He was one of the longest reigning monarchs in history, sitting on the Imperial throne
for nearly 68 years.
He ascended to the throne during a time of revolution and his reign ended during a time
of global war.
And on this day 100 years ago, he died in a time of crisis for his empire.
I’m speaking of none other than the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Josef.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War bio special episode about Emperor Franz Josef.
Erzherzog Franz Josef Karl von Österreich, Archduke Franz Josef Karl of Austria, was
born August 18th, 1830.
He came to power in a time of great political turmoil.
The February revolution in France in 1848 that would see Napoleon III become first President,
then Emperor there, was just the beginning of the civilian unrest that turned to open
revolution throughout Europe.
In Austria-Hungary, Emperor Ferdinand would stand on his balcony and watch the masses
marching toward his palace.
Ferdinand was a weak monarch, and his Minister-President Felix zu Schwarzenberg, the 6th of the year,
persuaded him to abdicate in favor of his nephew, Franz Josef.
I’m not going to go in to detail on the 1848 actions here and the fall of Metternich,
but your homework is to look it up, because it’s good to know.
On December 2, 1848, the 18-year-old Franz Josef became Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia,
and King of Croatia.
The violent revolt at his doorstep had convinced the young Emperor that the military would
be the key to his empire’s continued existence.
And that empire was consolidated into a centralized state with the March 1849 constitution and
the help of the Russian army to quell rebellion in Hungary.
Over the first part of his reign, Franz Josef hoped to invigorate his monarchy with a reactionary
approach, centralizing power in Vienna, though this antagonized the elite in Poland and Hungary.
After his defeat at the hands of the French at the Battle of Solferino in 1859, he gradually
realized that his neo-absolutism, though strong theoretically, would not secure the political
and financial support of the elite in a multi-national empire.
He opened negotiations with Hungary, the most powerful and most disgruntled ally about a
new constitution that would see fruition in 1867, giving Hungary special status in the
now Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In return the Hungarian parliament offered Franz Joseph the crown of Hungary, which they
had denied him before in 1848.
From this point on he opened his arms to his people in the east with the motto “viribus
unitis”, with united forces, and perhaps nowhere displayed this more then during his
famous Kaiserreise in 1880 through Poland and Galicia.
By allowing political power to flow from Vienna to the provinces and freeing Polish culture
he transformed the dissatisfied Polish into ardent patriots.
He also gave the large Jewish population full citizens’ rights and acknowledged them publicly.
I do have to point out though, that when ethnic Romanians in Transylvania petitioned for political
power alongside that of the minority Hungarian population there, he turned a deaf ear to
them.
But he was generally quite well-loved.
“Knightly and at the same time impressive as a courteous personage, the adored monarch
has awakened in the hearts of all his subjects true patriotic inspiration, from which arises
true love of throne and monarchy, promising to bring forth at each moment the most beautiful
fruit of unshaken submissive loyalty.”
In terms of his personal life, in 1852 he had traveled to Berlin partly to find a wife,
partly to built stronger ties with the northern German states.
Both failed due to Prussian influence.
He would marry Elisabeth from Bavaria, known as “Sissi”, and though the marriage was
not unhappy, it was distant.
Elisabeth hated the stiff nature of the Austrian court, while Franz Josef was devoted to his
duties.
He believed it to be his God given duty to run the empire.
He awoke each day at 4 AM to attend to affairs of state.
Though he did meddle in all those affairs, he was never really a despot.
He would never be ironhanded like the Russian Tsars, but he would also never identify himself
with the Germanic people of his empire like, say, Kaiser Wilhelm.
It wasn’t other monarchs, though, that were most dangerous to the Austrian state back
then, though, but rather future German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck - at the time Prussian Minister
President and Foreign Minister.
Bismarck saw that in a coming German Empire, the multi-cultural Austria-Hungary had no
place and Prussian dominance had to be established, if need be on the battlefield.
Even after losing to the French, Franz Josef felt his army could go toe to toe with Prussia,
but its lack of modernization in terms of weapons and tactics showed on the battlefield
at Königgrätz in 1866.
This ended the seven-week war between Austria and Prussia and resulted in Austria losing
Venetia, but also its voice in the Deutsche Bund, the German Confederation created in
1815.
Franz Josef was now cut off from German politics.
Many of his generals urged revenge, perhaps through an alliance with France, and timing
certainly suggested that as France and Prussia headed for war in 1870, but he did not want
another “brotherly” war, and Franz Josef detested Napoleon III.
You can decide for yourself if this was a missed opportunity or not, but you can see
how one person sets the course for an empire.
But this was the thing; Franz Josef’s empire didn’t have many friends.
France or Britain might have been a viable partner, since Austria had no intercontinental
colonial aspirations, but Franz Josef was looking to the Balkans, which was growing
to be quite the tinderbox.
The Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 provoked a lot of anti-Austrian sentiment
down there, which Russia was happy to exploit, and over the last couple of decades of the
19th century, Austria ended up growing more and more dependent on what was now the German
Empire as its ally.
And Franz Josef grew more fatalistic in outlook.
Much of this stemmed from disasters in his personal life.
Over the years his daughter died, his mother died, his two brothers died.
A huge tragedy was the suicide of his son and heir to the throne Rudolf in 1889, and
then Elizabeth was murdered by an Italian anarchist.
Franz Josef, though he loved his son, had hated his son’s liberal policies, and Rudolf’s
successor as heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, declared himself the strongest
opposition to the emperor, and Franz Josef became increasingly isolated.
By the time of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and the July Crisis in 1914, the old emperor
had no one to rely on but the voices of his military high command, particularly his Chief
of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who had repeatedly urged him to wage war in the
Balkans.
By repeatedly, I mean dozens of times.
He still wasn’t goaded into war with Serbia, though, and only issued his ultimatum to Serbia
after he was personally convinced that other nations would not intervene.
He was way wrong about that.
He felt that he was going to war not in anger, but what he saw was Austria’s rightful place
in the world.
During the war, he left military decisions to his general staff.
What he did was endorse war funds and work to help war widows, orphans, the hungry, and
the homeless.
As long as he lived, he was the public symbol of the unity of the Empire, and his soldiers
had a common beloved father figure.
In fact, many soldiers from various ethnicities of the empire, Polish, Hungarian, Ruthenian,
and so forth, still felt that they owed their rights to him, and many identified loyally
to the Empire with loyalty to Franz Josef.
It was an enormous blow to the nation and the war effort when he died November 21st,
1916, aged 86, of pneumonia of the right lung.
He was very much a man of the 19th century, and it’s not a stretch to say that his policies
and visions did not really have a place in the world of the 20th century.
He saw his power as Divine Right, and hated political innovations and more modern liberal
ideas.
He was no politician, but he did love his people and wished only to preserve his empire,
which had been deeply scarred by the events of his youth.
However, he couldn’t compete with Bismarck’s genius and he was unwilling to drag his country
out of its political isolation, which led to its eventual dependence on Germany as its
major ally, his personal dependence on his military leaders, and the events that culminated
in the First World War.