In the course of 600 years one family, the Habsburgs, came to dominate the huge area of central and south-eastern Europe which included what we know today as Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and large parts of Yugoslavia, Poland, Rumania, and northern Italy. Fifty years ago their Empire fell. Tonight's film tells the story of the man who strove so desperately to hold his inheritance together, the Emperor Franz Joseph. He came to the throne in 1848 at the age of eighteen, and for sixty-eight years suffered an unending series of public disasters and personal tragedies, including the suicide of his son and the assassination of his wife. On his shoulders rested the vast complex of an Empire approaching its end. But behind the glitter of a decadent Vienna an amazing burst of creative energy took place. Doctors, musicians-great men from all corners of the Empire converged on the capital, Vienna. In the midst of all this activity Franz Joseph tried in vain to hold at bay the forces of nationalism which eventually brought about the destruction of the old Europe.