The more I read about social conditions in The HRE/Imperial Austria/Austria-Hungary, the more I’m convinced that Marxist labels for dissecting society confuse rather than assist modern historians. “Bürgertum”as a social concept is far older than Marx, but it’s been unfairly burdened with his academization of ‘us vs. them’ ghetto politics.
I like “bourgeoise” as a translation of “Bürgertum” because both words reflect the essentialy urban nature of this type of person, whose existance has been acknowledged since the reign of Joseph I and his reforming policies. An etymology of “bourgeoise” as provided by Douglas Harper’s online etymological dictionary:
bourgeoisie (n.)
1707, “body of freemen in a French town,” hence, “the French middle class,” also extended to that of other countries, from French bourgeois, from Old French burgeis, borjois (12c.) “town dweller” (as distinct from “peasant”), from borc “town, village,” from Frankish *burg “city” (from PIE root *bhergh- (2) “high,” with derivatives referring to hills and hill-forts). Communist use for “the capitalist class generally” attested from 1886.
So what are cities and why would a Bürgertum class occur there? Cities are market towns which host government bodies. A market town can evolve in the absence of organized government, but a city can’t.
What Marxist thinking misses about the Bürgertum is that they are a government-created class; not a capitalism-created one. The rise of the bourgeoisie in the Holy Roman Empire was a product of the Hapsburgs’ desire to not share power with native, traditional aristocracies. This desire became a mania after the War of Austrian Succession. The Hapsburgs used state-granted monopolies to enrich anyone whom they felt could be useful checking the power of real aristocrats, whose utility rested in the lands they managed; the religious institutions they subsidized; and the armies they could muster. The merchant classes in cities, who sought social prestige almost as much as they sought economic power, were whom the Hapsburgs partnered with to achieve these centralized ends: hence the birth of the “enlightenment”-era Bürgertum.
A lot of the worrying academics do about what it meant to be “aristocratic” in Austria-Hungary stems from their inability/unwillingness to be honest about the Hapsburg “absolutist” agenda and the way liberal “enlightenment”/materialist/socialist values fit into that agenda. When good things are doled out from a massive central administration system, a “Bürgertum” will coalesce. Want to know who was aristocratic? Look who controlled land/funded churches/marshaled armies prior to 1740. Everybody else who got their money or titles after 1748 was Bürgertum, including those awkward beasts called the “Second Society” or “Dienstadel”. If your name is Reininghaus, Aehrenthal, or Hötzendorf and that hurts your feelings… life is sometimes like that.
To illustrate just how much of an absolutist creation the Austro-Hungarian Bürgertum were, I’d like to review a statistical analysis of this class published by Robert Hoffmann in 1998 using data from 1910. It’s not clear how the 1910 statisticians defined “Bürgertum” from Hoffmann’s paper, this may have been a self-reported social class.
One of the criticisms of Franz Joseph’s (centrally-controlled!) economic policy is that Imperial Austrian industries were not developed uniformly, rather certain monopolistic undertakings like railway construction, tobacco dispensing, textile manufacture, sugar refining, etc. were given undue attention [ie. taxpayer-guaranteed financing and state-guaranteed barriers to competition] at the expense of stable economic development and growth.
Just look at how much of the the “Bürgertum” even as late as 1910 came from those very same Hapsburg-favored monopolistic undertakings:
The table above contains selected data from Hoffmann’s “Table 5: Proportion of “bourgeois” strata among the members of the profession according to economic class and position in the profession”. (My interpretation is that “Number of Persons” means self-identifying members of the Bürgertum.) Only the numerically largest professions are represented here; Hoffmann’s original table is much more detailed.
[Source: Hoffmann, Robert. “Wie Bürgerlich war die Hapsburgmonarchie?” in Zwischen Wettbewerb und Protektion. Zur Rolle staatlicher Macht und wettbewerblicher Freiheit in Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert. Herausgeberen: Jürgen Nautz und Emil Brix. Passagen Verlag, 1998.]
As you can see above, about 40% of the Bürgertum identified as being in “Industry and Services”; 30% in “Goods and Services”; and 27% in that class of professionals that were basically government employees because their trades were so heavily regulated and subsidized out of Vienna. These professionals include doctors, lawyers and the like— occupations that the Anglophone world doesn’t typical consider “public”. However, in Austria-Hungary Franz Joseph’s central planning stretched very far into how these trades were licensed, paid and operated. Note how the retired and pensioned are lumped together in this class of state-clients.
In Austria-Hungary, these state-sponsored professions were often gateways for marginalized groups— particularly Eastern European Jews— to find employment in the cities, including the capital Vienna. The population of Jews in Vienna increased drastically as Franz Joseph encouraged their involvement in educating and minting these new professionals.
Consider Industry and Trade next: fully 34% of the Bürgertum were engaged in the manufacture and cleaning of clothes, that’s a percentage over twice the size of the next largest cohort, Foodstuffs. Taken into consideration with textile manufacture, the Bürgertum account for over 40% of Industry workers. Monopolies on textile production were a favorite way for the Hapsburgs to reward post-1748 cronies; they were also heavily associated with newly enfranchised Jewish communities.
This situation is repeated in the Services sector. 31% of census correspondents identified as “Bürgertum” were employed in Services, with 56% of those being in retail— that’s almost 3 times the percentage engaged in Hospitality, the next largest segment.
The picture that emerges is one of a social class whose appearance was imperially subsidized since the political upheaval of 1748. The elite of the Bürgertum, the Dienstadel or “Second Society”, were not a new, meritocracy-based “aristocracy”, but rather the world’s first socialist carpetbaggers!
Col. Alfred Redl 