The tired Emperor by Lucas Turks
The life of the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph who conducted the fates of
the empire since 1848 until its nemesis during the First World War. Second
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A sad life
The existence of the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph has been defined by historians
with many adjectives among the most varied and conflicting: colorless, heroic,
contradictory, traditional, mystical and worldly. Every quoted adjective is certain
able to describe some aspects of this character who held up the reins of the power
of the empire of Vienna from 1848 until 1916, but it would do it only partially,
skipping the global aspect of a figure that it can be said tragic, in the literal
sense of the word. It can be affirmed more correctly that his life was sad and
solitary, very more than what we can attend for a sovereign born in the nineteenth
century, educated to the ideas of divine supremacy of the emperors and who saw
disappearing little by little each principle of his under the unstoppable action
of the political and social progress.
Yet, the beginnings seemed of other kind. Born on August 18 1930 from the Archduchess
Sophia and from the archduke Francis Charles, he spent a serene youth without
worries or anxieties. The emperor was his uncle and the first heir to the throne
in straight line was his father, therefore the moment in which he would have to
be to worry from some business of state seemed still decidedly far and only possible.
So, he devoted himself to his first and greater passion, the military life and
this in contrast with the years when he was adolescent, pacific in almost whole
Europe. He was intimate with his younger brother Maximilian Ferdinand, only two
years younger than he was, who shared his same preferences for the army and the
discipline. In conclusion in youth he never had any serious problem, also thanks
to the strength and the temperament of his/ mother, an energetic and resolved
woman.
Everything changed in 1848, when Francis Joseph was eighteen years old only.
The winds of change that would have blown on the whole European continent were
also present in the Austrian territories. Particularly in the regions of northern
Italy (Lombardy, Trentino, Veneto and Friuli), in that time subdued to the imperial
authority, the revolutionary spark lighted up nearly instantly. Firstly in full
autonomy, then with the help of the House of Savoia and the Piedmont, the revolt
spread out succeeding in estranging the Austrian troops from wide zones of the
Lombardy. Francis Joseph, cadet of the army, had his baptism of the fire on the
Italian front, on May 6 1948, during the battle of Saint Lucy. The impression
that the bloody clash had on the future emperor was not immediately evident, but
emerged later during his reign. Although he generally continued to love the military
comradeship and the armed forces, Francis Joseph had always in the eyes the slaughters
of that first modern war and looked for with all his/her strengths maintaining
Austria the most possible away from the conflicts, with little fortune.
The advance of the Italian rebels was stopped in Lombardy, but the ideas of
political liberty had crossed the Alps reaching well soon even the capital city.
The empire of Hapsburg was for all its duration, a whole of many populations,
often in contrast if not in struggle among them. Italians, Croatians, Hungarians,
Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Bosnians, Germans were citizens of the same state,
but not for popular wish. They were kept united only from the myth of the emperor
that knew how to reconcile the different affairs in an unicum from his court in
Vienna. This, at least, until sovereigns of superior intelligence as the grandfather
of Francis Joseph, Francis I, were reigning helped by statesmen of immemorial
value as Metternich. Unfortunately, his uncle emperor was not a man of this kind.
Few disposed to listen to the demands of the people and very intransigent, he
didn't know how to see the skirmishes of the revolution and he was unprepared
to afford it. The imperial family had to run away from Vienna and to shelter in
the estate of Olmütz, waiting for its own destiny.
The classical solution to save the dynastic line was abdication. It was preferred
to leave the responsibility of the government to others in the hope that people
liked the new ruler a character. Therefore, Ferdinand I abdicated in favor of
his brother Francis Charles, Francis Joseph's father. The solution would have
been ideal if the man, who was selected, had had more courage, but Francis Charles
had never thought about becoming Emperor, sure that his older brother would have
thought ruling and in that so desperate moment, with the whole lineage in escape
and with the danger to lose the empire he felt himself not ready to govern. The
choice of Francis Charles is criticizable for two orders of reasons, one of political
character and one of moral character. Politically speaking, the refusal to become
emperor lengthened, even if of alone 24 hours, the period of chaos in Austria
consolidating the powers of the provisional national governments. Besides, he
ran away from his own duties setting them to the youth child, behavior that doesn't
show a figure of model father.
This way, unexpectedly, on December 2 1848, after having been declared of age
in all hurry, Francis Joseph became emperor of Austria. The situation was rather
unhappy. The capital city was lost in the hands of the revolutionary men. In every
part of the empire people declared its own sovereignty to loss of the imperial
power. The family of the Hapsburg seemed destined to the exile, so much more after
a teen-ager had been named emperor. Francis Joseph had fortune, the only one perhaps
of his life, to find an adviser from the qualities out of the ordinary one: the
prince Felix Schwarzenberg. He, with the help and the direction of men of power
as Stadion, Bach and Bruck, saved the throne and the monarchy. Repressed with
the force the popular rebellion, firstly where it was not rooted in requests deriving
from the commercial middle class. He granted some liberal constitutions to satisfy
the pretensions of the middle classes, in a first moment for every population
that composed the empire and then one for the whole country.
It was so possible for Francis Joseph to reenter with calm to Vienna as symbol
of refound national unity. The sudden liberal openings were momentary only, since
Schwarzenberg suggested to the new emperor to repeal the constitution already
in August 1851. The absolute monarchy returned in all its greatness in January
of the following year. The emperor became such not only of name, but also of fact.
At twenty-two years old, Francis Joseph governed one of the greatest nations in
Europe. To upset the dreams of glory of the Hapsburg came the death of Prince
Schwarzenberg, happened on April 20 1952. The young emperor was alone for the
first time in front of the power.
Love at first sight?
It is not known which ideas passed through the head of Francis Joseph after
the disappearance of his trusted adviser, but a fact is certain, they were rather
confused. Having to govern with his own head, the emperor seemed not being able
to do it. He dismissed all ministers that had accompanied him in the four preceding
years, without any right reason if not that to restore an absoluteness of power
that could be compared to that of Louis XIV only. At the half of 19th century
a similar vision of the government of a nation was not proposable anymore, but
this didn't seem upsetting Francis Joseph. However, not all his actions were flour
of his sack. The mother Sophia still preserved in that time all her influence
on her son, although only in respect of a child love that didn't mention to decrease
with the passing of the years.
It was really the Archduchess Sophia who, seeing growing in the mind of her
child certain restlessness that threatened mining its emotional stability, thought
about finding a wife for him. The first choice was Ann, nephew of the King of
Prussia. The sister of Sophia, Elizabeth, had become for marriage queen of Prussia
and he thought therefore that the arranged marriage was anything else other than
a matter of agreements between ruling families. It was not minded the fact that
the chosen person was already fiancée with a German prince and that she
didn't have any interest in Francis Joseph. If there had been only reasons of
the heart to prevent the union, probably the marriage would have been celebrated
in any case, but political motives opposed to it. The Prussia in that decade was
extending its own influence on the whole western Germany and a marriage between
the ruling families of the two nations would have prevented a widening of the
kingdom that damaged near Austria. War could not be made to just acquired relatives!
So, Sophia programmed a new meeting. Being daughter of king Maximilian of Bavaria
that at that time was an autonomous state, she thought that a marriage in family
with one of the five daughters of her sister Ludovica, duchess of Bavaria, it
was the ideal system to avoid ulterior delays in finding a worthy empress for
her son. The first-born Helen, of the same age of Francis Joseph, was seen as
the best choice. Since the future bride and bridegrooms have very rarely seen
each other and only in tender age, it was judged opportune to organize a meeting
before the wedding. Therefore, it was predisposed a family gathering in Ischl,
summer residence of the emperor, for the last agreements in sight of the wedding.
But in the summer of 1853, the duchess Ludovica arrived in Ischl in company of
Helen and also of the second-born Elizabeth, more known with the nickname of Sissy.
The girl was sixteen years old only and she had accompanied her mother and sister
only for motives of etiquette.
Albert Friederich von Margutti who had the opportunity to pick up direct testimonies
of characters who lived in person the meeting between Elizabeth and Francis Joseph,
tells that only watching at her, the emperor had set aside the idea to marry her
sister, as much her beauty was. We don't know if it was a true love treated, but
it was certainly a troubled one. The Archduchess Sophia didn't succeed in understanding
for which reason his son took a fancy to that girl, whom she considered nothing
else than a capricious child. In fact, Sissy certainly possessed a lot of qualities
in addition to beauty, but not that of the amiability. She had inherited from
the Wittelsbachs, the family to which the Sophia herself belonged, a certain incompatibility
with the life that was held at the Hofburg, the Austrian court. This resulted
so much more irritating for the mother of Francis Joseph, since the young Elizabeth
didn't make anything to hide her intolerance. In conclusion, she lacks those diplomacy
qualities that would have allowed her to become a good wife and empress. After
all, however, we cannot pretend that at only sixteen years old she could distinguish
between the fun and the reason of state.
Despite the obstructionism of his mother, Francis Joseph was inflexible. He
had made had completed his choice and nobody would have let him change idea. They
met each other in August 1853 and already in April 1954 the imperial wedding was
celebrated. The first days of kingdom of the new child empress were not the fable
that has been pictured in some old movies that usually stopped the tale at the
luxury of the marriage, without telling what it happened subsequently. The cohabitation
with her mother-in-law was impossible. Sophia believed to have another daughter
to educate and in every occasion she was prodigal of not required suggestions
that were badly digested by Elizabeth, stubborn and quarrelsome as all the teen-agers.
If this fact is added to a continuous absence of Francis Joseph deriving from
his role, we can be understood as her bride was creating for herself a destiny
of loneliness. Certainly, she would have been able to look for some allies in
the large family of the Hapsburg, in which some individuals were bored of the
power that the elderly Archduchess practiced in every occasion. However, either
the young age either the particular temper prevented her from finding friendship
that went beyond simple courtesy. It was so that although there was surely love
in that marriage it had to diminish in brief time pushing Elizabeth toward behaviors
on the beginning childish, then more and more “eccentric”, where for
eccentricity in the ruling houses it has to be intended some maniacal forms if
not straight acclaimed madness.
The Italian Risorgimento and the Prussian supremacy
1854 was not only the year of the marriage, but it also had to be the last happy
year for the emperor. From the date of the wedding for the rest of his life a
series of personal calamities happened that added to serious failures in the Austrian
politics they can show as Francis Joseph, besides an innate lack of ability, had
to be also extremely unlucky, if someone among the readers believes that the bad
luck exists.
In 1854, there was the crisis of Crimea that would have caused a real upsetting
in the relationships of force in the Balkans. The Russian czar Nicholas I, in
his attempt to widen the borders defeating the Ottoman empire, was so next to
Strait of the Dardanelles that France and the Great Britain felt themselves threatened
in their own commercial affairs in the Mediterranean, so that they invaded the
Crimea to strike Russia on its own territory. More times during the conflict,
Austria had been invited to join an alliance with Russia against the Turks, a
traditional enemy, but Francis Joseph, suggested by the octogenarian Metternich
that had returned in Vienna to die in peace, had preferred to stay neutral. The
idea looked out upon by the czar to recreate a league of the Three Emperors in
the style of the after Napoleon period Restoration, fascinated the Austrian emperor,
but he was too lover of the peace to accept the proposal. It was a serious error.
The war of Crimea came to nothing, but the consolidation of the status quo in
the Balkans. The territory of natural expansion of Austria-Hungary, that is the
in undoing Ottoman empire was now protected from the Great Britain and from France
and a new threat it was outlined to the horizon.
To the campaign in Russian land it had also participated a large contingent
of Piedmontese troops that had behaved with great honor, bringing the little italic
kingdom to the same table of the peace where they sat the other European powers.
The diplomatic job completed by the Count of Cavour to have the attention of the
other nations was guiltily unknown to Vienna. The Kingdom of Piedmont had already
fought in the 1848 war against Austria and there had not been a definition of
the problem of the Italian territories in Austrian hand, yet. Having shed the
blood of his own soldiers in Crimea, the Piedmontese king Vittorio Emanuele II
could surely declare himself a good ally of France and he could pretend from the
powerful neighbor a help in case of need. There was the occasion to return the
favor already in 1859, when in a remake of the first war of Italian independence,
the Piedmontese army began an offensive against the Austrian lines of defense
Austrians in Piedmont. This time, the soldiers were more experienced and better
armed that ten years before and above all they had the direct support of the French
army that fought at side of Italians in almost all battles. The Austrian disaster
was complete. The Lombardy was abandoned in Piedmontese hands losing the financially
richer part if the empire.
The partial attainment, the following year, of the Italian unity with the escape
from Tuscany of the House of the Hapsburg-Lorene, relatives of Francis Joseph
and the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, created a new national entity
that had expansionistic aims just in the same Adriatic area that had always been
dominion of Austria. The fluidity of the situation and the isolation, in which
the Hapsburg's empire was being confined, they were revealed in all their gravity
in 1866. Prussia that traditionally had been friend of Austria since the times
of the fight against Napoleon I, decided to declare war against the Austrian empire
in alliance with the newborn Reign of Italy to give origin to that German Reich
(empire) that had been always in the dreams of the Prussian sovereigns. The victories
gotten against Italians didn't serve to halt the Prussian advanced in Bohemia
and an ignominious peace forced Francis Joseph to recognize the Prussian predominance
in Germany and the annexation of Veneto to Italy.
Family pains and political failures
The loss of almost all Italian provinces and the hard defeat suffered from
Austria towards Prussia, reinvigorated the inside nationalism, especially the
Hungarian one that had never calmed since 1848. The advance of the army of Bismarck
toward Vienna had let run away good part of the imperial family, included the
empress Elisabeth, for the fear of a hostile occupation. Although Francis Joseph
had remained in the capital city, the abandonment of it from his family was seen
as a sign of weakness. The leaders of the Hungarian nationalists, Deak and Andrassy,
even condemned to death during the 1848 revolts and then pardoned, they were felt
in duty to already propose the same requests advanced during the first revolt
and that is a jurisdictional division between Austria and Hungary with the creation
of an autonomous parliament in Budapest that was dealt with the inside law of
the Hungarian nation.
Francis Joseph was aware of the fact that granting such privileges to Hungary
meant the end of the Austrian Empire as he had known it. In fact, the majority
of the population of Austria was of German language and the recent defeat with
the Prussia had broken every dream of unity with the most western German principalities
and so the German liberal party would also have pretended a parliament at the
same conditions of the Hungarians, otherwise the situation would have degenerated.
To save at least nominally the empire it was contrived a solution of compromise
that, with the time, would have displeased both factions, but that at that moment
it seemed the only way out. To Hungary they were guaranteed all demanded liberties,
to Austria it was given a parliament with the same powers of the assembly of Budapest
and as head of the newborn Austria-Hungary it was named Francis Joseph who, incredibly,
brought on his own head two crowns, that of Emperor of Austria and that of King
of Hungary.
The substantial division in two parts of the empire was a personal defeat for
Francis Joseph. He had shown himself since the first years of kingdom as worthy
heir of the absolute monarchs who had preceded him and to owe to be subdued to
a constitution destroyed the fundamental principles of his political belief. Naturally,
seen the critical situation, he owes to have thought about being able to repeat
the 1848 same movements: granting a constitution, consolidating his own position
of government, also with the strength if necessary, and then revoking the liberal
concessions with an absolutist restoration. The times, however, had changed. The
liberal ideas of the nations of empire had influenced the commercial middle class
that was the backbone of the Austrian economy, also thanks to the example given
from the Piedmont and from the Prussia that fighting against Austria had constituted
two national and independent kingdoms. In 1867 if Francis Joseph had tried a Restoration,
Hungary would have defended its own liberty with the weapons. The official separation
between the two nations was enacted on February 18 1967 with the nomination of
the first Hungarian autonomous government.
In the same year another circumstance was tragically concluded. It was initiated
three years before. The protagonist of the new pain given to Francis Joseph was
the beloved brother Maximilian Ferdinand. He, also the older brother respecting,
had not accepted to live to the shadow of the emperor. He would have desired to
become sovereign, but as second-born this would have been possible only at the
death of the ruler. The conflict between brotherly love and personal ambition
of Maximilian Ferdinand seemed to turn when the French emperor Napoleon III convinced
him, in 1864, to undertake a venture that grazed the absurdity.
aximilian Ferdinand with the support of the French army would have become emperor
of Mexico. A less covetous man than Ferdinand would have deeply thought about
the opportunity to accept the offer to govern a country, of which nothing was
known, not even the language. Contrarily, he welcomed with great enthusiasm the
offer that had been proposed him. It gave up the role of Archduke and he moved
to Mexico City with the whole family, believing being able to recreate in America
a court of mitteleuropean type. The reality was well different. The revolt of
the Mexican people was inevitable. It didn't bear a foreign dominator, which origins
he had. Maximilian didn't realize the gravity of the threat until he was halted
from the republican troops of Benito Juarez. Francis Joseph tried to save his
brother through diplomatic pressures, but it was useless. As in every revolution,
who embodies the figure of the despot and the tyrant, he must be sacrificed to
placate the popular hate and so it happened for Maximilian who was shot in the
Mexican village of Querentaro on June 19 1867.
The pain of Francis Joseph for the loss of his brother was a small of what
he had to feel with the disappearance of his first-born child Rudolf. Heir to
the throne for dynastic law, the young descendant of the Hapsburg was very beloved
from his father, as much as he hated his role of Archduke. He didn't bear, particularly,
the lack of liberal ideas of his father and he didn't miss occasion to express
this political vision of his in every public demonstration. Francis Joseph would
also have been able to bear these actions if Rudolf was not involved in some revolutionary
entourages that were forming in Vienna. He could not tolerate that the Kronprinz
was mixed with conspirators of low league. Firstly, they came the severe reproaches
of the uncle Charles, hero of the wars in Italy and adviser of Francis Joseph
that however didn't get the wanted effects. Then, perhaps unexpected, the call
of the Emperor himself came. It is difficult to understand if Rudolf was more
struck by the threat to be relegated to the command of a garrison in moors of
the Galitia or from the fact that such threat originated from the person that
more loved him in the world, but the reproach would have marked his destiny and
that of the whole world. Suffocated by a depressive crisis, he committed suicide
in January 1889, opening the road of the succession to his cousin Francis Ferdinand,
the man of Sarajevo.
The death of Rudolf was the coup de grace for Empress Elizabeth's precarious
stability. From that mournful day, she went estranging herself from the reality
in a definitive way, sojourning more and more rarely in Vienna, taking no interest
in what was happening at court. For irony of the fate, she who was the least interested
in politics was object of an anarchic attack that killed her in 1898. Francis
Joseph, by now old, tired and lonely didn't know that the worst years would have
arrived in the first awful decades of the twentieth century.
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