Fostering Kaisertreue in the Austrian Empire: Literature on the Occasion of the Marriage of Emperor Francis Josef (1854)

Abstract

This article explores poems devoted to the dynastic festivities of the ruling House of Habsburg as one of the multiple instruments of fostering loyalty and dynastic patriotism, primarily in in-school youth who were regarded as future citizens of the Austrian Empire. The concepts of dynastic patriotism, Kaisertreue (literally, faithfulness to the emperor), Huldigungsschriften (literally, homage writings), the Habsburg myth, pietas Austriaca, and Habsburg propaganda provide the theoretical and methodological basis of the research. The author refers to three poems devoted to the wedding festivities of Emperor Francis Joseph and Elizabeth of Bavaria in 1854. Two of them — one of which is written in Hungarian and the other in German — are examples of the panegyric ode and were authored by schoolteachers. The third one is a moral poem, easy to understand, with a heartwarming storyline. All the three poems in question are quite ordinary in terms of literary and artistic merit. Their choice is motivated by the author’s desire to demonstrate through those Huldigungsschriften her hypothesis that the Habsburg myth which emphasised the virtues and all-encompassing benevolence of the Habsburg rulers was being transmitted in various formats and different languages to in-school youth in the lands of the Austrian monarchy to foster loyalty and dynastic patriotism. Rather than studying the three writings for their literary and artistic merit, the article mainly focuses on discussing this kind of poetry as a historical phenomenon and an instrument of propaganda which was aimed at developing a loyal and faithful population of the polyethnic and multicultural Habsburg Empire.