Birthday Greetings #29

Happy birthday to Franz II & I of the Holy Roman Emperor and Austria respectively.  Yes, its another birthday shout out to another second rate Habsburg emperor.  Considering the average quality of the emperors they produced no sane person would believe their dynasty would last fifty years, much less four hundred.  Still utterly implacable mediocrity will frequently beat hesitant genius.  It also has to be admitted that on those occasions when the Habsburgs did throw up a ruler of something near genius the consequences were almost invariably disastrous.  Still Franz would be a good candidate for lousiest Habsburg emperor ever if he didn't have so much competition.  In fairness one must acknowledge that Napoleon made rulers much smarter than Franz look pretty stupid too.

Franz was born in Tuscany, the son of the then archduke of that place (Tuscany being one of those territories handed out to younger sons of Habsburg emperors to stop them getting clever ideas).  Since his uncle the Emperor Joseph (one of the brilliant, disastrous ones) had no surviving children (the fact that his wife was a lesbian probably didn't help) it was understood that in the fullness of time Franz would inherit (sorry, be unanimously elected to) the title of Holy Roman Emperor.  After an indulgent childhood in Tuscany he was sent to uncle Joseph in Vienna who treated him like crap.

Possibly as a result Franz became suspicious secretive and distrusting of innovation.  Something else that made him distrusting of innovation was France where they had innovated an entirely new system of government which appeared to make monarchy completely redundant (and executed).  As the monarchical powers of Europe gathered to crush newly republican France they found in Franz their most determined champion.  It didn't help that the French had executed his aunt (Marie Antoinnette) although we shouldn't read too much into this as apparently Franz wasn't that fond of her.

In a series of wars Franz suffered defeat after defeat and humiliation after humiliation.  After one particularly bad defeat Napoleon redesigned the Holy Roman Empire so that it had even less relevance and meaning than hitherto.  Franz took the hint and dissolved the empire completely after first proclaiming himself emperor of Austria.  Thus although the second Holy Roman Emperor to be called Franz he was the first Austrian emperor to bear the same name hence his nomenclature.

As his empire lurched from defeat to defeat Franz finally found himself forced into an alliance with the French and had to hand over his daughter Marie Louise as a wife for Napoleon.  Napoleon would find that if the Austrians made poor enemies they made even worse friends.  It is safe to say that Franz never wavered from his determination to crush the upstart Corsican and was only waiting for his opportunity.  He had some advantages.  His brother, Karl, was an intelligent, capable general (not as capable as Napoleon but, hey) who reformed the Habsburg military machine.  Karl couldn't make the empires armies as good as Napoleons but he did succeed in closing the gap significantly.  Franz was also lucky in having the ruthlessly talented Clemens von Metternich as first foreign minister and then chancellor.  Metternich was as reactionary as his master and considerably more capable.  Finally in 1813 when it became obvious that Napoleon had bitten off more than he could chew Franz declared war against him (for the fourth time) and the Austrian empire provided the majority of the troops which finally defeated Napoleon and drove him ino exile.

After Napoleon was done with Metternich sat down and redesigned Europe to his own and his master's liking and Franz settled down to a long, peaceful and stultifying reign.  Austria was a police state from top to bottom ruled by a congenitally suspicious emperor whom multiple defeats had taught caution and distrust in equal measure.  Despite this Franz tried to be a man of the people and devoted quite a bit of time to face to face meetings with his subjects (seriously, anybody could make an appointment and get an interview, show me a head of state who does that nowadays).  It is a measure of the way Franz ran his empire that when a peasant revolt broke out the leader of the revolt sent continuous letters to Franz complaining about the way the empire was run and Franz paid enough attention to them to have some of the major abuses investigated while at the same time demanding his army catch and execute the rebels.

After a long reign Franz finally died in 1835 leaving the empire to his idiot son Ferdinand.  He can't really claim to be either a good emperor or a particularly good man but after the revolutionary ferment of his early years on the throne a lot of people were probably quite prepared to accept a reliable and predictable tyranny.  Things would go seriously to hell shortly after he died and while insisting that poor Ferdinand take a throne he was utterly unfit to occupy certainly didn't help matters the real reason is that after twenty years of peace and order enforced with an iron fist people were probably prepared to take their chance with chaos again.