Category Archives: Austria

by | 16 February 2025 · 6:21 am

Comparing 1989 With 1848

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 738-740:

People speak of the revolutions of 1989, but the process of transformation preceded that year and extended far beyond it, to our present time. The earliest revolutionary event occurred in August 1980, when Poles launched a 10-million-strong protest movement that authorities outlawed but never crushed. When strikes broke out in Poland toward the end of the decade, reform Communists called on Solidarity’s leaders to negotiate the “solution” of (partly) free elections. The resonance of that event traveled beyond Poland, however, because the trade union’s continued strength showed people across the Soviet Bloc that state socialism was in need of repairs that went beyond and indeed contradicted Leninism.

That is one strand of the story: how some East Europeans showed others the character of their common predicament and how to escape it. Another strand was within the Communist parties themselves, when liberals—most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev but also Hungarian and Polish socialists—discussed and prepared for change, for example, through reforms of legal codes. Without Gorbachev, the Communist system could have continued, and perhaps transformed into something different. Reformers were absent in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which is why the events of 1989 appeared more explosive (and revolutionary) in these places than in Hungary and Poland. One author described the transition in Hungary as a “negotiated revolution.”

The “structural” argument that favored Gorbachev’s reform program was economic; all the East European states registered deepening debt and thus growing dependence on banks, with no end in sight. In the 1980s, Poland was struggling simply to pay interest on its debt. The one state that opposed the reliance on Western credit, Romania, which decided in 1982 to pay all foreign debt, maneuvered itself into a position that was reminiscent of Russia in 1917: the question was not whether there would be an explosion but when. The chain-reaction character of the revolutions of 1989 ensured that when the explosion ignited in Timișoara, the subsequent denouement took place within a “discourse” of democracy, though in fact only Communists had changed places with each other. An actual transition to democratic rule had to wait until later in the following decade.

Thus, when writing about chain reactions, or “avalanches” of revolution that crossed borders in 1988 and 1989, from small to huge (more like icebergs falling into the sea than a collapse of part of a glacier), historians do well to keep in mind that no one knew about the extent of change at the time. Perhaps that is because actors—the Polish dissidents and the Hungarian socialist reformers—could not discern what we now see clearly: the international dimensions of the phenomenon. The first people to make out the larger dynamic were the Czechs. After the East German trains left in early October, and the Berlin Wall fell in early November, Prague, with foreign camera crews on the scene, itself became the set for revolution, a very sudden one, where the major questions were posed and seemed to be answered in a week and a half.

There is a third level to the transnational agitation and ferment: the role of the West in the East, beginning with the work of US consular officials promoting dissenters as well as reform Communists in the 1980s, but continuing in the careful monitoring of political change in the 1990s. Next to Poland, Hungary was the front-runner. The émigré philanthropist George Soros had legally moved his Open Society Foundation to Hungary in the early 1980s, cooperating with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and offered technical equipment (such as copiers), stipends, and contacts with Western civil society organizations. Even before Communism’s collapse, Hungary was thus “networked” with pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The later fall of authoritarian leaders in Slovakia and Bulgaria would be directly tied to the work of NGOs active in those countries, as well as officials of the European Union.

The region’s response to a growing debt crisis, and the pressures of Western creditors, also had echoes of a deeper past. The last time peoples had mobilized en masse for freedom across Europe’s borders was the spring of 1848. That crisis had been preceded by a European-wide series of bad harvests, economic downturn, democratic agitation, and thus a political and intellectual ferment that went across the map. Events in France gave a signal that an opportunity had come for common aspirations to be fulfilled; and as soon as word could travel to Naples, Mannheim, or Bucharest, students, workers, and other urban revolutionaries responded. The enthusiasm was relatively short lived, as the old regime in fact was not vanquished but began reasserting itself from the summer of 1848 in northern Italy and Prague, and the revolution was crushed during the following year.

If 1848 was an attempt of urban classes to throw off the shackles of feudalism, 1989 was the effort of entire societies to shake off a modernization that came to seem counterproductive and inappropriate; from the late 1970s, the region was falling behind economically, as we know now inexorably, and outside of East Germany and the Soviet Union, even the party bureaucracy had long since abandoned commitment based on belief.

The year 1989 seemed to offer a similar script to 1848 but had a happier outcome. There was also a parallel to the Habsburg dilemma of a decade later, of the early 1860s, when perennial financial woes had forced constitutional reform on the monarchy, so that it could satisfy lenders in London and Paris. In a similar way, Polish and Hungarian governments ascended to freedom in 1990 with the immediate challenge of putting their countries back on sound financial footings to prevent their falling out of the international system of exchange. But the hyperinflation that Poland witnessed in early 1990 was a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, beyond anything Habsburg officials could have imagined or dealt with.

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by | 10 November 2024 · 6:33 am

Interwar Croats vs. Yugoslavia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 377-379:

The elections of 1919 produced stunning majorities in Croatia for the Croat Peasant Party, led by the mercurial, charismatic, popular, and erratic but principled Stjepan Radić, who decided to boycott the meetings that drafted the new state’s constitution. He told other Croat politicians before they rushed off to join the Serb Kingdom in 1918 that they were acting like “drunken geese in fog,” having learned nothing from the fall of Emperor Wilhelm in Germany a few weeks earlier. Like the fallen emperor, they were in a hurry to impose power on the people, rather than fostering self-governance by involving the people. No one had asked Croats if they wanted to belong to the new state, and that was an irrational, imprudent, and as time would show, self-defeating act.

Radić then led Croats in boycotting Yugoslav political institutions, and was arrested frequently, once for seeking support for Croat independence in Moscow (an act considered seditious). The other major political forces in Yugoslavia—Serbs from the old kingdom (Radicals), Serbs from Habsburg lands (Democrats), Muslims from Bosnia, and Slovene Catholics—thus ruled the new state without the Croats. Things seemed to change for the better in 1925, when Radić suddenly agreed to take a post as education minister and King Alexander made his first visit to Zagreb. Yet because of incompatibilities of the leaders, this relative harmony only lasted for just over a year.

The differences between Serbs and Croats in political vision proved unbridgable. Croat leaders insisted that Croatia must be guaranteed local autonomy in recognition of centuries of Croatian state’s rights that had been respected even under Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs had no tradition of federal rule. Having borne the costs of liberating Yugoslav territory from the Austrians—while Croats were fighting for Austria—Serbs claimed a moral right to rule the new state from the center. The determination to rule was reflected in a stranglehold Serbs established on institutions of state that lasted until 1941. Yet Serbs also argued compellingly that Yugoslavia had not been a Serb idea in the first place, and their political elite had acceded to unity in response to the urgent wishes of Croat politicians, first at Corfu in 1917, then in Belgrade with the delegation that appeared the following December. Without Serb backing, much of Croatia would have been divided between Hungary and Italy.

Nikola Pašić, the respected leader of the Serb Radical Party, died in 1927, and the parliamentary deputies in Belgrade sank into a routine of lobbing insults across the lines of ethnicity. In June 1928, Radić called Montenegrin deputies “apes,” and the next day, the Serb Radical Puniša Račić shot Radić on the floor of parliament along with two other Croat deputies. The two deputies died immediately, but Radić held on for several weeks, finally succumbing to complications from an operation in early August. The king reputedly offered to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia, but Radić refused, perhaps anticipating the difficulties of separating Croats from Serbs in the old military frontier (krajina) in Croatia and fearing Italian domination of the rump state that would be left.

In the end, Radić also acknowledged the basic need for a state that could secure the peaceful coexistence of the peoples on Yugoslav territory. Yet in contrast to Serb elites in Belgrade, his hope, and the hope of his deputy and successor Vladko Maček, was a federal Yugoslavia, perhaps even a Serb-Croat sharing of rule akin to the 1867 agreement between Austria and Hungary. One sign of hope was that since 1926, his Croatian Peasant Party worked in coalition with the Independent Democrats, a mostly Serb party from former Habsburg areas led by Svetozar Pribićević, also a target of the assassination in June 1928.

But with Radić’s death, the king felt a compulsion to act, and in January 1929, he declared a royal dictatorship, hoping simply to keep the state together. Parliament had proved a “hindrance to any fruitful work in the state” and to permit it to continue its work would expose Yugoslavia to the predations of its neighbors.49 In a modernizing frenzy meant to force Yugoslavia to become a state, Alexander made historic borders irrelevant and divided the country into nine banovine, or districts, named after rivers and with little relation to any district that had ever existed. Bosnia and Croatia simply disappeared from the map. In the army he abolished all insignias and standards that were attached to historic Serbia, thus alienating many Serbs. The country was now officially Yugoslavia and no longer the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Perhaps the king’s scheme was not so outlandish. After all, the very idea of a united South Slav state went against all prior history, and to some extent all interwar Eastern European politics involved creation of new units in disregard of old ones. And he was not a nationalist: far from a tool of the Serb bureaucracy, Alexander acted to reduce Serb predominance. (As we will see, like the region’s other intemperate centralizer, Joseph II, he failed in almost everything he attempted.)

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by | 23 October 2024 · 5:25 am

Protofascism in East Central Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 252-254:

Bohemia’s ethnic strife did not produce protofascism in Czech politics, and indeed, fascism would remain marginal in East Central Europe as a whole, emerging in strength in only German Bohemia, Hungary, and Romania. It flourished where national leaders, usually liberals, lost touch with the common people, thereby exposing themselves to accusations of treachery and contempt by forces further to the right. Like the Linz Program authors, these forces freely mixed socialism into their nationalism.

The liberal German leadership in Vienna, who “soft-pedalled their Germanism in the interest of a multi-national state,” had alienated Bohemia’s Germans by showing little concern for the nationality struggle in Bohemia. Usually of high bourgeois background, these liberals considered lower-class supporters of Schönerer and Wolf unripe for the political process. We hear echoes of their social elitism in the words President Paul von Hindenburg later found for Adolf Hitler: he was a “Bohemian corporal.” Hitler was not from Bohemia, but in Hindenburg’s mind, he fit the stereotype of a German ethnic of poorer quality. The 1882 Linz Program spoke for marginal people like Hitler and Wolf, in whom fears of national and social decline overlapped because they felt an urgent threat to a precarious status. They were being forced back down the social ladder before they had reached the first rung of respectability.

Yet the situation differed markedly among Bohemia’s Czechs. Their national leadership included few high bourgeois or large landholders, and the movement was about national as well as social upward mobility from the start, so that Czech politicians felt personally impugned when Germans said Czechs were a people of field hands and kitchen laborers. The directors of new institutions, political parties, scholarly organizations, and newspapers were one or two generations removed from small towns or the farm. Of the Czechs serving as deputies in the Austrian Parliament in 1900, 43.1 percent came from peasant and 36.5 percent from working-class backgrounds.

This upward mobility was the consequence of institutions that Czechs themselves had built, with some help from the Austrian state, to make the world around them one that seemed their own. By 1850 Czech-language schooling was close to universal, and the Czech movement built on it with secondary and higher education. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthy architect Josef Hlávka put up hospitals as well as administrative offices for the new elites. The movement’s ability to raise money for schools, hospitals, and museums reflected the wealth of a rising ethnic middle class, often pooled in Czech savings and loans associations.

The Czech middle classes rose in an economy that was already complex and well integrated with transregional commerce. Bohemia possessed one-third of the Habsburg monarchy’s industry, with mining and textile production that went back generations; the land’s agriculture was diversified and well capitalized, and featured very old productive sectors, like fish farming. As capitalism grew and Czechs became wealthier, the abundance of social and material goods dulled the edge of class conflict, opening paths to cooperation across the political parties that had emerged by World War I, including the Marxist one. When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, Czech parties continued to cooperate across the political spectrum.

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by | 22 October 2024 · 12:03 pm

Language Conflict in Bohemia, 1880s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 244-245:

In the elections in June 1879, the German liberals (themselves divided over Bosnia) lost seats, and Taaffe cobbled together a government without them, consisting of conservatives, clericals and Slavs—including the Czechs! The combination wobbled but proved the longest-lasting government in Cisleithania: Taaffe said he maintained power by keeping the nationalities in a balanced state of mild dissatisfaction. The Taaffe years were a nightmare for German liberals, who had “fought” for representative government for decades, only to be excluded by their enemies, some of whom had opposed the constitution as such.

Though hardly conservative and even less clerical, the Czechs now abandoned their boycott of government in return for promised concessions on the national question. Their representatives old and young operated as a disciplined club in Vienna’s parliament and scored victories, above all the 1880 “Stremayr ordinance,” which introduced Czech as an external language of administration in Bohemia (that is, as a language that had to be used with those who spoke Czech). A further achievement was the division of Prague’s Karl-Ferdinand University into Czech and German halves in 1882, meaning that Czechs could be educated from the humblest to most advanced stages in their own language. They also got more high schools. But to achieve all this, the Czechs accepted conservative “reforms” that strengthened the church’s role in education and marriage, moves at odds with their own liberal convictions, and not surprisingly, German liberals accused them of hypocrisy.

After that, concessions had to be dragged out of Taaffe, about whom one Czech leader said he threw the Czechs “little crumbs, as if to poultry.” Any progress for the Czech cause took place outside parliament through energies generated from below. As we have seen, when the Czech National Theater was damaged by fire just after opening in 1881, almost half the inhabitants of Prague contributed so that it could reopen two years later. In 1890 the Czechs founded and paid for their own Academy of Sciences and Arts, because the government had refused to support it.

But Minister President Taaffe himself operated under pressure. German liberals were out of government, and Austria’s ally in Berlin scrutinized what he did, protesting if anything seemed “pro-Slavic.” Taaffe forbade a gymnastics festival called by the nationalist Sokol movement in Prague in 1887 because guests were expected from other Slavic lands. This move in turn alienated the restive Young Czechs, the radical and growing wing of the Czech National Party, who formed a bloc within the Czech Club after 1888, calling for universal suffrage, local self-government, and getting the church out of schools. In accord with the ideology of Bohemian State’s Rights, they insisted that the entire Bohemian kingdom was Czech property. In 1882 Taaffe had expanded the franchise by lowering the tax requirements for voting, and the number of Czech voters shot up in the parliamentary elections of 1885, while German liberals lost almost twenty seats.

But if Taaffe left Czech politicians dissatisfied, he produced trauma among Germans. The division of the university in Prague, considered by Germans to be Germany’s oldest, only aggravated fears that they were on a downward slope toward cultural obscurity. From then on, German professors treated Prague’s university as a temporary way station, hoping for a call to a university outside Bohemia. But much worse, Germans in Austria had to stand back and watch a modern state taking shape in Cisleithania [the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary] without their input, a state that seemed increasingly Slavic.

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by | 24 September 2024 · 5:29 am

Berlin, 1878: Prelude to Versailles, 1919

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 210-212, 238-240:

In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, sovereigns, and even citizenship of four national states, which like Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1919, had to be created in the wake of imperial decline so as to secure Europe’s balance of power. We date the independence of modern Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from July 1878.

But in the interests of balance, the statesmen in Berlin traduced the spirit of nationalism by denying to Serbia territory where a plurality of the inhabitants was Orthodox South Slavs. That was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a quilt of ethnicities, which Austria-Hungary was permitted to occupy in 1878 with no purpose other than making sure it did not go to Serbia. Politicians in Vienna and Budapest viewed the prospect of a “great South Slav state” with horror, all the more so as it promised to be a close ally of Russia.

Some have called this frustrated Serb determination to expand “irredentist,” and that is both correct and misleading. The characterization is correct because Serbia felt there were Serbs beyond its boundaries who had to be included, but it is also misleading in suggesting that this agenda was unusual. In fact, every new state, beginning with Italy (where the word “irredentism” originated) and Germany, was irredentist in the sense that it “redeemed” national territory. Piedmont-Sardinia had not been Italy, nor was Prussia Germany. Without irredentism, there would be no Serbia, or any other new East European state, whether created in 1878 or 1919. Therefore, it is not hard to understand the tremendous affront that many Serbs, in and outside Serbia, felt after 1878.

But where Austria-Hungary was concerned, it was not only an affront but also the bizarre act of a troubled imperial state, now taking millions more Slavs under its rule, just a decade after dividing into Austria-Hungary precisely to keep a lid on the empire’s Slavs. But even more intriguingly and confoundingly, the man who negotiated the inclusion of more Serbs and Croats, as well as millions of Bosnian Muslims, was the beautiful hanged man, Count Gyula Andrássy, who became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, and whose own Hungary was trying to make loyal Magyars out of millions of Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenes, and Croats. Before the Compromise of 1867, Magyar politicians had assured representatives of those groups that their rights would be legally guaranteed. Afterward, those promises were forgotten, and demands for national autonomy were treated as seditious. Austria was not Germanizing its population, but German liberals were deeply concerned about the growing numerical superiority of Slavs. Now Vienna and Budapest took responsibility for 3 million more. How could they possibly make them into loyal citizens?

This story takes place in three acts. The first is the last major uprising of a Christian people against Ottoman rule in Europe, the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The acts of Herzegovinian and then Bosnian peasants generated the pressures leading to the Berlin Congress. The second is the sanguineous military campaigns of Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia against the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1878, whose success triggered concern among the European powers about the growth of Russian and the decline of Ottoman power. The third is the Berlin Congress itself and how the European powers rescued peace as well as Austria-Hungary, largely by extending their blessings to four new states, each of which considered itself not an end product but rather a toehold from which the respective ethnic nation would expand.

…

Internationally, the Congress of Berlin was a major step toward the twentieth century, perhaps its inaugural event. The Congress took a principle implicit in the 1830 London Protocol founding modern Greece—that an ethnicity could be a source of sovereignty—and multiplied it by four. By implication, it also adumbrated the idea of minorities, people in the nation-state who did not belong to the nation and required protection. The idea that ethnicity was the basis of the right to rule—a principle later called national self-determination—had been foreign to the Vienna system of 1815. Berlin was not just a halfway point; it was a rupture with that system. What changed in Paris in 1919 was to make the new principle not simply a result of grudging acceptance, but an explicit and valid—indeed, universal—method of organizing statehood.

For South East European peoples, the events of 1875–1878 had a meaning like that of 1848 in Bohemia: after initial uprisings, events soon cascaded in a way that forced choices about self-identification. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox still called themselves Bosnians but increasingly desired attachment to Montenegro or Serbia, while Catholics opted for Austria and more clearly than ever identified as Croats. Religious identity was a starting place but not an endpoint; the participants in the 1875 uprising knew that they were united by religion against the “occupier” and were picking up a script from earlier in the century, when Christian populations in Serbia and Greece had likewise risen up and begun carving out autonomous zones from Ottoman territory. Yet the issue was not religion per se—the insurgents did not care about suppression of worship or doctrine—but a sense that religious belonging had condemned much of the population to subservience.

Did Bosnian identity ever stand a chance as a form of nationhood? “Of the basic criteria by which the Serb and Croat nations established themselves during this period, history, language, and religion,” writes Noel Malcolm, “only religion could apply in Bosnia, a country which had its own separate history.” But in fact, history (that is, people’s consciousness of the past) ignored the boundaries of Bosnia and focused instead on a past that Orthodox South Slavs in Bosnia believed they shared with Orthodox South Slavs in Serbia. According to epic poetry, the common history stretched back to the 1389 Kosovo battle and earlier.

In Bosnia, Orthodox and Muslims had separate imaginations: the former told stories in oral poetry of their coreligionists deceiving Turkish authorities; the latter of theirs outwitting the Austrians. And if advocates for Serb nationhood in Bosnia were inspired by the romantic nationalism that was popular at Central Europe’s universities and understood language as a people’s soul, they had to look no further than Vuk Karadžić, who had based his Serb dictionary on a dialect in Herzegovina. Against Karadžić, Benjamin Kállay had not stood a chance; probably ten times the number of schools he built would not have resulted in the Bosnian identity he intended.

If Bosnian identity amounted to anything, it was the beginning of a strategy for Muslims to oppose complete assimilation by Serb and Croat nationalism, each of which expected co-nationals to become Christian, at least nominally. What the Bosnian and Romanian stories share is a hint that twentieth-century European nationalism was vigorously and exclusively Christian, even when its carriers were fiercely secular.

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by | 23 September 2024 · 5:57 am

Fatal Ausgleich/Kiegyezés of 1867

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 207-209:

The Compromise provided a stable legal platform for state consolidation and steady economic progress in both halves of the monarchy. From 1867 to 1914, the national income tripled, with a yearly rate of growth between 2.6 and 2.8 percent. In Hungary, agricultural exports grew and industrialization accelerated, though it lagged behind Bohemia and Austria. Still, its advance was remarkable. In the 1850s, an average of 250 kilometers of railroad were built each year, and after 1867, the total jumped to 600. The assets in Hungarian banks more than tripled between 1866 and 1873.

The Compromise would have continued to provide a basis for law and order in the Habsburg lands beyond 1918 had World War I not intervened. But the new arrangement was also marked by tension from the start. Hungarians were never satisfied with junior partner or even partner status, and they hoped that the center of gravity in the monarchy would be Budapest, not Vienna.

In 1867 the monarchy’s majority was Slavic, and in both halves Slavic politicians became deeply alienated. Czechs, Croats, Serbs, and Slovaks said their nations had come to the Habsburgs’ rescue in 1848/1849 but were now abandoned; the latter three had been placed at the mercy of the amnestied rebels! In Hungary, only Croats received any recognition, and that was due to the historic integrity of the Croatian kingdom. The others were simply “nationalities” to be subsumed in the “indivisible Hungarian nation.” Rights applied not to national groups but exclusively to individual citizens, and there was no appreciation of the need to protect local vernaculars. The Cisleithanian [Austrian] constitution respected German sensitivities above all others, not officially establishing the German language, but also not permitting it to be challenged as the dominant language of state. All ethnic groups (Volksstämme) had equal rights to nationality and language, but what constituted a Volksstamm, or how the state might protect it, was not specified.

In neither half of the monarchy did the new arrangement come close to satisfying the desires of the nationalities’ political elites for self-government and legally binding protection of their cultures. The difference between the two halves was that the Hungarian state actively sought to make its subjects into Magyars, while the Austrian government was for the most part nationally agnostic. It even passed a school law in 1869 that gave each nationality the right to a school if forty of its children lived within 4 kilometers of a given locale. Yet once this provision passed, Czechs took it for granted rather than crediting it to the Austrian government, and as the percentage of literate Czechs reached among the top rates in Europe, so did the dissatisfaction of Czech elites with the fact that they had no national autonomy comparable to the that of the Hungarians. The Czech leader Rieger called the Compromise “unnatural injustice,” and in general, Czechs referred to the December Constitution as “artificial.”

Czech passive resistance dated back to 1863 with the partial boycotting of the Vienna Reichsrat, but full-scale abstention by Czech deputies began in 1868 from Vienna and extended to the Bohemian and Moravian diets. It was accompanied by public protests so severe in October 1868 that the government imposed a state of siege in Prague and surrounding communities. Czech politics became what would later be called “extraparliamentary opposition.” Between 1868 and 1871, the movement staged more than a hundred mass meetings, called tabory, or camps, in the countryside, with between 1 and 1.5 million participants. The protesters called for Bohemian state rights, suffrage, education, and Slav solidarity. Authorities in Vienna tried to suppress the agitation through arrests and confiscations of newspapers, measures that were in clear violation of the freshly printed constitution. As we will see in Chapter 9, promising attempts to placate the Czechs were worked out in 1871 and supported by Francis Joseph, but they came to nothing because of Austro-German Magyar opposition. Magyar politicians feared that any concessions to nationalities in the west—“Cisleithania”—would encourage demands from the nationalities in Hungary.

The Compromise kept the monarchy afloat but ended any pretense that it might call itself an empire. The monarchy had no “imperial center” and no effective control over more than half the realm in the east, which was becoming a nation-state, while Cisleithania became a partly decentralized territorial conglomeration. Yet if Austria-Hungary was no empire, it was propelled by imperialist energies, based in the joint desires of German and Magyar elites to subjugate Slavs and convert them to the “higher” culture. The combination of condescension and fear led the monarchy forward—and also downward. In 1878, Austria-Hungary took the odd step of occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina, and taking charge of even more Slavs. In the background lay the conviction that it was bringing civilization to yet one more benighted region. In the foreground lay the simple determination to deny this land to a growing Serbia. Yet there was no chance of making Bosnians into Austrians or Hungarians. As the monarchy reformed, it made itself less reformable; as it grew in size, it shrank in self-confidence; and as it entered the imperial age, it was less an empire than ever before.

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by | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

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by | 1 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Bismarck Unites Italy

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 297-298:

In 1866 the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck found Austria to be a serious obstacle to the realization of his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. He therefore forged an alliance with the new kingdom of Italy: the two would attack Austria simultaneously on two fronts. In the event of victory, Italy’s reward would be Venice and the Veneto. A single battle was enough. It was fought on July 3 at Sadowa—also known by its German name of Königgrätz—some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the greatest number of troops—some 330,000—ever assembled on a European battlefield. The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Emperor Franz Josef and opened the way to Vienna. The ensuing armistice duly resulted in the cession of the promised territory. Venice was no longer the independent republic that she had once been, but she was at least an Italian city rather than an Austrian one; and Italy could boast a new and economically invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

The unity of Italy, however, could not be achieved without Rome; and Rome too was acquired by courtesy of Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian House of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain—a proposal clearly unacceptable to the French, who would have then found themselves completely surrounded by Germany. War was therefore declared—by France, not Prussia—on July 15, 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon III was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. Thus, by the end of August, not one French soldier remained in Rome. Pope Pius IX was left defenseless. Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on September 1 spelled the end of the Second Empire; and on September 20 the Italian army entered the Holy City. The Pope withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterward registered 133,681 votes in favor of the incorporation of Rome into the new kingdom and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy, not by right of conquest but by the will of its people; and the kingdom of Italy, under its sovereign King Victor Emmanuel II, finally took its place among the nations of Europe.

As the voting figures showed, the Sicilians were as happy as their new compatriots. They were, after all, a good deal more Italian than Spanish, and even though their King was a Piedmontese—a man of the mountains rather than of the sea, and hailing from as far from Sicily as it was possible to go while remaining an Italian—there seemed a fair chance that they would be allowed to play a larger part in their own affairs than they had in the past. They hoped so, anyway.

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by | 29 May 2024 · 3:36 pm

Sicily’s Quarantotto

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 273-275:

WHEN, ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1848—the thirty-eighth birthday of Ferdinand II—the people of Palermo rose up against their Bourbon masters, they could have had no idea of what they were starting. As we have seen, risings in the kingdom were nothing new, but they had all been relatively easily dealt with. What happened in 1848—the quarantotto, as Italy remembers it—was something else. It was a revolution, and by the end of the year it had been followed by many other revolutions. In Italy alone, they occurred in Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena and Milan; in northern and central Europe there were also those in Paris, Vienna, Cracow, Warsaw and Budapest.

Already, as the year opened, student riots had prompted the authorities to close the University of Palermo; several eminent citizens known for their liberal views had been arrested, and an unsigned manifesto was circulated calling on everyone to rise up on the King’s birthday. When that day dawned and the demonstrations began, the streets emptied, shops closed, houses were barricaded. A large number of the insurgents were mountain brigands or simple peasants, few of whom probably had much idea of what they were fighting for; but they were thrilled to be able to break down the customs barriers and give themselves over to looting to their hearts’ content. Many of the smaller villages and towns were devastated, as was much of the countryside.

The Bourbons had some 7,000 troops in the Palermo garrison, but they proved almost useless. Communications were atrocious, the roads execrable, and they could not be everywhere at once. In despair they decided to bombard the city—a decision which they soon had cause to regret, especially when a shell destroyed the municipal pawnbrokers, on which many families depended, aristocratic and plebeian alike. The infuriated mob fell on the royal palace, sacked it—sparing, thank heaven, the Palatine Chapel—and set fire to the state records and archives. Meanwhile, hundreds of prisoners were released from jail. The garrison retreated, and soon returned to Naples. In the following days a committee of government was formed under the presidency of the seventy-year-old Sicilian patriot (and former Neapolitan Minister of Marine) Ruggiero Settimo; meanwhile, the revolt spread to all the main cities—except Messina, which held back through jealousy of Palermo—and well over a hundred villages, where the support of the peasantry had by now been assured with lavish promises of land. It encountered no opposition worthy of the name.

…

By the end of the month the island was virtually free of royal troops, and on February 5 Settimo announced that “the evils of war had ceased, and that thenceforth an era of happiness had begun for Sicily.” He failed to mention that the citadel of Messina was still in Bourbon hands; nonetheless, it was clear to King Ferdinand that he had his back to the wall. Owing to the almost continuous demonstrations in Naples on the Sicilian model, on January 29 he offered a liberal constitution to both parts of his kingdom, providing for a bicameral legislature and a modest degree of franchise. “The game is up,” wrote the horrified Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, to Metternich; “the King and his ministers have completely lost their heads.” Metternich simply scribbled in the margin, “I defy the ministers to lose what they have never possessed.”

…

Sicily was now truly independent. The difficulty was that it lacked any machinery for self-government. Without an experienced hand at the helm, the old chaos and confusion grew worse than ever. Trade plummeted, unemployment soared, the legal system virtually collapsed. Toward the end of August, Ferdinand sent a combined military and naval force of some 20,000 under Field Marshal Prince Carlo Filangieri to restore comparative order on the island; and September saw a concerted land and sea attack on Messina. It was then that the city suffered heavy bombardment for eight hours—after it had already surrendered. The rebels fought back, and the age-old hatred between Neapolitans and Sicilians give rise to atrocities on both sides—to the point where the British and French admirals in Sicilian waters, revolted by the bloodshed and brutality, persuaded Ferdinand to grant a six-month armistice. Here, one might have thought, was an opportunity to end the stalemate, but every offer of settlement was rejected by the rebels out of hand. Had they been prepared to negotiate, they might have saved something from the wreckage; since they refused, more and more of their erstwhile supporters—for reasons of sheer self-preservation—turned back to the Bourbons. As a result, Filangieri was able to capture Taormina on April 2, 1849, and Catania five days later. On May 15, without any difficulty, he entered Palermo.

By their inefficiency, their lack of unity and their refusal to compromise, the Sicilians had perfectly demonstrated how a revolution should not be run.

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by | 26 May 2024 · 4:26 pm

Bentinck Restores Bourbons in Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 250-253:

HAVING EFFECTIVELY DEALT WITH both the King and the Queen and given Sicily its admirable new constitution, Bentinck—who never forgot that he was also a soldier—decided to obey a recent summons to go and join Wellington’s army in Catalonia. His brief campaign there was not a success; it certainly did nothing to enhance his military reputation. On September 12, 1813, he was soundly defeated by an army under Napoleon’s Marshal Suchet, and was soon afterward obliged to resign his command and return to Sicily, where he arrived on October 3. He soon realized that he should never have left.

…

He found the island once again in chaos. There were, for a start, violent arguments about the constitution, the full text of which had not yet been published. Belmonte, whom he had once described as “the main hope of his country,” had broken with his uncle and erstwhile colleague the Prince of Castelnuovo and caused a great rift which had split their party in two. In parliament, meanwhile, ham-fisted attempts to control prices were arousing such storms of protest as to lead to riots in Palermo and elsewhere. Fortunately the resident British troops were able to restore order; two of the ringleaders were hanged. To make matters worse, the plague had broken out in Malta and dark rumors were being spread that the British intended deliberately to introduce it into Sicily.

Bentinck saw that he had no choice but to resume dictatorial powers. He held no brief for despotism, he announced, but it was preferable to anarchy. He prorogued parliament, which the Prince Vicar obediently dissolved, formed a new ministry and issued a proclamation that all “disturbers of the public peace, assassins and other foes of the Constitution” would be summarily punished by martial law. He then set out on an extended tour of the island—his first—visiting all the larger cities and towns and explaining the immense benefits that the constitution would bring in its train. Finally he crossed to the mainland, the better to consider the problem of Joachim Murat.

…

Whether it was because he loathed the idea of an Austrian presence in Italy or whether he simply despised Murat for his disloyalty, Bentinck made no secret of his contempt for the agreement. It was lamentable, he wrote, “to see such advantages given to a man whose whole life had been a crime, who had been the active accomplice of Bonaparte for years, and who now deserted his benefactor through his own ambition and under the pressure of necessity.” But Castlereagh ordered him to negotiate an armistice between Sicily and Naples, and he had no course but to comply—though he was careful to avoid any formula which might be taken as recognition of Joachim Murat as King. In fact Murat probably cared little whether he did so or not; his sights were by now set a good deal higher—to make himself ruler of the entire Italian peninsula. As he marched north with his army to join the other allies, he and his soldiers scattered leaflets in all the villages through which they passed, calling on the Italian people to rally to his flag. Meanwhile Queen Caroline, who had remained behind as Regent, showed herself considerably more anti-French than her husband. He was already carefully avoiding any active engagements with the French army; she, on the other hand, expelled all French officials from the kingdom and closed Neapolitan ports to all French shipping.

At this point Bentinck seriously forgot himself. Abandoning every pretense of diplomacy, he decided to support the cause of Italian independence, landed with a considerable Anglo-Sicilian force at Livorno and there delivered a proclamation urging all Italians to vindicate their rights to be free. On March 15 he actually confronted Murat at Reggio Emilia. If, he threatened, Murat did not instantly withdraw his troops from Tuscany, he—Bentinck—would drive them out himself, restore the legitimate Grand Duke Ferdinand III and invade Naples under the Bourbon flag. Leaving Murat no time to answer, he marched his army up the coast to Genoa, where the French garrison immediately surrendered. According to his own account, he restored the old republic; according to the Genoese, they did so themselves; in any event, another corner of the Napoleonic empire crumbled away.

By now things were moving quickly. On March 31 the Allies entered Paris; April 2 saw the Acte de déchéance de l’Empereur, which declared Napoleon deposed. On that same day he abdicated in favor of his infant son, with Marie Louise as Regent; this, however, the Allies refused to accept; an unconditional abdication followed two days later….

Louis-Philippe then hurried on to tell his father-in-law. Ferdinand burst into tears of joy and gratitude. Already he began to feel that he was back in Naples. It was Belmonte who had suggested that with the fall of Napoleon there was no longer any reason why the King should not return to the throne. Aware that only the year before he had promised not to do so without British consent, Ferdinand made great play of asking Bentinck’s permission. Bentinck personally absolved him from his promise and on July 4 he returned to his capital, as always amid cheering crowds. Lord William Bentinck was not among them. His conduct in recent months had not gone unnoticed by the British government. Just twelve days later he left Sicily forever.

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