At the end of the eighteenth century the seeds of fresh conflict and change were already widely sown in Eastern Europe. In addition to the perennial clash of states' interests, both the political ferment attendant on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and more gradual social and economic changes, were preparing trouble. In the Ottoman Empire a series of revolts after 1804 led to the formation of new states and began a long process of break-up. The other states, though seemingly more stable, were also shaken by revolts or demands for political change, and although these upheavals were for the most part contained, the combined effect was to alter the regional balance of power by the mid-1860s.
Napoleon Bonaparte's impact on Eastern Europe was considerable. By 1801 he had defeated Austria and Russia yet again, and the Treaty of Luneville began the final dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire with France's annexation of the west bank of the Rhine. In 1803 the secular princes of the Holy Roman Empire, led by the Emperor Francis, agreed to compensate themselves by annexing the ecclesiastical states; Francis compensated himself even further in assuming the title of Emperor of Austria in 1804. In 1805 Austria, Russia and Britain launched a Third Coalition against France, but Austria's defeat at Austerlitz in December gave Napoleon all the excuse he needed to institutionalise French hegemony in Germany. Thirty German princes formed the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, in alliance with France; Francis had little option but to abdicate as Holy Roman Emperor. The Treaty of Pressburg in December 1805 had already handed over the former Venetian territories, including Dalmatia, to France, and the Tyrol and Vorarlberg to Bavaria. Continuing hostilities between France and Russia, on the Adriatic coast, led to a French occupation of Ragusa in 1806 and its annexation in 1808.
The Confederation of the Rhine provoked Prussia's suicidal war against France in the autumn of 1806, leading to a crushing defeat. Prussia's prostration
Was confirmed by the defeat of its ally Russia the following year and the subsequent Treaty of Tilsit. By this Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I divided Europe into spheres of influence, but with France's hegemony underscored by Russian adherence to the Continental Blockade against Britain and by the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw out of Prussia's share of the Polish Partitions. This resuscitation of Poland, while it lasted, and despite the duchy's obvious function as Napoleonic puppet state and provider of cannon fodder, ensured Napoleon the loyalty of many Poles, such as Prince Jozef Poniatowski, nephew of Stanislaw August, who became a Marshal of France and died at Leipzig in 1813.
The uneasy Franco-Russian condominium further destabilised the Ottoman Balkans, where yet another Russo-Turkish war had broken out in 1806 over Russian influence in the Romanian principalities. At Tilsit, grandiose plans were drawn up between Napoleon and Alexander for a partition of the Balkans, but nothing came of these apart from the resumption of French control of the Ionian Islands in 1807. These had fallen under joint Russo-Turkish protectorate as the 'Septinsular Republic', formally 'the first autonomous Greek state of modern times'.1 British sea power, however, captured most of the islands from France by 1814. In the Eastern Balkans, the Russo-Turkish War lasted until 1812, when the French invasion of Russia forced Alexander to settle for the largely Romanian-inhabited territory of Bessarabia.
Napoleon's reordering of Eastern Europe continued apace when the Habsburg Monarchy once again attacked in 1809. This time Austria's defeat was punished with the cession of its remaining western crownlands to Bavaria, the amalgamation of Dalmatia, western Croatia and the Slovene-inhabited parts of the Austrian crownlands into the 'Illyrian Provinces', annexed to France, and the transfer of West Galicia, the Habsburgs' share of the Third Partition, to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
I n the end Napoleon's hegemony in Europe collapsed through that most habit-forming of imperial defects, overstretch. The issues that led Napoleon to commit the fatal mistake of invading Russia in 1812 were continental in scope, but Alexander's break with Napoleon also owed much to a legitimate fear that the Grand Duchy of Warsaw would be used as a pretext for reopening the Polish question, and the enthusiastic participation of Polish troops in the 1812 campaign only validated this suspicion. Napoleon's willingness to play the Polish card confirmed the tsar's view of him as a true heir to the Revolution. The disastrous retreat from Moscow heralded the end of the Napoleonic imperium: first Prussia and then Austria deserted Napoleon, and by the spring of 1814 Russian Cossacks were bivouacking on the boulevards of Paris. Eastern Europe had been delivered from France; in its place stood Russia, seemingly more powerful than ever.
The 'restored' Eastern Europe (see Map 4), like everything else agreed by the victors at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was in fact anything but restored; all aspects of the settlement affecting the region reflected the uneasy balance of power between Austria, Prussia and Russia.2 The Habsburg Monarchy resumed
Map 4 Eastern Europe as of 1815
Source: ‘Eastern Europe 1815'; Palmer, R. R. and Colton, J., 1965, A History of the Modern World, 3rd edn, New York, 414-15.
Possession of most of its lost territories in the west: the Austrian crownlands, Croatia and Dalmatia with the addition of Ragusa and, as a buffer against future French aggression, the north Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. The Holy Roman Empire, however, was truly history. Instead, Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine was continued, but under Austrian leadership and rechristened the German Confederation. Despite the Monarchy's continuing role in German affairs the focus of Habsburg foreign policy was insensibly shifted towards Italy and the Balkans.
In the East, Poland was repartitioned, but here Russia insisted on the lion's share. Prussia regained the province of Posen, Austria the area around Tarnopol, and in a compromise designed to avert conflict between the great powers themselves, the city of Krakow was permitted to govern itself as a free city under great power guarantee. Otherwise the central bloc of the Polish lands went to Russia. Alexander I, however, was conscious also of the need to placate the Poles, who had fought enthusiastically for Napoleon. Russian Poland was accordingly reconstituted as a kingdom, under Alexander, with a constitution and a modest degree of self-rule. This was enough to win over many Poles, although it remained a sore point that the 'Congress Kingdom' excluded the vast eastern gubernii (governorships); these were henceforth ruled as integral parts of Russia proper.
Europe after 1815 thus gave the appearance of being firmly under control, nowhere more so than in the East, where the most conservative, not to say reactionary, governments dominated the region. Despite attempts by Austria, Prussia and Russia to cooperate with each other in maintaining order, however, through such mechanisms as the 'Congress system' or the 'Holy Alliance', instability was never far from the surface. The identity of interest between the three 'Northern Courts' was real enough, as the Polish question demonstrated, and produced other practical examples of conservative, monarchical solidarity. However, once the instability reached the surface, relations between the powers themselves were apt to deteriorate. A prime example was the so-called 'Eastern Question', revolving around the viability of the Ottoman Empire. The latter was already wrestling with rebellion among the Serbs, which ultimately resulted in Serbian autonomy in 1815. The Greek revolts of 1821 sparked enormous public attention in the rest of Europe, the armed intercession of Russia, Britain and France in 1827, and eventually another Russo-Turkish war in 1828—9. The result was not only the creation of an independent Kingdom of Greece by 1832 but a serious rift between Austria and the other powers.
Likewise the Treaty of Adrianople of September 1829, ending the Russo-Turkish War, established a virtual Russian protectorate over Moldavia and Wallachia, although both, like Serbia, remained formal vassal states of the sultan. Russia's augmented hold over the Ottoman Empire was a source of grave concern not only to the Habsburg Monarchy but also to France and Britain, which feared a Russian takeover of Constantinople and the Straits, with consequences for the stability of the entire eastern Mediterranean. This fear was exaggerated, in that the Russian government by the mid-1820s had decided that it was more in Russia's interest to preserve a weak Ottoman Empire, over which Russia could exert a preponderant influence, than it was to dismember it.
The Ottoman Empire's northern neighbours had their own internal problems. Russia's honeymoon with the Poles ended abruptly in November 1830 when the Congress Kingdom rose in revolt. It took Nicholas I (1825—55) until September 1831 to re-establish control, and the international ramifications were considerable. The revolt was partly inspired by the July Revolution in France, and one of its unintended consequences was to make any sort of intervention in France by the powers of the 'Holy Alliance' impossible, even had the latter seriously wished to do so. The brutal suppression of the revolt drove another 10,000 Poles into western exile, where for the next generation they were a constant worry to the partition powers. Moderates clustered around Prince Adam Czartoryski at his headquarters in Paris, with its network of agents throughout the continent, fertile in schemes for enlisting the support of foreign governments and allying with discontented nationalities in Eastern Europe. More radical Polish nationalists established links with revolutionary republicans such as Giuseppe Mazzini, the apostle of Italian nationalism. Polish soldiers fought on the side of Hungary against the Habsburgs in 1848—9 and took part in the unification of Italy between 1849 and 1860.
Polish grievances in Habsburg Galicia led to a minor revision of international boundaries in 1846 when Polish nobles staged an uprising designed to spread to the other Partitions. This rebellion too was successfully contained by the Habsburg Monarchy, but the fact that its origins lay in the free city of Krakow gave Austria a justification for annexing Krakow in November 1846.
Such disturbances pale in comparison with the revolutionary year of 1848—9. In the Habsburg Monarchy there were revolutions in Vienna, the north Italian provinces, Bohemia and the Kingdom of Hungary. The fact that revolution broke out in Vienna itself, the imperial capital, resulting in a power vacuum, encouraged the north Italian cities to revolt, which in turn emboldened King Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont to invade Habsburg territory. Despite a rapid Piedmontese defeat, this threat to the Monarchy was not completely contained until March 1849.
Even more cataclysmic was the escalation of events in Hungary, where a liberal revolution in March brought constitutional government and a form of home rule, but where the seeming irreconcilability of Hungarian claims to autonomy with Habsburg rule led in September to confrontation and war. The Hungarian War of Independence lasted until August 1849 and was resolved only by the assistance of Nicholas I of Russia, who in the name of monarchical solidarity despatched an army across the Carpathians to extirpate the demon of revolution. The twin effect of the Monarchy's loss of control in both Italy and Hungary, and the fact that it appeared to owe its recovery largely to Russian power, completed the picture of a state whose status as a great power was in question.
The concurrent rash of revolutions in the German states and in Italy also had an inevitable impact on the Habsburg Monarchy. In both regions the Monarchy aspired to play a dominant role; in each it found itself struggling desperately to maintain that position. The fact that a German National Assembly was called at Frankfurt, where it began debating the question of German unity, aroused a strong counter-response in some of the Monarchy's many nationalities.
The Czechs in particular rejected the claim that Bohemia was a 'German' land. At the same time the turmoil within the Monarchy, but especially in Hungary, made it painfully obvious that this was far more than just a 'German' state; this undermined its title to lead Germany, let alone unite it, to the corresponding advantage of Prussia. The 'neo-absolutist' government which finally crushed the revolutions in the Habsburg Monarchy was determined to re-establish its standing as a great power. Both the young Emperor Francis Joseph (1848—1916) and his first minister, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, adopted a far more confrontational stance against Prussia's pretensions to leadership in the German Confederation.
Prussia had experienced its own revolution in 1848 but had weathered this storm with far less strain than the Habsburg Monarchy. King Frederick William IV (1840—61) conceded a liberal government and also, to public acclaim, announced that 'henceforth Prussia is merged in Germany', an enigmatic phrase which nevertheless suggested an interest in playing a greater role in German unification.3 In the province of Posen the new government faced immediate demands from the Poles for some form of autonomy. Despite limited support for this at the Frankfurt National Assembly, opinion in Prussia but also the German Confederation as a whole turned vehemently against any such idea. By November Frederick William, mindful that he still enjoyed the obedience of the army, felt confident enough to dismiss the liberal government. Prussia's role for the rest of the revolutionary year was as a reactionary policeman, stamping out the last vestiges of revolution in the lesser states.
Despite their shared reactionary characteristics, Prussia and Austria were clearly on a collision course over the leadership of Germany after 1849, a rivalry with fateful implications for Eastern Europe. Prussia's attempt to fashion a kleindeutsch or 'Little German' union of states at Erfurt in 1850 was vetoed by the Habsburg government, a humiliation the Prussians had to accept but which reinforced their determination to build Prussian economic and military strength to the point where a repeat of the experience would be impossible. Austro-Prussian rivalry in Germany meant that on international issues affecting the territorial integrity of the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia was likely to remain neutral, if not actively hostile.
A further blow was dealt to the Habsburg Monarchy's international security by the outcome of the Crimean War of 1853—6. This conflict, initially between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, but which by 1855 had dragged in Britain and France and even Piedmont on the Ottoman side, was ultimately about Russia's ability to dominate the Ottomans. It also owed a good deal to the determination of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, from 1848 president and from 1852 emperor Napoleon III of France, to play a greater role internationally and, if possible, undo elements of the settlement imposed on France in 1815. This involved limiting the threat posed by that settlement's guarantors, in particular Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy. In 1854 Russia was Napoleon III's chief obstacle, in trying to overcome which he could rely on
Habsburg support. What made the Crimean War of particular relevance to the Habsburgs was Russia's immediate occupation, on the outbreak of the war in 1853, of the Romanian principalities.
Austro-Russian understanding over the Eastern Question had never been impossible: in 1833 the two powers had agreed to prop up the Ottoman Empire as long as possible and to consult with one another should that prove impracticable. Habsburg's toleration of Russia's involvement in the principalities, however, was always conditional upon the preservation of the status quo. The return of Russian troops to the region in 1853 represented a serious alteration of the balance of power, a permanent extension of Russian influence. The Monarchy's response was to demand Russian withdrawal from the principalities in June 1854. Given that Russia was by now under attack by France and Britain, the tsar was obliged to do this, but the result was an indelible sense of betrayal on the part of the Russians, compounded by the fact that Russian withdrawal was followed by an immediate joint Austro-Turkish occupation of the provinces. From this position of security Austria sat out the rest of the Crimean War in armed neutrality, but its future was anything but secure.
For the long-term effect of the war was a fatal undermining of the Monarchy's international position. Its rivalry with Prussia over Germany increasingly in the open, and its hold on Italy ever more likely to be challenged by Piedmont, with the backing of Napoleon III's France, the Monarchy was henceforth bereft of the support of its conservative soulmate Russia. Instead, Russia's humiliation at the Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean War in March 1856, ensured that it was more intent on revising or otherwise evading the treaty's terms than in policing the affairs of Europe. The Habsburg Monarchy, isolated, was obliged to fight its corner unaided in 1859, and again in 1866, and lost both times, with profound results not only for the future shape of Germany and Italy but also for the Monarchy's internal construction.
As for Russia, it was stripped of its right to intervene in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, whose vassal principalities were instead guaranteed their autonomy by all the great powers signatory to the treaty. Russia was forced to cede the southern part of Bessarabia to Moldavia, thus losing access to the mouth of the Danube. Most devastating of all for Russia, the Black Sea was neutralised, meaning that both Russia and the Ottomans were forbidden to maintain a fleet there or military installations on its shores.
In overall strategic terms the following decade and a half of European history is best understood as a power vacuum, in which the ambitions of individual states, combined with the rising force of nationalism, allowed them to redraw the map in the Italian Peninsula and Germany, while the truly global powers, Britain and Russia, remained relatively uninvolved, either from choice or necessity. These upheavals affected Eastern Europe directly, given that the Habsburg Monarchy was their principal victim, but the succession of crises by which this transformation was imposed had an impact in the rest of the region as well. Everywhere in Eastern Europe nationalists, however few in number,
Felt the force of the example set by the creation of so-called nation-states in Italy and Germany.
The war of 1859, in which the Habsburg Monarchy attacked Piedmont and France and lost Lombardy, was an unmitigated disaster because it demonstrated the Monarchy's essential weakness so plainly. Napoleon III and the Piedmontese openly encouraged the Hungarian nationalist emigration to foment an uprising in Hungary, and a Hungarian Legion of 4,000 men was formed in Piedmont. At the height of the fighting in Italy the Habsburg government felt obliged to station an entire army corps in Hungary for fear of rebellion. Losing the war completed the Habsburg Monarchy's financial bankruptcy, and the impossibility of securing further credit pushed Francis Joseph into a gradual abandonment of neo-absolutism and, by 1867, compromise with the Hungarians.
An essential element of Napoleon III's foreign policy in the post-Crimean decade was his support for the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia. This owed something to a genuine, if vague and selective, sympathy for national liberation movements; it owed even more to Napoleon's desire to exploit the Monarchy's vulnerability. As a result an international conference in 1858 sanctioned the 'United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia', a curious hybrid, with separate hospodars or princes, governments and assemblies, but joined by a Central Commission. The principalities promptly defied the great powers by electing the same man, Alexander Cuza, as hospodar of both principalities in 1859. Any chance that this Romanian fait accompli might be overturned then vanished when Austria suffered defeat in the Italian War.
For some years after the Crimean War the former enemies Russia and France found common ground in their hostility to the Habsburg Monarchy. This entente suffered a decisive rupture following the second great uprising in Russian Poland in January 1863. While Austria and Prussia made no secret of their desire to see Russia crush the uprising, the reaction in the West was one of sympathy for the insurgents. Russia's relations with Britain had never ceased to be frosty; because of the Polish revolt Russia's alienation from France was prompt and bitter, a key factor in 1870.
The final revolution in East European affairs was effected by the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Once again, conflict in a completely different arena, Germany, facilitated change in the Habsburg Monarchy as well as the Balkans. Prussia's steely minister-president from 1862, Otto von Bismarck, pursued confrontation with Austria precisely because he perceived the necessity of excluding the Habsburgs totally from German affairs, if Prussia's territorial expansion into the Confederation was to be achieved. Bismarck also knew that the acquiescence in this project of France, Russia and Britain was essential. Napoleon III was willing to sit on the sidelines in the belief that the two German states would fight one another to a standstill. Russia, ill-disposed towards Austria in any case, saw a strong Prussia as a useful, conservative counterweight to French power. Britain also favoured a strong central European state capable of restraining both France and Russia. Finally, Bismarck secured
A useful distraction against the Austrians in Italy, which signed an alliance with Prussia in return for the promise of Habsburg Venetia.
The Austro-Prussian War was bloody but brief, climaxing in the Austrians' defeat at Sadowa on 3 July 1866. By the Treaty of Prague, in August, the Habsburg Monarchy accepted its expulsion from the German Confederation. Venetia was ceded to Italy, despite the Italians' comprehensive defeat by the Austrians on land and sea. Most importantly, the Habsburg defeat meant that Francis Joseph was all the more inclined to accept home rule within the Monarchy for Hungary and a parallel constitutional government for the Austrian' half of the Habsburg realm. The Monarchy, bereft of its Italian and German role, was henceforth to take an even more intense interest in south-eastern Europe and the threat of Russian influence there.
As a coda to this period, it is worth noting that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—1, and France's defeat at the hands of Prussia and the other German states, confirmed the Habsburg Monarchy's inability to regain its former primacy in German affairs. Instead, the Monarchy's reorientation towards the Balkans was strengthened, as was its fundamental opposition to Russia, while at the same time giving it common cause with the new German Empire. The underlying antagonism of interests which was to help produce the First World War was thus in evidence by the early 1870s.
World History
