Kasimir Felix Graf Badeni

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Kasimir Felix Graf Badeni (or Count Kasimir Felix von Badeni, born Kazimierz Feliks hrabia Badeni; Surochów, Galicia, October 14, 1846 - July 9, 1909) was Minister-President of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1895 until 1897. Many people in Austria, especially Emperor Franz Joseph, had placed great hope in Badeni's ability to solve some of the Empire's constitutional problems, but he disappointed them.

The ethnic Polish aristocrat Badeni, born in Galicia, had served as governor of that province of Austro-Hungary. He was devoted to the Empire and the Emperor, but had some liberal and anti-clerical views.

He came to power in Austria after the failure of a democratic coalition ministry. In 1896 he succeeded in implementing a form of universal male suffrage but made it palatable to the ruling interests of the Empire. To the previous four classes of voters, which depended on the amount of taxes each individual paid, his reform added a fifth class to include every adult male below the five-guilder threshold set for the fourth class in the 1882 Taafe reform.

However, Badeni's "ordinance of April 5, 1897" would prove an astonishing failure. The ordinance declared "that Czech and German should be the languages of the 'inner service' throughout Bohemia." This meant that civil servants in the province of Bohemia would have to know both Czech and German, since government business would be conducted in both languages for internal Bohemian affairs. Germans in Bohemia were outraged, since this effectively excluded them from government jobs; Czechs learned German in school, but Germans had been forbidden by the Diet to learn "provincial languages" in school.

Late-19th-century Germans in Austria-Hungary, as a general rule, wanted the Empire to maintain its essentially German character, so they resisted the demands of the other nationalities for recognition of their languages. Badeni's ordinance was seen by Germans as the "last straw" in a series of concessions. Badeni was not prepared for the level of animosity the Germans of Bohemia and of the rest of the Empire directed at him due to his ordinance.

The fringe German Nationalist Party, headed by Georg Schönerer, hoping to destabilize the Empire and join the German lands of Austria to the new German Empire, disrupted parliamentary proceedings and instigated violent protests. Although most Germans of Austria had no sympathy for the Nationalist Party's cause, they participated in street protests across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hoping to have the ordinance repealed.

In November 1897, Franz Joseph, frightened by the mass agitation of some of the most important segments of society, dismissed Badeni.

Some authors feel that Badeni was unaccustomed to the political dynamics of the more-industrialized western part of the Empire; he was used to the largely illiterate peasants of Galicia. That is one possible explanation for Badeni's extraordinary political blunder.