Historians and the State in the Habsburg Lands - article ; n°1 ; vol.171, pg 203-218

Robert J.W.Evans

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Publications de l'École française de Rome - Année 1993 - Volume 171 - Numéro 1 - Pages 203-218
The historiography of the State in Habsburg Central Europe is a difficult and elusive subject. Those who have written about it have belonged to diverse and often divergent national traditions, while the composite polity ruled over by the Habsburgs remained very hard to handle conceptually. This paper introduces the three main territorial elements within that historiography, Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, which correspond to the three main constitutional elements within the Monarchy. At the same time it seeks to identify common themes by examining in turn the three main stages of reflection on the evolution and contemporary structure of the Monarchy : a dynastic era before the 1860s, a liberal age, and the neo-conservative decades after 1918. At all points historians' interpretations of earlier periods of Statebuilding in the area were closely interwoven rather with current political concerns than with philosophical or theoretical issues.
16 pages

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• Publié par: PUBLICATIONS_DE_L-ECOLE_FRANCAISE_DE_ROME0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1993
• Nombre de lectures: 40
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Robert J. W. Evans
Historians and the State in the Habsburg Lands
In: Visions sur le développement des États européens. Théories et historiographies de l'État moderne. Actes du
colloque de Rome (18-31 mars 1990). Rome : École Française de Rome, 1993. pp. 203-218. (Publications de
l'École française de Rome, 171)
Abstract
The historiography of the State in Habsburg Central Europe is a difficult and elusive subject. Those who have written about it
have belonged to diverse and often divergent national traditions, while the composite polity ruled over by the Habsburgs
remained very hard to handle conceptually. This paper introduces the three main territorial elements within that historiography,
Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, which correspond to the three main constitutional elements within the Monarchy. At the same
time it seeks to identify common themes by examining in turn the three main stages of reflection on the evolution and
contemporary structure of the Monarchy : a dynastic era before the 1860s, a liberal age, and the neo-conservative decades after
1918. At all points historians' interpretations of earlier periods of Statebuilding in the area were closely interwoven rather with
current political concerns than with philosophical or theoretical issues.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Evans Robert J. W. Historians and the State in the Habsburg Lands. In: Visions sur le développement des États européens.
Théories et historiographies de l'État moderne. Actes du colloque de Rome (18-31 mars 1990). Rome : École Française de
Rome, 1993. pp. 203-218. (Publications de l'École française de Rome, 171)
http://www.persee.fr/web/ouvrages/home/prescript/article/efr_0000-0000_1993_act_171_1_3040ROBERT J. W. EVANS
HISTORIANS AND THE STATE
IN THE HABSBURG LANDS
Before the notion of a "State" existed, there could be no writing
about the State, historical or otherwise. In Central Europe the term
spread slowly and hesitantly. In Zedler's Universal-Lexikon of 1744
the word "Staat" is given two meanings : the first, equivalent to
Stand or status ("nichts anders als die Regierung oder die
Regierungs-Forme und Verfassung zwischen Obrigkeit und
Unterthanen eines Landes") receives nineteen lines; the second,
equivalent to Etat ("eine besondere Verfassung, es sey eines gantzen
Regiments, oder eines Stücks in demselben") earns twenty-seven;
whereas the previous entry, on "Staar" (cataract on the eye), enjoys
sixty-eight columns space. So far as the Habsburgs were concerned,
their realm was semantically an Empire, and their Staat long merely Hofstaat, or court-list and aulic administration. The well-
known Elzevier publication of 1637, entitled Status Particularis
Regiminis Ferdinandi II, also translated into English as The
Particular State..., bore witness to that.
Whereas in the German territorial principalities Staatsbildung,
the extension of executive power and rank to embrace the polity as a
whole, formed a reasonably clear-cut progression, it was long
impossible for, and undesired by, the Habsburgs themselves. On the
one hand, such a process of definition might imply limits in
Germany and northern Italy to traditional kinds of loose hegemony,
with their powerful symbolism and myriad channels of influence.
On the other hand, the dynasty had to respect the separate standing
of its other dominions, especially the residues of the two east-central
European commonwealths of Hungary and Bohemia, which
possessed certain attributes of statehood and where sovereignty was
historically shared between the Crown and the estates. Maria
Monarchy" or "my Theresa, as in her "Testament", ruled over "my
House", rather than over "my State"; and that terminology survived
until the first substantial continuous account of the evolution of the
Habsburg lands, the History of the House of Austria (1807) by the
English cleric, William Coxe. Public law literature, with its
important historical dimension, was likewise backward in the
Monarchy; it was left to Germans such as Conring and Pufendprf, 204 ROBERT J. W. EVANS
Moser, Moser and Pütter, almost as if Austrians feared to presume
to penetrate the secrets of the Reichsidee.
But from the 1740s new pressures emerged : provocation from
the most advanced rival German polity; the disloyalty of Bohemian
feudals; a continuing struggle with Hungarian particularism.
Austrian enlightened absolutism, especially that of Joseph II, began
cultivating the idea of the State, mediated by the ideals of service
and patriotism. A Haus- und Staatskanzlei was established in 1742
for the conduct of foreign policy, gaining domestic influence too
under the masterful Staatskanzler Kaunitz by the 1760s. It acquired
Maria Theresa's Hausarchiv, later known as the Haus- Hof- und
Staatsarchiv, a key focus for future historiography. Then came the
creation of a Staatsrat from 1760, as the highest advisory body to the
sovereign. A concerted programme developed, harnessing a greatly
expanded bureaucracy to the purpose of centralizing reform in the
economic and social, religious and educational, administrative and
welfare spheres at home, and maintaining thereby a greatly
expanded army for Habsburg ambitions abroad. The programme's
particular targets were the entrenched traditional authority of
estates and Church, and its style and justification were largely
unhistorical, indeed often anti-historical. But its massive
documentation (including the first-fruits in Austria of that most
statist science of statistics) and some of the arguments on both sides
set the terms for later historical debate : a notable example is the
storm over the Court Librarian, A. F. Kollâr's vindication of the
ancient rights of the Hungarian Crown in ecclesiastical affairs.
Following a near-breakdown at the beginning of the 1790s, the
Josephinist legacy, with its achievements and its failures, remained
a crucial point of reference for all subsequent study of the genesis of
statehood in the region.
Only by the start of the nineteenth century, then, when its
foundations, according to the guidelines adopted for the present
project, were already well and truly laid, does the State come to be
perceived in a modern sense in Central Europe. Only then,
moreover, does historiography begin to come into its own.
The relation between those two propositions is an organic one : the
genetic view is essential to the very concept of a "modern state", as
Stephan Skalweit has shown. The first formative period for
investigating the origins of the State thus coincided with the
consolidation of new polities - in terminology especially, but also in
reality - which deeply coloured the assumptions of that
investigation. HISTORIANS AND THE STATE IN THE HABSBURG LANDS 205
In the Habsburg lands both processes were still delayed. The
1804 decree which established the style of "Emperor of Austria",
explicitly abstained from any innovatory declaration about
statehood. House" and Francis "without I assumed prejudice his new to the title rights "for the of our glory various of the
dominions"; though it probably did something for the claim to a
states" {vereinigter pristine unity of the "united Austrian body of
österreichischer Staaten-Körper) , as did the continuing
administrative consolidation and the role of Metternich as
Staatskanzler à la Kaunitz. Meanwhile scholarship moved only
gingerly beyond a dynastic and aulic framework, characterized by
the writings of Joseph von Hormayr and his activity as editor of the
Archiv für Geographie, Historie, Staats- und Kriegskunst. At length
even the deferential Hormayr lost official favour; the stagnant
universities were neither a threat nor an intellectual prop. The
language of a "Kaiserstaat Oesterreich" or "Kaisertum Oesterreich" ,
alongside traditional appellations, seems to have yielded no
significant theoretical discussion. The tension, familiar to historical
analysis, between the rising State as a vehicle for the power of the
absolute prince, and as locus for a system of rational administration
and law, still tended in the practice of the nineteenth-century
Habsburg dominions to be reduced by the mediation of officialdom
(a body whose legitimacy derived ultimately from the Hofstaat
tradition). Furthermore it was progressively mitigated in German
Austria by the readiness of critics to accept dynastic authority as a
guarantee against total breakdown; progressively distorted in
Hungary and Bohemia by claims for national, rather than just
liberal or constitutional rights.
The challenge from those two kingdoms was as yet no more
complete than the defence of that Vienna-centred torso at which
they tilted. Hungarians certainly refined their conception of the
dualism of Crown and "country" (regnum, or orszag); and the
Hungarian regnum was a sufficiently coherent entity to profit,
before other parts of the region, from the Enlightenment's stimulus
to a more serious and criti