Meanwhile, it must be emphasized that the Liberals represented only one trend of opinion among the Germans themselves (a fact often forgotten by historians, who tend, too frequently, to describe as ‘German’ feeling or policy what was in fact only the feeling or policy of the Liberals). Many of the voters in the Alpine Lands, especially the Tirol, disagreed profoundly with the Liberals’ doctrines (especially their anti-clericalism) and their centralism. They organized, in their turn, parties or groups whose main objective was to counter those tendencies, and were often more antagonistic to the German Liberals than to Slavs whose views on cultural and structural questions agreed with their own. They were, indeed, themselves clearly divided on the question of centralism versus federation.
*
The elections for which the Patent provided were held in the month after its issue, and in the West, with the results which could have been predicted. Among the non-Germans national feeling had reasserted itself as the political motif par excellence with such easy assurance that no one remarked, or perhaps even remembered, that for ten years the regime had refused it the right to any political expression whatever. Almost all of them found the Patent unsatisfactory on national grounds. When, on 63 May, the elected Deputies met in the wooden building (dubbed by the popular wit the ‘Schmerling Theatre’) which had been run up to accommodate them, the Poles, whose representatives had organized themselves in a disciplined Polenklub, took up the attitude that nothing short of complete autonomy for Galicia was acceptable to them.1 The Czech bourgeois representatives, now led by Rieger,64 had at first proposed to boycott the Reichsrat altogether. Then, however, they had taken the momentous decision to ally themselves with Clam-Martinic’s group of Bohemian magnates on the basis of a joint demand for the restoration of the Böhmisches Staatsrecht and to attend the Reichsrat in order to press for revision of the Patent in this sense65 (a decision which had, indeed, led a rival group of Bohemian magnates, led by Prince ‘Carlos’ Auersperg,66 to constitute themselves, with certain fellow-thinkers from the Alpine Lands, as a party of ‘Constitutional Great Landlords’). The Slovenes, too, were oppositional, while the Venetians ignored the elections altogether and the Italians of the Trentino elected ‘Italianissimo’ representatives who then did not attend the Reichsrat. The only non-German supporters of the Patent were the Ruthenes from Galicia, who saw in it a protection against the Poles, the Italians from Trieste and Dalmatia, who, similarly, regarded it as a shield against the local Slovenes and Croats, and the Roumanians from the Bukovina.67
The German-Tiroleans, led by a fiery priest named Greuter, declared that they would never attend the Reichsrat ‘unless given firm guarantees against the bureaucratic, absolutist encroachment of Liberalism on our fathers’ moral and legal heritage’.
German Clericals and Federalists constituted themselves as another group oppositional to the Patent, with a programme of wide autonomy for the Lands, with protection and equal status for all nationalities in the Monarchy, and maintenance of the Concordat. With this platform they were able to establish a working alliance with the Slavs (the Slovenes ended by actually adhering to this group).
All these oppositional groups together could, however, muster only about 70 Deputies,68 whereas the ‘German Left’ alone had returned 118, who did not, indeed, for a single ‘party’ in the modern sense of the word. They with their allies, divided into three groups: 30 ‘Great Austrians’, led by Mühlfeld, 68 ‘Unionists’ (Herbst) and 20 ‘German Autonomists’ (Kaiserfeld),69 and the attitude of the three towards the Patent was not identical. It was too centralist for the Autonomists, whose main strength lay in Styria,70 not centralist enough for the Great Austrians, who were largely Viennese, or for the Unionists, most of whom came from the Bohemian Lands. All three were, however, prepared to take it, subject to later amendment in one direction or another, as an acceptable solution of the structural problem of the Monarchy, and to play the constitutional role of a Government party under it. These 118, with the twelve Ruthenes (who attached themselves to the Unionists) and the four Italians and the Roumanians made up a majority in favour of the Patent large enough to enable it to work as a system for governing the Monarchy if no insuperable difficulties came from Hungary.
There, however, the Patent was received with almost universal hostility. Further concessions had been made to the country in the intervening weeks. The Commission sent down to the Voivody had recommended its incorporation in the Kingdom, and it had been placed under the Hungarian Court Chancellery (on the understanding, indeed, that a status satisfactory to the Serbs should be agreed between them and the Hungarian authorities). The Muraköz had been transferred back from Croatia to Hungary. But these sops counted for nothing compared with the fact that another Centralist constitution had been imposed by octroi on Hungary, and one which, besides perpetuating her territorial dismemberment, again subjected her (and that in aggravated form) to the control of a pan-Monarchic Parliament. The indignation evoked by the Diploma mounted still higher now. When the Rescript was issued ordering elections to the Diet, as a preliminary to the designation of representatives to the Reichsrat, a party of opinion favoured boycotting the elections altogether. Deák, who had now become a sort of one-man Court of Appeal on constitutional questions, advised that the order was legal, and should be obeyed. But a meeting of the country’s law lords convoked to decide on what franchise the elections should be held71 pronounced unanimously in favour of that of the April Laws,72 and the result of this decision was disastrous for the Old Conservatives. With the Counties in charge of the electoral apparatus, not one Deputy was returned who supported the Patent, which few even among the magnates found the courage to defend. Practically all the Deputies were agreed that Hungary’s programme must be insistence on the validity of the April Laws, amendment of which, by legal methods, might then be considered once the recognition had been given, and almost exactly half the House, led by Count László Teleki and Kálmán Ghyczy, argued that since Francis Joseph had not submitted himself to coronation, and Hungary had consequently no legal king, the proper course for the Diet was simply to express this attitude in the form of a Resolution of the House. Deák, who did not want the breach made irrevocable, invoked an historical precedent,73 and after nearly a month’s debating, a bare and largely fortuitous majority74 agreed to let the Diet’s statement take the form of an Address to the Throne. But the Address, which Deák drafted, although courteous in tone, was completely uncompromising in substance. It stated that Hungary had never known, and did not now recognize, any link with any other dominion ruled by the Monarch except the personal one of the common dynasty. She refused to attend the Reichsrat, or any representative body of the Monarchy, and denied such a body any competence to dispose of Hungarian affairs; she was only prepared ‘to enter into contact, if the circumstances required it’ with the ‘constitutional peoples of the Hereditary Lands as one independent, free nation with another’.
The Crown was also reminded of its obligation to restore the political integrity of the country, and in general, to honour the April Laws, the validity of which the Address reaffirmed.
The sequel was inevitable. On 22 July a Rescript75 was read to the House contesting Hungary’s legal case and insisting that the Pragmatic Sanction itself imposed a unity in respect of foreign affairs, defence and finance which went far beyond a personal union. The Union of Transylvania was legally invalid, and unacceptable ‘so long as Transylvania’s inhabitants of non-Hungarian tongue see their national interests threatened by such a union, and so long as the necessary guarantee of the interests and requirements of the State as a whole is not given’. The Diet was summoned to send its representatives to Vienna forthwith. A second Address, again drafted by Deák, re-stated Hungary’s legal case (with arguments which, from the purely legal point of view, wiped the floor with Perthaler), this time in terms of some acerbity; and the Crown’s reply to this was to dissolve the Diet (21 August). Vay (who had not signed the Patent) and Szécsen had already resigned,
Vay being replaced by Count Antal Forgách,76 one of the few Hungarian aristocrats who had chosen the Civil Service of the Monarchy as a career, and Szécsen, by Count Moritz Esterházy, an eccentric and enigmatic figure whose political views fell into no known category. On 5 November Field-Marshal Count Moritz Pálffy was nominated Statthalter of Hungary; all surviving representative bodies were dissolved, martial law proclaimed for a number of offences and dictatorial rule, exercised through returning squadrons of Bach Hussars, reintroduced, officially, it is true, only ‘provisionally’. The Hungarians fell back again on passive resistance. ‘The Government,’ wrote Szécsen in 1864, ‘has not so far been able to induce one single Hungarian citizen in the smallest village to serve on the provisional municipal Councils.’77 The quartering of an entire regiment of cavalry on Kálmán Tisza’s estate failed to induce him to pay his arrears of taxation.78
Meanwhile, the Croats’ private logic had led them to conclusions which, mutatis mutandis, were much the same as the Hungarians’ When the Sabor met in April 1861 one party, led by the Bishop, Haulik, was for accepting the February Patent another, the so-called ‘Magyarones’, under Baron Levin Rauch, for coming to terms with Hungary, while the majority (to which Strossmayr belonged) wavered, equally mistrustful of Vienna and Budapest. Outside all these groups stood the ‘Party of Right’79 founded by a young fanatic (afterwards to exercise a great influence over Croat politics) called Starčević, who was equally opposed to Austria, Hungary and the Serbs, and produced a programme which in the last instance desired complete independence for Croatia, with at the most a personal link with any other State, and a slogan that ‘to exist, Croatia needs only God and Croats’.80 After protracted debate, the Sabor resolved by a single vote81 not to send delegates to Vienna; on the other hand, it declared (in its so-called ‘Article 42’) that ‘the events of 1848 had had as legal consequence the dissolution of all bonds, legislative, administrative and judicial, between the Triune Kingdom and Hungary, except that of their common king, whom the same act of coronation, with the same crown, should instal at once as King of Hungary and of the Triune Kingdom’. The Sabor was, however, willing to negotiate with Hungary provided Hungary accepted Croatia’s full territorial claims and its view of the constitutional relationship between the two countries.
Other demands made by the Sabor, or some of its members, were for the incorporation not only of the Military Frontier and Dalmatia, but of Carniola and the Slovene parts of Styria and Carinthia. Strossmayr also tried to preach a crusade for the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Crown ‘sanctioned’ some of the Sabor’s productions, including Article 42 (although exactly what ‘sanction’ meant in this connection it is difficult to understand);82 but for the rest, it drew exactly the same consequences from Croatia’s refusal to attend the Reichsrat as it had from Hungary’s. The Sabor was dissolved, a near-absolutist regime reintroduced and recalcitrant officials dismissed.
Of all the Lands of the Hungarian Crown, it was only in Transylvania that Schmerling achieved a success, and that only a partial one. The Chancellor, Baron Kemény, and the President of the Gubernium, Count Mikó (both of them Hungarian magnates) succeeded in putting off the preparations for a Diet for something like two years. Then Schmerling lost patience and replaced Kemény by Count Nádasdy, an extreme centralist, and Mikó by an Imperial officer, F.M.L. Crenneville. A Catholic Bishop who had been a stalwart champion of the Magyar cause was got rid of by the device of appointing him Archbishop of Carthago in partibus. A revised franchise was now octroied, and elections held, which returned forty-six Roumanians, forty-three Magyars and thirty-two Saxons, the Crown adding eleven ‘Regalists’ from each nationality. The Diet was then convoked, and in the absence of the elected Magyars, who refused to attend it, announced its recognition of the Diploma and Patent, and passed laws admitting the Roumanian people and its two national Churches to full equality with the other ‘received’ nations and churches of Transylvania, and proclaiming the complete equality of all three local languages for all official business. The Roumanians received a further important concession, in that their Orthodox Church was released from its bondage to the Serbian Patriarchate and made autocephalous. Bishop Şaguna was promoted Archbishop, with his see at Nagyszeben, and given two Bishoprics (at Arad and Karansebeş) under him.
The Diet then chose twenty-six of its members to represent it in the Reichsrat, and nine Transylvanians were nominated to the Herrenhaus.83 The little group presented itself in the Schmerling Theatre on 20 October 1863.
*
One development which had taken place in Hungary before the breakdown had an important influence on later events. As we saw, the Rescripts with which the Crown accompanied the issue of the October Diploma had contained a provision insisting that the non-Magyar languages must enjoy adequate facilities under the new Hungarian regime. Francis Joseph had also declared that he would set his face against any action of nature to provoke or aggravate inter-national ill-feeling. During the later exchanges he formally demanded legislation safeguarding the rights of the non-Magyars.
The Nationalities themselves had also raised their voices. As the result of the Commissioner’s visit, the Serbs of the Voivodina had, in April 1861, held a National Congress which had accepted the reunification of the Voivodina with Inner Hungary (incidentally contrasting Viennese absolutism unfavourably with Hungarian constitutionalism), but asked for the re-constitution of a new Serbian territory (within frontiers excluding the Roumanian Eastern Bánát and the Magyaro-German North Bácska) within which they should enjoy extensive self-government under a Voivode elected by themselves and confirmed by the Monarch, and sitting among the chief dignitaries in both Pest and Zagreb.
A little later (on 6 June) a Slovak Congress at Thurócz Szent Martón forwarded to Pest (it was a sign of the times that it was Pest, not Vienna, that they addressed)84 a petition asking for the following points:
(1) The recognition by law of a Slovak ‘nation’.
(2) An autonomous ‘North Hungarian Slovak Territory’, in which Slovak should be the sole language of administration, the judiciary and education (Magyar was, however, to be the language of communication with the central authorities).
(3) The repeal of all Hungarian laws which infringed the principle of of inter-national equality.
(4) A Slovak Academy of Law and a Chair of Slavonic literature at Pest.
This was followed by a petition containing the same demands, mutatis mutandis, from a group of Ruthenes.
The Hungarians were thus under pressure from several quarters; but pressure was not necessary, for many of them, including Deák, were already convinced that both justice and expediency called for the enactment of legislation of nature to satisfy the ‘justified demands’ of the nationalities; although they also maintained that this was an internal Hungarian question, which must not become entangled with the relations between Hungary and the rest of the Monarchy. Hungary’s acknowledged expert in this field was Eötvös, who during the preceding decade had published a number of works on the national problem in the multi-national State, and when the representations from the nationalities reached the Diet, Eötvös arranged that the question should be referred to a Committee, which would then lay a Nationalities Bill before the Diet.
This was a step which had big long-term consequences, for although the Committee was twenty-seven strong and fairly enough composed, to allow all shades of opinion to be represented on it, Eötvös’s authority was such that in effect he dictated the principles on which the law should be based, and even, in large part, its specific provisions. And while these were, indeed, never given legislative sanction (although the Diet ‘approved’ the report) because the dissolution of the Diet came only a few days after the Committee had submitted its report, yet the documentation was, as we shall see, taken as its point de départ by the later Committee which resumed work on the subject in 1866, which found nothing to alter in the principles which had guided its predecessor, and made on
ly minor changes in the provisions. Thus the Law of 1868, equally with the draft of 1861, simply expressed, with very slight modifications, Eötvös’s personal solution for Hungary’s nationalities problem. They even did so so faithfully as to make it unnecessary for us to give any separate description of Eötvös’s philosophy, for this, although intellectually acute and morally lofty, was essentially inductive; the reader can induce it for himself out of the report and Bill.
The report stated that the Committee had considered the memoranda from the Slovaks and Serbs, with a third document, compiled for it by two members of the Committee, on the wishes of the Transylvanian Roumanians,85 which, like the other two, asked for Hungary to be divided into autonomous ‘national’ territories. It rejected this solution as incompatible with the political unity of the country, as exposing local minorities to the danger of tyranny (and it was a fact that the Slovak memorandum had been completely ruthless in its references to the large minorities which would have been included in its Slovak national territory) and as calculated to perpetuate friction between the nationalities. It maintained that ‘the just demands of individual citizens’ and consequently ‘the possible corporate development of the individual nationalities, through free association’, were better safeguarded under Hungary’s traditional system of communal, jurisdictional86 and denominational autonomy. It then laid down two ‘main principles’ which between them embodied Eötvös’s central philosophy on the place of ethnic or linguistic nationalism in the multi-national State:
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 83