Czech media said Schwarzenberg died in a Vienna hospital yesterday after battling health problems for months.
The pipe-puffing aristocrat also ran for president in the first Czech direct vote in 2013, eventually losing the run-off to pro-Russian veteran Milos Zeman.
Admired for his manners but mocked for dozing off in public, including at parliamentary meetings, the bow-tied “Prince” served as lawmaker until his retirement in 2021.
Schwarzenberg was born in Prague on Dec 10, 1937, as Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena Fuerst zu Schwarzenberg.
His family fled the country after the 1948 Communist takeover began an era of persecution of the nobility.
After studying law and forestry at universities in Austria and Germany – without “ever finishing any of that” – he took charge of the family assets, including forests and the Schwarzenberg palace with a hotel in Vienna.
Still in exile in 1984, Schwarzenberg became president of the International Helsinki Committee for human rights.
He returned to Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism in the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989, led by Vaclav Havel, and regained a considerable part of his family’s fortune confiscated by the communists.
He cut his political teeth as the head of the presidential office under Havel, who was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and of the Czech Republic in 1993.
Havel served until 2003 and died in 2011.
Schwarzenberg, who had both Czech and Swiss nationality, became a senator in 2004 and then foreign minister, serving two terms in right-wing governments in 2007-2013.
A co-founder of the conservative TOP 09 party in 2009, Schwarzenberg became a member of parliament in 2013.
“If I weren’t stupid, I would have enjoyed a wonderful retirement, gone to the forest to shoot deer, travelled the world, enjoyed good wine,” he once quipped.
“But since I’m stupid, I’ve entered politics.”
Schwarzenberg had two sons and a daughter with his wife Therese, whom he married in 1967, divorced in 1988 and remarried in 2008.
A polyglot who spoke six languages, he was famous for his love of good food, wine and whiskey, and for nodding off during tedious political meetings.
“I fall asleep when others talk nonsense,” he once told reporters.
Czech prime minister Petr Fiala hailed Schwarzenberg as “an outstanding personality of the Czech exile and Czech politics of the last few decades”.
“I respected him for his help to Czech dissidents during totalitarian rule and for serving our country selflessly after 1989,” Fiala said on X.