The franchise question continued to dominate Austrian domestic affairs and became closely welded to the nationality conflicts. The next Austrian prime minister, Alfred, Fürst (prince) zu Windischgrätz (grandson of the Windischgrätz who seized Prague in 1848), sought to win the support of parliament by forming a cabinet in which the clerical conservatives, the Poles, and the German liberals were represented. They were united, however, only in opposition to universal suffrage. Each minister defended his national cause, and the ministry was torn by ceaseless conflict. The end came in June 1895, when the government fulfilled an old promise and introduced Slovene classes into the grammar school at Cilli (now Celje, Slovenia) in Steiermark. Because the school had been exclusively German, this was regarded as a grave blow to the German cause, and the German liberals resigned, forcing Windischgrätz himself to resign.

Embittered by the conduct of the German liberals, Franz Joseph on October 2 entrusted the task of solving Austria’s problems to a Polish aristocrat, Kasimir Felix, Graf (count) von Badeni, known as a “strong man” for the high-handed way in which he had acted as governor of Galicia. Little noticed at the time, the appointment of Badeni as Austrian prime minister symbolized the breakdown of German control over the Habsburg monarchy. For the first time in Habsburg history, Germans controlled none of the key positions of government. Not only the prime minister but also the finance minister (Leo, Ritter [knight] von Biliński) and the foreign minister (Agenor, Graf Gołuchowski, who had succeeded Gusztáv Siegmund, Graf Kálnoky von Köröspatak, in May 1895) came from the Polish part of the empire.

Badeni managed to induce parliament to accept a compromise franchise bill that introduced qualified universal male suffrage but preserved the system of class voting (a fifth curia was even added). The shortcomings of the new system enraged the parties representing the masses of the population. By 1897, however, elections held on the basis of the new suffrage had strengthened the radical elements in the Reichsrat; the Young Czechs, for instance, had completely overwhelmed the conservative Old Czechs.

In the 1870s and ’80s, decisive economic changes with far-reaching social consequences had occurred in the Habsburg lands. Though remaining primarily agrarian, they had undergone an industrialization that had resulted in an unprecedented growth of urban centres. Vienna, which had about 430,000 inhabitants in 1851, had become a metropolis of 1,800,000 by the turn of the 20th century, and that phenomenon was paralleled in other areas, especially in Bohemia, which had become the industrial centre of the western part of the Habsburg lands. Those socioeconomic developments naturally began to affect politics. From 1890 on, the advance of the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists caused considerable tension in Vienna. In October 1894 the Social Democrats held their first impressive orderly mass demonstration in the capital, and the communal elections of 1895 made the Christian Socialists the strongest party in Vienna, ending the long liberal rule. When the emperor refused to confirm Karl Lueger, the popular leader of the Christian Socialists, as mayor of Vienna, there were demonstrations and protests. Not until Lueger was elected mayor for the fifth time did Franz Joseph agree to confirm him, in April 1897.

Counting on support from the Slav and conservative parties in parliament, Badeni dared to take up the Bohemian-language question again. In April 1897 he issued a famous language ordinance that introduced Czech as a language equal to German even in the “inner service”—i.e., for communications within government departments. This decision meant that civil servants in Bohemia and Moravia would have to be able to speak and write Czech as well as German. Since many Germans refused to learn Czech, the ordinance put them at a definite disadvantage in Bohemia’s administration. The publication of the ordinance provoked violent German reactions: university professors signed resolutions of protest, mass meetings incited the public, and German deputies in the Reichsrat began to obstruct all legislative activities. The protest reached its climax in November 1897, when parliamentary sessions turned into bedlam, and popular protests against Badeni led to street demonstrations. The mass protest was not restricted to Vienna. It was even worse in some German towns in Bohemia; in Graz, clashes between soldiers and the masses ended in the death of one demonstrator.

To pacify the public, Franz Joseph gave in; on November 28, 1897, he dismissed Badeni and asked Paul, Freiherr (baron) Gautsch von Frankenthurn, a former minister of education, to form a government out of the German parties of parliament. Gautsch’s attempts to appease the Germans ran into obstruction from the Czechs. The scene of violence shifted from Vienna to Prague and from the Reichsrat to the Bohemian diet. In March 1898 Gautsch was replaced by the former governor of Bohemia, Franz Anton, Fürst zu Thun und Hohenstein, who failed within a year. Of his successors neither Manfred, Graf Clary und Aldringen, who formally revoked the Badeni language ordinance, nor Heinrich Wittek, who headed a short-lived cabinet of a few weeks, managed to solve the nationality problem.

On January 18, 1900, Franz Joseph asked Ernest von Koerber, a former minister of the interior, to form a new cabinet. Koerber was the only commoner to be appointed prime minister by Franz Joseph. As a leading bureaucrat, he formed his ministry from the ranks of other bureaucrats, concentrating in subsequent years on the administration of public affairs and economic programs rather than trying to deal with political problems. First by imperial decree and then, after some political bargaining, by consent of parliament, Koerber carried through a program of economic expansion, social legislation, and administrative reform; among his reforms was the liberation of the press from government and police control. By devious politicking, he managed to keep government activities free from national strife, but he could not prevent national emotions from becoming more and more extremist. The national conflict came to be fought over educational matters, and in the final years of Koerber’s government the desire for national universities aroused the sentiments of Italians, Slovenes, and Ruthenians—turning the traditional Czech-German conflict into a multinational one. In December 1904 Koerber’s various maneuverings faltered, and he was driven from office by a combination of parties.

The political climate in Austria was further complicated by the worsening of relations between the emperor and the Hungarian government. Hungarian separatists had agitated for the separation of the Habsburg army, and when Franz Joseph used an address to the troops at Chłopy (now in Poland) in 1903 for an unequivocal reaffirmation of the common and unified character of his army, a controversy developed that had repercussions in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. The plan to use universal suffrage—for which popular demand had strongly increased since the Russian Revolution of 1905—to break the opposition in Hungary actually furthered the cause of political democracy in Austria.

Electoral reform

Gautsch, who had been reappointed as prime minister, oversaw a bill that would instate universal franchise in Austria. This first bill, introduced to parliament in February 1906, ran into the opposition of the middle-class and conservative parties that still controlled parliament. Nevertheless, imperial interest and popular pressure—the Social Democrats had organized mass rallies to support the bill—combined to overcome parliamentary opposition. After Gautsch resigned in March 1906 and his successor, Conrad, Fürst (prince) von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, failed to master the situation, Max Wladimir, Freiherr (baron) von Beck (Austrian prime minister from June 1906), managed to carry the bill through parliament. In January 1907 Franz Joseph sanctioned the law, which gave the vote to every male over age 23 and abolished the curiae.

The returns of the election of 1907 made the Germans inescapably a minority in parliament, with 233 members, though they certainly remained the strongest national group. (The Czechs could count on 107 seats, the Poles 82, the Ruthenians 33, the Slovenes 24, the Italians 19, the Serbs and Croats 13, and the Romanians 5.) Universal suffrage also brought the expected decline of the chauvinistic parties. The Young Czechs and the Pan-Germans were reduced to small factions without parliamentary influence, while the Christian Socialists and the Social Democrats returned as the two strongest parties out of more than 30 represented in parliament; the socialist delegation in the Austrian parliament was, in fact, larger than in any other country. The Austrian constitution, however, did not force the emperor to form his government according to the composition of the parliament. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian Socialists acquired any significant influence on the shaping of Austrian government affairs.

Beck remained in office and satisfied the Christian Socialists with some concessions but for the most part based his policy on the support of the conservative parties. In 1905 the diet of Moravia had succeeded in finding a compromise between German and Czech national demands, and it was hoped that a similar compromise could be achieved for Bohemia. But, within a short time, national conflicts got the upper hand again, and parliamentary debate and public opinion were once more excited by national strife. In 1908, however, international complications diverted attention from domestic affairs.