Imperial Council (Austria)

The Imperial Council (Reichsrat) was the parliament of the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy, known as Cisleithania. It had two chambers: the House of Lords, whose members were appointed by the emperor or seated by birth and church office, and the elected House of Deputies. From 1867 Hungary sent no deputies to Vienna and had its own parliament, so the laws of the Imperial Council applied only in the Austrian lands, from Bohemia and Galicia to Tyrol and Dalmatia.

A parliament of many nations

The electoral reform that Prime Minister Paul Gautsch introduced in 1906 gave the vote to all adult men and enlarged the House of Deputies to 516 seats. The last pre-war elections were held in 1911. In the building on Vienna’s Ringstrasse sat representatives of eight nations and more than 30 parties, and Karl Renner compared the chamber to a League of Nations in miniature. Only German was spoken there, and its work was often held up by national disputes: obstruction by deputies who used noise and endless speeches to prevent votes, and the fragile coalitions on which successive governments rested.

The Polish deputies from Galicia formed the Polish Club, from the 1870s a reliable support of every cabinet. At the outbreak of the war it was led by Juliusz Leo, who in August 1914 also took charge of the Supreme National Committee. The House of Deputies also included the socialist Ignacy Daszyński and the peasant leader Wincenty Witos.

War without parliament

On 16 March 1914, at the request of Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh, the emperor adjourned the session of parliament, and when the ultimatum was handed to Serbia in July, the government formally closed the Imperial Council. The deputies thus had no say at all in the decision for war. The cabinet governed under paragraph 14 of the constitution of 1867, which allowed imperial decrees with the provisional force of law to be issued when parliament was not sitting. The Reichstag in Berlin and the parliament in Budapest sat throughout the war; the Vienna parliament was silent. The authors of the habsburger.net portal write plainly that in the first years of the war Austria was in fact a dictatorship. Friedrich Adler was protesting against this kind of rule when in October 1916 he shot Stürgkh.

Return and break-up

The new emperor, Charles I, opted for a gesture of reconciliation, and on 30 May 1917, after a break of more than three years, the Imperial Council met again. Many benches were empty: some deputies had been killed, others were in prison or, like Tomáš Masaryk, active in exile. Instead of uniting, parliament became a platform for the nations. The Czechs demanded the transformation of the monarchy into a federation of national states, Anton Korošec read the May Declaration on behalf of the South Slavs, and the Polish Club had already adopted on 16 May a resolution for an independent and united Poland. The Clam-Martinic government lost its majority and fell in June. In the House of Lords Heinrich Lammasch spoke for a negotiated peace.

After the Brest peace with Ukraine, which gave it the Chełm region, the Polish Club was in opposition, and in July 1918 it brought down the Ernst Seidler cabinet. On 16 October the emperor’s manifesto called on the deputies of each nation to form national councils. Five days later the German deputies met as the Provisional National Assembly of German Austria. On 30 October the Imperial Council sat for ten minutes, and on 12 November, the day the republic was proclaimed, it met for the last time.