In August 1853, fifteen-year-old Elisabeth of Bavaria arrived at Bad Ischl as her older sister's companion. Emperor Franz Joseph was supposed to marry Helene. He took one look at Elisabeth and refused anyone else. She was engaged within a day and published in the Wiener Zeitung within five.
She arrived in Vienna at sixteen and walked into the Spanisches Hofzeremoniell, four centuries of Habsburg court protocol that regulated everything from walking speed in corridors to who could discuss philosophy. Her mother-in-law Archduchess Sophie, the woman who had engineered Franz Joseph's accession to the throne in 1848, took both of Elisabeth's daughters and raised them herself. Elisabeth was not allowed to breastfeed. She was not consulted on names. She did not gain control of a child's upbringing until Marie Valerie was born in 1868, fourteen years into the marriage.
Her first daughter died of typhus in Budapest on May 29, 1857. Elisabeth was nineteen.
After that, she stopped eating. Walter Vandereycken at the Catholic University of Leuven published three peer-reviewed studies concluding Elisabeth exhibited symptoms consistent with anorexia nervosa sustained over decades. She was weighed daily. Her hairdresser measured her waist every morning. Court doctors documented edema of hunger and acetone breath. She consumed raw meat juice pressed through a mechanical press, egg whites beaten with salt, and violet ice cream from Demel. She walked up to ten hours a day. She had gymnasiums installed at the Hofburg, Schonbrunn, and GodollΕ. She was sewn into her clothes to eliminate wrinkles. Her daily preparation, hair and corset and beauty treatments, took four hours, and she used every minute as cover for avoiding court obligations.
The Wittelsbach family she came from was collapsing around her. Cousin Ludwig II was found dead in Lake Starnberg in 1886 under circumstances that remain unresolved. Her son Crown Prince Rudolf shot his mistress Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge on January 30, 1889, then killed himself. Elisabeth said Rudolf's bullet had killed her faith.
On September 10, 1898, an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni stabbed her once below the left breast with a sharpened needle file on the Quai du Mont-Blanc in Geneva. She did not know she had been stabbed. She walked a hundred yards and boarded a steamship. The file had perforated her left ventricle. She died of pericardial tamponade at the Hotel Beau-Rivage roughly forty minutes later. Her last words were a question: what actually did happen to me?
π TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 β The most powerful woman in Europe
0:45 β The accidental engagement at Bad Ischl
2:12 β The cotillion ball that changed everything
3:22 β The wedding and arrival in Vienna
3:49 β The Habsburg court machine
5:06 β Archduchess Sophie: the real power
5:38 β Taking the children
7:27 β The death of baby Sophie
8:39 β Elisabeth's relationship with food
9:50 β The liquid diets and the meat press
11:03 β Walking ten hours a day
12:38 β Sewn into her clothes
14:00 β Sleeping in raw veal
14:37 β The Wittelsbach madness
17:45 β Crown Prince Rudolf and Mayerling
19:10 β Bay Middleton and Katharina Schratt
21:17 β The wandering Empress
23:09 β The sealed poems
24:27 β September 10, 1898
27:01 β The wound that killed an Empress
29:39 β Franz Joseph's reaction
30:22 β The Sisi Syndrome
πREAD MORE:
https://theforgottenhistory.com/journal/empress-elisabeth-of-austria-and-the-life-the-habsburg-court-could-not-containπ SOURCES:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7664349/https://www.historytoday.com/archive/anorectic-empress-elisabeth-austriahttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18949866/https://www.sisimuseum-hofburg.at/https://www.historyofroyalwomen.com/https://combermere-restoration.co.uk/an-empress-comes-to-the-abbey/π ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about Empress Elisabeth of Austria, born Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, Duchess in Bavaria, who married Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria on April 24, 1854, at age sixteen. Elisabeth developed symptoms consistent with anorexia nervosa over four decades at the Habsburg court in Vienna, documented by Walter Vandereycken at the Catholic University of Leuven. Her mother-in-law Archduchess Sophie controlled the upbringing of her daughters Sophie and Gisela at the Hofburg Palace and Schonbrunn Palace. Elisabeth's first daughter died of typhus in Budapest on May 29, 1857. Her son Crown Prince Rudolf died in a murder-suicide with Baroness Mary Vetsera at Mayerling on January 30, 1889. Luigi Lucheni assassinated Elisabeth on September 10, 1898, in Geneva with a sharpened needle file, causing pericardial tamponade. She died at the Hotel Beau-Rivage at approximately 2:10 PM. The Sisi Museum at the Hofburg in Vienna displays her personal scales, gymnasium equipment, and the weapon that killed her.
#ElisabethOfAustria #EmpressSisi #HabsburgEmpire #AnorexiaNervosa #FranzJoseph