Contenu du sommaire : Les noblesses dans l'empire des Habsbourg

Between Family Life and the Milieu of the Salons: Pauline of Schwarzenberg Pauline of Schwarzenberg (1774-1810) – wife of Joseph I, Earl of Schwarzenberg, the founder of the Schwarzenberg primogeniture and sister-in-law of a famous marshal – stays in the public mind as the tragic victim of the fire in the Austrian Embassy in Paris on 1 July 1810. This tragic event made it possible that the Countess of Schwarzenberg lived a 'life after life': her image was created and finalized during the 19th century. However, it seems to be rather unfair to the Countess since it was not her death, but first of all her life that made her a really exceptional personality, standing out due to her distinct talent for fine arts, the gift of excellent written communication (her correspondence is a real reading experience), but also due to the fact that she adopted Rousseau' s model of 'nouvelle mère', that is of a mother who takes care of her child from the very beginning breast-feeding it, looking after its health, education and socialization. However, her motherhood did not lead the Countess away from her usual duties relating to the position of wife of the governing Count of Schwarzenberg: she was able to comply with the requirements for representation, social life, économie matters and philanthropy. The Countess maintained extensive correspondence with her parents, her husband who was often tied up by his duties outside home, and with her friends. She had a nice friendship with Mrs de Staël in Vienna, playing in theatre performances under the writer's direction. Countess of Swarzenberg was an experienced reader and used to think about what she had read. She contributed to the establishment of the park in Třeboň. Pauline of Schwarzenberg also was a good painter – the album of her drawings containing gently feminine views of places she was familiar with was published in Paris. Countess Pauline was a talented, skillful, and active aristocrat who was, perhaps unwittingly, aware of the fact that the life style based on the ancestry privileges would soon be over.

The Buquoy, from Artois to Bohemia The French medieval noble family of the Longueval, from Artois and Picardy, turned into a nursery of loyal servants of the House of Austria when the comté d'Artois was conceded to the Burgundian dukes and later became a part of the Austrian inheritance. When the Low Countries revolt broke out, they stood firm in their loyalty to the dynasty and the Catholicism. Maximilien de Longueval was made comte de Buquoy in 1580. Thanks to the Archdukes Court of Brussels at the beginning of the seventeenth century, his son Charles Bonaventure became general of the Imperial Army as soon as 1614. Six years later he won the decisive battle of the White Mountain near Prague. A few months before, Ferdinand II. had given him a lot of confiscated estates in South Bohemia. After his unexpected death in 1621, these castles, towns, fields and woods were far from secure for his widow, the Italian-born Maria Maddalena who had to leave Brussels to save her unique son's inheritance. For a few generations, the family's fortune unfolded both in the Spanish Low Countries and in the Austrian Monarchy, the Buquoy being servants of the whole House of Austria. But from the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1945, Bohemia remained the single landed base for the descendants of the victorious general of the White Mountain. Then, it's worth emphasizing who where the Buquoy, where they lived and what they have done.

The Nobility of the Habsburg Monarchy at Heart of the European Republic of Letters: The Case of the Relation Between Windischgrätz und Condorcet Josef Mikuláš count Windischgrätz (1744 to 1802), a man of science and philosopher of the Enlightenment, was the descendent of a venerable noble family residing in Bohemia since the 16th century. At the turn of years 1784/1785 he announced a prize for solving the problem how to improve the legal acts by means of political arithmetic, which was a topical method in those days. Such a project stimulated a broad intellectual correspondence among the scientists and statesmen from different countries. Over the years 1785 to 1789 some fifty persons from all Europe (and even from all over the 'world') joined this project, for instance Richard Price and the knight Banks from the London Royal Society, Adam Smith from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the permanent secretary of the Berlin Academy Jean Henri Samuel Formay and the mathematician La Grange from the same scientific society, then Carmer, chancellor of the king of Prussia, professor of law at the University of Basel d'Annone, then Jean Marie Lampredi, professor at the University in Pisa, members of the French Academy of Sciences Condorcet, Duséjour, Borda, Lapiace, the abbé de Rochon, the German philosopher Frédéric-Henri Jacobi, Joseph Mader, the future professor of statistics at the Prague University, the Belgian mathematician count Nieuport or the ministers of Joseph II, Cobenzel and Karel Zinzendorf. Even Benjamin Franklin took part and mediated the propagation of the project in America. Thus the idea of Windischgrätz stimulated a wide correspondence network, which interconnected Paris, Brussels, Prague, Vienna, London, Edinburgh, Basel, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Magdeburg, Strasburg, Pisa, St. Petersburg and smaller localities like Tachov or St. Nicholas of Liptov. Participating in this network were not only individual persons but also the well known scientific institutions of that time: the Academy of Sciences in Paris, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society in Edinburgh, the University of Basel, the Academy of Berlin. Windischgrätz made the most ample correspondence with the mathematician Condorcet. Besides the political arithmetic they used to discuss the issues of political economy, universal language, enlightened constitutional reforms, exchanged information on political and cultural events in France and in the Habsburg monarchy and exchanged the literature of Enlightenment. This correspondence is significant for the history of science and administration, the cultural and intellectual history and as a document of mutual perception. It is also important for the study of the elite and nobility of the Habsburg monarchy and its integration into the European intellectual community.

Romance and Reality: Perceptions of Bohemia in French Literature, Middle Ages – 19th Century Three lines of research present themselves in order to trace the formation of a picture of Bohemia in French literature between the Middle Ages and the 19th century: the first focuses on the French language, and the emergence of a field of semantic denotations referring to the name of the country and its inhabitants; the second looks at French accounts of the actual Kingdom of Bohemia, its history and its geography; the third involves the creation of a picture of Bohemia in French literature, notably through travelogues, articles, novels and historical writings. These texts have been studied with a double purpose in mind: to determine the interest which their authors, and subsequently the French public at large, may or may not have accorded to Bohemia, and to define the impact which such readings may have had on the popular imagination of France; thus introducing new elements for a better understanding of an entity, both cultural and geographic, which had long been confused with Germany. This thesis aims to present a summary of the testimonies of Bohemia and its history in French literature, and thereby to contribute both to comparative literature and to exchanges between Western and Central Europe (in this case, France and Bohemia).