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  Elisabeth’s mother, Duchess Ludovika, had for some time been searching for a suitable match for Elisabeth, her second daughter. She had already made cautious and not very confident inquiries in Saxony. “I would certainly consider it a great happiness to think of Sisi as one of you … but alas, it is not likely to happen—for the only one who could be hoped for [presumably Prince Georg, second son of Johann, King of Saxony] is unlikely to consider her; first, I seriously question whether he would find her attractive, and then, he is surely looking for a fortune … true, she’s pretty because she is very young and animated, but she has no single pretty feature.”1 When Sisi returned from Dresden in the spring of 1853, it was without a groom.

  She stood completely in the shadow of her older sister, Helene, who was much more beautiful, better educated, more serious, and more widely admired; Helene was intended for a higher destiny—marriage to the Emperor of Austria. Compared to the older daughter, Sisi was the family ugly duckling. The fact that it was little Elisabeth who made the most brilliant match of the nineteenth century surprised no one more than herself.

  *

  The groom, Emperor Franz Joseph, was an exceptionally good-looking young man, with blond hair, soft features, and a very delicate, slender figure, flatteringly emphasized by the close-fitting general’s uniform he habitually wore. No wonder that he was the idol of all the Viennese countesses, all the more as he proved himself a passionate and spirited dancer at the balls of the high nobility.

  This charming youngster with the exceptional good manners was one of the most powerful men of his day. His complete title was: Franz Joseph I, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary and Bohemia; King of Lombardy and Venice, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, etc.; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Zator, of Teschen, Friuli, Ragusa, and Zara; Count with Princely Rank of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia, and Gradiska; Prince of Trent and Bressanone; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and in the Wendic Mark; Grand Voivode of the Voivodeship of Serbia, etc., etc.

  In 1848, the year of the Revolution, the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph ascended to the throne after his feebleminded uncle, Emperor Ferdinand I, abdicated and his father, the weak-willed Archduke Franz Karl, renounced the succession. After the pitiful figure cut by his predecessor, the young Emperor very quickly won popular favor.

  Franz Joseph was an absolute monarch: He was commander in chief, and he governed without parliament or constitution, even without a prime minister. His ministers were no more than advisers to their ruler, who alone was responsible for policy. It is probably not wrong to call the young Emperor head of a military monarchy—“by the grace of God,” of course.

  Franz Joseph governed his lands by wielding the power of the army and the police, suppressing the democratic and nationalist forces. The old joke of the Metternich period was also applicable to the years of Franz Joseph’s reign: The government was reinforced by a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of priests, and a creeping army of informers.

  In 1853, Austria was the largest state in Europe with the exception of Russia. It had roughly 40 million inhabitants, not including the 600,000 soldiers. The multiethnic state consisted of 8.5 million Germans, 16 million Slavs, 6 million Italians, 5 million Magyars, 2.7 million Romanians, about a million Jews, and around 100,000 gypsies. The northernmost point of the empire was Hilgersdorf in northern Bohemia (today’s Czechoslovakia); the southernmost, Mount Ostrawizza in Dalmatia (today’s Yugoslavia); the westernmost, near Rocca d’Angera on Lake Maggiore in Lombardy (now Italy); and the farthest east, near Chilischeny in the Bukovina (now in the Soviet Union).2

  Most of the monarchy’s subjects (29 million) made their living from agriculture, the country’s primary source of income. Austria was a world leader in the cultivation of flax and hemp and second only to France in wine growing. Farming and cattle raising were still carried on in conformity with centuries-old customs. Technical progress lagged far behind that of Western nations.

  Thanks to brilliant generals, Austria came through the Revolution of 1848 without territorial losses. The Constituent Assembly at Kremsier, a gathering of the intellectual elite of “Forty-Eighters,” was dispersed by force of arms. Many of the delegates were able to escape abroad, many others crowded the prisons. The young Emperor broke his own solemn promise to give the country a constitution at long last.

  But in spite of the continuing state of siege and strong military force, signal fires flickered on the political horizon as late as 1853, first and foremost in Hungary and Northern Italy. At the beginning of February, the Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini tried to instigate a popular uprising in Milan. During Carnival, Italian nationalists, armed with daggers, attacked Austrian soldiers. Ten Austrians were killed, fifty-nine were wounded. Some were skewered alive to house doors with long nails—a warning to the central government in Vienna. The rebellion was suppressed within a few hours, sixteen Italians were executed, and another forty-eight were given harsh prison sentences “in irons.”

  Equally deceptive was the calm that reigned in Vienna: At the time of the Milanese troubles, a serious attempt was made on the life of the young Emperor. While Franz Joseph was walking on the Bastei—the original city fortifications—one Johann Libényi, a Hungarian journeyman tailor, stabbed him through the neck with a daggerlike knife; the Emperor was seriously wounded. Even in this situation Franz Joseph showed his unusual coolheadedness and bravery. His first words to his mother were “Now I am wounded along with my soldiers, I like that.”3

  Libényi considered his crime a principled political act; when he was apprehended, he shouted, “Eljen Kossuth!” He thus saluted the Habsburgs’ archenemy, the Hungarian revolutionary who had proclaimed the Hungarian Republic in 1849 and who was now, in exile, urging the secession of Hungary from Austria.

  Libényi was executed. But his deed could not but serve as a warning to the young Emperor that his throne was not founded as firmly as it seemed.

  *

  While the Emperor’s awareness of his position kept him remote from most people, he had an extremely close and intimate relationship with the one person whose authority he respected: his mother, Archduchess Sophie.

  Sophie, a nineteen-year-old Bavarian princess, had arrived at the court in Vienna in 1824, at a time when Metternich ruled the nation. Emperor Franz was old; Ferdinand, his first son and successor, was sickly and feebleminded. The young ambitious Princess with a flair for politics found a vacuum at the Viennese court; it was not long before her strong personality filled it completely. Even Metternich soon learned that she was a factor to be reckoned with. Sophie was said to be the only man at this court swarming with weaklings. It was she who energetically contributed to Metternich’s fall in 1848. It was her accusation “that he wanted an impossible thing: to rule the monarchy without an emperor and with a numbskull as the representative of the crown,”4 by which she meant her feebleminded and epileptic brother-in-law, Emperor Ferdinand “the Kindly.” Sophie also deterred her husband from assuming the succession—thus relinquishing her chance to become empress and to govern through her husband, who was wholly devoted to her. She was the guiding force behind the accession to the throne of her “Franzi” in December 1848 at Olmütz. Her maternal pride was boundless.

  For the rest of his life Franz Joseph was grateful to his mother for her services. He let himself be guided by her sure hand, even if Sophie earnestly declared that “at my son’s accession to the throne, I firmly resolved not to interfere in any matters of state; I felt I had no right, and I also know them to be in such good hands after a thirteen-year period without a ru
ler—that I am happy with all my heart, after the hard-fought year ’48, to be able to sit by and observe current policy calmly and with confidence!”5

  Sophie did not keep her good resolutions. The merciless and bloody sentences handed out to the revolutionaries, the wrongful abrogation of the promised (and, briefly, realized) constitution, the close ties Austria maintained with the church, culminating in the Concordat of 1855—all these were seen by the people, not as the decisions of the diffident young Emperor, but as the work of Archduchess Sophie, who was Austria’s covert empress during the 1850s.

  *

  That Sophie would give serious thought to her son’s future consort—and by no means solely out of concern for the young Emperor’s heart, but more particularly with an eye to political considerations—was only natural. After the Revolution of 1848, Austria’s policies clearly had Germany in view: The nation strove to remain the leading power in the German Confederation—or, more precisely, to recover and assert its diminishing power against Prussia. It was Sophie’s idea to move closer to achieving this major objective—which was in direct conflict with Prussia’s notion—by means of a political marriage.

  There was much talk at court of an alliance between the Emperor and Archduchess Elisabeth from the Hungarian line of the House of Habsburg.6 This plan, however, had no chance of succeeding in the face of Sophie’s strong aversion to anything that came from Hungary. She definitely preferred a German connection. First she set her sights on the House of Hohenzollern as a way to improve the problematic relations between Austria and Prussia and to secure again Austria’s dominance in Germany. To gain this political end, she would even have put up with a Protestant daughter-in-law, provided only that she convert before the marriage.

  So, in the winter of 1852, the young Emperor—naturally under the pretext of political and family occasions—traveled to Berlin and promptly fell in love with a niece of the Prussian King, Princess Anna, who was his own age. Of course, the young woman was already engaged; but Sophie was not one to give up easily. She asked her sister Queen Elise of Prussia “whether there is any hope that this sad marriage, which they are imposing on this charming Anna and which leaves her with no prospect of happiness whatsoever, could be prevented.” Sophie wrote frankly how much the young Emperor was already smitten. She mentioned the

  happiness that showed itself to him like a fleeting dream and made an impression on his heart—hélas—much stronger and deeper than I had at first thought…. You know him well enough [to know] that it is not so easy to satisfy his taste and that he is not content with the first pretty face that comes his way, that he must be able to love the creature who is to become his companion, that she please him, that he have a liking for her. Your dear little girl seems to fulfill all these requirements, judge for yourself, then, how greatly I wish to have her for a son who is so much in need of happiness after having had to renounce so soon the freedom from care and the illusions of youth.7

  Queen Elise could not win against the Prussian statesmen. An alliance by marriage with Austria had no place in the Prussian calculations. The young Emperor had to swallow a personal defeat; in addition, his visit to Berlin was interpreted in terms that were far from flattering, as illustrated in the remark by Prince Wilhelm, the subsequent Emperor Wilhelm I: “We in Prussia congratulate ourselves on the fact that Austria has testified to its submission in our capital without our having surrendered so much as a foot of political ground.”8

  Sophie’s preliminary efforts to achieve a suitable marriage for the Emperor that would at the same time strengthen Austrian influence in Germany next turned to Dresden. This time the object was young Princess Sidonie of Saxony, even though she was sickly and did not appeal to the Emperor.

  The tenacity with which Sophie clung to her intention to pluck a German princess for the Viennese court is evident in her third plan, hatched with her sister, Duchess Ludovika of Bavaria. Ludovika’s oldest daughter, Helene, was the right age for the Emperor, even if she constituted a far less distinguished match than the first two young ladies. After all, she was descended merely from a collateral Bavarian line—not, like Sophie, directly from the Bavarian royal house. Nevertheless, next to Saxony, Bavaria was Austria’s most loyal partner in the German Confederation; an additional connection between Austria and Bavaria had clear political advantages.

  In the past, there had been no fewer than twenty-one alliances between the Bavarian and the Austrian families. The most prominent marriage in recent years had been that of Emperor Franz to Karoline Auguste, Sophie’s oldest sister. (By her marriage to Archduke Franz Karl, Emperor Franz’s son from his first marriage, Sophie became her sister’s daughter-in-law.)

  Duchess Ludovika was something like her powerful sister’s poor relation. She was the only one of the nine daughters of the Bavarian King Max I to have made merely a modest match, marrying her second cousin, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who did not receive the title of Royal Highness until 1845. The marriage was an unhappy one, but it resulted in eight beautiful though extremely demanding children.

  Ludovika loved her sister Sophie—older by three years—in a submissive, even servile way, holding her up constantly to her children as a model, following her advice anxiously, all in order to remain in Sophie’s good graces. The prospect of marrying off her daughter to the most eligible bachelor of the day was the final touch, turning her into the unquestioning and compliant handmaiden of her forceful sister.

  The two women had little in common. By the time of the engagement in Bad Ischl, she had been completely “countrified,” Ludovika reported later. She loved the countryside and unspoiled nature, paying little heed to the dress and society proper to her rank. Ludovika was frightened of the Viennese court. Nor did she have many dealings with the court in Munich, where her nephew, Max II, ruled and where the ducal line of the Wittelsbachs had no official function. Thus Ludovika was a purely private person. She lived for her children, whom she raised herself—an extraordinary practice among the aristocracy of the time.

  In contrast to the devoutly Catholic—even sanctimonious—Sophie, Ludovika was not very religious. She proudly boasted of her liberal upbringing in the Bavarian royal household: “When we were young—how we were Protestantized!” To pass the time, Ludovika collected clocks and occupied herself with studying geography—although, as her husband scoffed, most of her learning came from missionary almanacs. She did not know the first thing about politics.9

  The father of the prospective bride, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, was not at all to Sophie’s taste. True, he was the most popular Wittelsbach of his time; but popularity was hardly a quality with which to win the respect of Sophie, who thought in strictly dynastic terms. Max was a man who had traveled widely and read a vast amount. (His library comprised about 27,000 volumes, history being a predominant subject.) He had enjoyed a wholly unaristocratic education. For seven years he attended an academy in Munich, so that his schooling took place in the company of young men of his own age (and not alone with a private tutor, as was customary among the aristocracy). He then took courses at the University of Munich, especially in history and natural history.10

  For the rest of his life, Max remained true to the predilections of his student days; he cared nothing at all for conventional decorum, surrounding himself instead with a group of middle-class scholars and artists—his famous “Artusrunde,” or Round Table. Max’s companions were given to considerable drinking, versifying, singing, and composing, but they also enjoyed deep intellectual discussions.

  Max’s new palace in the Ludwigstrasse, where Elisabeth was born, had as one of its attractions a café chantant on the Parisian model and a ballroom with an oversize “Bacchus frieze” by Ludwig Schwanthaler; the forty-four-meters-long painting took a liberal view of its subject. The courtyard boasted a circus, with boxes and orchestra seats from which Munich society could admire Max at his riding feats, which he performed proudly, surrounded by pantomimes, crude clown acts, and military spectacles.


  Another hobby was playing the zither. Max took the instrument along when he traveled abroad; he insisted on playing his favorite melodies, Bavarian Schnadahüpfel—comic songs in three-four time—even on the pyramid of Cheops, to the openmouthed astonishment of his Egyptian attendants. In 1846, Duke Max published a collection of Bavarian folk tunes.

  Duke Max was not a man to turn up his nose at a pretty face, and he did not hold home life in very high regard. He was, however, a stickler for routine: Noontime was invariably sacrosanct; he was available to no one, especially not to his wife or his legitimate children. That was when he dined in his rooms with his two illegitimate daughters, whom he loved dearly.11

  Max openly expressed democratic views, if only to annoy those around him. “But if he thought that someone was stepping on his toes, there was hell to pay,” one of his relatives noted.

  The spirit of the household came to the fore in 1848, during the Revolution. The royal family fled the disturbances and street riots in Munich by taking refuge in Duke Max’s palace, because here, thanks to the popularity of the master of the house, there was the least likelihood of the doors being battered down.

  Max also paraded his liberal views in numerous articles on history that appeared anonymously in various periodicals. His book Wanderungen nach dem Orient (Travels to the East; Munich, 1839) gave proof of his wit; throughout he inserted sections of several blank lines, declaring them to be censorship gaps. Such antics were not designed to make him popular with his sister-in-law Sophie. The existence of Duke Max was all but ignored during the early phases of the marriage plot. He would too easily have compromised the bride’s family, with his odd brainstorms and with his anticourt attitude, which might have brought the whole project tumbling down.