Page - 624 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

624 The Death of the Old Emperor he had never considered calling the alliance into question, until the end of 1916, the possibility of concluding a separate peace was never seriously discussed in the Council of Ministers. While in 1915 and 1916, the Army High Command and the Balkan High Command had in their own way been occupied with issues of imperial reform, in the Joint Council of Ministers no such topic was discussed. Only in January 1917 was the question of peace brought up by Emperor Karl. From this, the following could be concluded : for the decision to go to war, the Joint Council of Ministers provided all the basic formal procedures ; when it came to ending the war, it was not consulted by Franz Joseph. This was clearly not a matter for the ministers ! There were also other issues that were not discussed in the Joint Council of Ministers, in particular questions relating to conditions at home, further national compromises or even a change to the dualistic form of state. The separate interests of individual crown lands and regions of the Empire were nothing new. However, before the war, while attempts at compromise may not have been pronounced, they were certainly being made. Then, the process of imperial re- form stagnated, and to the extent that it affected the prime ministers of the two halves of the Empire, they also showed no particular interest. They were far more forced to acknowledge the fact that the military centres had become the real bases of power, to which everything else was subordinate. Prime Minister Count Stürgkh reduced this to the simple formula : Austria is in fact not a state, but a conglomerate. He had indeed also ‘more trust in battles won than in compromise conferences’.1424 There was therefore no question of continuously steering the country through the war. Nonetheless, Franz Joseph, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, had an ‘extra-constitutional power of command’ at his disposal.1425 It was hardly ever exercised, however. Instead, a huge vacuum also emerged, and here in particular, it was combined with a contradiction that could not be resolved. The Austrian Emperor, while not foregoing the opportunity to control developments in the war and to exercise his power of command, was simply no longer capable of doing so. The Emperors’ advisors had become few in number, and they also appeared to be primarily concerned with ensuring that the Monarch was kept going by maintaining his usual routine and standardised sequence of daily events, and that he was relieved of the burden of his duties as far as possible. It was the conscious return to a routine that the old gentleman was looking for in particular during the war in order to create a sense of normality that by now was hardly provided at all. In line with this normality, Franz Joseph, after an interruption of several months, again arranged for a General Audience to be held on 9 November 1914. 13 people were permitted to attend ; five minutes were available for each presentation. On 26 November, a further General Audience took place, and again on 11 and 27 February 1915. Then these meetings ended entirely, and from that point on, an audience with