The Empress | Official Trailer | Netflix
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Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria (1837 – 1898), nicknamed Sisi, was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 until her assassination in 1898. . . .
In 1897, her sister, Sophie, died in an accidental fire at the Bazar de la Charité charity event in Paris. While travelling in Geneva in 1898, Elisabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. Her tenure of 44 years was the longest of any Austrian empress. - Wikipedia
Fabulous wealth, fabulous palaces, fabulous clothes, rigid social protocol, simmering unrest, neighbors threatening war, all the stuff we got in Game of Thrones but this time for real.
There were a couple of odd bits.
Franz's mother gives Elisabeth a necklace. Franz's brother tells her that the necklace was worn by Marie Antoinette at her execution. While there are a zillion pages talking about a fancy diamond necklace that a couple of jewelers tried to sell to Marie, I found nothing about one from her execution.
When the royal doctor conducts the royal purity test he finds Elisabeth's hymen is broken. Now it comes out that this can happen to a girl from horseback riding. Huh, the things nobody ever tells me. Google is no help, some pages say it's true, others say not.
Robert Stephenson, British railway engineer, has an oddly clandestine meeting with Franz Joseph about building a railroad in Austria. It actually did get built:
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| Semmering Railway |
The Semmering Railway, built over 41 km of high mountains between 1848 and 1854, is one of the greatest feats of civil engineering from this pioneering phase of railway building. The high standard of the tunnels, viaducts and other works has ensured the continuous use of the line up to the present day. - UNESCO
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