In 1521, in the imperial free city of Worms, the firebrand Augustinian friar Martin Luther stood before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, then the head of and heir to the House of Habsburg, and refused to recant his widely published criticisms of the Catholic Church. The first duty of the Holy Roman Emperor was to defend the faith, and Charles did so by … letting Luther go. If Charles had arrested Luther, it would have angered powerful princes in the empire whose support Charles needed to defeat the Ottoman Turks in Hungary. A few years after the showdown at Worms, unpaid troops in the Habsburg Emperor’s army mutinied, then sacked Rome and the Vatican. Among that mercenary army were German Lutherans. They stabled their horses in St. Peter’s basilica. Bored guards carved the name LUTHER into the Vatican’s walls.
In the centuries that followed, the feudal Catholic order represented by Habsburg power played the Washington Generals to Protestant capitalism’s Harlem Globetrotters. From the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the disastrous Battle of Rocroi, Hapsburgs absorbed loss after loss, while Protestant northern Europe extended itself across the world. (Check out our podcast, Hell on Earth, for more details!) By World War I, the European conflagration that brought down many of the continent’s remaining monarchies, the Habsburgs were just along for the ride.
That brings us—somehow!—to Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen, aka Archduke Eduard of Austria. He’s a 56-year-old social media influencer who also has a make-work job as Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See. His Twitter feed is filled with historical anecdotes about his family, the details of his day-to-day life as a diplomat, and lots of approachable, Gen X pop culture references. All of it is designed to make himself and his family appear relevant to a 21st-century audience. As part of his one-man Habsburg family charm offensive, he has now published a book: The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times.
The book’s aesthetic pitch is a cross between Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life and Mark Corrigan’s Business Secrets of the Pharaohs. It promises the reader blandly reactionary aphorisms, laundered in specious historical anecdotes, that will help them climb the ladder at whatever fake email job they have. The book’s chapters offer a brief overview of the Habsburg dynasty, following the family’s rise from minor Swiss nobles to possessors of an empire that spanned much of Europe and the Americas. Along the way, Eduard offers seven rules for living taken from his family’s experiences. One rule, “Be Catholic,” gets two chapters. One praises the piety of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, whose devotion to the One True Church helped spark the 30 Years’ War. Most of the advice is a bit too specific to be useful to the average reader, but if I ever go to war with the king of Bohemia, I’ll be sure to enlist support from Hungary. When scaled down for a regular schmo, Habsburg’s rules are general to the point of banality. “Get Married” is pretty straightforward, but “Be Brave in Battle (or Have a Great General)” is a bit harder to parse. Others, like “Believe in the Empire” and “Die Well,” just sound like chants from a Habsburg cheerleading squad.
The “life lessons” of the book are thin and halfhearted, but Habsburg has another agenda in mind with his slender volume. The Habsburg Way is a subtle but persistent case for monarchy as a political system, and the Hungarian state run by Viktor Orbán (whose government Habsburg works for) as the vehicle to pursue it. Habsburg contrasts the supposed honor, piety, and grace of his family’s dynasty with what he thinks is the narcissism and self-dealing of modern democratic political leaders. Hungary, Eduard writes, “is blessed to have political leaders who live their faith visibly,” and the Orbán government that upholds Catholic political values like “subsidiarity,” the devolution of power to its lowest viable level. This he places in contrast to unnamed leaders of other Western countries who rely on globalist notions of central authority. Hungary, of course, isn’t currently ruled by a monarchy, but Eduard repeatedly teases the notion that it may be—someday. “Are we waiting for the monarchy to return? No,” he writes, then adds, coyly: “Or are we?” Surely, in these “turbulent times,” our yearning for the gentle but firm hand of a monarch to gather the fractured pieces of the modern state will lead us back to the leadership of august dynasties like the Habsburgs.
But all of Archduke Eduard’s aw-shucks baroque kitsch cannot obscure the fact that all the modern horrors that Habsburg laments, from Protestantism and capitalism to secularism and mass democracy, were birthed on his family’s watch. At no point were the Habsburgs, for all their supposed virtue, able to successfully divert the course of history. They relented and vacillated and compromised until their power was reduced to a shadow. Somehow, according to Eduard, this unrivaled record of consistent bag-fumbling does nothing to implicate the character, values, or judgment of any of his ancestors. The one Habsburg who comes in for sustained criticism is the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II, who seized church property in the 19th century. Even here, Eduard flatters his kin, attributing Joseph’s actions to the supposedly vile influence of Freemasonry, rather than the relentless demands of capitalist efficiency. The family fought the tide of modernity and were resoundingly defeated by it, and we live in the aftermath of that defeat.
The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times
By Eduard Habsburg. Sophia Institute Press.
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The book ends with a request that the next time a “politician does something outlandish,” the reader ask themselves: “What would a Habsburg do now?” We don’t need to ask. We know! They’re doing just what the rest of us are doing: trying to be influencers. They’re driving race cars and apologizing for tech failures after hosting online events and writing groveling appeals to the commons like The Habsburg Way. The rule that the Habsburgs upheld led them to permanent eclipse. The family is now composed of the same sort of banal attention-seekers and time-servers as the rest of Europe’s pensioned aristocracy, which includes Facebook-addled coup plotters and Epstein island guests of honor. The toll that modernity has taken on the Habsburgs is evidenced in Eduard’s shallow understanding of the nature of empire, which doesn’t go beyond a few references to Dune and Star Wars. Based on the amount of time he spends in the book fantasizing about TV and movie versions of his family’s history, one must conclude that if he were offered the choice of the Crown of St. Stephen or a Netflix development deal, he would take the latter.
That explains why Eduard also feigns support for squishy liberal nostrums about tolerance and multiculturalism that neither his Habsburg ancestors nor his political patrons in the Orbán regime would countenance. He can’t voice his reactionary politics with a full throat for risk of alienating a mainstream audience, so instead he extols the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a model of multicultural toleration. You can agree or disagree with that assessment (Gavrilo Princip would definitely disagree), but either way it’s not a model that the current Hungarian government seeks to emulate. But this lion concerns himself very much with the opinions of sheep.
All told, The Habsburg Way is a powerful case against monarchy, or at least the return to power of the great monarchical houses of Europe. All those centuries of bloodshed and glory have produced a lineage that can understand itself only through the lens of pop culture and shallow political grievance. Whatever powers are thrown up by the unfolding crises of the 21st century, they would do well to look for inspiration elsewhere: The Hapsburg Way is a dead end.
