The Habsburg monarchy, which disintegrated into several individual states in 1918 as a result of the First World War, was indeed an anachronistic entity in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, it was certainly also able to point to its strengths. Keeping 53 million people who used thirteen different languages and who belonged to the most diverse religions, loyal to the monarchy at a time when strong nation-states (German or Italian unification) were emerging and at the same time facilitating a modernization process, was an amazing achievement. The cohesion of the empire was guaranteed by the person of the emperor, who ruled from 1848 to 1916, by the military, on the one hand, and by the bureaucracy, on the other hand, but also by the Catholic Church and Judaism, for the latter of which this half century had retrospectively been a ‘golden age’. Also, the young working-class movement proved to be a strong pillar of the multinational state.