24 November 2016
The Last Emperor
The lessons from Franz Joseph for Mr Juncker.
by J.R.Thomas
In Vienna there is a sight which few visitors go and see; yet to students of pre First World War history it must be one of the most evocative of all those places in the great Imperial Capital where one can ruminate on a world utterly changed. It is the burial vault of the Hapsburg family, under the ancient but relatively unimposing Capuchin Church, in a modest street a few paces from the Imperial Palace. The main vault is dominated by the enormous catafalque of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Stephen. More than twice life size, the recumbent figures of the imperial couple rise to look fondly at each other. But pass this romantic tribute to a great ruler and her spouse, and penetrate into the furthest vaults, where lie the more recent Hapsburgs. Note the great ages which seem to have been the norm among members of that family. In the Franz Joseph vault, built in 1908 by the Emperor Franz Joseph to commemorate sixty years on the throne (an odd way to celebrate an anniversary), there are just three raised tombs; the Emperor himself, placed in his own vault eight years later, his wife, Elisabeth of Bavaria, and their only son, Prince Rudolph.
We should say, that technically Franz Joseph wasn’t the last emperor. But the heading “The Second to Last Emperor” does not resonate in quite the same way; on 21st November 2016, what was never conceivable in his lifetime, what would have seemed like lese-majesté to even think about for most of his subjects, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was effectively over, seemed to become inevitable with his death. One hundred years ago (on Monday this week), a different world began.
Franz Joseph I came to the throne in 1848, the Year of Revolutions. It was, as 2016 may one day seem to us, a year in which the disaffected rose, in which minorities had finally had enough, in which old ways and long established forms of government were cast aside and a new and perhaps harsher world seemed to be arriving. And, rather as we or our descendants may well find, in the end not a lot changed; the old order shook and shuddered, but with a few tweaks to outward appearances things seemed to settle back into life much as before. The old guard reasserted control, personnel changed: structures, it seemed, did not. But in truth, the seeds of dissent were sown, to germinate and grow until things really did change, in the early years of the next century.
In 1848 Franz Joseph was a product of that desire for change; eighteen years old, the nephew of Emperor Ferdinand I, his abrupt replacement of his kindly but mentally weak uncle (passing over his father who had no desire for the role), was seen as a symbol of radical change in the ancient Austro-Hungarian empire. He got off to a bad start, losing a war against France, but achieved much personal popularity from his bravery in the fighting. His initial granting of a semi democratic constitution lasted only a year, and was then repealed, but Franz Joseph was neither against a form of democracy or a degree of self-determination; the problem was and remained, the intensely conservative nature of the imperial system and supporting bureaucracy.
His greatest problem, which was at the heart of all policy and political matters throughout his reign, was how to hold the Empire together; that conglomeration of different states, of different peoples, of different economies. Modern readers may see parallels in modern times and they are right; the Empire was a sort of proto European Community of south eastern European states, and in the nineteenth century the factors which had historically bound the Holy Roman Empire together became less strong than those which began to centrifuge it apart. Franz Joseph, and perhaps even more so his heir Crown Prince Rudolph, saw that, in the immortal phrase, if things were going to stay the same, they were going to have to change. The catalyst was a war against Italy, a consequence of Italy becoming a nation state under the campaigns of Garibaldi, which resulted in the southern Alpine states of Austria freeing themselves from Viennese rule and joining the new United Kingdom of Italy.
Franz Joseph saw that the forces of nationalism would inevitably break up the rest of his inheritance unless he took the initiative to create a new sense of statehood. In 1867 Hungary was granted a parliament in Budapest and became (or technically reverted to being) a Kingdom, with Franz Joseph as its monarch. In Bohemia, which is now the Czech Republic, there were similar hopes and long negotiations with various nationalist and democratic groups. By the late 1870’s, Franz Joseph habitually referred to himself as King and to the Kingdom of Bohemia, though there was still no representative assembly or indeed coronation by the First World War. In a similar way, the difficult issues of Croatia, Moravia, (nominally also separate Kingdoms), and Transylvania – which was lumped in with Hungary but had complex loyalties to itself, to the newly independent Romania, and to Hungary, were never to be resolved. Those wanting to know more about the extraordinarily complex politics of this area and the struggle for independence should read that great set of novels woven around the real events and people of the fifty years before and after the First World War “The Transylvanian Trilogy” by Miklos Banffy (who was briefly Hungarian foreign minister and thus remarkably features as a passing character in his own novel).
Franz Joseph’s great achievement is that he held the Empire together; he tends now to be remembered for the twin tragedies of the assassination of his partially estranged wife Elisabeth, and even more, for the apparent suicide of his son, Rudolph, at Mayerling in 1889. Those were personal tragedies, but also political ones; Elisabeth was a woman of radical instincts and a close and intelligent advisor to her husband, being instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Hungarian parliament. Rudolph’s death was an even greater political tragedy, so much so that it is still suggested that what happened at Mayerling may have been an assassination rather than a suicide. He was a democratically inclined reformist, with close if secret links to many opposition groups in the Empire. He would have, perhaps, propelled it towards some form of democratic federation and also formed an effective counter-weight amongst the German speaking nations to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
Franz Joseph maintained to the full extent his formal duties running his vast domains until a couple of days before his death aged 86, having ruled for sixty eight years. Most of his subjects could not remember a time in which he had not being Emperor; and he retained his enormous popularity to the end. Privately he became an isolated stiff formal man, intensely disliking his heir Franz Ferdinand, who he saw as insufficiently subtle for the duties awaiting him – duties which the shootings at Sarajevo ensured he never took up. Franz Joseph was succeeded by his young great nephew Charles, Emperor Karl. Within three years Karl was in exile, the Empire dissolved.
If not for the death of Rupert, the lack of a suitable heir, and the almost random tragedy of a war coming out of so little, there might well have been no Great War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire most probably would have survived as a union of states, the nominal capital of Europe would be Vienna, there would be no European Community, and the world could have had a very different twentieth century history. Jean-Claude Juncker and those who now must give thought to the future of Europe might ponder on this, and perhaps spend a useful away-weekend (the monastery at Mayerling would be a good base) studying the reign of the last but one Emperor, and how best to maintain a union of disparate states.
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