Empty Gesture

EMPEROR FRANCIS JOSEPH OF AUSTRIA. A Biography--Joseph Redlich--Macmillan ($5).

Author Redlich, Moravian born, practiced law in Vienna, sat for twelve years in Austria's Parliament, and was appointed in 1918 Minister of Finance for old Austria. At present professor of Comparative Public Law at Harvard Law School, he has written numerous essays and books on law and government. With such qualifications he now writes the first, and definitive, history of Francis Joseph--not a biography in the Strachey-Maurois manner, but a survey of European international problems since 1848, as reflected in the stubborn career of the last Emperor of Austria.

For the intimate biographer there is an embarrassment of riches in Francis Joseph's circle--the unhappy Empress, proud and beautiful, stabbed by an anarchist; Archduke Max, strangely Emperor of Mexico; Archduke John Salvator who disappeared into the Pacific; the Crown Prince Rudolf mysteriously and horribly a suicide; and finally the next heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, fatefully killed at Serajevo. But these dramatics are insignificant facts in Author Redlich's account of the final struggle between time-honored legitimacy and modern nationalism--Francis Joseph granting his people universal suffrage and a parliament, and then stultifying the gesture by reserving his absolute power.