An Address to the Italian PeopleYour government exhorts you to stand and die in their defence while they slip out the back door. Naples has been abandoned. Rather than fight your leaders, using the armies that should have been kept at home to protect you, have fled through France to Brest where they will shortly board ships and flee to London, into the safety and arms of their masters. The cities, women and children of your land have been left helpless while your leaders have been tricked into partaking in an Anglo-world conspiracy, fighting a proxy war in France as puppets alongside Germany. Is that where your fight rests? Many of your young men have fallen and died, seen their homes destroyed, and for what? So that your government can continue to lord over a few desert dwellers in Tunis? Leave the Orient and Africa for the Ottomans and abandon the petty strife of nationalism. Rejoin Europa, become one with a greater, cosmopolitan civilization.
The House of Habsburg has always been a friend to Italy. Out of the darkness of the middle ages the Habsburgs helped bring the light of the renaissance to Italy. Under the Habsburgs the arts, sciences and architecture of which Italians are now so proud flourished. Italy has always been at its best when it has been free of the pursuits of imperialism. Under the protection of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Italian provinces may flourish once more.
Italy must not be kept in isolation, but shared with the world. Receive us in friendship, and you shall be met with friendship in kind.
To Stability! To Prosperity! To Peace!
Signed, On behalf of His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, Emperor Franz Joseph I,
His Imperial and Royal Highness, The Archduke
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