A document collection rarely causes much excitement. But anyone who has sat in the Austrian State Archives and pried open a document file with a pair of tweezers as its burnt edges disintegrate into a pile of dust may forgive us for our enthusiasm. These three volumes under review constitute the first set of publications of the cabinet minutes of the Cisleithanian government. This ongoing series will contain the official cabinet discussions that start with the drawing up of the Cisleithanian government's official purview under the Equilibrium Settlement (Ausgleich or Kiegyezés) between Francis Joseph and Hungary. They will eventually end with the empire's dissolution under Kaiser Karl in October/November 1918. These minutes hitherto have been available to researchers in a limited fashion, as they were one of the collections heavily damaged by the deliberate fire that engulfed the Palace of Justice in 1927.
The books under review are part of a project that has been ongoing for more than six decades. Indeed, the minutes of the Cisleithanian cabinet are the third cabinet series to be published. The first series was titled Die Protokolle des österreichischen Ministerrates 1848–67 and was published with an introductory volume and six Abteilungen that totalled twenty-eight volumes. This series contained the minutes of the various governments in the revolutions of 1848 and the following five governments between 1848 and 1867 for the Austrian Empire. Publication began in 1970 and continued, after fits and starts, until 2015.
The original series covered the governmental cabinet minutes until 1867, when the nature of the Habsburg monarchy changed. Whereas the period between 1848 and 1867 saw one cabinet govern and administer the entire empire and its foreign affairs, after 1867 there were now three separate cabinets: a joint cabinet that handled common and foreign affairs, a domestic Hungarian government, and a domestic government for the kingdom and lands represented in the Reichsrat in Vienna, that is, Cisleithania. The Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences has been producing an edited edition of the Joint Ministerial Cabinet, which consisted of the three joint ministers for finances, war, and foreign affairs, was as well as the Transleithanian and Cisleithanian prime ministers. This is series 2, Die Protokolle des gemeinsamen Ministerrates der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie 1867–1918. So far, this series has published the Joint Cabinet minutes for the years 1867–71 and 1883–1918, and some of the individual volumes have been reviewed in these pages.
Series 3 now includes the Cabinet Minutes of the Cisleithanian government.Footnote 1 It has been a long wait, and the editions here show the signs of what difficulties such a project involves. Firstly, unlike the cabinet documents published in the other two series, these were heavily damaged in the fire that engulfed the Palace of Justice during unrest on 15 July 1927 in Vienna. Many were lost. What remained of these government minutes were water-soaked, partially burned, and damaged. The efforts to restore and make available these minutes date back to the earliest days after the fire. When the original archivist arrived at the Palace of Justice the day after the fire began, he found that the building was still burning in places. He talked his way into the old depot, where he found 1.5 m of ashes covering what had not yet burned. It took days before he and his staff could remove them to a dry and drafty room in the complex of the former Austro-Hungarian Bank. Of the over 9,700 document bundles and 3,900 cartons of archival material, only maybe a quarter survived the fire in some kind of form. At first, only 750 minutes were fully or partially saved. Thanks to generations of archivists and historians of Central Europe that this original total has been expanded. Over time, copies of minutes or partial copies have been added from various private collections and from other archival sources, where copies of individual agenda items existed.
Preservation and additions have continued in a modern, digital form. The destruction of a large part of the original collection and the fragile state of what remains has not only made this publication a welcome necessity but it has also led the editors to publish this series in a hybrid format. Thus, while this reviewer has been provided with traditional bound copies of these cabinet minutes in book format, the editors have simultaneously created a server that provides the minutes in accessible digital format with searchable text (available at mrp.oeaw.ac.at). Moreover, the minutes of the Cisleithanian Cabinet is also integrated into the minutes of the Joint Cabinet as well as the Hungarian one via a clickable calendar that displays when each cabinet met. The purpose of the digital edition not only allows easy access it also allows the database to be updated as other researchers find more bits of missing documents. Indeed, there may well be bits and pieces of the cabinet minutes that had been copied and included as addenda in various ministerial files that survived the Palace of Justice fire of 1927, but doing a systematic search through all the holdings of the Austrian State Archive, as well as the papers of the various crownland administration—now stretching over eight or nine countries—would take a team of researchers decades. A hybrid edition allows for new minutes or various agenda points to be integrated to the collection as researchers find them. Habsburg history thus meets crowdsourcing.Footnote 2
The printed editions follow the various guidelines laid out in the original publications of the Austrian Imperial Cabinet minutes that were first published in Series I. The editorial apparatus is thick. Introductory articles offer an able thematic overview of the main discussions that took place in the cabinet during the period covered in the volume. As such—and unlike other volumes in the previous two series—we see reflected in these cabinet minutes the high engagement with the empire's representative institutions: the crownland assemblies and the imperial parliament, or Reichsrat. Parliament and Landtag loomed large in the Austrian government. In addition to a reproduction of meeting agendas and stenographic minutes, the editors have included a glossary of archaic terms, a list of participants in the ministerial meetings, and a chronological list of the meeting minutes. The separate form of indexing that was common in the first two series (subject, place, and person) is now combined into one.
The first volume in this series covers the period of transition to dualism in 1867. As it became clear that Cisleithania would need a governing structure to correspond with the one the Hungarians had achieved for themselves, the imperial cabinet worked to lay the basis for a new domestic government. We therefore see the Austrian Imperial Government Ministry, headed by foreign minister and also prime minister Friederich Ferdinand von Beust, as it worked to establish the confines and purview of a future Cisleithanian government. We thus get to see in this volume the process of devolution—the stripping of the domestic aspects of governance and administration from the common cabinet. Indeed, this was a process filled with negotiation. Due to the Palace of Justice fire, the ministerial council's minutes are spotty. What is present comes from the copies made for Joseph Redlich, who consulted individual agenda items for his magnum opus, Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem. But the fires burned almost everything. Where the minutes are entirely missing, the editors have reproduced the session date, members present, and the individual agenda items, as these were part of the reports sent to Francis Joseph's cabinet chancellery.
The second volume begins with the onset of Cisleithania's proper government under the leadership of Carlos Auersperg in 1868. This government had the task of now putting into practice the state envisioned by Cisleithania's Fundamental Laws, that is, the December Constitution. As we can see here, this was no easy task. Politicians representing Czech-speakers from Bohemia had boycotted parliament and others who rejected the centralist impulse of the new government and constitutional framework threatened to stay away too. The government was highly concerned that parliament would not achieve a quorum for important votes. Because of this, Francis Joseph hoped to bring everyone into the fold. The centralist government of the Auersperg Ministry was dumped eventually in favor of a government under whose job would be to federalize the empire. This task fell first to Alfred Potocki and then to Karl Sigmund von Hohenwart, who hoped to bring both the politicians representing Polish and Czech interests into the government. Both governments would run aground on not only the opposition of liberals and centralists, but the other power brokers of dualism: Foreign Minister Beust and the Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy.
Thus, this second volume contains much of interest on the constitutional entanglements of dualism and the messy process of hammering out what dualism meant for the framework of the Cisleithanian state. Here are the cabinet minutes of four different governments, led by no less than seven minister-presidents. The volume admirably reproduces the important affairs, dealing with the back and forth of centralism and liberalism or federalism, as well as the negotiations with Czech national parties over the Fundamental Articles and the concessions to the Polish national leadership on autonomy and language use in Galicia. Here are also church affairs, including the abrogation of parts of the concordat which stood in conflict with the newly sanctioned Fundamental Laws. This volume is much larger than the first. But still, the fire of 1927 has destroyed much of the original material. Of the 618 meetings of the Cabinet between 1 January 1868 and the fall of the Hohenwart government on 21 November 1871, only seventy-three remain in full. The editors were able to partially reconstruct a further fourteen cabinet meetings from the private papers of Ludwig von Alexy (a longstanding director of the Office of Prime Minister) and Eduard Taaffe, as well as copies found in other archival collections. Still the loss is considerable and even in what has remained, there are closed brackets ([]) indicating places where the original files were burned and text is missing and cannot be reconstructed with total certainty.
While the first volume covers when the government set the foundations for dualism, and the second volume shows how the government, in implementing the constitution, struggled with back and forth between centralism and federalism under succeeding ministries, the third volume shows the cabinets building infrastructure and implementing the constitution at hand. This third volume, of which only the first sub-volume has been published so far, only covers the first five months of the government of Adolf Auersperg, which remained in office from 25 November 1871 to 15 February 1879. Here the records are much fuller. Out of seventy-two cabinet minutes, there remain the papers of seventy-one, though these too have gaps where the fire and water destroyed some pages and agenda items.
In this third volume we begin to see Cisleithania on track. Neither the adherents of centralism nor federalism were able to push through their concepts of state organization on the other and so Cisleithania's framework hovered somewhere in the middle. The “government of Lasser, named Auersperg” was liberal in spirit, but forced to accept the state that it inherited. It thus turned its attention to reforming the Reichsrat's electoral process, drafting laws that would allow for “emergency elections” when delegates failed to take up their seats in parliament. This would be followed by a law that changed how representatives to the imperial parliament would be elected—implementing direct elections instead of accepting delegates by the provincial assemblies—in 1873. Finally, much of this third volume is taken up by discussions over railroad building. Cisleithania was a great builder of infrastructure under dualism and here we see that activity dominate much of the government's time and discussions.
Finally, in taking these three volumes together, one is reminded of just how active Francis Joseph was in establishing the architecture of dualism, even if Beust and Andrássy did not always let him get his way. The emperor appears again and again to chair the meetings of the cabinet in 1867 in matters relating to the army, but also the important discussions of drafts of the fundamental laws. But he shows up again, even after the Cisleithanian government had been established at the end of 1867. And these matters of centralism and federalism, common monarchy and dualism were not the only ones here that drew the emperor's attention. The relationship to the Catholic Church and what to do with the Concordat, whose provisions stood in direct conflict with some aspects of the new fundamental laws, were also sticky issues that played out in the Ministerrat in these years. These also played out in the sphere of international relations, reminding us that none of these discussions or issues should be taken in isolation. Even so, these volumes, the first of Series III and our first glimpse of this larger project to publish the minutes of the Cisleithanian government, are most welcome. They are worthy successors to the work of the Austrian and Hungarian Academies of Sciences first two series. Historians are indebted to the team producing these volumes, sifting through the ashes, determining what is extant and what is missing, and producing marvellously edited volumes that point out where to go to next.
