The Many Myths of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the 19th-Century Royal Whose Beauty and Tragic Death Transformed Her Into a Legend
The reluctant empress known as “Sisi” painstakingly crafted her image through portraits and photographs, ensuring she would be remembered in a specific way
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In life, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was famed for her beauty, style and affinity for the Hungarian people. In death, however, the 19th-century Habsburg monarch has joined a long list of historical women reimagined in 21st-century popular culture as feminist heroines—much to some historians’ chagrin.
“The Empress,” a German-language Netflix series that was recently renewed for its third and final season, portrays Elisabeth, who was commonly known as “Sisi,” as a pseudo-Elizabeth Bennet who is always ready with a cutting remark at a dinner party. In the show’s second season, which debuted in the United States last fall, Elisabeth (played by Devrim Lingnau) is preparing to give birth to an heir when she comments, in perhaps too on-the-nose fashion, that “I know girls have less worth in this family.” She is an empress who cavorts with the people, shares her view on politics, speaks her mind and challenges the status quo in seemingly every way.
“The Empress” isn’t the first depiction of Elisabeth’s life to diverge from the historical record. In the mid-1950s Austrian Sissi trilogy, which used an alternative spelling of the nickname Sisi, actress Romy Schneider played Elisabeth as a knowing yet delicate youth who was thrust into a position of power at a young age, then managed to lead a life devoid of any real complications. The movies offered up a sanitized version of the empress, intended more to bolster Austria’s self-image in the aftermath of World War II than to depict Elisabeth as she really was.
Perhaps the real Elisabeth would be happy with these retellings of her story, as they are faithful to her desire to go unpainted and unphotographed after about age 30. They preserve her as she was in her youth, when she was beloved for her beauty, her long hair and her narrow frame. These adaptations may be fantasies, but Elisabeth was nothing if not self-possessed, adept at crafting a persona that may not have promoted her standing in the Viennese court but certainly helped shape the public’s perspective of her to this day.
The reality of Elisabeth, as close as modern observers can get to it, was darker, clouded by a haunting vision of what it was like to be a royal consort in the 1800s. Queens, princesses and empresses were expected to provide an heir, play a surface-level role in the monarchy and rely on appearance over perhaps anything else. If that is an oversimplification, it’s also reflective of how Elisabeth described her life in her poetry, as a kind of prison. According to a translation by biographer Brigitte Hamann, the empress wrote:
Once I was so young and rich
In love of life and hope;
I thought nothing could match my strength,
The whole world was open to me.
I loved, I lived,
I wandered through the world;
But never reached what I strove for.—
I deceived and was deceived.
These lines represent Elisabeth at her most despairing. But that isn’t far from how one of her biographers, Michaela Lindinger, a curator at the Vienna Museum, defines her.
“She was a very unhappy and reclusive person, and she was very reduced to trying to fill her time by herself,” Lindinger says. “That was the main problem—she could have tried to care for girls’ education or hospitals or reduce the problem with housing in Vienna. She could have done all these things. But she had no interest [in them] at all.”
Elisabeth was born a duchess in Munich, then the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria, in 1837. Her parents, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria and Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, were second cousins. Their union was not a happy one. Maximilian told Ludovika, who was forced to marry him after a failed affair with the future king of Portugal, “that he did not love her and was marrying her merely because he was afraid of his forceful grandfather,” writes Hamann in The Reluctant Empress. Needless to say, the biographer adds, this inauspicious beginning, paired with her father’s “restlessness and his many affairs” and her mother’s frequent complaints, did not leave Elisabeth with an impression of the joys of conjugal bliss.
Together with her seven surviving siblings, Elisabeth spent much of her childhood in nature rather than in the confines of the royal court. She enjoyed horseback riding, swimming and mountain climbing, and she even played alongside the children of local peasants. This was permissible in part because she was not the logical choice to one day marry an emperor—that would have been her better-educated and allegedly far more beautiful older sister, Helene.
The contemporary image of Elisabeth as a protofeminist stems in part from her childhood, which is often painted as an idyllic, liberated environment in which the children were encouraged to run free and follow their passions. In truth, Elisabeth grew up with a ne’er-do-well father who saw himself as an adventurer more than a paternal figure. Her mother, meanwhile, “simply could not cope with that many children—she tried to educate them, and there were servants,” but without her husband’s support, Lindinger says, “she was alone and could not manage.”
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In 1853, when Elisabeth was 15 years old, she accompanied her mother and Helene to Austria to witness her sister’s engagement to their first cousin Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg emperor of Austria. At the time, Austria was the largest state in Europe besides Russia, with about 40 million residents. The borders of the empire stretched from what is today the Czech Republic to the north, Croatia to the south, Italy to the west and Ukraine to the east.
When Franz Joseph met Elisabeth and Helene, he was immediately taken with the younger of the two sisters. As the emperor’s mother wrote in a letter, “He beamed, and you know how his face can beam when he is happy. The dear little one did not suspect the deep impression she had made on Franzi,” who soon asked Elisabeth to be his wife.
Elisabeth’s feelings were more complicated. She was surprised that the emperor had chosen her over her sister, deeming herself unimportant. According to Hamann, she declared that she loved “the emperor so much! If only he were not the emperor!” In April 1854, Elisabeth married Franz Joseph and became the empress of Austria—a title that she would come to dread.
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Michael Wohlfart, curator of the Vienna-based Sisi Museum, describes Elisabeth as an untamed daughter forced into one of the Austrian monarchy’s most structured roles.
“She came from this family into the imperial family in Vienna and the Viennese imperial court. It was very Catholic, very old-fashioned,” Wohlfart says. “They did not want modern-thinking people in the court, and this was the great problem.”
Lindinger puts it simply: Elisabeth “had no personal rights.” She came to Vienna at age 16 to marry the emperor, and in many ways, she forfeited her autonomy. Still, how sorry can one feel for an empress who had at her feet everything she could wish for and still was not happy? This is the eternal dilemma.
To visit Vienna is to be surrounded by Elisabeth: on a notebook, on the face of a mug, in the halls of Schönbrunn Palace, on a hexagonal box of marzipan-filled chocolates. In 2022, filmmaker Marie Kreutzer told the New York Times that Elisabeth was “the main tourist magnet” she witnessed growing up in Austria, “aside from Mozart.” This experience inspired her to write and direct the 2022 film Corsage, which depicts an aging Elisabeth, in stark contrast to most cultural portrayals of the empress.
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Every year, some 25 million people visit Hofburg, the Habsburg dynasty’s imperial palace in Vienna. Included in this complex is the Sisi Museum, which houses the empress’ private apartments. On its website, the museum suggests that visitors can feel “Sisi’s aura as a living experience.” Guests are implored to feel, not just to see.
The museum itself has an eclectic history. Opened in 2004, it was designed by prominent costume and stage designer Rolf Langenfass, who decided to organize it into five sections that “start with death and end with death,” says Wohlfart. After all, he adds, Elisabeth’s shocking assassination by an Italian anarchist in 1898 “was the beginning of the myth.”
Initially, the museum held very few objects original to the empress. Instead, its displays were largely thematic installations. It took ten years for the museum to acquire in earnest a permanent collection of Elisabeth’s private things, including a dress box purchased for €32,000 ($44,300) in 2012 that contained a nightgown and a frock worn by the empress at her summer home on the Greek island of Corfu.
Lindinger was initially drawn to Elisabeth out of obligation, not any kind of worshipful devotion. Early in her career, she was hired as the assistant curator at the Vienna Museum, which tasked her with organizing an exhibition on Elisabeth at Hermesvilla, the empress’ summer residence outside of Vienna, to mark the 100th anniversary of her assassination.
“We tried to collect all these myths, and we organized the rooms according to her poems,” Lindinger says. “So every room had one sentence of her poetry, and we tried to make people look at her as a different person from how they see her in films. There were many people who did not even know that she wrote poems.”
Other scholars, like Olivia Gruber Florek, an art historian at Delaware County Community College, were intrigued by portraits of Elisabeth, particularly those by German artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, which didn’t fit the era’s standards of depictions of royalty. Rather than bearing imagery of the state or the monarchy, Elisabeth’s portraits were focused on her defining physical features, particularly her long, flowing hair.
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From the beginning of her time at court, Elisabeth was an object of fascination, as much out of shock as out of worship. She didn’t follow imperial rules, like wearing her shoes only once before giving them to her servants. This didn’t make sense to her. Why waste a perfectly good pair of shoes? But the servants were incensed. They had a right to the shoes. Who was Elisabeth to deny them that?
The public was also frustrated by Elisabeth’s desire to keep herself hidden away. Vienna boasted one of the world’s most beautiful women, but no one was ever able to see her, Lindinger says. Her refusal to follow society’s implicit and explicit rules certainly won her enemies, like members of the court and even the public.
Every evening, crowds of people would gather in the courtyard of the Hofburg to spot just a glimpse of the legendary empress flitting by her windows, Wohlfart says. But Elisabeth refused to give the people what they wanted. First, she performed her wifely duties, giving birth to three children, the last of them a male heir, Rudolf, in just four years. She had her last child, Marie Valerie, ten years after Rudolf, at the age of 30. Then, she proclaimed herself finished. She was able to retreat further into private life, to rid herself of what she viewed as the bodily horrors of pregnancy.
Elisabeth’s relationship with Franz Joseph was complicated. Cracks stared showing within a few years of their wedding: The couple’s political views began to diverge, and the emperor refused to discuss politics with his wife, preferring his mother as a confidante. “Annoyed, the empress had to accept a situation in which she was pushed aside like a child and her suggestions were not even acknowledged,” Hamann writes.
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The empress’ main role was the conciliator, often calming Franz Joseph with a touch or a kind word. She used this knowledge to her advantage, knowing that her affection had such an effect on her husband that the mere promise of it would likely allow her to get her way.
Despite his deep love for his wife, Franz Joseph, like many male monarchs at the time, engaged in numerous affairs. Rumors at court claimed that Elisabeth also sought comfort outside of her marriage, though she refuted this gossip, saying, “I was … certainly not raised to be an empress, and I know that a great deal is lacking in my upbringing—but I have never done anything improper, as God is my witness. I had opportunity. They would have liked to separate me from the emperor.”
Many of the royal couple’s difficulties came down to what was, at its core, a fundamental mismatch.
“Elisabeth—an excessively sensitive, highly cultured woman given over to fantasy—was tied to a man who was practical and industrious but had no understanding for her complicated emotional life,” Hamann writes. “As husband and wife grew older, abysses opened to separate them, chasms that could be bridged only precariously by outward cordiality and formal politeness.”
There was also the problem of Elisabeth’s sexuality, or lack thereof. In her poetry, Elisabeth wrote that she hated love, or, in other words, sex: “For me no love, / For me no wine; / The one makes you ache, / The other makes you ill!” The physical consummation of love led to all of the things Elisabeth didn’t want: familial obligation, the opposite of liberation of the soul and body. According to her niece, Elisabeth once said, “Children are the curse of their mothers because they destroy their beauty … the sole and unique gift that God gives us.” The empress had a certain cutting clarity about her, although no one could say whether she saw the world clearly. She merely saw it by her own standards and acted accordingly.
“She played none of the roles assigned to her by tradition and her surroundings: not the role of loving and devoted wife, not the role of mother, not the role of principal figurehead in a gigantic empire,” Hamann writes. “She insisted on her rights as an individual—and she prevailed. That her self-realization did not make her happy is the tragedy of her life.”
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Wohlfart echoes this assessment.
“The special thing about [Elisabeth] was that she demanded very strictly the right to self-determination,” he says. “She thought that women should not be dominated by men and that they should be free.”
But not all of the empress’ biographers see her as a self-possessed figure—and those who do acknowledge the challenges associated with this depiction.
“[Elisabeth] was a very hard woman,” Lindinger says. “She tried to have a fence around her that nobody could get over. She wrote a lot of poems about the Habsburgs, about the court and the family, where she very accurately writes about all these people. And it’s not nice—it’s very harsh.”
Whatever grasp Elisabeth had on reality was tenuous at best, at least based on the contents of her poetry. She believed she had predestined connections with certain men, including the German and Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who supposedly dictated poetry to her, and the Greek hero Achilles, who provided the name for the empress’ villa in Corfu.
“She was definitely out of touch with reality in the way that any royal would be—even today,” Florek says. “Access to the normal world is highly restricted. You don’t know what it’s really like to live a life other than one in which you have a woman whose full-time job is brushing your hair.”
Elisabeth was famously obsessed with her physique. But this preoccupation may have been a way to offset the general malaise that plagued her. Lindinger calls the empress “obsessive.” She had to be slim, to exercise, to maintain a sane body and mind.
“In this way, she was a forerunner and extremely modern,” Lindinger says. “She tried to stay put with her thoughts, but they were always wandering.”
Aside from her weight, Elisabeth’s long, flowing hair, which came down to her heels, was an enduring part of her image—although that, too, brought physical pain.
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During her multi-hour hair routine, Elisabeth conversed with her Greek tutor and worked on translation activities. But the sheer weight of her hair caused an intense pressure on her head, so much so that she would have it pinned to the ceilings. As her tutor later recalled, he once told Elisabeth, “Your Majesty wears her hair like a crown instead of the crown.” She replied, “Except that any other crown is more easily laid aside,” alluding to both the privileges and burdens of her position.
In the empress’ official portraits, her hair played a starring role. In one iconic representation by Winterhalter, Elisabeth wears stars in her long locks. Her eyes turn to the viewer arrestingly, while her off-the-shoulder gown dissolves into a jumble of flowing taffeta layers.
“Part of why Winterhalter was so popular was because he was really good at making hair look gorgeous,” Florek says. “Women typically would wear hair pieces. They didn’t have hair that was long enough for this.” Elisabeth, however, “understood that it was a way she could express herself.”
It is through Elisabeth’s poems that we get a true portrait of her. The empress considered the publication of these poems so damaging to her and those named in them that in 1890, she ordered her compositions locked in a box for the next 60 years.
The people present at the box’s opening in 1951 “were probably a little dumbfounded when they saw the volumes of poetry written by the Austrian empress,” wrote historian Andrej Abplanalp in a 2021 blog post for the Swiss National Museum. “The men had assumed they would find important documents in the strongbox.”
With age and experience, Elisabeth began to develop political views that were increasingly at odds with her husband’s status as ruler of an empire. She once surprised the Viennese court by saying, “I have been told that the most appropriate form of government is that of the republic.”
But the empress really only wielded her political influence in a significant way once, when it came to the negotiation of the Ausgleich, or the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. This agreement created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, giving full governing autonomy to Hungary, which Franz Joseph had placed under a military dictatorship following Hungarian nationals’ failed bid for independence in 1848. Under the new terms, Franz Joseph would rule over both Austria and Hungary, but each country would be its own sovereign state.
Elisabeth’s keen interest in the Hungarian independence effort can be attributed in part to her close personal relationship with Count Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian prime minister. When the pair first met in 1866, Elisabeth reportedly made clear her personal affinity for Hungary, saying, “You see, when the emperor’s affairs in Italy go badly, it pains me; but when the same thing happens with Hungary, that is death to me.”
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Elisabeth had previously shown an interest in Hungarian culture, even learning enough of the language to deliver an “improvised speech … in faultless Hungarian” to welcome a delegation including Andrássy to Viennese court, Hamann writes.
Andrássy had a similarly high opinion of the empress, once observing “that no other such woman exists on earth.” But whether the two enjoyed a romantic rather than platonic relationship is a matter of debate.
To what degree Elisabeth was influenced by her relationship with Andrássy versus her general affection for the Hungarian population is difficult to say. Still, Hamann writes, “At no other time in her life did Elisabeth write such long letters to her husband as she did now, when it was a matter of Hungary (and Andrássy’s will). For the sake of Hungary (and Andrássy), she worded her political preferences so sharply as to approximate blackmail.”
According to Wohlfart, this approach ultimately backfired on the empress. Franz Joseph gave Elisabeth a clear imperative after capitulating to her request, telling her that she would never again be involved in political life.
Even without Elisabeth’s input, the Ausgleich would have likely still happened, Wohlfart says, although it might have taken more time. The Austro-Hungarian Empire survived until 1918, when it collapsed following the Central Powers’ defeat by the Allies during World War I.
For Elisabeth, the creation of Austria-Hungary was also the beginning of the end, this time of her interest in public life. What she regarded as her “triumphs,” according to Hamann, “angered court society in Vienna to such a degree that the gulf became unbridgeable.” In 1889, the empress also suffered a great tragedy when her son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed his lover and then himself, apparently as part of a murder-suicide pact. Elisabeth’s “rigid anguish, with her belief in predestination, her grief that it was her Bavarian blood that rose to Rudolf’s head … [was] unspeakably bitter to watch,” the empress’ youngest daughter wrote in her diary.
Rudolf’s death surely exacerbated Elisabeth’s desire to extricate herself from the public and physical world—a longing that was also reflected in her obsession with self-improvement and self-edification. By the time she reached her 40s in the late 1870s, she was engaging in a kind of conscious myth-building, becoming more reclusive but understanding the need to build a legacy.
“She’s very much a person of the Viennese 1900s, even if she died in 1898,” says Lindinger. “All the symbolism, all the paintings that were very famous at the time—she incorporates this. … The Empress Elisabeth in her black gowns, and her hairstyle and her face like a statue, severe and angular—this was the ideal of beauty at this time.”
Elisabeth wanted the public to remember her for her beauty and youth, even when she no longer had at least one of these. This is clear in the contrast between the death mask that was shown to the public after her assassination, a softened, youthful version, and her real death mask, which shows the facial rigidity of a 60-year-old woman.
The empress’ killer, Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, originally intended to assassinate Prince Henri of Orleans, but he settled for Elisabeth instead after learning that she was staying in Geneva. On September 10, 1898, Lucheni stopped the empress on the street and stabbed her in the chest with a file he had sharpened into a weapon. Elisabeth died of her injuries two hours later.
The public response to Elisabeth’s death was not what one might expect today, given just how large she looms in the popular imagination. As one Viennese noble said at the time, “Not many tears were shed for her,” and those that did fall were more for Franz Joseph, who had now lost both his wife and his son.
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While Elisabeth could not always control her image in life, she did so successfully in death. Her depictions spoke for her in a way that perhaps her physical self never could. For example, in official portraits, Florek argues, Elisabeth never really embraced her imperial role.
“I don’t think she identified herself as an empress,” Florek says. “She was really a celebrity at a moment in which monarchs are becoming more public figures than they are rulers. In the state portrait of her with stars in her hair, she doesn’t look like a queen. She looks like an opera star, a Queen of the Night, a theatrical photograph.”
As fashion editor Diana Vreeland argued in 1984, the empress “was one of the first modern women. She was one of the first women who did exercises, one of the first who did gymnastics, and one night a week she’d go to bed in special sheets of bath toweling packed in beefsteaks—for her skin. Apparently, she never looked older than 30—ever.”
This, Florek notes, is the paradox of Elisabeth.
“It seems utterly unreal and completely believable at the same time, this impossibly beautiful woman across these painted portraits,” she says. “The Winterhalters have added to her mystique, but I think she doesn’t get credit for constructing that mystique.”
So perhaps it is not Elisabeth’s legendary beauty that should compel us. Instead, we might ask how the reclusive empress managed to so deftly create a lasting public image without ever really being seen.