Zita of Bourbon-Parma
1892 – 1989 · Generation XXII · Consort
Zita (1892 – 1989). Consort. Married Charles in 1911. Last Empress of Austria; lived to age 96. The seventeenth of the deposed Duke Robert of Parma’s twenty-four children, she grew up between Villa Pianore near Viareggio and Schwarzau in Lower Austria and, deeply devout, once considered becoming a nun. Charles succeeded Franz Joseph in 1916; the next year her brother Prince Sixtus carried the couple’s secret peace overture to France, which ended in embarrassment when Clemenceau published the emperor’s letter in 1918. After the empire broke apart, British officers escorted the family to Switzerland, and when Charles’s bids to regain Hungary failed they were sent to Madeira, where he died in 1922, leaving her a widow at twenty-nine and eight months pregnant. She wore black for the rest of her life. Exile took her on to Spain, Belgium and wartime Quebec. Allowed back into Austria only in 1982, she was buried in the Imperial Crypt in 1989 and has since been declared a Servant of God.
Place in the family
- Zita of Bourbon-Parma married Charles I of Austria, a great-nephew of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
- The archive records 3 of her descendants, across 3 generations.
Partners
- Married Charles I of Austria (1887 – 1922) in 1911 — one child together
Children
- Otto von Habsburg (1912 – 2011)
Life
- 1892 — Born
- 1911 — Married Charles
- 1989 — Died