Sophie and the hopes of the dynasty

Sophie and the hopes
of the dynasty
Sophie fulfilled the expectations placed in her of
producing male offspring for the dynasty.
The daughter of King Maximilian I of Bavaria (1756–1825) and
his second wife Karoline of Baden (1776–1841), Sophie
Friederike Dorothea Wilhelmine was born on 27 January 1805 in
Munich together with her twin sister Maria Anna (1805–1877).
Outstandingly intelligent and strong-willed, she was bitterly
disappointed when dynastic considerations led to an arranged
marriage with Archduke Franz Karl, the unremarkable younger
son of Emperor Franz II (I) in 1824. Sophie was extremely
ambitious, and most of her sisters married ruling kings and
princes – her half-sister Karolina Auguste had become the
fourth wife of Emperor Franz II (I) and was thus incidentally
Sophie’s step-mother – while she had been assigned the
emperor’s rather unprepossessing second son.
Nevertheless, at the time of her marriage it was not beyond the
bounds of possibility that Sophie might eventually become
empress, as Crown Prince Ferdinand, the elder brother of her
husband, suffered from physical and mental shortcomings
which made him unfit for imperial office. When a marriage was
arranged for him to Anna Maria of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1831,
Sophie initially feared that her chances of ascending to the
throne would be lessened since this union could potentially
have resulted in the birth of a son. However, her fears were to
prove groundless, as Ferdinand’s marriage remained
without issue.
The ossified structures at the Viennese Court made it difficult
for the energetic and ambitious Sophie to position herself at
first. The ruling emperor Franz I was elderly, and the dominant
political force, State Chancellor Prince Metternich, had also
passed the zenith of his career.
Sophie found a soulmate in Napoleon Franz Joseph Bonaparte,
Duke of Reichstadt and son of Napoleon, who had grown up at
the Viennese Court and was only six years younger than her.
How far this relationship went is difficult to say with any
certainty. The rumour that her second son Maximilian was
fathered by the duke is however unlikely, as by this time he was
already seriously ill with laryngeal tuberculosis.
Following several miscarriages Sophie finally gave birth to a
son, Franz Joseph, in 1830. She went on to bear another five
children, of whom three sons, Ferdinand Maximilian, Karl
Ludwig and Ludwig Viktor, reached adulthood.
The archduchess groomed her sons, in particular her firstborn,
Franz Joseph, as the future hopes of the dynasty, laying great
emphasis on an upbringing in keeping with dynastic tradition.
Rejecting the principles of the Enlightenment and liberal
tendencies, she agitated for a strengthening of monarchical
and dynastic ideals. Sophie was a devout Catholic and adherent
of the anti-liberal clericalist tendency, bitterly opposed to the
Josephinian state church and seeing in a reinvigorated Catholic
church an important cornerstone in the fight against
revolutionary tendencies among the common people.
Step by step she strove to consolidate her position both at
Court, and with her force of character became the dominant
figure in the family. She opposed State Chancellor Metternich,
who found in her one of his few serious opponents in the
dynasty. She accused him of wanting ‘to run the Monarchy
without the Emperor and with a simpleton [i.e., Ferdinand] as
the representative of the Crown’, the very antithesis of her
ideals of dynastic monarchy. Outsiders dubbed Sophie ‘the
only man’ in the imperial family.
Author
Martin Mutschlechner
Literature
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