The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

A venerable, and in some respects, benevolent, despot, thinly disguised as a constitutional monarch, Francis Joseph, as we shall see, was deliberately exploiting the hunger for electoral reform, touched off among the most advanced of his subjects by the apparent liberal victory in Russia, in order to blackmail a peculiarly backward group — the Hungarians — who were threatening to give him trouble for reactionary reasons. His political strategy suggested the naive Machiavellism that one might expect from some harassed overlord of the Middle Ages, emancipating his burghers to humble his barons, and the analogy is not wholly accidental; politically speaking Austria-Hungary was in many ways a fossil remnant of Medieval Europe, embedded in twentieth-century history. The Habsburg lands had developed into an empire without ever becoming a nation. Stretching from Lake Constance on the Swiss-German border to the Transylvanian Alps, and from Lemberg (today Lvov) in Poland, to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Trieste on the Adriatic, Austria-Hungary was the second largest state in Europe from the viewpoint of area, with 240,456 square miles and the third largest in population, with something over 50,000,000 subjects, speaking a dozen different languages and dialects. “Eight nations, seventeen countries, twenty parliamentary groups, twenty-seven parties,” sighed one Austro-Hungarian statesman cited by the French historian, Pierre Renouvin.