Emperor Franz Joseph I
Franz Joseph ruled the Habsburg empire for sixty-eight years and outlived almost everyone he loved. Born in 1830, he came to the throne in December 1848 at eighteen, installed by his mother and the court during the revolutions after his uncle abdicated and his father was persuaded to renounce. He began as a neo-absolutist, governing through a bureaucracy and an army and revoking the constitution in 1851, and he was forced into every concession that followed by defeat. Losing Lombardy in 1859 produced the first constitutional experiments. Losing to Prussia at Königgrätz in 1866, and with it the leadership of Germany, produced the Compromise of 1867 — the transformation into Austria-Hungary, two states with separate parliaments sharing a monarch, an army and a foreign policy, and a settlement that answered the Hungarian question by leaving every other nationality out. He rose at four, worked at his desk all day, and once described himself as the last monarch of the old school. The private life reads as a catalogue. His brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico in 1867. His only son Rudolf killed himself and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. His wife Elisabeth was stabbed by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898. His nephew and heir Franz Ferdinand was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914. He signed the ultimatum to Serbia that began the world war, saying that if the monarchy must go down it should do so decently. He died in November 1916. The empire lasted two more years. His portrait hung in coffee houses across central Europe for a generation after there was no longer a country to hang it for.
- Lived: 1830 CE – 1916 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, monarch
