The Overlooked Role Of Franz Joseph In WW1 Outbreak: Sheds Light On A Shadowy Corner Of The Story: Franz Joseph Wwi

The most arguably devastating weapon ever made was a fairly commonplace pistol wielded by an obscure assassin in a street in Sarajevo in June 1914. This gun through a chain of events would trigger the machine guns rattling and the field guns roaring. Yet in the gap between that shot and the first battle was filled with letters and talking, it did not so much directly start the war, as it caused the crisis that prompted the decisions that started it all. It set the train in motion and although this belligerent locomotive, with death as the engineer, seemed to ride smoothly from station peace to station war, there were not a few stops in between that could have rerouted it or indeed derailed it.

In this book, the author forcibly argues, aided by a no-nonsense bullet point style that suits the perimeters of the work well, that one of the key decision-makers of the crisis was the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Joseph. It is commonly understood that WW1 was fought against Germany, but Austro-Hungary was actually the catalyst that brought the world crashing down in 1914. Largely ignored by history Franz Joseph was actually at the heart of the fateful decision after the attack at Sarajevo.

As the key decision-maker, the arbiter between war and peace, his decision to sanction war on 23 July 1914 proved crucial. The monarch must be studied to understand how and why the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy chose war in 1914.

World War I was not inevitable. We should not read history backward. The assassinations of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie Chotek, at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 were a crossroad, not a way station, on the road to Armageddon. The catastrophe that fell upon Europe in the summer of 1914 did not follow a well-worn path. The European apocalypse was not preordained; rather it came because decision-makers in the capitals of the old continent failed. One of the first capitals to fail was the Austro-Hungarian: Vienna.

Austria-Hungary chose to use Sarajevo. This was not a policy of revenge or an impulsive act. Cold calculated reason led the Austro-Hungarian Emperor to bring his realms to the brink of war. When the crucial moment finally came, Franz Joseph, the one man who could stop the war machine, the one man who could disperse the gathering storm, simply failed. Aware of the consequences, with a stroke of a pen, the monarch signed the declaration of war that would soon lead Europe, and the world, to unfathomable tragedy.