On 10 September 1898 Empress Elisabeth was murdered by an anarchist assassin. His name was Luigi Lucheni, but who was the man behind the name?

He was born in Paris on 22 April 1873, the son of a simple working-class woman of Italian descent. He knew poverty from a very early age, as he grew up in an orphanage and had to work hard from the age of ten. At the age of twenty he was conscripted into the Italian army and fought in the Abyssinian campaign of 1896. After this he was briefly employed by the Prince of Aragon, but mostly earned his living with occasional labour in Switzerland. Class distinctions and his own life, eking out his existence at the bare minimum, fed his hatred of the aristocracy and the wealthy. The event that triggered his assassination plans was the bloody suppression of a workers’ revolt in Milan in 1898. His intended victim was the Prince of Orléans. From newspaper reports Lucheni learned that Empress Elisabeth was staying at Geneva. He lay in wait for the empress and stabbed her with a triangular file, dealing her a fatal blow near the heart. Lucheni was arrested near the scene of the crime and gave himself up proudly. When he heard of the empress’s death he was exultant. Lucheni was sentenced to life imprisonment, the death penalty having been abolished in Switzerland. However he was determined to go down in history as a martyr of the anarchist movement. With a public execution the world’s attention would have been focused on him. He therefore demanded to be extradited to Italy, where his wish would have been granted. His application was however rejected. On 19 October 1910 he was found dead in his cell; he had hanged himself with his belt.

Parts of his body were preserved for scientific purposes. Lucheni’s head was preserved in a jar of Formalin and kept under lock and key at the Institute of Forensic Science of the University of Geneva. At Austria’s request it was transferred to the Federal Museum of Pathology and Anatomy in Vienna in 1985 on condition that the head would not be publicly displayed. In 2000 the murderer’s head was interred in Vienna’s Central Cemetery in the special graves reserved for human anatomical remains.