The People's Manifesto (German: Völkermanifest) was the unofficial name given to a manifesto issued by Emperor Charles I on 16 October 1918 in his capacity as head of state of the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Imperial Council, officially known as the Austrian lands since 1915. Its purpose was to prevent the complete disintegration of Austria-Hungary as a consequence of World War I. Charles attempted to preserve the monarchy by transforming it into a federal state. The manifesto, addressed To My Loyal Austrian Peoples, was officially drafted by the Hussarek ministry, although the emperor himself unofficially contributed to parts of it. It was published on 17 October 1918 in a special edition of the official newspaper, the Wiener Zeitung, but failed to achieve its intended effect.
Prime Minister Max Hussarek von Heinlein had already been described as intending to resign several days earlier. The proposed Völkerministerium (Ministry of the Peoples), which was intended to organise an orderly restructuring of Cisleithania through a cabinet representing all the nationalities of Old Austria, remained an illusion. The Czechs demanded union with Slovakia. As the manifesto applied only to Cisleithania, while Slovakia, unlike the Czech lands, belonged to the Hungarian half of the monarchy, such a project could scarcely have been realised. The Czechs also firmly rejected any “partition” of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. At the same time, the South Slavs of both halves of the monarchy demanded political unification.
Hussarek deliberately left unclear whether Bohemia was to be divided along ethnic boundaries. This further intensified Czech opposition to what was described as the “dismemberment of the historic lands”.
At the Crown Council meeting of 15 October 1918, Charles justified the reform by referring to the need to obtain peace under the conditions set out in the American president's Fourteen Points. He advocated the federal reorganisation of the empire on the basis of political autonomy for the individual nations of the empire. The Hungarian government, however, prevented the manifesto from applying to the Hungarian half of the monarchy.
On 18 October 1918, Vienna's best-known newspaper abroad, the Neue Freie Presse, reported that representatives of the affected nationalities had already informed Prime Minister Hussarek on 17 October that “the nations do not want this gift from him, but are claiming as a right what he wishes to give them.” According to the manifesto, Austria was to be organised as a “federation of free peoples”. The Neue Freie Presse commented that a federal state “consisting of peoples who for the most part cannot tolerate one another [...] will not be easy to establish”.
Because the peoples of Cisleithania were called upon in the manifesto to establish national councils, activities that had previously been liable to be regarded as treasonous separatism were now authorised by the monarch.
The People's Manifesto was consequently interpreted as a licence, or as a form of decree of dissolution, under which the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy were free to follow their own political paths. The Allied powers, for their part, did everything they could to encourage the continuing disintegration of the monarchy.
The political representatives of the monarchy's various peoples used the manifesto as an opportunity to pursue independence openly within a matter of days. Only two days later, Tomáš Masaryk issued the declaration of independence of the Czechoslovak nation.
The unsuccessful Hussarek ministry resigned on 27 October 1918. The Lammasch ministry, appointed by the emperor on the same day and described by the press as the “liquidation ministry” even before it took office, could no longer influence the dissolution of the existing state. By the end of October, Austria-Hungary as a real union of two states and the Austrian half of the empire had ceased to exist.
On 29 October 1918, the Croatian Sabor severed Croatia's constitutional relations with Austria-Hungary, transferred supreme executive authority to the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and proclaimed the short-lived State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The National Council assumed supreme command of the Croatian troops and withdrew them from the front.
Galicia left the monarchy on 30 October 1918, and Polish politicians declared the former crown land to be part of the newly established Polish state.
Although the manifesto was intended as an attempt to save the empire, it was later viewed by some members of the Austrian elite as a mistake. For one of Karl's harshest critics, the influential member of the House of Lords Rudolf Sieghart, the initiative was an “inconceivable error” that “organized and legalized the secession of the nations and heralded the collapse of the empire . . . World history knows of no similar case in which the dissolution of an empire was formally organized from above.”
Literature
Rudolf Neck (Hrsg.): Österreich im Jahre 1918. Berichte und Dokumente. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 1968, p. 64 ff.
Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Um Krone und Reich. Die Tragödie des letzten Habsburgerkaisers. Verlag Fritz Molden, Wien 1968, p. 194 ff.
Zbyněk A. Zeman: Der Zusammenbruch des Habsburgerreiches 1914–1918. Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, Wien 1963, p. 225 ff.