‘La société était au fond légitimiste’: Émigrés, Aristocracy, and the Court at Vienna, 1789-1848

Abstract

The House of Austria had a long tradition dating back at least to the Thirty Years War of accepting foreign nobles, regardless of origin, into its service. During the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, this tradition received renewed impetus. A relatively small, but highly visible, group of émigrés from France, the southern Netherlands, and the left bank of the Rhine gained admission on the basis of birth to Court at Vienna and eventually integrated permanently with the great Hapsburg aristocracy. By the late nineteenth century, the paternal ancestors of no less than ten per cent of Austrian aristocratic families had first settled in the Monarchy after 1789. These émigrés -aristocrats and their immediate descendants came to occupy many prominent positions in the highest echelons at Court, in the diplomatic service, and in the military. Almost alone among western and central European nobilities, the Hapsburg aristocracy had not been directly hit by revolutionary change. Yet its easy absorption of émigrés represented a remarkable social and cultural transformation that was not without political ramifications as well.