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“Historians of imperial Austria traditionally have seen the 1850s as the era of “neoabsolutism,” but it may be more useful for historians to ... see the 1850s, under the direction of the ambitious Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, as the era of bureaucracy. This decade provided a pivotal moment in building the structures and the mentalities of the Austrian imperial system and the bureaucracy that staffed and maintained it. It was a formative period for the reach and scope of bureaucratic authority in the midst of twenty years of constitutional experimentation. Between 1848 and 1867, Austria had no less than three constitutions and three imperial decrees that reworked the larger system of governance. Nestled in these years was a period of great change, of “revolution from above,” when the state again became a major force for reform and innovation. Bureaucrats were trained in Vienna and sent out to hundreds of new districts. They oversaw the building of roads, bridges, and canals. They witnessed school reform, the erection of town councils, agricultural societies, and clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies. They participated in the massive expansion of state offices and courts. In Vienna, they saw the city tear down its walls and begin the building of the Ringstrasse. What these bureaucrats witnessed was the transformative capabilities of the state—and their institutional power.

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...our narrative of the period has been subsumed by the Hungarian perspective of neoabsolutism as a form of administrative occupation, complete with the iconic image of “Bach’s Hussars,” wearing their special uniforms, consisting of the “attila” jacket, a hat, and a sabre. The object of ridicule, these officials became a symbol of neoabsolutism and of the tyranny of a regime that lacked popular support and would eventually fail. Although Hungary provides a dramatic lens, it can lead to a skewed reading of the period. For one, Bach’s agents were sent not just to Hungary but to all corners of the monarchy. In 1852, Egbert Belcredi wrote of this major state-building campaign, “rule gets more intricate and the rulers become more numerous.” The sheer weight of the administration, its new judges and district supervisors, “paralyzes” the creative output of any useful legislation. Belcredi differentiated between the traditional, “organic” rule of autonomous bodies and the nobles with the “synthetic machine” of Bach’s administration. The latter “reduced autonomy to dust,” and the monarch himself—Emperor Francis Joseph—to “a machine, who himself no longer knows in what form the matter, which he entrusted to the artificial gears of the machine, will see the light of day.’

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If the backdrop of neoabsolutism were Francis Joseph’s absolutism, the occupation of Hungary, and foreign policy failures, the foreground actually was filled with state reforms, economic development, and foundations for a modern, interventionist state. Under Francis Joseph’s government, the Austrian state expanded and took new interest in economic development, building roads, bridges, and canals. In fact, neoabsolutism was the moment when economic liberalism reached its maturity as a leading government principle. Austria abolished its internal tolls, ceased prohibiting imports, and focused on joining international trade. The former head of Austria’s Statistical Office, Baron Carl von Czoernig, could write by 1858 of “Austria’s re-creation,” as he cataloged new canals, roads, and railways that would connect, and thus unite the empire more solidly. Communication networks, such as the telegraph and the post, also tied the vast corners of the monarchy together. Between 1850 and 1856, the monarchy built 828 miles of telegraph lines (71 percent of the total mileage in the monarchy). It duly erected a new state monopoly, the Department of Imperial-Royal State Telegraphs, in 1856. In a period of eight years, between 1848 and 1856, the postal service was handling almost 33 million parcels more per year. Education was reformed from elementary school to the university system under minister of education and religious affairs Leo Count Thun. Professors flocked to the University of Vienna, which now in the German-speaking world rivaled Berlin as a premier research university

Although the liberal economic thrust of neoabsolutism had many supporters, the administrative and constitutional system needed to undergird it and give it legal and political power. This was a slow process that occurred in stages. With each stage, the system increasingly diverged from Stadion’s constitutional and administrative model. Bach built the bureaucratic structures outlined in the constitution, but the representative institutions that were to balance and infuse these new administrative offices never materialized. In fact, Baron Karl Kübeck, the old Josephinist who had served the Austrian state and its emperors for over forty years, would chip away at Stadion’s representative provisions. Francis Joseph summoned Kübeck back to Vienna from Frankfurt, where he represented Austria at the German League, and made him president of the Reichsrat. If this “imperial council” was supposed to sow the seeds of parliamentarism in Austria, those seeds were quickly thrown to the wayside.

In a personal audience on November 19, 1850, Francis Joseph told Kübeck that the Reichsrat must “push aside the constitution and in a manner of speaking, replace it.” Two days later Kübeck spoke to Bach about the emperor’s wishes. Bach apparently decided not to throw up any obstacles to the septuagenarian Kübeck’s plans to break apart the provisions for representative government and to dismantle all vestiges of constitutionalism. Kübeck later noted that Bach possessed three great qualities: “He is capable of learning from experience, he has the courage to admit recognized mistakes, and he has the ambition to overcome his vanity.” One is left to wonder if Kübeck would have seen Bach equally as favorably if Bach held on to a commitment to parliamentarism, representation, and civic rights.

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Constitutional rule ended on August 20, 1851, as decreed in three separate memoranda. The first memorandum annulled the principle of ministerial responsibility and made the Council of Ministers responsible only to the emperor. The second memorandum annulled the constitutional monarchy itself, formally making the Reichsrat only an advisory body to the crown instead of the parliament Stadion envisioned. The third memorandum gave both the Council of Ministers and the Reichsrat the task of preparing recommendations for the implementation of the suspended Stadion’s March Constitution. Andrian-Werburg was in Munich when he heard the news of their publication. He noted in his diaries that with the uncertainty of the monarch’s stance after 1848, “finally the bomb has gone off and despite this circumstances appear much clearer.”

A week after Francis Joseph published his intentions to abolish Stadion’s constitution, he moved to solidify his personal control over the Austrian bureaucracy. In the Council of Ministers on August 28, 1851, he proposed that all bureaucrats who took an oath to Stadion’s March Constitution be given the opportunity to resign. The young emperor saw the need to “ensure the obedience and loyalty of officials” for the state under its new form. Bach followed the emperor’s wishes and presented the Council of Ministers with a draft of a new oath for officials on September 7, 1851. Under Bach, the vision of the “ideal bureaucrat” was revised again to reassert a personal relationship between the emperor and his civil servants. Francis Joseph—not the system or the state—commanded their loyalty. The oath required that they loyally execute the orders of the emperor and removed any call to uphold the constitution.

The wavering in the systemization of loyalty of the civil servants might have been a step backward for a Weberian conception of the state and the process of rationalization. But a new system was emerging that, with all its centralizing elements, formed an important evolution in the process of building Austria’s political arena. The foundations of political participation were built with the stones of centralism and state authority, for the 1850s witnessed precisely the structural changes that underlined all the political radicalism of 1848 and its revolutions. This new state system would rationalize and standardize all of Austria’s administrative units and abolish Austria’s historic, traditional rights and peculiarities. The explosion of the bomb of the end of constitutionalism in August 1851 would be followed by a second, louder salvo: the Sylvester Patent.

Neoabsolutism was legally established on December 31, 1851— St. Sylvester’s Day—when Francis Joseph signed three edicts into being. Although St. Sylvester (280–335) was known for his piety and steadfastness in an age of Christian persecution, his name became synonymous with the heavy hand of rejuvenated imperial authority. These memoranda announced that Stadion’s constitution would be jettisoned in favor of one which would preserve monarchical authority in the absolute hands of the young emperor. The first edict (RGBl Nr. 2/1852) formally abolished Stadion’s constitution. The second edict (RGBl Nr. 3/1852) rescinded the Statute of Basic Rights. The third edict was a memo from the emperor to his prime minister, Prince Schwarzenberg, which included a supplement, “The Foundations for the Organic Construction of the Austrian Imperial State in the Crownlands.” This supplement laid down the all-important foundations for the neoabsolutist state as well as the ethos for a strictly centralist-minded administration.

The “Foundations”—Grundsätze, as they came to be called—in many ways made explicit what Stadion’s constitution and Bach’s subsequent administrative reforms envisioned: rationalization through the expansion of the administration to all corners of public life. This meant the standardization of the administration à la Stadion, but also the return of Joseph II’s idea of state and administration. Neoabsolutism sought to bring about a centralized state that was unified in the hands of an absolutist emperor and administered by a bureaucracy, loyal to the emperor and the central state. Francis Joseph’s second name may not have recalled the reformer that the 1848 revolutionaries had hoped he would be, but the name invoked instead the absolutist centralizer that Joseph II had been.

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Revolutions are usually thought of as harbingers of sudden, even drastic change. They topple rulers and kings and, in waves of violence, lop off their heads. They replace the rule of one group with another, shifting the channels of law and commerce to favor some over others. In the theory that underpins European political history we tend to pit the idea of revolution against “evolution”—a slower, gradual, and, if we ask Edmund Burke, a more permanent bringer of change. But can there be gradual revolutions? Can the process of change, the fundamental shifts in the way people think about government, society, economics, and politics be in their own way revolutionary? Austria in the 1850s allows us to consider this question, because so much of Austrian politics and political culture was laid down in the 1850s and would remain until the end of the monarchy.

But such things are not always obvious. The flash and bang of revolutionary violence of 1848 continued to shimmer and echo well after the revolutions finished. But while our eyes are often drawn to the cynosure of revolutionary violence, barricades, and bombardments, what lulls us to sleep is what actually effects fundamental change. The two decades between the revolutions of 1848 and the end of the 1860s were a period of constitutional experimentation. If the 1850s was the decade of bureaucracy, the 1860s would begin the era of representation. That decade culminated in the Great Compromise, or Ausgleich, which separated Hungary from the rest of the monarchy, and the promulgation of the December Constitution in 1867, which established a complete representative system in the Austrian half of the monarchy. In other words, these decades of experimentation yielded results. In the midst of all its constitutional change, the slate of Austria’s government was never again wiped clean like it was in 1848. Instead, each change was built upon the previous structure.

After the revolutions, Austria developed a powerful central administration that saw its reach extend into every town and village from the Vorarlberg to the Carpathians. But this administration was expensive and the added expenses of wars—lost wars—forced compromises between the emperor’s absolutism and ideas of representation. In a very real sense, the limits of the imperial state-building project were financial. The state could only hire so many bureaucrats and only regulate so much on its own merit and on its own bankroll. Such challenges would result in innovations of statecraft and a return to Stadion’s principles of government. But all this happened in time; for the moment, there was a bureaucracy to build.... The task of completing Austria’s political system—one that combined both representation and ministerial statesmen—was left to the erstwhile liberal lawyer, revolutionary, “barricade minister” of justice, and now minister of the interior, Alexander Bach. Bach was in the middle of a great personal transition as he entered the Prince Felix Schwarzenberg’s ministry along with Count Franz Stadion in November 1848; some would say he was shifting from a revolutionary to conservative. Before he entered government, Bach had earned a reputation as a fierce advocate of liberal and democratic reforms. In addition to being a highly prominent Viennese lawyer, Bach cofounded the Vienna Juridical-Political Reading Club, which was the meeting society of Vienna’s liberal professionals and intellectuals. But Bach had entered government during the revolutionary year and would lose his flair for barricades, and traded his appetite for revolutionary proclamations for ordinances and decrees on ministerial letterhead. After participating in the early chapters of Vienna’s revolution, Bach entered government as the minister of justice in the cabinet of Johann von Wessenberg, which lasted a matter of months.

During the October uprising, Bach had to don a disguise and flee an angry mob that was out to lynch him. He made it as far as Salzburg before receiving word that the emperor and his court were regrouping in the Moravian city of Olmütz/Olomouc. To everyone’s surprise, the next prime minister wanted Bach to join government again and take over the justice portfolio. Despite his revolutionary credentials, Bach’s intelligence and energy had thoroughly appealed to Schwarzenberg. However, Schwarzenberg also knew that Bach would have been a hard sell to his reactionary brother-in-law, the general Alfred von und zu Windisch-Graetz, who doubted that Bach could be relied upon to help Schwarzenberg carry out a return to stability and order. Schwarzenberg wrote of Bach to his brother-in-law:

“We need Bach. His constitutionalism, combined with a strict monarchical orientation, his decisive parliamentary talent, as well as his completely pure status as a private citizen marks him as a necessary member of this new ministry.”

Bach straddled two worlds, the world of the liberal salons and the world of the government bureaus. The revolutionary year and the opportunities it brought caused Alexander Bach to eventually opt for the latter.

Thirty-six years old and the youngest member of the cabinet, Bach brought with him an energetic commitment to his task and serving his superiors—namely Schwarzenberg and the new, young emperor, Francis Joseph. As minister of justice, Bach oversaw the étatization of local justice in central Europe. Where the local nobles once functioned as local administrator, judge, and jailor, the revolutions of 1848 had ended the system of patrimonial authority once and for all. Bach standardized the system and structures of local justice according to new state norms. He replaced patrimonial justice with a system of state courts, starting with district courts and winding up through county courts, provincial courts, to superior and supreme provincial courts. In addition, judges could not be replaced on account of their verdicts, justice was to be separated from administration in the newly created districts, and court cases were to be conducted orally and publically. In establishing the system of courts, Bach made clear that the fundamental rights of all Austrian citizens were to be guaranteed equally before the law, including the protection of property and freedom of the individual. This equality was insured through the exercise of justice in state courts led by an objective judge and judicial system Bach’s work in the administration of justice prepared him to take over the most important portfolio in cabinet, the Ministry of the Interior. Bach took over the post after Stadion became incapacitated in April 1849. If Stadion was the intellectual architect of Austria’s governmental transformation following the revolution, its implementation fell to Bach. But Bach had ideas of his own. Where Stadion saw stability through incorporation of public participation, Bach saw possible obstacles to efficiency and objectivity. For Bach, progress and enlightenment ran through Vienna; in the process of implementing Stadion’s constitution, Bach would often choose to strengthen the central government at the expense of the representative institutions that Stadion wanted to mold. Stadion wanted officials who could work with representative institutions; Bach wanted the bureaucracy to serve as society’s guardians who could “administer” progress and improve public life. In Bach’s view, the bureaucracy could do the work of parliamentary and representative institutions better and more efficiently through its own administrative processes. Bach’s system renewed the tensions between local and regional political participation and the paternalism of the central state; this tension would repeat itself throughout the course of Austria’s modern history. Thus, rather than implement Stadion’s structure where responsibility for administration was to devolve onto autonomous bodies, Bach implemented a system where power was concentrated in Austria’s imperial civil service, which was to act alone for the good of the state, and so for the good of all.

Bach quickly made moves to ensure that the imperial civil service would play a major role in Austria’s “rejuvenation” and the reconstruction of the Austrian state. To implement his new system and infiltrate the state administration at all levels, he needed to quickly create new administrative offices at the local level, and instill in his bureaucrats the sensibility and purpose of the guardians of Plato’s Republic. Bach’s guardians would not only be “philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong,” they would also devote themselves fully to implementing Bach’s system. In a memorandum to the imperial governors on August 18, 1849, Bach expressed that the work of the administration “has become new and better.” The task of Austria’s officialdom has moved beyond the realm of paperwork; rather, officials “are called . . . directly into the current of life, in touch with political and commercial [bürgerlich] activity.” Bach wanted officials who could operate in the provinces and towns, who could speak the local language, and could represent the strength of the central state to the populace after the upheavals and the uncertainty of revolution. At this point in time, Bach wanted officials who could navigate local needs and peculiarities, and he was still willing to have them work with the autonomous institutions that Stadion’s constitution and municipalities law envisioned. But in the momentous year of 1849, the constitutional landscape of Austria was quickly changing. Hungary was subjugated by the late summer of that year, and Stadion’s constitution was still suspended; its implementation seeming less likely. As 1849 drew to a close it became increasingly apparent that Bach would not implement Stadion’s system, which balanced elected representatives and state administrative institutions, the very administrative reforms on which the constitution depended. The first clues came on October 29, 1849, when Bach suspended Stadion’s Provisional Municipalities Law. The law was then annulled in March of the following year. At this time, Austria stood in a position of complete uncertainty. The constitution, which promised a complex system of self-administration, had never gone into effect and the subsequent laws which provided the foundations for autonomy were themselves annulled. Yet, cities like Prague, Trieste, Görz, Brünn/Brno, and Vienna had received their own special charters under the provisions of the very municipalities law that had been suspended.

Victor von Andrian-Werburg, viewing the administration of Austria in 1851, found the system in place to be neither fish nor fowl. He saw Bach’s administration as having no inherent sense, having neither complete centralism nor the Länder federalism that he endorsed, but rather “bureaucratic absolutism” and an “administrative labyrinth” that expressed an “untimely experimental politic.” But Andrian-Werburg was not critical of only Alexander Bach’s administrative domination. He was critical of everything that had emerged from Stadion’s March Constitution, which was still on the books, though suspended, when Andrian-Werburg’s Centralisation and Decentralisation in Oesterreich appeared in 1850. For him, Stadion’s constitution was also an administrative reform—and a deeply problematic one at that. In this work, Andrian-Werburg criticized Stadion’s constitution and the central state that he envisioned. For Andrian-Werburg, the most important question that the monarchy had to address was that of centralization: “The main questions, on which our political parties differ entiate themselves, do not rest on the greater or lesser measure of freedom that should be granted to the Volk, but rather to what extent power can and must be granted to the central government and what can and must be left to autonomy of the individual crownlands.” ...

For Andrian-Werburg, resisting absolutism in the name of liberty was about resisting the Josephine central state, the administration, and the economic and political forms of modernity it brought with it. Andrian-Werburg has often been cited as a liberal, because he used liberal terms to argue for freedom, autonomy, and cultural development. But in his defense of liberty, Andrian-Werburg looked to the crownlands to provide the territorial and administrative basis for a “state-free” zone, what would be called civil society today. For Andrian-Werburg, the crownlands provided the history, the tradition, and strongest protection of liberties against the central state. Of course, Andrian-Werburg saw those liberties in terms of estates—freedoms were class-based privileges. His voice, then, was a transitional voice, for the crownlands would remain a seat of resistance against crown authority. But as the political arena in Austria continued to develop, the nature of argument shifted from noble liberty to crownland autonomy, and from noble nations to nationalities.

Bach’s Administrative System During the early 1850s Alexander Bach, the former liberal jurist and revolutionary hero, may have lamented the end of constitutionalism in Austria, but he found himself unable to raise his voice or any objection to the emperor’s wishes. Instead of resigning his cabinet post, he brought his organizational talent to the new regime, even participating in the writing of the Sylvester Patent. Baron Kübeck thought that Bach had sold out his young idealism and relished the idea that he had turned Bach away from a revolutionary course. He noted that “Bach [has become] the most eager destroyer of his own revolutionary works.” But it is possible that Kübeck, old and backward-looking, did not see the changes that were afoot. Kübeck was focused on the rabble; he forgot how revolutionary a trained bureaucracy could be. Following the Sylvester Patent, Bach began a relentless and thoroughgoing reform and restructuring of the monarchy’s administration. As early as January 2, 1852, Bach proposed that a ministerial commission be established both to erect the administrative structure and to establish guidelines for the bureaucratic functioning of the empire. Over the course of the next two years, Bach created a strictly rationalized administrative structure of municipality, district, county, and crownland that reflected Stadion’s rationalization and standardization of the monarchy’s administration. Bach built his system based on Stadion’s concepts, but without the representative institutions that Stadion had intended to “balance” administrative authority with political participation.

As such, the new modern state was more palatable to the emperor and Kübeck. Moreover, Bach intended that his administration would provide all the impetus for innovation, observe the many needs and particular conditions of its posts, and provide the necessary ideas for the state to administer the general welfare of its citizens. When Stadion’s Provisional Municipalities Law of 1849 had been suspended and then annulled in 1850, the local townships were exposed to heavy state influence. Bodies which Stadion had intended to act as local organs of self-government lost their rights to autonomy and now had to carry out the orders of the central state. Even the provisions of the Sylvester Patent, which envisioned advisory bodies of notables from the landed nobility and industrialists at the district and county level, were ignored in Bach’s plan and never implemented.

But cities and townships could not be simply wiped off the map, and the new state centralism and Bach had no intention of permanently squashing them. Rather, Bach made municipal governments less political, less dependent on elections, and limited their purview to matters of local budgets and fulfilling the state’s objectives. In essence, local institutions now had a freer hand, but they were more dependent on the bureaucrats themselves. Elections to township councils were curtailed in favor of imperial appointments. District and county boards were also no longer elected, and instead Bach sought to staff those with imperial appointments—vetted and suggested by Bach’s Ministry of the Interior.

This “autonomy” was certainly less representative and could not claim to express the wishes of the “free communities.” So, while Stadion thought the work of governance needed the creative input of political participation, Bach preferred that such creativity lie with Joseph II’s intellectual heirs—the bureaucracy. In Bach’s estimation, it made sense for the good of the state to limit autonomous institutions and prevent their capabilities to obstruct state business. So as Kübeck unloaded the autonomy of the various representative institutions, Bach used the increased authority of the emperor to bring more matters under the purview of Austria’s imperial officials. As interior minister, Bach—the commoner—became responsible for nobility matters, as well as for the dismantlement of the patrimonial system and peasant emancipation, conscription, citizenship and passports, press and associations. His Ministry of the Interior gathered all these functions under its base as it rested on a deepened and broadened administrative pyramid—a ladder that Bach had altered from Stadion’s blueprint.

Bach’s administrative ladder had several platforms, or to follow the metaphor, rungs. At the top stood the emperor and his central ministries. From there the administration stretched into the provinces, which were now given the name crownlands. The crownlands existed in the same administrative level of the old Gubernia. The larger crownlands were divided into counties. Each county was now divided into several districts. Smaller provinces, like Salzburg or the Bukovina, were not divided into counties at all.

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Although the crownlands gathered an increased number of centralized functions just under the minister of the interior, Bach anchored his system in Stadion’s concept of the district. Stadion had already created this local unit as the basis of the plan for the “Foundations for the Organization of the Political Administration” of June 26, 1849. In 1849, when the edict was released, one could find the intention to govern according to Stadion’s constitution. By 1851, however, this was no longer the case; decentralization proceeded administratively instead. Bach strengthened the districts by making them smaller and more numerous, enabling them to exert a greater state presence in the Austrian countryside. Through these districts, the state could now directly oversee the local communities.

Bach’s “Foundations for the Organization of the Political Administrative Authorities,” sanctioned by the emperor on June 26, 1849, stipulated that the districts, “which form the lowest political unit, will be led by a district prefect, and stand directly under the authority of the county president.” The administrative division of the crownlands into counties and districts occurred almost immediately, in the last months of 1849. By January 1, 1850, the new administrative system was to be fully in place. Upper Austria, which had been part of the Habsburgs’ imperial patrimony, was to be divided into four counties and twelve districts. This system was to replace four imperial counties and 111 local administrative units, administered by the nobility and the cities.

Creating new districts on paper in Vienna was one thing; actually putting them into position was another entirely. When we move away from Vienna and into the provinces we see how groundbreaking Bach’s system was. It brought the state closer to the people, on the one hand; on the other, the changes and reform the administration brought with it introduced an element of chaos and confrontation. Chaos came from changing the plans as they went along, as well as the struggles implementing the enormous administration that Bach called for. For instance, the regime decided to dismantle Stadion’s institutions of local input—elected district and county councils. In their place Bach decided to increase the number of local districts exponentially. Moreover, in the midst of implementing Bach’s administrative restructuring, personnel changes abounded. At the beginning, the provincial governments had to hire new people, install them into counties and district offices, and see to it that they were educated and trained. In the process they brought numerous people under the umbrella of state service and refounded the administration—not only in a structural sense but also in terms of a bureaucratic culture. All of this was happening at once, hardly giving Bach or his senior officials the chance to take stock of what they were doing.

In a letter to the new imperial governor of Upper Austria, Dr. Alois Fischer, Alexander Bach admitted that this administrative revolution could not happen overnight and that Fischer would have to exercise a pragmatic attitude to building up a new administration in the crownlands. The new state apparatus was to take effect on January 1, 1850, taking over all local governmental and judicial authority from the patrimonial administration in the new year. But even as the Ministry of the Interior established the new administrative schema and how many bureaucrats were needed in each governor’s office, county prefecture, and district office, Bach wanted to approve each new provincial appointment. He wanted a list of applicants by 1 November 1849. He wrote that if “the machinery of state is not to be brought to a halt or completely ripped out of joint,” Fischer would have do his part in implementing the new system as soon as possible. Bach laid the gravity of the situation directly onto Fischer’s shoulders: “The introduction of new institutions, the realization of equality before the law, the constitution of free communes, and the implementation of its institutions and representatives” cannot be implemented without a public service that stands “in direct contact with the populace” and is committed to the project. And yet, Bach says: “A less than perfect-looking machine is still worth more than a stationary one, the crying needs of the present depend more on the swiftness of the remedy than at the consolation of an even more satisfying future.”

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The massive undertaking of building nearly fifteen hundred district courts and administrative offices strained every capacity of the state, and neither the state nor its officials, members of Austria’s bureaucratic Bildungsbürgertum, were prepared to confront the realities of peasant life in the countryside. An anonymous memoir, published in 1861, by a district official sent to a small town in Hungary tells of the hardships of such officials. Forced to transfer to a new post, the author of the memoir describes his reluctance to take the promotion. First he had to pay an exorbitant sum, five hundred guldens (nearly half his salary), for the Hungarian uniform. The uniform was meant to appease Hungarian sensibilities and evoke legends of Hungarian horsemen, but instead the Hungarian “Attila”—a medium-length coat with golden braids on the front; tight-fitting pants and long, spurred boots; and a feathered felt cap and long saber—inspired ridicule. When he arrived at his new post, the town magistrate gave him, the k.k. Stuhlrichter (the district official; Hungarian, szolgabíró), quarters in a peasant house, which had no kitchen or proper furniture, and not enough bed space to sleep. The official gave up his bed to his wife, children, and the servant girl, while he slept on the cold floor. His wife cried when she found out that there was no stove even for heating water for coffee. Their servant girl refused to work for him under these conditions and headed back west.

These district officials, whether stationed in Hungary or Upper Austria, were very much pioneers, even though many, including the author of this memoir, were relieved of office and sent back to “the German-Slavic crownlands” (the author’s term), when constitutional government returned in the 1860s. Sent to towns that were only loosely entwined in the sinews of power, they had to set up an infrastructure of governance and represent the state authority in the countryside. The district official’s job was essentially to create order and good government out of literally nothing. The office of our Stuhlrichter had no paper, so he had to track some down through the local merchants and pay it for on credit. The state seemed very far away. Petty cash to pay for printing ordinances took nine months to arrive. Money for the maintenance of the office was two years in coming. After five years, the district official could report that his office had received money for a jail. Before that, the state had put up local criminals at a guesthouse, where they could come and go as they pleased.

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Despite impressions from the memoir of our Stuhlrichter that the Habsburg state was doing everything on the cheap, state expenditures in fact increased dramatically in the 1850s. Harm-Hinrich Brandt’s two volume study of state finances under neoabsolutism shows that government expenditures on domestic administration (including administrative offices, the police, judicial courts, and public works) roughly doubled between 1847 and 1856, largely due to the creation of these new district offices, courts, and the gendarmerie. In Bohemia alone, the abolition of the patrimonial administration and the creation of district offices saw 1,650 officials employed at the district level in the courts, the administration, and public safety. The surprising finding from Brandt’s study is that an increase in tax revenue actually more than covered the enormous expenditure resulting from this incredible increase of bureaucrats and bureaucratic offices. The state’s income increased with the increased presence of the administration, judges, and police on the ground, all of whom supported the collection of revenue.

One of the striking qualities of the 1850s and the creation of district offices was how quickly it created an entirely new system of administration, bringing Vienna directly into the provinces with new district offices. Bach created many of them—1,463 to be exact—breaking up the monarchy into manageable units of around ten thousand to twenty thousand people. Diversity still reigned, but it was a diversity that was now limited. In Upper Austria, for instance, the eight districts of Traun County ranged from 7,390 inhabitants in Enns to more than twice as many—17,147—in Kirchdorf. Each district was to consist of a district chief and a support staff similar to those of the larger district prefectures. In addition, in larger provinces like Upper Austria, the county offices were reinstated and the governor had to hire new people while moving experienced officials into leadership positions.

Amid the chaotic administrative hustle and bustle of moving people to new positions, the administration became, almost paradoxically, more regimented than before. Despite all the new hires that had to be made, Bach’s imperial governors and county chairmen could not put just anyone in the post of district chairman. That position was in the eighth rank—meaning that the office holder had to have completed a university degree, have three years of practical experience as an intern or adjunct, and had passed an additional “political-practical” examination. Upper Austria—forced to find new civil servants to staff all these positions—hired university graduates and made sure that they sat these examinations as soon as they could.

The possibility of climbing into the ranks of salaried, mid-ranking, civil servants meant that the young aspirants were eager to sit the examination as well. Theodor Altwirth, twenty-five years old and provisionally employed in the district office in Schärding, sought admission to sit the political-practical exam in October 1852. He was born in Enzenkirchen, a small township in the Innviertel—not far from Schärding itself. He completed juridical studies at a university—his file does not say which one— and was recruited to work in the Upper Austrian provincial administration in 1850. His superiors noted in his file that he should be given special attention in the future, since he was very talented, knew the laws well, and proved to be more knowledgeable and efficient than those who had been in the office longer than he.

The Ministry of the Interior approved his request to sit the examination in October. His exam asked him questions that spoke to the new fiscal responsibilities of the local authorities.

“Question 2: Which authorities administer direct taxation?

Question 3: What is the relationship between the tax inspector vis-à-vis the district prefecture?

Question 4: According to what measure is the land tax calculated? What is cadastral net income and how is it calculated?”

Finally, students who took the exam were asked for an essay on the following theme: “Render a decision on the application by the pension administration in Pesenbach for the exemption of the income tax on the brickyard and fish hatchery and [give a] justification for this decision.” In addition to the written exam, Altwirth was subjected to twenty oral questions which gave him hypothetical situations which required decisions he had to make and articulate; for example:

“Maria Maier, widowed cottager, presents the request on behalf of herself and her two sons, the first an unmarried farmhand and the second a gymnasia-student, for permission to emigrate to America. How is this request to be handled?”

Altwirth passed with good or very good marks, but certainly not everyone did. The civil service was expanding under Bach, but only wanted officials who had the knowledge and will to render important, life-changing decisions for the populace in general. Moreover, tests like these affirmed the role the administration was to have in Austrian society. As the state replaced the local rule of the nobles and abolished the social and economic structures of feudalism, it liberated the peasants to work for themselves, but also left them exposed to the market. Patrimonial administration had been cheap for the state and fostered a paternalistic relationship between peasant and lord. The revolutions of 1848 not only wiped away the legal shackles of the peasants’ servitude, it also took away the social and legal obligations of the local lord. The peasants lost easements on their masters’ lands and now had to conduct all business in cash, not in kind, often without access to credit. As the district officials stepped in to take over the administrative role of the nobles, they became the new notables of local life. Whether the state would prove up to the task of taking care of the masses of rural citizens still was up in the air in the 1850s.

...

How did civil servants find their way to their eventual posting? Officials were hired by the district officials, county chairmen, or the governor himself, but the gateway to the civil service was still the intern post. Interns supplied capable, college-educated grunt labor with little or no pay, and offices often relied on them to handle their burgeoning workload. The provincial government of Salzburg in 1859, for instance, sent out a call for applications for four new posts; they were all for intern positions—two with a stipend of 315 guldens per year and two which were unpaid. Despite the low (or no) pay, the interns were required to have completed their university studies in law and government and to have already passed their state exams in political theory. But the internship meant the possibility of a quick rise through the ranks if a permanent position was ever attained. This pool of college-educated interns would provide ready-made bureaucrats when offices expanded, when new districts were established, or when officials died in office.

...

The continuity of organization in the 1850s combined with fundamental change. Bureaucrats were transferred quickly from place to place and they now had new colleagues to train. But this administrative chaos was a managed one—it was never a crisis, but rather, a moment for new opportunities. As such, it did much for refounding the principles and outlook of the administration. We can gain a sense of the newness of bureaucratic penetration into local life from the proliferation of manuals and instructions in the 1850s. These manuals ranged from official productions to books for the public market. The Ministries of the Interior and Justice released an office instruction in 1855 that was meant to standardize administrative practices in the new district offices.

The document laid down the foundations of a rational, objective administration in the localities. It described the bureaucratic hierarchy of land, county, and district; stipulated how the districts fit into that hierarchy; and laid down the practices for hiring new officials. Bureaucrats in the new district offices could not be related, they had to meet the necessary qualifications to take up their position, and they had to swear an oath of office. But contrary to Belcredi’s complaints...the new regulations did not merely spell the rule of the paragraph sign, §. It bore the imprint of a new optimism in the role of the local official: district personnel were to be the emperor’s feet on the ground. Peeking through flat descriptions of the hierarchy and office management were phrases like “of these officials, who stand in direct and daily communication with the populace,” which did much to remind the officials of their mission of bringing the state—and thus progress— to the people, without the problems associated with revolution.

Such optimism began with how the officials looked; they were to play their part in the new Austrian story of progress. Bach promulgated new regulations regarding officials’ uniforms on August 24, 1849, and made it clear that the bureaucrats, wherever they were to be stationed, would be “recognizable according to his outward appearance.” In the course of his duties, on festive occasions and at official ceremonies, officials were to appear in uniform. The daily uniform, from ministers and imperial governors down to the lowly clerk, was to consist of a dark green tunic. Branches and ranks within the service would be differentiated by the collars and uniform’s cuffs, which were to be made of velvet. The collars and cuffs of the uniforms mirrored the system of ranks and the new governmental division into ministries. Officials in the offices of the Foreign Ministry wore crimson accents; in the Ministry of the Interior, they wore a darker pompadour; Justice officials wore violet.

Such attention to the outward appearance helped to visually reinforce the principles of office hierarchy and rank internally. Externally, uniforms differentiated the bureaucrat from society, making him distinct, identifiable, and observable. The law was timely for Bach, who was in the process of building an administration in the hinterland, sending out men to establish imperial offices where the government had never tread before. These bureaucrats, educated and correct, were to care for the local populace and bring state-funded progress in the form of roads, bridges, and schools. They were to be ideal Austrian citizens, now readily identifiable in their dark green tunics and velvet bars in hues of pompadour, violet, and carnation blue.

The office instructions, along with regulations regarding uniforms, built the local administration into a visible, cohesive unit. Not only did the new legions of bureaucrats dress in the same manner, they ran their office in the same manner as well. The office instructions established a standard method of management, gave the proper rubrics for entering correspondence and decisions, and taught supervisors how to fill out their assessments in their underlings’ Qualifikation or Conduiten files. These files were to be kept in the strictest secrecy. The instructions reminded officials in leadership positions that these internal evaluation files “were to be filled out with the strictest conscientiousness and with particular attention as to whether the candidate possessed adequate, good, or excellent qualifications.”

The office also gave a template for these evaluation forms with eight rubrics and a large space for comments. In addition to listing the name, place of birth, age, marital status, social status, rank, and pay, the Qualificationstabelle required that officials be evaluated on which languages they spoke and how well they spoke them, their work-related skills and qualifications, and subjective categories such as “morality” and “political behavior.” Ignaz Beidtel’s complaint about these evaluations in the era of Joseph II and pre-1848 Austria, as turning “superiors into despots, subordinates into sycophants,” provide a marker of continuity between the first era of state building in the eighteenth century and its refounding under Bach in the 1850s. But here, in the 1850s, these lists were disseminated to the district and county offices and filled out by leagues of conscientious civil servants, sitting at their desks, wearing dark green uniforms. Whether we can say that these evaluations can be elevated to an aspect of national character, as a recent study in historical sociology has intimated, is a matter of debate. What they did do was standardize the qualities of evaluations at the moment when the administration expanded into the countryside and broadened its base. It made a basis for comparing officials, promoting some over others, and especially for transferring qualified officials between offices, provinces, and up the hierarchical ladder.

....

As the civil service expanded and penetrated into the countryside, officials were not the only ones who needed some form of orientation. After all, Bach’s reforms changed the relationship between the state and its citizens and there was obviously a market for private citizens to understand the new state and its administrative framework as well. Carl Mally wrote a book that provided orientation for members of the general public with their new role as citizens of the state. It was given a title that indicated how new the local system of bureaucracy was and how it indeed had overturned centuries of patrimonial administration, “The New Authorities and Their Jurisdiction; or, A Guide to Whom and to Which Offices We Turn to for Our Matters.” The first edition of this book was published in 1851;86 a second edition was released two years later, completely reworked and twice as long. These books explained in detail the new organization of the Austrian state, from the emperor and his cabinet at the top to the local district offices and courts. The 1851 edition ended with a short guide that directed private citizens to the appropriate governmental offices. In 1851, if private citizens were denied permission to marry, they were to take the matter to the district prefect. If they needed a divorce, they had to go to the district court.

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In fact, as the government expanded in the 1850s, so did everything with which it came into contact. As the maintenance of law and order fell under the purview of the state police, so did the number of arrests. The statistics regarding citations for disorderly conduct are telling: in 1850 the state security forces made 62,909 citations or arrests, by 1854 that number had increased to over 900,000. But police offices were not the only things this state built. It literally laid the connections between Vienna and the rest of the monarchy in tons of roadstone, in newly dug canals, in railroads, and bridges. Between 1850 and 1853, the state laid 314 million cubic feet of roadstone alone. Carl Czoernig cataloged new imperial streets connecting the Pingau in Salzberg to Tyrol, tunnels between Tyrol and Lombardy, and the raising of road and bridge standards in Transylvania. They converted roads from municipal or local control to imperial control, bringing 173 miles of streets under state control in Transylvania. Between 1850 and 1855, they tore down wooden bridges and replaced them with stone ones, they built ramparts along the monarchy’s rivers, from the Adige or Etsch in Tyrol to the Tisza in Hungary, improved the ports of Trieste and Fiume on the Adriatic coast, dredged rivers making them more navigable and invested 8 million guldens on the maintenance of the canals and waterways of Venice alone.

....

The sheer size of the administration—and its administrators’ new role as local model citizens, as bringers of civilization, as creators of order, and as lords of justice—would leave an historic imprint on the culture and ethos of the Austrian administration. In turn, this prominent place in a restructured and rejuvenated Austria would leave a legacy in its politics even once it became a democratic society, precisely because the 1850s saw the administration witness its own capabilities to transform the state and Austrian society. It had now become a power broker in its own right, and would use its authority and expanded place in Austria’s political system to protect its own stakes throughout the later periods of constitutional experimentation and constitutional government. The genie, dressed in a Hungarian attila or the green bureaucratic uniform, was out of the bottle.

The transformation of the administration into a political institution itself was a process. The state-political basis for Bach’s laws, his ordinances, and his regulations were themselves hardly without precedent. Joseph II, seventy years before Bach’s administrative reforms, had charged his civil servants to exhibit “fatherly care” (väterliche vorsorge) and to love service to the fatherland and to fellow citizens. Bach’s administrative policies, focused on control and interest in the minutiae of public life and welfare, imbued the administration with a rejuvenated Josephinism, just as Bach also hoped his administration would form a central pillar of the rejuvenated Austrian state. Under Bach, the Austrian bureaucracy was to shepherd Austria’s public life and economy. It was responsible for policing the press, for approving the assembly of private associations, for proper sanitation, and for enforcing local building codes. It had to approve the establishment of a local café or a new factory. Like the Stuhlrichter in Hungary, these men sensed as they entered new towns that had hardly seen the hand of the state, that they were bringing civilization to the countryside.

The idea that the administration acted as society’s benevolent and enlightened decision makers—choosing its goals, fostering its economy, and deciding what was best for everyone—would last far beyond Bach’s neoabsolutist system. Under Bach, the reach of the central state grew enormously. As the state moved in to fill the shoes of the nobility at the local level, it brought with it a heightened and concentrated control of public life. In the words of the governor (Statthalter) of Upper Austria, Eduard Bach— Alexander Bach’s brother—the state was now firmly entrenched in local life:

“In the essence of the political administration the entire world plays itself out within the framework formed by the district’s territory; it accompanies one from the cradle to the grave.”

Furthermore, the everyday praxis of administrative work intensified the idea that the administration—Austria’s political elite—was to act as society’s guardians. The newly implemented district offices manifested the rejuvenated power of the central state at the local level. The district officer was responsible for a wide variety of social services, which steadily grew over time. While his administrative duties included the upkeep of roads and canals, care for the poor, and the cultivation of the local economy, the district officer also exercised the power of the central state in a variety of aspects of local public life. His office granted music licenses and permission for theaters to put on plays. He controlled the local press, approved and regulated public auctions, and was responsible for the maintenance of public order in his district, while the governor himself had to approve the establishment of any pharmacy.”

- John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 100-133 Image is of Alexander von Bach. Lithographie von Josef Kriehuber, 1849

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