November 30, 2011 • 30 mins
Empress Elisabeth of Austria, better known as Sisi, is often considered the public's "favorite" member of the Habsburgs. She only reluctantly carried out her duties, but her murder created an outcry across Europe -- and the story doesn't end there.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Scared Dowdy and I'm Delaney Chocolate Boarding. And I'm
sure everyone who's listened to the podcast for a while
knows that one of my favorite subjects ever is Ludvig,
(00:24):
the second of Bavaria. He just to recap for you,
since I don't talk about him enough. He's a Wagner
super fan. He built all of those Disney castles, which
are really more the inspiration for Disney castles than anything.
And he died a very mysterious death, which is always
good for a podcast subject at least. But after that
episode on Livig aired, a lot of listeners started writing
(00:47):
in to suggest that we cover another member of the
Vittelsbach family, Ludvig's cousin and his best friend, the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria, who is better known as Empress c
And Cecy is really considered a prime example of Vittelsbach eccentricity,
but she's also considered, interestingly enough, a prime representative of
(01:11):
the family. She married into the Habsburgs, and that's pretty
ironic because Cecy wasn't really a very good Habsburg at all. No,
she wasn't. She was headstrong, introverted, and she preferred corefud
to Vienna. She believed monarchical government was obsolete, and worst
of all, for Habsburg matriarch, she was more interested in
tight laced corsets than having lots of babies. Yet she's
(01:34):
often considered the favorite Habsburg and even the original people's princess,
because she was so popular with her subjects. And you'll
notice a lot of Princess Diana similarities here. At the
one anniversary of her death, obviously a long time after
the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire, you could find
her lovely picture on mugs and kitchy souvenirs, and there's
(01:54):
even a CCI museum in Vienna. Mattel even made a
CC barbie for the European market. So we've got to ask,
what is it about this Habsburg empress, on this vittels
Buck odd ball essentially that continues to fascinate people enough
to make a barbie out of her. So Cecy's life
story is often told with this sort of fairy princess
(02:14):
kind of spin, and a lot of that started because
of these movies that came out in the nineteen fifties
that really presented her as the perfect fairy tale young
princess who has an idyllic childhood, meets her prince, lives
happily ever after. Um, but if you stop at age fifteen,
that really does kind of fit her her actual life story.
(02:35):
She was born Elizabeth amily Eugenie at a castle on
Lake Starnberg on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven, and she
was the daughter of the Bavarian Duke Maximilian Joseph and
Princess Lodovica, who was the vittels Buck, daughter of the
Bavarian King. And she I know that sounds like an
illustrious background, and it is, but she grew up in
(02:58):
a more rural setting than you'd expect. She grew up
horseback riding, hunting with her father, mountain climbing, doing charity
work like visiting peasants, all again kind of princess, the
sort of sounding things. And she really was a country
sort of princess, with this relaxed, loving family, a lot
of siblings and a very close environment she grew up in.
(03:20):
But she was also really pretty. She was considered to
be the most beautiful princess in Europe in fact, so
it's no surprise that in August eighteen fifty three, her
twenty three year old cousin, Franz Joseph, fell in love
with her. And now Franz Joseph had become Emperor of
Austria at age eighteen after his uncle abdicated and his
father was skipped over to reboot the monarchy with a
new youthful leader. But in eighteen fifty three assassination attempt
(03:43):
made it imperative that he get a family going, and
so his mother, Sophie, decided she wanted to keep things
in the family. She really wanted to set Franz Joseph
up with her sister Ludovika's daughter Helene, and invited the
ladies to summer getaway. It seemed like it would be
a good man. Helene was extremely religious, she was dutiful,
probably would have made a good match for hard working
(04:05):
Franz Joseph. But Ludovica fatefully brought along her younger daughter too,
so Elizabeth was there and Franz Joseph fell for her
instead of Helene. Yeah, and they ended up announcing their
engagement before they even left. The little country retreat, and
Ceci is supposed to have said at least some of
the following foreboding gems. I mean, you can, I guess,
(04:26):
pick whichever one you like the best. She is supposed
to have said, I'm so fond of the emperor. If
only he were not an emperor. That doesn't sound very good. Uh,
one doesn't turn down an emperor again, kind of scary
funding And oh, if only he were a tailor, which
that's just kind of funny. That one does sound pretty funny.
(04:47):
I don't know if we should dig it too lightly, though,
because cc did, of course later become one of the
most famous clients of the legendary couturier Charles Frederick Worth.
So she did like clothes. Maybe a tailor would have
been a good match. But whatever she's specifically said, it
seems likely that fifteen year old cecy knew that she
was going to have a really hard time being Empress
(05:09):
of Austria, and trouble really started almost immediately for them.
Even the couple's honeymoon was cut short since Franz Joseph
would have to ride back to Vienna every morning to
deal with the Crimean war, so it was sort of
a choppy honeymoon, I guess with him going back and forth.
Once installed at court, Cecy did her best to perform
her duties, but she found the formality they're compared to
(05:31):
Bavaria just terrible. At the time. To be in the
top tier at court, you had to prove unbroken descent
from sixteen ancestors in the upper nobility, eight paternal and
eight maternal lapses or marriages into the lesser nobility or
middle classes were only acceptable if they occurred before the
great great grandparents generation. So just to show you how
(05:52):
strict that's just getting into court, you can imagine the
kind of rules that regulate court once you're really there.
So Cecy did make attempts to loosen up the etiquette
a little bit, try to modernize it some, but she
was only met with disapproval from her mother in law,
the arch Duchess Sophie, who also started to censure her
(06:12):
daughter in law about her constant horseback riding. She would
take lots of horseback riding lessons and the fact that
she'd go out riding without chaperones, which her mother in
law thought was kind of unseemly but also a little
bit dangerous. So cc you know, this young teenager starts
to get pretty stressed out, not just from being away
from home now, but because of stressful court life in
(06:34):
Vienna and all this pressure from her mother in law
about how to act, and eventually she starts to get
sort of sick. She'd have these panics about going down long,
steep stairs, and she'd have coughing fits, and she'd suffer
from what people considered classic Little Spock melancholy. If you've
listened to the Ludwig episode, you know all about that.
(06:55):
And things really only got worse when her first baby
arrived only ten months after the wedding. She named her Sophie,
after friends Joseph's mother, and that was a name that
fit because the baby basically belonged to the Archduchess. Cec
was not allowed to play any part in its care
and education and was truly upset about that. And she
(07:18):
wasn't involved in the upbringing of her next daughter either, Gizella.
But she really fell into a new level of depression
when baby Sophie died in eighteen fifty seven, um Cec
stopped eating. She turned to these fasting cures where she'd
live on light meals of milk or eggs or what
(07:39):
sounds really terrible, raw beef juice served as a soup
um just trying to deal with her her depression in
in this way, and these mood related fast were just
the beginning for Cec. Today, many historians looking back at
her habits believe that she suffered from anorexia and also
exercise to excess. She'd ride for hours or in later
(08:00):
years ago on these long brisk walks. She took up
fencing and had gymnasiums installed in all of her palaces
so that she could work out whenever she wanted. If
her weight crept above fifty kilows or about one and
ten pounds, and she was five eight, so just keep
that she was really really tall for the time, she'd
start a hunger cure until she lost the weight, and
she'd weigh herself as many as three times a day.
(08:23):
Occasionally she'd eat a lot, but that was rare. In
eighteen seventy eight, for example, she was reported to have
feasted on a meal of a hen An Italian salad,
champagne and cake. In eight one, she bought an English
country house and had a spiral staircase put in from
her living room to the kitchen I guess, presumably to
sneak down at snap down again. Yeah, And I mean,
(08:46):
I just think that the fact that these two events
are actually of note in her dietary history gives this
a real sense of her her daily meals. I mean,
hand the salad, champagne and cake. That doesn't sound like
that much through fasting, how of her wasn't nearly as
traveling to her family as her habit of tight lacing corsets.
And of course that was the style for the time,
(09:08):
but CC really took it beyond the style into really
kind of outrageous territory. Her goal waste was fifty centimeters
that's nineteen inches. Again, she is five ft eight, so
super tiny, and her pregnancies really really bothered her because
obviously nineteen inch waste is exact opposite of being pregnant.
(09:31):
And after a third pregnancy, which she really spent trying
to hide her figure, which she saw as kind of grotesque,
she finally had a son and heir named Rudolph, which
meant that she could stop having kids. She had done
her her wifely duty at last. Yeah, and she didn't
just stop having kids, she also really stopped trying to
be the empress that her mother in law had wanted
(09:52):
her to be. She'd sleep only a few hours and
stay up all night reading and writing romantic poetry. There's
an article in History today by Walter Vandreiken and Ron
Vandeth and they call this her secret diary that she
would write in. She also took up smoking, and she
eventually learned English, French, Hungarian, and modern Greek. She has
a lot of time to study, as we're going to
(10:13):
talk about in a little bit. By eighteen sixty she
also got an easy way out of her official role.
Suffering from anemia, exhaustion, and a lung complaints, Cecy's doctor
prescribed a curative trip to Madeira. This meant that she
could leave Vienna with a good reason, so sweet, it's
an excuse to get out of town. And after six
months in Madeira she was entirely recovered and returned home,
(10:37):
only to have all of the symptoms, all of the
bad health come back after just four days in Vienna.
So I think we're seeing some psychosomatic things going on here.
Um And this really started a pattern of leaving for
exotic locales like Greece or Venice or home or Spotsina
going and seeing her family in Bavaria are going to
(10:59):
austrians Os and then popping back into Vienna only occasionally.
She was away for almost two entire years between eighteen
sixty two and eighteen sixty four, and on her way
back to Vienna an unannounced trip back to Vienna, she
threw up in her carriage four times. So she did
not like living in the capital city. I think it's
(11:20):
safe to assume no, she did, but she liked keeping
her lifestyle the way it was. In order to get
fresh dairy products on her rambles, which she loved, she'd
only drink milk from her own animals. She would essentially
she'd bring along goats and sheep with her, so essentially
travel sized cows, you know, I mean basically. I think
(11:41):
her her dairy obsession is kind of interesting. I read
one thing about how at some of her estates in
Vienna she had full ranges of cow breeds to choose from,
and the cook at the confectionery would actually specify which
cow he wanted milk or cream or butter from, because
they had different flavors and different tastes. Um. But anyway,
(12:03):
moving on from that, we have to wonder what Franz
Joseph thought of his wife being gone all the time.
I mean, after all, this was a love match, so
presumably he had some affection for her. Not to mention,
she's the consort, so she has a lot of official
roles um, even though they were frequently separated from the
eighteen sixties onward fronts too. If really did stay deeply
(12:27):
in love with his wife, they write a lot of
letters to each other. He would build these palaces for
her and her far off vacation spots or sometimes close
to home, Um trying to trying to urge her to
at least be near him in Vienna or make it
easier for him to visit. He built a Pompey inspired
palace and Crafu and this forest villa outside of Vienna
(12:51):
to give her a lot of privacy, had it decorated
with frescoes from Elizabeth's favorite play, which was A Midsummer
Night's Dream and It's funny. She acknowledged the Midsummer Night's
Dream reference, but she didn't stay there very much, and
when she did, she'd sleep on a mattress on the
floor near windows so she could see the sky out
the window. Franz Joseph wasn't totally selfless in this, though
(13:13):
he did want a second son to secure his line,
though Cecy's doctors said that her health couldn't permit a
fourth pregnancy. Oddly enough, it was her growing interest in
politics that finally convinced her to have a fourth child.
As we mentioned, Cecy wasn't the best representative of monarchy,
at least from the Habsburg perspective. She thought that it
was an outdated institution, but she was really interested in
(13:36):
Hungarian politics, an interest that might have been stoked by
her possible lover, Count you La and Rassi eventually prime
Minister of Hungary and Um, We're not going to go
into that too much because there's just not that much
information on them except that they were good friends and
they both obviously had a strong interest in Hungary. But
in eighteen sixty seven, the Austro Hungarian Compromise made Franz
(14:01):
Joseph the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary,
and by extension, Elizabeth the Empress Um. And it divided
the monarchy into two halves, and each half had its
own constitution in parliament, but they were ruled by one
leader in one ministry, and because of her interest in
Hungary and its culture, she had another villa built there.
(14:22):
She'd take her kids to Budapest all the time. Cecy
became immensely popular in Hungary. She decided to eventually repay
that love of the people by having a patriotic Hungarian baby,
so one that would be born in Hungary, one that
would symbolize the alliance between the two countries. So Cecie
(14:43):
and Franz Joseph one had and had one more child,
Murray Valerie, and she was born in Budapest April eighteen
sixty eight. And this time I mean she she was
the Hungarian baby, but she was also finally Cecy's baby.
She got to raise her and be in charge of
her her bringing in her education. The death of the
Archduchess Sophie in eighteen seventy two gave cc even more
(15:05):
freedom to do as she pleased. She started entering writing
competitions as far off as England and Ireland, and she'd
be seen in public for only the biggest events, like
the World Exhibition in Vienna and the wedding of her
daughter Gizella or Franz Joseph Silver Jubilee, So things like
that barely ever in Vienna. Right when she'd travel, she'd
(15:26):
go incognito. So it's probably strange, then, for someone who's
so interested in being unknown to simultaneously be so interested
in her looks. We've already talked about CC's extreme dieting
and her exercising, but she's also associated with something that's
become known as her cult of beauty. She almost idolized
her own beauty, or at least became a slave to it.
(15:47):
Trying to live up to her own reputation. She'd be
sewn into those figure hugging clothes that we talked about
to show off her tiny waist. She'd take icy cold
showers in the morning and warm olive oil baths every evening,
and you'd wear night masks of raw veal and strawberries
for her skin, which again sounds kind of strawberry sounds nice,
raw veal not so much. She also had a lot
(16:10):
of hair. It was dark blonde when she was younger,
chestnut colored when she was older, and it was not
only really long, but really thick. If you look at
any portraits of her, pictures of her, you'll see her
with this particular hairstyle kind of curled in the front
and then just piles and piles and piles of braids,
(16:31):
and all of that hair took three hours of attention
every single day. This is when she would study languages
and philosophy and literature and history. And her hairdresser, who
would come on all of those travels, just like the
goats and the sheep, would wash her hair in what
we're called essences every three weeks, and that day was
(16:52):
just totally set aside for hair care, so she really
could say, I'm sorry, I can't go out and washing
my hair. UM. For special occasions, she would really adorn
herself and try to draw even more attention to her
beautiful hair. She'd wear the set of twenty seven specially
made diamond and pearl stars, and um, those kind of
(17:15):
became associated with Elizabeth to CC's stars they're sometimes called.
She'd give them as tokens to family members and ladies
in waiting, kind of like a calling card almost, And
even her minimal use of makeup played into her own
cult of beauty. She wanted to differentiate herself her own
natural looks, that is, from the painted ladies that she
(17:36):
saw around her from the eighteen sixties onwards. She started
to collect photos in Venice. In eighteen sixty two she
started an album specifically about beauties and broke it up
into different collections like Beauties from the East, historical beauties,
dancers and skimpy outfits. Things like that. It's hard to
think of CC as entirely vain, though she took a
(17:56):
strong interest in the poor and in particular the mentally ill,
just like her cousin Ludwig the Second. In eighteen seventy one,
her husband actually asked her what she'd like for her
Saint's Day and she said she wanted a tiger cub
and a medallion, but quote, a fully equipped lunatic asylum
would please me most. Yeah, I mean, the sounding so strange,
(18:17):
And it's important to remember, you know, when we when
we talk about all these sort of eccentric things that
she does and her own cult of beauty, just how
popular she really was. I mean, people loved her. We
talked a little bit about how much the Hungarians loved
her because she was interested in their culture and their cause,
but the Austrians really came around to her two when
(18:37):
she took care of the wounded during or after a battle,
and people just really gravitated toward her. But Cecy's life
of eccentric rambling took a dark turn when in January nine,
her son, crowned Prince Rudolph killed himself in this bizarre
murder suicide with his seventeen year old mistress. And we
(18:58):
got to talk about Rudolph just a minute here. He
was also kind of an odd ball. He believed that
his father's views were really old fashioned, and like his
mother CC, he wanted a looser court, kind of a
more liberal government. And he actually went as far as
to write articles for a leading liberal newspaper under a pseudonym,
which sounds pretty I mean, I wonder how he got
(19:22):
that role if he admitted who he was and then
said you can't use my name. But um, that's a
pretty radical thing for the crown prince to be doing.
And he also socialized with people. We we talked about
how strict that court etiquette was. He socialized with people
who were outside of his class. He had a lot
of Jewish intellectual friends, and all of this, instead of
(19:42):
making him kind of the new Guard, maybe as he
was hoping, really made him an outcast with his father
and with the aristocracy as a whole, and as a
result he was allowed no part in government and married
off to a Belgian princess and clearly deeply unhappy and disturbed,
and so he entered into a suicidal pact with the
teenage Baroness Marie Vetstra, And it's possible that he first
(20:06):
asked one of his other mistresses to take part in
the pact but was refused. So yeah, just don't get
any ideas that they were some kind of star cross lovers.
It seems like he really just wanted to be just
the one who agreed. Yeah, exactly. So the resulting deaths
were called the Marling incident, and they were a huge scandal,
and the emperor tried to cover up all the facts
(20:26):
of the case. And there was some conspiracy theory surrounding this, right, yeah,
I mean, the main one is that Rudolf didn't first
kill his lover and then commit suicide, but was in
fact murdered, and the young baroness was murdered as well
to make it look like it was a murder suicide.
That's the main theory, but there are lots of them,
(20:46):
so regardless of how it happened. C. C. Was truly
devastated by her son's staff. She took to wearing mourning
for the rest of her life. And just to give
you some context to Rudo's death wasn't just an unhappy
event in her life. It came right in the middle
of a string of family tragedies. And the first you're
familiar with because we talked about it pretty recently in
(21:09):
our Emperor Maximilian of Mexico episode. He was of course
her brother in law and was executed in eighteen sixty seven.
After that, his wife, Carlo Cha, was driven mad. Another
one we've talked about before. In eighteen six, CC's beloved cousin,
Ludwig the Second drown or died under some kind of
(21:29):
mysterious circumstances. Then in eighteen ninety six another brother in law,
Carl Ludwig, died from a parasite after drinking from the
River Jordans. And then the last blow really came in
eighteen ninety seven when Cecy's sister Sophie, who was once
a fiance of Ludvig's, died in a fire at um
(21:50):
a Paris charity bazaar. So even before some of those
later events happened, even after the death of Rudolph, Cecy
was afraid that she was going to go crazy from
all of the grief in her life, go mad, and
according to that History Today article we mentioned, she stopped
writing poetry. She kind of encouraged her husband in his
(22:12):
relationship with the actress Katerina Schrot and uh she went
on to become his main companion really for the rest
of his life. Um and Cecy kept on traveling to
going to all of those spots far away near visiting Bavaria,
just constantly on the move. As we mentioned, Cecy would
usually go incognito on these travels, staying under an assumed name.
(22:35):
But in while she was on a trip to Geneva
to visit the Baroness Julie Rothschild, the hotel owner recognized
her and so news that she was in town wound
up in the paper. This was perfect timing for a
twenty year old anarchist named Luigi Luccini who was looking
to kill someone important. His original target had been Prince
Henri di or Leone, who was supposed to visit Geneva,
(22:56):
but the prince never showed up, and so when Luccini
saw the Austro Hungarian Impress was in town. He decided
she'd make a suitable replacement, especially since she wore all
black and would be easy to spot. So in September
tenth he approached CC and her lady in waiting on
the street and stabbed her with a homemade file, And
(23:17):
initially CC didn't even realize that she had been stabbed,
because she wore such thick course that she thought she'd
just been pushed to the ground, so she got up.
She quickly walked to the ship on Lake Geneva that
she had been bound for, and at that point she
collapsed and died soon after. The file turned out to
have barely struck her heart, so the assassin was easily
(23:39):
arrested taken in and he explained how he had wanted
to kill somebody powerful and said quote, only he who
works may eat, which turned out to be a really
peculiar statement in light of CC's eating disorders. But he
also admitted that he really didn't know who she was.
He just knew that she was somebody important. He had
no no knowledge of all of her charitable deeds, her
(24:03):
trying to help mentally ill people and um the poor,
all the things that made her such a popular figure
with a lot of Europe, and Luccini wanted to be
executed as a martyr for his crime. He asked to
be killed, but he really should have picked the place
where he committed his murder a little better because the
death penalty had by that point been outlawed in Switzerland.
(24:26):
So instead he got life in prison, and he hanged
himself with a belt um many years later in nineteen ten,
supposedly after his memoirs had been confiscated, and of course
Franz Joseph was deeply upset by what had happened. When
he heard that Cec had been killed, He's supposed to
have said, quote, you have no idea how much I
(24:46):
loved this woman, And in light of all his family tragedy,
he said, quote, nothing has been spared me in this world.
So a sad end to the love story of Phronsie
and Cecy here, but 's a very mccub twist to
this story too, And he knew Da Bolina is gonna
like it because there is a preserved head waiting at
(25:08):
the end of this podcast for all of us. So
for eighty seven years after Elizabeth's death, Geneva's morgue contained
the decapitated head of the assassin Luigi Luccini, and in
the nineteen eighties the head, which was preserved in formaldehyde,
was sent to Austria. And there's a dot the New
York Times article from the eighties UM that quotes a
(25:32):
doctor old Rich Freik, who was the chief of Geneva's
Institute of Legal Medicine. He said, quote, personally, I am
happy we are rid of it. You could keep it
for two hundred or three hundred years like that. I
had wanted to dispose of it, perhaps make a mass
casting of the faith, but the Austrians wanted it, perhaps
to see a piece of history of the Austro Hungarian Empire.
(25:56):
Gets weirder than that, though, because just a few years
after the swap, it seemed like everybody had forgotten how
the head got from Geneva to Austria in the first place.
There's an article I found from the Lancet in the
late nineties, and the head was by that point at
the Museum of Pathology, and it was just a total
puzzle to everyone how it had gotten there. UM. Carl Hlobar,
(26:20):
who was the chairman of the Institute for the History
of Medicine, figured quote the Swiss probably thought, my god,
what do we do with this? We'll give it to Austria,
So I like that. Um, they kind of assumed that
the Swiss didn't want the head and figured Austria would,
And really Austria did want the head. And I would
(26:41):
just like to point out that I'm not the only
one in the studio who was interested in head. I know,
I think you started, you started the trend there. So
unlike Ned Kelly's head that we discussed a few episodes ago,
no one wanted this creepy experimented on head of Luccini.
The Pathology Museum direct after at the time or curator
at the time even said that the head was quote
(27:03):
of no scientific worth and they've been trying to get
permission to have it intern for years and that finally
happened in two thousands. And you know why it happened.
Why because people kept on coming to the museum because
Emperor cc is still so popular. People would come, like
on the day she was assassinated and try to see
the head. And one of the stipulations of the head
(27:24):
being transferred to Austria was that it would not be
on public view because that's just too gross and creepy.
It's it's I mean a head and formaldehyde come on
with that in the stipulation that this, I mean, this
is gross and creepy and you can't do it. Those
are That's my interpretation of the transfer. So I think
closing with that head pretty much wraps up the story
(27:45):
of um CC's murderer's death. But um I mean I
wanted to talk a little bit more about who she
was and the things that made her so unusual for
her time. How strange it is that those things are
are common now or or not unusual at all. The
extreme dieting, the exercising, the being obsessed with her hair
(28:08):
and aging and losing her beauty, all things that just
a few decades later really wouldn't make her stand out
at all, wouldn't have been a big deal. And yeah,
that's a good point. She once wrote to her daughter
Marie Valerie quote, marriage is a nonsensical institution. One is
sold off as a fifteen year old child, taking an
(28:28):
oath that one does not understand, cannot revoke, and then
regrets for thirty years or more. I just thought that
was an interesting quote to end on, because you know,
after we told this whole story about the love story
with Franz Joseph. It gives you a different idea of
how she felt when she got married. Yeah, that they
had very different opinions of their relationship together. So Ceci
(28:50):
ended up kind of being the poster girl for the
Habsburgs weirdly enough, even though she is almost totally counter
to what the family is about. But if you want
to sit st any other Hatsburg family members were game.
I think we got a pretty positive response for covering
Maximilian another famous passport. So yeah, go ahead and write
us were at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(29:13):
You can also find us on Twitter at mist in history,
and we are on Facebook too. And if you want
to find out a little bit more about one of
CC's favorite garments or undergarments, I should say, you can
look up an article on our website called how Corselet's
work and you can find that by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(29:37):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Scared Dowdy and I'm Delaney Chocolate Boarding. And I'm
sure everyone who's listened to the podcast for a while
knows that one of my favorite subjects ever is Ludvig,
(00:24):
the second of Bavaria. He just to recap for you,
since I don't talk about him enough. He's a Wagner
super fan. He built all of those Disney castles, which
are really more the inspiration for Disney castles than anything.
And he died a very mysterious death, which is always
good for a podcast subject at least. But after that
episode on Livig aired, a lot of listeners started writing
(00:47):
in to suggest that we cover another member of the
Vittelsbach family, Ludvig's cousin and his best friend, the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria, who is better known as Empress c
And Cecy is really considered a prime example of Vittelsbach eccentricity,
but she's also considered, interestingly enough, a prime representative of
(01:11):
the family. She married into the Habsburgs, and that's pretty
ironic because Cecy wasn't really a very good Habsburg at all. No,
she wasn't. She was headstrong, introverted, and she preferred corefud
to Vienna. She believed monarchical government was obsolete, and worst
of all, for Habsburg matriarch, she was more interested in
tight laced corsets than having lots of babies. Yet she's
(01:34):
often considered the favorite Habsburg and even the original people's princess,
because she was so popular with her subjects. And you'll
notice a lot of Princess Diana similarities here. At the
one anniversary of her death, obviously a long time after
the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire, you could find
her lovely picture on mugs and kitchy souvenirs, and there's
(01:54):
even a CCI museum in Vienna. Mattel even made a
CC barbie for the European market. So we've got to ask,
what is it about this Habsburg empress, on this vittels
Buck odd ball essentially that continues to fascinate people enough
to make a barbie out of her. So Cecy's life
story is often told with this sort of fairy princess
(02:14):
kind of spin, and a lot of that started because
of these movies that came out in the nineteen fifties
that really presented her as the perfect fairy tale young
princess who has an idyllic childhood, meets her prince, lives
happily ever after. Um, but if you stop at age fifteen,
that really does kind of fit her her actual life story.
(02:35):
She was born Elizabeth amily Eugenie at a castle on
Lake Starnberg on Christmas Eve eighteen thirty seven, and she
was the daughter of the Bavarian Duke Maximilian Joseph and
Princess Lodovica, who was the vittels Buck, daughter of the
Bavarian King. And she I know that sounds like an
illustrious background, and it is, but she grew up in
(02:58):
a more rural setting than you'd expect. She grew up
horseback riding, hunting with her father, mountain climbing, doing charity
work like visiting peasants, all again kind of princess, the
sort of sounding things. And she really was a country
sort of princess, with this relaxed, loving family, a lot
of siblings and a very close environment she grew up in.
(03:20):
But she was also really pretty. She was considered to
be the most beautiful princess in Europe in fact, so
it's no surprise that in August eighteen fifty three, her
twenty three year old cousin, Franz Joseph, fell in love
with her. And now Franz Joseph had become Emperor of
Austria at age eighteen after his uncle abdicated and his
father was skipped over to reboot the monarchy with a
new youthful leader. But in eighteen fifty three assassination attempt
(03:43):
made it imperative that he get a family going, and
so his mother, Sophie, decided she wanted to keep things
in the family. She really wanted to set Franz Joseph
up with her sister Ludovika's daughter Helene, and invited the
ladies to summer getaway. It seemed like it would be
a good man. Helene was extremely religious, she was dutiful,
probably would have made a good match for hard working
(04:05):
Franz Joseph. But Ludovica fatefully brought along her younger daughter too,
so Elizabeth was there and Franz Joseph fell for her
instead of Helene. Yeah, and they ended up announcing their
engagement before they even left. The little country retreat, and
Ceci is supposed to have said at least some of
the following foreboding gems. I mean, you can, I guess,
(04:26):
pick whichever one you like the best. She is supposed
to have said, I'm so fond of the emperor. If
only he were not an emperor. That doesn't sound very good. Uh,
one doesn't turn down an emperor again, kind of scary
funding And oh, if only he were a tailor, which
that's just kind of funny. That one does sound pretty funny.
(04:47):
I don't know if we should dig it too lightly, though,
because cc did, of course later become one of the
most famous clients of the legendary couturier Charles Frederick Worth.
So she did like clothes. Maybe a tailor would have
been a good match. But whatever she's specifically said, it
seems likely that fifteen year old cecy knew that she
was going to have a really hard time being Empress
(05:09):
of Austria, and trouble really started almost immediately for them.
Even the couple's honeymoon was cut short since Franz Joseph
would have to ride back to Vienna every morning to
deal with the Crimean war, so it was sort of
a choppy honeymoon, I guess with him going back and forth.
Once installed at court, Cecy did her best to perform
her duties, but she found the formality they're compared to
(05:31):
Bavaria just terrible. At the time. To be in the
top tier at court, you had to prove unbroken descent
from sixteen ancestors in the upper nobility, eight paternal and
eight maternal lapses or marriages into the lesser nobility or
middle classes were only acceptable if they occurred before the
great great grandparents generation. So just to show you how
(05:52):
strict that's just getting into court, you can imagine the
kind of rules that regulate court once you're really there.
So Cecy did make attempts to loosen up the etiquette
a little bit, try to modernize it some, but she
was only met with disapproval from her mother in law,
the arch Duchess Sophie, who also started to censure her
(06:12):
daughter in law about her constant horseback riding. She would
take lots of horseback riding lessons and the fact that
she'd go out riding without chaperones, which her mother in
law thought was kind of unseemly but also a little
bit dangerous. So cc you know, this young teenager starts
to get pretty stressed out, not just from being away
from home now, but because of stressful court life in
(06:34):
Vienna and all this pressure from her mother in law
about how to act, and eventually she starts to get
sort of sick. She'd have these panics about going down long,
steep stairs, and she'd have coughing fits, and she'd suffer
from what people considered classic Little Spock melancholy. If you've
listened to the Ludwig episode, you know all about that.
(06:55):
And things really only got worse when her first baby
arrived only ten months after the wedding. She named her Sophie,
after friends Joseph's mother, and that was a name that
fit because the baby basically belonged to the Archduchess. Cec
was not allowed to play any part in its care
and education and was truly upset about that. And she
(07:18):
wasn't involved in the upbringing of her next daughter either, Gizella.
But she really fell into a new level of depression
when baby Sophie died in eighteen fifty seven, um Cec
stopped eating. She turned to these fasting cures where she'd
live on light meals of milk or eggs or what
(07:39):
sounds really terrible, raw beef juice served as a soup
um just trying to deal with her her depression in
in this way, and these mood related fast were just
the beginning for Cec. Today, many historians looking back at
her habits believe that she suffered from anorexia and also
exercise to excess. She'd ride for hours or in later
(08:00):
years ago on these long brisk walks. She took up
fencing and had gymnasiums installed in all of her palaces
so that she could work out whenever she wanted. If
her weight crept above fifty kilows or about one and
ten pounds, and she was five eight, so just keep
that she was really really tall for the time, she'd
start a hunger cure until she lost the weight, and
she'd weigh herself as many as three times a day.
(08:23):
Occasionally she'd eat a lot, but that was rare. In
eighteen seventy eight, for example, she was reported to have
feasted on a meal of a hen An Italian salad,
champagne and cake. In eight one, she bought an English
country house and had a spiral staircase put in from
her living room to the kitchen I guess, presumably to
sneak down at snap down again. Yeah, And I mean,
(08:46):
I just think that the fact that these two events
are actually of note in her dietary history gives this
a real sense of her her daily meals. I mean,
hand the salad, champagne and cake. That doesn't sound like
that much through fasting, how of her wasn't nearly as
traveling to her family as her habit of tight lacing corsets.
And of course that was the style for the time,
(09:08):
but CC really took it beyond the style into really
kind of outrageous territory. Her goal waste was fifty centimeters
that's nineteen inches. Again, she is five ft eight, so
super tiny, and her pregnancies really really bothered her because
obviously nineteen inch waste is exact opposite of being pregnant.
(09:31):
And after a third pregnancy, which she really spent trying
to hide her figure, which she saw as kind of grotesque,
she finally had a son and heir named Rudolph, which
meant that she could stop having kids. She had done
her her wifely duty at last. Yeah, and she didn't
just stop having kids, she also really stopped trying to
be the empress that her mother in law had wanted
(09:52):
her to be. She'd sleep only a few hours and
stay up all night reading and writing romantic poetry. There's
an article in History today by Walter Vandreiken and Ron
Vandeth and they call this her secret diary that she
would write in. She also took up smoking, and she
eventually learned English, French, Hungarian, and modern Greek. She has
a lot of time to study, as we're going to
(10:13):
talk about in a little bit. By eighteen sixty she
also got an easy way out of her official role.
Suffering from anemia, exhaustion, and a lung complaints, Cecy's doctor
prescribed a curative trip to Madeira. This meant that she
could leave Vienna with a good reason, so sweet, it's
an excuse to get out of town. And after six
months in Madeira she was entirely recovered and returned home,
(10:37):
only to have all of the symptoms, all of the
bad health come back after just four days in Vienna.
So I think we're seeing some psychosomatic things going on here.
Um And this really started a pattern of leaving for
exotic locales like Greece or Venice or home or Spotsina
going and seeing her family in Bavaria are going to
(10:59):
austrians Os and then popping back into Vienna only occasionally.
She was away for almost two entire years between eighteen
sixty two and eighteen sixty four, and on her way
back to Vienna an unannounced trip back to Vienna, she
threw up in her carriage four times. So she did
not like living in the capital city. I think it's
(11:20):
safe to assume no, she did, but she liked keeping
her lifestyle the way it was. In order to get
fresh dairy products on her rambles, which she loved, she'd
only drink milk from her own animals. She would essentially
she'd bring along goats and sheep with her, so essentially
travel sized cows, you know, I mean basically. I think
(11:41):
her her dairy obsession is kind of interesting. I read
one thing about how at some of her estates in
Vienna she had full ranges of cow breeds to choose from,
and the cook at the confectionery would actually specify which
cow he wanted milk or cream or butter from, because
they had different flavors and different tastes. Um. But anyway,
(12:03):
moving on from that, we have to wonder what Franz
Joseph thought of his wife being gone all the time.
I mean, after all, this was a love match, so
presumably he had some affection for her. Not to mention,
she's the consort, so she has a lot of official
roles um, even though they were frequently separated from the
eighteen sixties onward fronts too. If really did stay deeply
(12:27):
in love with his wife, they write a lot of
letters to each other. He would build these palaces for
her and her far off vacation spots or sometimes close
to home, Um trying to trying to urge her to
at least be near him in Vienna or make it
easier for him to visit. He built a Pompey inspired
palace and Crafu and this forest villa outside of Vienna
(12:51):
to give her a lot of privacy, had it decorated
with frescoes from Elizabeth's favorite play, which was A Midsummer
Night's Dream and It's funny. She acknowledged the Midsummer Night's
Dream reference, but she didn't stay there very much, and
when she did, she'd sleep on a mattress on the
floor near windows so she could see the sky out
the window. Franz Joseph wasn't totally selfless in this, though
(13:13):
he did want a second son to secure his line,
though Cecy's doctors said that her health couldn't permit a
fourth pregnancy. Oddly enough, it was her growing interest in
politics that finally convinced her to have a fourth child.
As we mentioned, Cecy wasn't the best representative of monarchy,
at least from the Habsburg perspective. She thought that it
was an outdated institution, but she was really interested in
(13:36):
Hungarian politics, an interest that might have been stoked by
her possible lover, Count you La and Rassi eventually prime
Minister of Hungary and Um, We're not going to go
into that too much because there's just not that much
information on them except that they were good friends and
they both obviously had a strong interest in Hungary. But
in eighteen sixty seven, the Austro Hungarian Compromise made Franz
(14:01):
Joseph the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary,
and by extension, Elizabeth the Empress Um. And it divided
the monarchy into two halves, and each half had its
own constitution in parliament, but they were ruled by one
leader in one ministry, and because of her interest in
Hungary and its culture, she had another villa built there.
(14:22):
She'd take her kids to Budapest all the time. Cecy
became immensely popular in Hungary. She decided to eventually repay
that love of the people by having a patriotic Hungarian baby,
so one that would be born in Hungary, one that
would symbolize the alliance between the two countries. So Cecie
(14:43):
and Franz Joseph one had and had one more child,
Murray Valerie, and she was born in Budapest April eighteen
sixty eight. And this time I mean she she was
the Hungarian baby, but she was also finally Cecy's baby.
She got to raise her and be in charge of
her her bringing in her education. The death of the
Archduchess Sophie in eighteen seventy two gave cc even more
(15:05):
freedom to do as she pleased. She started entering writing
competitions as far off as England and Ireland, and she'd
be seen in public for only the biggest events, like
the World Exhibition in Vienna and the wedding of her
daughter Gizella or Franz Joseph Silver Jubilee, So things like
that barely ever in Vienna. Right when she'd travel, she'd
(15:26):
go incognito. So it's probably strange, then, for someone who's
so interested in being unknown to simultaneously be so interested
in her looks. We've already talked about CC's extreme dieting
and her exercising, but she's also associated with something that's
become known as her cult of beauty. She almost idolized
her own beauty, or at least became a slave to it.
(15:47):
Trying to live up to her own reputation. She'd be
sewn into those figure hugging clothes that we talked about
to show off her tiny waist. She'd take icy cold
showers in the morning and warm olive oil baths every evening,
and you'd wear night masks of raw veal and strawberries
for her skin, which again sounds kind of strawberry sounds nice,
raw veal not so much. She also had a lot
(16:10):
of hair. It was dark blonde when she was younger,
chestnut colored when she was older, and it was not
only really long, but really thick. If you look at
any portraits of her, pictures of her, you'll see her
with this particular hairstyle kind of curled in the front
and then just piles and piles and piles of braids,
(16:31):
and all of that hair took three hours of attention
every single day. This is when she would study languages
and philosophy and literature and history. And her hairdresser, who
would come on all of those travels, just like the
goats and the sheep, would wash her hair in what
we're called essences every three weeks, and that day was
(16:52):
just totally set aside for hair care, so she really
could say, I'm sorry, I can't go out and washing
my hair. UM. For special occasions, she would really adorn
herself and try to draw even more attention to her
beautiful hair. She'd wear the set of twenty seven specially
made diamond and pearl stars, and um, those kind of
(17:15):
became associated with Elizabeth to CC's stars they're sometimes called.
She'd give them as tokens to family members and ladies
in waiting, kind of like a calling card almost, And
even her minimal use of makeup played into her own
cult of beauty. She wanted to differentiate herself her own
natural looks, that is, from the painted ladies that she
(17:36):
saw around her from the eighteen sixties onwards. She started
to collect photos in Venice. In eighteen sixty two she
started an album specifically about beauties and broke it up
into different collections like Beauties from the East, historical beauties,
dancers and skimpy outfits. Things like that. It's hard to
think of CC as entirely vain, though she took a
(17:56):
strong interest in the poor and in particular the mentally ill,
just like her cousin Ludwig the Second. In eighteen seventy one,
her husband actually asked her what she'd like for her
Saint's Day and she said she wanted a tiger cub
and a medallion, but quote, a fully equipped lunatic asylum
would please me most. Yeah, I mean, the sounding so strange,
(18:17):
And it's important to remember, you know, when we when
we talk about all these sort of eccentric things that
she does and her own cult of beauty, just how
popular she really was. I mean, people loved her. We
talked a little bit about how much the Hungarians loved
her because she was interested in their culture and their cause,
but the Austrians really came around to her two when
(18:37):
she took care of the wounded during or after a battle,
and people just really gravitated toward her. But Cecy's life
of eccentric rambling took a dark turn when in January nine,
her son, crowned Prince Rudolph killed himself in this bizarre
murder suicide with his seventeen year old mistress. And we
(18:58):
got to talk about Rudolph just a minute here. He
was also kind of an odd ball. He believed that
his father's views were really old fashioned, and like his
mother CC, he wanted a looser court, kind of a
more liberal government. And he actually went as far as
to write articles for a leading liberal newspaper under a pseudonym,
which sounds pretty I mean, I wonder how he got
(19:22):
that role if he admitted who he was and then
said you can't use my name. But um, that's a
pretty radical thing for the crown prince to be doing.
And he also socialized with people. We we talked about
how strict that court etiquette was. He socialized with people
who were outside of his class. He had a lot
of Jewish intellectual friends, and all of this, instead of
(19:42):
making him kind of the new Guard, maybe as he
was hoping, really made him an outcast with his father
and with the aristocracy as a whole, and as a
result he was allowed no part in government and married
off to a Belgian princess and clearly deeply unhappy and disturbed,
and so he entered into a suicidal pact with the
teenage Baroness Marie Vetstra, And it's possible that he first
(20:06):
asked one of his other mistresses to take part in
the pact but was refused. So yeah, just don't get
any ideas that they were some kind of star cross lovers.
It seems like he really just wanted to be just
the one who agreed. Yeah, exactly. So the resulting deaths
were called the Marling incident, and they were a huge scandal,
and the emperor tried to cover up all the facts
(20:26):
of the case. And there was some conspiracy theory surrounding this, right, yeah,
I mean, the main one is that Rudolf didn't first
kill his lover and then commit suicide, but was in
fact murdered, and the young baroness was murdered as well
to make it look like it was a murder suicide.
That's the main theory, but there are lots of them,
(20:46):
so regardless of how it happened. C. C. Was truly
devastated by her son's staff. She took to wearing mourning
for the rest of her life. And just to give
you some context to Rudo's death wasn't just an unhappy
event in her life. It came right in the middle
of a string of family tragedies. And the first you're
familiar with because we talked about it pretty recently in
(21:09):
our Emperor Maximilian of Mexico episode. He was of course
her brother in law and was executed in eighteen sixty seven.
After that, his wife, Carlo Cha, was driven mad. Another
one we've talked about before. In eighteen six, CC's beloved cousin,
Ludwig the Second drown or died under some kind of
(21:29):
mysterious circumstances. Then in eighteen ninety six another brother in law,
Carl Ludwig, died from a parasite after drinking from the
River Jordans. And then the last blow really came in
eighteen ninety seven when Cecy's sister Sophie, who was once
a fiance of Ludvig's, died in a fire at um
(21:50):
a Paris charity bazaar. So even before some of those
later events happened, even after the death of Rudolph, Cecy
was afraid that she was going to go crazy from
all of the grief in her life, go mad, and
according to that History Today article we mentioned, she stopped
writing poetry. She kind of encouraged her husband in his
(22:12):
relationship with the actress Katerina Schrot and uh she went
on to become his main companion really for the rest
of his life. Um and Cecy kept on traveling to
going to all of those spots far away near visiting Bavaria,
just constantly on the move. As we mentioned, Cecy would
usually go incognito on these travels, staying under an assumed name.
(22:35):
But in while she was on a trip to Geneva
to visit the Baroness Julie Rothschild, the hotel owner recognized
her and so news that she was in town wound
up in the paper. This was perfect timing for a
twenty year old anarchist named Luigi Luccini who was looking
to kill someone important. His original target had been Prince
Henri di or Leone, who was supposed to visit Geneva,
(22:56):
but the prince never showed up, and so when Luccini
saw the Austro Hungarian Impress was in town. He decided
she'd make a suitable replacement, especially since she wore all
black and would be easy to spot. So in September
tenth he approached CC and her lady in waiting on
the street and stabbed her with a homemade file, And
(23:17):
initially CC didn't even realize that she had been stabbed,
because she wore such thick course that she thought she'd
just been pushed to the ground, so she got up.
She quickly walked to the ship on Lake Geneva that
she had been bound for, and at that point she
collapsed and died soon after. The file turned out to
have barely struck her heart, so the assassin was easily
(23:39):
arrested taken in and he explained how he had wanted
to kill somebody powerful and said quote, only he who
works may eat, which turned out to be a really
peculiar statement in light of CC's eating disorders. But he
also admitted that he really didn't know who she was.
He just knew that she was somebody important. He had
no no knowledge of all of her charitable deeds, her
(24:03):
trying to help mentally ill people and um the poor,
all the things that made her such a popular figure
with a lot of Europe, and Luccini wanted to be
executed as a martyr for his crime. He asked to
be killed, but he really should have picked the place
where he committed his murder a little better because the
death penalty had by that point been outlawed in Switzerland.
(24:26):
So instead he got life in prison, and he hanged
himself with a belt um many years later in nineteen ten,
supposedly after his memoirs had been confiscated, and of course
Franz Joseph was deeply upset by what had happened. When
he heard that Cec had been killed, He's supposed to
have said, quote, you have no idea how much I
(24:46):
loved this woman, And in light of all his family tragedy,
he said, quote, nothing has been spared me in this world.
So a sad end to the love story of Phronsie
and Cecy here, but 's a very mccub twist to
this story too, And he knew Da Bolina is gonna
like it because there is a preserved head waiting at
(25:08):
the end of this podcast for all of us. So
for eighty seven years after Elizabeth's death, Geneva's morgue contained
the decapitated head of the assassin Luigi Luccini, and in
the nineteen eighties the head, which was preserved in formaldehyde,
was sent to Austria. And there's a dot the New
York Times article from the eighties UM that quotes a
(25:32):
doctor old Rich Freik, who was the chief of Geneva's
Institute of Legal Medicine. He said, quote, personally, I am
happy we are rid of it. You could keep it
for two hundred or three hundred years like that. I
had wanted to dispose of it, perhaps make a mass
casting of the faith, but the Austrians wanted it, perhaps
to see a piece of history of the Austro Hungarian Empire.
(25:56):
Gets weirder than that, though, because just a few years
after the swap, it seemed like everybody had forgotten how
the head got from Geneva to Austria in the first place.
There's an article I found from the Lancet in the
late nineties, and the head was by that point at
the Museum of Pathology, and it was just a total
puzzle to everyone how it had gotten there. UM. Carl Hlobar,
(26:20):
who was the chairman of the Institute for the History
of Medicine, figured quote the Swiss probably thought, my god,
what do we do with this? We'll give it to Austria,
So I like that. Um, they kind of assumed that
the Swiss didn't want the head and figured Austria would,
And really Austria did want the head. And I would
(26:41):
just like to point out that I'm not the only
one in the studio who was interested in head. I know,
I think you started, you started the trend there. So
unlike Ned Kelly's head that we discussed a few episodes ago,
no one wanted this creepy experimented on head of Luccini.
The Pathology Museum direct after at the time or curator
at the time even said that the head was quote
(27:03):
of no scientific worth and they've been trying to get
permission to have it intern for years and that finally
happened in two thousands. And you know why it happened.
Why because people kept on coming to the museum because
Emperor cc is still so popular. People would come, like
on the day she was assassinated and try to see
the head. And one of the stipulations of the head
(27:24):
being transferred to Austria was that it would not be
on public view because that's just too gross and creepy.
It's it's I mean a head and formaldehyde come on
with that in the stipulation that this, I mean, this
is gross and creepy and you can't do it. Those
are That's my interpretation of the transfer. So I think
closing with that head pretty much wraps up the story
(27:45):
of um CC's murderer's death. But um I mean I
wanted to talk a little bit more about who she
was and the things that made her so unusual for
her time. How strange it is that those things are
are common now or or not unusual at all. The
extreme dieting, the exercising, the being obsessed with her hair
(28:08):
and aging and losing her beauty, all things that just
a few decades later really wouldn't make her stand out
at all, wouldn't have been a big deal. And yeah,
that's a good point. She once wrote to her daughter
Marie Valerie quote, marriage is a nonsensical institution. One is
sold off as a fifteen year old child, taking an
(28:28):
oath that one does not understand, cannot revoke, and then
regrets for thirty years or more. I just thought that
was an interesting quote to end on, because you know,
after we told this whole story about the love story
with Franz Joseph. It gives you a different idea of
how she felt when she got married. Yeah, that they
had very different opinions of their relationship together. So Ceci
(28:50):
ended up kind of being the poster girl for the
Habsburgs weirdly enough, even though she is almost totally counter
to what the family is about. But if you want
to sit st any other Hatsburg family members were game.
I think we got a pretty positive response for covering
Maximilian another famous passport. So yeah, go ahead and write
us were at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(29:13):
You can also find us on Twitter at mist in history,
and we are on Facebook too. And if you want
to find out a little bit more about one of
CC's favorite garments or undergarments, I should say, you can
look up an article on our website called how Corselet's
work and you can find that by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(29:37):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
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The Bobby Bones Show
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