It therefore allows us to pass over the diplomatic exchanges of the next few months with the bare statements that they left Francis Joseph and his advisers under two convictions: one that France and Piedmont were so bent on war that nothing would deter them (whereas Napoleon had begun to hesitate and was putting pressure on Piedmont to back down); the other, that the war would inevitably spread, and involve the opening of another front on the Rhine, where the French would be met by a combined force to which Prussia would send a contingent.118 Acting on these assumptions, all of which proved to be mistaken, and after a fateful delay which was due partly, indeed, to the financiers’ hesitations, but partly to Buol’s grotesque misapprehension of the situation, Austria, on 19 April, sent Piedmont an ultimatum to demobilize, and when Cavour rejected this, an Austrian army commanded by General Gyulai and consisting of a force which, when the late arrivals came up, should have consisted of nine Army Corps of twenty thousand each, but in April was much smaller,119 crossed the Piedmontese frontier.

  Now, however, everything went wrong. Neither Britain nor Russia intervened on Austria’s side (this, too, had been hoped), and the Prince Regent of Prussia made difficulties, telling the emissaries sent him by Francis Joseph that he was not obliged, under the Bund law, to help Austria unless Bund territory was attacked, and at least hinting that he would require a political price for his services.120 Gyulai failed to engage the Piedmontese troops seriously while the French reinforcements were still north of the Alps, and when the news of their arrival reached him, retreated back across the Ticino. The armies first met seriously on 4 June, at Magenta, and here, although the Austrians had not even much the worst of the fighting, and were left in superior force to the enemy at the end of it, Gyulai took it as a defeat, thereby turning it into one, and retreated further, while Napoleon entered Milan in triumph.

  Meanwhile, Francis Joseph himself had, on 29 May, started for the field, leaving the Archduke Rainer fils to deputise for him in Vienna. He took over personal command of the army on 17 June, but on 24 June, at Solferino, the Austrian army was again defeated – again, not having had very much the worst of the fighting, but having suffered casualties which drew tears from the young Emperor’s eyes and from his lips the exclamation: ‘Rather lose a province than undergo such a horrible experience again!’

  Now Napoleon made overtures to him for an armistice, offering relatively favourable peace terms. Austria was to retain Venetia, plus the Quadrilateral, ceding only the rest of Lombardy. Eventually, Italy was to be constituted as a federation. The idea of a federation appealed to Francis Joseph, who at that time thought that Venetia would be able to join it, while remaining part of the Monarchy, and Austria could then even dominate it through Venetia, the secundo-genitures in Tuscany, Parma and Modena, if their rulers (who had been driven out by revolution) were restored, and the alliance of Naples and the support of the Papacy. He therefore accepted the offer in return for a promise from Napoleon not to oppose the restoration of the secundo-genitures, provided it was not effected by force; a face-saving stipulation that Lombardy was not to be ceded direct to Piedmont, but to Napoleon; and a reservation to himself, for his own lifetime, of the right of conferring the Lombard Order of the Iron Crown. On this basis, preliminary peace was signed at Villafranca on 12 July.

  We may note that the definitive peace, signed at Zurich on 10 November, was very much less favourable to Austria than the preliminary peace. The territorial provisions were, indeed, not altered; but meanwhile it had proved impossible to secure the restoration of the secundo-genitures, whose territories, with Emilia, were annexed by Piedmont in the following spring. It had also been found constitutionally impossible to give Venetia a dual status, as part of the Monarchy and simultaneously, member of an Italian federation. The whole idea of a federation faded away, leaving Austria with no foothold in Italy except her possession of Venetia.
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br />   For our purposes it is not the course of Austria’s catastrophe that is chiefly important, but the reasons for it. If we pass over the singular ineptness of Francis Joseph’s and Buol’s diplomacy, we should presumably put first the extraordinarily poor showing in the field made by the Austrian army. Gyulai proved himself an almost inconceivably incompetent commander, and his senior subordinates, with the single exception of Benedek, failed almost as badly. It should be added that Francis Joseph himself proved quite unequal to the task, entirely new to him, of commanding a large army in battle.

  The rank and file did not lack courage, but they lacked everything else. In the past years, only a relatively small proportion of the men called up had been kept with the colours, and they had simply been drilled on the barrack square: they had never been exercised in field operations, nor even hardened for them physically. The reservists had been left untrained, and there had not even been enough of them to make up the force mobilized, although this had not comprised the full nominal war strength of the army. The numbers had been brought up to strength by hurried recruiting reminiscent of the old Abstellung ex officio, and with the same results. Their equipment was exceedingly poor, and the commissariat broke down badly, many of the defects being, as it transpired afterwards, due to scandalous corruption. A number of ‘volunteer’ formations, hurriedly beaten together, were not ready for action when hostilities ceased.

  For all this, Grünne was held the scapegoat, and he was certainly primarily to blame for the unfortunate choice of commanders (it must be said for Gyulai that he had protested his unfitness for the command), for the bad training, and for overlooking the corruption. But behind all this had lain the creeping sickness of Austria’s financial weakness. The failure to keep the army properly trained and equipped had been due at least in large part to the financiers’ insistence on economy, particularly in this field, on which they had concentrated their endeavours. Thus the defence budget had been cut from 139 m.g. in 1856 to 127 in 1857 and 122 in 1858. Then the prospect of war opened up by Napoleon’s calculated indiscretion had brought matters to a head. The course of Austrian papers had plunged down again;121 the National Bank had been forced to suspend convertibility again, and silver had again been at a premium. To finance the war, when it came to regard it as inevitable, the Government had clapped a 20% surcharge on all taxes and cut payments on its own loans, but these devices could not be expected to cover a major war. An attempt to raise money in London brought in only about £1,000,000, and an internal loan for 200 m.g., although pressure amounting to near-compulsion was put on banks and institutions,122 yielded only 80 m.g. To meet the rest of its most immediate needs, the Government again borrowed from the National Bank, which advanced it 147 m.g. (20 m.g. in silver), but even so, Bruck had insisted that the resources for a big mobilization and a prolonged campaign were simply not there. The ultimatum was sent in the hope of escaping these by crushing Piedmont with relatively small forces before Napoleon had time to intervene, if, indeed, he was not prevented from doing so by the other Powers (as we have said, Austria’s diplomatic calculations were at fault); and in this hope, only twelve Corps had been mobilized. That, of these twelve, only nine were sent down to Italy and those only gradually, was due chiefly to the situation in Hungary, where the spring of 1859 had seen, not only a further hardening of the resistance à la Deák, but the re-emergence of a threat of actual revolt. Like everyone in history who has ever harboured designs on Austria, Napoleon and Cavour had thought of using Hungary against her, and round the turn of the year both men had talked to Klapka, their first simple idea having apparently been that Hungary should oblige them by staging a rising (to break out in the Szekel area) when hostilities broke out.123 Klapka, however, consulted Kossuth, who saw Napoleon on 5 May, and agreed to co-operate, but on conditions. The rising, which he assured the Emperor would be general when it came, was to be touched off by the landing of a legion (which he agreed to organize) on the Dalmatian coast, and this must be accompanied by a French detachment; further, Napoleon must officially proclaim the independence of Hungary as a French war aim.

  When Napoleon objected that the appearance of France on the Adriatic might lead Britain to intervene against Austria, Kossuth cheerfully announced that he would personally so influence opinion in the British elections which were just impending as to secure the return of a non-interventionist government in Westminster, and Napoleon having accepted this astonishing offer, and agreed to Kossuth’s other terms, the dauntless exile, who had already sent ‘instructions’ to Hungary to rise when he gave the signal (but not before), formed a ‘National Executive Committee’, consisting of himself, Count László Teleki and Klapka, and set on foot the organization of the legion;124 whereafter he left for London to talk the British people into so casting their votes as to force Queen Victoria to form a government favourable to Hungarian independence.

  The Austrian Government of course knew of these preparations, and when the army was mobilized, a Corps was left behind in Hungary to guard against the anticipated revolt: this Corps, moreover, was composed chiefly of reliable German and Czech troops, while Hungarians were sent down to Italy. Of the remaining eleven Corps, two were at first kept in reserve, but one whole Corps, composed of Hungarian units, showed itself so unreliable that it was sent back to Austria. Other Hungarian and Croat soldiers were taken out of their units and sent to the rear, and of those who were left with the colours, a not inconsiderable number, with some of the Italians, deserted to the enemy.125 Thus, although not a shot had, in the event, been fired in Hungary, her contribution to the Monarchy’s disaster had been substantial.

  It had been larger even than the foregoing lines would suggest, for fantastic as it had sounded, Kossuth had made good his promise to Napoleon, and it had been largely thanks to him that Britain had refrained from intervening against Napoleon on Austria’s side.126

  Then, when the war began to go badly, the political unrest raised its head in another quarter. This time it was the Liberals and financiers,127 the opponents of the war and the sworn enemies of the whole system which had embarked on it, who unleashed a Press campaign so vehement that the censorship was powerless to silence it, not only against individual scapegoats such as Grünne, Bach and Kempen, but against ‘the whole policy of the Concordat and militarism’ and the absolutist regime and its pillars, the whole Court and the Emperor himself, in person. The outcry was so formidable that on 9 June the Ministers, meeting in council, decided that it was their ‘sacred duty’ to warn the Emperor, and composed an alarming report. Count Johann Rechberg, who on 15 May had been appointed Foreign Minister and acting Minister President, vice Buol, carried it down to the Emperor and himself endorsed its warnings in the gravest terms. According to most authorities, it was this report, coming on the heels of information from Prussia that made him despair of help from that quarter,128 that tipped the scales for Francis Joseph and led him to make what terms he could with Napoleon, and hurry home.

  1 Kormányzó elnök. The statement often made, that Hungary was proclaimed a Republic, is incorrect. The title Kormányzó, which simply means ‘Regent’, was that worn in the fifteenth century by János Hunyadi, and in the twentieth, by Admiral Horthy. Szemere, however, whom Kossuth appointed Minister President, when expounding his programme, included in it the establishment of a republic.

  2 176,000 Austrians and 104,000 Russians.

  3 This law was so obviously a last-minute gesture of despair that many historians of Hungary do not even mention it, but it has its interest as a term in the series of proposals to solve the Hungarian nationalities problem. Broadly, it retained Magyar as the language of top-level official usage (diplomátikai használat) but placed no restrictions whatever on the use of non-Magyar languages on lower levels in schools, and in local government up to the County level. It also guaranteed the autonomy of the Greek Orthodox Church.

  The Diet also passed a law admitting Jews to complete equality, in recognition of the part played by them in the
national movement. This law was not quite without its effects: it had, of course, no immediate results, but was remembered thereafter by the Hungarian Jews with real appreciation.

  4 In 1852 the Austrian police succeeded in bribing an émigré Hungarian to betray the cypher record of the hiding-place and recovered the Crown, which was then brought back to Vienna. The police report on the search is reproduced in A. Schlitter, Aus der Regierungszeit Kaiser Franz Josephs (Vienna, 1910, pp. 33 ff.).

  5 Strictly, to his subordinate, F. M. L. Rüdiger, who, in spite of his name, was a Russian officer. Paskievicz had previously refused to accept a political surrender, as being outside his competence to receive.

  6 His claim was that he should have been allowed to show the clemency himself: to order it was derogatory to his reputation.

  7 Corti, Mensch und Herrscher, pp. 44 ff.

  8 This is borne out by the fact that of the thirteen ‘Martyrs of Arad’ those hanged were those who had surrendered to the Russians, while those surrendering to the Austrians got off with shooting.

  9 See above, p. 427.

  10 Bruck wanted that the final stage should bring the incorporation of Italy and Switzerland in the economic free trade area. He was not the first author of the idea: it had been mooted at Frankfurt by two Austrians, Deym and Möring.

  11 The Elector of Hesse had appealed for help against his subjects. The question was, who should intervene. Both Austria and Prussia sent troops into Hesse and there was actually some skirmishing between them.

  12 Only two or three years later, when she tried to get the Bund to promise her military reinforcements against Russia, the young Bismarck succeeded in thwarting the proposal completely.

  13 The treaty was renewed for a further three years in 1854.

  14 Many of them in fact received municipal Statutes (Vienna on 6 March 1850) which provided for elected Councils.