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In 1730 Victor Amadeus abdicated in favour of his son, Charles Emmanuel III, but, when he changed his mind and attempted to reassume his throne, Charles Emmanuel had him arrested (1731) and confined for the remainder of his years

By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Victor Amadeus II (reigned 1675–1730) was raised in 1713 from duke to the status of a king as ruler of Sicily

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), only Sardinia remained free of French control, but in 1815, Victor Emmanuel I (reigned 1802–21) added Genoa to the family’s holdings

At the beginning of the Risorgimento, the territory of the house of Savoy, centred on Piedmont, was unique among Italian states for its freedom from foreign influence and for its relative military strength. A liberal revolution in 1821 forced Victor Emmanuel I to abdicate in favour of his brother, Charles Felix. On the death of the latter in 1831, Charles Albert, of the Carignano branch of the family, obtained the throne. He contributed to the cause of unification under Piedmont’s leadership by modernizing his government

and fighting against Austrian power in Italy in the First War of Independence of 1848–49. Under his son Victor Emmanuel II (reigned 1849–1878, king of Italy from 1861), who supported Piedmont’s prime minister, Count Cavour, in the diplomatic maneuvering immediately before unification, the Kingdom of Italy was formed with the house of Savoy at its head

Victor Emmanuel III (reigned 1900–46), who remained as figurehead king during the Fascist regime, abdicated in 1946, at the end of World War II, in favour of his son Umberto II in an attempt to save the monarchy, but the Italian people voted in a referendum of June 2, 1946, for a republic, ending the rule of the house of Savoy

No longer royal, the Savoy family moved abroad, and the monarchist movement, strong in the 1950s, went into decline

built in 1020 by Werner

in the Aargau

in what is now Switzerland

rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950

Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232)

Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408

Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins

the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers

Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy

The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him

his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I.

Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s

Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance

Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued

To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial

Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy.

Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720

Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line

he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts

The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward

By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza

acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession

Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy

The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands

her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg–Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs

An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it

the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory

when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany

The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes

On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted

a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise

The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire

German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy

Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia.

Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”

he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary.

The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars

Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864

In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey

World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper

Five years later he had attempted to manipulate the outcome of the marriage of Isabella II of Spain against French interests in order to align Britain with a liberal Spain

In February 1848, a new revolution in Paris threatened to upset Anglo-French relations altogether

he Second Republic was therefore seen as unstable and potentially militaristic, and Palmerston’s reaction was to issue a confidential  paper outlining government preparations for an imminent invasion of Britain

There was considerable relief in London, then, when in October the political body in France agreed to usher in a republic under the authority of a president elected for four years by universal adult manhood suffrage. The future of Anglo-French relations would now hinge  on the identity of the new president

In December, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the great defeated enemy of England, was elected first president of the Second Republic, gaining 74.3 per cent of the 7,449,471 votes cast in metropolitan France

In Britain, initial reaction to the news was mixed. Louis-Napoléon had spent three years in exile in England between 1831 and 1848, and over five separate visits had acquired a respect for, and knowledge of, the country unrivalled among European heads of state

The sepoy revolt in India in May 1857 could hardly be blamed on Napoleon III, but in some quarters the suggestion was made that he was secretly helping them. A short visit to Osborne in August to meet the Queen and Palmerston put the matter straight (though none there had believed it).

When the French navy was not seen to be steaming up the Thames the panic dissipated, but the fears were resurrected after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2nd, 1851, dissolving the National Assembly and declaring a new constitution. Opinion polarised both in France and Britain; on the one hand Louis-Napoléon was declared a ‘saviour of society’ and on the other the ‘Antichrist’

even the Queen hoped that Louis-Napoléon’s enemies abroad would remain ‘perfectly passive’. But the press and its public were united in bitter condemnation. By January 1852, the poet Coventry Patmore had persuaded nineteen friends to form the first Rifle Club as part of a nation-wide army of volunteers to repel, as he put it later, ‘the threats of the French colonels and by suspicions of the intentions of Louis-Napoléon

The second invasion panic did not subside until a formal alliance was established in March 1854, preceding the Crimean War. In April 1855 the Emperor Napoleon III (as Louis-Napoléon had declared himself in December 1852) enjoyed a successful state visit to Britain, reciprocated by an equally successful visit by Victoria to Paris in August. Throughout the Crimean War, Napoleon III allowed Britain to lead affairs

personal relations between Palmerston and Napoleon III continued to deteriorate throughout the early 1860s

The incident most dangerous to Franco-British relations occurred on January 14th, 1858, when an attempt was made to assassinate Napoleon III in the streets of Paris, the plot hatched in London by political refugees

But popular opinion in England remained suspicious of the Second Republic, and the economic upturn was accompanied by the first of three intense ‘invasion panics’, which recalled to mind those set in motion many years earlier by Napoleon I

Outright war between France and England might have resulted had two different players been involved: Napoleon III apologised to Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, for having overlooked the jingoistic pronouncements in Le Moniteur universel, while Palmerston attempted to introduce a Conspiracy Bill, which would have elevated the crime of conspiring to murder persons abroad from a misdemeanour to a felony.

To Napoleon III from Queen Victoria’ promised to him in 1855 but somehow ‘forgotten’. The entente had been saved by an imperial whisker

In the wake of the assassination attempt Napoleon III was keen to demonstrate that his improvements to the naval base at Cherbourg were not a threat to Britain, and in August 1858 he invited Victoria and Albert, several politicians and naval men, to inspect them as a mark of trust.

The third invasion panic, the following year, originated in Napoleon III’s military attempt in May 1859 to oust Habsburg influence in Italy and prepare the peninsula for some form of unification and self-government

France’s annexation of Nice and Savoy in 1860 as a reward from Piedmont-Sardinia following the war in Italy was wholeheartedly approved by the local populace in a referendum

Napoleon III’s attempt to set up by direct intervention a European monarchy in Mexico from October 1861 (when a French, Spanish and British naval fleet worked in concert to extract the payment of debts from a corrupt Mexican administration) was approved by Palmerston but again vigorously opposed by Albert and all the royal family – and was unpopular in Britain, although offset by several other actions. Napoleon III’s vigorous support of free trade resulted in the pioneering Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 which, while it undoubtedly harmed a minority of trades, vastly improved the majority, increasing prosperity and mutual trust

Napoleon III was careful to appear subservient, enabling Palmerston to acknowledge that the British ‘throughout had their own way and ... led the way’

The Duruz were the aggressors in this instance, and thousands of Christians were killed during a period resolved only through French diplomacy, Turkish aid and Algerian sympathy

Napoleon III reacted by sighing that once he used to say ‘avec Lord Palmerston on peut faire les grandes choses’ but now he seemed determined to prevent him doing anything at all

The most bizarre was that Napoleon III was looking for the nephew of Marie Cantillon, a man who had attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington in Paris in 1818, to pay him money Napoléon I had bequeathed Cantillon in his recently published will

Napoleon III’s attempt to set up a European monarchy in Mexico was his only independent action undertaken in the 1860s to meet with Palmerston’s general approval, but only for what the scheme potentially meant for British trade

Following military defeat by Prussia and deposition by Parisian ideologues in 1870, Napoleon III died in England on January 9th, 1873.

Gladstone soon came to terms with the new Third French Republic, and the rest of Europe again took Britain’s lead in officially recognising the new French regime

The Napoleonic wars did not end at Waterloo, but in Paris in the hands of Napoleon III. Punch stated why on January 18th, 1873