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and confidentiality of correspondence – although this is something that most of our contemporaries have voluntarily done away with by using the internet.
However, there is a conceptual problem in German that most other languages are not aware of. The German word “Bürger” denotes both the (fully entitled) inhabitant of a pre-modern city and the (fully entitled) citizen. French, on the other hand, differentiates between “citoyen” (citizen of a state) and “bourgeois” (inhabitant of a town, with its root in “bourg” that can mean a market or – in the form of “fauxbourg” – a suburb). English recognises the “citizen”, as well as the “burgher” (city resident), and, in Italian, we have the “cittadino” and the “borghese”. It is obvious that they have their roots in the Latin “civis” and the “civitas” connected with it, and the Germanic-late-Latin “burgus”, which originally only meant a fort but was later expanded to include “civil” settlements, markets, and cities.3 Slavic languages also differentiate between the citizen (“državljan” in Slovene) and town resident (“meščan” in Slovene – and very similar in Russian).
However, “zivile”, with its roots in the Latin “civis”, has remained alive in German alongside the local word. It was originally used as a contrast to the military but soon came to denote a certain – “civilised”, non-violent, equitable – behaviour when dealing with other people. Borrowed from the French “civil” (from the Latin “civilis”) in the 16th century, it meant middle class, patriotic, national, and public.4 During the Enlightenment in the 18th century, “zivilisiert” – in the sense of enlightened, non-violent, good behaviour – was added although the old bourgeois concept of “Ehrsamkeit” (respectability) and its inherent factors of being of legitimate birth and upright behaviour still resonated.
The behaviour required a juridical standardisation: In 1789, the great Austrian enlightener Gottfried van Swieten (1733–1803, son of the famous doctor Gerard van Swieten) defined the “bourgeois society”, as opposed to a “horde of wild people”, by “those principles of their affiliation” that there can be “no right without obligation, and no obligation without right.”5 The “civil society “(= society of citizens) therefore needed a “civil law” as a basis. This was codified at the time and came into force as the “General Civil Code” (ABGB) in the year 1812.6 The term “citizen” was first encountered in legislation during the reign of Joseph II. The ABGB also assumed a common citizenship of the residents of those Habsburg (Austrian) countries in which the ABGB was put into effect (but not in Hungary!).
But was society – not only in Central Europe but throughout the continent – so advanced that it could be interpreted as a society of people with equal rights? Feudal dependencies actually still existed in most regions. In no way could those living in rural areas, who made up the majority of the population at the time, be considered as being members of this new general bourgeois society. In 1789, the French Revolution asserted the abolishment of all feudal bonds in Europe with the victory of its slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A few years previously, Joseph II had at least done away with serfdom in his “Austrian monarchy” (from 1781, first of all in Bohemia), but the farmers still had to rely on the manorial lords for their land and property. This dependence continued in the Austrian Empire until 1848; it was considered a component of the “state constitutions”, meaning that these conditions were not included in the AGBG (they were not regarded as a lease!)
The genesis of the “bourgeois society” in the Habsburg monarchy
Where can we look for the core of the new “bourgeois society”? It originally was comprised of men who were not dependent on domiciliary rights and not subjected feudally – therefore, first and foremost, townspeople. They were “citizens” in the traditional sense of possessing the civil rights of a town and being the subject of a monarch (and not a noble lord!). A new, educated bourgeois configuration, dominated by civil servants, buts also including writers, professors, teachers, and scientists – many of them in civil service (and more than a few ex-Jesuits after the repeal of their order in 1773) – developed out of this old urban bourgeoisie in the years after the reign of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. In addition, the emerging supra-regional market (and the almost equally significant market in the rapidly expanding residence city itself) resulted in considerable entrepreneurial growth, the prosperity of which formed the foil against which the bourgeois culture of the Biedermeier period could later develop. This new entrepreneurship was usually favoured by a state factory charter; i.e., it was possible to run a business without adhering to the restrictions and stipulations that the individual guilds, associations, and professional societies had formerly prescribed. This shows that the new educated bourgeoisie and new entrepreneurship were both the products of the state in the making!
Entrepreneurship, which was not regulated by a guild, and for which the name of “fabricant” was soon introduced to distinguish it from “master craftsman”, originally had no connection to the new educated classes. The entrepreneurs only gradually achieved some of the social standing that the intelligentsia had already claimed for itself. The state, which needed both, awarded outstanding members of the two groups with titles of nobility.7 These peerages (from a simple “von” to “knight” – or “baron” at the most) characterised the “second society” with their upper-class lifestyle who ranked behind the traditional high nobility but combined their sophisticated modes of behaviour with scientific, artistic, and literary interests. Schubert was honoured in these circles, and this is also where Grillparzer and Bauernfeld socialised. Grillparzer’s close ties were due to his uncle Joseph Sonnleithner’s connections. These circles were also the principal clients for painting which, along with music and theatre, rapidly blossomed in the Biedermeier and pre-March periods. Its master artists Friedrich von Amerling, Moritz Michael Daffinger, Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, Josef Kriehuber, and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller created many portraits of members of this society.
The “second society” and the middle classes
The “second society” can be considered the leading group of the new bourgeois class that referred to itself as middle class. As early as in 1770, a rhyme typifying the self-awareness of the new middle class made the rounds:
“No-one’s lord, and no-one’s slave
That is the right of the middle-class”
The middle class therefore found itself between the ruling system (sovereign, bureaucracy, military, and nobility) and those who were still subjected to feudal domination – the mass of the farmers, as well as those dependent on domiciliary rights, apprentices, labourers, messengers, servants, and maids. In an anonymous document published in Leipzig in 1843 “Pia desideria of an Austrian Writer”, Eduard von Bauernfeld described all the intellectually active segments of society, “Professors, academics, artists, fabricants, tradesmen, economists, and even civil servants and clerics”, as belonging to the middle classes that were urgently demanding that censorship be relaxed and a general change in the political situation:
“… the Viennese have changed; they have become desperately serious. Here, as everywhere else, industry has set up its throne; a people that forms trade associations no longer has time to deal with what they prefer most: fried chicken, the Theatre in the Leopoldstadt, and the music of Strauss and Lanner.”8
With the Lower Austrian Trade Association (1839), the Inner Austrian Trade Association in Graz (1839), the Juridical-Political Reading Circle (1841), and the Concordia Writers’ Club (1844), the still-young middle-classes created new, modern organisational forms – ultimately also discussion forums in which, in spite of censorship and the police, certain demands on the state were also formulated.
Numerous problems were waiting to be solved – the farmers’ demands to abolish the feudal system, the growing need of the lower classes, and the national discontent that was becoming increasingly pressing, as well as the paralysis of the government that had been playing absolutism without a monarch (since the death of Franz I). Ferdinand I (1835–1848) was only nominally in power.