In 1810, Napoleon Bonaparte famously married Marie Louise of Austria, daughter of Emperor Francis I. This union symbolized the continuing relevance of dynastic politics in the Napoleonic era, as one of the continent’s youngest dynasties allied itself with one of its oldest in a strategic play of prestige and power. Despite the upheavals of the preceding decades, ruling houses had remained an essential element of the European political landscape, coexisting with the revolutionary state that sought to dismantle the institutional legacy of the ancien régime. In recent decades, historians have shed new light on the nature and dynamics of European dynasties in the pre-modern period. Moving away from the older focus on the male heads of ruling families, the recent trends in dynastic history emphasize previously overlooked aspects, such as the roles played by non-ruling women and the social and cultural construction of dynasties. However, this shift has hardly extended to the study of dynasties after 1789. This workshop seeks to fill the gap by examining ruling houses as family power networks – explicitly conceived across gender boundaries – during the age of revolution between 1780 and 1850. Rather than seeing dynasties as passive holdovers from the past, we aim to explore their inner logic and functionality as well as their continued relevance as instruments of power, negotiation, and governance in states from the lesser German principalities to the great imperial monarchies. The workshop will assess how dynasties adapted to the rapidly changing political landscape, while simultaneously recalculating their sources of legitimacy.

The conference will open with a public lecture by Dominic Lieven, historian of Eastern Europe and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, on the topic "Monarchy, Dynasty, Empire: The Napoleonic Era in Historical Perspective".

This workshop takes place within the framework of the project ‘Dynastic Continuity in an Age of Crisis? The Habsburgs in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815)’ financed between 2023 and 2026 by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (Project No. P 36804-G). On the basis of the rich archival record, this project investigates the nature of dynastic thinking and dynastic agency against the background of the massive domestic and international challenges faced across a generation by Europe’s most ancient imperial lineage.