Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 Part 2 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Maria Theresa.]

[v.03 p.0010] The accession of Maria Theresa to the throne of the Habsburgs marks an important epoch in the history of Austria. For a while, indeed, it seemed that the monarchy was on the point of dissolution. To the diplomacy of the 18th century the breach of a solemn compact was but lightly regarded; and Charles VI. had neglected the advice of Prince Eugene to leave an effective army of 200,000 men as a more solid guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction than the signatures of the powers. As it was, the Austrian forces, disorganized in the long confusion of the Turkish wars, were in no condition to withstand Frederick the Great, when in 1740, at the head of the splendid army bequeathed to him by his father, he invaded Silesia (see AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION, WAR OF). The Prussian victory at Mollwitz (April 10, 1741) brought into the field against Austria all the powers which were ambitious of expansion at her expense: France, Bavaria, Spain, Saxony and Sardinia. Nor was the peril wholly external. Apart from the perennial discontents of Magyars and Slavs, the confusion and corruption of the administration, and the misery caused by the ruin of the finances, had made the Habsburg dynasty unpopular even in its German states, and in Vienna itself a large section of public opinion was loudly in favour of the claims of Charles of Bavaria. Yet the war, if it revealed the weakness of the Austrian monarchy, revealed also unexpected sources of strength. Not the least of these was the character of Maria Theresa herself, who to the fascination of a young and beautiful woman added a very masculine resolution and judgment. In response to her personal appeal, and also to her wise and timely concessions, the Hungarians had rallied to her support, and for the first time in history awoke not only to a feeling of enthusiastic loyalty to a Habsburg monarch, but also to the realization that their true interests were bound up with those of Austria (see HUNGARY: _History_). Although, then, as the result of the war, Silesia was by the treaty of Dresden transferred from Austria to Prussia, while in Italy by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 cessions were made at the expense of the house of Habsburg to the Spanish Don Philip and to Sardinia, the Austrian monarchy as a whole had displayed a vitality that had astonished the world, and was in some respects stronger than at the beginning of the struggle, notably in the great improvement in the army and in the possession of generals schooled by the experience of active service.

The period from 1747 to 1756, the year of the outbreak of the Seven Years'

War, was occupied in preparations for carrying into effect the determination of Maria Theresa to recover the lost provinces. To give any chance of success, it was recognized that a twofold change of system was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised and maintained by the various diets and provincial estates, was withdrawn from their interference. These reforms were practically confined to the central provinces of the monarchy; for in Hungary, as well as in the outlying territories of Lombardy and the Netherlands, it was recognized that the conservative temper of the peoples made any revolutionary change in the traditional system inadvisable.

[Sidenote: Austrian-French alliance, and Seven Years' War.]

Meanwhile, in foreign affairs, it had become clear that for Austria the enemy to be dreaded was no longer France, but Prussia, and Kaunitz prepared the way for a diplomatic revolution, which took effect when, on the 1st of May 1756, Austria and France concluded the first treaty of Versailles. The long rivalry between Bourbons and Habsburgs was thus ended, and France and Austria remained in alliance or at peace until the outbreak of the French Revolution. So far as Austria was concerned, the Seven Years' War (_q.v._) in which France and Austria were ranged against Prussia and Great Britain, was an attempt on the part of Maria Theresa to recover Silesia. It failed; and the peace of Hubertsburg, signed on the 15th of February 1763, left Germany divided between Austria and Prussia, whose rivalry for the hegemony was to last until the victory of Koniggratz (1866) definitely decided the issue in favour of the Hohenzollern monarchy.

[Sidenote: Austria and Bavaria.]

The loss of Silesia led Austria to look for ”compensation” elsewhere. The most obvious direction in which this could be sought was in Bavaria, ruled by the decadent house of Wittelsbach, the secular rival of the house of Habsburg in southern Germany. The question of the annexation of Bavaria by conquest or exchange had occupied the minds of Austrian statesmen throughout the century: it would not only have removed a perpetual menace to the peace of Austria, but would have given to the Habsburg monarchy an overwhelming strength in South Germany. The matter came to an issue in 1777, on the death of the elector Maximilian III. The heir was the elector palatine Charles Theodore, but Joseph II., who had been elected emperor in 1765, in succession to his father, and appointed co-regent with his mother--claimed the inheritance, and prepared to a.s.sert his claims by force. The result was the so-called War of Bavarian Succession. As a matter of fact, however, though the armies under Frederick and Joseph were face to face in the field, the affair was settled without actual fighting; Maria Theresa, fearing the chances of another struggle with Prussia, overruled her son at the last moment, and by the treaty of Teschen agreed to be content with the cession of the Quarter of the Inn (Innviertel) and some other districts.

[Sidenote: Russia, Austria and the Ottoman Empire.]

Meanwhile the ambition of Catherine of Russia, and the war with Turkey by which the empire of the tsars was advanced to the Black Sea and threatened to establish itself south of the Danube, were productive of consequences of enormous importance to Austria in the East. Russian control of the Danube was a far more serious menace to Austria than the neighbourhood of the decadent Ottoman power; and for a while the policy of Austria towards the Porte underwent a change that foreshadowed her att.i.tude towards the Eastern Question in the 19th century. In spite of the reluctance of Maria Theresa, Kaunitz, in July 1771, concluded a defensive alliance with the Porte. He would have exchanged this for an active co-operation with Turkey, could Frederick the Great have been persuaded to promise at least neutrality in the event of a Russo-Austrian War. But Frederick was unwilling to break with Russia, with whom he was negotiating the part.i.tion of Poland; Austria in these circ.u.mstances dared not take the offensive; and Maria Theresa was compelled to purchase the modification of the extreme claims of Russia in Turkey by agreeing to, and sharing in, the spoliation of Poland. [Sidenote: Part.i.tion of Poland.] Her own share of the spoils was the acquisition, by the first treaty of part.i.tion (August 5, 1772), of Galicia and Lodomeria.

Turkey was left in the lurch; and Austrian troops even occupied portions of Moldavia, in order to secure the communication between the new Polish provinces and Transylvania. At Constantinople, too, Austria once more supported Russian policy, and was rewarded, in 1777, by the acquisition of Bukovina from Turkey. In Italy the influence of the House of Austria had been strengthened by the marriage of the archduke Ferdinand with the heiress of the d'Estes of Modena, and the establishment of the archduke Leopold in the grand-duchy of Tuscany.

[Sidenote: Internal reforms under Maria Theresa.]

In internal affairs Maria Theresa may be regarded as the practical founder of the unified Austrian state. The new system of centralization has already been referred to. It only remains to add that, in carrying out this system, Maria Theresa was too wise to fall into the errors afterwards made by her son and successor. She was no doctrinaire, and consistently acted on the principle once laid down by Machiavelli, that while changing the substance, the prince should be careful to preserve the form of old inst.i.tutions.

Alongside the new bureaucracy, the old estates survived in somnolent inactivity, and even in Hungary, though the ancient const.i.tution was left untouched, the diet was only summoned four times during the reign, and reforms were carried out, without protest, by royal ordinance. It was under Maria Theresa, too, [v.03 p.0011] that the attempt was first made to make German the official language of the whole monarchy; an attempt which was partly successful even in Hungary, especially so far as the army was concerned, though Latin remained the official tongue of the diet, the county-a.s.semblies and the courts.

The social, religious and educational reforms of Maria Theresa also mark her reign as the true epoch of transition from medieval to modern conditions in Austria. In religious matters the empress, though a devout Catholic and herself devoted to the Holy See, was carried away by the prevailing reaction, in which her ministers shared, against the pretensions of the papacy. The anti-papal tendency, known as Febronianism (_q.v._), had made immense headway, not only among the laity but among the clergy in the Austrian dominions. By a new law, papal bulls could not be published without the consent of the crown, and the direct intercourse of the bishops with Rome was forbidden; the privileges of the religious orders were curtailed; and the education of the clergy was brought under state control.

It was, however, only with reluctance that Maria Theresa agreed to carry out the papal bull suppressing the Society of Jesus; and, while declaring herself against persecution, she could never be persuaded to accept the views of Kaunitz and Joseph in favour of toleration. Parallel with the a.s.sertion of the rights of the state as against the church, was the revolution effected in the educational system of the monarchy. This, too, was taken from the control of the church; the universities were remodelled and modernized by the introduction of new faculties, the study of ecclesiastical law being transferred from that of theology to that of jurisprudence, and the elaborate system of elementary and secondary education was established, which survived with slight modification till 1869.

[Sidenote: Joseph II. and ”Josephinism.”]

The death of Maria Theresa in 1780 left Joseph II. free to attempt the drastic revolution from above, which had been restrained by the wise statesmans.h.i.+p of his mother. He was himself a strange incarnation at once of doctrinaire liberalism and the old Habsburg autocracy. Of the essential conditions of his empire he was const.i.tutionally unable to form a conception. He was a disciple, not of Machiavelli, but of Rousseau; and his scattered dominions, divided by innumerable divergences of racial and cla.s.s prejudice, and enc.u.mbered with traditional inst.i.tutions to which the people clung with pa.s.sionate conservatism, he regarded as so much vacant territory on which to build up his ideal state. He was, in fact, a Revolutionist who happened also to be an emperor. ”Reason” and ”enlightenment” were his watchwords; opposition to his wise measures he regarded as obscurantist and unreasonable, and unreason, if it proved stubborn, as a vice to be corrected with whips. In this spirit he at once set to work to reconstruct the state, on lines that strangely antic.i.p.ated the principles of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly of 1789. He refused to be crowned or to take the oath of the local const.i.tutions, and divided the whole monarchy into thirteen departments, to be governed under a uniform system. In ecclesiastical matters his policy was also that of ”reform from above,” the complete subordination of the clergy to the state, and the severance of all effective ties with Rome. This treatment of the ”Fakirs and Ulemas” (as he called them in his letters), who formed the most powerful element in the monarchy, would alone have ensured the failure of his plans, but failure was made certain by the introduction of the conscription, which turned even the peasants, whom he had done much to emanc.i.p.ate, against him. The threatened revolt of Hungary, and the actual revolt of Tirol and of the Netherlands (see BELGIUM: _History_) together with the disasters of the war with Turkey, forced him, before he died, to the formal reversal of the whole policy of reform.

In his foreign policy Joseph II. had been scarcely less unhappy. In 1784 he had resumed his plan of acquiring Bavaria for Austria by negotiating with the elector Charles Theodore its exchange for the Netherlands, which were to be erected for his benefit into a ”Kingdom of Burgundy.” The elector was not unwilling, but the scheme was wrecked by the opposition of the heir to the Bavarian throne, the duke of Zweibrucken, in response to whose appeal Frederick the Great formed, on the 23rd of July 1785, a confederation of German princes (_Furstenbund_) for the purpose of opposing the threatened preponderance of Austria. Prussia was thus for the first time formally recognized as the protector of the German states against Austrian ambition, and had at the same time become the centre of an anti-Austrian alliance, which embraced Sweden, Poland and the maritime powers. In these circ.u.mstances the war with Turkey, on which Joseph embarked, in alliance with Russia, in 1788, would hardly have been justified by the most brilliant success. The first campaign, however, which he conducted in person was a dismal failure; the Turks followed the Austrian army, disorganized by disease, across the Danube, and though the transference of the command to the veteran marshal Loudon somewhat retrieved the initial disasters, his successes were more than counterbalanced by the alliance, concluded on the 31st of January 1790, between Prussia and Turkey. Three weeks later, on the 20th of February 1790, Joseph died broken-hearted.

[Sidenote: Leopold II.]

The situation needed all the statesmans.h.i.+p of the new ruler, Leopold II.

This was less obvious in his domestic than in his foreign policy, though perhaps equally present. As grand-duke of Tuscany Leopold had won the reputation of an enlightened and liberal ruler; but meanwhile ”Josephinism”

had not been justified by its results, and the progress of the Revolution in France was beginning to scare even enlightened princes into reaction.

Leopold, then, reverted to the traditional Habsburg methods; the old supremacy of the Church, regarded as the one effective bond of empire, was restored; and the _Einheitsstaat_ was once more resolved into its elements, with the old machinery of diets and estates, and the old abuses. It was the beginning of that policy of ”stability” a.s.sociated later with Metternich, which was to last till the cataclysm of 1848. For the time, the policy was justified by its results. The spirit of revolutionary France had not yet touched the heart of the Habsburg empire, and national rivalries were expressed, not so much in expansive ambitions, as in a somnolent clinging to traditional privileges. Leopold, therefore, who made his debut on the European stage as the executor of the ban of the Empire against the insurgent Liegeois, was free to pose as the champion of order against the Revolution, without needing to fear the resentment of his subjects. He played this role with consummate skill in the negotiations that led up to the treaty of Reichenbach (August 15, 1790), which ended the quarrel with Prussia and paved the way to the armistice of Giurgevo with Turkey (September 10). Leopold was now free to deal with the Low Countries, which were reduced to order before the end of the year. On the 4th of August 1791, was signed at Sistova the definitive peace with Turkey, which practically established the _status quo_.

[Sidenote: Austria and the French Revolution.]

On the 6th of October 1700, Leopold had been crowned Roman emperor at Frankfort, and it was as emperor, not as Habsburg, that he first found himself in direct antagonism to the France of the Revolution. The fact that Leopold's sister, Marie Antoinette, was the wife of Louis XVI. had done little to cement the Franco-Austrian alliance, which since 1763 had been practically non-existent; nor was it now the mainspring of his att.i.tude towards revolutionary France. But by the decree of the 4th of August, which in the general abolition of feudal rights involved the possessions of many German princes _enclaves_ in Alsace and Lorraine, the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly had made the first move in the war against the established European system.

Leopold protested as sovereign of Germany; and the protest was soon enlarged into one made in the name of Europe. The circular letter of Count Kaunitz, dated the 6th of July 1791, calling on the sovereigns to unite against the Revolution, was at once the beginning of the Concert of Europe, and in a sense the last manifesto of the Holy Roman Empire as ”the centre of political unity.” But the common policy proclaimed in the famous declaration of Pillnitz (August 27), was soon wrecked upon the particular interests of the powers. Both Austria and Prussia [v.03 p.0012] were much occupied with the Polish question, and to have plunged into a crusade against France would have been to have left Poland, where the new const.i.tution had been proclaimed on the 3rd of May, to the mercy of Russia.

Towards the further development of events in France, therefore, Leopold a.s.sumed at first a studiously moderate att.i.tude; but his refusal to respond to the demand of the French government for the dispersal of the corps of _emigres_ a.s.sembled under the protection of the German princes on the frontier of France, and the insistence on the rights of princes dispossessed in Alsace and Lorraine, precipitated the crisis. On the 25th of January 1792 the French a.s.sembly adopted the decree declaring that, in the event of no satisfactory reply having been received from the emperor by the 1st of March, war should be declared. On the 7th of February Austria and Prussia signed at Berlin an offensive and defensive treaty of alliance.

Thus was ushered in the series of stupendous events which were to change the face of Europe and profoundly to affect the destinies of Austria.

Leopold himself did not live to see the beginning of the struggle; he died on the 1st of March 1792, the day fixed by the Legislative a.s.sembly as that on which the question of peace or war was to be decided.

[Sidenote: Effects of the Revolutionary Wars.]