♦Austria at the peace. 1814-5.♦
We have already seen how Austria won back her lost Italian and Dalmatian territory, and so much of her lost German territory as was geographically continuous. ♦Ragusa and Cattaro.♦ Released from her inland prison, provided again with a great sea-board on both sides of the Hadriatic, she now refused to Ragusa the restoration of her freedom, and filched from Montenegro her hard-won haven of Cattaro. The recovered lands formed, in the new nomenclature of the Austrian possessions, the kingdoms of Lombardy and Venice, of Illyria, and of Dalmatia. The last was an ancient title of the Hungarian crown. The Kingdom of Illyria was a continuation of the affected nomenclature which had been bestowed on the lands which formed it under their French occupation. We have already traced the driving out of the Austrian power from Lombardy and Venetia, its momentary joint possession in Sleswick, Holstein, and Lauenburg. ♦Cracow, 1846.♦ The only other actual change of frontier has been the annexation of the inland commonwealth of Cracow, to match the annexation of the sea-faring commonwealth of Ragusa. ♦Separation of Hungary, 1848.♦ The movement of 1848 separated Hungary for a moment from the Austrian power. ♦Recovery of Hungary, 1849.♦ Won back, partly by Russian help, partly by the arms of her own Slavonic subjects, the Magyar kingdom remained crushed till Austria was shut out alike from Germany and from Italy. ♦Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 1867.♦ Then arose the present system, the so called dualism, the theory of which is that the ‘Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’ consists of two states under a common sovereign. By an odd turning about of meanings, Austria, once really the Oesterreich, the Eastern land, of Germany, has become in truth the Western land, the Neustria, of the new arrangement. With the Hungarian kingdom are grouped the principality of Transsilvania and the kingdoms of Slavonia and Croatia. The Austrian state is made up of Austria itself—the archduchy with the addition of Salzburg—the duchy of Styria, the county of Tyrol, the kingdoms of Bohemia, Galicia and Lodomeria, Illyria, and Dalmatia with Ragusa and Cattaro. These last lands are not continuous. Thus two states are formed. ♦Modern Austria.♦ In one the dominant German duchy has Slavonic lands on each side of it, and an Italian fringe on its coast. ♦Modern Hungary.♦ In the other state, the ruling Magyar holds also among the subjects of his crown the Slave, the Rouman, and the outlying Saxon of Siebenbürgen. ♦Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Spizza, 1878.♦ Add to this that the latest arrangements of all have added to the Austrian dominions, under the diplomatic phrase of ‘administration,’ the Slavonic lands of Herzegovina and Bosnia, while the kingdom of Dalmatia is increased by the harbour of Spizza. A power like this, which rests on no national basis, but which has been simply patched together during a space of six hundred years by this and that grant, this and that marriage, this and that treaty, is surely an anachronism on the face of modern Europe. Germany and Italy are nations as well as powers. Austria, changed from the Austria of Germany into the Neustria of Hungary, is simply a name without a meaning.
We have thus gone through the geographical changes of the three Imperial kingdoms, and of the states and powers which were formed by parts of those kingdoms falling away, and in some cases uniting themselves with lands beyond the Empire. They have all to some extent kept a common history down to our own time. We have now to turn to another land which parted off from the Empire in like manner, but which parted off so early as to become a wholly separate and rival land, with an altogether independent history of its own.
[CHAPTER IX.]
THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
♦Origin and growth of France.♦
The process by which a great power grew up to the west of the Western Empire has something in common with the process by which the powers spoken of in the later sections of the last Chapter split off from the Western Empire. As in the case of Switzerland and the United Provinces, so in the case of France, a land which had formed part of the dominions of Charles the Great became independent of his successors. ♦Comparison with Austria.♦ As in the case of Austria to the east, so in the case of France to the west, a duchy of the old Empire grew into a power distinct from the Empire, and tried to attach to itself the old Imperial titles and traditions. ♦Different nature of the Austrian and the French territories.♦ But there is more than one point of difference between the two cases. As a matter of geography, the power of the Austrian house has for some centuries largely rested on the possession of dominions beyond the boundaries of the Carolingian Empire, while it has been only for a moment, and that chiefly by the annexation of territory from Austria itself, that France has ever held any European possessions beyond the Carolingian frontier.[18] ♦Difference in the process of separation.♦ But the true difference lies in the date and circumstances of the separation. ♦The other powers split off after the Empire has become German.♦ The Swabian, Lotharingian, Frisian, and Austrian lands which gradually split off from the Empire to form distinct states split off after the Empire had been finally annexed to the crown of Germany, indeed after Germany and the Empire had come to mean nearly the same thing. But France can hardly be said to have split off from the German kingdom or from the Empire itself. The first prince of the Western Francia who bore the kingly title was indeed the man of the King of the East-Franks.[19] But no lasting relation, such as afterwards bound the princes of the Empire to its head, sprang out of his homage. Again from 887 to 963 the Imperial dignity was not finally attached to any one kingdom. It fluctuated between Germany and Italy; it might have passed to Burgundy; it might have passed to Karolingia, as it had once already done in the person of Charles the Bald. ♦The Empire divided into four kingdoms, of which three are again united, while one remains distinct.♦ The truer way of putting the matter is to say that in 887 the Empire split up into four kingdoms, of which three came together again, and formed the Empire in a new shape. The fourth kingdom remained separate; it can hardly be said to have split off from the Empire, but its separation hindered the full reconstruction of the Empire. It has had a distinct history, a history which made it the special rival of the Empire. ♦Karolingia receives the name of France.♦ This was Karolingia, the kingdom of the West-Franks, to which, through the results of the change of dynasty in 987, the name of France gradually came to be applied.
♦France a nation as well as a power.♦