HUBNER, JOSEPH ALEXANDER, Count of. – Austrian diplomat, b. 26 Nov. 1811 at Vienna, d. there 30 July 1892. In 1835 he entered the State Chancellery, was attached to the Austrian legation at Lisbon (1841–44), consul at Leipzig in 1844, and in 1848 entrusted with directing the diplomatic chancellery of Archduke Rainer, viceroy of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia. Taken prisoner by the provisional Milanese government, he returned to Vienna in the autumn of the same year and became the right-hand man of Prince Schwarzenberg on matters of foreign policy.
Sent to Paris in March 1849, first as chargé d’affaires, he later became minister plenipotentiary and ambassador. Minister of Police in Aug. 1859, he resigned two months later over disagreements with Minister Goluchowski on domestic policy. Austrian representative to the Holy See (1865–67), he left the post when the Vienna government began the diplomatic and political action that was to lead to denunciation of the 1855 Concordat. Of wide learning, the Count of H. left autobiographical writings: *Ein Jahr meines Lebens; Neun Jahre der Erinnerungen eines österreichischen Botschafters in Paris 1857–59* (2 vols.), edited by his son, Berlin 1904; a work on Sixtus V, *Sixtus-quint, d’après des correspondances diplomatiques* (3 vols.), Paris 1870; Italian ed., Rome 1887), and various writings on his travels around the world after his retirement.