Dynastic History | Schönbrunn, Vienna — The Declaration That Was Not an Abdication

The room is a first-floor salon hung with Chinese rice-paper panels: blue medallions set into yellow grounds, showing silk and porcelain being made. On 11 November 1918 the negotiations held in it produced a written declaration in which Karl I gave up any further part in the business of government in the Austrian half of the monarchy. Two days later he signed an equivalent for the Hungarian half.

The wording was chosen carefully. He renounced participation in the affairs of government; he did not renounce the throne, and he never did. He held the office to be his by God's grace rather than by a parliament's will, and later, at Feldkirch near the Swiss border, he issued a manifesto revoking the declarations and stating that he had been unlawfully deposed. It changed nothing outside the paper. The republic was proclaimed on 12 November, the day after he signed, while the monarchy's other nationalities were declaring successor states of their own. The family left for Switzerland in March 1919.

Schönbrunn itself passed to the republic. The state rooms are a ticketed museum run by a state-owned company, the park is public and has a zoo in it, and the salon is a stop on the visitor route, presented as the room where the monarchy ended.

📸 Cover: the east facade of Schönbrunn — the palace exterior, not the salon, Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons