The deficits, however, had not been heavy, except in 1878, when the Eastern crisis and the occupation of Bosnia had involved the Monarchy in a deficit of 93 m.g. (18% of its total expenditure). After the introduction of the autonomous tariff the balance of payments became favourable, and with the easing of the situation in the Balkans, the national credit improved (although that the bank-notes reached parity in 1879, was due to the fall in the world price of silver, and rather an embarrassment than otherwise). The new loans were raised on comparatively easy terms. There were deficits again in 1887 and 1888, but 1889 closed with a surplus, which now became regular. Another tax reform came in the same year, and at last tapped so much of Austria’s own resources as to make her independent of borrowing abroad.
As these economic developments occurred, the pattern of Austria’s social and political forces had, up to a point, adapted itself to them, although the effects had inevitably lagged behind the causes which produced them. The most immediate and obvious of them were those deriving from the growth in numbers, wealth, and in the influence which it was able to exert through such channels as the Press, of the upper strata of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie of the German and Bohemian Lands. This class, as we have seen, supplied the Ministries and their supporters from 1861 to 1878, and the legislation enacted by the Reichsrats of those years was, in the main, dictated by their interests and their Weltanschauung. Even after the government slipped from their hands as from 1878, their wishes and interests remained something which no government was able to, or tried to, ignore.
The advance of the bourgeoisie was naturally accompanied by retreats on the part of its chief opponents, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. By 1890 the direct power of the aristocracy was a shadow of what it had been in 1848, not to speak of 1748. Its fight against the bureaucratic neo-absolutism of the 1850s had been doughty and pertinacious – it had been one of the main threads of the political history of the decade – but had, after all, ended in defeat. The new political system, especially during Taaffe’s regime, was still weighted in favour of the aristocrats, but it did not depend on them. They were now in the essentially false position of a class which still enjoyed the privileges conferred on it in earlier ages in return for the performance of public functions which were now no longer exacted from it. Where its members took part in political life at all, it was now, even more than in the Vormärz (when the process had already begun), merely as representatives and defenders of their own class interests, which, since the positions defended were those of excessive and anachronistic advantage, brought on them the hostility of all other interests and classes. Many of them turned their backs altogether on the rest of Austria (except the Emperor). They formed a tight little clique in which everyone knew everyone else, and if of the same sex, was on du terms with him, and spent their time in gambling, horse-racing, exchanging scandal and seducing other people’s wives and daughters. The more respectable and/or impoverished (the terms were nearly, although not quite, interchangeable) shut themselves up on their country estates, which they formed into miniature projections into the nineteenth century of a dream-world which had been reality in the eighteenth. It has been remarked that after the loss of their power, they treated the bourgeoisie with more disdain than in the days when they could afford to do so.
The Church had suffered sharp reverses with the passage of the anti-clerical legislation of 1868–73. It never quite made these good. Efforts by Cardinal Rauscher to found a Pan-Cis-Leithanian Catholic Party broke down on the usual rocks: the different peoples could not be persuaded to sink their national differences, and even the Germans were unable to agree on the issue of federalism versus centralism (it was this difference that killed the ‘Casino movement’ of the 1870s out of which the party should have emerged).
One must, however, be careful not to exaggerate the extent to which the bourgeoisie had triumphed over its rivals. The losses of those two factors were not mortal, and those of the Church, hardly even crippling. Francis Joseph himself perhaps grew somewhat more Josephinian as the influences of his mother and of Rauscher faded,45 but he remained a staunch enough Catholic. In spite of repeated efforts, some of which had important political consequences,46 the Catholic Party failed to obtain either the re-Catholicization of the elementary schools, or the general reduction of the school years to six, but in 1893 it got the 1878 Act amended to provide that the ‘responsible head of a school’ must be ‘a person qualified to give religious instruction in the confession of the majority of its pupils’, and Lands were given power to reduce the pupils’ hours of schooling in their last two years.47 In practice, most of the schools outside the big centres were still staffed with products of the seminaries, and the adult peasant still usually took his political cue from his parish priest’s Sunday sermon. The very virulence and vulgarity of the Liberals’ attacks awoke in Catholic circles a spirit of combativeness which made croyant Catholicism a more living force in Austria than it had been, perhaps, since the days of Maria Theresa. This found impressive expression in the ‘Catholic Congresses’ (Katholikentage), the first of which met in Vienna in 1877. The movement itself contained an element of revolt against the extreme hierarchical spirit of the traditional Church, and it was none the weaker for this tinge of democratic appeal. One way and another, in spite of Rauscher’s failure, Catholicism came nearer than any other political force in Austria, except perhaps that of Social Democracy, to transcending nationalism, and for many years it remained the chief challenger to Liberalism for the allegiance of the German bourgeoisie; as, when Liberalism withered, it challenged German nationalism longer than any other force.
Its spiritual strength still enjoyed ample material backing, for the Church and its institutions remained among the biggest landowners of Austria, and their wealth increased rather than diminished.48
Nor were the great landowners at all a negligible force, even in 1890. The Curia system still left them an influence out of all proportion to their numbers in the Landtage and the Reichsrat, and it was even greater in the Herrenhaus, and perhaps most important of all, in the innermost circles of the Court. Aristocrats still filled a large proportion of the highest administrative posts: in 1905–7 twenty-one of the thirty-four officials in the Ministry of the Interior of the grade of Ministerialrat and upwards were Counts or Barons, eight out of nineteen in the Ministry of Agriculture, and nine out of twenty-four Heads of Departments in that of Railways. Only aristocrats were heads of Statthaltereien: one Prince, seven Counts, five Barons, and one Ritter.49 And this position, too, was still backed by great wealth. The landed magnates had had their share of the difficulties that had overtaken all Austrian agriculture after 1849, when it had had to face the full competition of Hungarian wheat, live-stock and wine, to which, after the mid-1870s, had been added the competition (which threatened Hungary also) of overseas wheat and cattle. But as we have said elsewhere,50 most of the big men had survived this. With the compensation which they had received under the land reform, and the credit which they had been able to obtain after it, relatively easily and cheaply (although money had been tight for all classes in the 1850s and 1860s), they had been able to modernize and rationalize their production, cutting their labour costs by mechanization and extensive employment of seasonal labour,51 and to go over largely to the production of industrial crops, among which an enormous part was played by the production of sugar beet. The cultivation of this crop, after its small beginnings in the 1830s, had made extraordinary progress after 1850: in 1892, 175,800 hectares were under it in Bohemia and 73,500 in Moravia (it was almost confined to these two Lands).52 Most of this was grown on the big estates, and where it was grown by peasants, they took it to the local magnate’s refinery. Thus in 1886, eighty out of the hundred and twenty refineries in Bohemia belonged to magnates, as did five hundred of the nine hundred breweries and three hundred of the four hundred distilleries. Another source of their wealth was timber and its products. Many of the forests had, indeed, been bought by the big new ind
ustrial companies, but the magnates still had a large share in the ownership of the forests and the exploitation of their products, including paper. In Bohemia, in 1886, they had in their service 72,000 workers, 300,000 day labourers, 15,000 foresters and gamekeepers and 40,000 carters.53
It is true that the appearance was often rosier than the reality, for many of the great estates were heavily mortgaged, and when Prince x figured as owner of a sawmill or a refinery, he might well be only a very minor participant in its profits. Nevertheless, the big landowners had been able not only to retain the nominal ownership of most of their estates, but to extend them. The number of legalized fidei-commissa had increased steadily. It was stated in the Reichsrat in 1883 that there were over 292 of these institutions in Austria, comprising 880 estates and with a total acreage of 1,140,193 hectares. 579,000 hectares lay in Bohemia; 178,000 in Moravia; 126,000 in Lower Austria; 70,000 in Carinthia, etc.; only Salzburg, Vorarlberg and the Bukovina had no fidei-commissa.54
The agrarian statistics for 31 December 1896 showed another increase, although a small one, since the Reichsrat, whose consent was now required for new formations, was growing reluctant to give it. Nevertheless, the number of fidei-commissa had risen to 297 and their acreage to 1,200,000 ha.55 At the latter date, 8,700,000 hectares in Austria, or 29% of the whole area of the country, fell into the category of ‘large estates’, defined as estates of at least 200 ha. and paying at least 200 Kronen in land tax, and of this, perhaps three-quarters consisted of really large estates of 2,000 ha. plus. In Bohemia the figure was 1,436,089 ha., owned by 151 persons, out of 5,194,500 ha.; in Moravia, 558,625 ha. (73 owners) out of an area of 2,222,200 ha.
A few of these very large estates were commercially owned, and another fraction belonged either to the Church, or to the Crown or the Imperial family; a few to business enterprises. But the great majority were still owned by the Hochadel. Thus in Bohemia, Prince Johann Schwarzenberg’s estates covered 177,000 ha., those of Count J. Colloredo-Mansfeld, 57,000, of Prince Egon Schwarzenberg, 39,000 and of Prince Johann Liechtenstein, 36,000. In all, the few hundred biggest families of Austria probably owned at least twenty per cent of its area.
The feudal landlords had thus salvaged quite a lot, but by no means all that they lost went into the balance of the bourgeoisie. That class, after all, owed its years of office chiefly to the fact that they were Germanic and centralist, and at the time, the Monarch’s most useful agents for the domestic, and still more the foreign, policy which he was then pursuing. And its heyday was short. After 1878 Austria never again saw a Government composed solely of their representatives, nor even a Minister President representative of them (Koerber, although untitled, came from exactly the same class of Beamtenadel as, for instance, Gautsch).
The men who inherited by far the greater part of the power lost by the aristocrats were the bureaucrats, who were, indeed, now overwhelmingly middle class in origin and circumstances (it was only a few plums, chiefly in the foreign service, that went almost exclusively to bearers of great names), but in their mental attitude classless (subject, of course, to the antagonism towards the poor inevitable in all States founded on property). Momentarily submerged in 1859–60 by the wave of anti-étatism which financial panic had sent washing over the country, they had very soon resurfaced to reoccupy the place in the State in which Bach had set them a decade earlier. Taaffe’s regime was already a bureaucratic one in nearly all but name; those of some of his successors even dispensed with the mask.
Modern Austrian writers have a stock adjective for the rule of the Austrian bureaucrats, over their own kinsfolk or others, in the old Monarchy: it was exemplary (vorbildlich). Some non-Austrians have outbid even this adjective. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but also μήδεν ἀγὰν. It was not as exemplary that the Austrians who knew them face to face saw their masters. Their favourite personification of the bureaucratic machine was the Amtschimmel, an aged and decrepit nag plodding along with infinite slowness under an enormous burden of accumulated files.56 And the poor creature was in fact slow of foot, cumbersome, unimaginative, and snobbish, and pried into the lives of the citizens in a manner which Westerners experiencing it found quite intolerable.57 But it is true that the Austrian service stood head and shoulders above those of Russia, or of the Balkan countries. Some of its technical services were quite outstanding, and the worst of them usually produced some result in the end. Most of its members were financially incorruptible, and they were generally prepared to help the public so long as it approached them cap in hand. From the Crown’s point of view, they possessed, at this stage, the virtue of absolute loyalty. It was only in the next that they began to be influenced by national feeling, and then indeed, the Monarchy was ripe for dissolution. Until then, they helped hold it together, and in so far as the wheels of its public life went round at all, they did so mainly thanks to the efforts of its devoted, and usually competent, bureaucrats.
The other main prop of the regime was the Corps of regular officers, which was now composed, in overwhelming measure, of the same class as the bureaucrats; for after the introduction of general military service, the high aristocrats had ‘withdrawn almost completely from the career of officer … Before that, the feudal magnates had been accustomed to serve at least up to the rank of Major or Captain. Now they contented themselves with that of Lieutenant of Reserve’.58 The bulk of the officers now came out of the two Military Academies, while a few ‘one-year reservists’ took regular commissions when their year expired.
The change presumably made for greater efficiency, and politically, the Corps of Officers proved a ‘cement’ of the Monarchy more reliable even than the civil servants. The officers who took sides with their respective nationalities in the final crisis of the Monarchy were almost exclusively non-regulars.
*
The position of the Cis-Leithanian peasantry, as a whole, declined steadily in the 1870s and 1880s. The general effect of the removal by the Liberal Government in 1868 of these protective (or restrictive) provisions relating to peasant land which the reform of 1849 had retained had been, like those of the reform itself, to create a dichotomy between those to whom freedom came like a fertilizing spring wind and those whom its blast withered. But the earlier change had come at a time when the prices of the peasant’s produce were generally high and the trade in them still largely carried on in the local market square. By 1868 the importation from Hungary was organized, and that from overseas standing on the threshold.
The freedom to borrow at will certainly benefited the thrifty farmer who employed his borrowed money productively: it enabled him to re-equip, consolidate and even enlarge his holding. Success stories were by no means unknown, especially in the fertile parts of the Alpine Lands, where the population was economically mature and credit comparatively easy. When the subject was debated in the Reichsrat in 1889 it was stated that the percentage of farms which had become more heavily indebted since 1868 was ‘minute’, and that indebtedness was heavier in the Tirol, to which the law had not applied, than in the Lands in which it had been applied.59 But it is difficult to suppose that the speaker was not referring only to the Alpine Lands. Other writers give a very different picture of, for example, Galicia. 60 Here, we read, the peasant borrowed either from his ex-landlord, from a neighbour, or from the local Jewish money-lender. The landlord usually did not ask for payment in cash, but required the peasant to work his debt out, on terms which might or might not be reasonable. The neighbour usually charged 30–50%, the Jew, 50–150%, and cases of 500% were not unknown.61 The Galician peasant, moreover, seldom borrowed for productive purposes, but usually to help himself out after a bad harvest, to pay his taxes, or for such purposes as weddings, which it was a point of prestige to celebrate on the most extravagant scale imaginable.62 An enormous number of peasants were unable to meet these obligations, and were either evicted altogether from their homesteads, or turned into tenants of them, working for rentals more exorbitant than their old obligations when they were unfr
ee men. According to figures given in the Reichsrat in 1880, over 37,500 holdings of real estate, by far the most of them peasant properties, came under the hammer between 1875 and 1879 alone. The creditors, incidentally, recovered only sixty per cent of their claims.
The lifting of the bans on division and alienation of peasant holdings was followed by very rapid parcellation, especially in those Slav areas where national tradition prescribed equal, or near-equal, division of an inheritance among all children. In Bohemia, where, according to Drage,63 41,537 new holdings were carved out of peasant properties between 1869 and 1888, 330,489 of the holdings in 1896 (38·0% of the total) were between 0·5–5 ha., and 373,088 (42·9%) under half a hectare. The figures for Moravia were, if anything, worse: 196,403 holdings (36·2%) of 0·5–5 ha. and 268,940 (49·6%) under half a hectare. Silesia showed much the same picture. In the Bukovina 90% of all holdings were of 5 ha. or less, and 59% of 1 ha. or less.
In the Bohemian Lands the rural congestion was partly relieved by the industrialization, which took many surplus hands off the land – into conditions, it is true, of miserable exploitation – and many dwarf-holders remaining on it made good enough livings growing beet for the local factory, and then working for it in the harvest weeks. But even here, and still more in primitive Galicia-Bukovina, the limit was quickly being reached when the land could support no more mouths, and the dwarf-holder’s surplus children would have to follow the sold-up man into the towns, or overseas.
Among the Germans, national custom favoured the retention of the undivided Bauernhof, and it was stated in the 1889 debate that ‘most of the holdings had remained intact’.64 But this statement, again, is hard to reconcile with the figures. In Styria, in 1896, 62·4% of the total holdings paying land tax (covering 7·9% of the whole area) were of under 5 ha., and only 34·9% (covering 44·3%) between 5–50. In Upper Austria, the traditional stronghold of the comfortable yeoman farmer, the figures were 61·6% (6·8% of the area) and 37·3% (62·3%).65 Drage writes that ‘the comfortable homestead … still exists, but it is gradually being replaced by allotments, or else it is swallowed up in the ever-widening territory of the capitalist landlord’.66
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