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Franz II (I)
Leopold’s son succeeded in going down in history as
‘good Emperor Franz’.
Archduke Franz is neither ignorant nor
unindustrious, his judgement is cold and slow but
sound, he is indifferent to all that we understand by
pleasure and entertainment, and he is healthy, even
strong. While he will never possess what we call the
graces of mind and body, in days to come he will
show himself to have a head that is well organized
for business and strength of character to boot.
Joseph II in a letter of 1789 on his nephew the future Emperor
Franz
Franz II (I) is described by the historian Adam Wandruszka as
having been a ‘narrow-minded, dry, reserved and in no respect
particularly talented individual.’ The explanation for his
character can be seen in terms of the excessive education and
tuition that he as future ruler received from his uncle Emperor
Joseph II.
Having had to assume the reins of government after the
unexpected death of his father Leopold II, Franz found himself
confronted by the phenomenon that dominated European
political life in the decades before and after 1800, namely, the
French Revolution. In the turmoil of the wars following the
Revolution and in all the conflicts with Napoleon, the mast to
which Franz nailed his colours was the alleged special position
of the Habsburg dynasty. Nevertheless, he broke with the
pomp and majesty of the ceremonial Baroque notion of how a
ruler should be, ruling instead as a dry bureaucrat and
developing a patriarchal image as the ‘good Emperor Franz’
who constantly had the interests of his people at heart. The
impression he deliberately created of being close to the people
accorded with the spirit of a new era marked by the rise of the
middle classes, and was promoted by such things as his
simple, quasi-bourgeois lifestyle, his exemplary family life, his
cultivation of Viennese dialect, and the innumerable audiences
he gave during his reign.
When Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor of the French in
1804, Franz felt compelled to follow suit – after all, ‘reaction’ in
the face of revolutionary France was the motto of the day.
Franz founded the hereditary empire of Austria and became its
first emperor, using a museum piece as official insignia: the
private crown of Rudolf II. In this office Franz was forearmed
with a substitute for the loss he was to incur two years later in
1806, when under pressure from Napoleon he was compelled
to lay down the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and dissolve
an institution that had existed since early medieval times.
Curiously enough, the war against the Emperor of the French
did not prevent Franz, at the instigation of the future strong
man of Austria Prince Metternich, from marrying off his
daughter Marie Louise to none other than Napoleon himself.
Author
Stephan Gruber
Literature
Vacha, Brigitte (Hrsg.): Die Habsburger. Eine europäische
Familiengeschichte, Graz/Wien/Köln 1992 (Reprint 1996), S. 351–
377
Vocelka, Karl: Glanz und Untergang der höfischen Welt.
Repräsentation, Reform und Reaktion im habsburgischen
Vielvölkerstaat 1699–1815, Wien 2001, S. 26–28, 39–41
Wandruszka, Adam: Das Haus Habsburg. Die Geschichte einer
europäischen Dynastie, 6. Auflage, Wien/Freiburg/Basel 1987
(1978), S. 174–176