Archduke Franz Ferdinand and You

100 years ago on June 28 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was murdered in Sarajevo, launching into motion events that led to The Great War.

Everything about our modern world can, perhaps, be tied back to the assassination of both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved morganic pregnant wife Sophia.

Did it have to happen?

Does it matter?

It happened, the Great War occurred and your life is different as a result. Click to Tweet

(Mine exists; you’ll have to read my post coming up on August 5, 2014 to find out why and how.)

Serbia had been a restless part of the Austro-Hungarian kingdom for, oh, about 600 years. Eleven years earlier, Serbian nationalists had broken into the royal palace and killed the ruling King Alexander Obrenović and his wife, Queen Draga, in what became known as the May Coup.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie

Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself was not a particularly popular fellow in either Austria or Serbia, but he and his wife traveled there anyway on a vacation. The deeply religious Catholic couple had attended mass that fateful morning and were riding in an open car to the town hall.

A Serbian nationalist threw a pocket bomb at the couple, but the driver saw it coming and swerved to miss. It fell inches behind the royal couple, Archduke Franz Ferdinand shoved it away and it exploded as the car zoomed away. Several people were injured.

Among the people lining the streets that day were a group of six young men of the “Black Hand” who had traveled to Sarajevo specifically to kill the Archduke. Despondent about missing their chance, they wandered away, one into a tea shop.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie continued with their planned outing, stopping at the town hall for a ceremonial welcome–the mayor read his script which mentioned how delighted everyone in Sarajevo was about the couple’s visit.

Franz Ferdinand & Sophie Leave Sarajevo Guildhall

 As the doting father of four children, Franz Ferdinand  insisted on being taken to the hospital to visit the people injured in the attempted bomb assassination. The Bosnian military governor assured him there would be no further trouble,  claiming “if I know anything about the Serb fanatics, they are capable of only one assassination attempt a day.”

Unfortunately, the chauffeur got lost driving them to the hospital. When the governor realized his error, he stopped the driver and told him to turn around.

The driver shifted gears, but while doing so “in a coincidence that has reverberated down the decades,” according to G. J. Meyer in The Story of the Great War, he stopped right in front of Gavrilo Princip. The one Black Hand assassin who had not been arrested already and the leader of the gang, pulled out his revolver and fired twice.

He got both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. The Archduke was heard to cry, “Sophie dear; Sophie dear, don’t die. Stay alive for our children.”

They were both dead within minutes.

Princip died in prison of tuberculosis nearly four years later.

What does Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s death have to do with you? Click to Tweet

More than you know.

The Great War shook up Europe and took a wealthy continent and fire blasted it to ruins. When it finally ground to what the French consider a long cease fire and the Germans regard as the middle of the European Civil War, the Spanish flu killed 50 million people world-wide. Out of those grim ashes came American super power notions as the saviors of the world and ultimately, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

You don’t think any of that affected your life?

I’ve been reading World War I history since February, 2013. It’s a continuing source of agony to read about all the small events that led to the big one. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was on vacation in a Scandinavian fjord and unreachable. The nervous heads of Europe had treaties requiring them to come to the aid of other nations. Once the Russian tsar called up his reservists, there was no going back–it took a week for them to get into place and in those years of stick telephones and Morse Code telegrams, the soldiers could not be recalled and returned home.

(For another way to understand what happened to start the war, consider If World War I was a bar fight.)

As a result of the Great War:

*the United States became a major player in international affairs–we were an isolationist nation before.

* The center of world banking shifted from London to New York.

* France lost so many men and so much of their industrial capabilities were destroyed, they had little ability or much less enthusiasm to fight World War II.

* Germany was so bankrupted paying reparations, the National Socialist Party was able to take over the country within a generation.

* Russia’s weak tsar was overthrown and Communism became the ruling power, ultimately leading to the Iron Curtain and the Cold War after World War II.

* European colonies were dismantled throughout the world.

* The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in countries like Iraq being formed of ethnic groups that didn’t get along. All of the Middle East was divided up following the end of World War I. (Thanks a lot, Lawrence of Arabia).

* Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia (important to me), Bosnia and Herzogovina were mixed into a country called Yugoslavia.

* Anti-semitism rose, ultimately leading to the Holocaust.

An expanded list can be found here.

 

Would any of the these had happened–and you have to admit they’ve effected you in some ways–if Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had gone elsewhere on their vacation? Click to Tweet

Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

How did World War I affect your life?

 

 

 

The post Archduke Franz Ferdinand and You appeared first on Michelle Ule, Author.