The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  His uncle Ferdinand’s abdication in December 1848, and Franz Joseph’s accession to the throne, were arranged by an inner circle of the dynasty that included Archduchess Sophie and the new chief minister Felix Schwarzenberg. Franz Joseph was only 18 at the time of his elevation, a fresh face chosen to mark a change but not a break in the context of revolutionary upheaval. Schwarzenberg and Sophie in the early years of the reign exercised significant influence over the young monarch. His immediate task was to complete the suppression of the rebellions and then institute a vigorous, sometimes brutal restoration of what he intended to be his absolute authority. The revolts in Vienna and Prague had been crushed with relative ease by October 1848, and Radetzky’s army in Italy had restored Habsburg power there by March 1849. The bigger problem was the situation in Hungary. The Hungarian revolutionaries led by Kossuth refused to recognize Franz Joseph’s authority because he was not crowned king of Hungary. In December 1848 the Austrian general Windischgrätz launched an invasion of Hungary that took Buda in January 1849. Kossuth and his army were forced to flee to the eastern city of Debrecen.

  FIGURE 11.1 Franz Joseph I, photographer unknown (1914). Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  In March a new unitary constitution was announced that would apply to the entire monarchy, including Hungary. Known as the oktroyierte Märzverfassung (or “imposed March constitution”), it invalidated the earlier Kremsier Constitution, but actually incorporated some of its features such as the abolition of serfdom. This new constitution was mostly authored by his minister Stadion, yet Franz Joseph never fully implemented it. He did not object to its centralizing aspects, for instance that he would be crowned only once, as emperor of Austria (rather than separately in his various realms), and would have a veto over all legislation. However, as emperor he would have to work with a parliament to whom his ministers were responsible. His objection was that ministers should only be responsible to the emperor and not to the people. Schwarzenberg also recalled the Austrian delegation from the Frankfurt Assembly, and that act, together with Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia’s refusal of the German crown offered him, ended the revolutionary events in Germany. In April Kossuth proclaimed Hungary a republic, formally deposing the Habsburgs. This was too provocative a move, since the major European powers would not support a royal family being forced out in this way. Russia, under the very conservative Tsar Nikolai I, was already making rumblings of intervention.

  That intervention became necessary later in the spring as the Austrian forces, ineptly commanded, lost ground to the Hungarian army. Franz Joseph had been pressed by Windischgrätz and Schwarzenberg to accept Nikolai’s offer of military assistance, but when he finally did so, he felt it a humiliation that he required outside help to regain control of one of his own realms. In June Russian troops invaded Hungary, but the Hungarians generally avoided pitched battles with the tsar’s forces. What truly led to the revolt’s defeat was that Hungary was simply weaker than Austria. It lacked international allies and an industrial base with which to support its army. When the Hungarian general Görgey finally surrendered in August, Kossuth fled with loyalists to Turkey and thence to England. The dynasty’s retribution for the Hungarian rebellion was swift and terrible: under Austrian military rule, the Hungarian generals were executed, numerous other army officers imprisoned, political leaders who had fled were condemned to death and hanged in absentia, and even moderate leaders were shot.

  The dynasty defeated the rebellions of 1848–9, but that did not mean that all the revolutionary goals were defeated. Certainly the visions of the Hungarian or Italian radicals for separation from the monarchy, or even of the Czech moderates for a more federated structure, did not come to fruition. Though at times the dynasty was in serious trouble from the multiple uprisings, the rebels in the various provinces never managed to coordinate with each other. Their respective national goals were often discordant, and even the more widely shared objectives of liberalism were fragmented by class and other divisions. Some of those objectives were achieved, however. Serfdom was definitively abolished. Peasants, students, and workers were politicized as they never had been before. The Kremsier Constitution established a precedent for sharing the monarch’s power with an elected, representative assembly. In so many ways, the revolutions’ defeat evolved into a long-term victory. Where the dynasty thought it had won in 1849, political forces of constitutionalism and national mobilization could be only temporarily subdued.

  Franz Joseph, backed by a few key ministers, now embarked upon a mission to strengthen the dynasty’s rule, relying on the bureaucracy and the army. This absolutist reaction lasted for roughly a decade, to October 1860. It aimed to overcome the old faults that had perennially plagued the Habsburg system: a weak monarchical state in which decentralized governance was defended by assertive regional interests such as the nobility. The initial architect of the reassertion of Habsburg authority was Felix Schwarzenberg, a clever, right-wing sybarite who strengthened Franz Joseph’s inclination for autocratic centralism. The neo-absolutist regime was inaugurated on 31 December 1851 when a royal patent was issued (known as the “Silvester Patent” after the German term for New Year’s Eve) that replaced the imposed constitution of 1849. Authority was now at least theoretically centralized in Franz Joseph’s hands. This patent restricted jury trials and joined the judicial to the administrative system for better central control. Ministers were directed strictly by the emperor, and most officials throughout the monarchy were now appointed by him rather than by regional authorities. German became the dominant language of administration and to a certain extent in schools, even in Hungary where it dislodged Magyar. Other laws in 1852 and 1853 were part of the crackdown, such as limiting press freedom and instituting a court system with secret trials. As Franz Joseph gleefully commented in a letter to his mother in 1851, “We have thrown all that constitutional stuff overboard, and now Austria has only one master.”2

  Schwarzenberg died suddenly in 1852; Franz Joseph was always to consider him his greatest minister. The decade of neo-absolutist reaction thus came to be identified with Franz Joseph’s interior minister, Alexander Bach, who oversaw the system of police surveillance, bureaucratic centralization, and a resurgence of Catholic domination. The Bach system was no mere throwback to archaic monarchical authority; this was a “modernizing dictatorship.”3 His repressive measures were designed to restore order, rationalize governing structures, and thereby set the stage for further reforms that would strengthen the state domestically and internationally. In many ways, the ideals Bach embodied, and the policies Franz Joseph let him undertake, were inspired by Joseph II’s incomplete project. This was to build a centralized state that removed power from local sources to focus it on an efficient bureaucracy and powerful army, which together would ensure not only the dynasty’s authority but also the well-being of its subjects. This goal came closer to realization in the 1850s than it would either before or after. And although there were some unquestionably authoritarian aspects to this system, it presided over an economic upswing even while civil rights were curtailed.

  Liberals grumbled, but much of the bourgeoisie settled into a familiar pattern for the Habsburg monarchy: meager participation in politics, but acceptance of adequate, paternalistic governance. The Hungarians complained most loudly about their lost freedoms—one tried to assassinate Franz Joseph in 1853, crying “Long live Kossuth!” as he did so—but were kept tightly suppressed. The paternalism was particularly evident in the state’s new coziness with the Catholic Church as a strongly traditional ideological ally. After Schwarzenberg died, Vienna’s Archbishop Rauscher became a very close confidant of Franz Joseph. The emperor signed a concordat with the Church in 1855 that gave the latter expanded censorship powers, oversight of educational curricula to assure accordance with dogma, and precedence over civil law in areas such as marriage.

  This short-lived neo-absolutist period should not be seen as a mere restoration of the status quo ante 1848. The old feud
al regime was definitively broken, and the landed aristocracy was largely supplanted by the middle class as the dynasty’s main support. This was a more modern autocracy, based on an increasingly urban and industrialized society. It was a more centralized autocracy than ever before, but it did carry over from the past the Josephine traditions of rule for the people but not by the people. It may thus seem more backward-looking than the constitutional regimes growing in many western European states. But in fact the years into the 1860s were an essential step toward the modernization of the Habsburg state. Franz Joseph did not long manage to remain the “one master” of Austria, however. His inexperience led him to several mistakes that undermined his temporarily consolidated authority.

  The first blunder came with the Crimean crisis in 1853. As part of geopolitical jockeying around the declining Ottoman Empire, Russia occupied Turkish dependencies along the Danube. This alarmed Franz Joseph and his foreign minister Count Buol, who themselves were angling for Turkish land in the Balkans. Franz Joseph was also worried about having the huge Russian Empire come right up to his doorstep, since the Slavs in his own lands could start looking to Russia for leadership. Austria arranged a secret deal with Prussia to fight Russia if necessary, and made diplomatic approaches to Britain and France, who after 1854 were at war to stop Russia’s preying on Turkey. The blunder came in trying to carve out a middle position for Austria in this conflict. Britain and especially France were never going to adopt Austria as a durable ally, since it was viewed as too repressive an autocracy. France in particular was looking to weaken Austria’s hold in Italy. But when in May 1854 Franz Joseph issued an ultimatum to Nikolai to evacuate Moldavia and Wallachia, he thereby alienated his old ally who had sent troops to prop him up in 1849. Nikolai was so angry at what he saw as this betrayal that he turned a portrait of Franz Joseph to the wall.4 The result was that Austria did end up in the middle, but with no major allies on either side. The amateurish two-timing toward Russia, Britain, and France exposed that Austria was no longer so essential to the European balance of power, and it is from this miscalculation over the Crimean War that the monarchy’s steep loss of international prestige can be charted.

  The other blunder cost the Habsburgs their three centuries’ old possession of Lombardy. Austrian control of northern Italy was deeply unpopular with the people there, made only more so because of Habsburg victories over the Italian revolutionaries in 1849. When Franz Joseph made a state visit to Venice in 1856 he was received coldly, with three-quarters of the Venetian nobility declining an invitation to a court reception. In 1857 he appointed his brother Maximilian as governor-general. Maximilian, as so often in Habsburg history, was more able than his older brother, and also more liberal. He recommended that Franz Joseph grant the people in Lombardy and Venetia concessions in response to their complaints of high taxes and minimal involvement in their own government. Franz Joseph was still intent on pursuing a hard-line, and so missed the opportunity to assuage the building resistance to Habsburg rule. In this volatile situation, Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia and architect of Italian unification, made a deal with Napoleon III of France for support in a war against Austria. Franz Joseph refused to negotiate, even when offered support from Britain and Prussia, believing that to back down in Italy would compromise his dynasty’s honor. When war broke out in 1859, Austria came to rue that it had no allies it could count on.

  For all Franz Joseph’s idealization of the military, it turned out he could not even count on his own army. His forces struck quickly at Piedmont-Sardinia, hoping to knock it out of the war before France could mobilize. But Franz Joseph’s general, Gyulai, was so incompetent that despite major numerical superiority he could not defeat the Piedmontese at the battle of Magenta. A series of command failures torpedoed the dynasty’s chances in Italy, until the final one, when an exasperated Franz Joseph came to the front to lead his armies himself. He proved no better a battlefield general than Gyulai. At the battle of Solferino in June 1859, he faced Napoleon III in personal command as his opponent, marking the last time in European history when armies on both sides were commanded by their monarchs. Austria was defeated, and afterwards, Franz Joseph met Napoleon III alone to make many of the arrangements that became the Treaty of Zürich. By this treaty the Habsburgs lost Lombardy, Modena, and Tuscany, and Franz Joseph personally lost much of his credibility as a leader. His initial response, dismissing Bach and shuffling his ministers, was minimal. But the clamor for change could not be silenced; despite his furious resistance, even his bankers were insisting Franz Joseph end the neo-absolutist experiment and introduce constitutional rule.

  The steps that the regime took first in October 1860 and then February 1861 did not grant a constitution, but they did move in that direction. The “October Diploma” was an initial step toward reducing some of the monarch’s powers. The Diploma appeased the provincial aristocracies, particularly in Hungary, by restoring their traditional rights such as diets. It also created an empire-wide assembly, the Reichsrat, which would have powers in taxation and other economic matters such as customs and currency. This bid for conservative federalization satisfied almost no one, however. For the Hungarians, it did not go far enough toward granting their autonomy. For the Czechs and the Croats, it was incomplete since it did not grant them roughly equal status with the Hungarians. The liberal bourgeoisie was dissatisfied because the Reichsrat would still be too weak, while other elements among the bourgeoisie, mainly the conservatives, objected to the retreat from centralism in favor of federalization.

  To this half-measure, Franz Joseph then added the February Patent in 1861, which backtracked on some of October’s federal commitments. The Reichsrat gained increased powers above the regional diets, for example. While that adjustment angered the Hungarians and Czechs who wanted increased autonomy, it satisfied the more conservative members of the Austro-German bourgeoisie, who in any case were among Franz Joseph’s strongest backers. To benefit them, the February Patent also expanded representation of the urban middle and upper classes. Franz Joseph reluctantly viewed these steps as necessary to shore up support for his regime. But while he admitted that he was introducing some constitutionalism, he also intended to hold tenaciously to his powers, above all over the military and foreign affairs. The next several years were a tentative time, as the monarch felt his way toward constitutional rule, and the aristocracies, bourgeoisies, and national groups within the monarchy similarly explored how the new arrangements would work. Though these October and February decrees did not firmly implant constitutional rule, they established a precedent for the end of absolutism that Franz Joseph was never able to reverse.

  As the defeats in the war for Italian unification forced changes on Franz Joseph in 1860, so too did the unification campaign in Germany later that decade. Since 1850 the Habsburgs’ authority within Germany continued to deteriorate. Though there were a variety of visions for governance of Germany, they boiled down essentially to two. One was the kleindeutsch (“small German”) solution in which Austria would be excluded from Germany, and Prussia would be the dominant power. The other was the opposite, the großdeutsch (“big German”) solution that included Austria; it was supported by a number of other German states such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony, who feared Prussian domination. In a number of instances, including its failure to enter the Zollverein, Austria botched strategies to strengthen its case for the großdeutsch option. One important reason why the Habsburgs’ initiatives in Germany were unsuccessful was because of domestic politics: the Austro-Germans were unable to dictate policy in Vienna, and Franz Joseph’s attempt at centralism was discredited by 1859. Hence any concerted effort to emphasize Austria’s connections to Germany was crippled by the assertiveness of the Hungarians and the growing impact of the Czechs, Croats, and other groups.

  The Habsburgs’ slow loss of weight in Germany was matched by Prussia’s striking rise. Once Otto von Bismarck was named Prussian minister president in 1862, he consistently an
d decisively out-maneuvered Franz Joseph and his advisors. In 1864, when Austria joined Prussia in an attack on Denmark over its majority-German duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, most of the gains from that war went to Prussia. Prussia at this time also had the sympathies of German patriots more than Austria ever could, since the Habsburgs’ state was multinational and viewed as more politically reactionary and economically backward. Some of Franz Joseph’s advisors had for several years been advocating an attack on Prussia sooner rather than later to assert Austrian supremacy. That the emperor became convinced of this plan was due not just to Bismarck’s skillful stratagems, but also to Franz Joseph’s own domestic problems. By the mid-1860s his regime was being challenged on a number of fronts. The Hungarians had been balking at cooperation in myriad ways, including in paying taxes. There was an uprising in Galicia in 1863 and unrest continued to simmer there. The monarchy was also experiencing bad harvests and serious financial problems, for example with mounting state debt. Franz Joseph unwisely decided that war would be the best way of winning back control of events. The idea was that his peoples would rally around him because of the conflict, and that defeating Prussia and Italy would bring large indemnity payments to stave off an Austrian state bankruptcy.