On September 10, 1898, Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, was stabbed in Geneva by Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist of 25, as she walked from her hotel to the steamer that would take her across the lake. She collapsed a few minutes later and died within the hour. She was 60.
Lucheni had come to Geneva to kill Prince Philippe of Orleans, the pretender to the French throne. The prince had already left. He decided to kill a royal instead, any royal. He went to the lakeside to see who was there, carrying a file sharpened to a point. It was a short weapon, and it went about two inches into her chest. She was wearing a corset that held the wound closed, which is partly why she was able to walk to the boat and did not understand what had happened.
The target was symbolic and that was the point of the whole style of attack. Lucheni told the police he had chosen a Habsburg because a Habsburg was available, and anarchist attacks in this period, the years that also took President Carnot of France in 1894, Prime Minister Canovas of Spain in 1897 and Empress Elisabeth, were aimed at the institution rather than the person. Lucheni was sentenced to life. He refused to defend himself. He killed himself in prison in 1910.
Elisabeth had been empress since 1854, married at 16 to Franz Joseph, and had spent her life in semi-retirement from a court she disliked, travelling, riding and keeping out of Vienna. Her only son, Rudolf, had died at Mayerling in 1889, and she had worn black and kept moving ever since. The Habsburg monarchy had 20 years left; Franz Joseph died in 1916 and the empire broke up in 1918.
The assassination produced one concrete international result. The killing of a head of state's consort by an individual with no state behind it pushed European governments toward coordinating police action against anarchist networks, and an anti-anarchist conference was held in Rome in November 1898, the first of several.