At the same time as Russia was undergoing an existential supernova, the pattern of victory the Central powers were enjoying began to disintegrate. In April 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Entente, which informally changed its name to the Allies. The move had been in the works since a German submarine sank the Lusitania, a British cruise liner, in May 1915. More than one thousand civilians were killed, including a number of Americans. “No gentleman would kill so many women and children,” Wilhelm II embarrassedly told the American ambassador. In Austria, Emperor Charles I was under no illusions about what the entry of the Americans into the war meant. He told his wife, “Now it’s the end. If America comes in we are finished for good.” Along with their munitions and supplies, the Americans contributed nearly four million additional troops to the war effort. Within a few months, ten thousand new soldiers were arriving in France daily.
The sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war led to major political crisis in Germany. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was forced to resign after coming under fire from the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution, a coalition of the Social Democrats, Progressives, and Centrists. Bethmann-Hollweg’s replacement was Georg Michaelis, Germany’s first nonaristocratic chancellor. He remained in office for only four months. On October 31, 1917, he too was forced to resign for his unwillingness to support the Reichstag’s peace initiatives. He was replaced by seventy-five-year-old Count Georg Hertling.
Emperor Charles had known since he was still an archduke that unless something was done to end the war, the damage to Austria-Hungary and the rest of Europe could be irreparable. As early as January 29, 1917, Zita’s two brothers Sixtus and Xavier met with their mother, the Duchess of Parma, in Switzerland to make preliminary and unofficial peace overtures. The emperor sent his old friend, Count Erdödy, to represent him at the meeting. In the Austrian foreign ministry there was some apprehension at the idea of Austria-Hungary pursuing a separate piece, since the alliance that bound it with the other Central powers was very close-knit. But the growing danger against monarchism, fueled by events in Russia, meant that peace might be the only way to save Austria-Hungary from its own revolution. In April, his foreign minister penned a prophetic note explaining that if “the monarchs of the Central Powers are unable to conclude peace in the next few months, the peoples will do so over their heads, and then the waves of revolution will sweep away everything for which our brothers and sons are still fighting and dying today.”
The appeals Charles made for peace through the usual diplomatic channels had failed. The only alternative he and Zita could think of to find a peaceful solution was to use the empress’s brother in the Belgian army—Prince Sixtus—to open the lines of communication with France. With his intellectual prowess, erudition, and reputation as a Renaissance man, Sixtus was the natural choice to act as a conduit between Vienna and Paris if there was to be any hope for peace. Raymond Poincaré, the French president, expressed interest in an article Sixtus had published in a French magazine that called for peace via Charles and Zita. The ensuing episode, which would ultimately help to topple Charles from the throne, would come to be known infamously as the Sixtus Affair.
In early 1917, Charles ordered his military attaché in Switzerland to look into making contact with Sixtus “in order to sound out the readiness for peace on the other side.” The emperor and empress of Austria’s peace initiatives were motivated not only by a desire to preserve their empire from any further losses but also to ally Austria with France and Britain against Germany. A British intelligence report from June 1917 cited that the “Emperor and Empress are entirely pro-French and pro-English. They are strongly anti-German and hate (a) the Kaiser (b) Prince Rupprecht [of Bavaria] both on political and private grounds. The Kaiser insulted the present Empress when she was young: Prince Rupprecht is a course [sic] dissolute Prussianised atheist who bullies the Emperor and Empress for their religious and moral principles.”
A memorandum written by Philippe Pétain, the French general in chief, to Paul Painlevé, the minister of war, shows that—at least at first—the French were willing to talk peace. The memo, dated August 4, 1917, highlights the desire on France’s part to limit German power in the postwar era.
The only enemy of France, the one danger in Europe is Prussia. The amendments to the constitutions of the other [German] governments are secondary factors as long as Prussia is not entirely and definitely vanquished and reduced to impotence. The Entente must therefore create an irremediably hostile power next to Prussia. It [the Entente] can achieve this through the Habsburgs by forming, with a bond of the personal union, a federation with a majority of Slavic states...
Once it became apparent that the French were on board and using the Duchess of Parma as a go-between, the empress convinced her brother to come to Laxenburg, a palace outside Vienna, for a secret meeting; Charles was uninvolved in the initial contact to give himself plausible deniability if needed. When Sixtus arrived on behalf of President Poincaré, he set the tone for the meeting by asking Charles Salomon, Poincaré’s political adviser, to join him. At the meeting, Sixtus pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pocket. It listed four points from the French government that were nonnegotiable for the peace talks to go forward. In no uncertain terms, if Austria wanted peace, France demanded the return of Alsace and Lorraine from Germany, which had been seized in the Franco-Prussian War; the restoration of Belgium’s independence; the guaranteed independence of Serbia; and the handover of Constantinople to Russia. Years later, Prince Sixtus wrote in his memoirs his impression of the initial peace negotiations.
The young Emperor was innocent of his predecessor’s faults and had come to the throne with only one desire, which was to put an end to the universal slaughter. He wished to play an untrammeled [sic] game, face to face with his associates and face to face with his enemies, in order to provoke a possibility and a necessity for peace. The Emperor Charles would have gone on further, for his duty clearly showed him that he could not uselessly sacrifice his people to the obstinacy of an ally [Germany] whose pride was causing his coming destruction.… a separate peace with Austria would have realised the principle object of the war. It would have brought about invincibly the submission of Bulgaria and Turkey. The facts of 1918 have proved how easy it would have been after 1917 to come to an understanding with these two powers. The war would have been concentrated on the French front and brought about the results obtained eighteen months later. The lives of thousands, nay millions of men would have been saved.
Upon leaving that first meeting, Sixtus obtained a guarantee from Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, that he was fully committed to the peace process. Ambitious, underhanded, tall, and with a gaunt face and deeply recessed eyes, Czernin was a vocal Germanophile who was committed to Austria-Hungary’s military alliance with the Hohenzollern Empire. There were even rumors that he was a German spy. All of these things made Sixtus very skeptical of his assurances, but he trusted Zita and Charles implicitly. It was enough for the peace process to go to stage two: examining the feasibility of France’s terms. Empress Zita recalled her husband’s reaction to the demands.
The return of Alsace-Lorraine was of course a French interest. But it was also one of the Emperor Charles’s, who was the head of the House of Lorraine. This family link of his with Lorraine was one reason why President Poincaré, who came from that province himself, had so much personal sympathy with the Emperor.
The four points that [were taken] back to Switzerland were personally drafted by the Emperor. It was still too early in his reign for him to have formed any close circle of advisers around him. As for the South Slav kingdom idea, I remember that he had pondered on this—and discussed it with several advisers and friends including my brothers—while he was heir-apparent and even earlier, before the war.… It was envisaged by the Emperor as part of his overall federalist solution.
Once Sixtus returned to France, a flurry of letters flew back and forth between him and Zita, to whom Charles had asked to speak on his behalf. It spoke volumes to the deep love the emperor and empress had for one another that Charles was able to trust his wife implicitly to speak for him. It was also hoped that should these negotiations ever be made public, it would appear as a woman asking her brother for help, not the emperor of Austria suing for peace.
~~Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires -by- Justin C. Vovk
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