Tea at Trianon: The Habsburg World We Have Lost

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 18, 2024

The Habsburg World We Have Lost

Empress Maria Theresa

From Engelsberg Ideas:

On 14 November 1918, Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister addressed his new-found country’s parliament. For too long, Karel Kramář announced, Czechs and Slovaks had ‘felt the barbarism of cultural oppression’ under their previous rulers. For too long they had suffered under the ‘heavy bonds of Austrian and Hungarian violence’. To a rapturous standing ovation, he declared that: ‘All ties that bound us to the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, are severed.’
Four years earlier, the head of that Habsburg dynasty had declared war on Serbia, setting off a chain reaction that drew Europe into a brutal, grinding war, from which few countries would emerge unscathed – least of all the defeated powers. Dejected and delegitimised, the Habsburgs watched their subjects declare their national independence one by one; the house’s rule over a sprawling Central European realm consigned to the history books.
For many decades, the legacy of Austria-Hungary was defined by people like Kramář, nationalists for whom the ‘black legend’ of Habsburg oppression served as a useful tool to legitimise the nation-states that succeeded it. The Habsburgs were not only deposed, but officially recognised as a malign historical influence, as a centuries-old obstacle to national freedom and self-determination.
Oddly enough, considering their later activities, Kramář and countless other politicians like him had, until the Great War, been loyal Habsburg subjects. Some were even loyal ‘Austrians’ in a supra-national state. Whether they were nationalists, conservatives, socialists, liberals, or Christian democrats, very few politicians envisioned – let alone advocated for – the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian state.
It was this state that ultimately shaped the political experiences and outlooks of the countless millions who came of age in it, particularly the 21 politicians who act as the subjects of Iryna Vushko’s ‘collective portrait’ in her new book Lost Fatherland. Despite the loss of their political homeland, most forged ahead as active participants in the process of shaping the continent’s future in the interwar years.
Vushko does an impressive job of picking apart the various political and intellectual strands that shaped late Austro-Hungarian politics, anchoring her story in real individuals and their political journeys. Many decades of innovative scholarship on the monarchy, which has largely languished far from public view in academic volumes and papers, shines through in a breezy, though not always particularly groundbreaking, narrative. And, it is worth noting, the book only addresses the ‘Austrian’ lands of the dual monarchy. (Read more.)