Napoleon’s rise to imperial stature fatally weakened the (already ramshackle and superannuated) Holy Roman Empire. A destabilizing territorial reshuffle was attempted in 1803 to indemnify imperial princes who had lost territories to Napoleon. This was done by the “mediatization” or “secularization” of free imperial fiefs: lordships or ecclesiastical lordships which until then had functioned autonomously under the immediate suzerainty of the Holy Roman Emperor were enfeoffed to intermediate vassals. In the process, the Habsburgs also lost their Catholic majority in the Imperial Electoral College. They forestalled a fall from power by granting to themselves, as rulers of their dynastic crownlands, the title of “Emperor of Austria”, and in 1806 released all vassals from their liege fealty to the Holy Roman Emperor, in effect abdicating as such and downsizing their imperial domain to their Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian crownlands. A loosely-organized German Confederation was set up by Metternich in 1815 to fill the vacuum of the Holy Roman Empire.

Although Austria was the hierarchical primus inter pares in the German Confederation, the Reichsidee that subsisted among nationally-minded Germans turned away from the Habsburgs in the next decades. Prussian activists looked to the Berlin-based Hohenzollerns (historically Vienna’s rival, and in the ascendancy), Protestants mistrusted Austria’s Catholicism, and German Catholic nationalists found a more congenial royal figurehead in the king of Bavaria. All German nationalists north of the Alps viewed the Habsburg Empire as a state with an overly large non-German population, and indeed within the Austrian Empire the rise of nationalism among Italians, Bohemian Czechs, Hungarians and South Slavs (Croats, Slovenes) challenged the state’s unity. (Tellingly, the Hungarian Crown lands, as far south as Dalmatia, did not form part of the Confederation, although Bohemia did.)

These developments came to a head in 1848, when the Frankfurt Parliament, assembled though it was under the nominal protection of a Habsburg prince, opted for a Reichsidee around the Hohenzollerns rather than the Habsburgs, while the various non-German minorities asserted their claims to self-determination in a cascading series of para-parliamentary gatherings, proclamations and overt revolts, forcing the resignation of the towering chancellor Metternich. Street battles and military campaigns lasted into 1849, the Hungarian bid for self-determination proving hardest to put down. The Hungarian war of independence was hampered because the non-Magyar ethnicities in the Hungarian Crown’s lands (especially the Croatian nobility, led by ban/viceroy Josip Jelačić) were as wary of a Hungarian-dominated nation-state as they were of Austrian imperial rule.

The years after 1848 were characterized by an anti-nationalist and anti-democratic government backlash, known generally as “neo-absolutism” or by the name of the prime minister of the 1850s, Alexander von Bach. The Bach regime, with its severe censorship and repression, not only stifled political dissent but also the middle-class culture of sociability and cultural production that had made national consciousness-raising possible pre-1848. Freedom of the press and, as importantly, freedom of association were drastically curtailed. This policy stifled cultural life in, particularly, Hungary and Bohemia; the situation in Croatia was slightly less constricted since the elite’s anti-Hungarian stance had earned them credit in Vienna. In all these areas, however, “cultural life” was now implicitly split between imperial (Austrian-German) and national camps. Some events like cultural or charitable festivities, or the funerals of leading personalities, provided rare occasions for public manifestations of a national spirit.

A combination of international factors (most importantly, the rise of Prussia and a realignment of French foreign policy after the Crimean War) weakened Austria politically. The Franco-Austrian War of 1859 and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 both ended in Austrian defeat; the former resulted in the loss of Lombardy, Tuscany, Modena and ultimately Venice, the latter demonstrated the inability of Austria, as leader of the German Confederation, to thwart Prussia’s designs on Schleswig-Holstein and on a hegemonial position north of the Alps. This weakening in the international arena forced the Habsburg monarchy to pursue a conciliation with its internal minority populations.

As Austria’s involvement in the German Confederation came to naught, various conciliatory measures were introduced within the Empire to rally the disaffected ethnicities to the Habsburg Crown. A consultative assembly was instituted in 1861, cultural repression was relaxed, and in 1867 a constitutional reboot (Ausgleich) was made by turning the Empire into a dual monarchy: the Empire of Austria (including Bohemia, the Slovenian lands and Galicia, as well as newly-acquired Balkan territories) and the Kingdom of Hungary (including a Slovak population as well as Croatia and the Serbian Vojvodina) – the Habsburg monarch functioning as the personal unification of the two. The later 1860s accordingly saw a great renewal of a nationalist cultural production among the newly enfranchised ethnicities. Some frictions remained. Czech nationalists were dissatisfied that the autonomy granted to the Hungarian Crown was not extended in equal measure to the Bohemian Crown; while within Hungary, a fervent government policy of Magyar cultural assertiveness caused frictions with the kingdom’s Slovak and Croatian populations. The latter, with their established nobility and its traditional feudal privileges, were in a position to conclude a subsidiary intra-Hungarian Ausgleich in 1868, known as the Hungarian-Croatian Settlement. All the overt and latent contentions over culture, autonomy and territoriality were cloaked in a culture of sentimental Reichspatriotismus, or else folded into the ambience of emerging party politics, but would re-emerge in full virulence in the 20th century.

The downfall of the multi-ethnic Dual Monarchy was set in motion by its own, ill-fated expansionism pursued in the Balkans, where the decline of the Ottoman Empire left a geopolitical vacuum. Most emerging nationalities in that region were Orthodox; in addition, the Slavic ones were Russophile in their cultural awareness. Russia, for its part, had since the Crimean War been extending its sphere of influence southward towards Istanbul along the western shores of the Black Sea. The Habsburg countermove, to extend its sphere of influence from Dubrovnik and Novi Sad southward towards Salonika and the Dardanelles, cut across the territorial ambitions of the newly-established Kingdom of Serbia. Austria’s imposition of a protectorate on Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878, followed by annexation in 1908, proved a destabilizing overstretch. It was in the annexed city of Sarajevo that the Bosnian-Serbophile nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots which in 1914 triggered the First World War: Austria imposing a punitive ultimatum on Serbia, provoking the mobilization of Serbia’s protector-state Russia, provoking in turn Germany’s declaration of war.