1848 (2 page)

The other three great European powers were absolute monarchies and, of these, Austria was in many ways central to the conservative European system. ‘Austria' was the Habsburg Empire, a polyglot assembly of territories enveloping no fewer than eleven different nationalities: Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Italians, and the Slav peoples - Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians (then known as Ruthenians), Slovenians, Serbs and Croats. This veritable Tower of Babel was held together by the Habsburg dynasty, ruling from its imperial capital, Vienna. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 right up to 1848, the dominant figure in Austrian politics was one of the giants of the nineteenth century, Klemens von Metternich. A long-serving Austrian diplomat, Metternich had been the Habsburg monarchy's foreign minister since 1809 and Chancellor since 1821. He was intelligent, arrogant, aloof and, as a British diplomat once put it, ‘intolerably loose and giddy with women'.
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He was not Austrian, but was born in 1773 in Koblenz, a town then ruled by one of the many states of the Rhineland, the Archbishopric of Trier. Like the other small German principalities, Trier reposed within the protective shell of the Holy Roman Empire, at the pinnacle of which was the Emperor, who was chosen by the prince-electors and who was invariably a Habsburg, since this dynasty had for centuries been the most powerful and therefore the best placed to defend Germany. In the autumn of 1794 the French revolutionary armies overran the Rhineland and with the triumph of the blue-coated hordes came the republican retribution against the local nobility. The Metternich estates were confiscated and Klemens fled to Vienna, where he subsisted on an imperial pension and the income from his last remaining land in Bohemia. His inexorable climb up the ladder of Austrian diplomatic service began in 1801, when he took the post of Austrian minister to Saxony. With Napoleon rampaging across Central Europe - abolishing the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire in 1806 - Metternich began to develop the idea that the multi-national Habsburg monarchy, held together by a strong imperial government in Vienna, could become the new ‘foundations of a European political system'.
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By 1815 Metternich's background and direct experience gave him a strong sense that the Habsburg monarchy was not only a German, but also a European, necessity. In a positive way, Metternich believed that a powerful state in Central Europe had a chance of protecting the smaller German states and of playing a leading role in preserving the social and political stability of the entire continental order. In a more negative sense, if the Habsburg monarchy failed, then the multi-national empire at the heart of Europe would fragment and, where once there was order, there would be civil strife, revolutionary conflict and terror, the effects of which no European state could hope to escape. Metternich was the main architect of the entire conservative order. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the diplomatic role that he played at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. After the protracted agony and slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars, this great international conference tried to reconstruct a European political system that aimed not only to maintain international peace, but to keep under the hammer the twin threats of liberalism and nationalism. This attitude was shared by Metternich's fellow diplomats. The legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte and the carnage of the wars that now bear his name (and killed proportionately as many Europeans as the First World War) weighed heavily on the minds of policy-makers. So, too, did the grim, angular shadow of the guillotine. For conservatives across Europe, liberalism and nationalism meant revolution - and that could only be the bleak herald of destruction and death, whether it came in the shape of revolutionary armies streaming across the continent, respecting neither life, nor religion, nor property, or in the form of a bloodthirsty social war waged by scythe-wielding peasants, or by the desperate, dispossessed urban masses, against all those who had a stake in the established order. The post-Napoleonic political system therefore tried to be muscular in the face of subversive threats to its existence; this was precisely because it was all too aware of what failure might mean.

For the chief organiser of this order, the only monarchy worth the title was an absolute monarchy. In 1820, fearful that Alexander I of Russia was flirting with the hair-raising idea of introducing a constitution, Metternich addressed to the Tsar his ‘profession of political faith'. Monarchs, he argued, had to be ‘placed above the sphere of passions which agitate society':

 

Among the ‘factions' that threatened ‘society' were liberals and nationalists who called for constitutions, national independence and political unity. Sovereigns should not yield to these demands, not even in an effort to make timely concessions to avoid revolution: ‘Respect for everything that exists; liberty for all Governments to watch over the well-being of their own peoples; a league between all Governments against the factions in all States; mistrust for words devoid of sense [“the cry for Constitutions”], which have become the rallying cry of the factions.' For Metternich, however, absolute rule did not mean despotism, which was government at the capricious whim of a single man. Rather, monarchs had to rule through a framework of law and regular administration: ‘The first and greatest of matters . . . is the fixity of laws, their uninterrupted working, and never changing them. So may Governments govern, may they maintain the fundamental bases of their institutions, old as well as new; for if it is always dangerous to interfere with them, it could not be useful to do so now, in today's general turbulence.'
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The Habsburg regime, in fact, was not especially oppressive - at least not by the standards of modern dictatorships. Its bureaucracy was generally honest and efficient. Moreover (and despite his advice to the Tsar), Metternich used his considerable diplomatic influence to press mild reforms on the more benighted absolute rulers whose intransigence threatened to provoke violent opposition: in 1821 he promised military aid to King Ferdinand I of Naples against the monarch's rebellious subjects, on the condition that Ferdinand made some minor concessions. Despite all the talk of the rule of law and of the benevolence of the monarchy, Metternich and other conservatives feared that, should constitutional or revolutionary movements have arisen among the diverse peoples of the Habsburg monarchy, then the very integrity of the empire would be endangered. In theory, it was held together by the subjects' loyalty to the dynasty, the common institutions of the monarchy (including the administration and the imperial army) and, although there were religious minorities such as Jews and Protestants, the Catholicism of most Austrian subjects. In 1815 perhaps only the Germans, the Magyars, the Poles and the Italians had a deep sense of their own national identity. The first three, in particular, also dominated the other subject-nationalities of the empire, politically and socially. In Hungary the Magyar gentry lorded over the peasants who in the north were Slovaks, in the east were Transylvanian Romanians and in the south were Serbs or Croats. In Galicia the Poles tended to be the landlords holding the Ukrainian peasantry in such a state of servitude that they were practically beasts of burden. The Czechs, at least, with their high standards of education and (by 1848) the most advanced manufacturing base in the Habsburg monarchy, were beginning to challenge German hegemony in Bohemia, but one of the seething resentments among the non-Germans was that since the machinery of the state was centred in Vienna, it was dominated by German officials, whose language was usually the official medium in the law, education and administration. Even so, a developed sense of national identity was primarily shared by the aristocratic elites and the urban, middle classes, who were of course precisely the people most frustrated that opportunities in the bureaucracy, the law and in higher education were closed off unless one spoke German. This had not yet trickled down to the mass of peasants, many of whom saw the Emperor as their guardian against the depredations of their landlords, but the very fact that social difference coincided with ethnic divisions would aggravate the frequently bloody conflicts among the nationalities of Central Europe.

The resentment of the Magyars against what they saw as German dominance and overbearing Habsburg authority was potentially very dangerous to the empire. Unlike most of the other nationalities, the Magyars had a constitutional voice: the Hungarians had a diet, or parliament, which was dominated by the Magyar nobility, the clergy and the burghers of the free royal towns. Thus the ‘Hungarian nation' - meaning in contemporary parlance those who were represented in the diet - made up a small proportion of the total population. The rest were legally defined, with graphic aptness, as the
misera plebs contribuens -
the poor tax-paying plebians (Latin was still, to the chagrin of patriotic Magyars, the official language of Hungarian politics and administration). The Magyar nobility none the less consisted of a fairly sizeable proportion of the Hungarian population - some 5 per cent compared to an estimated 1 per cent in pre-revolutionary France - and some of them were poor enough to be dubbed the ‘sandalled nobles', since, it was said, they were so penniless that they could not afford boots. Yet, since these men only had their privileges and titles to distinguish them from the rest of the toiling masses, they were often the most resistant to any reform that endangered their status. Although the Habsburg Emperor, who also held the title of King of Hungary, could summon and dismiss the diet at will (and Emperor Francis sulkily refused to call the troublesome parliament between 1812 and 1825), it was difficult to raise taxation without consulting it, so it met in 1825, 1832-6, 1839-40, 1843-4 and, most dramatically, in 1847-8. Moreover, even when the parliament was not in session, the Hungarian gentry entrenched their opposition to the Habsburg monarchy in the fifty-five counties, where they elected and salaried the local officials, and where their assemblies (or ‘congregations'), which often met annually, were sometimes so bold as to claim the right to reject royal legislation.
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In 1815 the Italians of Lombardy and Venetia fell under Habsburg rule. They, too, had an institutional outlet because they both had congregations, chosen from among local landowners and the towns, as well as the united ‘Congregations General', which drew together delegates from the two provinces. These assemblies had the right to decide how to implement laws handed down by the government, represented by a viceroy living in Milan, but not to make legislation of their own. The Habsburgs had to tread carefully, for northern Italy was one of the jewels in their crown: Lombardy's fertile, irrigated plains were a bright patchwork of wheat, of well-kept vines and of mulberry bushes, upon which silk worms produced their precious fibres. The duchy's capital and, to the irritation of the proud Venetians, of the two provinces together, was Milan, which was culturally one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, thanks in part to the lighter touch of the censor, as compared with elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire. Lombardy-Venetia accounted for a sixth of the monarchy's population, but contributed close to a third of its tax revenue - a fact that was not lost on Italian patriots. The Austrians worked hard to ensure that northern Italy was well and fairly governed, but the inevitable tensions arose. Educated Lombards and Venetians grumbled that Austrians occupied some 36,000 government posts, preventing Italians from enjoying their fair share of state patronage.
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Outside Hungary and Lombardy-Venetia, there were no representative institutions worthy of the name in the Habsburg Empire. Since 1835 the Emperor had been the mentally disabled Ferdinand (in one famous outburst, he yelled at his courtiers, ‘I am the Emperor and I want dumplings!'). He was loved by his subjects, who affectionately referred to him as ‘Ferdy the Loony', but of necessity the task of government was left to a council (or Staatskonferenz), dominated by Metternich. The rejection of constitutional government made repression almost unavoidable, since Metternich's political vision would not admit the legitimacy of any opposition. There was a secret police, which operated out of offices on the Herrengasse in Vienna, but the number of officers was small - some twenty-five, including thirteen censors - so in the imperial capital they relied upon the regular police (which also handled a plethora of other tasks), while in the provinces local bureaux had to deal with both regular and secret policing. This was not a particularly intense system of surveillance, but it is also true that the activities of printers, publishers and writers were hemmed in with a range of petty, irritating regulations.
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Since only one of four categories of books was fully permitted, this fostered a climate that assumed a publication would be forbidden unless it was explicitly allowed.
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The repression was particularly tough in Russia, the second of Europe's pre-eminent absolutist regimes. If Metternich cast Austria in the role of Central Europe's policeman, then Tsar Nicholas I saw himself as gendarme for the entire continent. The Russian empire had been in his iron, autocratic grip since the death of Alexander I in 1825. He had founded the notorious Third Section, the secret police, an organisation which had a tiny number of officials, but which worked through the gendarmerie and a larger number of informants, who made as many as five thousand denunciations a year. The very existence of police spies created an atmosphere in which it took a brave soul to express dissent openly. One widely believed myth held that in one office of the Third Section headquarters in Saint Petersburg there was a trap door: during a seemingly innocuous conversation, a perfectly innocent individual summoned before the police officials could be lured into saying a minor indiscretion, whereupon a lever would be pulled and the victim would fall into a dungeon below to be subjected to all sorts of unspeakable horrors.