George of Saxony
George of Saxony reigned for two years and four months, came to the throne at seventy, and is remembered for two things that happened to him rather than for anything he did. He had spent his life as the second son and the second general. In 1866 he commanded a Saxon division in Bohemia under his brother Albert, and in 1870 he led the First Royal Saxon Infantry Division at Saint-Privat and Sedan and then took over the Twelfth Corps when Albert moved to command the Army of the Meuse; he ended the war a general of infantry and later a field marshal. He was a devout Catholic, more pious than his brother, and his court was stricter. The first thing that happened to him came within two months of his accession. In December 1902 his daughter-in-law, the crown princess, a Habsburg archduchess of the Tuscan line and the wife of the heir, fled Dresden with her children's tutor, was divorced by a special court the following February, and became the most talked-about woman in Europe, while the king was left with a palace that the newspapers had made a stage. The second came in June 1903, when the Reichstag election returned Social Democrats in twenty-two of Saxony's twenty-three constituencies. The state was already the reddest in the Empire and the 1896 franchise had only moved the problem from the Landtag to the national vote. George changed nothing in response, and died at Pillnitz in October 1904. His son Frederick Augustus III succeeded him and turned out to be the most popular king the dynasty ever produced, which was not something anyone had expected of the man whose wife had run away.
- Lived: 1832 CE – 1904 CE
- Nationality: Saxon
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
