Empress Elisabeth of Austria

1837 – 1898 · Generation XX · Consort

Elisabeth, known in her family as Sisi, was born in Munich on Christmas Eve 1837, a daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria and Princess Ludovika of Bavaria. Her father, a member of the Bavarian house of Wittelsbach, was thought eccentric. He adored circuses and preferred roaming the countryside to the duties of his rank. The family spent winters at the Herzog-Max-Palais in Munich and summers at Possenhofen Castle, where the children were left to run free. Sisi grew up a fearless rider who would slip away from her lessons to be on horseback.

In the summer of 1853 her aunt, Archduchess Sophie, arranged for her son, the 23-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph, to meet Sisi’s elder sister Helene at Bad Ischl in the hope of a match. Fifteen-year-old Sisi came along as a companion, and the emperor fell in love with her instead, telling his mother that he would marry Elisabeth or nobody. The two were first cousins. They married in the Augustinerkirche in Vienna on 24 April 1854.

The Viennese court, governed by strict Spanish ceremonial, overwhelmed the shy young empress, and she resisted its etiquette from the start. Archduchess Sophie took over the care of her first two daughters, Sophie, born in 1855, and Gisela, born in 1856, naming the elder after herself. On Elisabeth’s first journey to Hungary in 1857 both girls fell ill and little Sophie died, a loss that drove her mother into deep depression. The birth of the heir, Rudolf, in August 1858 raised her standing at court, but her health gave way, and from 1860 she spent long spells away from Vienna, on Madeira, on Corfu and taking cures at Bad Kissingen.

Hungary gave her a cause. Unlike her mother-in-law, Elisabeth admired the Hungarians. She learned their language, befriended the statesman Count Gyula Andrássy and pressed her husband hard to come to terms with them. The Compromise of 1867 created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and in June of that year she and Franz Joseph were crowned king and queen of Hungary. The Hungarians gave the couple a country palace at Gödöllő, outside Budapest, and in 1868 her fourth child, Marie Valerie, was born in Buda. This daughter Elisabeth raised herself, as she had not been allowed to raise the others. According to the Sisi Museum in Vienna, her husband afterwards forbade her to interfere in politics again.

From then on she lived largely on her own terms. She became one of the finest horsewomen in Europe and hunted in England, installed gymnastic apparatus in her apartments and walked for hours at a stretch. Unusually tall, she kept her weight at about 50 kilograms by fasting and hard exercise and laced her corsets very tightly, habits that some historians read as signs of an eating disorder. Her ankle-length hair took hours to dress each day, and she used the time to study ancient and modern Greek. She wrote poetry in the manner of Heinrich Heine, directing that it stay unpublished for decades after her death. After the couple’s silver wedding in 1879 she seldom appeared at her husband’s side in public, and she encouraged his friendship with the actress Katharina Schratt.

The death of Rudolf and his young lover Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889, in what appeared to be a murder and suicide, broke her. Afterwards she appeared in public in mourning, hid her face from onlookers behind fans and parasols, and travelled almost without pause, much of it aboard the imperial yacht Miramar. On Corfu she built the Achilleion, a villa named after the hero of the Iliad, and lost interest in it once it was finished. In September 1898, travelling incognito as the Countess of Hohenembs, she was staying in Geneva. On 10 September, as she walked along the lakeside to catch a steamer, the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni stabbed her with a sharpened file. He had come to Geneva to kill a French pretender and chose her instead after the newspapers reported her presence. She managed to walk aboard before collapsing and died soon afterwards at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, aged sixty.

She was buried in the Imperial Crypt of the Capuchin Church in Vienna, where Franz Joseph was later laid beside her. She had shunned the public gaze in life, yet after her death writers, the stage and above all the Sissi films of the 1950s, starring the young Romy Schneider, turned her into the best-known member of the Habsburg dynasty.

Images

• State portrait in a ball gown with diamond stars in her hair, 1865 (Franz Xaver Winterhalter, public domain)
• Elisabeth with Gisela and the infant Rudolf beside a portrait of the dead Sophie, lithograph, 1858 (Josef Kriehuber, public domain)
• The young empress on horseback, 1857 (Franz Adam, public domain)
• Her sarcophagus in the Imperial Crypt, Vienna (Jebulon, CC0)

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916) in 1854 — one child together

Children

• Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1858 – 1889)

Life

• 1837 — Born
• 1854 — Married Franz Joseph
• 1898 — Died

Sources

1. Empress Elisabeth of Austria · Wikipedia
2. Elisabeth and Franz Joseph: wedding and marriage · Die Welt der Habsburger (Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.)
3. Elisabeth as an outsider · Die Welt der Habsburger
4. Elisabeth’s eccentric lifestyle · Die Welt der Habsburger
5. Traces of a life: Empress Elisabeth · Die Welt der Habsburger
6. Sisi Museum: all rooms in detail (At Court, Flight, Assassination) · Sisi Museum, Hofburg Vienna