The bonfire and the phoenix
John Jolliffe
THE LAST EMPRESS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ZITA OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY by Gordon Brook-Shepherd HarperCollins, £20, pp. 347 The Empress Zita's background was not so much international as supranational. She was born in 1892, a Princess of Bourbon-Parma, but her father had lost the Duchy of Parma to Cavour's Sardinian troops in 1859, making up for it by having 12 children by each of his two wives, and also acquiring Frohsdorf, 'the Austrian Versailles', as well as the castle of Chambord on the Loire, before taking as his second wife the daughter of King Miguel of Portugal, who became Zita's mother. Her early life was therefore spent not only in palatial surroundings but at the centre of a vast throng of close relations. In 1911 she made a love match with the then quite obscure Charles, the pious and dutiful nephew of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination at Sarajevo three years later made Charles unexpected- ly the heir to the Empire. The old Emperor Franz Joseph himself only survived another two years, but before he died he told Zita that ever since his own coronation in 1848 he had felt that the empire was a sleeping volcano 'not just because of nationalist movements that might sooner or later become violent, but because of the tangled web of alliances', which would one day lead to a hideous crash.
In the years between 1916 and 1921, only a political genius with exceptional powers of decisive leadership could have held on to the crumbling fragments of the Empire. Hungary, with its fierce and obsessive national spirit, could perhaps have been salvaged, but Charles' half-hearted attempts to regain the throne in 1921 (described here from material never before available) were not enough. He escaped with his family down the Danube to Constantinople, friendless and virtually penniless, eventually finding refuge in Madeira: not basking in the sun at sea level, but wrapped in wintry mists in an unheatable villa halfway up a mountain. For Charles, who already suffered from heart and chest troubles, it was a death- trap, and in April 1922 he succumbed, at the age of 35.
Zita now succeeded in finding a home for her eight children at the fishing village of Lequeitio in north-western Spain, before moving to Belgium, where Otto, her eldest son on whom her attention was concentrat- ed, could attend the University of Louvain. His earlier life in the schoolroom would have crushed a lesser child. He recalled doing
homework from 6 to 8 am. From 8.30 to mid- day, work with tutors. After lunch more lessons till 5, and then, until 7, I went on working by myself.
It is a wonderful reflection on both mother and son that their relations remained virtually unclouded until her death, in spite of endless scope for differences.
After the murder of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, his successor, Schussnigg, at first showed monarchist leanings, and secretly met Otto twice at Mulhouse. But no Austrian government had had any stuffing left in it for many years: as early as 1913 the brilliant but volatile Count Ottakar Czernin, who contributed largely to making Charles's position impossible in his brief role as Foreign Minister, reflected that
for millions, the parliamentary machine is a limited liability company for robbery . . . a corrupt and degenerate bunch of rascals like this cannot save itself .. . perhaps we have no choice but to go under, with dignity . . . if external pressure comes, the end will be quicker than we think.
When war came again, Zita and her family fled from their home in Belgium only the day before it was carefully dive- bombed by the Luftwaffe, and succeeded in getting visas from Lisbon to New York, where Otto had already established good relations with Roosevelt the year before. She soon moved again to Quebec, where the family's diet often consisted largely of dandelion salads, at least until 1942 when the family's bank accounts were unfrozen. Their strenuous efforts to form real Austri- an units to fight alongside the Americans against the Nazis were frustrated by the refusal of the large socialist element to co- operate, and in Austria itself no effective resistance movement ever got going. Zita did, however, receive a grotesque visit from Mountbatten, who was dreaming, as only he could, of becoming King of a truncated Germany. (Churchill himself strongly favoured some kind of post-war Danubian Confederation to counterbalance Prussia.) When peace came, Zita was first able to look after her own mother in her last years before finally settling in a convent near Chur in Switzerland, which had numerous guest rooms for family reunions. She only died, at the age of 97, in 1989, and her triumphant funeral in Vienna made use of the same horsedrawn hearse in which Franz Joseph had made his last journey.
Gordon Brook-Shepherd has been study- ing Central Europe for more than half a century. This book is the 'Life and Times', but contains far too much on the times —
some of it admittedly essential, though available elsewhere — and not enough life: whole chapters go by with barely a mention of Zita at all. He had the co-operation, even friendship, of Zita herself and also of her eldest son to whom the book is dedicat- ed. Perhaps the mass of material was over- whelming.
His style is, to say the least, uneven: 'The granite Titan who had held the monarchy together for nearly seven decades was crumbling at last.' Otto's wedding was staged at the little church of Des Cordeliers (!) in Nancy'. Nevertheless, he succeeds in bringing out the most important point of all. it was not because of their crowns and their strings of titles, echoing back over the centuries, that the Habsburgs, in the person of Doctor Otto, once again ply a leading role in their former territories. It is thanks to their deep and unflagging concern in recent times for the ultimate well-being of the ordinary people of their realms. In this, as well as in her decisiveness and her spartan habits of self-dicipline, the example of Zita was beyond compare.
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