Princess Stéphanie of Belgium
Archduchess of Austria
Died when: 81 years 94 days (975 months)Star Sign: Gemini
Princess Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte of Belgium (21 May 1864 – 23 August 1945) was a Belgian princess who became Crown Princess of Austria through marriage to Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Princess Stéphanie was the second daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium and Marie Henriette of Austria.She married in Vienna on 10 May 1881 Crown Prince Rudolf, son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.
They had one child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie.Stéphanie's marriage quickly became fragile.Rudolf, depressed and disappointed by politics, had multiple extramarital affairs and contracted a venereal disease that he transmitted to his wife, rendering her unable to conceive again.
In 1889 Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide pact at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods.
In 1900, Stéphanie married again, to Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank; for this, she was excluded from the House of Austria-Hungary.
However, this second union was happy.After the death of her father in 1909, Stéphanie joined her older sister Louise to claim from the Belgian courts the share of the inheritance of which they both felt they had been stripped.
Until World War II, Count and Countess Lónyay (elevated to the princely rank in 1917) peacefully spent their lives at Rusovce Mansion in Slovakia.
In 1935, Stéphanie published her memoirs, entitled Je devais être impératrice ("I Had to Be Empress").In 1944, she disinherited her daughter, who had divorced to live with a socialist deputy and whom she had not seen since 1925.
The arrival of the Red Army in April 1945, at the end of the war, forced Stéphanie and her husband to leave their residence and take refuge in the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary.
Stéphanie died of a stroke in the abbey later the same year.
Related People
Archduchess of Austria
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Archduchess of Austria
Archduchess of Austria