Franz Joseph I

Franz Joseph I was emperor of Austria from 1848 to 1916 and, from 1867, king of Hungary, ruling the Habsburg Monarchy for almost 68 years, one of the longest reigns in European history. He came to the throne amid revolution, lost Austria's position in Italy and Germany in a series of wars, and turned his empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In old age he became a symbol of continuity for its many peoples, until the war he declared on Serbia in 1914 brought it to ruin.

Franz Joseph was born on 18 August 1830 at Schönbrunn Palace outside Vienna, the eldest son of Archduke Franz Karl and Princess Sophie of Bavaria. His uncle, Emperor Ferdinand I, was epileptic and childless, and his ambitious mother saw early that her son, rather than her mild husband, should eventually rule. He was given a strict education in languages, law and above all military affairs, and grew up with a lifelong love of the army and its uniforms.

In 1848 revolutions swept the empire. Klemens von Metternich, the chancellor who had embodied the conservative order since 1815, fled Vienna, Hungary set up its own government, and the Italian provinces rose in revolt. Once the army had retaken Vienna, the court and its new chief minister, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, decided that a fresh start was needed. On 2 December 1848, at Olmütz in Moravia, Ferdinand abdicated, Franz Karl renounced his rights, and the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph became emperor.

The young emperor's first task was to crush the revolution. In April 1849 the Hungarian parliament, led by Lajos Kossuth, declared the Habsburgs deposed. Unable to win alone, Franz Joseph asked for the help of Tsar Nicholas I, and a Russian army helped force the Hungarians to surrender in August 1849. The reprisals were harsh: on 6 October thirteen Hungarian generals were executed at Arad, and the former prime minister, Count Lajos Batthyány, was shot in Pest the same day. Hundreds more were sentenced to death or prison.

The constitution granted in 1849 was abolished in 1851, and for a decade the empire was governed as a centralised, bureaucratic and police-controlled state, a system known as neo-absolutism. In 1853 a Hungarian nationalist stabbed Franz Joseph in the neck on a Vienna bastion; he survived, and the Votive Church was built in thanksgiving. In 1854 he married his cousin Elisabeth of Bavaria, known as Sisi. Franz Joseph also ordered the demolition of Vienna's old city walls in 1857, making way for the Ringstrasse and its grand public buildings.

Franz Joseph's foreign policy in his first two decades was a series of failures. Austria's neutrality in the Crimean War angered Russia, its old ally, without winning the friendship of Britain and France. In 1859 he went to war with Piedmont-Sardinia and France and personally commanded at Solferino, where his army was beaten, and he lost Lombardy, with Milan, helping to bring about the unification of Italy.

The defeats forced him to experiment with constitutional government from 1860 and 1861. Then came the struggle with Prussia for leadership of Germany. Otto von Bismarck provoked war in 1866, and the Prussians crushed the Austrian army at Königgrätz, also called Sadowa, on 3 July. Austria was excluded from German affairs, which led to the unification of Germany under Prussia, and lost Venice to Italy. The following year his younger brother Maximilian, who had accepted the throne of Mexico with French backing, was captured and shot by Mexican republicans.

Weakened, Franz Joseph made a settlement with the Hungarian elite. Under the Compromise of 1867 the empire became Austria-Hungary, two states with separate parliaments and governments, linked by the person of the monarch and by joint ministries for foreign affairs, war and their shared finances. Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary in Buda in June 1867. In the Austrian half a liberal constitution was granted the same year, and from 1907 men could vote in elections to its parliament on equal terms.

The settlement left the claims of the other nationalities, above all the Czechs, Poles, South Slavs and Romanians, unresolved, and the parliaments in Vienna and Budapest were often paralysed by national quarrels. Franz Joseph governed above the parties, through officials and ministers who depended on his confidence, and he regarded himself as the father of all his peoples rather than the ruler of any one nation. In foreign policy he made the Dual Alliance with Germany in 1879, which became the anchor of Austrian policy, and he looked to the Balkans for influence: Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and annexed it in 1908, angering Serbia and Russia.

The emperor's family life was marked by a series of disasters. His first daughter died as a small child in 1857. His marriage to Elisabeth, who disliked court life and spent long periods travelling, became distant; for decades his closest companion was the actress Katharina Schratt. In January 1889 his only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed his young lover and then himself at Mayerling. In 1898 Elisabeth was stabbed to death in Geneva by an Italian anarchist. The heir to the throne was now his nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, with whom he had a cold relationship.

When Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, Franz Joseph, then nearly 84, accepted his government's view that Serbia must be punished. On 28 July he signed the declaration of war on Serbia, setting off the First World War. Austria-Hungary suffered huge losses in Galicia and Serbia in the first months, and it became increasingly dependent on Germany. Franz Joseph died of pneumonia at Schönbrunn on 21 November 1916, aged 86, still at his desk almost to the end. He was succeeded by his great-nephew Charles, and two years later the monarchy broke apart into new national states.

For many former subjects Franz Joseph became, in memory, the embodiment of a stable and orderly old Europe, the image of the dutiful, white-whiskered emperor who rose at dawn to read files. Historians are more critical. He was hard-working and conscientious but cautious and unimaginative, slow to accept change and inclined to see problems in terms of dynastic honour and military prestige. His long reign held a multinational empire together for decades, but he never found a lasting answer to its national questions, and his decision for war in 1914 led to its destruction. His story is told further in the History of Austria.