Gavrilo Princip – history’s ultimate teenage tearaway

Amid the vast tonnage of recent books about the first world war this must be the most unusual — and one of the most interesting. The ‘Trigger’ of the title is Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old student dropout who shot the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street corner on 28 June 1914 and began the chain of events that led to catastrophic war a few weeks later.

At first it reads oddly, a curious ragbag of material that seems disconnected. It is part a biography of ‘history’s ultimate teenage tearaway’, as Tim Butcher puts it, part an investigation into some of Princip’s surviving family members in Bosnia, an intensely personal memoir by Butcher of his time as a journalist covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and partly a discourse into the nature of nationalism.  Yet he weaves the various strands together so deftly that it ends as a triumph of storytelling.

Princip’s story is well known. A Bosnian Serb, born in peasant penury, he is spotted as a bright boy by the Austro-Hungarian authorities and given a scholarship to the best school in the country, in Sarajevo. For a year he works hard and gets ‘A’ grades, but then he becomes obsessed by radical politics, is sucked into extremist groups, abjures drink, sex and parties for revolutionary nationalism and with three young co-conspirators concocts probably the most infamous and portentous assassination plot in history.

Butcher describes the day of the murder itself brilliantly, with vivid detail, and he handles the ghastly treatment of Princip afterwards with sympathy. Just two weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was too young under the Habsburg laws to be hanged; he languished in a damp dungeon, his tuberculosis left untreated, while his infected limbs were amputated.