by Mike Rapport
However, the first triumph of the reaction within the empire would come not in Vienna but in Galicia. While Polish nationalism failed in Poznania because it collided with German nationalism backed by Prussian military might, in Galicia it ran into the opposition of the peasantry, who, in the eastern part in particular, were Ukrainian (then called Ruthenians) and had very good reasons to support the Emperor. The gentry who led the Polish patriotic movement were impaled on the dangerously sharp horns of a menacing dilemma: should they sacrifice their social interests to their national cause by abolishing serfdom, thereby securing peasant support, or should they repress the urges of romantic nationalism and protect their masterly sway? When news of the Viennese revolution reached Lwów, the provincial capital, a petition was signed on 19 March by twelve thousand people, mostly Poles, but also Jews and some Ukrainian intellectuals, demanding provincial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian governor, Franz Stadion, who had already tried to stem the tide of protest by abolishing censorship and permitting a National Guard, allowed the Poles to present the petition to the Emperor. The delegation travelled via Kraków, where a Citizens’ Committee was formed, and offered to speak for the city when they met Ferdinand. Bearing the red-and-white Polish flag, the deputation finally reached Vienna, where it received a rapturous welcome from the population, still drunk with the heady spirit of revolutionary fraternity. Austrian newspapers saluted the prospect of the Habsburg monarchy taking the lead in restoring Polish freedom and, like Prussian liberals, excitedly anticipated war with Russia. The audience with Ferdinand took place on 6 April, when the delegates expressed their hope that with Galician autonomy Austria would spearhead the reconstruction of an independent Poland.
Meanwhile, Democratic Society agents had been arriving in Kraków: by 23 April the city teemed with twelve hundred fresh revolutionaries, who established newspapers, led patriotic marches and pressured the more staid Citizens’ Committee, which was cajoled into accepting radical members and changing its name to ‘National’. The surge of radical energy into the province thoroughly alarmed most of the local Polish gentry, who were still shaken by the experience of being put to the scythe at the hands of the Ukrainian peasantry in 1846. The raw memories of that year ensured that the landlords were deeply reluctant to follow the Polish democrats in their call for revolution. It was the question of serfdom - and the innate loyalty of the peasantry to the Emperor - which hamstrung the Polish revolution in Galicia from the start. While all the exiles, moderate and democratic alike, urged the gentry to emancipate their serfs, the Galician landlords feared that such appeals would merely prod the peasants into revolt. The National Committee in Kraków declared Easter Sunday, 23 April, to be ‘Emancipation Day’. Yet the inability of the democrats to impose their programme on the Galician elites allowed the Austrian authorities to split the Poles, to gather their own strength and to undercut the revolutionaries. It was probably with some relief that the more conservative Poles had received the orders of the Austrian authorities disarming the National Guard in Lwów and reinforcing the military presence in Galicia. Then Stadion played Austria’s ace: pre-emptive emancipation. On 17 April the Viennese court, seeking to shore up its crumbling authority, gave the governor permission to free the serfs in Galicia. On 22 April - the day before the Poles’ own deadline - Stadion, in the name of good Emperor Ferdinand, announced emancipation as of 15 May, with compensation for the landlords. With a few neatly penned words, Stadion had ensured that the Galician peasants would remain loyal to the Emperor and immune to the blandishments of Polish democrats, whose appeals to the consciences of the landlords had so signally failed.
After the reform came the reaction: tensions in Kraków and Lwów now reached breaking point. In the former, the Austrian government’s commissioner narrowly escaped being lynched on Easter Sunday, and three days later the garrison clashed with Polish democrats when it seized caches of pikes and lances. Barricades were thrown up in the streets and the four thousand troops withdrew into the castle. From there the Austrian cannon roared for two hours, bombarding the city into submission: twenty-eight Poles and eight Austrians had been killed. On 27 April, the National Committee was disbanded and the exiles were expelled. The Austrians had successfully carried out the first counter-attack against the 1848 revolutions.65
In eastern Galicia, Stadion ruthlessly exploited the tensions between the Ukrainians and the Poles, whose ethnic division coincided with a social chasm, since the former tended to be peasants, the latter their landlords. While always suspicious of Austrian petty officialdom, the Ukrainians had traditionally regarded the distant Emperor as their benign protector against the depredations of their masters. This was why Stadion’s imperial decree emancipating the peasantry was such a masterstroke. He not only harnessed the social grievances of the serfs but was able to play the incipient Ukrainian national movement off against the Polish patriots. Within a week of the suppression of Kraków, Stadion allowed the first meeting of a Supreme Ruthenian Council to take place in Saint George’s Cathedral in Lwów (Lviv in Ukrainian). One of its demands was for a separate Ukrainian administration, which would undermine Polish authority in Galicia. The council rapidly established local branches across the province (there were forty-three by October) and on 15 May the first Ukrainian periodical appeared, with Stadion’s blessing, selling four thousand copies a week throughout the year; it was soon joined by six others. These were significant developments for the future, since they gave Ukrainian national consciousness a formal voice. It was also through the councils that the peasantry got their first taste of politics and learned a sense of national identity: peasants accounted for a third of the membership in some places. Prior to 1848, Ukrainian peasants expressed their grievances against their landlords primarily in social terms, appealing to the good Emperor in Vienna for his protection. Now, they began to express their aspirations in national terms: as a peasant who attended one of the local councils explained, he had learned that ‘the Ruthenian people is eminent, great and powerful, that it is the original inhabitant and numerous in Galicia, that, although until now we have been scorned and humiliated, this is a Ruthenian land and more of us Ruthenians live here than Poles’.66 The fraught tensions between Polish landlords and Ukrainian peasants posed the severest limitations on the Polish national movement in Galicia. The fearful memories of 1846 explain why even Polish democrats were so reluctant to arm the peasants in their national cause.67
III
Appeals to the loyalties of the subject peoples of the empire would prove to be particularly effective in what would turn out to be the monarchy’s fiercest battleground: Hungary. There, the constitutional concessions wrested from Vienna in the March revolution were given concrete, legislative form in the ‘April Laws’. Late in March the Austrian government had tried to claw back some of its power over Hungary by watering down its earlier promises, but it was powerless to resist Kossuth’s thundering oratory in the Diet, backed by a determined show of force by a crowd of twenty thousand in Pest on 27-30 March, led by the city’s Committee of Public Safety. Sandor Petőfi kept the agitation on the boil with his own fiery speeches and radical poetry: the day of judgement, he wrote, was approaching for all kings, and the Habsburg monarchy was a tree whose fruit rotted on the branch. The streets resounded with calls of ‘We don’t want a German government!’ and even ‘Long live the republic!’68 Unable to impose its authority by force, Vienna once again yielded. It was a victory for both the Hungarian Diet and the Budapest radicals - an irresistible alliance of parliament and street.
The thirty-one April Laws gave Hungary independence within the Empire. A Habsburg would remain as King of Hungary, with the right to approve and veto laws, but his Hungarian cabinet would sit in Budapest. Ministers would be responsible to the new Hungarian parliament, which was to be elected on a much wider franchise than the old aristocratic Diet, but women, Jews and people who did not meet the property, residence and occupational qualifications - mostly wage-earners and
landless peasants - were excluded. In all, a quarter of all adult males received the right to vote. The fiscal privileges of the nobility were abolished and all citizens were guaranteed civil liberties. The laws also incorporated the abolition of both serfdom and the tithe. There were, however, some issues that were ominous for the future of Austro-Hungarian relations: the King alone commissioned army officers and could choose to send Hungarian army units abroad (meaning outside Hungary). There was also the fraught question of transferring the Military Frontier region, which hitherto had been under the direct control of the Austrian council of war, to the authority of Hungary’s civilian government. This was a sensitive issue, because the border region was a vital source of some of the monarchy’s finest soldiers - the Croats and the Serbs. After much cajoling, the court conceded, but only on condition that the Austrian government retained control of the military there and appointed the ban (viceroy). This, at last, was the most the Hungarians could force from the Habsburgs.69 The old Magyar Diet was dissolved on 11 April in advance of elections to the new National Assembly.
In celebration, the Hungarian colours were draped from windows of houses everywhere and, while all citizens wore the national cockade, radicals were distinguishable by the addition of huge red feathers. As a mark of equality, everyone now carried swords, once a symbol of noble status: Petőfi’s was so enormous that his friends - perhaps only half-jokingly - called it ‘the guillotine’.70 Yet, although the April Laws fell short of their March programme, the radical leaders were willing to submit to the new, legally constituted authorities; the Committee of Public Safety disbanded voluntarily on 15 April. This support was conditional, however. When on 14 April Batthyány’s ministers arrived in Budapest and stepped off the already de rigueur steamer, they were greeted by the radical spokesman Pál Vasvári, who in front of a huge crowd reminded the new government that the people of Budapest ‘now place the power of the revolution in your hands . . . You will have to account for your actions to a powerful reborn nation.’71
It seemed that the Hungarian revolution was over and that the way was open to a peaceful, constitutional era of reform. But it was not to be. Among the problems that the liberal regime faced were the demands of the national minorities within Hungary: Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. The relationships between Magyars and the rest would become festering wounds, weaknesses that would be cannily exploited by Vienna. On 25 April the Emperor had made a promise that gave the non-Magyar minorities cause to be loyal to the dynasty: ‘All peoples of the Monarchy are guaranteed the inviolability of their nationality and language.’ While vague, it certainly was more than anything promulgated by the April Laws, which offered no such commitment. Liberal Hungarian nationalism was rooted in a powerful sense that the nation grew from rich Magyar soil. It assumed that Hungary would include all the historic lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, encompassing such territories as Slovakia, Transylvania and the Military Frontier. It also expected that the various ethnic groups thus enveloped would be content to live within a state that offered all citizens equal rights and that they would simply assimilate into the liberal order, in which, of course, the Magyars would dominate. On 8 April Kossuth admonished a Serb delegation by saying that ‘the true meaning of freedom is that it recognises the inhabitants of the fatherland only as a whole, and not as castes or privileged groups, and that it extends the blessings of collective liberty to all; without distinction of language or religion’. 72 Yet he added that the ‘unity’ of the kingdom made it necessary for the official language to be Magyar. For Hungarian liberals, the unity of the historic lands meant denying the separate national identities of the non-Magyars, while offering to them their rights as individual citizens. ‘I shall never recognize more than one nation and nationality, the Magyar, under the Holy Crown of Hungary,’ Kossuth had declared in December 1847.73 From this perspective, national demands by the other ethnic groups of Hungary were ‘reactionary’, but they, in turn, could look to Palacký’s vision of a confederation of equal nations within the protective shell of the Habsburg monarchy.
Among the first to stake their claims were the Slovaks, who lived entirely within the Kingdom of Hungary and were backed by Czech nationalists, who saw them as fellow countrymen. This relationship was itself problematic. Some older Slovak patriots, such as the poet Jan Kollár, believed that the two peoples should draw closer together, with the Slovaks adopting Czech as their own language. A younger generation disagreed. They were led by the writer L’udovít Štúr, who had worked hard to promote Slovak as a literary language in its own right. The small Slovak national movement held its first meeting on 28 March and presented its demands to the Hungarian government, asking only that Slovak be taught in schools and used as an official language in Slovakia, and that the Slovak colours be displayed alongside the Hungarian. The government rejected these modest demands out of hand as a ‘manifestation of pan-Slavic activity’. Understanding that the Slovak peasants still cared little for questions of nationality, Štúr and his associates organised a larger meeting at Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš in May, drafting a more comprehensive programme, including the right for peasants to own land and greater political autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary. Budapest reacted by ordering the arrest of three Slovak leaders, including Štúr, who fled to Prague. Slovak volunteers would later join the Habsburg campaigns against Hungary, supporting the Austrians with a guerrilla war, but they failed to raise the peasantry, who listened quizzically to the patriotic appeals of Slovak nationalists.
The Romanians posed a far greater challenge to the Magyars. The 2.5 million Romanians who lived in Transylvania, in Bukovina to the north and in the Banat to the south, had strong commercial and cultural ties with those who lived beyond the frontier, in the Romanian Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were theoretically under Turkish sovereignty but were actually governed by the restrictive ‘Organic Statutes’ imposed by Tsar Nicholas I in 1832. The Grand Principality of Transylvania had long enjoyed a separate status within the Habsburg Empire: it had its own governor in Kolozsvár (or Kluj-Napoca in Romanian), its own chancellery in Vienna and a diet - albeit one dominated by the Magyar landlords. The nucleus of an army existed in the form of the Romanian border regiments, but these were drawn customarily from ethnic Magyars known as Székelys. Romanians were divided religiously between Uniate Catholics, who fell under the authority of the Hungarian bishops, and Orthodox Christians, who were subject to the Serb Orthodox hierarchy. As conditions for the union of Transylvania with Hungary, Romanian nationalists demanded, at the very least, a separate status for their two churches and legal recognition of their language and culture. Yet a more radical form of Romanian nationalism had been fostered by contacts and the cross-border smuggling of books and pamphlets among Romanian intellectuals, schoolteachers, students and journalists in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. In May 1848 a Banat priest named Daniel Roth published a tract that envisaged a new Romanian kingdom based on ‘Dacia’, an old province of the Roman Empire.74 In Transylvania the idea of Romanian national unity naturally meant rejection of the union with Hungary altogether, while in the principalities it meant shaking off Russian dominance and Turkish suzerainty.
At first, Magyars and Romanians alike in Transylvania enthusiastically celebrated the March revolution. The only people who felt threatened were the Hungarian and Saxon (ethnic German) magnates who feared for their privileges. The Magyar gentry of Transylvania embraced the idea of full union with the Hungarian kingdom, but they bitterly resented the Hungarian Diet’s abolition of serfdom. As most Romanians in Transylvania were peasants, the nobles fretted that Romanian nationalists might stoke up their hatred against the Magyars. Otherwise, in the revolutionary fraternity of the March days, Transylvanian Romanians went so far as to agree that union with Hungary would be a step in the right direction, because it would bind them more closely to their co-nationals in the Banat. The editor of the influential Gazeta de Transilvania, George Bariţiu, argued that un
ion with Hungary could be fruitful if the Romanians were allowed to use their own language in local government, church and education, while establishing cultural organisations that would lay firm foundations for their own sense of national identity.75
Yet therein lay the rub, for it ran counter to the vision of Magyar liberals, who denied the legitimacy of such national aspirations within Hungary. An article in the organ of the Budapest radical movement, March Fifteenth, praised the Romanians for being different from the Russians and remarked that their language was beautiful, though it needed work to become as pleasant as Italian. It went on to argue implausibly that the Romanians ‘would consider it an honour to be allowed to become Magyars’.76 It was not long before Romanian nationalists woke up to the fact that it would be tough to fulfil their own dreams of nationhood in union with the Hungarians. As early as 24 March, the radical lawyer Simion Bărnuţiu told his countrymen that, instead of trusting to Magyar goodwill, the Romanian patriots should hold a congress that would draw up a national programme - and it must include representatives of the peasantry.