Princess Stéphanie of Belgium
Princess Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte of Belgium (21 May 1864 – 23 August 1945) was a Belgian princess who became Crown Princess of Austria through marriage to Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Stéphanie of Belgium
21 May 1864
Palace of Laeken, Laeken, Brussels, Belgium
23 August 1945 (aged 81)
Pannonhalma Archabbey, Pannonhalma, Kingdom of Hungary
Princess Stéphanie was the second daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium and Marie Henriette of Austria. She married in Vienna on 10 May 1881 Crown Prince Rudolf, son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. They had one child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie. Stéphanie's marriage quickly became fragile. Rudolf, depressed and disappointed by politics, had multiple extramarital affairs, and contracted a venereal disease that he transmitted to his wife, rendering her unable to conceive again. In 1889, Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide pact at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods.
In 1900, Stéphanie married again, to Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank; for this, she was excluded from the House of Habsburg. However, this second union was happy. After the death of her father in 1909, Stéphanie joined her older sister Louise to claim from the Belgian courts the share of the inheritance of which they both felt they had been stripped.
Until World War II, Count and Countess Lónyay (elevated to the princely rank in 1917) peacefully spent their lives at Rusovce Mansion in Slovakia. In 1935, Stéphanie published her memoirs, entitled Je devais être impératrice ("I Had to Be Empress"). In 1944, she disinherited her daughter, who had divorced to live with a socialist deputy and whom she had not seen since 1925. The arrival of the Red Army in April 1945, at the end of the war, forced Stéphanie and her husband to leave their residence and take refuge in the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary. Stéphanie died of a stroke in the abbey later the same year.
Stéphanie's only daughter, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, finally obtained a divorce from her husband, Prince Otto Weriand of Windisch-Graetz in early 1948 and on 4 May of that year, she married her longtime partner Petznek in a registry office in Vienna. Estranged from her four children (of whom two died before her), after Leopold Petznek's death in 1956 from a heart attack, Elisabeth Marie (confined to a wheelchair due to gout) became reclusive until her death on 16 March 1963 at the Windisch-Graetz Villa in Hütteldorf, Vienna and was buried in an unmarked tomb (only recognized by the burial codification group 2, number G72) at the Hütteldorfer cemetery next to her husband; near her were buried her two sons who predeceased her, Rudolf and Ernst. Like her mother before her, she also disinherited her two surviving children: she left some 500 heirlooms, owned by the Habsburg Imperial family and inherited by her, to the Republic of Austria, and the extensive park of her Windisch-Graetz villa, in a prime Viennese residential area, was willed to the city of Vienna for the construction of a new residential complex.
From her first marriage, Elisabeth Marie had had four children:[91]
As of 2021, Stéphanie had eight great-grandchildren, 24 great-great-grandchildren and 32 great-great-great-grandchildren.
Invention[edit]
As the New York Times noted, Stéphanie "invented a new chafing dish and spirit lamp combined, and [took] out patents in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium".[92] Her 1908 decision to take out a US patent on a chafing dish surprised the New York Times, not because of her lineage but because "throughout Europe the proficiency of Columbia’s daughters with the chafing dish is traditional…".[92]
Titles and heraldry[edit]
Titles[edit]
At her birth, as the daughter of King Leopold II, Stéphanie was titled Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duchess in Saxony, with the predicate of Royal Highness, according to the titles of her house, and bears the unofficial title of Princess of Belgium, which will be officially regularized by Royal Decree dated 14 March 1891.[93]