Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg Nigel Aston Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. By Scott Berg. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 344. $59.99. ISBN: 9781612496962). In this deeply researched and engaging study, Scott Berg demonstrates conclusively that Austria before and during the Metternich years may have been an international symbol of conservatism but, in terms of the Empire’s confessional policy, it had all the hallmarks of a continuing Enlightened regime. Francis I was not his uncle Joseph’s nephew for nothing. Despite intensive pressure from Catholic activists clerical and lay, the Josephist inheritance founded on the 1781 Edict of Toleration was upheld by the bureaucrats driving policy even to the Revolutions of 1848. A multinational and multi-confessional empire had to function efficiently and that required a qualified throne and altar alliance and respect for the rights of non-Catholics (about 30 per cent of the Empire), including confirmation of citizenship under the Austrian Civil Code of 1811. The principle of toleration was upheld, albeit one that rejected a Josephist drive for uniformity in favour of [End Page 212] respecting difference in a composite monarchy. Censorship was in force and it was impossible for Catholic activists such as Hofbauer to agitate openly agains the Toleration Patent because they risked expulsion from Austria. Under ultramontanist pressure, in his last years as Chancellor before 1848 Metternich pushed for a rapprochement with the papacy that would loosen restrictions on the Church but not much was achieved before the Revolutions transformed the political landscape and brought an end to Josephist policies in religion. Prior to that, as Berg shows in Chapter 3, Protestants in Hungary had been integrated into the life of the Empire under Archduke Joseph, the representative of the Emperor in Budapest for half a century down to 1847. Legal curbs were evn imposed on Protestants who opted to convert and mixed marriages were officially discouraged. Only the Tyrol did not follow the loose interpretation of the Toleration Patent and the few Protestants resident there endured popular repression. The Habsburgs also reckoned with a sizeable Orthodox presence. It was left undisturbed though the price exacted was the discouragement of contacts with foreign governments, notably Russia, whose amity pre-1848 was a priority for Imperial officials. Francis I and his successor, the mentally impaired Emperor Ferdinand, ruled over the second largest Jewish population after Russia in Europe and they were keen, mainly through education, to integrate Jews into Habsburg society. And this despite much anti-semitism among the general population and the opposition of some Jews, especially in Galicia, the largest and poorest community. As Berg neatly expresses it: ‘If Liberalism was the best friend of the Jews in the nineteenth century, then Josephist absolutism was its bodyguard’ (p. 153). But the Revolutions of 1848 brought the end of Josephism. The régime finally made concessions to popular Catholicism and restored the Church’s privileged political status in relation to the state by 1850 as Emperor Franz Josef put in place a counter-revolutionary, neo-absolutist regime with internal order as the priority: competitors to ultramontanism were crushed, and the Concordat of 1855 granted the Catholic Church unprecedented rights in Austria. Scott Berg charts with assurance this half-century of Austrian confessional policy in a volume based on solid archival evidence and he ranges across the whole Empire noting territorial divergences where appropriate. There is a nice opening touch to each chapter by way of reference to a building or a statue in the old Imperial lands that recalls this era. Nigel Aston University of York Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...