AUSTEN, JANE

Jane Austen is one of the most important English-language novelists and probably the earliest woman writer whose work is consistently considered part of the canon of great literature. She completed six novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817), and Persuasion (1817). Her work was widely read during her lifetime and has been popularly and critically acclaimed since her death.

Her first four novels were published anonymously during her lifetime (though her identity was known to many), her last two posthumously.

Stylistically and thematically, her work anticipates that of later nineteenth-century authors, including realist novelists such as Charles Dickens (18121870) and popular writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915).

For many decades family members and biographers portrayed Austen as a reclusive spinster and an apolitical portraitist of village life, and praised her for her style and modest purview. However, since the 1970s critics have been more willing to study Austen in broadly historical rather than narrowly biographical context and to recognize the critiques of gender, class, and imperialism that are intrinsic to her works.

LIFE

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, in the village of Steventon, in rural Hampshire, England, where her father was the rector, or head priest. As was typical of educated families at that time, five of her brothers were better schooled than Jane and her sister Cassandra (one brother, George, was disabled and an exception). The Austens were socially well connected—they traveled in what is called ‘‘polite’’ society, which consisted of locally elite families—but were of very modest means. Her father’s death in 1805 left Jane Austen, her mother, and her sister in difficult financial circumstances (her brothers were by that time independent). As a single, middle-class woman, Austen had few options for earning her living; she made some money from her novels, but was never self-supporting. She spent most of her adult life without her own home or income, dependent on her brothers, and obliged to accept the living arrangements others imposed on her. As an adult she lived in various places, including the resort town of Bath, where some of her novels take place. She died on 18 July 1817 in Winchester at the age of forty-two, probably of Addison’s disease.

SCOPE OF THE NOVELS

In an 1814 letter, Austen wrote that ‘‘3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on.’’ All of her novels center on a few comfortable families in a provincial setting, and in all of them the protagonist is a young, single woman who marries at the end of the novel. In Sense and Sensibility, sensible Elinor Dashwood suffers heartsickness but ends happily married to Edward Fer-rars, while her overly romantic sister Marianne,

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of ... joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? . . . The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Northanger Abbey, chapters five, fourteen.

‘‘Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?''

‘‘I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.''

‘‘And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence!''

Mansfield Park, chapter twenty-one.

Subdued by illness, ends engaged to Colonel Brandon. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet overcomes her prejudice, and the extremely wealthy Mr. Darcy his pride, and the two find love and marriage with one another. Such settings and plots seem in some ways limited, and Austen herself called her work a ‘‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.’’

GENDER, CLASS, AND IMPERIALISM IN THE NOVELS

For many years critics tended to take Austen’s self-effacing descriptions of her work at face value. Austen was praised as a brilliant stylist, but one whose work was divorced from the larger concerns of the day. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries scholars have revised their opinions of her life and work. While Austen was single, she was hardly reclusive; on the contrary, she was involved in the lives of her nieces and nephews; was close to her sister, Cassandra; and was part of a supportive network of female friends. Her novels are shaped by her love of contemporary theater and her appreciation of regency society as fundamentally theatrical. They also reflect her readings of and critiques of contemporary novels and ideas about them; many characters in her novels are novel-readers, and Northanger Abbey is a satire of the gothic novels with which it competed in the marketplace.

Austen is also recognized as a critic of gender and class hierarchies. She was a harsh observer of the legal, economic, and cultural limitations placed on the women of the upper-middle classes who were her main characters. For instance, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters must marry because they cannot inherit their father’s ‘‘entailed’’ estate—that privilege is reserved for a distant male relation. Women in polite circles could not earn a living without giving up their respectability; marriage was the only economic alternative—the only career—open to them. All of Austen’s heroines marry happily and well, but not all marriages in the novels are successful; many minor characters have unhappy or loveless marriages. In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins not because she loves him but because she knows that she needs a husband. Furthermore, many unmarried female characters suffer economic deprivation. In Emma, the widowed Mrs. Bates and her unmarried adult daughter Miss Bates are of Emma’s social circle, but are forced by their small income to live in rented rooms. This brings them perilously close to lower-middle-class status, and subjects them to Emma’s social derision.

Finally, much attention has been paid during the 1990s to the relationship between Austen and imperialism. The theorist of empire Edward Said maintains that Mansfield Park, in which Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth is derived from a plantation in Antigua maintained by slave labor, was a key part of an imperial culture that helped to make later expansion and oppression possible. The 1999 film version of Mansfield Park reinforces other critical readings of the novel that see slavery as the core of the moral satire of Mansfield Park, and the Bertram estate represented in it as morally blighted. Recent outpourings of Austen criticism and film interpretations of Austen’s novels demonstrate the author’s ongoing significance and relevance to contemporary culture.

See also Dickens, Charles; Eliot, George; Great Britain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen’s Letters. Collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford, U. K., and New York, 1995.

Secondary Sources

Fraiman, Susan. ‘‘Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism.’’ In Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, edited by Deidre Lynch, 206-223. Princeton, N. J., 2000.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York, 1993.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York, 1997.

Susie L. Steinbach

AUSTERLITZ. The Battle of Austerlitz was fought on 2 December 1805 between the armies of France, Austria, and Russia, commanded in person by Napoleon, Francis II, and Alexander I respectively. It was the culmination of a war that had begun in late August with the Austrian invasion of Bavaria and the Battle of Ulm, which destroyed the main Austrian army in Germany. By November, Napoleon had chased the Austrian remnants and General Mikhail Kutuzov’s auxiliary Russian corps into Moravia, where they joined with reinforcements coming from Russia at Olmutz (modern-day Olomouc). Napoleon feared that a hostile Prussia might intervene against him and that Austrian reinforcements commanded by Archduke Charles might arrive in his rear. He launched diplomatic feelers toward Alexander to explore the possibilities for a negotiated peace, and simultaneously prepared for a climactic battle he hoped would end the war.

Alexander, exhilarated by his first appearance at the head of an army and encouraged by the size of the force at his command, rudely rejected Napoleon’s peace overtures. The tsar and his advisors believed that they might be able to isolate

Napoleon’s main body, concentrated at Brunn (modern-day Brno), from reinforcements near Vienna by enveloping the French from the south. The difficulties of supplying the Allied army in the poor lands of Moravia contributed to this decision. The Allied army accordingly marched southwest from Olmiitz in the last days of November, and by 1 December had taken up position near the village of Austerlitz (modern-day Slavkov u Brna).

The Allied battle plan came from the Austrian chief of staff, Colonel Franz von Weyrother, and was approved by Tsar Alexander over the objections of the nominal commander in chief, General Kutuzov. Alexander was eager to attack; Kutuzov feared to fight with the patchwork Allied force he commanded. The tsar supported Weyrother’s plan because it promised the action he wanted, and Kutuzov, unable to derail the unwise decision, remained silent about the plan’s obvious flaws.

Napoleon had initially occupied a formidable defensive position anchored on the Pratzen Heights to the west of Austerlitz. He feared, however, that the Allies would not attack so strong a position, and so withdrew from it, leaving the high ground to the AUies. On 2 December the AUies attacked in accord with Weyrother’s plan. The bulk of the Allied army streamed to the southwest from the Pratzen Heights in four columns, while a separate corps commanded by Prince Peter Bagration held the army’s northern flank. The AUies aimed to turn Napoleon’s right flank and envelop and then destroy his army from two directions.

Napoleon had prepared for precisely just such a maneuver, which the nature of the terrain strongly encouraged. He waited until most of the AUied troops had left the Pratzen Heights and then struck with his main forces against the Allied center. The fight for control of the Pratzen was fierce, and Napoleon’s commanders nearly gave in at a critical moment. But the French had the great advantage of knowing what they were doing, while the Allies tried desperately to react to the total collapse of their own plans and preconceptions. The determination of the French generals contrasted with the confusion that swept the Allied upper echelons at this critical moment, and allowed the French finally to drive the defenders away from the Pratzen and retake the heights they had abandoned a few days before. Napoleon was aided in this effort by the timely arrival of Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout with reinforcements from Vienna after a three-day, 145-kilometer (90-mile) forced march.

The French command of the Pratzen Heights allowed Napoleon to turn the Allies’ retreat into a rout by stationing artillery on the dominating hills at the southern end of the range beyond which the Russians tried to withdraw. Even so, the Allied army lost only about a third of its strength in the battle, and the remnant still outnumbered Napoleon’s disposable forces when the fighting stopped. Archduke Charles continued his northward march with reinforcements, and Prussia continued its preparations to enter the fight on the Allies’ side.

Napoleon now brought his diplomatic skill to bear to turn a solid victory into a decisive one. He began at once to negotiate with both the Austrians and the Prussians and succeeded in driving the Prussian emissary, Count Christian von Haugwitz, to a treaty on 15 December (the Treaty of Schonbrunn). Tsar Alexander had been devastated by the loss of his first battle and had withdrawn in haste as soon as he had collected his army. The beleaguered and abandoned Austrians were forced to accept the disastrous Treaty of Pressburg on 26 December, yielding Napoleon substantial Austrian territory, including the Tyrol, Venice, and Dalmatia.

The opposing armies at Austerlitz were evenly matched in tactical skill. Russian, Austrian, and French soldiers all fought using roughly similar techniques and equal determination. The outcome of the battle resulted from political complexities within the Allied command structure that led to a premature and ill-considered attack, and from Napoleon’s skill in setting the terms of the battle very much in his favor from the outset. At that, had Alexander kept his nerve or Napoleon not been as skillful a diplomat as he was a warrior, the battle would not have ended the war. It might, in fact, have been simply the prelude to the early destruction of the French army and Napoleon’s rule.

See also Alexander I; Clausewitz, Carl von; French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon;

Napoleonic Empire; Ulm, Battle of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duffy, Christopher. Austerlitz, 1805. London, 1977.

Frederick W. Kagan

AUSTRALIA. The history of Australia from the close of the eighteenth century to World War I is a chapter in the eclipse of indigenous peoples, the rise of the British Empire, mass emigration from Europe, the spread of democracy, and the growth of a world economy.

FALL OF ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

The establishment of a tiny enclave of British convicts and soldiers at Sydney in 1788 was accompanied by a formal British claim to all of New South Wales, as the eastern half of Australia was dubbed after its coast was charted by the navigator James Cook. The British claim was later (1828) extended to Australia’s western half. Yet Australia was already occupied, if thinly, by perhaps four hundred thousand Aborigines. They lived in small clans of hunter-gatherers, without knowledge of kings or constitutions, metalwork or money, writing or the wheel. Their ties to each other and to the land were difficult for outsiders to discern. Ironically it was their one obvious impact on the landscape, that of clearing undergrowth by fire, that helped lure the British to settle the continent they merely claimed. No other European power was lured, though. The French might have lodged in the west ofthe continent and the Dutch in the north, but the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars left Britain the undisputed maritime and colonizing power of the age.

The British enclave expanded significantly when the wars were over. Peace permitted British attention to shift from Europe to its colonies. It also brought recession, retrenchment, and reform agitation, flooding British courts with offenders. The result was an acceleration of convict transportation to Australia, which ended only in 1868. By that date more than 160,000 convicts, mostly male English thieves, had served long sentences of forced labor in Australia. Some had erected public buildings, roads, wharves, and bridges. Others had worked for free immigrants. Few returned home when their sentence expired. The passage was expensive, but in any case they found living conditions and wages better in Australia than back home.

Inland Australia seemed dry and infertile to British explorers who entered it looking for a second Mississippi and great plains. Yet sheep could live on the grasslands that, thanks to the Aborigines, covered

When the English socialist Beatrice Webb visited Australia in 1898 she detected the same ‘‘bad manners, ugly clothes, vigour and shrewdness'' she knew from England, but something else too. ‘‘On the other hand,'' Webb wrote, ‘‘there is more enjoyment of life, a greater measure of high spirits among the young people of all classes. Australians are obviously and even blatantly a young race proud of their youth.''

Source: The Webbs’ Australian Diary, edited by A. G. Austin, 107-108. Melbourne, 1965.

Much of southeast Australia, and Britain’s looms needed more fine wool than Europe could supply. Raising and shearing sheep to feed those looms thus became the bedrock of Australia’s economy for more than a century, and the rich yield immediately encouraged free immigration. By the 1830s, convict arrivals were outpaced by immigrants, nearly all from Britain’s working and lower-middle classes. Convicts opened up the island of Tasmania off the continent’s south (from 1803), but immigrants founded the colonies of Western Australia (1829), which soon received convict labor, and South Australia (1836), which spurned it. Pastoralists looking for grazing land sparked the creation of two more colonies: Victoria (which separated from New South Wales in 1851) and Queensland (which separated in 1859).

Wool and the immigrants it encouraged doomed Aboriginal Australia. News ofthe pale invaders had been unsettling enough. Worse harbingers were European diseases like smallpox and syphilis. When significant numbers of colonists finally arrived they insisted the land was theirs, cut down or dug up its natural features, proclaimed what seemed a simplistic religion, imposed what seemed confusing laws, and met any resistance with firmness or even violence. Perhaps twenty thousand Aborigines were killed in the process; twenty-lirst-century historians argue over the number. What is clear is that few Aborigines died from soldiers’ bullets. Sustained, bloody military campaigns like those that cleared other nineteenth-century frontiers for white settlers were never needed in Australia; the Aborigines were generally stripped of everything by civilians and police. By 1900 they were reduced to perhaps ninety thousand. Only those in the tropics and the remote inland still lived lives that were partly traditional. By then, many white Australians had never seen an Aborigine. They believed their predecessors had settled an empty continent, and that their society was unique for not having known war.

RISE OF COLONIAL AUSTRALIA

Australia was represented at London’s great exhibition of 1851 by animal skins, whale teeth, and bird feathers. Had the exhibition been held a year or two later these exhibits would have given way to gold nuggets. Inspired by the Californian gold rush, prospectors found gold across New South Wales and Victoria. An Australian gold rush began in 1851, joined by miners from Canton to California. Over the next forty years new finds prompted new rushes in Western Australia and the tropical north. Australia’s gold fields were never as riotous as America’s. Yet tension between miners and the authorities yielded a bloody skirmish at Victoria’s Eureka Field (3 December 1854), while anti-Chinese riots erupted at Lambing Flat in New South Wales (July 1861).

The gold seekers were the vanguard of 1.4 million immigrants who came to Australia from 1851 to 1890, trebling the colonial population in the 1850s and nearly trebling it again during the subsequent two decades. As before, the vast majority of immigrants were from Britain’s working and lower-middle classes. The earliest sought gold, the rest a brighter future in a land being made prosperous by gold and wool and by their own need for food, housing, transport, and manufactures. Sheep flocks expanded fivefold from the 1850s to the 1880s, and wool began to attract European and Asian buyers as well as British ones. British investors began to back Australian ventures, especially the railways that were tethering the sheep runs to the sea ports. Towns grew, and grew further as most settlers decided against making a living from the hard land. Melbourne’s population approached five hundred thousand and, along with slightly smaller Sydney, ranked among the chief cities of the British Empire. Australia became an even more urbanized white frontier than North America.

Gold and the wave of immigration it launched hastened the coming of self-government for the Australian colonies, and ensured that it took democratic form. Before the gold rushes, prosperous pastoralists hoped to form a governing class. Most immigrants and former convicts wanted the fraternal democracy of male voters for which England’s Chartists were campaigning. The British government handed the decision to the colonists, and numbers proved decisive. By 1860 all the colonies except Western Australia (which followed in 1890) were self-governing polities within the British Empire, enjoying something like English municipal government on a grand scale. Almost every male colonist was eligible to vote by secret ballot for lower houses of parliament, which controlled and dispensed his colony’s lands and revenues, lightly restrained by a rural bias to electoral boundaries and by more cautious upper houses of parliament whose members were sometimes nominated.

Effectively confined until the 1900s to Englishspeaking adult males, the colonial political class was small and homogeneous. There was no aristocracy in Australia, no peasantry, and few truly wealthy families. Social mobility and the absence of an established church eased the divide between the Irish Catholic-descended minority and the Protestant English, Scottish, and Irish majority. There was confidence in the future, and much agreement about the present. The main political concerns were to manage the infrastructure needed to sustain prosperity (governments, not private companies, managed the railways), and to distribute a little of that prosperity. One form of distribution, adopted by Victoria and South Australia, was to tax imports to encourage local industry and increase employment. Another form adopted in Victoria and New South Wales, generally unsuccessfully, was to settle families on small blocks of rural land. A third means emerged outside the parliaments in the 1880s with the growth of trade unions. The unions wanted better wages and compulsory union membership, not an end to capitalism. But their growth brought a real divide among the colonial political class.

DEPRESSION AND FEDERATION

The promise of the golden 1850s was never quite realized. The lion’s share of British investment went to America. No great fortunes were made in Australia like those made in the United States.

Pastoralists and farmers always battled drought and distance. There were pockets of distressing poverty in Sydney and Melbourne. Employment was uncertain for some colonists, and prices were high for everyone. Away from the settled southeast, colonization seemed to have stalled. Skin color quickly veered toward tan, brown, or black there. In the tropical north, labor was often performed almost free by indentured Chinese or Melanesian men. Most white colonists wanted these men out of Australia, and colonial governments did what they could to turn Asian immigrants away.

In the 1890s the colonial economy faltered. The need for new railways and dwellings was exhausted, overseas prices for wool had plunged, and the Baring crisis of 1890 panicked British investors. Spending, prices, and employment slumped across Australia, and immigration slowed to a trickle. Trade unions, which had hoped to exploit the prosperity of the 1880s, now fought employers over a shrinking cake. They lost a series of strikes (1890-1894), and the defeat hastened the formation of union-based Labor parties that most electors would support by 1914.

Recovery from economic depression was delayed in the second half of the 1890s by a long drought and obscured by a rise in national and imperial sentiment. Native-born colonists had outnumbered immigrants for a generation, and colonial art and literature had become increasingly Australian in subject matter. Now the colonies resolved to follow Canada and federate as a way ofpooling their economic and military resources and standing against Asian immigration or—an even deeper fear—an Asian invasion. At the same time, there was increasing affection for Queen Victoria and growing pride in membership in the world’s largest empire. Twenty thousand soldiers from Australia helped make the empire even larger when they enlisted for the South African War (1899-1902) and helped crush the Boer republics.

The colonies federated during the war (1 January 1901) to form the Commonwealth of Australia. The new federal parliament legislated to bar Asian immigrants and deport Melanesian workers (1901) and raise tariff walls around the continent to encourage manufacturing and urban employment (1908). After Japan’s naval victory in 1905 at Tsushima and

Female emigrants waiting to depart for Australia. This illustration appeared in the 12 March 1853 edition of the Illustrated London News. ©Corbis

The dreadnought crisis of 1909, it made mditia service compulsory and approved the construction of an Australian navy. The parliament also set up an arbitration court to settle strikes (1904). Encouraged by progressive politicians, the court came to set widely heeded wage levels. The court’s Harvester judgment (1907) based those levels on the needs of a male worker and his family, not an employer’s ability to pay.

That a male worker was taken to be the typical breadwinner reflected the notably masculine tenor of Australian society. Men outnumbered women; there were eleven males to every ten females in Australia in 1901. Strength and sporting prowess were highly praised. The distinctive Australian was said to be the bushman, as the white male inhabitant of the inland was called. But Australia was not entirely a man’s country and hardly at all compared with more traditional societies. Women had the same legal protections as their female cousins in Britain, and political rights in advance ofthem. They could vote in South Australian elections from 1894, in Western Australian ones from 1899, in federal elections from 1902, and in all elections by 1914.

Prosperity returned to Australia by the second decade of the twentieth century. Some said a new nation with a great future was being born. Whatever its future, Australia seemed likely to remain a transplanted, improved Britain. ‘‘When the Australian uses the word ‘home,’’’ visiting journalist John Foster Fraser observed in 1910, ‘‘he does not mean his home. He means England.’’ No wonder, then, that when the bugles of England sounded in August 1914, Australians responded eagerly.

See also Canada; Colonies; Emigration; Great Britain; New Zealand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, David, ed. The Letters of Rachel Henning. Sydney, 1952. Australian colonial life as experienced by a middle-class English migrant.

Blainey, Geoffrey. A Shorter History of Australia. Port Melbourne, 1994.

‘‘Emigrant Mechanic.’’ Settlers and Convicts; or, Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods. Melbourne, 1953. Reprint of a blend of memoir and fiction by an English settler of the 1830s.

Kingston, Beverley. The Oxford History of Australia. Vol. 3: 1860-1900: Glad, Confident Morning. Melbourne, 1988. A dissection of colonial Australian beliefs, culture, and activities.

Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Ringwood, Australia, 1981.

Sinclair, William Angus. The Process of Economic Development in Australia. Melbourne, 1976. Contains a clear account of the economic history of colonial Australia.

Smith, Bernard, ed. Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period, 1770-1914. Melbourne, 1975.

Souter, Gavin. Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia, 1901-1919. Sydney, 1976.

Craig Wilcox

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. In 1789 the Habs-burg Monarchy covered an area that today lies within the borders of Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Belgium, and Italy. By 1914 the Monarchy was geographically more consolidated, having lost its outlying territories in today’s Belgium and most of those on the Italian peninsula, and having gained Bosnia-Herzegovina at the expense of its Ottoman neighbor to the south. In the west, the Habsburg dynasty’s holdings included Bohemia and Moravia, territories originally acquired by marriage and election in 1526, and later claimed through hereditary rule. The family’s traditional hereditary lands included the provinces of Lower and Upper Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Salzburg, and Tirol— essentially today’s Austria and Slovenia. To the east, the Habsburgs ruled as elective, and later hereditary, kings of Hungary, a kingdom that in 1789 included the semiautonomous regions of Transylvania and Croatia. Although the dynasty had acquired Hungary in 1526, it had fought the Ottoman Empire for control over that kingdom in a series of wars that had ended only at the beginning ofthe eighteenth century and that had prevented the Habsburgs from consolidating administrative control over Hungary. More recently the dynasty had augmented its holdings in the northeast with the first partition of Poland, gaining the newly invented Kingdom ofGalicia and Lodo-meria in 1772 and, in 1775, a slice of neighboring territory farther to the east that was christened the Duchy of Bukovina.

As in the case of many other European states around 1800, the Habsburg Monarchy included diverse regions that had experienced very different degrees of economic development and urbanization, and whose people had access to different types of education and social mobility. Particularly in the west, Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Austria, Styria, and Lombardy had developed strong interregional markets and boasted levels of industrial production as sophisticated as any in continental Europe. Here urban merchants, artisans, elements of the aristocracy, and immigrants from western Europe with access to capital had founded textile, mining, and agriculturally based industries. The spread of large-scale commercial firms had begun to challenge the prevailing legal and customary concepts ofproperty ownership, banking and commercial practices, labor organization, and technological development. To the east and south, however, economies remained relatively isolated from interregional trade, overwhelmingly agricultural in nature, and far less productive. At the start of the eighteenth century all these territories had sported very different administrative structures and legal relations to the regime in Vienna, and in some cases, little or no relationship to each other. The central government in Vienna had in turn exercised its power differently over most of these territories. Local elites expressed their provincial interests in traditional noble-dominated diets that generally met irregularly and that struggled increasingly during the eighteenth century to enforce traditional privilege against their Habsburg rulers’ administrative encroachments.

AN AGE OF REFORM

The year 1789 found the Habsburg Monarchy in considerable political turmoil due to the imposition of a series of particularly radical reforms authored by Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780-1790) and enforced against the wishes of most interests represented in the regional diets. During the eighteenth century the Monarchy had experienced an inexorable progression of reform initiatives from Vienna that sought to forge a centralized state and to create an economically more productive society out of the diverse collection of territories that owed allegiance to the Habsburg ruler. A series of agreements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had already transformed the dynasty’s rule from elective to hereditary in character, and the acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction (1713) had ensured the succession through the female branch of the family as well. Maria Theresa (r. 1740-1780) sought not only to consolidate her political power vis-a-vis the diets, but also to transform, rationalize, and improve all aspects of society. She, her sons, and her ministers intended to reinvigorate a stagnating empire, to stimulate greater economic growth, to ensure generalized prosperity, and to raise the moral and educational level of their poorest subjects. By 1789 the Habsburgs’ centralizing efforts had largely succeeded in wearing down the most stubborn cases of institutional and administrative diversity. In their place, the contours ofa centralized state had emerged, one administered by a professional bureaucracy loyal to Vienna.

The main obstacles to royal reform, however, remained the crushing social and economic weight of local noble privilege, the often-landless and unproductive peasantry enserfed by that nobility, the monopolistic power exerted over production by local guilds, and the lack of an educated citizenry. Maria Theresa took steps to remedy each obstacle with the aid of a greatly expanded state civil service that gradually assumed the local and regional powers ofadministration from local nobles and the noble-dominated diets. Members of this growing civil service, in turn, whether themselves of noble or middle-class origin, identified their interests increasingly with those of the reforming state from which they derived their mandate to interfere in local society. In the 1770s Maria Theresa even instituted a mandatory system of schools in her Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands as a means not only to improve knowledge and morality among her peasant subjects, but also to produce a cadre of educated commoners for the expanding civil service.

With the accession of Joseph II in 1780, the pace of imperial reform moved swiftly to more radical conclusions. Joseph was a tireless worker who traveled frequently across his vast realms with the object of observing local conditions, cataloging and measuring economic resources, and developing effective policies for their rational exploitation. In 1781 Joseph abolished the physical rights nobles exercised over serfs in Austria and Bohemia, giving peasants the right to move, marry, and gain an education without their lord’s permission (although the manorial system continued to remain in effect). In 1785 he extended this abolition of physical control over peasants to Hungary as well. Edicts promulgated in 1784 and 1786 further relaxed local guild powers of economic regulation, and in 1785 Joseph undertook a land survey of the entire Monarchy as the prelude to developing a unified system of land taxation.

In cultural matters Joseph also proceeded rapidly, issuing an Edict of Toleration in 1781 that legalized the practice of Protestant, Orthodox, and Uniate (Greek Catholic) religions, placing their adherents on an equal legal footing with Catholics and removing many forms of discrimination against Jews. Jews were now eligible for military service, a transformation that called into question remaining limits on their freedom as citizens. Joseph’s intentions regarding the Catholic Church were not to subvert its predominant position in Austrian society so much as to bring it and the other constituted religions under the control of the state. He established seminaries for Catholic and Uniate (Greek Catholic) priests in Galicia, as well as a university in L’viv/Lwow/Lemberg, for example, thus raising the level of required education for priests, but also exerting state control over its content. Joseph also relaxed censorship laws and encouraged the expansion of public and private education at all levels. Radical new civil and criminal codes followed in 1786 that applied equally to noble and non-noble offenders.

What later nationalists considered the most execrable or praiseworthy ofJoseph’s many acts, depending on their political outlook, was the privileged legal status he assigned to the German language in the civil service and much ofthe school system. Joseph himself would not have understood the controversy because to him and his successors, these measures had nothing to do with a German nationalist impulse, a desire somehow to ‘‘Germanize’’ the Monarchy’s linguistically diverse peoples. Rather, Joseph believed that using the German language would enhance the institutional unity of the state and facilitate interregional commerce and administration. Latin, which had previously been the language of much official communication (serving, for example, as the language of the Hungarian Diet), was considered by Joseph to be inadequate in an age of technical innovation. The language law provoked angry reactions, however, particularly in Hungary where, in 1785, administrators were given just one year and judicial officials three years in which to learn German as a replacement for Latin. Proofthat Joseph did not envision a Germanization of his peoples may be found in his policies to promote use of vernacular languages other than German in some provinces as well. While its implementation as the new lingua franca for the Monarchy required the greater promotion of German language study in secondary schools and universities, the regime continued to recognize the importance of communication with the population in other locally used languages. The dynasty did not intend German to replace customary usage in regions where the vernacular differed from it. In Bohemia, for example, the government continued its traditional custom of proclaiming new laws in both the Czech and German languages.

In 1789 Joseph announced a tax law based on his new land survey that would have diminished the money paid by peasants to their lords and increased the amounts owed by those lords to the state. This measure would have completed the abolition of serfdom and in some parts of the Monarchy would have cut noble agricultural income by more than half. As Joseph’s reign came to a tumultuous close, the dynasty faced growing revolts in the Netherlands, in Hungary, and among nobles throughout the Monarchy. Joseph’s temperamentally more moderate brother and successor, Leopold II (r. 1790-1792), hoped to calm the uprisings by moderating the reforms, without backing down from their original intent, and in 1791 he reached a compromise with the Hungarian Diet. But by this time the reformers faced an entirely different set of challengers who forced nobles, bureaucrats, and emperor together in a common alliance to protect the social order at home and to combat military aggression from abroad.

REACTION

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, its subsequent radicalization and military challenge to aristocratic Europe, forced the dynasty to reconsi-

Women in traditional dress of the Mehadia region.

Illustration from the book Costumes de Hongrie, 1810, by J. H. Bikkesy. Mehadia is an ancient market town in the Cerna River valley, now part of Romania. Bibliothieque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library/Archives Charmet

Der the measures it had taken to weaken the powers of the nobility and church, two potentially conservative and stabilizing elements in Habsburg society. Threatened by the specter of revolutionary social unrest, Leopold’s son Francis II/I (r. 17921835) made peace with the nobility. He did not, however, renounce the centralist achievements of his predecessors. Instead, he used their formidable bureaucratic machinery for more socially conservative ends. During the next fifty years the Austrian bureaucracy assumed the unfamiliar and often uncomfortable role of preserving a socially conservative status quo, often by intruding on and censoring the activities and writings of an emerging middle-class civil society. Prince Clemens von Met-ternich, foreign minister from 1809 to 1848, epitomized this harsh domestic Habsburg policy that sought to suppress any signs of revolution, both at home and abroad.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) the Monarchy survived countless defeats and considerable territorial losses. The Holy Roman Empire, of which the Habsburgs were nominal emperors, collapsed in the face of Napoleonic alliances and armies. In 1804 Emperor Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire declared that the Habsburg realms constituted an ‘‘empire’’ of their own and that he would henceforth be known as ‘‘Emperor Francis I of Austria.’’ The final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 made the Habsburg state victorious in Europe, but victory came at the price of near bankruptcy. Financial crisis combined with Metternich’s ambition to police the rest of Europe led Emperor Francis to try to squeeze greater funds and soldiers from his territories. During the Napoleonic Wars the nobility had provided increased revenues for the military, while the Habsburgs had provided the nobility with protection against popular sedition. Nobles in some regions had prospered thanks to their exploitation of wartime economic needs. But by the 1820s they were doing much worse economically, and when, for example, the Hungarian nobles finally refused to pay up any longer, they also demanded the convocation of a Hungarian national diet in 1825.

Already during the eighteenth century, protesting nobles had couched their political opposition to Maria Theresa’s and Joseph II’s reforms in a language that invoked the concepts of ‘‘states’ rights’’ and ‘‘national liberties.’’ The Hungarian Diet of 1825 (as well as those that followed in the next decade) was understood by the nobles to speak for the so-called Hungarian nation. At this point in history, however, the term Hungarian nation (or in Latin, natio Hungarica) referred only to those groups with the right to representation in the diet: the nobility, the Catholic clergy, and a few enfranchised burghers of the free royal town. The vast majority of the country’s population, those who paid the taxes, served in the military, and bowed to the whims of the nobility, were commoners with no public role or voice, and no part in the political ‘‘nation.’’ This traditional understanding of the term nation applied equally well, for example, to the Polish nation, which is how nobles in Galicia referred to themselves. Nowhere in this region did the term nation share the more socially universal definition it had gained under the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes. Furthermore, while language use and religious practice later came to define national identity, at this point the number of self-styled nationalist nobles who could even speak the Magyar or Czech languages was quite small. While some historians believe that Joseph II’s centralizing policies had inadvertently ‘‘awakened’’ the slumbering consciousness of nations in the Monarchy, this formulation presumes there was something there to be awakened in the first place. Noble opponents of royal centralization framed their opposition to absolutism increasingly in terms of their so-called national liberties, but the collective body they invoked referred to their own narrow social class interests. It did not refer to some imagined mass of people who consciously shared some vital (if nebulously defined) characteristics such as language use, a common ‘‘culture,’’ or religion. The nobility spoke for the rights of their ancient states (Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland) against the encroachments of their imperial rulers.

Some critical observers such as Count Istvan Szechenyi (1791-1860) in Hungary blamed Hungary’s political weakness and economic poverty precisely on a shortsighted nobility that gave little thought to the economic welfare of the larger society and fought only to maintain its class privilege. Nobles in Galicia learned the hard way that if a Polish nation did in fact exist, its membership was limited to the uppermost classes, who were often hated by the rest of society. In another sign of the limited extent of national self-identification in these regions, peasants often mythologized their Habsburg rulers for having attempted to intervene on their behalf over the years against their noble masters. Such peasants did not see themselves as part of an imagined Hungarian or Polish nation. When in 1846 Polish nobles in Galicia rebelled against the Habsburgs, Polish - and Ukrainianspeaking peasants famously turned on their rebellious landlords in large numbers and massacred them, claiming to oppose the oppressive Polish nation in whose name the nobles had rebelled.

Nobles invoking national myths were not the only emerging opponents of the regime under the harsh rule of Francis and his mentally incompetent successor, Ferdinand I (r. 1835-1848). During the 1830s and 1840s an emerging urban civil society in cities throughout the monarchy (Vienna, Pest, Pressburg/Pozsony, Prague, Graz, Ljubljana/ Laibach, L’viv) created social and economic institutions that posited alternate models of rule to Habs-burg despotism or noble privilege. Early industrialist associations lobbied for more industry-friendly policies from a government that seemed intent on holding the potentially political ills of industrialization at bay. Noble and middle-class educational, scientific, professional, gymnastics, choral, and charity societies all attempted to effect some kind of social change through collective activity. Historians developed nationalist histories in vernacular languages serving the interests of incipient Czech, Hungarian, and Polish nationalist movements. The noble-dominated diets remained the locus of whatever forms of political protest were possible, but the discourses their members invoked and the policies they promoted began to follow more middle-class and less purely aristocratic formulations of interest. When strikes in the textile industry threatened social order in Moravia in 1844 or hunger threatened disorder in Vienna in 1847, middle-class journalists and reform-minded noble nationalists alike blamed both the incompetence and the arrogance of the oppressive central government.

In 1848, when a series of revolutions broke out across Europe, Pest, Vienna, and Prague were among the cities at the forefront of experiments with political reform. In Hungary, under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), the diet rapidly proclaimed a new constitutional regime in April (the April Laws). This arrangement confirmed Hungary’s existence independent of other Habsburg territories, promised liberal rights of citizenship and enfranchisement to many more inhabitants (although not to Jews or to small property owners), and maintained full enfranchisement for any noble, no matter how poor. The Hungarian reformers postponed any significant transformation of the manorial system, a tack that pleased the broad gentry class and nobility but did little to satisfy the peasantry. Furthermore, the April Laws imposed the Magyar language on state and society, and this tended to diminish revolutionary unity, provoking opposition among leaders in Croatia and Transylvania who rejected Magyar predominance and insisted on using Latin in their communications with the government. In fact the question of defining the nation and the privileged role of the

Magyar language helped to alienate many who spoke other languages and who might otherwise have sympathized with the new liberal constitutional regime. Later in 1848 and 1849 the Habs-burg military carefully exploited this alienation as the dynasty struggled to reimpose control over Hungary. The dynasty’s strategy of divide and conquer ultimately provoked the Hungarian revolutionaries in turn to depose the Habsburgs and to declare full independence in April 1849.

In Vienna the government collapsed in March 1848, Metternich fled, and the emperor’s advisors promised a constitutional regime with liberal franchise laws, civil rights, the abolition of censorship, and, eventually, an end to the remaining vestiges of serfdom and the manorial system (which in Galicia were considerable). Occasional outbursts of popular violence in Vienna throughout the spring continued to drive the revolution further to the left, until the court found it expedient to remove itself to the safer, more conservative city of Innsbruck. In July an Austrian parliament elected by means of an extremely generous suffrage set about writing a constitution, and it too was eventually removed to the sleepy town of Kremsier/KromeriZ in Moravia in order to avoid the political pressures exerted by the radical crowd in the streets of Vienna. At the same time, the issue of political nationalism came to the fore in several different and often contradictory contexts. Austria sent a large delegation to the Frankfurt National Assembly, which struggled in 1848 and 1849 to forge a new united Germany. Liberal Austrians who sat in the Frankfurt National Assembly tended to share an idealistic vision of a future united Germany that would include the non-German-speaking Habsburg territories. The inhabitants of these territories, it was imagined, would receive linguistic rights where necessary from the fraternal German people, and they would reap considerable benefits from their participation in the high cultural and economic development of the German nation. In fact, using a universal language of inclusion, many Austro-German liberals imagined their nation to be defined by its very commitment to the values of liberal humanism, values available to any struggling people in east-central Europe.

At the same time, and in reaction to the events at Frankfurt, Czech national liberal leaders proclaimed their own adherence to an Austria separate from Germany and defined by Slav interests. The (bilingual) Bohemian historian Frantisek Palacky (1798-1876), who had been invited to participate in the planning process for the Frankfurt National Assembly, used the occasion of his reply to articulate this Austro-Slav position most effectively. Calling for an Austria organized around a principle of Slav solidarity, since this would protect the so-called smaller nations of central Europe from German and Russian hegemony, Palacky argued that had Austria not existed, it would have had to be invented for this very purpose. In June an informal Slav Congress even met in Prague, although its activities tended to demonstrate the difficulties of forging a common program that would unite the political interests of Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, Serbian, and Slovene speakers across the Monarchy.

Many historians have since judged nationalism rather than liberalism to have been the major source of discontent in 1848. Such a judgment accepts the nationalist rhetoric of 1848 at face value, and views it in the context ofmodern nationalist sensibilities, rather than in terms of the specific and limited meanings that attached to such language over 150 years ago. The fact that Austro-Slav declarations by Czech nationalist leaders caught their German-speaking counterparts in Bohemia by surprise should alert the observer to the relative novelty and insignificance of the national issue to most Austrians in 1848. Nationalist discourse became a critical vehicle for conveying regional demands that year, but the nations it invoked were largely figments of the nationalists’ own imagination. More often than not, regional and class loyalties far outweighed their nationalist counterparts. German and Czech-identified deputies to the Austrian parliament from Bohemia (many of whom were bilingual) agreed more often with each other, for example, than they did with German-speaking delegates from Lower Austria or Styria. And unlike their Polish noble counterparts, Polish-speaking peasant deputies to the parliament sought an immediate end to all forms of manorial-ism. Many historians of 1848 have also argued that the work of the constitutional committee at the parliament in Kremsier constituted the last possibility for a friendly constitutional understanding among the various ‘‘nations’’ of Austria. Indeed the work of the committee provided a notable model for later Austrian constitutions, but the compromises achieved by the committee emerged from its members’ powerful conviction that their common liberal sympathies far outweighed nationalist differences. Whether they held centralist or federalist views, German national or Slav national orientations, the men at Kremsier largely put aside their differences over the latter issues to produce a bill of rights and state structure that would have transformed dynastic Austria into a genuinely constitutional regime.

Their efforts, however, would not pay off for another twenty years. Already in the summer of 1848 the regime had begun to reassert its dominance against the revolution, even against its more moderate proponents. In June, Field Marshal Prince Alfred Windischgratz successfully laid siege to Prague, ending both the Slav Congress and a radical student uprising there. In October the military besieged revolutionary Vienna, long since abandoned by the court and most moderates. In early December the regime replaced the faltering Emperor Ferdinand with the eighteen-year-old Francis Joseph I (r. 1848-1916), and in the spring of 1849 the new emperor and his prime minister, Felix Schwarzenberg, sent the Austrian parliament home, imposing a constitution of their own devising on Austria. Later in 1849, with the help of the Russian military, the Austrians finally managed to defeat the armies of the Hungarian rebels, and in 1851 the emperor decided to rule openly as an absolute monarch by abrogating the constitution he had issued a year before.

FAILED ABSOLUTISM AND LIBERAL REFORM

The absolutist system of the 1850s did not, however, represent a return to the Metternich years. After a brief period of harsh retribution following the revolutionary denouement, the regime focused on promoting industrial development, economic modernization, educational reform, and political quiescence. The regime invested close to 20 percent of its annual expenditures during the 1850s in railway construction, for example, an unheard of amount second only to its expenditure on the military. Starting in 1850 the state also sponsored the creation of chambers of commerce to promote local business interests in cities and towns throughout the monarchy. Several revolutionary reforms,

The Hungarian Revolution of 1848: Austrian Troops Assault the Buda Castle on 21 May 1849. Watercolor on paper, Hungarian School, nineteenth century. Private collection/Bridgeman Art Library/Archives Charmet

Including the abolition of serfdom (confirmed in 1849 in Austria and 1853 in Hungary), and the beginnings of municipal autonomy remained in force. Censorship returned, but in far less draconian form than its pre-1848 versions. Liberalism as a set of progressive and modern attitudes toward the transformation of society grew ever more popular throughout Austrian and Hungarian society, but was now shorn of its radical democratic implications.

Two severe and related weaknesses undermined the potential success of this new absolutist system, and eventually provoked liberal political reform, an international reorientation of Austria’s foreign goals, and a radical structural transformation of the monarchy. The first of these weaknesses was financial. Economic growth was substantial during the 1850s, but so was investment. Economic consolidation at home demanded a less activist policy abroad. Yet Francis Joseph and his ministers were determined during the 1850s to maintain both Austria’s great-power status and its political hegemony in the German Confederation. Both of these policies demanded significant investment in the military. In 1858 already 40 percent of the government’s expenditures went to service the state debt. An expensive mobilization during the Crimean War (1853-1856) and a disastrous campaign against Piedmont-Sardinia in 1859 brought the state to the verge of bankruptcy. The threat of fiscal insolvency and the demands of his creditors for an open and credible budgetary process forced the unwilling Francis Joseph to authorize political reform. The second and related weakness in the 1850s was the government’s inability to rule Hungary successfully. Widespread passive resistance in the form of withholding taxes in Hungary did not help the fiscal situation either. In the face of attempts to reintroduce German as the language of administration and to restructure and centralize local administration, the regime faced determined hostility and a resurgence in Magyar nationalism among the political classes.

For these reasons, the regime was forced to offer significant political reform both to the liberals and to the Hungarians, eventually creating the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, from the ruins of the unitary absolutist Austrian state. Military defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 also reoriented Austria’s foreign policy decisively by removing it from the German question. What is often forgotten is that domestic reform in 1861 and 1867 established firmly constitutional, if structurally very different regimes in both halves of the Dual Monarchy. The dynasty managed to retain its supremacy in foreign policy and military affairs, but liberal reform ended the unquestioned dominance of the Catholic Church in domestic affairs and established an independent judiciary as well as public school systems. Even Francis Joseph’s powers in foreign and military affairs were restricted by constitutional budget procedures. The compromise agreement, or Ausgleich, that created Austria-Hungary in 1867 gave each of the two new states complete independence from the other in its internal affairs, and required only that representatives from the two parliaments renegotiate common tariffs, debt policy, and joint finances every ten years. The emperor/king appointed three joint ministers for foreign affairs, defense, and joint finances. In his capacities as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, Francis Joseph I appointed the prime ministers of each state and presided over both sets of cabinet meetings as well as the meetings of the joint cabinet (usually the three common ministers plus the two prime ministers). Finally it is important for subsequent developments to note that each state maintained the capability to block any significant constitutional change proposed by the other.