The last Holy Roman Emperor dissolved his own empire and kept ruling
In 1806, facing an ultimatum from Napoleon, Francis II announced that circumstances made it impossible to keep his coronation oath and declared the bond with the empire's states dissolved. He never mentioned the ultimatum. Having already crowned himself Emperor of Austria two years earlier, he simply carried on reigning under a new number.
Francis was born in Florence in 1768, where his father Leopold ruled Tuscany. Because his uncle, Emperor Joseph II, had no surviving children, the boy was summoned to Vienna at sixteen for a harsh education. Joseph judged him stunted, awkward and spoiled, and prescribed isolation and fear to make him think for himself. Francis nonetheless admired his uncle, and when Leopold died suddenly in 1792, he became emperor just past his twenty-fourth birthday.
His reign collided immediately with revolutionary France, which guillotined his aunt Marie Antoinette in 1793, though he was largely indifferent to her fate. Defeat followed defeat. Austria surrendered the left bank of the Rhine, and after Napoleon took the title Emperor of the French in 1804, Francis matched him by proclaiming a hereditary Austrian empire, a step of dubious legality that Napoleon had approved. The crushing loss at Austerlitz and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine left the old empire hollow. After another failed war in 1809, he was even forced to marry his daughter Marie Louise to Napoleon.
In 1813 Austria switched sides for the last time and helped bring Napoleon down. At the Congress of Vienna, steered by his chancellor Metternich, Francis hosted Europe's rulers in comfort and recovered most of his lands, while quietly signing a secret treaty with the restored French king behind the backs of his Russian and Prussian allies. He became the first president of the new German Confederation.
Shaken by the Revolution, Francis grew deeply suspicious, building a web of police spies and censors that even watched his own brothers. One censor admitted suppressing a play by the patriotic writer Franz Grillparzer purely as a precaution. Yet Francis held open audiences twice a week for subjects of any rank. His most enduring legacy may be musical: Joseph Haydn's 1797 imperial anthem written in his honour now carries the words of Germany's national anthem. He died in 1835.
Source: Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor
