Empress Elisabeth of Austria

• 1. Introduction

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  Empress Elisabeth of Austria, nicknamed Sisi, left the Hôtel Beau-Rivage on the shore of Lake Geneva at 1:35 in the afternoon on Saturday the 10th of September 1898. She was 60 years old and travelling under a false name. Only one lady-in-waiting walked beside her, because she despised processions and had insisted on leaving the rest of her entourage behind. Within the hour she would be dead, killed by a stranger who had tried to peer beneath her parasol.

  Why did a woman so determined to escape the public gaze become one of the most beautiful and famous women of nineteenth-century Europe? How did a teenage girl who skipped her lessons to ride in the countryside end up inside the formal world of the Habsburg court? How could a woman with a fatal wound walk up a steamship's gangway? And why do films, musicals and novels still keep retelling her story?

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• 2. A Reluctant Bride

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  Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie was born on the 24th of December 1837 in the Herzog-Max-Palais in Munich. She was the second daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria and Princess Ludovika. Her father was considered peculiar. He adored circuses and roamed the Bavarian countryside to avoid his duties. The family wintered in Munich and spent summers at Possenhofen Castle, far from the rules of court. Sisi and her siblings grew up with almost no structure, and she often skipped her lessons to ride out into the countryside.

  In 1853, Archduchess Sophie decided that her 23-year-old son, Emperor Franz Joseph I, should marry a relative rather than a stranger. Her choice was Duchess Helene, known as Néné, the eldest daughter of her sister Ludovika. Sophie simply assumed that her son would obey. Someone once called her "the only man in the Hofburg" because of her authoritarian manner.

  The Duchesses were summoned to Bad Ischl, in Upper Austria, where Helene was expected to receive a formal proposal. Ludovika also brought along 15-year-old Sisi, who was grieving a young Count she had loved and had fallen into a long depression. Ludovika hoped fresh scenery would lift her spirits. She also hoped a reunion with Archduke Karl Ludwig, Franz Joseph's brother and a childhood friend of Sisi, might lead to an engagement.

  Their coaches left Munich and reached the resort later than planned. Ludovika suffered a headache and the journey halted, the carriages became separated, and the one holding the gala dresses never arrived. At Leopoldskron Palace, Theresa, the Queen Dowager of Bavaria, was mourning her brother Georg, so the Duchesses were dressed in black. The color did not suit 18-year-old Helene's dark coloring. It made her younger sister's fairer looks far more striking.

  Helene was pious and quiet, and she and Franz Joseph felt ill at ease in each other's company. He was instantly infatuated with her sister instead. He defied his mother and said that if he could not have Elisabeth, he would not marry at all. Five days later the betrothal was announced. The wedding followed at the Augustinerkirche in Vienna on the 24th of April 1854, when Elisabeth was 16. She received a dower equal to US$240,000 as of 2015.

  Within a few weeks of the wedding, the Hofburg and its etiquette began to wear her down. Elisabeth was shy and introverted, and she developed fits of coughing and a fear of narrow or steep staircases. Her first child, Sophie, was born just 10 months after the wedding. Archduchess Sophie named the baby after herself without asking the mother. She called Elisabeth "a silly young mother" and refused to let her feed or care for the infant. When Gisela was born a year later, the Archduchess took charge of her too.

  Without a male heir, Elisabeth felt increasingly unwanted. One day she found a pamphlet on her desk with certain passages underlined. It warned that a queen who bore no sons was "merely a foreigner in the State," and a dangerous one. Her mother-in-law is generally considered the source, though no evidence supports that claim.

  The charge of meddling pointed to her influence on Franz Joseph over his Italian and Hungarian subjects. On a trip to Italy with him, she suggested an amnesty, and he freed a number of political prisoners. It was in Hungary, though, that she would find the relief the Hofburg denied her.

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• 3. Hungarian Heart

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  In 1857, Elisabeth visited Hungary for the first time, travelling with Franz Joseph and their two daughters. Many historians believe the trip left such a deep mark because Hungary offered relief from the constraints of the Austrian court. Unlike Sophie, who despised Hungarians, Elisabeth began learning their language. The country returned her affection. When Patrick Leigh Fermor visited in 1934, he found her picture framed on desks, tables and grand pianos, still adored thirty-six years after her assassination.

  Both of her daughters fell ill during that journey. Gisela recovered quickly, but two-year-old Sophie grew steadily weaker and died. Today it is generally assumed that the cause was typhus. The loss pushed Elisabeth, who already suffered bouts of melancholy, into heavy depressions that haunted her for the rest of her life. She turned away from Gisela and neglected her.

  On the 21st of August 1858, Elisabeth gave birth to an heir, Rudolf. A 101-gun salute announced the news to Vienna, and her standing at court rose with it. Combined with her sympathy for Hungary, that made her an ideal go-between for the Hungarians and the Emperor. She was liberal-minded and placed herself firmly on the Hungarian side in the empire's conflict of nationalities.

  Count Gyula Andrássy found a personal advocate in her, and rumor even named him her lover. Whenever difficult negotiations between the Hungarians and the court broke off, she helped restart them. She proposed that Andrássy become premier of Hungary as part of a compromise. In a forceful letter urging Franz Joseph to trust the Count, she said she wanted to be able to tell Rudolf one day: "I did everything in my power. Your misfortunes are not on my conscience."

  The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Andrássy became the first Hungarian prime minister, and in June he saw to it that Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were crowned King and Queen of Hungary. As a coronation gift, Hungary gave the couple a country residence at Gödöllő, 20 miles east of Budapest. Elisabeth had avoided pregnancy for years, but she now wanted a fourth child. The choice was both personal and political. By returning to the marriage, she ensured that Hungary would gain equal footing with Austria.

  Marie Valerie Mathilde Amalie was born in Buda 10 months after the coronation and baptised there in April. Elisabeth spent that year mostly at Gödöllő, and resentful Austrians traded rumors that a son would be named Stephen, after Hungary's patron saint and first king. A daughter ended the speculation. Elisabeth was determined to raise this "Hungarian child" herself, and she poured all her held-back maternal feeling into her, nearly smothering her. Archduchess Sophie's influence over the children and the court faded, and she died in 1872.

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• 4. Discipline and Beauty

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  Elisabeth kept her weight near 50 kg, about 110 pounds, for most of her life, using fasting and exercise such as gymnastics and riding. After the death of her daughter Sophie, she refused food for days, a pattern that returned during later spells of depression. Whenever the scale crept above 50 kilos, she began a "fasting cure" or "hunger cure" of almost no food. Meat often filled her with disgust. She took the juice of half-raw beefsteaks squeezed into thin soup, or lived on milk and eggs.

  Her waist became the signature of her silhouette. In the peak period of 1859-60, she tightlaced it down to 40 cm, or 16 inches. That peak coincided with her losing struggle with her mother-in-law over the children. She had rigid, solid-front corsets of leather made in Paris, and lacing them could take an hour. She wore them only for a few weeks, perhaps because even leather could not withstand the strain. Her mother-in-law was angered by the defiant display.

  From 1862 until her death, her clothing measured only 47-49.5 cm around the waist, roughly 18 to 19 and a half inches. The Prince of Hesse called her "almost inhumanly slender." When hoop skirts fell out of fashion, Elisabeth was among the first to abandon them for a tighter, leaner line. She disliked costly accessories and the protocol of constant costume changes, and she preferred plain, single-color outfits like riding habits. She wore no petticoats or underlinen, because they added bulk, and she was often sewn into her clothes.

  In her last years, Elisabeth weighed herself up to three times a day and took regular steam baths to prevent weight gain. By 1894 she had wasted to near emaciation, with a low of 43.5 kg, or 95.7 pounds. Yet she sometimes broke her own rules in secret. In 1878 she visited a restaurant incognito and astonished her companions by drinking champagne, eating a broiled chicken and an Italian salad, and finishing with a considerable quantity of cake. In 1881 she bought an English country house and had a spiral staircase built from her sitting room into the kitchen, so she could reach it privately.

  Historians have suggested that these habits point to a restrictive eating disorder. Walter Vandereycken, a professor of psychology, has said that "numerous documents repeatedly describe her considerable fear of weight gain and the psychopathological changes specific for anorexia nervosa."

  Her hair demanded at least three hours of care every day. It was abundant and extremely long, and it darkened from the dark blonde of her youth to chestnut brunette. The weight of the braids and pins gave her headaches. Her hairdresser, Franziska Feifalik, had been a stage hairdresser at the Wiener Burgtheater. She could not wear rings, she had to wear white gloves, and every fallen hair was presented to the Empress in a silver bowl for inspection. Once every two weeks, hair-washing day with eggs and cognac cancelled all activities and obligations.

  Elisabeth used those captive hours to study. She spoke fluent English and French, and she added modern Greek to her Hungarian studies. Her Greek tutor, Constantine Christomanos, recorded her remark about the ritual: "while my hair is busy, my mind stays idle."

  At night, Elisabeth slept without a pillow on a metal bedstead, convinced it kept her posture upright. Raw veal or crushed strawberries lined the leather mask she wore on her face. Cloths soaked in violet or cider vinegar lay across her hips to protect her waist. Each morning she took a cold shower, which in later years aggravated her arthritis, and each evening an olive-oil bath. She favored a cream called Crème Céleste, made from white wax, spermaceti, sweet almond oil and rose water, and she tested countless other products.

  Elisabeth had an aversion to being photographed, especially later in life, and she was quick to raise a fan or sunshade against any camera. Preserving her youthful looks also shaped her view of motherhood, and she used it to justify avoiding further pregnancies. She once declared: "Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty, which is the best gift of the gods."

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• 5. Titania's Secret Diary

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  Franz Joseph was passionately in love with his wife, yet their marriage was complicated. He was stolid and sober, a political conservative still guided by his mother and by the strict Spanish Court ceremony. Elisabeth lived in a different world. He indulged her wanderings but tried, without success, to tempt her into a more domestic life. In their last years, their letters grew more frequent and the relationship became a warm friendship. During her long absences she even encouraged his closeness with the actress Katharina Schratt, to ease his loneliness.

  The Empress slept very little and spent hours at night reading and writing. She also took up smoking, a shocking habit for a woman that fed the already avid gossip. History, philosophy and literature absorbed her, and she revered the German poet Heinrich Heine, whose letters she collected. She wrote Heine-inspired poems and called herself Titania, the Fairy Queen of William Shakespeare. The verses worked as a secret diary of her thoughts and desires. Most dealt with her journeys, classical Greek and romantic themes, and ironic commentary on the Habsburg dynasty.

  In 1871, Franz Joseph asked what she would like for her Saint's Day. She named a young tiger and a medallion, then added that "a fully equipped lunatic asylum would please me most." Her interest in the treatment of the mentally ill may have been tied to the melancholy and eccentricity attributed to her Wittelsbach family. Its best-known member was her favorite cousin, Ludwig II of Bavaria.

  Her health told a darker story. In October 1860, she was reported to suffer from green-sickness and physical exhaustion, and the lung specialist Joseph Škoda feared tuberculosis. He advised a stay on Madeira. The court was full of malicious rumors that Franz Joseph was having a liaison with an actress named Frau Roll. Elisabeth seized on the excuse, left her husband and children, and spent the winter in seclusion.

  Six months later, only four days after her return to Vienna, the coughing fits and fever came back. Another rest cure was advised, this time on Corfu, where she improved almost immediately. If her illnesses were mostly psychosomatic, they faded whenever she was removed from her husband and duties. Her eating habits, however, were definitely causing physical harm.

  In 1862, after about a year away from Vienna, her family physician Fischer of Munich found serious anemia and signs of dropsy. Her feet were sometimes so swollen that she could walk only with support. After a cure at Bad Kissingen she recovered quickly, but she stayed longer with her family in Bavaria instead of calming the gossip. She returned in August 1862, shortly before her husband's birthday, and at once suffered a violent migraine, vomiting four times on the way.

  Rudolf was now four, and Franz Joseph hoped for another son. Fischer claimed her health would not permit another pregnancy, and she used her health to avoid both official duties and intimacy. She also openly opposed her husband and mother-in-law over the military education of Rudolf, who, like his mother, was extremely sensitive. Corfu, where she recovered so quickly, would draw her back again.

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• 6. Mayerling and Flight

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  In 1889, Rudolf, her only son, was found dead beside his young lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at his hunting lodge at Mayerling in Lower Austria. It was suspected to be a murder-suicide on Rudolf's part, and the scandal took the name of the lodge. Elisabeth never fully recovered. The sorrows came quickly. Within ten years she lost her father, Maximilian Joseph, in 1888, her older sister Helene in 1890, and her mother, Ludovika, in 1892. Her younger sister Sophie Charlotte died in 1897 during an accidental fire at the Bazar de la Charité.

  Count Gyula Andrássy died on the 18th of February 1890. "My last and only friend is dead," Elisabeth lamented. Her daughter Marie Valerie said her mother clung to him with a true and steadfast friendship, as perhaps to no other person. After Rudolf's death, Elisabeth was thought to have worn only black for the rest of her life. Yet the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg has since found a light blue and cream dress from this period.

  In 1890, she had a palace built on the Greek island of Corfu and named it Achilleion, after Achilles, the hero of Homer's Iliad. Its decoration carried an elaborate Greek mythological motif, and it became a refuge that she visited often. Franz Joseph hoped she would finally settle there, but she soon lost interest in the fairytale property. German Emperor Wilhelm II bought it after her death, and Greece later acquired it and turned it into a museum.

  On her imperial steamer, Miramar, Elisabeth cruised the Mediterranean. She favored Cape Martin on the French Riviera, Sanremo on the Ligurian Riviera, Lake Geneva, Bad Ischl, where the imperial couple spent their summers, and Corfu. She also went where European royals seldom did, to Morocco, Algeria, Malta, Turkey and Egypt. In England she twice rented Combermere Abbey in Cheshire, in 1881 and 1882. Alterations worth £10,000, including hot water and an electric bell system, were paid for by the Emperor. Her 80-strong retinue included 25 grooms, and she hunted often with the Cheshire Hunt.

  She explained her restlessness in a single line: "If I arrived at a place and knew that I could never leave it again, the whole stay would become hell despite being paradise."

  While in Greece in 1888, at the age of 51, Elisabeth had an anchor tattooed on her shoulder to reflect her love of the sea. On her journeys she mostly traveled incognito, using pseudonyms like "Countess of Hohenembs." She refused to meet European monarchs when she did not feel like it. Her high-speed walking tours lasted several hours, usually with Greek tutors or ladies-in-waiting beside her. The public fascination only grew after Mayerling, and she carried a white leather parasol and a fan to hide her face from the curious.

  Almost all of the ten companions who traveled with her were in their mid-twenties and of Greek origin. Constantin Christomanos, a future playwright and theater director, wrote memoirs that the Viennese court banned. Marinos Marinaky later co-founded the football club Panathinaikos. Constantin Manos became a resistance fighter against the Turks in Crete, and Roussos Roussopoulos became an honorary consul in Budapest thanks to Elisabeth. A Swedish therapist, Arvid Ludvig Kellgren, attended her on voyages and received romantic poetry from her.

  Countess Irma Sztáray, her last lady-in-waiting, described the reclusive and highly sensitive Empress as natural, liberal and modest. She called her a good listener and keen observer with great intellect. Sztáray would be the one beside her on the Geneva promenade.

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• 7. The Needle File

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  Luigi Lucheni, a 25-year-old Italian anarchist, had come to Geneva to kill a sovereign. His first target was the Duke of Orléans, the pretender to France's throne, but the Duke had already left for the Valais. Warnings of a possible attempt on Elisabeth had circulated, yet someone at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage revealed who their guest was. A Geneva newspaper then exposed the elegant "Countess of Hohenembs" as the Empress of Austria. Lucheni followed her for several days, waiting for a chance. He later said: "It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view."

  His weapon was a needle file about 4 inches long, the kind used to file the eyes of industrial needles, fixed into a handle cut from a piece of firewood. He had meant to buy a stiletto, but he lacked the price of 12 francs, so he sharpened an old file instead. Its dull look may have been an advantage, since a shiny blade could have given him away as he approached.

  According to Countess Sztáray, the bell of the steamship Genève announced its departure just as Lucheni seemed to stumble and flung out a hand to keep his balance. In truth he had stabbed Elisabeth in an act of "propaganda of the deed." She collapsed, and a coach driver helped her up. The Austrian concierge of the Beau-Rivage, a man named Planner, had been watching her progress and hurried over. The two women walked roughly 100 yards to the gangway and boarded.

  Only then did Elisabeth lose consciousness again. The boat's captain, Captain Roux, did not know who she was and advised the Countess to take her friend back to the hotel. By then the boat was already sailing out of the harbor. Three men carried the Empress to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Sztáray cut her corset laces so she could breathe. Elisabeth revived and, asked if she was in pain, answered "No." She then asked, "What has happened?" and lost consciousness once more.

  Sztáray noticed a small brown stain above the Empress's left breast and finally told the captain who she was. The boat turned back to Geneva. Six sailors carried Elisabeth to the hotel on a stretcher improvised from a sail, cushions and two oars. When Fanny Mayer, the hotel director's wife, and a visiting nurse helped undress her, they found a few small drops of blood and a small wound. Two doctors, Golay and Mayer, arrived with a priest, who came too late to grant absolution. Mayer opened the artery in her left arm and found no blood. Everyone knelt and prayed, and Sztáray closed Elisabeth's eyes and joined her hands.

  The autopsy, performed the next day by Golay, explained the strange calm of the walk to the boat. The file had gone 3.33 inches into her chest, fractured the fourth rib, pierced the lung and the pericardium, and entered the heart from the top. The wound was so narrow, and her extremely tight corseting pressed so hard, that blood seeped into the sac around the heart in mere drops. Until that sac filled, a condition known as cardiac tamponade, her heart kept beating normally. Had the weapon stayed in place, it would have acted like a plug and she might have lived longer.

  Golay photographed the wound, but the Swiss Procurator-General destroyed the photograph on the orders of Franz Joseph, along with the autopsy instruments. When the telegram reached the Emperor, his first fear was that she had killed herself. A later message describing the assassination reassured him on that point.

  Geneva shuttered itself in mourning. Elisabeth's body was placed in a triple coffin, two inner ones of lead and a bronze outer one resting on lion claws, with two glass panels behind sliding doors. A funeral train carried it to Vienna on Wednesday. The coffin read "Elisabeth, Empress of Austria," and outraged Hungarians had the words "and Queen of Hungary" hastily added. Eighty-two sovereigns and high-ranking nobles followed the cortege on the morning of the 17th of September to the Imperial Crypt at the Capuchin Church.

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• 8. Trial and Afterlife

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  After striking the Empress, Lucheni fled down the Rue des Alpes and threw the file into the entrance of No. 3. Two cabdrivers and a sailor caught him, and a gendarme secured him. The concierge found the weapon the next day while cleaning. He assumed it belonged to a laborer who had moved out, and he told the police only a day later. The tip was broken off, and there was no blood on the file.

  Once Vienna learned that an Italian was responsible, unrest swept the city and reprisals against Italians were threatened. The shock and outrage far exceeded the reaction to Rudolf's death. An outcry also erupted over how little protection the Empress had. Police Chief Virieux of the Canton of Vaud had arranged her protection, but she spotted his officers outside the hotel the day before and complained that the surveillance was disagreeable. He had no choice but to withdraw them.

  In October, Lucheni appeared before the Geneva Court. Furious that Geneva had abolished the death sentence, he demanded to be tried under the laws of the Canton of Lucerne, which still had it. He signed his letter "Luigi Lucheni, anarchist, and one of the most dangerous." Because Elisabeth was famous for preferring the common man to courtiers, his sanity was first questioned. He was declared sane and tried as a common murderer rather than a political criminal.

  He was jailed for life and denied a political platform. On the 20th of February 1900, he tried to kill himself with the sharpened key from a tin of sardines. On the evening of the 16th of October 1910, he hanged himself with his belt in his cell, after a guard confiscated his uncompleted memoirs.

  Franz Joseph said that a man who could attack such a woman, whose whole life was spent doing good, was beyond his understanding. Her will ordered that much of her jewel collection be sold, with proceeds estimated at over £600,000 going to religious and charitable organizations. The rest she could bequeath went to her granddaughter, Archduchess Elisabeth, Rudolf's only child. The assassination led to the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists, the first international conference against terrorism. Franz Joseph also founded the Order of Elizabeth in her memory.

  Monuments spread across Europe. Antonio Chiattone made one in 1902 on the promenade at Territet, Switzerland. A seated statue by Hans Bitterlich was dedicated in the Volksgarten of Vienna on the 4th of June 1907. Philip Jackson's statue near the Quai du Mont-Blanc in Geneva was dedicated in 1998, on the 100th anniversary of the assassination. Budapest has two districts named after her, Erzsébetváros and Pesterzsébet, and the Elisabeth Bridge over the Danube, first built in 1903. Her childhood summer home, Possenhofen Castle, now houses the Empress Elizabeth Museum.

  Her jewels still make news. A ten-pointed diamond star around an enormous pearl, known as the Sisi Star, was one of about 27 pieces designed by court jeweler Jakob Heinrich Köchert for her hair. Gerald Blanchard stole it from a Schönbrunn Palace exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary of her assassination. Canadian police recovered it in 2007, and it was returned to Austria. No one was ever formally charged with stealing it.

  The arts took her up quickly. The comic operetta Sissi, composed by Fritz Kreisler, premiered in Vienna in 1932. Her nickname was always spelled "Sisi," but the incorrect "Sissi" persisted in the works that followed. In 1992, the musical Elisabeth premiered at the Theater an der Wien with a libretto by Michael Kunze and music by Sylvester Levay. It shows Elisabeth bringing a physical manifestation of death to court, and it became the most successful German-language musical of all time.

  In the German and Italian-speaking world, her name is often tied to three romantic films by Ernst Marischka, released in 1955-1956 and 1957. They made a teenage Romy Schneider famous worldwide, and they are shown every Christmas on Austrian, German, Dutch and French television. Schneider came to loathe the role, saying, "Sissi sticks to me like porridge (haferbrei)." In 1988, historian Brigitte Hamann countered the fairytale with The Reluctant Empress, portraying a bitter, unhappy woman who died without finding happiness. In 2022, Vicky Krieps won the Best Performance Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes for playing Elisabeth after her 40th birthday in the film Corsage.

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