Austrian expansion in the Balkans—Occupation of Bosnia—Problem of
Servia Irredenta—Postponement of the day of reckoning—Luck of the
Habsburgs in public life—Calamities dog them in private life—List of
Habsburg fatalities during Francis Joseph’s reign.
The four great dates in modern Austrian history are 1859, 1866, 1870,
and 1878—the year of the Russo-Turkish war. The events of those years
gradually made it clear that the future of Austria was not in Italy,
nor in Germany, but in the Balkans: that the real rival of Austria
was Russia, and that the real contest would be for the hegemony,
not of Germany, but of the Slav subjects of the Sultan of Turkey.
Thenceforward the central principle of Austrian foreign policy was
that, for every step which Russia took towards Constantinople, Austria
should take a corresponding step towards Salonica; and its first
tangible expression was the secret treaty which, in 1878, allowed
Austria to occupy Bosnia as the price of her neutrality.
It took an army of 200,000 men, with 480 guns, to pacify that little
strip of land; and the occupation, and the subsequent events in the
peninsula, have brought Austria up against another problem, uncommonly
like the old one which disturbed the beginning of Francis Joseph’s
reign. For the inhabitants of Bosnia are of Servian race; and there are
many other Servians in other parts of the Austrian dominions; and there
is a Kingdom of Servia, full of fiercely patriotic men, from whom the
cry of Servia Irredenta is going up. Austria once despised them, as she
once despised the Italians; but they have proved, like the Italians,
that they can fight; and they demand, as loudly as the Italians, to be
taken seriously. So that Austria, in spite of her losses and gains,
retains her essential character as the Purgatory of the Unredeemed.
It is not a quiet purgatory—perhaps no purgatory is ever quiet—but
a purgatory in which order is only kept by the strenuousness of the
police, and the frequent declaration of martial law. Consequently it
is a purgatory in which startling things may happen at any time; but
speculation as to what will happen there may be deferred until a later
chapter. Probably nothing in particular will happen during Francis
Joseph’s lifetime; but the matter needs nevertheless to be mentioned
here as a part of the spectacle of trouble perpetually dogging Francis
Joseph’s footsteps alike in public and in private life. People speak of
him as a lover of peace; and it is likely enough that he has learnt to
love peace through sheer weariness of war and rumours of war. But it is
none the less true that, whenever he has sought to extend his paternal
sway, he has not brought peace but a sword; and it was mainly with
reference to the events of his reign that Gladstone said: “Nowhere on
the map of Europe can you lay your finger and say: ‘Here Austria has
done good.’” It has already been demonstrated to him, more than once,
that the Servians are of Gladstone’s opinion; and the demonstration
will not become less emphatic with the lapse of time.
We must let that pass, however, though we shall have to return to
it. The day of reckoning is not yet; and it will not come in Francis
Joseph’s life-time if either he or his Ministers can help it. One’s
continual impression, when reading modern Austrian history, is of a
day of reckoning always imminent, yet repeatedly by some happy hazard
adjourned.
In public affairs, that is to say, Francis Joseph has enjoyed, and
continues to enjoy, a luck like that which is said to attend the
British Army and save it from the consequences of its blunders. It is
only in his private life that misfortune has pursued him so closely and
incessantly that, when the news of the assassination of the Empress
Elizabeth was broken to him, he covered his face with his hands and
broke down, exclaiming: “What! Is there no sorrow possible to man which
I am to be spared?”
The time has come to speak of these sorrows; and the black series
began, curiously enough, in the very year in which Francis Joseph
achieved his most signal triumph as a ruler. It was in 1867, as we have
seen, that he pulled his Empire out of the fire after the disaster
of Sadowa, conciliated Hungary, and was crowned with gorgeous and
impressive ceremony in the Buda Cathedral. It was also in 1867 that
his brother, the Archduke Maximilian, was shot for pretending to be
Emperor of Mexico; and that execution was the first of the series of
tragedies which never fail to strike one as due to happen in fulfilment
of Countess Károlyi’s curse. Since we have come to the theme, we must
have the text of that curse before us once again: the curse of a mother
whose son had forfeited his life as a rebel:—
“=May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be
exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May
his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!=”
And now let us set beside that curse a newspaper cutting, taken from
one of the Vienna journals at the time of the assassination of the
Empress Elizabeth. It is a bald summary, headed “The Sorrows of the
House of Habsburg,” and it runs thus:—
“On January 30, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life in his
hunting-box at Meyerling. In May, 1897, Sophie, Duchess d’Alençon, at
one time the affianced bride of Ludwig II. of Bavaria, was burnt to
death, in Paris. On June 16, 1867, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico,
the Empress’s brother-in-law, was shot by a firing-party at Queretaro.
His consort, the Belgian Princess Marie-Charlotte, lost her reason,
and has been, for the last thirty years, under restraint at the
Château of Bouchout. Archduke William Francis Charles died, in the
summer of 1894, at Baden near Vienna, from injuries sustained through
a fall from his horse. Archduke John of Tuscany, who had resigned his
rank and taken the name of John Orth, disappeared on the high seas off
the coast of South America. King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, the Empress’s
cousin, committed suicide on June 13, 1886, drowning himself in the
Lake of Starnberg in a fit of insanity. Count Ludwig of Trani, Prince
of the Two Sicilies, husband of Duchess Matilda in Bavaria, and sister
of the Empress, committed suicide at Zurich. Archduchess Matilda,
daughter of Field-Marshal Archduke Albert, was burnt to death in her
father’s palace as the result of a blazing log from the fire having
set alight to her ball dress. Archduke Ladislas, son of the Archduke
Joseph, came to grief while hunting by an accidental discharge of his
gun. And now we learn that the Empress Elizabeth has been murdered.”
A mere list, it will be seen, eloquent in his simplicity: a list which
takes cognisance of nothing except violent deaths, but enumerates ten
such deaths among the near relatives of the Emperor and Empress. It is
a list which we shall have to lengthen by the inclusion of calamities
of other kinds: scandals due to the proceedings of those whom Bismarck
styled “Austria’s idiot Archdukes,” and of more than one Archduchess;
and outrageous marriages, as they generally seemed to Francis Joseph,
on the part of scions of his house—some of them quite close to the
throne—who made light jests about his agreeable relations with
Katti Schratt, and left him alone in his glory, turning their backs
upon the exclusive magnificence which seemed to him essential to the
time-honoured grandeur of the House of Habsburg, and quitting imperial
for theatrical and bourgeois circles, not reluctantly, but with an
eagerness which suggested a hurried flight from a plague-stricken city.
All these catastrophes will have to be reviewed; and we will speak
first of the bitter fate of that young Archduke Maximilian, who, at the
very time when his brother was adding a kingdom to an Empire in Europe,
was led out into the Square of Queretaro and shot for pretending to be
an Emperor in Mexico.