Franz Josef followed the promptings of his heart (or a somewhat lower portion of his anatomy), but his marriage to the cousin of his dreams proved disastrous from the get-go. Sisi turned out to be both neurotic and frigid. She adored being admired, but hated sex. And she was so enamored of her own beauty that she was repulsed by pregnancy, especially because it ruined her figure. Sisi was devastated that her firstborn, Sophie, was a girl, because females could not inherit the imperial throne, and was doubly distraught that her second child, Gisela, was a daughter as well.
Rudolf was the third child and first son born to Franz Joseph and Sisi. As Rudolf grew older and Sisi saw his personality begin to take shape, she despaired of having passed him the “tainted” Wittelsbach blood. And the way the crown prince met his tragic and sordid demise—if in fact he had perished the way his mother suspected—gave her all the more reason to suspect that her son had indeed inherited “bad” blood.
For decades, people have accepted the fact that Rudolf’s life ended in a brandy-infused double-suicide pact. But over the last few years, a raft of conspiracy theories that began at the time of the prince’s death have resurfaced. What was the truth? What kind of royal pain did Rudolf become, as he matured from angsty adolescent to agitated adult? Was he unhappy—or unhinged?
Crown Prince Rudolf Francis Charles Joseph of Hapsburg-Lorraine was born on August 21, 1858, in the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna. His twenty-eight-year-old father was thrilled to finally have an heir after three tries, although he described the baby as “not exactly beautiful, but well built and strong.”
Twenty-year-old Sisi was probably even more relieved. She had little desire to be a mother, evincing a maternal interest only when it came to a power struggle with her mother-in-law over raising the children. Franz Joseph, who had become emperor at the age of eighteen, was accustomed to maintaining the same advisers his mother had favored. Sophia’s managerial decisions extended to the nursery as well—with devastating consequences for Rudolf.
At the time of the crown prince’s birth, economic conditions in the Austrian empire were dismal; Franz Joseph’s foreign policy was disastrous, and Austria’s international reputation was at an all-time low. The vast Hapsburg empire was a multilingual realm in which several religions and ethnicities—Jews, Italians, Slavs, Germans, Balkans, and Hungarians—were expected to peacefully coexist as cogs within the enormous imperial wheel; but Franz Joseph’s expansionist agenda had cost him the loyalty and respect of the Hungarians and the Italians. He was not prepared to relinquish their territories without a fight. With the birth of an heir, his subjects hoped that the crown prince would eventually prove to be a healer.
As a boy Rudolf physically resembled his mother: beautiful, physically fragile, and emotionally high-strung. He was a sickly child who enjoyed watching Sisi dress for balls, but his father was adamant that Rudolf be prepared to inherit the imperial throne, force-feeding him the rigid education he’d never received himself. To begin with, the crown prince was expected to master all of the languages spoken in the Austrian Empire, plus English, French, and Latin, when he was barely out of leading strings. The Dowager Empress Sophia had selected Rudolf’s nursemaid, as well as his first tutor, Count Gondrecourt, who was the worst possible choice for an overly sensitive child, and would have made a better boot-camp sergeant.
At the age of five, Rudolf contracted typhoid fever, and the following year he received a concussion when he fell out of a tree, but Count Gondrecourt adamantly refused to coddle his delicate pupil. Awakened by noise in the predawn hours one winter morning, Franz Joseph got out of bed and walked over to the window to look out over the snow-covered courtyard. There he saw Gondrecourt drilling Rudolf in military maneuvers by lantern light.
The count’s idea of a field trip was to take his young charge to a nearby game park called the Lainzer Tiergarten, where he would shove the boy into one of the enclosures, alert him that a wild boar was coming—and then leave the crown prince alone to fend for himself! Gondrecourt was also fond of shooting off pistols in Rudolf’s bedroom, presumably to toughen him up.
Finally, the empress, who had been attempting to take control of her son’s schooling for years, had seen and heard enough of Gondrecourt’s educational system. Sisi presented Franz Joseph with an ultimatum: Either Gondrecourt went or she did. Aware that her husband avoided anything that might upset his mother, she followed up her demand with a succinct letter.
I wish to reserve for myself unlimited authority in everything concerning the children, the choice of their entourage, the place of their residence, the complete direction of their education, in one word, all this has to be decided by me alone until the children come of age.
The emperor gave the count his walking papers and seven-year-old Rudolf was assigned a new governor, the cultured, well-read Latour von Thurmberg. The crown prince instantly adored him, and Latour became his mentor for life, a confidant and correspondent long after Rudolf left the schoolroom. As governor, Latour supervised the youth’s education, with nearly fifty different tutors under his aegis, each chosen for his erudition in his given field, even if the scholar’s politics were not in concordance with the emperor’s.
Unfortunately, too much focus was placed on rigorous academics, with scant attention paid to developing the prince’s character. In not too many years, Rudolf’s parents and their proxies would reap what they had sown. By the time the crown prince was ten, Latour noticed that the boy had the tendency to find the easiest way around a difficult hurdle. He also was exhibiting a penchant for insincerity, telling people (especially his paternal grandmother) what they wanted to hear, and covering his true opinions because they might be unpopular, or even scandalous.
Another watershed event at ten was Rudolf’s first confession. At the time, he tended to view things quite literally, so he was understandably terrorized by the apocalyptic language of the prayer “O my God, I have provoked thy vengeance, I am not worthy of being called thy child any longer, I have deserved to be cast out forever.”
Latour was reticent about offering too much comfort to the hysterical boy for fear that Rudolf would come to view religion too lightly if he pooh-poohed the drama of the liturgy. And when he observed that Rudolf tended to mumble his prayers before bedtime, the governor worried that “it seems that he wants to get it over with.” Nonetheless, Latour decided not to make an issue of the matter, in case an admonishment would cause the crown prince to view prayer as something distasteful. But the damage had already been done. For the rest of his life, Rudolf would be emphatically anticlerical, writing lengthy screeds regarding the destructive influence of the Church on western European history.
Count Gondrecourt’s malign influence had also left the prince with a morbid streak that he never overcame. Even as a little boy, Rudolf was fascinated by death, his interest in the subject far beyond the merely curious. When he learned that his father had a sister who had died quite young, Rudolf wanted to know all the sordid details. He liked to watch animals die, especially birds. Just six or seven years old when Franz Joseph took him on his first shooting venture, the child took to it like a duck to water. Rudolf would shoot little birds and have them cooked up for his lunch. Employing his artistic talents to draw pictures of himself with his quarry, he rendered the blood and gore as realistically as he could manage.
In twenty-first-century parlance, the adolescent Rudolf would qualify as an “emo boy,” filling his journals with angsty poems and diatribes. During the summer of his fourteenth birthday, instead of viewing an afternoon’s idyll in a rowboat on a pastoral lake as a pleasant diversion, he saw the scene as “gliding over death . . . How awe-inspiring that sounds. It makes one’s blood run cold,” the prince observed.
By the age of fourteen or fifteen, Rudolf was already pouring his political philosophies onto the page, writing in one of his journals in December 1872: I am also convinced that mankind would have advanced much further without the terrible days of the Middle Ages . . . the clerg
y, 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 . . . means which the clergy had used to enrich themselves.
Rudolf’s views could not have been farther from his father’s. Although he came from the aristocracy, the crown prince viewed their caste as a “curse to humanity,” writing, “The Nobility’s selfishness brought about the incessant struggles in the Middle Ages, the poverty of the people, the obstruction of all development.” His angry, progressive opinions undoubtedly annoyed the emperor no end. To Franz Joseph it must have felt as though his heir were biting the hand that fed him.
How much of Rudolf’s adolescent outpourings were influenced by Latour and his tutors and how much reflected an expression of his own original views is open to conjecture. He certainly had a susceptible mind. But straight from the teen’s tortured soul is a comment written during the Christmas holidays of 1873 in a notebook he called “Various Thoughts,” which he dedicated to Latour.
Thoughts of all kinds roam through my head; all seems confused, all day long my brain boils and toils . . . all thoughts contradicting, sometimes serene and merry, sometimes raven black, crowded with frenzy, they struggle with one another and slowly truth develops from them. I always ponder: What will be the end? . . . often I ask myself: Are you already a madman or will you become one? . . .
This little volume also contains strong views about the monarchy being a “mighty ruin” that would “ultimately tumble,” because the people who had been blindly led by it for centuries would inevitably see the light.
They were prescient comments, as the assassination of his father’s successor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would lead to the First World War, and the end of the Hapsburg Dynasty and the Austrian Empire. Romanov rule in Russia, and the Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria would crumble as well.
The Austria of Rudolf’s teenage years offered little in the way of social freedoms, even to the wealthiest citizens. Civil marriages were recognized and the liberty to practice one’s religion existed, but only the highest taxpayers qualified for these benefits, which was another way of soaking the Jews. There was industrialization without social legislation; the rise of the factory meant the demise of the small craftsman. The nouveau riche class of industrial capitalists suddenly vied with the aristocracy on an economic level.
During the 1870s, the Austrian nobility was fighting tooth and nail to preserve the status quo of the aristocracy and the Church. Rudolf’s ideas, as well as his education, were viewed as dangerously progressive, if not downright radical.
One month before his nineteenth birthday, in July of 1877, Rudolf came of age, which meant that his education was formally over, and he was given his own court and a fixed allowance. Latour could be no more than a mentor now. Shortly after Christmas, the crown prince traveled to England with his mother, who had become a rabid Anglophile. There he toured factories, the Bank of England, the Coal Exchange, and the Smithfield and Billingsgate markets, and made an informal study of England’s centuries-old parliamentary procedure. By the time he returned to Austria, Rudolf had formed the impression that his country’s liberals should stop arguing with one another and organize themselves into a single political party.
He joined the army, not as a choice, but because it was an obligation. Franz Joseph sent his son to an ordinary regiment of the line, the 36th, stationed in Prague, the capital of what was then called Bohemia. The twenty-year-old crown prince, who disdained the nobility because he considered them clueless about life, was glad to get out among common men, who he believed were the real people. Rudolf took his military duties seriously, and his commanding officer praised his “warm heart and noble character.”
The soldier-prince was often the target of rumors, particularly those that concerned love affairs. He went through puberty relatively late and wasn’t taught the facts of life until he was in his midteens. Rudolf first evinced an interest in girls at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but after that, there was no stopping him, and it’s possible that he became rather promiscuous in Prague. He had turned into a handsome and exceptionally charming, intelligent young man, with his mother’s delicate features and an easy grace in company that would certainly have made him attractive to women. If those qualities didn’t make him a chick magnet, his title surely would have done so.
Rudolf’s taste in paramours was as iconoclastic as his politics. He fell madly in love with a girl from Prague’s old Jewish ghetto. Recognizing that no good could possibly come of the affair, her parents sent her away, but she sneaked back into the city to see the crown prince, falling ill on the day of her arrival. She died without ever again laying eyes on her royal beloved and was buried in Prague’s Jewish cemetery. Rudolf allegedly made regular visits to her grave, leaving a floral tribute on each occasion.
In the spring of 1879, the dashing twenty-year-old prince traveled to Spain. In the will he made before embarking, he signed off with bravado, leaving “a last farewell kiss in thought to all the beautiful women of Vienna whom I have loved so much.”
Around the same time, Rudolf wrote to Latour: In later years, when I shall have obtained influence and experience, I shall dissuade the Emperor from the ways which are now used in military and political affairs, and which are wrong in my view, and I shall help to create a new system. To do so I would move to Vienna and gladly live there.
But Franz Joseph was a classic autocrat, not only uninterested and unwilling, but congenitally unable to cede his heir any political role or responsibility. Even if their opinions had been in accord, it is doubtful that the emperor would have permitted Rudolf to hold any meaningful governmental post.
His desire to micromanage every aspect of his son’s life led to Franz Joseph’s conclusion toward the end of 1879 that it was time for Rudolf to wed. The emperor settled on Princess Stephanie, the second daughter of King Leopold of the Belgians (Queen Victoria’s uncle) and Marie Henriette, a Hapsburg princess from the Hungarian branch of the family. Although Franz Joseph had married for love, Rudolf would not be allowed the same luxury.
Rudolf arrived in Brussels on March 5, 1880. He proposed to the fifteen-year-old Stephanie without fanfare and she promptly accepted him. On March 11, the prince wrote to Latour: I am intoxicated with happiness and contentment. . . . I think anxiously of the moment when I shall have to leave. I have learned to love my parents-in-law very much.
After telling Latour how impressed he was by Leopold’s intelligence and political acumen, on March 13 the prince described his rather sheltered fiancée to his mentor: In Stephanie I have found a real angel, a faithful good being who loves me, a very clever, well educated and able companion for this life who will stand by my side well and successfully in all my difficult tasks. . . .
Although this sounds like an expression of euphoric ardor, readers should recall Latour’s assessment of Rudolf’s personality as a ten-year-old boy: He told people what he thought they wanted to hear. So, was the prince’s effusion merely propaganda? Stephanie was by all other accounts dull and homely with zero spark and no critical faculties. The product of a strict Catholic education, she was also a bad dresser—heresy to her oh-so-chic mother-in-law, who had once been a provincial belle herself. Aware of her intellectual inferiority to Rudolf, Stephanie overcompensated by acting pushy and stubborn—a bad match indeed for the neurotic and sensitive crown prince. However, each of the young royals was starved for affection and should have had much in common. King Leopold was a serial philanderer and Stephanie’s mother was a profoundly unhappy woman. Rudolph and his fiancée could have been each other’s life raft, but stories with princes and princesses in them don’t always end with a happily-ever-after.
Although the royal wedding was planned for December 1880, the date was postponed because Stephanie hadn’t matured enough physically. Perhaps she had not even gotten her first period
at the time she became engaged.
Sisi was in England when she received the telegram announcing her son’s betrothal. “Thank God it is not a calamity!” she exclaimed when she discovered that the delivery contained good news. But the empress presciently added, “Please, God, that it will not become one.” Sisi’s son had inherited her morbid personality, and even though she was not terribly maternal, her forebodings, especially those concerning her children, were invariably correct.
She worried because she knew that Rudolf, like her husband, regarded everything with the utmost seriousness. In his dreams, the crown prince hoped that his child bride would side with him politically while his father still reigned and become a full political partner when he eventually ascended the imperial throne. But Stephanie was way out of her depth, and Sisi never cautioned Rudolf not to push her, especially at the beginning of their relationship, or to expect too much from her too soon. Rudolf adored his mother and most likely would have heeded her warning, but one of Sisi’s greatest failings was her inability to confront a situation after she acknowledged its existence. Instead, she routinely ran from anything unpleasant.
On May 22, 1881, the twenty-two-year-old Rudolf and Stephanie (eleven days shy of her seventeenth birthday) were wed in Vienna, exchanging the same rings that were worn by Marie Antoinette’s parents, Francis of Lorraine and Maria Theresa, 150 years earlier. But just prior to the nuptials the groom experienced a fit of nerves; morose and tearful, he seemed to dread the impending ceremony.
Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Page 24