first world problems royalty edition: Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia and Duchess of Bavaria.
1865
Sissi was beautiful, cultured and loved by the people. She seems like the prototype for every Disney princess ever. In reality, she lamented her privileged life in a way only those who relish in luxury are able to. Basically, If Paul Verlaine had first world problems, Sissi had 0,01% world problems. Let’s explore both sides of the coin.
Disney-esque features:
-She had Rapunzel’s hair
Clearly
It eventually reached her heels. Her hairslave (dresser?) cared for it for 3 hours a day. Bi-weekly, the mass needed to be washed (with a solution of egg and cognac no less). So they did nothing else but wash her goddamn hair all goddamn day.
Basically, she invented the “no I can’t come, I have to wash my hair” excuse.
-She had Cinderella’s evil stepmother
Before the Targaryens, there were the Habsburgs, a royal family so powerful and so incestuous that there’s an inbreeding related deformity named after them: the Habsburg Jaw. Princess Sophie of the Habsburg-Lorraine line was Franz-Josephs’s mother. She was also Sissi’s aunt and the bane of her existence (I guess that makes her the evil-stepauntmother?).
Here’s a short list of bitch moves Sophie pulled:
-Named Sissi’s first born Sophie after herself, without asking
-Basically confiscated Sissi’s first 3 children fresh out of the box to raise them according to tradition, ensuring that Sissi could only visit them with Sophie’s permission and supervision.
– Had a note dropped on Sissi’s desk, reading, amongst other lovely things: “if the Queen bears no sons, she is merely a foreigner in the State, and a very dangerous foreigner, too. For as she can never hope to be looked on kindly here, and must always expect to be sent back whence she came”.
Ain’t no bitch like a Habsburg matriarch.
-She was the prettiest in all of the land and stole the prince’s heart (every Disney film ever)
Franz Joseph was supposed to marry Sissi’s older sister, but fell hopelessly in love with the 15 year old instead. Her entire life she was hailed as the most beautiful woman in Europe. He, on the other hand, was hailed as the monarch with the weirdest fucking beard ever:
Franz Joseph of Austria (1865)
Whether his beard was styled as such to showcase his non-habsburgian chin remains unknown.
The non-disney reality
Sissi was eccentric and enticing. She was also deeply troubled and hopelessly miserable. Just like the tragic characters Disney princesses are based on, the reality of Sissi’s world was much darker than the fairytale.
Hungarian coronation (1867)
-She battled serious eating disorders her entire life.
She was obsessed with tight-lacing to maintain a 19 inch waist. To put that in perspective; a barbie doll waist would proportionately measure 16 inches. She exercised daily in her custom built home gym. She wrapped her body in cider vinegar cloths and wore masks raw veal every night to preserve the youthfulness of her skin. Her physicians forced her to drink the juice of raw beefsteaks for protein in her numerous periods of fasting (juice cleanse?). She was definitely anorexic, with some hint of Bulimia, having a secret staircase built that connected her bedroom to the kitchen so she could binge in private (ok, that actually sounds AWESOME).
-She was depressed.
I wander lonely in this world Delight and life longtime averted No confidant to share my inner self A matching soul never revealed.
She wrote lots of poetry and, for the most part, it’s depressing as fuck. The ways of the Habsburg court were diametrically opposed to her carefree bavarian upbringing and she never fit in. Being separated from her children by means of evil stepauntmotherness and finding little in common with her cold, bureaucratic husband increased her sense of isolation and she never felt at home anywhere.
O'er thee, like thine own sea birds I'll circle without rest For me earth holds no corner To build a lasting nest.
-Her only son died in a tragic murder-suicide
Crown Prince Rudolph of Habsburg (1888)
Rudolph, the only son of Sissi and Franz-Joseph, was heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, he didn’t want to be Emperor and was like omg dad I don’t want your life leave me alone. So he rebelled, mainly with extramarital affairs. One of them produced my great-grandfather, another lead to murder-suicide, A.K.A. the Mayerling incident. The throne then went to Rudolph’s cousin, Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated, and then a little thing called WW1 happened.
Way to go, Rudolph.
Sissi didn’t raise Rudolph. Like his two older sisters he was snatched up by Sophie, and Sissi wasn’t even around until he was about 4, travelling to Madeira and Corfu spas to treat her anemia, edema and tuberculosis. Still, Rudolph was clearly his mothers son, inheriting her disregard for traditional monarchial duties. He died in 1889 at just 30 years old.
-She was assassinated by happenstance.
Luigi Lucheni was planning on assassinating the Duke of Orleans, but a change in this one’s itinerary forced Luigi to settle for the next monarch at hand, Sissi. Hating the fuss of a procession, she travelled only with her handmaiden to catch a boat in Geneva. Pretending to trip and fall into her, Luigi stabbed her in the heart with a needle file. Her tight-laced corset prevented her from bleeding out immediately and no one noticed what happened until she collapsed and died an hour later : “the hemorrhage of blood into the pericardial sac around the heart was slowed to mere drops (…). Had the weapon not been removed, she would have lived a while longer, as it would have acted like a plug to stop the bleeding.“
lIKE SLEEPING BEAUTY…
Sissi’s handmaiden compared her to a child in a fairytale, bestowed with many gifts by good fairies, and then cursed as follows:
"Nothing will bring you happiness, everything will turn against you. Even your beauty will bring you nothing but sorrow and you will never find peace."
This is not to say that Sissi’s problems weren’t real, regardless of her royal status. Unlike Verlaine, many of her life’s tragedies were not of her own doing. She was plucked from near obscurity (by monarchial standards) and thrust into the spotlight of the oldest and most rigid court in Europe, with responsibilities and expectations no teenager would be prepared to handle on a whim:
"Marriage is an absurd arrangement. One is sold as a fifteen-year-old child and makes a vow one does not understand and then regrets for thirty years or more, and which one can never undo again."
Our many roles and identities are ever changing. Forging your personal identity is a volatile experience that never truly ends. Not only did she lack the freedom to explore possibilities, as a public figure, she was required to offer herself up for constant scrutiny to see if she measured up to her imposed role. There was no way out of the gilded cage she loathed so much.
She had to assume an identity, Empress of Austria, in a world where appearances trumped inner experience. She was also deprived of being a mother, an identity that could’ve kept her grounded. So she rebelled, obsessively taking control of the parts of her life she still could, never drawing any sense of wholeness from her experiences.
And in a final stroke of irony, she was murdered because of the very identity she tried to escape her entire life.
Kelly Faircloth wrote a much more comprehensive and professional article about Elisabeth. I used it to make sure my bad jokes were factual. Read it here.
These problems matter 