Jonathan Keates

A hostage to fortune

Jonathan Keates on a comprehensive study of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand

issue 19 July 2008

Mugging, according to a popular theory, is a consensual act. Split seconds before the assault takes place victims supposedly establish some sort of complicity with their attackers, thus turning the robbery into a contractual arrangement. The same principle is just as easily applied to political assassination. Along the lines traced by Hardy’s famous poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, which suggests that the Titanic and the iceberg had actually been waiting to bump into each other, the hated tyrant seeks some kind of consummation in the thrust of a dagger or the discharge of a bullet.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, appears to have received more than one premonitory glimmer of his death at the hands of the Serb student Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914. ‘I know I shall soon be murdered,’ he announced to a relative shortly beforehand, adding that a newly-completed crypt at the family castle stood ready to receive him.

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