Marx looked upon Russia as the home of reaction, he too denounced Austria.
It was in this pro-Austrian atmosphere that the Emperor Charles—with the help of his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Parma who, like his brother, was serving in the Belgian army opened the peace negotiations with the Allies to which I have already referred. Overtures were begun at the end of January 1917—though initial steps had been taken a month earlier—by the mother of Prince Sixtus, whom the Emperor Charles had sent to Switzerland, and they were afterwards continued by other persons in the Emperor’s confidence. Prince Sixtus himself went to see the Emperor at Vienna; and, in a letter dated March 24, 1917, which was intended for President Poincaré, the Emperor Charles promised to do all in his power to persuade Germany to give up Alsace-Lorraine. For himself he demanded that the Hapsburg Monarchy should be preserved within its existing frontiers. After the negotiations, Prince Sixtus saw President Poincaré five times in the course of 1917. M. Briand approved of the scheme, as did Mr. Lloyd George whom Prince Sixtus saw more than once. The Prince was received also by the King of England.
I need hardly go into details. Disputes and differences arose between the Emperor Charles and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, whose references to France at the Vienna Town Hall were anything but straightforward. He alleged that, before the new German offensive began, Clemenceau had sent a negotiator to him; whereupon Clemenceau answered “Count Czernin has lied.” The Austro-Hungarian Government went on lying and, finally, the Emperor Charles sought to defend himself by lying repeatedly to the German Emperor and by attacking Clemenceau—until the publication of a photographic facsimile of the Austrian Emperor’s letter put an end to the lying. Clemenceau drastically disposed of him and of Czernin in an exclamation which pertinently described the Austria of the Hapsburgs—” putrid consciences!” Mainly through the writings of M. Ribot and of a person in the confidence of Prince Sixtus these things are now sufficiently cleared up, and the mendacity and infinite clumsiness of the Hapsburgs adequately exposed. The significance of Prince Sixtus’s negotiations lay in the circumstance that the most influential persons on both sides were directly concerned in them. The Emperor of Austria himself wrote to the President of the French Republic; and Briand, Lloyd George and the King of England took part in them, as well as the French
