Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (71 page)

By the beginning of October, Austria-Hungary began its descent into near anarchy. The Czechoslovak nationalist party had control of Prague, the Hungarian Magyars were succumbing to Bolshevik propaganda filtering in from Russia, and soldiers from Slovenia and Croatia were in open revolt. Like Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor Charles did not want civil war to erupt, prompting him to acknowledge the different nation-states within the empire. Upon meeting with his Crown Council, Charles’s ministers presented him with a People’s Manifesto, but the emperor made it clear he would not sign an act of abdication. For the better part of a day, his ministers hounded him incessantly to sign the manifesto, following him from one room of Schönbrunn to the next. Fed up, Charles turned to his minister of the interior, who was holding the document, and said, “If you won’t even let me
read
it, how do you expect me to
sign
it?” When he finally read the document, Charles handed it to his wife for her opinion. Zita mistook it for an abdication. In one of the rare emotional outbursts of her life, she flew into a frenzy.

“A sovereign can never abdicate,” she said. “He can be deposed and his sovereign rights declared forfeit. All right. That is force. But abdicate—never, never, never! I would rather fall here at your side. Then there would be Otto. And even if all of us here were killed, there would still be other Habsburgs!” The ministers still pressed for a signature.

“The country will be reduced to the utmost misery,” Zita declared. “Who will be concerned for the country if it is no longer led by the one man who is above party interests, and cares only for the future of all?”
¹⁰⁶¹
When one of his ministers told Charles that it was not an abdication—that he was not surrendering his role as emperor—he sat silently for a moment then said, “Madness reigns today and a madhouse is no place for a sovereign.”
¹⁰⁶²
With that, Emperor Charles I affixed his signature in pencil. His ministers hurriedly grabbed the document and rushed over to the Reichsrat.

The parliamentary delegations decried the manifesto. The Czechs boycotted it, the Slovenians and the other Slavs walked out of the assembly, the Germans refused to accept it, the Ukrainians outright denied its existence, the Poles were in abstention, and the Italians refused to believe it applied to them. Protests broke out in Vienna and the economy “came to a standstill; [there was] no coal, no food, no direction, no control. Prisoners of war returning from Russia brought with them Bolshevik ideas, or at any rate the contempt for ‘authority’ which had inaugurated the Russian Revolution.”
¹⁰⁶³

Near the end of October, Charles sent Wilhelm II a telegram stating that he intended to ask for peace from the Allies “within twenty-four hours.” Charles declared he was ready “without awaiting the result of the other negotiations, to enter into negotiations upon peace between Austria-Hungary and the states in the opposing group, and for an immediate armistice upon all the Dual Monarchy’s fronts.”
¹⁰⁶⁴

A few days later, riots broke out in Hungary. Charles and Zita hurried to Budapest to assess the stability of the monarchy there. “We must show the people, that we are where our duty commands,” Zita said.
¹⁰⁶⁵
The Hungarians had shown the couple moving demonstrations of loyalty at their coronation. Now, they hoped that those same people would support the entire empire in its hour of despair. Charles, Zita, and their children arrived by motorcar in Budapest on October 24. They took up residence at Gödöllö Palace, one of the largest royal residences in Central Europe. Built in a double-U shape, Gödöllö boasted eight wings in addition to the residential apartments, as well as a church, theater, riding hall, greenhouse, and orangery. As soon as the children were settled in, Charles and Zita faced the daunting task of consolidating the government. They appointed a new prime minister named Michael Karolyi. Descended from a wealthy aristocratic family, Karolyi believed he was destined to play a part in ruling Hungary. He had been opposed to Austria’s involvement in the war but managed to convince Charles that his appointment as prime minister would strengthen the ties between Hungary and Austria. This proved to be a fatal mistake. When the emperor sounded out Karolyi’s government a few days later for support, he was alarmed to learn that they were abandoning the monarchy in favor of turning the country into a republic. Knowing he had been beaten, Charles released Karolyi and his government from their oaths of loyalty. The death knell of the Habsburg monarchy had been sounded.

Throughout the rest of the empire, the situation completely fell apart. From October 24 to November 3, the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was fought along the Austro-Italian border. The Italian army inflicted demoralizing casualties on the Austro-Hungarian forces—more than four hundred thousand soldiers were captured, wounded, or killed. The defeat marked the collapse of the Italian front and the first dissolutions in the Austro-Hungarian military. This disastrous outcome precipitated the total collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

On October 29, the Croatian parliamentary body, the Sabor, met in Zagreb where they severed all ties with Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg kingdoms of Croatia and Dalmatia declared themselves independent from the empire. They proclaimed themselves the Common Sovereign National State of the Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs. On the same day, students, factory workers, and their supporters revolted in Vienna. By the next day, the military had joined the revolution and were marching through the streets with an army of soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands. Later that day, the head of Austria’s National Council, Franz Dinghofer, declared that the legislative body “would take over the whole administration of the country, ‘but without the Habsburgs.’” Within a few days, the eastern empire was dissolving. The Polish National Council took the reins of administration, as did the Ukrainians, who proclaimed the West Ukrainian Republic at Przemysl. On October 31, the empire’s Romanian subjects declared their independence.

At Gödöllö, Charles and Zita were shocked and saddened by the reports flooding in, but the situation would continue to go from bad to worse. The next day, Charles was forced to surrender his sovereign powers in the Balkans by a delegation representing the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. This nation would join with Serbia on December 1, changing its name to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. It would informally be known as Yugoslavia, a name that would not become official until 1929. In the east, the Ukrainians founded their own national republic. This was especially bittersweet since the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist cause was a Habsburg—Archduke Wilhelm. Once it was obvious that Hungary, the Balkans, and the eastern realms were beyond hope, Charles and Zita left Budapest, worried about the deteriorating political situation in Austria. In spite of the revolts, Gödöllö was still considered safer than any place in Vienna. The empress made the difficult decision to leave her children at the palace under the care of her brother Prince René, the court chamberlain, Count Hunyády, and the staff. Zita explained the reasons for her decision this way:

It was a dreadful decision to have to take but we did it deliberately. It was the only way to show the Hungarian people that their King and Queen did not intend to flee Hungary for good. It would have been the last straw had that idea spread about! But our children were not left there as hostages against our will. Nobody asked that they should stay. It was our decision and it was helped by two things. First, at that particular moment, the situation in Vienna looked if anything even more dangerous than in Budapest. We were not moving from trouble into peace but from one storm into another. Second, our children were by now so used to their parents being continually on the move that they were in no way anxious or frightened at being left alone.
¹⁰⁶⁶

When the imperial couple arrived at Schönbrunn Palace late on the night of October 30, Vienna was eerily calm, as if it could explode at any moment. There was little doubt that night that the age of empires was about to meet its climactic end. If Zita expected their first night back in Vienna to be calm, she was mistaken. No sooner had they returned to Vienna than Budapest exploded into violent revolution. Crowds looted, plundered, and murdered innocent people, but their greatest animosity was directed against the Habsburgs. “The emperor had not got to bed in Schönbrunn until long after midnight on 30 October,” Zita recalled. “In the small hours, just as he had fallen asleep, an urgent telephone call came through for him from Budapest. It was General Lucacics, the commander of the garrison there, who told me, beside himself with agitation, that revolution had broken out in the city and that he simply had to speak to the emperor.” Zita, in her usual direct manner, cut straight to the heart of the issue: “I was naturally very worried about the safety of my children.”
¹⁰⁶⁷

As soon as she hung up the phone, Zita called Gödöllö to raise the alarm. The chaos in the streets was making its way up to the palace. The children and their attendants were bundled up in the night and set off in a cavalcade of automobiles for Vienna, where they arrived many hours later. To speed up their journey and keep the children safe, the imperial crests on the sides of the cars were painted over. As morning dawned on October 31, the republicans had full control of Budapest. Michael Karolyi telegraphed to Berlin, “Revolution in Budapest. National Council has taken over the government. Military and police acknowledge National Council completely. Inhabitants rejoicing.”
¹⁰⁶⁸
With each hour that passed, the Habsburgs’ empire unraveled more and more. Kingdoms, grand duchies, principalities, and whole ethnic groups declared their independence, leaving the monarchy without a leg to stand on. From Prague in the north to Sarajevo in the south, protests, riots, and revolutions were breaking out everywhere.

On November 1, 1918, Emperor Charles I contacted President Woodrow Wilson without any conditions for negotiations. Austria-Hungary, or what was left of it, was now agreeing to the Allies’ terms unconditionally, which included national self-determination for all of the empire’s ethnic groups. In all but name, the First World War had ended. Charles had no choice but to finally concede defeat. All of the empire’s territories had broken away, creating half a dozen ethnically diverse nations spread across central and southern Europe. Charles issued another manifesto in which he did not abdicate but, instead, renounced his participation in government. Upon signing the order, he ended six hundred years of Habsburg rule in Austria. His reign was the shortest in Habsburg history, lasting just under two years. Though he could have fought to the bitter end, he announced, “Filled, now as ever, with unwavering devotion to all my peoples, I do not wish to oppose their growth with my own person … The people, through its representatives, has taken over the government. I renounce all participation in the affairs of state.”
¹⁰⁶⁹
Not wishing to vanish from the public eye completely, Emperor Charles opted to leave Vienna but remain within Austria’s borders.

The next day, November 2, was a depressing one at Schönbrunn. Beginning with the Hungarian Battalion, one regiment after the other abandoned the imperial family. Zita explains the last day her family spent at the palace as follows:

Our own life guard troops were also disappearing, but it was the departure of the Hungarian battalion which first created a really dangerous situation. The whole palace was now open. There were not even sentries at the main gates. The only people permanently at Schönbrunn from now on – apart from the Emperor and myself and our children – were about half-a-dozen ladies-in-waiting and aides, a few remaining servants and retainers and the life guards officers who stayed behind after their men left.
¹⁰⁷⁰

That night, Charles, Zita, and their children fled Schönbrunn Palace. Before their departure, they attended a special Mass to pray for their safe return soon. Unsettling echoes of the Russian imperial family’s dramatic fate haunted the Habsburgs. The empress later said that the “whole day was a nightmare.”
¹⁰⁷¹
As they packed everything they could take, shouts could be heard outside calling for the imperial family’s blood. Later that evening, the emperor and empress entered the Hall of Ceremonies, where the loyal staff who had stayed with them was dismissed in a series of emotional embraces. Charles and Zita took the time to shake hands with every person there, offering each of them a personal farewell. As Zita and her family left the palace, they marched down the long stairwell to the inner courtyard. Flanking them on either side in full honor guard were cadets from the nearby Maria Theresia Military Academy, who had unexpectedly shown up earlier that evening to defend the imperial family. According to the empress, the young men, many of whom were teenagers, stood there “with tears in their eyes, but still perfectly turned out and guarding us to the end.”
¹⁰⁷²
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Erich Mann, one of the cadets, snapped to attention and saluted the emperor and empress. Although Zita understood the magnitude of their situation, Charles did not. One witness observed that even though the emperor “was in fact leaving for good, and was never to recover even one of the several crowns he had been forced to abandon, he did not realize the finality of the occasion.”
¹⁰⁷³