Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (43 page)

A principal enjoyment of researching this book has been to engage in a cock-eyed interpretation of
The Seasons
by wandering around the countryside at different times of year, and revelling in more extreme weather patterns than those generally felt in south-east England. All countries furnish their own musical, literary and painterly hymns to their countryside, but it is done very well in Central Europe. I have often found myself humming extracts from Schubert’s
The Beautiful Mill-Girl
as I wander along by some blameless stream and it only needs to get a little bit Alpine and heroic before incoherent chunks of Mahler’s Third pop up. An otherwise perhaps almost featureless Bohemian valley is ennobled by Dvořák and bleak bits of Transylvania turn spectral and highly flavoured thanks to Ligeti.

The greatest master of this Habsburg
Seasons
pantheism is the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, at his peak in the 1840s, whose series of stories and novels is of an almost eye-watering brightness and beauty, with his characters both exalting in and hemmed in by the rural worlds (mountains, meadows, forests) they traverse. You have to pick and choose a bit with Stifter’s work – his late novel
Indian Summer
is a book of unyielding tedium, with a featureless narrator paying repeated visits to a house which is in a perfect relation to God and nature, with everyone tending trellises and drying fruit so that you want to scream. I was encouraged that one contemporary German critic said that he would offer the crown of Poland to anyone who could get to the end. So little happens that it could be that the whole novel is (like Perec’s
Life: A User’s Manual
) a staggering exercise in authorial self-control, with the entire structure devoted to the final page, on which there will be a grotesque, head-busting revelation which depraves and poisons all the previous five hundred pages of boredom, now suddenly rotting and bubbling in all their undraped luridity. But, alas, despite two efforts my high-water mark is shown by page 300 being turned down and I will never pursue this remote chance of a good result.

But setting aside
Indian Summer,
Stifter is a writer who can be read over and over, not for the stories themselves (although these are absorbing) but because he sees everything through such strange eyes: ‘Rock Crystal’, ‘Limestone’, ‘Brigitta’ (a sensational wolf attack!), ‘Abdias’, ‘The Forest Path’. Stifter was a remarkable landscape painter as well as writer, whose almost crazy level of precision in trying to show how, say, a slope of rock is reflected in a mountain lake is equalled in his fiction, where (oddly) he manages in a few words to be
more
vivid than in his paintings. His wonder-work is probably the short novel
The Bachelors
, where a young man, full of vigour and with his whole life ahead of him, walks ecstatically through a series of mountain valleys to visit a mysterious uncle who, crushed with misanthropic bitterness, lives in an abandoned monastery on a lake. If you have managed to persevere,
Indian Summer
-like, with reading my book to this point, then I can only plead with you to drop it and switch to
The Bachelors
.

There is a moment in the novel when as the young man, Victor, is being rowed across the lake (over which towers a mountain, in a scene of photorealist hallucination) to the monastery island a church bell rings out, and the rower stops his work and says the prayer of that hour. Perhaps what is most thrilling about Stifter is that he clearly has some emotional and mental ideal in which God, Man and Nature are perfectly aligned, but this vision is so extreme and hard to achieve (we are too lazy, too venal, too distracted) that it is always threatening to spring into pieces. I went, in a semi-pilgrim frame of mind, down to the far south of Bohemia where Stifter grew up, the remote small town of Horní Planá, looking out over the almost empty hills and mountains separating the area from Austria. There is a little Stifter museum and a genuine feeling of being in the back of beyond, and yet even here the twentieth century has really reached in its claws, with the vandalized stump of a First World War monument and an almost entirely new Czech-speaking population after the Germans were all expelled. Stifter’s original visionary community has therefore entirely vanished, but this God–Man–Nature idea was always, outside the frame of its own artistic brilliance, a disturbing and intolerant one. It left out many Central Europeans and it made rural life a moral force in its own right (a message that even I was able to glean from
Indian Summer
despite an increasing preoccupation with my own mental health as I dragged through each page). Like
The Seasons
but more hectically,
this vision was very German, very Catholic and with a sense of order and hierarchy which even as Stifter was writing was already under acute threat. For all his worship of nature Stifter spent much of his life in cities, not least Linz, which has a terrific statue to him.
The Bachelors
ends in a sort of frenzy of God-supervised multi-generational ruralism, but in practice the cheerful Victor would probably himself, by the time his author died in the 1860s, have been wondering about slinking off to some obviously more desirable and sinful city. And virtually all the actors in the
The Seasons
itself would have been on the first train to Vienna, singing about the joys of factories, giant beer-cellars, consumer goods and not having to give a stuff about the seasons any more.

The Habsburg monarchy had always been a sort of patchwork of nearly empty lands (mountains, swamps) and verdant countryside dotted with
Seasons
-style individuals working for their noble masters and (by western European standards) small, generally German-speaking towns acting as goods exchanges and fortifications. The great story of the nineteenth century was the transformation of these towns, as hundreds of thousands of people headed into them, running as fast as they could from the remorseless rural cycle.

CHAPTER TEN

A warning to legitimists
»
Problems with loyal subjects
»
Un vero quarantotto
»
Mountain people

A warning to legitimists

Growing up, we had a set of French ‘Happy Families’ playing cards featuring Heroes of France, picked up on holiday one year. While other children were playing the same game sensibly featuring those old favourites Mrs Bones the Butcher’s Wife and Mr Soot the Sweep, we were engrossed in swapping cards featuring little paintings of historical personages. So we would swap Marie de Médicis for Bertrand Duguesclin – ‘pig-faced soldier of destiny’ – or a nicely dressed Henri III for Clemenceau. We must have spent a huge amount of time over the years on this game. What in retrospect seems rather attractive is the way that we never had any idea who any of these people were (except for an unrealistically gamine and available-looking Joanne of Arc) and stubbornly refused to engage in any way with their identities. We never learned anything historical from handling King Clovis or the funny-looking Marshal Ney, and the Duc de Richelieu may as well have been Master Bun the Baker’s Son.

I mention this because it was thanks to the game that as an adult reading about post-Napoleonic France, I found myself taking an odd interest in Charles X. He was perhaps the most inflexibly idiotic of all French rulers but his card in ‘Happy Families’ – an ironic context, given that his family was really not that happy, what with all the executions – made him look dashing and smart in a lovely blue cavalry uniform. I was therefore somewhat smitten with him and have always found his era much more interesting than I should.

The ghost of Charles X stalked his contemporaries like a nightmare. After the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the new world order after 1815 was based around the return to legitimism, the God-backed right to rule based on dynastic succession. Charles X was the true King of France – brother of Louis XVI, uncle of the dead child Louis XVII, brother of Louis XVIII and without a doubt next in the queue. And yet in only six years of rule he managed to alienate almost everybody, behaving as though the Revolution had never happened, insisting on an incense-laden, knee-breeches coronation in Rheims Cathedral and passing a demented, non-market-tested law to make stealing a chalice and host from a church a capital crime (with the felon’s offending right hand cut off as a preliminary to his execution). This was not really the tone for the Paris of Delacroix and Balzac and, in a harmless and rather stage-managed version of 1789, Charles was forced into exile.

That a man who had so much going for him – ruling against a backdrop of war-exhaustion and genuine pan-European conservatism – should mess up so badly had a chilling effect on other dynasties. Charles was offered asylum by Franz I, settling ultimately in Görz, a somnolent but lovely Habsburg town north-east of Venice, where he died of cholera. His family continued to be based in Görz, an angry and rather mad group waiting for the call to return, thronged by needy toadies and decayed snobs while real life in France continued without them.

Spending a few days in Gorizia (now split, with the old town of Gorizia in Italy and Nova Gorica in Slovenia), I was overjoyed to discover that my old ‘Happy Families’ friend was buried in the nearby Franciscan monastery of Kostanjeviča, on the Slovenian side of the border. First puffing up an alarmingly penitential hill to the monastery with rain pounding down so hard it threatened to knock me to the ground, and then stepping gingerly down some chilly steps to the crypt, there, suddenly, in all their desperate flummery were the tombs of dynastic failure: Charles X and the mad parallel universe of his son ‘Louis XIX’ and grandson ‘Henri V’. Henri V made his grandfather look relatively free-and-easy when through the unexpected implosion of Napoleon III’s state following the Franco-Prussian War there was a genuine move to re-establish the monarchy. These negotiations foundered on Henri’s surreal refusal to rule over a country which used the blood-soaked tricolour flag and his insistence it revert to Charles X’s pure white flag. This sort of nonsense meant the moment that had been awaited in Gorizia for some forty years passed over in silence and Henri in due course joined the part of his family residing in the cold vaults of Kostanjeviča rather than that buried in the ancient royal abbey of St Denis.

There is an acute sense of sadness about these helpless tombs, with their dogmatic claims (
Roi de France et Navarre, par la grâce de Dieu
) and long-life legitimist wreaths. Where was the man in the light blue cavalry coat, saluting on his horse, who I had admired as a youth? The family’s subsequent fate was chaotic. The monastery was destroyed in fighting during the First World War and the fading Habsburg regime of Karl I had the coffins and their haughty contents hauled off to Vienna. Once the monastery was rebuilt they were taken back in 1932 to Kostanjeviča (then under a brief period of Italian rule) and buried again, with a rather impressive turnout judging from the photos. After the Second World War they found themselves as refugees in the unsympathetic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (by about five hundred metres), but survived this interlude to be under the care of the genial Republic of Slovenia. Representatives of the Bourbon family have been trying to persuade the Slovenian government and the Franciscans to let them move the unfortunates yet again, this time to Paris, but their nutty request has been sensibly refused.

I have to admit that I have a weakness for legitimist tombs and once spent an ecstatic afternoon at the luxurious Orléans family burial chambers at Dreux, a playground of white marble, religious peculiarity and thwarted pride without equal. But I cannot pretend, alas, that it has even the faintest relevance to this book. Charles X has, however. His fate ravaged other legitimist rulers. It made Franz I and Metternich ill with worry. Decades of fighting had
not
crushed revolutionary populism back into its box. The only justification for legitimism turned out to be its effectiveness – a contradiction in terms. The gloomy conclusion was that the monarch could only receive the instinctive obeisance of his grateful subjects if they were infiltrated by secret police and watched with unsleeping vigilance. It was in this period that Austria’s notorious censorship system blossomed, which managed to be both stifling and inept in a unique mixture. Charles X flouncing around with his Ultra friends, pretending Robespierre and Napoleon had never happened, was not going to be enough. Gorizia beckoned for those who failed.

With the other like-minded monarchs, Franz and Metternich searched the horizon for fresh signs of revolution, hosting congresses around Central Europe to ensure that a united front would prevent the emergence anywhere of pro-Revolution revanche. The great square where they met in 1820 can still be seen – much altered – in the centre of Ljubljana (then Laibach). When these characters met up it must have been hilarious, with row upon row of gorgeously tricked out cavalrymen and the elaborately uniformed rulers giving each other stiff embraces, medals and spurs clinking and everything awash in expensive gentleman’s fragrances. Franz may have been cold and unintelligent, but he was an effective Emperor, full to his fingertips with belief in his God-given right to rule. If conservative vigilance could only be maintained – if Austria, Prussia and Russia could stick together – then God would allow him to strike down any threat to his rule. Alas, disaster for Franz came from his own, incredibly legitimate DNA. In a final flourish of Habsburg genetic stupidity he had married his double first cousin Maria Theresa (who sang in
The Seasons
), daughter of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, himself another legitimist horror. The entirely predictable result was that their eldest son Ferdinand suffered from innumerable physical handicaps and terrible fits, and could not father children himself. But legitimism could not make exceptions. Charles X may have been stupid, vengeful and incompetent, but he was the rightful King of France. For Franz I to pass over his son Ferdinand for a more suitable heir would be dangerous as well as virtually republican. So the inflexible and God-fearing Franz insisted on being succeeded by someone effectively incapable of ruling.