The Slovenes and the Habsburg Monarchy

E-ISSN： 1558-5255|3|2|159-188

ISSN： 0067-2378

Source： Austrian History Yearbook, Vol.3, Iss.2, 1967-01, pp. : 159-188

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

An important fact to keep in mind in studying the Slovenian nationality problem in the nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy is the lack of coincidence between ethnic and administrative boundaries. Instead of living together in a single province, the Slovenes formed a significant percentage of the population of each of more than a half dozen different administrative subdivisions of the Austrian empire. Approximately half of them lived in provinces with a non-Slovenian majority. According to the official survey made by Carl Joseph von Czoernig, which was based on the 1846 census for the Austrian lands and that of 1850 for the kingdom of Hungary, there were 428,000 Slovenes and Serbo-Croatians (92 percent of the total population) in Carniola. There were 363,000 Slovenes (36 percent of all the inhabitants) in Styria; 96,000 (30 percent), in Carinthia;¹ 128,000 (67 percent), in Gorica (Görz); 25,000 (31.5 percent), in Trieste; and 32,000 (14 percent), in Istria. In addition, 45,000 Slovenes lived in the border areas that were added to the Transleithanian half of the dual monarchy after 1867 and 27,000 in the province of Venetia, which belonged to the Habsburg empire until 1866.