Franz Joseph I of Austria
Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I (Franz Joseph Karl; 18 August 1830 – 21 November 1916) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and monarch of many other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 2 December 1848 to his death. From 1 May 1850 to 24 August 1866 he was also President of the German Confederation. He was the longest-reigning Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, as well as the third-longest-reigning monarch of any country in European history, after Louis XIV of France and Johann II of Liechtenstein.
December Constitution
Hungary had come close to independence during the 1848 revolutions, had been beaten into submission only with the help of the Russian Empire, and had lived under what effectively was a military dictatorship ever since. In 1866, Austria was defeated in the Austro-Prussian War and lost its claim to being the leading German state, plunging the Habsburg dynasty and their German-speaking realms into an unprecedented identity crisis. The monarch's moral authority gravely damaged once more, unrest in Hungary threatened to erupt again. His back to the wall, Franz Joseph saw no choice but grant Hungary all but full independence in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. To prevent the empire's non-Hungarian ethnicities from demanding similar levels of autonomy, Franz Joseph then had to return to constitutionalism and vest the empire's peoples with participation rights in the legislative and administrative process.