The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (34 page)

So long as the conservative powers in Europe were united in preserving the status quo—against French resurgence, or the “revolution” generally—this Habsburg weakness was concealed. By appealing to the ideological solidarity of the Holy Alliance, Metternich could usually be assured of the support of Russia and Prussia, which in turn allowed him a free hand to arrange the interventions against any liberal stirrings—whether by sending Austrian troops to put down the Naples insurrection of 1821, or by permitting the French military action in Spain to support the Bourbon regime, or by orchestrating the imposition of the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees (1819) upon the members of the German Federation. In much the same way, the Habsburg Empire’s relations with St. Petersburg and Berlin benefited from their shared interest in suppressing Polish nationalism, which for the Russian government was a far more vital issue than the occasional disagreements over Greece or the Straits; the joint suppression of the Polish revolt in Galicia and Austria’s incorporation of the Free City of Kracow in 1846 with the concurrence of Russia and Prussia showed
the advantages which could be gained from such monarchical solidarity.

Over the longer term, however, this Metternichian strategy was deeply flawed. A radical
social
revolution could fairly easily be kept in check in nineteenth-century Europe; whenever one occurred (1830, 1848, the 1871 Commune), the frightened middle classes defected to the side of “law and order.” But the widespread ideas and movements in favor of national self-determination, stimulated by the French Revolution and the various wars of liberation earlier in the century, could not be suppressed forever; and Metternich’s attempts to crush independence movements steadily exhausted the Habsburg Empire. By resolutely opposing any stirrings of national independence, Austria quickly lost the sympathy of its old ally, Britain. Its repeated use of military force in Italy provoked a reaction among all classes against their Habsburg “jailor,” which in turn was to play into the hands of Napoleon III a few decades later, when that ambitious French monarch was able to help Cavour in driving the Austrians out of northern Italy. In the same way, the Habsburg Empire’s unwillingness to join the Zollverein for economic reasons and the constitutional-geographical impossibility of its becoming part of a “greater Germany” disappointed many German nationalists, who then began to look to Prussia for leadership. Even the czarist regime, which generally supported Vienna’s efforts to crush revolutions, occasionally found it easier than Austria to deal with national questions: witness Alexander I’s policy, in cooperation with the British, of supporting Greek independence during the late 1820s despite all Metternich’s counterarguments.

The fact was that in an age of increasing national consciousness, the Habsburg Empire looked ever more of an anachronism. In each of the other Great Powers, it has been pointed out,

The Habsburg army, regarded as “one of the most important, if not the most important, single institutions” in the empire, reflected this ethnic diversity. “In 1865 [that is, the year before the decisive clash with Prussia for mastery of Germany], the army had 128,286 Germans, 96,300 Czechs and Slovaks, 52,700 Italians, 22,700 Slovenes, 20,700 Rumanians, 19,000 Serbs, 50,100 Ruthenes, 37,700 Poles, 32,500 Magyars, 27,600 Croats, and 5,100 men of other nationalities on its muster roles.”
⁴³
Although this made the army almost as colorful and variegated as the British-Indian regiments under the Raj, it also created all sorts of disadvantages when compared with the much more homogeneous French or Prussian armies.

This potential military weakness was compounded by the lack of adequate funding, which was due partly to the difficulties of raising taxes in the empire, but chiefly caused by the meagerness of its commercial and industrial base. Although historians now speak of “the economic rise of the Habsburg Empire”
⁴⁴
in the period 1760–1914, the fact is that during the first half of the nineteenth century industrialization occurred only in certain western regions, such as Bohemia, the Alpine lands, and around Vienna itself, whereas the greater part of the empire remained relatively untouched. While Austria itself advanced, therefore, the empire
as a whole
fell behind Britain, France, and Prussia in terms of per capita industrialization, iron and steel production, steam-power capacities, and so on.

What was more, the costs of the French wars “had left the empire financially exhausted, burdened with a heavy public debt and a mass of depreciated paper money,”
⁴⁵
which virtually compelled the government to keep military spending to a minimum. In 1830 the army was allocated the equivalent of only 23 percent of the total revenues (down from 50 percent in 1817), and by 1848 that share had sunk to 20 percent. When crises occurred, as in 1848–1849,1854–1855,1859–1860, and 1864, extraordinary increases in military spending were authorized; but they were never enough to bring the army up to anywhere like full strength, and they were just as swiftly reduced when the crisis was perceived to be over. For example, the military budget was 179 million florins in 1860, dropped to 118 million by 1863, rose to 155 million in the 1864 conflict with Denmark, and was drastically cut back to 96 million in 1865—again, just a year before the war with Prussia. None of these totals kept pace with the military budgets of France, Britain, and Russia, or (a little later) that of Prussia; and since the Austrian military administration was regarded as corrupt and inefficient even by mid-nineteenth-century standards, the monies which
were
allocated
were not very well spent. In sum, the armed strength of the Habsburg Empire in no way corresponded to the wars it might be called upon to fight.
⁴⁶

All this is not to antedate the demise of the empire. Its staying power, as many historians have remarked, was quite extraordinary: having survived the Reformation, the Turks, and the French Revolution, it also proved capable of weathering the events of 1848–1849, the defeat of 1866, and, until the very last stages, the strains of the First World War. While its weaknesses, were evident, it also possessed strengths. The monarchy commanded the loyalty not only of the ethnic German subjects but also of many aristocrats and “service” families in the non-German lands; its rule, say, in Poland was fairly benign compared with the Russian and Prussian administrations. Furthermore, the complex, multinational character of the empire, with its array of local rivalries, permitted a certain amount of
divide et impera
from the center, as its careful use of the army demonstrated: Hungarian regiments were stationed chiefly in Italy and Austria and Italian regiments in Hungary, half of the Hussar regiments were stationed abroad, and so on.
⁴⁷

Finally, it possessed the negative advantage that none of the other Great Powers—even when engaged in hostilities with the Habsburg Empire—knew what to put in its place. Czar Nicholas I might resent Austrian pretensions in the Balkans, but he was willing enough to lend an army to help crush the Hungarian revolution of 1848; France might intrigue to drive the Habsburgs out of Italy, but Napoleon III also knew that Vienna could be a useful future ally against Prussia or Russia; and Bismarck, though determined to expel all Austrian influence from Germany, was keen to preserve the Habsburg Empire as soon as it capitulated in 1866. As long as that situation existed, the Empire would survive—on sufferance.

    Despite its losses during the Napoleonic War, the position of France in the half-century following 1815 was significantly better than that of either Prussia or the Habsburg Empire in many respects.
⁴⁸
Its national income was much larger, and capital was more readily available; its population was far bigger than Prussia’s and more homogeneous than the Habsburg Empire’s; it could more easily afford a large army, and could pay for a considerable navy as well. Nonetheless, it is treated here as a “middle power” simply because strategical, diplomatic, and economic circumstances all combined to prevent France from concentrating its resources and gaining a decisive lead in any particular sphere.

The overriding fact about the years 1814–1815, at the power-political level, was that all of the other great states had shown themselves determined to prevent French attempts to maintain a hegemony over
Europe; and not only were London, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg willing to compose their quarrels on other issues (e.g., Saxony) in order to defeat Napoleon’s final bid, but they were also intent upon erecting a postwar system to block France off in the future from its traditional routes of expansion. Thus, while Prussia acted as guardian to the Rhineland, Austria strengthened its position in northern Italy, and British influence was expanded in the Iberian peninsula; behind all this lay a large Russian army, ready to move across Europe in defense of the 1815 settlement. In consequence, however, much Frenchmen of all parties might urge a policy of “recovery,”
⁴⁹
it was plain that no dramatic improvement Was possible. The best that could be achieved was, on the one hand, the recognition that France was an equal partner in the European Concert, and on the other, the restoration of French political influence in neighboring regions
alongside
that of the existing powers. Yet even when the French could achieve parity with, say, the British in the Iberian Peninsula and return to playing a major role in the Levant, they always had to be wary of provoking another coalition against them. Any move by France into the Low Countries, as it became clear in the 1820s and 1830s, instinctively produced an Anglo-Prussian alliance which was too strong to combat.

The other card available to Paris was to establish close relations with
one
of the Great Powers, which could then be exploited to secure French aims.
⁵⁰
Given the latent rivalries between the other states and the considerable advantages a French alliance could offer (money, troops, weapons), this was a plausible assumption; yet it was flawed in three respects. First, the other power might be able to exploit the French more than France could exploit it—as Metternich did in the mid-1830s, when he entertained French overtures simply to divide London and Paris. Secondly, the changes of regime which occurred in France in these decades inevitably affected diplomatic relations in a period where ideology played so large a role. For example, the long-felt hopes of an alliance with Russia crashed with the coming of the 1830 revolution in France. Finally, there remained the insuperable problem that while several of the other powers wanted to cooperate with France at certain times, none of them in this period desired a change in the status quo: that is, they offered the French only diplomatic friendship, not the promise of territorial gain. Not until after the Crimean War was there any widespread sentiment outside France for a reordering of the 1815 boundaries.

These obstacles might have appeared less formidable had France been as strong vis-à-vis the rest of Europe as it had been under Louis XIV at the height of his power, or under Napoleon at the height of his. But the fact was that France after 1815 was not a particularly dynamic country. Perhaps as many as 1.5 million Frenchmen had died in the wars of 1793–1815,
⁵¹
and, more significant still, the French population
increase was slower than that of any other Great Power throughout the nineteenth century. Not only had that lengthy conflict distorted the French economy in the various ways mentioned above (see pp. 131–33 above), but the coming of peace exposed it to the commercial challenge of its great British rival. “The cardinal fact for most French producers after 1815 was the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant and powerful industrial producer not only as their nearest neighbor but as a mighty force in all foreign markets and sometimes even in their own heavily protected domestic market.”
⁵²
This lack of competitiveness, the existing disincentives within France to modernize (e.g., small size of agricultural holdings, poor communications, essentially local markets, absence of cheap, readily available coal), and the loss of any stimulus from overseas markets meant that between 1815 and 1850 its rate of industrial growth was considerably less than Britain’s. At the beginning of the century, the latter’s manufacturing output was level with France’s; by 1830 it was 182.5 percent of France’s; and by 1860 that had risen to 251 percent.
⁵³
Moreover, even when France’s rate of railway construction and general industrialization began to quicken in the second half of the nineteenth century, it found to its alarm that Germany was growing even faster.

Yet it is now no longer so clear to historians that France’s economy during this century should be airily dismissed as “backward” or “disappointing”; in many respects, the path taken by Frenchmen toward national prosperity was just as logical as the quite different route taken by the British.
⁵⁴
The social horrors of the Industrial Revolution were less widespread in France; yet by concentration upon high-quality rather than mass-produced goods, the value per capita added to each manufacture was substantially greater. If the French on the whole did not invest domestically in large-scale industrial enterprises, this was often a matter of calculation rather than a sign of poverty or retardation. There was, in fact, considerable surplus capital in the country, much of which went into industrial investments elsewhere in Europe.
⁵⁵
French governments were not likely to be embarrassed by a shortage of funds, and there
was
investment in munitions and in metallurgical processes related to the armed forces. It was French inventors who produced the shell gun under General Paixhans, the “epoch-making ship designs” of the
Napoleon
and
La Gloire
, and the Minié bullet and rifling.
⁵⁶