engleski

"He held sacred every place that was marked by the presence of a member of the Austrian imperial family." The forging of the Austrian imperial identity at the Wiener Neustadt Military Academy during the time of Count Franz Joseph Kinsky (1779-1805)

The composite character of the Habsburg Monarchy was in many cases a source of conflicting loyalties for its citizens because the loyalty toward the country did not correspond with the loyalty to the king, such as was the case in France or in Prussia. The sovereign could not totally embody the composite state, which was joined together by a personal union rather than by common institutions. The Habsburg army was one of the cohesive forces, and especially the officer corps has been considered as the „glue that enabled the monarchy to look - if only occasionally, to be sure - beyond the travail of nationalism.” (Samuel R. Williamson Jr.). This thesis has been proved in Istvan Deák's magisterial book Beyond nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (1990), which goes in line with the revisionist “new history of the Habsburg Empire” as promoted by Pieter Judson in recent years. In Judson’s view, the Monarchy was a site of allegiance and personal loyalty for its citizens most of the modern period, that is, he makes a paradigmatic shift from the negative view of the empire, which prevailed in the older, post-WWI historiography. In my paper, I would like to present the case of forging the Austrian imperial (or supranational) identity at the Wiener Neustadt Military Academy in the second half of the 18th century, that is, during the command of Feldmarschall-Leutnant Count Franz Joseph Kinsky (1779-1805). Different aspects of imperial politics in sponsoring and favoring the institution, as well as of symbolic and narrative communication and everyday practices developed by Count Kinsky will be examined, by which the loyalties and gratitude towards the House of Habsburg were established among the ethnically diverse cadets, who eventually became the Austrian military elite.

Wiener Neustadt Military Academy, Franz Joseph Kinsky, imperial identity, history of military education, Enlightenment

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