The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (38 page)

The only other truly imperial institution was the monarchy itself. It had lasted for centuries and had seen out invasions, conquerors from Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottomans to Napoleon, civil wars and
revolutions while the empire had grown, contracted, grown again, and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, contracted yet again. The Habsburgs traced their descent back to Charlemagne but they first made their mark on the history of Europe when one of their number was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Over the succeeding centuries the family virtually made the title its own until it was finally abolished by Napoleon in 1806. The Habsburgs endured, however, and Emperor Franz of Austria, as he now was, lived to see the defeat of Napoleon and reigned until 1835, when he was succeeded by his gentle and simple-minded son, Ferdinand. His grandson, Franz Joseph, became emperor in 1848, a year of revolutions all over Europe, when the dynasty tottered and the Austrian Empire itself nearly fell to pieces. His uncle Ferdinand was persuaded to abdicate and Franz Joseph’s own father, who was only slightly more competent than his brother (he had been nicknamed ‘the Good’ because no one could think of anything else), agreed to step aside as well. (The Habsburgs dealt ruthlessly and briskly with the frequent consequences of inbreeding.) The new emperor, who had just turned eighteen, reportedly remarked ‘Goodbye, youth.’
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He was a handsome and dignified man and remained slim with an erect military bearing until the end of his days. His tutors had set up a programme for him of history, philosophy and theology as well as languages including, in addition to the German which was his first tongue, Italian, Hungarian, French, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Latin. His memory, fortunately, was excellent and so was his capacity for work. He had applied himself to his studies with determination. ‘My birthday’, he wrote in his diary in 1845, ‘and more important still my fifteenth. Fifteen years old – and only a little more time to go to get educated! I must really pull my socks up, really mend my ways!’
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That strong sense of duty stayed with him all his life. So, after the events of 1848, did a hatred of revolution and a determination to preserve the dynasty and his empire. He was not a reactionary, however; he accepted with a degree of fatalism that change had occurred and might have to occur in the future. Changes there would be: the gradual loss of most of his Italian territories and then, after defeat in 1866 by Prussia, the exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation.

His empire was slowly shrinking, but Franz Joseph kept up the state of his great ancestors. In Vienna alone he had two palaces: the gigantic
Hofburg and the Schönbrunn, his favourite, built by Maria Theresa as a summer place (with 1,400 rooms and a huge park). Count Albert von Margutti, who served as the emperor’s aide-de-camp for nearly two decades, remembered his first meeting: ‘With beating heart I ascended what is known in the Hofburg as the “Chancery Staircase”, an enormous flight of steps leading to the ante-room of the audience chamber.’ Guards in magnificent uniforms stood at the top of the stairs while the door into the emperor’s presence was flanked by two officers with drawn swords. ‘Everything went off like clockwork and quite noiselessly; notwithstanding all the people present, there was a silence which greatly intensified the impressiveness of the occasion.’
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At the heart of the grandeur was a man who liked plain food, predictable routines, and, for relaxation, hunting and shooting. He was a good Catholic without thinking much about it. Like his fellow sovereigns Nicholas II and Wilhelm II, Franz Joseph loved the military life and almost always appeared in uniform. Like them too he was sent into a rage when the details of army uniforms were wrong. Apart from that, he was invariably courteous to everyone although always conscious of rank. He only shook Margutti’s hand once, to recognise that he had been promoted. (Margutti regretted ever after that no one else at court had seen this momentous gesture.)
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Franz Joseph found modern art puzzling but his sense of duty took him to public art exhibitions and the opening of important new buildings, especially if they were under royal patronage.
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His taste in music ran to military marches or Strauss waltzes and, while he liked the theatre and from time to time the prettier actresses, he preferred the old favourites. He did not like unpunctuality, loud laughter or people who talked too much.
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He had a sense of humour, of a rather basic sort. He had climbed the Great Pyramid in Egypt, he wrote to his wife, Empress Elisabeth, with the help of Bedouin guides. ‘As they mostly only wear a shirt, when they are climbing they leave a lot exposed, and that must be the reason why English women so happily and frequently like to scale the pyramids.’
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In his later days, Franz Joseph slept on an army camp cot in a bedroom of the utmost simplicity, or, as Margutti said, ‘downright penury’. He followed a strict and spartan routine, waking just after four in the morning and having himself rubbed down with cold water. He
drank a glass of milk and then worked alone until seven or seven thirty, when he started conferences with his advisers. From ten until five or six in the afternoon he saw his ministers and dignitaries such as ambassadors, stopping only for a half-hour to eat a light lunch alone. In the evening he dined alone or with guests. He hated wasting time and insisted on meals being served at a rapid pace with the result that the younger members of the family often did not have time to eat before the meal ended. Unless there was a court ball or reception he was in bed by half past eight. For all the studied simplicity of his life, he had a strong sense of his own dignity and the respect owed him.
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Franz Joseph had adored his strong-willed mother. ‘Is there anything dearer on earth than one’s mother?’ he asked when he heard that Wilhelm’s mother had died. ‘Whatever differences may separate us the mother is always the mother, and when we lose her we bury a good part of ourselves in her grave.’
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His personal life was complicated and often sad. His brother, Maximilian, had been executed in Mexico after a failed attempt to establish a kingdom there, and the widow had gone mad. His only son, Rudolf, a troubled and unhappy young man, had committed suicide with his teenage mistress at his hunting lodge of Mayerling. The authorities covered up the scandal but that did not stop rumours, many of them wild conspiracy theories, floating about. Franz Joseph carried on, as he always did, but wrote to the actress Katharina Schratt, who was perhaps his closest friend in the world, that ‘things can never be the same’.
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To add to his burdens, the heir was likely to be his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, whom he did not particularly care for.

Franz Joseph’s marriage had long since ceased to provide him with any comfort. He had adored Elisabeth, his cousin, whom he had married when she was only seventeen, but things had not turned out well. Elisabeth was charming, vivacious and lovely, and, as a girl, delightfully wayward and impulsive. She never, unfortunately, grew up. She hated the court, ceremonials, and obligations, and did her best to avoid them. Yet she could, when she wanted, be helpful to her husband. She so charmed the Hungarians by learning their language and wearing their national dress that they gave the royal couple a summer palace outside Budapest. She loved riding, travelling, and herself. Although she was widely agreed to be a beauty, she always worried about her looks. She made an album of the most beautiful women in Europe, but that only
reduced her to tears.
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Throughout her life, she exercised fanatically and ate as little as possible. ‘Her waist’, wrote Queen Victoria in her diary, ‘is smaller than anything one can imagine.’
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In 1898, when her anarchist assassin stabbed Elisabeth in the heart, she did not die immediately because her corsets were so tight that she bled only very slowly.

Franz Joseph soldiered on, working methodically through his piles of papers as though, somehow, through sheer hard work and attention to detail, he could stave off chaos and hold his empire together. ‘God help us’, he was fond of saying, ‘if we ever fall into the ways of the Latin races.’
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As the years of his long reign went by, he was nevertheless increasingly in the position of someone riding two ill-matched horses. Hungary, with its long past as an independent kingdom, had always fitted awkwardly under the Habsburg crown. The Hungarian aristocracy and minor nobles who dominated society and politics were highly conscious of their own language (different from almost any other in the world), history, and culture, and deeply proud of their own constitution and laws. In the revolutionary year of 1848–9 they tried, but failed, to make Hungary independent. In 1867 they took advantage of the Austrian Empire’s crushing defeat at the hands of Prussia to negotiate a new arrangement with the emperor, the famous Compromise.

It created a new entity whose name said it all: Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy. It was a partnership between Hungary, which still included Transylvania, Slovakia and Croatia, and the remaining Habsburg territories in the west, which came to be called for convenience Austria and which swept up from the Adriatic and the Alps towards the vanished kingdom of Poland and then eastwards to the Russian border. Each part ran its own affairs with its own parliament, ministers, bureaucracy, law courts, and armed forces. The sole remaining shared activities were foreign affairs and defence as well as the finances to pay for them, each with its own minister who met together as the three common ministers, and the only other remaining link was the emperor himself, or as he was known in Hungary, the king. Otherwise the Dual Monarchy was not so much a compromise as a never-ending negotiation. Delegations nominated by each parliament met once a year to work out any necessary agreements on common tariffs, for example on railways, but, at the insistence of the Hungarians, only communicated in writing to avoid any notion that there was a shared government.
Financial and commercial matters came up for renegotiation every ten years and usually caused difficulties.

Of all the major European powers, Austria-Hungary had the poorest mechanisms for sharing information among ministries and coordinating policies. True, the three common ministers met from time to time along with the Prime Ministers from both Hungary and Austria, but while they discussed foreign and defence issues they did not act as an executive. Between the autumn of 1913 and the start of the July crisis in 1914, the Common Ministerial Council, as it was known, met just three times, and then only to talk about relatively trivial matters. Nor did the emperor take charge of overall policy or encourage anyone else to do so; Franz Joseph would speak to his ministers only separately and only concerning their own areas of responsibility. And although he continued his dogged routine of work, he was ageing. He turned eighty in 1910 and his health, robust for so long, was beginning to fail. By the time the war came he was increasingly isolated from the public gaze inside the Schönbrunn palace and reluctant to intervene in disputes among his ministers. The vacuum of leadership meant, among other things, that strong individuals or departments often made policy and in areas outside their own purview.
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The Hungarians were initially delighted with the Compromise and commissioned a new parliament building for Budapest. ‘There must be no place for caution, calculation and thrift,’ said their Prime Minister, and the Hungarian architect took him at his word. The Hungarian parliament buildings, which drew on every architectural style and form of ornamentation from Gothic to Renaissance to baroque, and used up eighty-four pounds of gold in their decoration, were the biggest in the world when they were finished. What went on inside was outsized in another way. Politics was a national sport and the Hungarians played to win, against each other with biting rhetoric, even challenges to duels, and, when that palled, against Vienna.
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Some of the worst scenes came during a prolonged and bitter crisis between Budapest and Vienna over the joint army.

Successive Hungarian political leaders and their followers demanded a series of measures to make a large part of the Dual Monarchy’s army more Hungarian, with exclusively Hungarian regiments commanded by Hungarian-speaking officers and flying the Hungarian flag. This
threatened the efficiency and unity of the army and, as the French military attaché pointed out, there were not in any case enough Hungarian-speaking officers to go round. When Franz Joseph tried to calm the situation in 1903 by issuing an anodyne statement that his armed forces were animated by a spirit of unity and harmony and treated all ethnic groups with respect, he simply threw more fuel the way of the Hungarian nationalists in Budapest. ‘Ethnic’ came out as ‘tribal’ in Hungarian, which was seized upon as a deadly insult.
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The Hungarian parliament was paralysed by filibustering and negotiations between Budapest and Vienna came to a halt. At the end of 1904, when the Hungarian Prime Minister, István Tisza (who was to be in office again in the summer of 1914), tried to move matters forward, the opposition swarmed into the chamber armed with coshes, knuckle dusters and revolvers, smashing the furniture and beating up the parliamentary guards. Although the opposition won the subsequent election it refused to take office until Franz Joseph conceded their demands on the army, which he refused to do. The stand-off ended in 1906 when the emperor threatened to introduce universal suffrage in Hungary and the opposition fell to pieces.