Francis Joseph I

I

Introduction

Francis Joseph I (German, Franz Josef) (1830-1916), Habsburg Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary (1848-1916), during whose reign the Austro-Hungarian Empire experienced an increasing paralysis of its domestic politics and a steady decline of its standing as a Great Power.

II

Early Years and Accession

Francis Joseph was born on August 18, 1830, as the first son of Archduke Francis Charles, the younger brother of Emperor Francis I. Since the emperor’s son, Ferdinand, was unlikely to have children due to his epilepsy, Francis Joseph was groomed for a future role as emperor. His ambitious mother, the pious Archduchess Sophie of Bavaria, devised a gruelling training regimen for him, which anticipated the challenge that awaited him. In addition to physical and military exercises, he received lessons in German, Hungarian, Czech, French, Italian, Polish, religion, diplomacy, law, and several other subjects. Not a natural scholar and occasionally ill from overwork, the future emperor was nevertheless formed by these early years. Throughout his reign, Francis Joseph retained a capacity for endless paperwork, a love for things military, a belief in the political principles expounded by his conservative tutors, and a determination to uphold the dignity of his Catholic court.

Francis Joseph came to the throne on December 2, 1848, in circumstances that shaped his subsequent reign. The Revolutions of 1848 had brought the Austrian Empire to the brink of collapse. Twice the imperial family had to flee Vienna. Italy, Hungary, and Bohemia were in open revolt. In Germany, the Frankfurt Parliament and Prussia challenged Austria’s erstwhile preeminence. The Habsburg dynasty’s empire was saved by the army and by a group of conservative politicians led by the cold-blooded Minister-President Prince Felix Schwarzenberg. Soon after his appointment, Schwarzenberg arranged for Francis Joseph to succeed the feeble-minded Emperor Ferdinand. Having thus started his reign under Schwarzenberg’s tutelage, the 18-year-old emperor committed himself to a lifelong defence of his dynastic realm and its pivotal institution, the military.

III

Francis Joseph’s Empire and the Great Powers

After a successful start—Francis Joseph’s government defeated the revolution at home and re-established Austria’s authority among the German states—Austria’s international situation deteriorated. Francis Joseph’s half-hearted support of the Western Powers during the Crimean War earned her little more than Russia’s wrath and had a ruinous effect on Austria’s finances. In 1859, Francis Joseph fell into the trap set for him by the French ruler Napoleon III and the Piedmontese politician Camillo Cavour and was defeated by French-Piedmontese troops at the battles of Magenta (June 4) and Solferino (June 24). Without support from his German confederates, Francis Joseph had to cede Lombardy to Napoleon, who passed it on to Piedmont (see Unification of Italy).

North of the Alps, Austria’s position proved equally precarious. A national movement aiming at a united Germany reemerged in 1859 (see German Unification). After 1862, the Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck harnessed this movement to eject Austria from Germany. Having involved her in the war against Denmark in 1864, Bismarck precipitated a war against Austria in 1866 (see Seven Weeks’ War). Even though Francis Joseph’s troops twice defeated Prussia’s ally Italy, the Prussian victory at Königgrätz (also known as Sadowa) on July 3 proved decisive. The peace agreed in Prague on August 23, 1866, was relatively lenient, but still sealed Austria’s exclusion from a Prussian-dominated Germany and the handover of the province of Venetia to the Kingdom of Italy.

Having lost her former spheres of interest in Germany and Italy, the main thrust of Austria’s foreign policy was naturally directed towards the explosive field of Balkan politics. At the Congress of Berlin, chaired by Bismarck in 1878, Austria and Britain forced Russia to relinquish most of the spoils of her recent victory over Turkey (see Russo-Turkish Wars). Austria was authorized to occupy the formerly Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the Russo-German-Austrian Three Emperors’ League of 1873 destroyed, Germany and Austria concluded the Dual Alliance (1879). Henceforth, three key components shaped the course of Austrian foreign policy: (i) the long-term alliance with Germany; (ii) Austria’s relationship with Russia, which vacillated from renewed alliance (Three Emperors’ Alliance, 1881-1887) and limited co-operation (Austro-Russian Agreement, 1897) to outright hostility; and (iii) a keen interest in the affairs of the Balkans. Austro-Russian relations eventually broke down during the crisis of 1908-1909 when Austria—with German backing and despite furious Russian protests—unilaterally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the subsequent Balkan Wars, the Russian-backed kingdom of Serbia emerged as the main thorn in Francis Joseph’s side.

IV

Francis Joseph’s Domestic Policies

The almost obsessive concern with which Francis Joseph and his ministers viewed Serbia reveals an important intersection of foreign policy and the internal workings of the Habsburg Empire. As a Slav state Serbia appealed to the disaffected millions of Francis Joseph’s Slav subjects and put pressure on the monarchy’s sorest point: the nationality issue. The imperial constitution Francis Joseph decreed in March 1849 had imposed a centralist structure. This tendency continued after the emperor’s Sylvesterpatent (December 31, 1851) introduced a neo-absolutist form of government. However, in the wake of his foreign political setbacks Francis Joseph had to make concessions to the liberal and national aspirations of his peoples. After the loss of Lombardy, the emperor yielded what he called “a little parliamentarism” through the “October Diploma” (October 30, 1860) and the “February Patent” (February 28, 1861).

The defeat of 1866 necessitated more far-reaching reforms. The Ausgleich (“Compromise”) of 1867 transformed the empire into the “Dual Monarchy” of Austria-Hungary, linked largely through the person of Emperor-King. Francis Joseph and the leadership of the Hungarian Diet had negotiated the Ausgleich without consulting the peoples of the monarchy, a fact painfully felt by the sizeable Slav populations having to defer to the dominant German and Magyar populations in both halves of the monarchy. With a harsh policy of Magyarization stoking the fires of Slav nationalism in Hungary and Slav obstruction paralysing parliamentary life in the German (or Cisleithanian) part of the monarchy, the domestic politics of Francis Joseph’s realm consisted largely of successive premiers—hand-picked by the emperor—stalling in a mire of opposition, bureaucratic procrastination, and barren compromise.

Francis Joseph played a key role at the heart of this system. Forever in uniform, forever at his desk, and insisting on an archaic court ceremonial, his popular image was that of an honest, Christian, and benign father of his peoples. The old emperor’s tribulations, which included the suicide of his son Rudolph in 1889 and the assassination of his wife Elizabeth (“Sissi”) in 1898, added to this popularity, which veiled the largely negative effect his rigid and deeply conservative outlook had on Austro-Hungarian politics. Jealously defending his prerogatives and conceding change with the utmost reluctance, he treated the nationality problem “more as an opportunity for power than as a problem to solve”, in the words of the historian Steven Beller. However, the very extent to which Francis Joseph had become the irreplaceable embodiment of the empire betrays his failure as a dynastic statesman. After more than 60 years on the throne he was no closer to overcoming the fundamental difficulties that beset his Habsburg inheritance.