At the time, the two major powers in central Europe were the Hohenzollern dynasty ruling Germany and the Habsburg dynasty ruling the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two major powers in the west were France and the United Kingdom. The major power in the east was Russia.
Since the Congress of Vienna 1815, Europe had enjoyed peace; no major wars had occurred since then. The Congress of Vienna had been a large — perhaps the largest ever — gathering of diplomats. Their goal was to stabilize Europe in the wake of a twenty-five-year-long streak of violence: the ten years of the French Revolution (1789 to 1799) and fifteen years of Napoleon’s military aggression (1800 to 1815). They hoped to negotiate peaceful resolutions to whichever tensions existed between various European powers, repair the damage done by the French Revolution and by Napoleon, and create a stable diplomatic system moving forward: a system which would, they hoped, continue to find peaceful international solutions.
The architect of this new international system was Klemens von Metternich, a German-born diplomat who made his career managing foreign policy for the Habsburgs in Austria. He organized the Congress of Vienna and shaped much of its deliberations.
Part of the new arrangement was a balance of power, a sort of equilibrium, between these five nations. The intent was to have each of them approximately equal in terms of their military, political, and economic influence.
The system worked for a century. The few small wars which did happen during that time were brief and resulted in few deaths.
The relationships between the five major nations were not always warm and friendly, but they were at least diplomatic and cooperative. Diplomacy was the sustaining force which preserved the international balance of power and preserved peace.
By 1889, the Emperor Franz-Josef was ruling the Habsburg lands, and Kaiser Wilhelm was ruling the Hohenzollern dominions. In January 1889, Kaiser Wilhem had his thirtieth birthday. Celebrations occurred around Europe, usually hosted by the respective German embassy. In Vienna, the event was hosted by the German ambassador to that capital, a man named Heinrich VII, Prince Reuss.
At the German Embassy in Vienna, Emperor Franz-Josef and his son Crown Prince Rudolf attended the party, wearing their German military uniforms. It was the custom that various European aristocrats were made honorary members of other nations’ military units: another way to demonstrate unity and diffuse potential conflicts.
Awkwardly, both the Crown Prince’s wife and his mistress were at the event, as historian Angus Robertson explains:
Despite all kinds of rumors swirling about the personal life of Rudolf, there were no public clues about one of the most shocking personal tragedies to befall European royalty in the entire 19th century. The last time that members of the royal family and Vienna society saw Rudolf alive was at a reception held in the German Embassy in late January 1889 to mark the 30th birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm. None of them had any idea what was about to happen to Rudolf and his young lover. The heir to the throne arrived at the party showing his public respect by dressing as Colonel-in-Chief in the uniform of the German 2nd Brandenburg Uhlan Regiment, despite privately disliking Wilhelm. He joined his father Emperor Francis Joseph, who wore the uniform of a Prussian field marshal, along with the cream of aristocratic society and the diplomatic corps, as the guest of the German ambassador Heinrich VII, Prince Reuss (1825 - 1906). Lady Walburga Paget, wife of the British ambassador, spoke to Rudolf and described the extraordinary scenes at the reception in her diary: ‘I thought the Crown Prince was changed and strange, and I could not think what was the matter with him.’
Crown Prince Rudolf had married Princess Stephanie of Belgium, but not for love. It was a diplomatic arrangement designed to improve relationships between Belgium and Austria-Hungary. In an ongoing irony, it was the wealthy and powerful who were often unable to marry for love and who submitted to such arranged marriages. The common people were free to choose their spouses.
The Crown Prince quickly lost interest in his wife, if indeed he had ever had any. He had a series of affairs with other women, as Angust Robertson reports:
While the crown prince, his wife Princess Stephanie of Belgium (1864-1945) and the other guests mingled in the embassy ballroom, the young beauty Baroness Mary Vetsers (1871-1889) flirted with Rudolf in plain sight. The 17-year-old daughter of an Austrian diplomat had had a crush on the dashing crown prince for some time and enjoyed demonstrating her affections for him at public events, including the opera. While it is not certain when their affair started, it was just the latest for the rakish Rudolf, who maintained a register of his conquests and gifted silver-boxes when he brought his dalliances to an end.
His personal life spiraled downward, out of control. He was, however, a highly-educated man, capable of speaking “four or five languages” according to the New York Times. He authored significant books, and explored philosophy and economics in detail. He was personally acquainted with Carl Menger, a leading economist of the era.
He co-authored a political manifesto, The Austrian Nobility and its Constitutional Calling, which envisioned a healthy sense of civic duty for the aristocrats. While privately troubled, the Crown Prince was professionally forward-looking.
The private troubles would shipwreck the political vision, as Angus Robertson writes:
In an unhappy marriage with Stephanie and barred from meaningful responsibilities by his father, Rudolf had descended into an increasingly dissolute lifestyle of sexual affairs, drink, and drugs. He contracted venereal disease, infected his wife and ended hopes of having further children after their daughter was born. For more than three years he had been prescribed a dangerous cocktail of opium, morphine, and cocaine, which he consumed in addition to ‘copious amounts’ of cognac and champagne. Stephanie remembered the destructive impact this was having on her husband: ‘He suffered more and more from nervous unrest and from a violent temper, culminating in what was tantamount to complete mental decay.’ Queen Victoria, who had taken a shine to Rudolf and appointed him personally to the English Order of the Garter, confided to her granddaughter that he ‘led a very bad life.’
It was shortly after the January 1889 party at the German embassy in Vienna that the end came. Rudolf arranged a secret rendezvous with Baroness Mary in the small village of Mayerling. The royal family had a hunting lodge there.
The next morning, Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Mary were found dead. Most of the evidence pointed to a double suicide in which he shot her and then himself. Each of them had left farewell letters to friends and family. But there was some ambiguity in the investigation, and it is possible that it was something other than a double suicide. The letters, for example, might have been forgeries.
In any case, the troubled personal life of the Crown Prince came to an end, but so did his opportunity to influence the European diplomatic scene. In the wake of Rudolf’s death, the Archduke Karl Ludwig became the heir to the imperial throne, but died soon after Rudolf died, so Franz-Ferdinand became the heir to the imperial throne. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Rudolf’s death, the New York Times wrote:
At the age of 84 Franz Joseph, the most unwarlike of emperors, blundered into war with Serbia because Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, had been murdered by Serbian nationalists. With this war all our troubles began. It might not have happened if Rudolph had been alive.
The aging Franz-Josef continued to rule after Rudolf’s death, but without Rudolf’s advice. For eighteen years, the heir presumptive — and for all purposes, the heir apparent — was Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, whose personality and style were different from Crown Prince Rudolf’s. Had Rudolf lived longer, it would have been him instead of Franz-Ferdinand who was working with Emperor Franz-Josef: different decisions might have been made, and the lives of millions affected thereby.
Franz-Josef mentored three men, one after another, to be his successor, and he outlived all three of them. The result was his personal grief and World War I. Had Crown Prince Rudolf lived longer, it’s at least possible that WW1 might not have happened.
