Blessed Charles of Austria

Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy
Charles Coulombe
TAN Books, 2020

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Disturbed by the current state of the world, a good friend recently asked me if it were possible for a man to be a successful political leader without compromising his moral conscience. Without hesitation I replied in the affirmative and provided the example of Blessed Charles of Austria, the last of the illustrious House of Habsburg to wear the crown of St Stephen. 

Charles, or Karl as he is known in the German-speaking world, was crowned the Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary in the midst of the First World War and is the subject of Charles Coulombe’s new book; Blessed Charles of Austria, A Holy Emperor and His Legacy.

The book is a product of Coulombe’s life-long passion for the cause of the Monarchical Principle and his recent travels to Austria to cast light on a hitherto overlooked historical figure shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. 

As a result, the book, while born of painstaking academic research, at times strikes the tone of a hagiography as Coulombe makes no effort to suppress his assessment of Charles as the saint for our modern times. This however, can also add to the book as the reader benefits from a holistic narrative of a man who strove for holiness in the middle of the world throughout the entirety of his short life, a too often neglected aspect within modern historiography on the Emperor. Another benefit of Coulombe’s unashamedly Catholic approach are the masterfully selected quotes to open every chapter, gathered from a wide range of sources such as the Tridentine Latin Mass Missal, the Pontificale Romanum and even Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. 

Coulombe begins his work with a brief and well formulated summation of what he calls the “The Imperial Ideal” and “Sacred Monarchy” before moving on to give the reader a concise and accurate layman’s explanation of Imperial Austria’s place in the context of Europe from the early modern to the contemporary period. 

The second part of the book is more biographical in nature, giving the reader an in-depth insight into the family life of the young Prince, his education at a Viennese monastery founded by twelfth century Irish monks and his happy marriage to Princess Zita of House Bourbon-Parma in 1911 (the date of which – 21st October – is his feast day in the Church today). 

The peaceful tranquillity is then interrupted by the assassination of his uncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Charles is propelled into the position of heir apparent to the throne and with the outbreak of the First World War we learn of his heroism on the battlefield before he is recalled to Vienna to assume his duty as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary upon the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. 

While little is made of his military career, Coulombe does point out that Charles was the only head of state to have directly led men into combat and such experience no doubt greatly influenced his appreciation of peace. From there the drama only escalates as we learn of his downfall, precipitated by external conspiracy and internal betrayal. 

The third and final part of Coulombe’s book, and where he makes his most original contribution to the study of Blessed Charles is related to the legacy of the noble Emperor. Here the author conveys the romantic dream of an inextinguishable flame that provides light in our modern darkness, the dream of restoration. Coulombe compares his sacred Imperial Ideal to the national and international socialist dystopias of Stalin and Hitler which dominated mid-twentieth century Europe not long after the death of Charles in 1922. 

Coulombe however, is not the first to write about Emperor Charles. Indeed, one could say that he follows in the footsteps of other historians such as the prolific Gordon Brook-Shepherd, who like Coulombe was a friend and ally to the House of Habsburg and arguably kick-started the modern interest in Austrian Studies that exists today among academics, especially in the English-speaking world. 

Brook-Shepherd, being a British army intelligence officer in post-Second World-War Vienna, witnessed first-hand the destruction that befell the city at the hands of National Socialist invasion, Western-allied bombing, Soviet invasion and Cold War occupation. Walking amongst the rubble of a once mighty Imperial city, he sought answers to explain how such a calamity could be inflicted upon one of the most historic cities of Christendom. 

While the physical rubble has long since been cleared away, one could argue that today his successor, Charles Coulombe, walks through the moral rubble of the modern Western World. He follows in the footsteps of Brook-Shepherd and likewise looks to Blessed Charles von Habsburg for light in the darkness. 

While Vienna and Europe today no longer have to contend with the dictatorships of Hitler or Stalin, we are however confronted with a more subtle but no less destructive dictatorship. Vienna is symbolic of Europe at large. A Europe and a world which has turned its back on God. A Europe that has embraced what Pope Benedict calls the “dictatorship of relativism”.

Keen to combat this all-pervading relativism, Coulombe seeks to add to the ever-developing historiography of Imperial Austria by emphasising the so often overlooked moral virtues of Emperor Charles. 

Charles had a remarkable quality, the ability to identify and emulate the best virtues of all those he met. Just as he inherited his father’s good sense of humour and his mother’s devout piety, so too did he embody his late uncle Franz Ferdinand’s forward-thinking federalising tendencies and willingness to reach political compromises but also his great-uncle’s, the long reigning Franz Joseph, supernatural understanding of the responsibilities of a monarch. 

While not ignoring the thrilling aspects of high-level inter-state diplomacy, such as Charles’ tireless efforts to advocate for peace, going so far as to ignore the advice of his own minsters and secretly approach the Entente powers of France and Britain to offer them acceptable peace terms, Coulombe tells us the story of a disciple of Christ, a husband, a father, a soldier and an Emperor in that order.

 

While Charles’ efforts to bring an end to the First World War never came to be and his vision to restore the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe, which had ensured the longest period of peace and prosperity that Europe had ever seen, may have seemed to many as utopian, one cannot dismiss his reign as a failure. 

The core question is, what does it mean to be successful? One prominent Austrian anti-clerical newspaper greeted the news of the former Emperor’s 2004 beatification with the headline “The Patron Saint of Losers.” So goes the secular narrative. In a world of positivistic rationalism, power and success must not only be quantifiable but must be tangible. To them success is measured in accumulation of cash, fame or women, anything but sanctity.  

Few things are worth more in this life than principle. In this respect Charles surpasses even the likes of the Roman Senator Cato and perhaps has only a rival in the likes of St Thomas More. 

It is very true that Blessed Charles would stand little chance getting elected in any Western democracy today. But such is the fate of those that follow Christ. As we read in Matthew 10:22; “And you shall be hated by all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved”. Nearly all of his values, the beliefs that contributed so much to his greatness, would be met with the same hostility and malice which he encountered in the winter of 1918. After all, a democracy is only as strong as its electorate. 

If Charles is the noble hero of this great epic saga, then Coulombe leaves no doubt as to who the villains are. They are the external conspirators, the French Prime Minister Clemenceau and American President Wilson, who stipulated that any peace treaty would involve the dismemberment of Charles’ empire along national lines, and the internal traitors of Karl Renner and Miklós Horthy who helped Wilson and Clemenceau achieve that objective. 

Renner and Horthy as Coulombe points out, not only betrayed Charles’ trust and conspired to undermine the monarchy from within but in fact later went on to collaborate with Adolf Hitler. This “political flexibility” or what one might call a proclivity to “adapt” to new political surroundings, separates them from their Emperor. Charles died an impoverished martyr in exile, but Renner and Horthy lost something far more valuable. Something that makes us more than mere animal. Putting a spin on the great St Thomas More, one could easily say “what does it profit a man to gain the world but to lose his soul? But for Austria and Hungary?”

Coulombe puts Charles’ legacy in the context of a long line of Catholic monarchs who helped create and defend Christendom. Charles ought to be seen in the tradition of his namesakes, both the mighty Charlemagne (whose name in German is Karl der Große, literally Charles the Great) and Archduke Karl von Teschen (Archduke Charles was brother to Emperor Francis II/I of Austria in the early nineteenth century). 

Charlemagne established countless scriptoria throughout his ninth century kingdom, and their monks tirelessly copied ancient texts. These texts account for the vast majority of what we know about classical antiquity. Karl von Teschen, almost exactly a millennium later, was the first to inflict military defeat upon Napoleon, securing victory at the Battle of Aspern-Essling (near Vienna) in 1809.

This legacy as the book’s subtitle would suggest is the main focus of Coulombe’s work and is not confined to the past. Charles’ impact, while strongest in the Germanic world, has interestingly taken deep roots in an unlikely place, the English-speaking world. As Coulombe outlines in his book, it is remarkable that the legacy of Charles of Austria is so pronounced in the new world, in a forward-looking republic that was after all, the wartime enemy of Austro-Hungarian Empire, an enemy which was instrumental in her eradication off the map of Europe, Coulombe’s own United States of America. 

As I told my friend, the most important thing to understand about Charles of Austria is his heartfelt divine filiation which informed everything he did. Charles was well aware of what Coulombe calls the “sacred character of his office”, the need to do his work well and sanctify it. Charles gives witness to the fact that we are all called to holiness, from the soldier in the trenches to the Emperor at the Imperial court. 

He understood that which we read in John 19:11 where Christ says, “You would  have no power over me, if it had not been given to you from above”. All power comes from God and is merely delegated to secular rulers. To reign as king and emperor is not an opportunity to exploit those underneath oneself, but a sacred responsibility to dispense temporal justice, looking to the example of Christ for a model of true sacrificial kingship, loving one’s people to the point of giving up one’s life for them. Born into luxury and dying in exile, Charles lost everything, everything except his moral conscience, his faith and his family. The duty of an emperor, or any any man for that matter, is to fulfil the will of God. It therefore says a lot about Charles that his last words echoed those of Christ on the cross; “thy will be done”.   

It is for this reason that Pope John Paul II, on the occasion of the beatification of Emperor Charles of Austria in 2004, said “From the beginning, the Emperor Charles conceived of his office as a holy service to his people. His chief concern was to follow the Christian vocation to holiness also in his political actions. For this reason, his thoughts turned to social assistance. May he be an example for all of us, especially for those who have political responsibilities in Europe today!”