Who was Franz Ferdinand?

Let me start out by saying wow, Franz Ferdinand is one unlucky guy. History only really remembers him as the guy who was shot in Sarajevo. I don't really know anything else about him. What kind of a person was he? Was he going to be an anti-Serbian leader? It is even more depressing to think about how his wife suffered the same fate on June 28, 1914. She was probably innocent and undeserving of being killed. The death of someone innocent seems to be the way that most major revolutions start, or at least the revolutions that produce major results fast. The deaths of the weak French King Louis XVI and the former czar Nicholas II, who had abdicated and no longer threatened the revolution, are examples of such deaths, or at least in my eyes. These people differ from a repressive ruler like Saddam Hussein because a repressive ruler works with a network of ruthless, loyal followers who may still opperate under the death of their leader. This could easily lead to war, as we are seeing today. The assassination of a relatively benign leader is not met by such crippling consequences as other leaders because these rulers do not have such a close group of followers that were relied upon in life to take up the cause of revenge.

Franz Ferdinand obviously had some powerful alllies, however. His death caused a global feud. Does this mean that he would have had the power, or desire, to be an oppressive ruler? I don't necessarily think so. I think strong feelings of nationalism, causing the citizens of Austria-Hungary to feel insulted by the assassination, were more the cause of war than powerful government bodies. If the citizens of his country were so upset by his death, Franz Ferdinand was probably expected to be a good ruler for his people.