The last Empress of Austria died at ninety-six after wearing mourning clothes for sixty-seven years. She was only twenty-nine when her world collapsed, pregnant with her eighth child as her husband lay dying at thirty-four in a rented villa on a Portuguese island, without adequate medical equipment and without a homeland to return to. Zita of Bourbon-Parma had been Empress for just over two years. Her grief for the man she shared that throne with lasted more than six decades.
Her life began far from any throne. Born on May 9, 1892, in Tuscany, Italy, she was the seventeenth of twenty-four children born to Robert I, the deposed Duke of Parma, and his second wife, Princess Maria Antonia of Portugal. The family had lost their duchy in 1859 when Parma was absorbed into a unified Italy. They traveled between three homes on a private train with sixteen carriages, and the children switched between French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, often mid-sentence.
Zita later recalled a largely happy childhood, visiting the sick and elderly in nearby villages with her sisters, and learning from her mother that charity was the best protection against infection—a lesson she understood far beyond medicine. Her father died in 1907 when she was fifteen. She was sent to study with Benedictine nuns on the Isle of Wight in England, at the same convent where her maternal grandmother had taken religious vows. During that time, Zita felt a genuine calling to religious life.
She did not become a nun, but the discipline and faith she absorbed there held firm through everything that followed. Zita had known Karl of Habsburg-Lorraine nearly all her life. Their families met through the same castles, summer visits, and religious celebrations across Central Europe for years. He was the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph.
She was the seventeenth daughter of a deposed duke. Neither was heir to anything extraordinary. By 1909, something had changed. Within two years, their engagement was announced.
They were married on October 21, 1911, at Schwarzau Palace in Austria, in what historian Erich Feigl later described as the last great wedding of old Europe. Two hundred guests attended, including royal representatives from twelve dynasties, with waltzes played in Zita’s honor. No one in that ballroom knew that Karl would be only three years from the assassination that made him heir, or less than seven years from the empire’s collapse. The couple, universally described as genuinely and visibly in love, had just seven years of happiness before everything changed.
Their honeymoon was a car trip through the Austro-Hungarian Empire—a six-hundred-year-old realm with only seven years left. Karl and Zita had eight children. The eldest, Crown Prince Otto, was born in 1912, followed by Adelheid, Robert, Felix, Karl Ludwig, Rudolf, and Charlotte. Elisabeth, the eighth child, was born on May 31, 1922, in Madrid, two months after her father’s death.
She never saw her father. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, making Karl heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Five weeks later, World War I broke out. In November 1916, Franz Joseph died at eighty-six, and Karl and Zita took the throne.
On December 30, 1916, Zita was crowned Queen of Hungary in Budapest, the last coronation in Hungarian history. They were twenty-nine and twenty-four years old. They reigned for exactly two years and twelve days. Karl was not a proponent of war.
A deeply devout Catholic, he viewed his imperial role as a duty to his people rather than a privilege over them. From his first day on the throne, his primary goal was ending the conflict. Zita was his closest adviser. Biographer Charles Coulombe described her as having “a lively personality, an iron will, and a first-rate mind.
” She traveled with Karl to the front lines, organized relief for those affected, visited hospitals, and pushed for social reforms—workers’ rights, better conditions for the poor, and proper care for prisoners of war. Karl launched secret peace negotiations through Zita’s brothers, Princes Sixtus and Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, who served in the Belgian army. When the talks were exposed, German nationalists branded Zita a traitor because of her French Bourbon origins. She bore the accusation without public response.
The peace initiative failed. On November 11, 1918, the armistice ended the war and the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. Ministers insisted on a formal abdication. Karl refused, and Zita stood firmly beside him.
She explained to those pressing her that a monarch does not resign like a minister: a king can be overthrown—something imposed from outside, not granted from within. Karl signed a document renouncing his participation in state affairs. It was not an abdication, and that distinction became a defining principle for both of them. In April 1919, they were forced to move to Switzerland.
In 1921, Karl made two attempts to reclaim the Hungarian throne. Both failed. The Allies intervened, demanding his permanent removal. Madeira was chosen.
They arrived in Funchal on November 19, 1921, under house arrest on the island, in harsh conditions far removed from the fifty territories listed in Zita’s imperial titles. They lived in a rented villa, nearly penniless. Then Karl fell ill. A cold became bronchitis, then pneumonia.
The island lacked adequate medical equipment. He suffered a first heart attack, then a second. Zita, eight months pregnant, nursed him while also caring for their other sick children. She never left his side.
On April 1, 1922, Karl I died. He was thirty-four. As he lay dying, he told Zita he loved her—that he had always loved her, more than words could express. She never remarried.
The next morning, she dressed in black and wore it for sixty-seven years. Zita left Madeira on May 19, 1922. Weeks after Karl’s death, King Alfonso XIII of Spain arranged for her and her children to move to Spain, despite Allied powers preferring to keep the last emperor’s widow away from Europe. She raised her children in a palace near Bilbao, with no government income, living on the charity of sympathetic monarchs and Bourbon-Parma resources.
In 1929, the family moved to Belgium, to Steenokkerzeel Castle near Brussels. She oversaw her children’s education, maintaining the dynasty as a living family rather than a political force seeking restoration. Her son Otto embodied that purpose with exceptional persistence. For decades he led the International Paneuropean Union, a intellectual predecessor of the European Union, and later served as a member of the European Parliament.
The Habsburg exile unexpectedly contributed to building a united Europe. Then came 1938. Hitler annexed Austria. Otto was sentenced to death by the Nazi regime for his public opposition to the Anschluss.
Zita’s family was on the target list. On May 9, 1940—Zita’s forty-eighth birthday—Germany attacked Belgium. At dawn the next day, Luftwaffe bombers flew over Steenokkerzeel Castle. Seventeen residents left in three cars.
Two hours later, the house was in flames. Otto later described the raid as a personal gesture of hatred from Hitler toward the Habsburgs. They fled through France to Spain, then crossed the Atlantic to the United States and eventually to Quebec, where Zita and her family lived from 1940 to 1952. She attended Mass daily.
Her four youngest children studied at Laval University. The former Empress of Austria spent twelve years in Quebec, cooking, praying, keeping the family together, and waiting. In 1952, Zita returned to Europe, first to Luxembourg, then in 1962 to Switzerland, to the small village of Zizers in the Alpine canton of Graubünden. She lived in a room in a Catholic care home, leading a quiet life.
She could not return to Austria. The Habsburg Law of 1919 barred members of the dynasty from entering the country unless they renounced all claims to the throne. Zita refused. She would not abdicate and would not surrender her titles.
In her conviction, these titles were a gift from God and could not be renounced by a law passed by the republic that had overthrown her. It was a matter of principle, and it cost her dearly. In 1971, one of her daughters died in Austria. Zita could not cross the border to attend the funeral.
The law did not allow a mother to bury her daughter. She remained in Switzerland, bearing her grief from afar. In 1982, Austrian courts ruled that the Habsburg Law had been applied to Zita illegally. Born a Bourbon-Parma, she had become a Habsburg only through marriage and should never have been subject to the law.
After sixty-three years, she was finally allowed to return to her homeland. She was ninety years old. More than twenty thousand people attended the Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, with crowds standing in the surrounding streets.
Zita celebrated her ninetieth birthday surrounded by thirty-three grandchildren. Her eyesight was failing and she moved with difficulty, yet those around her noted she bore her infirmities with a calm that seemed more like preparation than surrender. She was waiting for death, which would allow her to be reunited with Karl. On March 14, 1989, she died at the Catholic care home in Zizers.
She was ninety-six. The Austrian Republic agreed to host the funeral on the condition that the Habsburg family cover the considerable costs entirely. The date was April 1, the anniversary of Karl’s death in Madeira, exactly sixty-seven years later. Zita’s coffin was wrapped in the imperial Habsburg shroud.
Her body was taken to the Capuchin Crypt in the same historic hearse that had carried Franz Joseph’s coffin in 1916—the hearse behind which the young empress herself had walked on foot seventy-three years earlier. At least two hundred thousand people filed past her coffin over two days. Eight thousand attended the funeral service. More than two hundred members of the Habsburg and Bourbon-Parma families arrived.
Forty thousand people stood in April rain on the streets of Vienna. She was buried in the Imperial Crypt alongside twelve emperors and nineteen empresses spanning four centuries. Her heart was later moved to Muri Abbey in Switzerland, placed next to Karl’s heart. After sixty-seven years of separation, they were together.
Zita of Bourbon-Parma was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia for two years and twelve days. She spent seventy years in exile. She spoke six languages, raised eight children alone in poverty, lived in nine countries, crossed the Atlantic twice, survived a house burning at dawn, spent twelve years in Quebec, was barred from Austria for sixty-three years, and wore black for sixty-seven.
Not as performance or political statement, but simply as it was: love with no outlet.