The Fall of the Dynasties

I tried to write a “straight” review of this one, I really did, but in the end I couldn’t…the author and I are too much men of our respective times.

We turn today to The Fall of Dynasties by Edmond Taylor. In it, Taylor tells the story of the years leading up to the First World War and the peace negotiations that followed…1905 to 1922, as the subtitle helpfully informs us. It is a period that our author just missed: he was born in 1908 and became head of the Chicago Tribune Paris bureau in 1933. It was impossible for Taylor to write about the First World War (and specifically, its settlement) without anticipating the Second. The book is one of our older titles, first published in 1963. I remember 1963, thank you very much, and quite clearly; it was impossible for me to read this one without remembering the Cold War years. But once we got those formalities out of the way, Taylor turned out to be a dandy read.

As to the dynasties that fell, those would be the ruling families of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, and they all fell as a result of or in close conjunction with World War I. The Ottoman Turks take a guest turn at points in the narrative, and they too fell shortly after the war, but their history is clearly outside the scope of a work focused on Europe. The English dynasty survived but had to rebrand themselves from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. And while the French were deeply in the war, their dynastic linage had come to an end already, back in the French Revolution.

So just how on Earth did the shooting of a guy third in line to the throne of a hyphenated empire wind up with a politico from Virginia redrawing the map of Europe? The answer I got (or at least the one I remember) from school was, “There were all these treaties…it was complicated.” Turns out, the treaties were the easy part…it was the people who were complicated.

The Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated on June 28, 1914 in Bosnia, by a shot from the crowd during a motorcade. Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy (the Triple Alliance) had mutual defense alliances against the English, French, and Russians (the Triple Entente). The Austro-Hungarians took the offing of their young prince as an attack on the state, and despite a number of totally ineffective efforts to avoid it, war was declared and by treaty everybody piled on.

What’s complicated about that?

Well, maybe the small matter of “reinsurance.” Those in the property/casualty industry might quibble with the word usage, but in the day they called it that, “reinsurance,” side deals meant to hedge the parties’ bets. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II entered into a deal in 1905 that would ally Germany and Russia if attacked, nominally breaking both the Alliance and the Entente. The idea was that the French would have to go along (they didn’t), and the three would then leave the English out in the cold (they weren’t). A number of such deals were floating around throughout the era: in deciding to enter World War I, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary asked his ministers, “Is our reinsurance in place?” Duplicity never sounded so prudent.

From this discussion, you many infer that many of the players were less than sterling individuals, and you would be right. Start with the Austro-Hungarians, headed up by the Hapsburg dynasty. They had been prominent in international politics since the eleventh century…if you told them they were medieval, they’d acknowledge the fact and blush at the compliment. A family that old develops some pretty old habits, and by the early 20th century the disconnect between court and contemporary life was jarring. The emperor, Francis Joseph, was old, and so he seemed. His nephew, Francis Ferdinand, was young and modern, and was a political reformer of a fashion. He even set up a sort of shadow court in competition with the emperor’s, partly in an attempt to bring more liberal elements into the political discussion. Also, to feed his ego…predictably, the emperor and his young would-be heir hated each other.

Over in Germany, things were not a lot rosier with the Hohenzollern dynasty. Kaiser Wilhelm II was a grandson of Queen Victoria, heir to a great Prussian military tradition, and had the bad luck to be born with a withered arm. He took pains to hide the arm and he tried to live up to the military tradition, although he was better at the arm. Willy (his intimates actually called Wilhelm that) had as his close personal friend one Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, who went by the name “Phili.” That’s right, Willy and Phili. Phili was a major woo-woo who adored Willy but was ultimately tried for homosexuality. Wilhelm was straight as far as we know…writing pre-Stonewall, Taylor tells us the relationship between Willy and Phili was “blameless,” from which we infer that it was asexual (and I arch an eyebrow).

Finally, there was Nicky and the Romanovs. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the Romanov dynasty, that is. Another grandson of Victoria, and thereby Willy’s cousin. Nicholas was pretty and amiable (after he was deposed, all the guards just loved him and the whole family), but he appears to be not to have been overly bright. He had a nagging wife, the Czarina Alexandra, who kept telling him to be an absolute monarch like his father was, and to pass the empire along to their son, like his father did. Plus, he had the mad monk Rasputin on his hands, a hemophilic son, and then there was the Bolshevik Revolution.

Taylor’s treatment of events in Russia is notably detailed. It’s hard to remember now how closed Russia was in the early 1960s. Public reports of events in the Soviet Union were scattered and piecemeal, much like reports of life in North Korea today. Our author seems to have been what the boys over at the State Department would call an “old Russia hand,” and he gives a full report of that country during the war years. If some of it sounds very familiar, bordering on cliché, that’s probably because your teachers and mine were themselves taught from this book.

Surprisingly, the story the author does not tell is that of the actual conduct of World War I. That action happens offstage, summarized in a brief chapter. It’s a pragmatic choice: detailing the conduct of the war would take the focus off the fall of the dynasties, plus the book would have become unwieldy in length. Eliding the actual conflict, however, weakens the second half. One of Taylor’s theses, commonplace in the day, was that the severity of World War I reparations demanded of Germany contributed mightily to Hitler’s rise and the second war. Probably…but the reader is denied an understanding of the atrocities of the First World War. There was a reason everyone was out for blood at its end.

The post-World War I era was much messier than I had ever realized. The Romanovs were the first dynasty to fall, victim to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 even before the war ended. Nicholas abdicated gracefully, for himself and his son, but was executed anyway…such are the limits of charm. The Communist insurrection spread into Germany, who just barely kept the Kaiser in power until the Armistice. At the end, the German Army rebelled…and Wilhelm at first didn’t get it that he was being deposed, he was looking forward to bringing the army home “in good order” before the formal surrender. His aides had to tell him that the army would indeed come home in good order, just not with him. Wilhelm lived to die of old age in 1941, in the Netherlands. Over in Austria-Hungary they had a new emperor, Emperor Karl (he was Francis Ferdinand’s nephew). New though he was, Karl was a worthy successor to his medieval predecessors: he resigned the imperial office, but not the imperial rights. In his mind he was setting the House of Hapsburg up for a come-back tour…which never materialized. Karl died in Portugal in 1922.

And Woodrow Wilson was the Virginian who got involved in redrawing Europe. As American President, he had waxed noble with documents like his Fourteen Points (very famous, everybody was talking about them) that he felt should govern ethical international action. Against all good advice, Wilson insisted on leading the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference himself. During the course of which Wilson held to his public views in public, but in private indulged in a series of “special arrangements” that reapportioned nations and people, in clear violation of his own Fourteen Points. At least he didn’t call it reinsurance.

Elsewhere on this site I call out authors who editorialize, rather than just reporting the facts. I should – and do – apply that caveat here. Taylor is a man of his age, and while his prose never quite attains the Churchillian, he aspires to it. He does a pretty good Walter Cronkite, though, and the latter portions of the book reflect an optimism for world peace that was not yet clouded by the events of the subsequent six decades.

In 1963 there were 15,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. The number would shortly grow.