Assassination of Empress Sisi in Geneva
An Account of the Assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary in Geneva by the Italian anarchist Lucheni.
The most famous assassination of a Habsburg was the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand by Yugoslav separatist Gavrilo Princip, while riding in a car in Sarajevo in 1914, which is deemed to be the catalyst which led to the beginning of the First World War. This was not the first murder of an Austro-Hungarian royal while traveling. Mary Shelley set the tragic events of her novel Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva with the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son on the Plainpalais by the creature he had created. This was the terrible retribution for his hubris of creating a living being and then abandoning him. A similar case might be made for the turning of the anarchists on the imperials in class warfare. The French Revolution, of which Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft had been a witness and had written about, and the resulting end of the Emperor Napoleon, had been one of the draws which had brought Mary and Percy to Paris on their elopement tour in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Frankenstein Diaries.
As Geneva celebrates the 200th anniversary of the origination of Frankenstein, for history buff sight-seeking visitors to Geneva who might be drawn by the story of Frankenstein, and looking for more to explore, here is an account of the curious murder of one of the most sympathetic of the Imperial family of Habsburgs who ruled and dominated the life of Central Europe.
There had been warnings of possible assassination movements when the popular Empress Elisabeth, more commonly called “Sisi” (or Sissi), now sixty years old and essentially estranged from her husband, the Emperor Franz Joseph, visited Geneva in 1898. She was traveling incognito, but such an illustrious personage is hard to keep quiet and an employee of the Hotel Beau Rivage, where she was staying, had bragged that the Empress of Austria was a guest.
On Saturday, the 10th of September, at 1:35 in the afternoon, Sisi and her lady-in-waiting and traveling companion, the Countess Irma Sztáray, 35, left the hotel to walk the short distance to the harbor dock to catch the steamship Genève for a scenic cruise journey to Montreux where she was residing. The empress like many others had followed the “Grand Tour” which began with the writings of Byron and the other romantics. The Empress Sisi didn’t like “processions,” and she had ordered that her servants take the train ahead to Territet on the lake shore at Montreux where they would meet the boat after she had taking the scenic Lake Geneva cruise boat on the waters. Percy Shelly and George Lord Bryon had made this trip by row boat, now it was a tourist trip by paddle steamer.
The two women were strolling on the promenade when a 25-year-old Italian man approached them. In an account by Countess Sztáray, the young man tried to peek under her mistress’s parasol, then, just as the ship’s bell rang to signal the departure, the man stumbled against her and made a movement with his hand as if he was trying to catch his balance. She was unaware at the moment it happened that he was actually holding a small weapon made of a sharpened four inch long needle file embedded into a wooden handle. The attacker was an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. The tool was used to file the eyes of industrial needles, intended by the assassin as a symbol of the rise of the industrial worker against the oppressor, and he later pronounced this as part of the anarchist creed, the “propaganda of the deed”, promoting the change of society by a violent action. His original plan was to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, a pretender to the throne of France, but the duke had departed on a tour of the Swiss Valais before he could make his move. Then, a Geneva newspaper had reported from the hotel source that a guest staying under the name of the “Countess of Hohenembs” was in fact the Empress Sisi of Austria, and he changed his target.
Lucheni declared at his trail. “I am an anarchist by conviction…I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign” as an example for those impoverished who take no action 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.”
After Lucheni had made his sly attack and moved swiftly on, neither woman realized the seriousness of what had happened, that she had been stabbed. The empress weakened on her feet and a nearby coach driver rushed to assist her. He signaled to the concierge of the Beau Rivage, an Austrian named Planner, who was watching. Rather than return to the hotel, the coachman helped the two women to the boat dock, about a 100 yards, and up the gangway to board the Genève steamer. Countess Sztáray relaxed her hold on the empress’s arm and at that moment she collapsed unconscious on the boat deck. The companion called urgently for a doctor, but there was none on board and only a fellow passenger, a former nurse, came to aid. The captain of the Genève, a Captain Roux, was unaware of the true identity of the ill passenger and since it was a very hot day, advised that her companion should take her back to the hotel. This was impossible as the boat was already departing from the dock, and sailing out of harbor onto the lake. Three men carried the empress to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Countess Sztáray then opened her gown and cut the laces of her corset so she could take air. The empress came around briefly and her lady-in-waiting asked if she was in pain. “No”, Elizabeth answered, and then asked, “What has happened?” They were her last words as she lost consciousness.
It was then that the Countess Sztáray noticed a small brown stain above her mistress’s left breast, but still didn’t know what it was. Frightened that she had passed out a second time, the lady finally revealed who her companion was. The captain, recognizing the seriousness, immediately turned the boat to return to the Geneva harbor, where the empress was carried by sailors on an improvised stretcher made from two oars and a sail with seat cushions, back to the Hotel Beau Rivage.
The wife of the hotel chief was a nurse and when she and Sztáray began to undress the empress’s layers, they finally noticed the small stain of blood and the tiny puncture wound. The empress was still. She had breathed her last breaths as they had carried her into the room, but when they lifted her to a bed, she was certainly dead. Two doctors arrived and a priest. Dr. Mayer made a small incision in her arm, but there was no blood flow, and the Empress Elizabeth was pronounced dead at 2:20 pm and that Saturday afternoon. An autopsy was performed by Dr. Golay, who determined that the thin tool, just three and third inches, had pierced the lung and penetrated the heart. The pressure from the tight corsets the empress wore to control her slim figure, had kept the blood flow from the surface and had kept the empress from being aware of the wound. When the corseting was removed, the blood hemorrhage had filled the pericardial sac, stopping the heart.
She had been placed in placed in a triple coffin, with two inner lead linings and a bronze exterior case with lion claw feet. On Tuesday, before the coffins were sealed, Franz Joseph’s official representatives arrived to identify the body. The coffin had two glass panels with doors which could be slid back to view her face. Eighty-three sovereigns and the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed the funeral cortege of the hearse to her burial in the Habsburg crypt at the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. The tomb inscription first denoted “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”, but the words “and Queen of Hungary” were added after the protests of Hungarians.
On Wednesday morning, Elisabeth’s body was carried back to Vienna aboard a funeral train. The inscription on her coffin read, “Elisabeth, Empress of Austria”. The Hungarians were outraged and the words, “and Queen of Hungary” were hastily added. The entire Austro-Hungarian Empire was in deep mourning; 82 sovereigns and high-ranking nobles followed her funeral cortege on the morning of 17 September to the Habsburg tomb in the Church of the Capuchins.
The assassin had made his escape from the harbor down the Rue des Alpes and tossed the weapon into the doorway of No. 3 Rue des Alpes, which is now a storefront abutting the Hotel de La Paix. After an alarm was raised he was cornered by two sailors and a cab coachman until a gendarme could be called. The file was found by the building concierge who didn’t at first realize what it was as the sharp tip had broken off.
Luigi Lucheni was actually born Paris and left as an orphan and spent most of his life in Switzerland, so he was only really Italian by the parentage of his mother. But the news that the assassin of the adored Sisi was “Italian” caused a wave of anti-Italian reprisals through Switzerland. There was concern that a wave of political attacks was coming from cells of anarchists, but Lucheni claimed he was acting alone. But a few months later, the International Conference for the Social Defense Against Anarchists was held in Rome, but it failed to curb the movement, until another anarchist would fire the shot which sent the world into war and ended empires.
Lucheni wanted his trial moved to Lucerne when he learned that the Canton of Geneva had abolished the death penalty, as he wanted to be famous as a martyr. He was sentenced to life. He first unsuccessfully tried to kill himself with a sardine can key in 1900, but it was another ten years before he was found hanging by his belt in his cell in an apparent suicide.
In a bit of gruesome science theater worthy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lucheni’s head was removed during autopsy and kept in a jar of formaldehyde for 100 years, first at the Institute of Forensic Science of the University of Geneva until 1985, then given to the Federal Museum of Pathology and Anatomy in Vienna, until finally buried at the Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) in Vienna in the year 2000. The murder weapon can still be seen in the Sisi Museum at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna and Sisi’s hearse at Imperial Carriage Museum of the Schonbrunn Palace. You can still take the Lake Geneva cruise that Sisi never completed, or stay incognito at the Beau Rivage.