Climateer Investing: "Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg"

Saturday, May 10, 2025

"Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg"

I'm not sure I agree with the headline but the rest of the story is interesting.

From The Dial, issue 20:

Eduard Habsburg, with the help of his royal ancestors, wants to fix your marriage, your soul, and your politics.

For two decades, Marie Antoinette’s mother gave birth almost annually. She had her first child in 1737 at age 20 and her 16th in 1756 at 39. The future queen of France, born Maria Antonia, was child number 15, and arrived the day after the calamitous 1755 Lisbon earthquake, whose tremors were felt across Europe. For her mother, the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, these quakes of body and earth coincided with those of politics. She had just wrangled a new alliance with archenemy France — negotiated secretly through the French king’s mistress — that soon erupted into the Seven Years’ War.
War waging and baby making went together for Maria Theresa from the start, as we learn in a magisterial new biography by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. The only woman to rule in the long history of the Habsburg dynasty, she held sway over Central Europe for 40 eventful years. When at age 23 she inherited the crown — or rather crowns — from her father, Charles VI, she had already birthed three daughters. Her right to rule was immediately contested by rival European powers who, coveting various parts of her patrimony, made it their pretext for war. She gave birth to her fourth child and future heir, Joseph, while fighting their invasion. Political cartoons from the time depict the young queen naked to the waist, surrounded by a circle of virile princes gradually stripping off all her clothes.
In one of those satisfying and not exactly untrue fairy tales of European history, this naive young mother defied the odds of a crumbling army and bankrupt treasury to repel her enemies, quiet the skeptics and defend her realm. Even her husband had counseled compromise and territorial concessions to Frederick II of Prussia, but she stood her ground. “For once the Habsburgs have a man,” Frederick would later remark, “and it is a woman.”
Her prodigious fecundity was neither a decorative bonus nor a “distraction” from political work. On the contrary: The fate of her state depended on it. Her father sired no sons. Until he secured a fragile international agreement that a daughter could succeed him, it seemed as though the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty would die out just as the Spanish one had. A storied royal line hung by a thread, and that thread was her.
The once-majestic empire quickly became a tragicomic history lesson and,
more recently, colorful fodder for some bodice-ripping popular culture.

If the line of succession was precarious, so was the polity. The modern idea of the state as an abstract legal entity distinct from its ruler had not entirely won out, especially in the eponymous Habsburg monarchy, a dynastic state par excellence, in which a common monarch often served as the only connection between distinct imperial holdings such as Hungary and Bohemia. Smooth royal reproduction was synonymous with state continuity, political stability and territorial integrity.
A large brood of children was also shrewd international relations. By marrying offspring into other ruling families, monarchs created diplomatic alliances and crucial flows of information. Maria Theresa excelled here, too, wedding her daughters Carolina to the king of Naples and Amalia to the Duke of Parma even before Maria Antonia fatefully landed the high prize of the Dauphin.
The standard styling of Maria Theresa as mother to her empire thus spills out beyond the bounds of mere metaphor. Long before Hilary Mantel wrote about Kate Middleton that “a royal lady is a royal vagina,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote about Maria Theresa: “The demonically maternal side of her was decisive. She transferred her capacity to animate a body, to bring into the world a being through whose veins flows the sensation of life and unity, onto the part of the world that had been entrusted to her.” Her witchy womanly magic made Austria into an integral living whole, as though it, too, had passed through her birth canal and emerged as a modern state. Her sovereignty, to borrow a phrase from Mantel, was always “graphically gynaecological.”
Fortified by this robust harvest of princes and princesses — and that of her son Leopold, who added another 16 children to the royal granary — the dynasty tramped on ably enough until World War I knocked the Habsburg state off the map. The once-majestic empire quickly became a tragicomic history lesson and, more recently, colorful fodder for some bodice-ripping popular culture.
Meanwhile, the family itself breeds on. Today there are hundreds of Habsburgs scattered about. One of them thinks he can help you fix your marriage, fix your soul, fix your politics and generally find meaning by following the example of his illustrious forebears.
Meet Eduard Habsburg, author of The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times. He is 57 years old and a lifelong James Bond fan. He also likes zombies, sci-fi and Star Wars. He can tell you everything you need to know about Harry Potter in 60 minutes and wrote a book to prove it. He has rosy cheeks, warm eyes and lush hair that would probably flop around à la Hugh Grant if he let it grow a little longer. A pious Catholic, he is delighted with his wife (a baroness), his six children (five girls, one boy) and especially his last name. “It’s 80 percent cool to be a Habsburg, I have to admit it,” he said in an interview last year.
The self-help genre creaks under the strain of his premise:
Forget eat, pray, love — just be royal?
So cool it landed him his current job, serving as Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See, where he has worked to downplay differences over issues like migration. Though he belongs to the so-called Hungarian branch of the family, he grew up in Germany and commands only patchy Hungarian. He has worked mostly as a jobbing writer: television screenplays, a romance novel, a children’s book, a guide to castles. An odd choice, then, for ambassador? As he explained it to The New York Times last year, the Hungarian government did not dress up its motivation, telling him simply: “You’re a Habsburg. You will find respect in the Vatican if you go to Rome, because the Vatican still respects traditional families.” The ancien régime dies hard.

Not hard enough, according to Eduard, who has fashioned himself into a one-man media juggernaut for traditional values. His assessment of what ails us does not extend beyond well-trodden cliché, as old as modernity itself: “We live in a crazy time. Everybody seems to be without roots, floating around alone, helpless, no values are safe anymore. Everything is gone, everything is up in the air, everything is for grabs.” His remedies are perhaps a little less well trodden. To combat our godless anomie, he proposes that we all do things “the Habsburg Way,” a lifestyle option that he has kindly boiled down to seven propositions so we can follow along, despite the unfortunate handicap of our own less-magical surnames. The self-help genre creaks under the strain of his premise: Forget eat, pray, love — just be royal?
According to Eduard, it’s all quite straightforward. The first rule is “Get Married (and Have Lots of Children).” The second comes with an exclamation point that underscores Eduard’s passion: “Be Catholic! (and Practice Your Faith).” Some feel attainable, if vacuous — “Know Who You Are,” commands rule number five — while others seem less well adapted to us plebs. Rule six urges that we “Be Brave in Battle (or Have a Great General),” and rule seven that we “Die Well (and Have a Memorable Funeral).”
Each rule is elaborated through examples plucked from across Habsburg history. His favorite illustrations concern marriages, which he transforms from carefully calculated acts of state into modern love stories. He renders the 15th-century joining of Maximilian and Mary — betrothed by parents scheming for status, married the day after their first meeting and able to communicate only in Latin — as “one of the most glamorous and romantic endeavors in European history.” It was “love at first sight” after Maximilian arrived, gleaming in his golden armor, looking like “an Archangel.” Marital bliss ensued. “When Maximilian was not off fighting the French,” Eduard tells us, “he and Mary would go hunting and make music together. They both loved animals like hunting falcons, and she tried to teach him (rather unsuccessfully) how to ice skate.” They also “read romance novels together (a bit like watching a rom-com on an iMac nowadays).”....

....MUCH MORE

Eduard, on our previous visits, came across as fairly well adjusted:

And In Political Commentary...

...He seems comfortable in his own skin.