The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The annexation immediately antagonized the Serbs, who feared that Austria-Hungary was trying to dominate the South Slav region and exclude Serbia. Russia then objected to what it saw as an aggressive act toward Serbia. Turkey and Britain objected as well, since the unilateral annexation violated the terms of the 1878 Berlin Congress. In the spring of 1909, the monarchy responded to the uproar not with conciliation but with an ultimatum to Serbia to back down. Germany added its muscle, issuing another ultimatum to Russia that it would have to abandon its support of Serbia or risk war. Then in 1912–13 Austria-Hungary worked against Serbian interests in the First and Second Balkan Wars, for example by thwarting Serbia’s aims of winning access to the Adriatic. This geopolitical contest wove into the problems with the South Slav populations inside the monarchy. There were sizeable numbers of Croats and Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also of Serbs in areas that Croats considered part of Croatia. While few Croats wanted to break up the monarchy, many Serb radicals did want out, and they looked to Serbia as their protector. Croat and Serb politicians sometimes collaborated against Vienna, but also sometimes tussled over competing visions for a South Slav state. This contributed to increasing rancor and extremism in the South Slav areas, evinced by several assassination attempts on the monarchy’s officials.

  By 1914, therefore, the Habsburg monarchy was facing problems on many fronts. Internationally, its relations with Russia were tense, and it could count only Germany as a strong ally. It had irredentist threats from Italy, Romania, and most dangerously Serbia. Its domestic politics were also troubled. The diets of Istria, Croatia, and Bohemia were all closed down in the years just prior to 1914, and in that year the Reichsrat was also dissolved by the prime minister Stürgkh. It might seem that Austria-Hungary by this point was in a state of terminal decline and dysfunction. There were numerous voices among intellectuals in the Danubian domains claiming that politics were fundamentally broken, and that the monarchy was a relic, especially when compared to the dynamic-seeming behemoth of Germany. Even Wilhelm II, before he took the German throne, opined to Crown Prince Rudolf that the Habsburg monarchy was “rotten” and “near to dissolution.”13 There were undeniable problems, with parliamentary politics in particular obstructed by competing nationalisms. The regime was most retrograde in Hungary, where in 1913 the government of István Tisza interfered with a number of civil rights including those of the press, assembly, and jury trials.

  But a more judicious view would recognize that, although the politics were dysfunctional, the state and society were not in death throes. Public goods such as roads, railways, canals, and schools continued to be provided. The bureaucracy continued to function reasonably well to administer government. The state’s fiscal basis was admittedly fragile, and the economy was not Europe’s most robust, but it still brought great strides in material prosperity to many. Culturally, too, the major cities were incredibly vibrant. Many Austro-German, Czech, Magyar, and other politicians were not certain that the competing national groups could compromise to reform the monarchy’s structure—but at the same time, very few of those politicians actively advocated the monarchy’s end. Even the difficult relationship with Hungary was amenable to negotiation, as demonstrated by a new agreement in 1907 to increase Hungary’s contribution to the general treasury. The greatest failure, and the one that led directly to World War One, was with the monarchy’s leadership. The dynasty made decisions that led to its own downfall.

  The monarchy’s provocative politics in the South Slav lands provided the backdrop to the war, though the immediate spark was of course the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whom Franz Joseph had chosen as successor after Rudolf’s death. Franz Ferdinand proved a particularly problematic addition to the dynasty’s leadership. He was intelligent, but reactionary and authoritarian by nature. He derided the non-German peoples for causing the monarchy’s problems, and expressed a quite inclusive set of prejudices against Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, and Jews. He rarely got along with the old emperor, operating a shadow cabinet out of his residence at the Belvedere Palace. Franz Ferdinand had his own plans for reform of the monarchy, and resented Franz Joseph’s sclerotic resistance to those plans. After Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were killed by a Bosnian Serb extremist in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, a number of key leaders were determined to crush Serbia once and for all—even though the Serbian government was not responsible for the murder. Franz Joseph was not in Vienna as this crisis came to a head, instead summering at his Alpine getaway in Bad Ischl. Though he had for decades generally counseled peace as key to the monarchy’s preservation, he had also allowed his ministers to pursue policies in the Balkans for more than a decade that were bellicose, especially toward Serbia. The monarchy’s leadership repeatedly spurned compromise, and did so now.

  Franz Joseph and Austria-Hungary bear a large share of the responsibility for the disaster of World War One. The emperor was the one who gave the final, fatalistic assent to war. The Habsburgs were admittedly caught in a difficult position. If Austria-Hungary did not respond aggressively, it would effectively surrender its status as a great power. It was well known that war with Serbia probably meant war with Russia, but Wilhelm II assured Franz Joseph of Germany’s backing. The emperor therefore determined that the dynasty’s honor required military action. There were further motivations as well, including some hope that victory might tame the monarchy’s other problems. The regime’s leadership drew up an ultimatum deliberately designed so that Serbia could never accept it. When Serbia did reject it, Austria-Hungary declared war on 28 July. The leadership was counting on a short conflict, since the monarchy’s finances could not sustain a long one. Franz Joseph might not have been so optimistic, however; the later Empress Zita reported that he told her already at the beginning of the war that he foresaw it ending in defeat and revolution.

  The monarchy encountered some very serious problems in the early phases of the war. The military was exposed as well-trained but under-funded. Even Italy spent more on defense than did Austria-Hungary. Hence Franz Joseph’s army lacked adequate materiel and weapons. The emperor himself opposed some innovations such as armored cars because they scared horses. The overall strategy was for Austria-Hungary to defeat Serbia quickly and then hold off Russia while Germany delivered a swift death blow to France. This became impossible once the western front stalemated after the Marne, and Austro-Hungarian forces failed to beat Serbia and to repel the Russians in Poland. Because of poor command and a faulty mobilization (itself a result of inadequate investment in locomotives), more than half of the Habsburg army had been killed by the end of 1914. Henceforth many of its troops were hastily trained recruits who could never fully replace the experienced men lost in the initial bloodbath. Then Italy entered the war against Austria-Hungary in 1915, after making extortionate demands for territorial compensation as the price for neutrality. The monarchy found itself fighting a three-front war, in the Balkans, against Russia, and against Italy. It was also clear that it was fighting for its very survival: defeat would assuredly mean dismemberment of large chunks of territory.

  In 1915, with German help, Serbia was overrun, and Galicia was won back from Russia. Once Romania entered the war against the Central Powers in August 1916 it was defeated by autumn, with the help of allies Turkey and Bulgaria. After its early difficulties, Austria-Hungary’s military functioned reasonably well, even though its chief general, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, committed a number of critical mistakes. Its heavy troop losses made the monarchy ever more dependent on German military assistance, and Germany did not hesitate to exploit that relationship. Germany provided weapons, troops, financial subsidies, and even food aid. It charged high prices for the fuel it supplied, and consistently subordinated Austria-Hungary to German military and policy interests. The longer the war dragged on, too, the more precarious the situation for the Central Powers, since they were particularly vulnerable to the economic blockades mounted by Britain and France. Public opinion in the first
war years was generally supportive. The fraternal feuding that had convulsed politics over the previous two decades subsided. But all was not peaceful on the home front; there was still squabbling between Czechs and Germans over the administration in Bohemia, and Hungarians maneuvered to integrate Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia into Hungary. In October 1916 a socialist agitator assassinated the prime minister Stürgkh. By that time, there was growing dissatisfaction over food shortages and censorship.

  When Franz Joseph died on 30 November 1916, the outcome of the war was not yet certain, but it was undeniable by that point that his peoples and his prestige had suffered terribly. He was not blind to this: in the months prior to his death he argued that the monarchy needed peace. The course of events was long past his control, however. Franz Joseph was probably resigned to that fact. A line he wrote to his mother after the defeat at Königgrätz in 1866 gives an important indication to his character. He said, “When the whole world is against you and you have no friends, there is little chance of success, but you have to keep fighting as long as you can to do your duty, and finally to succumb with honor.”14 The old emperor, tradition-bound as he was, set such a high store on the honor of his dynasty that he entered a war whose consequences he himself dreaded. Though Franz Joseph was obsolete in so many ways by the time he died, his loss was still terrible for the monarchy. Once he was gone, so too was much of the long experience, residual authority, and age-old legitimacy of the dynasty. His successor, though much younger and more modern, was not able truly to step into Franz Joseph’s boots, nor wear his crown.

  Karl I (1887–1922)

  After the deaths of Rudolf and Franz Ferdinand, the succession fell to Karl, the son of Otto Franz, one of Franz Joseph’s nephews. He was 29 when he came to the throne, and had never been educated to become a ruler. He participated in offensives in Italy and Galicia during the war, so he had seen the frontlines, which assuredly helped motivate his objective of securing peace. Karl’s aims were indeed laudable. He hoped to reform the monarchy, to rebalance its structure to answer some of the concerns of the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the various South Slavs. He was also appropriately more up-to-date than Franz Joseph, for instance introducing telephones into Schönbrunn. He and his family lived fairly modestly since many of his subjects were suffering deprivations. However, Karl was regarded even by his underlings as weak and indecisive, and his lack of experience in the monarchy’s politics proved damaging. One example was that he agreed to be crowned king of Hungary as soon as possible. In so doing, he had to swear to respect the provisions of the Ausgleich, which effectively countered his own plans for reform, and antagonized many of the monarchy’s Germans and Slavs. He also recalled the Reichsrat in May of 1917 to show his support for constitutional government, but it rapidly fell into bitter feuding among national groups.

  Even a very skilled politician would have had difficulty rectifying the monarchy’s mounting problems in the last two years of the war. Domestic unrest was growing stronger by 1916, motivated by ever-deepening privation. Shortages of many kinds wracked the economy, including of cotton, wool, iron, coal, and troops. These hurt not just the military effort but the general population. The lack of coal meant that people did not have fuel even for heat. Inflation rose rapidly, driven by scarcity and by the government’s printing currency to cover its huge debts. People’s purchasing power plummeted in the face of a precipitous rise in the cost of living, which by 1918 had increased more than ten-fold over 1914. The food shortages were particularly serious. In part because of manpower shortages, harvests shrunk and production of cereals and grains plunged. Strict bread rations were imposed for soldiers and civilians alike, and people’s consumption of meat fell to less than half of prewar levels. Wide segments of the populace were understandably holding the regime responsible for these terrible conditions. Hunger became one of the primary motivators of the growing unrest. Major strikes hit Austria in May 1917, and flared up throughout the monarchy in the months to November 1918. In June 1918, workers at the state railway factory in Budapest rioted until they were fired upon by the military. The next day 500,000 workers around Hungary joined in protests that lasted nine days before they were suppressed.

  There was some good news on the battlefield in Karl’s first year on the throne. A Russian offensive in the summer of 1917 was repulsed, and then after the October Bolshevik Revolution, Russia left the war with the peace of Brest-Litovsk in December. The Central Powers routed Italian armies at the battle of Caporetto in October. However, Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917—which Karl had opposed—helped bring the United States into the war in April. Another example of Karl’s well-meaning but bungled initiatives was the disastrous diplomacy of the Sixtus affair, which broke in April 1918. Karl was sincere about seeking peace, and was irritated by German rejection of negotiations; he complained in particular that Kaiser Wilhelm would not listen to reason in his pursuit of “total victory.” Karl therefore reached out to Britain and France via his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma. He signaled that he would support a peace in which Germany would give Alsace-Lorraine to France and in compensation Austria-Hungary would give Galicia to Germany. This was a pointless offer, though, since hard-liners in Germany would never surrender Alsace-Lorraine, and anyway it was not Karl’s to promise.

  The proposal initially went nowhere, until Karl’s maladroit chancellor Černin in April 1918 suggested that France had actually offered to reach a separate peace and give up its claims on Alsace-Lorraine. This was a lie and besmirched French honor. It led the French prime minister Clemenceau to publish a letter of Karl’s from a year earlier. In the letter, Karl voiced support for France’s claims for Alsace-Lorraine, and intimated his receptivity to a separate peace for Austria-Hungary. The publication of this letter was a ghastly humiliation for Karl and briefly roiled the alliance with Germany. He had a heart attack, and Černin threatened suicide. The outcome was even worse for the future of the dynasty and Austria-Hungary as a state. In a shame-faced reaffirmation to Germany of his alliance commitments, Karl surrendered nearly all foreign policy and economic independence, tying the fate of his dynasty to the success of the German war effort. Moreover, his obvious double-dealing caused him to lose all credibility with the Allies, who henceforth saw Austria-Hungary as essentially an appendage of Germany and began to support proposals for the breakup of the monarchy.

  By the summer of 1918 the Habsburg dynasty’s death knell was ringing. Though Romania and Russia had left the war, in the west Germany was retreating as more American troops and supplies poured in. In the east, an allied army forced Bulgaria out of the war in September, Romania rejoined hostilities on the allies’ side, and Turkey signed an armistice. Allied forces were marching through the Balkans toward Hungary. Also in September, Italian and British troops broke through on the Italian front. Non-German troops in the monarchy’s armies began deserting in growing numbers. Deprivation and riots on the home front erased whatever legitimacy the regime had left. After Woodrow Wilson promulgated his Fourteen Points in January 1918, they became the basis for the national groups’ calls for self-determination. The reopening of the Reichsrat proved not a safety valve for discontent but rather a megaphone for it, and over the summer Slavic politicians’ former calls for autonomy became instead demands for independence. The monarchy’s top leadership, including Cisleithanian and Hungarian prime ministers, had been insisting that increased autonomy was a nonstarter—but this was a senseless position that only reinforced the propagandistic image of the Habsburg monarchy as a “prison of peoples.” It helped the national minorities align their struggle with claims of democracy and liberty. Wilson, who had originally envisioned federalization of the monarchy, in October was convinced by Clemenceau and Lloyd George instead to support independent Czechoslovak and South Slav states.

  Karl presided impotently over the progressive hollowing out of the whole monarchical state until there was almost nothing left that he actually go
verned. At the end of October the nearly 400-year-old monarchy dissolved in a matter of weeks. Karl issued a proposal for federalization on 16 October, but he and his idea were already irrelevant by that point. Gyula Andrássy, the last foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, said that the implicit logic behind the final, futile moves taken by the leadership was that “so that no one can kill us, we’ll commit suicide.”15 The initiative was instead firmly in the hands of the various national groups. On 18 October Romanians in Hungary called for union with the Kingdom of Romania. On the 21st the Germans of the monarchy declared their right to self-determination. On the 28th the Czech National Council declared independence, and on the 30th the new Czechoslovakia was officially formed. On the 29th the Croatian parliament formally dissolved its connections to Austria and Hungary and pledged to join the new Yugoslav kingdom. On the 31st the Ruthenians in Galicia announced their secession. On 1 November the Hungarians proclaimed their ties to the monarchy ended, followed ten days later by Galicia joining the new Polish republic. As all this was happening, Karl was still working at his desk in Schönbrunn, but the palace was mostly empty. Only a few loyal servants remained, since even his bodyguards had left. Finally on 11 November Karl signed papers that he was “temporarily” giving up his powers. He never formally abdicated but went into exile, first in Switzerland. Karl twice tried to retake the throne in Hungary in 1921, but after these unsuccessful attempts he was removed by the British to Madeira, where he died in 1922.