Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg
Eduard Habsburg, with the help of his royal ancestors, wants to fix your marriage, your soul, and your politics.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2024
For two decades, Marie Antoinette’s mother gave birth almost annually. She had her first child in 1737 at age 20 and her 16th in 1756 at 39. The future queen of France, born Maria Antonia, was child number 15, and arrived the day after the calamitous 1755 Lisbon earthquake, whose tremors were felt across Europe. For her mother, the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, these quakes of body and earth coincided with those of politics. She had just wrangled a new alliance with archenemy France — negotiated secretly through the French king’s mistress — that soon erupted into the Seven Years’ War.
War waging and baby making went together for Maria Theresa from the start, as we learn in a magisterial new biography by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. The only woman to rule in the long history of the Habsburg dynasty, she held sway over Central Europe for 40 eventful years. When at age 23 she inherited the crown — or rather crowns — from her father, Charles VI, she had already birthed three daughters. Her right to rule was immediately contested by rival European powers who, coveting various parts of her patrimony, made it their pretext for war. She gave birth to her fourth child and future heir, Joseph, while fighting their invasion. Political cartoons from the time depict the young queen naked to the waist, surrounded by a circle of virile princes gradually stripping off all her clothes.
In one of those satisfying and not exactly untrue fairy tales of European history, this naive young mother defied the odds of a crumbling army and bankrupt treasury to repel her enemies, quiet the skeptics and defend her realm. Even her husband had counseled compromise and territorial concessions to Frederick II of Prussia, but she stood her ground. “For once the Habsburgs have a man,” Frederick would later remark, “and it is a woman.”
Her prodigious fecundity was neither a decorative bonus nor a “distraction” from political work. On the contrary: The fate of her state depended on it. Her father sired no sons. Until he secured a fragile international agreement that a daughter could succeed him, it seemed as though the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty would die out just as the Spanish one had. A storied royal line hung by a thread, and that thread was her.
The once-majestic empire quickly became a tragicomic history lesson and, more recently, colorful fodder for some bodice-ripping popular culture.
If the line of succession was precarious, so was the polity. The modern idea of the state as an abstract legal entity distinct from its ruler had not entirely won out, especially in the eponymous Habsburg monarchy, a dynastic state par excellence, in which a common monarch often served as the only connection between distinct imperial holdings such as Hungary and Bohemia. Smooth royal reproduction was synonymous with state continuity, political stability and territorial integrity.
A large brood of children was also shrewd international relations. By marrying offspring into other ruling families, monarchs created diplomatic alliances and crucial flows of information. Maria Theresa excelled here, too, wedding her daughters Carolina to the king of Naples and Amalia to the Duke of Parma even before Maria Antonia fatefully landed the high prize of the Dauphin.
The standard styling of Maria Theresa as mother to her empire thus spills out beyond the bounds of mere metaphor. Long before Hilary Mantel wrote about Kate Middleton that “a royal lady is a royal vagina,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote about Maria Theresa: “The demonically maternal side of her was decisive. She transferred her capacity to animate a body, to bring into the world a being through whose veins flows the sensation of life and unity, onto the part of the world that had been entrusted to her.” Her witchy womanly magic made Austria into an integral living whole, as though it, too, had passed through her birth canal and emerged as a modern state. Her sovereignty, to borrow a phrase from Mantel, was always “graphically gynaecological.”
Fortified by this robust harvest of princes and princesses — and that of her son Leopold, who added another 16 children to the royal granary — the dynasty tramped on ably enough until World War I knocked the Habsburg state off the map. The once-majestic empire quickly became a tragicomic history lesson and, more recently, colorful fodder for some bodice-ripping popular culture.
Meanwhile, the family itself breeds on. Today there are hundreds of Habsburgs scattered about. One of them thinks he can help you fix your marriage, fix your soul, fix your politics and generally find meaning by following the example of his illustrious forebears.
Meet Eduard Habsburg, author of The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times. He is 57 years old and a lifelong James Bond fan. He also likes zombies, sci-fi and Star Wars. He can tell you everything you need to know about Harry Potter in 60 minutes and wrote a book to prove it. He has rosy cheeks, warm eyes and lush hair that would probably flop around à la Hugh Grant if he let it grow a little longer. A pious Catholic, he is delighted with his wife (a baroness), his six children (five girls, one boy) and especially his last name. “It’s 80 percent cool to be a Habsburg, I have to admit it,” he said in an interview last year.
The self-help genre creaks under the strain of his premise: Forget eat, pray, love — just be royal?
So cool it landed him his current job, serving as Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See, where he has worked to downplay differences over issues like migration. Though he belongs to the so-called Hungarian branch of the family, he grew up in Germany and commands only patchy Hungarian. He has worked mostly as a jobbing writer: television screenplays, a romance novel, a children’s book, a guide to castles. An odd choice, then, for ambassador? As he explained it to The New York Times last year, the Hungarian government did not dress up its motivation, telling him simply: “You’re a Habsburg. You will find respect in the Vatican if you go to Rome, because the Vatican still respects traditional families.” The ancien régime dies hard.
Not hard enough, according to Eduard, who has fashioned himself into a one-man media juggernaut for traditional values. His assessment of what ails us does not extend beyond well-trodden cliché, as old as modernity itself: “We live in a crazy time. Everybody seems to be without roots, floating around alone, helpless, no values are safe anymore. Everything is gone, everything is up in the air, everything is for grabs.” His remedies are perhaps a little less well trodden. To combat our godless anomie, he proposes that we all do things “the Habsburg Way,” a lifestyle option that he has kindly boiled down to seven propositions so we can follow along, despite the unfortunate handicap of our own less-magical surnames. The self-help genre creaks under the strain of his premise: Forget eat, pray, love — just be royal?
According to Eduard, it’s all quite straightforward. The first rule is “Get Married (and Have Lots of Children).” The second comes with an exclamation point that underscores Eduard’s passion: “Be Catholic! (and Practice Your Faith).” Some feel attainable, if vacuous — “Know Who You Are,” commands rule number five — while others seem less well adapted to us plebs. Rule six urges that we “Be Brave in Battle (or Have a Great General),” and rule seven that we “Die Well (and Have a Memorable Funeral).”
Each rule is elaborated through examples plucked from across Habsburg history. His favorite illustrations concern marriages, which he transforms from carefully calculated acts of state into modern love stories. He renders the 15th-century joining of Maximilian and Mary — betrothed by parents scheming for status, married the day after their first meeting and able to communicate only in Latin — as “one of the most glamorous and romantic endeavors in European history.” It was “love at first sight” after Maximilian arrived, gleaming in his golden armor, looking like “an Archangel.” Marital bliss ensued. “When Maximilian was not off fighting the French,” Eduard tells us, “he and Mary would go hunting and make music together. They both loved animals like hunting falcons, and she tried to teach him (rather unsuccessfully) how to ice skate.” They also “read romance novels together (a bit like watching a rom-com on an iMac nowadays).”
A historian Eduard is not — nor does he claim to be. Such narratives tell us much more about Eduard and his sensibilities than they do about European history. And that is by design: What Eduard is selling is himself. Blue blood has not shielded him from the imperative to endlessly broadcast and commodify the self; it has simply supplied him with a lot of good content.
Eduard excels at the sale, graced with the easy, winking narcissism the form requires. His product is, to be sure, very easy to mock. The dad jokes are corny, the selfie smiles gormless and the whole shtick unabashedly cheesy. “One reason to visit Habsburg castle in Switzerland,” Eduard writes, “is because the cafeteria serves not only hamburgers, but also Habsburgers.” Following his Twitter (now X) feed can feel a little like a royalist remake of Eurovision, or perhaps a reality TV show where we gawk at minor celebrities competing in a tropical jungle. We shouldn’t be curious, but we are, and indulging has the happy side effect of enhancing our own self-satisfied dignity.
Yet shaking our heads at the silliness is akin to holding up a “science is real, love is love” placard at a Donald Trump rally. Our earnestness has no power here and might even impede analysis of the phenomenon in question. Though the two men are worlds apart, Eduard in fact shares a crucial attribute with the former U.S. president. He, too, is profoundly unembarrassed and perhaps unembarrassable. His very mode of speech, and the unencumbered self it betrays, is a walking rebuke to the self-consciousness of left-liberal culture. He abounds in goofy joy and prides himself on universal affability, as though handcrafted to remind us how the left has struggled to meet the moral gravity of our current crises without forfeiting optimism to the right.
He presents “the Habsburg Way” as a positive program and leaves the alternatives ill-defined. Yet traces of the right-populist conspiratorial imaginary seep through.
Eduard yokes his sunny, hokey chattiness to deep wells of apparent profundity: the majesty and splendor of Habsburg history and the mysterious sacrality of the Catholic Church. The frisson of that compound lies at the heart of the brand. A prince on social media! He invites us into the family crypt or the secrets of the Order of the Golden Fleece and in the next breath riffs on the latest meme. “Women would be surprised if they knew how often their husbands think about the Holy Roman Empire!” he wrote alongside a picture of the bejeweled imperial crown his family wore for centuries, in a post liked almost 7,000 times. He sates our appetite for irreverence and need for enchantment simultaneously. There is no doubting his sincerity, nor his opportunism.
The good-natured buffoonery shouldn’t distract us from the political content. Eduard has hitched his wagon firmly to the right’s cultural reaction, forging an (un)holy alliance between the neotrad and what we could call — given the counterrevolutionary legacy of the Habsburg dynasty – the paleotrad. The Habsburg Way features a foreword by Eduard’s boss, Viktor Orbán, whose ideological agenda he defends with gusto. According to the Hungarian prime minister, Hungarians and Habsburgs are once again “going into battle together,” fighting now for the family and for Christianity, the best means to achieve human happiness and “preserve our identity.” As conservative natalism surges on both sides of the Atlantic (with Orbán leading the charge in Europe), Eduard invokes the fabulous fecundity of forebears like Maria Theresa as evidence that the Habsburgs had it right. He turns dynastic state makers into fertility-rate heroes.
Ironies abound in this merger between right-wing populism and the aristocratic old regime. Unlike Orbán, Eduard generally steers away from lambasting cultural enemies. There are no tirades against wokeism or gender studies (though he is clear that marriage is the joining of a man and a woman). He presents “the Habsburg Way” as a positive program and leaves the alternatives ill-defined. Yet traces of the right-populist conspiratorial imaginary seep through. The family, he told Crisis magazine last year, is a “safe space,” a place “where the state can’t put their wires into your brain”: “It’s the most revolutionary and countercultural thing you can do to have a big family. And it’s wonderful.” But the large Habsburg families of yesteryear were no bulwark against the state and its “wires”: They were the state and its wires.
In the conclusion to his book, Eduard writes that a more Christian society and government would encourage “its citizens to live an ethical life and not simply to consume and exist in an egotistical way.” Many may sympathize with that end goal even if they recoil from his road map for getting there. Eduard’s message taps into the “postliberalism” of current dissent on the left as well as the right. It is no coincidence that we see a Catholic revival in left circles committed to a world of thicker social bonds and communal responsibility.
But a shared rejection of (neo)liberal atomism does not make Eduard much of an ally for those seeking a new social contract, or even those interested in the relationship between marriage and social justice. As Eduard rebels against one form of materialism, he has nothing to say about the more structural sort. The Habsburg Way supposes we could all have six children if only we had the right values — as if large families did not require myriad forms of material support, as if political economy were irrelevant. He turns social questions into matters of conscience and will.
“What would a Habsburg do now?” The closing mantra of Eduard’s book might yield a moment of dorky amusement, akin to schoolboy counterfactuals and well suited to the gimmick economy of social media. But as a tool of self-help or social commentary, let alone an accessible way into conservative thought, it can only conjure a yawning chasm where the substance should be.
IMAGE: “Family Tree of the House of Habsburg” by Aegidius Sadeler II, 1629.
✺ Published in “Issue 20: Lessons” of The Dial
