by Greg King
For the next three decades Schratt became the closest thing Franz Josef ever had to a true confidante. Although rewarded with lavish gifts, she asked for nothing, providing the emperor with emotional comfort and a refuge from his troubled reign. A few historians, quoting cautious letters written between the pair in 1888, have insisted that the emperor and the actress were never lovers.57 Yet Schratt faithfully reported her menstrual periods to the emperor, who was, after all, only in his fifties when the relationship began.58 As the biographer Joan Haslip wrote of the friendship, “One is inclined to doubt whether it was always so platonic.”59
Now this man of dull habits and autocratic temperament marked forty years on the throne. With the losses of his Italian provinces, military defeat by Prussia, and political blackmail by Hungary, Franz Josef had little cause for celebration. Elisabeth was absent—as indeed she so often was—when the anniversary came, and the scandals and disappointments weighed heavily on the emperor’s shoulders. Yet his country was at peace, and a chorus of voices assured him that his subjects were content. Perhaps Franz Josef believed that better days lay ahead; any such illusions were about to be shattered in a way that shook the monarchy to its very core and brought unforeseen tragedy into the very heart of the imperial family.
CHAPTER TWO
First there had been a girl, named Sophie after her grandmother on her birth in 1855; then Empress Elisabeth gave birth to another daughter, Gisela, the following year. Sophie died of complications from measles at the age of two, and Gisela couldn’t inherit the throne ahead of any living male Habsburg.1 But on August 21, 1858, a 101-gun salute announced that the empress had finally given birth to a son at Schloss Laxenburg, some fifteen miles outside Vienna.2 “Magnificently built and very strong,” Franz Josef declared, though he thought his new son was a very ugly baby.3 But he finally had an heir, and from the first Franz Josef heaped expectation on his shoulders. Along with the string of titles—Crown Prince of Austria and of Hungary, Thronfolger (heir to the throne), Archduke and Prince of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia—came a string of names: Rudolf Franz Karl Josef of Habsburg-Lorraine, evoking the glorious accomplishments of Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who had founded the dynasty in the twelfth century.
Rudolf, like his sisters before him, was taken from his mother’s arms to a nursery where Archduchess Sophie enforced the court’s onerous Spanish etiquette: The new mother couldn’t nurse her son, contact was limited, and always under Sophie’s censorious gaze. Sophie, not Elisabeth, chose Rudolf’s nurse, the widowed Baroness Karolina von Welden, to provide him with maternal attention. “Wowo,” as Rudolf called his nurse, became one of the few stable influences in his young life.4
In Great Britain, Queen Victoria idealized her private family life to win popular support; such a concept was alien to the Habsburgs. They had no desire to humanize themselves, to live as examples of familial unity to appeal to the masses. The emperor’s devotion to duty and the empress’s desire to wander Europe in the wake of her domestic disappointments left Rudolf emotionally adrift. It wasn’t often that he saw both of his parents, and even when he did, it was only for a rigidly controlled sixty minutes before Baroness Welden returned him to the nursery.5
Franz Josef treated his young son like a military cadet, someone to be trained and shaped by discipline so that he would “show a good deal of courage, manliness, and industry.” When a scared four-year-old Rudolf shied away from a group of boisterous soldiers, Franz Josef wrote to his son that it was “a disgrace.”6 Shy by nature and uneasy showing any emotion, the emperor was friendly but reserved with his son. Franz Josef could not forget that he was emperor, and exalted conceptions of his role demanded that he always act as sovereign first and father second. Informalities leading to unwelcome intimacies were discouraged: Indeed, Rudolf’s youngest sister, Marie Valerie, characterized the relationship between father and son as “self-conscious.”7 There was something so distant in Franz Josef’s manner that even Rudolf’s tutor once begged the emperor to consider the crown prince’s “sensitive heart” when speaking to him, and to treat him “not sternly, but kindly.”8
Empress Elisabeth was an inconsistent, erratic presence in her son’s life, and she often let animosities sour their infrequent time together: As soon as Archduchess Sophie entered a room, Elisabeth fled, leaving Rudolf a bewildered and upset pawn in their personal power struggles.9 Rudolf adored his mother: She was a magical, beautiful figure who flitted in and out of his life. He worshipped an abstract ideal, desperate for her love and affection, but Elisabeth was unable to take much interest in him. In 1863 Elisabeth refused to cut short her holiday in Bavaria on learning that Rudolf had typhoid, and so it was Sophie who nursed him through the disease.10 Constantly traveling, Elisabeth filled letters to her son with lines like, “Do not forget your Mama,” or “Think of your Mama often,” but her behavior undermined any sense of emotional security: She often let days pass before answering Rudolf’s letters, saying that she had been too busy traveling, riding, or even attending the theater to answer him.11 Even when she did reply, Elisabeth made it clear she was only going through the motions: “I have just written good little Gisela a long letter,” she reported to her three-year-old son, “and so there’s nothing left to tell you.”12 After years of such treatment, Rudolf complained that his mother “no longer cares for anything” other than her own interests.13
The kind of happy domestic family life depicted in popular Victorian lithographs and sentimental postcards eluded the Habsburg heir. His father was too unimaginative and distant, while his mother, caring more about her own diversions, ignored her only son. This left Rudolf anxious and high-strung: even as a young boy he suffered from poor health. Temperamentally he was his mother’s son: charming and agreeable one minute, withdrawn and depressed the next. Wild tantrums when denied something he wanted were common. Rudolf was also manipulative: Disliking confrontation, he was inevitably agreeable only to avoid emotional scenes. Early on, he learned to use his ill health and claims of headaches to escape unwelcome situations and evade unpleasant obligations.14
At six Rudolf was forcibly torn from his beloved “Wowo” and his sister Gisela to begin his formal education, destroying any vestige of stability.15 Like the nursery, the schoolroom became a battleground in the ongoing war between Empress Elisabeth and Archduchess Sophie. Sophie rebuffed the empress’s attempts to push for a liberal education, declaring, “How can Elisabeth, badly brought up as she is, and with no idea of how to behave, be expected to bring up the heir to a great empire?”16 On his mother’s advice Franz Josef appointed Major General Count Leopold Gondrecourt as his son’s governor, charged with toughening up the “nervous” crown prince.17
A professional soldier, Gondrecourt brought with him a reputation for exaggerated piety, harsh language, and needless cruelty.18 Following the emperor’s charge, Gondrecourt delighted in employing methods both emotionally and physically abusive. At night he crept into the young boy’s room and fired off pistols to wake a terrified Rudolf from his sleep.19 At six every morning, in rain and snow and by the light of a lantern, he made Rudolf do military drill in the courtyard.20 Then there was the day Gondrecourt took his young charge to the zoo. He locked Rudolf in a cage and shouted that a wild boar was coming to kill him as the boy screamed in terror.21
This brutal regimen took a toll on six-year-old Rudolf: He suffered from terrible nightmares and frequently wet his bed.22 In May 1865 a traumatized Rudolf collapsed: The imperial court said it was diphtheria, but it is likely that the young boy had suffered a nervous breakdown.23 Even the self-absorbed empress finally recognized the danger, insisting that Gondrecourt be fired. When Franz Josef refused to go against his mother’s choice, Elisabeth gave him an ultimatum: “I cannot stand to see such things going on,” she wrote. “It must either be Gondrecourt or myself.… It is my wish that I alone should have full and unlimited power in all matters concerning the children, the choice of those who surround them and their place of residence, and compl
ete control of their upbringing. In short, I must alone decide everything concerning them until their majorities.”24
Faced with this threat, Franz Josef relented. Having won her battle, Elisabeth retreated back into her own self-centered life—“she was incapable of sustaining interest in Rudolf very long,” as one of her biographers noted.25 The emperor replaced Gondrecourt with Elisabeth’s choice, the liberal Colonel Josef Latour von Thurmberg. Like Gondrecourt, the forty-five-year-old Latour von Thurmberg was a career army officer; he’d even lost a finger battling Italian soldiers in 1849. But unlike his predecessor, Latour von Thurmberg was gentle, cultured, and had an innate sympathy for his young charge, whom he likened to a “whipped dog” on assuming his post.26 He became Rudolf’s confidant, the closest thing he had to a trusted friend.
Rudolf, Franz Josef insisted, “must not become a free thinker, but he should become thoroughly acquainted with the conditions and requirements of modern times.”27 Given Latour von Thurmberg’s liberal reputation, the worry was real. “I could not approve of the entire tendency of these studies to introduce the Crown Prince to all branches of knowledge and public life,” wrote one of the emperor’s adjutants, “to name professors and tutors of the most liberal conviction and to allow him, according to the unfortunate, existing court regulations, to complete his studies.” He feared that “the youthful, easily excited mind of the Crown Prince, the immaturity of his concepts, and his extravagant though undeniable high intelligence” would lead Rudolf to absorb “ideas and tendencies not corresponding to the future monarchy’s conservative character.”28
Expectations buried Rudolf: As future emperor, he must become the most knowledgeable, most adept, most learned prince the Habsurgs had ever produced. Just as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted to turn their son Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, into an “ideal man,” so too did Franz Josef burden his son with unreasonable goals. And in both cases, unrelenting pressure and expectation crushed spirits, leaving the boys anxious, nervous, and ultimately rebellious against the ideas thrust upon them.
Latour von Thurmberg selected men of respectable achievement and liberal inclination to tutor the crown prince. The problem wasn’t quality but rather quantity: Nearly fifty different instructors pushed a disparate array of subjects at a superficial, head-turning pace. From seven in the morning to eight at night, instructors drilled Rudolf in Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, and European history; world history; grammar; literature; geography; arithmetic; politics; economics; jurisprudence; natural science; military history and strategy; and lessons in Latin, French, Magyar, Czech, Polish, English, and Croatian. On top of this was instruction in gymnastics, swimming, riding, fencing, and dancing, along with music and art.29 The latter two subjects left Rudolf cold. He was his father’s son when it came to the arts, disliking operatic and orchestral music, shunning literature, and finding no escape in paintings.30
Having endured a similar educational regime, Franz Josef saw no reason to alter the heavy burdens heaped upon his son. But Rudolf wasn’t the compliant, unemotional and unintellectual pupil his father had been. The speed of lessons and rapid shifts in focus left Rudolf, as Latour von Thurmberg complained, incapable “of thinking methodically.”31 Another tutor wrote that Rudolf was “inclined merely to skim the surface of the subject at hand”; coupled with his “lack of concentration in observing and thinking and also his want of precision following a lecture and rendering it verbally,” the young student never developed the ability to critically analyze and assess information.32
Then there was religion. Lessons in Catholic catechism reinforced guilt and the necessity for perpetual penance that preyed on Rudolf’s anxious mind. At ten he burst into uncontrollable, guilty sobs when asked to make his first confession, which Latour von Thurmberg thought unnerving and quite out of proportion to any boyish transgression. But this apparent piety soon turned to cynicism. As a boy Rudolf rushed through his prayers as an unwelcome chore; by fifteen he was questioning Catholicism itself.33 “The Clergy,” Rudolf wrote in an essay on the Middle Ages, “always hand in glove with the proud aristocracy, used their influence over the people and did not permit the development of any free ideas; the church chose ways dangerous for itself, for eventually the people would realize how they were treated and recognize the sacrilege of those indulgences and other means which the clergy had used to enrich themselves.”34 Rudolf declared that he had “no sympathy whatever for the influence of the Church on the State,” and detested “all tendencies toward Church influence. I would much rather send my children to a school whose master is a Jew than to one whose headmaster is a clergyman.” A strong Catholic Church, he believed, always resulted in “evil consequences.”35 And, to his mother’s second cousin King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Rudolf declared, “I consider the Christian faith, in the narrow forms demanded by our Church, quite unacceptable for any educated man who has reached a stage of mental development that allows him to rise above common life and logically think and ask questions.”36 It is not surprising that the adult Rudolf was an unapologetic, though private, atheist.
Rudolf’s words reflect something of his inquisitive nature, but he struggled to understand his tendency to anxiety and depression. A notebook entry made at the age of fifteen reveals his troubled state of mind:
Thoughts of all kinds race through my head; it seems confused, all day long my brain boils and toils the whole day long; one goes out, another comes in, and each possess me, each tells me something different, sometimes serene and happy, sometimes black as a raven, full of fury; they fight and from the struggle truth slowly develops. I always wonder: how will it end? Are we spirits, or are we animals? Animals, that is what we are. Have we descended from apes or has man always existed as a species of his own? Often I ask myself: are you already a madman, or will you become one? I realize I shall know all I want to know, but one thing is certain: one must always strive, always endeavor, to achieve more and always more, not titles and dignities nor riches—leave that to the venal races who trace their ancestors to the birth of Christ. No, I want knowledge.37
Latour von Thurmberg never showed such writings to the emperor, who undoubtedly would have been astonished by his son’s musings. Ostensibly Rudolf was flamboyantly liberal. Also at fifteen he had written:
During the French Revolution the King, the nobility and the clergy were punished for their own iniquities and for those of their forebears. The punishment was rough and bloody, but it was a necessary and salutary catastrophe. The government has changed and is a step nearer to the Republic. Monarchy has lost its old power and clings to the trust and love of the people.… Monarchy stands as a mighty ruin, which may remain from today till tomorrow but which will finally disappear altogether. It has stood for centuries and as long as the people could be led blindly all was well. Now the end has come. All men are free, and in the next conflict the ruins will come tumbling down.38
And a few years later he asserted: “Our age requires new points of view. Everywhere, especially in Austria, there is reaction, which is the first step toward a downfall. Those who preach reaction are the most dangerous enemies.”39
Some of these views stemmed from Rudolf’s sincere conviction, but there was also an element of rebellion against his father’s archaic court and rigid conservatism. He remained his father’s son when it came to his privileged position. Change was necessary, but for Rudolf this meant change enacted within the existing monarchical framework: The same young man who spouted liberal ideologies shared Franz Josef’s belief that God had selected the Habsburgs to rule.40 The liberal Rudolf, Latour von Thurmberg complained, “began to think that he was omnipotence personified.”41
Rudolf’s political views were also inconsistent. Initially favorable to the Czechs, he came to resent Bohemian nationalism as a threat to Vienna’s power.42 He also harbored ambivalent feelings about Austria’s role in the Balkans: At times he suggested that the South Slavs under Habsburg rule should be given their own semiautonomous state in an
effort to counteract any Russian influence or potential expansion. At others he seemed to think that Austrian involvement in the Balkans would lead only to political and military trouble.43
Rudolf inherited his mother’s love of Hungary, once writing that he felt “irresistibly drawn toward the dark forests” and thrilled at its sunsets, where “the leaden darkness was separated from the light of the departing day by a belt of orange broken only by a few bright, isolated stars, while the low-lying woods and swamps wrapped in blue vapors and feathery mists assumed ghostly indefinite shapes.”44 He’d learned the country’s history and language from the Benedictine priest Jácinth János von Rónay, a surprising choice given that Rónay had taken part in the 1848 rebellion against Austrian rule and Franz Josef had actually signed a death warrant against him as a “traitor.”45 Rónay eventually abandoned such troubling separatist views, though he supported more Magyar autonomy and the creation of a third nation in the empire, comprising Bohemia and Moravia.46 This left Rudolf torn between liberal dreams of an independent nation and a personal conviction that the Habsburgs must always wear the Crown of Saint Stephen.
Latour von Thurmberg’s work came to an end in 1877. He deemed his student “a puzzle.” On the one hand, he said, “I’ve never met a more talented man.” But, he complained, Rudolf lacked character.47 On July 24, a month short of his nineteenth birthday, the crown prince was declared to be of age. With his inquisitive mind Rudolf would undoubtedly have benefited from being allowed to continue his studies at a university, but this was contrary to Habsburg etiquette, and he remained something of an intellectual dilettante, unable to evaluate conflicting information and subject to rash judgments on political issues.