(Roughly) Daily

Christopher Hooks reports from a gathering of royalists in Texas…

Why did several hundred people in Texas pay good money to spend a beautiful Saturday inside, listening to three living members of the Habsburg family and a scattering of Carlists talk about what ails the world? It’s clear what the Habsburgs got out of it: the conference, held in Plano and organized by David Ross, a Dallas-area realtor and right-wing Catholic, was in support of the family’s effort to win a sainthood for Emperor Karl I, perhaps the least successful and most tragic Habsburg monarch, who reigned for the last two years of World War I and then died penniless on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The family hoped to keep their memory alive—and maybe sell a few books. What everyone else might get out of it was unclear, at least at first…

…

There were two faces to the day’s events: the general strain of advocacy, or at least apology, for monarchy and monarchism, and a defense of the Habsburg empire. The other was discussion of the last emperor and his wife, both on the long, slow track to sainthood. These sat uneasily together because the case for the Blessed Karl—called so because he has already passed two of the three steps to sainthood—is partly that he bore his tragic failure well, and that failure calls into question why he should have been on the throne in the first place, doomed to inherit the record of failures generated by his family.

Contradictions abounded. The most visible members of the audience were three young men who wore the red berets of the Carlists, the bizarrely long-lived Spanish monarchist movement that has sought, since 1833, to put a more conservative branch of the Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne. Carlists supported the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, but the dictator Francisco Franco later turned against them. Carlism has always had a strange following on the American right: William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., was an evangelist for the cause. The Bourbons and the Habsburgs hated each other for most of their history. Time, however, makes all men brothers: in 2250, perhaps, Hitler and Stalin fans will join hands at an autocrat appreciation conference.

To the left of the stage, a young man with a Carlist flag sat keeping watch over the audience. Midmorning, the emcee Ross, dressed in black tie, as one might for a formal wedding, noted that he was giving the Carlists fifteen minutes to make their pitch. In essence: if you like our defeated king, you might like theirs.

But no Carlist has ever been able to adequately explain what Carlism is actually about to a normal person. The Carlist who took the stage, den father to the beret-wearing cubs in the audience, started strong. “Carlism is the oldest counterrevolutionary movement that is around today.” And he ended strong: “Liberalism is a sin.” In between, it might as well have been Scientology. An audience that had patiently listened to some pretty dry stuff all morning was clearly fading during a long reverie about the brilliance of Xavier of Bourbon. “In the U.S. there’s this myth that Franco was this defender of the Catholic Church,” the speaker intoned. This was fake news. Franco “grew up with the liberal-conservative perspective,” he said, not immune to the lies and ideology of the fake Bourbons.

The speaker was from a recently formed Carlist Circle in Texas—based mainly in nearby Irving, apparently—that’s dedicated to spreading the good word. The Carlist to the left of the stage, proud in his bright red beret, stood at attention with his flag outstretched. Overlaid on the traditional red cross of the Carlists was a seal with the Alamo, the symbol of Texas nationalism that was once a Catholic mission. The Carlist Circle seeks to return Christly rule to “the Spains, including Texas,” and proudly advertises that it was convened under “His Royal Highness Prince Sixtus Henry’s [see here] blessing.” I can think of no finer endorsement…

Americana, monarchist edition– the Habsburg convention in Plano: “Feeling Blessed” (possible soft paywall) from @cd_hooks in @thebafflermag. Eminently worth reading in full.

* Jane Austen

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As we noodle on noisome nostalgia, we might recall that it was on this date in 1608 that an ancestor of the Hapsburgs at the convention, Matthias von Habsburg, led an army to Prague, where he began a siege. Matthias was in conflict with his brother Emperor Rudolf II. Matthias prevailed, and in 1612 was elected Holy Roman Emperor.  As a consequence of his failed religious and administrative policies, the Bohemian Revolt, the initial theatre of the Thirty Years’ War, began in 1619, the final year of Matthias’ reign.

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