October Diploma

The October Diploma was a constitution of the Austrian Empire issued by Emperor Franz Joseph I on 20 October 1860, drafted by Interior Minister Agenor Goluchowski. It sought to reorganize the empire along lines of aristocratic federalism, strengthening the conservative nobility by returning greater authority to provincial diets and expanding the Reichsrat, the empire's central representative body, while leaving certain matters to imperial legislation made with the diets' cooperation. The reform satisfied neither centralists nor the empire's various national movements, and Franz Joseph replaced it within months with the more centralizing February Patent of 1861. Despite its short life, historians treat the October Diploma as marking the opening of Austria's constitutional era.