the assassination of franz ferdinand was actually the most hilariously botched assassination attempt of all time though like i can’t even explain to you how badly it went i mean there were six guys and the first one chickened out and the second one forgot to factor in the delay on a hand grenade so it exploded like three cars past the archduke’s so the guy took a cyanide pill and threw himself into a river, but the cyanide was expired and the river was six inches deep so the police just pulled him out and took him off to jail and then everyone else basically gave up and headed home, and then the driver of the archduke took a wrong turn and the car stalled next to the last of the six guys, and he was just like “what a crazy random happenstance” and started world war one
You forgot to mention that the last guy only happened to kill Franz because he had just come out of the sandwich shop where the car stopped
It is obvious to even the most casual observer that this particular event has been meddled with by at least two groups of time travelers trying to change history. Please, if you invent a time machine, leave the assassination of Ferdinand alone; the space-time continuum there is already showing obvious cracks from the strain.
the story of how ww1 was started by a bunch of incompetent children is my fave historical fact of all time - (and I do mean children, since all 5 of the initially arrested assassination conspirators were minors under austrian law at the time)
and the fact that some of them initially banded together to commit, like, just any unspecified act of terrorism,not necessarily assassinate the archduke, as a sort of early 20th century assassination fandom, because they idolized a guy from their town who had previously tried to kill a high ranking bosnian official, meaning terrorism was just the major teen fad of their time
but my absolute fave little factoid that really shows these were just completely regular 19 year old boys in every way is that all of them took a virginity pledge so nothing would distract them in their revolutionary mission
except gavrilo princip had a gf called jelena, and on the night before the assassination he decided he really didn’t want to die a virgin, so he arranged a rendez-vous with jelena in a park and tried to explain that it’s vitally important that they have sex right then, but he couldn’t tell her why because he didn’t want to implicate her in the assassination
so obviously with it being 1914 she says no, he goes home, then goes on to start ww1 in the morning, but what makes the story for me is that when they later interviewed jelena about gavrilo and the assassination, after telling the story about them meeting in the park she said the following (i’m paraphrasing slightly)
‘i’m not surprised. gavrilo was so pissed that night (about them not having sex) he was ready to shoot god, let alone an emperor ’
“Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.”
-Otto von Bismarck, 1878
I love history.
