![]() Yet despite her somber demeanor Sisi captivated the public, thanks to her stunning beauty and ankle-length chestnut hair. “You cannot imagine how charming Sisi is when she cries,” Archduchess Sophie wrote, as recounted by Viennese historian Brigitte Hamann in The Reluctant Empress. Her melancholy and distaste for public life was treated as a childish indulgence by her distracted husband and his mother, the formidable Archduchess Sophie. She bore Franz Joseph three children during the first four years of their marriage, but only two- Crown Prince Rudolf and Archduchess Gisela-survived past infancy. Shy and unsure, Sisi crumbled under the strict court etiquette, which left her isolated and friendless. The situation did not improve as she settled into her new reality. ![]() Sisi, on the other hand, was so nervous during the courtship that she was unable to eat. The new couple’s mothers (who were also sisters) had intended for the handsome 23-year-old emperor to marry Sisi’s sophisticated older sister, but Franz Joseph had been captivated by the slight Sisi from the moment he saw her. Sisi’s husband, Franz Joseph, was hardworking and loved her, but had little imagination or humor. The Emperor family of Austria, circa 1856. From her hands-on mother, Princess Ludovika, she developed a love of privacy and a fear of public duties-traits that would not serve her well as empress. From her eccentric father, Duke Maximilian Joseph, she inherited a belief in progressive democratic ideals and pacifism, uncommon for royalty at the time. Stalked by the press, adored by the common man and bedeviled by depression and a severe eating disorder, Sisi’s royal career also brings to mind Princess Diana, whose life ended similarly tragically a century later.īorn in 1837 in Munich, Germany, Sisi grew up playing in the Bavarian forests with her seven brothers and sisters, riding horses and climbing mountains. But unlike the excesses of Marie Antoinette, the aloof Sisi would spend her life denying her own appetites. With her ambivalence to public duties and reluctance to marry, the young bride recalled another royal born at the Hofburg almost exactly 100 years before, Marie Antoinette. Isolated in the palace, she suffered through mental illness, mourned her beloved son’s suicide and set off to wander the globe in search of peace-all before her assassination at the hand of an Italian anarchist. This unusual entrance into public life was one in a string of tragedies that marked Sisi’s reign, placing her within a long line of reluctant royal consorts trapped in gilded cages. But in her glass coach on the way to her new home in the sprawling Hofburg imperial palace, Sisi sobbed-overwhelmed and afraid. ![]() During the wedding festivities, thousands lined Vienna’s streets, eager to catch a glimpse of the new teenage empress. Trembling and overcome with emotion, 16-year-old Elisabeth, known by her childhood nickname Sisi, was wed to the 23-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, the absolute monarch of the largest empire in Europe outside of Russia. On April 25, 1854, a shy and melancholy bride married into a major European royal house.
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