Charles I of Austria

Charles I was the last ruler of the Habsburg dynasty. He came to the throne in November 1916, in the middle of the war, at the age of 29, after the almost 68-year reign of his great-uncle Franz Joseph I. From his first days he was convinced that a prolonged war would destroy the monarchy: a German victory would turn it into a satellite of the Reich, while an Entente victory threatened it with partition. He replaced almost all of his predecessor’s men, took supreme command himself, restored parliament and secretly sought a separate peace with France. When in the spring of 1918 his letter to his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus, came to light, the monarchy lost what remained of its credibility in Berlin and with the Allies. In the autumn of 1918 the state broke up into national states, and Charles, who never formally abdicated, died in exile at the age of 34. To some he was a man of goodwill, the only monarch of the warring states who truly wanted peace; to others a weak and inconsistent ruler whose ideas came too late.

Before the war

He was born on 17 August 1887 at Persenbeug Castle on the Danube, in Lower Austria. He was the elder son of Archduke Otto and Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony, and a grandson of Archduke Karl Ludwig, the emperor’s younger brother. For a long time nobody saw him as a future monarch. The heir to the throne was his uncle Franz Ferdinand, but because he had made a morganatic marriage with Countess Sophie Chotek, his children could not inherit. After his father’s death in 1906, Charles was therefore second in line to the throne. He was taught mainly by private tutors; for two years he attended the Benedictine-run Schottengymnasium in Vienna, a rarity in the imperial family, and later attended lectures in law and economics at the university in Prague. From 1905 he served in the cavalry, and from the end of 1912 he served as a major in the 39th Infantry Regiment in Vienna.

On 21 October 1911 he married Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, daughter of the last Duke of Parma. The marriage was happy and unusually close: the empress later accompanied her husband on his travels and was present at many consultations, which his opponents were glad to exploit. Her brothers Sixtus and Xavier, who felt themselves to be French, joined the Belgian army in 1914, and Charles helped them leave Austria, although he knew they would fight on the other side. At Hetzendorf Palace in Vienna the young couple kept up friendly relations with Franz Ferdinand, who, historians suppose, initiated his nephew into his plans for reshaping the monarchy.

Heir to the throne

After the assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, Charles became heir to the throne under the house law. He took no part in the decisions of the July Crisis. After the outbreak of war the emperor attached him to the high command in Teschen, where the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, kept him away from operational planning. The archduke toured the front, took parades and handed out decorations. In the summer of 1915 Franz Joseph summoned him to observe the work of the government, but could not bring himself to entrust him with any political responsibility.

In the spring of 1916 Charles received his first real command. In March he was made a Feldmarschalleutnant and took over XX Corps, known as the Edelweiss Corps, in the 11th Army in Tyrol. On 15 May his divisions opened the Trentino offensive on the Folgaria plateau and in the first days broke through the Italian lines. The Battle of Asiago stalled in June, however, when the Brusilov offensive forced Conrad to shift troops to the east. At the end of July the Central Powers rearranged their commands on the Eastern Front, and Charles took over the army group defending Eastern Galicia and the Carpathians. Its chief of staff was the German general Hans von Seeckt, who in practice directed operations. After Romania entered the war at the end of August, the group was also responsible for Transylvania, and its headquarters was set up in Segesvár (Sighișoara). In the Battle of Transylvania, however, the decisive role was played by Erich von Falkenhayn’s German 9th Army and Arthur Arz von Straußenburg’s Austro-Hungarian 1st Army.

Emperor in wartime

On 21 November 1916 Franz Joseph died and Charles became emperor. That same day, in the manifesto “To my peoples!”, he announced that he would do everything to end the war as quickly as possible. On 2 December he took over supreme command of the army himself in place of Archduke Friedrich, and moved headquarters from Teschen to Baden near Vienna. On 30 December he was crowned King of Hungary in Budapest as Charles IV. The haste, urged on him by the Hungarian prime minister István Tisza, had its price: the coronation oath bound him to defend the integrity of the lands of the Hungarian crown, which closed the way to a reshaping of the monarchy that would include the Slavs of its Hungarian half.

Within a few months the new ruler replaced his predecessor’s men, often turning to Franz Ferdinand’s former associates. Heinrich Clam-Martinic became Prime Minister of Austria, and Count Ottokar Czernin, who shared the emperor’s conviction that peace was urgent, became foreign minister in place of István Burián. On 1 March 1917 Charles dismissed Conrad and entrusted the General Staff to Arz. In May he demanded the resignation of Tisza, who refused to extend the franchise in Hungary. On 30 May the Imperial Council met in Vienna after a break of more than three years, and on 2 July the emperor proclaimed an amnesty for those convicted of political offences, covering among others the Czech leader Karel Kramář, earlier sentenced to death for high treason. Some historians see these steps as heralding reform; others point out that they were gestures rather than a considered programme, and that in Germany and among the Austrian Germans they aroused suspicion.

As supreme commander Charles often visited the front, coming among other places to the Isonzo during the tenth and eleventh battles. He wanted to wage the war against Italy with his own forces alone, and in August 1917 he asked Emperor Wilhelm II for Germans to replace Austro-Hungarian divisions in the east. After the eleventh battle, however, he concluded that the army would not withstand another Italian attack, and agreed to German divisions taking part in the offensive which in October brought victory at Caporetto. According to some accounts he opposed the use of poison gas by his own troops, but did not forbid it to the Germans. At the end of November he watched the failed attack on the Meletta massif, and on 2 December he ordered the offensive on the Piave to be halted.

Seeking peace

Charles knew from the start that the monarchy would not survive a long war. At the beginning of 1917 he had doubts about unrestricted submarine warfare, but gave way in the face of the Germans’ fait accompli. At the same time, through his wife’s family, he made secret contact with France. Sixtus set out conditions: the return of Alsace-Lorraine, the restoration of Belgium and Serbia, and the handing over of Constantinople to Russia. On the evening of 24 March 1917 at Laxenburg the emperor gave him a handwritten letter in which he promised to support France’s “just claims” to Alsace-Lorraine. President Raymond Poincaré and the British prime minister David Lloyd George received the offer with interest, but the talks foundered on Italy, to which the Entente had promised large territories of the monarchy, while Charles would not discuss concessions to Rome. A second letter in May changed nothing. In the summer the emperor also welcomed Pope Benedict XV’s peace note.

The chances of peace dwindled, and the war bound the monarchy ever more tightly to Germany. When the revolution knocked Russia out, Charles did not want to resume the war in the east, and agreed to Austro-Hungarian troops entering Ukraine only once the Germans were already marching. At the crown council of 22 January 1918 he accepted the terms for the negotiations with the Ukrainians, including the cession of the Chełm Land to them. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine outraged the Poles, who until recently had pinned their hopes on the new emperor: in May 1917 he had visited Kraków with Zita, and in September he had signed the patent on the Regency Council of the Kingdom of Poland. On news of the treaty the former II Brigade of the Legions broke through the front at Rarańcza, and its commander, Józef Haller, sent his decoration back to the emperor.

The Sixtus affair and defeat

In April 1918 Czernin publicly accused the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, of having sought peace. Clemenceau replied that it was the Austrians who had sought talks, and on 11 April he published the emperor’s letter of 1917. Charles, who had promised Sixtus that he would deny everything in the event of an indiscretion, called the letter a forgery and assured Wilhelm II of his loyalty. Czernin pressed the emperor to hand over government to a regent for a time on grounds of supposed illness, and when he refused, resigned. On 12 May Charles had to travel to German headquarters at Spa, which the press compared to the road to Canossa, and agree to a closer military and economic union with Germany. In the eyes of German nationalists he and “the Italian woman” Zita were henceforth traitors, and in the eyes of the Allies the monarchy ceased to be a partner for a separate peace.

In June the army struck for the last time. Neither Charles nor his chief of staff Arz wanted to refuse either of the rival field marshals, Conrad and Svetozar Boroević, so they approved both attacks at once. In the Second Battle of the Piave neither had enough strength, and on 20 June the emperor agreed to a withdrawal behind the river. In July he dismissed Conrad. In September, against the Germans’ wishes, he sent a peace note to all the warring states, but the Allies no longer wanted to talk.

On 16 October 1918 the emperor issued a manifesto announcing the transformation of Austria into a federal state of nations, but leaving out Hungary. The national councils whose creation it called for took power in their own name. On 26 October Charles informed Wilhelm II that he would ask for a separate peace, and a day later Vienna asked for an armistice. Archduke Joseph August became the king’s plenipotentiary in Hungary, but the Aster Revolution forced him to entrust the government to Mihály Károlyi. On 30 October the emperor signed the order handing over the fleet to the National Council in Zagreb. On the night of 2–3 November, hesitating to the last, he accepted the terms of the Armistice of Villa Giusti, and in the morning he laid down the supreme command. The order to cease fighting reached the troops more than a day before the armistice came into force, and by then the Italians had taken prisoner hundreds of thousands of soldiers who believed the war was already over.

After the war

On 11 November at Schönbrunn Charles signed a declaration that he renounced all participation in affairs of state, and on 13 November at Eckartsau Castle a similar one for Hungary. He carefully avoided the word “abdication”, and later wrote that he did not feel bound by a signature extorted like a cheque by a bandit. He spent the winter at Eckartsau under the protection of British officers, and on 23 March 1919 left for Switzerland. On the way, at Feldkirch, he signed a manifesto declaring all the decisions of the new authorities null and void. The Austrian parliament responded with the law of 3 April 1919, which stripped the Habsburgs of their rights to the throne and barred the former emperor from returning to the country.

In 1921 Charles twice tried to regain the Hungarian crown. In the spring he arrived unexpectedly in Budapest and demanded that the regent, Miklós Horthy, hand over power, but faced with the threat of intervention by the neighbouring states he had to return to Switzerland. In October he flew with Zita to the area of Sopron and, with units of loyal volunteers, set off for the capital. At Budaörs there was a clash with government troops, and Charles, unwilling to start a civil war, surrendered. The Allies exiled him to Madeira, and the Hungarian parliament proclaimed the dethronement of the Habsburgs. The family lived there in poverty. In March 1922 the former emperor fell ill with influenza, which turned into pneumonia, and on 1 April he died in a villa on the hill of Monte above Funchal. He was buried in the local church of Our Lady. On 3 October 2004 Pope John Paul II beatified him, which provoked lively debate in Austria.

Assessment

Charles is judged very differently today. Sympathetic biographers, such as the British historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd, and the Austrian historian Elisabeth Kovács, who for years worked for his rehabilitation, stress that he was the only leader of the warring states who consistently sought peace, restored constitutional life in Austria, forbade the bombing of civilian targets and tried to save the monarchy by reshaping it before it was too late. Often quoted are words attributed to the French writer Anatole France, who is said to have called him the only decent man to have stood at the head of a state during the war.

Critics point to his inexperience, vacillation and tendency to act on his own. The Austrian historian Helmut Rumpler called him a dilettante, too weak for the challenges he faced. The letter to Sixtus promised other people’s lands while saying nothing of concessions of his own, and the later denials destroyed the emperor’s credibility in Berlin, Paris and London. The American Secretary of State Robert Lansing believed that the disclosure of the letter pushed Austria into Germany’s arms, and many historians agree with him. The changes of personnel and the political gestures of 1917 did not add up to a coherent programme, and the coronation in Budapest tied his hands on the national question. Most scholars agree that by 1916 no ruler could have led the monarchy out of the war on his own, and that Charles, as it is often put, inherited a lost game. The dispute is mainly about whether his decisions hastened its end or whether he merely failed to reverse it.