The Red Prince by Snyder Timothy;

Author:Snyder, Timothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

And when it was all over, when the verdict was in, she came after him again.

BROWN

Aristocratic Fascism

WHEN THE PRESS attaché of the Austrian legation in Paris took the telephone call from the Princess of Bourbon-Parma on 1 April 1936, he was expecting good news. What with the Wilhelm affair and then the rise of the Popular Front to power in France, there had been precious little of that for the diplomats of Austria’s right-wing regime. So this call was something promising. The Bourbon-Parmas were a branch of the French royal family, related by marriage to the Habsburgs. Empress Zita, Emperor Karl’s widow, was a Bourbon-Parma. The press attaché, one Dr. Wasserbäck, hoped for an initiative that might improve the parlous state of Austro-French relations. The feminine voice on the telephone did indeed convey an appealing proposition, one that spoke directly to an Austrian predicament in the difficult Europe of 1936.

Hard hit by the Great Depression, its factories closed and its fields lying fallow, Austria was desperate for tourism. The Alps appealed to hikers and skiers, the countryside was backward and beautiful, and the oversized cosmopolitan capital offered more art, theater, and music than domestic demand could support. Yet Adolf Hitler had ruined the Austrian tourist industry. To express his displeasure at the Austrian ban on the Nazi Party, the Führer had required all Germans who wished to travel to Austria to pay a fee of one thousand marks. Rather than stopping in Austria, German tourists were now traveling through the Brenner Pass of the Alps to Italy. To compensate for the loss of German tourism, Austrian diplomats had to redouble their efforts to draw visitors from other European countries. So Wasserbäck was very pleased to hear that the Princess of Bourbon-Parma had a friend, the Countess de Rivat, who wished to undertake a “great propaganda action” for Austria. Would the countess be received by the press attaché at the legation? Of course she would.1

The Countess de Rivat made a vivid first impression. From behind a hat and a good deal of makeup, she spoke quickly of her desire to improve the image of Austria in France. She had a great many friends among the Austrian aristocracy, she explained, and wished their country much prosperity. For example, she had known the unfortunate Archduke Wilhelm quite well, and expressed her disappointment that Austrian diplomats had done nothing to aid him during the investigation and trial. As a result of this inaction, she continued, poor Mademoiselle Couyba had been forced to sacrifice herself for her beloved Wilhelm, and was now utterly ruined.

Perhaps sensing that Wasserbäck would be unlikely to endorse that version of events, the countess then rushed forward to make her proposal. She was on good terms, she said, with the French journalist Michel Georges-Michel. The two of them, with official Austrian diplomatic endorsement, would like to travel to Austria. Georges-Michel would then write favorable articles for the press, and a propagandistic book or two, to encourage the French to follow in their footsteps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.