Holy Roman Empire

Chapter 9: Building a Public Persona

Countless lessons drawn from his past life had taught Franz a profound truth: you didn't necessarily have to take the side of the majority, but at the very least, you had to make them think you were with them.

That's the route Franz was pursuing. He surely had to tell the outside world that he was in support of reform, as reform was mainstream in Austria at that time.

Meanwhile, the power of Austrian conservatives could not be underestimated. The Vienna Court was the base camp of conservatives, and Franz could not betray his class.

His youth was the best solution for a dilemma like that, as it was satisfying enough for the reformists to know that he was on their side. No one was counting on a 16-year-old to lead the reform in Austria.

From the conservatives' point of view, Franz was reserved enough not to comment on specifics of reform. Everyone understood it was necessary for Austria but didn't know how to implement it, causing the lasting debate on the subject.

As the Crown Prince of the Empire, there was nothing wrong with Franz advocating reform. However, he would be taught a lesson if he was cocky enough to put forward his own reform plan.

By contrast, it was no problem for Franz to focus on the living conditions of the people at the bottom, as a merciful leader benefitted everyone.

Before the mystery was solved, neither the capitalists nor the aristocracy gave a damn about Franz raising his profile with the people, since no one understood it was all a diversion.

Bowenfield was convinced by Franz, or by reality, really, and there was nothing wrong with listening to the words of this young archduke. It would make things even better if he could influence this archduke and let him accept his ideas.

Though Franz understood Bowenfield's plan as clear as day, he did not care about it. At that point, the only thing he needed was to use Bowenfield's influence to start up the newspaper in the shortest time possible.

The matters of political reform in Austria were beyond their concern. Franz had a plan sketched out already; however, before carrying it out, he had to weaken the bourgeois and the aristocracy.

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Things like raising the status of capitalists would never happen in his reform.

"Capital is borderless," Franz had heard. The capitalists, who could never be satisfied, would betray the noble class immediately if it were in their interest, so Franz would not dare count on them as the backbone of the empire.

The specific conditions of Austria were such that, to integrate this country truly, he must take into account the interests of the vast majority of the underprivileged population and let the nobility and the capitalist class make sacrifices.

Franz had a chance to succeed only in this particular time when the conflict between the nobility and the capitalist class was intense.

The more he learned about the country, the more Franz was sure that various powers simmered under the surface of this empire.

In 1846, Austria was affected by the crop failure of Germany. As a matter of course, the Austrian Empire, with the Great Hungarian Plain, should not have been severely affected by this event, for it always was the most important food exporter in Europe.

However, the facts suggested the opposite. For their own profit, the capitalists excessively exaggerated food shortages to raise food prices, while at the same time, they depressed the purchase price of food in the Hungarian region, because of the great local harvest of grain.

By the beginning of 1847, the price of food in Vienna had risen by fifty-four percent, and ordinary Viennese citizens had felt the pinch.

As the capitalists manipulated food prices, a large number of farmers went bankrupt, and even some nobles suffered heavy losses; consequently, various undercurrents were agitated in the Hungarian region.

For a while, Franz had noticed the growth of the foreign population in Vienna. It was clear that they were bankrupt farmers who came into the city to try to make a living.

Some of them might have been serfs, still in service for the nobility. The nobles had loosened their control because by then, Austria's population had exceeded 30 million. Since the labor force was plentiful, they had no shortage of serfs.

Serfs were wealth to the nobles, certainly, but they also had to eat; after they had enough laborers to guarantee the completion of production tasks, any excess would become a burden to them.

However, the European countries' successful liberation of serfs was not as simple as it looked. One factor was the fact that more machinery, like animal-powered harvesters, made a large number of laborers unnecessary for farming.

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the nobles' demand for a labor force was in decline, and resistance to the abolition of serfdom was less intense. Most open-minded nobles preferred to release serfs in exchange for compensation from the government.

The reason nobles still resisted Prime Minister Metternich's promotion of the abolitionist movement in Austria was simply that the offering was too low, a point on which Franz supported the Prime Minister.

Austria did not have sufficient funds to pay any more, so a lower settlement was inevitable.

However, this was not a dead-end problem: For example, abolitionist aristocracy could be given preferential tax rates, or, at the expense of capitalists, the government could intervene in the market and set a cap on food prices to safeguard everyone's interests.

There was always a way to resolve a conflict, as long as there was an appropriate distribution of benefits. Franz would not put forward these resolutions then, though, because they were his bargaining chips in exchange for benefits from Prime Minister Metternich.

On January 11, 1847, Franz's newspaper, "We Want Bread, We Want Cheese," was officially published.

He himself fiddled around a bit, writing the article "Caring for the People at the Bottom, Building a Better Austria Together" at the top of the page.

There was no doubt that it was just sentimental chicken soup, meant to make people feel better with no actual change. Franz dedicated a significant portion of his article to the importance of the role played by the people at the bottom in the country. The article asserted that the Austrian Empire could improve only if it met the basic living needs of those people.

The article's influence was indisputable, and many people were fooled by it since it was the first appearance of such chicken soup in the world.

Though they were not averse to Franz, the aristocrats and capitalists thought Franz to be an overwhelmingly merciful Crown Prince, who was leisurely enough to worry about the lives of the people at the bottom.

A merciful emperor was better than a tyrant; at the very least, they didn't have to worry about being killed without reason.

The influence on the poor, meanwhile, was quite enormous. A Crown Prince who cared about their living conditions must be a real sage.

It was a pity that the Crown Prince was too young to have a voice in politics. The perfect situation would be that he held power as an emperor.

...

"What a pity!" Franz said to himself. If only he had a group of people to lead publicity throughout the country, to make the impact even greater!

Franz had, in fact, sent people to do that, but the problem was that his team was short-handed. Accordingly, their influence was limited to Vienna, and he had to wait for it to spread slowly to other places.