The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  196 Surveys of the positions of the two nations in these fields are given by Hugelmann, op. cit., pp. 416 ff., and Münch, op. cit., pp. 456 ff.

  197 See above, p. 219.

  198 He also wrote a book denouncing the legend of Jewish ritual murder. This, indeed, later brought great advantage to his national cause, for it helped to win it much support from the Jewish communities of Britain and the USA during the First World War (see Sir Tom Bridges, Alarms and Excursions, 1938, p. 213).

  199 In the very last speech made by him in the Reichsrat (in 1913) he said specifically that ‘he could not indulge in dreams of the collapse of Austria, and knew that this Austria would endure for good or ill’. Cit. Hantsch, Nationalitätenfrage, p. 66.

  200 Masaryk, The Making of a State, p. 46.

  201 Masaryk, op. cit., p. 47.

  202 The statistics show the Slovenes in Carinthia as declining both percentually (1880, 29·7%; 1900, 25·1%) and absolutely (102,000, 90,000). In Styria their percentage went down, owing to the increase in population brought to North Styria by industrialization, but their absolute figures rose slightly. In Carniola their percentage rose from 93·7 to 94·2. In Gorizia-Gradisca the population figures show little change in the proportions, but the school statistics, which show the language spoken by the majority in each commune, indicate a steady Slovene advance. In Trieste the number of Slovenes remained almost static round 25,000 from 1880 to 1900, but bounded up to 57,000 in 1910, apparently owing to an influx of workers into the new shipyards.

  203 In 1910 it contained only 5,900 Germans against 33,800 Slovenes.

  204 Another factor was the introduction by the Government (in 1892 in Galicia and 1895 in the Bukovina) of the phonetic orthography in school-books, Old Slavonic being retained only in liturgical works. The identity with Ukrainian of the language spoken by the Ruthenes at once became apparent, and the Ukrainian movement received a big impetus.

  205 For school figures in 1911–12 see Hugelmann, p. 709. The Ruthenes had their full quota of elementary schools, but only 8 out of 79 boys’ gymnasia and one out of 21 girls’ and no other institution whatever above primary level, except 2 out of the 54 schools for teaching trades. Of the elections to the Reichstag and the Landtag, it is enough to say that the terrorism and corruption practised in them left their Hungarian counterparts in the shade, and that the number of Ruthenes returned in them was always only a small fraction of what their total numbers would have justified.

  206 The figures were: 1900, Polish, 54·8%, Ruthene, 42·2%; 1910, Polish, 58·5%, Ruthene, 40·2%.

  207 Kleinwächter writes (op. cit., p. 177): ‘I have myself observed how, especially in circles which had received academic education, Ruthenes who as youths had Polonized completely, reverted to their nationality and now became national Ruthenes.’

  208 See above, p. 671.

  209 The harvest strikes were supported and (it was alleged by the Poles) fomented by a ‘National Committee’ organized in 1901 by the Ruthenes, who had just walked out of the Landtag. It was also alleged that the Ruthenes organized the seasonal migration to Germany, in order to embarrass the Polish landlords. In some cases the more extreme Left-wing Polish parties supported the Ruthenes.

  210 The population figures for the Bukovina are particularly perplexing. The official figures of the Tafel for 1846 practically reverse those of Hain, who gives a Ruthene majority even for that year. Hain is almost certainly right: presumably some scribe concerned with the Tafel simply put the figures in the wrong columns. The official linguistic figures from 1857 to 1900

  German % Ruthene % Roumanian % Other % TOTAL

  1857 37,885 8·47 188,288 42·1 175,679 39·3 45,394 10·1 447,095

  1880 108,820 19·1 239,690 42·2 190,005 33·4 29,938 5·3 568,453

  1890 133,501 20·8 268,367 41·8 208,301 32·4 32,326 5·0 642,495

  1900 159,486 22·0 297,798 41·2 229,018 31·7 37,202 5·1 723,504

  The ‘others’ included Poles, Magyars and Armenians. Yiddish was counted as German. It will be seen that while both Ruthenes and Roumanians lost ground percentually, their losses were rather to the German group, than to each other.

  211 To the earlier considerations motivating this refusal were now added strategic ones, for many of the new fortifications which Austria was building against her ally lay in the Italian-speaking area. Koerber refused a petition for this, in very decided terms, in October 1900.

  212 While Lombardy-Venetia still belonged to the Monarchy, its Italians had gone to the Universities of Padua and Pavia (where, incidentally, many of them had imbibed strong Italian nationalism). After 1859 an 1866 they could no longer do so with practical profit because the Austrian Government did not recognize degrees from foreign universities as qualifying for admission to the State services or professions. The Italians of Austria therefore asked for their own University, which they wanted to have in Trieste, as the one big Italian town in the Monarchy. The Austrian authorities were reluctant to allow this, fearing, and certainly with reason, that an Italian university in Trieste would be a hot-bed of irrendentism. The idea of putting the University in Rovereto was considered and dropped; the townlet had, indeed, no qualification except that of inaccessibility. An Italian Law Faculty was opened in Innsbruck in 1904, but riots between Italian and German students promptly broke out, on so severe a scale that the Faculty had to be closed. In 1914 the Italians were promised a Faculty in Vienna, as a provisional measure until a solution for the problem had been found; but it was still baffling authority in 1918. Another difficulty was the insistence of the Slovenes that if the Italians had a University, they must have one too (in Laibach); and this brought the Germans out against them.

  Another enormous outcry arose in 1913, when the Governor of Trieste forbade the Municipal Council to employ Italian subjects. This, however, was only ending an abnormal situation.

  213 See the anecdotes in Sosnowski, Politik, I. p. 286, n. 2, and 287, n. 1. On one occasion, when Italians and anti-Italians planned rival demonstrations in Trieste, the authorities authorized the former to carry red, white and green banners and forbade the latter to carry black and yellow ones. The second anecdote describes how a subaltern quartered in the Trentino was officially censured for having sung the Gott Erhalte, with friends, at a private party, with windows open, on an evening when a prominent Italian agitator was visiting the town.

  214 See above, p. 601.

  215 See Sutter, op. cit., pp. 127–8.

  216 Nevertheless, it had a directly national and not necessarily irredentist appeal in the Bohemian Lands owing to the fact that a disproportionate number of the clergy there, even in the German districts, were Slavs: only 15% of the clergy were German, while the figure should have been 38% had it been proportionate to their total numbers. (Figures from Dr Emil Pfersche, Die Parteien der Deutschen in Oesterreich, 1915, p. 11).

  217 Notably the Lutheran Church in Berlin and the Gustav Adolf Verein.

  218 Zöllner, p. 432, puts the number at 70,000, including converts to the Old Catholic confession. About 100,000 converts joined the Lutheran Church up to 1918, nearly all from the Roman Catholic Church, but we cannot suppose all of them to have been disciples of Schönerer and Wolf.

  219 The Party was, however, now entirely German in membership, and contained a strong nationalist wing.

  220 The full text of the Pfingstprogramm, as it was commonly called, is given by Kolmer, VII. 297 ff. There is also a long summary and commentary in Hugelmann, pp. 204 ff.

  221 A demand for the stricter use of the German word of command in the Army may perhaps be interpreted as a reference to Hungary.

  222 This cannot be said of the proposals for Carinthia, Carniola or Styria.

  223 Karl Renner, in Der Kampf der oe. Nationen um den Staat (1902) and Grundlagen und Entwicklungsziele der oe. u. Monarchie (1906) (both published under the pseudonym of Rudolf Springer) and many other works; Otto Bauer in Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemocratie (1907).

  224 Renner mad
e his proposals applicable to Cis-Leithania only, arguing that if they were carried through there, the success of the example would cause it to be followed in Hungary, but he probably adopted this attitude out of tactical considerations; certainly not out of approval for the national position in Hungary – his Grundlagen is conspicuous even among Austrian works for the venom of its references to Hungary. Bauer was prepared to see his system enforced in Hungary. Both men were obviously thinking in terms of the Gesammtmonarchie.

  225 He began his career as librarian in the National Library in Vienna, and joined the Social Democrat Party only after 1900, when he was already over thirty years of age.

  226 Galicia-Bukovina, Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia, Carniola-Littoral, Lower Austria, Upper Austria-Salzburg, Tirol-Vorarlberg, Styria-Carinthia.

  227 Alpine, Bohemian, Galician, Littoral.

  228 These plans are interesting not only in themselves but as having formed the basis of the nationalities policy afterwards introduced by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia.

  229 See above, p. 554.

  230 Charmatz, Kampf der Nationen, p. 31.

  231 Brüghel, Geschichte, I. 319.

  232 In 1873 the police even believed that ‘the politicians’ (i.e. the Young Czechs) had ‘called the workers’ movement into being in their own interest’ (Brügel, II. 258). Another report said that the German employers ‘tried to Germanize their workers’, to which the Czechs objected.

  233 German, Czech, Croat(!), Slovene, Italian, Polish, Ruthene.

  234 See below, p. 803 f.

  235 After the tragedy she put off mourning only for a single day in her life, the wedding of her daughter Valerie.

  236 Margutti, p. 146. On these intimate details, Margutti is far better informed than Redlich, or even Tschuppik.

  237 The sensational case in this respect was that of the Archduke Johann Salvator, who, shortly after Rudolph’s death, had renounced his membership of the family, taken the name of Johann Orth, and simply disappeared. There seems to be no doubt (although popular opinion long refused to believe it) that he went down with a sailing-ship which he was commanding in Pacific waters in 1891.

  238 Perhaps his only real friend had been Albert of Saxony, who, however, died in 1902.

  15

  Hungary under Dualism, 1867–1903

  I POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

  The salient difference between the political working of Austria and Hungary for a generation after 1867 was that while in the former the Dualist system achieved in 1867 was, after some initial hesitation, generally accepted as an unpalatable but unalterable fact of life, this was not the case in Hungary. It has been said that while Francis Joseph looked on the Compromise as the end of a process, the Hungarians regarded it as a beginning. This is not entirely true of the Monarch himself, in the first years, and certainly not true of some of his advisers; it was only when he grew older, and felt himself too tired to reopen the series of experiments, that Francis Joseph himself insisted that the settlement reached in 1867 must be taken as final. But it never occurred to the Hungarians, whose entire political history had consisted of a series of periodical re-statements of their relationship to their Monarch, that this one was to be regarded as sacrosanct and immutable. If satisfactory to them, it should be maintained; if it proved unsatisfactory, they were as a nation neither legally nor morally bound to refrain from trying to get it amended. And the effect of the inveterate traditional national assumption (which had some historical justification) that all Hungary’s problems were governed, in greater or less degree, by her relationship with her king, was that this question of the maintenance or revision of the Compromise – the ‘issue of public law’,1 as it was called, was from the first the central theme of her entire political life.

  The primacy might not have been so absolute if the country had really been making a fresh start in the autumn of 1867. But the Diet of 1865 had been convoked for the specific purpose of reaching (if it could) agreement with the Crown. No other item had been on its agenda – the settlements with Croatia and the Nationalities and the completion of the Union with Transylvania had been parts of the main problem – and the Deputies had been the less tempted to stray into other fields because, elected as they had been on a franchise which, relatively broad by the European standards of the day, yet embraced only 6·1% of the population, and elected, moreover, by traditional methods, they practically all held an outlook which was broadly homogeneous on questions of social and general internal politics.2

  The Parliament of 1867 was simply the Diet of 1865 m continued session. It was entirely natural that the Deputies’ minds should still have been filled with the great Issue, and as natural that, almost without exception, they should have taken up the traditional attitude which invested it not only with the primacy over all other problems, but with the governance of them, and that the Party alignment which now took place should have been determined almost exclusively by the Issue. That alignment was fairly simple. Twenty-one Deputies, led from outside by the ex-Chancellor, Apponyi, and inside Parliament, by Baron Pál Sennyey, formed a loose ‘Conservative’ group. There were 120 Deákists, twenty Deputies of the Extreme Left, who rejected any Compromise whatever, and a ‘Left Centre’ of ninety-four, led by Ghyczy and Tisza, whose programme, drawn up in March 1868, and known, from its place of origin, as the ‘Bihar Points’, accepted the Pragmatic Sanction, but asked for the abolition of the Delegations and of the Common Ministry of Finance, an entirely separate Hungarian Army and separate diplomatic representation for Hungary: in brief, very little short of personal union, pure and simple.

  If this development was natural, it was none the less profoundly unfortunate for Hungary, particularly as it proved self-perpetuating. It meant that precious energies were wasted in barren wrangling over the Issue which ought to have been devoted to constructive work, and that such work as was accomplished was often distorted because its authors had been all the while keeping one eye on the Issue. At the junctures at which the two sides were closely balanced, any such work was well-nigh impossible.

  At the outset, the Government’s position was fairly strong. The Conservatives, if they sometimes played for their own hand, at least refused to join forces with the Left, which was thus outnumbered by nearly two to one in Parliament. A number of factors were in the Government’s favour. Deák’s personal prestige was enormous, and Andrássy’s almost as high after he had gained his points over the questions of nomenclature, the Military Frontier and the Honvédség (had he failed on them it would, on the contrary, have sunk to zero, and that of the whole Government with it, and he had been obliged to use that argument to Francis Joseph). The extraordinary harvests of 1868 and 1869 brought an influx of money which started a boom in Hungary even more spectacular than its Austrian counterpart. Enormous numbers of banks and similar institutions were founded,3 and many industries, and above all, a great expansion of the railway system was initiated, usually, as in Austria, on the basis that foreign entrepreneurs undertook and financed the construction, while the State guaranteed the interest on their capital. Some of the new institutions brought real and unmistakable benefit to the country, and many individuals derived much personal profit from them as Directors on their boards. Very many more believed themselves to have made fortunes through investing in the shares of the companies. The budgets for 1868 and 1869 closed with surpluses, although small ones.

  The country was happy, and its mood allowed the Government to address itself seriously to the problems before it, which were generally much larger than those confronting its opposite number in Austria. The latter were often able to build on solidly-laid foundations, whereas the Hungarians had sometimes to start from the bottom, and sometimes worse than that; for the sequence of revolution and counter-revolution, followed by a series of regimes each of which had been principally concerned with undoing the work of its predecessor, had produced in many fields a condition of the utmost complexity, not to say chaos.

  The matters to be settled inclu
ded even the basic political structure of the country. Besides the settlements with Croatia and the Nationalities, neither yet completed in 1867, there were the problems connected with the incorporation of Transylvania and the Military Frontier, and another which concerned the whole country: that of the relationship between the central and the local authorities, viz., the Counties. This was a problem which revolved very largely round the Issue, although those who took the side of the Counties were more numerous than the direct opponents of the Compromise. Broadly, however, this party wanted the autonomous Counties preserved, both because, with Kossuth, they saw in them the purest expression of the national genius, and still more, because they felt that Hungary would not be safe against possible future encroachments by Vienna if any breach were made in this traditional national bulwark. The other party thought that the Compromise safeguarded Hungary adequately, and therefore wished, in the cause of efficiency, to introduce the greater measure of Governmental centralization for which Eötvös and his fellow-‘Doctrinaires’ had been campaigning before 1848. The question was complicated by the circumstance that some of the most extensive autonomous liberties in Hungary were enjoyed by non-Magyar communities such as the Transylvanian Saxons, and, for that matter, the German burghers who still controlled many of the boroughs.

  The settlements with Croatia and the Nationalities are described elsewhere. The political assimilations of the Partium and the Military Frontier were carried through by simply extending the normal County organization to the areas concerned, a process which, as mentioned elsewhere, it took several years to complete in the Frontier. That of Transylvania was more complex. A Law of 1868, which legalized its incorporation, abolished the political prerogatives of the Three Nations, thereby depriving the Saxon University of its judicial functions, but promised the Königsboden a Statute which should do justice to its historic rights, and the office of Sachsengraf was to be retained, although its holder was thenceforward to be nominated by the Government (in fact, the last elected Sachsengraf, Konrad Schmidt, who had, indeed, been a very vehement opponent of the Union, had been relieved of his office as early as 8 February 1868).