Liberalism at High Latitudes: The Politics of Polar Exploration in the Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

In the autumn of 1874, Austrian popular society seemed ablaze with talk of ice. The Habsburg monarchy's first major polar expedition was returning, and, as the German geographer August Petermann put it, “No field commander, returning home with his army victorious from battle, could be received more magnificently and enthusiastically than this small band of twenty- two men.” The first published narrative of the expedition was released in Vienna around 24 September and had sold out of its print run of forty-five thousand copies by 27 September. This figure, however, is dwarfed by contemporary estimates of the multitude that turned up to welcome the explorers to Vienna on 25 September: around a quarter million, or approximately one-fourth of the city's entire population. Although such figures should be taken with a grain of salt, the festivities that greeted the explorers involved possibly the largest crowds seen on the streets of Vienna between the revolutions of 1848–49 and the mass marches of the Social Democratic Party in support of universal male suffrage around the turn of the century.