New Year's Patent
With the later so-called New Year's Eve patent, on December 31, 1851 , Emperor Franz Joseph repealed the March 1849 constitution imposed by him .
history
The constitution, which was passed in 1849 by the Kaiser who was not yet 19 years old, without the involvement of a parliament, was subsequently not implemented. After the victory over the Hungarian revolutionaries , who had declared the House of Habsburg-Lorraine in Hungary to be dethroned, in the summer of 1849 with Russian help , the emperor and his advisors believed that they could govern the state without a constitution and without elected representatives in the spirit of neo-absolutism .
The imperial letter of December 31, 1851 therefore repealed the constitution imposed on March 4, 1849 . Thus the process of a neo-absolutist reorganization of the state finally prevailed in the Austrian Empire , which had been announced since the suppression of the October uprising in Vienna in 1848.
The New Year's Eve patent abolished the freedom of the press as well as the public from legal proceedings and the applicable municipal constitutions. The so-called Bach system, which was composed of 36 articles written by Interior Minister Alexander Freiherr von Bach and addressed by the Kaiser to Prime Minister Felix zu Schwarzenberg , became the new structure of the Austrian imperial state . After Schwarzenberg's unexpected death on April 5, 1852, Bach was not appointed as the new Prime Minister , as expected ; Rather, Franz Joseph eliminated the Council of Ministers as a collegiate body and only called the ministers to conferences , which either he himself or Foreign Minister Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein presided as the leading minister .
This marked the beginning of the era of neo-absolutism in Austria , which was only ended in the wake of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 with the October diploma of October 20, 1860.
literature
- Wolfgang Hardtwig , Helmut Hinze (eds.): From the German Confederation to the Empire 1815-1871. Volume 7, in: German history in sources and presentation . Reclam, Stuttgart 1997; ISBN 3-15-017007-9 .
- Walter Friedrich: The Austrian central administration. 3. Department: From the March Revolution in 1848 to the December Constitution in 1867. Adolf Holzhausen's successor, Vienna 1964.
- Rudolf Slawitschek: The development of the Austrian constitution. Part 1: From the beginning of the constitutional life to the New Year's Eve patent (1851). Haase, Leipzig / Prague / Vienna 1918.
Web links
- The New Year's Patent in full
- Entry on the New Year's Eve patent in the Austria Forum (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )