December 2, 1848: Abdication of Austrian Emperor Ferdinand and the Accession of Archduke Franz Joseph on the Imperial Throne.

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Archduke Franz Charles of Austria, Archduke Franz Joseph of Austria, Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, Emperor Franz of Austria, Ferdinand of the Two-Sicilies, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, Revolutions of 1848, Sophie of Bavaria

On this date Emperor Ferdinand of Austria abdicated the throne in favor of his nephew, Archduke Franz Joseph who ascended the throne and would reign for nearly 68 years.

Ferdinand I (April 19, 1793 – June 29, 1875) was the eldest son of Franz II, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa de Bourbon of Naples and Sicily. Possibly as a result of his parents’ genetic closeness (they were double first cousins), Ferdinand suffered from hydrocephalus, neurological problems including epilepsy, and a speech impediment. He was educated by Baron Josef Kalasanz von Erberg, and his wife Countess Josephine von Attems.

Ferdinand succeeded to the throne of the Habsburg Empire on the death of his father Emperor Franz of Austria on March 2, 1835. Previously his father was known as Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, who abdicated that throne in August of 1806. As ruler of Austria, Emperor Ferdinand was also President of the German Confederation, King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia (as Ferdinand V), King of Lombardy–Venetia and holder of many other lesser titles.

Due to his rocky, passive but well-intentioned character, he gained the sobriquet The Benign or The Benevolent.

Emperor Ferdinand was incapable of ruling his empire because of a mental deficiency, so his father, before he died, made a will promulgating that Ferdinand should consult his uncle Archduke Ludwig on all aspects of internal policy and urged him to be influenced by Prince Metternich, Austria’s Foreign Minister.

Ferdinand’s abdication came as a result of Revolutions of 1848 that swept across most of Europe.

The Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire were a set of revolutions that took place in the Austrian Empire from March 1848 to November 1849. Much of the revolutionary activity had a nationalist character: the Empire, ruled from Vienna, included ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Romanians, Croats, Venetians (Italians) and Serbs; all of whom attempted in the course of the revolution to either achieve autonomy, independence, or even hegemony over other nationalities.

The nationalist picture was further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states, which moved toward greater German national unity. Besides these nationalists, liberal and even socialist currents resisted the Empire’s longstanding conservatism.

Photo of Emperor Ferdinand of Austria

The early rumblings

The events of 1848 were the product of mounting social and political tensions after the Congress of Vienna of 1815. During the “pre-March” period, the already conservative Austrian Empire moved further away from ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, by restricting freedom of the press, limited many university activities, and banned fraternities.

As the revolutionaries of 1848 were marching on the palace, he is supposed to have asked Metternich for an explanation. When Metternich answered that they were making a revolution, Ferdinand is supposed to have said “But are they allowed to do that?” (Viennese German: Ja, dürfen’s denn des?) He was convinced by Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg to abdicate in favour of his nephew, Archduke Franz Joseph (the next in line was Ferdinand’s younger brother Archduke Franz Charles, but he was persuaded to waive his succession rights in favour of his son)

The reason Archduke Franz Charles was the heir was due to the fact that Emperor Ferdinand didn’t have any children. When Ferdinand married Princess Maria Anna of Savoy, the court physician considered it unlikely that he would be able to consummate the marriage. When he tried to consummate the marriage, he had five seizures.

Therefore the heir to the throne was his brother Archduke Franz Charles of Austria (December 17, 1802 – March 8, 1878). He was the father of two emperors: Franz Joseph I of Austria and Maximilian I of Mexico. Through his third son Charles Ludwig, he was the grandfather of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria – whose assassination sparked the hostilities that led to the outbreak of World War I – and the great-grandfather of the last Habsburg emperor Charles I.

Archduke Franz Charles of Austria

Franz Charles was born in Vienna, the third son of Emperor Franz of Austria by his second marriage with Princess Maria Theresa from the House of Bourbon, daughter of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and Maria Carolina of Austria. Archduchess Maria Carolina was the thirteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungry etc and Emperor Franz I. Archduchess Maria Carolina was also a sister to Archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria, Queen Consort to Louis XVI of France and Navarre.

On November 4, 1824 in Vienna Archduke Franz Charles married Princess Sophie of Bavaria from the House of Wittelsbach, a daughter of King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria by his second wife Caroline of Baden. Sophie’s paternal half-sister, Caroline Augusta of Bavaria was by this time Franz Charles’ stepmother, having married his thrice-widowed father, Emperor Franz, in 1816. The Wittelsbachs condoned the unappealing manners of Sophie’s husband in consideration of the incapability of his elder brother Ferdinand and Sophie’s chance to become Austrian Empress.

A young Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria

Franz Charles was an unambitious and generally ineffectual man, although he was, together with his uncle Archduke Ludwig, a member of the Geheime Staatskonferenz council, which after the death of Emperor Franz ruled the Austrian Empire in the place of his mentally ill brother Ferdinand from 1835 to 1848.

The decisions, however, were actually made by the Minister of State Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich and his rival Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky. His wife Sophie had already transferred her ambitions, when she urged Franz Charles to renounce his claims to the throne at the time of his brother’s abdication on December 2, 1848, allowing their eldest son Archduke Franz Joseph to take the Imperia Throne of the vast Austrian Empire.

At this time, he first became known by his second as well as his first Christian name. The name “Franz Joseph” was chosen to bring back memories of the new Emperor’s great-granduncle, Emperor Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790), remembered as a modernising reformer.

Also, the new emperor wanted to be known as Franz III, however he realized that the ordinal number “III” was associated with the old Holy Roman Empire and he would therefore be Emperor Franz II of Austria, but it was believed that would cause confusion since his grandfather was the last Holy Roman Emperorwith the name Franz II.

November 21, 1916: Death of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, King of Hungary

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Archduke Franz Charles of Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, Felix zu Schwarzenberg, Franz Joseph of Austria, Katharina Schratt, King of Croatia and Bohemia, King of Hungary, Sarajevo, Sisi, Sophie of Bavaria, World War I

Franz Joseph I (August 18, 1830 – November 21, 1916) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, and monarch of other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from December 2, 1848 until his death. From May 1, 1850 to August 24, 1866 he was also President of the German Confederation. He was the longest-reigning ruler of Austria and Hungary, as well as the sixth-longest-reigning monarch of any country.

Franz Joseph was born August 18, 1830 in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (on the 65th anniversary of the death of Franz of Lorraine, Holy RomanEmperorFranz I) as the eldest son of Archduke Franz Charles (the younger son of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II), and his wife Princess Sophie of Bavaria.

His mother, Princess Sophie of Bavaria (1805 – 1872) was born to King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria and his second wife Caroline of Baden. She was the identical twin sister of Princess Maria Anna of Bavaria, Queen of Saxony as wife of Friedrich August II of Saxony.

Because his uncle, reigning from 1835 as the Emperor Ferdinand, was weak-minded, and his father unambitious and retiring, the mother of the young Archduke “Franzi” brought him up as a future Emperor, with emphasis on devotion, responsibility and diligence.

Since no descendants were to be expected from the marriage of the heir to the throne, Archduke Ferdinand (emperor from 1835), his next elder brother Franz Charles was to continue the succession of the Habsburgs, which is why the birth of his son Franz Joseph at the Viennese court was given special importance.

Franz Charles was physically as well as mentally of weak constitution and was therefore hardly suitable for a reign. For this reason, Franz Joseph was consistently built up as a potential successor to the imperial throne by his politically ambitious mother from early childhood.

It was generally felt in the court that the Emperor should marry and produce heirs as soon as possible. Various potential brides were considered, including Princess Elisabeth of Modena, Princess Anna of Prussia and Princess Sidonia of Saxony.

Although in public life Franz Joseph was the unquestioned director of affairs, in his private life his mother still wielded crucial influence. Sophie wanted to strengthen the relationship between the Houses of Habsburg and Wittelsbach—descending from the latter house herself—and hoped to match Franz Joseph with her sister Ludovika’s eldest daughter, Helene (“Néné”), who was four years the Emperor’s junior.

Helene was the eldest daughter of Maximilian Joseph, Duke in Bavaria and Princess Ludovika of Bavaria.

However, Franz Joseph fell deeply in love with Néné’s younger sister Elisabeth (“Sisi”), a beautiful girl of fifteen, and insisted on marrying her instead. Sophie acquiesced, despite her misgivings about Sisi’s appropriateness as an imperial consort, and the young couple were married on April 24, 1854 in St. Augustine’s Church, Vienna.

Their marriage would eventually prove to be an unhappy one; though Franz Joseph was passionately in love with his wife, the feeling was not mutual. Elisabeth never truly acclimatized to life at court, and was frequently in conflict with the imperial family. Their first daughter Sophie died as an infant, and their only son Rudolf died by suicide in 1889 in the infamous Mayerling Incident.

In 1885 Franz Joseph met Katharina Schratt, a leading actress of the Vienna stage, and she became his friend and confidante. This relationship lasted the rest of his life, and was—to a certain degree—tolerated by Elisabeth. Franz Joseph built Villa Schratt in Bad Ischl for her, and also provided her with a small palace in Vienna. Though their relationship lasted for thirty-four years, it remained platonic.

In December 1848, Franz Joseph’s uncle Emperor Ferdinand abdicated the throne at Olomouc, as part of Minister President Felix zu Schwarzenberg’s plan to end the Revolutions of 1848 in Hungary.

Franz Joseph then acceded to the throne. Largely considered to be a reactionary, he spent his early reign resisting constitutionalism in his domains. The Austrian Empire was forced to cede its influence over Tuscany and most of its claim to Lombardy–Venetia to the Kingdom of Sardinia, following the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 and the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866.

Although Franz Joseph ceded no territory to the Kingdom of Prussia after the Austrian defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, the Peace of Prague (August 23, 1866) settled the German Question in favour of Prussia, which prevented the unification of Germany from occurring under the House of Habsburg.

Franz Joseph was troubled by nationalism during his entire reign. He concluded the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which granted greater autonomy to Hungary and transformed the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

He ruled peacefully for the next 45 years, but personally suffered the tragedies of the execution of his brother Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in 1867, the suicide of his son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, the assassination of his wife Empress Elisabeth (“Sisi”) in 1898, and the assassination of his nephew and heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914.

After the Austro-Prussian War, Austria-Hungary turned its attention to the Balkans, which was a hotspot of international tension because of conflicting interests with the Russian Empire. The Bosnian Crisis was a result of Franz Joseph’s annexation in 1908 of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by his troops since the Congress of Berlin (1878).

On June 28, 1914, the assassination of his nephew Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo resulted in Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against the Kingdom of Serbia, which was an ally of the Russian Empire. That activated a system of alliances which resulted in World War I. The Emperor died in 1916, after ruling his domains for almost 68 years. He was succeeded by his grandnephew Charles.