Stand for Law and Justice

 George Lucas’s Star Wars is not the only fantasy that challenges the idea of empire. The foundational myth of “fighting unjust tyrants” is deeply embedded into the origin of the United States of America; it may take effort for my American readers to accommodate their thinking to the idea that the very purpose of monarchies was to stand for law, justice, and peace for your people. Monarchs may not always have achieved this goal, either internally or along their borders, but, nevertheless, it was the goal and their purpose.

Partly, it may be more difficult for Americans to understand real monarchies because they rarely encounter real royals; and they tend to have little sense of actual royalty throughout history. They haven’t seen, or considered, how future monarchs were raised; how they took their first responsibilities and finally took over from their parents; how they then raised children of their own. All they imagine is an oppressive tyrant, sitting on a far-away throne. But the populations in countries with active monarchs, who witness royalty directly or are raised to consider the history of royalty throughout the generations, benefit from a completely different perspective, and this creates a close social bond. Furthermore, as a cousin to many modern royals, I personally have had the additional advantage of knowing and understanding the goals and aspirations of some of the princes and princesses who became rulers.

What did I find? I met people who, since their earliest childhood, were raised toserve — to serve their country with every appearance, every gesture, every parade, every photo. Just as their parents and grandparents had done before. Since they were young, they got to know their countries, the political parties and politicians, and the Church representatives. They learned about all the fault lines that menaced their country. They watched as their parents dealt with many problems. And they were told how their grandparents had confronted similar problems. 

Serving always meant putting your own interests second. In a country with several languages, your preferred language was not used exclusively; rather, all the country’s languages were spoken. Your preference for one region or for one kind of people could not be indulged. You were a symbol of unity and had to show respect to all regions and all people. Furthermore, you knew that any mess you created when you were eventually in the position of power would burden your children when they came to power. Finally, at least in my youth there was very little option to renounce your responsibilities and disappear into a private life. You simply owed it to your country: for God’s sake, and for the many privileges you had been given. And precisely because you were not elected — and therefore not obliged to calibrate your decisions to ensure re-election — you were specially positioned to engage real problems honestly. 

You may say this is a rose-tinted view. Perhaps. But nevertheless, it is what I have seen. 

Even if modern European monarchies have very limited constitutional powers — indeed, they have far less power than an American president — their real power is the power of example. But that was always a critical, perhaps the most critical, role played by monarchs. Whether a monarch is upholding the law, or simply the Truth, a Catholic monarch who believes in God understands that He will, someday, render final judgment. 

Contrast this mindset with some modern politicians. Not having been raised to responsibility, and with less permanently secure positions, they will quite understandably be more naturally tempted to use their careers as paths to personal advancement, profiting off the connections made during those careers. Nobody can blame them. But this was something rulers in the past need not have done. 

From the first Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf in 1273, the Habsburgs defended the law, tried to be just, and tried to improve the lives of their subjects. Remember, there had been a nearly thirty-year interregnum after the fall of the House of Hohenstaufen, so there had been constant fights, conflicts, and lawlessness. Rudolf’s first challenge was to restore order, which he did with remarkable success. He worked with local rulers to reorganize territories taken in those thirty years from the empire (the so-called “Revendication”). He gave them a juridical structure and abolished tolls unlawfully instituted during the interregnum. He forced his great rival Ottokar of Bohemia to give back all the countries he had taken — Central Austria, Styria, and Carinthia — that were then still independent lands. (First the lands were placed under imperial guardianship; later, when Ottokar was defeated, Rudolf gave the lands to his own sons.)

So the role of the emperors — as the “kings above kings” — required them to take law and justice very, very seriously.18 And like their forebear Rudolf, they did. There are too many Habsburg emperors to review each of their records; but it is worth considering at least a few examples of how seriously they stood for law, justice, and their subjects: (...)

There is much more to be said about the “glorious generation” of Francis and his brothers, especially about their modesty and frugality. But I want to finish with an amusing anecdote that illustrates what was typically said of them. When the poet Byron spent his famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816 with Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover Percy B. Shelley, a literary bet prompted Mary to create the first scene of what was to become her immortal novel Frankenstein. During the same stay, Byron himself wrote a fragmentary novel, and his personal physician, John William Polidori, also wrote The Vampyre, the precursor of romantic vampire stories. However, Byron and Polidori had a falling out, and so Polidori left on a trip to Italy. Coming from Switzerland, Polidori crossed over the Grand St. Bernard and spent the night of September 27, 1816, in the monastery located at the top of the mountain pass. He notes in his diary that there was great excitement there: another simple traveler had stayed the previous night, and the monks had only just discovered, through his signature in the monk’s guest book, that the guest had been the famous Archduke Rainer, Viceroy of Lombardo-Venetia. Rainer, one of the “glorious brothers,” is known to regularly have hiked, incognito, along the borders of his reign, in order to better understand his subjects (and to study rock formations). 

Finally, I want to end the chapter with an anecdote about Franz Joseph standing up for his subjects. In 1910, the old emperor met with the former president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, in the Hofburg. When the former president and Noble Peace Prize winner asked the emperor to explain to him exactly what he was doing — implying, I suspect, that elected parliaments and governments had made the emperor’s role a superfluous anachronism — the emperor answered simply: “The idea of my office is to protect my peoples from their politicians.” 

I leave you with this question: Who protects the voters from their politicians today?

From:

The Habsburg Way

Seven Rules for Turbulent Times

By Eduard Habsburg