The Reluctant Empress : A Biography of Empress Elisabeth of Austria

by Brigitte Hamann

The remark Count Alexander Hübner entered in his diary on November 18, 1884, was surely true: “It is a fact that no one any longer believes in kings, and I do not know if they believe in themselves.” And Elisabeth’s friend, the poet Carmen Sylva (Queen Elisabeth of Romania), expressed the same belief even more bluntly: “The republican form of government is the only rational one; I can never understand the foolish people, the fact that they continue to tolerate us”

Archduchess Sophie was still entirely caught up in eighteenth-century thinking. She had no high opinion of individualism, let alone emotion, as an element in court politics—in contrast to her daughter-in-law-to-be. On one occasion, Sophie wrote to Princess Metternich that one should not believe “that individual personalities have any significance.” She had always noticed that one person was replaced by another, without making the slightest difference in the world.18 Now, whether the future Empress was named Helene or Elisabeth made little difference, according to this view. Both came from the same family, were equal in rank, were both Catholic and Sophie’s nieces—and that last was all that mattered in the end.

In all likelihood, the Habsburg court of the late eighteenth century (under Maria Theresia, Joseph II, and Leopold II) would have found it much easier to accept a personality like that of young Elisabeth, since that court was considerably more “progressive”—closer to the people, and more enlightened than the court of the 1850s.