Archduke Franz Ferdinand
The Austro-Hungarian heir whose assassination triggered World War I, and who, in bitter irony, was the empire's leading advocate for its Slavs.
The man whose murder started the First World War was, by a cruel irony, one of the few figures in Vienna who might have held the Austro-Hungarian Empire together by reforming it. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, wanted to loosen the empire's grip on its restless Slavs, not tighten it. The Serbian nationalists who shot him in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 understood this perfectly. It was part of why they wanted him dead.
The reformer
Franz Ferdinand was not a warm man. Those around him found him suspicious, short-tempered, and rigid. But he had a clear diagnosis of the empire's disease. The 1867 compromise that split power between German-speaking Austrians and Hungarians had left the Slavs, roughly half the population, without a real voice, and their resentment was pulling the state apart. His circle floated schemes to fix it, most strikingly the idea of a United States of Greater Austria, drafted by the Romanian jurist Aurel Popovici in 1906, which would have recut the monarchy into some fifteen ethnically based states under the crown. For Serbian nationalists this was not a hope but a threat. Their own dream was to gather the South Slavs into a Serb-led kingdom, and a Habsburg Empire that gave its Slavs a comfortable, autonomous home might drain that dream of its urgency. The heir who wanted to accommodate the Slavs was, to men like Gavrilo Princip, the most dangerous kind of ruler.
The marriage the court despised
Franz Ferdinand had already defied Vienna once, for love. In 1900 he married Sophie Chotek, a Bohemian countess judged too lowly for a future emperor. The union was permitted only as a morganatic one: he had to swear that any children would never inherit the throne, and Sophie was denied the rank, the titles, and the seat beside him that a wife should have had. A military inspection in Sarajevo, where court protocol relaxed, was one of the rare occasions she could ride openly at his side. The date chosen for the visit, June 28, was Vidovdan, St Vitus's Day, sacred to Serbs as the anniversary of their medieval defeat at Kosovo, which made an imperial parade through the city an affront in nationalist eyes. Sophie was shot in the car beside him and died within minutes; his reported last words were a plea for her to live for their children.
The pretext
Whatever Franz Ferdinand might have done for the empire alive, his corpse was more useful to its hawks. The war party in Vienna, led by the chief of staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, had wanted a reckoning with Serbia for years. The assassination handed them their pretext, and the ultimatum that followed was written to be rejected. Within weeks the alliance system dragged in Russia, Germany, France, and Britain. Historians still weigh the counterfactual. Had the car not stopped in front of Princip, had Franz Ferdinand lived to take the throne, the empire might have bent toward federation rather than shattered in war. Instead the one Habsburg who wanted to give the Slavs a place died at the hands of a Slav who feared he might succeed.