Here's a historical novel waiting to be written. Or maybe it would make a good YouTube video. Or a Monty Python skit. Or a poem written in the style of Alexander Pope. Or a tragic opera filled with heartbreaking arias. Oy.

The Habsburg monarch, Francis, could no longer call himself Holy Roman Emperor, since Bonaparte had abolished that ancient entity, which went back to Charlemagne. Francis himself was a feeble figure, who spent his time making toffee and endlessly stamping blank sheets of parchment with specimens from his huge collection of seals. When Bonaparte, who had discarded his wife Josephine for failing to give him an heir, demanded of Francis a further sacrifice in the shape of his eldest daughter, Marie-Louise, the head of the House of Habsburg, then the grandest ruling family in Europe, felt he had to assent. It is true that the Habsburgs had made their way in the world less by winning battles than by judicious marriages. But the shame was fearful. Marie-Louise, then 18, had been brought up to call Bonaparte "the Corsican Anti-Christ." It was as though the Britain of 1940, having surrendered to Hitler, had been forced to deliver Princess Elizabeth, elder daughter of King George VI, to the Fuhrer as his bride. Marie-Louise, hitherto interested chiefly in whipped cream and her pet ducks, was happy to escape from her governesses and inquisitive priests to the glamor of the usurper's court at Fontainebleau. But the Courts of Germany felt the horror of an alliance which, in effect, sanctioned the murder of Marie Antoinette, another Habsburg princess and the bride's great-aunt, and legitimated a plebeian tyrant.

[from Johnson, The Birth of the Modern]