Francis I was an upright but unenquiring and stubborn personality. Committed to combating the principles of the French Revolution, his resistance to innovation of any sort was intransigent and lifelong. 'I want no change,' he told one of his ministers in 1831, the year of a disquieting peasant uprising in Hungary. 'This is no time for reform.'2
This ostrich-like conservatism was impracticable. Francis reigned over a population of which an increasing proportion was literate. The rational approach to government and economic management stimulated by the Enlightenment could not be banished and indeed survived in the minds of many of Francis's own officials. Nationalism was a contagion which, once propagated in one people, had a habit of spreading to others. And although Francis would have been glad to govern without reference to the Monarchy's historic institutions, particularly the Hungarian Diet, he repeatedly found that the Monarchy's weakness, as a state, made this untenable.
Some of the confusions inherent in abandoning the modernisation project became obvious in the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Monarchy's six wars against France required, willy-nilly, the cooperation in voting taxes and recruits of the Hungarian Diet which, according to the settlement of 1791, had to be convened every three years. Combating the appeal of French revolutionary ideas involved, logically, a supply of rival concepts, but apart from loyalty to himself as dynast Francis's sole weapon was an evermore draconian and absurd censorship: of the press and literature, of productions of Shakespeare's Hamlet for depicting regicide, of the images on fans and snuff boxes, and so on. By the war of 1809, some of the emperor's advisers were convinced that fire had to be fought with fire, and an attempt was made to whip up patriotic sentiment against the French invaders. There was, however, an inevitable conundrum in this, for these appeals were couched largely by Austrian Germans in terms of joining a 'national' movement of other Germans, and their allure for the Monarchy's non-Germans was conjectural at best.
Francis's right-hand man after 1809, Metternich, owed his office solely to the emperor's confidence and thus was never the all-powerful minister of legend. Rather, Metternich was trusted by Francis precisely because he too abhorred the prospect of change and believed in constant vigilance against liberal and nationalist ideas. As foreign minister Metternich enjoyed a free hand; in domestic affairs he played a more ambiguous role. He was state chancellor after 1824, but this was a largely honorific post which gave him no authority over the amorphous government structure favoured by Francis, who preferred to keep his ministers independent of each other. There was nothing like a collective government; instead all decisions were referred directly to Francis, who was notoriously averse to making decisions. Metternich had a rival for the emperor's ear in Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, responsible for internal affairs from 1826 and finance from 1827. Kolowrat and Metternich were so jealous of each other's influence that they effectively cancelled each other out.
When Francis died in 1835 and his amiable but mentally subnormal son Ferdinand became emperor, a sort of regency, the State Conference [Staatskonferenz], was established, chaired theoretically by Ferdinand but in practice by his uncle, Archduke Ludwig, and consisting otherwise of Archduke Franz Karl, Metternich and Kolowrat. This arrangement was virtually a guarantee that government would take no steps that were not positively forced on it. 'Drift' seems too mobile a term with which to characterise the policy of such a regime.
The one area where Metternich exercised a real, even fateful, influence in domestic policy was in his control of the police system and censorship. It was
Metternich's determined attempts to stifle debate and new ideas, and the psychologically cruel conditions in which certain famous political prisoners were held, that made the Monarchy such a byword for costive repression. The censorship was irritating but on the whole ineffective in preventing the influx of new publications and ideas. Recent studies have sought to demonstrate that Metternichian Austria hardly deserves the epithet 'police state'. The gravest charge against the regime, however, was that it sought to inhibit change but was too weak to do so competently.3
This resistance to modernity might not have mattered had the Monarchy not been so clearly paying the penalty for postponing a controlled adaptation. The Monarchy's pretensions as a great power were constantly undermined by its financial weakness. Budgetary constraints were such that the effective strength of the army was never more than 230,000 men. This led to a 'catastrophic decline' in Austrian influence in the 1820s.4 Metternich's inability to oppose much of the international upheaval of the period was ultimately due to the government's failure to harness the Monarchy's real economic potential.
Despite clear signs of economic growth, the social stresses attendant upon a rising population, changing methods of industrial production and an inherently inefficient agricultural base were becoming greater by the year. This was despite the fact that a growing section of noble opinion, as typified by Szechenyi in Hungary, perceived the need for some resolution of the agrarian question that did not involve social upheaval. At the same time, the marginalised artisan class was beginning to experience the worst effects of unbridled capitalism: undercut by the cheapness and ubiquity of the new industrialism, this group found itself driven into the ranks of the unskilled labourers. The simmering restlessness of peasants whose folk memory dwelt fondly on the promises of liberation held out, briefly, by Joseph II, and the hatred of the artisans for a system which could not protect them against boom-and-bust, were potent sources of revolution by the time the harvests failed in 1846 and 1847. Peasant unrest in Hungary in 1831, but even more the murderous rage of peasants against their lords in Galicia in 1846, convinced many of the possessing classes that they were sitting atop a social volcano.
Politically the Monarchy seemed on the surface quiescent, largely because Francis, and after him the State Conference, governed almost entirely without reference to the Diets of the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands and Galicia, ruled the Italian provinces directly from Vienna, and consulted the Hungarian Diet only when they had to. In the non-Hungarian lands there was little enough evidence of a demand for constitutional government as such, merely a weariness of the censorship and a growing sense that economic and legal reform was long overdue. In Hungary, although Francis avoided convening the Diet from 1813 to 1825, the discontent this bred at such flouting of the Hungarian constitution proved too costly to ignore. Hungarian nobles and county assemblies had an awkward habit of refusing to vote taxes and recruits if the Diet were sidelined, and from 1825 a succession of Diets gave voice to an increasing debate about how to redress the kingdom's problems.
World History
