The Habsburg Empire, 1790 - 1918

THIS WORK of monumental scholarship is a narrative history of the hundred-year power struggle between the ancient dynastic empire which ruled Central Europe and the new national, political, and social forces in conflict with it and with one another.The book begins with the turning point in the struggle, the day Emperor Joseph II admitted defeat at the hands of the Hungarian Estates. On January 28, 1790, Joseph, admitting that he had pushed autocracy and centralism beyond the line which it could hold, revoked the bulk of the measures he had imposed on Hungary during the preceding decade. With this admission, the old monarchy received its first hesitant shove to the brink of the new age.The history unfolds with the excitement of wild fluctuation in both the technical and the actual strength of the empire and in the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times) with the waxing and the waning of the popularity of the monarch. The dynastic monarchy had been created in the single-minded pursuit of family aggrandizement, unqualified by considerations of political, social, ethnical or geographical congruity. The author brings out the diversity within the unity and the unity synthesizing the diversity that comprises the Empire, and he touches upon the deepest foundations of the conflict which leads to the ultimate fission and downfall of the pan-Monarchic forces.The story of the final decay and fall of this glittering ancien régime is truly the story of the transformation—and splintering—of all Europe. The vacuum of power created by the ruin of the Habsburg Empire plagues the world to this day—the music heard in the gilded halls of the Schoenbrunn palace is echoed in the funeral march of Czech freedom. The architectural glories and artistic treasures of Vienna provide a Baroque funeral urn for the remains of an empire reaching back to a greater European decline and fall—that of Rome itself.