The Habsburg government in Austria was initially willing to make concessions to Sardinia, but it was strongly discouraged from doing so by its military commander in Italy, the old but highly respected and talented Field Marshal Radetzky, who had been the Austrian chief of staff in the war against Napoleon in 1813–14. In July 1848 Radetzky proved the value of his advice by defeating the Sardinians at Custoza, a victory that helped restore confidence to the Habsburg government as it faced so many enemies. Radetzky reimposed Habsburg rule in Milan and Venice, and in March 1849 he defeated the Sardinians once again when they invaded Austria’s Italian possessions. (See Custoza, battles of.)
Besides the Hungarians and the Italians, the Slavic peoples of the monarchy also responded to the revolutionary surge, although with less violence than the other two. In June 1848 a Pan-Slav congress met in Prague to hammer out a set of principles that all Slavic peoples could endorse (see Pan-Slavism). The organizer of the conference was the great Czech historian František Palacký (most of the delegates were Czech), who not only had called for the cooperation of the Habsburg Slavs but also had endorsed the Habsburg monarchy as the most reasonable political formation to protect the peoples of central Europe. Upon being asked by the Germans to declare himself favourably disposed to their desire for national unity, he responded that he could not do so because it would weaken the Habsburg state. And in that reply he wrote his famous words: “Truly, if it were not that Austria had long existed, it would be necessary, in the interest of Europe, in the interest of humanity itself, to create it.”
Unfortunately, the Pan-Slav congress met in a highly charged atmosphere, as young inhabitants of Prague likewise had been influenced by revolutions elsewhere and had taken to the streets. In the commotion, a stray bullet killed the wife of Field Marshal Alfred, Fürst (prince) zu Windischgrätz, the commander of the forces in Prague. Enraged, Windischgrätz seized the city, dispersed the congress, and established martial law throughout the province of Bohemia.
The Germans themselves also experienced a certain degree of national fervour, but in their case it was part of a general German yearning for national unification. Responding to calls for a meeting of national unity, in May 1848 delegates from all the German states met at Frankfurt to discuss a constitution for a united Germany. Made up primarily of the commercial and professional classes, this body was indeed distinguished and was looked upon by the German princes as an important gathering. To prove its respect for tradition, the Frankfurt parliament selected the emperor’s uncle, Archduke Johann, as head of a provisional executive power and in September selected another Austrian, Anton, Ritter (knight) von Schmerling, as prime minister.
Despite this deference to Austria’s prominent men, a major question the parliament addressed was whether to include Austria in the new Germany. Those who favoured doing so argued that a new Germany could accept the German-speaking provinces of the monarchy but not the non-German lands (the Grossdeutsch, or large German, position). Those against contended that the Austrian monarchy could never divide itself along ethnic lines and so favoured the exclusion of Austria altogether (the Kleindeutsch, or small German, position). Implicit in the latter position was that the new Germany would be greatly influenced if not dominated by Prussia, by far the most important German state next to Austria. In October 1848 the delegates agreed to invite the Austrian German lands to become part of the new Germany, but only if they were disconnected from non-German territory. This so-called compromise was really a victory for the Kleindeutsch supporters, who knew that the Austrian government would reject the invitation because it would never willfully break the monarchy apart.
In the end neither position prevailed, because the Frankfurt parliament was unable to unify Germany. All the German states finally rejected its proposals, and in April 1849 it dissolved. Nonetheless, it had created the impression that, when the new Germany did emerge, it would do so under the aegis of Prussia and with the exclusion of Austria. Neoabsolutist era, 1849–60
All things considered, the revolution across the empire had not accomplished much. Absolutism seemed firmly entrenched, and the political clock seemed to have been set back to the 18th century. And yet a regime so badly shaken as Austria’s could not hope to rule unchallenged in the future. The unresolved social, constitutional, and national issues became more intense, and new changes were soon in the offing.
The period 1849–60 is called the Neoabsolutist era because it was the last effort by an Austrian emperor to provide good government by relying solely on bureaucratic effectiveness. In doing so, it was the legitimate descendant of the governments of Joseph II and Metternich. The emperor in this case was Francis Joseph, who in December 1848 had succeeded at the age of 18 to the throne in a deal engineered by Schwarzenberg" class="md-crosslink">Felix, Fürst (prince) zu Schwarzenberg, an able and iron-willed opponent of the 1848 revolutionaries and a proponent of strong central government. Francis Joseph had not been the heir, but Schwarzenberg contended that too many promises to revolutionaries had been made in the name of Ferdinand and the true heir, Francis Joseph’s father, Francis Charles, and so only his son could rule without making compromises. Francis Joseph thus became emperor and ruled for the next 68 years, dying in the midst of World War I at the age of 86.
Franz JosephFranz Joseph, 1908.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.
Under Francis Joseph and Schwarzenberg, order was restored. Schwarzenberg died in 1852, and the new regime passed largely to the direction of Alexander, Freiherr (baron) von Bach, minister of the interior and a competent bureaucrat. Despite its reputation as a repressive instrument, Bach’s government was not without positive accomplishments. It established a unified customs territory for the whole monarchy (including Hungary), composed a code for trades and crafts, completed the task of serf emancipation, and introduced improvements in universities and secondary schools. In this period, economic growth continued its slow but steady pace, which had characterized the monarchy before 1848 and would continue to do so after 1860.
The regime’s policies on other matters were more typically reactionary. Freedom of the press as well as jury and public trials were abandoned, corporal punishment by police orders restored, and internal surveillance increased. The observation of the liberal reformer Adolf Fischhof that the regime rested on the support of a standing army of soldiers, a kneeling army of worshippers, and a crawling army of informants was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded. One of the more backward developments was the concordat reached with the papacy that gave the church jurisdiction in marriage questions, partial control of censorship, and oversight of elementary and secondary education. Priests entrusted with religious education in the schools had the authority to see to it that instruction in any field, be it history or physics, did not conflict with the church’s teachings.
The neoabsolutist regime came to an end because of its foreign policy. In the mid-1850s the matter that dominated the foreign offices of the European states was the Crimean War, a struggle that pitted an alliance system of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia against Russia. Since the mid-18th century, Austrian statesmen had generally agreed that it was better to have as the monarchy’s southeastern neighbour a weak Ottoman Empire than any strong power—especially Russia. So, in this war the monarchy declared its neutrality but also insisted that Russia not advance into the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia, which lay to the east of the Austrian Empire. This policy had two deleterious results: it alienated Russia, which had helped the monarchy put down the Hungarian revolution, and it did not befriend France, which would in 1859 support Sardinia in its war of Italian unification against the Austrians.