The Assassination of Empress Elisabeth

Empress Elisabeth was stabbed in the heart with a sharpened needle file on the Geneva lakeside on Saturday 10 September 1898 and died about thirty-five minutes later. She was sixty, and had been Empress of Austria for forty-four years. Her killer did not know who she was until a newspaper told him, and had come to Geneva to murder somebody else.

The day

She had travelled to Switzerland incognito, against warnings of possible assassination attempts, and was staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage on the shore of Lake Geneva. Someone at the hotel let it be known that the Empress of Austria was a guest.

At 1:35 p.m. she left the hotel on foot with her lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma Sztáray, to catch the steamship Genève for Montreux. She despised processions and insisted the two of them walk without the rest of the entourage.

On the promenade a 25-year-old Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni, approached them and appeared to try to look under her parasol. As the ship’s bell rang for departure he seemed to stumble and made a movement with his hand, as though catching his balance. What he had actually done was drive a sharpened needle file — four inches long, of the kind used to file the eyes of industrial needles, fitted into a wooden handle he had cut from firewood — into her chest.

The man with the file

Lucheni had come to Geneva to kill the Duke of Orléans, the pretender to the French throne. The Duke had already left for the Valais. Having failed to find him, Lucheni picked Elisabeth after a Geneva newspaper revealed that the elegant woman travelling as the “Countess of Hohenembs” was the Empress of Austria.

His own account left nothing to interpret:

“I am an anarchist by conviction… I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with object of giving an example to those who suffer and those who do nothing to improve their social position; it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill… It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.”

He had wanted to buy a stiletto but could not afford the twelve francs, so he sharpened an old file instead. Its dullness may have been deliberate — a shiny blade would have given him away as he closed in. He had been following her for several days.

Why she walked on

Elisabeth collapsed, was helped to her feet by a coach driver, and then walked roughly a hundred yards to the gangway and boarded the ship. Only when Countess Sztáray let go of her arm did she lose consciousness.

The autopsy the next day explained it. The file had gone 85 mm into her thorax, fractured the fourth rib, pierced the lung and the pericardium and passed through the heart, coming out at the base of the left ventricle. But the weapon was so thin and so sharp that the wound was very narrow, and the pressure of her extremely tight corseting slowed the bleeding into the sac around the heart to a few drops at a time. Until that sac filled — cardiac tamponade — her heart kept beating normally. That is why she was able to walk to the boat and up the ramp.

The doctor who performed the autopsy added a detail with a terrible symmetry to it: had the file not been pulled out, it would have acted as a plug and she would have lived a while longer.

On deck, the captain did not know who she was and advised the Countess to take her companion back to the hotel. Sztáray opened the dress and cut the corset laces so she could breathe. Elisabeth revived enough to say that she was not in pain and to ask what had happened, then lost consciousness again. Sztáray noticed a small brown stain above her left breast, told the captain who she was, and the boat turned back.

Six sailors carried her to the hotel on a stretcher improvised from a sail, cushions and two oars. She was pronounced dead at 2:10 p.m.

Afterwards

Franz Joseph’s first fear, on the telegram, was that she had killed herself. Only a later message telling him it was murder reassured him on that point. He ordered the autopsy photograph of the wound and the instruments destroyed.

Her body went into a triple coffin — two inner shells of lead, an outer one of bronze on lion’s claws — with two glass panels in the lid so her face could be seen. It travelled to Vienna by funeral train. The inscription read “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”; the Hungarians were outraged, and “and Queen of Hungary” was hastily added.

On the morning of 17 September, eighty-two sovereigns and high-ranking nobles followed the cortege to the Imperial Crypt at the Capuchin Church, five minutes from the Hofburg, where she lies beside Franz Joseph and their son Rudolf.

Lucheni threw the file into a doorway as he fled and was caught by two cab drivers and a sailor. Furious that Geneva had abolished the death penalty, he demanded to be tried under the laws of Lucerne, which had not, and signed his letter “Luigi Lucheni, anarchist, and one of the most dangerous”. He was declared sane and tried as a common murderer rather than a political one — which denied him exactly the platform he had killed for. He was imprisoned for life, attempted suicide in 1900 with the sharpened key of a sardine tin, and hanged himself with his belt on 16 October 1910, the evening after a guard confiscated his unfinished memoirs.

The killing produced one lasting institution. The International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists, convened in its aftermath, was the first international conference against terrorism.

Franz Joseph never really recovered. “You’ll never know how important she was to me,” he told his relatives.

Where the story is told in Vienna

Two places, ten minutes apart. The Sisi Museum in the Hofburg holds the objects and the version of her life she actually lived, rather than the one the films invented. The Imperial Crypt on the Neuer Markt holds the grave.

Doing one without the other is the most common mistake visitors make with this story.