Despite its stunning perch atop a hill overlooking the Seine Valley, the Renaissance chateau at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, home today to France’s renowned National Archeological Museum, does not fit into most Paris tourist agendas. Pressed for time, visitors prefer to see the nearby Versailles palace, which, as the seat of the pre-revolutionary French court, is far grander, and in the popular mind more historically important — among other things, it was the site of the famous peace treaty that concluded World War I in 1919.

Yet Versailles was not the only scenic royal setting for a treaty ending the Great War. One hundred years ago today, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed between the victorious Allies and the new Austrian Republic. The sparsely attended ceremony in a small room of the solemn chateau had none of the pomp of the Versailles Treaty signing, a few months earlier, in the magnificent Hall of Mirrors. But this simplicity belied Saint-Germain’s momentous outcome: the dismemberment of the centuries-old Hapsburg empire — the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as it was known since 1867 — and the emergence of several brand-new states on the European map. For 50 million people, something new and exciting was beginning, while at the same time an older way of life was dying out amid the ruins of the defunct empire.

“A laboratory built over the great graveyard of the world war” was how Tomas Masaryk, the philosopher-president of the first Czechoslovak Republic, described the states whose creation was sanctioned by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (and other postwar treaties signed in and around Paris) — Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as Yugoslavia). This territorial redrawing was no mere afterthought of an atrocious world war — it cemented national self-determination as the basis for political sovereignty. The state, in other words, should correspond to the nation, which was another way of saying the people. The new countries defending this nation-state vision thus emphasized their uniqueness and demonized their predecessor as a “prison of nations”: the multinational Austro-Hungarian monarchy, presided over by the Hapsburgs.

While few people were willing to stand up for the old empire after four years of world war, a century later scholars are rethinking its legacy, eager to assert its multifaceted attributes and surprisingly progressive institutions. Stretching from today’s western Ukraine to Switzerland and from the Czech Republic’s northern border with Germany down Croatia’s Adriatic coast, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had no internal borders, one currency, two parliaments (in Vienna and Budapest), 11 officially recognized peoples/languages and almost as many religions, including Yiddish-speaking Jews, Bosnian Muslims and a variety of Orthodox Christians and Protestants to complement its Catholic majority. Formed and reformed through six centuries of feudal alliances, dynastic marriages, wars and Great Power bargains, the Hapsburg Empire was on its way to becoming a modern multinational state by the late 19th century. The army accommodated linguistic diversity in its regiments, schooling was available in different languages, and the bureaucracy was multilingual.