The Limits of Loyalty

The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion of state unity and loyalty towards the ruling house. These essays, all original contributions and written by an international group of historians, provide a critical examination of the phenomenon of “dynastic patriotism” and offer a richly nuanced treatment of the multinational empire in its final phase.

The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion of state unity and loyalty towards the ruling house. These essays, all original contributions and written by an international group of historians, provide a critical examination of the phenomenon of “dynastic patriotism” and offer a richly nuanced treatment of the multinational empire in its final phase.

List of Illustrations

Introduction
Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky

Chapter 1. Patriotic and national myths: National consciousness and elementary school education in imperial Austria
Ernst Bruckmüller

Chapter 2. Military veterans and popular patriotism in imperial Austria, 1870—1914
Laurence Cole

Chapter 3. Emperor Joseph II in the Austrian imagination to 1914
Nancy M. Wingfield

Chapter 4. The flyspecks on Palivec’s portrait: Francis Joseph, the symbols of monarchy, and Czech popular loyalty
Hugh LeCaine Agnew

Chapter 5. Celebrating two emperors and a revolution: The public contest to represent the Polish and Ruthenian nations in 1880
Daniel L. Unowsky

Chapter 6. Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian queen: The uses of celebrity monarchism
Alice Freifeld

Chapter 7. State ritual and ritual parody: Croatian student protest and the limits of loyalty at the end of the nineteenth-century
Sarah Kent

Chapter 8. Collective identifications and Austro-Hungarian Jews (1914—1918): The contradictions and travails of Avigdor Hameiri
Alon Rachamimov

Chapter 9. Representing constitutional monarchy in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, Germany, and Austria
Christiane Wolf

Afterword
R.J.W. Evans

Notes on contributors
Select bibliography
Index