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Marie-Thérèse d’ Autriche, Lettres de l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse à Sophie d’Enzenberg (1746–1780): ‘le soleil même me paraît noir’. Édition établie par Jean-Pierre Lavandier. Préface d’Élisabeth Badinter

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knaa102

1468-2931

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev,

Central European and Russian historical studies

While the editor of this critical edition, Jean-Pierre Lavandier, is at pains to highlight the touching emotional intimacy of the letters from Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80) to her friend and lady-in-waiting Countess Sophie von Enzenberg (née Schack von Schackenburg, 1707–88), the correspondence stands out above all for the vicissitudes of its preservation. The letters we read are the remnants of what must have been an extensive, politically sensitive, and often emotionally charged French-language exchange. No letters from the countess to her sovereign have survived, likely destroyed with other private papers by Joseph II after his mother’s death (p. 20). Although on one occasion the countess manifestly ignored Maria Theresa’s instructions to burn a letter (p. 181), she seems otherwise to have prudently eliminated large swathes of their correspondence. The letters that escaped contain very little sensitive material: many contain practical instructions that required the countess to keep the texts for reference, and many others are recommendation letters, which, given their accessibility to third-party readers, are typically innocuous. The letters themselves record a similar process of triage after the death of the countess’s husband, the trusted Governor of Tyrol, Count Cassian Ignaz Bonaventura von Enzenberg: the couple’s son, affectionately dubbed Frantzl in the exchange, returns to Vienna all the letters his father had received from Maria Theresa, who mercifully sends back a few letters deemed unproblematic enough to be kept as family heirlooms (pp. 193–97). Lavandier’s edition presents the result of this multi-stage process of elimination: in 1828, the grandson of Sophie and Cassian Ignaz von Enzenberg, Franz Seraphicus Josef, assembled the remaining letters from Maria Theresa to his grandparents, binding them into a single volume alongside related epistles, such as those of imperial secretaries, Archduchess Maria Anna, and Joseph II. Maria Theresa’s major nineteenth-century biographer, Alfred von Arneth, published a large selection of these letters in his four-volume Briefe der Kaiserin Maria Theresia an ihre Kinder und Freunde (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1881). Lavandier himself collaborated with Monika Czernin to publish a German translation of the collection for a non-scholarly audience (Liebet mich immer. Maria Theresia: Briefe an ihre engste Freundin (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2017)), a fact that goes strangely unmentioned in the French edition. The present volume constitutes the first full critical edition of the so-called ‘Manuscrit de Tratzberg’, still the property of the Enzenberg family today. Providing the complete French text and largely very reliable French translations of German-language letters, such as those addressed to Count Cassian Ignaz, Lavandier offers a mostly biographical Introduction and footnotes; he occasionally makes odd choices in the apparatus, including a thematic index comprising only two themes (Maria Theresa’s depressive anxiety and her letters of recommendation). This correspondence does not furnish the extensive glimpse into Maria Theresa’s intellectual, emotional, and political world that one finds in her better-preserved exchanges with her children Marie-Antoinette and Ferdinand. Nevertheless, this edition of the ‘Manuscrit de Tratzberg’ tells the fascinating history of its constitution as a collection and draws attention to how we as scholars read the inevitably partial epistolary record.