cover image Franz Joseph

Franz Joseph

Jean-Paul Bled, Jean-Paul Bled. Blackwell Publishers, $61.95 (359pp) ISBN 978-0-631-16778-5

A man of simple, even banal tastes beneath the official pomp, Hapsburg ruler Franz Joseph (1830-1916) ascended the throne at the age of 18. For 68 years his prestige held together the 11 peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which collapsed two years after his death amid world war. In this dramatic, engrossing biography, Bled, a professor at the University of Strausbourg, limns a sovereign with no exceptional gifts, a senior bureaucrat who enacted reforms such as universal suffrage but could not cure the political paralysis of the dual monarchy. Franz Joseph's life was beset by personal tragedies. He disinherited his brother, Archduke Maximilian, who then became emperor of Mexico and was executed by firing squad in 1867. Rudolf, Franz Joseph's son, died with a lover in a joint suicide pact, whereupon the manic-depressive Empress Elisabeth became obsessed with her own death. Her assassination in 1898 increased Franz Joseph's suffering and loneliness, but his greatest tragedy, according to Bled, was governing an empire caught between two conflicting ideologies: the multinational state versus rampant nationalism. (Dec.)