Everywhere the mass of the peasantry was
attached to the Habsburg dynasty. Agitation for
independence, whether of Czech or southern
Slavs, was largely the work of a minority among
the more educated. The great majority of Franz
Josef’s subjects wanted the empire to continue
even though they differed so bitterly on the kind
of empire they wanted. Meanwhile the dynasty
and its central power, the imperial civil service and
administration, and the imperial army all carried
out their duties sustained by the common consent
of the great majority of the people.
Franz Josef had won the affection of his subjects
simply by always having been there. His family
misfortunes bravely borne, his simplicity and
honesty, and pride in his robustness in very old
age combined to make him the most respected
and venerated monarch in Europe. And all this
despite the fact that he had made war on his own
subjects in 1849 (Hungary) and had lost all the
wars in which Austria had engaged since his acces-
sion against Italy, France and Prussia. It was a
remarkable achievement.
During the last years of the nineteenth and
during the early twentieth century, the empire
emerged as a modern state. In Hungary the
administration was virtually Magyarised. This
applied also to the judicial administration. But the
country enjoyed a high reputation for justice,
with admittedly the important exception of what
were seen as ‘political’ offences. The kingdom of
Hungary was Magyar: patriotism meant Magyar
patriotism; dissent from this view was treated
harshly. But, despite this fierce attempt to
Magyarise the nationalities on the peripheries of
the kingdom, the policy met with little success;
the nationalities preserved their identities. In the
Austrian half of the empire the governments
sought to arrive at settlements between Germans,
Czechs and Poles acceptable to all sides.
That the empire was, largely, so well governed
was in no small part due to an incorruptible and,
on the whole, intelligent and fair-minded bureau-
cracy of civil servants and jurists. It is true that
in the Austrian half of the empire the Germans
constituted some 80 per cent of the civil servants
though by population they were entitled only to a
third. The much better education of the Germans
accounts for some of this predominance. In
Hungary deliberate Magyarisation led to more
than 19 per cent of government service being in
Hungarian-speaking hands. In the central imperial
administration the Germans also played the major
role, with more than half the civil servants
German-speaking. But one can certainly not speak
of a totally German-dominated imperial adminis-
tration. In the principal joint ministries of the
empire, Franz Josef ensured that the three com-
mon ministers never came from the same half of
the Monarchy. The senior Foreign Ministry was
held in turn by a Saxon German, a Hungarian,
an Austrian German, a Pole, a Hungarian and an
Austrian German.The economic development of the empire that
was disappointingly slow in the latter part of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries implies a
comparison with western and northern Europe.
But the empire’s centre was in the Balkans, the
grain-producing Hungarian plain. Within the
empire lay regions such as the Czech provinces,
which achieved a development comparable to the
most advanced areas of Europe.
The empire provides great contrasts between
comparative wealth and stark poverty. Agri-
cultural backwardness and an increasing popula-
tion condemned the peasants of Galicia to
continuous poverty. Large-scale emigration was
one consequence. (The empire’s population grew
from 46.9 million in 1900 to 52.4 million in
1910.) In Bohemia, and in upper and lower
Austria, agriculture, as well as industry, turned
these regions into the most prosperous in the
empire. In Hungary the owners of the great
landed estates led the way to the introduction of
better farming methods. The central Hungarian
plain became one of the granaries of Europe. The
imperial customs union, freeing all trade within
the empire, opened up to Hungary’s agriculture
the market of the more industrialised Austrian
half of the empire.
In the twentieth century Austria-Hungary
achieved a fast rate of industrial growth in the
favoured regions. Nevertheless, the empire as a