emperor franz joseph of austria household guards

EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH OF AUSTRIA HOUSEHOLD GUARDS HOW TO

Boxed in by economically rampant Germany and Russia, the Habsburg Empire allowed itself to become obsessed with the one quadrant of Europe in which it still believed it had some leverage - its remote, economically marginal southern border. If the core task of any policymaking elite is to maintain its own power and position, then Habsburg decision-making was hideously incompetent. The dynasty’s sacred sites, such as Franz Joseph’s palaces in Vienna and Franz Ferdinand’s castle at Konopiste in the Czech Republic, swarm with visitors in pursuit of a more graceful and leisured time, with all of them happily oblivious to how few of them would have been allowed anywhere near these places when they had been up and running, and how genuinely stuffy, pampered, and peculiar the Habsburgs really were. Meanwhile, many citizens of the Habsburg successor states recall the monarchy with rose-tinted fondness.

Amid arguments about Scottish, Catalan, and Walloon autonomy and so on, others are looking to the Habsburgs - who would have viewed these independence movements as one among many “routine crises” to be dealt with through bribes and arrests - for insight.

EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH OF AUSTRIA HOUSEHOLD GUARDS HOW TO

Among academics, it has become fashionable to argue the virtues of the strange, incoherent Habsburg state - to claim that, rather than being seen as backward and oppressive, Habsburg rule should be interpreted as an early model of how to run a modern, multinational body politic, one that even contains lessons for today’s European Union. A certain lingering nostalgia has begun creeping into Central Europe, where the greatest tragedies of a post-empire world unfolded. By the end of World War I, the Western allies cared so little about the Habsburgs’ future that they were happy to begin recognizing successor regimes, encouraging the nationalisms that would tear apart the map of Central Europe and plunge the world toward a modernity that had no place for such antiques.īut now, a disastrous century on from these seismic events, some in the former Habsburg lands are having second thoughts about the hasty disposal of the dual monarchy. It had once been one of the key allies in the defeat of Napoleon by the early years of the 20th century, it simply filled a chunk of mostly landlocked and low-value space in Europe’s sagging middle. As the British, French, and Italian colonial empires piled up new holdings, and as Russia and the United States became continentwide powers of a new kind, the Habsburg Empire looked increasingly quaint. Perhaps their only truly global role had been to send a small naval element to China as part of the international expedition that destroyed the Boxer Rebellion - a role only memorable because one of the sailors was the young Baron von Trapp, later immortalized in The Sound of Music. In a world where power required influence that stretched across the globe, the Habsburgs had almost none. In the period leading up to World War I, the empire itself, too, had in large part come to be defined by its obsolescence.

Rather than being associated with anything remotely modern, Franz Ferdinand was to be remembered in the English-speaking world only for the circumstances of his murder: a laughably antique figure in his ostrich-plume hat, elaborate moustache, and too-tight uniform, gunned down by fanatical Serbian teenagers - an appropriate symbol of an empire that suddenly was made to look very old-fashioned and vulnerable. But as the decades passed and the extraordinarily old Emperor Franz Joseph continued to live on year after year, Franz Ferdinand grew into a bulky, irritable, pious (though still very rich) middle-aged malcontent, pacing back and forth in his various palaces, surrounded by his equally aging advisors and friends, his drastic modernization plans for the empire eternally on hold. He’d started off as an arrogant, inquisitive, very rich young man, suddenly and shockingly vaulted into his role as heir by the squalid suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf. By the time of his death, a century ago this summer, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been fretfully waiting for some 25 years to take over the Habsburg Empire.

Emperor franz joseph of austria household guards