Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  One summer I quite accidentally found myself repeatedly at the site of Napoleon’s greatest triumph. I had based myself for several days in Olomouc, only to find that my heart really belonged to Brno. This resulted in a lot of time spent on buses which, through sheer good luck, took me along the road down which the Austro-Russian army marched in December 1805 before being annihilated by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz. Like all battlefields it, of course, tells you nothing. Indeed the fields give no more clues as to what happened than would the sea at Trafalgar, where a similarly decisive battle had happened a few weeks before. So shockingly inscrutable was Austerlitz that I abandoned plans to drive to places like Breitenfeld, Blenheim and Königgrätz, as it suddenly struck me as absurd to pace up and down various hills trying to establish which group of luckless recruits had stood where. Luckily the casually free-market nature of the modern Czech Republic meant that advertisers at least had taken advantage of the battlefield, and the relatively small monuments were completely dwarfed by a hording for some brand of mineral water that happened to use a Napoleon-style eagle as its symbol and – even better – an advertisement for batteries consisting of a huge artillery piece made out of giant model batteries. These did a lot to perk up the field of destiny, but it seemed a poor strategy to visit further battlefields in the sole hope that I could rely on prankster advertising agencies to do the heavy imaginative lifting.

  Austerlitz was a shameful disaster and ended the Third Coalition as well as prostrating the Habsburgs. Franz lost both a block of ancient western Austrian territory to the hated Bavarians and his lightly gained north-east Italian and coastal Adriatic lands to France. Most critically though, the resulting treaty – the Treaty of Pressburg – marked the final gasp of the Holy Roman Empire. Franz agreed that his role in the rest of Germany was now at an end. In practical terms this was merely a final admission, as 1803 had already seen a disgraceful bun-fight called the ‘Imperial Recess’ at which some hundred and twelve independent mini-states, sixty-six ecclesiastical territories and forty-one free cities had been wiped out, absorbed into whichever larger state was both nearby and most pro-Napoleon. On 6 August 1806, Franz II abdicated as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, shoving German-speakers into a new world.

  The Habsburgs had in many ways been abusive and incompetent in their role, and certainly since Joseph II the Empire had been so messed about as to have become incoherent, but switching from a protector in Vienna to a protector in Paris did little to change the basic problem of German weakness. The Habsburgs had for many generations protected the Germans from the French in the west and the Turks in the east, but this had been a confused blessing as it meant that so many of Europe’s battles were fought in German towns of a kind hard to find on a map. The sheer helplessness of people living in places like Essen or Bamberg continued under this fresh dispensation, with the twist that many of their young men would now die invading Russia on behalf of the French rather than being defeated by the French. It was the differing perceptions of what should happen to these people that would be a major theme of Europe’s history through to 1870 – and indeed through to 1945, but Austria’s role was now to remain limited and provisional.

  In the homicidal variant on musical chairs that now followed, hundreds of ancient states vanished almost overnight. Many bishops, knights, dukes, abbesses and petty oligarchs lost out, but others cleverly adapted. There is a funny painting of the young Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian IV Joseph, all dolled up in his wig and jewels, the acme of rococo flummery, which can be contrasted with the surprisingly different painting of him as the brand new (from 1806) King of Bavaria, Maximilian I, thanks to Napoleon, sporting his own hair, cut short and severe, and dressed in a dark blue, almost undecorated uniform, faking the stern mien of the simple soldier. This sort of graceless rebranding was going on everywhere.

  Franz sat in stunned dullness in Vienna. The Habsburg lands, which can now be called the Habsburg Empire (or, as an acceptable shorthand, ‘Austria’), remained an enormous state, but existed only at Napoleon’s pleasure. The ghastly fate of Prussia, a ragged, minor French colony since its destruction at the Battle of Jena–Auerstädt in October 1806, was a horrible lesson in just how far Napoleon could go – the equivalent of a gamekeeper nailing the corpse of a crow to a fence to warn other crows off. It was, of course, also extremely annoying in historical terms, as France had managed to wipe out Prussia in a few weeks, something which had eluded Austria since 1740. But Franz’s craven sense of caution kept bumping into the problem of hegemony: all attempts by Vienna to treat with Paris as an equal were rebuffed or ignored, for the simple reason that Napoleon did not think for a second that they were equals. The new Empire’s tattered dignity threatened with each year to slump into mere deliquescence. A final, huge effort was therefore needed and the catastrophic War of the Fifth Coalition for a few months in 1809 allied Austria and Britain against the whole of Napoleonic Europe. Against a background of almost paralytic gloom and declinist talk, Vienna tried to take on Napoleon, briefly checked him at Aspern-Essling and then went down to absolute defeat at Wagram – beaten not just by the French but by a great array of France’s new best friends, such as Bavaria, Saxony and the Confederation of the Rhine. These battles were the largest yet fought and a worrying indicator of future developments. Instead of the often elegant victories of Napoleon’s earlier years, Wagram and its successors were afflicted by a crippling gigantism, with almost uncontrollable hordes of under-trained men inflicting horrible, rather random casualties on one another. Wagram ushered in the era of woefully managed slaughterhouses which make nineteenth-century wars (until the Prussians created a new aesthetic in the 1860s) so depressing and unmemorable.

  Aspern-Essling was a great personal triumph for the Archduke Karl, and in retrospect it validated everything he had hoped for from the Austrian army and provided the Empire with something to cling to in the bleak times ahead. Just in brackets: one must envy those who had to carry out what must have been one of the handful of truly wonderful jobs in the Austrian army – the successful attempt to prevent part of Napoleon’s army crossing the Danube. This was done through the richly enjoyable process of throwing heaps of huge objects into the river upstream so that the flow would hurl them against the French pontoons. There would have been a lot less to relish for Napoleon’s engineers, but for the Austrians there must have been scenes of joyous near hysteria as flaming barges, barrels of explosives, gnarled and sharp lumps of handmade flotsam and so on were launched into the current. The pièce de résistance must have been when an entire, vast wooden Danubian floating mill was set alight and cut loose from its moorings. There are a couple of these magical objects preserved in the great ASTRA Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization in the Dumbrava Forest in southern Transylvania. Incredibly weird and unwieldy, they would ply for trade in the countless, isolated riverside communities, gradually heading east as there was no means by which they could head back upstream. Anyway, one of these whoppers came to a glorious end on the morning of 22 May 1809 as, a roaring mass of flame, it hurtled crazily and unstoppably into the latest French attempt at a pontoon bridge, tearing out a huge chunk and carrying with it a French general and a number of pontonniers several miles downstream.

  An intimate family wedding

  Setting aside floating-mill-based initiatives, the end result of the campaign was a traditional disaster and the punitive Treaty of Schönbrunn, the palace chosen as a particularly crushing location for the heirs of Maria Theresa to sit in. About a fifth of the Empire’s population was handed out, with the loss of Galicia to a new Polish satellite state, of Salzburg to an ever-cockier Bavaria and of ancient southern Austrian, Italian and Slovenian lands to Napoleon’s new Illyrian Provinces. With the Empire prostrate, Franz’s advisers felt that there was little choice but to agree to anything Napoleon might ask and hope that they would not suffer the fate of Prussia. As so often in the past, the core competence turned out to be dynastic survival at all costs and it was now –
in perhaps the most humiliating moment in an era crowded with humiliating moments – that the eyes of the court turned on Franz’s attractive teenage daughter Maria Ludovica.

  The Augustinian church in Vienna is a classic example of the strain within the Catholic hierarchy which is highly suspicious of aesthetic value for its own sake. It is a very ancient, extremely battered and rather smelly working church. A handful of remarkable monuments are treated as incidental to the overall austerity: it is a place where monks and congregations go to liaise with their Maker. The church has an almost Methodist atmosphere in its refusal to get in the way of direct prayer and serious issues. It is one of the central Habsburg cultic churches as the Emperors’ hearts are buried there (which, on reflection, doesn’t sound overwhelmingly Methodist in its flavour) and it has, since his beatification by John Paul II in 2004, become the principal site of worship of the Emperor Karl I. But on 11 March 1810 it was the site of the wedding of the Emperor Franz I’s favourite daughter, Maria Ludovica, to the Emperor Napoleon I. In an amazing twist Franz’s brother, the Archduke Karl, fairly recent victor of Aspern-Essling, stood proxy for Napoleon himself in the ceremony. The ramifications of such an exquisite piece of nastiness almost burst the bounds of this book. Napoleon was, of course, the heir to the French Revolution, an event which had resulted in Karl’s aunt Marie Antoinette having her severed head put on a stick in front of a cheering crowd. Marie Antoinette’s being packed off to Paris in the first place had been viewed as a disgraceful mistake and came from a long-forgotten earlier pro-French twist in eighteenth-century Habsburg diplomatic history. Maria Ludovica was now being pushed down the same path. Almost as bad, the Augustinian church was already famous for its recently completed monument by Canova to another of Maria Ludovica’s aunts, Maria Christina. Maria Christina’s cenotaph is perhaps the greatest piece of neo-classicism in Vienna, a wonderful pyramid with stricken mourners and a melancholy lion. Archduke Karl was raised by Maria Christina (who had no children of her own) and her husband, Albert of Saxony, who founded the Albertina art museum.

  So Archduke Karl had to solemnly stand at the altar with his niece, in the same spot where so many Habsburgs had been married, and act as proxy for the man who had sprung from events that had murdered his aunt, who had deposed various Habsburgs in Italy, who had spent ten years killing many thousands of Austrian soldiers and humiliating the entire Empire, and had recently taken for himself blocks of territory which Karl’s family had owned for over four centuries, the ceremony taking place in the presence of his adoptive mother’s memorial. However blackened and desiccated they may have been, the hearts of the former Emperors must surely have convulsed a little in their caskets.

  As it happened Maria Ludovica did not have to share the head-on-a-stick setbacks of her great-aunt, instead getting to look sensational in a series of French Imperial gowns, cloaks and tiaras. Napoleon had married her (having divorced Josephine) because she was posh and because he was anxious to have an heir. The Empress Marie Louise, as she now became, had a son with Napoleon who was proclaimed, in a mockery (by Habsburg criteria) of ancient procedure, as the King of Rome. In a sense it was helpful that Franz I was such a bore as anyone more imaginative would have been driven mad by the idea that a peculiar Corsican who nobody had even heard of until recently could make himself Emperor and threaten to reroute the entire system of succession away from the Habsburg family. Marie Louise had a strange life, partly very enjoyable and partly a pawn of wider forces, with two further husbands after Napoleon (including a fun-sounding equerry) and ruling the Duchy of Parma. It cannot have been easy to be pulled between two families, with every move betraying one or the other. Her much-loved son (very briefly known as Napoleon II) became a sad footnote in royal history – a source of embarrassment but also potential danger to the Habsburgs until his death aged twenty-one from tuberculosis. His extraordinary gold crib in the Habsburg Treasury is a strange reminder of a future that never happened: Napoleon as the founder of a dynasty that ruled a united European super-state. In a peculiar piece of tidying up after the defeat of France, Hitler had Napoleon II’s body transferred from Vienna to Les Invalides to be buried near his father. No attempt was made to get hold of his heart, which still sits – in a permanent affront to all the other hearts – in the Augustinian church.

  Maria Ludovica’s sacrifice on the altar of political expediency came from Franz and his advisers’ pathological anxiety, in the wake of the Treaty of Schönbrunn, to save what remained of the Empire from total dismemberment. No humiliation was too great and all flashes of hatred for Napoleon were banned. This worked very well. Nothing the British could do seemed to threaten an end to Napoleon’s rule, and so an indefinite future of circumscribed Habsburg watchfulness seemed the only course. It is a fascinating and in some ways plausible counterfactual to think of a permanent Napoleonic Europe, but however many genuine allies the French might have had across the continent, there was something about Napoleon’s default fighting mode which made the whole structure deeply unstable. His ruinous decision in 1812 to invade Russia was entirely logical, as was his inability to come to terms with Britain. Paris, London and St Petersburg all shared nigh-on Mongol superiority complexes, each of which was incompatible with the others and much of world history was to stem from this (with Berlin added in later) until the 1940s. It is very hard for the panoply of ideas associated with being head of an Empire to coexist with others who, by their very existence, mock and undermine your own absolute claims.

  The invasion of Russia had all the signs of being the triumph that would seal Napoleon’s greatness and potentially bring the entire generation-long war to an end, with a defeated Russia giving France the ability to destroy British India at leisure and thereby force Britain to sue for peace. The Habsburgs managed to limit their engagement with the Grande Armée to providing thirty thousand men to threaten Russia in the south. Once it was clear the invasion had gone absolutely and catastrophically wrong a new coalition became possible and the Austrians cautiously linked up with the Prussians and Russians. This extraordinary change in fortunes resulted in Austria dominating the Sixth Coalition. With Prussia important but relatively small and Russia operating a huge distance from its home base – and with the British as usual following a different agenda – Franz and his chief minister Metternich found themselves much to their surprise, and not entirely through their own efforts, in a position to dictate the future of Europe. The years of peace had been spent by Austria steadily building up an enormous if not very good army of well over half a million men and it had easily the largest contingent in the Coalition. All these soldiers now simply swamped the French – however brilliantly Napoleon manoeuvred he could not deal with this fundamental reversal in the maths. The Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 saw some six hundred thousand troops crashing into each other, the largest encounter in European history before 1914. In a series of truly horrible battles over the following months both sides suffered grotesque losses, but the French could no longer afford these. The strange interlude of Napoleon’s banishment to Elba (a tiny island, once part of the Tuscan Habsburgs’ patrimony) and his frantic ‘Hundred Days’ attempt to re-establish himself in France may have ended with the Battle of Waterloo, but even if Napoleon had won that battle he was faced with an infinity of Austrian, Prussian and Russian troops all marching west and making this final bid for power utterly futile.

  I apologize for having written so much about warfare and diplomacy and I will try to offer a break from this for a while. The Habsburg Empire that came out of this process was very different from its predecessor, larger but more compact, with a formidable group of allies with a shared conservative agenda, and also a shared wish to forget all the terrible things that had recently gone wrong. As so much of the fighting was so humiliating, the Napoleonic Wars had an uncertain place in the regime’s sense of itself. There are a scattering of big monuments to the major figures, but the main business of Franz I seems to have been to proceed with the remainder of his
reign pretending none of this stuff had happened. A permanent monument was Haydn’s ‘Emperor’s Hymn’, written in 1797 and adopted during what turned out to be only one of many crises, as a peculiarly beautiful and uplifting song of hope:

  God save Franz the Emperor, our good Emperor Franz!

  Long live Franz the Emperor in the brightest splendour of bliss!

  May laurel branches bloom for him, wherever he goes, as a wreath of honour.

  God save Franz the Emperor, our good Emperor Franz!

  If ever someone deserved this less it was the gloomy policeman Franz, but the tune (reused magically by Haydn in his ‘Emperor’ Quartet) took on a life of its own. It became the great English hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, and following what one can only imagine were a number of nervous breakdowns, it was successfully and scanningly translated it into every language of the Habsburg Empire. And finally, as the German national anthem, it was rewritten first to start with what would come to be seen as the chilling assertion:

  Germany, Germany above everything,

  Above everything in the world

  and then reconditioned after the world wars so it starts with the much nicer:

  Unity and justice and freedom

  For the German fatherland!

  Back to nature

  On 24 May 1801, during a welcome break from being beaten up by Napoleon, the Habsburgs enjoyed one of the great cultural events of the new century, the first full performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. The soprano role was taken by the Empress herself, not terribly well, but nobody was in a position to suggest she should be replaced by someone else. The Seasons became a pan-European sensation with countless performances in every conceivable type of venue, sometimes with that early nineteenth-century equivalent of wide-screen or 3D for movies: the pointless doubling up or tripling up of vocal or musical parts, making the closing ecstatic hymn to God’s grace perhaps the loudest human sound yet invented outside the battlefield.