Ágnes Deák

Ferenc Deák and the Habsburg Empire

 

Ferenc Deák (1803 - 1876), "the sage of the nation", is a much less familiar figure outside Hungary than contemporary statesmen such as Count István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth, or even Baron József Eötvös, whom Hungarians have placed in their national pantheon. As a member of the great pre-1848 Reform Era generation, his life's work has become inseparable from the achievements of creating equality of civil rights and implanting modern liberal constitutional government in Hungary. Deák was one of the most distinguished leading figures in the liberal reform movement even before 1848 with his successful synthesis of the traditional opposition by the country's nobility to the Habsburg central administration and the ideas of modern liberalism. He became Minister of Justice in the immediate wake of the April Laws of 1848, but as the constitutional conflict between Vienna and Pest tipped over into open military conflict he increasingly took a back seat and finally stood aside. After the military crushing of the national uprising against the house of Habsburg in 1849, and with the government in Vienna trying to set up a uniform centralised empire, Deák's name became a byword for Hungarians as a symbol of their passive resistance. The principles of that resistance might be summed up as to have no truck with the organs of the new state authority, let alone accept any state post, but instead to bury oneself in the intimate circle of family and friends and keep the flame of commitment to patriotism, nationalism and liberalism alive there.
In 1859, following defeat in a war against the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont and France, the weakness of the Austrian Empire's foreign and domestic policies was plain to all, and leaders in Vienna embarked on a tentative search for a way forward down various avenues. Eventually, from 1865, Francis Joseph was increasingly in favour of a negotiated compromise with Hungary's liberals. A key role in that process was played by Ferenc Deák, who had sufficient prestige to stand both as trustee and modifier of the liberal traditions of the Reform Era and 1848/49. The Ausgleich (kiegyenlítés) that was reached in 1867 - with overtones more of "calling it quits" than of "compromise" (kiegyezés) the standard term in current Hungarian - was the subject of lively debate amongst contemporaries, and has been to this day amongst historians, despite the fact that it set the framework for close to half a century of dynamic and peaceful growth in Hungary, drawing to a close a quest that by then had been in progress for well over a hundred years.

At the start of the eighteenth century, two lengthy processes in Hungary's history drew to a close. First, the entire territory of the country was successfully liberated from Ottoman domination, with the country now firmly united within the framework of the Habsburg Empire. Secondly, the series of anti-Habsburg uprisings that had as their goal the defence of the Hungarian feudal Estates against centralising absolutism came to an end. With the conclusion of the unsuccessful revolt led by Prince Francis II Rákóczi, an uneasy compromise was reached between the Empire and the Hungarian Estates. The former abjured a policy of open confrontation, whilst the Estates recognised the legitimacy of the newly created authorities. The Pragmatic Sanction, enacted in Hungary in 1723, extended the rights of succession to female members of certain branches of the house of Habsburg and proclaimed the principle that the title to the Empire was unitary and indivisible, while guaranteeing Hungary's separate status and upholding the privileges of the Estates.
Vienna, however, justifiably continued to regard Hungary's separate status, and hence the co-existence of a feudal constitution (in Hungary) and absolutist rule (in the hereditary provinces) within the structure of a single empire as the greatest obstacle to imperial integration. The aim, though now eschewing direct conflict, was progressively to reduce the powers and political clout of the Hungarian Diet and the nobility's county administrative institutions, and to obtain an ever-broader scope for the sovereign's will; that is to say, increasingly to subordinate Hungary, on the pattern of Bohemia before her, to the central authorities of imperial government. The break-up of the Holy Roman Empire within the German-speaking lands during the early part of the nineteenth century lent even greater urgency to imperial integration, insofar as the Habsburg Empire still wished to remain one of the great powers in Europe and to strengthen its leading role amongst the German states. The balance between the Hungarian Estates and the central authorities wavered towards the end of Maria Theresa's rule and during the decade of attempts at centralisation under Joseph II, but it was restored on the latter's death in 1790: the feudal constitution reaffirmed the separate status of Hungary in all areas where the basic principles permitted political participation by the Estates. Where the sovereign's rights and privileges, collectively known as the Reservatrechte, came to the fore - notably in foreign and military affairs, and finance - absolutist tendencies, with their integrationist aspirations, gained the upper hand through the intertwined royal (in Hungary) and imperial (outside Hungary) administrative apparatuses.
Prior to 1848, all political forces in Hungary were agreed that the Habsburg Empire offered the desired political framework for a country which, lying as it did within the force-field of the two major powers of Russia and a Germany undergoing unification, would not be sufficiently strong on its own to maintain its independence, and its territorial integrity might even be threatened by the looming threat of Pan-Slavism. Little opportunity arose to formulate those fears before a wider public, however. The most explicit statement that we know of comes from a letter that Ferenc Deák wrote in November 1842 to his brother-in-law and one of his closest friends, József Tarányi Oszterhueber. Deák argued that the Austrian empire was an amalgam of many small nations that, at that juncture, were held together purely by the ruling house they shared. The other European great powers might consider the survival of Austria as serving their own interests, but that could change in the future. Unlike many of his liberal contemporaries, Deák was highly realistic in presuming that the Hungarian future was not directly threatened by some form of Pan-Slav unity under Russian leadership, though he sensed the lengthening shadow projected by modern nationalism. He thought the great western powers would certainly be unwilling to accept the risks of an unsuccessful war against Russia in the interests of keeping Austria intact. In that event, several new states were likely to emerge: a northern Slav state (comprising Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia, and the Slovak-inhabited areas of Upper Hungary), a southern Slav state (comprising the Slovene-inhabited areas of the hereditary provinces, Croatia, Dalmatia, and the Serb-inhabited areas of southern Hungary), with the German-speaking areas of the hereditary provinces becoming part of a German unitary state in one form or another, leaving a much diminished rump Hungary. He even went so far as to raise the possibility that the whole of Hungary might be divided amongst the other three emergent states surrounding it.
That letter eloquently displays just how pessimistic Deák was in regard to the possible impact of foreign-political factors. He has often been unjustly accused that his vision did not extend beyond the horizon of county politics, yet in his case the absence of reference to those external factors was a deliberate strategy. He was fully convinced that great power interests were all that counted in European diplomacy and that none of the powers was going to concern itself with Hungarian nationalist aims, so it was pointless basing a programme for the future on foreign-political relations on which Hungary was anyway unable to exert an influence.
"Admittedly, Hungary's Magyar provinces would be nothing in respect of their autonomy and nationality," he continues his train of thought in the above letter,

but then Europe does not give them any thought. Neither in their size nor their political significance, neither in their cultural refinement nor their commerce, are they such as to obtain the sympathy of other nations on these accounts [...] they treat us like fractional numbers, casting us wherever they see best by way of rounding off, so to say, the adjustments to their sums.

Prior to 1848, for Hungarian liberals the basic law governing relations between Hungary and the Habsburg Empire was Law X of 1790, under which Hungary

is a free Kingdom and independent as regards the whole legal form of its governance; that is to say, it is dependent on no other Kingdom or people, but is possessed of its own separate existence and Constitution,

which was interpreted to mean that Hungary was an autonomous state unit and not part of the Austrian Empire. In the course of the debates that were conducted in the Hungarian Diet during 1836 over how Ferdinand was to be styled as King of Hungary, Deák proclaimed:

since our homeland is totally independent of the hereditary provinces of Austria, and not a constituent part of the Austrian Empire, to imbed the title of King of Hungary completely within the that of the Austrian emperor, indeed to subsume it totally to that even in respect of how it is styled, is tantamount to insulting at least one external sign of our national independence.

What he was arguing was that Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria should only style himself Ferdinand V when acting in his capacity as King of Hungary. Hungarian liberals did indeed recognise the Pragmatic Sanction, though not as the basic law but as just part of the country's feudal constitution - and one that they rarely resorted to at that. Lajos Kossuth noted in a private letter written in early 1847:

We respect the Pragmatic Sanction, but any extension of its scope beyond the unity of the sovereign to the unity of the common empire we regard as treachery. Where our interests coincide with the interests of Austria, we are glad to offer a helping hand in order that a reconciliation of those interests be attempted, but in no case are we prepared to surrender 1790: X, and if that reconciliation cannot take place on some point, we are not prepared to subordinate the interests of our homeland to the interests of Austria; indeed we both desire and demand that, under those circumstances, the Cabinet in Vienna seek advice in its policy on the constitutional autonomy of Hungary, not its own absolutism...

Under this interpretation, then, it was purely the person of the shared sovereign who linked Hungary to the 'other half' of the Habsburg Empire.
The liberals were well aware, of course, that the actual state of affairs embodied a far closer interdependence of the two parts of the Empire than a mere personal union. Likewise that it was to be expected that inasmuch as modern constitutional measures were to be adopted eventually even in Hungary and Austria, this would affect the Empire's traditional 'dualist' relations.

In 1848 the Habsburg Empire was shaken to its foundations as it was forced to grapple not just with the challenges of modern constitutionality and civil rights but also the centrifugal force of nationalism. The national movements of the Slavs in the empire aimed at a kind of federalism based on either the existing provinces or the creation of new units, drawn up in accordance with ethnic principles. Hungary would not have occupied a privileged place within such a federation; indeed, acceptance of nationality as the principle determining the way the state was structured could be linked with schemes for breaking up Hungary as it then existed. After initial euphoria over a unified Greater Germany, German-speaking Austrian liberals gradually fell back on the notions of a Greater Austria, for as soon as it became clear that substantial parts of the Habsburg Empire, such as the lands of the Hungarian crown, northern Italy, or Galicia, could not be integrated into a united Germany, they concentrated on preserving the Austrian empire's integrity as their primary goal. For them, it stood to reason that under a constitutional arrangement the exercise of the sovereign's previous imperial and royal privileges would need to be transferred to a unitary imperial parliament and government, thereby establishing a unified, centralised modern state within which Hungary would be just one of the provinces.
The Hungarian liberal élite, on the other hand, saw in the European-wide political storms of the spring of 1848 a historical opportunity, in the wake of the achievement of Italian and, particularly, German unification, to loosen the dependence on the imperial rulers and progressively to bring the country's true status within the Empire closer to the ideal of a personal union. They considered the Hungarian Diet and government as empowered to exercise the previous Reservatrechte. The April Laws of 1848 in themselves created conditions which, with the exception of foreign and military affairs, approximated to a personal union, whilst - despite reference to the Pragmatic Sanction in the preamble - the government of Prime Minister Count Lajos Batthyány saw "continued development" in this direction as one of its main objectives. They were keen supporters of a Greater Germany, because they regarded the creation of a unified Germany as an almost indispensable foreign-political prerequisite for a personal union. Vienna meanwhile, from the summer of 1848 onwards, as the balance on the northern Italian front, and within the European political arena more generally, swung back in their favour, was seeking to restrict even the autonomies secured under the April Laws, and this dual tension set Vienna and Pest increasingly at odds. From the private letters that he wrote to his brother-in-law, we know how anxious and pessimistic a view Deák took of events from as early as the spring of 1848. As a minister, he personally was not in favour of Hungary assuming partial responsibility for the Empire's debts, which was one of the most acute issues between the Hungarian government and the Austrian political leadership, though in the letter in question he did not justify that stand with any arguments of principle but with the practical consideration that the country simply could not afford to pay the interest. He also backed the Hungarian government's policy on dispatching military units to northern Italy, for although recognising the defensive obligations placed on it by the Pragmatic Sanction, the government made its support for the Austrian force in the war against Sardinia and Piedmont conditional on a consolidation of the domestic political situation. He likewise stood behind the Hungarian government's line, as a token of its right to conduct its own foreign policy, of sending two representatives to the German parliament in Frankfurt am Main. In so doing, however, he strove to bolster Batthyány's position as prime minister against Lajos Kossuth, who was riding on the support and pressure exerted by the radical democratic faction. As one of the constitutional moderates, Deák was in the party that travelled with Batthyány to Vienna in late August in an attempt to reduce tensions between Vienna and Pest, just as in that September he was also a member of the National Assembly delegation dispatched to the imperial parliament in Vienna with the aim of settling 'mutual relations'. In the autumn of 1848, on the evidence of a statement he made much later, Deák would have considered acceptable a constitutional solution similar to that eventually enshrined in the 1867 Ausgleich. Moreover, in his view, the Hungarian National Assembly would have endorsed such an arrangement. He nevertheless roundly condemned attacks on the April Laws. He took an active part in the work of parliament even after the King had issued his manifesto of October 3rd dissolving it and thereby accepted the status of a rebellious subject. Early in 1849, however, he stepped down, or to put it another way, switched to passive resistance both against the Hungarian political leadership, by then tilting towards the revolutionary democratic line, and against the imperial leadership. He had retired to his estate in Zala County by the time he learned of the 14 April 1849 Declaration of Independence.

Despite the promised constitutionality, the post-1849 era for Hungary was a period of absolutist imperial centralisation. The form of government introduced and known by the names of the Austrian prime minister, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, and his minister of the interior, Count Franz Stadion, sought to use the historically unprecedented chance thrown up by Hungary's defeat in the War of Independence as a way of resuscitating some of Joseph II's innovations and so achieving a centuries old centralising dream.
Conservative and liberal pamphlets published in Hungary during the early 1850s fell back on ideas of the Reform era in the sense of arguing for the necessity of the continued existence of the Habsburg Empire as a bulwark against the perceived Russian and Pan-Slav threat. At the same time, they dissociated themselves from what 1848/49 had meant as an earnest of a personal union or of secession from the Empire, just as they did from the drive for imperial centralism. In place of a personal union, they advocated a scheme of federalism based on historical rights, though what they meant by historical rights was no longer a claim enshrined in, or inferrable from, a body of law but one based on the power relations that actually pertained in the past: "...one cannot take into account more of the historical rights of the provinces than were theirs in reality...," wrote the novelist and liberal thinker József Eötvös, who had likewise been a minister in the 1848 government, in a German-language pamphlet which was published first at Leipzig then at Pest in 1850. Precisely on that account, such programmes no longer interpreted the Pragmatic Sanction as a personal union but as a true union between two states, which would create spheres of common affairs in respect of foreign policy, national defence, finance and foreign trade.
Hungary's exiled political leaders at the same time clearly abandoned the concept of 'Austro-Hungarism' and, in line with the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed that the Habsburg Empire could only be maintained by force and would inevitably be split up by the historical energies inherent in the drives for Italian and German unification. They saw it as their job to win the backing of, first and foremost, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont to take on board the creation of an independent Hungary as one of the objectives of a future war against Austria. The alternative future, as they saw it, was a Hungary within a confederation of Danubian peoples based on democratic principles.
Within this political force-field, Deák's 'silence' during the 1850s became a repository of the heritage of 1848 for the Hungarian political public, without his doing anything in particular. Even earlier on he had held himself aloof from modern publicity, the world of newspapers and pamphlets; with the Diet and self-governing county assemblies, the traditional forums for politicking by the feudal Estates, now closed down, his principal arena of political activity had disappeared. He ran his farm on his estate and lived the life of the Hungarian country gentry meanwhile becoming a living symbol of the nation's 'passive resistance'. We have no precise information on Deák's political views during the 1850s as all the relevant comments stem from later decades. According to the recollections of Pál Somssich, a conservative, Deák had doubts about the steadfastness of the Hungarian nation, he felt uneasy about its ability to withstand the maelstrom of international relations and the debilitating power of the non-Magyar minorities, whilst at the same time counting on the weakness of Austria and her leading politicians and on the "fickle whims of fate".

In a statement published in 1867, in response to a public letter by Lajos Kossuth that was highly critical of the constitutional compromise Hungary was negotiating with Austria, Deák summed up the motives that had guided his search for a post-1849 settlement in the following terms:

In our position I regard a peaceful settlement as more salutary than a policy that, alongside vague promises, and thrown back on waiting and further suffering, would pin our future fate merely on chance, possibly revolution and the dissolution of the Empire; on foreign assistance, in which one may be quite certain our interests would not be the chief consideration; and on new and foreign alliances neither the shape nor the aim nor the utility of which is as yet known.

These lines display the same deep mistrust of the impact of external factors as in Deák's 1842 private correspondence. Indeed, that negative appraisal had been further strengthened by the experience of 1848/49, when the great western powers had all given tacit assistance to the policy of retribution pursued by the Austro-Russian political and military alliance in Hungary. This is likely to have firmed Deák's belief that it was not expedient, but rather downright risky, to hang a political programme primarily on foreign-political considerations.
The second fundamental principle to which he referred in the parliamentary debate over the Compromise was the conviction that Austria continued to offer the most favourable framework for Hungarian developments. On that point, Deák kept faith with the Reform era:

I don't know whether anyone is desirous of the break-up of Austria, but if there are such people, they are most certainly not desirous of our interests. I am anxious, very anxious, that we would not gain from that break-up, and our fate would not change for the better.

Contrary to the standpoint of leaders in exile, he did not regard the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire as imminent, considering any such expectations to be excessive. Most liberals, as we have seen, expected the Habsburg Empire to disintegrate with the unification of Italy and, above all, of Germany. By 1867, of course, Deák knew that the dream of a Greater Germany including Austria had faded, with Prussia managing to manouvre Austria out of the unified state, just as it had transpired by then that although the advent of a unified Italy had succeeded in wresting the northern Italian provinces from Austria, it had not shaken the survival of the Habsburg Empire as such. He thus had cause for expressing his doubts. Yet it seems he was a good deal more sceptical than a fair number of even his closest supporters, including József Eötvös, about the prospects of the Greater German project even before the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Unfortunately, we have no hard evidence for this, but the fact that he was already seriously contemplating the idea of a peaceful settlement from at least the autumn of 1860 onwards does suggest that he was reckoning on the empire's long-term survival. Equally, it is important to stress that although, from his perspective, foreign politics appeared to be an area of unpredictable fortune that was little susceptible to influence, his outlook was not deterministic, for he also reckoned, and moreover said so in the selfsame speech, that

the terminal disintegration of a great empire is not something that happens as easily or so swiftly, especially if its sovereign seeks the firmest support for his throne in the constitutional freedom of his peoples

- or in other words, well-implemented internal constitutional reform would be capable of offsetting the impact even of unfavourable foreign-political factors.
Furthermore, even if Deák considered a potential break-up of the Empire as a catastrophe from the viewpoint of Hungary, as indeed he did, he rightly asked:

What would be better from our point of view: that such a catastrophe should find Hungary in a constitutionally settled state, or that, drained of strength, we should be obliged to confront the fateful events in a confusion of ongoing muddling through? In the first case, we would be more readily and more surely able to serve as a solid kernel of a new formation; in the second case, we would be seen merely as disorderly material that, broken down, might be used on other edifices, and any appeal to our laws and our constitutional autonomy in the face of that would be ineffectual.

Here we again encounter the previously flagged concerns about the dismantling of the country's territorial and ethnic integrity. There is also a glimmer of an alternative concept, likewise going back to the spring of 1848, of a vanished Habsburg Empire being replaced by a larger empire under Hungarian leadership. Deák still found it hard to accept the thought that Hungary had the strength to function as a self-standing, autonomous state. As he put it on another occasion:

The majority of European powers are of a size and dispose of such substantial resources that Hungary would be unable to survive as a separate, freestanding country without a closer alliance that offered secure support. Fate placed our country amidst a group of great powers, any of which, the moment they believed we were crossing its wishes and plans would certainly dispose of us - those trusting in our own might - with its colossal might. And if these great powers were to fight amongst one another for any reason, it would not be our interest but their own that decided our fate, swallowing up or dismembering our homeland.

He was more inclined to the view that even in that case Hungary, "uniting with sundry peoples, would form a new confederative state." Deák was not alone in cherishing dreams of this kind, for his liberal colleagues shared them. József Eötvös, for example, noted in his journal:

If I suppose that the Austrian empire in its old form and with its ambitions, the moment that Austria stepped out of Germany and no longer exercised any influence on Italy would exist no more; that into its place would step a new state, the natural basis for which is Hungary, and which, apart from our own nation, would unify the Bohemian, Polish and other Catholic Slavs and, at best, the Romanians as well, thereby resuscitating almost in full the empire of Louis the Great, securing the same role for the Magyar race as fell to it in its most glorious days, in that, along with unifying all the small nations into one great state, it should be the guardian of freedom and Western civilisation...

On this point, of course, Deák (and also Eötvös) were implicitly taking issue with the plan for a Danubian confederation that Kossuth and László Teleki nurtured. Regarding Kossuth's scheme, all that Deák disclosed to Antal Zichy in 1862 was, "As for that, it's highly impractical!"26 However, he later spoke more openly about this in one of his parliamentary speeches, to which reference has previously been made:

If [...] we should wish to enter in an alliance with our smaller Eastern neighbours, we might come into such friction and internal strife with our own allies on account of our homeland's territorial integrity as to shatter the very goal of alliance.

In other words, the attraction of the idea of the nation-state, if anything, might well signify a fateful threat to the territorial integrity of Hungary, creating insoluble conflicts of interest with the very states on which Kossuth - appealing to the vigour of that selfsame nationalist ideal - was seeking to build a new state. Moreover, in any alliance there would be shared business in which it would be necessary to act collectively, and presumably that federal link would represent no less of a restriction in regard to Hungary's autonomy of action.
Deák's third main argument for the necessity of constitutional consolidation was that passive resistance to absolutism was sapping the nation and hindering socio-economic growth, which would weaken the country's political position in whatever foreign-political constellation the future might bring.

Thus, Deák remained wholly true to the principles of the Reform era regarding the developmental framework that was desirable for Hungary. His views in this respect remained unchanged from those declared in the spring of 1848, which he himself designated as the point of departure for continuity. He did not accept responsibility for the constitutional radicalism of the spring of 1849, nor was there any 'need' for him to do so as he had not shared its aims at the time. What he did revise, on the other hand, was his attitude to the attempts at personal union in the spring and summer of 1848. As he saw it, those had been prompted by the special and possibly unrepeatable international situation that had been created by the wave of revolution in Europe. By the mid-1860s it must have been evident to him that it was likely to take a long time yet before a comparably favourable set of circumstances could be expected to arise. That judgement was confirmed by events.
As his point of departure now he accepted the line that the Habsburg court adopted in 1848 in designating the Pragmatic Sanction as the basic law of the Empire, though in his case emphasising the bilateral character of the treaty. At the same time, he interpreted it as a basic document determining not just a shared sovereign but also a common defence policy, which could be derived - at least in the spirit if not literally, as he admitted in a later parliamentary debate - from it. On that basis, he declared as common affairs, first and foremost, the imperial and royal household and foreign policy, thereby implicitly demanding a constitutional control on foreign affairs. As for military matters, he offered a compromise, recognising the need for an integrated army and command but wishing to retain a right of final decision for the Hungarian parliament on such matters as numbers of recruits, the duration of army service, and the billeting and stationing of troops. He also wished to see finances broken down into imperial and national components, whilst expressing the need for a harmonisation of basic principles on matters of customs duties, trade and taxation. His proposal for handling common affairs was to have a joint session of delegations elected by the Hungarian and Austrian parliaments. Despite the idea of a federal transformation and that of centralisation of the Empire, he stayed true at heart to the traditionalist 'dualist' principles of Hungarian liberals.
It goes without saying that the achievement of the Compromise was not the handwork of a single person, for many played a part in outlining its arrangements, including not a few Hungarian conservatives; indeed, during the final stages of negotiations his most eminent supporters, whom Deák himself had originally pushed forward as negotiating partners, made certain concessions that Deák found very hard to go along with when it came to giving his ex post facto assent. It was his personal standing and credibility nonetheless which mattered, these being the primary factors in lending it a moral and political capital and security in the eyes of the Hungarian public.
Confiding to his journal, József Eötvös characterised the balance of the forthcoming agreement in the following terms:

Through it Hungary will be gaining an influence on precisely the most crucial aspects of political life such as it has never exercised hitherto. It provides for material welfare and an opportunity for intellectual growth to a degree that it has not previously been able to do. On the other hand, with regard to its autonomy, particularly from a legal standpoint, it will undoubtedly bring sacrifices, and in respect of those affairs which are of common interest to Hungary and the Empire, it will attain roughly the same condition as the individual states of America stood in relation to the Union prior to the revolution.

In all likelihood Deák himself felt much the same. He did indeed abandon the abstract claim for a personal union that Hungarian Liberals had professed prior to 1848, but meanwhile he secured for Hungary an opportunity for autonomous action and constitutional decision-making within a broader domain of state sovereignty than it had enjoyed under any earlier dispensation.

Ágnes Deák
teaches nineteenth-century Hungarian history at József Attila University, Szeged. Her research centres on the history of ideas in the 19th century.