The other casualties of 1918 – Europe’s vanished monarchies

Exactly a century ago the guns fell silent at the end of the most catastrophic war mankind had experienced up to that point in history. At cenotaphs across Britain and Europe (though not in our culturally Marxist universities) homage will be paid to the courage and sacrifice of the fighting forces of all the belligerent nations. That is right and proper: that we should render thanks for the heroism of a generation of giants.

Considering the current instability of Europe, there is another casualty of the Great War that we should mourn: the fall of the ancient monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany. The ending of the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties in the chaos of 1918 (or 1917 in Russia) created a politico-cultural vacuum that still afflicts Europe. Over the past century Europe has been a less civilized place than it was under dynastic rule.

Of course, in Little Arthur’s History of Progress the infantile narrative is of unrelenting improvement. Absolute monarchy was ‘outdated’, ‘undemocratic’ and, most reprehensibly, ‘unfair’. Unfortunately we have no means of testing that thesis since no such phenomenon as ‘absolute monarchy’ ever existed in Christian Europe. Louis XIV, who is generally portrayed as the personification of royal absolutism, would have goggled in disbelief at the amount of power wielded by Emmanuel Macron.

From earliest times all European monarchs, while enjoying significant power, were ultimately under constraints imposed by parliaments of various kinds, the nobility, the Church, constitutional tradition and even the mob in their capital cities.

In 1914 none of the great sovereigns – the Tsar, the Kaiser or the Austro-Hungarian Emperor – was an absolute ruler. And that is precisely why they became embroiled in an unprecedented bloodbath from which they could not extricate themselves and which discredited their dynasties. The individual rulers were not blameless, but their responsibility pales beside that of the new forces of ‘liberalism’ with which by then they were forced unhappily to co-exist.

The pressure exerted by conflicting political parties, the intrinsically irresponsible news press moulding public opinion to favour war, the similarly self-interested influence of industrial magnates and financiers, all those modern phenomena deprived monarchs of the ability to rule decisively. During the ‘cabinet wars’ of the eighteenth century, in which limited numbers of professional soldiers were engaged, European sovereigns could make peace at will, before too much harm was done. By 1914 they no longer enjoyed such discretion, due to the impingement of supposedly ‘liberal’ forces upon their authority.

Nicholas II still bore the title of ‘Autocrat’, but he had not been an absolute ruler since 1906 when the Duma was established in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1905. Like the French Revolution, this was a bourgeois coup, meaning that the class least representative of the Russian population took power. It was the bourgeoisie that championed the War, even after the fall of Nicholas when Kerensky stubbornly pursued hostilities; it was the nobility and peasantry that were mown down on the battlefields.

Nicholas II bears responsibility for one terrible mistake, when he allowed his generals to bamboozle him into agreeing to partial mobilization, on pretexts of urgency that should have carried no conviction in so vast an empire, where Kutuzov had demonstrated in 1812 that simply yielding ground (he fought the Battle of Borodino under protest) and leaving the rest to General Winter was a strategy to guarantee Russian security and avert the necessity for precipitate military action.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a braggart and unstable, but he was not a serious warmonger. He greeted the conciliatory (though cynical) Serbian response to the Austrian ultimatum with relief. He was guilty of not maintaining sufficiently strict oversight of his ministers. When he returned to Berlin on account of the crisis and was met by his Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg tendering his resignation, Wilhelm angrily refused to accept it, saying: ‘You’ve made this stew, now you’re going to eat it.’

The most tragic victim of the conflict was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Joseph may be blamed for needlessly annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, sowing the seeds of conflict, but there his culpability ends. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne should have been acknowledged by Nicholas II, in a spirit of monarchic solidarity, as a quasi-regicide that, regardless of the claims of Pan-Slavism, meant that the complicit Serbian monarchy had forfeited his support.

Austria was the injured party, yet it was Serbia, where even members of the royal family belonged to the terrorist Black Hand secret society, that uniquely emerged from the War with its territory multiplied into the unsustainable kingdom of Yugoslavia. Hungary, in contrast, at the Treaty of Trianon, was stripped of two-thirds of its territory, one-third of all ethnic Hungarians in its population, all of its seaports and almost 90 per cent of its natural resources.

That act of gross despoliation was the climax of President Woodrow Wilson’s cack-handed realignment of Europe, inspired by small-town American, Mark Twain-style dislike of monarchies, especially the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire (Wilson had enforced segregation on black troops serving in the US Army). One of the least plausible of Adolf Hitler’s lies was his claim to have created the Third Reich when its true originator was Woodrow Wilson.

Emperor Karl, who inherited the Austro-Hungarian throne in 1916, risked his crown by secretly proposing an honourable peace to the Allies, whereby everyone would return to the frontiers of 1914, but the monster Clemenceau, fired by hatred of the Habsburgs and Catholicism, as well as revanchist designs on Alsace-Lorraine, rejected the proposal, at a cost of a further million lives. That is how democratically elected politicians can be relied on to protect the interests of the people, unlike hereditary monarchs motivated by Christian conscience.

The Habsburgs were overthrown in 1918 by leftists, producing another interesting case study: the slimy Karl Renner, inventor of Austro-Marxism, who became chancellor, later president, of the Austrian republic, hailed Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938 and in 1945 volunteered his services to Stalin as puppet chancellor of Soviet-occupied Austria. That is the kind of cursus honorum that, in politicians’ obituaries, is termed ‘a lifetime of public service’.

Another exemplar of post-monarchic politics was Edvard Benes, much lauded in the Allies’ Second World War propaganda despite his close relations with Soviet intelligence, who, after benefiting from Wilson’s bogus ‘self-determination of nations’ policy to head the synthetic and unsustainable confection that was Czechoslovakia, used his influence in 1921 to prevent the restoration of the hugely popular Emperor Karl as King Charles IV of Hungary. So, no self-determination for Hungary.

A rich literature records what was lost, from Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March to Count Miklos Banffy’s towering Transylvanian Trilogy. Banffy had served briefly as foreign minister early in the Horthy government and his disgust for politicians, the termites that undermined the Dual Monarchy, permeates the narrative.

The drabness, vulgarity and squalor of modern life, the decline in art (it is no coincidence that Duchamp’s urinal coincided with the overthrow of the Old Order) and the corruption of the political class, now wholly divorced from the populations it governs, demonstrates the cultural impoverishment that has resulted from the deracination of society from its monarchic traditions. That loss also deserves to be mourned today.