Fighting for the Habsburgs

Fighting for the Habsburgs: Military Honor and State Citizenship, 1765–1815 investigates how the Habsburg state responded to Revolutionary and Imperial France by analyzing how native interpretations of the European Enlightenment powered the Habsburg dynasty and its people’s war effort and state-building projects between 1765 and 1815. The book reveals how the military honor culture of the regular army, informed by theories of natural law, dignity, and virtue, offered a universal language of state citizenship used by different local communities to position themselves within the Habsburg state. Through examining the experience of military service, the representation of soldiers as symbols of self-recognition, and political agency in local civic societies, this work elucidates how radical ideas about rights and liberty played out in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows how Habsburg subjects actively enabled the dynasty to outlast the French Empire and build foundations of political unity that sustained Imperial dominance in Central and Eastern Europe until 1918.