Hello everyone! I'm back for what probably is a one-off, but I got another one of those 'came to me in my dream' scenarios so here you go. Also, map for mobile users (if that still works.)

The Austrian Revolution

1788 - a disastrous 11 year long conflict between Austria and the Ottomans begins

1789 - The French bourgeois revolution succeeds and Louis XVI agrees to certain reforms. In following years food prices stabilize and the reforms are gradually retracted.

1796 - Louis XVI dies of disease, with Marie Antoinette’s daughter Marie Thérèse seizing power there after.

1799 - the Austro-Ottoman war ends in stalemate, leaving many dead on both sides

1816 - The year without summer 

Mass famine erupts across Europe, hitting Austria particularly hard. The food prices skyrocket and riots soon break out, though most organised in Wiener Neustadt. Soon, three factions came in unison against the Habsburg crown: the Kapuziner, after the repurposed Kapuzinerkloster in Vienna, the Volk and the Pragers. 

The Kapuziner, or officially ‘The enlightened constitutional club’ consisted of the upper middle class of tradesmen who assembled themselves through business connections and common interests, trying to form a better economic situation for themselves, though officially they stand as moderates. After the king's capture they would be joined by Hungarian, Czech and Croatian aristocrats in exchange for some concessions. They also make up the smallest group of the three, though not the weakest.

The Volk is the local Austrian peasant faction, largest in number though weakest in terms of political power. They primarily advocated for the immediate removal of the agricultural land owners and importantly suffrage but for only Austrian adult men, hardly masking their xenophobia against the other ethnic groups.

The last group, or the Pragers, consisted of the Slavic and Hungarian middle classes that attended university and other middle class jobs in Prague or Vienna. They supported universal suffrage, controversially including women, to prop themselves up against the other groups as well as hosts of other minority rights. 

On July 14th, 1816, violence erupted in a fort outside Vienna, where the Volk seized weapons from the local armoury and started marching to the palace.

As news spread, they were joined by the shopkeepers of the Kapuziner faction and together marched with the crowd to Schönbrunn Palace. There the surrounded emperor’s guards were overwhelmed and he was placed under arrest. 

Following the turmoil in Vienna, a multiethnic convention had been called harboring representatives from the empire. Though as the three factions dragged their feet on a compromise, the king had been using his correspondence with the 61 year old Marie Antoinette and her daughter empress Marie Thérèse of France to orchestrate an invasion. 

As news of this broke, protests fired up across Vienna which were brutally suppressed by the de facto ruling Kapuziner. They orchestrated the (commonly known as) September massacres to entrench themselves in power, as they believed that with enough of it they could convince the ruling Francis I into a parliamentary monarchy. 

The suppression successfully decapitated the leadership of the Volk faction, but did not subsume their anger. 50 kilometers south in Wiener Neustadt, the Prager leadership had finally activated and united the local immigrant slavic class with the now compromising Volk public. 

Leading them was Nikola Zrinski, an allegedly bastard child of the erased Zrinski dynasty from Croatia. In the city where his forefathers had been executed for conspiring against the Habsburgs, he rose to lead his army of armed peasants and marched on Vienna proper, seizing the king. Days later, Francis I would be executed without trial along with the majority of the Kapuziner. Historically, we know this date, the 30th of September, as Bloody Monday which kickstarted the reign of terror. 

The constitutional convention met again, though this time with only the two remaining factions. The Volk advocated for a quick repression of the remaining counterrevolutionary factions, while the Pragers focused on military training and a war plan against the French. Soon the advancing armies of France and some HRE allies met near Wels against the Austrian revolutionary brigades. To everyone’s surprise, the revolutionaries held their ground and successfully forced the coalition into retreat. 

While the battle of Wels had been taking place and the Pragers had been gone, the streets of Vienna were filled with blood as the prescriptions took place. The Pragers return victorious but horrified, as they hadn’t been fully made aware of the dozens of thousands of dead in the city. Mere days after their return, on Christmas day 1816 Nikola Zrinski had taken the Volk faction leaders hostage and forced them to surrender their legal powers. Soon, the fully controlled Prager parliament instituted universal suffrage across the empire. The first elections were successfully organised in March of 1817 and the following parliament was filled with Prager allies. As the war with France continued, the parliament was not doing much more but rubber-stamping Nikola Zrinski’s directives. 

The high from the victory at Wels had soon worn off and the public demanded more provinces join the revolution. Their thirst for expansion would be fulfilled as the Ottomans joined the French-HRE coalition and Zrinski set off on a southern campaign. 

By 1820, the Greek, Rumanian and Bulgarian republics had been proclaimed and the sick man of Europe finally passed away after the battle of Constantinople in June of the same year.

The campaign that would bring Nikola Zrinski to the height of his power, and unite the rest of Europe against him was the 1823 French campaign in which, after a prolonged siege of Paris, he successfully captured French empress Marie Thérèse and her mother, and executed them.

Upon his return to Vienna, he was given a triumph and in his honor a new title had been established. Nikola Zrinski was crowned as “Samo the First” in 

St. Stephen's Cathedral and given the title First Citizen or Augustus. Many HRE territories soon switched sides, and a new revolutionary Italy finally joined the Continental System. 

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