Posted on 08/01/2016 8:10:06 AM PDT by C19fan
The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy charm, but as a dynastic empire among nation-states, critics and historians deemed Austria an anachronism. Nineteenth-century liberals judged the Habsburgs for ruling a prison of peoples and siding with fellow despots. William Gladstone, the British prime minister who epitomized liberal moralism, called Austria “the unflinching foe of freedom in every country of Europe.” Never and nowhere, he insisted, could it be said that “here Austria did good.” Those charges defined narrative even before the Habsburg Empire collapsed amidst the catastrophe of World War I.
(Excerpt) Read more at kirkcenter.org ...
bfl
arnold schwarzenegger?
Bookmark.
By the last quarter of the 1800s....the Hapsburg Empire was dying off. It was more of dog-and-pony show or soap opera, than some kingdom with actual power.
Really even after the Napoleonic Wars it was on fumes for the next century. They made a huge mistake by not intervening in France when the Revolution broke out.
Having defeated him it was advantageous to the Romans to subsequently write Hannibal up in every positive light possible, for the greater he, the greater those who defeated him.
By contrast those in who languish under the same legal philosophies as led to the French Revolution (that underscore “administrative law”, not common laws, as basis for all laws and governance) could not but benefit if any system that was a rival to them was cast in worse possible terms.
If only America had successfully resisted, in the 19th and 20th centuries, perversion and usurpation of her legal system at the hands of so-called “progressives” the same sort abuse would be heaped on us too ... only more shrilly (in like manner it is heaped upon the “Robber Barons” who somehow managed to lead industrialization and presided over a general increase in prosperity but somehow didn’t fill the land with mass graves, Terrors, and all that).
No amount of Waltzes can make up for the horror of Polka. (Heheh)
In reality the Habsburg empire was doomed by multiculturalism.
Nowhere Austria did good? What, acting as Europe’s bulwark against the Ottomans and Islam in general for hundreds of years didn’t count for anything?
They mishandled the assassination by the Serbs. Serbia would never agree to the terms(and they didn’t) set for them by their masters, for the death of Ferdinand, and it led to their downfall.
“Is it a coincidence Austria and Central Europe have become nothing but a living history museum since the fall of the Habsburgs?”
A feudal monarchy, destroyed millions of lives, stood against human freedom everywhere. The antithesis of everything decent, good, or American. But I know a lot of Americans really pine for a monarchy. Some are catholic who enjoy that, some are vapid types who just want a monarch celebrity culture, and some are anglophiles who wish we had a queen.
But they are all wrong.
“Nowhere Austria did good? What, acting as Europe’s bulwark against the Ottomans and Islam in general for hundreds of years didn’t count for anything?”
Nope, because a free Austrian people could and would have easily done the same thing. They weren’t saving Europe, they were saving their own power scam. For your point to be true, it would have to be that only an absolute monarchy could have done it.
Prior to the French Revolution, Monarchy was the norm in Europe going back over a thousand years. There is no reason to single out the Austrian monarchy.
The Polka is the Bohemian National Dance. Listen to Smetana’s Ten Czech Dances for piano from 1879. He does things with the POlka that will take your breath away.
Why did it inspire such loyalty until the very end?
Well, it didn't, exactly. It certainly morphed through several succeeding phases, among them a forced marriage between Hungary and Austria that was the length to which Maria Theresa was forced to ascend the throne. There was, prior to that, the fading of the Spanish Habsburgs that culminated in the unfortunate Charles II and the War of the Spanish Succession that lit off the 18th century's little parade of mini-wars. The Austrian side of the house didn't really survive it by much: she bore 16 children but their patrimony lay elsewhere.
And so the family survived in the form of its secondary lines pretty much until the events this review concentrates on happened. By 1848 the handwriting was on the wall. And the one fellow who appeared willing and capable of dealing with a gentle divorce of its constituent peoples took a bullet from Gavrilo Princip on 28 June, 1914.
The Franco Prussian War was one of the last gasps. The influence of the Austrian monarchy was curtailed by the rising influence of Prussia and the new German Empire.
AS the title mentions the Hapsburg monarchy as opposed to the empire, the real cause of their decline was the loss of mastery of the German states. As German nationalism rose in the 19th century, the two big dogs had to fight it out to see who would lead them - and Prussia won. At that point, Vienna could only look south for expansion, trying to cobble together a superpower from an assortment of unrelated ethnic and religious groups.
When Hitler entered Austria in 1938, he was actually undoing the exclusion of Austria from Bismarck’s Germany; there was no monarchy left to oppose him, and many Austrians realized this was the only means for Austria to have any relevance at all. FWIW, Hitler himself was Austrian and as such had difficulty enlisting in the German army in WWI.
Yes, and the eclipse of the House of Wittelsbach, that might have served as something of a parachute for the Habsburgs had it not been completely subordinated to the Hohenzollerns. Their chance to resume their prominence after the latter abdicated in 1918 was marred by the fact that the Crown Prince happened to be a German Field Marshal (and a damn good one). Too bad, too, because the resulting chaos in that area was Hitler’s nursery.
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