For BullDog and Chouan and anybody else thinking of pitching a Napoleonic buddy-cop TV series to your local cable affiliate….
Episode 47: The case of the Hessian preacher. April – August, 1809.
Starring: Karl Christian von Gehren, preacher in the town of Felsberg, in northern Hessen-Kassel.
On 22 April, revolts broke out in several nearby towns, and a mob overthrew the local government in Felsberg: the mayor was knocked unconscious and unceremoniously dumped on a manure pile, as was a French lieutenant who later escaped. Citizens arrested the other local officials and stuck them in the municipal jail.
Three days later the Gendarmes came to Gehren's house and arrested him. He and about 60 other men were taken to Kassel, where "several hundred" suspects had been incarcerated. After five weeks incarceration, he was finally brought in front of a police commissioner to be interrogated.
This is one of the unusual cases where an interrogation record survives. The interrogation was in both French and German, depending upon who was asking the questions. He answered entirely in German, but his answers had to be translated to French for the record. Here are some of my favorite parts. The commissioner begins with:
"So, why are you here?"
— Because the gendarmes took me from my peaceful home in Felsberg.
Oh really, said the commissioner, who then read out a denunciation of him in French. Among other things, he was accused of ringing the alarm bells for the insurrection "with his own hand." (The bells of his church rang out, and he's the preacher there, so there you go. Except that he wasn't in the church at the time. He was at home with his family.)
"And is it true that you've led prayers for the Kurfürst of Hessen-Kassel?" (Thus he's accused of something fairly serious: being an instigator of rebellion, albeit not taking part in any uprising himself. There are other accusations: somebody waved an old Hessian flag from the church tower, and that flag was later used in the revolt. (Untrue: the rebels in Felsberg had no flag.) And somebody put up an anti-French proclamation on the church wall; was that you?)
"Did you know about the insurrection before it happened?"
— Yes. I read about it three months earlier, in the Hamburger Correspondent. It said that (Freiherr) vom Stein was planning a Hessian insurrection.
"Why didn't you warn the government as quickly as possible, about such a dangerous plot?"
— Because I didn't think that my job as preacher obligated me to warn the government about things that are published in newspapers.
"When the alarm bells rang out from your church, why did you rush out of your home and join the mob in the streets?"
— After they were ringing for an hour, I went out to see what was going on.
The interrogation lasted about six hours. His jailers mocked his impending death sentence.
In subsequent interrogations they changed tactics, claiming that he'd "preached against the king and the government." No witnesses were ever produced, however.
Eventually they brought in his wife, mother, and children, and told him in front of his family, that if he wanted to avoid being shot, he needed to swear his loyalty to the king and to Westphalia, and declare no loyalty to the former Hessian state. Which he did. Two days later they released him.
A month later the Gendarmes are back at his door. This time they're accusing him of whipping up enthusiasm for Schill and the Black Duke. His wife knows so-and-so, correct? And that so-and-so knows so-and-so, correct?
Arrested again. This time taken down to Mainz with about 70 others.
In Frankfurt, somebody spread a rumor that they were prisoners from Schill's revolt, and suddenly they were local heroes. One of the people who approached them excitedly asked: "Is Schill himself among you?" By the time he got to Mainz, his brother had been working on his behalf to persuade the French that it was all a big misunderstanding, and to his astonishment, it worked. He was released.
Back they went, via Hanau… seven of them went into town to buy some things, got followed by the French police, and arrested again as insurgents. Brought before the French military governor back in Mainz, who didn't speak a word of German, they were handed off to the Gendarmes. And then tossed back in jail. After 4 weeks he started to get sick, and apparently almost died. He'd left a note for his wife in the event of his death, but the people back home in Hessen had no idea of this third arrest. They'd heard only from his brother, that he'd been released and was coming home. Eventually he recovered, was taken back to Kassel, interrogated again, and on 9 August, he was released again.
The great irony is that this guy was more or less neutral about Westphalia and Napoleon before all of this happened. By the end of it, they'd turned him into exactly the sort of vengeful, plotting German nationalist that they always presumed him to be.
looks at a multi-period building.
Dumb and violent indeed!