The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The most important legacy of this period in the dynasty’s history was these improved institutional structures that would preserve its rule into the twentieth century. There was estimable progress in other areas too. The Habsburg realms on the whole enjoyed substantial economic growth during this time. Proto-industries bloomed in Bohemia and Upper Austria, often in textiles. The monarchy admittedly missed out on British- and French-style overseas colonization because of its deficient navy. Nonetheless, Trieste grew as the monarchy’s major port, and developed a number of small industries. Transportation networks improved and internal tolls were reduced to promote commerce. Literacy grew, not just in the cities but in the countryside as well. Most advanced were Lombardy and Belgium, urbanized, commercial economies that supplied taxes to far-off Vienna but otherwise remained distant and disconnected. The Danubian domains were mostly rural, with Galicia and Transylvania the most backward. And while the onerous robot was reduced and peasants’ legal rights protected, in many areas the nobility still had great sway. In parts of Hungary, nearly half the land was controlled by just 28 noble families. While this magnate class was becoming somewhat Germanized, it continued to rule over a dizzyingly pluralistic hodge-podge of ethnicities, languages, and even faiths. That pluralism posed few challenges during Maria Theresia’s reign, but already in this time, shoots of more assertive national consciousness were beginning to sprout in some areas such as Bohemia. At Leopold’s death, the monarchy’s population of 26 million people made it the second largest in Europe. Hungary accounted for nearly half that total, with the Bohemian crownlands and the Austrian territories adding another 20 percent each.

  Much of what was positive in these developments can be credited to Maria Theresia’s leadership. With her, the Habsburg dynasty reached an unequaled apogee of good monarchical governance. She savvily wielded the power given to her, from rescuing the monarchy at her reign’s outset, to selecting excellent advisors to manage the task of remedying the monarchy’s problems. It was precisely her gradual, conservative approach that enabled progress in rationalizing administrative structures, strengthening the financial base of her state, and improving the welfare of her subjects. This reformist period, it is true, unleashed forces which the dynasty never mastered. Its compromise path of preserving existing structures while encouraging progressive developments was hazardous, since it antagonized both traditionalists (the most conservative nobles) and liberals (for whom the reforms did not go far enough). Maria Theresia managed this contradiction with greater skill than Joseph did; it was largely because of his impolitic impatience that his reforms engendered so much resistance and had to be rolled back.

  Where posterity has judged Maria Theresia so positively, Joseph has to be rescued from the harshest critiques of his reign. Those critiques brand him as a blinkered despot trying to meld an unwieldy patchwork of realms into a modern unitary state, when in fact they were far too diverse ever to be so unified. He has been accused of sowing the ultimate collapse of the supranational monarchy in the twentieth century by sparking the centrifugal forces of nationalism with his Germanization campaign. Even his emphasis on improving agriculture has been alleged to have retarded the monarchy’s economic development, consigning it to agrarian backwardness in the industrializing nineteenth century. Those charges are exaggerated, but it is undeniable that Joseph tried to do too much too fast. It is also undeniable that his enlightened convictions about equality and greater liberty sat uneasily against his despotic tendencies. It must nonetheless be recognized that however clumsy Joseph’s actual politics may have been, his motivations (as he himself suggested) were often good. He did want to create a state that would rule more effectively in the best interests of his subjects, at least as those in power identified those interests. He cannot fairly be faulted for being an idealist, though he can be criticized for his dogmatism and lack of political finesse. The misfortune for himself and for the future of the dynasty was that he recognized his mistakes too late, since after Leopold’s brief rule, the vital reformist impetus was lost for generations.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Revolution and reaction (1792–1848)

  “There are new ideas around, that I cannot, and never shall, approve of,” Franz [Francis] I declared to schoolteachers in 1821. “Stay away from these and keep to what you know.” This was not advice but an order. “Who serves me,” he said, “must teach what I command. He who cannot do that, or comes along with new ideas, can leave—or I will remove him.”1 This quotation illuminates the deeply conservative core of Franz’s character. He was suspicious of new ideas, jealous of his status and authority, and demanded unthinking obedience. This was the man who confronted the immense turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, clinging to old notions as tightly as he could, trying to remain impervious to the flood of change. As head of the most august dynasty in Europe, Franz has come to symbolize Habsburg hostility to revolutionary popular sovereignty, and the rejection of his three predecessors’ reformist spirit.

  He was not always such a reactionary. In his younger years he supported agricultural reform, for example. But the upheaval of the Revolution, and the execution of his aunt and her husband the king, horrified him. While his desire to protect his own domains and his authority was understandable, his biggest mistake came after France was finally defeated. After 1815 together with his chief minister Metternich he tried to rewind history as if the Revolution had never happened. The system Metternich created to restore order in Austria and Europe did preserve Habsburg authority, including for Franz’s feeble-minded son and successor Ferdinand I. Yet because Franz was trapped by his intellectual limitations and excessive attachment to tradition, he failed to see that the forces of change the Revolution had unleashed were a genie that could not be put back in the bottle. In their stubborn resistance to “new ideas,” Franz and Metternich ossified the dynasty.

  Franz I (II) (1768–1835)

  Franz has dual Roman numerals because he was the second so-named emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but the first of Austria. One of the defining characteristics of his reign—as for so many Habsburgs—was tenacity. His first two decades on the throne were consumed by wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, wars he usually lost until the final triumph. And though he outlasted Napoleon, in all other regards Franz was too small a man for his position. He was described by an observer at the Congress of Vienna as physically slight, as “broken and old” (this when he was in his later 40s), “with a round back and knees bent inward.” This observer, an emissary from the Republic of Geneva, went on to say that Franz seemed very shy and awkward, not particularly intelligent, that, in short, “he resembled more a petty bourgeois from a provincial city than a sovereign.”2 This impression is supported by Friedrich von Amerling’s 1832 portrait of Franz, in which he looks like a small-time clerk incongruously swathed in royal robes, staring with a strange mixture of arrogance and suspicion at the viewer. Though he was not dumb, he was definitely narrow-minded. His younger brothers Karl and Johann surpassed him in intellectual ability, for which he always resented them. His uncle Joseph and his father Leopold observed that despite the enlightened education they tried to give him, Franz remained rather lethargic.

  His ruling principles, though reactionary, were not despotic. For example, he believed in the rule of law, and sponsored important reforms of the legal code in 1803 and 1811. His convictions always returned to the primacy of royal power, which drove a centralizing attitude in his government, and explain his consistent emphasis on obedience rather than innovation. That he was not without some political shrewdness is shown by the mere fact of his survival—and by his selection of Metternich as his chief minister. And while in so many ways he was inadequate as a ruler, Franz (Figure 10.1) did have his positive qualities. One of the most surprising was how deeply his subjects loved him. Perhaps in accordance with some bourgeois streak in his character, he knew how to relate to common people. In Vienna he held regular open-door sessions where anyone
could come and tell him about their problems, and during the city’s cholera epidemic in 1831, he went around visiting hospitals rather than fleeing the city. He often spoke in Viennese dialect and had an acerbic sense of humor. He was also known to be generous with those in need while he himself lived a somewhat modest lifestyle, avoiding lavish expenditure at court. He was a fairly hard worker, a serious collector of art and books, and he traveled widely around his dominions. Not only his people but his four wives had great affection for him, which he sincerely reciprocated.

  That the progressive development of the monarchy during his predecessors’ reigns ended so abruptly in Franz’s time can be explained in part by his own political inexperience in responding to the French Revolution. It was only a few weeks after Franz succeeded to the throne in March 1792, when he was 23 years old, that conflict broke out with revolutionary France. The subsequent series of wars involved shifting coalitions of Prussia, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia against France; Austria was the longest-standing opponent on the continent and fought in all the major conflicts. Though the revolution certainly posed a threat to established monarchical regimes, Franz’s characteristically unsubtle response was categorical hostility, exacerbated by the executions of Louis XVI and his aunt Marie Antoinette in 1793. His and his ministers’ aims were nothing less than to suppress the revolution and return to the status quo ante. Thus Austria became not just a polity in the struggle, but an ideological symbol: it represented the resistance of the old aristocratic order against Jacobinism.

  FIGURE 10.1 Franz I, by Friedrich von Amerling (1832). In the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

  In both the military and ideological campaigns, the Habsburgs were repeatedly thwarted by Austrian armies’ battlefield losses. Already at Valmy in September 1792 French forces repelled a poorly commanded Prussian/Austrian force. France took Belgium and parts of the Rhineland in 1794, and Prussia signed a separate peace in 1795. Franz participated in the planning of some of the Austrian assaults, but demonstrated that he was no military man. Archduke Karl, the Habsburgs’ best military commander, won some victories against French armies, but could not compete with the rapid rise of Napoleon after 1796. In that year the Corsican genius won impressive victories in Italy, pushing the Austrians out of Lombardy, and later captured the key Austrian fortress of Mantua. This led to the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, by which Franz had to surrender Belgium and parts of Italy, but gained Venice and its territories in Istria and Dalmatia. Campo Formio was not a decisive setback for the Habsburgs, and Franz just bided his time until the next attack. The opportunity came in 1799 with Napoleon’s misadventure in Egypt. The War of the Second Coalition proved no more successful than the previous one for Austria. In 1800 Austrian armies were again defeated by the French at Marengo and Hohenlinden, which led to the treaty of Lunéville, wherein Franz had to acknowledge French gains in Italy and possession of the Rhineland. All during this first decade of war the Habsburg monarchy was in serious financial trouble. It amassed huge debts, and depended on vital subsidies from the British for the war effort.

  Just as Franz was committed to combating the revolution abroad, so he and his coterie of conservative ministers were determined to stamp out any stirrings of revolt at home. Their campaign took the form of heavy police surveillance and censorship that clamped down on intellectual and political life in the monarchy. Newspapers and journals were shut down and groups of scholars and intellectuals were broken up. Franz evinced a particular distrust of the masons by closing a number of their lodges. Fearful that the French example might stir up the peasantry to press for a complete abolition of feudal agricultural obligations, Franz ditched even some of his own ideas on reducing the burden of the robot. This crackdown was measured and never became outright tyranny. Franz and his advisors did not arbitrarily violate laws in order to root out revolutionary sentiment. There were relatively few political prisoners, punishments such as executions were infrequent, and jail terms were usually not cruel. The reaction might have been harsher but for the fact that there was not widespread revolutionary sentiment in the monarchy’s realms. Most nobles understandably opposed the Revolution. Though there was some sympathy for French liberal ideas among the monarchy’s educated classes, the execution of the French king and queen appalled many. All in all, the Revolution so overturned the existing social order that even most liberals within the Austrian monarchy viewed it as too extreme. It was thus not too difficult for Franz’s regime to suppress ferment among the lower classes, and retain the firm partnership with the nobility both to resist revolution and later to construct the postwar order.

  One major casualty of the wars against France was German unity. There was for a time in the years right around 1800 a wave of German patriotism that the Habsburgs tried to attach to Franz. That enthusiasm for German solidarity did not translate into political cooperation among the princes, however; the Empire never managed to cohere in the war against France because of many competing interests. Besides the rivalry between Austria and Prussia, many of the other German states such as Bavaria and Württemberg veered off into France’s orbit, seeing Napoleon as their protector against the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Moreover, Austria’s repeated losses to the French convinced many German rulers that the Habsburgs could neither lead nor protect them. Franz in any case paid relatively little attention to the Empire. Like his predecessors, he consistently neglected it in favor of his own dynastic interests. Thus after Lunéville Napoleon and his foreign minister Talleyrand were at least as influential in German affairs as were any of the German dynasties.

  Several events then provoked the final, flailing expiration of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1804 Napoleon was declared emperor of France, which was a terrible affront to Franz, who could not abide that this Corsican upstart would place himself on a level equal to the prestige of the Habsburgs. Franz was also justifiably worried that Napoleon would either take the German imperial title or dissolve the German empire, which would then leave the Habsburgs actually inferior in rank. Thus in August 1804 Franz proclaimed an Austrian Empire, giving himself an ambitious new title without changing much else about his realms. In fact, in his proclamation, Franz explicitly recognized that he ruled over several states, and promised that he would not change any of their constitutions. The legality of this unilateral proclamation was questionable, but it received solid support from the aristocracy and the rest of his subjects, even in Hungary. Franz’s assumption of a new imperial title was a naked play for dynastic honor, to ensure that he would remain an emperor regardless of what Bonaparte called himself.

  This new Austrian Empire did not fare well in fresh hostilities against Napoleon, the War of the Third Coalition (which also included Britain and Russia) that started in 1805. After a crushing victory over Austria at Ulm in October 1805, Napoleon advanced on Vienna and occupied it in November. The royal family fled, and Napoleon made his headquarters at Schönbrunn. Archduke Karl brought round an army from Italy, and linked up with Russian troops under Kutuzov. They met Napoleon in battle at Austerlitz in December 1805, which became one of Austria’s worst defeats. The terms of the subsequent treaty of Pressburg were onerous: Napoleon’s allies Bavaria and Württemberg were raised to the status of kingdoms and received a number of Habsburg possessions such as Tirol and Vorarlberg. Franz also lost Venice and the Adriatic territories he had gained in 1797. Together with the French occupation of Vienna, this was a terrible humiliation. It was compounded in July of 1806 when 16 imperial princes organized into the new Confederation of the Rhine under Napoleon’s protection, and Napoleon demanded that the imperial crown be delivered to him. This for Franz was the writing on the wall; rather than let Napoleon seize the German imperial title, Franz decided to end the Empire altogether. Thus on 1 August Franz declared the Holy Roman Empire dead at the age of 1006. This act demonstrated a streak of realism on Franz’s part. He knew that he could not fulfill his duties to defend the title nor the Empi
re from Napoleon. He also desperately needed peace, and felt that he had to focus on the interests of his Hereditary Lands. Though he did relinquish the imperial title held by his family for most of the preceding 400 years, he did not relinquish the symbolism: he moved all the old imperial relics and regalia to Vienna, to the seat of the new dynastic empire.

  In the years after Austerlitz, there was a halting move toward reforms in the Austrian regime. Much of the impetus came from Franz’s brothers Karl, who instituted some military improvements, and Johann, who created nationally based militias within the army as part of a broader effort to foment an Austro-German patriotism in support of the monarchy. There was also a campaign by the foreign minister Stadion to relax censorship and liberalize slightly as part of rallying popular support. There were other pressing problems, such as the monarchy’s disastrous financial state, but these reforms remained incomplete because Franz himself never strongly backed them. He was actively suspicious of his brothers’ efforts. As Napoleon’s war in the Iberian Peninsula heated up in 1808, it became clear to Franz and his brothers that another fight between Austria and France was coming. Prussia and Russia would not join, so Austria ended up fighting alone, albeit with British financial assistance. The conflict proved short and disheartening. Though Karl did inflict a rare battlefield defeat on Napoleon at Aspern in May 1809, his cautious tactics failed to capitalize, and Napoleon then won a hard-fought victory at Wagram six weeks later. Franz personally watched this battle from the sidelines, and left the world a reminder of his sodden phlegmatism when, as Austria’s defeat became clear, he supposedly remarked, “Now we can just go home.”3