Until not so very long ago, the national conflicts in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy prompted historians to focus on nationality as the crucial marker of self-understanding among its populations. The high tide of modern nation-states after 1918 made national borders, national mindsets, and national power structures the framework for ever-greater historical interest in the lineages of national genealogy. In recent decades, scholars have questioned the assumption that modern nations were primordial or natural, even as such entities remain a prime object of attention in a world where nation-states and identity politics help define research agendas and nationalism continues to be a potent force.Footnote ² The lines of inquiry have taken a number of directions. First, historians have linked the pervasiveness of nation and national identity to specific historical circumstances. Perhaps most famously, the political scientist Benedict Anderson's insight regarding “imagined communities” pointed up the contingency of modern nations.Footnote ³ It was increasingly accepted that they are artificial constructs of relatively recent date and firmly rooted in time and place. The neat boundaries that seemed to define them, as on old ethnographic maps, faded as their elusive, conditional, and shifting contours were recognized.

Second, thanks to newer theoretical approaches concerned with the problem of human perception, even the “constructed” nature of the nation as simple extrinsic reality has come to seem doubtful. The sociologist Rogers Brubaker has argued that group formation occurs not on the basis of apparently objective and recognizable criteria, but rather on the basis of how the social environment is perceived. Hence “[e]thnicity, race, and nationhood are fundamentally ways of perceiving, interpreting, and representing the social world. They are not things in the world, but perspectives on the world.”Footnote ⁴ On this view, nations are cultural crutches by which humans try to make sense of the world around them. Third, in part drawing on the insights of such work, several studies have called attention in the specifically central European context to what has been labeled “national indifference.”Footnote ⁵ Even at the time of the fiercest nationality battles in the late Habsburg monarchy, a sizable portion of the population would appear to have been comparatively unmoved by the claims of nation. Explainable by the widespread practice of bi- and multilingualism, as well as other local factors and the logic of specific contexts, this disregard was in many ways no less a product of processes of modernization than nationalism itself. Moreover, the willingness to accommodate or admit national claims often reflected pragmatism rather than preexisting tendency. All of these advances in understanding indicate that nations do not emerge organically, but rather take hold through the efforts of historical protagonists. Pieter Judson has shown vividly how this worked in the creation of so-called national language frontiers.

Finally, scholars have taken up the examination of other basic forms of collective belonging that were earlier obscured by the interest in nation and nationalism. In the Habsburg setting, these have included local and regional patriotisms, imperial-dynastic loyalties, and religious fidelities. The research suggests that all of these ostensibly older phenomena likewise adapted to new conditions and constituted responses to the challenges of modernity. The question was not whether to yield to or deny change, but how to come to terms with it within existing mental frameworks. Territorial identities experienced sundry forms of revival: for example, under the impact of the revolutionary-Napoleonic threat, or during the parliamentary-constitutional era when the reestablishment of the diets in the 1860s injected fresh political substance into the historic lands. With respect to broader Habsburg loyalties as centered on the dynasty and the person of the emperor, the emphasis has been on the ways that the regime tried to cultivate support. These ranged from the staging of imperial spectacles and progresses to the supervision of the content of schoolbooks.Footnote ⁶ The display of traditional forms of dynastic piety in court pageants, such as the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna's inner city and the Maundy Thursday foot washing in the Hofburg in imitation of Christ, highlighted the continuing intersection of one brand of Catholicism and imperial patriotism. Through the work of Laurence Cole, it has indeed become clear that the diverse forms of loyalty—imperial-dynastic, provincial, national, local, and religious—were not inevitably incompatible.Footnote ⁷ They interacted with one another depending on the context. Historic regions, as the Bohemian example would suggest, were in some cases inherent to ideas of nationhood. At least in their earlier forms, even the various nationalisms would appear not to have been mutually exclusive.Footnote ⁸

The older narratives of nation and the history of nobles crossed at one decisive point: the weakening of the nobility in the nineteenth century seemed to follow inexorably from the rise of (initially middle-class) nations. Especially the higher noble reaches, the assemblage of landed, supraregional, and court-oriented aristocratic lineages that for centuries represented a vital binder of the Habsburg monarchy, were thought to exist outside of or on the margins of the several national communities. Under the impact of the nationalization of the rest of society, they mutated into what was conceived of as a largely “supranational” group that became little more than a remnant of a bygone age. This process represented an essential aspect not only of their decline and fall, but also of the monarchy's internal dissolution more generally. On the basis of the recent findings concerning “national indifference,” but also of the recognition that nobles were perhaps less “supranational” than had been thought, the traditional interpretation with regard to the aristocracy now appears doubtful. The story of its relationship to the nation and other forms of commitment in fact appears to bear many similarities to the experiences of other social groups thanks to multilingualism, the attachment to the local and rural world through landowning, but also a supraregional orientation.

The long history of the aristocracy reminds us of the totality of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a territorially bounded entity.Footnote ⁹ This group took shape out of member lineages of the various territorial nobilities as a consequence of the expansion of dynastic-state power beginning in the late sixteenth century and remained a recognizable social formation until 1918. Its experiences suggest that there are useful ways of thinking about the monarchy other than as a “multinational” or “multiethnic” entity, however true this aspect may also have been. In a seminal article published nearly a quarter-century ago, the British historian J. H. Elliott pointed out that the Habsburg agglomeration survived until the end as what he called a “composite monarchy.”Footnote ¹⁰ According to his definition, this type of state constituted a union of distinct territories under the rule of one sovereign by which each territory retained its distinctive laws and customs. Obviously the early modern programs of confessionalization as well as cameral and enlightened reform carried through by the Habsburgs, in addition to historical processes such as the rise of an aristocracy and a fiscal-military state, had created a much closer association of lands than the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composite monarchies with which Elliott was primarily concerned. Nonetheless, the search for a workable balance between centralization and diversity in a state that embraced a wide variety of laws, traditions, languages, and peoples continued to characterize the last century of the Habsburg monarchy's existence. The creation of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia after 1814 as a new constituent part of the monarchy, the Compromise of 1867 that replaced the “Austrian Empire” of 1804 with the dual monarchy of “Austria-Hungary,” the insistent demands by later nineteenth-century Czech nationalists and others for Bohemian autonomy, Aurel Popovici's 1906 plan to federalize the monarchy along ethnic-national lines, and the solution worked out to attach Bosnia-Herzegovina to the monarchy in the twentieth century all arguably constituted facets of the enduring composite history.

A comparative perspective offered by the work of another scholar, David Cannadine, suggests how the Habsburg monarchy even in its late history might also be conceived of as a “social organism” in addition to a multinational or composite one. He too placed the problem of conception at the center of his thinking and drew attention to the fact that “[t]he British empire has been extensively studied as a complex racial hierarchy …; but it has received far less attention as an equally complex social hierarchy, or, indeed, as a social organism, or construct, of any kind.”Footnote ¹¹ He demonstrated that practices of social conceit borrowed from the British domestic sphere lay at the heart of imperial rule across the globe. Similar processes appear to have been at work in Habsburg space. The institutions of monarchy, dynasty, and court all remained at the heart of the system of Habsburg dominion. All were inherently hierarchical in their social implications.

One way in which contemporary notions of hierarchy found expression was through the honors system. While we still know comparatively little about it, there can be no question of its vast expansion into all corners of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the later nineteenth century. Of the time spent at his desk, the emperor-king Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916) devoted a good deal of it to signing off on titles of nobility, orders of knighthood for public service (the Order of Saint Stephen, the Leopold Order, the Order of the Iron Crown, and the Francis Joseph Order), and other awards and distinctions at the sovereign's disposal. Many of these will have been given at the express wish of the persons involved—not only civilian officials and military men of all ranks, but also bankers, businessmen, industrialists, jurists, landowners, journalists, scholars, and others from many walks of life. We can safely assume that these people professed a wide variety of loyalties that extended beyond the imperial-dynastic idea to include provincial, national, and local ones. In asking for or accepting such decorations, they were buying into as much as being co-opted into a modern Habsburg social pyramid based on merit as well as on birth and status. After the turn of the twentieth century, a yearly publication called the High Life Almanac gave the heights of this changing hierarchy novel manifestation by listing thousands of individual names of those persons thought to have constituted it.Footnote ¹² As the listings were arranged according to residence in Vienna and the “Austrian Crownlands,” the vision was one of graded social order in historical-regional arrangement (Bohemia, Styria, Tirol, etc.). It visibly diminished the distance between the old aristocracy at the top and the new elites, while taking no perceptible account of any possible “multinational” quality of the monarchy.

Starting from these assumptions and the findings of the recent scholarship reviewed above, this article offers a case study of an individual aristocrat for whom no known evidence of national allegiance in either the modern or older senses exists. It explores what we might call the coordinates of Habsburg patriotism: diverse, interconnected kinds of commitment that ranged from territorially defined attachments to a confessionally charged form of belonging. Though derived from factors of longer historical standing, such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Bohemian lands, and indeed the Habsburg monarchy itself, these loyalties were thoroughly modern in that they were a response to specific historical conditions tied to larger processes of change such as secularization, democratization, and nationalization. A case study of an individual also offers a way to take into account the problem of perception, which has been at the center of the recent scholarship on nationalism, as well as to examine in depth the connections among various forms of allegiance that may be less apparent when the focus is on only one of them. Here the archival practices of noble lineages that preserved family correspondence as a source of memory offer an important advantage.

The case presented here is of a woman named Countess Rosa Neipperg. While exceedingly well-connected and of privileged background and existence, she remained outside the public spotlight throughout her life. At the time of her birth as a Princess Lobkowicz in 1832 in Vienna, the constituent parts of the comparatively highly integrated composite monarchy were the groups of historic lands with their representative assemblies that ranged from the old-style estates (in most of the Bohemian, Austrian, and Hungarian territories) to the so-called congregations established after 1814 in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. In 1905, the year of her death (likewise in Vienna), linguistic-ethnic political nations as they had emerged to that point achieved recognition as legal entities in part of the western half of Austria-Hungary (Moravia).Footnote ¹³ The period of her entire adult life was characterized by political strife over the constitutional form that the Habsburg composite state would take, as well as by what historians have referred to as the “culture wars” in which two transformative processes—secularization and religious revival—were intertwined.Footnote ¹⁴ After 1859, the struggle of the forces of Italian nationalism with the pope in Rome and the Austrians in the north of the peninsula overlapped with the efforts of a liberal government in Vienna to reduce the influence of the church. For a time, the issue of the Habsburg monarchy's role in Germany and the rise of the Prussian- and Protestant-dominated German Empire added further dimensions to the contention. Rosa Neipperg's responses to the great questions of the day offer exceptional insight into the nature of vital commitments in the classical age of nationalism.

On the paternal side, she descended from the Mĕlník (Melnik) branch of an ancient, broad-acred lineage of the high Bohemian nobility.Footnote ¹⁵ The careers of its nineteenth-century heads exemplified the interlocking unity and diversity of the Habsburg monarchy. Her paternal grandfather, Prince Anton Isidor Lobkowicz (1773–1819), was a patron of territorial patriotic endeavors in the Kingdom of Bohemia.Footnote ¹⁶ Her father, Prince August Longin Lobkowicz (1797–1842), enjoyed a successful career in government service and rose to the dignity of aulic chancellor (Hofkanzler), a position in the central administration that he held at the time of her birth. Her brother, Prince Georg Christian (Jiří Kristián) Lobkowicz (1835–1908), returned to the Bohemian stage, where for decades he headed the so-called Feudal Conservative Party and chaired the diet in Prague.Footnote ¹⁷ Rosa's mother, Anna Bertha née Princess Schwarzenberg (1807–83), was a daughter of Bohemia's most opulent landowner. At the age of twenty, Rosa married Count Erwin Neipperg (1813–97), an Austrian cavalry officer who was a member and later the head of a south German mediatized noble house with comparatively modest landholdings in the Kraichgau in Württemberg. His career culminated in the high rank of cavalry general.

Unlike the army and bureaucracy, which were state organs, the Habsburg aristocracy was an informal social formation that by its history, makeup, and still outstanding position in public life—at court, in the higher reaches of government, and in the diplomatic service—almost exceptionally evinced the monarchy's composite whole.Footnote ¹⁸ This form of cohesion remained apparent in familial relations. Among Rosa Neipperg's own immediate connections, one sister wed a Hungarian magnate (Esterházy), whereas another married into an originally Inner Austrian lineage (Windisch-Graetz) with holdings in Bohemia, Carniola, Hungary, and Württemberg. In recent years, the history of the Habsburg aristocracy has been comparatively underexplored in comparison to its British, German, or Russian counterparts, though its various territorial parts have come off somewhat better.Footnote ¹⁹ The question of the relationship of the titled Bohemian nobility to the “nation” (whether “German” or “Czech”), which is of interest in our case as well, has in particular drawn recurrent historical attention.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, female aristocrats and noblewomen remain an almost total blank in the scholarship, although a few relatively well-known aspects of their history have called for closer inspection of this group.Footnote ²¹ Until the twentieth century, the quality of nobility in the Habsburg monarchy remained unusually closely tied to pedigree not only in the male lines, but in the female ones as well. This was in part a legacy of the society of orders, but also of early modern state-building processes that led to greater differentiation within the nobility.Footnote ²² Similarly, Europe's most prestigious order for noblewomen, the Order of the Star-Cross (Sternkreuzorden), which was in the gift and under the patronage of the house of Austria's ranking female (either the empress or, in her absence, an archduchess), was dominated by the aristocracy.Footnote ²³

The research on nineteenth-century European women more generally, and their relationship to concepts of nation specifically, has largely discredited the earlier notion that women were confined to a domestic and exclusively nonpolitical sphere by revolutionary change. In particular, it has exposed the wide gap between the discourse of exclusion and reality after 1800.Footnote ²⁴ As in the early modern world, courts and salons remained places for the exercise of influence by women, while associations and, later, national movements opened up new avenues of activity. The first women's association in the Habsburg monarchy appeared as early as 1810 with the “Society of Noblewomen for the Promotion of the Good and the Useful” that undertook charitable work in an up-to-date way. As a sign of the times, the Viennese salonnière and Jewish financier's wife Fanny Arnstein was among the founding members, who otherwise included high-born aristocrats.Footnote ²⁵ In Victorian Britain, virtually all aristocratic women are reported to have been engaged to some degree in activities such as “entertaining political connections, exercising patronage, guarding political confidences, and offering advice.” Among this larger group, there was a more select set that contemporaries explicitly viewed as “political hostesses” in a world in which politics and social life in great London townhouses, as well as at country seats at nearer or greater remove from the capital, were inseparable.Footnote ²⁶

Active participation in politics was far from being reserved to noblewomen, as the work of Birgitta Bader-Zaar and others on the Habsburg case has demonstrated.Footnote ²⁷ At the imperial level in the so-called Austrian half of the monarchy women were excluded, to be sure, from the vote. But because constitutional law provided for a measure of provincial and communal autonomy and because property requirements determined who could vote, women enjoyed the franchise in many places, even as it increasingly occasioned controversy among those who regarded it as an anomaly. At the level of communities and municipalities in Bohemia, for instance, some 20 percent of voters in the 1880s were women. At the provincial level, women belonged by right of property qualifications to the curia of great landowners, in which the nobility was strongly represented, and the law explicitly stipulated that voters cast their ballots personally (also by proxy). Where necessary, the government attempted to obtain the votes of the women involved.Footnote ²⁸ On one occasion, Rosa Neipperg assumed that Chancellor Beust's attentiveness to her mother was an attempt to win her over to his political agenda for Bohemia.Footnote ²⁹ That a noblewoman was per se a political being in her exclusive capacity to bear children was another, more traditional aspect that paradoxically acquired fresh meaning under the new constitutional circumstances of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. When she learned of the pregnancy of her sister-in-law, the wife of her brother Georg Christian, Rosa fervently wished for the birth of “a boy in order to strengthen the constitutional opposition.”Footnote ³⁰ Endowed with the family's landholdings, a male would in due time have been able to carry on her brother's political work in part by means of the foothold in the curia of great landowners. At the very time that she penned these lines, the centralizing government in Vienna again lay at loggerheads with the Bohemian federalists.Footnote ³¹ It is against this varied backdrop of continuing discrimination tempered by change and the nobility's historically unique relationship to power that Rosa Neipperg's passion for politics must be regarded.

The world of Rosa Neipperg-Lobkowicz and her husband was not bounded by the territories in which the properties of their respective families lay. On account of their birth and connections as well as their offices and titles at the court of Vienna—she belonged to the Order of the Star-Cross and was a lady-in-waiting (Palastdame), honors reserved to women from the higher reaches of the nobility, while he was a chamberlain, privy councillor, knight of the Golden Fleece, captain of the Trabanten, and member of the House of Lords—they occupied a position near the peak of Habsburg society. Rosa belonged to the old, hard core of the aristocracy on both the maternal and paternal sides, whereas the Neippergs had joined the group only in the eighteenth century, enduringly as it turned out.Footnote ³² Of special importance in his case was the second marriage of his father, Count Adam Albert Neipperg, to the archduchess Marie Louise (1791–1847), a daughter of the emperor Francis I (r. 1792–1835), but also Napoléon's second wife and then widow. Although Erwin himself descended from his father's first marriage, he grew up on account of this unusual connection in close, if ill-defined proximity to the Austrian imperial family. Through their south German holdings, the Neippergs belonged to the nobility of Württemberg; as a mediatized house, they were also part of the wider German noble world, also after the formation of the Second Empire in 1871.

In a purely formal sense, the supraregional orientation is clearly evident in Rosa Neipperg's correspondence. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of letters in her hand have survived. A sample of those she addressed between the 1860s and the early twentieth century, first to her mother and later to her daughter-in-law, Gabrielle Neipperg, née Countess Waldstein (1857–1948), likewise an aristocrat of Bohemian origin, forms the basis of this article. Though written in German, the letters are peppered with words, phrases, and entire passages in French and English that demonstrate her proficiency in those languages as well. During the years under consideration here, she lived first in Mainz (a fortress city of the German Confederation in the Grand Duchy of Hesse), then in Preßburg (Pozsony, Bratislava) in Hungary, followed by Vienna, and later in Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv) in Galicia, all stations in her husband's military career.Footnote ³³ She spent summer vacations at the Neipperg castle at Schwaigern in Württemberg and around the New Year was sometimes to be found visiting her relatives on their estates in Bohemia. After her husband's retirement, and until the time of her death, she lived either in a Viennese apartment or a villa in Salzburg inherited from her mother. As late as 1900, she considered moving from Vienna to Prague, because, as she wrote, she had “the feeling of home there.”Footnote ³⁴ Both on account of her background and her own experience living between Württemberg in the west and Galicia in the east, she habitually traversed spaces that even in her own lifetime were becoming nationally contested. In this respect she must have been typical not only of women of the high nobility, but also of wives of functional elites represented in the Habsburg army and civil administration, as well as many others whose business took them across territorial borders. The correspondence exudes immediacy and spontaneity approaching that of a diary. It is also distinguished by what must be regarded as an unusual level of intellectual curiosity, sparkle, and expressiveness with regard to matters that extended far beyond the confines of everyday life. Rosa took an avid interest in the doings of high society to which she herself belonged; in political developments at the locus of power in Vienna, but also in the various Crownlands, especially Bohemia, as well as further afield in Germany; in diplomatic affairs and complications on the international stage; and in current events in both the broader European and non-European worlds. Her oft-expressed irritation at German intervention in Austro-Hungarian internal affairs, for example, helps explain her decided sympathy for the Boxers in China in 1900:

She appears to have genuinely opposed colonialism and its excrescences quite apart from any possible analogy to events closer to home and, indeed, in spite of questions of family loyalty. In connection with a notorious incident in German Southwest Africa, in which a Prince Arenberg, a kinsman, was accused of torturing a local person to death, she responded to an apparent reproach by her daughter-in-law as follows: “And you find that I should not take the side of the ‘natives.’ The whites are always and everywhere cruel.”Footnote ³⁶ She clearly saw the horror of the specific case as exemplary of European expansion overseas generally.

Apparent throughout her writings over the decades was an interaction between two pronounced strands of political fidelity that were territorially based. We detect a highly developed awareness, on the one hand, as a patriot of the Habsburg monarchy and, on the other, as a loyalist of the historic Kingdom of Bohemia. Unlike the linguistic boundaries invented by nineteenth-century nationalists, the borders of these entities were longstanding, if hardly immutable, as the lost wars of the 1850s and 1860s were to show. There is no evidence that she construed either of these patriotisms in an exclusively or even primarily linguistic- or ethnic-cultural manner. Most especially she did not regard the Austrian state as “German” in the way that corresponded to the so-called Gesamtstaatsidee invented by Austrian liberals during her own lifetime in part to give ideological underpinning to their program of German-inspired centralization.Footnote ³⁷ She also did not see these patriotisms as contradictory. Indeed they were complementary much in the way that Cicero defined the “patria civitatis” or “patria communis” and the “patria naturae” or “patria propria” in his dialogue On the Laws.Footnote ³⁸ For Rosa Neipperg, “the Bohemian lords,” as she called them, were “the good Austrian patriots” in contrast to the Viennese liberals or the Hungarians.Footnote ³⁹ The Bohemian orientation was firmly embedded in the broader Habsburg one, and she appears never to have conceived of the former outside of the latter.

If we accept the idea that for “a given territory to become an important aspect of identity, it requires a ‘complex group of other elements' that interact with the territory,” then the Habsburg ruling house was another key component of Rosa Neipperg's broader imperial patriotism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Her writings additionally make clear that the emotional state that the specifically monarchical aspect could induce was anything but a bloodless counterpoint to the emotions aroused by the nation, as still tends to be supposed when the two are juxtaposed by historians. In a letter that she penned in 1867, soon after attending the royal Hungarian coronation, she gave vent to her worries about the empire's unity, but also to her Habsburg patriotism. The event in Buda sealed the Compromise between the emperor-king and Hungary, and thus the autonomy conceded to the latter:

Her lack of “enthusiasm” for Francis Joseph remained a constant of her thinking over time. To her he was a weak figure who failed to defend the interests of his inheritance energetically enough, and notably also failed to keep his promise to be crowned king of Bohemia, a ceremony that she clearly regarded as more compatible with the continuing unity of the composite monarchy than the Hungarian one. Even near the end of her life, she did not share what by then was the general veneration of the emperor.Footnote ⁴² The available sources unfortunately give no insight into the way Rosa had originally internalized her dynastic and monarchical consciousness, though its roots clearly lay in her early years and assuredly private education.

Her imperial patriotism was stimulated less by the person of the ruler—as in the Caesarism of Napoléon III or in the twentieth-century cults of the “leader”—than by the dynasty itself as the venerable embodiment of the monarchy's impartibility. In contrast to many other imperial patriots across the empire, she was personally well-acquainted with members of the dynasty. As a member of court society, she cultivated relations with the ruling family during winter social seasons spent in Vienna. Here too, idea and reality diverged at times, while “attendance on archdukes” bored her more often than not.Footnote ⁴³ An invitation to dine at the archduke Ludwig Viktor's counted as “one of [her] most unwelcome blows of fate.”Footnote ⁴⁴ She compensated for the disappointment at the personal level by a keen interest in dynastic history. A passionate reader, she consumed with a critical eye the works of leading scholars including Alfred von Arneth (1819–97) and Adam Wolf (1822–83), who were producing pioneering biographies of Austrian rulers and bringing out editions of imperial correspondence.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her attachment to the Habsburgs was especially evident in an unmistakable reverence for the memory of the empress Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80). The person of the empress, to whom historians were then assigning a key role in the development of the modern Habsburg-Austrian state that she has retained to the present day, had for Rosa not yet retreated far enough into the past to be properly emulated in a theater performance: “For us she is not yet a historical personage.”Footnote ⁴⁶

But it was the Habsburg monarchy in the constellation of European great powers that most often set her imperial patriotism on fire. It was a consciousness that went beyond the purely dynastic or monarchical idea and derived from a commitment to the longstanding, territorially defined Habsburg state. No evidence, moreover, indicates that she thought of herself as belonging only to an Austrian “half” of that state after 1867. External threats to the security and integrity of the monarchy called forth the most fervent expressions of partisanship, even jingoism, from her. Defeat in the Austro-Prussian War (1866) inflamed her outrage at the memory of Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa's nemesis, whom Rosa labeled that “infamous guy.”Footnote ⁴⁷ After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), she expressed her “desperation” that her husband would not allow her to rush from Lemberg to southern Germany to protect the family properties in the event that the theater of war moved into the area. In the same letter, she labeled the Prussian victories an “appalling danger for Austria.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Around the same time, she hoped that the monarchy's battlefield enemies of the previous decade, France and Prussia, would batter each other to death (totschlagen).Footnote ⁴⁹ As Habsburg international isolation sharpened as a consequence of the hostilities, she desired to fight “with passion simultaneously against Turin, Berlin, and [St.] Petersburg.”Footnote ⁵⁰ A few years earlier, she had bristled at the famous speech by the emperor Napoléon III in which he had spoken of Austria as a European necessity: “Just because this guy thinks that we are necessary or useful to him we are allowed to exist. In the end there's something to it, but I have not felt so much rage and shame since last summer [during the Austro-Prussian War].”Footnote ⁵¹

The transformation of Germany at Habsburg expense under the auspices of Prussia gradually reconciled her somewhat to France, the power that had been behind Austria's expulsion from Italy. Despite her mother tongue, the process of German unification that had been accompanied by the bitter Habsburg defeat on the Bohemian battleground of Königgrätz (1866) evoked in Rosa a lasting hatred of Prussia that was all the more rancorous given that earlier in her life she had expressed pro-Prussian sympathies, ones that had doubtlessly been grounded in notions of conservative solidarity current since the Napoleonic era.Footnote ⁵² She despised the idea of the German nation-state thus created—and its local exponents such as the south German principalities and their rulers. In 1870, she reported that she was “frantically” happy when Bavarian troops suffered setbacks on the battlefields of France, whereas she was “inconsolable” when they were victorious.Footnote ⁵³ From distant Lemberg, she was irritated by the “stupid ‘German’ intoxication” that she suspected of the people on the Neipperg estates in Württemberg.Footnote ⁵⁴ Among the mediatized noble houses caught between the Austrians and Prussians in 1866, the Neippergs would become notorious for their long and bitter rejection of the new German Empire. Although a “württembergische Standesherrin,” as she referred to herself around this time with a bit of tongue in cheek, and thus a German noblewoman, Rosa had already determined even before the imperial proclamation at Versailles that “Emperor William of Germany … will not have a good subject in me, that I know. And in my descendants hopefully also not; in any case I'll do what I can to infuse loathing and contempt into them for everything called Prussia and Hohenzollern.”Footnote ⁵⁵

A motif in her correspondence until her death, her anti-German sentiment had another source as well: the liberal political ascendency of the 1860s and 1870s. Under the double impact of German unification and the liberal push to secularize certain areas of public life, her increasingly politicized Catholicism constituted yet another fundamental aspect of her frame of reference. In her view, the German cause came down on the wrong side on both of these issues. The resulting political anxiety vented itself in the anti-Judaism typical of the ever more polarized atmosphere, even as it was rooted in traditions of the church. For her, the Jews were the “main supporters” of the liberal government, and at the height of her worries about liberal reform she gave fierce expression to anti-Jewish feelings.Footnote ⁵⁶ Closely associated with the neoabsolutist regime thanks to the Concordat of 1855, which had conceded it wide-ranging freedom, the Catholic Church became the prime legislative target of the liberals once they were finally able to assume power in 1867.Footnote ⁵⁷ Their policies deeply offended her beliefs in a way that surely also affronted her idea of what it meant to be a Habsburg patriot, given the historic identification of the imperial body politic with the Catholic mission. Even before the signature of the Concordat, Francis Joseph renewed the partnership of church and dynasty as a source of political legitimacy by the revival of older practices of pietas austriaca following the revolutionary break of 1848.Footnote ⁵⁸ He would maintain them throughout his reign and in one notorious case—the indictment and trial of the bishop of Linz for preaching resistance to liberal legislation—distance himself publicly from the very liberals who formed his government.

Through her own membership in the originally baroque-Catholic Order of the Star-Cross, dedicated since the seventeenth century to the veneration of the Cross, Rosa herself stood in the tradition of pietas austriaca. She joined the order as young women in the 1850s soon after the signature of the Concordat.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years later, she also became a dame du palais, as she put it. While living in Vienna after her husband's retirement from active duty, she took official part in both capacities in the court rituals that regularly punctuated Francis Joseph's reign. In 1880, the grand mistress of the empress' household recruited her for service during Holy Week, when she was assigned as one of the “extra ladies-in-waiting” to the ceremonies of the foot-washing and resurrection.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a member of the Star-Cross, she volunteered in March 1888 for early morning prayer service in the Hofburg chapel during the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament because she found it “seemly for ladies to be present also at this hour [between seven and eight a.m.] and [it is] always difficult to find ones that are prepared” to be so.Footnote ⁶¹ As captain of the Trabanten, her husband attended events on the court's annual Catholic calendar. In 1885, she found that he had performed “brilliantly” during Holy Week.Footnote ⁶²

While rooted in the baroque-imperial court culture revived under Francis Joseph, Rosa's brand of Catholicism also reflected the popular religious renewal that clashed with the forces of secularization across nineteenth-century central Europe. No devotee, she avoided the more flamboyant displays of the new piety and found them distasteful in others.Footnote ⁶³ But the modern spiritual turn was otherwise evident. She read saints' lives and cultivated the Marian devotion typical of the Catholicism of the day; the papal definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as church doctrine in 1854 and the apparitions of the Virgin throughout Europe were its most famous expressions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most notably, she paid out of her own resources for the construction of a chapel dedicated to the Mother of God at the Neipperg castle in Schwaigern, whose population was largely Protestant. Unlike most such edifices, which were built in a Gothic or Romanesque style meant to conjure up the sanctity of medieval Christendom, her chapel received a Renaissance facade. The cornerstone was laid in 1869, and it was dedicated two years later.Footnote ⁶⁵ In connection with this latter event, we also find hints of ultramontane sympathies, which, in the context of the larger “culture wars,” were one response to “aggressive intervention by the state.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Rosa unsuccessfully objected to the inclusion of the local bishop (of Rottenburg) in the ceremony on the basis of his opposition to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Only a few years earlier, the incumbent pope, Pius IX (r. 1846–78), had issued the Syllabus of Errors (1864) that condemned liberalism and other indices of modernity. From what we know of Rosa's views, this step will have found her approbation, most especially once the government in Vienna had begun to reform the school and marriage laws.

We should take care not to ascribe to Rosa a too tidy, reactionary version of Catholicism. Just as the construction of the chapel in Schwaigern was about to get under way, she is known to have been “feasting” (schwelgen) on the writings of Henri Lacordaire, a liberal French priest who had supported the Revolution of 1848.Footnote ⁶⁷ Her independence of mind was also apparent in her criticism of Das Vaterland, Vienna's foremost Catholic-conservative daily that was run with the support of leading Bohemian nobles. On one occasion she found its “ferocious and common tone entirely unworthy of the cause that it wants to defend.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Her letters reveal her to have been a reader of the paper for much of its history. The Kulturkampf launched by Bismarck's government beginning in 1871 intensified the incongruity she felt between her confession and the new German order.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, the outrage inspired in her by that state-sponsored campaign fused faith to politics in a way that the comparatively milder measures in Austria, where most liberals remained confessing Catholics, had not done: “Since I have learned that Catholicism is the only thing that Bismarck fears, I feel more Catholic than ever and would like to keep on ‘doing’ Catholicism, if only to irritate him.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Although Rosa had lived in Mainz for a number of years, where Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–77), a conservative Catholic social reformer, headed the local see, he tellingly became “my bishop” and a “knightly warrior and holy prince of the Church” only after he had become a conspicuous opponent of Bismarck.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1871, she had hoped that he rather than the local bishop would dedicate the new chapel in Schwaigern.

The lively interplay among politics, patriotism, and religion also characterized Rosa's profound attachment to Bohemia, her ancestral home. While Catholicism linked her Bohemian and Habsburg-Austrian loyalties, her territorial patriotism operated as another alternative to a “German” compass without being “Czech.” Following the introduction of parliamentary government in Austria in 1861, heated debates had erupted over the monarchy's future structure. The German-minded liberals advocated a centrally governed polity, whereas nationalists and representatives of the historic territories of varying political complexion, who were often noble, supported a federal solution that would give more power to the monarchy's composite units. This clash constituted yet another variation—apparent in the disputes over secularizing measures in both Austria and Germany—on the problem of the extent of central state penetration in Crownland affairs. In Bohemia, this political constellation produced an uneasy alliance between the patriotic nobility and Czech nationalists (later known as the “Old Czechs”). In spite of their often divergent views and interests, both groups appealed to what they construed as the historic “constitution” of the Bohemian lands and their indivisibility, one example of how territory remained a crucial factor for nationalists.

The Bohemian allegiance of the nobility drew on two sources. First there was the old idea of territorial autonomy and the role played by the traditional “noble nation” in running Crownland affairs. Here it helps to recall that before 1848, the Bohemian diet, which the nobility had overwhelming dominated after Joseph II's monastic dissolutions, had enjoyed an unbroken existence for at least two centuries.Footnote ⁷² Second, nineteenth-century territorial patriotism also developed out of lively impulses traceable to late Enlightenment notions of progress and reform increasingly evident in the associational life that drew participants from many backgrounds, as well as out of the political revival of the 1860s. After 1861, the curial suffrage that underlay the new parliamentary system guaranteed large landowners, particularly the holders of entails and thus a significant part of the former estates, a privileged position in the provincial diet. In the resulting political arrangement, the Bohemian large landowners split into two major factions that reflected the broader divide between centralists and federalists: the so-called Constitutional Loyalists (Verfassungstreuer Großgrundbesitz) who supported the idea of a strong central state and were disposed to the liberal- and German-minded parties, and the so-called Feudal Conservatives (Feudaler Großgrundbesitz) who favored autonomy for the Crownlands and stood with the Czech nationalists.Footnote ⁷³ Less explored in the literature has been the confessional angle of this political division. Marking their opposition to the liberals' centralizing and anticlerical views, the conservatives made “federalism an integral part of Catholic politics” across the monarchy, including Bohemia.Footnote ⁷⁴ The decisive contribution of Bohemian aristocrats to the Catholic newspaper Das Vaterland was one expression of this inclination; Georg Christian Lobkowicz's foundation of a specifically Catholic political association was another.Footnote ⁷⁵

If Rosa had been so stirred by the spectacle of the Hungarian coronation, one can only speculate on how she would have reacted had Francis Joseph realized his repeated promise to be crowned king of Bohemia.Footnote ⁷⁶ She referred to Bohemia as her “core fatherland” (engeres Vaterland) or more affectionately as her “cara patria” and passionately championed the Feudal Conservative commitment to restore the kingdom's supposed historic rights and to obtain a special status for it within a looser federalized imperial structure that took greater account of the composite character of the Habsburg heritage.Footnote ⁷⁷ The strong Bohemian sympathies were an ancestral inheritance that her brother Georg Christian cultivated as an active politician at the head of the Feudal Conservatives in Prague. Rosa's own political enthusiasm reflected more than just family tradition. As representatives of the old ruling stratum themselves, aristocratic women had a longstanding proximity to political power. Thanks to their birth, position, and connections, they had often exercised influence or even political rights in the early modern world.Footnote ⁷⁸ This continued to be the case under the changed circumstances of the nineteenth century as large numbers of women gained the right to vote by proxy in communal and provincial elections. What Rosa Neipperg might have thought of this particular aspect of democratization is unclear, but her British-flavored acceptance of the essentials of parliamentary government in the 1860s and 1870s cannot be doubted. Using the English phrase in her letter, she eagerly inquired after the success of her brother's “maiden speech” in the Bohemian diet and expressed the hope that his activity there would be fruitful.Footnote ⁷⁹

Despite the political relationship of the Feudal Conservatives to Czech nationalists, there is no indication that Rosa was Czech nationalist in outlook, notwithstanding her Czech-language aptitudes and a one-off remark about “legitimate nationality aspirations” that was almost certainly in frustrated reference to the failure of a Bohemian compromise.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whether her linguistic skills were as good as her brother's is unclear; Czech words and phrases are much less common in her letters than French or English ones. This may, however, have had to do rather more with the abilities of her mother or daughter-in-law than her own. Yet in one letter she recorded a short dialogue in the original Czech in which she herself had been involved.Footnote ⁸¹ She also used the Czech name “Sváty Jan” for the Bohemian national saint, John of Nepomuk, a relic of whom she sought from her uncle, Cardinal Schwarzenberg, for the chapel at Schwaigern.Footnote ⁸² That this prince of the Church had in 1861 submitted a motion in the Bohemian diet on behalf of staging the Bohemian coronation manifested the link between religion and territorial patriotism, both of which in turn constituted elements of a broader Habsburg loyalty. The demand that Francis Joseph undergo the ceremony explicitly acknowledged that it (indeed the kingdom itself) was embedded in the broader composite, though indissoluble monarchy provided for by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.Footnote ⁸³

Similarly, Rosa used a slightly mocking tone to express her conviction that “the Germanic children” of her daughter-in-law, who were growing up in Württemberg, would not understand a Czech caption on a postcard that she had sent them from Bohemia.Footnote ⁸⁴ The sentiment behind this was assuredly Bohemian in a patriotic sense rather than Czech in a nationalist sense. After all, Czech was a historic idiom of the kingdom. At least up to the later years of the personal rule of Joseph II (1780–90), the diet's solemn business had been conducted in Czech as well as German.Footnote ⁸⁵ Along the same lines, she wished on another occasion for a more “Bohemian-German” lingual environment for those same grandchildren than what she labeled the purely “German” one in which they were growing up.Footnote ⁸⁶ This did not imply any sympathy for Bohemian-German national demands, traces of which are entirely absent from the correspondence examined. If anything, affection for things Czech that stopped short of nationalism shimmers through her writings. At the same time, the increasingly anticlerical edge of Czech nationalism, with its reverence for Jan Hus and the Bohemian Brethren, but also its egalitarianism will help explain the reserve that contrasted to the attitude evinced by her brother.

Georg Christian Lobkowicz spoke fluent Czech and publicly supported certain Czech-nationalist claims.Footnote ⁸⁷ Because of his active participation in politics, he was necessarily closer to nationalism—in particular that of the Old Czechs—than she. More than two decades ago, the scholar Solomon Wank noted that, precisely on account of such activity, noble politicians were less territorially patriotic or “supranational” than has generally been assumed. If for no other reason, their political engagement aimed at defending their interests and those of their peers, and both cooperation with nationalists and exploitation of nationalism served that purpose.Footnote ⁸⁸ With the radicalization of the national movement in the late nineteenth century, as the more socially extreme Young Czechs displaced the Old Czechs, however, pressure on the territorially minded nobility increased, while its room for political maneuver decreased. Lobkowicz experienced this too.Footnote ⁸⁹ As time passed, a few males of the high nobility came to see the world from an emphatically nationalist lookout (whether “Czech” or “German”). The Czech nationalists among them included Prince Rudolf Thurn und Taxis (1833–1904), Count Wenzel Kaunitz (Václav Kounic) (1848–1913), and Count Vladimír Lažanský (1857–1925).Footnote ⁹⁰ At present, only one female bearer of an aristocratic name—a Countess Kaunitz (mother of the above-mentioned Václav)—appears to fall into the same category.Footnote ⁹¹

Did the lack of a national commitment combined with the thick skein of imperial, territorial, religious, and social loyalties make Rosa's self-understanding “supranational?” The word itself implies the existence of one or more nations “above” whom the aristocracy allegedly hovered. But this supposition now seems improbable given the findings on the contingent nature of nations and the increasing amount of evidence concerning the existence of “national indifference” into the twentieth century. These findings have special relevance for rural areas, where most of the population still lived and the landed nobility also had its center of interest. Neither the social contours nor the rhetoric of national activists fit into the realities of life in the countryside, noble or otherwise.Footnote ⁹² Only with the so-called Moravian Compromise of 1905 did Austrian law provide for an explicitly “multinational” (as opposed to nonnational) political arena through the creation of national voting cadastres. Large landowners and leading ecclesiastical figures, however, did not belong to these new categorical entities given that they were supposed to stand “outside and above the national camps, as powerful guardians of more-than-national interests.”Footnote ⁹³ Thus only in the year of Rosa Neipperg's death can the idea of “supranational” nobility be said to have had some basis in political reality. Its application even to that time smacks of anachronism and of nationalist narratives that have shut out those people who rejected the national perspectives increasingly demanded of them.

If Rosa Neipperg was nationally indifferent, she was certainly aware of cultural-linguistic differences. During her time in Lemberg, she occasionally used the derogatory word “Polack” to describe both Galician nobles and other local people.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet she perceived her social environment more as a “federally organized hierarchy” than as an entity vertically divided by nation.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was apparent not only with respect to her native Bohemia, but also during her stay beginning in 1869 in Galicia, where her husband had become commanding general. In the following years, she entertained two circles that appear to have been socially distinct rather than nationally divided. To one kind of soirée she invited the local landed and pedigreed aristocracy, to the other, imperial officials to whom she referred as the “Ärarischen” (literally, those paid out of the imperial treasury, or the aerarium in Latin).Footnote ⁹⁶ As the wife of an army officer, she herself belonged in a manner of speaking to the latter, but her letters clearly show that her self-understanding corresponded to the former. The names of Galicia's leading noble families appear time and again in the society gossip that she passed along, often in the original French, to her mother, who had herself lived in Lemberg decades earlier as the governor's wife. Rosa's reports also touched on familial and other connections of local nobles to lineages elsewhere in the Habsburg monarchy.Footnote ⁹⁷ This seldom occurred in the case of the “Ärarischen” and then sometimes in an ironic tone. The distinction that she made between the two groups is apparent in a letter that she wrote after attending a children's ball at the house of the vice-president of the provincial government in Lemberg, Baron Possinger:

Here the question of social distinction trumped the common mother tongue. Characteristic for the importance she attached to territorial sociopolitical structures was an incident at a dinner party in her own house attended by the cream of local officialdom. She gave place of honor to Prince Sapieha, who as Galician Landmarschall was head of the nobility, and in so doing put the imperial governor, Count Gołuchowski, in a visibly ill humor that lasted the whole meal. Though her husband reproached her afterward, she remained skeptical and wanted to know what her mother thought: “I should really like to know if it is different elsewhere. In Prague for example, would one give one's arm to [Count] Chotek as governor and not to Gox [the nickname of her brother Georg Christian], who is prince and Landmarschall?”Footnote ⁹⁹ The importance of the territories to her perspective manifested itself in other ways too. Only ten days before the dinner party, she had attended for reasons of her own interest an assembly of the Galician diet, whose president was Sapieha. This was perhaps unusual only because she was a relative outsider. In the early constitutional period, many Habsburg noblewomen are known to have followed “the proceedings of the diet and the central parliament from the visitor's gallery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the same letter in which she described her time at the Galician diet, Rosa also discoursed on “Bohemian affairs” as well as on events in the Lower Austrian diet about which she was informed.Footnote ¹⁰¹ She ardently read newspapers and journals. Apart from Das Vaterland, these included the liberal Prague daily Bohemia and the Parisian Revue des deux Mondes.Footnote ¹⁰²

Social hierarchy, territory, and the Catholic faith defined Rosa Neipperg-Lobkowicz's perspective on the world in essential ways. These frameworks in turn ensued from lines of development in Habsburg history that were far from exhausted during her lifetime. National differences, contrarily, played a distinctly subordinate role in her perception of reality. She rejected national claims when they appeared to be a threat to the unity of the Habsburg state. Because she feared the corrosion of the army, one of its bulwarks, she condemned as a “nationality swindle” the use of national criteria in the appointment of its officers.Footnote ¹⁰³ Here she was one with her husband, who as an imperial military man had been involved “for the good cause” in a sensational conflict with soldiers of the Hungarian Honvéd and been transferred for his trouble.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ That the transfer was to Vienna, the most desirable of stations, she rightly interpreted as a kind of vindication. She was never able to shake off her fears that Francis Joseph would not be able to see through Hungarian national-constitutional machinations. These fears were fed by her sister, Countess Polyxena Esterházy (1830–1913), who in the mid 1890s complained about what she saw as the nationalist hijacking of the Hungarian millennium celebrations. The “nationality swindle,” a phrase that seems to have come easily to her as well, threatened to swamp what was “really beautiful [and] holy” about the anniversary of the founding of the kingdom by King Saint Stephen.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ With the onset of a crisis after the turn of the century over the language of command in the common army, Rosa was again overcome by anxiety that Budapest would be able to manipulate the emperor in way that was the “most pernicious for the entire monarchy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Over time, religion and German forms of nationalism remained as incompatible in Rosa's worldview as religion and Hungarian nationalism in that of her sister. The ways in which the claims of nation and religion were being reconciled in this period were thus not reflected in the sisters' writings.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the 1860s and 1870s, German nationalism had been associated for Rosa with the anticlerical politics of the liberals and the unification of Germany under Prussian-Protestant auspices. The later, increasingly authoritarian and mass-popular aspects of German nationalism she found no more appealing. In the 1880s, she condemned Bismarck's oppression of the Poles in East and West Prussia, with its obvious confessional overtones, as “infamous, stupid, and tyrannical.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ After the turn of the century, she was not sure whether she “should laugh or be irritated” when she learned that the heavily noble Teutonic Order, a prestigious Catholic institution based in Austria, had participated in a nationally charged commemoration staged by the Wilhelmine Kaiserreich at Marienburg (today Malbork in Poland).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

At the same time, Rosa's politics evolved in other ways in response to the events of the day. Her sympathy for the Catholic Center Party, the main vehicle of political Catholicism in Germany, cannot be reduced to the fact that her son, Reinhard Neipperg (1856–1919), was elected in 1881 to the Reichstag as its representative from Württemberg. Indeed, the causal relationship was assuredly the reverse: his willingness to enter parliament at a young age and his Catholic and fiercely anti-Reich politics are hardly explicable without reference to his mother.Footnote ¹¹⁰ He had been a youth at the time of the wars of unification that had so aroused her feelings between 1866 and 1871. On her part, she acknowledged her envy that her daughter-in-law was able to dine with Ludwig Windthorst (1812–91), a party leader and prominent Bismarck opponent, and was eager to get to know Baron Franckenstein, a Bavarian Center politician who had famously dealt Bismarck a defeat in the question of Reich finances.Footnote ¹¹¹ To enter Catholic politics, the young Reinhard Neipperg had been compelled to shift his seat to Württemberg, where the family estates were located. Despite his grand Bohemian connections and the long residence of his family in Austria, he lacked the landed prerequisites for a political career there in keeping with his social station. Although the Center Party offered a common political home to Catholics across Germany, a comparable formation was lacking in the Habsburg monarchy, where political Catholicism with its initially heavily rural character was divided along territorial lines. By becoming a parliamentarian in Berlin, however, Reinhard Neipperg implicitly accepted the German political framework as it had come to exist after 1871. Following the death of his mother, he would pursue an open policy of reconciliation with the Wilhelmine regime.Footnote ¹¹²

With the rise of Christian Socialism beginning in the late 1880s, a mass political movement based on the petite bourgeoisie arose that was at first a largely Viennese and Lower Austrian phenomenon. No evidence has come to light to suggest that Rosa Neipperg, who was living in Vienna at the time, felt an affinity to the new party as she did to the German Center. To the contrary: what the historian John Boyer has referred to as the movement's “antiepiscopal and anticonservative rhetoric” initially canceled out, if the views of her sister, Polyxena Esterházy, are indicative, whatever sympathy she might have had for it on account of its antiliberal and anti-Semitic stance.Footnote ¹¹³ Though a Carmelite nun, Polyxena feared that the party's landslide victory of September 1895 would be “extremely dangerous” given the social stratum whence the Christian Socials drew key support. More than two years later, after the leading Christian Socialist politician, Karl Lueger, had assumed the mayor's office (1897), her suspicions that the party was “revolutionary” had still not been allayed.Footnote ¹¹⁴

On its way to power, the party flouted the Habsburg powers that be, not only the emperor but also the bishops, even as it garnered the Roman curia's support.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Thereafter, the relationship to the imperial authorities began to improve. In 1898, the Christian Socials positioned themselves as a champion of the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Francis Joseph's accession. This was, of course, more than newfound devotion to the aging monarch: it was a response to the anti-Habsburg, German-nationalist Los von Rom movement that constituted a rival political threat.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this way, the dynasty and the Christian Socials found common Catholic political ground that reduced whatever conflicting loyalties those of ultramontane tendency may have felt. Rosa Neipperg's hesitations about a pilgrimage to Rome in the jubilee year 1900 were at all events not connected to the papal refusal to condemn the Christian Socials, but rather to fears that the city had been “desecrated” under the rule of the Italian national state. Her audience with Pope Leo XIII proved an “elating and elevating” experience that she had “no longer expected on this side of the grave.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Whether her willingness in the same year to attribute an improvement in the administration of Vienna—cleaner streets after heavy snowfalls—to Lueger personally indicated that her views of Christian Socialism were changing is unclear. The somewhat defensive tone of the remark (“c'est une justice à rendre à Lueger”)Footnote ¹¹⁸ would suggest that it was, and certainly reflected the popularity that Lueger came to enjoy on the basis of his modernization program. Perhaps near the end of her life, Rosa's political views were arriving, if hesitantly, in the twentieth century.

Rosa Neipperg's relationship to national claims and frames of reference was only one of the varieties apparent among Habsburg aristocrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the “national indifference” apparent in her case to national sentiment that stopped short of demands for national self-determination, to outright nationalism. The desire to preserve the traditional noble claim to rule seems to have been the thread that connected all of these positions. Increasingly, nationalism was becoming a common language of politics, and the nobility, we should not forget, viewed itself as the traditional political nation. For that reason, the nobility's relationship to modern forms of the nation often appeared contradictory or paradoxical. To the regret of his mother, a countess from an old Hungarian family, Prince Ludwig Windisch-Graetz, who descended from a supraregional house of the high nobility, moved in nationalist circles in Budapest politics. Later he would be caricatured as the tellingly named “Prince Wulffenstein” whose “Hungarian blood” was often brought to “boil” by the politics of the Viennese government.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Rosa Neipperg's brother, Georg Christian Lobkowicz, supported Czech nationalist positions even as this Catholic grandee assuredly did not perceive the world in exclusively or even primarily Czech nationalist terms. On the other side of the Bohemian political divide was Count Oswald Thun-Hohenstein-Salm-Reifferscheidt (1849–1913), a leader of the party of Constitutionally Loyal great landowners, who made no secret of his German centralizing sentiment. But it was no more his goal to join the German-speaking areas of the Habsburg monarchy to the new German Empire than it was Lobkowicz's to create a Czech national state: “Our [German] nationality,” wrote Thun, “[is] definitely limited by our [Habsburg-imperial] patriotism.”Footnote ¹²⁰ With Count Vladimír Lažanský, finally, we have the case of a patriotic Czech noble who never mastered the Czech language, but who forsook the Habsburg cause before it was lost.Footnote ¹²¹

Lažanský was unusual. There is scant indication that aristocrats such as Ludwig Windisch-Graetz, Georg Christian Lobkowicz, and Oswald Thun-Hohenstein-Salm-Reifferscheidt were unable to reconcile whatever national claims they acknowledged to loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy. At bottom, the question concerned the form that the Habsburg monarchy was supposed to take—in particular the degree of centralization—and not whether it was to exist. By virtue of its territorial reality, it was the source of a collective consciousness for all of them. In this they will not have differed significantly from many others among the wider population. It would be the hardship and privation of World War I that would undermine the regime, open the way for new nation-states, and destroy the territorially bounded polity that was the prerequisite for the kind of Habsburg-imperial patriotism that Rosa Neipperg-Lobkowicz professed. That patriotism was composed in her case of a web of densely interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements—dynastic, hierarchical, territorial, local, and religious—that only at the analytical level can be made to appear discrete. The mixture and indeed the elements themselves will have been different in the case of other Habsburg-imperial patriots. The perspectives on the world that these vantage points offered in turn infused her imperial patriotism with sustained vitality that was more than just the negation of nationalist imperatives.