Page - 710 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

710 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution Perhaps too much importance had been attached to the question of the octroi, since it turned out that this question only played a marginal role for the non-German nation- alities. What did it now matter for those who were prepared to fundamentally reject the Monarchy, whether Bohemia was divided into districts, Galicia and Dalmatia were removed from the Austrian half of the Empire or the Emperor swore an oath on the imposed constitution ? There were now bigger things at stake. From March 1917, first of all orderlies, then transportation personnel, and finally workmen and cleaners had come into the Reichsrat building on Vienna’s ‘Parlaments- ring’, in order to relocate the military hospital that was situated here and to arrange the building once more for the parliament of the Austrian half of the Empire. The clubs moved into their meeting rooms and prepared themselves for the first session. For many of them, it was to be a day of reckoning. Instead of a possible 516 deputies, however, only 421 were able to come. They  – all of them men  – could only invoke the parliamentary seat that they had received before the war, but they were very well aware of the mood among the nationalities and the social classes. And, as far as was necessary, the last grain of uncertainty was glossed over by radicality. First of all, the resolution on the reconvention of the Reichsrat had exerted an elec- trifying and, for some, also an alarming effect. The latter had been the case, for exam- ple, for the Czech émigré organisations, since they had lost an almost stereotypical argument that they had used for years. But the émigré movement recovered itself just as quickly as it had briefly lost its orientation. Masaryk and Beneš recalled the Czech deputies from their exile in London ; they were to resort to the method of rejecting the budget and the funds necessary for waging the war. Not all deputies were permitted to return to the Reichsrat ; the radicals, at least, were to stay away. If the Emperor intended to swear an oath on the constitution, it was not to be acknowledged. Instead, the ‘his- torical rights’ of the Czechs were to be demanded. Similar sentiments could be read in a ‘Manifesto of Writers’, which was published on 17 May and signed by 222 Czechs.1620 It was less this call for non-compliance that influenced the parties in Bohemia and Moravia that were united in the Czech Union. And it was also not the influence of émi- gré organisations and Entente policies that was to then find its expression in the prepa- ration for the first Reichsrat session. It was the questions that had merely been pent up and had increased during the course of the war. Questions relating to the octroi were no longer of interest. It was also automatically accepted that the Emperor  – on the recom- mendation of the Clam-Martinic government  – did not intend to swear an oath on the constitution. The Cabinet had claimed that the Emperor could not be expected ‘to swear an oath to a constitution that has proven to be useless and indeed in view of the impos- sibility of altering and improving it in a constitutional way’.1621 Karl left it at that. Other things also did not develop as they had been envisaged and prepared for. The radicals’ renunciation of the state was not yet definitive, but they were well on their way to this.