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On Dec. 13, 1740, the Prussian king Frederick II slipped out of a masquerade ball and mounted his horse at the head of 27,000 well-drilled troops. Three days later, he crossed the frontier into neighboring Silesia, northernmost province of the Habsburg Monarchy, then at peace with Prussia.
Frederick had chosen his moment wisely. In late October, the emperor Charles VI had died without a male heir, leaving the chaotic jumble of territories that made up the Habsburg patrimony to his 23-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa. The realm that she inherited was in a pitiable state: its army demoralized following a recent defeat by the Turks; its treasury depleted by Charles’s long campaign of bribery to secure the sanction of Europe’s other monarchs for his daughter’s inheritance.
The Habsburg dynasty’s first and only female ruler, Maria Theresa ascended the throne under a cloud of doubts about her competence and legitimacy. Young, pretty and pregnant, she was inexperienced in statecraft or war. Smelling blood, France, Spain and Bavaria joined in Frederick’s conquest, each hoping to carve a lump from the flailing empire. Beset on all sides, the young Archduchess now found herself in a desperate fight for survival — as she would later write, “without money, without credit, without army. . . without any counsel. ” Many of her ministers began to prepare for what they assumed would be Austria’s inevitable defeat and partition at the hands of the invaders. The House of Habsburg, it seemed, had reached the end of its rope.
But Frederick had underestimated the young queen. Maria Theresa rallied her subjects, outwitted her foes and fought Frederick to a standstill. In the years that followed, she overhauled Austria’s antiquated systems of finance and administration, modernized its army and revolutionized its foreign policy. When Frederick attacked again in 1756, the tables were turned against him. Altogether, Maria Theresa would fight “the monster” (as she called Frederick) for more than a third of her 40-year reign. Along the way, she bore 16 children, 10 of whom reached adulthood and four of whom would go on to become European monarchs.
By any measure, Maria Theresa must be judged among the most successful Habsburg monarchs and most remarkable leaders of the 18th century. Yet modern historians have had little to say about her. She was too conservative to ever appeal to feminist historians. She lacked the offensive warfighting prowess that has given Frederick II a cultlike following among American military historians. And she lacked the adventurous sex life that made Russia’s Catherine the Great a favorite for television miniseries producers. The last comprehensive history of the empress, Alfred von Arneth’s 10-volume “Geschichte Maria Theresas,” was written a century and a half ago.
An effort to pull Maria Theresa out of the shadows is overdue, and two very different historians have taken on the task with two new and very different biographies.
Popular historian Nancy Goldstone’s “In the Shadow of the Empress” is a really a quartet of biographies, encompassing the lives of Maria Theresa and three of her daughters — Maria Christina, Maria Carolina and Maria Antonia (later Marie Antoinette). Powerful queens are Ms. Goldstone’s métier; she has previously produced books on Joan of Arc, Catherine de ‘Medici, the Provençal sisters and Mary Queen of Scots.
The book is elegantly written, in a brisk style that plays to Ms. Goldstone’s strengths in portraiture and the theatrical set-piece. The author deftly interweaves the ups and downs of Maria Theresa’s running contest with Frederick with the vicissitudes of her life as Europe’s most prolific procreator. To bear 16 children is surely a stupendous feat in any era; to do so as a head of state, often during wartime and in the span of 20 years, staggers the imagination. Yet these trials did not diminish Maria Theresa’s stamina as a reformer, a vocation she pursued with astonishing vigor in virtually every corner of Habsburg government, from administration and finance, to agriculture and the army.
Ms. Goldstone gives us a lively account of the empress’s favorite daughter, Maria Christina (“Mimi”), whose passion for the seductively charming Isabella of Parma (Mimi’s sister-in-law) takes some of the starch out of the Habsburg facade. (“I burn for you,” one letter reads; another, “I kiss everything that you let me kiss.”) She resurrects the similarly obscure Maria Carolina, who shrewdly usurped her husband, the feckless and juvenile King of Naples. And she avoids a stale recital of the oft-told tale of Marie Antoinette, without ever fully explaining how Maria Theresa’s youngest daughter left home with such a noticeably lower level of self-discipline and sense of duty than her elder sisters.
Four life stories in one cover is a heavy lift for even the most talented biographer. Ms. Goldstone could have done a better job tying the proliferating plotlines back to the book’s implied central theme — the galvanizing figure of Maria Theresa. The author’s evocative prose occasionally borders on camp (somehow calling the future Holy Roman Emperor Francis Stephen of Lorraine a “high school heartthrob” does not fit). And the maps are a mess, giving the Habsburg Monarchy a name (“Austria-Hungary”) that would not exist for another century and boundaries that it had lost before the date on the map. But these shortcomings are offset by Ms. Goldstone’s rich storytelling and the humane and balanced portraits she provides of her subjects.
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Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s “Maria Theresa” is, at more than 1,000 pages, a monumental feat of scholarship that represents the first comprehensive reappraisal of the empress’ life and legacy since the mid-19th century. Where Ms. Goldstone aims to popularize Maria Theresa, Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger, an academic historian at the University of Münster, wants to “rescue” her from the appraisals of earlier historians like Arneth, who saw in the empress’s piety, patriotism and family values the makings of a mother figure for the Austrian nation.
Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger scrutinizes every conceivable aspect of the empress’s life and reign. The exhaustive research and scholarly nature of the book does not come at the expense of readability. Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger excels at both detail and grand scale, and translator Robert Savage never lets her down. Her description of the Habsburg Monarchy’s complex machinery, her analysis of the arcane workings of the Holy Roman Empire, and her exposition of the family’s marriage strategies are all masterpieces in miniature. Her accounts of Maria Theresa’s showdowns with insubordinate courtiers have all the tension of a corporate boardroom drama. Students of executive leadership might learn a lot from Maria Theresa’s method of empowering high-octane personalities to carry out difficult reforms against the resistance of large bureaucracies.
As always, human details capture the imagination. We learn that the searingly self-honest empress called herself “Theresa the fat”; that she was immune to flattery and refused to allow disloyal officials to kiss her ring; that she shamelessly spoiled Mimi while smothering and hectoring her other children; and that she launched a “chastity commission” in a vain attempt to stamp out infidelity among the nobility, which her husband, the amiable but idle Francis Stephen, elevated to a high art form in his hunting lodges.
Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger strives to avoid anachronisms; one benefit is that the reader is largely spared the overlay of identity politics that has become a mainstay of modern academia. She does not make gender the main focus of the text — an approach that Maria Theresa, who styled herself “king” and once considered challenging Frederick to a duel, would in any event have rejected.
Yet the author sometimes seems more interested in fighting historiographical battles than understanding Maria Theresa. The modern biographer, she says, must avoid “direct empathy” with a historical personality and abjure the search for “timelessly valid” truths about the past. Her text can thus sometimes seem coldly forensic or, worse, myopic. Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger is so preoccupied with debunking the “classic hero narrative” of Maria Theresa’s reign that she sometimes fails to acknowledge characteristics of heroism in her subject.
Many of the author’s judgments also carry a strong whiff of present sensibilities. In analyzing the basis for Maria Theresa’s bond with her subjects, she offers a starkly materialist interpretation straight out of the mid-20th-century, overlooking the crucial role of Catholicism. She criticizes Maria Theresa for “refusal[ing] to plead her case before the self-appointed tribunal of a critically informed public, ”without explaining what exactly that would have meant in 18th-century Austria — or reflecting on the obvious irony that such a“ tribunal ”eventually cost Maria Theresa’s daughter Marie Antoinette her head.
Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger’s real beef is with Maria Theresa’s contempt for the Enlightenment, which the old empress saw as the dangerous theorizing of “fashionable philosophers.” This German academic finds it distressing that in an emerging age of rationality, Maria Theresa would adhere to a “premodern virtue ethics” grounded in “piety, steadfastness and vigor, wisdom and moderation, benevolence and munificence.” The image she leaves us with is of an antique empress clinging to outdated beliefs, who failed in her most important life missions.
Readers are likely to find this bleak assessment unconvincing and indeed unsupported by Ms. Stollberg-Rilinger’s own, superbly researched text. The truth is, whether in her rejection of predatory warfare or fidelity to her spouse or circumspection in child-rearing, Maria Theresa was exceptional for her class and time. That she saved her empire and reared a generation of reform-minded monarchs while displaying a personal integrity that was alien to supposedly more Enlightened contemporaries like Frederick and Catherine makes her story more remarkable, not less.
Acknowledging this does not require us to be blind to Maria Theresa’s faults. But it does require us to recognize that what made her remarkable was adherence to virtues that, however outdated they may seem today, are in fact “timelessly valid.” And seeing that requires a humility that is not in abundant supply in the 21st century.
—Mr. Mitchell is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and the author of “The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire.”
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发表于 2-23-2022 11:44:12
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