Nicholas T. Parsons
Finger in the Dyke
Steven Beller: Francis Joseph. Profiles in Power series.
Addison Wesley Longman, 1996, 276 pp.
[...]
Dispensing with history
Francis Joseph entered upon his inheritance in a time of grave crisis
for the Empire and the Habsburg dynasty. His lands had erupted in revolution,
forcing con ces sions from his predecessor, the weak-minded Ferdinand I;
advised by the devious Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, he felt obliged to
begin his reign by reneging on all the undertakings given by Ferdinand
and taking revenge on the insurgents (in most cases, but especially in
that of Hun gary, the revenge was little better than
judicial murder). This was the exaltation of force that proved a harbinger
of absolutist rule, a form of governance that did not dis tinguish between
legal or non-legal opposition, or even between loyalty and dissidence in
the Empire; as was sardonically observed at the time, the other nationalities
of the Empire were rewarded with the same treatment with which the Hun
garians were punished. However, absolut ism is a blunt instrument and even
its successes in the realm of economic management contribute to dissatisfaction
with it, since increased prosperity inevitably brings with it aspirations
to greater civil liberty and political autonomy for the individual, as
for the nation.
One way of looking at Francis Joseph's reign is to see it as a series of
concessions under pressure, each one producing as many new problems as
old ones were thereby defused. Concessions not willingly made imply a belief
that the clock might yet be turned back when the time is ripe. Certainly
the beginning of the reign was a reversion to Metternichian principles,
even if these were not applied with quite the Metternichian cynicism (the
old fox is said to have repeated Madame de Pompa dour's notorious remark,
"Après nous le déluge", when contemplating the
expected consequences of dismantling his system). Met ter nichian principles
were progressively diluted as time went on, but not entirely abandoned,
containing as they did the contradictory formulas of "divide and rule"
on the one hand, and "unite round the Em peror" on the other.
The oppressive sys tem of governance that resulted has been summed up in
the following words quoted by Beller: "Francis Joseph ruled with four
armies: a standing army (of soldiers), a sitting army (of officials), a
kneeling army (of priests) and a crawling army (of informers)". "It
is not a very kind description," writes Beller, "but it does
sum up the basis of the neo-absolutist system" (p. 59).
The modifications to that system during Francis Joseph's reign chart the
course of attempted modernization. One of the Em peror's most retrogressive
acts had been to sign the 1855 Concordat with the papacy, which allowed
the Vatican direct control over the Austrian Church, as also a monopoly
of primary education and the regulation of marriage. It was not until 1868
that the Emperor, "much to his chagrin", as Beller writes, decided
it would be expedient to allow the German Liberals to pass the May Laws
reasserting state control over education and marriage and providing legal
equality of religious denominations; in 1870 the Concordat itself was abrogated.
The standing army of soldiers remained the apple of Francis Joseph's eye,
not least because he had been brought up to admire the military code and
ethos. Steven Beller reminds us that he acquired his first uniform at the
age of three and his first regiment at the age of thirteen. To his dying
day he preferred the uniform of a simple Lieutenant, his habitual garb
for the daily routine, as the statue of him in the Burg garten shows him.
Unfortunately, recurrent budgetary crises meant that his be loved army
was not as well equipped as it should have been. The fatal consequences
of this were seen at the battle of König grätz (1866), when the
needle-gun adopted by the Prussians decided the day and--according to A.J.P.
Taylor--the ultimate fate of the Empire.
Then again, Francis Joseph himself embodied the sitting army of bureaucrats,
rising at 4.30 a.m. and often working until late at night on official papers.
On the last day of his life he was studying recruitment figures with a
temperature of 39.5°C and almost his last words to his valet were an
injunction to call him in the morning at the usual time, so that he could
get down to the mass of work that awaited his attention. Lastly the crawling
army of informers may have been less irksome once Vienna had become a vibrant
metropolis in the Gründerzeit, but we have the testimony of James
Joyce in Trieste to indicate how it was experienced in the outer reaches
of Cisleithania. Spying on the heir to the throne may have been a regrettable
necessity, but it was hardly an attractive aspect of autocracy; nor was
the tiresome censorship, of which Grillparzer complained, albeit sotto
voce.
As against all such objections, it is clear that Francis Joseph did unite
symbol with political reality in his person, that he and he alone represented
for the majority of his peoples a desire for stability and order. The case
for the Emperor was partly the case for monarchy that Walter Bagehot
put forward in The English Constitution (1872): "The best reason why
Monarchy is a strong government" he wrote, "is that it is an
intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it and they hardly
anywhere in the world understand any other." Time and democratic republicanism
have made this look like an oddly provincial view, but in the year it was
written, it is doubtful if many individuals under Francis Joseph's rule
would have dissented from it. As has been frequently pointed out, most
of their concerns and grievances were of a local nature; if anything, they
saw the Emperor as being able to transcend the underling's misuse of power
and put to rights what was wrongfully being done in his name. The institution
of the Monarchy might still command allegiance, even if the Emperor's policies
carried out through his ministers left much to be desired. This contradictory
allegiance would certainly have been a feature of Hungary as well, at least
after the 1867 Ausgleich, but the Hungarians were exceptional in that they
suffered from a burning sense of injured merit, unable to forget that it
was the Emperor himself who had trampled on their rights as late as 1849.
Francis Joseph and Hungary
Near the beginning of his book Beller writes the following: "Among
the most fervent admirers of the former empire are now, irony of ironies,
Hungarian historians", and adds: "Instead of the dynasty get
ting in the way of nationalities, it is now almost as if it is the nationalities
who get in the way of the one thing that could have saved them--and by
implication the rest of us--from the terrors of the twentieth century,
the institution of the Habs burg Monarchy." (p. 8) The author cites
István Deák in support of this remarkable claim, one which
sounds uncannily like a repositioning of the focus of an earlier historian,
A.J.P. Taylor: "In other countries, dynasties are episodes in the
history of the people; in the Habsburg Empire, peoples are a complication
in the the history of the dynasty." If Beller is right, however, the
Hungarians may partly be reacting to years of abuse that places much of
the blame for the break-up of the Monarchy on Magyar shoulders. In resisting
this claim (insofar as it is resisted and not simply ignored) it is natural
that the value of what they are accused of destroying is rediscovered.
The bottom line, however, is that the discrepancy between the claims of
indvidual nations, and the political compromises needed to keep a multi-ethnic
Empire on the rails, requires that legal fundamentalism be tempered with
pain ful realism. More over the desire to ex tract more concessions from
the dynasty (whether or not grounded in historical and constitutional rights)
than your neighbours can extract, must be tempered with some awareness
of the justified aspirations of those neighbours, lest the whole delicately
interlocking system of imperial rule breaks apart.
It is perhaps inevitable, and certainly understandable, that Hungarian
tactics were primarily concerned with safeguarding and strengthening their
privileged position, even if at times such manoeuvres seemed little more
edifying than the doctrine advanced by Don Alhambra in The Gondoliers:
"When everyone is somebodee, / Then no one's anybody!". It is
hard to see how it could have been otherwise, for as Alan Sked (following
István Deák) stresses in his book, the Hungarians believed
their revolution of 1848 to have been lawful in two senses: "firstly
in that it restored the constitution; secondly, in that the king [had]
agreed to it [i.e. the April Laws]". Thus, when Jellacic attacked
Hun gary, the Hun garians "found themselves in opposition to their
monarch, and not at all by their own decision. It was he--or his Austrian
advisers--who in their eyes had overthrown the legal order."
Francis Joseph's actions merely compounded this situation. Indeed, calling
in a Russian army to crush the Hungarians was, in the eyes of a nineteenth-century
Magyar patriot, not different from the enforcement of the Brezhnev doctrine
in the eyes of a twentieth-century one. It is a bizarre but not totally
distorted perspective that sees Francis Joseph as the im-poser of a legal
settlement that was no more true to the principles of genuine law than
was later the carefully planned lawlessness enshrined in "socialist
legality". After the Emperor was forced to abandon his unyielding
stance and enact the Com promise of 1867, there was no reason why he should
not command the loyalty of his Hungarian subjects--so long as he fulfilled
his coronation oath, uttered as he flourished his sword to all four points
of the compass, which obliged him to protect the interests of the Magyar
nation. The problem was, of course, that the Emperor had the (possibly
conflicting) interests of the other nations under his rule to consider.
Several of his ministers tried to address these (particularly with regard
to the Czechs and the language laws), but all such perfectly sincere efforts
usually foundered on the opposition of those in one ethnic group who would
be disadvantaged by concessions to another. In 1871, Francis Joseph actually
sent a message to the Bohemian Diet promising a settlement somewhat si
milar to the one with the Hungarians, but the uproar the proposal provoked
amongst Germans, Poles and Magyars meant that it had to be abandoned.
In the case of Hungary, matters were particularly sensitive, not least
because the burgeoning demographic deficit threatened Magyar supremacy
head-on. In 1905 Francis Joseph decided--or was forced by circumstance--to
exploit this factor when a nationalist Hungarian government refused to
collaborate with Vienna, nominally because of a dispute about the language
of command in the Hungarian army. The Emperor introduced a general franchise
bill in the Hungarian Parliament, which would at a stroke have removed
both national sup remacy and the class supremacy of the gentry. This blackmail
had its effect and the Hungarians fell into line. The whole incident brought
into sharp focus the fact that "Magyar dominance in Hungary was the
most important condition of the dualist system". At least from this
time on there were many (most notably the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand)
who saw the Magyars as the single biggest obstacle to reform of the Empire,
whether in terms of federalization ("trialism" to supersede dualism)
or of democratization.
It may not be very popular to say so, but it is hard to resist the conclusion
that Francis Joseph in his more liberal phase was in many respects forebearing
with the Hungarians, although that may have been because he had no choice.
No doubt his adored wife Sissi also had some influence on him, though probably
not as much as his Hungarian subjects imagined or hoped. On the other hand,
Francis Joseph never forgot his baptism of fire in 1848, and his alleged
remark to Gyula Andrássy that he was glad he had not executed all
the leaders of the revolution, since otherwise he (Andrássy) would
not be around to serve him as Foreign Minister, savours more of the wit
of Saddam Hussein than of the regal little jest he doubtless intended.
The remark may also reveal Francis Joseph's
lingering conscience about the activities of General Haynau in 1849, "a
moderate soldier but an outstanding butcher of psychopathic proportions,"
as Gordon Brook-Shepherd describes him.8The judicial murd er
of Count Lajos Batthyány, the le gally constituted Prime Minister
in 1848, and the execution of thirteen Hungarian generals (many of them
bearing names that revealed Germanic origin) was pretty bad politics too.
Hungarians were hailed in much of Europe as freedom fighters, Kossuth was
fêted in England and America, and Baron Haynau, on a visit to London,
narrowly escaped lynching when recognized in the street by some draymen
from a local brewery.
After such a start to his reign in Hun gary, it is a wonder that any reconciliation
with his Magyar subjects was reached at all by Francis Joseph; it was only
the pragmatic and far-sighted statesmanship of Ferenc Deák that
eventually made such a reconciliation a political possibility, but until
that occurred the Emperor was generally hated. Beller cites an incident
in 1852 when Francis Joseph was on a visit to Hungary and asked the mayor
of a village through which he was travelling why the people shouted "Vivat!"
instead of "Éljen!". The candid reply was that they were
so used to shouting "Éljen Kossuth!" that some of them
might forget to change the name, and it had therefore been thought prudent
to have them shout "Vivat!" instead. As late as 1884, when the
Com promise had been in force for seventeen years, Liszt composed a Royal
Hymn for the inauguration of the Budapest Opera (which Francis Joseph had
financed out of his own pocket); unfortunately, this stirring composition
had to be banned at the last minute when the sharp-eared house manager
realized that it was a thinly disguised version of the Rákóczi
March.
Nevertheless, as modern historiography has increasingly demonstrated, neo-absolutism
had proved a useful device for modernization of infrastructure and stimulation
of commerce, from which Hungary undoubtedly benefited. As R.J.W. Evans
has written, the implementation of the Silvester Patents "proved a
massive operation which proceeded according to recognizably modern standards,
even if it involved anomalies like reintroducing the birch into Austria
from Hungary on the grounds of consistency." He points out that growth
rates in the Empire "roughly matched those elsewhere in the German
Confederation", and that "rational reform of taxation, both direct
and indirect... raised (the state's) revenue by two-thirds (in Hungary
by four times)". Moreover, full equality before the law and the abolition
of serfdom were taken over from the reforms of Kossuth and enshrined in
the new dispensation. Evans cites the "complacent, punctilious and
indefatigable" head of the statistical office, Carl Czoernig, who
boasts in 1858 of the achievements of the regime, including "47,221,812
cubic feet of roadstone used in Hungary, 3,000 kms of railway, 2,389 post-offices,
359 barges on the Danube", and so on and so forth. "Czoernig",
says Evans, "records a mass of endeavours great and small, from the
maintenance of law and order (the police made over a million arrests in
1854, against only 70,000 four years before--what progress!), to measures
against cruelty to animals or elaborate safeguards against the explosion
of steam engines."
The great weakness of such a system of governance is that its only solution
to problems that bring into question the ideological basis of the power
wielded by the establishment is to pretend that they do not exist. The
Catholic Church has supplied a paradigm for similarly blind autocracy with
its attitude to misbehaviour in the priestly ranks, encapsulated in the
phrase "was nicht sein darf, nicht sein kann". In the same way,
the nationality issue, the proximate cause of the Empire's demise according
to many commentators, was at first deemed a non-issue, which in practice
meant that there was one nationality (German Austrian) to which the others
were cultural and political appendages. Evans cites the patronizing remarks
even of the great Grillparzer which showed that this mind-set was fairly
widespread among officials and the intelligentsia (Grillparzer remarked
that Kant's Critique would have sold only three copies in Magyar and that
"Czech nationality has only a single flaw, that it isn't one").
Presiding over such a one-eyed system brought out in Francis Joseph the
least attractive sides of the two forebears his chosen name was supposed
to honour--the hypocritical and oppressive conservatism of Franz I and
the ruthless Germanizing centralism of Joseph II. The refusal to recognize,
perhaps even to grasp empirically, the spiritual and legal claims of subject
nations ultimately exacted a high price despite the system's delivery of
material improvements to living standards, and despite the rather desperate
attempts to make up for lost ground later. In a happy phrase, Evans remarks
that the "real motto for the first and main phase of the Austrian
experiment might have been 'sauter pour mieux reculer', the more so because
of its sins of omission and commission in respect of other kinds of national
sentiment."
It may be thought that this unsatisfactory state of affairs was done away
with by the Ausgleich of 1867. Yet, as Steven Beller points out, the appearance
of a reformed constitutional monarchy was largely misleading: "Both
in Cisleithania and Hungary Francis Joseph retained very large constitutional
powers, which were far from being merely theoretical." In Hungary
in the secret Punktation of March 1867, Francis Joseph insisted on, and
the Magyar leadership accepted, various powers which went beyond those
of a monarch in a "parliamentary" system. Apart from various
executive powers, such as those of appointment in the central bureaucracy,
there
was the crucial power of the royal "presanction" of legislation.
That is to say, Francis Joseph had to give his permission before legislation
was presented to the Hun garian parliament by his ministers. This amounted
to a royal prophylactic veto, giving the Emperor immense negative powers
over his Hungarian ministers and parliament. the post-1867 constitutional
settlement in Hungary thus included within itself what George Barany has
called "the disguised continuation of monarchical absolutism"
(pp. 105-106). In other words, the resulting Hungarian polity was neither
fish (complete political assimilation to the more powerful unit, as was
the case with the union of Scotland with England) nor fowl (complete autonomy,
which would have led to the break-up of the Empire). This political imbalance
did not, perhaps, totally eclipse the rather generous economic settlement
of the Aus gleich: just as Scotland has always tended to do better pro
capita in exchequer outlay than the rest of the United Kingdom, so Hungary
was only obliged to contribute 30 per cent of common expenditure to Austria's
70 per cent (after 1908, 36.4 per cent to 63.6 per cent). This no doubt
helped to assuage some of the discontent, and there were plenty of people
who simply concentrated on getting rich. Even so there was at least one
political crisis around the turn of the century that caused Francis Joseph
and the Austrian high command to draw up plans for a possible invasion
of the Trans leithanian part of the Empire.
[...]
Nicholas T. Parsons
is the author of The Xenophobe's Guide to
the Austrians (Ravette Books, 1994) and The Blue Guide to Vienna (1996).
