“According to the Strict Principles of Honor”: Loyalty, Ambition, and Service in the Habsburg Army during the Coalition Wars

Abstract

This article examines the lived experience of the Habsburg's military institutions in the lead-up to the Austro-Franco war of 1809, a period in which military service was positioned as the most loyal act a dutiful male subject of the emperor Francis I (II) could undertake. It does this by paying particular attention to a shameful and embarrassing public military display and the resulting near-violent dispute between company officers of the Jordis infantry regiment, as recorded and reflected upon by a young junior officer in 1808. This account allows for the examination of the ways in which honor created narrative frameworks and communities that persuaded diverse individuals to place their experiences within the context of the monarchy's war with France.

On 27 July 1808, Marcus Hibler, a second captain (Kapitainleute) in the Habsburg infantry regiment Jordis, recounted a public and violent altercation with his second lieutenant (Unterleutnant) in his journal, noting it as “one of the saddest memories of my life.” The lieutenant, twenty-four-year-old Franz Nachtigall, had in a drunken rage insulted Hibler at a local inn in front of the inhabitants of Enns in Upper Austria. The slurs, uttered after Hibler gave Nachtigall the “honor” of drilling the regiment's new reservists before the regimental staff and an onlooking crowd, culminated in the lieutenant threatening to run his superior through with his sword. In a report written the day after the dispute for the Regimental Command in Linz, Hibler demanded the full weight of military law be brought against Nachtigall because he could not be expected to “remain indifferent to the insults and degrading behavior that have been inflicted on me in civilian and military circles.” His honor, he concluded, dictated that he should be “given the opportunity to take appropriate measures to deal with the deeds in which and how they have occurred.”¹

This article examines the lived experience of the Habsburg's military institutions in the lead-up to the Austro-Franco war of 1809, a period in which military service was positioned as the most loyal act a dutiful male subject of the emperor Francis I (II) could undertake. It does this by paying particular attention to a shameful and embarrassing public military display and the resulting near-violent dispute between company officers of the Jordis infantry regiment, as recorded and reflected on by the twenty-eight-year-old Hibler. These events were understood by those involved as dishonoring the regiment's officer corps and undermining the unit's connection to the society it relied upon to mobilize during a time of heightened tension with France.

The event in question, which Hibler rated as the “saddest” of his time in the army (placing it above the death of his brother at Austerlitz), made the experience of soldiering and the role of the soldier prominent to surrounding civilians. By exploring it, it is possible to glimpse how honor was negotiated and produced to fashion communities, local military processes, and wartime identities that were utilized in the Habsburg effort against France. In Hibler's case, these negotiations were informed by ambition, communal ties, competing models of military service, and the army structures to which he and his comrades were subjected. Together, they manifested and policed a type of honor that was understood as essential to both the maintenance of the regular soldiers’ position as dynastic intermediaries as well as the support of local societies for the war with France.²

While highlighting the importance of honor to officers is not new, Hibler's account allows for the examination of lived identity within a communal setting and articulates the ways in which honor created narrative frameworks and communities that persuaded diverse individuals to place their experiences within the context of the monarchy's war with France.³ At a time when generals, statesmen, and the bourgeoisie debated the merit of popular military service and its links to the nation after the introduction of the popular militia—the Landwehr—in 1808, it is Hibler's interactions within the sphere of the professional army that the transnational comparisons and meanings of military service, honor, citizenship, patriotism, and subjecthood can be tellingly examined to discern the ways in which the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were experienced within the many societies of the Habsburg monarchy.⁴

Recent histories of the Habsburg monarchy have focused on what Pieter Judson has articulated as the question of how “local societies across central Europe engaged with the Habsburg dynasty's efforts to build a unified and unifying imperial state from the eighteenth century until the First World War.”⁵ These works have found that regional identities within the monarchy were co-opted by the dynasty to bind together its many peoples, allowing the Habsburgs to negotiate the social, cultural, and political difficulties of European state formation in the nineteenth century. These regional identities, or loyalties, were founded on local jurisdictions, civic orders, faith, and shared traditions that coalesced to form a cultural identity or “provincial consciousness.” As recent studies show, these were never relegated by a supranational “Austrian identity” but rather were linked to the dynasty by different and intersecting layers of authority. Being “Austrian” in the early nineteenth century thus meant maintaining allegiances within local communities while acknowledging that these existed thanks only to the protection offered by the House of Austria.⁶ Brian Vick has termed this process of identity formation as “step-wise” patriotism. He argues that contemporaries, such as the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, imagined that familial, professional, and communal loyalties and roles within local subregions combined to manifest regional identities.⁷ As Daniel Unowsky has shown of the later imperial period, these local constancies could then be easily narrated as part of a unified dynastic loyalty through top-down displays of Habsburg power that expressed the imperial family's right to rule in each area.⁸

This process of developing a sense of belonging was in a perpetual state of flux, far from defined and constantly negotiated.⁹ The wars with France were one part of this process, a time in which government officials, intellectuals, and literati attempted to create the links of loyalty that could sustain the Habsburg war effort and allow it to easily mobilize domestic resources.¹⁰ As Laurence Cole has shown of the late nineteenth century, one of the defining factors used to link the regions of the monarchy was service in the standing army, an institution built throughout the eighteenth century to defend the supremacy of the Habsburg family in Central Europe.¹¹ It is during the war with France that we can see “step-wise” patriotism in effect long before the reaction and reform of the Metternich period and the salon networks of 1814.¹²

During a period when the relationship between military service and national citizenship in different European countries was beginning to serve as a barometer for battlefield effectiveness, the monarchy's military institutions continued to champion Old Regime systems of motivation and conscription throughout its wars with France.¹³ While this meant that the army continued to serve as a tool for the dynasty, it did not mean that it operated as a separate entity removed from the polity it defended. Thanks to almost forty years of military reform—first enacted by Maria Theresa and continued by her son Joseph II—the army was symbiotically linked to society through relentless conscription drives and logistical processes that depended on mobilizing resources through corporate organizations and institutions at a local level.¹⁴ The need for a well-administered army dictated approaches to policing, education, sanitation, tenancy rights, credit, subsidies, taxation, and noble privileges, creating societies in the lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia that were, as Michael Hochedlinger has shown, more militarized than Prussia before the French Revolution.¹⁵

While ostensibly an imperial army, one of the tenants of the Habsburg force's military culture, understood in this piece as “the values, norms and assumptions that encourage people to make certain choices in given circumstances,” was a regionalism fostered within regiments by the way in which men were locally recruited.¹⁶ As we shall see, these local identities were solidified during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, culminating in the war of 1809 and then subsequently reinforced through public military displays and massed conscription, which identified these military communities as a region's “locus of loyalty” right up until 1918.¹⁷ These communities served as an anchor point for the links that bound local societies to the dynasty and its wider polity.¹⁸ As an intended consequence of local recruitment and displays of regional allegiances during the wars with France, a “horizontal plane” of loyalty was created within regiments and their extended communities, which was drawn upward, or stepped outward, toward the emperor through systems of military honor.¹⁹

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, military honor as a set of moral and ethical frameworks helped co-opt and convince men to serve the state as soldiers. It did this by giving those without status or clear opportunities a community with which they could identify and an identity that was aligned with and connected to the ruling dynasty.²⁰ Ilya Berkovich has argued that individual soldiers across Central Europe and the Atlantic World internalized the principles of honor found within their unit with the hope of being respected.²¹ They then used these models to judge which types of actions and emotions were to be exhibited within their military community, a place where a soldier was measured both internally and externally, with deviant behavior policed by comrades, and culprits shamed to conform. As Berkovich reveals, the military corporate identity shared by officers and men used honor to promote soldiering to economically and socially marginalized men as an acceptable profession.

With respect to Prussia and its army, Katrin and Sascha Möbius have shown how the success of the social interactions within regimental communities and their local societies, informed by a “psychology of honor,” reaffirmed their locales’ loyalty to the king, allowing for greater demands to be placed upon them during the brutal Seven Years’ War.²² Christy Pichichero and Julia Osman have both highlighted how honor and military fraternity also influenced the First French Republic's treatment and representation of the levee en masse, as well as the subsequent armies built after the introduction of universal conscription in 1798.²³ The honor ascribed to military service and the social collateral it could bring, they conclude, not only created more humane armies in the conservative states of Europe, thanks to French military intellectuals’ engagement in a pan-European “military public sphere,” but also enabled the change in political discourse that linked mandatory military service to national citizenship.²⁴

While much has recently been written on the effects of enlightened sensibility on French military culture and its subsequent links to honor and the nation, only a little has been done on the Habsburg monarchy's army in either German or English beyond the analysis of battles and campaigns.²⁵ The most influential treatise on the Habsburg army during the Napoleonic Wars has dismissed service in the ranks as neither “honourable [n]or desirable,” labeling conditions as “poor.” Simultaneously, it praises the common soldier's “fortitude and professionalism,” leaving us with a fractured understanding of the soldier, his motivations, and what exactly his “professionalism” was.²⁶

Leighton James has shown a way in which to mend this gap in the historiography. He has used the written accounts of some Habsburg soldiers to shed light on their military experiences by revealing the importance of Enlightenment discourse to their perceptions of war.²⁷ James's work examined the presence—or lack thereof—of nationalism and patriotism in the German-speaking world's experience of the conflict. Specifically, his analysis of the accounts of Habsburg cavalry officers Karl Johann Nepomuk von Grueber and Michael Pauliny von Köwelsdam concludes that personal honor and the social identity provided by the army was the main driving force behind these men's decisions to serve. Though James's analysis establishes honor as a prime motivator, his work is not concerned with how this was developed and fostered within the army or how it related to wartime loyalty in the Habsburg monarchy.

The first part of this article builds upon this avenue of inquiry to show how honor shaped soldiers’ loyalty and experience of the conflict. It examines why Hibler was so eager to address his standing within the “military circle” of Jordis, and the reasons why he chose to avoid the violence of the duel to obtain his satisfaction. Honor provided individuals with a profession and a community where duty, rewarded with rank and then privilege, linked together men from myriads of backgrounds who were eager to attain some form of social security as soldier-citizens, men who enjoyed the securities of a corporate community earned through military service.²⁸ Using Hibler's account of his wartime experience and the altercation with Nachtigall as well as the service record of Jordis’ officers, this part argues that the relationship between military honor, social standing, and state legitimacy was as much a pressing concern for the men of Jordis in July 1808 as was maintaining the equilibrium of a wartime unit after a public and violent dispute.

The second part of this article investigates the reasons why Hibler was so concerned by his standing and perception within the civilian sphere of Enns. It argues that Hibler's understanding of honor in 1808, and therefore his standing with civilians, was influenced by concurrent prowar rhetoric that positioned the soldier at the forefront of dynastic patriotism. Men in the uniform of the emperor were now narrated as citizen-soldiers, representing the very best of local communities and their loyalties to the Habsburgs.²⁹ Yet this military motivation and rhetoric, which was primarily promulgated to equate popular military service in the Landwehr as an act of active male citizenship, was not monolithic.³⁰ Veteran professionals and army generals still viewed themselves as part of a separate military sphere with its own concepts of masculinity, loyalty, and citizenship that overlapped with other regional corporations, even if they were now seen by civilians as representing their local society's engagement with the monarchy's “imperial project.”

It was the friction between being viewed as a soldier for the “prince” or a soldier of the “people,” and the precedence given to one over the other in the lead-up to the war of 1809, that influenced the way in which the men of Jordis viewed themselves and the performance of their role within the wider community.³¹ The dispute between Hibler and Nachtigall reveals at a pivotal moment in the conflict the individual actions in local communities that made tangible the models of soldiering, systems of state, different identities, and popular rhetoric used to facilitate and understand the ongoing Habsburg war effort. As Hibler's daybook relates, military honor and the forms it took were at the center of this experience.

One

Hibler is the central witness to his account of the Coalition Wars. His journal sits firmly within a corpus of autobiographical texts created by German-speaking soldiers who fought the French. These works, as James has argued, coupled a new and emerging “introspection and an increasing concentration … on the individual” with older forms of narratives in which self-fashioning was still susceptible to communitarian influences.³² Beginning as the work of an amateur ethnographer, Hibler's reflections quickly turn to the self, recounting many of the transformative events to which soldiers of the Habsburg monarchy were subjected. Written between 1797 and 1837, the officer's written expressions were repetitive meditations that enabled Hibler to manage himself as a soldier through the reflection and review of the violence and drudgery of war and his time in the army.

The “few hours” Hibler took to make the “final descriptions” of his experience set out the chastising and violent encounters many of the officers of Jordis would have experienced in the first decades of the conflict.³³ By 1808 Hibler had already been captured in battle twice, wounded three times, and served in the infantry regiment Stain until 1802—in the Tyrolean Militia where his links to the province were used to raise the unit's professionalism—and briefly in the infantry regiment Coburg. As Mark Hewitson has shown of other military authors in German armies, Hibler's response to past violence, and the way in which he recorded it, was pivotal in fashioning his ongoing experience of it.³⁴ This was an analysis of the self, relying on what Hibler expected of the emperor's honorable officers—an identity instructed by the military culture of the Habsburg army that allowed him to overcome the anxiety of battle. For Hibler, the battlefield was a place where claims for respect and reward were set out, and the brutality of modern warfare was not allowed to hamper his abilities as a soldier. While in most instances battle was a “technical, practical, and unexceptional activity,” the detailed accounts Hibler left of these events depict a man affected by the death and suffering he witnessed.³⁵ It was military honor that marked him out as a worthy member of the “military estate” and enabled him to mediate the scenes of horror he encountered and the fear he held.³⁶

For every Habsburg soldier and company officer who fought between 1792 and 1815, the desire for honor while serving the state was “to be the motivating force of all his actions.”³⁷ Military regulations dictated that to obtain honor a soldier had to show “obedience, faithfulness, vigilance, and steadfastness in the exercise of his duties”; while on the battlefield, “resilience and valor before the enemy are his virtues.” He was instructed to seek out “opportunities for glory,” though not at the cost of his “love for God and his monarch.”³⁸ “In a word,” the regulations stated, “a soldier must be a man of honor.” This was the defining element of one's exclusive citizenship of the Habsburg military estate. This was a corporation specific to each regiment, one that men were told would provide a “well-to-do life” and present economic and social opportunities to them and their lineage through the honorable fulfilment of military service. This understanding enabled Hibler to put aside the consequences of defeat and fatalistically accept the effects of battlefield violence, with personal success and social standing measured through his own and his unit's honorable performance.³⁹

While Hibler understood the war through his social institution, taking great solace in the professionalism of the Habsburg army in defeat, he also recognized that experiencing it as a soldier altered who he was as a person. As a young man Hibler already had an appreciation that his life would be transformed by the conflict, noting at the beginning of his journal that by taking care to write down the events, customs, and places where soldiering took him, he could “make passing days clear again.” As Hibler reminded himself in the foreword of his journal in February 1797, this was to be an intellectual effort that enabled him to “benefit from the sorrowful fate of the soldier” and the decision he had made to join the “military estate.”⁴⁰

Hibler's first experience of war was as a volunteer soldier with the Tyroler Sharfschützen-Corps, a unit he joined in 1796 while a student of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. It is likely that he was motivated in part by the patriotic rhetoric promulgated in the region as Napoleon's army drew closer and in part by his family history of military service.⁴¹ A year later he obtained a commission in the infantry regiment Stain as an ensign (Fähnrich). His brother was a grenadier captain in the regiment, and it is probable that his uncle, who was Hibler's guardian after the death of his father, provided the money to purchase the uniform and equipment of an officer.⁴² Hibler's familial connections no doubt made the transition from soldier to officer a smooth one, as did the standing of his family in Tyrol, where Hibler's father had been the magistrate for the town of Sillian.⁴³ It was from there that Hibler left to join Stain stationed in Southern Tyrol in the spring of 1797. Nine years later, Hibler was assigned to Jordis after Tyrol was lost to Bavaria as part of the Peace of Pressburg.⁴⁴ It was that act of writing down the world he saw as a soldier, the boredom and pettiness of garrison life and the effect this had on him, that led Hibler to document his role in Nachtigall's shameful outburst “to justify myself, and to anyone who had heard it, and perhaps to another who holds this journal in their hands.”⁴⁵

If we return to the account that opened this article, it is easy to understand why Hibler, aware that honor was what defined his person, profession, and loyalty, was so determined in July 1808 to redress the “the insults and degrading behavior that have been inflicted on me in … military circles.” On 28 July, the day after Nachtigall attempted to run his captain through, Hibler wrote a copy of the letter he expected to send to the regiment's staff in his daybook. In it, he began by asserting that he had always acted

according to the strict principles of honor, and I would have stopped doing so if I could properly digest the foolishness (sottises) and the misconduct inflicted upon me by Lieutenant Nachtigall. As is well-known, and as all people who have seen the lieutenant must have noticed, he came to the drill ground drunk yesterday afternoon, and had already begun to drill the reserve when I arrived. The several spectators there kept me silent. Soon the major (Oberstwachtmeister) and battalion commander, Baron Bernkopf, called my attention to the condition of the lieutenant, but refused my request to lead the exercise, as they did not want to shame (prostituierten) him in front of the civilians. Afterward I went to the Strobl Brewery where I was with Lieutenant Gonzani and some of the civilians in front of the house, drinking a glass of beer. Nachtigall arrived soon after in a rage and accused me of lying to the major about his drunkenness. I saw his disgraceful state, and of the whole officer corps, and tried to treat him with kindness as I rebuked him.… Since it is impossible for me to remain indifferent to the insults and degrading behavior that have been inflicted on me in civilian and military circles, I request that Regimental Command, in accordance to the law, have the matter investigated thoroughly, and that I be given the opportunity to take appropriate measures to deal with the deeds in which and how they have occurred.⁴⁶

Hibler concludes this entry by stating that he showed this report to Nachtigall and, despite his “crying” and “pleading,” told him the disagreement “had happened too publicly and it had gone too far” for him to forget.⁴⁷

The strict principles of honor understood by Hibler can be best represented by the proclamation the archduke Charles used to address his troops in Vienna before they were deployed in April 1809 for the invasion of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Written by Friedrich Schlegel, working as the army's chief propogandist, but approved by the Generalissimo, the proclamation underlined for the soldiers the kind of men they were to be while on campaign. They were to embody “unconditional obedience, strict discipline, courage, unwavering steadfastness,” and to act with “modesty, compassion, and humanity.” These were the principles of honor that characterized the masculine military identity that Hibler and Nachtigall were to exemplify as part of the “cooperation of the whole” and the “unity of will” needed to defeat France.⁴⁸ This gendered self was intended to create soldiers who, as Peter Olsthoorn has articulated more widely of military honor in the Western world, “behaved virtuously and fostered a greater good, but for a motive not devoid of self-regarding elements.”⁴⁹ It was the characteristics summarized by the archduke Charles in 1809 that Hibler strove to abide by as he resisted and sought to redress Nachtigall's slander and conceited lack of control.

Despite the strong demand for satisfaction, Hibler did not immediately deliver his report on the incident in the Strobl brewery. Instead, he sought the advice of the regiment's officer corps, hesitant to expose Nachtigall to the shame of an official investigation and expulsion from the regiment. What prevented Franz Nachtigall's immediate and official prosecution was his familial connections to Jordis and the informal modes of social control wielded by its officers. Nachtigall was the son of one of Hibler's fellow company commanders, Heinrich Nachtigall, who having originally volunteered in 1777 had risen from enlisted soldier to the rank of second captain.⁵⁰ It was this personal connection within the regiment, and Hibler's professional respect for Heinrich, that demanded he approach the elder Nachtigall and warn him of his intention to officially report his son. On hearing of the near-violent dispute, Heinrich asked Hibler to call the “Rath” (honor council), openly hoping that the officer corps’ council would hand out an unofficial reprimand and seemingly spare his son official punishment. A professional officer, whose social status was intrinsically linked to the honor of his rank and regiment, Hibler agreed to hear the council's verdict before sending his report to Command.⁵¹ It was possible the council would advocate for Nachtigall and unofficially rebuke him, sparing the young man and the regiment the shame of an official investigation—a decision all officers in the regiment were honor-bound to respect.

Two days later, on 29 July, Hibler recalled in his journal that the council had met in Enns and unanimously agreed to officially report Franz Nachtigall, “since they had saved him three times from disgrace” already.⁵² The young Nachtigall, it was decided, had undermined the loyalty, professional pride, and integrity of the regiment as represented by its officers, and he no longer warranted the protection of the council. Punishment now had to be official, the honor of the company commanders could only be defended by removing Nachtigall from the regiment. Hibler, it seems, immediately regretted the decision, aware that his fellow officer would be socially and economically ruined if cashiered. Yet, now more than personal honor was at stake. Thanks to its notoriety, the altercation had become a professional matter that threatened the integrity of the regiment and its relationship to the local area around Linz. The young man was now at the mercy of the regimental commander and its proprietor, Feldmarschalleutnant Alexander von Jordis.⁵³

As shall be discussed later, preparations for war and the desire of the Habsburg monarchy to end French hegemony on the continent framed the decisions of the Jordis honor council in 1808. But much like Hibler's initial response to Nachtigall's behavior, their decision was also influenced by an initial impulse to maintain their own personal standing.⁵⁴ The army was, like Habsburg society, an institution in which obligation was communicated as duty, which, if carried out correctly, was rewarded with an honor that enabled individuals to acquire rank.⁵⁵ Within each regiment the honor council was an informal regulatory body that served to contain disputes, the unwritten and unofficial rules of which maintained its members’ duty by promulgating honorable behavior among officers. Theoretically, each rank in the regimental officer corps had its own council, called upon to resolve disagreements between its members and provide remedies when confronted with internal regimental disputes. In some instances, members of a particular council would service the debts of one of its own, pay marriage fees, or provide them with means to support themselves during trying times.⁵⁶ When the council chose to withdraw their support for Nachtigall, its members knew it would lead to his expulsion from the regiment.

After the meeting, Hibler found a letter waiting in his room. It was written by Franz Nachtigall, and Hibler transcribed it into his daybook on the night of 29 July. The contents of the letter, as well as the ruling of the Rath, seem to have affirmed in Hibler's mind that the decision made on Nachtigall was not a ruling on a personal matter but a resolution handed down that protected the whole structure of the regiment. Nachtigall told his “esteemed captain” that “my life depends on you,” warning that if dismissed from the regiment his “existence would also be ended.” The young officer's fear of being called to Linz and the irrationality of his thoughts at the prospect of being evicted from the army are clear to see. In one line he expressed the deepest remorse for his insults, articulating his love for Hibler as his superior, before immediately labeling the captain as the cause of his misfortune. Nachtigall asked Hibler to think of the fate of his poor father “when he hears of my misfortune” and promised to leave the regiment for another if no official inquiry was launched into his conduct. The letter ended with Nachtigall assuring Hibler that he was his “most subservient and grateful servant.”⁵⁷

Hibler's reply was written knowing full well the effects of being cashiered would have on a man whose whole life had been lived within the sphere of the regiment. He told the distressed subaltern that he forgave him and wished to forget what happened, but Hibler made it clear that Nachtigall's misfortunes were of his own making, stressing that the “insults you said so often yesterday also affect the whole local officer corps.” The only way to prevent an official inquiry, Hibler wrote, was for him to go on Nachtigall's behalf and ask every single officer for forgiveness. This, he stated, he would do as a sign of his “friendship and goodness,” and if he was unable to cancel the trip to Linz, he would “pity” the lieutenant.⁵⁸

Hibler's response attempted to balance his conflicting loyalties. The first was to his immediate comrade and to Nachtigall's father. At nineteen, Franz Nachtigall was able to secure his original position as a cadet within the regiment Jordis because of his father's service.⁵⁹ The regiment and its recruiting district of Traunviertel was his fatherland. It was the only community he had known, or in which he could properly function. As a man who had already lost his honor, thanks to his actions in Enns, Hibler knew that the younger officer would also potentially lose the corporate security of the army, an income, access to a pension, and the ability to utilize dynastic service as a means to secure a comfortable life in a salaried position or the establishing service nobility.⁶⁰ After all, military service had seen Heinrich Nachtigall, a volunteer from Sinsheim in the Margraviate of Baden, prove himself as an officer of the emperor and develop the networks to secure his son a commission in the regiment. The younger Nachtigall, whose impetuousness had seen him already run afoul of the council, would have become a penniless drifter, without the means or connections to support himself.

Hibler's second loyalty was to the wider regimental community, where the perception of officers within the local area dictated the ease with which they could find suitable billets, source loans, and socialize with those with authority and economic power. The officer corps of Jordis was socially heterogeneous, and for many of those in positions of authority, military service provided their sole access to social mobility. Military rank alone did not give many the means to amass wealth. Officers’ pay was stagnant throughout the eighteenth century, leaving some contemporaries to bemoan the lack of material recompense found in the army and reliant on the support of their family.⁶¹ Yet these same men were eager to serve, desiring the networks of patronage and career opportunities.⁶²

Some of the company officers were foreign volunteers promoted from the ranks, and without the social honor gained from serving as representatives of the dynasty, they were potentially in the same uncertain economic and social position as the conscripts they trained.⁶³ For some noble company officers, their status was so minor they needed military service and the regiment's standing in the area to maintain the legitimacy of their family's rank.⁶⁴ The collective decision of the council to expose Franz Nachtigall to an official inquiry protected both their corporate identity as dutiful and honorable military servants and the social mobility this allowed.

The best example of the social mobility acquired through professional and dutiful service for the men of Jordis was the military career of the regiment's commanding officer. Colonel (Oberst) Christoph Adler was a Catholic Reich volunteer from the city of Erfurt in Thuringia who had joined the regiment in 1763 at the age of fifteen. In 1773 he was made an ensign after ascending through all common ranks. Henceforward, promotion stalled, and he did not acquire the rank of first captain (Hauptmann) and command of a company until 1799, when wartime attrition played a prominent part in his promotion. War seems to have favored Adler, who was appointed second in command in September 1800. In the lead-up to the War of the Third Coalition, and after forty-two years of service, Adler was made regimental commander in October 1805. Without the private means to support his new position, he was loaned 3,000 florins as part of his promotion to acquire the necessary uniform and equipment.⁶⁵ By 1808 he was ennobled by the emperor, obtaining the nobiliary particle of “von” after petitioning the Habsburg court for the privilege.⁶⁶

The longevity and upward thrust of Adler's career is remarkable, but his origins as an officer were not. Similar military careers were also present in Jordis. Hibler is but one example of a volunteer soldier acquiring rank, even if it was by the normal means of patronage and familial connection. Across the regiment, the 1806 roll call indicates fifty-six officers having served in the ranks. Most of these men were subaltern company officers, as ennobled officers still received preferential promotion to company commander.⁶⁷ However, as the war progressed the numbers of nobles, most of whom had come from the Reich, diminished, and those who had been promoted from the ranks or become career officers to acquire opportunity became the backbone of a professional officer cadre that served the army well in the later coalitions (Table 1).

Table 1. Social background of Jordis officers in 1806

Many of the men promoted from the ranks were self-funded common soldiers (Expropriis Gemeiner). These were men who had privately purchased the uniform of a common soldier on enlistment, and who entered the regiment with the hope of one day being promoted to cadet by the regiment's proprietor once a position became available.⁶⁸ These gentlemen soldiers were officially classified as separate from the common soldier.⁶⁹ They were akin to—but not quite a part of—the regiment's officer corps. Most of the men who had joined the army in this fashion served in the ranks of Jordis for more than three years before securing promotion. Many came in the preceding ten years from the southern parts of the Reich and may have been motivated by the imperial influence of France. Alternatively, these wealthier men may have identified war as playing to their advantage, with the loss of life providing avenues for their social advancement.

Also present were those common soldier volunteers from the Reich who had made Jordis and Upper Austria their homeland, using military service to escape the stultifying confines of preindustrial agrarian life and advance their prosperity.⁷⁰ Many of these volunteers agreed to remain with the regiment after their initial first six years and were paid a further bounty upward of thirty florins.⁷¹ These men would rather continue living with steady pay and regular billets than return to the communities they left and the precariousness that entailed. A tiny minority eventually acquired the rank of officer like Heinrich Nachtigall, whose dedication and duty had been dimmed by the shameful actions of his son. Indeed, the elder Nachtigall's other second lieutenant was a veteran of a Hessian regiment who fought in America.⁷² The fifty-year-old Johann Justus Eggert, lacking security with a young family, had taken advantage of the regiment's ability to recruit in the Reich in 1790 to support his second wife and last living son from his first marriage. In 1808 Eggert's son was a twenty-two-year-old ensign in the regiment's fifth company, securing for the moment the family's economic and social position.⁷³ The significant number of enlisted soldiers from the ranks in the officer corps suggests that the honor code of the council, used to define the behaviors and identities of these men and bind them to the emperor, was also prevalent among the rank and file of the regiment.⁷⁴

The personal interactions within the Habsburg military estate and the sets of conditions that bound this community dictated the behaviors of officers from noble families and the newly formed service class, as well as those of the volunteer common soldiers and native-born conscripts they commanded. Contemporaries were aware of the existence of this sphere and knew that it was part of the networks of separate estates and corporations that made up Habsburg society (Ständische Gesellschaft).⁷⁵ While far from unique in military intellectual circles, the Habsburg military estate, known also as Soldatenstande, was exceptional in each local society because access was freely given to co-opt men into serving the monarchy. But in most ways, it mirrored a society in which a small group of authorities controlled nearly every detail of a member's life.⁷⁶

Each corporation in early modern society had its own form of honor, which it worked hard to maintain to validate the legal and social privileges it offered its members.⁷⁷ As a result, the behavior and practices of individuals were fiercely regulated. If the honor of a corporation was tarnished by individual action, then the social status it offered was undermined—along with the honor of each of its members. Corporations ranged from guilds and towns all the way up to provinces, and access to privileges in these areas only came from the explicit acknowledgment that an individual belonged and was welcome.⁷⁸ Each distinct group of officers in Jordis was united by a commitment to a code of military honor that defined their standing in the regiment's hierarchy, as well as in an estate-based society in which membership to a corporation bestowed a person status, potential wealth, and power, signifying to outsiders their personal integrity.

The patronage that came from being aligned to a guild or a patron of repute was not a sign of corruption. Instead, it was a consistent way in which individuals were chosen for positions of employment during a period when education, especially at a tertiary level, could not be relied upon to provide men of merit for every position.⁷⁹ The Habsburg army was one of the institutions in Upper Austria that utilized this same process of sponsorship. Sourcing patrons of authority was therefore essential if individuals and their families wished to improve their social standings. Military connections provided powerful patrons in local societies because they had the ability to call upon larger social circles that transcended the petty structures of regional economies.⁸⁰ Regimental staff officers could be the relatives of influential local landowning nobles or the sons of imperial nobility, and though the proprietors of each regiment may not have had the supreme power they wielded in the seventeenth century, their selection by the emperor meant that a respectable career after the army was all but assured for their protégé.⁸¹

We can see how familial connections and professional influences played out in the career of Ignaz Friedrich Frisch. A first lieutenant in a Galician regiment in 1821, he used his friendship with the wife of a comrade who was killed in 1809, Colonel Franz Brusch von Neuberg, to petition the president of the Hofkriegsrat, Count Heinrich von Bellegarde, for a promotion.⁸² Madame Brusch laid out the “talent,” “application,” and “zeal” of Frisch to Bellegarde, who advised her that appointments were handled by regimental proprietors.⁸³ Madame Brusch must have also written to General Johann Frimont at the same time, commander of the army in Naples in 1821 and in whose service her husband had served as aide in 1809.⁸⁴ Honored to have received a letter of recommendation from the wife of his late aide, Frimont promised to give the matter of Frisch “my highest consideration,” which he must have done as the lieutenant was a captain in 1822.⁸⁵ Social networks played a vital role in Frisch's career as a lieutenant-colonel (Obrist) in Lombardy and an aide to Radetzky in 1843, but it was also his professionalism, honor, and good standing within his military community that provided the possibilities for his career trajectory.⁸⁶

The various avenues through which officers came to Jordis before attaining their rank in the military estate meant that securing their privileges and policing deviant behavior had to rely on cooperation and an honor code that was founded on duty and enabled the intermingling of men from different backgrounds. In Hibler's journal he recounts several personal disputes with fellow officers, as well as between company commanders and one of the regiment's majors. In most instances, Adler policed these encounters by placing men under house arrest after hearing from both parties, and the commander's unique career may have informed the regiment's approach to deviant behavior. Because of their respect for the regiment and its commander, officers in Jordis abided by these decisions, and personal grievances were not allowed to escalate to violence.

Instead of taking the defense of his honor into his own hands, Hibler chose to operate in “accordance to the law” as a professional officer because it provided him with better options to redress his standing in a community where competence was cherished above all. And though the makeup of the officer corps of Jordis reflects a trend in the Habsburg army, it is impossible to generalize their experience of regulating honor as universal and place it within a narrative of lessening vindicatory violence in Europe.⁸⁷ As Christopher Duffy's work on the army of Maria Theresa shows, officers were concerned with individual honor and fought illegally to protect it, just like the young cadet in the armies of France examined by Stuart Carroll.⁸⁸ Yet professionalism and a sense of duty to the regiment that defined one's honor had developed in the army between the 1760s and the 1790s, which may have contributed to the approach of the officers of Jordis.⁸⁹ Nachtigall's infringement demonstrates that for Hibler and his diverse set of comrades, the honor councils found within their regiment served as an important representative body that mediated between members, exercising its unofficial power to police professionalism—and therefore the ability of all to obtain the rank and privilege they desired.

Moreover, as Hibler was acutely aware, his personal pride was second to the honor of Jordis as personified by its officers. At a time when elderly and substandard officers were being pensioned as part of limited military reforms, the behavior of Nachtigall affected the regiment's reputation within the army and at a local level. An officer like Nachtigall, who was unable to publicly act the part of a Habsburg officer, called into question the social standing soldiers were given by the emperor and undermined any levels of esteem held by civilians at a time when the soldier was specifically marked out as an embodiment of the virtue and loyalty of the many societies in the Habsburg monarchy.

Two

What makes Hibler's altercation with Nachtigall important—other than as an analysis of how military honor was constructed and policed to secure loyalty and privilege—is that it played out amidst a marked change in civilian-military relations in Austria, thereby providing a glimpse of the tension that arose from this shift.⁹⁰ This was a time when the monarchy was experimenting with a different type of soldierly identity, the citizen-soldier, where the man in uniform was represented as an important individual within “one of the strongest and grandest of armies, which stands ready and announces noli me tangere (do not touch me).” People were instructed to “pay attention to [the soldier] for he is the protector of the monarchy,” and news sourced from different parts of the Habsburg domains reported that the inhabitants there hoped for the “continued existence” of their regular soldiers.⁹¹

In 1808, when Nachtigall brought shame to his military estate, the soldier was beginning to be marked out as a central pillar of Habsburg wartime identity and society's contribution to the dynasty's war effort. This new and emerging relationship between Austrian society and its armed forces was fostered and then utilized for the introduction of the Landwehr,⁹² a militia unit that sought to mobilize the able-bodied male population in support of a new war with France. These were men whose importance and rank in civilian society had previously excused them from military service. Now they expected to share the same type of honor gained from military service without assuming the burden placed upon professional soldiers.⁹³ As one paper proclaimed “the wall between defenders and defended was torn down,” and with its destruction, the rank and privilege afforded to those who fought on behalf of the fatherland were no longer solely for the professional soldier.⁹⁴ As Hibler stressed in his account of the events, Nachtigall's actions were witnessed by members of the “civilian estate,” whose positive perception of the regiment allowed for the ongoing mobilization of the region's resources, its engagement in the monarchy's war to come, and the precedence of Jordis over the newly formed militia.

From the writings of Hibler, it is clear to see that he placed little faith in the patriotism of civilians or the effectiveness of armed militias, and his views of the civilian estate were far from complimentary.⁹⁵ Some of this was informed by his personal experience of the historical disdain civilians had for soldiers. As a wounded officer returning to Linz in 1800 he wrote that “it infuriated me infinitely that in a city where the regiment had been garrisoning for about twenty years, I was denied accommodation for two or three days.”⁹⁶ Hibler's contempt also came from his authority—derived directly from the emperor—and from his close relationship to violence.⁹⁷ His humanist and enlightened education contributed further to the scorn he had for the wider masses out of uniform: he observed that the inhabitants of his home province of Tyrol were “drunkards, mistrustful, backward, petty, sarcastic, and motivated by avarice.”⁹⁸

As a regular soldier ensconced within a military culture that extolled the virtues of dedicated fighting men, and like most of the army's commanders, Hibler trusted only military honor as a motivator, regarding the professionalism that it entailed a mandatory requirement on the battlefield.⁹⁹ This view was clearly exhibited during Hibler's time as a captain in the Tyrolean militia in 1805, in which he condemned the aversion of those from the shooting associations to serve in the professional army, praying he hoped to come away from the unit with honor as “I have encountered how horrible it is for experienced officers to command men in front of the enemy who are not used to blindly obeying.” Yet, as Hibler's daybook attests, his perception of those out of uniform had changed on the day he was nearly assaulted by Nachtigall. Hibler's developing awareness of civilians was influenced by the ongoing socialization of the military in 1808, the changing perceptions of military service in wider society, the infringing nature of this on the close confines of the military estate, and the relegation of the soldier-citizen for the new model of the citizen-soldier in the politicized wartime culture of the monarchy.¹⁰⁰

Hibler's decision to report the lieutenant and the reaction of the officer corps of Jordis to the younger man's behavior was played out with the increasing costs of two decades of war fresh in the minds of local inhabitants of Enns, who were now expected to provide more.¹⁰¹ By 1808 Jordis had been part of Upper Austrian social fabric for twenty-seven years, mustering men in the area to serve in its ranks during wartime for twenty.¹⁰² Throughout this time the ability of the regiment to source men and goods effectively had relied on the good standing of the regiment's officers in the region's conscription department. Successive defeats in 1797, 1801, and 1805 had led the regiment to demand more of local communities; and to devote so much to what appeared as a rabble would not have increased the area's support for war. This was especially the case with respect to a unit that had left the people in the areas around Linz reliant on their own strength of arms to defend against the extortionate demands and violence of the French in 1801 and 1805, where, as Anneliese Schweiger's research reveals, mobilization and the cost of occupation had been bloody and demanding.¹⁰³

The failings of the professional forces and the social turmoil that deployments of the army brought to society and the economy was at the forefront of Habsburg political discussions at all levels between 1806 and 1809. Civilian-military relations had to be amended and the perception of the fighting man rehabilitated if more men were to be easily conscripted into the regular army and the urban and middle class were to accept their new position in the newly established Landwehr. To strategically circumvent any resentment or trepidation at the increasing status military institutions had in local societies, a cacophony of wartime rhetoric was deployed, championing the contributions made by Habsburg subjects as soldiers to the dynasty's war effort.¹⁰⁴

The gathering of Jordis at Enns was thus an authoritative and theatrical display of state violence that proved the professionalism of the regiment and allowed locals to identify with soldiers while also representing the region's commitment to the Habsburg war effort.¹⁰⁵ This exhibition of military strength in July 1808, at the very same time the Landwehr were being formed, was part of the spectacle of wartime events and rhetoric that permeated the culture of the monarchy in the years leading up to the War of the Fifth Coalition, which placed the soldier at the center of dynastic patriotism.¹⁰⁶ As one memoirist remembered in 1808 of the gathering of training troops in public spaces, “already it was a matter of public communication and deliberation that the new outbreak of war, a very serious one that brought about extraordinary constrictions and preparations, was a foregone conclusion.”¹⁰⁷

It was the lessening of state censorship in 1808 by the new foreign minister, Johann Philipp Stadion, that signaled imminent war. This new approach to arts, entertainment, and war reporting allowed for an explosion of public commentary on the state of the monarchy and the war with France, which had been previously contained. Stadion's decision was intended to foster an atmosphere that would allow the government and military to encourage all levels of the population to contribute to mobilization.¹⁰⁸ His allowance of commentary on European events was also motivated by his desire—and those of his supporters within the Habsburg court, the “War party”—to use the population's enthusiasm for war to influence the emperor Francis and silence the “Peace party,” led by his brother the archduke Charles.¹⁰⁹

Poems, plays, pamphlets, regional newspapers, and popular shows of local patriotism depicted the soldier as a revitalized defender of the Habsburg state.¹¹⁰ The Vaterländische Blätter, a periodical founded in 1808 to promote a collective identity in the Austrian imperial state (Österreichischen Kaiserstaat), presented the soldier as someone who was no longer “a useless lodger whose feeding one laments” but a “warrior who fights for more than just honor, but for the nation of which he belongs. It is that which encourages him.”¹¹¹ Honor, however, was still the defining trait of the soldier in the most widely available works written by the Austrian poets and government bureaucrats Ignaz Franz Castelli and Heinrich Joseph von Collin. Commissioned by powerful figures within the Habsburg government, these two championed the valor and courage of the regular soldier and his commitment to the dynasty, along with his regional identity.¹¹² Their work defined honor in the army, as extolled by Joseph II in its founding,¹¹³ as something that inspired soldiers to serve as the “wall” for all the dynasty, its peoples and traditions.¹¹⁴

It was the use of native-born conscripts after the Seven Years’ War that led Joseph and his advisors to envisage and communicate soldiering as an extension of subjects’ regional loyalties and love for the dynasty. Specifically, as Derek Beales and Franz Szabo have shown, the emperor saw military service as a duty owed directly to him,¹¹⁵ an obligation he and his chief military advisor, Franz Moritz Graf von Lacy, positioned during the initial introduction of regular conscription in the 1770s as an avenue that subjects could use to obtain status and honor. These conscripts, it was believed, who were already loyal to the emperor and whose families would be affected by defeat and occupation, would fight better than foreign volunteers and accentuate the army and the dynasty's connection to local communities.¹¹⁶

At all times, from the first centrally administered regulations for the infantry written in 1769 to the ones issued by the archduke Charles in 1807, it was honor gained from protecting “the public safety from enemies outside and within” that served as the defining purpose of the soldier.¹¹⁷ Implicitly what the regulations meant by “public safety” was the emperor, but in the wider military culture of the monarchy's army and through the regiments’ close affiliation with their respective area, this was communicated to mean the people, territories, and rights of the emperor's domain. Part of the process of normalizing conscription was leveraging local identities and the ideal of the fatherland. During Hibler's time the fatherland was understood by contemporaries as a space that radiated out from a man's family to encompass the land in which he had made his permanent abode, and where he enjoyed security and protection. It also comprised the area's inhabitants and those who enjoyed the same rights.¹¹⁸

After the introduction of recruiting districts, regiments were positioned as a symbol of the region—its people's loyalty to their lord and the region's loyalty to the dynasty. In official military documents these units were referred to as “Upper Austrian,” “Bohemian,” or “Hungarian” infantry regiments, denoting their links to specific localities.¹¹⁹ Flags of the regiments and their soldiers were made part of public displays of local civic patriotism (Landespatriotismus) in town celebrations, parading alongside town guards to mark regional autonomy, reinforcing the unit's place within the territory's traditions.¹²⁰ A few months later, these same men could be part of an imperial commemoration that highlighted the dynasty's monopoly on violence and right to rule over all local inhabitants.¹²¹

Moreover, the conscription patent of 1804 (Konskriptions- und Rekrutierungpatent) made the regiment's control over local allegiances and affiliations official policy for those living in the monarchy's Austro-Bohemian lands. This patent linked residency rights, personal jurisdiction, and access to poor relief to military service by issuing passports to those men who were eligible for conscription. These men were not allowed to travel without requesting permission from local magistrates and always had to have their identification documents on them. If, while away from their place of birth, a man was chosen for military service, he was ordered back to his homeland and assigned to its local regiment. In this way conscription defined the state as a man's local community and the horizon bound by the regiment, not the steeple.¹²²

If the work of Collins and Castelli echoed the foundational sentiments of the Josephinian army by accentuating dynastic service displayed through local loyalties, the works of the emigres from the defunct Reich, like Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Karl Count von Stein, and Friedrich von Gentz, working directly for Stadion, celebrated the army as a liberator of Germany and a champion of the lost privileges these men were desperate to regain.¹²³ These writers imagined that a unified German nation under the dominion of the Habsburgs would make the introduction of compulsory military service in the new Landwehr palatable to the thousands of middle-class and urban men who had been exempt from conscription in the regular army. Yet the themes of their pieces that extolled a German nation, while avidly read in Vienna, were absent from the founding rituals of the new Landwehr battalions and may have been little understood outside the circles of the more educated readers and theater attendees.¹²⁴ Indeed, it seems most officers and soldiers of the Habsburg army had little knowledge of the propaganda consumed in Vienna.¹²⁵

While the regulars may not have spent time with the poetry of Schlegel, they became increasingly aware that the new citizen-soldier challenged the hold that professionals like Hibler had over honor, generating a resentment that highlighted the divide between the regular soldier and the relatively well-off soldier, a divide that Stadion's rhetoric attempted to bridge. At the same time Nachtigall was insulting his commanding officer, men across Austria were receiving their enlistment papers (Landeswehrkarte), joining communal battalions that drew upon existing kin and fictive networks and assuming the role of the soldier and all its trappings of honor.¹²⁶ As Ernst Zehetbauer's research on the creation of the Landwehr has shown, professional officers were resentful of the symbols of military honor and rank that seemed to be freely handed to the unbloodied militia, whereas they had earned their status and badge of honor on the battlefield. The Landwehr were initially a home defense force: units that would alleviate the need for the regular soldiers to provide defense cordons behind the campaign theater. For the veterans in Jordis, the militia now served as a competing model of the military man, generating such an unwelcome focus on the position of the regular soldier that many used anything they could, such as the color of their portepee, to reaffirm their status as the first military servants of the emperor over men who would remain at home even as they wore the uniform of the monarch.¹²⁷

The resentment held by regular soldiers was especially fierce during the militia's early founding in the summer months of 1808. Here, questions over rank and deference between professional and Landwehr commanders required that Archduke Charles and the emperor decree that veterans of the line army were to be shown the highest degree of honor by their militia counterparts.¹²⁸ This proposition rankled with some of the newly made citizen-soldiers, who as noncombatants had viewed the thrice-defeated army as incapable and incompetent. It was this tension between the two models of soldiering, soldier-citizens and citizen-soldiers, that surrounded Hibler, Nachtigall, and Jordis in 1808.

A reflection of the Landwehr's original strategic use as a local defense force aligned with the army was embedded in the swearing in of its members—a military practice and unit, as Judson has argued, that first served to link all those in local societies to the dynasty.¹²⁹ This oath giving was also a display of military pomp highlighting the unity of the militia and the regular army in the eyes of the imperial family. In Vienna, thousands turned out to witness Archduke Charles and Empress Maria Ludovica present the volunteer battalions with their banners under the spire of St. Stephan's Cathedral. Touched by the empress, who was known among the people as “our State's Mother” (unsere Landesmutter), and awarded by the head of the army, these flags and the public military performance transformed clerks, students, lawyers, and accountants into soldiers.

The performative event, staged in front of the cathedral—an icon of Viennese civic identity—merged the dutiful obligations of Habsburg subjects and the local understanding of the self with the corporate soldierly identity represented by the archduke as the head of the regular army. Moreover, the public ceremonial presentation of the battalion's colors, in the city's most prominent public space and within sight of the Almighty, communicated to observers that military service was now the preeminent way that one could show commitment to God, the House of Austria, and their local fatherland.¹³⁰ It was an act of loyalty that joined urban bookkeepers in the militia with the rural day-laborers who were simultaneously being conscripted into the regular army.

The proliferation of wartime poetry in 1808 and 1809, motivating the bourgeoisie to show loyalty through military service, also coincided with greater demands being placed on rural areas by the regular army at a time when war weariness might have prohibited the increased use of local-born men. While the pervasive presence of military service within the urban and educated cultural spheres of the monarchy was sudden, in Hibler's local area the shift reflected what had already been a gradual change in the social makeup of the regular regiments stationed within Upper Austria. These units, after Napoleon's victories in Germany, could no longer rely on volunteers from across Europe or the transnational soldier trade that had facilitated their movement.¹³¹ They were now almost exclusively dependent on local-born conscripts from their assigned areas to maintain effectiveness.

Roll calls of Upper Austrian regiments Jordis, Klebeck, and Stain show the decline of volunteer foreigners from the Reich and other parts of Europe, most of whom were killed or wounded during the last war with the Ottoman Empire (1788–91), and the increasing numbers of local men used to replace them. This demographic trend culminated in the interwar years between 1806 and 1809, when local men became the dominant demographic grouping. This social movement, present in the army before and during the war with France—not copied from them—was finalized after 1809.¹³²

Taking Klebeck as a regiment with nearly complete records, men from Upper Austria already comprised the largest majority of common soldiers in 1786, serving as the unit's social and cultural link to the region, just as the Josephinian system intended (Table 2).¹³³ This was not a force of foreign mercenaries, nor was the conscription system a dead letter.¹³⁴ The presence of local-born men declined, however, as attrition in the Banat between 1788 and 1791 meant that conscripted Galicians from the regiment's supplementary district in Austria Galicia were utilized to replace the dead volunteers and local conscripts. This practice circumvented any social or economic issues in Upper Austria stemming from increased conscription. In the months immediately after the war, one company contained 73 Galicians and 43 Upper Austrians, reflecting a wider trend across the regiment. The remainder of the 66 common soldiers were “Reichs Recrout,” six of them Frenchman, as well as a seventeen-year-old nobleman from the Duchy of Lorraine with the rank Expropriis Gemeiner. All had joined in the six months leading up to September 1791.¹³⁵

Table 2. Social composition of common soldiers in Upper Austrian infantry regiments, 1786–1817

If we examine Stain in 1804, Hibler's old regiment, the fashion of using Galicians to replace the dead foreign volunteers had clearly continued during the Revolutionary Wars, while the use of Austrians still aligned with Klebeck's demographic in 1786. Out of the 2,778 common soldiers within the Upper Austrian regiment, Galicians accounted for the majority, though the more localized and grouped birthplaces of the Austrian conscripts still served to link the regiment to the area (Table 2).¹³⁶ In that same year, new administrative wings for each of the regiments in Upper Austria and across the crownlands were introduced to streamline the recruiting process and further harness the local population for war. Each regiment was required to maintain a recruiting office staffed with officers entrusted with liaising with local officials to maintain the flow of conscripts from the district's villages. This concentrated the connection between military service and society even further, with companies expected to draw more on the inhabitants of their area—utilizing population books maintained by local magistrates—instead of using Galicians from supplementary districts.¹³⁷ In 1806, Hibler's company in Jordis reflected this mandate, with Upper Austrians now the unit's majority cultural core. Of the 139 on the mustering field at Linz, 56 were from the surrounding villages on the Danube's right bank, and 36 of them had been conscripted since April 1804.¹³⁸ Many of those were forced to join the regiment in September 1805 in preparation for its deployment to Tyrol during the Third Coalition.¹³⁹

As part of the reforms to the Habsburg army introduced by Archduke Charles between 1806 and 1808, each company was instructed to train cadres of reservists from those men who had previously been passed over for conscription.¹⁴⁰ These men would be immediately available to replace casualties sustained in the first weeks of a new war with France, preventing the monarchy's army from disintegrating after its first clash in the field.¹⁴¹ This process is exemplified by the regiment Klebeck's roll call in 1811, which after the reduction of the army as stipulated by the Peace of Schönbrunn in 1809, listed 957 Austrian conscripts, 250 foreign volunteers, and 216 from Galicia. Of the 73 Austrian conscripts from one company, 49 had been drafted in preparation for the war of 1809.¹⁴² Almost all these were conscribed in the last days of February 1809. These men were probably the reservists trained in the preceding year and came from the villages and towns in Upper Austria north of the Danube, or around Salzburg. Such was the commitment to fostering local loyalties and maintaining the regiment's regional identity that eleven men from Lower Austria were transferred in 1810 from one Klebeck company to the Deutschmeister or Erzherzog Carl regiments based in that province.¹⁴³ Now Klebeck, which drew its men from the western part of Upper Austria, just like Jordis did in the east, had come to reflect the social networks and bonds of loyalty at a village level. As the 1817 roll call of Jordis attests, this process was finalized by the end of the war with 97 percent of the regiment's common soldiers coming from Upper Austria or Salzburg (Table 2).¹⁴⁴ These men, conscripted at a time when soldiering served as a barometer of popular patriotism, solidified the regiment as exclusively Upper Austrian long before universal conscription in 1868 and embodied their society's loyalty to the emperor and its contribution to his wider political community.¹⁴⁵

The rhetoric unleashed by Stadion in 1808 told the monarchy's inhabitants that the soldiers among them now fought to protect a way of life as their local representatives.¹⁴⁶ For professional officers like Hibler and the Nachtigalls, this new development enabled regulars to assume a more prominent position in their local regions. The Galician-born, Bohemian-raised infantry captain Lorenz Zagitzeck, describing this new relationship in his memoir for his children, wrote positively of the burgeoning links found between civilians and soldiers and its effects on wartime fervor. In early April of that year, Zagitzeck's regiment Zach was treated to their first hearing of the patriotic song “God Save the Emperor Francis” in Prague by a popular singer. After learning the “people's hymn,” a song he identified as written in the “Turkish” style, it became the marching song of the regiment; and as the men left Prague, thousands of the city's enthusiastic inhabitants joined in the singing—a triumphant cacophony that Zagitzeck said could be heard from every window his men passed.¹⁴⁷

Zagitzeck's account of the campaign in 1809 also provides a glimpse of how the connections between the dynasty, its local areas, and their affiliated regiments were used to motivate native-born soldiers. His account of the defense of Regensburg in 1809 contains a speech he remembered from one of the regiment's Bohemian company commanders, Joachim Baierwek. Faced with advancing French grenadiers, Zagitzeck remembers that “the thoughtful officer” Baierwek spoke to the Bohemian soldiers in their native language—instead of the German in which the regiment's orders were given—and said: “Remember we are Bohemians, and that our compatriots (Landsleute) from another age were Heroes. If we come to a point where we need to help, we will keep our word and die as Heroes, as the good Bohemian always has.”¹⁴⁸ And though only a small part of the Habsburgs’ war, the lines used by Baierwek, just before he was killed at Regensburg, tell us something very new about the men that faced the armies of imperial France: to be an honorable and brave professional soldier meant to embody the very best local areas had to offer the dynasty—an expectation the men of Jordis in July 1808 knew they had not kept.

As we have already seen, the military culture of the army that fought France had always utilized regional loyalties and provincial consciousness. Yet, between 1807 and 1809 a change had occurred in the representation and perception of the soldier in the wider community, dictated by the increasing use of native-born men in the professional army and the introduction of the Landwehr. This change accentuated the already established connection between local loyalty and military service. As well as being beholden to the emperor as soldier-citizens, professionals were now representatives of their local people as citizen-soldiers. And it was at the local level that the continuation of a more positive acceptance of the regular army depended on officers and their men living up to the statuses prescribed to them. The shameful display of one man could tarnish the new symbol of the soldier in these communities, which facilitated the escalating demands regiments put on local places in 1808. It was in this context that Nachtigall's fourth infraction was judged by the officer corps of Jordis as too egregious to ignore.

Adler, a man who through honor, duty, and obedience had risen through the ranks and made Upper Austria his home, must have agreed with his officers, as Hibler concludes that Nachtigall was later “cashiered.” At the end of Hibler's detailed description of the event, he writes, “I certainly regret it very much, but I did my duty, my obligation.”¹⁴⁹ This line, written as a final epitaph to Franz Nachtigall, reveals the weight the processes and practices of the Habsburg military and its war brought to bear on individuals. Hibler personally forgave the young man, but his military honor, which was a key to status, a way of being, and a tool for state building, meant that as a soldier he could not. The youngest son of a deceased magistrate, Hibler honorably inhabited the role through forty years of service, earning himself the nobiliary particle and thereby cementing a powerful position within Tyrolean society for his descendants.¹⁵⁰

Conclusion

Hibler's account of the altercation with Nachtigall crystalizes the tension that came with the increasing socialization of the Habsburg military and the different ways in which this social change was narrated. When Hibler “did his duty,” he did it to protect his own honor and the honor of the officer corps, both of which were intimately connected and offered security and social value to individuals as soldier-citizens while also serving as an integral element to the embodiment of dynastic power in local areas. Yet it was not just the threat to reputation that dictated that Nachtigall had to be officially punished and Hibler to carry out his obligations. The lieutenant's shaming display occurred during a time when the local structures of the Habsburg monarchy's military power—and the burgeoning relationship between military service and popular patriotism—were brought into sharp focus by a war that sought to reinstate the emperor Francis's primacy in Central Europe.

The continual demands placed on the monarch's subjects, leading to experimentation with popular military service and a new representation of the soldier, turned the military spheres of local societies into places of contestation, where military men and the civilians they lived alongside grappled with the purpose of soldiering and its connections to the dynasty. And even though the Landwehr and its model of citizen-soldier service was quickly forgotten after 1809, the increased mobilization of local regular conscripts in 1808 introduced greater numbers of subjects to the local loyalties these negotiations accentuated and the culture of honor by which Hibler and Nachtigall had tried to conduct themselves. Now men in the regular army were citizen-soldiers as well as soldier-citizens. It was a model of the military man devoid of the active connotations of citizenship to be sure, but one that was seen to exemplify a community and its loyalty to the monarchy. In 1808 Enns, both models rested upon the ability of individuals to play the part if the Habsburg government were to utilize more efficiently the resources within its domain.

Moreover, Hibler's testimony offers an insight into how the honor system of the Habsburg army of this period, and the links of loyalty it enabled, were negotiated and assumed by the hundreds of thousands of men whose everyday lives were governed by them. The officers of Jordis, including Hibler, took their own private needs as soldier-citizens and their new role as citizen-soldiers into consideration when they met to decide Nachtigall's fate. The purge of young Franz Nachtigall from the safety of their ranks was but a small production of their loyalty and an exhibition of military honor that the emperor Francis needed to engage the many subjects of his kingdom in the struggle with, and eventual defeat of, imperial France. It may be that by uncovering the ways in which honor, loyalty, and ambition motivated men to commit to the emperor Francis, we can learn more about the choices his subjects took to find their place in the monarchy's postwar period.¹⁵¹