Without such a dramatic casus belli, would the Austrian government have had less reason to confront Serbia? Or would the attempt itself still have given them enough of a pretext? Is it possible that one of the most destructive wars in human history was the result of a teenager's lunch choice? Without that error, or even if the timing had been off by just a few minutes, it is likely that the archduke would have lived. Only an unfortunate driver's error gave the Serbian conspirators a second chance to assassinate him. What if Franz Ferdinand had lived? Would World War I have been avoided? He did survive the first assassination attempt. The murder set off an avalanche of events that would culminate in a few short weeks with the start of World War I. ![]() Seizing the opportunity, Princip rushed out and fired two fatal bullets at Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Inside, one of the six Serbian conspirators, a 19-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip, was buying a sandwich. Attempting to reverse, he stopped directly in front of Schiller's Delicatessen. While attempting to find the hospital where his aides were being treated, the archduke's driver mistakenly turned into Franz Joseph Strasse. The plot failed, resulting in the injury, from a bomb blast, to several of the archduke's aides. A Serbian "paramilitary organization" - today, we would call them terrorists - committed to the unification of Bosnian Serbs with the kingdom of Serbia had organized an assassination attempt while the archduke's motorcade traveled along the Apple Quay in Sarajevo. The funeral occurred a week after the assassination of the archduke and his wife, on June 28, while they were on an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. His disdain for his heir was so great, that, even though he was in residence in Vienna at the time, he did not even bother to attend his nephew's funeral. His uncle, the Emperor Franz Joseph, had chosen him only reluctantly as his heir after the suicide of his only son, the Crown Prince Rudolph. ![]() The archduke had never been particularly popular in Austria-Hungary. ![]() On July 4, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, the Countess Sophia, were buried at Artstetten, about 50 miles west of Vienna.
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