Franz Joseph I

Yeah.

So this is the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary.

His family, his son, who was obviously a psychopath.

and ended up murdering his mistress and killing himself in a family retreat called Meierling.

He said he was over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed like a gardener, I thought, lean as a rake and immensely muscular.

His wrinkled face seemed to consist entirely of muscles so far as it was visible, for he wore mustache and side whiskers with a clean shaven skin like the Emperor Franz Joseph.

Lewis called him a purely logical entity of a human.

And he said the idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating and except that of discovering truth was preposterous to Kirkpatrick.

So I think The Habsburgs had a sense, the Habsburgs had a sense owing to this kind of frontier experience, not so much that they were immune to some sort of sectarian revolt, but that their system had some sort of built-in mechanism whereby, you know, a general state of civil war would be kind of unthinkable.

And another thing that kind of aggravated this, you know, the Habsburgs, they, I think people have this view of them in this era kind of like they, I mean, don't get me wrong, I think Franz Joseph was a great man and a real hero, but, you know, by the 19th century, the Spanish Habsburgs were a mess.

And the Austrian Habsburgs, admirable as Franz Joseph may have been, you know, there was something clearly out of time about them and very reactionary.

But, you know, in the 17th century, they were probably the best of European royals.

You know, these were learned people who excelled at military command and commerce and all the other things that a leadership caste of a people should, you know, be adept at.