FRANCESCO IV of Austria-Este, duke of MODENA and REGGIO. - Born on 6 Oct. 1799 at Milan, died on 18 Jan. 1846 at Modena, firstborn son of Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, and of Maria Beatrice, heiress of the duchies of Modena, Reggio, Massa and Carrara. During the Revolution and the Empire he was in exile and married in 1812, at Cagliari, Maria Beatrice of Savoy. After Napoleon's fall, he became in 1814 duke of Modena and Reggio. Intelligent and cultured, he governed with prudent energy, displaying singular administrative gifts, although from the earliest years the tendency was evident to concentrate every power in his own person and to prevent in every way in his State the spread of any innovative concept.
Of this he made no further mystery after the risings of 1820-21 at Naples and in Piedmont. He adhered without hesitation to the resolutions of the Congress of Ljubljana and considered the struggle against the sects the chief aim of his political activity, setting up a special tribunal at Rubiera to judge the Carbonari. He conceived his political action as a mission and a crusade. He saw excessive weakness toward revolutionaries everywhere, preached severity without remission to all the other sovereigns of Italy, and whoever did not heed him was considered by him a traitor to the absolutist cause. He even doubted Cardinal Spina, pontifical plenipotentiary at the Congress of Ljubljana, and accused him in a letter to Pius VII of having expressed liberal maxims at that assembly, because the cardinal had not accepted his thesis that even one who was merely suspected of sectarian membership was liable to condemnation, without such suspicion being justified by the necessary proofs. In 1822 he had the priest G. Andreoli condemned to death, as more guilty than the other accused, «because of his quality as priest and professor, which he used to seduce the young and draw them into the society of the Carbonari to which he belonged».
Firmly convinced that he could nullify the efficacy of revolutionary ideas with reforms of a paternalistic character, he took care to eliminate by economic measures (taxes distributed equitably, sale of grain at a fair price in time of famine, greater impetus to agricultural, industrial and commercial activities) the causes that could provoke the discontent of his subjects and make them inclined to innovations. It was claimed that he was not insensible to the prospect of seeing his sovereignty extended over a territory larger than that inherited, and that he granted his support to Enrico Milsley and Ciro Menotti, who would have held out such an eventuality to him; but in any case it is certain that he was not fully informed by the conspirators about their real political and ideological intentions. The death sentence of Menotti was therefore erroneously judged and assessed as a vindictive resentment, dictated also by the equivocal position in which the duke would have found himself before Austria and the other Italian States. He considered the alliance between throne and altar one of the fundamental conditions for the preservation of the established order and always favored the Church, but he affirmed on some occasion the pre-eminence of civil power over ecclesiastical power. To him is owed, among other things, an interesting and symptomatic study on Sardinia, which he attentively traversed and acutely described.