struggles for independence in Hungary – with Russian help – and Italy had been crushed by the summer of 1849.
Neo-absolutism – restoration or bourgeois control?
In contrast to the old form of absolutism, neo-absolutism was characterised by resolute government. Agrarian reform was quickly introduced. Now the “Empire of Austria” became a genuinely unified state for the first time, having been given a unified administration, a unified customs territory, and a unified (private) legal sphere. The decision-making authority was concentrated on the young Emperor Franz Joseph. The bureaucracy became the pillar of this new system of rule. It could be said that, as compensation for political codetermination, the German-Austrian, bourgeois-bureaucratic element was de facto given control not only of the bureaucracy but of all people living in the empire. Seeing that, after 1848, the German-Austrian bourgeoisie developed into the beneficiaries and bearers of the counterrevolution, Habsburg centralism, and concept of large national state, their memories of the “bourgeois” revolution were later relatively insignificant. At the same time, a slow change in the German bourgeoisie’s traditional feeling of cultural superiority led in the direction of an increasingly radical German nationalism (and increasingly radical antisemitism) in which, finally, anticlericalism remained the sole remnant of the once liberal heritage.10
The entrepreneurs also profited from the new unified state. During the Revolution, they had already taken the side of the government and military. The most important thing for them was the preservation of greater Habsburg Austria, with equal rights throughout the country and a uniform customs and currency area. If the counterrevolution guaranteed that the bourgeoisie would achieve their goal, and this was threatened by the Revolution, they would inevitably become an ally of the restoration. One small example:
On 27 March 1848, Giuseppe Miller-Aichholz, a Viennese wholesaler from Trentino, wrote to his father (in Italian) in Cles that the behaviour in Milan and Venice was hair-raising, that they had broken their oaths and were unfaithful traitors. In June, he travelled to Innsbruck as a member of a community committee to beseech the emperor to return to Vienna. On 13 August, he enthusiastically told his father about Radetzky’s victories over the Lombards and Piemontese. In March 1849, Miller was a member of the deputation of Viennese citizens chosen to thank the young Emperor Franz Joseph for the constitution and dissolution of the Reichstag. Only a few days later, he travelled to the war theatre in northern Italy, together with other councillors, to present Radetzky with the diploma making him an honorary citizen of Vienna. This put an impressive seal on the alliance between the upper classes and the army.
The brief reign of the liberal bourgeoisie
Initially, the “German” bourgeoisie only dominated in Austria in the form of the bureaucracy.11 However, simultaneously with the retraction of “civil” liberties, the entrepreneurial upper classes were granted considerable freedoms. The state’s difficult financial situation increased the possibilities of the financial bourgeoisie to have an influence, seeing that the state needed a tremendous amount of money to develop the new court and administration system with its countless new civil servants. At the same time, the expenses for the army and (new!) gendarmery remained high.12 And they increased even further when Austria occupied the Romanian princedoms during the Crimean War and stationed an army in Galicia. These politics led to a state of permanent hostility with Russia, without being able to win the liberal Western powers (England and France) as allies. Finally, after the defeat near Solferino in 1859, the Emperor was informed that there could only be new loans for the highly-indebted state with parliamentary representation – at least for a control of the state’s finances. In this way, the unwilling Emperor was forced to establish representative bodies from the individual parliaments and imperial Reichsrat that were principally intended to act as the taxpayers’ controllers of the state’s non-transparent expenditure policies.
The voting rights for the communities and individual parliaments, which were legislated within the framework of the “February patent” in 1861, from which the representatives in the Reichsrat were to be elected were quite clearly tailored to satisfy the interests of the bourgeoisie. Seeing that it was, in principle, a matter of controlling finances, the right to vote was linked to the tax payments: each person who paid a direct tax (property, trade, building, or income tax) in the communities was entitled to vote. However, only the top two-thirds of community voters, and those in the cities who paid taxes amounting to more than 10 guilders annually, were entitled to vote for the parliaments. Those in possession of an education patent – teachers, professors, priests, doctors, engineers, and attorneys, as well as captains in coastal regions – were also eligible. The aim was to ensure that community councils, parliaments and the “Reichsrat” were dominated by “property and education”.
It was not until 1867 – after the defeat at Königgrätz – that these representative bodies were given more responsibilities and all citizens were given the five fundamental constitutional rights (“December Constitution”) that had long been demanded by the liberal bourgeoisie: independence of the judiciary, the separation of justice and the administration, and a clear definition of the positions of the parliament and (imperial) government. This resulted in the introduction of the first government to be made up almost entirely of men from the bourgeoisie – the “citizens ministry”. To provide a balance to so much bourgeois culture, its head, the Minister-President, was “Carlos” Prinz Auersperg, the “first cavalier of the empire”. The bourgeois ministers actually did particularly good work. Here, I should mention the passing of the Elementary School Law that was presented to the Reichsrat by the Minister of Education Hasner Ritter von Arta (1818–1891). In the years before 1875, the representatives of the bourgeoisie, German, centralistic liberalism developed considerable problem-solving competence in areas that, in the future, would make “civil-society” commitment easier. These included the Cooperatives Law (1873), which complemented the freedom of association in the area of economic activity that had been attained in 1867. The liberals also simplified the self-organisation of workers through the coalition freedom. However, after several confessional laws, its creative powers became paralysed around 1875. The liberals became the defenders of the already-achieved legal and material possibilities, but they lost their role in the forefront of bourgeois society. They truly became conservative.
The weaknesses of the bourgeoisie of the Habsburg monarchy
The stock exchange crash of 1873, and the prolonged economic crisis that followed, shattered faith in the supposedly so beneficial power of the free market, as well as in liberal politics. This was further aggravated by shameless corruption in the circles of the liberal parliamentarians who had been rewarded with shares in railway companies for passing various railway laws.13
The antiliberal criticism targeted the bourgeois liberals as politicians who cashed in on their office who exploited farmers, small tradesmen, and labourers, and even deprived them of their political rights. Did they not benefit from this state, whose authoritarian orientation was, in fact, extremely advantageous to the bourgeoisie, which (from a theoretical perspective) was so strongly focused on independence and personal freedom – insomuch as the state provided the bourgeoisie with everything they needed, like a gigantic common market, protection of property and parliamentary budget control? This criticism went hand in hand with those antisemitic positions that continued to live on among many Catholics as a result of the church’s condemnation of Jews as the “murderers of Christ”. In the Catholic “Vaterland” newspaper from 20 December 1871, the liberal economic laws (abolition of the guilds, freedom of trade, mobilisation of peasant property, abolition of usuary laws, etc.) were criticised as tearing down “all the barriers” that protected the Christian people to the benefit of the Jews. “The workers and craftsmen are moving into the factories, property into the hands, houses into the possession, and the people’s wealth, into the pockets, of the Jews (…).14
The
