September 29, 1929
Former Empress Zita of Austria and four of her children arrived in Belgium today, creating a media storm in some of Belgium's newspapers. The "quiet black veiled" woman's arrival relighted "political and wartime passions throughout Belgium," reports the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Zita is the widow of Austria's last Emperor, Karl I, who died in 1922, nearly four years after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The family arrived by train, traveling in a second class car. Zita, who is the mother of the heir to the former throne, wants her children to attend Catholic schools.
"Newspaper polemics" broke out as soon as she stepped on Belgian soil.
The Catholic daily, La Libre Belgique, opined: "born to wear the crown of an empire where the vast majority of people hope for Zita's return." The paper's editorial added: "Zita saw a brilliant future at the side of the beloved Charles, last emperor of Austria and Hungary. Revolution, which since the armistice has undermined so many dynasties, ruined the big-hearted dreams of the young Austrian rulers."
La Libre Belgique's views were scorned by other newspapers, including, Le Peuple, the labor daily. Their comments were far more scornful toward the former empress. "What does all this nonsense mean? The Habsburgs, just like the Hohenzollern, are responsible for the world war. Their Austro-Hungarian empire was a freak state which thrived only as long as it oppressed the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Italian and Roumanian minorities.
"Zita may be pitied, but she ought to be less pitied than a hundred million orphans, widows and lonely old mothers who owe their misery to sinister old man [the emperor Franz Joseph] whose worthy successors Charles and Zita wanted to be. Let all those princes keep in the shade! That will be best..."
Archduke Otto will be attending Louvain University.
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