Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Wow, you've really spoiled us with the sheer number of updates the past week. Keep up the good work!
One question I have: what's the status of women's suffrage in the US? Now that the Dems are back to a majority in both chambers could we expect to see an amendment being voted on soon?
One question I have: what's the status of women's suffrage in the US? Now that the Dems are back to a majority in both chambers could we expect to see an amendment being voted on soon?
Last edited:
Thank you!
It'll be something on the docket, though it'll be a bit more expansive than the OTL 19th
Thats a comedy of errors there...
A Prince of Belgium shoots a German Prince who was trying to stop him assaulting a Austrian Princess......
OTL, The 15th Amendement barred banning voters on the basis of race. I guess TTL, the 16th Amendment is mash up of 19th and 15th Amendments
The Crime of the Century
"...figure well-liked by the Austrian establishment, and the feeling was reciprocated; Prince Franz and his wife, Isabella Antonie of Croy, had been married in Baden bei Wien in 1912 and often summered in Pula and its emerging riviera. Isabella had even given birth to their fourth child, Eleanore Marie, at their house in Vienna and had not felt any urge to return to Bavaria with her yet, so comfortable were they in the city. For Franz and Isabella, the posting to Vienna had not only been an intriguing opportunity but a blessing for their family, and on October 24, they were invited to a gala at the Hofburg to celebrate the return of the Habsburgs to their "winter palace" for the season.
The festivities were to last all day, with Ferdinand and Empress Maria Dorothea arriving in the late evening with an honor procession; Ferdinand was said to be hunting all day in the nearby Wienerwald, but it turns out, as he often was when "hunting," he was instead in the Mayerling hunting lodge with his longstanding mistress, the Baroness Sophie Chotek, mother of several illegitimate children of his and married to a cavalry officer suspected by historians to have been homosexual, a fact that only Ferdinand and Sophie were privy to. Though the stifling court protocols of the Hofburg had been relaxed in the previous two years somewhat by Ferdinand, his movements and that of his wife were nonetheless quite controlled, and it would be some time before they arrived at the party. To compensate for this, Maria Dorothea - a socialite who used galas, banquets, feasts and frequent travel as a coping mechanism for her unhappy marriage - had encouraged guests to arrive early for the ball, which at the last minute was made a masquerade.
Stephane Clement was, ironically, meant to have left Vienna to return to Brussels several days earlier, but a delay to his train and the chance to attend the ball - and his lack of interest in returning to Augusta Victoria and the children after three months sleeping his way through Vienna's whorehouses and the lower echelons of Court - led him to postponing his return until the first week of November. As such, he attended the gala alone, having already drank a bottle of wine to himself at home.
What happened next is a matter of great dispute. The general contours of the evening are, generally, agreed upon: at some point in the early evening, about ninety minutes before the Emperor and Empress were scheduled to arrive at the Hofburg, Stephane Clement of Belgium found himself alone with Isabella Antonie of Croy. Prince Franz of Bavaria, looking for his wife, found them in a room together, and a physical altercation occurred between himself and the Prince of Belgium. This concluded with Franz slamming Stephane Clement's head into a pillar, breaking his nose, badly bruising the right side of his face so that his eye swelled shut, and cutting a deep gash along his hairline; this all occurred in front of a Hofburg guard who had overhead the commotion and was rushing to inspect. Stephane Clement stumbled into the guard, wrestled his sidearm from his holster - guards of the Hofburg having been issues pistols only in the previous six months, on orders of Ferdinand, due to security concerns with the situation in the Habsburg Empire being what it was - and aimed at Franz.
Here, things get complicated. Stephane Clement was adamant that he and Isabella Antonie had merely been speaking privately and Franz attacked him, unprovoked, and when he drew the pistol upon his "attacker," Franz rushed him and Stephane Clement fired in self-defense after giving him a warning. The Hofburg guard, Ernst Sachs, testified that he fell backwards after Stephane Clement took the pistol off of him forcefully, and that he did not hear the prince give a verbal warning but did hear Franz shout something unintelligible before shots were fired, but could not see clearly what had happened or if Franz had moved in Stephane Clement's direction, with his view blocked by a pillar and the Belgian's body. Whatever occurred in that passageway of the Hofburg, everyone who heard the gunshots agreed that they heard one bang, very clearly, followed by three more in quick succession. Stephane Clement stated that the first bullet struck Franz in the upper chest near his heart and he lowered his gun upon realizing that he had indeed pulled the trigger, and when Franz took a second step towards him he fired three more times rapidly, instinctively, striking him in the abdomen and puncturing both his stomach and liver. Bleeding out, Franz expired within moments, lying on his left side, spitting blood out. Whatever the last words he intended to say were, they were between him and God.
Isabelle Antonie had a very different version of the story. She had met Stephane Clement socially a few times in Vienna and had always found him as grotesque as his reputation across the Courts of Europe, with an air of menace about him. As she had gone off to re-powder, he had allegedly followed her, and she had not realized it was him in the mask until he began speaking as he tried to put his hands up her skirt. He failed in his effort to rape her only because of the quick arrival of her husband, and she screamed at him that it was the Belgian prince, so that he understood the severity of the moment and did not accidentally kill her attacker with his bare hands. What came to be a matter of some controversy in the months to come was whether she had witnessed the slaying of her husband; Sachs and Stephane Clement both suggested she came out of the room to find him dead, and worried revelers and guards who rushed into the hall found her cradling his head in her arms sobbing when they arrived, but she maintained to her death in 1982 that she had seen her husband ram Stephane Clement into the pillar as they struggled, watched the Belgian pull the pistol off the guard and shove the guard onto his rear, pivot around and aim and then fire without giving her husband a chance to respond. In later years, it became an apocryphal story that Franz had raised his hands, and that what he had "shouted," according to Sachs, was a plea not to fire. This was never part of Isabella's testimony or description of the events, but she also never made any effort to correct such accounts.
Sachs leapt to his feet as Stephane Clement lowered the pistol and seized him from behind, as two other guards came charging into the hallway. The Black Prince of Belgium handed them the pistol silently, chest heaving, the stink of brandy on his breath, and as they took the masque from his face, his eyes were wild with anger, confusion, and fear. Whatever had really happened in that hallway - and historians have generally believed the accounts of Sachs and Isabella Antonie, considering Stephane Clement's reputation - it was done, and there was no going back now. His life, and indeed the world, had changed forever..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
"...Ferdinand had accepted the Belgian appeal for an alliance, but he very did much not care for Stephane Clement; that diplomatic formalities precluded his simply expelling the cretin from Vienna, especially now, was all that stopped him from pursuing such a course, and he had been delighted to hear that after overstaying his welcome well beyond a reasonable period of time, the "Black Prince" was finally going to slither his way back to Brussels. It was a dark joke that Ferdinand had delayed his scheduled return to the Hofburg on October 24 specifically because he found out Stephane Clement was going to be there; this is not true, but it was the kind of humor that became common in the postwar years, as Austrians tried to explain the bleak sequence of farcical events that followed a horrific tragedy.
What was true was that Ferdinand was running late, as was not uncommon, on his return from the Mayerling in part because the car sent to pick him up was delayed by a herd of sheep and in part because Ferdinand had given his guards strict instructions not to disturb him while with Sophie; when his car finally arrived, he was still not ready, and the guards did not knock on the door to inform them of a frantic telegram from the Hofburg warning them of shots being fired within the palace, the gala in a pandemonium, and at least one person, possibly several, having been slain in an "argument over a woman." Twenty minutes later, when Ferdinand did finally emerge from a full afternoon with his beloved mistress, he read this telegram and ordered that they return immediately - the forty-kilometer drive ahead expected to take well over an hour.
While he was returning, the frantic court retainers had elected to forbid anybody from leaving the Hofburg until the Emperor returned, which was customary anyways, but upon hearing about the death of Franz, and with no word from Franz at Mayerling, Maria Dorothea stepped in to order the palace be evacuated and the festivities cancelled. Franz's body was to be brought to a spare room and treated with respect, while Stephane Clement was told to stay where he was. The Belgian prince, naturally, protested; he maintained that as the son of a foreign King, he could not be held against his will unless he was being arrested for a crime, and curtly informed Maria Dorothea to her face that he intended to "walk out of the front gates as what I am - a free man." Maria Dorothea admitted in later years that she was tempted to slap him, shocked that he would be so insolent in the mere moments after shooting a man, but relented, stating that he was free to leave the Hofburg provided that he was under guard.
Stodgy Habsburg court protocol generally did not allow for the Viennese police to enter the grounds, without the express permission of the palace chamberlain or, barring that, the Emperor. Due to the severity of the "Hofburg Incident," as it came to be known in the immediate days thereafter, the palace staff were unwilling to break etiquette and have Ferdinand return from his intimate day "hunting" at Mayerling to the place crawling with police. As such, it would be hours until Ferdinand was back in the palace, up to speed on what had happened, and decided to ask that the Viennese police detectives come to the palace and, thereafter, go to interview Stephane Clement, who naturally was making hasty arrangements to leave Vienna as soon as that evening if he was able.
In the space between the shooting and the first interview by detectives, Ernst Sachs' story changed dramatically from initial claims amongst others that he stated that the Belgian Prince had gunned down the Bavarian Franz in cold blood; now, suddenly, he claimed that he had not had a good view of what had happened. It is unclear if his story changed because he had been pressured, or because as he tried to think of how he recalled it going down in the heat of the moment he started to doubt himself. The rumors that Sachs had told others in the palace one version shortly after the slaying, and the police and, later, the courts a different version, became a foundational piece of the German media outrage in the weeks and months to come, as did the fact that Stephane Clement had to be apprehended at his lavish apartment as he was packing his bags and formally arrested, narrowly preventing his escape from the city..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
"...October 24th, 1918 became one of those moments that seemed frozen in time; old veterans of the war could, decades later, still seem to recall where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard tell of the "Crime of the Century." There was a sense even then that something unspeakably terrible had happened, something that would forever change Europe and the world, that there was a time before October 24th, and a time after, into which history could be easily split.
The term "Hofburg affair" seemed not to do it justice; the story quickly spread that Prince Stephane Clement had tried to rape the wife of Prince Franz of Bavaria, and when her husband stepped in to pull him off and defend his wife from the unforgivable attack, he had been gunned down in cold blood in the halls of the grand Hofburg. It was lurid enough a tale on its own, but it quickly began to take on its own life, with conspiracy theories quickly promulgating, and German newspapers - even Prussian ones - baying for blood. Of course Stephane Clement was a rapist criminal who deserved nothing less than the gallows; of course the Hofburg was covering it up to protect him. And why were they protecting him? Why had Stephane Clement been in Austria, and for so long? German civil servants, well aware of the answer, finally began to leak the truth to their country's papers, which only made the firestorm worse: Stephane Clement had been in Austria securing an outright alliance with Vienna as his brother did the same in Paris, abrogating the Treaty of London, and adding a much darker wrinkle to the absurdity of the affair - a geopolitical one, of the second son of King Leopold III of Belgium murdering the third son of Ludwig III of Bavaria, the son who just happened to be the elder brother of the Empress of France, and whose sister-in-law was married to a Belgian prince herself. France, Belgium, Bavaria, Austria - it was a tangled familial web, but one that opened, as a genuine question, what way the French government would lean, especially as there was some lack of clarity in what, exactly, had occurred the night of October 24th.."
- The Central European War
"...the "Crime of the Century" was the last rites of a marriage that had long, in many ways, been dead; Helmtrud asked her husband directly what the position of "the Crown" would be after her brother lay slain by "that damned, disgusting Belgian!"
Alfie, after stating that he would pray on the matter, returned to her and stated that he had been assured by his counterparts in Vienna that Stephane Clement would be investigated and, "if appropriate," stand trial in an Austrian court rather than be allowed to return to Brussels. In the immediate days after October 24th, the opinions of people who mattered seemed to be very much against Stephane Clement. For all his faults, the Emperor of France had always found his "cousin" from Belgium lecherous in a way even his brothers were not, and he wrote in his diary on October 26th that if Stephane Clement hung for the Hofburg crime, then it would be the just judgement of God. Ferdinand II of Austria denounced "the slaying in my sanctity of my home" and cabled his condolences to King Ludwig. There was a disquieting silence from Brussels, but there was a general sense in Paris that, perhaps this time, the "Black Prince" had gone too far, finally crossed an uncrossable line that would finally so anger his father that he was finally on his own. The drugs and drinking had not done it, and even the exile to the Americas after assaulting a teenaged princess at his own brother's wedding had not driven Leopold III over the line, but perhaps this was the final straw.
As October crawled to a halt, however, the positions of many in Paris started to suddenly soften. News arrived from Vienna that Stephane Clement would, indeed, stand trial, and that he would "enjoy the chance to disprove his guilt." By that point, however, Belgian newspapers - never a friend of "Steffie" - began to openly question whether the events had even occurred, and French periodicals, including ones suspiciously aligned with the government line, began repeating this line of inquiry. Who was telling the truth? Was it even possible to know? It was not so much a defense of Stephane Clement as character assassination on Isabella Antonie, the now-widowed victim and Helmtrud's sister-in-law. Helmtrud was appalled at these attacks on her honesty in the French press; she had never known Isabella to be anything other than forthright, and she would never lie about something like this. And Franz, who was now being portrayed by French and Belgian reporters by the first days of November as an angry, violent and easily provoked man, had been anything but; he had been a naturalist, interested in fossils and reading lengthy books about science.
It was hard not to see in the shifting tenor of the coverage of the looming trial, scheduled for after Christmas, political concerns; the Belgian establishment had become convinced, or perhaps more accurately convinced itself, that the fight between Franz and Stephane Clement was not a quarrel gotten out of hand but rather an extension of the geopolitical tensions between Germany and Belgium. In that context, Franz was not a husband trying to defend his wife from a rape, but rather just another German aggressor - notwithstanding that he was not Prussian, as coverage of German expansionism usually focused in on - attacking a poor defenseless Belgian, and Stephane Clement was instead the first Belgian to nobly stand up for himself and, by extension, his country.
This absurdity was surely influenced by the accusations in German newspapers, rapidly circulating out now and not unnoticed in Britain, that Belgium had formed a formal alliance with France and Austria, and thus was in direct contravention of the Treaty of London signed in 1839. A siege mentality could be detected in how Belgians were talking about the Hofburg Affair, and it was asked in the Devoir-Bruxelles whether Germany's implication of the treaty guaranteeing Belgium being "void" was a prelude to invasion. Nonetheless, German coverage of this matter was not entirely innocent either; it was suggested, at first obliquely and before long directly, that Stephane Clement's "confidence in his crime" was a byproduct of the Franco-Belgian alliance, that now that Belgium had foresworn neutrality, the "uppity" little country that had so provoked European public opinion in the Congo now felt empowered to do as it pleased, a proverbial "blank check" and a very serious accusation that opened the door to Franz's death perhaps even being a plot orchestrated from Brussels.
Caught in the middle of this spiraling, frenzied and radicalizing and counter-radicalizing storm of speculation were the shocked Wittelsbachs, who gathered in Munich on November 9, 1918 [1] to bury Franz after his body was returned with honors by the Austrians. Helmtrud traveled with Lieutenant de Gaulle and her daughters, and it was a sign of how detached from reality the political implications of the slaying were becoming that Alfie declined to accompany her to Germany for fear of his own safety and out of concerns of the "message" it would send to "our friends in Brussels." It was an oversight that Helmtrud never forgave, and only the insistence of her father that she had to go back lest things get worse by her staying in Germany persuaded her to make her way back on November 24, a month to the day after her brother's death.
By the time she returned to Paris, the situation had dramatically changed under her feet. Wild speculation had now calcified into deeply-held beliefs; Raymond Poincare himself suggested, in a speech before the Corps Legislatif, that the accusations against Stephane Clement were "hearsay, based on a man's innoble reputation from his younger and less mature years," and without a hint of irony denounced "the efforts of the German government through their braying mouthpieces to not only try an innocent man in the press but to destabilize the continent at this time of their choosing!" Helmtrud confronted Alfie and he shrugged it off as "hot tempers amongst the Cabinet," but it was two days later, on November 28, that she was confronted with the truth spelled out more bluntly by the Dowager Empress Eugenie.
Ninety-two years old, nearly blind and deaf, and unable to walk without assistance, the Emperor's domineering and politically influential fossil of a grandmother called the Empress to her chateau and asked her to sit down. Speaking to her as she might have spoken to a child who had stolen a sibling's toy, Eugenie stated flatly that Helmtrud "needed to begin to understand" that "forces greater than your life or that of your brother" were at play; Helmtrud's duty now was to France, and France's duty was to support Belgium. Helmtrud angrily challenged her over the "truth;" had not her brother been killed, and her sister-in-law violently assaulted, by one of the most notorious lotharios and drunks of European royalty. Eugenie leaned back, smirked, and responded icily: "That may well be, but the truth of the Hofburg matters less now than the truth of public opinion, and the public has decided that the Germans are the enemy, and so that is the truth we must follow."
The battle lines were thus drawn, the truth be damned. And all the while this was going on, Stephane Clement was to go on trial in Vienna in January for the murder of her brother and the attempted rape of his sister, with the eyes of the world upon him, and the outcome of that trial potentially bringing Europe to blows..." [2]
- A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte
[1]
[2] A long update, and a difficult one to get right, but one of the most important of the TL. I want to especially thank @Curtain Jerker for helping me crack the code on how to make Steffie responsible for the war breaking out, and congrats to Dan for guessing the outcome here correctly and @naraht for supposing Steffie would tip Europe into conflict through his penchant for rape way back when
The festivities were to last all day, with Ferdinand and Empress Maria Dorothea arriving in the late evening with an honor procession; Ferdinand was said to be hunting all day in the nearby Wienerwald, but it turns out, as he often was when "hunting," he was instead in the Mayerling hunting lodge with his longstanding mistress, the Baroness Sophie Chotek, mother of several illegitimate children of his and married to a cavalry officer suspected by historians to have been homosexual, a fact that only Ferdinand and Sophie were privy to. Though the stifling court protocols of the Hofburg had been relaxed in the previous two years somewhat by Ferdinand, his movements and that of his wife were nonetheless quite controlled, and it would be some time before they arrived at the party. To compensate for this, Maria Dorothea - a socialite who used galas, banquets, feasts and frequent travel as a coping mechanism for her unhappy marriage - had encouraged guests to arrive early for the ball, which at the last minute was made a masquerade.
Stephane Clement was, ironically, meant to have left Vienna to return to Brussels several days earlier, but a delay to his train and the chance to attend the ball - and his lack of interest in returning to Augusta Victoria and the children after three months sleeping his way through Vienna's whorehouses and the lower echelons of Court - led him to postponing his return until the first week of November. As such, he attended the gala alone, having already drank a bottle of wine to himself at home.
What happened next is a matter of great dispute. The general contours of the evening are, generally, agreed upon: at some point in the early evening, about ninety minutes before the Emperor and Empress were scheduled to arrive at the Hofburg, Stephane Clement of Belgium found himself alone with Isabella Antonie of Croy. Prince Franz of Bavaria, looking for his wife, found them in a room together, and a physical altercation occurred between himself and the Prince of Belgium. This concluded with Franz slamming Stephane Clement's head into a pillar, breaking his nose, badly bruising the right side of his face so that his eye swelled shut, and cutting a deep gash along his hairline; this all occurred in front of a Hofburg guard who had overhead the commotion and was rushing to inspect. Stephane Clement stumbled into the guard, wrestled his sidearm from his holster - guards of the Hofburg having been issues pistols only in the previous six months, on orders of Ferdinand, due to security concerns with the situation in the Habsburg Empire being what it was - and aimed at Franz.
Here, things get complicated. Stephane Clement was adamant that he and Isabella Antonie had merely been speaking privately and Franz attacked him, unprovoked, and when he drew the pistol upon his "attacker," Franz rushed him and Stephane Clement fired in self-defense after giving him a warning. The Hofburg guard, Ernst Sachs, testified that he fell backwards after Stephane Clement took the pistol off of him forcefully, and that he did not hear the prince give a verbal warning but did hear Franz shout something unintelligible before shots were fired, but could not see clearly what had happened or if Franz had moved in Stephane Clement's direction, with his view blocked by a pillar and the Belgian's body. Whatever occurred in that passageway of the Hofburg, everyone who heard the gunshots agreed that they heard one bang, very clearly, followed by three more in quick succession. Stephane Clement stated that the first bullet struck Franz in the upper chest near his heart and he lowered his gun upon realizing that he had indeed pulled the trigger, and when Franz took a second step towards him he fired three more times rapidly, instinctively, striking him in the abdomen and puncturing both his stomach and liver. Bleeding out, Franz expired within moments, lying on his left side, spitting blood out. Whatever the last words he intended to say were, they were between him and God.
Isabelle Antonie had a very different version of the story. She had met Stephane Clement socially a few times in Vienna and had always found him as grotesque as his reputation across the Courts of Europe, with an air of menace about him. As she had gone off to re-powder, he had allegedly followed her, and she had not realized it was him in the mask until he began speaking as he tried to put his hands up her skirt. He failed in his effort to rape her only because of the quick arrival of her husband, and she screamed at him that it was the Belgian prince, so that he understood the severity of the moment and did not accidentally kill her attacker with his bare hands. What came to be a matter of some controversy in the months to come was whether she had witnessed the slaying of her husband; Sachs and Stephane Clement both suggested she came out of the room to find him dead, and worried revelers and guards who rushed into the hall found her cradling his head in her arms sobbing when they arrived, but she maintained to her death in 1982 that she had seen her husband ram Stephane Clement into the pillar as they struggled, watched the Belgian pull the pistol off the guard and shove the guard onto his rear, pivot around and aim and then fire without giving her husband a chance to respond. In later years, it became an apocryphal story that Franz had raised his hands, and that what he had "shouted," according to Sachs, was a plea not to fire. This was never part of Isabella's testimony or description of the events, but she also never made any effort to correct such accounts.
Sachs leapt to his feet as Stephane Clement lowered the pistol and seized him from behind, as two other guards came charging into the hallway. The Black Prince of Belgium handed them the pistol silently, chest heaving, the stink of brandy on his breath, and as they took the masque from his face, his eyes were wild with anger, confusion, and fear. Whatever had really happened in that hallway - and historians have generally believed the accounts of Sachs and Isabella Antonie, considering Stephane Clement's reputation - it was done, and there was no going back now. His life, and indeed the world, had changed forever..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
"...Ferdinand had accepted the Belgian appeal for an alliance, but he very did much not care for Stephane Clement; that diplomatic formalities precluded his simply expelling the cretin from Vienna, especially now, was all that stopped him from pursuing such a course, and he had been delighted to hear that after overstaying his welcome well beyond a reasonable period of time, the "Black Prince" was finally going to slither his way back to Brussels. It was a dark joke that Ferdinand had delayed his scheduled return to the Hofburg on October 24 specifically because he found out Stephane Clement was going to be there; this is not true, but it was the kind of humor that became common in the postwar years, as Austrians tried to explain the bleak sequence of farcical events that followed a horrific tragedy.
What was true was that Ferdinand was running late, as was not uncommon, on his return from the Mayerling in part because the car sent to pick him up was delayed by a herd of sheep and in part because Ferdinand had given his guards strict instructions not to disturb him while with Sophie; when his car finally arrived, he was still not ready, and the guards did not knock on the door to inform them of a frantic telegram from the Hofburg warning them of shots being fired within the palace, the gala in a pandemonium, and at least one person, possibly several, having been slain in an "argument over a woman." Twenty minutes later, when Ferdinand did finally emerge from a full afternoon with his beloved mistress, he read this telegram and ordered that they return immediately - the forty-kilometer drive ahead expected to take well over an hour.
While he was returning, the frantic court retainers had elected to forbid anybody from leaving the Hofburg until the Emperor returned, which was customary anyways, but upon hearing about the death of Franz, and with no word from Franz at Mayerling, Maria Dorothea stepped in to order the palace be evacuated and the festivities cancelled. Franz's body was to be brought to a spare room and treated with respect, while Stephane Clement was told to stay where he was. The Belgian prince, naturally, protested; he maintained that as the son of a foreign King, he could not be held against his will unless he was being arrested for a crime, and curtly informed Maria Dorothea to her face that he intended to "walk out of the front gates as what I am - a free man." Maria Dorothea admitted in later years that she was tempted to slap him, shocked that he would be so insolent in the mere moments after shooting a man, but relented, stating that he was free to leave the Hofburg provided that he was under guard.
Stodgy Habsburg court protocol generally did not allow for the Viennese police to enter the grounds, without the express permission of the palace chamberlain or, barring that, the Emperor. Due to the severity of the "Hofburg Incident," as it came to be known in the immediate days thereafter, the palace staff were unwilling to break etiquette and have Ferdinand return from his intimate day "hunting" at Mayerling to the place crawling with police. As such, it would be hours until Ferdinand was back in the palace, up to speed on what had happened, and decided to ask that the Viennese police detectives come to the palace and, thereafter, go to interview Stephane Clement, who naturally was making hasty arrangements to leave Vienna as soon as that evening if he was able.
In the space between the shooting and the first interview by detectives, Ernst Sachs' story changed dramatically from initial claims amongst others that he stated that the Belgian Prince had gunned down the Bavarian Franz in cold blood; now, suddenly, he claimed that he had not had a good view of what had happened. It is unclear if his story changed because he had been pressured, or because as he tried to think of how he recalled it going down in the heat of the moment he started to doubt himself. The rumors that Sachs had told others in the palace one version shortly after the slaying, and the police and, later, the courts a different version, became a foundational piece of the German media outrage in the weeks and months to come, as did the fact that Stephane Clement had to be apprehended at his lavish apartment as he was packing his bags and formally arrested, narrowly preventing his escape from the city..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
"...October 24th, 1918 became one of those moments that seemed frozen in time; old veterans of the war could, decades later, still seem to recall where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard tell of the "Crime of the Century." There was a sense even then that something unspeakably terrible had happened, something that would forever change Europe and the world, that there was a time before October 24th, and a time after, into which history could be easily split.
The term "Hofburg affair" seemed not to do it justice; the story quickly spread that Prince Stephane Clement had tried to rape the wife of Prince Franz of Bavaria, and when her husband stepped in to pull him off and defend his wife from the unforgivable attack, he had been gunned down in cold blood in the halls of the grand Hofburg. It was lurid enough a tale on its own, but it quickly began to take on its own life, with conspiracy theories quickly promulgating, and German newspapers - even Prussian ones - baying for blood. Of course Stephane Clement was a rapist criminal who deserved nothing less than the gallows; of course the Hofburg was covering it up to protect him. And why were they protecting him? Why had Stephane Clement been in Austria, and for so long? German civil servants, well aware of the answer, finally began to leak the truth to their country's papers, which only made the firestorm worse: Stephane Clement had been in Austria securing an outright alliance with Vienna as his brother did the same in Paris, abrogating the Treaty of London, and adding a much darker wrinkle to the absurdity of the affair - a geopolitical one, of the second son of King Leopold III of Belgium murdering the third son of Ludwig III of Bavaria, the son who just happened to be the elder brother of the Empress of France, and whose sister-in-law was married to a Belgian prince herself. France, Belgium, Bavaria, Austria - it was a tangled familial web, but one that opened, as a genuine question, what way the French government would lean, especially as there was some lack of clarity in what, exactly, had occurred the night of October 24th.."
- The Central European War
"...the "Crime of the Century" was the last rites of a marriage that had long, in many ways, been dead; Helmtrud asked her husband directly what the position of "the Crown" would be after her brother lay slain by "that damned, disgusting Belgian!"
Alfie, after stating that he would pray on the matter, returned to her and stated that he had been assured by his counterparts in Vienna that Stephane Clement would be investigated and, "if appropriate," stand trial in an Austrian court rather than be allowed to return to Brussels. In the immediate days after October 24th, the opinions of people who mattered seemed to be very much against Stephane Clement. For all his faults, the Emperor of France had always found his "cousin" from Belgium lecherous in a way even his brothers were not, and he wrote in his diary on October 26th that if Stephane Clement hung for the Hofburg crime, then it would be the just judgement of God. Ferdinand II of Austria denounced "the slaying in my sanctity of my home" and cabled his condolences to King Ludwig. There was a disquieting silence from Brussels, but there was a general sense in Paris that, perhaps this time, the "Black Prince" had gone too far, finally crossed an uncrossable line that would finally so anger his father that he was finally on his own. The drugs and drinking had not done it, and even the exile to the Americas after assaulting a teenaged princess at his own brother's wedding had not driven Leopold III over the line, but perhaps this was the final straw.
As October crawled to a halt, however, the positions of many in Paris started to suddenly soften. News arrived from Vienna that Stephane Clement would, indeed, stand trial, and that he would "enjoy the chance to disprove his guilt." By that point, however, Belgian newspapers - never a friend of "Steffie" - began to openly question whether the events had even occurred, and French periodicals, including ones suspiciously aligned with the government line, began repeating this line of inquiry. Who was telling the truth? Was it even possible to know? It was not so much a defense of Stephane Clement as character assassination on Isabella Antonie, the now-widowed victim and Helmtrud's sister-in-law. Helmtrud was appalled at these attacks on her honesty in the French press; she had never known Isabella to be anything other than forthright, and she would never lie about something like this. And Franz, who was now being portrayed by French and Belgian reporters by the first days of November as an angry, violent and easily provoked man, had been anything but; he had been a naturalist, interested in fossils and reading lengthy books about science.
It was hard not to see in the shifting tenor of the coverage of the looming trial, scheduled for after Christmas, political concerns; the Belgian establishment had become convinced, or perhaps more accurately convinced itself, that the fight between Franz and Stephane Clement was not a quarrel gotten out of hand but rather an extension of the geopolitical tensions between Germany and Belgium. In that context, Franz was not a husband trying to defend his wife from a rape, but rather just another German aggressor - notwithstanding that he was not Prussian, as coverage of German expansionism usually focused in on - attacking a poor defenseless Belgian, and Stephane Clement was instead the first Belgian to nobly stand up for himself and, by extension, his country.
This absurdity was surely influenced by the accusations in German newspapers, rapidly circulating out now and not unnoticed in Britain, that Belgium had formed a formal alliance with France and Austria, and thus was in direct contravention of the Treaty of London signed in 1839. A siege mentality could be detected in how Belgians were talking about the Hofburg Affair, and it was asked in the Devoir-Bruxelles whether Germany's implication of the treaty guaranteeing Belgium being "void" was a prelude to invasion. Nonetheless, German coverage of this matter was not entirely innocent either; it was suggested, at first obliquely and before long directly, that Stephane Clement's "confidence in his crime" was a byproduct of the Franco-Belgian alliance, that now that Belgium had foresworn neutrality, the "uppity" little country that had so provoked European public opinion in the Congo now felt empowered to do as it pleased, a proverbial "blank check" and a very serious accusation that opened the door to Franz's death perhaps even being a plot orchestrated from Brussels.
Caught in the middle of this spiraling, frenzied and radicalizing and counter-radicalizing storm of speculation were the shocked Wittelsbachs, who gathered in Munich on November 9, 1918 [1] to bury Franz after his body was returned with honors by the Austrians. Helmtrud traveled with Lieutenant de Gaulle and her daughters, and it was a sign of how detached from reality the political implications of the slaying were becoming that Alfie declined to accompany her to Germany for fear of his own safety and out of concerns of the "message" it would send to "our friends in Brussels." It was an oversight that Helmtrud never forgave, and only the insistence of her father that she had to go back lest things get worse by her staying in Germany persuaded her to make her way back on November 24, a month to the day after her brother's death.
By the time she returned to Paris, the situation had dramatically changed under her feet. Wild speculation had now calcified into deeply-held beliefs; Raymond Poincare himself suggested, in a speech before the Corps Legislatif, that the accusations against Stephane Clement were "hearsay, based on a man's innoble reputation from his younger and less mature years," and without a hint of irony denounced "the efforts of the German government through their braying mouthpieces to not only try an innocent man in the press but to destabilize the continent at this time of their choosing!" Helmtrud confronted Alfie and he shrugged it off as "hot tempers amongst the Cabinet," but it was two days later, on November 28, that she was confronted with the truth spelled out more bluntly by the Dowager Empress Eugenie.
Ninety-two years old, nearly blind and deaf, and unable to walk without assistance, the Emperor's domineering and politically influential fossil of a grandmother called the Empress to her chateau and asked her to sit down. Speaking to her as she might have spoken to a child who had stolen a sibling's toy, Eugenie stated flatly that Helmtrud "needed to begin to understand" that "forces greater than your life or that of your brother" were at play; Helmtrud's duty now was to France, and France's duty was to support Belgium. Helmtrud angrily challenged her over the "truth;" had not her brother been killed, and her sister-in-law violently assaulted, by one of the most notorious lotharios and drunks of European royalty. Eugenie leaned back, smirked, and responded icily: "That may well be, but the truth of the Hofburg matters less now than the truth of public opinion, and the public has decided that the Germans are the enemy, and so that is the truth we must follow."
The battle lines were thus drawn, the truth be damned. And all the while this was going on, Stephane Clement was to go on trial in Vienna in January for the murder of her brother and the attempted rape of his sister, with the eyes of the world upon him, and the outcome of that trial potentially bringing Europe to blows..." [2]
- A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte
[1]
[2] A long update, and a difficult one to get right, but one of the most important of the TL. I want to especially thank @Curtain Jerker for helping me crack the code on how to make Steffie responsible for the war breaking out, and congrats to Dan for guessing the outcome here correctly and @naraht for supposing Steffie would tip Europe into conflict through his penchant for rape way back when
@KingSweden24 The black prince of Belgium really did it this time.
May belgium be spared of him and his entire family eventually
May belgium be spared of him and his entire family eventually
Glad to help in any way I can. Excellent job with this update.
I'm now praying Eugenie lives long enough to see France in ashes but odds are she dies before the final surrender.
I think Europe is going to be spared of Belgium in the not too distant future ...
Austria-Hungary is about to go to war with Germany, and Hungary is its own tinderbox with its relationship with Austria.
How can Hungarian nationalists not take advantage of that...
You can't leave us in a cliffhanger. You have to continue. I was on the edge of my seat just waiting what the verdict was.
The paranoia seeping through the Austrian establishment setting up their dalliance with Belgium isn’t enough of a part?
Indeed. Major POD for TTL’s what ifs
Thank you!
She died OTL in 1920 which will be before the end of the war. But I had to make use of “evil Integralist grandma” one more time
Bingo
In a good way or bad?
Those bonds of familiarity between Bavaria and Austria are badly frayed now, that’s for sure
It’ll come fear not!