Austrian Revolution & Reaction: 1840-51
1840 CE to 1851 CE
The liberal revolutions of 1848 in Italy, Galicia, Bohemia and Hungary rock the Habsburg Empire, and in Vienna itself, the revolutionists drive out Metternich and gain from Emperor Ferdinand a liberal constitution, which a constituent assembly soon replaces with a more democratic one.
After a new outbreak Vienna is bombarded by imperial forces, and absolutism is gradually but steadily restored in Austria.
Before two decades pass, however, the Habsburgs lose Lombardy and Venetia to a unified Italy and are forced by Hungarian moderate naionalists to create a dual state known as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, an anachronism in an increasingly nationalistic age.
The failure of the German-Magyar minority to provide a satisfactory status for the other nationalities, notably the Slavs, plays a major role in bringing about the Great War.
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Europe endures hard times during much of the 1840s.
A series of bad harvests culminating in the potato blight of 1845-46 brings widespread misery and some starvation.
An economic depression adds to the hardship, spreading discontent among the poor and the middle class alike.
A popular uprising in Paris in February 1848 turns into a revolution, forcing the French king Louis Philippe to flee to Britain.
The success of the revolution sparks revolts elsewhere in Europe.
Numerous German cities are shaken by uprisings in which crowds consisting mainly of the urban poor, but also of students and members of the liberal middle class, storm their rulers' palaces and demand fundamental reform.
Berlin and Vienna are especially hard hit by what comes to be called the revolutions of 1848.
The rulers of both cities, like rulers elsewhere, quickly accede to the demands of their rebellious subjects and promise constitutions and representative government.
Conservative governments fall, and Prince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, flees to Britain.
The Paris revolution of February 1848 precipitates a succession of liberal and national revolts against autocratic governments.
Revolutionary disturbances pervade the territories of the Austrian Empire, and Emperor Ferdinand I (1835-48) promises to reorganize the empire on a constitutional, parliamentary basis.
In the Bohemian Kingdom, a national committee is formed that includes Germans and Czechs, but Bohemian Germans favor creating a Greater Germany out of various German-speaking territories.
The Bohemian Germans soon withdraw from the committee, signaling the Czech-German conflict that will characterize subsequent history.
František Palacký proposes Austro-Slavism as the creed of the Czech national movement.
He advocates the preservation of the Austrian Empire as a buffer against both German and Russian expansionism.
He also proposes the federalization of the empire on an ethnographic basis to unite the Bohemian
Germans with Austria in one province and Czechs and Slovaks in another.
Palacký further suggests that the various Slavic peoples of the empire, together constituting a majority, should form a political unit to defend their common interests.
In June 1848 the Czechs convene the first Slavic Congress to discuss the possibility of political consolidation of Austrian Slavs, including Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs.
The 1848 revolution in the Kingdom of Hungary temporarily topples Habsburg absolutism, and there is an attempt at establishing a liberal constitutional government.
Conflict soon ensues between the Hungarians and several other nationalities as to how Hungary is to be restructured.
Hungarian liberals like Louis Kossuth, who favor the overthrow of the Habsburgs and an independent Hungary, are at the same time opposed to the aspirations of the non-Hungarian nationalities.
The liberals seek to create a national state solely for the Hungarians.
The movement for liberal reform (including constitutional, parliamentary government, economic freedom, and civil liberties) initiated during the Napoleonic era survives during the so-called Vormdrz (1815-48), a period of struggle between absolutism and rising liberalism.
The July 1830 French revolution had incited the German liberal intelligentsia—lower government officials, men of letters, professors, and lawyers—to organize local clubs and assume leadership of the reform effort.
The liberal intelligentsia, however, do not succeed in overthrowing absolutism in the "revolution of the intellectuals," which takes place in March 1848 following the February revolution in France of the same year.
Averse to revolutionary violence, the people do not oppose the Prussian troops that march into Berlin to establish order.
At first, the national movements were confined to discussion of language, literature, and culture, but during the revolutions of 1848, the Czechs and Slovaks make bold political demands.
The revolutions of 1848 also reveal that the German and Hungarian liberals, who are opposed to Habsburg absolutism, are equally hostile to Czech and Slovak aspirations.
It has become clear that the Czech and Slovak national movements have to contend not only with Habsburg absolutism but also with increasingly virulent German and Hungarian nationalism.
Prussia, the most powerful and militarily the most important of the German monarchies, plays a leading role in both the movement for unification and the suppression of radicalism.
Aside from Austria and its Empire, the German-speaking part of Europe at mid-nineteenth century consists of countless sovereignties.
There are six kingdoms—Baden, Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, Saxony, and Württemberg—five grand duchies; thirteen duchies and principalities; three free cities; and hundreds of sovereign mini-mini-states.
Many of them are loosely affiliated with the Germanic Confederation, which had been founded in 1815 to replace the ancient and obsolete Holy Roman Empire.
In the confused revolutionary struggles of 1848-49 two main currents cross and clash with each other: (1) internal political reform, including radical demands by workers, and (2) unification of all German states in a national government.
The proclamation of the revolutionary Second Republic in France in late February shakes conservative Austria.
Popular expectations of war cause a financial panic in the Habsburg Empire that works to the advantage of the revolutionaries.
By early March, events throughout the empire are accelerating faster than the government can control them.
As a symbol of conservative government, Klemens von Metternich is an early casualty of the revolution.
His resignation and flight in mid-March only lead to greater demands.
By mid- April the court sanctions sweeping liberal reforms passed by the Hungarian diet.
In May the government is forced to announce plans for a popularly elected constituent assembly for the Habsburg lands.
This assembly, the first parliament in Austrian history, opens in July 1848.
Although the separate administrative status of Moravia had been abolished in the eighteenth century, the area is reconstituted by Austria as a separate crown land in 1849.
German nationalists and liberals had convened an assembly in Frankfurt in May 1848 that suspended the diet of the German Confederation and took tentative steps toward German unification.
However, the close association of nationalism and liberalism in Germany belied the growing conflict between these two ideologies.
Although ethnic Germans from Bohemia were participating in the Frankfurt assembly, Czech nationalists and liberals had rejected Bohemian participation in the German nation being born in Frankfurt.
They envision a reconstituted Habsburg Empire in which the Slavic nations of central and southern Europe will assume equality with the German and Hungarian components of the empire and avoid absorption by either Germany or Russia.
The government has given concessions that appeared to endorse this plan, and the Czechs had convened an Austro-Slavic congress in Prague in June as a counterpart to the Frankfurt assembly.
As conservative political authority give way before the revolutionary forces, two bold military commanders begin to reassert control over the situation, often ignoring or contravening timid
orders from the court.
General Alfred Windischgratz routs the revolutionaries from Prague and Vienna and reestablishes order by military force.
South of the Alps, General Joseph Radetzky reestablishes Austrian control of Lombardy-Venetia by August.
Although only Hungary remains in the hands of the revolutionaries, the Austrian government begins to reorganize in the fall of 1848.
A team of ministers associated with constitutionalism is presented to the constituent assembly in November.
The minister-president not only commits the government to popular liberties and constitutional institutions but also to the unity of the empire.
To cap the reorganization, the mentally incompetent Ferdinand formally abdicates on December 2, 1848, and his eighteen-year- old nephew is crowned Emperor Franz Joseph I (r. 1848-1916).
To accomplish the first, the government promulgates a secretly prepared constitution in March 1849. thus undercutting the constituent assembly.
This constitution contains guarantees of individual liberties and equality under the law, but its greatest significance lies in provisions that establish a centralized government based on unitary political, legal, and economic institutions for the entire empire.
The new constitution exacerbates the revolutionary situation in Hungary.
The Hungarian diet deposes the Habsburg Dynasty and declares Hungarian independence.
Although Austria could have eventually restored order on its own, the need to deal simultaneously with events in Germany prompts Emperor Franz Joseph to ask for and get Russian military assistance, thus accomplishing his second objective
The rebellion is effectively, if brutally, ended by September 1849.