by Greg King
The peace won was temporary. The emperor’s attempts to promote himself as head of the thirty-nine-state German Confederation brought him into conflict with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who insisted on Prussian supremacy. The Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 pitted Vienna against Berlin. Hungary openly rebelled, siding with Prussia, and Austria suffered a humiliating defeat at Königgrätz; sensing weakness, Venice—the last Italian province still under Habsburg rule—broke away from Vienna. Hungary, too, took advantage of the chaos after the Seven Weeks’ War to force Vienna’s hand. Franz Josef barely managed to keep his remaining possessions together by signing the Ausgleich in 1867, a compromise between Austria and Hungary that granted the Magyars considerable autonomy and created the Austro-Hungarian Empire, known as the Dual Monarchy.
More bad news came from Mexico, where Franz Josef’s brother Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte, had unwisely assumed a French-backed throne to rule the new empire in 1864. The misadventure lasted a mere three years before French emperor Napoleon III withdrew his support. Mexican rebels overthrew their emperor: On June 19, 1867, they stood Maximilian against a wall in Querétaro and executed him by firing squad. The tragedy left Charlotte unhinged. Declared insane, she spent the rest of her life locked away in a Belgian castle, a tinsel crown atop her head as she held court for the phantoms of her past.9
Humiliating military defeats, loss of territory, repression followed by forced concessions, and personal tragedies—these became the hallmarks of Franz Josef’s reign. “The Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Bukovina; Grand Prince of Transylvania…,” went only half of his string of titles.10 His was a curious empire encompassing some forty-five million Austrian Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Rumanians, Moravians, Poles, and, after 1878, the South Slavs—Slovenians, Croats, and Serbs—and Muslims in the occupied Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Babel of languages, ethnic identities, warring nationalist sentiments, and conflicting faiths, the Habsburg Empire faltered on out of habit, bound together only by the monarch in Vienna, even as Great Britain, imperial Germany, and even backward Russia modernized and grew in industrial, economic, and military strength.
“You see in me,” Franz Josef once told American president Theodore Roosevelt, “the last monarch of the old school.”11 The dashingly handsome young man who had come to the throne at eighteen was now fifty-eight, the “chosen guardian of the fame and reputation of his House,” as one of his aides-de-camp, Flügeladjutant Lieutenant General Baron Albert von Margutti, explained.12 Franz Josef used “ceremonial politeness” to create “a sense of distance between himself and others.”13 He was agreeable but remote, ever conscious of his rank. The emperor, Margutti recalled, even thought “that for him to shake hands was an altogether exceptional mark of esteem, and that he must not be too free with it.”14
Although everyone agreed that the emperor was charming and polite, the polished veneer concealed the soul of an autocrat. “Everything about him,” recalled a courtier, “including his memory, had to be unchallenged, unchallengeable.”15 Franz Josef prided himself on his self-control, and only rarely did he stray from his usual soft, conversational tones. But while he occasionally gave voice to his frustrations, the emperor made no such allowances for others. “Unseemly expressions,” “gesticulations,” or even impulsive laughter were deemed a “discourtesy to his Imperial dignity.”16 Slights against Habsburg dignity—real or perceived—in fact consumed much of Franz Josef’s attention. He once greeted a proposal that guards should no longer present arms to baby Habsburgs in their carriages as an insult to the imperial house.17 An officer who dared appear before him with a medal out of place, a button undone, or a sash askew set Franz Josef “quivering with rage.”18 There is a story that perfectly encapsulates this obsession with outward propriety: One night, in the midst of a severe cold, Franz Josef awoke with a cough so violent that he could not catch his breath. Alerted to the dire emergency, the physician in attendance rushed to the emperor’s bed; although gasping for air, Franz Josef still managed to berate the poor man for not having changed into the customary frock coat demanded by court etiquette.19
Franz Josef lived in self-imposed isolation. Aside from shooting he had no real interests, dismissing most art, music, and literature as wastes of time.20 “Our Emperor,” his only son scathingly wrote, “has not one friend; his character and temperament do not permit it. He stands isolated on his pinnacle. With his servants he discusses the official business of each, but he anxiously avoids any other subject, hence he knows very little about the thoughts and feelings of the people, of the ideas and opinions of the nation.… He believes we are now in one of the happiest epochs of Austria’s history; this is what he is told officially.”21 Officials played their part in this intellectual isolation, assuring Franz Josef that his people were happy. Withholding contradictory information, they even printed special editions of the daily newspapers, editions that carefully eliminated hints of unrest or potentially troublesome developments.22
In contrast to Vienna’s burgeoning intellectual reputation, the emperor prided himself on the simplicity of his views. “For him,” asserted one courtier, “only primitive concepts exist. Beautiful, ugly, dead, living, healthy, young, old, clever, stupid—these are all separate notions to him and he is unable to form a bridge leading from one to the other.… His ideas know no nuances.”23 This black–and-white approach dominated. To Franz Josef “the people” fell into one of two categories: a loyal but nameless citizenry whose faces blurred one into another as they cheered imperial rule, or the equally intangible crowd of rebels and revolutionaries he had fought in 1848, in Hungary, in Italy, and now in the fragile empire. Antiquated conceptions of duty drove Franz Josef relentlessly onward as he confronted one disaster after another, providing a rigidly ordered refuge from a hostile modern world.
Filling his days with routine paperwork helped Franz Josef escape his unhappy marriage. In his first years on the throne the handsome young emperor had freely bestowed his sexual favors on a specially selected succession of “hygienic” young aristocratic women, forming a kind of Viennese harem.24 But soon enough his mother insisted that he marry—and Sophie had just the right candidate, someone who was not only a good Catholic but whom she could also easily control: Princess Helene, one of the ten children born to Sophie’s sister Ludovika and her husband, Max, who carried the junior title Duke in Bavaria to distinguish him from the more regal Dukes of Bavaria. This was dipping a bit too perilously into an already thin gene pool: Not only was Helene—called “Nené” in the family—Franz Josef’s first cousin, but her aunt Karolina Augusta had married Emperor Franz I of Austria. Aunt Sophie, of course, had married Archduke Franz Karl—and in doing so had become her own sister’s daughter-in-law. The Bavarian Wittelsbachs boasted more than their fair share of eccentrics, and frequently incestuous marriages—including twenty-one previous unions with the Habsburgs—had resulted in fragile temperaments and mental instability.
Sophie and Ludovika, though, gave little thought to such concerns, and brought their children together at the alpine resort of Bad Ischl in the summer of 1853. Here their careful plans dissipated as soon as Franz Josef saw Helene’s fifteen-year-old sister, Elisabeth. Called “Sisi” within the family, the young girl was stunningly beautiful, with light brown eyes and long chestnut hair. Brought up in relative simplicity at her father’s little Gothic revival castle of Possenhofen on the shore of Lake Starnberg outside Munich—a place where cows wandered through the rose garden and the furniture was threadbare—she seemed an ebullient, refreshing change from the sophisticated young ladies in Franz Josef’s orbit. Accustomed to a son who always gave way to her wishes, Sophie was horrified when Franz Josef announced that he wanted to marry Elisabeth: The young girl was too immature, too uneducated, too emotional, an
d too high-strung, she asserted, to become empress of Austria. But the more Sophie argued, the more Franz Josef insisted.25 When he finally proposed to his startled cousin, Elisabeth accepted, but, in a hint of things to come, soon collapsed in tears, sobbing, “If only he were not an emperor!”26
When, on the evening of April 24, 1854, Franz Josef led his bride to the altar of Vienna’s Augustinerkirche, Elisabeth was terrified and briefly fled the reception that followed in tears.27 She dreaded her wedding night and tried to hide herself behind a bank of pillows: Franz Josef humored her insecurities for two nights, but on the third he took possession of his wife.28 Passionate about everything but sex, Elisabeth felt humiliated that everyone knew of her deflowering; indeed, her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, apparently made a point of openly questioning her son about the details.29
Sophie quickly became Elisabeth’s bête noire. The two proud women, fighting for Franz Josef’s attention and jostling for emotional dominance, soon came to resent each other. Sophie, said one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, tried to “come between the two married people, always forcing a decision between mother and wife, and it is only by God’s grace that an open break did not occur. She wanted to break the influence of the Empress over the Emperor.”30 Accustomed to the freedom of her former life at Possenhofen, the new empress felt trapped in a gilded cage. The Habsburgs lived and died by the infamous Spanish etiquette of their court, a sixteenth-century remnant from their Iberian rule. Accustomed to being deferred to, the punctilious Sophie insisted that her daughter-in-law learn, respect, and obey every archaic rite without question. When Elisabeth resisted, Sophie chastised: “Your Majesty,” she once snapped, “evidently thinks you are still in the Bavarian mountains.”31
Elisabeth rebelled at attempts to instruct her in her duties and court ceremony, earning her lectures on removing her gloves at dinner, on riding too much, and on her overt shyness. Sophie filled her daughter-in-law’s household with a contingent of aristocrat ladies whose principal duties were to spy on Elisabeth and spread word of her mistakes in Viennese society.32 The more Sophie insisted, the deeper Elisabeth dug in her heels, sulking, treating her duties with contempt, and refusing to make even minor concessions to her “nasty” mother-in-law.33 And Franz Josef was caught in the uncomfortable middle, as wife and mother each besieged him with complaints about the other.34
However reluctant she was, Elisabeth fulfilled her principal duty by providing her husband with four children, though the imperial nursery soon became yet another battleground in her war with Archduchess Sophie. As soon as they were born, the children were whisked from their mother’s arms to a nursery where Sophie reigned supreme. Elisabeth was allowed no say in their upbringing and, as a consequence, developed little maternal instinct. Instead she vainly viewed her children as a “curse,” saying, “When they come, they drive away beauty.”35
Franz Josef refused to intervene, though he graciously indulged his wife’s selfish caprices. More and more the unhappy Elisabeth avoided her duties; she rarely appeared at court, preferring to seclude herself with her animals, her poetry, and her small circle of intimates. If she felt unwell, if her hair wasn’t looking its best, if inspired to compose—Elisabeth often used any excuse to abruptly cancel appearances at balls, dinners, and receptions, oblivious to the hurt feelings or damage to her prestige.36 Desperately in love with his beautiful wife, Franz Josef deluged “my dearest angel Sisi” with effusively romantic letters, assuring her of his devotion while pleading that she not go riding so often, and asking that she “show herself in the city” to avoid alienating his subjects.37 But his pleas went unheeded as the empress sank into gloomy depression. The idea that she might be tainted with hereditary madness both fascinated and repelled Elisabeth. Once, when Franz Josef asked what she would most like for her birthday, Elisabeth declared in all seriousness that he should give her “a fully equipped lunatic asylum,” so that she could study the patients in depth.38 One of her more disagreeable eccentricities involved a young African boy called Rustimo. Given to her by the shah of Persia, the boy was coddled and fawned over, dressed up in elaborate costumes, and treated as a prized toy, “a joke,” as the historian Brigitte Hamann noted, used merely to provoke outrage—until such time as Rustimo protested and the empress ruthlessly sent him away “like a monkey whose manners were not up to scratch.”39
Unable to share her husband’s passionate sexuality, Elisabeth withdrew, and Sophie—ever watchful for opportunities to influence her son—urged Franz Josef to seek romantic comfort elsewhere, and he soon strayed from his marital vows.40 Unlike in his youth, the women Franz Josef now consorted with were neither carefully selected nor “hygienic.” It is unclear exactly what happened, but it seems likely that Franz Josef contracted gonorrhea and infected his wife with the disease at the end of 1859. Elisabeth’s joints swelled, she broke out in a rash, and she was in great distress: Secret consultations with a series of physicians reportedly confirmed venereal disease.41
Elisabeth was still young and prided herself on her beauty, yet her husband had looked elsewhere. From this point onward she made a conscious decision to live according to her own terms, terms that only rarely made concessions to her responsibilities as empress or role as a wife and mother; perhaps out of guilt Franz Josef indulged her as she all but abandoned her duties.42 She began a peripatetic existence, fleeing Vienna for Madeira, where she spent the winter of 1860, officially seeking a cure for anemia. Extended stays in Corfu and Malta followed: Nearly two years passed before Elisabeth returned to Vienna, but she never remained long, seeking consolation and distraction in composing morbid poetry and wandering across Europe, from fashionable resorts to the fields of England, where she rode to hounds with a fervor approaching mania.
The empress also developed a mania for all things Hungarian, a passion likely driven by her mother-in-law’s antipathy for that country. Viennese tongues clucked over her circle of Magyar confidants, especially her friendship with the dashing Count Gyula Andrássy. She took up the Magyar cause in the wake of the Seven Weeks’ War, pushing her husband to sign the new compromise with Hungary that created the Dual Monarchy.43 To celebrate the couple’s crowning in Budapest in 1867, Hungary presented Franz Josef and Elisabeth with a country residence, the baroque palace of Gödöllö, where the empress increasingly spent her time when in her husband’s empire. Franz Josef’s concessions temporarily won Elisabeth back: In 1868 she gave birth—in Budapest—to her last and favorite child, a girl named Marie Valerie.
“I have been so persecuted, misjudged, and slandered, so hurt and wounded in the great world,” Elisabeth once declared.44 Depressed, she gave herself over to a quest for eternal youth. After 1870 she refused to sit for photographic portraits, wanting people to remember her only as young and beautiful. Vain about her exceptionally long hair, she refused to have it cut even though its weight gave her constant headaches. After its weekly washing, her maid had to brush it and count the number of hairs Elisabeth had lost.45 The empress slept with slabs of raw veal tied around her face to guard against wrinkles; bathed in olive oil; and refused to use a pillow for fear it would crease her face.46 Each morning she was weighed: If she had gained even an ounce, Elisabeth subsisted on a diet of clear soup, milk, wine, juice squeezed from a cut of beef, and raw eggs. Exercising for hours on gymnastic equipment she installed in her rooms, Elisabeth soon developed anorexia.47
By 1888, and after thirty-four years of marriage, both Franz Josef and Elisabeth had grown cynical. “Marriage,” Elisabeth declared, “is a nonsensical institution. One is sold as a child of fifteen and takes an oath one does not understand but can never undo.”48 Her reader Ida von Ferenczy thought that Elisabeth respected Franz Josef, “but I doubt she loved him.”49 Devoted as he was, even the emperor once candidly spoke of the “bitter experience” of his marriage.50 He continued to pour out his heart in letters to his wife, but Elisabeth often replied coldly, finding excuses to avoid both her husband and Vienna; if he didn’t like h
er “habits,” she once wrote threateningly, she could “be pensioned off” and replaced with a more sympathetic consort.51
Franz Josef took it all in stride. “I must simply make the best of it and continue to bear patiently the lonely existence to which I have long been accustomed,” he wrote sadly to his wife.52 He buried himself in his work, following a routine that itself gave comfort to his ordered mind. The emperor arose shortly after four each morning, was dressed by his valet, and by six was inevitably in his study, where a seductive portrait of Empress Elisabeth by Franz Xaver Winterhalter offered a ghostly reminder of his absent wife. Audiences and reports filled his days, interrupted only by an afternoon walk. Simple in his tastes, Franz Josef regularly dined on boiled beef and pork knuckles washed down with beer. Except for those evenings when he had to preside over court functions or attend the theater, the emperor was usually asleep by nine.53
Perhaps the kindest thing Elisabeth ever did for Franz Josef was to provide her husband with a mistress, the actress Katharina Schratt. After 1860 Franz Josef had indulged in any number of affairs and is said to have fathered several illegitimate children, but his relationship with Schratt proved to be something entirely different.54 He first took notice of the pretty young actress during a performance at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1884.55 Sensing the attraction, Elisabeth asked Schratt to tea, delicately explaining that she wanted to travel but that someone must care for her husband in her absence. Schratt agreed, and Elisabeth soon left Vienna with a clearer conscience.56