The three accused of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder that changed the World By Greg King and Sue Woolmans, Macmillan, £20

Franz Ferdinand was a complex character. Although often projected as a moustachioed militaristic buffoon, he dreamt of a US-style federation to solve the Austro-Hungarian empire’s challenge of diverse ethnicities and competing national identities. The historian, Samuel Williamson, noted that although his death “became the pretext for war”, he “had acted as brake on the pressures for military action”. The greatest constant in his life was the devotion he and Sophie had for each other and for their three children. That makes this book one of the greatest love stories in the world.

The assassination’s momentous consequences tend to overshadow the romance. The two bullets that Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, fired splintered the Habsburg empire into the many fragments that continue to bedevil the Balkans a century later. The chain of events unleashed by his death also sounded the death knell of the Romanov and Ottoman empires. “Without Sarajevo,” Greg King and Sue Woolmans ask, perhaps stretching a point but only slightly, “would there have been a Russian Revolution, a Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, a Second World War, or a Cold War?”

That can’t be substantiated without exploring events in half-a-dozen other countries. But the authors have produced a compelling and readable account of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire that projects the human story behind the larger political issue. They examine the love affair between Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, and Sophie Chotek, a Bohemian countess of ancient lineage whom Emperor Franz Josef nevertheless refused to regard as the equal of the Habsburgs, in meticulous detail to highlight the tremendous courage the two principals demonstrated. They draw on private archives that were not open to earlier historians. King and Woolmans also talked to the descendants, styled Hohenberg, of the morganatic marriage and describe how Franz Ferdinand’s two sons were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. Their sister, Sophie, provides the book with a short but moving foreword.

Karl, the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, formally brought the Hohenbergs back into the imperial family. Being 27 at the time of the assassinations, he must have been well acquainted with Franz Ferdinand and his family to whom he showed courtesy and consideration in defiance of the Viennese court. The latter’s undisguised hostility is the mystery at the heart of this tale. The authors avoid apportioning blame but two things emerge with startling clarity. First, the First World War didn’t need the catalyst of Sarajevo. As Bismarck had predicted, “Some damn foolish thing in the Balkans” would cause a conflagration sooner or later. Slav aspirations, Austro-Hungarian megalomania and Russian ambitions (not to mention Anglo-French stratagems) were bound to ignite the flames of war. But that doesn’t mean there was any truth in Allied propaganda about Sophie’s ambitions driving Franz Ferdinand to plot and plan war with Kaiser Wilhelm. The second ominous suggestion is of a coalescence of interests between Austrian reaction and Slav revolution. Franz Josef disliked Franz Ferdinand and mistrusted his political views. He had no option but to accept him as heir after Crown Prince Rudolf committed suicide with his mistress. But he did so with ill grace and never ceased to heap humiliations on his heir and, even more, on his heir’s despised wife.

Hence, the conspiracy theories. It’s still not clear who planned the fatal visit to Sarajevo on a day on which “every Serb vowed revenge” against intruders because it marked the 1389 battle of Kosovo which made Serbia a Turkish vassal. Explicit death warnings were ignored, rudimentary precautions neglected. Franz Josef ordered no investigation into what had gone wrong. Nor did he punish officials whose negligence helped the conspirators. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a fool if not a knave, was commended instead of being reprimanded.

For once, the tragic hero isn’t the emperor whose world crumbled around him and who is believed to have lamented “I am spared nothing” (which the authors don’t believe). He emerges as a mean old diehard, politically unyielding, ungenerous in personal relationships, incapable of understanding anything new, and the worst enemy of the exalted institution he symbolized. He received the news of Sarajevo with relief, believing the murders solved his problem of dynastic protocol. The hero of the tale is the archduke whose last mumbled words as the blood trickled from his mouth were “Sopher! Sopher! Don’t die! Live for our children!” Hearing them, one of the conspirators, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, regretted his deed and asked for forgiveness. The two older children did forgive Cabrinovic in a letter that a Jesuit priest delivered to his prison cell. King and Woolmans tell the story well but two drawbacks deserve mention. A more detailed family tree tracing the descent from Franz Josef and his siblings would have added to clarity. Second, Sophie’s personality could have been drawn more boldly.