Emperor Franz Joseph was dead, and the crown had fallen to a man who had never wanted it. Karl had been a devout Catholic who saw his imperial role as a duty, not a privilege, and from his very first day on the throne, his only goal had been to end the war that was tearing Europe apart. Zita, his wife, was his closest advisor. They had been married for only five years when they became Emperor and Empress of Austria-Hungary.
As they were crowned in Budapest on December 30, 1916, the sacred Crown of Saint Stephen was welded to Zita’s shoulder as a symbol that she shared the burden of power. It was the last coronation in Hungarian history. They were twenty-four and twenty-nine years old. They reigned for exactly two years and twelve days.
Karl began secret peace negotiations through Zita’s brothers, who served in the Belgian army, trying to open a back channel to France and Britain. When the talks were exposed, German nationalists called Zita a traitor because of her French Bourbon origins. She bore the accusation in silence. The peace initiative failed.
In November 1918, the war ended, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved. Ministers insisted on a formal abdication. Karl refused, and Zita stood firmly beside him. She made it clear to those who pressured her that a king does not abdicate as a minister resigns: a king can be deposed, which is something entirely different, something imposed from outside, not granted from within.
Karl signed a document renouncing his participation in state affairs. It was not an abdication. This distinction became a defining principle of Zita’s life. In April 1919, they were forced to move to Switzerland.
In 1921, Karl made two attempts to regain the throne in Hungary. Both failed. The Allies intervened, demanding his permanent removal. Madeira was chosen.
They arrived in Funchal on November 19, 1921. The governor greeted them at the dock, offering Zita a bouquet of blue and red flowers, the colors of her grandfather, the exiled King of Portugal. It was house arrest, on an island, in harsh conditions far removed from the fifty territories listed in Zita’s imperial titles. A rented villa near a hotel.
Hardly any money. Then Karl fell ill. A cold. Bronchitis.
Pneumonia. The island lacked adequate medical equipment. A first heart attack. Then a second.
Zita was eight months pregnant with her eighth child. She nursed her husband herself while also caring for her other sick children. She never left his side. On April 1, 1922, Karl died at age thirty-four.
As he was dying, he told Zita that he loved her, that he had always loved her, more than words could express. She never remarried. The next morning, she put on black. She was still wearing black sixty-seven years later when she died at age ninety-six.
The empire Zita ruled lasted two years. Her grief for the man she shared it with lasted sixty-seven years. Zita left Madeira in May 1922. King Alfonso XIII of Spain, through his ambassador to Britain, obtained permission for Zita and her children to move to Spain, though the Allied powers preferred keeping the last emperor’s widow away from Europe.
She raised her children in a palace near Bilbao, living on the charity of sympathetic monarchs and the resources of the Bourbon-Parma family. In 1929, they moved to Belgium. Zita oversaw her children’s education, preserving the dynasty as a living family, not as a political force seeking restoration, but as individuals bound by a deep understanding of their identity and values. She raised eight children alone, without a homeland, without an army, without income.
She refused to let tragedy turn them into victims of history. Each one received an education worthy of the Habsburg spirit: strict Catholic upbringing, mastery of several languages, and a deep understanding of who they were. When King Alfonso XIII offered to place the heir Otto in the best school in the kingdom under his full patronage, Zita politely refused. She intended to raise her son according to Austrian and Hungarian tradition, with tutors she chose herself.
Once, as a young girl, Zita and her sisters would visit the sick and elderly in the village, then return home exhausted to be sterilized. Her mother taught her that charity was the best protection against infection. It was a lesson Zita understood far beyond medicine. Her father had been a man of exceptional warmth and humor, a man who never raised a hand to any child.
Zita learned from her mother and her Portuguese aunts, exiled princesses who built lives of real meaning without thrones, that nothing in this world lasts forever, that worldly power is the most fleeting thing of all, and that the only thing that cannot be taken away is love. In 1938, Hitler invaded Austria. The Anschluss. Otto was sentenced to death by the Nazi regime for his public opposition to the annexation.
Zita’s family was on the target list. On May 9, 1940, Zita’s forty-eighth birthday, Germany attacked Belgium. At dawn the next day, Luftwaffe bombers flew over Steenokkerzeel castle. Seventeen occupants left in three cars.
Two hours later, the house was in flames. Otto later described the raid as a gesture of personal hatred from Hitler toward the Habsburgs. They fled through France to Spain, then crossed the Atlantic. They arrived in the United States, then to Quebec, where Zita and her family lived from 1940 to 1952.
The former Empress of Austria lived in Quebec for twelve years. She cooked, she prayed, she kept the family together, and she waited. In 1952, Zita returned to Europe. She lived first in Luxembourg, then, in 1962, moved to Switzerland, to the small Alpine village of Zizers.
A room in a Catholic care home. A quiet life. She could not return to Austria. The Habsburg Law of 1919 barred members of the dynasty from entering the country unless they renounced all claims to the throne.
Zita refused. She would not abdicate, and she would not give up her titles, because in her conviction, these titles were a gift from God and could not be renounced by a law passed by the republic that had overthrown her. It was not a whim. It was a principle.
It cost her dearly. In 1971, one of her daughters died in Austria. Zita could not cross the border to attend the funeral. The law would not allow a mother to bury her daughter.
She stayed in Switzerland, enduring her grief from afar. In 1982, Austrian courts ruled that the Habsburg Law had been applied to Zita illegally. She had been born a Bourbon-Parma, and only became a Habsburg through marriage. The law should never have applied to her.
After sixty-three years, she was finally able to return to her homeland. She was ninety years old. More than twenty thousand people attended the Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
Those who could not fit inside stood in the surrounding streets. Zita celebrated her ninetieth birthday surrounded by thirty-three grandchildren. Her eyesight was failing, and she moved with difficulty. Yet those around her noted that she bore these ailments with a calm that seemed more like readiness than resignation.
She was waiting for death, which would allow her to be reunited with Karl. On March 14, 1989, Zita died at the Catholic home of St. John in Zizers. She was ninety-six years old.
The Austrian Republic agreed to host the funeral on the condition that the Habsburg family cover the considerable expenses entirely. The date was April 1, the anniversary of Karl’s death in Madeira, exactly sixty-seven years later. Zita’s coffin was draped in the imperial Habsburg shroud. Her body was taken to the Capuchin Church on the same historic hearse that had carried Franz Joseph’s coffin in 1916, in a funeral procession that the young empress herself had followed on foot seventy-three years earlier.
The same hearse. A different world. At least two hundred thousand people filed past her coffin over two days. Eight thousand attended the funeral service.
More than two hundred members of the Habsburg and Bourbon-Parma families arrived. Forty thousand people stood in the April rain in the streets of Vienna. Zita was buried in the Imperial Crypt, alongside twelve emperors and nineteen empresses spanning four centuries. Her heart was later transferred to Muri Abbey in Switzerland, placed right next to Karl’s heart.
After sixty-seven years of separation. Together.
