Franz Joseph I of Austria: Sixty-Eight Years of Duty
On his last night alive, eighty-six years old with pneumonia in his lungs, the Emperor gave his valet a final instruction: "Tomorrow morning, at half past three." He had risen at that hour for most of a reign that began in the year of revolutions and ended in the middle of the war his own signature had started. Nothing about Franz Joseph is better documented than his refusal to stop working, and nothing explains him better.
Fifty Hours a Week of Lessons
Franz Joseph Karl was born on 18 August 1830 at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, eldest son of Archduke Franz Karl and the formidably ambitious Sophie of Bavaria. His mother built the boy for the throne: an education that expanded from eighteen hours a week to fifty by the time he was sixteen, covering French, Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Polish, Latin and Ancient Greek alongside mathematics, history and military science, all wrapped in relentless drilling on duty, religion and dynasty. At thirteen he received a military commission and put on a uniform he would essentially never take off again.
An Emperor at Eighteen
The revolutions of 1848 broke the Habsburg monarchy's confidence and made him emperor. On 2 December 1848 his uncle Ferdinand I abdicated as part of Minister-President Felix zu Schwarzenberg's plan to crush the Hungarian revolution unencumbered by the promises Ferdinand had made. The regnal name was chosen deliberately to summon the memory of Joseph II, the reforming emperor — a promise the young man had no intention of keeping. After Russian troops helped destroy the Hungarian rising, he suspended the 1849 constitution and governed absolutely through his interior minister Alexander Bach. On 18 February 1853 a Hungarian nationalist stabbed him in the neck; the high collar of his uniform saved his life, and the Votivkirche was raised in thanksgiving.
Defeat as the Only Teacher
What absolutism could not survive was losing wars. In the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859 Austria lost Lombardy and its grip on Tuscany to Sardinia. In 1866 the Austro-Prussian War cost no territory but everything else: the Peace of Prague of 23 August 1866 settled the German question in Prussia's favour and extinguished four centuries of Habsburg leadership in Germany. Franz Joseph had begun as a reactionary who regarded constitutions as concessions to disorder. Twice beaten in the field, he conceded because he had to — the pattern of the whole reign.
The Compromise of 1867
The most consequential act of his life followed directly. Negotiating with the Hungarian leaders Ferenc Deák and Gyula Andrássy, he agreed the Ausgleich, which created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary and restored Hungary's historic sovereignty; he was crowned King of Hungary on 8 June 1867. He described the authorship without embellishment: "There were three of us who made the agreement: Deák, Andrássy and myself." His wife Elisabeth, fluent in Hungarian and openly sympathetic to Hungarian interests, had done substantial work behind the scenes. Eighteen years of absolutist rule ended, and the empire bought itself half a century.
A Family Destroyed
He had married his cousin Elisabeth of Bavaria — Sisi — on 24 April 1854, and loved her deeply; the feeling was not mutual, and she found the Viennese court unendurable and its expectations of her impossible. The catastrophes then arrived in sequence. In 1867 his younger brother Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, was executed. On 30 January 1889 his only son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf, died at Mayerling in a murder-suicide. In 1898 an Italian anarchist stabbed Elisabeth to death in Geneva; he never recovered. Robert of Parma, who saw him soon after, wrote: "It was pitiful to look at the Emperor, he showed a great deal of energy in his immense pain, but at times one could see all the immensity of his grief."
Sarajevo, and the Last Signature
In 1908 he annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina unilaterally, enraging Serbia and Russia and setting the fuse. On 28 June 1914 his nephew and heir presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Franz Joseph's relations with Franz Ferdinand had been poisonous for years, and his recorded reactions are extraordinary for their coldness: that "one has not to defy the Almighty. In this manner a superior power has restored that order which I unfortunately was unable to maintain," and, of the death itself, "For me, it is a relief from a great worry." When Serbia declined to accept the July ultimatum in full, he signed the declaration of war on 28 July 1914 and the alliance system did the rest.
Why Franz Is Called a Genius
He is not, in any usual sense, and the honest verdict has to start there. Franz Joseph produced no idea, no doctrine and no reform of his own devising; every major concession of his reign — the 1867 Compromise above all — was extracted from him by defeat rather than conceived by him. He lost to France and Sardinia in 1859, to Prussia in 1866, mishandled the Balkans in 1908, and signed the document that began a war which destroyed his empire within two years of his death. That is not a record of strategic brilliance.
What he possessed instead was a rare and genuinely uncommon capacity: administrative stamina and self-suppression on a scale that functioned as a constitutional organ in its own right. For sixty-eight years he worked through imperial paperwork in painstaking detail, rising before dawn, in a multinational state with a dozen nationalities that had no other unifying institution. He was fluent in the languages of the peoples he ruled, and he outlasted his wife, his brother, his son and his heir without visibly faltering at his desk. In an empire held together by nothing but a dynasty, the person of the emperor was the constitution, and he performed that person flawlessly for the better part of a century. The gift was endurance rather than intellect — and it is worth saying plainly that endurance, in his case, also meant a refusal to imagine any future different from the one he had inherited.
Legacy
Franz Joseph died at Schönbrunn on 21 November 1916 of pneumonia contracted after a walk in the palace gardens, and was succeeded by his grandnephew Charles I, who would reign for two years before the monarchy vanished. He is remembered less as a ruler than as an atmosphere: the whiskered figure at the desk who gave his name to the last decades of Habsburg Vienna, the city of Freud, Klimt and Mahler, all of it flourishing under a devout Catholic autocrat who would have disapproved of nearly every word of it.
