Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War

William D. Godsey

Purdue University Press, 1999 - Aristocracy - 304 pages

Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War is a study of the nobility who served in the foreign office prior to World War I. Following the lead of historians who are reexamining pre-industrial elites in England and Germany, Godsey deals with such facets of aristocratic life as education, wealth, religion, and ethnicity. He contends that although the pre-war aristocracy has been stereotyped as frivolous and decadent, the Austro-Hungarian nobility, and thus the monarchy, in fact had great staying power. This work is a social history of the bureaucracy of the Ballhausplatz primarily in the decade leading up to 1914, though it provides a thorough overview of the service during the entire Dualist period.

Contents

• Social Origins: 16
• Admission Standards and Education: 33
• Wealth and Outside Career Experience: 59

About the author

William D. Godsey, Jr., is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for European History in Mainz and the author of a number of articles on the social history of the Habsburg Empire. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His dissertation on the Austro-Hungarian foreign office won the Austrian Cultural Institute Prize in 1996. Godsey is currently writing a book on social transformation in central Europe from the early modern period to the modern era.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War; Central European studies
• Author: William D. Godsey
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Purdue University Press, 1999
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Jun 17, 2008
• ISBN: 1557531404, 9781557531407
• Length: 304 pages