15 These instruments were never destined to be put into force, even in the amended form in which they were promulgated some months later (see below), but they testify to the purity of Stadion’s intentions, and are also both of interest as showing the ideas current in the spring of 1849 among the more progressive members of the Government, and of historical importance; for further amended (in a retrogressive sense) they constituted the bases of the statutes actually promulgated by Goluchowski a decade later, and via these (again amended, in a direction which brought them back closer to Stadion’s intentions) of those issued by Schmerling, most of which then remained in force, with further amendments, until the last years of the Monarchy.
Stadion’s drafts departed from those of the Reichstag, which themselves provided for separate vocational representation, but differentiated only between urban and rural communes, and allowed no separate representation based on birth or wealth. Stadion thought some weighting of the bodies necessary if they were to be uni-cameral, and therefore added to the two categories of urban and rural communes a third, representative (as in Pillersdorf’s draft, of which they may themselves be regarded as a re-edition) of the highest taxpayers (the financial qualification varying from Land to Land), whatever the source of their wealth. In most of the statutes the three categories were represented in almost equal numbers; only in that for Galicia were the peasants given more voices. The representation was thus still strongly weighted in favour of property, but far less so than in the old Estates, and the overwhelming predominance enjoyed in those bodies by the landowners was greatly reduced, while the small manorial landlords who had owed their position to a birth qualification alone lost it altogether. It was a change which undoubtedly reflected the Government’s wish to favour the middle classes, in recognition both of their growing economic importance and of the fact that politically they, on the whole, represented centralist and pan-Monarchic interests against the more federalist interests of the provincial landowners and, in particular, against the unreliable Hungarian and Polish nobilities.
16 He died in an asylum in 1853.
17 On the same day, von Cordon was replaced as Minister of War by General Gyulai, who in his turn left the Ministry in July 1850 to take over command of the Milan Army Corps. He was replaced as Minister by F. M. L. von Csorich.
18 The form adopted was that the Government submitted its proposals to the Crown in a written exposé dated 29 December 1849, and this was published on 4 January 1850, with an order from the Emperor approving it. The exposé seems to have taken over Stadion’s drafts of the previous spring with few alterations, except in respect of Galicia, where, since Bach had already changed Stadion’s proposed bisection of the Province into a sort of trisection, the draft Statute provided for three Landtage, but there was a single Executive Committee (called here the Wyzdial Krajowy), composed of five representatives from each Landtag; also a ‘Central Committee’ (Wyzdial Centralny), in which these fifteen were reinforced by six more representatives from each Landtag, whose task was to bring about agreement between the three Landtage if they differed.
19 In many Lands much of the work had been carried on since 1848 by the Standing Committees of the Landtage elected in the spring of that year.
20 A Polish (with centre at Cracow), a mixed (Lemberg) and a Ruthene (Stanislavov).
21The text of this is printed in Frommelt, op. cit., pp. 163 ff.
22 ‘There was’, wrote one historian, ‘no spectacle more wounding to the dignity of the Germans than to see German civilization served up by Czech officials on a plate of state of siege’ (cf. Eisenmann, p. 189).
23 Weinzierl-Fischer, op. cit., p. 27. The following paragraphs are based on this work.
24 He was of bourgeois origin, and it seems likely that he was over-awed by his colleague’s rank (Weinzierl-Fischer, p. 38).
25A Pastoral Letter of 17 June 1849 condemned nationalism as a revolutionary principle. ‘The variety of languages’ was itself described as ‘only a consequence of sin, and of falling away from God’.
26 Details of this operation can be found in R. Sieghart, Zolltrennung und Zolleinheit (Vienna, 1915).
27 See on this I. Jánossy in the Jahrbücher des Institutes für ungarische Geschichtsforschung in Wien, Vienna, 1933.
28 This, of course, reduced the number of Hungarian Military Districts to five.
29 The population of the Voivodina, according to the military census of 1851, consisted of 407,000 Serbs, 395,000 Roumanians, 325,000 Germans, 241,000 Magyars and 32,000 others. The total number of Serbs in the Monarchy at that date was 1,438,000.
30 General Ferdinand von Mayerhofer. Mayerhofer was, indeed, a man of local experience and, according to Friedjung (op. cit., pp. 429 f.), common-sense and humour, who carried out his difficult duties well.
31 The popular genius distinguished the Provisorium from its predecessor by dubbing the latter the Provisorissimum.
32 The official designation was Regierungsbezirk (German) or Kerület (Hungarian). Both words are usually translated ‘District’, but that term is used also for much smaller units, and ‘province’ is a more appropriate word for these formations.
33 Generally, a County was equated with a Kreis and a járás with a Bezirk.
34 Of 117 applicants for posts in the Commissioner’s office in June 1850, only 9 were Magyars. All the others were from Western Lands (80 of them from Bohemia) (Berzeviczy, op. cit., p. 267).
35 In Transylvania the immigrant officials were currently known as ‘Galicians’. They were probably recruited largely from among the sons of German officials in Galicia.
36 Cambridge History of Poland, II. 431. Goluchowski had been educated in the Jesuit school at Tarnopol and was a strong Catholic, which may have contributed to the Archduchess’s partiality towards him.
37 There were, however, thereafter, endless administrative manipulations, some of them involving the Bukovina, with which the reader need not be troubled. In the late 1850s Cracow again had its separate Gubernium, which was only finally abolished by Goluchowski in 1860, when he was Minister of State.
38 The Government had then decreed that Ruthene should be used in the gymnasia in Ruthene areas as far as, and as soon as, possible. Where this was still impracticable, instruction was to be in German, ‘since national feeling among the Ruthenes is less hostile to the German language, than to the Polish’ (Fischel, Sprachenrecht, No. 178).
39His contemptuous term of the ‘Mis-Constitution’ and ugly pun (Misverfassung = mis-Constitution, Mistverfassung = dung Constitution) seem to have been levelled, not at Stadion’s work, but at the Kremsier draft, his dislike of which he never hid.
40 Krausz had also offended Metternich, who inspired many of Kübeck’s moves, by insisting on an inquiry into some of Metternich’s financial transactions, and by haggling over his pension.
41 Hübner, pp. 248–9.
42 The Constitution had left these questions to be settled by subsequent legislation.
43 It is remarkable that we should have to write this, but such is the case. Redlich, who promises us (Problem, I. 1. 387) ‘a detailed account of the genesis of the Reichsrat’, contrives, when he does give the account (id., I. 2. 111 ff.), not even to raise the question of original authorship, much less answer it. Older historians such as Friedjung believed the suggestion to have come from Schwarzenberg, but Walter’s account (op. cit., pp. 438 ff.) shows this to be a mistake. When Kübeck first saw Schwarzenberg, after his first audience with the Emperor, the Minister President was ‘aware of the situation, but obviously not entranced by it’. He thought that the Reichsrat might relieve the Ministerial Council of some work, but was anxious that it should not become dangerous. Bach hoped that it might ‘prove a transitional move towards activating the Constitution’. But Kübeck himself did not produce the idea; he only took advantage of his opportunity. It is not impossible that the idea of using the Reichsrat as a lever to overthrow the rest of the Constitution came from Metternich, who had by now moved to Brus
sels and was deep in his favourite employment of teaching everyone else their business. At any rate, if he did not originate the plan, he warmly approved it (Srbik, Metternich, II. 368).
44 ‘Today’, he wrote to his mother, ‘we have taken a long step forward. We have thrown our constitutional stuff overboard’ (Schnürer, p. 160).
45 i.e. New Year’s Eve Patent (Sylvesterabend = New Year’s Eve).
46 Kübeck, the chief author of the three documents, had wanted to include here equality for the Jews, but Francis Joseph himself had struck this out.
47 This paragraph was in fact never invoked.
48 So he wrote to his mother (Schnürer, p. 179).
49 The ‘Military Adjutant’ or Head of the Military Chancellery was the supreme instance for all questions relating to ‘the personnel, organization and officering of the armed forces’. He represented the armed forces at all Ministerial Conferences and reported to the Emperor on all military aspects. On the psychological significance of the Emperor’s step, see above, p. 410.
50 Thinning was replaced in 1853 by a civil servant, who was not given Ministerial rank.
51 He had first been Head Chamberlain to the Archduke Stephen, but had resigned when Stephen identified himself too closely with Hungarian nationalism in March 1848. This had endeared him to the Archduchess Sophie, who in June 1848, when Bombelles retired, had got Grünne given his post.
52 Redlich, Franz Joseph, p. 56.
53 His reason, like that of Stadion and so many others, gave way; he died in 1858, a lunatic.
54 He was made Archbishop of Vienna in 1853, and Cardinal in 1855.
55 Thus the Cardinal-Primate of Hungary objected tenaciously to the inclusion of Hungary in the instrument.
56 The Austrians retreated from their first positions on eleven points relating to Church-State relations and seven relating to doctrine (M.K.P., III. 173).
57 A translation of this document will be found in Weinzierl-Fischer, pp. 250 ff.
58 Op. cit., p. 162.
59 In Carinthia, for example, no less than 497 such Courts had existed before the reform. They were replaced by twenty-nine Bezirksgerichte and six higher Courts.
60 On Thun, see also C. Thiènen-Adlerflycht, Graf Leo Thun im Vormärz (Graz, 1967). The Jewish Liberal historians of the later nineteenth century, who hated Thun for his clericalism and his Czech nationalism, are in general very hard on him. On the other hand, Frommelt credits him with ‘extreme devotion to duty and conscientiousness’ and ‘passionate zeal’ for his work (op. cit., p. 57).
61 In 1859 the Czechs presented Thun with an address thanking him for what he had done for their cultural development. While the number of elementary schools remained almost static under his regime in the Austrias and Lower Bohemia, they increased by 118% in the Bukovina and by 142% in Carniola.
62 It is interesting that these were the only forms of popular representation not abolished in the succeeding period, and that they were also retained as a separate electoral college when constitutional life recommenced (see below, p. 514).
63 For an account of the negotiations, see Charmatz, Bruck, pp. 86 ff.
64 When the main commissions were wound up some questions of detail were left for later regulation, and not all of these had been finally settled in 1918.
65 The reform did not extend to Lombardy-Venetia, where the nexus subditelae did not exist, nor, for the same reason, to Dalmatia.
66 In this group was included (outside Hungary, where the Church had voluntarily renounced it) the tithe, which in most places had long ceased to be a special payment to the Church.
67 Grünberg, L.u.F., p. 70 ff.
68 In the Tirol, where almost all the peasants were free, and only fifty days’ robot had been worked in the entire Land, 278,000 persons were recorded in the list of payers. The total sums paid under these headings were, however, small; the communes in Austria only received, in the end, 29 million gulden, while 225·9 million gulden went to private landowners and 34·9 million gulden to the Church.
69 Other figures are slightly higher: 12,872,000 ‘payers’ and 506,975 recipients.
70 A large proportion of the vineyards in both Hungary and Transylvania (according to Fényes’s statistics, 913,410 out of 1,399,836 Magyar hold in the Kingdom and 82,415 out of 103,615 in the Grand Principality) were allodial land, but cultivated against payment of a so-called ‘grape tithe’ (szölödezsma), usually by zsellers, sometimes by villein peasants, as extensions to their holdings, occasionally even by nobles. There was a strong movement, which was supported by the more progressive nobles themselves, to equate such vineyards with villein peasant holdings, and the Hungarian Diet adopted a Resolution to this effect on 15 September 1848. This was afterwards implemented by the Austrian commissioners.
71 Czoernig, Ethnographie, I. 501.
72 A vigorous statement of the ‘case for the prosecution’ in this field can be found in the interesting book by the Austrian Social Democrat leader, Otto Bauer, Der Kampf um Wald und Weide (Vienna, 1925), pp. 102 ff. The Patents discussed by Bauer are:
(1) The Forstpatent of 1852, which gave the owner of any piece of afforested land free disposition over it, subject to the provision that it must not be de-forested.
(2) The Jagdpatent of 1853, which assigned the sporting rights over any land to its owner, but if it was smaller than 200 yokes, he could not exercise them himself; they were in charge of the commune, which could either exercise them itself, or lease them, the owner then receiving a share of the proceeds.
(3) The Servitutenpatent of 1853, which abolished the peasants’ easements over the lord’s forests. For these they were compensated in land, if the lord agreed, or by a cash payment, which, according to Bauer, was always below their real value. Often the change was not wanted by either party, and the old system continued in being.
The common lands were usually divided between the landlord and the commune, the usufruct of the commune’s share going to the ex-rustical peasants proportionately to the size of their holdings.
73 It has been stated that the only case, not, indeed, a rare one, in which a peasant ever required to borrow a substantial sum before 1848 was when he wanted to set his sons up as technical ‘peasants’, by buying or leasing for them farms, in order to procure for them exemption from military service.
74 It is interesting that Leiningen (who did not object to the reform on his own account) prophesied precisely this effect on the peasants. ‘Here in Becse’ (in South Hungary, where his estates were), he wrote, ‘there is no doubt that the peasants will reap no advantage from their liberation, for when there is no one to make them work, their innate idleness and indolence will lead them to fall a prey to speculation’ (op. cit., p. 76).
75 The total amount paid in compensation in Cis-Leithania alone was no less than 230 million gulden. The Schwarzenberg family alone received 1,870,000 m.g. for its seven main estates (607,000 g. for the Krumslov estate alone); the Assems, of Styria, 1,236,000 g.
76 Jewish speculation in land went on on such a scale that in 1853 me Government forbade the sale of land to Jews. This measure had very important effects described below, p. 484.
77 See below, p. 501, n. 1. A draft Gewerbeordnung had been prepared in 1854, but laid aside ‘since it was soon outdated by the general national economic development’ (Czoernig, I. 338).
78 The growth of factory industry in these years was actually faster in Hungary than in Cis-Leithania. See the irrefutable figures given by Futó, op. cit., p. I. 301, which show that the number of machines worked by steam in Hungary rose from 79, with 1, 175 h.p., in 1852 to 480, with 8,134 h.p., in 1863. The figures for the rest of the Monarchy were: 1852, 551 machines with 6,298 h.p.; 1863, 2,361 machines with 36,276 h.p.
79 The popular antagonism in 1848 against Salomon Rothschild had been so formidable that he had fled the country, to which he did not return. The Austrian Ambassador in Paris, Hübner, surprisingly, in view of his alleged origin (he is reputed to have been a natura
l son of Metternich’s), preferred the Pereires and Sina to the Rothschilds.
80 The list, it will be observed, does not contain the name of Windisch-Graetz. The Prince refused to soil his fingers with ‘business’.
81 According to Reuchlin, Geschichte Italiens, III. 140, 422 million franks were collected in this way in Lombardy between August 1848 and December 1851, and 240 in Venetia. Friedjung, who quotes these figures (Oe. von 1848–1860, I. 243), does so with a certain scepticism, but agrees that in any case the deficits of the war years would have been larger ‘if the war had not financed the war in Italy’.
82 67% of the taxes from Inner Hungary were in arrears, 68% from the Voivodina, and 52% from Transylvania (Beer, op. cit., p. 236).
83 Ibid.
84 It was issued at 94, to bear 5% interest. The date was May 1852.
85 See Beer, op. cit., pp. 237 ff.
86 Czoernig’s Ethnographie (a remarkable work which contains information on much more than ethnography) gives on Vol. I. p. 325, the ordinary budgets for 1848–53 as follows:
Millions of gulden
Revenue Expenditure Deficit
1848 122 167 45
1849 144 190 46
1850 194 230 36
1851 220 261 41
1852 226 275 49
1853 237 286 49
But besides this, the State had by the end of 1854 incurred extraordinary expenditure as follows:
On the amortization of the funded and floating debt 290 m.g.
On ‘extraordinary armaments and costs of intervention’ 241 m.g.
On railways and telegraphs 125 m.g.
This had been covered by loans, advances from the Banks and issue of uncovered paper money, together with a few ‘extraordinary’ receipts, these consisting largely of the proceeds of sales of State property.
87 The Order establishing it was issued on 8 June 1849. The force then consisted of thirteen battalions (afterwards raised to nineteen.)
88 The Liberal historians of the period, such as Rogge, represent Bach’s gendarmerie as simply a new instrument of political oppression, called into being for that purpose, but the improvement of public security had long been an item on the programmes of many reformers, for the existing forces maintained for the purpose in most parts of the Monarchy had been notoriously inadequate, where they existed at all. A para-military gendarmerie had been introduced by the French into Lombardy and the Trentino, during their rule there, and had been kept in being under Austrian rule, on the urgent advice of F. M. Bellegarde. There was an analogous civilian body, of similar origin, in Venetia, and as we have seen, a special force had been created in Galicia in 1847. In most parts of the Monarchy, however, security had been left to the Patrimonial Courts or the Estates, most of which maintained only a handful of men, chiefly for the purpose of arresting criminals (in Hungary these were called Pandurs), the military being called in when such phenomena as highway robbery became indecently prevalent. A few of the larger towns kept their own police forces, which appear to have been of the Dogberry type.
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