The voting rights for the communities and individual parliaments, which were legislated within the framework of the “February patent” in 1861, from which the representatives in the Reichsrat were to be elected were quite clearly tailored to satisfy the interests of the bourgeoisie. Seeing that it was, in principle, a matter of controlling finances, the right to vote was linked to the tax payments: each person who paid a direct tax (property, trade, building, or income tax) in the communities was entitled to vote. However, only the top two-thirds of community voters, and those in the cities who paid taxes amounting to more than 10 guilders annually, were entitled to vote for the parliaments. Those in possession of an education patent – teachers, professors, priests, doctors, engineers, and attorneys, as well as captains in coastal regions – were also eligible. The aim was to ensure that community councils, parliaments and the “Reichsrat” were dominated by “property and education”.
It was not until 1867 – after the defeat at Königgrätz – that these representative bodies were given more responsibilities and all citizens were given the five fundamental constitutional rights (“December Constitution”) that had long been demanded by the liberal bourgeoisie: independence of the judiciary, the separation of justice and the administration, and a clear definition of the positions of the parliament and (imperial) government. This resulted in the introduction of the first government to be made up almost entirely of men from the bourgeoisie – the “citizens ministry”. To provide a balance to so much bourgeois culture, its head, the Minister-President, was “Carlos” Prinz Auersperg, the “first cavalier of the empire”. The bourgeois ministers actually did particularly good work. Here, I should mention the passing of the Elementary School Law that was presented to the Reichsrat by the Minister of Education Hasner Ritter von Arta (1818–1891). In the years before 1875, the representatives of the bourgeoisie, German, centralistic liberalism developed considerable problem-solving competence in areas that, in the future, would make “civil-society” commitment easier. These included the Cooperatives Law (1873), which complemented the freedom of association in the area of economic activity that had been attained in 1867. The liberals also simplified the self-organisation of workers through the coalition freedom. However, after several confessional laws, its creative powers became paralysed around 1875. The liberals became the defenders of the already-achieved legal and material possibilities, but they lost their role in the forefront of bourgeois society. They truly became conservative.
The weaknesses of the bourgeoisie of the Habsburg monarchy
The stock exchange crash of 1873, and the prolonged economic crisis that followed, shattered faith in the supposedly so beneficial power of the free market, as well as in liberal politics. This was further aggravated by shameless corruption in the circles of the liberal parliamentarians who had been rewarded with shares in railway companies for passing various railway laws.13
The antiliberal criticism targeted the bourgeois liberals as politicians who cashed in on their office who exploited farmers, small tradesmen, and labourers, and even deprived them of their political rights. Did they not benefit from this state, whose authoritarian orientation was, in fact, extremely advantageous to the bourgeoisie, which (from a theoretical perspective) was so strongly focused on independence and personal freedom – insomuch as the state provided the bourgeoisie with everything they needed, like a gigantic common market, protection of property and parliamentary budget control? This criticism went hand in hand with those antisemitic positions that continued to live on among many Catholics as a result of the church’s condemnation of Jews as the “murderers of Christ”. In the Catholic “Vaterland” newspaper from 20 December 1871, the liberal economic laws (abolition of the guilds, freedom of trade, mobilisation of peasant property, abolition of usuary laws, etc.) were criticised as tearing down “all the barriers” that protected the Christian people to the benefit of the Jews. “The workers and craftsmen are moving into the factories, property into the hands, houses into the possession, and the people’s wealth, into the pockets, of the Jews (…).14
The defensive position taken by bourgeois liberalism from around 1875 was also connected with the numerical relationships. From around 1870, it would have probably been possible to circumscribe the largest section of bourgeoisie with those who were entitled to vote in cities and industrial locations. Later, the extension of the electoral law made this increasingly less likely. If it can be assumed that “bourgeois” presupposes a certain income, the statistics on personal income tax, which were introduced in 1896, provide a first approximation. At the time, around 6.5 per cent of all employed people were taxpayers. The 33 per cent (or about 300,00 wage earners) who had an income of more than 2400 crowns must certainly be classified as middle-class. Assuming that an average bourgeois household was made up of 4 people, the middle classes consisted of at least 1.2 million people or about 4.6 per cent of the total population of the Austrian part of the empire that totalled around 26 million in 1900. The prominent liberal politician Ernst von Plener (1841–1923) also referred to the small size of the Austrian middle classes during the debate on universal suffrage in 1905/06 – according to his calculations, while 3.4 per cent of the Austrian population was subject to income tax, the figure was 9 per cent in Prussia and as high as 13 per cent in Saxony.15
This picture changes if the Western half of the Habsburg monarchy (Cisleithania) is compared with the territory of the Republic of Austria. Of course, this is due to the fact that, after the collapse of the monarchy, the most important bourgeois centre, the metropolis of Vienna, came to lie on its territory.
Around 1900, about a quarter of all taxpayers lived in Vienna and they earned almost exactly one third of all taxable income in old Austria. The dominance of Vienna among the higher income brackets emerges even more clearly: In 1907, only a quarter of the low-bracket taxpayers lived in Vienna, but this rose to 45 per cent among the “rich” (over 12,000 crowns annual income) and close to 52 per cent among the “very wealthy” (over 40,000 crowns annual income). This shows that more than half of all top incomes were assessed in Vienna!16
If one considers the comparatively small number of bourgeois existences, it comes as almost no surprise that these classes were relatively weak in the overall system of the monarchy. The strength of these groups was diminished even more by three additional problems:
1 1 The not especially large bourgeois classes were divided into a few metropolitan (especially Viennese) configurations and many groups in small and medium-sized towns with few parallels in connection with wealth, culture, and political positions. The dense network of large medium, and small large, towns that existed in Germany (and England) was missing. This differentiation was further increased by the fact that, although the Viennese bourgeoisie clearly dominated the economic sphere, it did not take the lead in the cultural and political life of the monarchy – as was the case with the Parisian bourgeoisie for example. This is because, on the one hand, the Viennese bourgeoisie was consciously German – this hindered any identification on the part of this leading bourgeoisie with the non-German middle-classes and on the other hand, it was strongly perceived to be “Jewish” – and this created a considerable gulf between the liberal upper classes and the increasingly antisemitic middle and lower classes. This perception also prevented the identification of the – mainly German-national (or: Christian social) – antisemitic medium and small towns with the liberal bourgeoisie in Vienna.17
2 2 The ongoing democratisation of the political life that ultimately led to universal suffrage for men in 1906 undermined the hardly resilient, precarious domination of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie even more. The nationalistic, antisemitic, and socialist mass movements threatened the bourgeois positions and contributed to “bourgeois” changing from being another word for “progressive” to a metaphor for cautious, security conscious, progress sceptical, and defensive to the demands for further political modernisation. It is possible that democratisation did not reach old-Austria too late, but too early – before