Chapter Sixteen- Gott Erhalte Karl den Kaiser, Unsern Guten Kaiser Karl
"Today, I announce the freedom and liberation of all my peoples. For too long, you have suffered and been neglected; your needs unanswered, your empire aloof. I say: no more! From now on, as citizens of the United Empire of Danubia, all of us shall be equal under my rule!"
- Emperor Karl I, announcing the Constitution of 1917
"
This is an insult! We are made to rule- but we are treated as subservient, no more important than the Balkan rabble!"
- Hungarian Prime Minister Károly Khuen-Héderváry, upon hearing of the new Constitution's passage.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an ancient state, with roots dating back to the thirteenth century. It had experienced a painful transition to the modern age, which had culminated in alignment with Germany and compromise with the Hungarians. What felt like a lifetime ago, its pride had led it to declare war on Serbia, throwing Europe into the fire. Yet, its planned revenge had gone awry; Serbian arms had repulsed the Dual Monarchy not once but twice, and Germans and Bulgarians had had to step in to ensure victory. German and Italian diplomats had humiliated her in her own capital, forcing her to cede territory to the puny Italians, who had been a collection of petty states when the signatories were boys. Galicia had spent several months under Russian occupation before German troops came in to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. While Germany’s
Sturmtruppenkorps had achieved glory in the last weeks of the Eastern war, marching all the way to the gates of Petrograd, Austro-Hungarian forces had undertaken only diversionary attacks in western Ukraine, or worse still, wasted on garrison duty in Poland. And the Dual Monarchy’s only reward was occupation duty in half of Serbia. National consciousness in the empire’s minorities was at its highest since the revolutions of 1848, and the economy was tottering. The empire had only one real advantage; a steady hand rested on the rudder in the form of Emperor Franz Joseph. The octogenarian ruler had sat atop the throne since he was eighteen years old, and his court knew its business. True, his health was fading, but surely he’d just stick around for a little while when he was most needed… surely?
Evidently not.
Franz Joseph died on 7 November 1916, four days before the peace treaty with Russia. His successor Archduke Karl was a 29-year-old with plenty of idealism and little substantial experience in the political field. What could go wrong?
The fallout of the war- which Franz Joseph had died before he could attend to- immediately confronted Karl. Domestically, the Austro-Hungarians had suffered the most of the Central Powers. Before the war, the backbone of the empire had been the exchange between Austria and Hungary; Austrian industrial goods kept rural Hungary modernised, Hungarian grain kept the cities of the west fed. The war had fatally disrupted this symbiosis. For the past three years, Hungarian grain had gone primarily to the army and the rest had mostly remained at home, leaving Vienna hungry. (1) To Budapest, this was perfectly reasonable- they were making their own sacrifices and needed to look after their own people first. But from the perspective of Viennese bureaucrats, their Hungarian cousins were jealously hoarding resources the entire empire needed, forcing them to drift further apart. Every time they attempted to discuss this, the Hungarians gave them smooth oratory worth its weight in gold. Thus, relations between the two halves of the empire had become bitter by the time of Franz Joseph’s death. However, that was not the only ethnic problem facing the new Emperor. The other peoples of the empire- the Czechs, South Slavs, Poles, and Ukrainians (amongst others) had all fought and died for Vienna, and in the process had re-discovered themselves, in a way. Czechs had fought alongside Czechs, Ukrainians alongside Ukrainians, etc. They had survived by fighting alongside their countrymen, sharing a language and culture. Men had formed bonds that would never break, and these bonds were often stronger than loyalty to an unknown emperor of a different nationality.
Beyond that, there was the fact that Serbia now lay under imperial military occupation. One cause of the war, Slavic nationalism, had been put on pause as the Croats and Bosnians went off to the front, but now it had received a shot in the arm of sorts. Although the occupying forces had hunted the Black Hand to extinction, successors had risen, and these successors had one advantage their predecessors had lacked:
they now conducted all of their operations in the same country. For a Bosnian, say, to slip into Serbia, all he needed was the appropriate papers; Serbs had a harder time leaving their respective military districts, but it could be done. And if one of those Bosnians just so happened to be carrying a pistol or a bomb… Small wonder that officials in occupied Serbia all drew hazardous-duty pay. A growing South Slavic consciousness was awakening within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some postwar nationalists felt that change within the system was possible, others saw a violent war of independence as the only solution.
All this to say, the system devised in 1867 direly needed an update. Emperor Karl was a young visionary who had shared plenty of correspondence with none other than Franz Ferdinand on this issue. And in his New Years Day 1917 address, the young sovereign dropped a bombshell. He was going to hold a constitutional convention to reform the empire in six months’ time. Anyone with suggestions was welcome to submit them to the imperial government.
Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary
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The first six months of 1917 saw the job market for postmen explode. People of all walks of life from every corner of the empire wrote to Vienna with their ideas. Some wanted autonomy for Transylvania, some wanted Bohemia elevated to the status of a co-equal kingdom, some wanted a separate Polish kingdom in Galicia in personal union with the King of Poland… the ideas went on and on. As Stefan Zweig wrote in his
Die Welt von Morgen, “there seemed in those months a great spirit of civic pride and energy scarcely seen before or since…” Sudeten Germans and their Czech brethren united in a shared imperial spirit, bitter acrimonies in Transylvania died down, and even the Slav terrorists in Bosnia-Herzegovina quietened down somewhat. Forgetting the nationalist rhetoric they’d spouted only weeks before, people now thought
what difference does it make what language we speak, or if we are Catholic or Orthodox? We are all subjects of His Imperial Majesty, after all. The last days of May saw drinking and dancing in the streets, and a gaiety in the air not felt since long before the war. As the mythical date, the first of June, approached, everyone was happy and excited, with one exception.
The Hungarians were not at all pleased about what was being done. They were special, better than the other imperial minorities! If popular rumour was even halfway true, the boy emperor in Vienna was planning to make the Czechs and Poles, peoples who hadn’t had nations of their own for centuries, into co-equal partners! It wasn’t just insensitive, it was downright offensive. Nevertheless, the Hungarians sent a delegation to the Imperial Constitutional Convention.
The glorious moment arrived at 9 AM on 1 June 1917 in the Imperial Palace. After a High Mass presided over by the Archbishop of Vienna, Emperor Karl declared the Imperial Constitutional Convention to be in session. Every nationality within the empire had sent a delegation. However, these “delegations” were not particularly well-organised, nor did they have unified, coherent plans. In the interests of representing all his subjects, the Emperor declared that “any gentleman of thirty-five years or more, in good and honourable standing, and of firm patriotic convictions with the means to constructively offer practical solutions for the betterment of our realm” would be welcome to attend. Thus, diplomats and politicians attended, but so did professors, writers, clergy of all ranks, and even tradesmen. A total of almost two thousand turned up. The conference, held in an old ballroom, was standing room only; the imperial family sitting in their thrones were the exceptions. It immediately became apparent that Karl had set the bar for attendance too low, as several quite uncouth delegates were ejected for disorderly conduct. Two of these were Austrian nationalists who yelled about how the empire’s minorities were unworthy of equal representation; a third was a Polish workman who assaulted a Hungarian member of parliament and said something quite unprintable about his mother.
Once some of the riffraff had been shown the door, the actual work began. For a start, this was less a constitutional convention than an open forum for discussion; this convention had no power to craft laws or actually create a new constitution. The way the system was designed to work was that any delegate could propose something he wanted in the new constitution, and then all present would then vote upon the issue. If it passed with a three-fourths majority, the emperor’s secretary would record it as an official proposal. Once the convention was done, Parliament and Emperor Karl would then use the official proposals as a framework to actually craft a new constitution. Everyone was grouped together by nationality, but since, say, an impoverished adjunct professor and a landowner with four centuries of family power, both from Upper Austria, were both classified as “Germans”, they were put in the same bloc without consideration for their myriad differences. One case perfectly illustrates the difficulties faced by the convention.
In the first three days, different delegates made no less than thirteen calls for the state to provide a free grain dole or its cash equivalent to all citizens. The argument was that the empire’s industrial, urban proletariat was swelling, and many of these people were spending most of their wages on bread and rent. Unless the government did something to help, thousands of families would forever be living on a knife-edge in squalor. Surely, His Imperial Majesty wanted to take a humane course and do something for these poor souls? Middle-class, petty-bourgeois delegates from Austria and Bohemia, which had gone hungry during the war, applauded these, but their conservative, aristocratic counterparts- many of whom were clumped in ethnically with their rivals- were aghast. That, they thundered, was
Marxism! Giving out food to all would not only destroy the market, it would invite the people to clamour for more, and their demands would quickly outstrip the state’s power to provide. Worst of all, the state’s inevitable failure to live up to its promises would lead to revolutionaries like those seen in Petrograd making a bid for power, which would be 1789 all over again! Surely, His Imperial Majesty wanted to keep his head atop his shoulders? The conservatives shot down every attempt for a formal grain-dole proposal, but the proponents fired back that they were speaking in the name of the people too poor to be allowed in, and that although those in favour of a free grain dole couldn’t get a three-fourths majority here, that didn’t mean that three-fourths of the imperial populace opposed such a move. That was as may be, the conservatives replied smoothly, but the rules were on their side here and that was what counted. The frustrated liberals could do nothing but shake their fists, grind their teeth, and sit down. The Hungarians, too, were vehemently opposed to the free-grain idea for very different reasons. They had been the imperial breadbasket for centuries and were happy in that role. If Vienna forced them to distribute their product at a rate determined by fancy German bureaucrats in lavish offices- a rate inevitably set to meet the needs of the consumers, not the producers- their economy would collapse. Everyone argued their point insistently and with fiery passion, but in the end the idea was shot down, causing much bitterness.
This happened
thirteen times in three days.
The mess over free grain was parallelled in numerous other quibbles- should Transylvanian schools be permitted to offer introductory classes to the Hungarian language to those students who didn’t speak it? Not if the Romanian-speaking delegates had anything to say about it, by God!- but they were not the central issue facing the Constitutional Convention. That had to do with what the actual federative structure of the empire was to be going forward. On this key question, the delegates broadly came into two camps: the “Trialists” and “Federalists”. The trialists, as best exemplified by the late Franz Ferdinand, advocated creating a third Kingdom within the empire on the same terms as Hungary. The most common name put forth was the “Kingdom of Slavia”, but there were plenty of other proposals. The trialists, who were mostly South Slavs, argued that with Serbia and Montenegro already under imperial rule, uniting them with Bosnia-Herzegovina would give the Slavic nationalists everything they wanted and bring peace to the empire. Bosnian and Herzegovinian delegates, even those who didn’t consider themselves trialists, were broadly amiable to such a plan. However, there were two problems which ailed the trialist cause. For a start, Bosnia-Herzegovina was under a condominium between Vienna and Budapest, and there was no way the Hungarians were giving up their influence in the territory. Besides, pandering to Slavic nationalism would only lead to Croatia’s desire to join “Slavia”, which would leave Hungary not just shorn of territory but without access to the sea. Thus, almost no Hungarians voted to adopt a formal trialist proposal. There was another issue facing trialism which Hungarian pride had nothing to do with: Serbia. If the Empire now declared that it was going to make a place for Slavic nationalists within the confines of the imperial system, surely the peoples of Serbia would want to join. After all, pan-Slavism had been one factor leading Gavrilo Princip to pull the trigger that fateful June day. (2) Giving the Serbs co-equal status would be rewarding Princip’s actions. Those making this argument conveniently papered over the fact that Franz Ferdinand had been a trialist, but these assaults left trialism dead in the water.
The second proposal for reorganising the empire was federalism. Federalists were a more diverse group than the mostly South Slavic trialists, both in terms of geography and ideology. Essentially, their theory revolved around taking each of the major ethnic groups of the empire and making them co-equals. Just as the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary existed under the same roof in personal union, so too would the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Kingdom of Transylvania, and such. One significant advantage federalism enjoyed was that it wasn’t mutually exclusive with trialism. A “Kingdom of Slavia”, proponents of federalism stressed time and time again, was compatible with their system. The other obvious advantage was that all the minorities had a stake in its implementation, not just South Slavs; the flip side of this coin was that opponents of reform could still point to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia to attack federalism with. The movement’s weakness was that it would force both Austria and Hungary to cede plenty of territory, and many conservatives in both countries were loath to do so. It was also not at all clear where to draw borders between these kingdoms, and what ethnicities merited a kingdom of their own. For example, the Czech delegates put up a fierce argument that “Czech” was a national identity, and that the Czech people had reasonably clearly-defined historic borders. But to Viennese conservatives, the Czechs were talking about Austria giving up land it had held since the Middle Ages, land which nearly everyone considered an integral part of Austria. Furthermore, these conservatives argued, what about the Sudeten Germans? They lived deep within this proposed Kingdom of Bohemia, yet had no cultural links with Prague; should they be hung out to dry? When a moderate voice from the Austrian delegation cried out that perhaps Austria ought to keep the Sudetenland as an enclave, the Czechs drowned him in a sea of boos. And all the while, the Hungarians protested that they were
special, and that this whole business was offensive to their status within the empire.
Emperor Karl was the one man in the room whom everyone respected, yet as a federalist he couldn’t be all things to all people, and many left the conference exasperated at their sovereign. Conservatives wanted him to do less for the sake of his crown, the petty-bourgeoisie wanted him to do more for the sake of worker’s rights, every nationality within the empire wanted what it perceived to be its share, the Hungarians were deeply offended that they were no longer a unique minority, and no one was interested in speaking in turns. All the while, Clement von Metternich was rolling in his grave, watching what happened when the people were given a voice.
Such was the atmosphere of calm, rational discussion which pervaded the Imperial Constitutional Convention.
The Convention adjourned on 13 June, having passed seventy-four official proposals in twelve chaotic days. These covered a wide sweep of topics and many were contradictory, but that was acceptable to Emperor Karl. His goal had been to get a feel for the opinions of the general public; now it was time to put that information to good use. Since all of Parliament had been present for the first convention, it was the work of a moment for Karl to call a session the next day. They spent two weeks mulling over the various proposals, trying to figure out what was mutually inclusive with what, and attempting to reach good-faith compromises. The differences between liberals and conservatives were still present, and ethnic interests still played a divisive role, but a calmer atmosphere prevailed. This was in part because all the members of Parliament were relatively conservative when compared to the intellectuals and petty-bourgeois at the convention, but also because Emperor Karl took a very active role in shaping the new constitution. At his heart, the sovereign was an idealist. A devout Catholic, he considered his faith and his secular role intertwined. As he commented to the Empress Zita, “as God has given the Poles, the Slovakians, and the Croatians an identity and a self-conception, so I must give these peoples the honour they deserve.” He was determined to do good for all his people, and saw federalism as the best way to accomplish that. Thus, on 28 June 1917, three years to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, Emperor Karl went to Holy Mass before announcing triumphantly that the Imperial Constitution of 1917 was ratified.
Flag of the United Empire of Danubia
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The 1917 Constitution brought the empire forward into the modern age while still keeping the best parts of its historic structure. It adopted a federalist proposal, making Karl the constitutional monarch of many different kingdoms. The Constitution abolished the name “Austria-Hungary”, renaming the realm the United Empire of Danubia. (3) Austria was downgraded from an Empire to a Kingdom, and placed on an equal footing with Bohemia, Slovakia, Transylvania, West Galicia, East Galicia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Hungary, all in personal union with one another. Every kingdom had its own parliament and the right to decide all internal affairs, but the empire kept a single currency (4), imperial-level parliament, a united military, and a uniform foreign policy. Emperor Karl and Parliament agreed to keep Serbia under military rule for another ten years, after which it would become a kingdom all its own.
The different Kingdoms of the United Empire of Danubia. Note the Austrian enclave in the Sudetenland and military rule in Serbia/Montenegro.
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The last days of June brought celebration all over the Empire. All the minorities had struggled for this for years, and now they were receiving their reward. Being allowed to elect their own parliaments and give their own languages pride of place seemed too good to be true, and it was all thanks to their benevolent new ruler! The Emperor travelled to the new capitals, (5) where the local bishop crowned him King at a Solemn High Mass; he was photographed leading five hundred Czechs in a decade of the Rosary at St.Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Of course, celebrations of a more secular kind took place; many a glass of wine was consumed over the next few days, and surviving statistics show that the average wine-seller in the empire made a bigger profit on 29 June 1917 than any day since before the war. The twenty-eighth became Constitution Day, and it is still a public holiday in Austria today. However, one group was decidedly unhappy: the Hungarians.
The 1917 Constitution stripped Hungary of its special status. Having its own parliament, its own monarch, and its own domestic policy were no longer things to boast about; now, everyone within the empire had these. But even more humiliating, the Constitution sheared Hungary of much territory; all the non-Magyar lands were gone, and Hungary was left without so much as access to the sea. In the era of colonialism, Hungarian patriots had held their heads high. They might not’ve been fully independent, and the empire might not control any overseas colonies, but the Hungarians could lord it over the Slovaks, the Croats, and the Romanians of Transylvania. No longer. Hungarian members of the Imperial Parliament had stringently voted against the new constitution, but their Austrian counterparts had overruled them. Now, Budapest was forced to do what it could with what Karl had left it.
Hungary’s prime minister resigned on 4 July, to be replaced with the nationalistic Károly Khuen-Héderváry. An outraged Prime Minister Károly called a special cabinet meeting forty-eight hours after he took office, ostensibly to discuss “Hungary’s place under the new constitutional system.” But if this meeting was merely about constitutional politics, why were two of the most prominent military officials in Hungary- Vilmos Nagy de Nagybaczon and Adalbert Dani von Gyarmata und Magyar-Cséke (6)- present? Why were six meetings held in a week, all discussing the same theme under utmost secrecy, with plenty of Army officers present? And, for that matter, why was Károly remaining awfully silent about the Hungarians rioting in the new Kingdoms of Slovakia, Transylvania, and Croatia? Emperor Karl was suspicious, but didn’t piece it all together until it was too late…
On 13 July 1917, Prime Minister Károly declared the independence of the Hungarian Republic, with a claim to the country’s 1914 borders. When Emperor Karl heard the news, he is said to have got down on his knees and crossed himself three times. “God preserve me”, he said, “for I have failed to keep my realm together. It could have ended so perfectly, but no.” The Hungarians in the Imperial Parliament were informed that they would be protected, and that Emperor Karl wanted to talk to Károly. The scheming Hungarian Prime Minister had already told them about his plans, and they replied that Karl was not their king, and that Károly was leader of the independent Hungarian Republic. One of them then cheekily asked if he could present his credentials to the emperor as Hungarian ambassador to Austria. Heartbroken at the fracturing of his empire, Karl had the men arrested; they would be released and sent home at the end of the war. He then went to the Cathedral of Saint Stephen and prayed for four hours that God would grant him the wisdom to keep the empire intact. (6)
Time would tell if He would answer Karl’s petition...
Comments?
- My apologies.
- Besides, “Austria-Hungary-Slavia” is an appalling name.
- What should I call the state now? Danubia? Austria? Austria-Hungary? Please comment below!
- However, notes and coins varied from place to place. As an example, a one-krone bill from Austria and a one-crone bill from East Galicia would both have the same value, and both would be legal tender anywhere in the empire. However, one would be in German; the other Ukrainian. One might have an Austrian landmark on it; the other a local one, and so forth.
- Prague, Bratislava, Cluj, Krakow, Lemberg, Zagreb, and Sarajevo, in the order of kingdoms listed above.
- Both of those names really roll off the tongue, no?
- IOTL, Karl was an extremely devout Catholic.