The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)
Page 133
Thus Wilson’s reply, which became known on the 20th and said that the President could no longer be bound by the tenth of his Fourteen Points, which had simply demanded ‘autonomy’ for the peoples of the Monarchy; the Czecho-Slovaks and Yugoslavs must be their own judges of what would satisfy them – did little more than recognize an existing situation. In fact, Charles on the 23rd appointed a Committee (transformed on the 27th into a Cabinet) under the distinguished pacifist, Professor Lammasch, to carry through the peaceful liquidation of Austria, and on the 24th he entrusted the Portfolio of Foreign Affairs to Count Gyula Andrássy, jun., who sent off a Note accepting Wilson’s conditions and again asking for an armistice. Again the answer was slow to arrive, and pending its coming, the disintegration went on. On the 28th a Czecho-Slovak Republic was proclaimed in Prague, and the Poles set up a ‘liquidation Committee’ to wind up relations between Vienna and the already existent Polish State. On the 29th the Sabor in Zagreb proclaimed Croatia-Slavonia, with Dalmatia and Fiume, an independent State, part of the ‘national and sovereign State of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’. The Landtag in Laibach issued a similar proclamation on the 31st, Serajevo on 1 November. The German-Austrian Deputies of the Reichsrat had already, on 21 October, voted the establishment of an independent German-Austrian State, to include all districts ‘(of Austria)’ inhabited by Germans. A Constituent Assembly was to determine the Constitution of the new State. On the 30th the Deputies met again and declared themselves authorized to speak for the German-Austrian people in matters of foreign policy. A Council of State, to be elected immediately by the Reichsrat, was to take over the executive authority. A Coalition Government took office the next day.
On 1 November the Ruthenes proclaimed their independence. Last of the peoples of Cis-Leithania to be out of one war, they were first to be in the next, for they were promptly engaged in hostilities with the Poles.
In Hungary, Wekerle had resigned on the 23rd. A Governmental interregnum followed while the Archduke Joseph, whom Charles had appointed his homo regius, hesitated whom to propose for the succession. Meanwhile, Károlyi’s followers from the Party of Independence, the Bourgeois Radicals32 and the Social Democrats, formed a ‘National Council’ who mobilized the streets in their favour. On the evening of the 30th the Archduke yielded to the clamour and advised Charles to appoint Károlyi Minister President. The next day (which was also the day on which assassins broke into Tisza’s house and murdered him), Charles actually administered the oath of loyalty to Károlyi, but released him from it on 1 November. The new Government announced themselves to be representing an independent State, unconnected with the Habsburgs’ other dominions. Their belief that the change of regime would placate the Nationalities had, however, already been negated by the voices of the Nationalities themselves. On 27 October the Roumanians had claimed self-determination. Croatia-Slavonia, as we saw, had gone on the 29th, and on the 30th and 31st a meeting of Slovaks had decided to ‘join Czecho-Slovakia’.
Meanwhile, on 24 October, the Allies had launched an offensive at Vittorio Veneto. For some days the Austrian armies resisted valiantly enough, but then the Czechs began to desert to the enemy, and the Hungarians to clamour to be sent back to defend their own endangered country. On the 31st Károlyi’s Minister of War, Colonel Lindner, ordered them to return, and some began the journey. The fleet in Pola mutinied, and on Charles’s orders its Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Horthy, handed it over to the representatives of the Serb-Croat-Slovene State.
On 1 November the Italian Command communicated to emissaries from the Austrian army the armistice terms on which the Supreme War Council had agreed. These obligated Austria to evacuate, roughly, the areas promised to Italy under the Treaty of London. The Allies were entitled also to occupy such other ‘strategic points’ within the Monarchy as they thought fit. Charles authorized acceptance, and the Austrian armies ceased fire at 3 a.m. on 3 November. The Italians, indeed, suspended hostilities only at 3 p.m. on the 4th. In the intervening thirty-six hours they had advanced, capturing large quantities of stores and 300,000 unresisting prisoners. Those Austrian soldiers who escaped captivity made their ways home, some in orderly formations, others as best they could, jettisoning their arms on the way.
Meanwhile, a mixed French and Serbian force had reached Belgrade. Its commander, General Franchet d’Espérey, maintained that the Armistice of Padua applied to the Italian front only. Károlyi led a delegation to Belgrade to receive terms from him, and the General presented him with a line which authorized the French and Serbian troops to occupy large parts of South and South-Eastern Hungary. To add to Hungary’s troubles, Roumania redeclared war on 9 November and marched into Transylvania, while Czech detachments entered North Hungary under the pretext of occupying ‘strategic points’ under the Padua Armistice.
By this time only one top-level question had still to be decided. Neither German-Austria nor Hungary had yet officially pronounced on its future form of State. It was, however, clear that the majorities of both Governments favoured the republican form, for which rowdy mobs in both capitals were clamouring. After the German Kaiser had abdicated, on 9 November, his advisers warned Charles that even his own person was no longer secure.
On 11 November a proclamation from Charles was posted up in Vienna. ‘Filled’, it read, ‘now as ever with unshakeable love for My peoples, I will no longer set My person as a barrier to their free development. I recognize in advance the decision which German-Austria will take on its future form of State. The people has now taken over the Government through its representatives. I renounce any participation in the business of the State. Simultaneously I relieve My Austrian Government of office.’
The next day, the German-Austrian Provisional Parliament proclaimed the constitution of the German-Austrian Republic. On the 13th Charles, who had retired to his near-by estate of Eckartsau, handed a declaration in similar terms to three emissaries from the Hungarian Parliament, which in its turn proclaimed Hungary a republic on the 16th. The old Monarchy had ceased to exist.
1 Kossuth had died on 5 May.
2 See above, p. 803.
3 Some idea may be gathered from the statistics of soldiers fallen in battle. These were not kept by nationality, but the regional statistics give the following picture:
Recorded dead (military)
Purely German areas (A) 29·7% Moravian-Slovak areas (A) 26·7%
Purely Magyar areas (H) 28·0% Croatia 25·7%
Purely Slovene areas (A) 27·5% Purely Slovak areas (H) 23·7%
Purely Roumanian areas
(H) 23·0% Bosnia 19·1%
Purely Czech (A) 22·5% Italo-Ladin
(A) 18·3%
Mixed Serb-Croat
(H) 22·2% Purely Serbo-Croat
(A) 17·0%
Purely Ruthene
(A) 21·5%
Mainly Roumanian
(A) 19·2% Purely Polish 16·2%
These figures also give ‘mixed Ruthene’ (H) 11·9%, but I suspect a misprint. In another passage Gratz gives the Croat figure as ‘under the average for the Monarchy’.
4 According to R. W. Seton-Watson, History of the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 287, ‘many thousands of Czech civilians were interned as political suspects’ and death-sentences by Court Martial numbered close on 5,000.
5 For the following, see Macartney and Palmer, Independent Eastern Europe (London, 1962), pp. 39 ff.
6 See below, p. 814.
7 Germany, indeed, who at the outset of the war was inclined to make free with her allies’ territory, wanted the Roumanians to be allowed to ‘occupy’ Transylvania ‘to defend it against Russia’. Tisza, naturally, would hear nothing of this.
8 See Macartney and Palmer, op. cit., pp. 52–6.
9 Other Czech émigré organizations had been established in Russia and elsewhere. For a convenient recent account of these, see Zeman, op. cit., pp. 72–94.
10 The memorandum for which Masaryk was then seeking Allied approval did, however, ask for a Corridor th
rough West Hungary to link Czecho-Slovakia with the projected Southern Slav State.
11 One of the numerous Treaties of Bucharest.
12 The struggle which went on between Germany and Austria for the possession of Poland after the war, both parties assuming that they were going to have a voice in the matter, is well described by Fischer, op. cit. cc. 8, 12, 17, 19 and 23.
13 This sentence does not mean that no Czechs were genuinely attached to the Monarchy. There were certainly some, in all social strata, who were sincerely loyal.
14 A convenient short account of Austria’s military plans may be found in an article by Kiszling, Vorabend, pp. 83 ff.
15 Commuted to five years’ imprisonment.
16 On this see Redlich, op. cit., II. 133, 163; Höglinger, pp. 132 ff.; Uhlirz, op. cit., pp. 241 ff.
17 Macartney and Palmer, p. 65.
18 The appointment was made on 22 December. Czernin’s predecessor had been Baron Burian, who had succeeded Berchtold on 1 January 1915.
19 He had brought himself to the Archduke’s notice in 1910 by sending him a memorandum urging him to break the supremacy of the Magyars in the Monarchy (see Singer, Czernin, pp. 14 f.).
20 On the history of this remarkable phrase, see Macartney and Palmer, p. 67. The Central Powers’ reply was made on 26 December 1916; that of the Allies on 12 January 1917. In respect of Poland, the Allied Note confined itself to a reference to the Czar’s recent proclamation.
21 A nephew of the other Heinrich von Clam-Martinic who had played such a large role in public affairs half a century earlier, Heinrich cadet had begun his public career as a federalist and something of a Czech nationalist, but had changed his ideas (apparently as a result of his war experiences: see Höglinger, op. cit., passim) and was now of the view that the only possible Government for Austria was one resting on its Germans and Poles.
22 The excuse for pressing these was the allegation that Hungarian units were being deliberately chosen for dangerous or desperate operations.
23 It was reprinted in a booklet, Friedrich Adler vor dem Ausnahmegericht, which is an indispensable source for the social history of the period.
24 See on this Macartney and Palmer, pp. 68 ff., 78 ff.
25 Known from its date as the Epiphany Resolution.
26 Starčević’s successor, Pavelić, was a ‘Yugoslav’.
27 Britain had recently established a Ministry of Propaganda under Lord Northcliffe, who had taken the natural but fateful step of putting Steed and Seton-Watson in charge of propaganda to the Monarchy.
28 Mr Balfour made on it the extraordinarily disingenuous comment that his policies, of promising independence to the nationalities and preserving the Habsburg Monarchy, were not mutually exclusive, since the former could be utilized to blackmail the Monarchy into saving itself by making a separate peace. The whole policy of the Allies on this question is riddled with dishonesty.
29 In one unit there were uniforms only for the men in the front line. The men in reserve wore underclothing only.
30 Seidler had resigned on 25 June, after the Poles had demanded his head for failing to defend the indivisibility of Galicia at Brest-Litovsk. Hussarek was governing with a makeshift majority composed of the non-Socialist Germans, the Polish Conservatives, the Roumanians of the Bukovina and the Italians of Istria.
31 Hussarek, although he counter-signed the Manifesto, was not the author. It had been composed in Charles’ secretariat and afterwards revised by various hands, including German nationalists, who had insisted on the phrase ‘Ethnic territory’ in order to save German Bohemia from the Czechs.
32 A midget group, led by Jérzi, who had constituted themselves a ‘party’ in July, 1914.
Index
Abrahamowycz, David, Ritter von, 1
Abstellung ex officio, 1
Academic Legion, 1, 2, 3, 4 ff., 5 f., 6
Academy of Sciences (Vienna), 1; (Budapest), 1, 2;
(Zagreb), 1
Acsády, I., 1
Aczél, István, 1
Adamovitch, Bishop, 1, 2
Adler, Friedrich, 1, 2
Adler, Viktor, 1, 2, 3 f., 4, 5, 6
Administrators (in Hungary), 1, 2 f., 3, 4
Adrianople, Peace of, 1
Ady, E., 1
Aehrenthal, Baron Lexa von, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ff., 6 ff., 7, 8
Agliardi, Mgr, 1, 2
Ágoston, A., 1
Agrarian credit, 1, 2, 3
Agrarian indebtedness, 1, 2 f., 3
Agrarian Socialist Party, 1 ff.
Agricultural labour, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; (Hungary), 1
Agriculture, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ff., 9, 10, 11, 12 ff., 13 ff., 14 f., 15 ff., 16, 17
Albania, 1, 2, 3, 4
Albert v of Hungary and Bohemia, 1 f.
Albert of Saxony-Teschen, 1, 2, 3
Albrecht I, von Habsburg, Duke, 1
Albrecht, Archduke, 1, 2 ff., 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 f., 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 1, 2
Alexander, Crown Prince (King) of Serbia, see Obrenović
Alexander, Archduke, 1, 2, 3, 4
Alföld, 1
Alispán, 1, 2
Alldeutscher Verein, 1, 2, 3
Allgemeine Schulordnung, 1, 2
Allgemeines Krankenhaus (Vienna), 1
Alpine Lands, 1 ff., 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ff., 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Alpine Montan, 1
Alsace-Lorraine, 1
Ambrózy, Baron L., 1
American Civil War, 1
Amtschimmel, 1
Andics, E., 1
Andrássy, Count Gyula, 1, 2 ff., 3 f., 4, 5 f., 6 f., 7 ff., 8 ff., 9, 10 f., 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 ff.
Andrássy, Count Gyula, jun., 1
Andrian Warburg, Viktor Frh. von, 1, 2, 3, 4
Angelovitch, Mgr, 1
Anne, daughter of Wladislaw Jagiellon, 1
Anticipationsscheine, 1, 2
Anti-Semitism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Anton, Archduke, 1
Apponyi, Count Albert, 1, 2, 3 f., 4, 5 ff., 6, 7
Apponyi, Count György, 1 f., 2, 3 f., 4, 5, 6, 7
April Laws, 1, 2 f., 3, 4, 5 f., 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 f., 14, 15
Arad, martyrs of, 1 f.
Aristocracy, 1 ff., 2, 3 f., 4 f., 5, 6 f.; (Hungary), 1 f.
Armenian Catholics, see Churches
Armenians, 1 ff., 2
Army, 1 ff., 2 f., 3 f., 4 f., 5, 6, 7, 8 f., 9 f., 10 f., 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 f.; see Defence Law
Arneth, A., Ritter von, 1
Arnstein, banking house of, 1, 2; Fanny von, 1
Árpád dynasty, 1, 2
Aspern, battle of, 1
Asquith, Mr H. H., 1
Auersperg, Prince Adolf, 1, 2 ff., 3, 4
Auersperg, Count Anton von, 1
Auersperg, Prince ‘Carlos’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Auersperg, Count Karl, 1, 2, 3 f.
Auffenberg-Komarow, F.M.L. M. von, 1 f.
Auguss, Frh. A. von, 1
August, Prince Karl, of Weimar, 1
Aussee Programme, 1, 2
Austerlitz, battle of, 1, 2
Austria Above the Enns, see Upper Austria
Austria Below the Enns, see Lower Austria
Austrian Netherlands, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 f.
Austrian Succession, War of, 1, 2, 3
Austro-Slavism, 1, 2 f., 3 f., 4, 5 ff.
Autonomists, German-Austrian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 f., 6, 7. 8
Avars, 1
Aviticitas, 1, 2, 3, 4
d’Azeglio, Massimo, 1, 2
Babenberg, dynasty of, 1, 2
Babeş, Vincentiu, 1
Babits, M., 1
Bach, Alexander, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ff., 8 f., 9, 10 f., 11 f., 12, 13, 14 f., 15 ff., 16, 17 ff, 18, 19, 20, 21 ff., 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33
Bach, Eduard, 1
Bach, Ljudevit, 1
‘Bach Hussars’, 1, 2, 3
Bácka, 1; see Voivodina
/> Bács-Bodrog, County, 1
Badeni, Count Casimir, 1 f., 2, 3, 4 ff., 5, 6, 7 f., 8, 9
Badeni Ordinances, 1
Baedeker, K., 1 f.
Baernreither, Dr Joseph, 1 f., 2, 3, 4 f.
Baillet-Latour, Count, 1, 2 f., 3 f., 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ff.
Bajza, Josef Ignatius, 1
Bakunin, 1
Balázsfalva, 1, 2
Baldacci, Frh. A. von, 1 f., 2, 3, 4
Balfour, Mr Arthur, 1
Balkan League, 1 f.
Balkan Wars, 1, 2
Balkans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ff., 15, 16 ff., 17 ff.
Balogh, D., 1
Ban (of Croatia), 1, 2, 3
Bánát of Temesvár, 1, 2, 3 f., 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 f., 9; see also Voivodina
Bánffy, Baron Dezsö, 1, 2, 3, 4 f., 5, 6, 7, 8
Banhans, Dr A., 1, 2
Bankozettel, 1, 2 f., 3, 4 ff.
Bárándy, A., 1
Baranya, County, 1, 2
Barbarossa, Emperor Frederick, 1
Bardolff, Col. K., 1
Barrère, 1
Bartok, Béla, 1
Barwinski, Hofrat S. von, 1
Basilians, 1
Batthyány, family, 1
Batthyány, Count Kázmer, 1, 2, 3 ff., 4, 5, 6 ff., 7. 8 f., 9
Batthyány, Count Lajos, 1
Bauer, Otto, 1, 2 f., 3
‘Bauer’, defined, 1; see Peasants
Bauernfeld, E., 1, 2
Baumgartner, A., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 f., 6 f.
Bavaria, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 f.
Bavarian Succession, War of, 1
Baylen, Capitulation of, 1
Beamtenadel, 1
Beatrix, of Modena d’Este, 1
Beauharnais, Marshal, 1 f.
Becher, Johann, 1
Beck, Col. (later F.M.L.) F. F., Baron von, 1, 2, 3
Beck, Max Wladimir, Frh. von, 1, 2, 3
Beck, Baron, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Becke, Carl Ritter von, 1, 2, 3, 4
Becquehem, Marquis, 1
Bedekovics, K., 1