Vienna in 1848
The rise of national feeling among the Hungarian, Slavonic, and Italian subjects of the House of Hapsburg was not the only difficulty of the Emperor Ferdinand I. Vienna was then the gayest and the dearest centre of fashion and luxury in Europe, but side by side with wealth there seethed a mass of wretched poverty; and the protective trade system of Austria so increased the price of the necessaries of life that bread-riots were frequent. . . . The university students were foremost in the demand for a constitution and for the removal of the rigid censorship of the press and of all books. So, when the news came of the flight of Louis Philippe from Paris [see France: 1841-1848, and 1848] the students as well as the artisans of Vienna rose in revolt (March 13, 1848), the latter breaking machinery and attacking the houses of unpopular employers. A deputation of citizens clamoured for the resignation of the hated Metternich: his house was burnt down, and he fled to England.
A second outbreak of the excited populace (May 15, 1848), sent the Emperor Ferdinand in helpless flight to Innsbruck in Tyrol; but he returned when they avowed their loyalty to his person, though they detested the old bureaucratic system.
The democrats, exasperated by the perfidious policy of the government, had on October 6, 1848, risen a third lime: the war-minister, Latour, had been hanged on a lamp-post, and the emperor again fled from his turbulent capital to the everfaithful Tyrolese. But now Jellachich and Windischgratz bombarded the rebellious capital. It was on the point of surrendering when the Hungarians appeared to aid the city; but the levies raised by the exertions of Kossuth were this time outmanoeuvred [and defeated] by the imperialists at Schwechat (October 30, 1848), and on the next day Vienna surrendered.
Blum, a delegate from Saxony Tto the German Parliament of Frankfort, who had come on a mission of mediation to Vienna, but who had taken a part in the fightingl, and some other democrats, were shot. By this clever but unscrupulous use of race jealousy the Viennese Government seemed to have overcome Bohemians, Italians, Hungarians, and the citizens of its own capital in turn; while it had diverted the southern Slavonians from hostility to actual service on its side.
The weak health and vacillating spirit of Ferdinand did not satisfy the knot of courtiers of Vienna, who now, flushed by success, sought to concentrate all power in the Viennese Cabinet. Worn out by the excitements of the year and by the demands of these men, Ferdinand, on December 2, 1848, yielded up the crown, not to his rightful successor, his brother, but to his nephew, Francis Joseph. He, a youth of eighteen, ascended the throne so rudely shaken. Despite almost uniform disaster in war, he ruled till 1916 over an empire larger and more powerful than he found it in 1848.
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