He made two attempts to reclaim the Hungarian throne in 1921 but failed due to the opposition of Hungary's Calvinist regent Admiral Miklós Horthy. He spent the remaining years of his life attempting to restore the monarchy. However, the Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed the following day, and in April 1919 the National Assembly formally dethroned the Habsburgs and banished Charles from German-Austria for life.Ĭharles spent the early part of his exile in Switzerland. Following the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Charles "renounced any participation" in government affairs, but did not abdicate. Despite Charles's efforts to preserve the empire by returning it to federalism and by championing Austro-Slavism, Austria-Hungary hurtled into disintegration: Czechoslovakia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were proclaimed, and Hungary broke monarchic ties to Austria by the end of October 1918. He began secret negotiations with the Allies, hoping to peacefully end the First World War but was unsuccessful. Ĭharles succeeded to the thrones in November 1916 following the death of his grand-uncle, Franz Joseph. He is venerated in the Catholic Church, having been beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 October 2004, and is known to the Catholic Church as Blessed Karl of Austria. In 1911, he married Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. The son of Archduke Otto of Austria and Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony, Charles became heir presumptive of Emperor Franz Joseph when his uncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in 1914. Károly), King of Croatia, King of Bohemia (as Charles III, Czech: Karel III.), and the last of the monarchs belonging to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine to rule over Austria-Hungary. The fact that Emperor Karl chose the motto of the Pragmatic Sanction as his own – ‘ Indivisibiliter ac inseparabiliter’ (‘Indivisibly and inseparably’) – was to appear particularly grotesque in the light of the disintegration of his empire.Charles I on the Austrian Army in World War IĬharles I or Karl I ( German: Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria, Hungarian: Károly Ferenc József Lajos Hubert György Ottó Mária 17 August 1887 – 1 April 1922) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary (as Charles IV, Hungarian: IV. After he had been sent into exile in 1919, the year 1921 saw him making two bids for a restoration in Hungary, from which it is clear that the Habsburg dynasty’s age-old territorial claims had not been given up with the downfall of the Monarchy. On 11 November 1918 he relinquished his involvement in government but did not formally abdicate. In October 1918, Emperor Karl made a belated and unsuccessful attempt to save the Monarchy through a ‘manifesto to the peoples’ intended to lead to the creation of a kind of federal state with autonomous national units. The fact that he is now accorded the appellation of ‘peace emperor’ only conceals the fact that innumerable men and women had to die in his name. While historians gladly concede that Karl acted in good will in his peace negotiations, as a ruler he was way out of his depth. This speech not only underplays the horrors that soldiers and civilians had to go through in the war but positively glorifies them, presenting them as service for a greater cause. In a speech on behalf of the Imperial-Royal Austrian Military Widows and Orphans Fund in 1916, Karl still referred to the Monarchy as heading towards ‘a great goal’ in the world war. Consequently, Austria finally subordinated itself to the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This ‘affair’ became embarrassing when early in 1918 the letter to Sixtus was published by France and Karl adamantly denied that he had engaged in the negotiations at all. In a letter to Sixtus, Karl committed himself to supporting French territorial claims in Alsace-Lorraine, but his secret endeavours failed. His attempts at diplomatic mediation proved unsuccessful, particular famous among them being the so-called Sixtus Affair in which Sixtus and Xavier, two of his wife Zita’s brothers, acted as go-betweens in secret peace negotiations with France. Politically entirely inexperienced, Karl did not play a leading role in the world war – in the question of the nationalities, for instance, he had little scope for action. When Franz Joseph died in the middle of the First World War in November 1916, he was succeeded as Emperor of Austria by his great-nephew Karl, who was to be Austria’s last Habsburg ruler. The old Emperor Franz Joseph, his successor Karl and the young Archduke Otto having fun playing with tin soldiers – in the First World War, however, the lithograph’s image of a harmless family idyll was for innumerable men and women to become the experience of war in all its grim reality.
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