Mirrors for princes, books of advice aimed at those who rule, have fallen out of style in our modern, supposedly democratic age. Books of advice for commoners, however, are ubiquitous, though most of them are stupid, because wisdom comes from experience, not rumination, and most authors offer only the latter. Eduard Habsburg, scion of the most famous family in European history, here rescues both genres, offering advice based on his family’s long history which is useful for both rulers and the average person. And his pithy recommendations also stir thought on matters more generally related to modern aristocrats, including the despicable modern trend toward eschewing intergenerational family wealth and power.
The core of this book is the claim, hard to deny, that the Habsburg family has been a very successful family for a very long time, and that much of this success is due to certain “central principles and beliefs,” which can be communicated to others using historical examples. On a technical note, I will call simply call the author Eduard. I despise informality, and normally exclusively refer to an author by his full name and then his last name, but here that would be confusing. To be clear, however, his proper form of address, which he does not use himself, is or should be “Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria.”
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But this isn’t a book of nostalgia, or an argument why the Habsburgs should be restored to the throne, though Eduard doesn’t reject that idea. It wouldn’t likely be him wearing the crown; he’s not really in line for the throne, were such a throne to ever exist again. He is a descendant of one of the four sons of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II—Archduke Joseph, who was sent as Palatine, a semi-symbolic high administrative office, to Hungary in the 1790s. Eduard counts the sons of Leopold as, for sorting purposes, having arranged the family into four branches. The eldest surviving son of Leopold II, Francis II, became the first Emperor of Austria, after Napoleon terminated the Holy Roman Empire—thus making Leopold also the last Holy Roman Emperor. His descendants include all the modern Emperors and, following World War I, what we can call kings-in-waiting. Descendants of the other brothers are not directly in the line of dynastic descent, but all count as the same family.
I have a personal, if idiosyncratic, interest in the Habsburgs, and in who would be king. My maternal grandfather, ráczalmási Molnár Gyula (1902–1999), held a title of minor Hungarian nobility (indicated by the extra name, praedicatum in Latin, before his family name, and fairly common in Hungary). The title was granted in 1686 by Leopold I, King of Hungary (and Holy Roman Emperor) for the service of two Molnár brothers, Nicholas and Stephen, in the wars against the Turks. (Below is a picture of the crest.)
But the praedicatum died with my grandfather, for he had only daughters, and he was the last of the male line. Before he died, he executed a document asking, in some future dispensation, that the title pass by descent to me and to my male children, were I to have any. I am not sure what to do with this, or how it would be executed or applied, but if there is ever a Habsburg monarch again, this request lies waiting for my descendants to effectuate. It would be irregular relative to historical practice, to be sure—but if the virtues of our past are ever restored, this will be the least of the irregular acts associated with that result.
Beyond my personal “connection,” the entire Habsburg family, although Swiss in origin and largely Austrian in practice, is inextricably linked with Hungary. This tie is even more important today, because Hungary has become the last European bastion of traditional Europe, and is still friendly to the Habsburgs. No surprise, therefore, that Viktor Orbán wrote the Foreword to this book. He’s not calling for the restoration of the monarchy (though who knows what he really thinks about the matter), but he is respectful of the intertwined history of Hungary and the Habsburgs. He acknowledges the conflicts they had, ending in the Compromise of 1870 (which established the Dual Monarchy and the preeminence of Hungary among the multi-national Habsburg empire). And he notes “the perpetual goal of the Hungarians and the Habsburgs alike was always the same: how to remain ourselves through the centuries and how to make Central Europe a strong, independent player in world politics.” “We affirm that mankind can best find happiness in the family. We believe that Christianity will preserve our identity. And we maintain that integrating Europe—in opposition to its peoples’ will—is preposterous. . . . We are on the same side again, and we are going into battle together again, as we did eight hundred years ago.”
As Eduard narrates, he can trace his ancestry to before the year 1000; the family name came from the name of a castle built around 1000 in the Swiss canton of Aargau (although the Habsburgs lost their Swiss holdings to the Swiss Confederacy quite a long time ago). This castle was built by Radbot, son of Guntram the Rich; Eduard proudly notes that you can still visit his grave, and that of his wife, today, at a Benedictine monastery nearby. Or, rather, at a museum nearby, which used to be a Benedictine monastery. Eduard does not mention this sad and indicative latter fact, which illustrates both a feature and a defect of this book—a relentlessly positive outlook. You will not find here apocalyptic musings about the future of Europe, or attacks on the invading savages whom the rulers of Europe have allowed to swamp the continent, who will no doubt, unless stopped by force and cast back to the cesspools from which they emerged, soon enough destroy the graves of Radbot and his wife. The same fate awaits the famous Kapuzinergruft, the burial crypt in Vienna of many Habsburgs (in the Capuchin Church), which I saw when I was seven and more than once since. I will probably never see it again, unfortunately. Unless something very dramatic happens, and the Europeans take the necessary actions both to expel invaders and to remake their societies, in a hundred years few in Europe will remember the Habsburgs at all.
But back to the story. In the thirteenth century, Rudolf von Habsburg, godson of the Emperor Frederick II, was chosen as a compromise candidate to fill a twenty-five-year vacancy in the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor. He strengthened the Empire, and also, as Eduard notes, began the Habsburgs’ long relationship with Hungary, because the Hungarian king helped Rudolf in his battles. The Habsburgs had ups and downs, but in the fifteenth century began to regularly be elected as Holy Roman Emperor, in part because they had already begun their long habit of marrying well and generating many children. The family led the Age of Exploration and dominated much of Europe through the early modern period.
Their twilight age began with the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the position of their empire degenerated further with the unfortunate revolutions of 1848. The second-to-last Emperor, Franz Joseph, reigned from 1848 to 1916. He did the best he could, but the tides of the world overwhelmed the Empire, and when he died, his grand-nephew Charles ruled. (He became emperor even though the assassinated heir presumptive Ferdinand, Franz Joseph’s nephew, had a son; his marriage was morganatic, to a woman not of adequately noble blood, and so their children were excluded from the line of succession.) But only until 1918, when Charles was deposed after the Habsburgs lost the war (though he never abdicated, nor renounced the family’s claim to the throne). Eduard is a great admirer of Charles, the “Blessed Emperor Karl” (he has been beatified by the Roman Catholic Church). And Charles died in 1922, after two abortive attempts to regain the Hungarian throne, and so ended the temporal power of the Habsburgs.
Not all of it, though, perhaps. For the remainder of the twentieth century, the man who would have been Emperor after Charles played an important, if not central, role in European politics. Charles’s son Otto, who died in 2011, was known as a (conservative) advocate of European integration, without renouncing (in practice) his claim to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, if such ever were to exist again. True, that project was wholly pernicious in retrospect, but that was not so obvious seventy years ago. Otto’s son Karl, however, seems mostly useless, and Karl’s own eldest son is a twenty-seven-year-old racecar driver (who looks a bit like Barron Trump), and has no apparent involvement in politics. I would not hope for much in the future from the dynastic branch of the Habsburgs.
This leaves Eduard with the role of the most prominent Habsburg alive today. He is a Hungarian citizen (though his “Hungarian” branch remained largely Austrian, while continuing as Palatines of Hungary into the twentieth century, and he grew up outside Hungary), and serves as Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See and to the Order of Malta. What ambitions he has beyond that, if any, are not clear. No doubt he is, as all of us are, waiting to see how matters play out in Europe. After all, as the subtitle of his book makes clear, he offers rules “for turbulent times.” He is young enough to be relevant if he is called, and much stranger things have happened than such a family returning to power, even monarchical power.
But that is the future, and Eduard’s rules are for the present. Each rule is part hortatory, part history, and part reflection on how the Habsburgs have exemplified, or failed to exemplify, the rule. His first rule is “Get Married (and Have Lots of Children).” Eduard himself has been married for nearly thirty years and has six children (five girls and one boy). From the second paragraph we see that Eduard is not afraid to state the unfashionable truth, when he correctly rejects as “absurd” the idea that marriage can be anything but a man and a woman. Marriage is essential for showing children how men and women should live, to give them security, to show what it is to have a stake in a society. (His advice, I am pleased to say, largely echoes my own marriage advice, so he must be right.) For a successful marriage, Eduard recommends “shared faith, a mutual understanding of the sacredness and indissolubility of marriage, a common belief in the importance of family and the openness to children, similar societal background and perspective on social responsibilities—and, ideally, a similar sense of humor and interests.”
We are shown this in part through the lens of Emperor Maximilian, the “Last Knight,” who ruled from 1486 to 1519, and began the real expansion of the Habsburg domains through marriage, including acquiring the Hungarian crown and creating the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg lines. (He also began the unfortunate tendency of the Habsburgs to marry close relatives, although Eduard points out the famous Habsburg jaw, now dormant, is not actually the product of this tendency.) As to faith, he recommends here, and vigorously throughout the book, Roman Catholicism, a faith he views as stable, as well as true. But he does not shy away from criticism of his family, especially of Franz Joseph’s marriage to Elizabeth, from the German House of Wittelsbach. She was inadequately religious and not sufficiently devoted to her husband or to her duties, and while the Hungarians loved her, and she the Hungarians, that was not enough. Eduard blames, in part, on her the troubles of Franz Joseph’s only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, who at the age of thirty committed suicide after murdering (by pact) his seventeen-year-old lover. Being a Habsburg has often not meant happiness. Still, Eduard points to the marriage of Emperor Charles and Zita, princess of Bourbon-Parma, as the ideal Habsburg marriage, and so it was, until Charles died at the age of only thirty-four, though Zita lived until 1989. Most of all, they explicitly worked to “help each other to Heaven.” Here is an evocative picture of their wedding in 1911, a different, and better, time, where none of them knew the horrors that awaited.
Rule 2, really tied in many ways to Rule 1, is “Be Catholic! (and Practice Your Faith).” Not for Eduard a bogus ecumenism. He notes that until the modern era, it was taken for granted that a monarch had the extremely weighty responsibility of answering to God for the souls of his people, including by harsh treatment of erroneous Christians, and by ensuring that they were not excessively exposed to pagan beliefs. We moderns have not only abandoned this important conception of the ruler’s role, but also absorbed many other false ideas, such as that public displays of faith, especially of government leaders, must be limited, when the exact opposite is the truth. Through this prism, he examines Charles V and the so-called Reformation, and Charles’s son, Ferdinand I, who harmed his people and his domains by weakening his advocacy of the faith. This trend was made worse by Ferdinand’s son Maximilian I, and then by his son, Rudolf II, who was dissolute and so open-minded that his brains fell out. As one of his brothers wrote, “He strives all the time to eliminate God completely, so that he may, in the future, serve a different master.”
Yet the Habsburgs then became crucial to the Counter-Reformation, and are therefore Catholic to this day—even though they faced ongoing internal challenges, such as Joseph II, badly tainted by the so-called Enlightenment, and who forcibly dissolved many monasteries and convents. To be fair, he was less of a mini-Henry VIII, and more an adherent to Jansenism, a Catholic heresy analogous to Calvinism, and opposed to popular piety and the Jesuits. Jansenism survived into the modern era; my mother tells me that her mother, raised in Debrecen early in the twentieth century and educated by nuns at the Svetits school, still extant, was tainted by Jansenism at that school, although I very much doubt it is even meaningfully Catholic today. During and after the nineteenth century, no longer did quite a few Habsburgs not in line to succeed become priests (one of Eduard’s brothers is, to his satisfaction, “the first Habsburg in nearly two hundred years” to do so). The last Emperor, Charles, perhaps presaged a return to hardcore religiosity (which is one reason he has been beatified)—but Eduard does not comment on the religious commitment of the larger family today, which would be an interesting exploration.
I will not go through the remainder of the rules in detail; this is a short book, and well worth reading in its entirety. But I will say the rules are quite Foundationalist. Rule 3 is “Believe in the Empire (and in Subsidiarity).” Subsidiarity is one of the pillars of Foundationalism, and Eduard offers an excellent discussion of it, both in theory and as applied. We today, of course, live in whatever is the opposite of subsidiarity, what Auron MacIntyre calls the Total State. Rule 4 is “Stand for Justice (and Your Subjects).” Again, this recognizes, though more implicitly than explicitly, that democracy is a very stupid system, and what is a desirable system is where the central authority rules competently and in the interests, if not precisely of subjects, but of the people as whole—not as reflected in their votes, but as determined by a competent ruling class. It is only because of the endless propaganda birthed in the Enlightenment that we believe that past monarchs ruled exclusively for their own benefit, in an extractive and tyrannical manner, when usually the exact opposite was the case.
Rule 5 is “Know Who You Are (and Live Accordingly),” by which Eduard does not mean you should follow the rules found in Eat, Pray, Love, but that you should know who you are in the line of your people, the communion of the dead, the living, and the unborn, and act with that in mind. Rule 6 is “Be Brave in Battle (or Have a Great General).” Eduard focuses on history, and declines to apply this to the future, but it is easy enough to see the need for bravery in conflict—one need only look at recent events in England, where Britons have risen up against a government that has, against the wishes of the vast majority of the people, imposed masses of aliens, rapists, and murderers on them. Those men are brave, and they also need a great general. Whether one will emerge from the mist, we will see. And Rule 7, completing the circle, is “Die Well (and have a Memorable Funeral).” I joke that I want to have as my grave monument a fifty-foot obelisk with a giant strobe light, visible from space, on top, and letters an inch wide carved eighteen inches deep in granite, so that ten thousand years from now, they will ask “Who was this great man?” But my children correctly point out it’d probably be broken up for road aggregate in a few decades.
Finally, let’s turn to the more general topic of aristocratic families. I do not come from any kind of aristocracy (Hungarian minor nobility is not aristocracy), but I am most definitely nouveau riche, and could therefore possibly form an aristocratic family. The fashion, however, is for the wealthy to proudly declaim that they are leaving their children nothing (although, sadly, I am nowhere near as rich as Bill Gates or even Mick Jagger, but the same “promise” has been made by many more minor celebrities recently). Coupled with this, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly, is the claim that children should be generally on their own—free to do what they want, when young and when adult, without any kind of strictures or demands placed on them by their family. This isn’t surprising; it’s just standard Left doctrine of emancipation and egalitarianism. But it is destructive, to both children and parents, to their larger family, and to society.
How to form a family for the long term is an important topic, and it is currently being excellently addressed by the Substack author Johann Kurtz (who is, I believe, planning a book). He refers to The Habsburg Way, but greatly expands on some of the themes, as well as demonstrates, for example, that contrary to myth the wealth of truly aristocratic families does not tend to dissipate over time. I will not attempt to summarize his thoughts, but direct you to them. He also makes other crucial points that Eduard does not make explicitly, such as that formation of a virtuous elite class (something totally lacking in America and the entire West today) is crucial to any society’s success.
As to me specifically, by great good luck (and by my wife’s good management, as for years I ground out the path to wealth while she did most of the work of raising our children) my progeny have all been raised largely in line with Eduard’s advice. That is much different than founding an aristocratic house, to be sure, but it tends in the same direction, and early results are good. Moreover, I have just about completed an enormous family home, complete with co-situated ancillary dwellings that I hope will be occupied by some or all of the children and their spouses and children. It seems unlikely, however, that this arrangement will last for long after the deaths of me and my wife (not for some decades, I hope). But perhaps that is a failure of vision. Nonetheless, I am placing all my bets on massive societal change in the next zero to ten years, and on the world becoming smaller, in the sense of it becoming the norm for children to stay closer to home, and for atomization not to be the norm. Still, it is hard to swim against what seem like the tides of history. All one can do is make the right preparations for a possible future where everything old is new again.
I sometimes wonder, however, if instead of selling my business in 2020, I should have turned it into a generation-spanning family enterprise. That would not have been difficult, in normal times—it was a manufacturing business, in a consumer area always needed, with a fantastic reputation, and it could have been grown indefinitely. But these are not normal times, so I chose to sell it because of the political risk, given my anti-Regime views, and because of my certainty that tumultuous times will arrive in the very near future. I prioritized a bird in the hand, and cash in hand, that can be used more flexibly to assist my family’s goals. Still, there is something to a family enterprise, or set of family enterprises, for which cash does not substitute. I am in the process of starting (another, much smaller, unrelated) business, and maybe once the Spicy Times are over I will return to aristocracy building through enterprise. And perhaps when he rules Elon Musk will appoint me hereditary Satrap of Indiana, and my children will build on what I have built, and follow the rules of Eduard Habsburg, along with the rules I and my wife have laid down. A nice thought.
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You can subscribe to writings published in The Worthy House. In these days of massive censorship, this is wise, even if you normally consume The Worthy House on some other platform.
If you subscribe will get a notification of all new writings by email. You will get no spam, of course. And we do not and will not solicit you; we neither need nor accept money.