Eduard, count von Taaffe

Eduard, count von Taaffe (born Feb. 24, 1833, Vienna, Austria—died Nov. 29, 1895, Ellischau, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now Nalžovy, Czech Republic]) was a statesman and twice prime minister of Austria (1868–70 and 1879–93) who controlled most of the empire’s quarreling nationalities and forged a conservative coalition that remained in power longer than any other ministry during the reign of the emperor Francis Joseph.

Taaffe, who was of Irish descent and was Francis Joseph’s boyhood friend, entered the Austrian civil service in 1852 and rose rapidly. After serving as governor of Upper Austria, minister of the interior, and minister of defense and public security, he became prime minister in 1868 but resigned in 1870 because his advocacy of concessions to the Czechs caused a government crisis. Again minister of the interior (1870–71 and 1879) and governor of Tirol from 1871, he returned as prime minister in August 1879, governing for the next 14 years with the support of conservative clericals and Polish and Czech landowners, a coalition that became known as Taaffe’s Iron Ring. His greatest success was the restoration of a modicum of order by granting concessions to the nationalist aspirations of Poles and Czechs and bringing them into the Habsburg civil service. The demands of the Czech nationalists became increasingly radical, however, and Taaffe finally lost control of his coalition, resigning over the Reichsrat’s (parliament’s lower house) rejection of his enlarged suffrage bill in November 1893.