The Austrian Empire

Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

At some point in the 1020s, a Radbot of Klettgau built a castle near the Aare River in the Duchy of Swabia, today a part of northern Switzerland. And oh yeah, before we go on, this is my obligatory notice that I’ll be butchering a lot of German in this series, but fear not, you listeners who know German but never knew Spanish or French and so haven’t had your ears assaulted yet. I have it on good authority that I often get better and often wind up at a place described as not completely terrible.

So taking its name either from a nearby ford, or more romantically from a hawk that was seen perched atop the walls, Radbot named his new fortress Hapsburg Castle. The castle became one of the principal bases for a small family of minor nobles that began styling themselves the Counts of Hapsburg. From these extremely humble origins, arguably the single greatest royal dynasty in the history of Europe was born.

Operating within the larger framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the Counts of Hapsburg maneuvered and muscled and married their way into further dynastic acquisitions until by the late 1200s, they made their first big move, taking control of the Duchy of Austria and its capital, Vienna. Now, this was not an uncontested acquisition, and in 1278, the Hapsburgs fought the hugely consequential Battle on the Marchfeld against a rival Bohemian dynasty to solidify their hold on Vienna and the Duchy of Austria. From that point on, Austria and the Hapsburgs become virtually synonymous. Vienna would be the capital of the Hapsburg dynasty for the next 650 years, until the whole thing fell apart at the end of World War I.

So the now Austrian Hapsburgs then continued to maneuver, muscle, and marry their way into further dynastic possessions until they made their next big move. In 1440, Frederick, Duke of Austria, managed to convince the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire to elect him King of the Romans, a title that had to be held before a man could be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. And in fact, to oversimplify things a bit, for all intents and purposes, the King of the Romans was the Holy Roman Emperor. It’s just that he hadn’t been crowned as such by the Pope yet. Now, usually, there was a pretty quick turnaround, but in Frederick’s case, it was not until 1452 that he was crowned Frederick III Holy Roman Emperor.

But once Frederick was elevated, the Hapsburgs would hold the Holy Roman Emperor ship uninterrupted for the next 300 years. And even when the streak was broken, when a member of a rival Bavarian dynasty managed to grab it in 1740, the Hapsburgs promptly reacquired the crown in 1745. So, but for that five-year window, the Hapsburgs were synonymous with the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 until 1806.

The fortunes of the Hapsburgs and their Holy Roman Empire peaked two generations after Frederick III, with the arrival of Charles V. As you may recall from Episode 5.1, the Hapsburgs had married one of their sons into the Spanish kingdoms, and Charles, the eldest son of that union, was born in 1500. When he was still just a teenager, Charles inherited the Spanish crowns. He was in fact the first to simultaneously hold both the crowns of Aragon and Castile in his own right. That meant that he also inherited all of Spain’s vast imperial possessions, which included at that moment literally the whole of the Americas west of that famous line in the Atlantic established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Then a few years later, Charles turned the profits of that empire into a successful bid to succeed his grandfather, and he was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519.

Claiming territory that spanned the globe, from Vienna to Madrid to South America to the Philippines, Charles V is the first of whom it was said controlled an empire upon which the sun never set. This empire upon which the sun never set then grew even more early in Charles’ reign because the peak of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire was also the peak of the Ottoman Turks, who were still looking to expand west after they had successfully snuffed out the last candle of the actual Roman Empire in 1453.

Now, if you’ll follow along with me here for a second, after Charles V beat the French at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, King Francis I of France opened negotiations with the Ottomans to secure a common alliance against the growing power of Charles and the Habsburg Empire upon which the sun never set. The Turks were quite happy to take up this invitation to expand towards central Europe, and specifically, they aimed themselves at the Kingdom of Hungary. Now we’re going to talk all about the Kingdom of Hungary in two episodes, so I won’t get lost in the weeds here, but just know that the Habsburgs had married their way over into the Hungarian royal family, which meant that when the Ottomans smashed the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and the Hungarian King Louis II was killed in battle, that the Hungarian Crown Lands, those that weren’t gobbled up by the Ottomans anyway, migrated over to Charles V’s brother Ferdinand. Confusing? Good. All you need to know is that this is how the Habsburgs acquired their permanent claim to both the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Bohemia, as well as all the little constellation territories that were included in the Hungarian Crown Lands. This is all a very big part of our story for the Revolutions of 1848.

After successfully withstanding the subsequent Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529, and then continuing to spar with the French for the next couple of decades, Charles V decided to purposefully separate his various possessions rather than attempt to form a permanent universal European monarchy, which many had long suspected was his true aim. He began a series of planned abdications in 1554. First, some of his minor holdings, then his son Philip took over his King of Spain in 1556, and then his brother Ferdinand, who had already been administering the Austrian territories and now also claimed Hungary and Bohemia, became Holy Roman Emperor upon Charles’ death in 1558.

Now, we’re just gonna blow right on through the Thirty Years’ War, if you don’t mind, but just know that the Habsburgs were like the Catholic side of that fight. And also a nice bit of trivia is that in the midst of those wars, the Habsburgs actually lost possession of Habsburg Castle. The castle that gave them their name. They had to cede it at the Peace of Prague in 1635.

So zooming forward now a bit to some more of the stuff that we covered in Episodes 5.1 and 5.2, the Spanish branch of the Habsburg trundled along until they skidded, faced first into extinction in 1700. And our old friends, the Bourbons, moved in, triggering the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1700 to 1715. I highlight this bit here today because it was during the War of the Spanish Succession and the resulting treaties that the Austrian Habsburgs acquired territory for the first time in northern Italy, specifically the Duchy of Milan and the all-important Fortress of Mantua. This is how they got their first toehold in Italy, which, like the acquisition of Hungary, is very important to the story of 1848. And we’re going to talk more about that next week, obviously, when we talk about Italy.

So as I mentioned a few minutes ago, in 1740, the Austrian Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died without a male heir. And the unbroken string Holy Roman Emperor ships stretched all the way back to 1440 or 1452, whichever one you want to use to date it, it ended. And a Bavarian claimant managed to secure election. So technically, the death of Charles VI extinguished the Habsburg line. But it’s really super hard to say that, what with Charles VI’s daughter being Maria Theresa and all. When the Bavarian Emperor died in 1745, Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis of Lorraine, was elected Holy Roman Emperor, and really he was a happy figurehead. The Empress, Maria Theresa, was the real power behind the throne. So, the Habsburg streak began anew.

After the death of Francis I in 1765, his eldest son, Joseph II, took over, and now we’re pushing all the way into the early days of the French Revolution, because it was this generation of Habsburgs, basically Maria Theresa’s children, who were running Austria and the Holy Roman Empire when the French Revolution broke out. Marie Antoinette was Maria Theresa’s daughter, and also Emperor Joseph II’s sister. And it was Joseph II who started all those post-seven years for enlightened reforms from above that he hoped would modernize the empire, exactly the sort of reforms that the Bourbon Ministries over in France might have liked to roll out had they not run into so much trouble with the French aristocracy.

As opposition to Metternich’s management of the Austrian Empire grew in the 1840s, the so-called Josephist program would be pointed to by the liberal nobility as the superior model that the Austrian Empire needed to return to. When Joseph II died in 1790, his brother Leopold II became Holy Roman Emperor, and as we discussed in Episode 3.20, Leopold did everything he could to not get involved with the French Revolution, despite his sister Marie Antoinette’s constant begging. Instead, Leopold simply tried to kick back and enjoy watching the Bourbons allow themselves to be crippled by domestic unrest.

But then critically, Leopold II died in 1792. Remember, that’s a pretty big turning point from Episode 3.22, because at that moment, just as France and Austria are about to go to war with each other, his son Francis II takes over. More aggressively conservative than his father, and certainly more convinced that the post-revolution French armies would be a pushover, the new Holy Roman Emperor Francis led Austria to war against France. And we kind of know how things went after that. Contrary to the assumption of both the French and the Austrians, neither side was a pushover. And instead of the quick and decisive campaign both expected in the spring of 1792, the war just went on and on and on until it consumed Europe in a fireball of death and destruction. Bonaparte came up at the Austrian possessions in Italy in 1796 and then continued to attack their exposed belly after he captured the fortress of Mantua, which he did in Episode 3.45.

But of particular consequence for the story of 1848, when Bonaparte drew up the Treaty of Campo Formio, he reorganized the Austrian Italian possessions into the new Cisalpine Republic. But to compensate the Habsburgs for their loss, he told them to go ahead and take control of the Venetian Republic. This was a very controversial decision in both Italy and France, and will have profound consequences for the revolutions of 1848.

But then the wars kept going, and after General Bonaparte beat the Austrians, he came back again a few years later as First Consul Bonaparte and beat them again. And then he came back a few years later as Emperor Napoleon and beat them again. And that one was the biggie. After crushing the Austrians at Austerlitz, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved permanently, extinguishing an entity that traced its roots all the way back to Charlemagne. Having suspected the end was nigh for the Holy Roman Empire, though, Francis had already taken the additional title of Emperor of Austria for himself in 1804. So when he abdicated the Holy Roman Emperorship, he remained an Emperor, though he was no longer Francis II Holy Roman Emperor, but instead, Emperor Francis I of Austria. He then proceeded to live unhappily under French hegemony. A few years later, the Austrians made a play to toss off that hegemony when Napoleon opened his bleeding ulcer in Spain, but the attempt was unsuccessful. And after the disastrous Battle of Wagram in 1809, the Habsburg slipped back to doomed resignation.

After this latest defeat, the old crowd that had been advising, now former Holy Roman Emperor Francis, but now just King of Austria Francis, were cleared out. And the youngish Prince Metternich was elevated to the post of foreign minister. Now trying to work as France’s ally rather than their enemy, one of Metternich’s first foreign policy triumphs was successfully marrying Francis’ daughter Marie Louise to Napoleon. A diplomatic success made even better when she bore Napoleon a son. And that was the ill-fated Napoleon II, who we unceremoniously killed off two episodes back.

But this alliance only lasted as long as was absolutely necessary. And after Napoleon dragged the peoples of Europe from west to east, and then the peoples of Europe pushed him back from east to west, the Austrians joined the Allies for the final campaigns, and Metternich worked his charms to host the final conference of the Allies at Vienna, and it became Napoleon’s first defeat in 1814.

So as we’ve talked about the Congress of Vienna, what Metternich and the other conservatives were trying to do was recreate in spirit, if not in exact form, the network of absolute monarchies that had ruled Europe before the dang oh French had come along and wrecked everything. The idea was to check as much as possible the budding nationalist movements that had grown up in the wake of Napoleon.

So last week, we talked about how that meant keeping the Germans disunited in a patchwork of small kingdoms. While for the Austrians, Metternich planned the opposite, to take a huge swath of territory composing more than a dozen distinct nationalities and subsuming them all into one massive multi-ethnic empire run from Vienna. Metternich’s master, Francis II, would never again be Holy Roman Emperor, but he would be an emperor again. Emperor of the Austrian Empire.

Now obviously, I skipped a lot of history as we whipped through 800 years of the Habsburgs, but that was because I was principally focusing on the big moments where they acquired claim to what, at the Congress of Vienna, would become the Austrian Empire. Because basically what Metternich did was pull all those claims and see how many he could get the other great powers to recognize. And he did pretty well for himself, too. Though just a few years earlier, it had seemed like the Austrian Habsburgs had lost everything. At the Congress of Vienna, they got back territory that amounted to about two-thirds of what they had had before they went to war with France in 1792.

And especially down in Italy, they also had minor branches of the Habsburg family ruling independent kingdoms, so their personal hegemonic reach was even greater than their official holdings. To say nothing of the outsized weight they were able to throw around in the new German Confederation. So what I want to do now is real quick run through the possessions of the Austrian Empire with a particular emphasis on those territories that will see action in 1848.

So starting in the far west, we begin with the Italian territories and the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia that encompass some of the most recent additions to the traditional Habsburg realms. The Austrians had only crept south through the Alps permanently during the War of the Spanish Succession when they gained the Duchy of Milan and the Duchy of Mantua. The Republic of Venice had only come under their dominion thanks to the generosity of Bonaparte. So the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia jammed all those possessions together, and prior to the Congress of Vienna, no such thing as the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia existed. It was one of those new states that captured the spirit of the new order without being too particular about the old borders. But we’re going to talk about Italy a bunch next week, so let’s just keep moving.

Down on the northern bend of the Adriatic was the Kingdom of Illyria, which contained a number of smaller duchies, principalities, and also the free city of Trieste. All those little units had been a part of the Habsburg dominions, but Napoleon had reformed them into something he called the Illyrian provinces, a deliberate nod to the classical name for the region. At the Congress of Vienna, the basic organization was kept in place, but it was all rechristened the Kingdom of Illyria.

Illyria then became roughly coextensive to what was becoming, at that moment, in the eyes of some of the residents, if not the rest of the world, Slovenia, a geographic region made up of a heretofore unknown people called the Slovenes, who were at that moment in the rising tide of Romantic nationalism, staking out the breadth and depth of a national identity, and, when 1848 came along, would be among those peoples for whom spring had possibly come.

To keep moving south along the Adriatic coast, you come to the Kingdom of Dalmatia, which again gets its name from the old classical name for the region, and came to the Habsburgs very late, as it was all lands claimed by the Venetians. Today, what once was the Kingdom of Dalmatia is now mostly in Croatia, so duh, it was mostly filled with Croatians, another Slavic group that was just starting to dawn a national identity.

If you keep moving east, you find more Croatians living in the Kingdom of Croatia, a kingdom that predated the Napoleonic conquest, but which had lived under the shadow of the much larger and more powerful Kingdom of Hungary, which loomed so large in southeastern Europe. This whole region then helps mark the southern and eastern borders of the Austrian Empire, as their territory did not extend any deeper into the Balkans. All that territory was claimed by the Ottoman Turks.

To create a buffer zone, the Austrians formed special administrative units called military frontiers. There was a Croatian military frontier, a Slavonian military frontier, and a Transylvanian military frontier. These thin strips acted as a buffer region. They were populated with Croatians and Serbs and Romanians who were exempt from taxes, taxes, which was good, but then faced heavy conscription requirements if war ever came, which was bad. Those military frontiers buffered the much larger lands to the north, specifically the all-important Kingdom of Hungary that we’re going to be talking about a lot two weeks from now and its neighbor, the Grand Principality of Transylvania, which was itself part of the lands of the Hungarian Crown. Today, Transylvania forms the northwest of Romania and is populated with, you guessed it, Romanians, but at the time, it was the far eastern border of the Austrian Empire, and it ran the empire not just up against the Ottomans, but also the Russians. And the invisible line that divided those two empires also divided the Romanians, because the rest of the Romanians lived on the far side of the border in neighboring Moldavia.

North of Hungary and Transylvania was the Kingdom of Galicia, which was the great big chunk of territory carved out of the old Kingdom of Poland that Austria had gotten during the Polish partitions. The Kingdom of Galicia was filled with Poles and Lithuanians and Ruthenians, and because they too were a very late Habsburg acquisition and had come via the Polish partitions, everyone there remembered a time when Poland was great. Before the dark times had come.

Heading back west, you follow the northern border of the Empire back to the inner domains and the lands of the Bohemian Crown, an ancient kingdom that had for centuries been rivals of the Austrian Habsburgs, but who had then been swallowed up into their domains after the Great Battle of Mohács. The capital of Bohemia proper is Prague. There is going to be a revolution in Prague in 1848, and the kingdom is basically coextensive to the modern Czech Republic, which I’m now being told they would like us to call Czechia, which, okay, Czechia it is. Among these Bohemian lands, one would find Czechs and Germans and Poles, and the Bohemian Crown lands fixed the northern border of the Empire, and included Silesia, which had been a major point of contention between the Austrians and Prussians when the Prussians had first exploded as a great power under Frederick the Great back in the mid-1700s. The Bohemian lands were neighbored to the south by Austria proper, which now set itself to the task of ruling this multi-ethnic empire.

So to govern this array of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and free cities, and the dozen or more nationalities that inhabited them, the Austrian empire would be run from the centre by an absolute monarch, as if Metternich would have it any other way. In a world inundated with constitutions and calls for constitutions, Metternich would have none of it. To him, the sovereign was sovereign, and to say that the sovereign was not sovereign was a flat contradiction.

So aside from a few special cases over in Hungary and Transylvania, the laws of the Habsburg Empire were made in Vienna and promulgated to the subjects. A few regions, like Bohemia, still convened provincial diets, they were basically provincial estates made up of the old estates, the clergy, the nobility, and the commons, but they were powerless and they just rubber-stamped everything.

And the laws made in Vienna were not just being made by anyone, they were being made by the Emperor, who until 1835 was still Francis, who was now styled Francis I, but still the same guy who had been at the helm of Austria since 1792.

Francis and Metternich were of one mind about the goodness and rightness of absolute monarchy. But oddly enough, Francis’ vision of how that absolute monarchy should run gave Metternich heartburn. Though a fan of absolutist government, Metternich was not a fan of arbitrary government, which might itself seem like a contradiction. But the hair that is being split here is that Metternich wanted the absolute monarchy to be run in a regular, predictable way, through chains of reports and advice with specialists and committees and ministries and chancelleries who would collate and analyze and discuss policy and then make recommendations to the sovereign, a process that would provide the Emperor with the best advice to make the best decision to give the empire a real sense of justice, orderliness, and rationality. But none of that ever really came off. Despite the existence of all those specialists and committees and ministries and chancelleries, Emperor Francis wanted to make all the decisions himself, to the point of outright micromanagement of things that were way below his pay grade.

So Francis’ governing style was to bypass the regular framework of decision making and commission individual reports on matters that interested him, then, when those reports came in, to take forever to get around to reading them before he made his decision. There was nothing that defined the Austrian imperial government so much as the unread report. It was a real problem, as matters of great importance would languish for years. I mean, remember in our episode on Metternich specifically, he submitted a list of reforms for the government of Italy that Francis then spent the next 15 years apologizing for not having read yet. The reforms were never implemented.

But though their styles differed, Metternich and Francis did agree on the object of government. Domestically, the first order of business was protect the monarchy against revolution, defined now by liberalism and nationalism. They also wanted to broadly defend the restored conservative social order. This was all done presumably in the interests of the people, who could not be expected to govern themselves.

To guard against revolutions of a particularly nationalist variety, the Austrians kept the subject nations divided internally by pitting aristocrats against peasants and pitting peasants against aristocrats, and they also pitted the subject nations against each other. And Metternich himself believed it a feature of the system, that if the Italians got out of line, he could call in Bohemians to put them down. If the Croatians made trouble, the Hungarians would be happy to step in.

In foreign affairs, the Austrian Empire was supposed to be the centerpiece of Metternich’s Congress system, occupying literally a central place in that system, wedged in between France to the West and Russia to the East, and itself responsible for the fate of dozens of nationalities. Metternich hoped that in post-Napoleonic Europe, Austria would play a leading role in avoiding costly wars and eliminating the mutual threat of revolution. Now it is true that this is what Metternich wanted for Austria and Europe, in the grand and idealistic sense of the word. But there was also some pretty naked self-interest at play here. Because Austria could not afford any foreign policy but peaceful management among the great powers. For the entire period between 1815 and 1848, Austrian finances were a mess. There was often so little pay to go around that half the standing army was on furlough at any given moment. Civil servants in the bureaucracy sometimes went months and even years without a steady paycheck, all in the hopes that if they hung on they would still qualify for their pensions. Running annual deficits to maintain even this rickety system, by 1830 the finance minister was telling Metternich and the Emperor, we literally cannot afford a war. So that’s one of the principal reasons Metternich accepted the July Revolution as a fait accompli. So though a great power, the Austrian Empire was already at the maximum limits of its ability to project power.

Adding to the Empire’s troubles was the death of Emperor Francis in 1835. Though himself a prime cause of the lethargy and stagnation that the Empire labored under, thanks to all those unread reports, Emperor Francis was at least qualified to do the work. When the same system of micromanaged imperial rule was passed over to the hands of someone who was not qualified to do the job, problems arose. In this case, it was Francis’ unfortunate son, Ferdinand.

Now, it is difficult to say exactly what Ferdinand’s particular problems were, but for sure he was a severe epileptic who suffered upwards of 20 attacks a day, which rendered any kind of prolonged engagement with anything impossible. There were also no doubt other associated issues, all very possibly related to centuries of Habsburg inbreeding, but Ferdinand was simply not fit to be emperor, and everyone knew it. The only reason he got the job is because he was the heir, and Francis believed anything less would cause a legitimacy crisis.

So prior to his death, the emperor established a council of state who would act as a regency council for his son. But regencies are dicey politically even in the best of times, and this particular council of state would be divided and at odds with each other, and that tended to check any kind of decisive decision making. So after 1835, the Austrian Empire was an empire without an Emperor.

Now part of the reason that the state finances were in chronic trouble was that the Austrian economy, that is the broad economy of the whole empire, was just not keeping pace with the rest of Europe. It is usually described as backward, but I don’t think that’s quite right. They were modernizing, just not as broadly or quickly as their neighbors, especially to the west and the north.

Like everywhere else in Europe, Austrian lands were still predominantly rural, but most of the serfs had been freed back during the Josephist reform period. But they were of course still obligated to fulfill all kinds of feudal obligations, payments to their landlords, tithes to the church, local taxes and imperial taxes. And then they also still owed free labor, which in the Habsburg realms was called the robot.

And for you science fiction nerds out there, you know that the term robot comes from a 1920 play called RUR or Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was written by a Czech named Karel Čapek, who absolutely took the word robot from the old term for forced peasant labor.

The proto-industrialization had started up by the 1830s, particularly in Austria and Bohemia, but one peculiarity of Austrian industrialization was that it often took place not in new city based factories, but rather out on the huge landed aristocratic estates. Since commercial banking was only very slightly developed, the only people with money to invest were the noble landlords. So though there were certainly the kind of city based factories sprouting up everywhere, a lot of the initial mechanization and industrial manufacturing was developed in rural areas on these large estates.

But even then the progress was slow going, and one of the things holding Austrian industrialization back was the simple fact that coal deposits were scattered around all over the place, rather than being concentrated, and those same landlords made very good money in timber, and they didn’t want to switch over to charcoal. Another thing holding the empire back was that their manufactured goods seemed to be produced for two markets. They were either really cheap stuff that only the poor would want, or really expensive luxury items that only the rich would want.

So that whole rising middle consumer class that was proving so lucrative for the British and the Belgians, the French, the Dutch, and the Prussians was just untapped by the Austrian Empire. So by the 1840s, the empire was not just chronically in deficit and paying a lot to service their debt, they were also running persistent trade imbalances, importing way more than they exported. This was one of the principal reasons Metternich wanted to keep the empire out of the Zollverein. Joining a free market zone would have flooded nascent Austrian industry beneath a sea of cheaper and frankly better products.

So being that they were so far behind, it probably will not come as a surprise to learn that the Austrian empire was also where the old guild system was still pretty strong. Now obviously, the guild craftsmen and artisans were feeling the effects of industrialization. I mean, we’re talking about a seismic shift taking place in the wider European economic world. But in the Austrian domains, most guilds were still legal, and the state would lend support for maintaining their rules. So in the general revolutionary flare-up against the empire in 1848, the particular group most primed to man the barricades would be the apprentices and the journeymen, because with the rise of industrialization, the masters had protected their own interests by refusing to open up the guilds to more masters, and then they often just handed down their own status as master to their sons or sons-in-laws. They kept it all in the family. So when times got really tough, as they would in the 1840s, it would be the journeymen and the apprentices who would be trapped on the outside looking in, just as the blizzard of industrialization was threatening to freeze them all to death.

So because of the relative backwardness of the empire’s economy, the middle class bourgeoisie was made up primarily of men educated at the university who hoped for civil service jobs, rather than being eager go-getters looking to make something of themselves. And very similar to the plight of the journeymen and the apprentices, the graduates being pumped out of the universities every year were competing for just 140,000 civil service jobs in the imperial bureaucracy. And as I just mentioned, deficits were a major problem, and austerity measures were a constant ax hanging over the heads of everyone with a government job. So those who held them held on to them for dear life, and there was very little chance of a new job being created.

And then even the quote unquote lucky ones who managed to get hired toiled for years, sometimes a decade, doing menial work for barely subsistence pay before they even got a promotion. And even then, with the Austrian aristocracy dominating the higher reaches of the bureaucracy, there was a hard ceiling for how hard anyone could rise anyway. So this is where you will find the beating and bitter heart of the growing intellectual opposition to the imperial regime.

Joining the ranks of the educated but disaffected were young and liberal minded nobles, especially those of provincial origin. They were not rich like the great landlords, and those who came from rich families were often second or third sons with very little future prospects. And as often as not, they were simply the blood descendants of a family that had once been great, but had now fallen on hard times. And even those who might be respected and prosperous at home ran into trouble when they ran up against their proper Austrian counterparts, who always got special treatment and favors.

So those professional classes and these young disgruntled nobles formed the core of the liberal opposition to the imperial regime. Though, as liberals go, this is one of the mildest strains in Europe. They hated the incompetence, the stagnation, the closed off-idedness of the state, but there were very few outright calls for like the Declaration of the Rights of Man or a Bill of Rights. Most didn’t even advocate a constitution, they just wanted the Emperor to get better advice from better ministers and be surrounded by better institutions. Some advocated for increasing the power of the local provincial estates. Mostly those calls came from the liberal nobles, who would have benefited the most from such devolution of power since the nobility controlled the provincial estates. The middle class intellectuals, meanwhile, just wanted broader franchise so they could participate themselves in government a little bit, but nothing like democracy, and really they just wanted the right to ratify new taxes rather than participate in all legislation. And in terms of immediate self-interest, they wanted state jobs to be awarded on merit rather than remain dominated by incompetent and unqualified nobles.

So this growing, if still mild, form of liberalism was then joined by the rising tide of nationalism, which took root in the Austrian Empire in as many flavors as there were nationalities. So like in France, nationalism was about reviving the Napoleonic Empire. In Germany, it was about uniting the German-speaking people into a single state. In the Austrian Empire, it meant different things to different people. Every region of the empire saw a rise in interest in local language, culture, art, literature, food, whatever. And for a while, at least, Metternich saw this as a fairly benign diversion from actual political action, though he did realize his mistake.

But like I say, it was different for everyone. So the Italian nationalists, they want outright independence and unification of the Italian peninsula. Bohemian nationalists, meanwhile, just wanted more power for the provincial estates. The Poles and Galicia wanted Poland back, and thus shared with France something of a backward-looking vision, to recreate past glories. The Hungarians, meanwhile, wanted autonomy within the empire that would make them near equals of the Austrians, and this Hungarian ambition then had a direct impact on how Slavic nationalism manifested itself, as the Slovenes and the Croatians and the Serbs mostly feared Hungarian power, and believed that the only thing protecting them from the Hungarians was the Austrians, so their nationalism will lead them to take the imperial side in the coming revolutions.

But as mild as all of this was, it sent shivers through Metternich’s reactionary heart. And as we’ve discussed a few times now, he set up elaborate censorship and police spy rings to open all the mail and monitor everyone’s political chatter. He was convinced that there really was one revolutionary group that he dubbed the Grand Directory that was run out of Paris, and he spent most of his life trying to prove it. So the mail was opened and read all the time, and it was just assumed that if you were writing to somebody inside the Austrian Empire that it was being read by a third party en route. And Medernich himself got daily reports on this mail reading, as did the Emperor Francis, who particularly enjoyed good gossip that might be gotten from it. The police ministry employed linguists and professional codebreakers to crack the foreign mail, and things that could get you into trouble for discussing included criticisms of the Emperor or his policies, the regime in general, expressing sympathy for liberalism, radicalism, or nationalism. You couldn’t even criticize another foreign head of state. Basically, everything was off-limits if it was political, unless you were saying, I love the Emperor and he’s doing a great job.

And beyond the constant surveillance, there was also heavy censorship. Newspapers had to submit copy for approval no later than noon, the day before publication. Every new book had to be submitted to a committee of censors for approval. And lists of banned books from abroad was practically just a list of every book that was published abroad.

But though Metternich’s censorship and political police cast an omnipresent shadow, it was a lot like a rat standing next to a flashlight. The shadow was larger than the actual threat. And it was pretty easy to get banned books into the country if you really wanted them. Or to arrange for private delivery of mail, or write things, send them abroad for publication, and then reimport them. Where reading societies could acquire and share all of this supposedly banned material, often practically right out in the open. And a key point to keep in mind here is that the censorship was considered burdensome and an affront to an educated man’s dignity. More than a violation of the natural rights of man. Even liberals in the empire agreed that some censorship and ferreting out of dangerous elements was not just a necessary evil, but a positive good. So they might argue for a loosening of the rules, but they all understood that free speech came with limits.

So despite his constant worrying, inside the core domains of the Austrian Empire, Metternich faced nothing but a fairly docile and quite loyal stable of liberal critics, at least prior to the economic upheavals of the mid-1840s. But there was at least one region where his fears were very well founded, and that was in Italy. We’ve already seen the Carbonari, exactly the kind of secret revolutionary society that kept Metternich up at night. I mean, they had tried to overthrow the Habsburg aligned Kingdom in Naples. Well, that was just the beginning, because as we’ll see next week, Risorgimento had already begun.”

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