| The New Europe | |
| Vol. I, No. 7. | November 30, 1916 |
Austria under Francis Joseph
"Francis Joseph" became Emperor of Austria on 2nd December, 1848, in his eighteenth year, and he reigned for sixty-eight years. At the beginning of his reign the whole of Europe was shaken by revolution—the inevitable result of former disturbances, and, in particular, of the great French Revolution. Turkey and Russia were the only countries to escape the full effects of that political and spiritual upheaval, although, even in Russia, it was the ideas to which it gave birth that prompted the Emperor Nicholas I. to inaugurate a régime of the severest repression.
Until 1848 Austria was completely under the influence of Metternich, who inspired the old Habsburg system, and, indeed, gave his name to it as a kind of label. Only once, under the Emperor Joseph II., did Austria accept the modern ideas of Western Europe. It was at the time when the Great Revolution was being evolved, when Frederick the Great and even the Empress Catherine were the leaders of the so-called "enlightened" absolutism; but the French Revolution cooled all such liberal aspirations, not only on the part of the reigning sovereigns, but of the ruling classes, aristocracy and plutocracy alike. Europe for a time restored the foundations of the old régime, and Austria, under the Emperor Francis, became the bulwark of the reaction.
The French Revolution strengthened the growing nationalist feeling and led to the establishment of the national principle in politics, and it was this very movement that drove Austria, in view of her many subject nationalities, to adopt an attitude rigorously anti-national and anti-democratic. She was strengthened in this resolve by the spectacle of the Turkish Empire, which was at that very time being shaken by the rising nationalist feeling of the Serbs and Greeks.
In order fully to understand the reactionary system of government which has characterised Austria-Hungary, and which one of the greatest Austrian poets has stigmatised as "the murder of the spirit," it will be necessary to bear in mind the main outline of that empire's historical development.
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