Fichtner, Paula Sutter The Habsburgs: Dynasty, Culture and Politics (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 743 Fichtner, Paula Sutter. The Habsburgs: Dynasty, Culture and Politics. Reaktion Books, London, 2014. 349 pp. Map. Illustrations. Political chronology. Geneology. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £30.00. In a distinguished career, Paula Sutter Fichtner, emeritus professor of history at Brooklyn College, has produced over half a dozen monographs and textbooks on the six-hundred-year history of the Habsburg Monarchy, several of them on individual dynasts. The present book is mistitled, in that it certainly does not deal with all the Habsburgs: the history of the Spanish line from the 1550s to 1702 is omitted, presumably for reasons of practicality. Readers hoping for a comprehensive political history even of the Habsburgs’ Central European realms will also be disappointed; despite his importance for the Monarchy’s fate in the sixteenth century, the Emperor Charles V gets particularly short shrift, even though his brother Ferdinand, as archduke of Austria, is covered in detail. This is basically an exercise in cultural history, an examination of how the Habsburgs adapted over the centuries, in terms of how they ‘sold’ themselves to their subjects; the emphasis is not so much on political events, as on the representation of individuals and the imperial family, on their public ‘performance’, and on what reception this dynastic propaganda met with, in so far as that can be gauged. Onthetechnicalsidethebookissomethingofacurate’segg.Thebibliography, disingenuously described as ‘select’, is a missed opportunity: scores of items, cited in the thirty-one pages of endnotes, and including whole books as well as a wealth of journal articles, are not listed at the end. Presumably this was a deliberate choice by the author or her publishers, but it is hard to see the point of such a frustrating apparatus in what is supposed to be a scholarly product. Similarly, the twenty black-and-white illustrations, a key evidential base in a study of cultural representation, are so poorly reproduced as to be virtually useless; the detail in some sixteenth-century woodcuts, for example, would have been more user-friendly in a full- or double-page spread. Finally, the book has been appallingly proof-read. The battle of Mohács was in 1526, not 1525 (p. 80); Ferdinand II, subject of a biography by Fichtner, died in 1637, not 1537 (p. 96); the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, not 1862 (p. 203); the German word ‘Mörder’ means ‘murderer’, not ‘murder’ (p. 252); and the Monarchy was never apostrophized as a ‘Prisoner of Peoples’ (p. 288). In terms of content the picture is more promising. Fichtner gets off to a rather slow start, reducing most of the early medieval period to a cavalcade of facts; but her prose comes alive in dealing with Maximilian I as a Renaissance prince. The author makes the important point (p. 63) that Maximilian was one of the first monarchs to exploit the new print technology for putting out his image and the dynasty’s ‘message’, commissioning over a thousand such SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 744 images and texts commemorating the family’s achievements. The subtle ways in which monarchs like Ferdinand II and Rudolph II continued this agenda is conveyed in abundant detail, even if the occasionally questionable claims for the efficacy of the propaganda is betrayed by the frequency of words like ‘probably’ (e.g., p. 108). Roughly half of the book deals with the period after 1790, and the core argument is well put on page 186: the Habsburgs survived the upheavals of the French revolutionary period, and into the twentieth century, because they ‘credibly positioned themselves as ready and willing to coordinate their interests with public needs’. This might not always have seemed obvious to the Monarchy’s multifarious subjects; but chapter six, on ‘Constructing Commitment’, is interesting on the conscious ways in which Francis Joseph, in particular, after the disastrous early decades of his reign, eventually learned how to ‘market’ the dynasty, whether in public ceremonies or images or books, which consistently humanized the Emperor and his family. There is a persistent lopsidedness to the book, in that Fichtner is clearly more authoritative on the Cisleithanian side of the Monarchy, devoting less attention to the Hungarian side. But the latter half of...