Francis Ferdinand

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FRANCIS FERDINAND

FRANCIS FERDINAND (1863–1914), archduke of Austria.

Francis Ferdinand was born 18 December 1863 in Graz. His assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 led to World War I.

Francis Ferdinand received a strict, Catholic, and conservative upbringing and pursued a career in the military. He unexpectedly became heir apparent to the Habsburg Monarchy on the death of his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889. After a world trip in 1892 and 1893, Francis Ferdinand was laid low for several years by tuberculosis, from which he recovered only in 1898. In the same year he was made deputy in military affairs to his uncle, Emperor Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916).

Relations between the emperor and his heir apparent were never all that good, however, and they worsened exponentially over Francis Ferdinand's determination to marry Countess Sophie Chotek. Chotek, though a noblewoman, was not regarded by Francis Joseph as of sufficiently high status to be an appropriate spouse for a future Austrian emperor. A compromise was reached whereby on 28 June 1900 Francis Ferdinand formally renounced the rights of any children from the prospective, morganatic marriage. On 1 July he married Chotek.

From 1906 Francis Ferdinand was allowed to play a role in the politics of the Monarchy. His advisors, grouped around his military chancery in the Belvedere Palace, and known collectively as the Belvedere Circle, achieved a level of influence over Habsburg policy. They usually only did so, however, once they had become the emperor's ministers, and this often meant opposing the wishes of their former patron. Max Vladimir Beck, for instance, became Austrian prime minister and achieved passage of the electoral reform of 1907. Yet his policies came to be opposed by Francis Ferdinand, and the heir apparent intrigued to arrange Beck's dismissal in 1908. Francis Ferdinand had allies within the regime, such as the chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, but his attempts to increase his influence over policy were persistently resisted by Francis Joseph.

This may have been just as well. Francis Ferdinand was ideologically a radical conservative and shared the authoritarian sentiments of William II (emperor of Germany and king of Prussia; r. 1888–1918) and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (r. 1894–1917). An archconservative Catholic, he held anti-Semitic views and combined contempt for the Magyars with a general dislike for liberalism. His plan for the Monarchy was to reduce Hungarian autonomy and counter Magyar power in Hungary by increasing the rights of the minority nationalities in the kingdom. This approach brought him the sympathy of many minority nationalists, who supported some form of federalism, or, in the South Slav case, trialism (the uniting of the South Slav provinces in the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Monarchy, as well as Bosnia, in a new, third South Slav "kingdom" under the Habsburg monarch). Francis Ferdinand's reputed sympathy for trialism made him hated by many Serb nationalists, for trialism threatened the dream of an independent Greater Serbia. Ironically, Francis Ferdinand had little time for real trialism (at most he wanted to reorganize the South Slav lands to reduce Hungarian power), nor was he for federalism. Instead, he envisaged recentralizing power in Vienna and subordinating all of the Monarchy's peoples once more to the emperor's rule. His succession was looked on by trepidation by many in the German and Magyar middle classes and the liberal intelligentsia, and especially by Habsburg Jews.

He was seen, moreover, due to his military involvements and his links with Conrad von Hötzendorf as a militarist and warmonger. Public opinion was quite wrong in this. Francis Ferdinand was a believer in authoritarianism, but this also made him a supporter of peace between the Habsburg Monarchy, Germany, and Russia, as a guarantor of authoritarian conservatism. He was hence against an aggressive policy in the Balkans, and constantly counseled staying out of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. Nevertheless, as the representative of the Habsburg military, especially after his appointment as general inspector of the army in 1913, with his reputation as a warmonger and with his supposed support of anti-Serb trialism, Francis Ferdinand became a target for Bosnian Serb nationalist terrorists. On 28 June 1914, while on a trip to inspect the military maneuvers, he and his wife were gunned down in their car in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip. The assassination of the heir apparent was then used by Francis Joseph and his advisors as the excuse for launching a "preventive" war against Serbia, exactly what Francis Ferdinand had counseled against, that in days led to World War I and eventually the collapse of the Monarchy.

See alsoAustria-Hungary; Francis Joseph; Nationalism.