The Habsburg Monarchy and Trieste: National Indifference amid the Nationalization of Politics

Nationalist activists in 1848, but also official Habsburg censuses from 1880, contributed to the nationalization of the Habsburg monarchy by reducing vernaculars “to a set of predetermined linguistic categories […] from among the following: German, Bohemian-Moravian-Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Slovene, Serbian-Croat, Italian-Ladino, Romanian, and Hungarian” and neglecting the widespread phenomenon of bilingualism and multilingualism (Stergar and Sheer Reference Stergar and Sheer2018, 580). In particular in the Austrian half of the empire, from the middle of the century, imperial institutions favored the formation of ethnolinguistic nations, which nonetheless did not challenge the cohesion of the empire (Cohen Reference Cohen2007). Although the nationalization of politics at the end of the century complicated interethnic relations, with imperial institutions at times failing to act as neutral supranational arbiters (Cornwall Reference Cornwall2019), more often than not nationalist activists sought to improve the relative position of what they considered to be their respective national groups (Cattaruzza Reference Cattaruzza and Engman1992; Judson Reference Judson2006).

Given the role of nationalist groups in Habsburg politics, the imposition of national categories based on standardized languages and the widespread dismissal of multilingualism and ethnic hybridity have consistently figured in historiography until the recent turn in Habsburg studies. Pieter Judson’s works, “instead of seeing political conflict as the inevitable product of underlying ethnic differences in society, [have] ask[ed] instead how political conflicts may have produced a greater sense of national differences among people” (Judson Reference Judson2016, 272). People’s indifference to nations and nationalist stirrings had been the torment of nationalist activists throughout the Habsburg monarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Judson Reference Judson2006). Yet, as Tara Zahra (Reference Zahra2010, 93) put it, “while national indifference has long been an obsession of nationalist activists in east central Europe, it has only recently become a subject of historical research.” Pamela Ballinger (Reference Ballinger2012, 116–117) has shown that, until Dominique Kirchner Reill’s recent studies, “the phenomenon of indifference to the nation that Judson and Zahra, among others, have documented for other frontier zones of the former Habsburg Empire has warranted relatively little conceptual or empirical elaboration for the Julian Region.” Although throughout the empire it was the “propertied and educated social elements” that identified with discrete nations (Cohen Reference Cohen2007, 255), Habsburg society was not composed by distinct national groups. Not only were national and ethnic identifications irrelevant for many Habsburg citizens, but more local and regional forms of identification encompassing different “nationalities” appeared to characterize the lived experiences of large parts of the population. This was as true for Budweisers (King Reference King2002) as it was for Triestines and Fiumans, even when politics became nationally polarized (Maritan Reference Maritan2021; Rutar Reference Rutar and Cattaruzza2002; Techet Reference Techet and Osterkamp2018).

Italian national narratives, both historical actors’ and historians’—even those acknowledging Trieste’s multiethnic nature and the cosmopolitanism of its elites—are steeped in what Judson (Reference Judson, Cohen and Feichtinger2014, 62) described as a belief in the existence of “language-based cultures […] [that] produced different national societies in the twentieth century” and tend to lump together the Venetian language and culture with the Italian (Maritan Reference Maritan2021).Footnote ¹ This process is concomitant with the appropriation of the Venetian colonial past on the part of Italian imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century (Laven and Damien Reference Laven, Damien, Berger and Miller2015). As Will Hanley (Reference Hanley2017, 28) put it with regard to late nineteenth-century Alexandria, a context that in many respects resembled that of Trieste and the other port cities of the eastern Mediterranean, “the cardinal sin of histories of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism is pleasure in the anachronistic use of present-day categories, especially those of modular and indelible nationality.” Pier Paolo Dorsi (Reference Dorsi and Cattaruzza1996, 116–117), for example, wrote that “between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Trieste was the pole of attraction mainly of the Italian people of the Adriatic, more than for peoples that were more removed in culture and traditions,” arguing teleologically that there existed a relatively homogenous Italian culture “from Friuli to Apulia.” Yet in the Austrian Littoral, a regional shared sense of belonging existed irrespective of present-day national categorizations and intertwined with Mitteleuropa and the eastern Adriatic (Laven and Baycroft Reference Laven and Baycroft2008). As David Laven (Reference Laven2014), Dominique Kirchner Reill (Reference Kirchner Reill2012), and Konstantina Zanou (Reference Zanou2018) have shown, to speak of an Italian culture in the mid-nineteenth-century Adriatic (and even in later decades) is anachronistic, notwithstanding the fact that nationalist and municipalist political figures of Trieste identified with the Italian “nation,” albeit for different purposes.

Until the eighteenth century, the position of Trieste at the northernmost tip of the Adriatic coast, at the meeting point between the Italian peninsula and the Balkans, had made the city the center of struggles between Venice and Austria, when the Ottoman threat was not the preeminent concern of the two powers. The act of dedication of 1382, by which Trieste’s elites swore allegiance to the Habsburgs, lifted direct Venetian pressure on the city. Trieste’s voluntary adhesion to the House of Habsburg guaranteed Triestine freedom from Venetian forays. In 1719, Emperor Charles VI declared Trieste a free port, in the same year as nearby Fiume/Rijeka, in order to eschew Venetian tolls and thus challenge the hegemony of the Adriatic that the Republic of Venice had secured for centuries (Dubin Reference Dubin1999, 11; Vivante Reference Vivante1912).

From a fishing hamlet, Trieste became the center of Habsburg overseas traffic. The Habsburg government aimed at establishing itself as a world-scale competitor in long-distance trade with the foundation of the Oriental Company in 1719, which focused on trade with the Ottoman Empire, and the East Indian Trading Company in 1722 (Good Reference Good1984, 27). Nevertheless, these first enterprises soon foundered, and Charles VI’s project of the free port fell in abeyance amid decades of wars that shook Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. The War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War triggered a period of stagnation notwithstanding Maria Theresia’s efforts to sustain the economy. Her economic policies, implemented by her son, Joseph II, began yielding results in the 1780s (Coons Reference Coons1975). In a bid to revitalize the state economy, legal and economic privileges were granted to skilled laborers, artisans, and non-Catholic merchants, who were attracted to the city from the rest of the monarchy and beyond (Good Reference Good1984, 28).

As a result, Trieste attracted Jewish, German, Greek, Serb, and Armenian merchants who contributed to establishing a cosmopolitan mercantilist urban society, similar to several other port cities of the Mediterranean (Cattaruzza Reference Cattaruzza and Cattaruzza1996; Driessen Reference Driessen2005; Dubin Reference Dubin1999). Newcomers from the rest of the monarchy also contributed to the population growth of the city, which saw an exponential increase from about 5,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the eighteenth century to about 30,000 at the end of the century and more than 80,000 by 1850 (Cattaruzza Reference Cattaruzza1995; Judson Reference Judson2016; Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the city was one of the leading ports in Europe and the fourth most populated city of the monarchy (Frank Reference Frank2011, 783; Judson Reference Judson2016, 113–115). As this brief overview of Trieste’s history shows, the history of the city was bound up with that of the Habsburg monarchy and, through the Austrian Lloyd, the eastern Adriatic and Mediterranean (Coons Reference Coons1975; Ivetic Reference Ivetic2019, 248–252). Italian and German nationalists used elements like language—the former—and past medieval rule over the region—the latter—as justifications for Trieste’s secession from Austrian rule.

A Prelude to the Nationalization of Politics: The Trieste Question in Frankfurt

“In the meeting of 27 May, after long discussions, the Assembly, gathered in Frankfurt to establish the Constitution of Germany, adopted the following proposition, which was greeted almost unanimously: ‘The German National Assembly, as the authority instituted by the will and election of the German nation in order to establish the unity and political freedom of Germany, declares that all the arrangements of the single German constitutions that do not conform with the workings of the universal Constitution that is being formed shall be considered as valid only with respect to the latter’” (von Bruck Reference von Bruck1848). In response to the overarching role taken by the Frankfurt parliament, the two deputies of Trieste, von Bruck and Burger, expressed their worry as to the future of their city and monarchy: “Against today’s resolution of the high German National Assembly […] the here undersigned express their contrary opinion through this document, at the same time […] [wondering] whether the Constitution of the Germanic Empire, which is being discussed and established, is irreconcilable with the specific Constitution of Austria and the special condition of Trieste” (von Bruck Reference von Bruck1848). Von Bruck justified the protest by arguing that the German population of Trieste was a small minority compared with the Slavic and Italian populations of the city. Deputy Schilling retorted, at the behest of 37 other Austrian deputies, that “where the strength, unity, and solidity of Germany [were] at stake, the special interests of a city [could] not be taken into consideration” (von Bruck Reference von Bruck1848). Seeing no prospects for the preservation of Trieste’s liberties within a greater Germany, von Bruck left Frankfurt.

In one of his letters to the family, the Triestine Giacomo Venezian (Reference Venezian1849), the Jewish Italian patriot who died in the defense of Rome in 1849, attacked von Bruck’s decision to espouse, after several hesitations, the Viennese cause instead of that of the Frankfurt parliament, pointing to the liberalism of the latter as opposed to the repressive nature of the former, and for having “his mind informed […] by [Vienna’s] absolutist and Jesuit doctrines.” Yet “Bruck’s activities in Frankfurt confirm that he made good his pledge to subordinate German unification to Trieste’s interests” (Goodman Reference Goodman1994, 188). The accusations that Italian activists leveled against him as to his political opportunism, given his participation at Frankfurt (“I camaleonti politici del 1848,” La Frusta, December 5, 1848), appear groundless in light of his intentions. They are also unwarranted, given that it was those Austro-Germans supporting the German Confederation who were opposed to local or regional specificities and privileges. As a matter of fact, the existence of the monarchy as a whole was repeatedly called into question at Frankfurt, as it was not possible to think “that Venice [would] remain linked to Hermannstadt, Dalmatia to Galitia, if Vienna [was] not the central point of the Austrian lands any longer” (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 2856).

It was not only in the interest of Trieste that von Bruck had gone to Frankfurt, but also the survival of the Habsburg monarchy, which was jeopardized by the overarching power of the German Confederation. The proceedings of the Frankfurt parliament make clear that at stake was, as von Bruck put it, “the unification and strength of Germany,” which dismissed the particular position of Trieste, “where the German element [was] weak compared to its Italian and Slavic population” (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 159). As Lawrence Sondhaus (Reference Sondhaus1987, 126) showed, Bruck’s involvement in Frankfurt included the organization of a German navy, a task he shared with Archduke Johann and Schwarzenberg, whose aim was a revived “Habsburg sea power in the service of an Austrian-led Greater Germany.” Their position of authority at Frankfurt was steeped in their attempt to guarantee Austrian interests within a new Germanic Confederation, where the Habsburg monarchy would have a pivotal role. Therefore, their initial participation was not paradoxical or against the interests of the various peoples of the monarchy, as Italian nationalists complained. Part and parcel of the Forty-Eighters’ interest in the Trieste region was the establishment of a German navy in the Mediterranean, which implied extending the borders of the confederation so as to include Istria to the south; according to this plan, Pola would become the war harbor, as Wedekind, deputy for Hannover, suggested (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 312). Yet Austria was expected to bear the most onerous burden, although even the plan of strengthening an Adriatic fleet based in the northeastern Adriatic was soon abandoned in favor of the preeminent role given to the fleets in the Baltic and North Seas (Sondhaus Reference Sondhaus1987, 129–131).

In the early months of the Frankfurt parliament, it became clear to von Bruck that Trieste in a united German state would never possess the same rights and privileges that it did under Austria. Von Arnim-Boitzenburg’s perspective on Trieste contemplated only “the material point of view,” not the cultural and linguistic specificity of the city (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 176). Wipperman, deputy from Cassel, argued that the city’s privileges could not be guaranteed, since “the main point [was] the relation in which a single district of Germany should be part of the whole” (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 177). Where protection was contemplated, Trieste was nevertheless considered an integral part of a German state and its union with Austria was dismissed. The idea of Trieste as part of a greater Germany triggered a set of priorities that did not allow for its cultural specificities, even when the economic factors were considered. This neglect of other ethnicities can also be seen in relation to other Italian-speaking territories. When Giovanni Prato, deputy from Welschtirol (today the Italian region of Trentino), addressed the assembly, he introduced himself as “a native of Trento, but represent[ing] Roveredo,” to which several voices immediately commented, “In Germany they say Trent!” (Wigard 1848–Reference Wigard1849, 788). Vick (Reference Vick2003, 246) adduces this attitude toward the assimilationist drive of the Forty-Eighters, insofar as “the notion of a German world-historical civilizing mission was a central pillar of the nascent German national identity being promoted by the national movement.” Yet it was precisely this “mission” that made the Frankfurt parliament an illiberal enterprise undermining forms of multiethnic coexistence that had been in place for centuries, notwithstanding the intention of some of its members, which came to define later perceptions of 1848. While Vick (Reference Vick2003, 248) focuses on the “assimilatory moderation,” which, according to him “even extended to embrace German Jews and certain of Central Europe’s non-German-speaking groups as welcome constituents of the German nation,” Axel Körner (Reference Körner and Körner2000, 14) more convincingly argued that “the question of national borders and of who would belong to the new German nation-state destroyed much of th[is] initial idealism in the Frankfurt parliament.”

Although the nationality principle of German nationalists in 1848 was very different from that of the twentieth century, inasmuch as it went beyond ethno-cultural markers of national belonging, Frankfurt’s aspirations of a greater Germany through the assimilation of other ethnic groups still gave primacy to German culture (Vick Reference Vick2003, 249). Pan-German thinking in the Vörmarz thus involved not just the reacquisition of old Holy Roman imperial territories through the attraction exerted by a new powerful German state, but also their partial Germanization in the face of an ostensibly superior and more progressive German culture (Vick Reference Vick2002, 61). Part and parcel of this conviction was the belief in “the German cosmopolitan national mission to bring Bildung to the world through assimilating, reworking, and disseminating its diverse cultural heritage” (Vick Reference Vick2002, 58).

Frankfurt’s aim to assimilate other ethnic groups not only into a German polity, but also into its culture and language, did not originate in what Otto Dann (Reference Dann1986) argued to be a German inclination toward multinational rule, which Vick (Reference Vick2002, 44–45) described as being rooted in “memories of long-standing multinational association and to facilitate the inclusion of non-German speaking groups within the German nation.” For understandings of multinationalism or supranationalism that still held for the Habsburg monarchy do not apply to the German Confederation in 1848; the question of unification with Germany triggered a difficult situation for the political and intellectual figures identifying with the various nationalities of the Habsburg monarchy (Judson Reference Judson1996, 60–62). Nonetheless, Vick (Reference Vick2002, 80) agrees that parliamentarians had difficulties in accommodating other nationalities, as “the architects of national unity encountered even greater obstacles when they confronted their problematic relationship with other national groups both inside and outside the various proposed borders of the new Germany.”

As with Italian nationalism, which was being formulated in the same years, precisely these aspects soon came to influence exclusive policies and aggressive forms of nationalism, in whose way the Habsburg monarchy stood. Consequently, this conflation of “liberalism” with early nationalism is not only dangerous but also misleading. “The paradox of the ‘non-German German’ would have presented deputies with a nearly insoluble dilemma requiring far-reaching compromise” (Vick Reference Vick2002, 111), in which contemporary commentators saw the inevitability of ethnic strife. Italian activists favored the German Confederation. Yet it is precisely this contradictory support of Frankfurt on the part of Italian nationalists that, if read in conjunction with German “liberalism,” makes Italian activism in Trieste an even more populist venture.

Down with “The Blooded Austrian Color”: Italian Support for the German Confederation

The leading figures of local Italian nationalism would soon find a place in the Venetian revolution. Although they were eventually celebrated as harbingers of Italian unification, Italian activists promoted the only violent manifestation in Trieste with very limited support. On March 23, 1848, on news of the revolution in Venice, Giovanni Orlandini, former editor of the local paper La Favilla, led an assault on the government palace in the name of an “Italian Trieste” (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012). Orlandini, a bookseller by profession, through alternate successes had been editor of La Favilla before seeing the paper gradually taken over by Francesco Dall’Ongaro and Pacifico Valussi (Negrelli Reference Negrelli1978). Few scholars have focused on the insurrection he led. Tullia Catalan (Reference Catalan and Ferrari2004, 241), although downsizing its relevance, relied on Angelo Scocchi’s nationalist reconstruction of the events. It was this perspective that made him write on the centenary of Orlandini’s movement and on other occasions that his “republican audacity” had been a harbinger of the Italian annexation of Trieste in 1918 (Scocchi Reference Scocchi1949, Reference Scocchi1951).Footnote ²

While traditional Risorgimento historiography has emphasized the relevance of the revolution attempted by Orlandini in Trieste, Kirchner Reill (Reference Kirchner Reill2012) has more recently questioned the resonance of Orlandini’s movement. Anna Millo (Reference Millo and Cole2007, 69), too, notwithstanding her Italo-centric perspective bordering on the teleological as to the final annexation of Trieste to Italy, agrees that the revolutionary attempt did not have serious repercussions on the city. The assault on the Palazzo del Governo led by Orlandini resulted in a brief riot that was soon quelled by the joint effort of the Landwehr (territorial militia) and the Trieste National Guard, with the participation of parts of the wider populace (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012, 176).

In the aftermath of his defeat, Orlandini issued a manifesto in which he addressed the Venetian people. In this document, he justified the reasons for the failure of the insurrection in Trieste, after Venetian revolutionaries had expressed their belief that Trieste had served the Austrian cause (Vivante Reference Vivante1912, 32–33). Orlandini (Reference Orlandini1848, 165) appeared to speak and act on behalf of the entirety of Italian-speaking Triestines, who were, according to him, the real Triestines; therefore, he claimed to represent the Triestine people as a whole. He presented himself as “Triestine of birth, and therefore Italian.” The few who did not comply with his political program were targeted as traitors and non-Triestines, claiming that “the Triestine people [were] Italian.” What, then, of the thousands of Slovenes and other Slavs, Germans, and Greeks who were Triestines, being autochthonous or having migrated to the city, like many Italian speakers? Orlandini (Reference Orlandini1848, 165) claimed that the failed Triestine revolution had made throughout Venice “a bleak impression regarding the national sentiments of the Triestine people.” Addressing the Venetian people, he urged them “not to be indignant if the movement [he] had raised in order to follow in [their] footsteps had been arrested by an obscurantist, that is Austrian, reaction.” He went on in his invective against his opponents and claimed that “such reaction had been bought by the governor of that province, who had money distributed to some idlers with whom all the royal employees, the spies, and some Austrian lordlings domiciled in Trieste joined forces” (Orlandini Reference Orlandini1848, 165).

As to the National Guard, widely acknowledged to be a liberal institution, it “could not resolve to promptly join such movement since,” Orlandini explained, “at the time of its formation, a mass of Austrians […] had sneaked in” (Orlandini Reference Orlandini1848). His clearly anti-Austrian sentiments made him connect everything Austrian with absolutism. For he considered as reactionary those Austrians who had joined the National Guard and quelled his attempt at making Trieste secede from Austria. The National Guard, although endorsed in Trieste by people such as von Salm and Gyulai, whom Orlandini detested as part of the ancien régime, was born out of the constitutional promises of March 15, 1848. Thus, he attributed the failure of his revolution to pro-Habsburg “foreign” elements of the guard.

Notwithstanding his invective, Orlandini manifested sympathy for Germans, since, according to him, they had “always manifested their warmest sentiments for the Italian cause and [had] raised the German tricolour and not the blooded Austrian colour” (Orlandini Reference Orlandini1848). Orlandini’s antipathy for Austria and support for the German nation seems odd, nevertheless, since it was the transformations auspicated by the Frankfurt parliament that undermined not only the privileges of Trieste, but also its use of the Italian language, as Alessandro Mauroner (Reference Mauroner1848a), a prominent local publicist, explained in the same months. The threat that the Frankfurt parliament posed to Austrian hegemony over Central Europe was saluted by Italian “liberals.” They did not seem to be preoccupied by the expansionistic aims of many German nationalists who projected the notion of German medieval territorial greatness into the present, which would draw Trieste within the boundaries of a new Germany together with multiple other territories in which German speakers constituted only minorities, which included “the Netherlands, the Flemish part of Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine, the Balkans, Bohemia, Moravia, the Polish-speaking Prussian province of Posen, Trieste, and southern Tyrol” (Berger Reference Berger, Baycroft and Hewitson2006, 46). Consequently, they revealed an ideological blindness rooted in an unconditional hatred for Austria, which was considered oppressive whatever was its political configuration, even constitutional. His words were echoed by another advocate of Italian Trieste, Dall’Ongaro. The latter’s opposition to Vienna originated from his animosity toward what he perceived to be Austrian policies of Germanization, in opposition to the widely held perception of Vienna as the guarantor of local identities.

Nationalist propaganda in favor of an Italian unitary state was steeped in complaints about Austria’s supposed attempts at Germanizing the city. Yet the sources point to a different situation. Italian was the language used by local authorities, including the police, and there was no sign of opposition to it on the part of central authorities. Also, one needs to bear in mind that the very same activists who complained about Austrian “oppression” were Dall’Ongaro and Valussi, who, as Kirchner Reill (Reference Kirchner Reill2012, 187–190) has shown, carried out a pervasive daily propaganda against Austria during the Venetian revolution. Theirs was a propaganda aimed at spurring the Venetian populace to fight, through images that depicted Austria as the foreign Germanic enemy using its Slavic regiments. In the same year, the Milanese Carlo Cattaneo (Reference Cattaneo1972, 169, 201–206) would call Austrian troops in Italy “Croatian hordes”; similarly, in his invective against the Habsburg monarchy, Karl Marx ([1848] Reference Marx1977, 110) wrote that Austrians were “inundat[ing] Lombardy from German soil with Croats and Pandurs”—when the majority of them were actually Italian speakers (Sondahus 1990). Therefore, their arguments must be met with caution, when, on the contrary, they have informed Italian perceptions of Austrian rule and inflamed Italo-Slavic enmity. The main tenet of Italian propaganda, which portrayed Austria as the “prison of peoples,” was to become a classic trope in later historiography.

The Triestine paper La Frusta accused Austrian authorities of trying to turn Trieste into a Slavic city, an accusation, that of the purported Habsburg machination centered on Slavicizing Trieste, that was to become one of the main propagandistic tenets of Italian Irredentism. “Why here in Trieste,” the author wondered, “a Slavic society of propaganda is being established, with its club, library, and several hundred subscribers of which 7/8 are from outside? […] Why, as it is said, 6000 Croats pass through Istria?” These were all signals of a plot aimed at Slavicizing the city, the author concluded (“Segnali!,” La Frusta, November 21, 1848). “Until a few days ago,” the author continued, “Germany was your fatherland and Frankfurt your capital; now it is Zagreb that gives orders, and you are Slavs! When will you remember that you have but to receive orders from Vienna and that this said to you that you are Italians and masters at home?” The same paper criticized Triestines for having been “fooled […] by seven or eight Germans […] and now also by the Slavs, who too are very few amongst us, but given the present circumstances are in a position of advantage” (La Frusta, November 21, 1848). Trieste was portrayed as culturally Italian, yet the supposed Italian character of the city appeared to be feeble and constantly threatened by a consistent Slavic presence. In the same months, Croat nationalists’ claims of the Slavic character of nearby Fiume had justified the Croat occupation of the city and the loss of its autonomy (Maritan Reference Maritan2021). Triestine municipalists, similarly to their Fiuman counterparts, hoped that their assiduous depiction of Trieste as Italian—in terms that were often similar to Italian-speaking secessionists—would guarantee Trieste’s autonomy and the preservation of its privileges as a free port.

The Hamburg of the Adriatic, Triestine Municipalism, and Italian Austro-Slavism: Curious Oddities or Sociopolitical Realities?

Those who advocated the demise of the monarchy depicted Austrian rule as foreign and centered on attempts at Germanizing the peoples of the empire. This view could not come to terms with the supranational nature of the Habsburg monarchy. It also promoted essentialist notions of ethnicity and the nation that eventually obtained at the end of the nineteenth century. Dall’Ongaro’s thought is a case in point. Similar to Orlandini, Dall’Ongaro depicted those who were not spurred by Italian sentiments as foreigners. Together with the former and Valussi, he had been editor of the paper La Favilla, which until 1847 had advocated the fusion of Italian speakers and Slavs into a single people, epitomized by what Dalmatia would become in their hopes, and deemed by the Ragusan Ivan Antun Kaznačić (Reference Kaznačić1848, 44) as having shared in the effort to “reconcile the Italian element with the Slavic.” Yet Dall’Ongaro’s and Valussi’s espousal of “Adriatic multi-nationalism” did not last long and did not survive the events of 1848. In Dall’Ongaro’s (1848) case, resentment against Austrian rule proved stronger than the idea of a shared sense of identity across the Adriatic under the Habsburg aegis. He complained about the supposed policies of Germanization first introduced by Joseph II, which were but an attempt at making crownlands administratively uniform, as “the unhappy practice of Germanizing [the Triestine] people.” He also described the situation in Trieste as monopolized by “German government, German tribunals, teachers who taught the rudiment of Italian in German, German priests, everything German,” by which he did not refer to the German Confederation, but to an Austrian state that he perceived as a foreign presence. Notwithstanding these attempts, he continued, “Trieste remain[ed] Italian. […] The Triestine people are an Italian people. Slavs live only on the outskirts, brothers of Italy in misfortune. […] Germans were there, as they were amongst us, an overlapping people […], a parasitic plant. […] To whom who sleeps, wake up, wake up at least at the clamour of the ruins of a decrepit Empire.”

Yet these words took a sudden turn insofar as Dall’Ongaro (1848) wrote, “Triestines, Italy does not need you. Italy has two ports, one on the Mediterranean and one on the Adriatic. […] Will you prefer to be, as you already were, the humble servants of Austria with the advantage of becoming the Hamburg of the Adriatic? Here is the destiny that Italy harboured for you. Italian papers […] already wished you this: Italian arms will help you achieve it, glad […] to repel the common oppressor out of domains that are not his.” And, again, Dall’Ongaro reiterated, “People of Trieste, it is not time yet. We do not want from you either justifications or excuses,” which justifies the failure of the Italian revolution there. The purported sentiments of Italianness, the wish to forsake Austria, had not caught on through the city, but were the preserve of few, however persistent. “We want that you look around yourself, that you distinguish your true friends from the false ones, that you follow the winning party and not the losing one.” He concluded by proclaiming “Hail Trieste, Hanseatic city! Hail the Hamburg of the Mediterranean!,” when a few lines earlier, he criticized such Hanseatic identity, which he deemed to have been imposed on Trieste by its Germanic oppressor. Kirchner Reill (Reference Kirchner Reill2012), in line with Vivante, has emphasized Dall’Ongaro’s promotion of Trieste as the “Hamburg of the Adriatic.” Yet the first part of the document highlights the minimal extent of interethnic cooperation between Italian speakers and Slavs that Dall’Ongaro upheld already in 1848, underlying both German and Italian anti-Slavic tendencies. This dismissal of the Slavic component of Trieste as a suburban group prone to being assimilated into Italian Trieste did not constitute an isolated case of disregard of Slavic needs for wider participation in municipal life. Dall’Ongaro’s words, as he was one of the most prominent Italian activists in town, bear witness to the contradiction of nationalist propaganda in 1848, which in the context of Habsburg Trieste found it difficult to come to terms with a strong tradition of municipalism and multiethnic coexistence.

In Trieste, opposition to a union with a greater Germany did not derive from a chauvinistic antipathy toward Germans. Although Alessandro Mauroner followed the cue of Italian activists in emphasizing the mainly Italian nationality of Trieste, contrary to them, he was a staunch Habsburg loyalist (Boaglio Reference Boaglio2012, 154). As copy editor of Il Costituzionale and later La Gazzetta di Vienna, the Italian-language newspaper published in Vienna from 1850 to 1857, in response to an article that had appeared in the Ost-Deutsche Post, he claimed that widespread Triestine opposition to Frankfurt was the result of the conviction “that everyone must have a nationality and support that in which he was born and raised, and that the Italian was the nationality of the majority of Triestines” (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848a, 159). Trieste could not be incorporated into a new German state, because that would lead to the abrogation of the voluntary act of adhesion to Austria of 1382, from which the fortunes of the port had originated (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848a, 159). Such was the general perspective of the Triestine bourgeoisie, which Mauroner voiced in opposition to German pretensions over Trieste.

In words exemplifying the supranational principles of the Habsburg monarchy, local historian, municipalist, and Habsburg loyalist Pietro Kandler (Reference Kandler1848, 176) argued that while “nationality is sacred as much as religion” and needed to be respected in view of a peaceful coexistence and the common good, the idea of founding states on the basis of the nationality principle was a very novel idea, since the need for building nation-states was “an idea of the most recent times, which shall yield to the example of centuries.” Kandler’s support for the primacy of the Italian language in Trieste derived from his awareness that Italian was the language of regional traffics and Trieste’s multiethnic business community, similar to what the Fiuman public figure Antonio Giacich argued in the same years for nearby Fiume (Maritan Reference Maritan2021). The complexity of nationality and the different implications it had at the time were further voiced by Kandler. In praising Johann Hagenauer, who had been initially appointed as representative of Trieste to the short-lived constitutional assembly of Vienna instituted in 1848, Kandler (Reference Kandler1848, 180) expressed his sympathy stating that “when [Hagenauer] said to be a representative of an Italian city [he] clearly manifested to be a true Austrian and Triestine, favouring the welfare of the Empire, this littoral, from Duino to Cattaro [present-day Kotor], and this city.”

Yet the fact that intellectuals and nationalist activists thought in national terms does not imply that the populations thought and felt in national terms, too. It shows that the nationalities endorsed by political activists, whether nationalist or Habsburg loyal, were conflated with the more or less standardized written languages that would appear in Habsburg censuses decades later. As municipalists and Habsburg loyalists in Trieste showed, their support of the Italian language derived, as in Fiume, from their understanding of their city’s economic and cultural specificity. Language and nation were seen as a bulwark against the assimilatory tendencies of nationalists. And the local multiethnic elite considered advocating the Italian character of the city as the safest way of preserving the cosmopolitan nazionalità triestina against Italian, German, and Slavic nationalisms (Kandler Reference Kandler1848). The paper of Trieste’s National Guard, arguing that the empire was “the aggregate of different states of various nationalities,” emphasized that “the city of Trieste is in itself a state” (“Parole schiette,” La Guardia Nazionale, April 20, 1848). And, in a statement that is revealing of the understanding of nationality at the middle of the century, the contributor to one of its issues—“a Guard,” as he signed—argued that “nationality manifests itself mainly through the language its people adopt.” The author stressed that “the nationality of Trieste is Italian and Italian is the language,” yet the national color of Trieste was not the Italian tricolor: for “red and white are the colours of Trieste and these should be the colours of the national cockade” carried by the members of the National Guard.

Mauroner (Reference Mauroner1848a, 159), too, repeatedly asserted the Italian nationality of the Triestine people, which prevented them from desiring “to merge with the Germanic nation or […] the Slavic.” Although he stated that Slavs were part and parcel of the Littoral, and, whatever the future held for Trieste, the destiny of the city was intertwined with theirs, the preservation of the Italian nationality of Trieste was paramount for its very same existence as the commercial outlet of the monarchy. For it was the conservation of the Italian character of the city that made Triestines “Austrian, not German.” As to the pretensions of the Frankfurt parliament over Trieste, for Triestines, “the question would be whether to join Italians or Slavs, not Germans” (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848a, 159), which shows that the city was to be understood as Italian in linguistic terms and for economic reasons—because of the role of Italian as the lingua franca of the Adriatic—and not in historical and ethnic terms. The national question in Trieste was laid out similarly in other cities of the empire, like Budweis/Budějovice, which Jeremy King (Reference King2002, 13–14) described as “German only in the purely linguistic sense that most residents seem to have preferred to speak German until some time after the middle of the nineteenth century.” Municipalists’ views dramatically contrasted with that of those Italian activists who were against Habsburg rule, as the latter used the trope of the Italian language with the aim of seceding from Austria and joining a yet-to-be-formed Italian state, and not in defense of municipal privileges.

The supranational Austrian state implied, in Mauroner’s (Reference Mauroner1848a, 160) words, “a confederation of states bound by a sentiment of common interest, while Germany [indicated] a union of peoples of German language.” In the pamphlet under attack by the Ost-Deutsche-Post, focusing on the momentous political challenges faced by the monarchy and titled Questioni del giorno in Austria (Current issues in Austria), Mauroner made these points clear. In a way summarizing the supranational character of the Habsburg Empire, he argued that “to say that I am Austrian means that I am part of the federative Monarchy of various peoples, which is Austria; the Slav, the Hungarian, and the Italian can belong to it without renouncing their respective nationality […] while the German confederation will be joined willingly solely by Germanic peoples” (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848b, 8). He identified the greatest threat to the monarchy as the unitary and democratic tendencies of the Frankfurt parliament, expressing an attitude that was widely shared also by activists and liberals throughout the monarchy (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848b, 9). According to his argumentation, echoed by several publicists of different nationalities, the interests of the various Austrian nations would be better served by union with the Habsburgs. Trieste, too, while preserving its Italian nationality, which in the docks and suburbs gave way to the Slavic, was assured its prosperity by the Habsburgs. The act of dedication of 1382, by which Trieste had voluntarily tied its destiny to that of the monarchy, forced Trieste to need “a strong Austria, not a great and powerful Germany” (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848b, 9).

Mauroner’s (Reference Mauroner1848b, 12) defense of what he described as the Italian nationality of Trieste was not concurrent with a desire to see Trieste tied to a future Italian state. Nevertheless, “the greatest danger for Austria,” Mauroner (Reference Mauroner1848b, 12) cautioned his fellow citizens, “comes from Germany, not Italy.” He was convinced that “the Italian tricolour implie[d] only the shrinkage of Austria, whilst the German [could] lead the Monarchy to its total disintegration,” since, to his dismay, the very existence of Austria was called into question by several members of parliament in Frankfurt (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848b, 12). The Slavic component of the monarchy would serve as a counterbalance against German and Italian centrifugal forces (Mauroner Reference Mauroner1848b, 12).

Mauroner (Reference Mauroner1848a) went on to argue that “it is natural that the Germans of Trieste sympathize with the union with Germany, as Italians all the more so with nearby Italy, and most natural that our peasant is bound to the Slavic stock […] in the present political chaos, in the general conflict of material and national interests that upset in particular this part of Europe.” Yet the sources do not seem to corroborate his conviction that Germans in Trieste supported the German Confederation, or that people in general would necessarily identify with national groups.

That several Germans continued to settle in the port city as employees of the Austrian Lloyd does not seem to suggest that Habsburg authorities were willing to strengthen the German presence in the city in opposition to other ethnic groups. The Lloyd was a conduit of allegiance to the Habsburgs thanks to the stability of employment, good wages, and career prospects that it offered to its employees irrespective of their origins. In 1847, the year before he took the leadership of the Venetian revolution, Niccolò Tommaseo (Reference Tommaseo1847, 148–149) even pleaded with the Lloyd’s authorities to receive financial aid for his fellow citizens in Šibenik hit by a severe famine. Having obtained the sum of 2,000 florins, he thanked and blessed “the Slav and the Greek, the Jew and the Armenian, the Italian and the transalpine,” by which he also recognized Trieste as a city “that, inhabited by people of different stocks, promise[d] to be a precious ring of trust and intelligence between several nations,” thus running counter to the same claims of Italianità espoused not only by his soon-to-be fellow revolutionaries Dall’Ongaro and Orlandini, but also by himself. Only one year later, the Lloyd became the object of Italian activists’ animosity as a bastion of loyalty to the Habsburgs. The local paper La Frusta (no. 8, 1848) even started one of its issues with the words, “the German Lloyd […] had the mission of promoting, spreading, and developing the German element here among us.” While several Germans worked for the Lloyd, numerous men from the Italian peninsula also found employment there. Germans did occupy positions as naval engineers and stokers, as Venetians and Pontifical or Neapolitan subjects tended to be sea captains or sailors, the divide being a matter of sociocultural legacies and expertise.