The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Karl then made a truce without Franz’s approval—and Franz blamed the disastrous war on his brothers and Stadion, who were all dismissed. Vienna was again occupied by French troops, and the Habsburgs were forced into another humiliating peace. They surrendered parts of Upper Austria and Salzburg to Bavaria, and parts of Galicia to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Parts of Carinthia, Carniola, and all of Dalmatia went to Napoleon’s newly created Adriatic puppet state known as the Illyrian Provinces. Austria was thereby dismembered, losing its access to the sea. There was even talk of Napoleon’s compelling Franz to abdicate, though such did not come to pass. Austria was reduced to a French satellite, its army forcibly limited to 150,000. Worst of all for Franz, he had to marry his daughter Marie-Louise to Napoleon to seal the armistice.

  In the government shakeup resultant to this treaty, Franz recalled his ambassador in Paris to become his new foreign minister. This was Klemens von Metternich, the man who would become synonymous with the next 40 years of Habsburg history. Praised and reviled since his own time, Metternich was an unashamed reactionary, a skilled diplomat, an unrepentant philanderer, and a haughty political puppetmaster. As a young man he had been imbued with Enlightenment ideas, but came to privilege reason primarily as it would serve the state and the nobility. He therefore rejected the ideas of revolution and equality because they would undermine the existing social order and the monarchy’s exercise of power. He was no crude despot, since he believed a monarch should uphold laws, nor did he ever supplant Franz as the actual ruler of the Habsburg monarchy. He was also not quite as sharp as he considered himself, and as the years went on he betrayed an inability to reexamine his positions in the light of changing circumstances. His immediate goals in 1809 were to win the monarchy a period of peace during which it could rebuild, and then resume the battle against the French menace. His strategy was not to mobilize popular energy—as the Revolution had done, and even as Archduke Johann had suggested—but to rely on slippery statecraft and the rock-solid support of the aristocracy.

  Franz was persuaded by Metternich’s approach, and the two formed a remarkable working relationship. That relationship was not free from disagreements, and Metternich never had uncontested control in either foreign or, much less, in domestic policy. But Franz’s trust of his most famous minister was rooted in their deep, shared conservatism. Metternich expressed his vision in this summary he wrote for Franz: “Your Majesty is the central point, the only true, surviving representative of an old order of things built upon an eternal, unchangeable law. In this irreplaceable role, all eyes are directed at your highest Majesty.”4 To preserve this central role for the dynasty and Austria, Metternich cannily pulled many strings at home and abroad. Domestically, he limited free speech rights, kept personal control of the secret police, and created a number of central governing ministries that would tie the various realms, including Hungary, closer to Vienna. Internationally, he stitched a web of diplomacy that made Austria, weak as it was after its string of defeats and financial crises, pivotal in the final alliance against Napoleon. After 1809 Franz wanted to stay out of war. When in Metternich’s view the time came for Austria once again to prepare for combat, he had to bring Franz around. His means for doing so included turning Franz against his own empress, who was strongly opposed to renewed war. Metternich’s surprisingly successful strategy ensured that in accomplishing Napoleon’s defeat, and then in engineering the whole postwar order, the Habsburgs became the crux of the European balance of power.

  As Austria nursed its wounds after Wagram, Metternich arranged for a rather loose alliance with France. This meant that some 30,000 Austrian soldiers took part in Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Russia in 1812, although the Austrians rarely engaged the Russians. In 1813 the Sixth Coalition formed, bringing together Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Britain, Spain, and Portugal—Austria was absent until Metternich decided that the time was right to cut the French alliance and turn on Napoleon. When Austria reentered the war against France in August 1813, it was suddenly the leader of the whole coalition, with Prince Karl Schwarzenberg the senior commander of the armies and Metternich heading the diplomatic efforts. Franz joined his counterparts Tsar Aleksandr I of Russia and King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in the camp outside Leipzig to watch the so-called Battle of Nations in October 1813, in which Napoleon was soundly defeated. The allied forces then marched on Paris, taking it in March 1814. Napoleon abdicated in April. Austria’s rather improbable leadership in the whole effort was confirmed by Vienna becoming the site of the famous congress to rearrange Europe’s chess pieces after the war.

  In the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna, amidst all the balls, intrigues and assorted frivolity, Metternich managed to get most of what he wanted. The question is whether what he wanted was really the best thing for the monarchy in the long term. The goal that he and Franz agreed upon was as far as possible to restore the European order as it had been before the Revolution. This meant that prerevolutionary leaders had to be put back in possession of their former principalities, which in turn would mostly keep to their earlier borders. The whole project was designed to maintain a finely calibrated balance of power. Thus France was not too harshly punished. Prussia was rewarded with a chunk of Saxon territory—but an independent Saxony remained. The problem of Prussian ambitions in Germany was also dealt with by creating the new German Confederation, in which Austria would retain nominal leadership while Prussia’s influence nonetheless grew. A new Polish state was constituted, though it became a Russian satellite. The Habsburgs themselves had to give up their old lands in Belgium, but instead gained most of Venice’s former territory in the Adriatic as well as other parts of Italy. Those changes made the monarchy at last territorially contiguous, though only marginally more defensible. Metternich did not unduly press for Austrian territorial gains because one of his principles was that Austria should be seen as neither too powerful, nor as too weak.

  In hindsight, Metternich’s achievements seem much less impressive. The monarchy’s new position as the dominant Italian power weakened its weight in Germany and set the stage for repeated problems responding to growing national feelings in Italy. Further, Metternich’s and Franz’s idea of turning back the clock was only a partial solution. On the one hand, it was reasonable that the pre-1790 European order would be reassembled, since it was neither possible nor in accordance with dynastic rulers’ interests to engineer a new sociopolitical system on the basis of the French Revolution’s transformations. However, where Franz and Metternich failed was that they preferred to ignore the ripple effects of those transformations, including liberalism and nationalism. The mistake the Habsburg dynasty made was to try to suppress rather than harness the century’s political, social, and cultural changes.

  The governance system credited to Metternich, which applied both internationally and domestically in the decades after 1815, gradually broke down as the years went by. Internationally, his vision was for Austria to work in concert with the other great powers to combat revolution, nationalism, and liberal stirrings more generally. This was the motivation behind the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which clamped down on universities and ratcheted up censorship in German-speaking Europe in an attempt to neutralize patriotic feelings. Metternich and Franz feared nationalism because of its inherent claims for popular sovereignty, which posed a threat not just to monarchy, but especially to supranational dynasties such as the Habsburgs. The Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia was supposed to keep up the fight against revolution, hence military action to suppress revolts in Naples and Piedmont in the early 1820s. After 1825 in particular, Austria formed a closer relationship with Russia because Franz and Nikolai [Nicholas] I shared an abhorrence of popular revolt. Contrary to the view of Metternich as a simple reactionary, he actually advocated reforms in places like Naples so that they would have a professional bureaucracy and a more efficient, equitable legal system, as Austrian dependencies like Lombardy had. Thus though Austrian rule in Italy was unquestionably re
pressive, its territories were the best governed in the whole peninsula.

  Domestically, the last 20 years of Franz’s rule were peaceful, a period known as the complacent Austrian Biedermeier. Indeed it was too complacent: while theses of political rights and more participatory government percolated among the growing middle class in much of western Europe, Franz and Metternich remained immobile, and in many ways the monarchy’s ruling system stagnated. Franz insisted that his was a government of laws that applied just as well to him as to everyone else, regardless of social class. Nonetheless, the system that evolved incarnated the conservative ideal. It was a highly paternalistic governing arrangement in which a monarch with greater centralized power relied on a loyal and efficient bureaucracy to rule over a grateful and quiescent populace. This was a time of pervasive though not especially invasive police surveillance. Censorship constrained the University of Vienna, which was not as intellectually vital as universities elsewhere in German-speaking Europe. The minister of police, Sedlnitzky, targeted any documents or even artworks that put too much emphasis on words such as “constitution” or “freedom.”

  Some reforms were introduced, such as the establishment of the Austrian National Bank in 1816, which helped stabilize finances, and the continued expansion of education, including compulsory free primary schooling for girls. The provincial diets’ powers were preserved but only in a limited fashion; they could raise taxes but not veto Franz’s demands for funds, and so their sovereign ignored them as best he could. Franz’s government was often rather listless and inefficient. He would commission reports but put off reading them, so decisions were postponed and ministerial competencies confused. Little was done to improve the organization of the military, which remained chronically under-funded. This meant that Austria routinely had shortages of soldiers and could not keep up its defense commitments, which undermined its status as a great power. Though Habsburg government resisted adaption to changing circumstances, it cannot be criticized for being unpopular, since most of Franz’s subjects respected his regime and revered him personally.

  While Franz and Metternich in many ways wanted to return the monarchy to 1790, after 1815 economic change far outpaced the political. The years up to 1848 saw much wider industrialization in the monarchy, above all in Austria and Bohemia, since Hungary remained overwhelmingly agricultural. The Habsburgs’ realm as a whole lagged somewhat behind lands further west, but individual territories developed quite vibrantly, particularly Lombardy and Bohemia. Steam engines came into wider use around 1820, and the flourishing textile industry in Bohemia was fully mechanized by about 1840. Mining was important in Bohemia, Moravia, Styria, and Upper Austria; Bohemia alone accounted for 50 percent of the monarchy’s coal. Iron production also grew in many of these same areas. The first railway on Habsburg territory was opened between Linz and České Budějovice in 1832, and one between Vienna and Olomouc in 1836. The railways and canals—such as that linking the Danube to the Vltava to the Elbe—gave Bohemian and Moravian industries greater access to distant markets. Steam navigation came to the Danube in 1831. Transportation improvements also helped Hungarian agricultural exports, which expanded rapidly. Sugar refining grew in Hungary and elsewhere. The banking sector also expanded, led by the Rothschilds and a few other houses. Franz took an active interest in many of these economic developments, and sought to encourage more growth as with road and rail expansion.

  This robust economic growth was unavoidably attended by important social changes. The population increased significantly, with the monarchy reaching a total of nearly 34 million inhabitants by 1848. Vienna had some 360,000 people in that decade, Prague 115,000. The Habsburg realms remained a dizzyingly complex patchwork of peoples and near-feudal conditions in some rural areas. A traveler to Vienna in the early 1800s was amazed by the diversity of peoples he saw there—Hungarians, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Wallachians, Moldavians, Greeks, and Turks—unlike any city further west.5 There was nonetheless the slow but steady growth of a bourgeoisie, which often had German as their main language. Some of them were wealthy capitalists, some were middle-class functionaries. While most bourgeois remained loyal to the regime, many could not help but notice how the dynastic monarchy restricted their growing economic clout from translating to political influence. There was also a small but growing working class. Working conditions in the fledgling industries were predictably harsh, with 14-hour days not uncommon until 1839—though in that year children’s labor was officially limited to 12 hours a day. Worker unrest grew from isolated miners’ protests around 1810 to larger demonstrations, including attacks on machines, in Prague in the 1840s. In the Hereditary Lands, the condition of the peasantry had markedly improved under the reigns of Franz’s predecessors. Reforms in Hungary in the 1830s reduced feudal burdens on peasants, such as by giving them greater security of land title, but in Galicia landlords’ powers over rural people were still formidable.

  In addition to the tectonic societal shifts, developments outside the monarchy also undermined Metternich’s system. There were further congresses in Aachen in 1818, Troppau in 1819, Ljubljana in 1820, and Verona in 1822, yet the ability of such meetings of European powers to impose a political vision rapidly diminished. At the Ljubljana congress it was decided that Austria would intervene to suppress the popular revolt in Naples, which earned Franz and Metternich resentment from liberals throughout Europe. The Verona congress determined that France would take the lead in suppressing the revolt in Spain. Britain thereafter withdrew from the Congress System, and Russia’s growing weight and assertiveness meant that the system’s ability to preserve the balance of power was vitiated. The revolutions in Paris and Belgium, and the uprising in Poland, all in 1830, also posed problems for Metternich. He feared the precedent of another Bourbon deposed in France, and the secession of Belgium from the Netherlands, but he could not risk a war over it. He tried to seal off the Polish parts of the Habsburg monarchy so that they could not aid the Polish rebels. To Metternich’s mind that rebellion was a shocking challenge to the tsar’s legitimate sovereignty, as well as an alarming pretext for further Russian military gains.

  The remainder of Franz’s reign also saw a fairly steady decline of Habsburg influence in Germany. Though his constitutional power had vanished when the Holy Roman Empire expired, Franz nonetheless enjoyed a swell of popularity in the years before 1820. For his visit to Aachen for the 1818 congress, he was met with jubilation in the streets. It was almost as if he were still the emperor, and Austria for a time remained the predominant German state. Franz himself remained generally uninterested in German affairs, however, and Metternich’s main concern was to make sure that Prussia would not come to dominate Germany. The German Confederation proved a weak association, with an inadequate base of solidarity to combat external threats. Austria could not hold its own, since when in 1830 there was rumor of war with France, Prussia mustered far more troops for Germany’s defense than could Austria. By the later 1820s it had become clear that Metternich and Austria had relatively little to offer either the smaller German princes or the segment of the population craving increased German unity. Metternich made sure that the liberal nationalists he despised were closely monitored by the police. Austria was also gradually excluded from the increased economic integration of the various German states. Nascent customs unions among those states began in 1819; by 1830 this Zollverein included a number of the larger German polities and was dominated by Prussia. Though the German Confederation did succeed in preventing any revolutions, and kept Austria influential especially in southern Germany, Metternich himself realized that his German policy was failing in the other goal of averting Prussian preponderance.

  Metternich’s system was more successful at maintaining Austrian influence in Italy, where there was no other large competing state. Franz also took a greater interest in the Italian situation: he had been born in Tuscany, and he visited Milan and Venice numerous times as emperor. Here, too, the goal was to suppress revolution and bind smaller st
ates in an alliance under Austrian sway. The Habsburg possessions were themselves ruled from Vienna with a strong hand. Vienna sent troops into Italy five times between 1820 and 1848 to suppress uprisings. Sources of resentment among the local population were that relatively few of the bureaucrats and officials were locals, and also that taxes were too high. Thus even though Habsburg rule brought some progress such as improved educational systems and various social services, it was an autocratic government that did not ingratiate itself with either the aristocracy or the middle class.

  Just as in Italy, in Hungary stirrings of nationalism and liberalism foreshadowed the explosion of 1848. There was a gradually increasing politicization of the Hungarian population, though the leaders pushing for greater national autonomy were predictably the elites. The Hungarian nobility vociferously protested the introduction of a paper currency in 1811, which was part of remedying the monarchy’s anemic financial state. Franz and Metternich forced the scheme through, and after that Franz did not call the Hungarian diet again until 1825. Metternich of course opposed Hungarian autonomist sentiment, fearing its vaguely democratic character and that it might lead to a more vigorous push for Hungary’s independence from the monarchy. His response was to assert central control over the Hungarian county governments, increase censorship, and use the secret police to jail activists. Even as Hungarian nationalism was sprouting, so too was that of other peoples within Hungary, most notably the Croats, who objected strongly to the deterioration of Croatia’s constitutional status within the Hungarian kingdom and the relegation of the Croatian language to secondary status in favor of Hungarian. Tensions were thus building up not only in Hungary’s relationship with the dynasty, but also in the relationships of the various peoples of Hungary.