The last Empress of Austria. Queen of Bohemia and Hungary. A widow at twenty-nine. And a woman who, at the exact moment her world collapsed, was carrying her eighth child. Her husband was dying at thirty-four of pneumonia on a Portuguese island, in a rented villa, without adequate medical equipment and without a country to return to. She nursed him herself.
As he lay dying, he told her that he loved her—more than words could ever express. Those were his last words. The next morning, she dressed in black. She was still in black sixty-seven years later, when she died at the age of ninety-six. Think about that. The Austrian Empire she ruled lasted for two years.
Her mourning for the man with whom she shared it lasted sixty-seven. This is the story of Zita of Bourbon-Parma. The last Empress of Europe. A woman whose mourning outlived her empire. And one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century—almost entirely forgotten outside of Catholic and monarchist circles.
On May 9, 1892, at the Villa Pianore in Tuscany, Italy, a girl was born. She was named Zita—after a local 13th-century saint, a Tuscan maid from Lucca known for her piety, humility, and habit of giving her own bread to the poor. The name proved quietly prophetic. Her father—Robert I, Duke of Parma—had lost his throne in 1859 when Parma was absorbed into a unifying Italy.
This detail matters: Zita grew up in a family that had already lost everything once and had built a life around something greater than power. Her father was, by all accounts, a man of extraordinary warmth, good humor, and sincere faith. His family was exceptional in size. Robert had twenty-four children—twelve by his first wife, who passed away, and twelve by his second, Infanta Maria Antonia of Portugal, granddaughter of the exiled King Dom Miguel. Zita was the seventeenth child overall. The family moved between three homes on a private
train with sixteen carriages. The children—always numerous, always everywhere—spoke French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English among themselves, switching languages mid-sentence. Zita recalled her childhood as almost entirely happy. She described how she and her sisters visited the sick and elderly in the village—returning home exhausted to undergo disinfection.
Her mother taught her that charity was the best protection against the risk of infection. It was a lesson she understood far beyond the realm of medicine. She described her father as the embodiment of joy and kindness—a man who never raised a hand to a child, but whose rare reprimands cut to the heart. And until the end of her days, she carried a lesson learned from her mother and her Portuguese aunts—exiled princesses who had built lives of genuine purpose without thrones: nothing in this world lasts forever, worldly power is the most fleeting thing of all, and the only thing that cannot be taken away is love.
In 1907, her father died. Zita was fifteen. She was sent to study with Benedictine nuns on the Isle of Wight in England—to the very convent where her maternal grandmother, the dowager Queen of Portugal, had taken her vows and was now the abbess. There, amidst philosophy, theology, and music, Zita felt a genuine calling to monastic life.
She did not become a nun. But the formation she received there—the discipline, the prayer, the conviction that the visible world always serves the invisible—held her together through everything that followed. Karl of Habsburg-Lorraine had known Zita nearly all his life.
Their families had crossed paths since childhood—the same castles, the same summer visits, the same religious ceremonies, year after year, across Central Europe. He was the grand-nephew of Franz Joseph. She was the seventeenth child of a dethroned duke. Neither of them, at that point, was heir to anything extraordinary. By 1909, something had changed.
Within a couple of years, their engagement was announced. The wedding took place on October 21, 1911, at Schloss Schwarzau. The Austrian historian Erich Feigl would later call it the last great wedding in Europe—two hundred guests, royals from a dozen dynasties, and a waltz composed in Zita’s honor for the celebration. What no one in that ballroom knew was that the heir whom everyone assumed would always stand between Karl and the throne was less than three years away from assassination.
The empire visible from every window of Schloss Schwarzau was less than seven years away from collapse. And the two at the center of it all—a couple of whom everyone unanimously said were so obviously, so genuinely in love—had only about seven years of happiness ahead of them before everything would change. But on that October day in 1911, none of that existed yet.
There was only the wedding. The waltz. A bronze statue delivered by airship from young officers who had heard of Zita’s fascination with aviation. Their honeymoon was a driving tour through the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were young, in love, and traveling through an empire that had existed for six hundred years—and had only seven left to live.
Karl and Zita had eight children. The eldest was Crown Prince Otto, born in 1912. He was followed by Adelheid, Robert, Felix, Karl Ludwig, Rudolf, and Charlotte. The eighth, Elisabeth, was born two months after her father’s death—on May 31, 1922, in Madrid. She never saw her father. With these eight children—the oldest just ten, the youngest not yet born—Zita found herself utterly alone. Without a country. Without an army. Without an income.
Armed only with the realization that her primary duty was now right here. Zita refused to let tragedy turn her children into victims of history. She transformed them into its participants. Each received an education fitting the spirit of the Habsburgs: a strict Catholic upbringing, mastery of multiple languages, and a profound understanding of who they were and what it meant.
When King Alfonso XIII of Spain offered to place Crown Prince Otto’s education in the kingdom’s finest school entirely under his patronage, Zita politely declined—she intended to raise her son according to Austrian and Hungarian traditions, under teachers she chose herself. The destinies of these eight children proved diverse.
Otto became the symbol of the house—for decades, he led the International Paneuropean Union, later became a Member of the European Parliament, and went down in history as one of the architects of a united Europe. Robert engaged in political and humanitarian work. Felix and Karl Ludwig studied in Quebec, close to their mother. After the war, Charlotte spent several years working under a pseudonym in the United States as a social welfare specialist. Elisabeth, the youngest, married into the Prince of Liechtenstein’s family.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Karl became the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Five weeks later, the First World War began. In November 1916, Franz Joseph died at the age of eighty-six. Karl and Zita ascended the throne. On December 30, 1916, in Budapest, Zita was crowned to the Hungarian throne.
According to ancient tradition, the Queen’s crown was placed upon her head, while the holy Crown of Saint Stephen—one of Europe’s oldest royal regalia, dating back to the 11th century—was touched to her right shoulder as a symbol of sharing the burden of power. It was the last coronation in Hungarian history. They were twenty-nine and twenty-four years old.
They would reign for exactly two years and twelve days. Karl was no champion of war. He was a deeply devout Catholic who viewed his imperial role as a duty to his peoples, not a privilege over them. From his first day on the throne, his primary goal was to bring an end to the war. Zita was his closest advisor.
Her biographer, Charles Coulombe, described her as possessing a “vibrant personality, an iron will, and a superb intellect.” She traveled with Karl to the front lines. She organized relief for the suffering, visited hospitals, and pushed for social reforms—workers’ rights, better conditions for the poor, and the proper care of prisoners of war.
Karl initiated secret peace negotiations through Zita’s brothers—Princes Sixtus and Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, who were serving in the Belgian army—attempting to open a backchannel to France and Great Britain. When the talks were exposed, German nationalists branded Zita a traitor due to her French Bourbon lineage. She bore this without a public response. The peace initiative failed.
On November 11, 1918, an armistice ended the war. Austria-Hungary was dissolved. Ministers insisted on an official abdication. Karl refused, and Zita stood resolutely beside him. To those who pressured her on the matter, she made it clear that a sovereign cannot abdicate the way a minister resigns: a sovereign can be overthrown—which is fundamentally different, imposed from without, rather than surrendered from within.
Karl signed a document relinquishing his participation in state affairs. It was not an abdication. This distinction was a matter of principle for both of them, and it defined the rest of Zita’s life. In April 1919, they were forced to move to Switzerland. In 1921, Karl made two attempts to restore royal authority in Hungary. Both failed.
The Allies intervened, demanding his permanent removal. Madeira was chosen. They arrived in Funchal on November 19, 1921. The governor met them at the pier. Zita was presented with a bouquet tied in blue and red—the colors of her grandfather, the exiled King of Portugal, Dom Miguel. It was house arrest. On an island.
Under strained circumstances that bore no resemblance to the fifty territories listed in Zita’s imperial titles. A rented villa near a hotel. Almost no money. And then Karl fell ill. A cold. Bronchitis. Pneumonia. The island lacked adequate medical equipment. A first heart attack. A second. Zita was eight months pregnant with their eighth child. She nursed him herself, while also caring for her other sick children.
She never left his side. She sat with him. On April 1, 1922, Karl I died. He was thirty-four years old. As he lay dying, he told Zita that he loved her—that he had always loved her, more than words could ever express. Zita never remarried. The next morning, she dressed in black. She was still in black sixty-seven years later.
Zita left Madeira on May 19, 1922. A few weeks after Karl’s death, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, acting through his ambassador to Great Britain, secured permission for Zita and her children to move to Spain—even though the Allied powers would have preferred to keep the widow of the last emperor far away from Europe. The invitation was accepted.
Zita raised her children at the Uribarren Palace near Bilbao. There was no state income. She lived on the charity of sympathetic monarchs and the resources of the Bourbon-Parma family. In 1929, the family moved to Belgium, to the castle of Steenokkerzeel near Brussels. She educated her children.
She maintained the dynasty as a living family—not as a political force seeking restoration, but as individuals with a cohesive understanding of who they were and what they stood for. Her son Otto embodied this purpose with exceptional consistency. For decades, he presided over the International Paneuropean Union—one of the intellectual precursors to the European Union—and later became a Member of the European Parliament.
In an unexpected way, the exile of the Habsburgs contributed to the building of a united Europe. Then came 1938. Hitler invaded Austria. The Anschluss. Otto was sentenced to death by the Nazi regime for his open opposition to the annexation. Zita’s family was on the target list. On May 9, 1940—Zita’s forty-eighth birthday—Germany attacked Belgium.
At dawn the following day, Luftwaffe bombers flew over Schloss Steenokkerzeel. Seventeen inhabitants left in three cars. Two hours later, the house was in flames. Otto later described this raid as Hitler’s personal gesture of hatred toward the Habsburgs. They fled through France to Spain, then across the Atlantic.
They reached the United States, and later Quebec—where Zita and her family lived from 1940 to 1952. She attended Mass every day. Her four youngest children studied at Université Laval. Her sister-in-law, Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg, and her brother, Prince Felix, were also in Quebec during the war years. The former Empress of Austria lived in Quebec for twelve years. She cooked. She prayed. She kept the family together. She waited.
In 1952, Zita returned to Europe. At first, she lived in Luxembourg, but ten years later, in 1962, she moved to Switzerland—to the small village of Zizers in the alpine canton of Graubünden. A room in a Catholic nursing home. A quiet life. She could not return to Austria. The Habsburg Law of 1919 banned members of the dynasty from entering the country unless they renounced all claims to the throne. Zita refused. She would not abdicate.
She would not renounce her titles. In her conviction, these titles were given by God—and could not be surrendered at the demand of a law passed by the republic that had overthrown her. It was not a whim. It was a principle. And it cost her dearly. In 1971, one of her daughters died in Austria. Zita could not cross the border to attend the funeral.
The law made no allowance for a mother wishing to bury her child. She remained in Switzerland, enduring her grief from a distance. In 1982, Austrian courts ruled that the Habsburg Law had been unlawfully applied to Zita. She was born a Bourbon-Parma and was a Habsburg only by marriage. The law should never have applied to her.
After sixty-three years, she could finally return home. She was ninety years old. More than twenty thousand people came to the Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Incapable of fitting inside, they stood on the streets outside. She celebrated her ninetieth birthday surrounded by thirty-three grandchildren. Her eyesight was failing. She moved with difficulty.
Yet those around her invariably noted that she bore these infirmities with a serenity that resembled readiness more than resignation. She was waiting for death, which would allow her to be reunited with Karl. On March 14, 1989, she died at the St. John’s Catholic Home in Zizers. She was ninety-six years old.
The Austrian Republic agreed to host the funeral—on the condition that the Habsburg family fully cover the massive expenses themselves. The date was April 1st. The anniversary of Karl’s death on Madeira. Sixty-seven years to the day. Zita’s coffin was draped with the imperial funeral pall of the Habsburgs. To the Capuchin Church, it was carried by the very same historic carriage that had borne the coffin of Franz Joseph in 1916—a funeral behind which the young Empress herself had walked on foot, seventy-three years before. The same carriage. A different world. At least two hundred thousand people filed
past her coffin over the course of two days. Eight thousand attended the funeral service. More than two hundred members of the Habsburg and Bourbon-Parma families arrived. Forty thousand people stood in the April rain on the streets of Vienna. Zita was laid to rest in the Imperial Crypt—alongside twelve emperors and nineteen empresses spanning four centuries.
Her heart was later brought to Muri Abbey in Switzerland. Right next to the heart of Karl. After sixty-seven years of separation. Together. Zita of Bourbon-Parma was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia for two years and twelve days. In exile—for seventy years. She spoke six languages. She raised eight children alone in poverty. She lived in nine countries. She crossed the Atlantic twice.
She escaped a burning house at dawn. She spent twelve years in Quebec. For sixty-three years, she was banned from entering Austria. She wore black for sixty-seven years. Not as theater. Not as a political statement. But as exactly what it was: a love that had nowhere else to go. Thank you for watching.
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