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assemblies. Yet. with Bavaria insisting that arbitration was not binding- on a diet against its will, little was achieved. The fact was lhat the : Bund constitution of 1813 permitted, indeed encouraged, member states to grant constitutions, with their attendant assemblies, as :; many middle-sized ones had done. German public response to the ( temporary threat of war with France in 1840. which produced the (( famous patriotic song 'The Watch on the Rhine', showed the nation- :'( alist bogey was untamed.
The war scare with France arose over a new twist in the Eastern :J question, which, like the German question in one form or another, :« became a fixture of the international scene. In 1834 the British Whig (( foreign secretary Palmersion orchestrated a liberal Quadruple Alliance of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal as a counter-blast to the conservative Austro-Russian agreement of Miinchengratz the pre-vious year. Munchengratz, soon endorsed by Prussia, pledged sup-:!:! port for the status quo in Poland and Turkey. Yet in 1839 40 when (! the Sultan was threatened by his nominal Egyptian vassal. MehemetJ! Ali, it was to Palmersion and a conference in London that TsarJ Nicholas turned to sort out the matter, not to Vienna. Metter-1 nich, now 67, was prostrated by chagrin and took live weeks to recuperate. This last great episode of his diplomatic career showed bisf declining influence.
By this time Emperor Francis was dead. Domestically, the chief!!! feature of his reign was drift. Metternich was joined in an ageing;!!! troika by the minister of police Count Josef Scdlnitzky (from 1817 to 1848) and by Kolowrat, the Staatsrat member with responsibility! for internal affairs (1826-48), who called his sovereign the personiri-cation of suspicion. A pervasive censorship, which divided all hooks into four categories, only one of them fully tolerated, helped to foster;. a climate in which things were assumed to be forbidden unlesif expressly permitted. Francis sought to buy up the copyright pfMil play by Austria's most famous dramatist, Franz Grillparzer, afteri seeing it several times; the play celebrated a loya! servant of a medielt val Hungarian king, but presumably Francis felt it could also besee!ti( as showing up a monarch unworthy of such loyalty. Only exception!!!! ally were foreign newspapers allowed into Austria, while the leading! Austrian paper, Metternich's creation, the Oesteneicltische Beabachtergs simply did not report the military successes of the revolutionaries !ift! Congress Poland in the spring of 1831.
Yet such censorship was as much paternalist as repressive in intent. Francis and Mctternich shared a view of a contented, docile citizertrya
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who should be protected from the machinations of foreign radicals. :•. Theirs became the Austria of Bkdermeier, originally a style in furniture which came to be associated with a whole epoch of cosy bourgeois domesticity, good music and a theatre of local colour, comedy of manners and the escapist 'magical' genre which took the audience to other worlds onlv to reveal that there was no place like home. ! Beethoven, Schubert, the classical tragedian Grillparzer, the satiri-\\CA\ farceurs Raimund and Nestroy represent the Vienna of this time, (and hardly a journalist or social thinker of note. Part of the price for ((the authorities' apolitical idyll was respect for a certain sense of civic dignity in broad strata of the urban population, in other words, (maintenance of the enlightened idea of citizenship, as enshrined in the 1811 Civil Code. The Josephinian church settlement also survived, for it made the Church for the most part a tame organ of !! the state. The logic of conservatism inclined Francis to an accommodation with the Vatican after his visit to Rome in 1819 bu1 its practi-= cal implementation moved at a snail's pace, despite Metternich's effort*. Two textbooks on church law and history put on the Papal (Tndex in 1820 were not finally withdrawn from Austrian universities land seminaries until 1833 and (hen the state authorities could not (idfecide how openly they should acknowledge the change of course. (Two different proposals over this, left hanging in the air in 1837, were put on the desk of Austria's first minister of education on llMay 1848!
Education was another field where the heritage of the reform HipvemcM was far from lost. Voices questioning the utility of school-(ing!for peasant children were not heard, partly because peasant (styns were more than ever needed for the priesthood at a time of falling vocations, partly because the argument that the uneducated ifeiCaihc.disproportionately social pests and mendicants won the my;- Indeed, the second Ratio educations for Hungary in 1806 Intended the principle of compulsory free education to girls as well. In Bohemia 93% of children of school age were being educated by |M}34. The parallel expansion of secondary education swelled the ifffics' of non-nobie notables (officials, professionals and experts pfvarious kinds) till the category acquired its own name - the Honor-aiivscn. Thus this term, previously applied, in the Hungarian case, iffialfwho lived from intellectual work, by the 1830s was confined Ijlipbn-noblcs who did so, though their lifestyle took on noble aspects. (Tpspeak of the emergence of a homogenous bourgeoisie thereby, i';||l}14css of a fusion of eliles through common education, would