ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom tends to heap the blame for the final collapse of Austria-Hungary on the last Habsburg patriarch, emperor, and king, Franz Joseph I. The policies of this unfortunate monarch, to continue with the usual cant, were the product of his imperious but mediocre mind; when combined with the old emperor's vaunted arrogance and cold-blooded selfishness, it goes far toward explaining the final disaster that overtook the Austrian state and the ancient House of Habsburg. It is said that further evidence of the extent of Franz Joseph's misanthropy is the fact that personal misfortune visited those whose lives in any way touched upon the emperor's.
This hostile view of Franz Joseph was created, for the most part, since his death in 1916. The states that replaced the Dual Monarchy desired to defame the old as much as possible so as to justify the new state order associated with the settlement of the First World War. In fact, Franz Joseph, by the very fact that he stood at the helm of his dynasty, was Austria-Hungary's chief political icon; his towering visibility exerted immense centripetal political pull. His presence--indeed, the very thought that he existed--gave legitimacy to that political order often referred to in the vernacular as the Habsburg empire or the realm of the Habsburgs. The kaiser's role as chief prop in the ceremonial that gave life and color to Austrian political culture came about not because of any prescribed cult of personality, but because he personified those historical forces that had brought together and continued to sustain the Danubian realm. Moreover, the kaiser's persona carried the weight of that hoary political tradition, conjuring up in the minds of those who looked upon him as continuity between present and past as well as expectation of the future. This distinction between persona and office, one which combined in the emperor an unusual, not always easy mix of folksy informality and a near holy presence, is illustrated in a famous letter by Empress Maria Theresa to her son, Joseph, in which the mother, not the empress, wrote:
You have enjoyed yourself putting the dagger into the heart, ironically and with reproaches too extreme for people for whom you yourself believe to be the best. ... How I fear that you will never find friends who will be attached to Joseph .... For it is not the Emperor or co-regent from whom these biting, ironical mischievous shafts come, it is from the heart of Joseph, and this is what alarms me, and this is what will bring, ill fortune into your life, dragging the Monarchy and all of us with you.
