Habsburg-Lorraine

The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands. Moreover, her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs.

The peace of 1748 did not last long. Prussia was not satiated by the seizure of Silesia from the Habsburgs, and they in turn were even more determined to recover Silesia than anxious to ensure the protection of their outlying possessions in the Netherlands against the continuing danger of French attack. The so-called Diplomatic Revolution, which preceded the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, was the product, basically, of those situations: finding that their former British friends were more interested in conciliating Prussia than in abetting Austro-Russian plans for destroying it, the Habsburgs played their part in the “reversal of alliances” by achieving—without territorial profit—a reconciliation with France, hitherto their longest-standing enemy. An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it.

To secure their imperial status in Germany against Prussian enterprises, the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory. For that purpose Tuscany and the Netherlands were practically irrelevant. Tuscany in fact was kept separate from the ancient Habsburg inheritance: when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany. Similarly, when Leopold succeeded to Joseph’s titles (1790), his own second son succeeded to Tuscany as Ferdinand III. Thereafter the Tuscan branch of the Habsburgs remained distinct from the senior or imperial line.

The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772), which gave him Galicia and Lodomeria, was a Russo-Prussian arrangement disgusting to his conscientious mother, who remembered Silesia; and his subsequent acquisition of Bukovina (1775), geopolitically logical though it was as bridging a gap between his Transylvanian and his new Galician lands, was a side effect of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774).

Joseph II was considerably more interested in westward expansion, over Bavaria, which would have both strengthened his western frontier strategically and enhanced his status among the German princes politically. Prussia’s forceful opposition, however, reduced his gains in the War of the Bavarian Succession to the Innviertel (1779) and frustrated his plan for ceding the Netherlands to the house of Wittelsbach in exchange for Bavaria five years later (1784).

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes. Three were clearly significant for the future of the house of Habsburg: (1) the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, in anticipation of which Leopold II’s successor Francis II had in 1804 begun to style himself “hereditary emperor of Austria,” a title that, as Francis I, he could retain come what might; (2) the definitive renunciation of the southern Netherlands by the Habsburgs in 1797; and (3) the awakening of the spirit of nationalism in the modern sense.

On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered house of Habsburg naturally benefitted. Francis I of Austria recovered Lombardy (lost in 1797), Venetia and Dalmatia (both of them acquired in 1797 but lost in 1809), and Tirol (lost also in 1809); Ferdinand III of Tuscany recovered his grand duchy; another Habsburg was recognized as sovereign duke of Modena, because his father, a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the house of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise, received the duchies of Parma and Piacenza for her lifetime (after which they were to revert to the Bourbons). The territory of Salzburg, which the Habsburgs had acquired in 1803 but lost to Bavaria in 1809, was finally restored to Austria in 1816. Though the Congress of Vienna did not restore Austrian rule over “Western Galicia” (the Habsburgs’ share under the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, lost likewise in 1809), a small part of that area, namely the territory of Cracow, was annexed by Austria in 1846.

The history of the house of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire, a bastion of monarchical conservatism that the forces of nationalism—German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy, and could do nothing to prevent the same power from dispossessing the Habsburgs of Tuscany and of Modena. Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia. After that disaster the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”: in 1867, to conciliate Hungary, he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The result, however, was that the Magyars, jealous of their unique parity with the Germans and of their superiority over the non-Magyar peoples of their kingdom, rejected any suggestion of conciliating the Slavs and the Romanians of the Dual Monarchy by similar measures. The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars.

Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the house of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864, he was executed by a Mexican firing squad in 1867. No less grievous to the dynasty and of more concern to Austria-Hungary was the suicide of the crown prince Rudolf in 1889, though his fitness for the imperial and royal succession was questionable; and the scandalous misconduct of certain archdukes and archduchesses, in the imperial and in the Tuscan lines alike, further impaired the Habsburgs’ personal prestige. The assassination of Franz Joseph’s Wittelsbach consort Elizabeth in 1898 was to be followed in less than two decades by an assassination of far greater consequence.

In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey. In 1908 that territory had been formally annexed to Austria-Hungary, in a manner that was outrageous not only to Serbia (which coveted Bosnia for itself) but also to Serbia’s patron, Russia. Visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in 1914, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Dual Monarchy (and incidentally legatee, from 1875, of the rights of the house of Austria-Este to Modena), was shot to death by a nationalist Serb. A month later the First World War was beginning.

World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper. On November 11, 1918, he issued a proclamation recognizing Austria’s right to determine the future form of the state and renouncing for himself any share in affairs of state, and on November 13 he issued a similar proclamation to Hungary. Even so, he did not abdicate his hereditary titles either for himself or for the Habsburg dynasty. Consequently the national assembly of the Austrian Republic passed the “Habsburg Law” of April 3, 1919, banishing all Habsburgs from Austrian territory unless they renounced all dynastic pretensions and loyally accepted the status of private citizens. In Hungary, however, the collapse of the republican regime at the end of 1919 raised strong royalist hopes of a Habsburg restoration, and after the conclusion of the Treaty of Trianon (June 1920) Charles twice tried to return (March and October 1921). Under pressure from the other European powers, especially those of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania), the Hungarian parliament on November 3, 1921, decreed the abrogation of Charles’s sovereign rights and of the Pragmatic Sanction.

Habsburg property rights in Austria, forfeited under the law of 1919, were restored in 1935 but withdrawn again by the German chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1938. After World War II the Allied Control Council in Austria in January 1946 declared that it would support the Austrian government in measures to prevent any return of the Habsburgs, and the law of 1919 was written into the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. In June 1961 the Austrian government rejected an application by the archduke Otto, head of the house of Habsburg, to be allowed to return to Austria as a private citizen, but in 1963 the administrative court of Austria ruled that Otto’s application was legal. Because of Socialist opposition to his return, however, he was not granted a visa until June 1966 after the People’s Party had won a majority in that year’s general election. Under Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (1970–83), tensions between the Austrian government and the Habsburgs eased, although some family members continued to demand the restitution of the Habsburg assets.