For God and Kaiser by Richard Bassett

Author:Richard Bassett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300178586
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Hungarian crisis and the new Emperor Ferdinand

In Hungary, the situation was different. There, the crisis began to take the form of a nationalist uprising compromising the Hungarian elements of the army and, unsurprisingly, witnessing the almost wholesale defection of the Hussar regiments to the revolutionary cause.

To deal with this emergency, the Habsburg forces were woefully ill prepared. The only units that had trained for war and could be mobilised swiftly were the troops stationed in northern Italy, numbering barely 73,000 men.3 Of these, 20,000 were Italian and could not be considered reliable while Venice rose up first. The King of Sardinia then declared war on the Habsburgs in an attempt to revive an Italian kingdom in the lands which Metternich had dismissed as ‘purely a geographical expression’. Italy, the Sardinian King hoped, would unite the peninsula and drive the Austrians out ‘by herself’ (‘Italia fara da se’).

As it happened, all these fierce tremors which shook virtually every corner of the Empire occurred at a time when the throne was occupied by a melancholy half-wit known affectionately as ‘Ferdinand der Gute’ (Ferdinand the kindly) whose mental and physical attributes were wholly unequal to the challenges which now faced the dynasty. Ferdinand could be perceptive and bitingly witty but his deficiencies, possibly the result of his parents being first cousins, outweighed any mental consistency and robustness that might have enabled him to rule effectively.

When Francis I died in 1835, the temptation to pass the succession to one of his gifted brothers, the Archduke John or the Archduke Charles, had been squashed in favour of strict adherence to the principle of legitimacy. Both Metternich and Francis were convinced that any deviation from that principle would lead inevitably to an English style of monarchy which ‘finds itself in a false position since the revolution of 1688’. The Austrian monarchy was a monarchy de jure resting on legitimacy while in Vienna’s eyes the British monarchy was a monarchy de facto attempting to reconcile monarchical right with popular sovereignty.4

Despite the mental weakness of Franz’s son Ferdinand, Metternich supported his accession, perhaps also convinced that this young man, perceived by the Archduke John as ‘wholly incapable of decisive action’, would allow Metternich to run the affairs of state with the minimum of interference. Indeed, Metternich proceeded to personify the system that now governed most of Central and Eastern Europe far more than the Emperor.

Ferdinand’s reign witnessed huge encroachments by the ‘apparatus of the state’, with police informers and surveillance reaching levels that would be achieved in Central Europe only in totalitarian states a century later. It was a tribute to the popularity of the half-wit Emperor’s predecessor that this unhappy state of affairs lasted thirteen years before there was an explosion. As the Archduke Albert wrote of Ferdinand’s reign, ‘It could not have lasted a year had not his predecessor enjoyed an unimpeachable position.’5

The ‘tyranny’ that was reported to have descended on the Empire was much exaggerated by liberal opinion, especially in England. The remarkable memoirs

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