The War that Ended Peace
Page 28
At the heart of the grandeur was a man who liked plain food, predictable routines, and, for relaxation, hunting and shooting. He was a good Catholic without thinking much about it. Like his fellow sovereigns Nicholas II and Wilhelm II, Franz Joseph loved the military life and almost always appeared in uniform. Like them too he was sent into a rage when the details of army uniforms were wrong. Apart from that, he was invariably courteous to everyone although always conscious of rank. He only shook Margutti’s hand once, to recognise that he had been promoted. (Margutti regretted ever after that no one else at court had seen this momentous gesture.)10 Franz Joseph found modern art puzzling but his sense of duty took him to public art exhibitions and the opening of important new buildings, especially if they were under royal patronage.11 His taste in music ran to military marches or Strauss waltzes and, while he liked the theatre and from time to time the prettier actresses, he preferred the old favourites. He did not like unpunctuality, loud laughter or people who talked too much.12 He had a sense of humour, of a rather basic sort. He had climbed the Great Pyramid in Egypt, he wrote to his wife, Empress Elisabeth, with the help of Bedouin guides. ‘As they mostly only wear a shirt, when they are climbing they leave a lot exposed, and that must be the reason why English women so happily and frequently like to scale the pyramids.’13
In his later days, Franz Joseph slept on an army camp cot in a bedroom of the utmost simplicity, or, as Margutti said, ‘downright penury’. He followed a strict and spartan routine, waking just after four in the morning and having himself rubbed down with cold water. He drank a glass of milk and then worked alone until seven or seven thirty, when he started conferences with his advisers. From ten until five or six in the afternoon he saw his ministers and dignitaries such as ambassadors, stopping only for a half-hour to eat a light lunch alone. In the evening he dined alone or with guests. He hated wasting time and insisted on meals being served at a rapid pace with the result that the younger members of the family often did not have time to eat before the meal ended. Unless there was a court ball or reception he was in bed by half past eight. For all the studied simplicity of his life, he had a strong sense of his own dignity and the respect owed him.14
Franz Joseph had adored his strong-willed mother. ‘Is there anything dearer on earth than one’s mother?’ he asked when he heard that Wilhelm’s mother had died. ‘Whatever differences may separate us the mother is always the mother, and when we lose her we bury a good part of ourselves in her grave.’15 His personal life was complicated and often sad. His brother, Maximilian, had been executed in Mexico after a failed attempt to establish a kingdom there, and the widow had gone mad. His only son, Rudolf, a troubled and unhappy young man, had committed suicide with his teenage mistress at his hunting lodge of Mayerling. The authorities covered up the scandal but that did not stop rumours, many of them wild conspiracy theories, floating about. Franz Joseph carried on, as he always did, but wrote to the actress Katharina Schratt, who was perhaps his closest friend in the world, that ‘things can never be the same’.16 To add to his burdens, the heir was likely to be his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, whom he did not particularly care for.
Franz Joseph’s marriage had long since ceased to provide him with any comfort. He had adored Elisabeth, his cousin, whom he had married when she was only seventeen, but things had not turned out well. Elisabeth was charming, vivacious and lovely, and, as a girl, delightfully wayward and impulsive. She never, unfortunately, grew up. She hated the court, ceremonials, and obligations, and did her best to avoid them. Yet she could, when she wanted, be helpful to her husband. She so charmed the Hungarians by learning their language and wearing their national dress that they gave the royal couple a summer palace outside Budapest. She loved riding, travelling, and herself. Although she was widely agreed to be a beauty, she always worried about her looks. She made an album of the most beautiful women in Europe, but that only reduced her to tears.17 Throughout her life, she exercised fanatically and ate as little as possible. ‘Her waist’, wrote Queen Victoria in her diary, ‘is smaller than anything one can imagine.’18 In 1898, when her anarchist assassin stabbed Elisabeth in the heart, she did not die immediately because her corsets were so tight that she bled only very slowly.
Franz Joseph soldiered on, working methodically through his piles of papers as though, somehow, through sheer hard work and attention to detail, he could stave off chaos and hold his empire together. ‘God help us’, he was fond of saying, ‘if we ever fall into the ways of the Latin races.’19 As the years of his long reign went by, he was nevertheless increasingly in the position of someone riding two ill-matched horses. Hungary, with its long past as an independent kingdom, had always fitted awkwardly under the Habsburg crown. The Hungarian aristocracy and minor nobles who dominated society and politics were highly conscious of their own language (different from almost any other in the world), history, and culture, and deeply proud of their own constitution and laws. In the revolutionary year of 1848–9 they tried, but failed, to make Hungary independent. In 1867 they took advantage of the Austrian Empire’s crushing defeat at the hands of Prussia to negotiate a new arrangement with the emperor, the famous Compromise.
It created a new entity whose name said it all: Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy. It was a partnership between Hungary, which still included Transylvania, Slovakia and Croatia, and the remaining Habsburg territories in the west, which came to be called for convenience Austria and which swept up from the Adriatic and the Alps towards the vanished kingdom of Poland and then eastwards to the Russian border. Each part ran its own affairs with its own parliament, ministers, bureaucracy, law courts, and armed forces. The sole remaining shared activities were foreign affairs and defence as well as the finances to pay for them, each with its own minister who met together as the three common ministers, and the only other remaining link was the emperor himself, or as he was known in Hungary, the king. Otherwise the Dual Monarchy was not so much a compromise as a never-ending negotiation. Delegations nominated by each parliament met once a year to work out any necessary agreements on common tariffs, for example on railways, but, at the insistence of the Hungarians, only communicated in writing to avoid any notion that there was a shared government. Financial and commercial matters came up for renegotiation every ten years and usually caused difficulties.
Of all the major European powers, Austria-Hungary had the poorest mechanisms for sharing information among ministries and coordinating policies. True, the three common ministers met from time to time along with the Prime Ministers from both Hungary and Austria, but while they discussed foreign and defence issues they did not act as an executive. Between the autumn of 1913 and the start of the July crisis in 1914, the Common Ministerial Council, as it was known, met just three times, and then only to talk about relatively trivial matters. Nor did the emperor take charge of overall policy or encourage anyone else to do so; Franz Joseph would speak to his ministers only separately and only concerning their own areas of responsibility. And although he continued his dogged routine of work, he was ageing. He turned eighty in 1910 and his health, robust for so long, was beginning to fail. By the time the war came he was increasingly isolated from the public gaze inside the Schönbrunn palace and reluctant to intervene in disputes among his ministers. The vacuum of leadership meant, among other things, that strong individuals or departments often made policy and in areas outside their own purview.20
The Hungarians were initially delighted with the Compromise and commissioned a new parliament building for Budapest. ‘There must be no place for caution, calculation and thrift,’ said their Prime Minister, and the Hungarian architect took him at his word. The Hungarian parliament buildings, which drew on every architectural style and form of ornamentation from Gothic to Renaissance to baroque, and used up eighty-four pounds of gold in their decoration, were the biggest in the world when they were finished. What went on inside was outsized in another way. Politics was a national sport and the Hungarians played to win, against each
other with biting rhetoric, even challenges to duels, and, when that palled, against Vienna.21 Some of the worst scenes came during a prolonged and bitter crisis between Budapest and Vienna over the joint army.
Successive Hungarian political leaders and their followers demanded a series of measures to make a large part of the Dual Monarchy’s army more Hungarian, with exclusively Hungarian regiments commanded by Hungarian-speaking officers and flying the Hungarian flag. This threatened the efficiency and unity of the army and, as the French military attaché pointed out, there were not in any case enough Hungarian-speaking officers to go round. When Franz Joseph tried to calm the situation in 1903 by issuing an anodyne statement that his armed forces were animated by a spirit of unity and harmony and treated all ethnic groups with respect, he simply threw more fuel the way of the Hungarian nationalists in Budapest. ‘Ethnic’ came out as ‘tribal’ in Hungarian, which was seized upon as a deadly insult.22 The Hungarian parliament was paralysed by filibustering and negotiations between Budapest and Vienna came to a halt. At the end of 1904, when the Hungarian Prime Minister, István Tisza (who was to be in office again in the summer of 1914), tried to move matters forward, the opposition swarmed into the chamber armed with coshes, knuckle dusters and revolvers, smashing the furniture and beating up the parliamentary guards. Although the opposition won the subsequent election it refused to take office until Franz Joseph conceded their demands on the army, which he refused to do. The stand-off ended in 1906 when the emperor threatened to introduce universal suffrage in Hungary and the opposition fell to pieces.
The Hungarians, after all, had their own nationalities problem, one which they had managed to ignore successfully up to this point. Hungarians, or Magyars, as they liked to be called, were only a bare majority within Hungary’s borders but the restricted franchise gave them almost all the seats in parliament. By 1900 national movements – Serb, Rumanian, Croat – were igniting around Hungary, fuelled by this lack of power as well as resentment at government promotion of Hungarian in schools and offices. They were also mirrored by growing nationalist movements elsewhere, both inside Austria-Hungary and around its borders. In 1895 a Congress of Nationalities met in Budapest to demand that Hungary become a multinational state. The Hungarians reacted with alarm and anger. Even the relatively liberal Tisza simply could not accept that there were other nations with legitimate national aspirations within Hungary. In his view Rumanians, except for extremists, were like the peasants on his estate and knew that they needed to work with Hungarians: ‘I know that they are gentle, peaceful, respectful of gentlemen, and grateful for every good word.’23
Throughout the Dual Monarchy, the rising tide of nationalism brought with it endless and insoluble fights about schools, jobs, even street signs. The question on the census asking people to put down their mother tongues became a vital marker of national strength and national groups took out advertisements urging the ‘right’ answers. Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords. Yet such was the force of nationalism that classes which in other countries formed socialist or liberal or conservative parties here split apart on national lines.
Because Austria-Hungary’s population had been so mixed by centuries of history almost every locality had its own nationalist struggles: in Slovenia, Italians against Slovenes, in Galicia, Poles against Ruthenians, and Germans, it seemed, against everyone, whether Italians in the Tyrol or Czechs in Bohemia. In 1895 the Austrian government fell because German speakers objected to parallel Slovene classes in a secondary school; two years later conflict between Czechs and Germans over the use of Czech in government business in Bohemia and Moravia led to violence in the streets and the fall of another Prime Minister; and in 1904 there were violent demonstrations by Germans when an Italian law faculty was established in Innsbruck. New railway stations remained nameless because no one could agree on which language to use. Perhaps it was no accident that it was a Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who was to come up with the notion of the narcissism of small differences. As he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, ‘it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other …’24
‘An air of unreality pervaded everything,’ said Henry Wickham Steed, a British journalist assigned to Vienna. ‘Public attention was fixed on trifles – a squabble at the Opera between a Czech and a German singer, a row in Parliament over the appointment of some obscure official in Bohemia, the attractions of the latest comic opera or the sale of tickets for a charity ball.’25 The younger generation either became bored and cynical about politics or joined new political movements which promised to clean up the mess, by violent means if necessary. Austria-Hungary was being weakened and its international position damaged by the ‘defective solution of the nationality question’, the future Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, Alois von Aehrenthal, wrote to his cousin in 1899. ‘The hereditary defect of the Austrian – pessimism – is already seizing the youth and threatens to stifle every idealistic impulse.’26
National differences led not only to a breakdown of civility in the streets but to increasing stalemate inside the Dual Monarchy’s parliaments. Political parties, divided as they mostly were on linguistic and ethnic lines, were mainly interested in promoting the interests of their own group and in blocking the others. Deputies blew trumpets, rang cowbells, banged gongs, beat on drums and hurled inkpots and books around to silence their opponents. The filibusters became a normal tactic; in one of the most famous a German deputy spoke for twelve straight hours during the struggle to prevent Czech being given equal status with German in Bohemia and Moravia. ‘In our country’, a conservative aristocrat wrote to a friend, ‘an optimist must commit suicide.’27 The government somehow muddled through, increasingly by using its emergency powers. When war came in August 1914, the Austrian parliament had been suspended for several months and was not to meet again until the spring of 1917.
Nationalism also undermined the bureaucracy as appointments became a way for parties to reward their followers. As result the size and costs of the bureaucracy went up enormously. Between 1890 and 1911 there was a 200 per cent increase in the numbers of bureaucrats, most of them new appointments. In Austria alone there were 3 million civil servants for a total population of some 28 million. Even the simplest decisions were wound about with red tape or, in reality, coloured twine, black and yellow for imperial matters, red, white, and green for Hungary, or, when it was annexed, brown and yellow for Bosnia. A single tax payment in Vienna went through the hands of twenty-seven different officials. In the Adriatic province of Dalmatia, a commission set up to report on ways to improve the bureaucracy discovered that the collection of direct taxes cost twice as much as it raised. The commission painted a dispiriting picture of inefficiency and waste throughout the country: while civil servants were expected, for example, to work five to six hours a day, few did even that. In the Foreign Office, a new recruit said he rarely received more than three or four files a day to deal with and no one minded if he came in late and left early. In 1903 the British embassy had to wait for ten months to get an answer about the duty on Canadian whisky. ‘The dilatoriness of this country, if continued in progressive ratio, will soon rival that of Turkey,’ a British diplomat complained to London.28
Not surprisingly, the public tended to describe the bureaucracy as a broken-down old nag but the consequences were far from a joke. The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called Bürokretinismus served further to undermine public confidence in their government. And the costs of the bureaucracy meant, among other things, that there was less money for the armed forces which in any case remained caught up in the endless political struggles. Until 1912, the Hungarian parliament had refused to agree to increased funding or the number of men being conscripted annually unless it got concessions on such matters as th
e language issue in return. It took a crisis in the Balkans on the Dual Monarchy’s doorstep to bring about a modest improvement. Even so, by 1914 Austria-Hungary was spending less on its army than was Britain (which had by far the smallest army of all the powers in Europe). The Dual Monarchy’s total defence budget was well under half of that of Russia, its most formidable enemy.29
Austria-Hungary was by no means the corpse on the Danube, as some in its ally Germany had taken to calling it, but it clearly was sick. Various cures were considered and rejected or found to be unworkable. During the crisis with Hungary over the language issue and the army, the Dual Monarchy’s military drew up plans to use force in Hungary but the emperor refused to contemplate it.30 Hopes of making the bureaucracy truly national and above politics foundered in the face of inertia and entrenched nationalisms. Universal suffrage as a way of linking the masses closer to the crown was tried in Austria but it only produced more voters for the new populist national parties. Or there was Trialism, a new sort of compromise with the South Slavs, a term increasingly being used for the Serb, Slovene and Croat inhabitants of the southern part of the Dual Monarchy as well as those in the Balkans. A South Slav bloc would counterbalance Austria and Hungary and satisfy South Slav nationalist demands. It was rejected out of hand by the Hungarians. For many the last hope was the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, who was relatively young and energetic and undoubtedly full of ideas, largely authoritarian and reactionary ones. Perhaps he could roll back change and make the Dual Monarchy a proper autocracy again with a strong central government. He certainly looked and acted the part of a decisive ruler.
Franz Ferdinand was a tall, handsome man with large expressive eyes and a loud and domineering voice. If his moustache was not quite a match for Wilhelm’s it nevertheless twirled smartly into sharp points. His private life, after the usual youthful indiscretions, was impeccable. He had married for love and was a devoted husband and father. He had an eye for beautiful things and did much to save Austria-Hungary’s architectural heritage. He was intellectually curious and, unlike his uncle the emperor, read the newspapers thoroughly. He was also greedy, demanding, and intolerant. He was known for beating dealers down to get the paintings and furniture he wanted. He was unforgiving with subordinates for even the smallest of mistakes. Among others, he hated Jews, Freemasons and anyone who criticised or challenged the Catholic Church to which he was passionately devoted. He also loathed Hungarians (‘traitors’) and Serbs (‘pigs’). They should, he said frequently, be crushed. There was something excessive about both his pleasures and hatreds. When he hunted he preferred to have the game, great quantities of it, driven towards him as he shot until his guns turned red hot. It was said that he once suddenly demanded that a herd of deer be rounded up and shot all 200 of them as well as one of the beaters by mistake.31