Francis Joseph’s childhood—The severe education which prepared him
for his _rôle_—Difficulties of that _rôle_—The Liberal revolt
against the Metternich system—The idea of nationality—Hübner’s
surprise that anyone should object to Austrian rule—Every Austrian
a policeman at heart—The Italian rising of 1848—Francis Joseph in
action—Radetzky’s remonstrances—Francis Joseph’s return to his
studies.
Francis Joseph was born at Schönnbrunn on August 18, 1830. His father
was the Archduke Francis Charles, and his mother the Archduchess
Sophie, daughter of Maxmilian I. of Bavaria. He grew up and was
educated in the period of peace between the two great revolutionary
storms which shook Europe free from the Metternich system: a period
which begins with Metternich supreme, and ends with Metternich in
flight from an angry mob. He owed his throne, the steps of which he
mounted, as a lad of eighteen, in the midst of the second epoch of
turmoil, to his mother’s influence. She was an able and imperious
woman; she made up her mind that her son would make a better Emperor
than either her brother-in-law or her husband; she pulled the wires
and got her way.
The boy’s education was thorough and practical: just the sort of
education which he would have been given if his destiny had been in
view from his birth. He was taught the whole duty of a soldier in each
of the several branches of the service: to point a cannon as well as he
could mount a horse; to dig a trench as well as he could handle a sabre
or a rifle. He was also taken through complete courses of history,
literature, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and natural history,
instructed weekly in the maxims of statecraft by Metternich himself,
and compelled to acquire innumerable modern languages: Hungarian,
Czech, and Polish, as well as French, Italian, and, to a limited
extent, English. It was an intellectual preparation which might easily
have addled his brain, and does appear to have made him prematurely
serious. Even before the troubles of his family compelled him to
shoulder its responsibilities, he was remarked as being grave, earnest,
and reserved: the good boy of his family, it was thought—and as clever
as he was good.
Of course, there are anecdotes indicating that he loved his
people—and, above all, loved his army—from his earliest years. The
most famous of them shows him to us, moved to pity by the sight of
a sentry sweltering in the August sun, stealing up behind him, and
dropping a small coin into his cartridge-box, to the delight and
admiration of his aged grandfather: a subject picture by Kriehuber
keeps the memory of that incident alive. “Poor man! But now he is not
a poor man any longer,” he is said to have said, jumping about with
joy at the thought that he had made someone happy. Very likely it is
true; very likely it is also true that he, who was soon to be one of
the best horsemen in his dominions, began life with a horror of horses.
Those about him knew what sort of a man they wanted him to be, and did
their best to make him such a man. There was a regular Habsburg system
of education, though not all the Habsburgs have done credit to it. The
great Maria Theresa had laid it down that “they must not be coddled or
spoiled”; and the Emperor Joseph had expressed similar sentiments in
emphatic language:—
“It may be enough for one of my subjects to say that, whereas his son
will be of service to the State if he is well educated, the neglect to
educate him does not matter, as he will have no public functions to
perform. The case of an Archduke—a possible heir to the throne—is
very different. The most important of all public functions—the
government of the State—is absolutely incumbent on him. The question,
therefore, whether he is or is not well educated, is one which it
should be impossible to raise. He _must_ be well educated; for there
is no branch of the administration in which he might not do infinite
harm if he had not the necessary knowledge to cope with his task and
were unprovided with fixed principles of conduct.”
It is a prescription as admirable as any to be found in the copy-book;
though the rigid application of it has not prevented a good many
Habsburgs from turning out, from the Habsburg point of view, badly. It
is a call to every Habsburg in turn to “be a Habsburg,” in the sense in
which George III.’s mother appealed to him to “be a King”; and it rests
upon a conception of the House of Habsburg as a house specially and
divinely called into being in order to practise the art of government
in central Europe. One may almost say that it assumes a caste of
anointed rulers differing from their subjects as angels differ from
the children of men; but it stops short of the corollary that rulers
are born, not made. It lays down, rather, that the caste, in order to
retain and exalt its qualities as a caste, must always be specialising
from infancy to age. In that way, and in that way alone, its members
might dispense with genius.
On the whole, they have had to dispense with it: their figures do not
tower above the figures of their ministers, like those of Alexander I.
of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Metternich is not the
only Austrian minister who has been infinitely greater than any of
the Emperors whom he served. Not all of them, again, have continued
to specialise a day after the compulsion of tutors was withdrawn. A
great many of them, on the contrary—a constantly increasing number
of them in these latter times—have openly revolted against every
restriction which made the caste characteristic. But the caste has
continued, buttressed by the system, an object of regard, and almost
of veneration, thanks to certain model Habsburgs, who have consented
to the restrictions, and profited by them. Francis Joseph steps on to
the stage of history as such a one: a specialised Habsburg, approaching
nearer to genius than the others, but also gifted with a tactful
adaptability which has enabled him to realise that the dead past must
be allowed to bury its dead from time to time. Let us indicate the
political troubles which called him into activity.
The revolutions of 1830 had been, in the main, abortive: a symptom of
general discontent, but not its complete and successful expression. The
work done at the Resettlement of 1815 had been shaken by it, but had
not, except here and there—in Belgium, for instance—been upset; and
that resettlement had been planned in the interest of reigning houses,
not of peoples. The reigning houses continued to sit on the safety
valve; and the steam which was trying to find vent through the safety
valve consisted of:—
1. Liberal ideas in general.
2. The idea of nationality in particular.
To both those groups of ideas the Austrian Government was bitterly
opposed; with both of them it was to have trouble. Its political
prisons were famous throughout Europe as the homes of distinguished
men, and its subject populations seethed with discontent. The idea of
nationality was particularly obnoxious to it because it did not itself
repose upon a national basis. “Austria,” said Mazzini, with a gesture
of disdain, “is not a country, but a bureaucracy”; and Austria was, in
fact—what Metternich said that Italy was—a geographical ex-pression.
It simply comprised the possessions of the House of Habsburg, which
had, for generations, added field to field by means of prosperous
marriages,[2] or accepted territory as the recompense of services
rendered in war. The Emperor of Austria was also King of Hungary, King
of Lombardy, King of Bohemia, etc., etc.: the head, as it were, of an
ancient firm formed to carry on the general purposes of government in
central Europe, and regarding men and women merely as material to be
governed.
[Footnote 2: The idea was set forth in the famous hexameter line:
_Bella gerant alii: tu, felix Austria, nube._]
The system had its advantages—it kept the peace provisionally in what
might otherwise have been one of the cockpits of Europe. That was what
the French diplomatist meant when he said that, if the Austrian Empire
had not existed it would have been necessary to invent it. But it was
not popular, and it tended to make every Austrian statesman a policeman
at heart. Even Metternich was a policeman at heart: a policeman of
genius—a policeman of wide culture and charming manners—but still a
policeman. He and his subordinates simply could not understand that
people of other races might object to being policed by Germans. The
Germans, they considered, were the best policemen in the world; and
that should be an end of the matter. Count Hübner—a most intelligent
Austrian—threw up his hands in amazement at the obstinate prevalence
of the contrary opinion:—
“To-day” (we find him writing in his diary) “the magic word which
moves the masses—not the proletariate, but the intelligent public—is
_nationality_. Germans, Italians, Poles, Magyars, Slavs! It is a
formula capable of throwing the universe off its hinges—the lever
which Archimedes sought in vain. The ringleaders have discovered it.
With this lever they have, in the course of a few days, upset the old
social system, and dazzled the eyes of the purblind with the deceptive
promise of the perpetual happiness of the human race.”
The peoples of central Europe, in Hübner’s opinion, should have been
as proud of their subjection to the House of Habsburg as the domestic
servants whom Thackeray met on the top of the coach were of their
position as the flunkeys of the Duke of Richmond. Italian national
aspirations, in particular, seemed to him merely comical. He derided
the Italians as mongrels—a medley of Gauls, Celts, Goths, Germans,
Greeks, Normans, and Arabs; he recalled the internecine strife which
had raged among their Republics in the Middle Ages. He comforted
himself with the reflection that they spoke different dialects in
different parts of the Peninsula, and he concluded: “I cannot believe
in a United Italy.”
Yet Italy was being united—and the Austrian Empire was apparently
crumbling into its component parts—at the moment when he wrote, in
July, 1848. Already, from the beginning of that year, anxiety had been
widespread; and, in February, events in France had given a signal of
unmistakable significance. “If Guizot falls,” Mélanie Metternich
exclaimed, “then we are all lost.” Guizot did fall; and Louis-Philippe
fell with him. The news reached Vienna; and it seemed as if Austria
was in the melting-pot, though the trouble began, not in Vienna,
but at Milan, where an Archduke reigned as Viceroy, and that sturdy
octogenarian Radetzky commanded the army of occupation.
Charles Albert, King of Sardinia—the great-grandfather of the
present King of Italy—had promised to be “the sword of Italy,” on
one condition. He would not collaborate with mere conspirators,
but if there were an insurrection he would march to the aid of the
insurgents. His terms were accepted, and there was a riot which became
a revolution, though, in its inception, it presented some of the
distinguishing characteristics of comic opera.
The revolutionists began by decreeing that as the Austrian Government
depended largely for its revenues on the tobacco monopoly, no one in
Italy should smoke. Austrian soldiers retorted by swaggering through
the streets of Milan, smoking several cigars at once. Female patriots
knocked the cigars out of their mouths, and pelted them from the
house-tops with flower-pots and other missiles; while male patriots,
armed with various weapons, molested them in other ways. There was
street fighting, and there were killed and wounded. The patriots were
many; the garrison was small; Charles Albert was known to be coming.
Radetzky had no choice but to withdraw his troops within the famous
Quadrilateral of Fortresses, leaving the provisional government set up
by the revolutionists in possession. It seemed to the sapient Hübner a
case of black ingratitude towards the admirable Austrian police.
But Austria was not, this time, to be beaten. Within the Quadrilateral
Radetzky was safe; and, in due course, he marched out and defeated
Charles Albert at Custozza. Few reinforcements had reached him, but
they sufficed; and among the officers who came to serve under him
was included Francis Joseph—not yet eighteen years of age. It was
his first appearance in the field; and Radetzky was not particularly
glad to see him. The scene which passed between the stripling and the
veteran is best described in the Life of Radetzky included in General
Ambert’s _Cinq Epées_:—
“Radetzky addressed the new arrival in peremptory military language.
‘Imperial Highness,’ he said, ‘your presence here is exceedingly
embarrassing for me. Consider my responsibility in case anything
should happen to you! If you should be taken prisoner, for instance,
the accident would annihilate at a stroke any advantage which the
Austrian army might have gained.’ ‘Marshal,’ replied Francis Joseph,
‘it is quite possible that it was unwise to send me here; but, as I am
here, honour forbids me to depart without facing the enemy’s fire’;
and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke.
“No objection could be taken to an explanation so simple and gallant;
and it was agreed that the Archduke should take part in the next
battle, which was fought a few days later (the battle of May 6, at
Santa Lucia). Here are the precise words of the report, addressed by
Radetzky, immediately after that sanguinary struggle, to the Minister
of War: ‘I was myself an eye-witness of the intrepidity displayed by
the Archduke, when one of the enemy’s shells burst quite close to
him.’”
“Austria does not lack Archdukes,” he said gallantly, when implored not
to expose himself to danger; but his battle was only of the nature of
a holiday treat. He was still _in statu pupillari_—occupied with the
severe studies by which he was preparing himself for his great _rôle_;
and when he had done enough for honour, he returned to them. It was
then, or soon afterwards, that he was confidentially informed of the
great trust about to be reposed in him; but the intimation neither
puffed him up with pride nor disturbed his diligence. He brought out
his books again—immense tomes dealing with Roman, civil, criminal,
and canonical law—and resumed his reading, almost as if everything
depended upon his passing an examination in high honours. Not if he
could help it should the arrival of his hour find him unready for it.
And his hour was near, for the times were critical. Trouble at home had
followed hard on the heels of the trouble in Lombardy, and, being more
complicated, had been more difficult to deal with.