Archduke Franz Ferdinand Karl Ludwig Joseph Maria von Habsburg-d'Este
The heir to the
Habsburg throne, whose assassination on
June 28, 1914 set off the diplomatic crisis which became
World War I. In life, the Archduke espoused radical reforms to the complicated structure of the Monarchy and had shocked the dynasty with his marriage to a Czech countess.
Franz Ferdinand was born in
1863 in the
Austrian city of
Graz, the eldest son of Emperor
Franz Josef who had come to power as a young man in
1848. In
1888, he met his future wife
Sophie Chotek at a dance in
Prague, when she was lady in waiting to
Archduchess Isabella.
For Want Of A Glass Slipper...
Although a countess, Sophie was still the social inferior of the Habsburgs, who were expected only to marry members of other
royal houses. Franz Ferdinand began to assiduously visit Isabella and her husband, who assumed he had his sights set on their own daughter Marie Christine.
Isabella discovered her error when she opened a
gold watch that the Archduke had thoughtlessly left lying around on their
tennis court and found a photograph of Sophie instead of the anticipated likeness of Marie Christine. Isabella dismissed Sophie from her service at once, and her husband
Friedrich, the senior Archduke, ensured that the rest of the family did not attend Franz Ferdinand's wedding in
1900.
The disapproving family insisted that the marriage was
morganatic, so that the couple's children could not inherit the throne. Although Franz Josef softened somewhat and revived a long-defunct title for Sophie, naming her
Princess of Hohenberg, royal protocol still separated her from her husband at official functions and many of the Habsburgs remained hostile to her
until her death.
All the same, Franz Ferdinand himself was not prevented from helping to run the country, and became an Inspector of the Army in
1903. What he saw when he observed
amphibious exercises on the
Dalmatian coast convinced him that the
Austro-Hungarian army was in dire need of reform, and he convinced Franz Josef to sack his chief of staff in favour of one of his own associates, General
Conrad von Hotzendorff.
Franz Ferdinand The Federalist
Franz Ferdinand's circle also espoused various projects to reform the monarchy, which then took the form of a
federation between Austria and Hungary. Only the army, diplomacy and taxation were directed by central government, but the terms of the arrangement, known as the
Ausgleich, which had been worked out in
1867 allowed the stronger partner to exert undue influence on the affairs of the Monarchy as a whole when its financial provisions were re-negotiated every ten years.
At first, the Archduke seemed to favour
trialism, which would create a third unit from the Monarchy's
South Slav lands, a policy that understandably appealed to the right-wing
Croat nationalist
Josip Frank. Later, he believed that the entire Monarchy should be reorganised into a federation, cutting across historical boundaries, and with a strong central government in
Vienna.
Either strategy would bring him into conflict with the
Magyar elite in Hungary, who guarded their privileges jealously. The Magyars duly took against the man who would one day be their King, and the feeling was undoubtedly mutual: Franz Ferdinand and Conrad appear even to have had a
worst case scenario up their sleeve in which the
Imperial and Royal Army would march on
Budapest, take over Hungary and divide it into the five envisaged regions.
In June
1914, Franz Ferdinand and his wife were invited by General
Oskar Potiorek to watch military manoeuvres taking place in
Bosnia and Hercegovina, which the Monarchy had taken over in
1878 and formally annexed in
1908, requiring some nifty
brinkmanship with
Russia.
As well as extricating the couple from Viennese formalities and allowing them to travel together, the
walkabout was supposed to shore up support for the dynasty in the newly acquired provinces, where South Slavs - many Croats as well as Serbs - looked sympathetically towards
Serbia to liberate them from the Monarchy, described by nationalists of all persuasions as a
prison of peoples.
The Serbian threat was a new one to Austria-Hungary, which had kept her as a compliant satellite until a bloody palace coup in
1903 had re-installed the
Karađorđević dynasty, far less sympathetic to the Habsburgs. After Serbia had doubled her size in the
Balkan Wars in
1912 and
1913, she became an even more attractive alternative, a prospect of which Conrad was especially aware: his war plans against Serbia had become almost an annual event, replaced from time to time with potential offensives against the traditional enemy
Italy.
June 28, 1914
The couple visited
Sarajevo on
June 28, 1914, coinciding with the Serbian national day of
Vidovdan which commemmorated the
Battle of Kosovo in
1389. A band of Bosnian Serb students, members of the pan-Serb group
Mlada Bosna, had been assisted by
the Black Hand, a network of conspiratorial Serbian officers led by Colonel
Dragutin Dimitrijević, had stationed themselves along the
Miljacka river to bomb the archducal
motorcade.
The bomb, thrown by
Nedjeljko Čabrinović, in fact missed the couple - it may even have glanced off the Archduke's arm - but slightly injured a colonel in the car behind. Understanding his mistake, Čabrinović swallowed the
cyanide with which he had been supplied and dived into the Miljacka, but the poison failed to act and loyal Sarajevans dragged him out and had him arrested.
Franz Ferdinand proceeded to his official reception unharmed, but insisted on visiting the colonel before he left Sarajevo, requiring another outing for the motorcade which took a wrong turn on the way to the hospital and drove, this time, past Čabrinović's comrade
Gavrilo Princip, whose several shots hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck and Sophie in the stomach. Before losing consciousness, the Archduke is supposed to have implored Sophie to '
Stay alive for the children!'.
The two coffins were returned to Vienna, drawing curious crowds all the way. Nonetheless, the Court Chamberlain,
Prince Alfred Montenuovo, one of many courtiers who had taken against Sophie, organised as low-key a funeral as he could get away with, to the annoyance of Viennese diplomats at the
Ballhausplatz who would have liked as many foreign royals as possible invited to the service. Eight decades later, the
House of Windsor could have shown them
a thing or two.
Sophie's lower birth dictated that her coffin had to be placed at a lower level to Franz Ferdinand's in the
Hofburg chapel, and only diplomats and her children were allowed to place flowers on it. Neither were they allowed to be buried with the Archduke's forebears in the
Capuchin Church, but had to be quickly transferred to the parish church at
Artstetten: Franz Josef had even had to put his foot down over a suggestion that the couple should be laid to rest in separate places of burial.
As the bodies were transported through Vienna, a number of nobles and army oficers - led by
Karl, the Archduke's brother and now the heir apparent - defied the diktats of protocol to give the coffins a final
guard of honour.
Conspiracy Theories
Almost from the moment the Archduke died, a multitude of conspiracy theories have circulated concerning who might have ordered his death and why. The official Austro-Hungarian line, which became the Vienna hawks' pretext for
war against Serbia, was that the assassination had occurred with the full knowledge of the Serbian prime minister
Nikola Pašić and that Black Hand connections reached to the highest level.
In fact, Pašić was very unlikely to have been a Black Hand member; his disagreements with them had plagued Serbian politics throughout
1914. On the other hand, the cabinet probably knew that the plot existed, and the Serbian ambassador to Vienna,
Jovan Jovanović, had issued an extremely vague warning to the Habsburg authorities in early June.
The English journalist
Henry Wickham Steed, on the other hand, blamed General Potiorek and the army for not providing the couple with sufficient security for their procession, even wondering whether Sophie's antagonistic in-laws had had a hand in the decision.
In articles he wrote during World War I, when he was agitating for Austria-Hungary to be broken up, Steed further alleged that the assassination was related to the Archduke's conversation with
Kaiser Wilhelm II at
Konopišt two days before he died; perhaps, Steed suggested, they had agreed a plan in which Franz Ferdinand would rule Hungary,
Bohemia and parts of
Poland under an extended
German Empire.
The outrage provided Conrad and his supporters with the perfect opportunity to start the war to crush Serbia.
Economic sanctions applied in the previous decade and defensive diplomacy during the Balkan Wars had only enriched Serbia in the end; in contrast, the threat of military action had made
Montenegro back down from occupying the port of
Scutari in June 1913.
Waverers such as
Leopold von Berchtold, the Foreign Minister and another friend of the Archduke's, also became convinced after Franz Ferdinand had been killed, and the Hungarian premier
István Tisza stood alone among major politicians that July in opposing any action that might lead to the inclusion of more disruptive Slavs in his half of the Monarchy.
Read more:
Arthur J. May, The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy
Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years
Samuel J. Williamson Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, if you still can't get enough of Viennese diplomacy...
Pseudo_Intellectual says: I have heard (but not seen here) that his gun wounds would have been easily treatable if they were more accessible to doctors, but as he had been sewn into his clothing to ensure a fashionable fit they were unable to reach the wounds in time.