Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Election of Pius IX., June, 1846.]

[Reforms expected from Pius.]

[Ferrara, June, 1847.]

A monk, ignorant of everything but cloister lore, benighted, tyrannical,
the companion in his private life of a few jolly priests and a gossiping
barber, was not an alluring emblem of the Church of the future. But in 1846
Pope Gregory XVI., who for the last five years had been engaged in one
incessant struggle against insurgents, conspirators, and reformers, and
whose prisons were crowded with the best of his subjects, passed away.
[405] His successor, Mastai Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected under
the title of Pius IX., after the candidate favoured by Austria had failed
to secure the requisite number of votes (June 17). The choice of this
kindly and popular prelate was to some extent a tribute to Italian feeling;
and for the next eighteen months it appeared as it Gioberti had really
divined the secret of the age. The first act of the new Pope was the
publication of a universal amnesty for political offences. The prison doors
throughout his dominions were thrown open, and men who had been sentenced
to confinement for life returned in exultation to their homes. The act
created a profound impression throughout Italy, and each good-humoured
utterance of Pius confirmed the belief that great changes were at hand. A
wild enthusiasm seized upon Rome. The population abandoned itself to
festivals in honour of the Pontiff and of the approaching restoration of
Roman liberty. Little was done; not much was actually promised; everything
was believed. The principle of representative government was discerned in
the new Council of State now placed by the side of the College of
Cardinals; a more serious concession was made to popular feeling in the
permission given to the citizens of Rome, and afterwards to those of the
provinces, to enrol themselves in a civic guard. But the climax of
excitement was reached when, in answer to a threatening movement of
Austria, occasioned by the growing agitation throughout Central Italy, the
Papal Court protested against the action of its late protector. By the
Treaties of Vienna Austria had gained the right to garrison the citadel of
Ferrara, though this town lay within the Ecclesiastical States. Placing a
new interpretation on the expression used in the Treaties, the Austrian
Government occupied the town of Ferrara itself (June 17th, 1847). The
movement was universally understood to be the preliminary to a new
occupation of the Papal States, like that of 1831; and the protests of the
Pope against the violation of his territory gave to the controversy a
European importance. The English and French fleets appeared at Naples; the
King of Sardinia openly announced his intention to take the field against
Austria if war should break out. By the efforts of neutral Powers a
compromise on the occupation of Ferrara was at length arranged; but the
passions which had been excited were not appeased, and the Pope remained in
popular imagination the champion of Italian independence against Austria,
as well as the apostle of constitutional Government and the rights of the
people.

[Revolution at Palermo, Jan., 1848.]

In the meantime the agitation begun in Rome was spreading through the north
and the south of the peninsula, and beyond the Sicilian Straits. The
centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa in December, 1746,
was celebrated throughout central Italy with popular demonstrations which
gave Austria warning of the storm about to burst upon it. In the south,
however, impatience under domestic tyranny was a far more powerful force
than the distant hope of national independence. Sicily had never forgotten
the separate rights which it had once enjoyed, and the constitution given
to it under the auspices of England in 1812. Communications passed between
the Sicilian leaders and the opponents of the Bourbon Government on the
mainland, and in the autumn of 1847 simultaneous risings took place in
Calabria and at Messina. These were repressed without difficulty; but the
fire smouldered far and wide, and on the 13th of January, 1848, the
population of Palermo rose in revolt. For fourteen days the conflict
between the people and the Neapolitan troops continued. The city was
bombarded, but in the end the people were victorious, and a provisional
government was formed by the leaders of the insurrection. One Sicilian town
after another followed the example of the capital, and expelled its
Neapolitan garrison. Threatened by revolution in Naples itself, King
Ferdinand II., grandson of the despot of 1821, now imitated the policy of
his predecessor, and proclaimed a constitution. A Liberal Ministry was
formed, but no word was said as to the autonomy claimed by Sicily, and
promised, as it would seem, by the leaders of the popular party on the
mainland. After the first excitement of success was past, it became clear
that the Sicilians were as widely at variance with the newly-formed
Government at Naples as with that which they had overthrown.

[Agitation in Austrian Italy.]

The insurrection of Palermo gave a new stimulus and imparted more of
revolutionary colour to the popular movement throughout Italy.
Constitutions were granted in Piedmont and Tuscany. In the Austrian
provinces national exasperation against the rule of the foreigner grew
daily more menacing. Radetzky, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, had long
foreseen the impending struggle, and had endeavoured, but not with complete
success, to impress his own views upon the imperial Government. Verona had
been made the centre of a great system of fortifications, and the strength
of the army under Radetzky's command had been considerably increased, but
it was not until the eleventh hour that Metternich abandoned the hope of
tiding over difficulties by his old system of police and spies, and
permitted the establishment of undisguised military rule. In order to
injure the finances of Austria, a general resolution had been made by the
patriotic societies of Upper Italy to abstain from the use of tobacco, from
which the Government drew a large part of its revenue. On the first Sunday
in 1848 Austrian officers, smoking in the streets of Milan, were attacked
by the people. The troops were called to arms: a conflict took place, and
enough blood was shed to give to the tumult the importance of an actual
revolt. In Padua and elsewhere similar outbreaks followed. Radetzky issued
a general order to his troops, declaring that the Emperor was determined to
defend his Italian dominion whether against an external or domestic foe.
Martial law was proclaimed; and for a moment, although Piedmont gave signs
of throwing itself into the Italian movement, the awe of Austria's military
power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished
world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the
eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution.

[Austria.]

[Affairs in Hungary.]

It was to the absence of all stirring public life, not to any real
assimilative power or any high intelligence in administration, that the
House of Hapsburg owed, during the eighteenth century, the continued union
of that motley of nations or races which successive conquests, marriages,
and treaties had brought under its dominion. The violence of the attack
made by the Emperor Joseph upon all provincial rights first re-awakened the
slumbering spirit of Hungary; but the national movement of that time, which
excited such strong hopes and alarms, had been succeeded by a long period
of stagnation, and during the Napoleonic wars the repression of everything
that appealed to any distinctively national spirit had become more avowedly
than before the settled principle of the Austrian Court. In 1812 the
Hungarian Diet had resisted the financial measures of the Government. The
consequence was that, in spite of the law requiring its convocation every
three years, the Diet was not again summoned till 1825. During the
intermediate period, the Emperor raised taxes and levies by edict alone.
Deprived of its constitutional representation, the Hungarian nobility
pursued its opposition to the encroachments of the Crown in the Sessions of
each county. At these assemblies, to which there existed no parallel in the
western and more advanced States of the Continent, each resident land-owner
who belonged to the very numerous caste of the noblesse was entitled to
speak and to vote. Retaining, in addition to the right of free discussion
and petition, the appointment of local officials, as well as a considerable
share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-assemblies,
handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were
probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great
monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits,
oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and
caste, the mass of the Magyar nobility had indeed proved as impervious to
the humanising influences of the eighteenth century as they had to the
solicitations of despotism. The Magnates, or highest order of noblesse, who
formed a separate chamber in the Diet, had been to some extent
denationalised; they were at once more European in their culture, and more
submissive to the Austrian Court. In banishing political discussion from
the Diet to the County Sessions, the Emperor's Government had intensified
the provincial spirit which it sought to extinguish. Too numerous to be won
over by personal inducements, and remote from the imperial agencies which
had worked so effectively through the Chamber of Magnates, the lesser
nobility of Hungary during these years of absolutism carried the habit of
political discussion to their homes, and learnt to baffle the imperial
Government by withholding all help and all information from its subordinate
agents. Each county-assembly became a little Parliament, and a centre of
resistance to the usurpation of the Crown. The stimulus given to the
national spirit by this struggle against unconstitutional rule was seen not
less in the vigorous attacks made upon the Government on the re-assembling
of the Diet in 1825, than in the demand that Magyar, and not Latin as
heretofore, should be the language used in recording the proceedings of the
Diet, and in which communications should pass between the Upper and the
Lower House.

[Magyars and Slavs.]

There lay in this demand for the recognition of the national language the
germ of a conflict of race against race which was least of all suspected by
those by whom the demand was made. Hungary, as a political unity,
comprised, besides the Slavic kingdom of Croatia, wide regions in which the
inhabitants were of Slavic or Roumanian race, and where the Magyar was
known only as a feudal lord. The district in which the population at large
belonged to the Magyar stock did not exceed one-half of the kingdom. For
the other races of Hungary, who were probably twice as numerous as
themselves, the Magyars entertained the utmost contempt, attributing to
them the moral qualities of the savage, and denying to them the possession
of any nationality whatever. In a country combining so many elements
ill-blended with one another, and all alike subject to a German Court at
Vienna, Latin, as the language of the Church and formerly the language of
international communication, had served well as a neutral means of
expression in public affairs. There might be Croatian deputies in the Diet
who could not speak Magyar; the Magyars could not understand Croatian; both
could understand and could without much effort express themselves in the
species of Latin which passed muster at Presburg and at Vienna. Yet no
freedom of handling could convert a dead language into a living one; and
when the love of country and of ancient right became once more among the
Magyars an inspiring passion, it naturally sought a nobler and more
spontaneous utterance than dog-latin. Though no law was passed upon the
subject in the Parliament in which it was first mooted, speakers in the
Diet of 1832 used their mother-tongue; and when the Viennese Government
forbade the publication of the debates, reports were circulated in
manuscript through the country by Kossuth, a young deputy, who after the
dissolution of the Diet in 1836 paid for his defiance of the Emperor by
three years' imprisonment.

[Hungary after 1830.]

[The Diet of 1832-36.]

[Szechenyi.]

Hungary now seemed to be entering upon an epoch of varied and rapid
national development. The barriers which separated it from the Western
world were disappearing. The literature, the ideas, the inventions of
Western Europe were penetrating its archaic society, and transforming a
movement which in its origin had been conservative and aristocratic into
one of far-reaching progress and reform. Alone among the opponents of
absolute power on the Continent, the Magyars had based their resistance on
positive constitutional right, on prescription, and the settled usage of
the past; and throughout the conflict with the Crown between 1812 and 1825
legal right was on the side not of the Emperor but of those whom he
attempted to coerce. With excellent judgment the Hungarian leaders had
during these years abstained from raising any demand for reforms,
appreciating the advantage of a purely defensive position in a combat with
a Court pledged in the eyes of all Europe, as Austria was, to the defence
of legitimate rights. This policy had gained its end; the Emperor, after
thirteen years of conflict, had been forced to re-convoke the Diet, and to
abandon the hope of effecting a work in which his uncle, Joseph II., had
failed. But, the constitution once saved, that narrow and exclusive body of
rights for which the nobility had contended no longer satisfied the needs
or the conscience of the time. [406] Opinion was moving fast; the claims of
the towns and of the rural population were making themselves felt; the
agitation that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 reached
Hungary too, not so much through French influence as through the Polish war
of independence, in which the Magyars saw a struggle not unlike their own,
enlisting their warmest sympathies for the Polish armies so long as they
kept the field, and for the exiles who came among them when the conflict
was over. By the side of the old defenders of class-privilege there arose
men imbued with the spirit of modern Liberalism. The laws governing the
relation of the peasant to his lord, which remained nearly as they had been
left by Maria Theresa, were dealt with by the Diet of 1832 in so liberal a
spirit that the Austrian Government, formerly far in advance of Hungarian
opinion on this subject, refused its assent to many of the measures passed.
Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public
hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect
of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe--of its
poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into
the work of advance by Count Szechenyi, a nobleman whose imagination had
been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the
practical interests of its higher classes presented to the torpor of his
own country. It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double
capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the
Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks
known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent
patriot, Szechenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and
the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their
country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist,
nor was he an enemy to Austria. A peaceful political future would best have
accorded with his own designs for raising Hungary to its due place among
nations.

[Transylvania.]

That the Hungarian movement of this time was converted from one of fruitful
progress into an embittered political conflict ending in civil war was due,
among other causes, to the action of the Austrian Cabinet itself. Wherever
constitutional right existed, there Austria saw a natural enemy. The
province of Transylvania, containing a mixed population of Magyars,
Germans, and Roumanians, had, like Hungary, a Diet of its own, which Diet
ought to have been summoned every year. It was, however, not once assembled
between 1811 and 1834. In the agitation at length provoked in Transylvania
by this disregard of constitutional right, the Magyar element naturally
took the lead, and so gained complete ascendancy in the province. When the
Diet met in 1834, its language and conduct were defiant in the highest
degree. It was speedily dissolved, and the scandal occasioned by its
proceedings disturbed the last days of the Emperor Francis, who died in
1835, leaving the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any
serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the
principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been
formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were
delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselenyi,
himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet,
betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there
delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and
brought to trial for high treason. His cause was taken up by the Hungarian
Diet, as one in which the rights of the local assemblies were involved. The
plea of privilege was, however, urged in vain, and the sentence of exile
which was passed upon Count Wesselenyi became a new source of contention
between the Crown and the Magyar Estates. [407]

[Parties among the Magyars.]

[The Diet of 1843.]

The enmity of Government was now a sufficient passport to popular favour.
On emerging from his prison under a general amnesty in 1840, Kossuth
undertook the direction of a Magyar journal at Pesth, which at once gained
an immense influence throughout the country. The spokesman of a new
generation, Kossuth represented an entirely different order of ideas from
those of the orthodox defenders of the Hungarian Constitution. They had
been conservative and aristocratic; he was revolutionary: their weapons had
been drawn from the storehouse of Hungarian positive law; his inspiration
was from the Liberalism of western Europe. Thus within the national party
itself there grew up sections in more or less pronounced antagonism to one
another, though all were united by a passionate devotion to Hungary and by
an unbounded faith in its future. Szechenyi, and those who with him
subordinated political to material ends, regarded Kossuth as a dangerous
theorist. Between the more impetuous and the more cautious reformers stood
the recognised Parliamentary leaders of the Liberals, among whom Deak had
already given proof of political capacity of no common order. In Kossuth's
journal the national problems of the time were discussed both by his
opponents and by his friends. Publicity gave greater range as well as
greater animation to the conflict of ideas; and the rapid development of
opinion during these years was seen in the large and ambitious measures
which occupied the Diet of 1843. Electoral and municipal reform, the
creation of a code of criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury, the
abolition of the immunity of the nobles from taxation; all these, and
similar legislative projects, displayed at once the energy of the time and
the influence of western Europe in transforming the political conceptions
of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed
but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed
by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not
continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small
privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of constitutional reform
carried with it that of a reform of the municipalities. Hungary in short
was now face to face with the task of converting its ancient system of the
representation of the privileged orders into the modern system of a
representation of the nation at large. Arduous at every epoch and in every
country, this work was one of almost insuperable difficulty in Hungary,
through the close connection with the absolute monarchy of Austria; through
the existence of a body of poor noblesse, numbered at two hundred thousand,
who, though strong in patriotic sentiment, bitterly resented any attack
upon their own freedom from taxation; and above all through the variety of
races in Hungary, and the attitude assumed by the Magyars, as the dominant
nationality, towards the Slavs around them. In proportion as the energy of
the Magyars and their confidence in the victory of the national cause
mounted high, so rose their disdain of all claims beside their own within
the Hungarian kingdom. It was resolved by the Lower Chamber of the Diet of
1843 that no language but Magyar should be permitted in debate, and that at
the end of ten years every person not capable of speaking the Magyar
language should be excluded from all public employment. The Magnates
softened the latter provision by excepting from it the holders of merely
local offices in Slavic districts; against the prohibition of Latin in the
Diet the Croatians appealed to the Emperor. A rescript arrived from Vienna
placing a veto upon the resolution. So violent was the storm excited in the
Diet itself by this rescript, and so threatening the language of the
national leaders outside, that the Cabinet, after a short interval, revoked
its decision, and accepted a compromise which, while establishing Magyar as
the official language of the kingdom, and requiring that it should be
taught even in Croatian schools, permitted the use of Latin in the Diet for
the next six years. In the meantime the Diet had shouted down every speaker
who began with the usual Latin formula, and fighting had taken place in
Agram, the Croatian capital, between the national and the Magyar factions.

[The Slavic national movements.]

It was in vain that the effort was made at Presburg to resist all claims
but those of one race. The same quickening breath which had stirred the
Magyar nation to new life had also passed over the branches of the Slavic
family within the Austrian dominions far and near. In Bohemia a revival of
interest in the Czech language and literature, which began about 1820, had
in the following decade gained a distinctly political character. Societies
originally or professedly founded for literary objects had become the
centres of a popular movement directed towards the emancipation of the
Czech elements in Bohemia from German ascendancy, and the restoration of
something of a national character to the institutions of the kingdom. Among
the southern Slavs, with whom Hungary was more directly concerned, the
national movement first became visible rather later. Its earliest
manifestations took, just as in Bohemia, a literary or linguistic form.
Projects for the formation of a common language which, under the name of
Illyrian, should draw together all the Slavic populations between the
Adriatic and the Black Sea, occupied for a while the fancy of the learned;
but the more ambitious part of this design, which had given some umbrage to
the Turkish Government, was abandoned in obedience to instructions from
Vienna; and the movement first gained political importance when its scope
was limited to the Croatian and Slavonic districts of Hungary, and it was
endowed with the distinct task of resisting the imposition of Magyar as an
official language. In addition to their representation in the Diet of the
Kingdom at Presburg, the Croatian landowners had their own Provincial Diet
at Agram. In this they possessed not only a common centre of action, but an
organ of communication with the Imperial Government at Vienna, which
rendered them some support in their resistance to Magyar pretensions. Later
events gave currency to the belief that a conflict of races in Hungary was
deliberately stimulated by the Austrian Court in its own interest. But the
whole temper and principle of Metternich's rule was opposed to the
development of national spirit, whether in one race or another; and the
patronage which the Croats appeared at this time to receive at Vienna was
probably no more than an instinctive act of conservatism, intended to
maintain the balance of interests, and to reduce within the narrowest
possible limits such changes as might prove inevitable.

[Agitation after 1843.]

Of all the important measures of reform which were brought before the
Hungarian Diet of 1843, one alone had become law. The rest were either
rejected by the Chamber of Magnates after passing the Lower House, or were
thrown out in the Lower House in spite of the approval of the majority, in
consequence of peremptory instructions sent to Presburg by the county
assemblies. The representative of a Hungarian constituency was not free to
vote at his discretion; he was the delegate of the body of nobles which
sent him, and was legally bound to give his vote in accordance with the
instructions which he might from time to time receive. However zealous the
Legislature itself, it was therefore liable to be paralysed by external
pressure as soon as any question was raised which touched the privileges of
the noble caste. This was especially the case with all projects involving
the expenditure of public revenue. Until the nobles bore their share of
taxation it was impossible that Hungary should emerge from a condition of
beggarly need; yet, be the inclination of the Diet what it might, it was
controlled by bodies of stubborn squires or yeomen in each county, who
fully understood their own power, and stoutly forbade the passing of any
measure which imposed a share of the public burdens upon themselves. The
impossibility of carrying out reforms tinder existing conditions had been
demonstrated by the failures of 1843. In order to overcome the obstruction
as well of the Magnates as of the county assemblies, it was necessary that
an appeal should be made to the country at large, and that a force of
public sentiment should be aroused which should both overmaster the
existing array of special interests, and give birth to legislation merging
them for the future in a comprehensive system of really national
institutions. To this task the Liberal Opposition addressed itself; and
although large differences existed within the party, and the action of
Kossuth, who now exchanged the career of the journalist for that of the
orator, was little fettered by the opinions of his colleagues, the general
result did not disappoint the hopes that had been formed. Political
associations and clubs took vigorous root in the country. The magic of
Kossuth's oratory left every hearer a more patriotic, if not a wiser man;
and an awakening passion for the public good seemed for a while to throw
all private interests into the shade.

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