REVIEW: Blessed Charles of Austria – Charles Coulombe (TAN books, 2020)

Imagine your country is run by a saint. Imagine you have reasonable cause to presume this, because his public life is so visible and the man so reverend in his actions that, even when you think he’s wrong, it’s hard to think without admiration. Maybe you served alongside him during the fiercest war man remembers waging, and you saw him lead men with his own body, and take them where he would only go himself. Maybe you assisted at Holy Mass where he happened to be in attendance, and saw—though no doubt, without intending to stare—the depths of his prayerful thanksgiving after the Leonine prayers had been said and the priest had left the sanctuary.

Imagine your country was run by this saint, and then imagine, in the interests of modernization and democracy, you had his titles stripped, his properties federalized and seized, his position abolished, and he and his family quite literally driven out of the empire on a rail. But let’s not be too hyperbolic, of course: the rail included several rather comfortable train cars, and he went with his luggage, and he had refuge with the family of his rather well-connected wife of almost comparable birth.

Welcome to the life of a citizen in the Empire of Austria-Hungary circa 1921. But this book isn’t about the citizens of the empire so much as its last crowned ruler, the aforementioned saint whose name and likeness graces cover. Although he has not yet been canonized, his beatification makes such an event effectively inevitable—and, unsurprisingly to those familiar with the imperial family’s life and history, the same goes for his wife, Empress Zita.

Blessed Charles of Austria is as much a monograph as it is a crash-course apologetic for monarchism. Coulombe approaches his subject first from the abstract, then from the historical, and then finally in specific; over the course of part one, he outlines the general definition of imperial monarchy, how this applied to Europe, and finally who and what the Habsburgs were. His short survey covers the unifying aspect of multi-ethnic, broadly multi-national elements of empires stretching back into antiquity, the dominance of Rome over European history, and the origins of the royal bloodlines as inheritors of the Roman mantle—of which the Habsburgs were a dominant part.

Politics

Blessed Karl enters the scene in the fifth chapter, on August 17^th, 1887. Coulombe goes to great lengths to detail, even from the boy’s earliest days, the attention to worship, duty, and service that the future emperor would exhibit in both his public and private lives. He understood the Faith to be a lived experience, and as such, the primary organizing principle around which the rest of his life was oriented. He seamlessly interwove his religious life through his administration, his leadership, and his politics.

The book traces the man through his time on the battlefield, fighting the Italians, Russians, and Romanians, through his ascension to the throne, the politics of the war, and the utter disasters of negotiations that concluded both the empire’s participation in the conflict and, unfortunately, its existence as a cohesive body. Like so much of the affairs of the war, the politics and negotiations of the liberalizing old world get to be a bit of a nightmare to parse out, but Coulombe’s description of the events adequately summarizes the important parts. These politics ultimately collided with the existence of the empire, already on the verge of breakup as a result of the prevailing winds of liberalism having run roughshod over the continent for two centuries.

As negotiations with the Entente powers disintegrated over the summer of 1918, these liberalizing factors on the home front threatened to destabilize the country. Abroad, the Emperor had already recognized years beforehand that his ally Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was not really in command of his own military apparatus; this made negotiations difficult if not impossible with the Triple Entente. Blessed Karl himself found that he had only limited influence in his own political region, and the collapse of negotiations with France and America only expedited the triumph of more nationalist, federalist, and liberal elements of Austria’s statesman class.

The result, as Coulombe summarizes, was the complicated ethnic composition of the empire forming into their own weakened nationalities under approved councils, only for them to turn around and collectively attempt, eventually, to vote the imperial apparatus out of existence. One can scarcely shake the impression of an image: Blessed Karl, one hand tied behind his back, extending an olive branch to a purely secular order with this other hand, only for his opposing negotiators to take the branch along with the arm holding it. As Coulombe explains:

Those around him at that time have left two sets of assertions. One is that he appeared resigned to whatever happened. Having tried his utmost from the beginning of his reign to bring both peace and reform to the empire, he was all too conscious that his predictions from the beginning were being fulfilled—thou those that had impeded him were nowhere to be seen. The second was his constantly repeated refusal to abdicate or to leave the country.¹

Although refusing abdication, it did not ultimately stop the republican forces from dismantling the institution, taking its properties, and kindly showing him the way out of town. He would return soon afterward to attempt a restoration of the Hungarian crown—by force, as it turned out—but this would be undermined by turncoats in his own ranks and his own advisory class. It can be admitted only in retrospect that, to the credit of the imperial citizens, this de facto abolition of the monarchy went far more orderly than it did most elsewhere that it occurred.

The King’s Two Bodies

What we see on display with the deposition and handling of the Emperor and Empress is the ultimate distillation of the conflict between the political facets of modernity and tradition. The various regimes that sought a ‘solution’ to the problem of Austria-Hungary’s emperor had no faces to present to him. They had ministers, generals, diplomats, to be sure. But each stood in as a quasi-faceless automaton for the bureaucracy behind him. This is especially striking after the last attempt of Charles to be with his people is met with political and, though limited, military defeat:

The three entente powers discussed what to do with the imperial couple. It was decided that they would be placed aboard a ship of the British naval flotilla in the Danube. This would take them down to the Black Sea, where a Royal Navy ship was expected at Galatz; they would be transferred to that ship, which would set sail for… where? Various islands were discussed: Malta? The Balearics? The Canaries? But no choice was made in the immediate.²

The emperor and his wife are treated like puzzling ornaments out of time and bereft of a box in which to be put away. Modern political thought has no way of putting those figures of authority into context; materialist frameworks can’t figure out what to do with structures so heavily steeped in both tradition and history. Blessed Charles was indeed the head of state, but he was also the head of the people; as Coulombe makes clear, Charles understood himself rightly to be the leader of his empire in a political sense, as well as one upon whom responsibility for their well-being was bestowed by God.

He wasn’t the Pope, obviously, but neither was he a prime minister, or president, or some Dear Leader. He was emperor, and for many, he was also king. He was a living member and expression of a history that went back hundreds, thousands of years; he was a man whose identity acted as regent and whose position tied the nation into the continuity of history.

Coulombe draws a great deal of attention to the sacramental character of the Habsburg imperial monarchy. Those born into the positions they occupied were expected to carry out such duties as their positions entailed. Far from being an oppressive structure that limited individual freedom or curbed libertine desire, such belief brought out the most in people when properly ordered and understood. This is implicitly stressed by the focus given to Charles’ sense of duty, which was supported by his deep faith—likewise also for the empire he led.

This devout fealty is perhaps best given attention at the death of his grandfather, Franz Josef. A living imperial monarch had not died on the throne in more than half a century, as Franz Josef’s reign was long enough to warrant comparisons to Victoria or the present-day Elizabeth of England. Upon his death, the ceremonies, although necessarily opulent, maintained a form befitting their purpose. Coulombe writes:

When the funeral cortege arrived at the Capuchin church, the door was closed. As ceremony prescribed, the court chamberlain knocked with his staff against the portal. The friar behind the door asked, “Who is there?” The chamberlain responded with the late emperor’s name and all of his many stirring titles and decorations, only to receive a brusque: “We do not know him!” and the door slammed in his face. He knocked again, at which the door opened once more, and the friar asked the same question; this time the chamberlain said, “Franz Josef of Habsburg, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.” This received no more of a sympathetic hearing than the first attempt, and the door slammed once more. Finally, on the third attempt and the chamberlain’s identification of the deceased as “Franz Josef, a mortal, sinful man,” the body was allowed inside.³

For dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return; the funeral rite, no matter how ornate its ceremony or how esteemed its celebrants, enforces a leveling principle that escapes the notice of no one. By including this exposition, Coulombe further reminds us that Blessed Charles, like his grandfather Franz Josef before him, ruled in a way that both led the laity and the religious, in a certain capacity. He remained subject to that spiritual institution both by birth and by death.

End of the Empire

Both of the emperor’s departures from Austria were marked with a strong sense of filial devotion on account of the populace. Coulombe notes that “most of the pilots on the Danube were Croats” who, upon learning of the mission that the emperor’s boat embarked upon, “refused to pilot the ship, no matter how much money the British offered”.⁴ When they had to travel by car, they were met with adoring crowds. By the time they arrived in Madiera, their place of exile, the imperial family was penniless. It was only out of the charity of a banker that they even had a place to live—a summer villa unsuited to the winters of the archipelago. In less than a year, Blessed Karl would contract a cold due to the elements, which would develop into an infection. On April 1^st, 1922, he died.

It might very well be argued that Charles was killed by the neglect of the entente, the pettiness of the successor states, and the treason of Renner and Horthy.⁵

Coulombe certainly seems to think so, and it’s hard to consider it otherwise. Liberals may argue over whether the last man officially crowned had any right to the support from the successor states of the empire, as if the people of the land had no obligation, no fealty, or no connection to the ancient regime that had guided them for so many centuries. Worse, it would imply no love for the man and office that stood at the junction of the temporal and spiritual realms of leadership. Those people obviously would not have agreed with such a sentiment, powerless as they were to combat it.

As Coulombe presents it, the prevalence of adoration from the populace contrasts sharply with the self-indulgence of the liberal statesmen that took the reigns of governance—ironic, considering the stereotypes of meaningless opulence and excess that so characterize our understanding of monarchy in this more enlightened age. A liberal elite usurped power it could not possibly attain any other way; an elite of the same spirit—and presumptive ideological father—have ruled in America, and across much of the West, for just as long.

There is much in this book that this short review cannot cover. Coulombe traces the life of the Empress to its conclusion in 1989, as well as the life of the uncrowned emperor Otto—particularly in his dealings with the Austria of the interwar Anschluss, the socialists, and Dolfuss. The beatification of Blessed Charles by Pope St. John Paul II also deserves note. Just as the first part of the book details the soil into which monarchy is planted, so the last part observes what is left of the tree after the fires of a soft revolution have surged forth: a charred stump, but with soil now nourished by the inferno. Coulombe, for his part, seems optimistic about the future of the old empire.

This is, even more than Coulombe’s previous Star Spangled Crown, a strong apologetic for monarchy, but implicitly so. His previous apologetic framed explicit proposals and theories of monarchy within a hypothetical future America, informed by history but nonetheless speculative. It gave a good rundown on what monarchy actually is for the more modernized, liberal-sympathetic types who grew up assuming it was just some hereditary form of despotism.

Blessed Charles of Austria, however, presents a monarchy as it actually was—understandable editorializing aside. More than that, it presents this monarchy in its last days, when it was rather uniquely disassembled such that the monarch himself was neither executed nor forced into an agreeable abdication. Blessed Charles went to his grave as the king of Hungary; he did not renounce his throne. More than what mere theory can provide, the example of Blessed Charles himself highlights the importance of the king’s two bodies; a king is not a mere dictator. A proper king must be as devout in his faith as he is just in his rule—indeed, the latter flows from the former. This book drives such a point home well.

As our own more enlightened system of government spirals further into the openly scornful, absurd, and contradictory, we are well reminded of several things from this book. First, that politics didn’t use to be so hostile to reason and so welcoming to the hackneyed performances of second-rate actors. Second, that a political life without the Faith wilts into a frozen and self-obsessed version of itself that inevitably collapses under its own weight—this is true, it should be noted, both for emperors and statesmen as well as for those peons like us that simply dabble in opining on the craft for entertainment.

Recommended.

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