Sixtus affair

On 11 April 1918 the French government issued an official note publishing the full text of a letter from the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Charles I, to his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma. The note began with words that ran roughly as follows: “Once one is caught in the gears of lies, there is no way of stopping. Emperor Charles, under the eye of Berlin, takes upon himself the lying denials of Count Czernin and thereby compels the French government to produce the proof.” That proof was the letter of 24 March 1917, in which the monarch promised to use all his personal influence with his allies to support France’s “just claims” to Alsace and Lorraine. The British chronology of the war and the American press of the time date the note to 11 April. Many historians give 12 April. The disclosure of the letter turned a secret episode of a year before into a political scandal known as the Sixtus affair.

Czernin’s speech

The scandal was set off by the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister himself, Count Ottokar Czernin. He had just returned from Romania, where he had negotiated the preliminary Peace of Buftea, and wanted to give an account of his policy. Because of the Easter holidays the delegations of the two parliaments could not be convened, so on 2 April, the Tuesday after Easter, he addressed a delegation of the Vienna city council in the ministry building on the Ballhausplatz. The speech was bellicose. Czernin defended the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, stressed the monarchy’s loyalty to Germany and sharply attacked Czech politicians, whom he accused of high treason. About the war in the west he said: “Some time before the start of the offensive in the west, Clemenceau asked me whether I was ready to negotiate and on what basis. I immediately replied, in agreement with Berlin, that I was ready and that, as regards France, I saw no obstacle to peace other than the French aspiration to Alsace-Lorraine. The answer came from Paris that it was impossible to negotiate on this basis.”

In this way Czernin wanted to show that France was responsible for further bloodshed, and at the same time to humiliate Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who since November 1917 had ruled in Paris with a firm hand and hunted down “defeatists”. The next day the Vienna Fremden-Blatt printed the speech on its front page. For Clemenceau it was an insult: it portrayed him as a man begging Austria for peace at the very moment when the Germans had launched a great offensive on the Western Front.

A war of communiqués

The reply came at once. According to most accounts, on 4 April, after returning from an inspection at the front, Clemenceau gave the Havas agency a one-sentence statement: “Count Czernin has lied.” On 5 or 6 April the French government explained the details. Talks had indeed taken place, but on Austria’s initiative. From August 1917 Count Nikolaus Revertera, a personal friend of the Emperor, and his distant relative, Major Abel Armand of French intelligence, had been meeting in Fribourg in Switzerland. Clemenceau allowed them to continue with the instruction: “Listen and say nothing.” The same statement contained a sentence that Vienna should not have ignored: did Count Czernin not remember a similar attempt, made in Paris and London two months before Revertera’s mission, by a person “of much higher rank”?

Czernin did not back down. On 8 April Vienna published a lengthy reply: it was the French who had first approached Revertera, and in February 1918 Clemenceau had rejected the talks because he would not give up Alsace and Lorraine. Of the attempt by a person “of higher rank” the minister wrote that he remembered it, but that it too had produced no result. The same day Clemenceau retorted: “A watered-down lie is still a lie.” He added that the Emperor of Austria himself, in a letter of March 1917, had written in his own hand his support for “France’s just claims regarding Alsace-Lorraine”, and in a second letter had stated that he was in agreement with his minister. On 9 April this sentence was printed by the Paris press, among others L’Écho de Paris. Vienna denied it, and on 10 April Czernin publicly accused Clemenceau of lying.

The letter on the table

Charles I was trapped. He had promised Sixtus that in case of an indiscretion he would deny everything, and that is what he did. In a telegram to Emperor Wilhelm II, sent according to contemporary reports the day before the letter was published, he wrote that Clemenceau, to extricate himself from a web of lies, was piling up new ones and falsely claiming that Charles had recognised France’s claims to Alsace-Lorraine as just. “I reject this assertion with indignation,” he assured him. Wilhelm II thanked him warmly. Clemenceau then reached for his final argument and published the whole letter, with its passages on the restoration of Belgium and Serbia. The Austrian historian Elisabeth Kovács, an advocate of the Emperor’s rehabilitation, maintains that the copy found in Vienna on 11 April was only a first draft of the letter, in which the key sentence was worded differently. Historians have no doubt, however, that the text published in Paris corresponded to the letter that Sixtus had handed to the President of France in 1917.

Even so, the monarch did not acknowledge the letter. The Vienna foreign ministry declared that the published letter was forged, and Charles sent Wilhelm II a second telegram: “M. Clemenceau’s accusations against me are so base that I do not intend to discuss this matter with France any further. Our further answer is my guns in the west.”

Consequences

The affair struck first at Czernin himself, who by his own account had not known the contents of the letter. Over the following days the minister extracted one statement after another from the Emperor, and his resignation became inevitable. The most serious consequences, however, were for the monarchy as a whole. In Germany and among German nationalists in Austria, Charles and his wife Zita were henceforth regarded as traitors to the alliance, and the Empress, the sister of Sixtus and Xavier, whom her opponents nicknamed “the Italian woman”, was accused of working for the enemy. To restore Berlin’s trust, Charles had to travel on 12 May to German headquarters at Spa. The press compared the visit to Henry IV’s penitential journey to Canossa, and there the two emperors agreed on a closer military and economic union between their states.

In the Entente camp, too, the disclosure of the letter was judged in different ways. The American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, believed that Clemenceau had indeed proved that Czernin had lied, but had paid for it by pushing Austria into Germany’s arms. Many historians agree with him. The affair destroyed the last hopes of a separate peace with Vienna. In the following weeks the Entente governments supported ever more openly the aspirations of the Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs and Poles to independence, and the preservation of the Habsburg monarchy ceased to be one of their war aims.