Immediately after the death of Charles the Pragmatic Sanction
was forgotten. A crowd of claimants called for various parts of
the Habsburg lands; Frederick the Great, talking less but acting
more, invaded and conquered Silesia, and it seemed likely that
the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy would at no long
interval follow the extinction of the Habsburg race. A Wittelsbach
prince, Charles Albert, elector of Bavaria, the emperor
Charles VII., and not Francis Stephen, was chosen emperor in
January 1742, and by the treaty of Breslau, made later in the
same year, nearly all Silesia was formally surrendered to Prussia.
But the worst was now over, and when in 1748 the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle, which practically confirmed the treaty of
Breslau, had cleared away the dust of war, Maria Theresa and
her consort were found to occupy a strong position in Europe.
In the first place, in September 1745, Francis had been chosen
emperor; then the imperial pair ruled Hungary and Bohemia,
although the latter kingdom was shorn of Silesia; in spite of
French conquests the Austrian Netherlands remained in their
hands; and in Italy Francis had added Tuscany to his wife’s
heritage, although Parma and Piacenza had been surrendered
to Spain and part of Milan to the king of Sardinia. The diplomatic
volte-face and the futile attempts of Maria Theresa to
recover Silesia which followed this treaty belong to the general
history of Europe.
The emperor Francis I. died in 1765 and was succeeded by his son Joseph II., an ambitious and able prince, whose aim was to restore the Habsburgs and the Empire to their former great positions in Europe, and whose pride did not prevent him from learning from Frederick the Great, the despoiler of his house. His projects, however, including one of uniting Bavaria with Austria, which was especially cherished, failed completely, and when he died in February 1790 he left his lands in a state of turbulence which reflected the general condition of Europe. The Netherlands had risen against the Austrians, and in January 1790 had declared themselves independent; Hungary, angered by Joseph’s despotic measures, was in revolt, and the other parts of the monarchy were hardly more contented. But the 18th century saw a few successes for the Habsburgs. In 1718 a successful war with Turkey was ended by the peace of Passarowitz, which advanced the Austrian boundary very considerably to the east, and although by the treaty of Belgrade, signed twenty-one years later, a large part of this territory was surrendered, yet a residuum, the banate of Temesvar, was permanently incorporated with Hungary. The struggle over the succession to Bavaria, which was concluded in 1779 by the treaty of Teschen, was responsible for adding Innviertel, or the quarter of the Inn, to Austria; the first partition of Poland brought eastern Galicia and Lodomeria, and in 1777 the sultan ceded Bukovina. Joseph II. was followed by his brother, Leopold II., who restored the Austrian authority in the Netherlands, and the latter by his son Francis II., who resigned the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806, having two years before taken the title of emperor of Austria as Francis I.
Before the abdication of the emperor Francis in 1806 Austria had met and suffered from the fury of revolutionary France, but the cessions of territory made by her at the treaties of Campo Formio (1797), of Lunéville (1801) and of Pressburg (1805) were of no enduring importance. This, however, cannot be said for the treaties of Paris and of Vienna, which in 1814 and 1815 arranged the map of Europe upon the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. These were highly favourable to the Habsburgs. In eastern and central Europe Austria regained her former position, the lands ceded to Bavaria and also eastern Galicia, which had been in the hands of Russia since 1809, being restored; she gave up the Austrian Netherlands, soon to be known as Belgium, to the new kingdom of the Netherlands, and acquiesced in the arrangement which had taken from her the Breisgau and the remnant of the Habsburg lands upon the Rhine. In return for these losses Austria became the dominant power in Italy. A mass of northern Italy, including her former possessions in Milan and the neighbourhood, and also the lands recently forming the republic of Venice, was made into the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, and this owned the emperor of Austria as king. Across the Adriatic Dalmatia was added to the Habsburg monarchy, the population of which, it has been estimated, was increased at this time by over four millions.
The illiberal and oppressive character of the Austrian rule in Italy made it very unpopular; it was hardly less so in Hungary and Bohemia, and the advent of the year 1848 found the subject kingdoms eager to throw off the Habsburg yoke. The whole monarchy was quickly in a state of revolution, in the midst of which the emperor Ferdinand, who had succeeded his father Francis in 1835, abdicated, and his place was taken by his young nephew Francis Joseph. The position of the Habsburg monarchy now seemed desperate. But it was strong in its immemorial tradition, which was enough to make the efforts of the Frankfort parliament to establish German unity under Prussian hegemony abortive; it was strong also in the general loyalty to the throne of the imperial army; and its counsels were directed by statesmen who knew well how to exploit in the interests of the central power the national rivalries within the monarchy. With the crushing of the Hungarian revolt by the emperor Nicholas I. of Russia in 1849 the monarchy was freed from the most formidable of its internal troubles; in 1850 the convention of Olmütz restored its influence in Germany.
Though the status quo was thus outwardly re-established, the revolutions of 1848 had really unchained forces which made its maintenance impossible. In Germany Prussia was steadily preparing for the inevitable struggle with Austria for the mastery; in France Napoleon III. was preparing to pose as the champion of the oppressed nationalities which had once more settled down sullenly under the Habsburg yoke. The alliance of the French emperor and the king of Sardinia, and the Italian war of 1859 ended in the loss of Lombardy to the Habsburgs. Seven years later the crushing defeat of Königgrätz not only ended their long rule in Italy, based on the tradition of the medieval empire, by leading to the cession of Venetia to the new Italian kingdom, but led to their final exclusion from the German confederation, soon to become, under the headship of Prussia, the German empire.
By the loss of the predominance in Germany conceded to it by the treaties of Vienna, and by the shifting of its “centre of gravity” eastward, the Habsburg monarchy, however, perhaps gained more than it lost. One necessary result, indeed, was the composition (Ausgleich) with Hungary in 1867, by which the latter became an independent state (Francis Joseph being crowned king at Pest in June 1867) bound to the rest of the monarchy only by the machinery necessary for the carrying out of a common policy in matters of common interest. This at least restored the loyalty of the Hungarians to the Habsburg dynasty; it is too soon yet to say that it secured permanently the essential unity of the Habsburg monarchy. By the system of the Dual Monarchy the rest of the Austrian emperor’s dominions (Cis-Leithan) were consolidated under a single central government, the history of which has been mainly that of the rival races within the empire struggling for political predominance. Since the development of the constitution has been consistently in a democratic direction and the Slavs are in a great majority, the tendency has been for the German element—strong in its social status and tradition of predominance—to be swamped by what it regards as an inferior race; and a considerable number of Austrian “Germans” have learned to look not to their Habsburg rulers, but to the power of the German empire for political salvation. The tendency eastwards of the monarchy was increased when in 1878 the congress of Berlin placed Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austrian rule. Old ambitions were now revived at the expense of the Ottoman empire, the goal of which was the port of Salonica; and not the least menacing aspect of the question of the near East has been that the rivalry of Italy and the Habsburg monarchy has been transferred to the Balkan peninsula. Yet, in spite of internal
