A Book Review… Western Civilization Owes Much To Hapsburg Rule

By JUDE DOUGHERTY

Judson, Peter M. The Hapsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press at The Harvard University Press, 2016. xiii+367 pp.

The book takes as its subject the Hapsburg Empire (1770-1918), known in its various stages as the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and after 1867 as the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
Peter Judson is professor of 19th and 20th-century history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He offers a “new history” in the sense that he differs from many contemporary historians insofar as he approaches his material from the perspective of empire, from the top down rather than by attempting to explain how its ethnic and regional components came together to create what Judson calls the “Accidental Empire.”
At the height of their power the Hapsburgs governed territories that today are located today in 12 different countries. Fifteen different languages were spoken in the lands they controlled. In the 18th century, Hapsburg rulers managed to create a unified and centralized set of institutions in the territories they controlled, and yet many of those territories functioned largely according to their own laws, institutions, and administrative traditions.
Although the Roman Catholic Church traditionally held a privileged place in Hapsburg lands, their subjects included Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews, Armenian Christians, and Unitarians.
Confronted with such diversity, Judson shows why the Hapsburg Empire mattered for so long to millions of central Europeans, across linguistic, regional, and cultural divides. With ample documentation he explains why ordinary men and women felt a common attachment to their empire in spite of their national origins. For many the empire constituted an alternative source of real power that tempered the power of local elites.
No brief review can do justice to this very rich volume, but any review would be amiss if it did not devote attention to the rule of Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) and the cultural wars of the 1850s and 1860s, a period that transformed Austria and Hungary.
In her day, Maria Theresa was herself a reformer. Torn between liberal and conservative advisers, her personal religious practice often governed her decisions. Hers was a life of simple forms of devotion, a life of internal personal piety and good works.
In Judson’s description, she “emphasized, simple, modest, and pietistic virtue, while avoiding the overtly emotional excesses of baroque ritual practice.”
When under her rule new primary schools were created, most of the teachers were local members of the clergy with varying degrees of education and ability. The nature of the Church’s influence on public education depended a great deal on the attitude and ability of the local priest. In the interest of uniformity, if not quality, Maria Theresa eventually imposed state supervision over the Church in all matters, save the purely spiritual, from the education of priests in state-run seminaries to the appointment of bishops.
Under her rule, the regime reduced the number of religious holidays and dissolved contemplative orders whose members did not serve a chartable purpose in the community, appropriating their property to help fund local educational and welfare institutions. The regime also attacked the influence of the Jesuit order in the universities. Throughout her reign Maria Theresa vigorously opposed the principle of religious toleration for Protestant and Eastern Orthodox sects.
Before Maria Theresa became empress, the Hapsburgs had extended legal civic equality to men and women of all social classes, but legal equality did not imply social equality and cultural equality. Status remained based on refined hierarchies of education and class. Not all were to Vienna born. Still, social groups identified strongly with the empire from landless peasants to merchants engaged in regional trade.
The Ringstrasse of Vienna, begun under the rule of Maria Theresa but not completed until 1890, symbolized the high culture of the time with its opera house, museums, and impressive state buildings that tourists enjoy to this day. High culture was not confined to Vienna. National theaters arose in Zagreb, Graz, and Brno. Thomas Edison designed the lighting system for the city theater in Brno.
The Hapsburg Empire is not a philosophical treatise, but it illustrates the influence of philosophy in the shaping and reshaping of the culture in what was once known as the Holy Roman Empire. The first cultural wars to preoccupy Austrian and Hungarian publics had little to do with nationalism and everything to do with the adoption of a new constitution when Emperor Francis, who began his reign as Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire and ended it as Francis I of Austria, resigned after Austrian forces were defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and in subsequent battles. A new liberal class with its Hobbesian rationality had developed under his predecessor, Francis Joseph I, who is said to have favored “enlightened progress at all costs.”
Judson believes that cultural differences were not much experienced in local society, but they became meaningful when they became the basis for a political agenda. People in the same village were not likely to think of each other as belonging to different cultures just because they spoke a different language.
In their efforts to transform society according to their “grand liberal vision,” liberals, with the aid of a complicit press and the universities, acted as if they had the popular support and did not need to seek some kind of consensus with their political opponents.
That changed when control of education became a political objective. Traditionalists accused the liberals of destroying the pillars of society, as indeed they were. In hindsight, the battle between the left and right which ensued seems to be a perennial facet of human nature.
Scientific, artistic, any other cultural achievements under Hapsburg rule are too numerous to mention here. Suffice it to say that Western civilization owes much to the peoples of those lands that the Hapsburgs controlled for a millennium.