II.

Background

Ever since it had been re-established as a European Great Power at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the agglomeration of territories ruled by the Habsburgs, known since 1804 as the Austrian Empire, had faced a number of threats; internally from nationalists and liberals dissatisfied with the centralized, absolutist regime, and externally from ambitious states such as Piedmont and Prussia that challenged the dominant position it had acquired in Italy and Germany by the peace settlement of 1815. For almost half a century Habsburg rulers managed to contain these threats with the aid of such centripetal forces as the army, the Roman Catholic Church, and the bureaucracy, and with the benevolent tolerance, and sometimes armed support, of its “super-Power” partners in the anti-Napoleonic coalition—Great Britain and Russia. Thus, it emerged from the welter of constitutional experiments, political conflicts, and wars that characterized the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe with the absolute power of the new Emperor Francis Joseph I apparently restored. By 1859, however, having forfeited Russian support by its attitude of unfriendly neutrality in the Crimean War, the Habsburg monarchy had suffered military defeat and loss of territory in Italy at the hands of France and Piedmont, and faced a growing Prussian challenge to its authority as head of the German Confederation. Internal weaknesses were exacerbating these problems: in the war of 1859 the monarchy had had to retain forces in Hungary to repress simmering discontent; and the financial situation was not helped by the unwillingness of the German liberal bourgeoisie to lend money to an irresponsible absolutist regime. The early 1860s, therefore, saw a number of constitutional experiments designed to bring internal harmony and equip the monarchy to defend its remaining interests in Central Europe. The February Patent of 1861 established a constitutional regime that, although it was boycotted by the Hungarians and failed to satisfy many Slavs, was welcomed by the Emperor’s German subjects; but in 1866 attempts to secure a political settlement with the Magyar elite in Hungary were overtaken by the Seven Weeks’ War, the defeat of Austria and her expulsion from the German Confederation.