On the right, Emperor Franz Joseph, on the occasion of the marriage of Charles of Austria and Zita of Bourbon-Parma: tradition steeped in virtues.
In January 1919, the Peace Conference80 took place in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It marked the end of a war without precedents in history, both because of its human cost of over eight million dead as well as the extent of its political and social repercussions.
Germany was humiliated both materially and morally, but the great loser of the war was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.81
The objective of a limited circle of politicians, associated with Freemasonry, to bringing about its destruction was to “republicanize Europe”82 thus completing the French Revolution. Having begun as a classic war, the First World War finished, according to the Hungarian historian François Fejtö, as an ideological war whose aim was to dismember Austria-Hungary.83
The Treaties of 1919-20, which imposed or promoted the transformation of the monarchical regimes of Germany and of Austria into Parliamentary Republics, were “more of a European Revolution than a European peace”.84 The European political map, outlined by the Congress of Vienna, was redrawn according to the new criterion of the “self-determination of peoples”, affirmed by the American President Wilson. Upon the ruins of the Austrian Empire, while Germany began to develop into the only great power of Central Europe, new “multinational” states were born such as the Republic of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira realised how the end of the Hapsburgs would have marked the end of the old European civilisation. For him, Austria of the Hapsburgs meant the medieval idea of the Holy Roman Empire, the programme of the “Reconquest” against the Moors and of Counter- Reformation, the opposition to the world born of the French Revolution.
“Catholicism, Leo XIII said with his sovereign and decisive authority, cannot be identified with any form of government, and can exist and flourish whether in a monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or even in a mixed form containing elements of all three. The destiny of Catholicism was not connected to the European monarchies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that these monarchies, at least in their fundamental aspects, were structured according to Catholic doctrine. Liberalism wanted to abolish them and to substitute them with another order of things. It transformed aristocratic monarchies of Catholic inspiration into bourgeois and liberal republics with an anti-Catholic spirit and mentality.”85
Although we are not surprised by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s French cultural roots, linked to the intellectual and social life of São Paulo of that time, what is surprising is a real passion he showed even then for the Austria of the Hapsburgs. This time the young Brazilian’s love for the Austrian Empire was rooted in the supernatural. Austria, heir to the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire, was in his eyes the historical manifestation par excellence of Christian civilization. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in face of the rampant Protestantism of Northern Europe and the secular and pre-Enlightenment culture being formed, the Hapsburg Empire represented the symbol of loyalty to the Church. In an age when the value of dynasties prevailed over that of States, the name of the Hapsburgs symbolized that of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Iberian conquistadors making inroads into the interior of Latin America and the warriors defending the frontiers of the Christian Empire on the battlements of Budapest and Vienna were fighting under the same flag. It was in the Austrian capital, in 1815, that the Congress was held that should have ratified the restoration of order in a Europe disrupted by the French Revolution and Napoleon. Until its fall in 1918, the Hapsburg Empire was the principal target for the anti-Christian hatred of secret societies and revolutionary forces. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira always defended its irreplaceable historical role, writing just after the Second World War:
“Vienna should be the capital of either a great German Empire, or of an Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. Anything else will be an irreparable misfortune for Catholic influence in the Danube basin.”86
Notes:
81. Germany is humiliated and diminished, but still survives. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire is torn apart and the only thing left is German Austria, which only survives with difficulty” (P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A conjuração dos Cesares e do Synhedrio”, O Legionário, no. 288, 20 March 1938).
82. François Fejtö, Requiem pour un empire défunt, (Paris, Lieu Commun, 1988), 308, 311. “The great goal presented by the political and intellectual elite to the soldiers in the trenches was to eradicate the last vestiges of clericalism and monarchism from Europe” (p. 310). On the role of Freemasonry, cf. ibid, pp. 337-49.
83. Cf. F. Fejtö, Requiem pour un empire défunt, p. 306-13. On the First World War: Leo Valiani, La dissoluzione dell’Austria-Ungheria, Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1985; Gian Enrico Rusconi, Il rischio 1914. Come si decide la guerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987; Renouvin, La prima guerra mondiale, Rome, Lucarini, 1989. The year that “the war finds its permanent ideological set-up”, according to Furet, is 1917. François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion, (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1995), p. 73. The Revolution of February, that leads to the abdication of czar Nicholas II, and then that of October, which sees the coming of Lenin, cancel centuries of Czarist Empire and clears the way for a new Russia that cuts the ties with its past. In the month of April, President Wilson drags America into the war proclaiming the democratic crusade against autocratism. On 8 January 1918, the same Wilson publishes the “fourteen points” that, among other things, announces the foundation of a “Society of Nations” to guarantee world peace.
84. François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion, 74. On the end of the Hapsburg Empire, cf. Zybnek A. B. Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire 1914-1918, London-New York, Oxford University Press, 1961; Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Habsburg, London, Cardinal, 1974; Adam Wandruszka, Das Haus Habsburg, Herder, Wien 1989 (1978).
85. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Terceiro acto”, O Legionário, no. 421, 6 October 1940.
86. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “7 dias em Revista”, O Legionário, no. 570, 11 July 1943. “In this sense, it is especially necessary to have strength and prudence. Strength to destroy within Germany and without everything that should be destroyed. Prudence so as not to destroy what should not be destroyed, in order not to exacerbate what should continue to live. The errors of Versailles should not be repeated. Never, never more within the Germanic world should there be a central axis consisting of Prussia and Berlin. The right thing to do is to transfer the axis to Vienna. Herein lies, more than in any other measures, the key to most of the problem” (P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “7 dias em Revista”, O Legionário, no. 632, 17 September 1944).