When Emperor Franz Josef Learned of the Archduke's Assassination

The Archduke's Bloody Tunic

By Greg King and Sue Woolmans

Franz Josef was at Ischl that Sunday when the telegram arrived from Baron Rumerskirsch [a member of the Archduke's entourage]:

Stunned and deeply shaken by the incomprehensible, I am broken-hearted to inform you that in the course of a drive through Sarajevo His Imperial Highness and Her Highness were hit by shots from a dastardly assassin's hand and badly wounded. They were taken at once to the Konak where immediate medical help was present but it was not possible for human help to save them and Their Highnesses passed away after a few minutes without having regained consciousness.

Count Paar, the emperor's adjutant, took the cable to Franz Josef. The old emperor said little. As if overwhelmed at the news, he closed his eyes for a few moments, then spoke—inadvertently, Paar thought—expressing in a moment of weakness a sentiment he never otherwise would have revealed. “Horrible! The Almighty does not allow Himself to be challenged with impunity. A higher power has restored the old order that I unfortunately was unable to uphold.” 

Emperor Franz Josef had responded with harsh insensitivity. The shocking remarks have been questioned as out of character for the old emperor, yet his subsequent behavior confirmed his sense of relief. He had always regarded his nephew with suspicion and his morganatic marriage as an unwelcome, humiliating situation that had dragged the dignity of the imperial Habsburgs through the mud. 

Certainly no one has questioned the veracity of Franz Josef's daughter Marie Valerie, who rushed to her father on hearing the news although, as she noted in her diary, she knew “that it would cause him no grief, merely excitement.” She found her father “amazingly fresh.” He was, she recorded, “moved, to be sure,” and spoke “of the poor children with tears in his eyes,” but, “as I knew beforehand, not personally stricken.” In their conversation, he made only a passing reference to the assassination of his heir, telling his daughter coldly, “For me, it's one great worry less.”

The emperor now acted to tie up loose ends. He ordered Franz  Ferdinand's Militärkanzlerei (Military Chancery) immediately closed. All of the archduke's mail was seized, his files and papers confiscated, and everything sealed in the emperor's archives. Later that Sunday, an adjutant presented the emperor with the proposed text of a public statement on Franz Ferdinand's assassination that included the line “The death of my Beloved Nephew, a death painful to me. . .”

Seeing these words, Franz Josef picked up a pen and crossed through “a death painful to me.” Colonel Bardolff confirmed this lack of feeling when he met the emperor a few days later. After delivering an account of events in Sarajevo, Franz Josef quizzed Bardolff. “And how did the archduke bear himself?” “Like a soldier, Your Majesty,” Bardolff replied. “That was to be expected,” the emperor commented. That was it; not a word of sympathy for the victims before Franz Josef quickly moved on, asking, “And how did the maneuvers go?”

Source: Over the Top, June 2014