CHAPTER IV

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:—

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.

[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.