The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  In November the family decided on a new cabinet that took power in Vienna. Led by the conservative aristocrat Felix Schwarzenberg, the decision was soon made that the reestablishment of the dynasty’s control required a change of sovereign. In December Ferdinand had to be convinced to abdicate; he resisted because he thought abdication was inimical to his divine ruling status. But in the end he agreed to step down in favor of his nephew, Franz Joseph. Ferdinand was 55 years old when he abdicated, and lived for another 20 years. His entire reign had been a kind of shadow play staged by Metternich and the dynasty to uphold their legitimist, obsolescent fantasy of absolute monarchy. His abdication did not defuse the uprisings, which challenged the ongoing absolutist fantasy of Franz Joseph’s first years.

  Dynastic strategies

  The dynasty’s record of production and reproduction in this time must be seen in the same spirit as Franz’s whole reign: its outward adequacy masked real insufficiencies. On the territorial front, the indefensible holdings in Belgium were lost. The compensating stretches of territory gained in the 1795 third Polish partition, and then the old Venetian lands along the Adriatic firmly acquired after 1814, were at least contiguous with the rest of the monarchy, but they added little in terms of wealth or productivity. In his marital and fatherly roles Franz was prolific, siring 13 children with 4 wives. None of these children, however, proved particularly scintillating. Ferdinand came from the second marriage, which was to Franz’s cousin Maria Teresa. This close connection helps explain Ferdinand’s disabilities, and also why Franz Karl, Franz’s second son and a possible alternate candidate for the succession, was dull and not much of an improvement over Ferdinand. Franz, tenacious to primogeniture in his own line and jealous of his smarter brothers Karl and Johann, refused to consider them for the succession. Because Ferdinand remained childless, it was Franz Karl who continued the line; his son Franz Joseph was the dynasty’s penultimate ruler. Of Franz’s other children, his daughter Leopoldine notably went on to become the Empress of Brazil.

  There were other tricky succession issues because of Franz’s daughter Marie-Louise, Empress of the French thanks to her marriage to Napoleon. Marie-Louise’s son from that marriage, Napoleon II, was named successor by his father, which the victorious allies did not allow after 1814. The young son was then taken in by his Habsburg family, and died at Schönbrunn in 1832 at age 21. An important moment in ensuring dynastic solidarity came in Ferdinand’s reign with the family statute of 1839, which regulated succession issues. It also specified rules for territorial inheritance among the various Habsburg progeny, their rights and duties in relation to the dynasty, and how the family’s head could use its joint funds. The statute was nothing less than a codification of the expectations for how each family member would contribute to the dynastic project, specifying a legal framework for maintaining its corporate interests. The statute governed such matters for the Habsburgs up to their fall from power in 1918.

  The French Revolution and the turmoil in its wake mounted an enormous challenge to the Habsburgs’ legitimizing traditions. Though the dynasty’s response to that challenge for a time offered the possibility of loyalty on a new basis, ultimately thanks to Franz’s and Metternich’s conservatism there was a retreat to earlier traditions, no matter how antiquated. The experiments around the turn of the century were mostly the product of thinking by people like Stadion, Archduke Johann, and the Tyrolean intellectual Joseph von Hormayr. The guiding idea was to create a source of loyalty to the dynasty that would mobilize the populace and substitute for French patriotism. Because these men recognized that a French-style patriotism, based on some core of linguistic and cultural affinity, could never work in the heterogeneous Habsburg lands, they instead launched a project to create a loyalty based on what those lands did have in common, which was the dynasty itself. Johann said that he wanted to make “the business of the state the business of the nation.” He went to Tyrol and Styria to organize militias for the fight against the French, arguing that “the nation, the mass, must fight, all for one and one for all,” and that thereby the “Austrian nation” would be “invincible.”8

  The hope was to promote local pride and culture that would raise troops and motivate resistance, but also build national feeling in support of Habsburg rule. The government funded various publications, provincial and national museums, and other cultural activities aiming to create community solidarity. Johann himself sponsored patriotic art, for example commissioning the painter Karl Ruß to produce a cycle of paintings depicting the historical achievements of the dynasty. While Johann’s activities focused on the Austrian lands, Stadion encouraged people in Bohemia and elsewhere to undertake many of the same activities, so there were publications in Czech, Polish, and other languages. These projects lost steam after a few years. Franz was suspicious of their utility and of what forces they might be awakening that could challenge his rule. Moreover, his jealousy of his smarter brother always inclined him to look askance at Johann’s activities.

  Franz and his advisors rejected the French Revolution’s assertion of popular and national sovereignty, which they understandably saw as contrary to dynastic rule. Their vision of legitimacy was that the dynasty had to be in charge because it had always been in charge. Admittedly, the regime made some claims to justify its rule through its insistence that it protected the public welfare by combating the disastrous chaos and iconoclasm of revolutionary ideas. There was also some recourse to claims of efficiency of rule, that Habsburg administrative sovereignty was justified because it provided good government. Where Maria Theresia, Joseph II, and Leopold II had advanced a particular but explicit notion of a social contract, however, Franz and Metternich downplayed such ideas. Maria Theresia and her sons espoused a vision of the dynasty and its state relatively in tune with its times, whereby legitimacy came from serving the people by fashioning a modern institutional apparatus. For Franz and Metternich, the state would still serve the people—that legacy of the Josephine era persisted—but the paternalistic, autocratic steering of the state was inimical to modern political ideas of liberalism and nationalism, even if it did embrace to a certain extent contemporary economic developments.

  The intransigence bordering on fossilization of the dynasty’s legitimizing strategies can also be seen in its use of religion. The state by this time had so thoroughly consumed the institutional Church that the latter could hardly be counted as an independent support of the monarchy. The Church did have a significant role in supervising secondary education, but in that sphere, too, it was closely supervised. Promoting Catholic morality and routine observance was still part of the dynasty’s ruling ideology, especially as a defense against French revolutionary godlessness. But as Franz’s and then Ferdinand’s reigns went on, the dynasty’s religious attitudes fell more out of step with those of the general population. As religion became more of an inward matter, insisting on conformity—as the regime did, with required church attendance and communion for secondary students—offered another example of an archaic, overly paternalistic attitude toward its subjects. Thus even as the Church and religion became less vital to the cultural, social, and intellectual life of the populace, the dynasty stuck to old habits, including a deep suspicion of Protestant influences.

  It is debatable whether Franz truly understood what postrevolutionary patriotism meant. An anecdote attributed to Franz has him asking, when told that a particular man was a patriot, “But is he a patriot for me?” Franz seemed to assume that patriotism could be tied to an individual dynast rather than to a national polity. He maintained an unsurprisingly conservative ideal for his function as a ruler: he rejected the notion of constitutional monarchy. He denied that any other part of society could make rules that would bind the sovereign. His image as a ruler was actually less hide-bound. He affected to remain aloof from the turmoil of his reign, to stand as a stern, but benevolent father over his subjects, who were much like children in that they did not know what was good for themselves. Though his roya
l function necessitated some distance from his subjects, Franz was in many ways personally more accessible than previous Habsburg rulers had been. He gave audiences several times a week at which he would wear an unostentatious officer’s uniform, speak in Viennese dialect (or Hungarian, Czech, or Italian), and genuinely listen to his supplicants’ concerns. He did not like formal protocol in general, enjoying more the chance to escape the court and interact with ordinary people. Most of all he preferred to spend time with his family. He was in short an approachable monarch, one who seemed more like a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat, but who earned sympathy for surviving Napoleon’s assaults and the deaths of three of his wives. As much as he revered his authority and assiduously defended his traditional prerogatives, Franz was not enamored with glorifying his own person, nor with the symbolic trappings of his authority. This may be one reason why he looks so grumpy in the portrait by Friedrich von Amerling.

  Some institutional structures were strengthened during the reigns of Franz and Ferdinand, but very few meaningful reforms were carried out, despite frequent calls for them. The problems of the administration were widely recognized. Archduke Karl in particular proposed various reforms, but was repeatedly rebuffed. He for a time had an ally in Johann Ludwig von Cobenzl, who headed the foreign ministry. But while there were still such reformist minds in government, the monarchy was embroiled in wars that redirected attention to only the most pressing needs. After 1815, reformers were suppressed under Metternich’s government. Metternich himself was not inherently hostile to reforms, and indeed long looked to remedy the military’s problems. Franz, too, was not categorically opposed to reform, but his governing style was often procrastinating. His overriding approach was to uphold the status quo, which contributed to the political stasis at the monarchy’s heart.

  Even if the regime was hostile to changes it saw as undermining its authority, it nonetheless provided its subjects expanded services through the burgeoning welfare state in the Hereditary Lands. It offered pension systems, hospitals, charity care for those who could not afford it, and tuition support for needy university students, among other things. The monumental codification of civil law in 1812 was based on the principles of equality of all before the law. A demonstration that the impersonal state would serve its citizens equally was its legal assistance for lower-class people in civil suits. Strict supervision of how noble landlords treated their peasants was also instituted, as were not inconsiderable taxes on the nobility. The dynasty served in new ways, expanding its charitable giving often for programs to help the disadvantaged. Perhaps less benevolently, the police apparatus grew significantly from the kernel Joseph II had established; it was tasked with providing Franz and Metternich a fresh report every morning with their breakfast. The state’s scope and penetration further enlarged to promote economic and infrastructural development via railroads, navigation, and postal service.

  Such expansion of state activities was generally characteristic of European polities after the French Revolution. One aspect was a gradual move to direct rule, in which specialized bureaucrats implemented the center’s decisions in local areas. This was a major change for the Habsburg realms because it attenuated the dynasty’s old reliance on indirect rule through the aristocracy. Though the aristocracy overall remained firmly in the dynasty’s camp in these years, the relationship altered fundamentally because the dynasty did not need nobles as it had a century previously. They retained some role in administration—particularly high nobles in the most important posts—but increasingly the bureaucracy was staffed by members of the middle class. Bourgeois functionaries thereby grew into an essential support of the regime. They served in the bureaucracy, but they also benefited from the stability of the social order that had allowed them to attain their positions.

  This class’s growth enabled the ongoing professionalization of the bureaucracy, which in turn promoted the expansion of the state. As schools turned out more educated people, there were qualified candidates for posts, who increased not only the state’s penetration into society but the effectiveness of its services. As long as the dynasty provided stability, opportunity for economic gain, and was not overly heavy-handed with the secret police, the middle class was solidly behind the regime. Economic troubles in the later 1840s and a sense that the monarchy had become inexcusably reprobate in its guaranteeing of political rights helped motivate the individuals in the middle class who revolted in 1848. It must be said that all of these administrative structures were still limited, often by the monarchy’s financial troubles. Such institutional weaknesses help account for the monarchy’s shaky response to the revolutions.

  Though with historical hindsight Habsburg history from 1792 to 1848 must be judged unfavorably, fairness requires acknowledgment of some worthy, if transitory, achievements. Despite the many failings of the Habsburgs’ state, it managed to mount a nearly continuous resistance against a much larger French polity enflamed with revolutionary fervor, and could then claim victory in 1815. Franz and others read this victory as an affirmation of the eternal resiliency and legitimacy of the dynasty. In some ways, the decade or so after 1815 was also an improbable triumph for the dynasty, since its hodgepodge realm acted for a time as the linchpin of politics on the continent, thanks above all to Metternich’s leadership. The later years of Franz’s rule, and then the placeholder reign of Ferdinand, were not wholly a time of decline. There were positive developments in the monarchy, such as economic growth, the expansion of a generally loyal middle class, and domestic and international peace.

  The problem is that these were years of political stagnation. The Metternich system was both a tactical and an ideological response to the decades of upheaval. Tactically, it sought to restore the status quo ante in order to bring peace and stability. Ideologically, the status quo ante of dynastic monarchy was conceived as inherently more legitimate than any of the revolutionary or Napoleonic political models. This system did bring some peace and stability, and an adherence to the traditional, supranational bases of rule was in some ways a sensible recourse given the challenges the Habsburgs faced at home and abroad. But in the end, because they were so distrustful of changes whether abrupt (such as the original revolution in France) or percolating (such as the growth of liberalism, or nationalist tensions in Italy, the Czech lands, and Hungary), Franz and Metternich failed to capitalize on the years of stability to adapt in any consequential way, even to accept the modest proposals made by Archdukes Johann and Karl. Franz held to an intransigently antiquated vision of dynastic rule that maintained a reactionary social order for an artificially long time. It was because it resisted adaptation that the monarchy found itself in confrontation in 1848. Not only was there a failure to quell the revolutions in Ferdinand’s time, the confrontations between the dynastic monarchy and changing sociopolitical circumstances led to shocks repeatedly throughout the rest of the century.

  MAP 3. Ethnic distribution in Austria-Hungary, 1910.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  To succumb with honor (1848–1918)

  In 1874, greeted by festive fireworks and a representation of the Bohemian crown in flowers, Franz Joseph visited Prague. It was the twenty-sixth year of his rule. For the emperor’s arrival, a triumphal arch was erected at Prague’s main railway station. It was emblazoned with the slogan, “God bring him luck.”1 As it turned out, that wish was in vain. Throughout his 68 years on the throne, Franz Joseph needed a great deal of luck—but he had relatively little, much of it bad. This was a man who incarnated conservative, dynastic rule, and who endured setback after setback in maintaining the prerogatives of his dynasty. And while bad luck may have played some part in those setbacks, his own poor decisions were even more important. When he came to the throne he hoped to rule with an iron hand, to assert the central authority of the monarchy as never before. This dream also was in vain, and over several decades Franz Joseph saw that traditional authority whittled away by losing territory to Italy, international clout to Prussia/Germany, and governing po
wer to new political parties within his own state. To his credit, Franz Joseph did adapt. He relinquished some—though not all—illusions about what a monarch could be in the late nineteenth century. He never ceded all power, and never became a mere figurehead. He was a multivalent symbol: a symbol of one of the few unifying features of his heterogeneous realms, a symbol of monarchical authority pared down by modern parliamentary politics, a symbol of dynasty as dinosaur in a world so greatly changed from the conditions that had privileged dynasties in the first place.

  The Habsburgs’ last seven decades of rule were a time of modernization and resistance to modernization. Rapid changes in the economy and society stood at odds with the halting changes in the regime. Where the dynasty dragged its feet in responding to the consequences of the growing political assertiveness of the middle and lower classes, and looked stonily down upon the growing fragmentation of nationalist movements, these two developments precipitated pressures that ultimately the sovereigns and their ministers could not rebuff. Where these decades amounted domestically to a conflictual lurch toward constitutional government, internationally the monarchy’s prestige was often in free fall. At times it seemed almost incapable of defending itself, until the final fateful gambit, when the dynasty’s attempt to assert its evaporating great power status led to the catastrophic world war that ended the monarchy altogether.

  Franz Joseph I (1830–1916)

  Franz Joseph (Figure 11.1) was a dull personality, but because of his difficult position athwart epochal change, he is a fascinating figure. His defining characteristics were his sense of duty, propriety, and the legitimacy of his house. He slept on an old iron bed in the Hofburg and never installed a modern bathroom. He rose early every morning and dealt with some 4,000 papers a year. He was no intellectual, but he was not unintelligent. His education was supervised by his mother Archduchess Sophie, and by Metternich. Thus he was inculcated with a deep sense of tradition, of reverence for the established truths of the dynasty and its rule. In contrast to so many of his ancestors, he never learned to love art and music, preferring instead the pleasures of military regimentation and simple domesticity. A bureaucrat’s reverence for routine and order guided him. As monarch, he maintained a very formal, reserved demeanor, a kind of rigid professionalism, beyond which very few intimates ever penetrated. He endured a series of personal tragedies, including the final cataclysm that engulfed his subjects and his realm in war, yet rarely betrayed any public emotion. This is what makes him interesting: he was brought up in, and always lived in, an archaic world, one that (as he himself acknowledged late in life) was out of step with his own times. How he negotiated those tensions over his long rule—the longest of any Habsburg sovereign—is a study in an ancient dynasty’s confrontation with its own obsolescence.