The name “Austrian Empire” is linked to its history: The Austrian Empire is the successor to the HRE. The Austrian Empire began when the HRE ended in 1806. The starting date for the HRE itself is subject to debate, depending on which event one takes to be the origin of the HRE. Commonly, either 800 A.D. or 962 A.D. is listed as the beginning of the HRE.
The term “Habsburg Empire” is also frequently used, and applies both to the Austrian Empire and the HRE — the Habsburgs ruled the HRE for the majority of its existence, although “rule” might not be the right verb: the emperor did not have absolute power, and to the contrary, often had to negotiate and compromise to get a majority of the HRE’s nobles to agree with his plans.
The Austrian Empire ended in 1867, with the creation of the “personal union” of Hungary with the rest of the Habsburg lands. For the present discussion, however, the term “Austrian Empire” will be taken to refer to the totality of 1804 to 1918. More cumbersome, but perhaps more legally accurate, names like “Austria-Hungary” or the “Austro-Hungarian Empire” or the “Austro-Hungarian Monarchy” refer to the phase from 1867 to 1918, but here “Austrian Empire” will be used for the monarchy from 1804 to 1918.
Retaining his title as Holy Roman Emperor, Franz declared into existence the Austrian Empire, which consisted of those parts of the HRE which were his family’s hereditary territories. The other parts of the HRE had their own monarchs and dynasties. Franz provided for the eventuality of his no longer being Holy Roman Emperor: in that case, he would still be able to claim imperial status. The Austrian Empire was his backup empire.
What Franz foresaw came to pass.
The Austrian Empire was created in 1804. By 1806, Franz dissolved the HRE, in order to avoid Napoleon installing himself as Holy Roman Emperor or destroying the empire if he could not claim the imperial title. Franz could make the relatively smooth transition from being Franz II of the HRE to being Franz I of the Austrian Empire.
So, confusingly, Franz II and Franz I are the same man. First he was Franz II of the HRE, meaning that he was the second emperor named Franz; Franz I was not his father, and not even his grandfather, but a much earlier emperor in the lineage. Franz I ruled the HRE from 1515 to 1547; Franz II ruled the HRE from 1792 to 1806. To complicate matters further, the name is also sometimes spelled Francis.
Then Franz II of the HRE became Franz I of the Austrian Empire. He was the first emperor of the Austrian Empire, and therefore the first Austrian Emperor to be named Franz.
Franz not only preserved his own dignity; he preserved the status of the Habsburg dynasty.
The Habsburg family had ruled the HRE almost continuously since 1273. There were a few years when a different family ruled the HRE. After 1806, the Habsburgs ruled the Austrian Empire until its demise in 1918.
This provides a glimpse into the mentality of an era from before the time of the nation-state. The “nation-state” is a geopolitical concept which defined much of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the “nation-state” understanding, the world is a collection of nation-states: France, China, Canada, Italy, Germany, etc. A “nation-state” consists of a nation, i.e. a group defined and united by culture and ethnicity, and a state, i.e. a defined territory on the map with a single government to manage it.
There is another way to look at the world. Instead of dividing it into nation-states, it can be organized by dynasties. For people living in the first half of the twenty-first century, it takes effort to understand this outlook. The ordinary citizens of that era viewed themselves not as Englishmen or Spaniards or Frenchmen, but rather as loyal to the Plantagenets, Stuarts, or Tudors, in the case of the Englishman; loyal to the House of Trastámara or the Spanish Habsburgs in the case of the Spaniard; loyal to the Capetian dynasty or the Bourbon dynasty in the case of the Frenchman.
In the minds of the people of that era, they were not loyal to a country — to England, Spain, or France — but rather to the respective royal families which happened to be in power at the time.
Thus it was among the people in the Habsburg Empire — which is to say, the Austrian Empire. To modern eyes and ears, the phrase “Austrian Empire” alludes to the modern nation-state of Austria. But in 1804, Austria did not exist as a state. The citizens of the Austrian Empire included Hungarians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Tirolians, Italians, Bohemians, and others. (Bohemians equate approximately to the region and people of the current Czech Republic.) These people thought of themselves politically as subjects of the Habsburg family. They thought of themselves culturally and ethnically as Hungarians, Austrians, Slovaks, etc.
Indeed it was the earliest waves of nationalist which taught the people to think of themselves as Tirolians, Italians, Slovenes, Bohemians, etc., and thereby spread the poison which eventually killed the dynasties.
Before the emergence of nationalism, the HRE and later the Austrian Empire were multi-national, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual. The empire was not united by language, culture, or ethnicity; it was united by the Habsburg dynasty and by allegiance to the reigning member of this dynasty. Indeed, in the final years of the empire, it assumed the structure of a “personal union,” in which different parts of the empire were not united in their laws, constitutions, or legal systems, but rather only by the fact that the same person was the monarch of them.
The end of the HRE and the beginning of the Austrian Empire reveal the weakening of the dynastic imperial concept, although the final decline of it would take more than another century, as historian Benjamin Curtis writes:
This new Austrian Empire did not fare well in fresh hostilities against Napoleon, the War of the Third Coalition (which also included Britain and Russia) that started in 1805. After a crushing victory over Austria at Ulm in October 1805, Napoleon advanced on Vienna and occupied it in November. The royal family fled, and Napoleon made his headquarters at Schönbrunn. Archduke Karl brought round an army from Italy, and linked up with Russian troops under Kutuzov. They met Napoleon in battle at Austerlitz in December 1805, which became one of Austria’s worst defeats. The terms in the subsequent treaty of Pressburg were onerous: Napoleon’s allies Bavaria and Württemberg were raised to the status of kingdoms and received a number of Habsburg possessions such as Tirol and Vorarlberg. Franz also lost Venice and the Adriatic territories he had gained in 1797. Together with the French occupation of Vienna, this was a terrible humiliation. It was compounded in July of 1806 when 16 imperial princes organized into the new Confederation of the Rhine under Napoleon’s protection, and Napoleon demanded that the imperial crown be delivered to him. This for Franz was the writing on the wall; rather than let Napoleon seize the German imperial title, Franz decided to end the Empire altogether. Thus on 1 August Franz declared the Holy Roman Empire dead at the age of 1006. This act demonstrated a streak of realism on Franz’s part. He knew that he could not fulfill his duties to defend the title nor the Empire from Napoleon. He also desperately needed peace, and felt that he had to focus on the interests of his Hereditary Lands. Though he did relinquish the imperial title held by his family for most of the preceding 400 years, he did not relinquish the symbolism: he moved all the old imperial relics and regalia to Vienna, to the seat of the new dynastic empire.
Although the Austrian Empire was created because Franz anticipated the end of the HRE, and although the Austrian Empire flirted with its own demise until 1815, it eventually stabilized enough to raise hopes that it might survive. Yet, even after Napoleon’s final defeat, and after the masterpiece of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna, the Austrian Empire was not a powerful or geopolitically dominant force.
The geography of the Austrian Empire, as historian Aaron Wess Mitchell notes, left it with no major salt-water harbors or ports — it had intermittent and unsteady access to the Adriatic by means of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Trieste in the Italian parts of Carniola, which were constituent parts of the empire. Carniola corresponds to parts of modern-day Slovenia, and Dalmatia corresponds to the coastal regions of Montenegro and Croatia. Briefly, the empire lacked major access points to the sea, which hampered it commercially and militarily.
By contrast, France, Spain, Italy, England, Prussia, Belgium, Holland, and Scandinavia all had easy and major access points to the sea.
A second topographical hindrance for the Austrian Empire was multiple frontiers with several hostile — or at least not reliably friendly — powers: Russia, Prussia, the Ottoman Empire, parts of Italy, and, at times, France, as Aaron Wess Mitchell notes.
Another difficulty was the not-always-enthusiastic participation of some parts of the empire. The Hungarians and the Bohemians were not always eager to follow the lead of the crown.
From its birth, the Austrian Empire was on a downward trajectory. Franz and the Habsburg emperors who followed him struggled to maintain an equilibrium among the various nations which composed the empire. Constitutions were written and rewritten; compromises and balances were brokered. Amidst this continuous struggle for survival, the Austrian Empire slowly lost its clout. It was sliding into a status which was secondary to Prussia, Russia, France, and Britain, with whom it had once been an equal.
It is amazing, given that Austria was gradually becoming a second-tier power, that it managed to do as well as it did for as long as it did. One of the keys to the somewhat unlikely success of the Austrian Empire, and the reason it was able to sustain itself for over a century, was Klemens von Metternich.
The diplomatic brilliance of Metternich, Foreign Minister and later Chancellor of Austria in the service of the Habsburgs, earned him international fame at the Congress of Vienna. This conference, from late 1814 to early 1815, was a gathering of major world leaders. Their goal was to find a diplomatic solution to potential conflicts between countries: they hoped to establish a system which would prevent future wars.
Europe had suffered twenty-five years of nearly uninterrupted warfare: the ten years of the French Revolution and the twenty-five years of Napoleon. There was a strong desire for peace.
Metternich conceived of an arrangement in which Europe would be centered around five major powers: England, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The five major powers were to be of approximately equal strength. This, Metternich reasoned, would prevent any one of them from grasping hegemony; if conflict erupted between any two of them, the remaining three would be strong enough to impose peace and thereby prevent bloodshed. The dozens of smaller countries would find a peaceful existence in the equilibrium created by the big five.
Among the results of the Congress of Vienna, which included the condemnation and end of slave trade, were two outcomes which might have surprised some observers.
The first was the survival of France, which could have been dismembered into a number of small and insignificant kingdoms, given that France had caused the continuous bloodshed of the previous twenty-five years. France was saved at the Congress by the diplomatic skills of Charles Talleyrand, who negotiated to obtain for France a place as one of the big five.
The second was Metternich’s success in persuading Russia, England, and Prussia to view Austria as an equal. Austria was doubtless significant, but also arguably the least of the big five. Metternich managed to place Austria into the role of being the diplomatic hub for Europe, a role which Austria kept, and keeps, long after the demise of both Metternich and the Habsburgs.
It was Austria’s diplomatic, not military, skill which enabled its longevity.
Prior to creation of the Austrian Empire in 1804, prior to the dissolution of the HRE in 1806, and prior to the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, Austria denoted merely a region within the HRE, a region which happened to be the home territory of the Habsburgs, but otherwise not a major world power.
Metternich was essential to the Austrian Empire, as historian A.J.P. Taylor writes:
This Austria was personified in Metternich, who became Foreign Minister in 1809 and who represented Austria to Europe for thirty-nine years. For him, as for Europe, Austria was a diplomatic term. He was a German from the Rhineland, western European in upbringing and outlook, a belated rationalist of the Enlightenment, delighting to construct abstract systems of politics and convinced of his infallibility. Metternich’s diplomatic skill carried Austria through the dangerous years between 1809 and 1813, and made Austria the center of the European order which followed the downfall of Napoleon: the Congress of Vienna was the symbol of his achievement. For, since Austria was a European necessity, Europe was an Austrian necessity. Austria could not follow a policy of isolation, or even of independence; she had always to be justifying her existence, to be fulfilling a mission, to be constructing systems of alliance. Metternich’s foreign policy sprang from the hard experiences with which he had entered his office: he dreaded action, sought always to postpone decisions and cared only for repose. Europe, too, in the generation after Napoleon, desired repose; and thus Metternich was in tune with European sentiment. His misfortune was to outlive the war-weary generation and to survive into a Europe which demanded more positive ideals.
The Austrian Empire seemed to tick along nicely for a few decades. A big bump came with the revolutionary sentiment which rolled across nearly every European country in 1848-1849. The revolution failed in Austria, as it did in every other country, yet left its mark and affected thinking for the next few years.
In the wake of the revolutionary outburst, the Habsburg emperors partially and sporadically yielded to popular demands for a written constitution and for the recognition of national sentiments among the constituent nations of the Austrian Empire: Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia, etc. But the dynasty also partially and sporadically reasserted its monarchical power and authority.
Each of those constituent territories demanded acknowledgement of their languages and cultures. Among the populace, a significant percentage began to think of themselves, not as subjects of the Habsburg dynasty, but rather as Poles, Tirolian, Slovenes, etc. The emergence of these patriotic emotions undermined the stability and power of the imperial throne.
Language was one theater in which these tensions played out: The Hungarians wanted to operate their schools and bureaucracies in Hungarian, the Bohemians wanted to operate in Czech, etc.
These constituent regions, which retained in bits and pieces their own hereditary aristocracies and representative bodies, wanted those local governmental institutions to have increased sovereignty. The after-echoes of the failed revolutions lingered, and by 1867, Hungary obtained its status as an independent nation, not a part of the Austrian Empire. In return, Hungary acknowledged the reigning Habsburg, at the time Franz-Josef, to be its king. In a political arrangement known as a “personal union,” Franz-Josef was King of Hungary and Emperor of the Austrian Empire. Hungary was a sovereign state, which was in no way bound to the Austrian Empire, but which happened to have a king who was also the emperor of the Austrian Empire.
Some historians regard this as the end of the Austrian Empire, others merely see it as a reconfiguration of the Austrian Empire. In any case, the Habsburg hold on Hungary was weakened.
The Austrian Empire seemed to be losing influence. Yet it had tried to strengthen itself and grow. Between 1861 and 1867, a Habsburg sat on the throne in Mexico. Habsburg memories recalled times, decades earlier, in which they claimed territories in South America and the Philippines.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the empire was bargaining and negotiating for bits of territory, losing more than it gained. The Habsburgs, over their years as leaders of the HRE and as leaders of the Austrian Empire, ruled massive amounts of land. Their holdings in Europe peaked in the Middle Ages, when they controlled much of what would later be Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, as well as parts of Switzerland and France. In the early modern era, the Habsburgs oversaw a far-flung collection of territories, including Spain, Mexico, much of Central America and South America, and the Philippines.
By the end of the 1890s, however, it was losing its territories in Italy and in southern Germany, had already lost its territories in Switzerland, and had little land left on the Adriatic coast. Its ownership of territories in Hungary and in the Balkans was precarious, as were its claims to parts of Poland and Hungary. The overseas possessions were long-gone.
By 1918, several empires ended, either directly or indirectly as a result of WW1: the Prussian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Austrian empires all ceased. Although the Austrian Empire’s demise was tragic, in as much as it signaled the end of the empire’s contribution to the world’s cultural and diplomatic functioning, it was also a noteworthy achievement to have kept the empire alive for so long. The empire lasted over a thousand years, and the Habsburgs had been at the helm of it for over six hundred years.
