Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (41 page)

We would light-heartedly bring up over breakfast some sort of cultural destination (the Louvre, the Musée Carnavalet) and the children’s ears would go flat to the sides of their heads, like threatened cats, clinging to their croissants but alert to danger. Various compromises would be made about types of food for the day, souvenirs which could be bought and promises not to leave the hotel until late morning: these kept some essentials of the original plan in place, but we shared the common parental problem of wanting some appeal to a higher authority – like the UN – which could find more fully in our favour.

One of our trips was to Les Invalides, where both sons’ quiescence was bought by the idea of a museum full of guns, and the daughter’s by abusing the fact she was too young to know anything much. The relevance to the Habsburgs of all this is that Les Invalides is the home of their nemesis Napoleon. In a bold gesture designed to shore up his ebbing regime, King Louis-Philippe arranged in 1840 for «
le retour des cendres
» from Napoleon’s original burial place on the island of St Helena. In scenes of surely unparalleled nationalist hysteria most of Paris turned out to cheer on the dead man’s elaborate cortège. I have never myself been quite clear what I think about Napoleon, but as I ushered my sons into the presence of his quartzite whopper of a tomb, I felt I had underplayed the moment and should have at the very least designed special little cloaks and boots for them and possibly got them to spreadeagle themselves on the marble while I intoned something like, ‘I bring you a whole new generation, O Master,’ in a sort of Commendatore
basso
. As it happened, we on that occasion had to flee prematurely, as my daughter wandered up to a huge gold vase presented by Tsar Alexander I to his fellow Allies and set off its alarm. The tears of the daughter and exhortations of the guards – it is probably true that she was about to push it over, in an accidental death-to-all-autocrats gesture which would have shaped the rest of her life – made it sensible to leave. But this also meant abandoning any notions I might have had involving lighted torches, a muffled drumbeat and so on. The afternoon ended in an unhappy wrangle in the gift shop over whether a paper-knife in the shape of an antique dagger was a legitimate souvenir, or whether – it could be argued – this made it in all practical senses simply a dagger.

Louis-Philippe’s gesture in bringing back Napoleon was an epic blunder as it simply served to heighten the gap between those heroic days and his own low-wattage regime – indeed paving the way for Napoleon’s nephew taking power later in the decade, a figure who did almost as much damage to the Habsburgs as his uncle.

Napoleon’s career will always be in some sense a quite boring enigma. What was most obvious to contemporaries was his extraordinary improvisatory energy. But, as we know the outcome, it unavoidably becomes a story of over-reaching, hubris, futility, burned-out meteors and so on. It also becomes victors’ history – the almost implacable opposition to Napoleon by the Habsburgs and the British becomes dogged and heroic rather than merely a brake on progress and a willingness to see hundreds of thousands of troops die in futile bids to hold off the forces of the future.

Britain’s role is particularly problematic as, by various definitions, it was true that the ‘balance of power’ pursued by British leaders meant the ‘balance of power in Britain’s favour’, just as ‘free trade’ had a tendency to mean ‘free trade in British ships’. In the end the Anglo-Austrian alliance held, but with Napoleon’s destruction it became clear that – in a deeply significant geopolitical shift – the two countries’ concerns were now simply too remote from one another. The key European motor of the London–Vienna axis, which had endured spottily ever since the days of William III and Leopold I, now came to an end. The two countries’ interests simply no longer overlapped except, often bitterly, in relation to Russia, and they remained substantially at odds until the final and total estrangement of the First World War.

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.