FRANCIS JOSEPH I. (183o-1916), emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, was born on Aug. 18, 183o, eldest son of the archduke Francis Charles, second son of the reigning emperor Francis I., and Sophia, daughter of Maximilian I., king of Bavaria. Francis Joseph was educated in a severe and clerical atmosphere, his preceptors including Metternich himself. On the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 he served in Italy, under Radetzky; and when the revolution was crushed, as the leaders of the reaction, Schwarzenberg and Windischgratz, wished to start afresh with a monarch not compromised by any concessions or promises to the revolutionaries, Ferdinand was persuaded to abdicate in favour of his nephew (Dec. 2, 1848). During the first years of his reign (for details see AUSTRIA) Francis Joseph was wholly under the influence of Schwarzenberg, his mother, and his tutor, Cardinal Rauscher. His rule began unauspiciously with the suppression of liberty in Germany, in Italy and in Hungary, where Russian help was called in to crush the Magyars. Even in Austria, the parliament of Kremsier was suppressed, and on Dec. 31, 1851, the young sovereign revoked the constitution which he himself had enacted two years previously to establish a centralist absolu tism in which the monarch assumed the entire weight and responsi bility of government. After Schwarzenberg's death (April 1852), Francis Joseph appointed no successor, but acted as his own Minister President. His conscientious diligence was untiring, and this period of his reign, for all its lack of liberty, did not lack wise administrative reforms. Unfortunately, in his youth even more than his age, Francis Joseph was convinced both of the impossibility and the impiety of constitutional methods. While leaving his bureaucracy to control a docile people, he embarked himself on an ambitious foreign policy. The army was increased; and his natural piety heightened by his escape from an assassin's knife in 1853, and combined with visions of a revival of the old Holy Roman Empire, found vent in the conclusion of the Con cordat of 1855. Francis Joseph dreamed of a brilliant autocracy, resting on the church and the sword ; but the foreign ventures of his early years was as unlucky as they were ambitious. His vacillating policy in the Crimean War left Austria isolated, and earned him the personal antagonism of the Tsar; the war of 1859 ended ill; his most brilliant plan of all, the convocation of a Fiirstentag in Frankfurt, under his own presidency, to discuss German affairs, was frustrated by the shrewdness of Bismarck in preventing the king of Prussia from attending. The hegemony in Germany passed definitively to Prussia at the end of the Seven Weeks War of 1866.
These 18 years of misfortune constitute the first period of Francis Joseph's career—the period of hope, ambition and self confidence at home and abroad. During this period he might have justly been called a militarist ; acts of repression and severity amounting to cruelty were perpetrated in his name, and the responsibility for them must lie with him, since he claimed the right to autocracy. Hitherto, also, he had believed in his ability (he always believed in his right) to enforce an absolute system, and to be sole judge of his peoples' welfare. But the consistent failure of his ambitions, involving Austria, as it did, in a disastrous financial crisis, compelled him to come to terms with his subjects, first and foremost the Magyars, but also the Poles, Czechs and Germans. With the plainest reluctance and opposition, he was forced step by step into the path of constitutionalism. Francis Joseph's inner resistance to this necessity was manifested in the impatience and instability of his decisions. He was still far from the idea of letting the people govern ; the idea of sharing responsibility with the centralizing German bureaucracy alter nated in his mind with that of concessions to the politically less desirable, but socially intelligible Magyar magnates. As each in turn disappointed him, and seemed intolerably distasteful, he flew to the extreme of the other; so that all the period 1859-67 was marked by extraordinary vacillations which revealed another of the Emperor's weaknesses ; he never trusted his ministers fully or for long, and looking on the most faithful of them only as servants and instruments, he threw them aside without a second thought when he was done with them.
The years 1866-67 formed the turning-point in Francis Joseph's life. He had been forced to accept the constitutional principle, had come to terms with the Magyars, in token of which he was at last crowned king in Hungary, and to admit definitively a constitutional regime in Austria. The period of adventure was over at home, and to a large extent abroad, for if up to 187o he dreamed of revenge on Prussia, the decisive step was never taken, and after the foundation of the German Empire, Francis Joseph accommodated himself—joylessly but without resistance— to his diminished role in the west. In his private life, too, a period was closed. His marriage (April 24, 1854) with the beautiful Elizabeth of Wittelsbach had been a true love-match ; but the couple soon became estranged, partly owing to the Emperor's fault, and partly to his mother's intrigues. His brother Maximilian perished in Mexico in 1867; his only son Rudolph was no joy to him.
His word once pledged to Constitutionalism, Francis Joseph stood by it. In his heart he probably always looked on the Mag yars as rebels ; but he was socially sympathetic to their magnates, and held loyally by the compromise of 1867; the prolonged crisis of 1903 on was caused by Magyar endeavours to alter the basis of the compromise, particularly of that prerogative to which Francis Joseph held above all others--his undisputed control over the army. His natural sympathies were for the German race ; but the leading German party was that of the Liberals—middle class, anti-clerical and opposed to military expenditure—while the Slav districts were the stronghold of the feudal magnates. So Francis Joseph stood above party, at heart unsympathetic to all, and playing off one against the other with a sole eye to the integrity of the monarchy. So far did his indifference to parliamentarism go, that he was actually largely instrumental in the introduction of general suffrage into Austria, as a last attempt to play off a new factor against all the unsatisfactory parties alike.
His foreign policy became increasingly pacific. He did, indeed, seek some compensation for his early losses in the occupation, and later annexation, of Bosnia and the Hercegovina ; but these measures, especially the latter, were far more defensive than is generally admitted. His personal influence was always on the side of peace, and although deeply shocked by the murder of the Archduke, he would probably have found some means of averting war with Serbia in 1914, had the conduct of foreign policy not slipped from his hands with advancing age. War once declared, he remained wholly loyal to his German ally, although he would gladly have seen peace restored. For his illusions regarding suc cessful war were gone ; and he declared now that Austria "would be lucky if she got off with a black eye." His disillusionment was due in part to the unceasing bickering of his subjects, in part to the increasing loneliness of his private life ; for his wife was assassinated in 1897, his son Rudolph (q.v.) committed suicide in 1889, his nephew and heir, Francis Ferdinand (q.v.), was unsympathetic to him. In his old age he consorted with few persons except his lifelong friend, Katharine Schratt, and his young grandchildren. The hostility between him and his subjects (to whose welfare he was always devoted) had vanished; but their reverence for him was too remote to become active affection.
Francis Joseph's invariable reserve, due partly to his conscious ness of his exalted position, was such that character-sketches or even anecdotes of him are rare. In his old age his character softened ; and he was always courteous, conscientious, industrious, and above all dignified. He had a prodigious memory and ex perience, but an intellect not above the average, and a cold and somewhat ungenial nature, with no taste for the arts. His only passion was the chase. His great failing as a rule was his distrust of ability. Two of his phrases are illuminating: to the citizens of Frankfurt, in 1866, he said : "I have an unlucky hand"; and to the Field Marshal Conrad, at the end of his life : "Believe me, this realm cannot be ruled constitutionally." He died peace fully or. Nov. 21, 1916. (C. A. M.) "Kaiser Franz Joseph," Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins fir Geschichte Mdhrens and Schlesiens (1917) ; H. Friedjung, "Kaiser Franz Josef I.," Historische Aufsdtze, p. 493 ff. (1919) ; Schneider, Kaiser Franz Josef and sein Hof 0921); A. A. v. Margutti, V om alten Kaiser (1921) new edition (192 5) ; Oswald Red lich, "Kaiser Franz Josef," Neese Oesterreichische Biographie, Band I. (5923) ; O. Redlich, Franz Josef (1928) .