Apart from great nobles like Archduke Charles, who had a special fondness for the military, the other great nobles had all cut their guard forces to fewer than a hundred men. The lesser and middling nobles had even disbanded their guards outright to save money, or retained only a symbolic handful.
Thus, during the Vienna uprising, although the nobles could still muster a rebel force numbering over ten thousand, only those few thousand private guards and noble offspring possessed any real fighting strength. And since they answered to no common command, they schemed against one another; when faced with a real army, they naturally crumbled at the first touch.
Moreover, Franz had never intended to give them an opportunity for a pitched battle. Planting a few informants within such a vast and chaotic organization could not have been easier.
Thus, every time, the rebels marched straight into traps Franz had designed in advance. It was not that he possessed divine foresight and could always anticipate the enemy; the other side's information and actions were all out in the open. If he still could not handle them under those conditions, that would have been truly ridiculous.
Still, this did establish Franz's reputation as a god of war. At the very least, anyone who wished to rebel afterward would regard him as a tyrant skilled in both warfare and intrigue.
The bureaucratic system had also been shaken by 1848. Metternich, once the Austrian Empire's greatest bureaucrat, had been sent by Franz to North America. Coupled with the repeated turnover of prime ministers and interest groups afterward, by the time Franz took power, the officials' influence had already been split apart and scattered into dozens of factions.
From the very beginning of his reign, Franz mixed sand into the bureaucratic machine, creating new