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Ignaz Seipel (19 July 1876 – 2 August 1932) was an Austrian Catholic priest and conservative politician, who served as the Chancellor of the First Austrian Republic twice during the 1920s and leader of the Christian Social Party. He is considered the most prominent statesman of the Austrian right in the interwar period.
Born into a modest bourgeois family, Seipel grew up in the town of Meidling, near Vienna, where he completed his studies before enrolling at the University of Vienna. He studied theology and was ordained as a priest in 1899. After serving in a rural parish, he returned to the imperial capital to pursue a doctorate. In 1908, he became an assistant professor of moral theology at the University of Vienna, and a year later, a full professor of the same discipline at the University of Salzburg, where he taught for the next eight years.
Seipel took an interest in social, educational, and economic issues and became friends with Heinrich Lammasch, a prominent Austrian jurist and the last Imperial Minister-President, who appointed him Minister of Social Welfare in his cabinet in late 1918. Although a monarchist, Seipel played a key role in helping the Christian Socialists accept the new republican system. He built up political Catholicism by aligning the clericals with Vienna's large bourgeoisie, often of Jewish descent. Over time, his political stance evolved: while initially a strong supporter of the Austria–Hungary and the Habsburg dynasty, after World War I, he adopted a conciliatory approach toward socialists and democracy to prevent the establishment of a left-wing dictatorship. Later, between 1922 and 1924, he distanced himself from the socialists, forming alliances with capitalist and anti-Marxist groups. Disillusioned with democracy, by 1927, Seipel advocated for replacing it with a clerical authoritarian system.
A dominant figure in Austrian politics during the 1920s, Seipel served as Chancellor from 31 May 1922 to 3 April 1929, except for a period between 1924 and 1926. In 1922, he managed to end severe inflation through an international stabilization loan, although this meant subjecting state economic policy to the supervision of the League of Nations. Deeply anti-socialist, he led a government coalition of Christian Socialists and Pan-Germans. Considered brilliant and the most capable conservative politician of his time, Seipel shared with his socialist rival, Otto Bauer, a firm commitment to defending their principles. Within his party, Seipel belonged to the most radical and conservative faction, which included the most capable leaders. Even when not leading the government, he wielded significant influence in the Christian Social Party. He played a crucial role in both the Christian Socialists' acceptance of the republic and their eventual abandonment of democracy. In his later years, Seipel supported constitutional reforms to establish an authoritarian government and worked closely with fascist groups like the Heimwehr ( Home Guard), an organization similar to the German Freikorps. He died in 1932, suffering from diabetes and tuberculosis.
In his 1907 work reflecting Catholic social teaching, Ethical Teachings on Economics of the Church Fathers, he was the first to use the phrase "economic ethics". In 1908 he joined the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna. From 1909 to 1917 he was professor of moral theology at the University of Salzburg. There he published his study Nation and State (1916), which helped cement his later prominent role in the Christian Social Party. In the book he viewed the state – the self-governing political entity – as the primary justification of sovereignty, rather than the nation – a group that shares a common culture, as for example speakers of German. In 1917 he was appointed professor at the University of Vienna, succeeding the moral theologian Franz Martin Schindler.
On 16 February 1919 Seipel was elected on the Christian Social ticket to the Constituent National Assembly, the body that adopted the constitution for the First Austrian Republic, which replaced the Republic of German-Austria. Seipel's parliamentary group elected him to the club presidium, one of its leadership bodies.
Seipel prevented the party from splitting in 1918 over the question of the abolition of the monarchy that was advocated by the Social Democrats and the greater Germans, the name for those who wanted Austria to join the German Reich (the Weimar Republic). In March 1919 he spoke out against the two parties' annexation euphoria on the grounds that annexation of German Austria to the German Reich was generally rejected by the victorious Allies of World War I and would endanger the peace treaty. In 1920 he nevertheless broke the Christian Social Party away from the coalition with the Social Democrats and formed an alliance with the nationalist Greater German People's Party.
Although Seipel supported the Austrian Republic's new parliamentary democracy, he was clearly skeptical of it. During the preliminary deliberations on the Federal Constitution in 1920 and thereafter in 1922, Seipel advocated a partial weakening of parliament in favor of a federal president endowed with significantly more extensive powers.
At the same time, Seipel supported the development of militant right-wing groups in Vienna, as seen above all in the fact that beginning in March 1920 he was a board member of the secret Association for Order and Law (Vereinigung für Ordnung und Recht). The group included monarchist and greater German representatives as well as military figures. It planned the forcible suppression of the Social Democrats and worked closely with the Bavarian right-wing radicals around Georg Escherich.
In September 1920, in a speech that was clearly tinged with anti-Semitism, Seipel called for a numerus clausus – an enrollment limit – for Jews at higher-level schools, colleges, and universities "according to population". (2025). 9783707606515, Czernin. ISBN 9783707606515
Seipel reorganized state finances with the aid of a League of Nations loan which was obtained when Austria officially renounced annexation to Germany. In order to fight the hyperinflation of the krone currency, the government prepared for the introduction of the schilling on 1 March 1925 and re-founded Austria's central bank, the Österreichische Nationalbank, with the task of securing monetary stability.
In the fall of 1924 the Bavarian Immigration Police considered deporting Adolf Hitler from Bavaria to Austria if he were released from prison early. Hitler had been serving time at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria since April 1924 following his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Seipel did not want the putschist and troublemaker back in Austria and sent Bavaria a statement saying that Hitler had become a German by serving in its army. Bavaria attested that Austria had recognized the Austrian citizenship of German soldiers in other cases, but Seipel adhered to his legal opinion.
Theodor Körner, a retired general and successful Social Democratic candidate for parliament in 1924, paid tribute to Seipel during the election campaign. The Innsbruck newspaper Volkszeitung quoted him saying that Seipel was "as a character of integrity in every respect, a diligent, selfless worker".
In the Austrian town of Schattendorf on 30 January 1927, members of a right-wing paramilitary group fired on Social Democratic demonstrators, including members of its paramilitary Republican Protection League ( Republikanischer Schutzbund), killing two and wounding five. The acquittal of the men charged in the deaths led to the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna during which police killed 89 protestors and wounded over 600. Afterwards, Social Democrats called Seipel a "prelate without clemency", a "prelate without mercy" and a "blood prelate". In his statement before the lower house of parliament, the National Council , on 26 July 1927, Seipel said, "In these days of misfortune, do not ask anything of the parliament and the government that would seem merciful to the victims and the guilty but would be cruel to the wounded republic."Stenographisches Protokoll. 7. Sitzung des Nationalrates der Republik Österreich. III. Gesetzgebungsperiode. 26. Juli 1927 Stenographic. pp. 133 ff. Seipel's statement was followed by an intensely heated parliamentary debate. The opposition seized on the phrase "without mercy" and linked it to their criticism of the excessive police action, for which they blamed Police Commissioner and former Austrian chancellor Johannes Schober. In 1928, Seipel, in agreement with Karl Buresch, the governor of Lower Austria, championed the interests of the Heimwehr by approving its march in Wiener Neustadt, as well as one by the Republican Protection League, against the express wish of Wiener Neustadt Mayor Anton Ofenböck. As Chancellor, Seipel was able to show his strength with a massive contingent of police and military. There were no violent incidents on the days of the marches.
Seipel resigned from the office of chancellor on 4 April 1929, although he continued in office until 4 May, when he was succeeded as head of government by Ernst Streeruwitz, also of the Christian Social Party. In all, five federal governments of the First Republic were under Seipel's leadership.
In 1930 Seipel was briefly Austrian foreign minister in the cabinet of Carl Vaugoin. After the bankruptcy of the Creditanstalt Bank in 1931, he was to take over the reins of government again but was unsuccessful in forming a coalition.
Decades later, Bruno Kreisky, Social Democratic Federal Chancellor from 1970 to 1983, criticized his own party for the 1931 events. Seipel had offered Otto Bauer, the head of the Social Democrats, a coalition at the height of the world economic crisis. The party executive, however, had not taken him up on it. "In retrospect, it seems to me clearly wrong not to have pushed harder for a compromise in order to be in government at such a critical moment. ... In my opinion, this was the last chance to save Austrian democracy," Kreisky wrote in 1986.
Seipel had seen in the Jews a class that represented mobile large capital and a "certain kind of merchant mentality" by which the people felt threatened in their economic existence. Austria, Seipel said, was "in danger of being dominated economically, culturally, and politically by the Jews." As a solution to the so-called Jewish question, he proposed recognizing the Jews as a national minority.
While Seipel's politics were initially characterized by a belief in Austria's self-reliance, he later took the view that without the German Reich Austrian politics were not meaningful.
The Corporatism Federal State of Austria (1934–1938) considered Seipel to be the founding father of the regime. As Seipel's final resting place, the Christ the King Church was built in Vienna's working-class district of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, six blocks from Seipel's birthplace, on the initiative of the women's and workers' rights activist Hildegard Burjan and supported by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß. Seipel's coffin was interred in the crypt of the church in the fall of 1934. Dollfuß had been assassinated by a Nazism two months earlier. His successor Kurt Schuschnigg had Dollfuß buried there; the regime named the church the "Seipel-Dollfuß Memorial Church". After the 1938 annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, it had both coffins reburied in 1939: Seipel's coffin was moved to a grave of honor at the Vienna Central Cemetery. The grave is located directly next to the presidential crypt in front of the St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery Church, then called the "Dr. Karl Lueger Memorial Church" after the founder of the Christian Social Party. Dollfuß was buried in the Hietzing cemetery in Vienna.
On 27 April 1934 the dictatorial city administration renamed the Ring of November 12, a part of Vienna's Ringstrasse commemorating the founding of the Republic, to the Dr.-Ignaz-Seipel-Ring in the section in front of the Parliament building. In 1940 it was renamed after the Nazi Gauleiter Josef Bürckel; on 27 April 1945 it became Seipel-Ring again and on 8 July 1956 it was given its present name, Dr.-Karl Renner-Ring.
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