The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) by C A Macartney

Author:C A Macartney [Macartney, C A]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780571306299
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2014-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Since the fiscal and economic integration of Hungary into the Monarchy had now been completed, the Patent for the Voivodina made complete (except as regards Lombardy-Venetia) the ‘unification of the Lands and races of the Monarchy in one great body politic’ which Schwarzenberg had announced to be his programme.

The extension of the new regime to the Hungarian Lands had, of course, been a much larger task than the introduction of it into the Western Lands. There, few, if any, changes had been necessary among the professional civil servants, and to change Standing Committees of locally elected authorities, or magistrates paid by manorial lords, into Government employees, had required a mere stroke of the pen. In most of them, moreover, the designation of German as the inner language of administration had been no innovation, since it had long occupied that position in the Czech and Slovene areas, not to speak of the German.

But in the Hungarian Lands the substitution of autocratic-bureaucratic rule for the old self-governing institutions had meant a genuine change of system, and the linguistic requirements had also been a real innovation. To these difficulties had been added the reluctance of many Hungarians to serve under the new regime, and the suspicion with which the Government regarded those who professed themselves willing. To ask whether the reluctance begat the suspicion, or vice-versa, is to ask whether the hen preceded the egg, for while it is certainly true that Bach’s hand was often forced by the difficulty of finding Hungarians both willing and qualified to serve him;34 it is equally certain that he and his colleagues jumped at every opportunity to break the political influence of the old Hungarian ruling class. In any case, many Hungarians boycotted the new system; others who volunteered to serve it had their offers rejected out of doubts of their reliability; others, after the introduction of the Provisorium, were failed on the language test (which was rigorously applied in Hungary) or for inability to master their duties. Some of the gaps were filled by Swabians, a few by Slovaks, or, in Transylvania, by Saxons, but qualified and reliable Hungarian-born men were thin on the ground, and the regime, unreluctantly, resorted to importation, so that within a few months of the end of the Provisorissimum, a substantial proportion of the civil servants, high and low, governing Hungary and Transylvania for the regime, the magistrates judging them and the tax-collectors garnering (or trying to garner) their resources, were not only non-Magyars, but non-Hungarians: Czechs (these provided the largest contingent), German-Bohemians, Slovenes or even Poles.35

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