Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. The Last Emperor of an Empire That Vanished

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  On the 6th of August 1806, a Habsburg monarch signed away a thousand years of European tradition. Francis II declared the bond tying him to the states of the Empire dissolved, and with that sentence the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation ceased to exist. He had ruled it since 1792, the last man ever to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Yet two years before he ended one empire, he had already invented another, crowning himself the first Emperor of Austria as Francis I. How did a man become the final ruler of one realm and the founder of a new one in the span of two years? What kind of person presides over the death of an institution older than any nation around him? The answers run through guillotines and battlefields, through a marriage offered to an enemy, and through a childhood so harsh that an emperor called the boy a spoiled mother's child.

• 2. A Spoiled Mother's Child

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  Francis was born in Florence on the 12th of February 1768, the eldest son of the future Emperor Leopold II and Maria Louisa of Spain. His father ruled there as Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the boy grew up surrounded by many siblings in what the source calls a happy childhood. That comfort ended in 1784. Because his uncle Emperor Joseph II had no surviving children from either of his two marriages, the family knew Francis was likely to be a future Emperor, and he was sent to the Imperial Court in Vienna to be prepared. Joseph II took charge of the boy's development personally, and his disciplinarian regime stood in stark contrast to the indulgent Florentine court. The Emperor's written verdict on his nephew was brutal. He called Francis stunted in growth, backward in bodily dexterity and deportment, and neither more nor less than a spoiled mother's child. Joseph's method of improvement was, in his own words, fear and unpleasantness. He isolated the young Archduke, believing this would force self-sufficiency in a youth who he felt failed to lead himself and to do his own thinking. Francis admired his uncle nonetheless, if rather in fear of him. To finish his training he joined an army regiment in Hungary, where he settled easily into military routine and was present at the siege of Belgrade during the Austro-Turkish War. The throne came sooner than expected: on the afternoon of the 1st of March 1792 Leopold died at the age of 44, and Francis, just past his 24th birthday, was Emperor.

• 3. The Adversary Across The Rhine

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  Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, was guillotined by the revolutionaries in 1793, at the very beginning of Francis's reign. She was his aunt, yet the source records that on the whole he was indifferent to her fate. The wider threat troubled him far more. As head of the Holy Roman Empire and ruler of vast realms in Central and Eastern Europe, Francis felt menaced by the French revolutionaries and their reforms, which were being exported across Europe in the wake of conquering armies. He led the Empire into the French Revolutionary Wars and briefly commanded the Allied forces during the Flanders Campaign of 1794 before handing command to his brother, Archduke Charles. Defeat followed. By the Treaty of Campo Formio he ceded the left bank of the Rhine to France in exchange for Venice and Dalmatia. He fought France again in the War of the Second Coalition. On the 11th of August 1804, responding to Napoleon crowning himself emperor of the French earlier that year, Francis announced he would assume the title of hereditary emperor of Austria as Francis I. The move was technically illegal under imperial law, but Napoleon had agreed beforehand, and so it happened. The defeat at Austerlitz during the War of the Third Coalition forced him into the Treaty of Pressburg, which greatly weakened Austria and pushed the old Empire toward collapse.

• 4. A Daughter Given To The Enemy

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  In 1809 Francis attacked France again, deeming another war inevitable and pushed by hawks in Vienna who hoped to exploit Napoleon's entanglement in the Peninsular War in Spain. The gamble failed. He was defeated and forced to ally himself with Napoleon, ceding territory, joining the Continental System, and wedding his daughter Marie-Louise to the Emperor. The Napoleonic Wars drastically weakened Austria, leaving it entirely landlocked and threatening its preeminence among the German states, a position it would eventually cede to the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1813, for the fifth and final time, Austria turned against France, joining Great Britain, Russia, Prussia and Sweden against Napoleon. This time Austria played a major role in his final defeat. In recognition, Francis, represented by Clemens von Metternich, presided over the Congress of Vienna, helping form the Concert of Europe and the Holy Alliance. The German Confederation was created by the Congress in 1815 to organize the surviving states of the Holy Roman Empire, and Francis served as its first president. The Congress was a personal triumph; he hosted the assorted dignitaries in comfort. Yet he undermined his own allies Tsar Alexander and Frederick William III of Prussia by negotiating a secret treaty with the restored French king Louis XVIII.

• 5. Spies, Censors, And The Word Maybe

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  In 1794 a Jacobin conspiracy was discovered in the Austrian and Hungarian armies, and the violent memory of the French Revolution had already taught Francis to distrust radicalism in any form. The trials only skirted the perimeter of the plot. His brother Alexander Leopold, then Palatine of Hungary, admitted in a letter that although they had caught many culprits, they had not really got to the bottom of the business. Two officers heavily implicated were hanged and gibbeted, and numerous others were imprisoned, many dying from the conditions. Francis built an extensive network of police spies and censors to monitor dissent, following his father's lead, since the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had run the most effective secret police in Europe. Even his own family was watched: his brothers, the Archdukes Charles and Johann, had their meetings spied upon. The mood that censorship produced survives in one exchange. The author Franz Grillparzer, a Habsburg patriot, had a play suppressed purely as a precautionary measure. When he asked the responsible censor what was objectionable, the man replied, Oh, nothing at all. But I thought to myself, One can never tell. Francis still presented himself as approachable, setting aside two mornings each week to meet subjects of any status by appointment, even speaking to them in their own language.

• 6. An Anthem And A Shrinking Army

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  Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser was composed in 1797 to be sung as the Kaiserhymne, with music by Joseph Haydn, to raise patriotic feeling during the war with France. The lyrics were later adapted for other Emperors, and the music outlived the dynasty entirely; it survives today as the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied. Francis ran his military affairs with the same caution he applied to everything. He allowed his brother, the Archduke Charles, extensive control over the army during the Napoleonic wars, yet, distrustful of giving any one man too much power, he kept command functions divided between the Hofkriegsrat and his field commanders. In his later years he capped military spending so it would not exceed forty million florins per year. Inflation turned that ceiling into a starvation diet: the army's share of the budget shrank from half in 1817 to only twenty-three percent by 1830. Francis married four times. His second wife, his double first cousin Maria Teresa of the Two Sicilies, bore him twelve children, of whom only seven reached adulthood. Through that line his descendants reached thrones far beyond Vienna, including Maria Leopoldina, who married Pedro I of Brazil and whose issue included Maria II of Portugal and Pedro II of Brazil.

• 7. Tomb Number 57

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  On the 2nd of March 1835, exactly 43 years and a day after his father had died, Francis died in Vienna of a sudden fever at the age of 67, surrounded by family and with all the religious comforts. His funeral was magnificent. For three days his Viennese subjects filed respectfully past his coffin in the court chapel of the Hofburg palace. He was interred in the Imperial Crypt at Vienna's Neue Markt Square, the traditional resting place of Habsburg monarchs, in tomb number 57, surrounded by the tombs of his four wives. The man who had spent his reign distrusting almost everyone left a single instruction at the center of the political testament he wrote for his heir, his son Ferdinand I: to preserve unity in the family and regard it as one of the highest goods. He had asked to be remembered not as the emperor who buried an empire but as a patriarch, and the portraits painted by Peter Fendi obliged, showing him surrounded by his children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren, through his son Franz Karl, would rule as Franz Joseph I of Austria.