Maria Ludovika Beatrix of Austria-Este

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Maria Ludovika Beatrix of Modena

Maria Ludovika Beatrix (born December 14, 1787 in Monza ; † April 7, 1816 in Verona ) was the third wife of Franz I to be Austrian Empress (from 1808).

youth

Maria Ludovika, who was originally called Maria Luigia , was the youngest daughter of Archduke Ferdinand Karl († 1806) and Maria Beatrice d'Este († 1829). Her father was the fourth son from the marriage of Emperor Franz I Stephan and Maria Theresa . Her brothers were, among others, Duke Franz IV of Modena († 1846) and Maximilian Joseph († 1863), who became Grand Master of the Teutonic Order . She also had several siblings.

Little Maria Luigia's upbringing was influenced by the strict etiquette of her grandmother Maria Theresa, who had also arranged her parents' marriage. The girl initially lived in Milan and in a beautiful castle in Monza , which her father had built based on the model of Schönbrunn . She was raised together by her mother and a wet nurse and educator (Aja) whom Maria Theresa had sent to Milan. The child grew up bilingual, but since her teachers and her mother only spoke Italian to her, she was only able to communicate with her future husband in broken German.

As the Austrian governor of Lombardy, her father Ferdinand and his family had to flee from the victorious Napoleon , who conquered Milan on May 16, 1796, first to Trieste , then to Wiener Neustadt . At that time, little Maria Luigia was instilled with a lifelong hatred of Bonaparte by her mother. The Wiener Neustädter exile was spartan compared to the luxurious residence in Milan. In 1803 the family moved to the Palais Dietrichstein on Minoritenplatz in Vienna , where the father of the young Archduchess died in 1806.

Marriage and opposition to Napoleon

Princess Maria Ludovika Beatrix of Modena

The Roman-German Emperor Franz II (later Franz I of Austria) became a widower for the second time in 1807 at the age of 39. As a consolation, he also visited his aunt Maria Beatrice, in whose house a tender relationship with the now 19-year-old, beautiful and literarily educated Maria Luigia developed. She didn't seem to mind the big age difference. The marriage took place with great splendor on January 6, 1808, led by her youngest brother, Bishop Karl Ambrosius . Now her name has been Germanized to Maria Ludovika. Numerous writers celebrated the great wedding celebrations and especially the grace of the bride in her works, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel and the Germanophile French writer Madame de Staël , who was then in Vienna. In contrast to the rather cool and less impulsive husband, Ludovika was very temperamental and her good knowledge of human nature allowed her to make very correct forward judgments.

However, this marriage sparked fears in Vienna that the new Empress - in the spirit of her mother - could stir up war again as a declared enemy of Napoleon after a peace treaty had only been signed in 1806 after catastrophic defeats. Archduke Charles in particular would have preferred a further rapprochement with France and would have liked to underline this by marrying his imperial brother. The French ambassador in Vienna also protested against this marriage. In fact, Maria Ludovika did not consider limiting herself to marital duties, such as bringing up her husband's children from his second marriage. She joined the war party and thus stood in opposition to the peace-loving emperor. After the capture of Vienna in 1809, she defended herself in a letter to her husband that she had stood up for her accused brother Maximilian, who had given up Vienna; Franz himself should make a judgment.

In 1808, Maria Ludovika tried to persuade the emperor, who was not very determined, to crack down on Napoleon. She was supported by Foreign Minister Count Johann Philipp von Stadion and some generals, but Archduke Karl, who was supposed to wage war, hesitated. When she was crowned Queen of Hungary in Pressburg (September 7, 1808), Maria Ludovika, walking in the footsteps of Maria Theresa, impressed the Hungarians so much that they were ready to support the monarchy financially and militarily under great privation. Only the Spanish uprising gave Maria Ludovika sufficient reasons to bring Emperor Franz to open arms against Napoleon. In Vienna they hoped in vain for allies in the Confederation of the Rhine and the newly awakened Prussian patriotism. After all, Maria Ludovika was able to popularize the war in Austria by attaching embroidered flag ribbons for the army on poles in St. Stephen's Cathedral . Count Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich returned from his post as envoy in Paris at the end of 1808 and was annoyed by the mood of war, since he considered the dangers of a power struggle with Napoleon to be too great for Austria. The Empress, on the other hand, considered the war to be inevitable and, thanks to her great influence on the Emperor as the driving force, was incessantly involved in the first uprising in Austria. She was able to successfully defend the Catholic priest Klemens Maria Hofbauer , who later became the city patron of Vienna, who was expelled from Warsaw under French influence .

Despite her commitment to the war, Maria Ludovika tried to be fair, as her letter of April 16, 1809, which is now in the Vienna State Archives, shows. In it she reprimanded Archduke Johann for calling on the Tyroleans to fight against the Bavarians allied with Napoleon; because Tyrol was legally ceded to Bavaria in 1805 and thus officially subject to it. After the first clashes with the enemy, which were unfortunate for Austria, the Kaiser visited his army for motivation; Ludovika followed him, but was disappointed when she found him only with the supply troops near Enns . When Napoleon conquered Vienna, Maria Ludovika lived with the emperor's children in the castle of Ofen for months far away from her husband. Even though she was sick, she encouraged him to persevere. The climate in the cold castle at Ofen exacerbated her chronic pulmonary catarrh, which had badly shaken her health at the beginning of their marriage. She was tormented by a cough and fever, and her doctor, Dr. Thonhauser, who wrote regular reports to the emperor, complained that she allowed herself too little bed rest and cared too much about her imperial stepchildren and politics, i.e. not paying enough attention to his medical advice. After Napoleon had dictated the conditions to Austria in the Treaty of Schönbrunn , the Empress wanted to see her husband and, despite her poor health, travel to him. This would have put her life in danger. After the emperor had received urgent information, he hurried to his wife's bed in the oven. Her health improved somewhat, but despite the peace she did not believe that Napoleon wanted Austria to exist as a sovereign state.

Metternich, who increasingly gained influence over the emperor, thwarted several of Ludovika's marriage projects. A marriage between Archduke Charles and the tsarina's sister, Princess Amalie von Württemberg, planned by her, in order to win Russia as a counterweight to Napoleon, did not materialize. Maria Ludovika's long-cherished hope was not fulfilled either: the marriage of her brother Franz to her stepdaughter Marie Louise , who instead was married to Napoleon at the instigation of Metternich. At least the emperor achieved a compromise with the Corsican for some time. Ironically, the horrified Maria Ludovika then had to lead her stepdaughter to the altar as the bride's mother at the procuration ceremony; this certainly required a lot of self-control from her.

The unstable health of the Empress was badly affected by all the political excitement and the ever increasing coldness of her marriage. The fact that, as already mentioned, she had preferred not to be in Vienna when Napoleon moved in, but rather to stay in Budapest for a long time with her stepchildren, had not helped to improve the marriage. The couple had drifted apart for some time due to their different characters and views. Furthermore, Metternich had meanwhile extended his control himself to the letters of the empress and learned from a letter to her friend, Countess Esterházy, that she would have to overcome her marital duties as she would no longer feel love for her husband. The emaciated Empress went to the cure on the advice of her personal physician Dr. Thonhauser went to Karlsbad in June 1810 , where she recovered a little. She played in a play by Kotzebue and met 61-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the first time , who wrote poems on her on various occasions and was very impressed by her intellectual gifts. So far she had mainly occupied herself with Italian and French literature, as she did not speak German perfectly; but the great poet was also able to bring them closer to German authors. Ludovika only mentioned him once in a letter, but a few months after her stay at the cure he gave him a gold box with Luise's name set with diamonds. Another admirer in Karlsbad was Karl August, the Duke of Weimar.

After returning to Vienna the latent enmity between the Empress and Foreign Minister Metternich continued, who politically relied on waiting and eyed her anti-Napoleonic efforts with suspicion. He read her letters and, if necessary, forwarded them to the emperor, to whom he was responsible for his approach to Ludovika's correspondence with her brother Franz. After the failed marriage project with Marie Louise, he had turned his back on Austria and sought to establish contacts with England and Russia in Italy, just as his sister supported any attempted rapprochement with the Tsarist Empire. As Metternich and Franz could infer from their correspondence, Maria Ludovika also maintained good relations with the Emperor's brother, Archduke Joseph , the Hungarian Palatine and also dissatisfied with the Foreign Minister's policy. The Empress, who knew nothing of Metternich's censorship of her letters, also wrote very openly about private feelings; For example, she openly criticized the male members of the Habsburg family, to which she also belonged, or, as mentioned, informed her friend Countess Esterhazy of her lack of love for her husband. Metternich also increasingly presented this politically irrelevant news to the Kaiser. Perhaps he hoped that this would alienate the couple and thereby strengthen his power.

In May 1812 Maria Ludovika reluctantly traveled with her husband to Dresden , where Napoleon received the imperial family in front of the assembled German princes and was pompously celebrated before he set off with his "Great Army" on the Russian campaign. The empress often had to sit next to Napoleon at banquets and entertain him. In addition, she did not like to see that her husband apparently felt comfortable in the presence of the French monarch and could only prevent him from taking part in the Russian war personally with tearful appearances. After Napoleon's departure to the East, she recovered from the exertions in Teplitz in July 1812 , regained her health and happiness and dined with Goethe more often. He read his poems to her and after a dialogue, whether the man or the woman should be allowed to confess their love first, wrote his comedy “Die Wette”. The Empress and the German poet are also said to have reenacted his work " Torquato Tasso ", with Goethe taking on the role of Torquato Tasso and Maria Ludovika that of his (alleged) lover Princess Leonore; Documents for this episode are not available. Shortly afterwards, Goethe wrote that this encounter with Maria Ludovika was a great asset to him and mentions it often in letters to her friend Countess O'Donnell. In contrast, the Empress mentions the poet only twice again.

After Napoleon had failed colossally in Russia, Metternich also supported an alliance between Austria and Prussia and Russia, but did not pursue a blind desire to fight like Maria Ludovika, but a security-conscious policy. Their persistent efforts to improve the Austrian army since 1808 contributed to the fact that the Habsburg monarchy played a major role in the victory over the French.

Congress of Vienna and death

Sarcophagus of Empress Maria Ludovika Beatrix in the Capuchin Crypt .

At the Congress of Vienna , Maria Ludovika played the charming hostess for top European politicians. Despite this very exhausting task, which again seriously affected her health, she fully fulfilled her duties of representation and entertained her guests. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord flattered that, despite her cough and anorexia, she had the "grace of a French woman". The Hofburg became the center of the European aristocracy. It was an advantage that Maria Ludovika had been able to refurbish some of the rooms, especially her own, much earlier with the consent of the normally thrifty emperor for almost a million guilders.

After the final defeat of Napoleon, Maria Ludovika, as she writes, no longer felt any hatred because her goal was fulfilled. The goods previously taken from their Este family by the great French general have now been returned. She refused any participation of the people in politics, as well as the plan that the Habsburgs should again provide the Roman-German emperor, and worked on her husband in this sense. In 1815 she went shortly to Bavaria and at the end of that year with her husband to her homeland, liberated Upper Italy, visited Venice, Milan and many other cities with countless homages and celebrated splendid festivals, but felt very sick and weak inside. She wanted to die, as she told her mother. After traveling for several months in Italy, she could not get up in Verona in March 1816. Her doctor, Dr. Thonhauser rushed to help other famous doctors, but at that time no remedies could be found against the rampant pulmonary consumption . On April 7, 1816, Maria Ludovika died childless in Palazzo Canossa at the age of only 28; her husband stayed with her sick bed to the end. She is one of the 41 people who received a " separate burial " with the body being divided between all three traditional Viennese burial sites of the Habsburgs ( imperial crypt , heart crypt , ducal crypt ).

Half a year after Maria Ludovika's death, the emperor entered into a new marriage. Goethe mourned her for a long time and often wrote about her. In their completely preserved library (today in the National Library in Vienna) only one of his works, a translation of Denis Diderot's "Rameau's Neffe", is available. Some of her family correspondence is in the Austrian State Archives .

Honors

Monument to Maria Ludovika in the garden of the Ludiviceum in Budapest . (left Palatine Joseph , right Count János Butler)

Maria Ludovika was crowned Queen of Hungary on September 7, 1808 in St. Martin's Cathedral in Pressburg . The coronation ceremony was performed by her own brother, Karl Ambrosius of Austria-Este , in his capacity as Archbishop of Gran and Primate of Hungary. She received a coronation gift of 50,000 guilders from the Hungarian nation . Maria Ludovika donated this amount to the establishment of a military academy in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary . The Hungarian Reichstag then decided to locate the academy in Pest and name it after the name of its founder, Maria Ludovika. The academy, called Ludoviceum , was the most important military training facility in the entire Kingdom of Hungary and existed until the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ Friedrich Weissensteiner : Women on the Habsburgs Throne - the Austrian Empresses , Ueberreuter-Verlag Vienna, 1998
  2. ↑ Quoted by Ann Tizia Leitich (see lit.), p. 10.
  3. ↑ Quoted by Ann Tizia Leitich, p. 11.
  4. ↑ Sigrid-Maria Großering : To crown and love , Amalthea Verlag
  5. ↑ Großing: About crown and love
  6. ↑ The monument is the work of the Hungarian sculptor Adolf Bassler and was erected in 1903 in the garden of the Ludoviceum. In 1919, at the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic , the monument was badly damaged and removed. In the following years it was restored by the Hungarian sculptor Viktor Vass (1873–1955) and put back on the same spot in 1929. During the time of communist rule in Hungary, it was removed again after 1945 and only returned to its original location after the fall of the Wall in 1992.
  7. ↑ Count János Buttler (1773-1845) was a wealthy Hungarian aristocrat. For the construction of the military academy he donated an amount of 126,000 guilders from his private fortune for its construction.
predecessor Office Successor
Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily Empress of Austria
1808–1816 		Karoline Auguste of Bavaria
personal data
SURNAME Maria Ludovika Beatrix of Austria-Este
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maria Luigia of Austria-Este
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Empress
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1787
PLACE OF BIRTH Monza
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1816
Place of death Verona