192. Staps
Compared with the noisy and highly theatrical scene in the other timeline, when Emperor Napoleon led his army into Berlin in triumph, André behaved with remarkable restraint on the first day of his conquest of the Prussian capital. Some later pseudo-historians, men with far too much idle time on their hands, claimed after much painstaking “research” and elaborate argument that the brave women of Prussia had, in the French camps the night before, successfully defeated André’s invincible warriors, so that not a single soldier under his command remained spirited enough to carry out the solemn and majestic entry into the city.
Plainly, that was not true. The real situation was that the Military Intelligence Office and the gendarmerie had jointly confirmed one alarming report: a group of vicious Prussian fanatics was preparing to assassinate Commander André during the French army’s entry ceremony. As for who exactly was involved, where the attempt was to be made, and what method was to be used, none of that was yet known.
For that reason, André, who always valued his own life highly, accepted the warning from the intelligence service without hesitation. He not only ordered the cancellation of a whole series of tedious and lengthy ceremonial arrangements, but also moved the entry forward to the small hours of the next morning rather than at eleven o’clock, five hours later. Only the final item of the ceremony was retained: the planting, in the square before the Berlin City Palace, of an oak sapling symbolizing liberty and equality.
When André poured water from his canteen onto the soil around the oak sapling, applause immediately rose from every side. Among the onlookers were not only the officers and aides around the Commander-in-Chief of the French army, but also the diplomats of the various nations who had come as witnesses, together with the officials of Berlin’s City Hall.
From this day onward, every official in the Prussian capital district, including Berlin, Potsdam, Brandenburg, and the surrounding areas, was to obey French orders until the Kingdom of Prussia had fulfilled every clause of the Treaty of the Five Powers, above all the payment of the war indemnity. One hour before his arrival in Berlin, André had already signed a decree, in accordance with the supplementary clauses of the treaty, appointing General Moncey Governor-Supervisor of Berlin and placing West Prussia under the military rule of the multinational coalition, in effect the French army.
For the European order as a whole, this Treaty of the Five Powers was the gravest blow since the Thirty Years’ War. The once powerful and brilliant Kingdom of Prussia had been stripped of more than forty percent of its population, leaving it with only around five million people, and over one-third of its territory, chiefly in West Prussia. On the map, the realm now looked fragmented and broken. Moreover, West Prussia itself still remained under the control of the French army and its allies.
Viewed in that light, the House of Hohenzollern, once so illustrious in Europe, seemed destined to sink into insignificance. Yet André still did not trust this “army with a state,” even after beating it half to death. In fact, he had at one point insisted on dismantling the whole of Prussia, leaving it only a small territory and a single fortress at Königsberg on the Baltic, reducing Prussia to a medieval condition and turning it into little more than a small city-state under the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.
The British ambassador opposed that proposal with the utmost firmness. The Russian ambassador, speaking directly for Saint Petersburg, issued a threat of war. In addition, the Austrian envoy Metternich, acting under orders from Vienna, declared Austria’s position aligned with Britain and Russia. Even André’s two most steadfast allies, the Elector of Saxony, his future father-in-law, and the Regent of Sweden, who was practically family to him, expressed dissatisfaction with André’s stubborn determination to break Prussia apart completely.
Furious, André smashed yet another set of British bone china. In the end, however, rather than allow himself to fall into the position of fighting alone, he ordered that the destruction of the Prussian kingdom be postponed until the next war. From beginning to end, André never believed that the arrogant and warlike Prussians would become Europe’s peace party. For the present, all he could do was to suppress as much as possible the war potential of West Prussia.
Reducing the one hundred thousand Prussian prisoners in the camps to laborers in France was only the first step. As General Penduvas prepared to depart for Stockholm, André also ordered the newly appointed head of the Sixth Section of the Military Intelligence Office, General Laclos, formerly artillery commander of Hoche’s First Army, to begin an operation targeting “the elite class attempting to restore Prussia.” Among those included were Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, a Prussian general, Baron de Stein, the statesman, and Marquis de Hardenberg, another statesman.
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Founded in 1696, the Brandenburg and Prussian Academy of Arts, which in the other timeline would become the Berlin University of the Arts, was one of the earliest higher art academies in West Prussia, older even than the Kingdom of Prussia itself, which came into being only in 1701. After Frederick the Great ascended the throne, the Prussian king, who loved the arts, had the academy moved from Brandenburg in the west to the capital Berlin, directly opposite the City Palace.
Once André had completed the “tree-planting ceremony” in the square before the City Palace, he invited the diplomats of the various nations inside to tour the palace as its master. Only the day before, the French Commander had still been trading sharp words and angry glances with those same envoys. Now, however, the various disputes and criticisms had melted away. The Kingdom of Prussia, reduced to the rank of a second- or third-rate European state, had been allowed to survive, while the conqueror himself now possessed more than enough authority.
At that moment, near one side of the garden outside the City Palace, a frail young man with fair hair and a slight build was pacing back and forth. He soon drew the attention of the gendarmerie. After General Laclos had been informed, this German youth, who claimed he wished to present a peace petition to the conqueror of Berlin, was taken to a room in the palace for further examination. Very quickly the gendarmes found on him a sharp dagger, a short pistol already loaded and primed, and a stack of leaflets containing militant proclamations against the French army and against André.
Soon afterward, under interrogation by the Military Intelligence Office, the pale, delicate young man, whose manner was refined and whose appearance was shy and almost timid, stated that his name was Staps, that he came from the province of Silesia, and that he was a new student at the conservatory of the Prussian Academy of Arts. He had planned to assassinate André while the latter was receiving and reading the petition.
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After hearing Laclos’s secret report, André signaled to the newly appointed general of the Military Intelligence Office to bring the audacious Prussian youth before him. He intended to examine him publicly in the presence of the diplomats of the various nations.
Looking at the boy before him, no more than seventeen years old, André motioned for the gendarmes to remove his handcuffs and asked, “Tell me, Monsieur Staps, what were you planning to do with the dagger and pistol you carried?”
The Prussian youth straightened his chest and answered loudly, “To kill you, of course.”
A low murmur ran through the hall. The officials of Berlin’s City Hall and the diplomats all knew that the boy was as good as dead. In Europe, whether one succeeded or failed, the price of attempting to assassinate a sovereign was always death.
André smiled. When his sharp gaze swept the room, the whole hall instantly fell silent. The conqueror then asked, “Poor child, are you an idiot, or are you ill?”
Staps took a step as though to answer André with even greater force, but the drawn swords of the gendarmes forced him to stand where he was. The would-be assassin said stubbornly, “I am not an idiot, and I am not ill. I am in excellent health.”
André asked again, “Then why do you want to kill me?” He had plainly seen that the youth’s soft, slender fingers were made for the piano or the violin, not for the dagger and pistol of a professional assassin.
The young man of artistic temperament replied, “Because you are the source of the suffering of Prussia and Germany.”
André shook his head. “You are an arrogant and ignorant student. For that reason, I am inclined to pardon you and spare your life. If I grant you mercy, will you be grateful? And you must...”
Staps cut him off without the least courtesy. “I want no mercy, and I will never be grateful to a hypocritical French invader. I can tell you now that even if I walk out of this palace alive, I will still try again to kill you, unless you leave Prussia.”
Throughout the questioning in the palace hall, Staps remained calm, resolute, and unbending, which left a deep impression upon André. Yet this brainless patriot did not understand how much harm his actions might do to his own country. The French dictator had been searching in vain for a pretext to march against East Prussia.
A few days later, before a special criminal tribunal designated by the French army, Staps, the music student from the Prussian Academy of Arts, was sentenced to death by hanging for the attempted assassination of the Commander-in-Chief of the French army.
But two hours later André received a letter of intercession from his fiancée, whom he had not yet met in person, Princesse Maria of Saxony. He then decided to sign a pardon: the Prussian youth of artistic temperament who had attempted to assassinate him was to be exiled to the French colonial possession of New Orléans in North America for no fewer than twenty years.
At the same time, the Sixth Section of the Military Intelligence Office under General Laclos did not abandon its pursuit of the deeper plot behind the assassination attempt, and it soon established that the conspiracy had originated in Königsberg and had received secret cooperation from Sanssouci and from many officials in West Prussia.
Very soon, a French infantry brigade, supported by ten guns, was ordered into Sanssouci. It disarmed the five hundred Prussian troops there and placed Wilhelm II under the direct supervision of the French army. In addition, the French gendarmerie, on charges of involvement in the plot to assassinate Commander André, arrested large numbers of anti-French officials in Berlin, Potsdam, Brandenburg, and other places, later sending them to hard labor in French quarries, and issued a series of warrants for the arrest of General Blücher, Baron de Stein, Marquis de Hardenberg, and others who had fled to Russia.
Originally, André intended to use the immense impact of the “failed Staps assassination” as grounds to order the one hundred and twenty thousand men of the coalition to continue the offensive into East Prussia, seize Königsberg, and dismantle Prussia once and for all. Even the French and Russian ambassadors present had to admit the plain and undeniable fact that the Prussians had attempted to murder the conqueror of Berlin. By international custom, Commander André had every right to take military action in retaliation.
Yet just as André was about to order the French army to march on Königsberg, the National Convention in Paris refused his request to postpone once again the trial of the former king Louis XVI. It decided instead that in late February the final fate of the “Bourbon tyrant” would be determined by vote. André was so enraged that inside the Berlin Palace he smashed the busts of Brissot, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon.
In early March, André instructed General Moncey to cancel the military plan, and East Prussia escaped destruction by good fortune. Later, once the envoy Talleyrand, who had gone to Königsberg for negotiations, had “forced” the authorities in East Prussia to expel every Prussian official implicated in the conspiracy, André brought his journey in West Prussia to an end and returned to Reims with the Guard Division.
Before departing, André expanded General Macdonald’s Second Army, which was to remain in West Prussia, from forty thousand men to fifty thousand, the additional troops coming from General Lefebvre’s division. Because everything was done in haste, André ultimately failed to go on to Dresden and see his fiancée, the innocent and kind-hearted Princesse Maria of Saxony.
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On the question of Louis XVI, André found himself facing an extraordinarily difficult political choice.
As the “great son of the Revolution,” a phrase drawn from the endless flattery with which Le Figaro praised its own master, and as the foremost beneficiary of the French Republic, André Franck had to stand with the Jacobins and support the just trial of the tyrant Louis XVI, thereby bringing the legality of the French Revolution, at least in terms of procedure, to its conclusion.
Yet the Commander André of this moment was no longer the revolutionary of 1792. The power and position he now possessed were enough to make him one of the most commanding monarchs in Europe in all but name. Andréan France had already crushed the once overbearing Prussians twice, and the major European powers had in turn come to recognize that Andréan France had replaced Prussia among the great powers of Europe.
Under such conditions, André, now effectively a monarch, could never allow a deposed king of France to die at the hands of the Paris mob. In fact, the great powers of Europe, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Spain, together with André’s own allies, the Elector of Saxony and the Regent of Sweden, all hoped that André would step forward of his own accord, turn his gaze toward Paris, and put a stop to the series of unhappy events unfolding there. This included Comte de Provence, Louis XVI’s brother, now in exile in London, and Princesse Élisabeth, Louis XVI’s sister.
André, however, rejected with firmness the political and military demands of the various envoys. He openly declared that he would oppose any form of civil war without hesitation, would not threaten the revolutionary capital by force, and would never betray the France he loved.
He knew very well that, even though he possessed so-called noble blood, ruled over thirteen million people in Andréan France, commanded more than two hundred thousand soldiers personally loyal to him, and wielded a degree of authority unmatched by ordinary European monarchs, one undeniable fact remained: the ultimate source of his strength still lay in the French Republic, in the thirty-three million people of France, including Belgium and the territories of western Germany.
For that reason, André could loudly condemn lawless violence, but he could not oppose the French Revolution itself. He could denounce the radical proposals of the Jacobins, but he could not repudiate the entire political program that had emerged since 1789, especially the Declaration of the Rights of Man, with its core principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity...
After turning the matter over in his mind again and again, André began to think of using political maneuver rather than force to free himself from this awkward predicament.