Death of Franz Joseph

On the evening of 21 November 1916 the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Franz Joseph I, died at Schönbrunn Palace outside Vienna. He was 86 and had reigned since 2 December 1848, almost 68 years, longer than any other ruler of the Habsburg dynasty. For most of his subjects he was the only monarch they had ever known. He died in the third year of a war that he himself had declared on Serbia in the summer of 1914 and whose end was nowhere in sight. That same evening the 29-year-old Archduke Charles, the grandson of his brother, became emperor and king by operation of law.

The last days

The emperor had long suffered from chronic catarrh of the respiratory tract. At the beginning of November it developed into pneumonia. According to some accounts the old monarch caught a chill during a walk in the park at Schönbrunn with the King of Bavaria, Ludwig III. Despite a high fever he did not change his daily routine. He rose before dawn, read reports and received officials. Even on the morning of 21 November he received petitioners as on every other day, and the Viennese press assured its readers, “from well-informed sources”, of his extraordinary resilience.

At about one in the afternoon his strength suddenly failed. Even so, the emperor went on working at his desk. The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, told an American journalist a few days later that Franz Joseph read dispatches until the afternoon and only then went to bed, having ordered that he be woken the next day at the usual hour, early in the morning. According to the most often repeated account, his last words, addressed to his valet Eugen Ketterl, were: “Tomorrow morning at half past three.” In the evening his closest family, adjutants and servants gathered by the bed. Shortly after nine in the evening his personal physician, Joseph von Kerzl, pronounced him dead.

Seventy years of history

Franz Joseph came to the throne at eighteen, in December 1848 in Olmütz, during the Revolutions of 1848, when his uncle, Emperor Ferdinand I, abdicated under pressure from the family and the court. The first years of his reign were spent suppressing the revolution, above all in Hungary, and in absolute rule. Then came defeats: in 1859 the loss of Lombardy, and in 1866 the defeat by Prussia at Königgrätz, which excluded Austria from Germany and cost it Venetia. A year later the emperor concluded the Compromise with Hungary, which divided the state into two equal parts and created Austria-Hungary. In 1867 he was crowned King of Hungary in Budapest.

His personal life brought him many blows. In 1867 his brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico, in 1889 the heir to the throne, his son Rudolf, took his own life at Mayerling, and in 1898 in Geneva an anarchist murdered his wife, Empress Elisabeth, known as Sisi. In June 1914 the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, was killed in Sarajevo. A month later the old emperor approved the ultimatum to Serbia and declared war on it. In the eyes of his subjects he had over time become not so much a politician as the embodiment of the state: a stern, hard-working “father of the peoples”, tried by fate, who held the multinational monarchy together. That is precisely why many had for years asked themselves what would become of the monarchy when he was gone.

The monarchy in 1916

The emperor left the state in a bad condition. In June 1916 the Brusilov offensive shattered the Austro-Hungarian armies in Volhynia and Bukovina. Huge losses of men and equipment made Austria-Hungary ever more dependent on its German ally. In September the Central Powers agreed to a joint supreme command under the authority of Emperor Wilhelm II, and in practice of the German Supreme Army Command. In the campaign against Romania, too, German armies were decisive, although in Transylvania an army group was formally commanded by none other than Archduke Charles. In the cities there was a shortage of bread, flour, fat and coal, queues stood outside the shops, and prices rose month by month.

Political life was paralysed as well. The Austrian parliament had not sat since the spring of 1914, and the government ruled by decree. On 21 October 1916, exactly a month before the emperor’s death, the Social Democrat Friedrich Adler shot the Prime Minister, Karl Stürgkh. One of Franz Joseph’s last important decisions was the appointment of Ernest von Koerber as his successor.

The emperor and the Poles

For the Poles of the Austrian partition Franz Joseph was a special figure. After the defeat of 1866 the monarchy sought support among the Polish nobility. In 1867–1873 Galicia obtained broad autonomy (PL): Polish became the language of the administration, the courts and the schools, the universities in Kraków and Lviv were Polonised, and a minister for Galicia sat in the Vienna government. Poles held the highest offices of state. Kazimierz Badeni was Prime Minister of Austria, Agenor Gołuchowski was Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary for over ten years, and Leon Biliński was several times Minister of Finance. Kraków became a centre of Polish learning and culture where, unlike in Warsaw or Posen, national anniversaries could be celebrated freely. In 1880 the emperor made a ceremonial journey through Galicia and was received enthusiastically in Kraków. With his consent Wawel, occupied by the army for decades, returned to Polish hands in 1905 and its restoration began. Galicia nevertheless remained a poor province, and its autonomy served above all the Polish propertied class. The Ukrainians, or Ruthenians, who made up the majority of the population in the eastern part of the province, felt wronged by it.

During the war the Polish Legions were formed under the protection of the monarchy, and Galicia became a field of heavy fighting and Russian occupation. In the last weeks of his life the emperor approved decisions that were meant to open a new chapter in the Polish question. On 5 November 1916, in his name and that of the German emperor, the creation of a Kingdom of Poland from the lands of the Russian partition was proclaimed in Warsaw and Lublin. In a handwritten letter to Prime Minister Koerber, dated 4 November and published almost simultaneously with the act, Franz Joseph also announced that Galicia would be granted even broader self-government. For many Poles, however, this meant that Galicia would not be united with the new kingdom. The old emperor did not live to see the further fate of the Polish question. For the older generation of Galicians he remained “His Most Serene Majesty”, and his times were long remembered with nostalgia.

Charles I

The new ruler was born in 1887. He was the son of Archduke Otto, Franz Joseph’s nephew, and became heir to the throne only after the assassination in Sarajevo. Since 1911 he had been married to Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. The old emperor gave him only a small part in affairs of state. During the war Charles served mainly on staffs and at the front. In the spring of 1916 he commanded a corps in the Trentino offensive, and from August an army group in Transylvania. On the day of the emperor’s death he was already in Vienna.

In the Austrian half of the monarchy Charles needed no formal enthronement. On 21 November itself he issued the manifesto “To my peoples!”. In it he announced that he wished “to do everything to banish in the shortest time the horrors and sacrifices of the war” and to restore peace to his peoples. Historians agree that the young emperor was convinced from the outset that the monarchy had to get out of the war as quickly as possible.

The funeral and what followed

The emperor’s body was taken from Schönbrunn to the Hofburg and laid in state in the palace chapel. The funeral took place on 30 November. It was the last great ceremony of the old monarchy. To the sound of the bells of all the churches of Vienna the cortège passed along the Ring to St Stephen’s Cathedral. Behind the coffin walked the new emperor with Empress Zita and their four-year-old son Otto, and representatives of the allied states and of the German ruling houses. Franz Joseph was buried in the Capuchin Crypt, beside his wife and son.

Beyond the borders of the monarchy the emperor’s death no longer made a great impression. The French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, noted the next day that the news had been almost passed over in silence, as an event of little importance. The war had overshadowed the consequences that had been speculated about for years in the event of his death. The new ruler quickly began to change people and course. On 2 December he personally took over the supreme command of the army, on 30 December he was crowned King of Hungary in Budapest as Charles IV, and in 1917, through his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, he secretly sounded out the possibility of peace with France. These efforts came to nothing. The monarchy outlived its old emperor by less than two years and fell apart in the autumn of 1918.