The Day That Shook the World The Day That Shook the World The Day That Shook the World (, lit. "The Sarajevo Assassination") is a 1975 Czechoslovak-Yugoslav-German co-production film directed by Veljko Bulajić, starring Christopher Plummer and Florinda Bolkan. The film is about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in 1914 and the immediate aftermath that led to the outbreak of World War I. When the only surviving heir to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was killed by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, on 28 June 1914, his death set in motion a chain of events that
July Crisis Emperor Franz Joseph signed the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Russia. July Crisis The July Crisis was a series of interrelated diplomatic and military escalations among the major powers of Europe in the summer of 1914 that was the penultimate cause of World War I. The crisis began on June 28, 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A complex web of alliances, coupled with miscalculations by many leaders that war was in their best interests or that a general war would not occur, resulted in a general outbreak of