The Radiant Republic

In mid-to-late October, the remnants of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition had already been driven beyond France’s borders, while the main body of the Army of the Meuse was crossing the vast Ardennes Forest and, with the cooperation of the Army of the North, laying siege to the Bohemian Corps. To the east, as the Army of the Moselle and the Rhine Army advanced respectively into the Duchy of Luxembourg and Trier—two electorates of the Holy Roman Empire—and launched fierce attacks on the German states and free cities west of the Rhine, André, newly appointed by the National Convention as the Republic’s Marshal, received an official letter at the Sedan headquarters from the Committee of Twelve, requesting that the supreme commander of the north return to Paris soon to report in person.

At the same time, a courier of the Military Intelligence Office in Paris brought a coded message from Director Javert. He reported that Brissot and his friends, who held the majority in the National Assembly, were extending an olive branch toward Reims, hoping to continue coexisting peacefully with Marshal André. This trip to Paris, Javert said, was meant to delineate each side’s sphere of influence and prevent any further unnecessary misunderstandings. As for Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, they appeared to have similar intentions and aims.

After all, André, who held in his hands two hundred thousand tiger-wolf troops and the five million people of the northern provinces, was enough to make any man’s blood run cold. More alarming still, the appointment and removal of mid- and senior-ranking officers in the four field armies, as well as the authority to move forces back and forth, all belonged to the Northern Command Headquarters. On that point, neither the Convention nor the government yet dared to cut off supplies and thereby exert real leverage. The Fardel affair had already proved as much: even with André two hundred kilometres away, a single dispatch was enough to strip a corps commander of every post at once.

Although the Brissot faction in the Convention and the Robespierre–Danton faction had more than once tried to entice and corrupt commanders at every level under André’s banner, each attempt ended in a complete rout. They not only suffered losses; they were publicly humiliated, and even Convention deputies were not spared. There had been cases in which five deputies were stripped of their seats and sentenced to ninety days of forced labour. As a result, the moment anyone spoke of trying to pry away André’s subordinates, Parisian politicians and revolutionary stalwarts alike would keep their distance and decline with stiff politeness.

There was no doubt that André had begun laying out his position three years earlier. Thus the Champagne region possessed an unrivalled industrial strength, the northern provinces had a rapidly developing agricultural base, and, in addition, the vast self-ransoms paid by captured noble prisoners of the Prusso-French Coalition brought in enormous sums. The Northern Command Headquarters could, in practice, ignore Paris. If one had to borrow a familiar term, it resembled the great territorial magnates before the Revolution, akin to the Germanic kings who, in the late Roman Empire, once dominated the whole north.

As early as June of last year, Robespierre had cut to the bone in his description of André, calling him “a thoroughgoing federalist, a dictator in the mould of Caesar,” whose actions amounted to splitting France into a northern and a southern bloc—Frankish lands and Latin Gaul—so that he could rule despotically from Reims. Unfortunately, few believed Robespierre’s absurd and laughable “prophecy” at the time. Now the prophecy had become fact. When people finally turned back and tried to restrain and guard against André, they discovered that he had already become a flood and a beast—immovable.

What was fortunate, however, was that the dictator had no interest in entering Paris, nor any intention of transplanting to the capital the methods he used in Reims. During the War of National Defence, André’s chief propaganda engine, Le Figaro, dressed its owner up as an eighteenth-century Joan of Arc. Once the French armies crossed the frontier, André transformed again into a Duc de Richelieu who laid the foundations of France’s continental supremacy. As for the future, no one could say—Caesar of ancient Rome, Cromwell across the Channel, or Charlemagne crowned as “Emperor of the Romans.” Yet even Robespierre, the man most wary of André’s ambition, admitted openly that, at least for the next two to three years, André had no intention of imitating Caesar by leading a great army across the Rubicon and marching south on Paris.

Although the domestic security organs and Director Javert had neither heard nor confirmed that anyone in Paris dared commit an outrage against André, the higher a man climbed, the more dearly he clung to life. When André entered Paris on this occasion, he notified those around him that he would bring five hundred armed gendarmes at his side.

This was plainly contrary to the regulations governing a returning commander reporting in the capital. Thus couriers shuttled back and forth between the Minister of War’s office and the marshal’s carriage outside the city. After bargaining, André was still permitted to retain one hundred and twenty uniformed, fully armed gendarmes. This was Paris’s special courtesy to the Republic’s First Marshal, victor of the War of National Defence. By contrast, when other generals entered the capital, they were allowed at most twenty personal guards.

After departing the fortress of Sedan, every time Marshal André’s carriage column stopped to rest in a town, countless men and women, National Guards, and hastily arriving municipal officials would gather around, all cheering and saluting the victorious commander. More than once André caught his reflection in the carriage window and saw that his face was thin, pale, and exhausted. Plainly, this was the result of long-standing psychological strain. He had wagered everything—his entire fortune and his life—on the War of National Defence. By extraordinary luck, he had won, and he had won magnificently, with a triumph more than ten times as brilliant as the victory of history.

Yet whenever the carriage halted, André would spring down with renewed energy despite the fatigue of travel. He liked to watch the townspeople press toward him with grateful eyes and speak, in plain and unadorned words, the thanks that rose from their hearts. Of all visitors, he was most willing to receive the families of fallen soldiers, and he took particular care to ask after the enforcement of the policy of land in exchange for military service. If any abuse was reported, the gendarmerie would immediately verify it; once confirmed, the officials involved would be sent directly to a military tribunal with simple procedure and severe punishments, rather than to a slow and evasive civil court. During the War of National Defence, officials in the northern provinces had all been granted reserve commissions.

Aside from taking up lodging only to ensure sufficient sleep at night, André took nearly all his meals and handled almost all document review inside the swaying carriage. Because semaphore stations now covered the northern provinces, André could receive urgent dispatches at any time and in any place from the Command Headquarters base and from the four corps.

As the carriage drew nearer and nearer to Paris, André appeared in public less and less. Even when he stepped out again to approach the crowd, the time and place were carefully selected in advance by the gendarmerie and the Military Intelligence Office to ensure the commander’s absolute safety.

Late at night, André’s party finally reached the gates of Paris. However, after receiving a letter from Javert, André ordered the coachman to halt the carriage for the time being. He decided to change his appearance and equipment. Javert had advised that André must shock the people of Paris and leave them with an unforgettable impression of the great commander who had led the nation to victory, rather than maintain André’s long-standing habit of entering the city quietly.

On October twenty-eighth, André entered Paris in a lavishly decorated carriage. The coach was drawn by eight fine horses fitted with parade harness. Thirty burly gendarmes rode as cavalry escort in front, and another thirty behind. A further sixty gendarmes were quartered at the villa on the Île Saint-Louis.

From the Rue Saint-Antoine, along the Rue de la Tuilerie, and all the way to the National Convention’s meeting place, the Manège Hall, the roads on both sides were already packed with more than two hundred thousand Parisians who had rushed out at the news to welcome the victorious commander. Among them were several thousand National Guards assigned to maintain order, as well as large numbers of police.

Each time André leaned out from the carriage, removed his blue soft-cornered hat with its tricolour plume, and waved to the citizens, the crowd would erupt as one:

“Long live André!”

“Long live the great Marshal of the Republic!”

As André’s accompanying aide-de-camp, Major Kellermann the younger, who had never seen such a spectacle, was stunned. Unable to restrain his excitement, he said to André, “Marshal, the people of Paris adore you!”

André smiled with restraint, but warned the aide-de-camp not to use aristocratic forms of address, especially in public in Paris. In truth, André had long since grown accustomed to the intoxication of flattery. Yet no one understood better than he did how fickle the political temper of the Parisian masses could be. Today they could cheer and applaud you; tomorrow they could drag you to the guillotine.

In France after the Renaissance—beginning with Duc de Richelieu, perhaps earlier—great rulers never liked, and never trusted, these Parisians who loved to make trouble and lacked firmness of will. In this respect, General Lafayette in July 1792, and, in another timeline, Emperor Napoleon in March 1814, had both suffered and been deceived.

Paris’s churches had still been wrecked by the crowd. Many of the grand exterior statues were missing heads or arms. André saw a stone-eyed saint in a posture of supplication and prayer whose fingers had been removed almost entirely, leaving only the middle finger standing straight up. André could not help himself; he snorted with laughter inside the carriage.

Even so, the city still concealed Catholics who were devout, intelligent, and skilled at adapting. If a man or woman wished to save a Madonna statue from a mob determined to smash it, all that was required was to put a little revolutionary red cap on the figure, and it became a beloved Statue of Liberty.

André stepped down from his carriage amid the thunder of gun salutes in the square before the Convention—seventy in all. They symbolised that from August twentieth, when André swore the sacred oath of war in the Assembly hall, until the day the supreme commander returned to Paris in victory, seventy days and nights had passed.

Carnot, the Convention’s new presiding president on rotation, stood on the steps with a group of deputies to welcome André. Below, the supreme commander of the north seemed intoxicated by the deafening cheers of the Parisian crowd. Separated by an iron barrier, André kept waving to the people.

“Damn it—does André want to be a Caesar who pleases the mob?” a deputy muttered, displeased.

“Shut up. André is the Duc de Richelieu we have been waiting for!” Yet in the Convention André’s supporters were still numerous.

“A cardinal and a kingdom’s chief minister, notorious for dictatorship—how has he become the idol of a republican commander?” another laughed.

“If you dare say that in front of two hundred thousand people, I guarantee you will be thrown into the cold Seine, and my mood will improve considerably,” came the reply.

Carnot had long since grown used to such quarrels. Since the victory in the War of National Defence, troubles connected to André had surfaced in the Convention without end. Yet, as before, very few deputies truly wished to challenge André head-on. Now, with the northern dictator right before their eyes, those hostile deputies still hid in the crowd to mutter low complaints, not daring to step forward and confront him in open debate.

A few minutes later, André mounted the steps and strode into the hall with head held high, beneath gazes of reverence, gratitude, envy, jealousy, and no small amount of hatred. Soon he stood alone at the very centre of the chamber, raised both arms high, and even formed a “V” of victory with his fingers as he surveyed the room again and again. As the great victor, he could accept with perfect composure the standing welcome of the entire Convention, and the applause and cheers that shook the vaulted ceiling.

André looked up along the rising, horseshoe-shaped semicircle of benches and saw many familiar faces. At the same time, that rising “mountain” of men looked down at him: the Mountain faction of the Convention, the left wing within the Jacobins.

Stiff and restrained, Robespierre wore a powdered wig. His face was still pale, his expression unreadable. He merely nodded to André. Danton, smiling broadly, applauded with enthusiasm. He had left his most flamboyant red coat with its huge lapels in his office at the Ministry of Justice; here in the hall he wore a plain yet solemn black cloak. Marat seemed to be doing his utmost to avoid André’s gaze, flashing signals to his companions again and again; his head, wrapped in a kerchief, rocked left and right in a way that made the men in the front rows uneasy.

Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, the former actor, deliberately wore a loose, sagging robe, as if to display his difference. The sly Barère smiled from beginning to end, no matter whether he faced friend or enemy. The grim Billaud-Varenne managed only a strained, ugly smile when his eyes met André’s. And Saint-Just, once André’s closest companion, crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the Marshal of the Republic with a face of contempt, hatred, and coldness. Desmoulins, frivolous as ever, muttered something at André with an air of indifference. The painter David split his grotesque mouth in a grin, his appearance nauseating.

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On the benches of the Mountain, a broad space seemed to have been left for André, directly between Robespierre and Danton. Yet André, already burdened beyond measure, had no intention of “climbing the mountain” again. His gaze moved downward. On the middle tiers sat Brissot and his friends—the men Robespierre called the Girondins, the right wing within the Jacobins.

“Pillars of the nation?” That was Marat’s sneer.

Polite in appearance, vile at heart. That was André’s bitter verdict in silence.

Even if, in the future, Robespierre and Marat did not strike them down first, André would purge these conspirators who worked in the shadows. It was a pity about Pétion and Condorcet, but André would give them an escape route at the critical moment. In any case, André would have no further entanglement with the Girondins.

Lower still were the deputies who sat on the lower tiers of the hall, known by a playful nickname: “the toads of the swamp.” These men held more than half the seats, yet they seldom spoke, following a strategy of self-preservation and saying as little as possible. André also spotted several familiar figures among them: Barras, a former vicomte; beside him the former priest Sieyès; and the noted lawyer Cambacérès.

As the applause gradually subsided, the little brass bell in President Carnot’s hand rang softly. It was time for André to choose his seat. Instead, the Marshal of the Republic gave the presiding president a gesture and walked straight to the lectern.

His opening sentence stunned the chamber.

“As the supreme war commander of the Republic’s armies, and in the name of the state and the fairness of the law, I know that I can no longer fulfil the duties entrusted to me as a representative of the people. Therefore, I request that the Convention permit me to resign my seat as a deputy of the National Convention.”

Just as seventy days earlier, the moment André finished his rhetorical strike, he turned and left at once, without the slightest attachment to the benches behind him. The hall seemed to fall into a dead silence. Only when the great doors swung shut with a loud crash did the deputies come back to themselves. The more than seven hundred “corpses” revived. The chamber returned to its usual noise and disorder.

“Ah-ha—André has resigned. Has the threat to the Revolution been removed?” Desmoulins turned in excitement and asked Danton, who sat behind him in thought. Danton only shook his head without speaking. Robespierre simply closed his eyes. Marat covered his mouth and nose with his kerchief, heavy with the smell of vinegar.

Desmoulins was naive beyond measure. André had resigned only as a deputy; he still held supreme command of the Northern Command Headquarters. Moreover, one glance at the numerous members of the Swamp below—those deputies from the fifteen northern provinces who belonged to André’s sphere and sat entirely unruffled—made it clear that André still had further moves.

In a moment when the nation celebrated victory, the Convention dared not rashly accept André’s resignation. If it did, a charge of suppressing a national hero would fall on the heads of either the Mountain faction or the Girondins. The leaders of the Jacobin factions were mostly lawyers by training, natural defenders of law and order, and none wished to see France plunge into a massive internal upheaval.

The Girondins were no less astonished by André’s resignation. Condorcet even swept Brissot and the others with a reproachful look, until Pétion moved over and swore that he had only learned of it just now. Only then did the last great Enlightenment thinker of France ease his expression.

“After the morning session ends, leave early and go to André’s villa. Ask what is going on,” Brissot instructed Pétion in Condorcet’s presence. Among the Girondins, only Condorcet and Pétion still maintained comparatively deep private ties with André.

In fact, André’s decision to resign his seat was the result of careful reflection. First, he no longer needed the protective cloak of being a national representative. If the fifteen northern provinces and more than two hundred thousand elite troops could not secure the personal safety of the God-Favoured, then even God’s blessing and an archangel’s protection would be useless.

Second, this resignation was André’s reply to the attempts by the Convention’s two great blocs to recruit him. He was signalling that he would stand aside, no longer take the initiative in the Jacobins’ internal split, the Convention’s internal contradictions, or Parisian political life. Put plainly: once I leave Paris, you may fight yourselves to the death as you please.

The France of another timeline took nearly two hundred years, through countless restorations and republics reborn, before it could barely digest this historical tragedy and formally declare the Revolution ended. André had no illusion of achieving such a resolution at one stroke.

Finally—and this was the crucial point—André could not, and would not, prevent what was coming next month: the Convention’s reckoning with Louis XVI. If André were a firm republican, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, André’s hands had already begun to weigh the crown. The infamy of “regicide” was unacceptable to a man who wished to revive the glory of Charlemagne. In truth, he too coveted the crown the House of Bourbon had lost.

Two weeks earlier, Marey, acting as André’s private envoy, had secretly travelled to Paris after Victory Day under André’s orders. On André’s behalf, he held bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral meetings with Robespierre, Danton, and also Brissot, Condorcet, and others. They reached compromises and formed a package of oral understandings. “Oral understandings” meant, in other words, that when all sides were strong, they would observe the terms; when one side weakened, the stronger party could tear them up without bearing any moral burden.

These understandings provided that the Northern Command Headquarters led by André would continue to exist for two years, until October 1794, with all its powers unchanged. Those powers included the appointment of officers, the movement of troops, and the authority to conclude secret treaties, but André was required to report such actions in a timely fashion to the National Convention and the Committee of Twelve, and they were to be limited to northern conquest and the export of revolution. Any declaration of war on a sovereign state had to be approved by a vote of the National Convention.

After November 1792, the four field armies under André were not to move back into the interior of the fifteen northern provinces to rest and refit; they were advised to remain outside France’s borders and continue the war. At any time, all field armies under André had to keep at least two hundred kilometres away from Paris. Meanwhile, in each northern province, the combined strength of the National Guard and the gendarmerie was not to exceed six thousand. Because the War of National Defence had ended and the treasury was strained, the parliamentary government would gradually reduce its supply and material support to the four northern corps and the two hundred thousand French troops. In other words, André’s army would have to prepare to sustain itself.

In addition, the National Convention declared that it would no longer dispatch plenipotentiaries to the frontline troops—that is, inside the four field armies—to supervise operations. However, special representatives of the Convention had the right to be present at the Northern Command Headquarters to understand strategic planning and military policy for the coming period. These representatives were not to interfere on their own authority with the Command Headquarters’ command decisions or the appointment of officers.

…

The moment André stepped out of the Manège Hall, he sent his major aide-de-camp, Kellermann the younger, to the police officers’ school in the northern suburbs of Paris as a messenger. André wished to invite Director Javert and his wife to dine at the villa on the Île Saint-Louis that evening. André himself, accompanied by sixty armed gendarmes, took the route over the Pont Neuf to the Île de la Cité, and then crossed the Pont Saint-Louis to go home.

When André’s carriage was passing near the Sainte-Chapelle, it suddenly lurched downward; the axle had snapped. After apologising, the coachman hurried to the nearest coachworks to seek replacement parts. With time on his hands, André stepped down from the carriage and went into the old royal precinct to take a look around—an abode long abandoned by successive kings of France.

Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame de Paris both stood on the Île de la Cité, both were Gothic chapels, and, in a certain sense, Sainte-Chapelle was a smaller version of Notre-Dame. In the thirteenth century, King Louis IX ordered this chapel built, and it formally opened in 1248. Its lower chapel served as the tall base of the whole structure; above it, immense windows rose beneath triangular gables and spires, and the building was famed for its exquisite stained glass. The interior was decorated with gilding and marble. The glass panels depicted more than one thousand stories from the Bible.

The chapel’s purpose, however, was the preservation of relics associated with the Passion of Christ, above all the Crown of Thorns, and fragments of the True Cross. Louis IX had purchased the Crown of Thorns in 1239 for one hundred and fifty thousand gold coins from the King of Jerusalem. For more than five centuries, the Vatican and the popes sought to redeem these relics, yet French Catholics and French kings alike refused as one.

Now, as André stood before the chapel, he found that it had suffered the same calamity as other religious sites in Paris. Everything that bore the marks of the House of Bourbon or symbols of royal authority had been hacked away by men in sans-culotte dress, using iron hammers, mallets, and cleavers in a brutal and crude fashion. Along the inner walls and outer façade, the heads of the sculpted figures—France’s kings of past dynasties and various saints—had likewise been chopped off.

As for the furnishings inside, anything of gold or silver had been carried off by townspeople eager for bargains. All bronze items, including the roof’s bells, had been melted down and recast into cannon. Tables, chairs, and benches had become private property or free fuel. If the National Convention and Danton had not intervened to stop it, even the chapel’s masterwork stained glass might have been destroyed.

These were the works of Chaumette and his comrades. That extremist member of the Paris Commune, fiercely hostile to the Catholic Church, had even proposed remaking Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason.

André, however, was not standing at the chapel door to mourn the past. As the Marshal of the Republic turned back toward his carriage, a middle-aged man in sans-culotte clothing followed closely after him, holding in both hands a wooden box wrapped in plain grey linen.

The dozens of gendarmes deployed on the perimeter looked on with indifference as the mysterious stranger approached the marshal. They had received André’s instructions in advance: no one was to step forward to question him.

Standing to the left of the carriage door, André opened it himself with his right hand. He lowered his head and bent at the waist in an almost humble posture, inviting the man with the box to enter first. André followed after.

After murmuring a long passage of Latin, the man lifted the wooden box from his knees with both hands and placed it on the seat beside André. Then he rose at once, preparing to leave.

“So this is the relic—the Crown of Thorns worn during the Passion of Christ?” André asked abruptly.

After hesitating for a moment, the man returned to his seat and answered simply, “Yes.”

Driven by curiosity, André asked him to recount what had happened. The relic had originally been kept in the upper chapel for veneration, but the visitors admitted there were limited to the king, members of the royal family, and the chapter clergy. In September of last year, Parisian sans-culottes, led by Chaumette, stormed into Sainte-Chapelle and tried to burn the Crown of Thorns, but numerous clergy defended it with their lives and preserved it.

In the period that followed, the non-juring priest responsible for guarding the relic was seized by sans-culottes while outside and perished in the September Massacres. Before long, the relic—together with many personal effects of the murdered priest—fell into the hands of the mob. Fortunately, the illiterate rioters did not recognise what it was. They tossed it aside in an abandoned warehouse, until this middle-aged man finally traced it and recovered it.

“Since September, from the moment I received Brother Benjamin’s last words until I found the relic again, it was thirty-six days.” The man’s voice trembled with fervour. “Thanks be to Almighty God—Marshal, it is you who will escort the relic to Rome.” Almost every short sentence he spoke was followed by a murmured prayer.

André understood parts of it: words of praise to God, and confessions of personal sin. From the bloodshot eyes it was plain that this loyal priest—or perhaps simply a devout believer—had gone without sleep for days, sustained only by conviction.

In fact, André himself had received, only days earlier, a secret dispatch from Father Fischer via semaphore. Fischer requested that André convey the Crown of Thorns from Sainte-Chapelle to Rome and deliver it to Bishop Maury. Rome’s Curia and the Pope had promised that, once the relic returned to Roman custody, Bishop Maury would be made a cardinal within three months. Yet Parisian Catholicism had effectively been crushed; the clergy could not carry such a relic out of the city. The only possible saviour was the Jacobin dictator who still maintained a measure of respect for the Church.

It must be explained that Father Fischer belonged to the Catholic chaplains’ corps attached to the Command Headquarters. This chaplains’ corps operated under Bishop Maury’s authority and was responsible for receiving, training, and managing chaplains assigned to the various corps in the north. André was not hostile to Catholicism. In his view, a priest who kept to his parish—or who chose to serve the army—could be a good priest, provided he met two conditions: he did not enclose land, and he did not meddle in secular power. As for whether priests must obey Rome, that depended on whether Rome remained aligned with André.

Under existing national law, any priest who swore loyalty to the constitution could serve the army. In practice, however, whether a priest swore or not was something the dictator André decided. Thus most young priests and nuns in Paris had been arranged by Bishop Maury to take refuge in Reims, where they were protected by Abbess Sophia. Older clergy stayed behind in Paris, enduring in hope that the skies would clear one day, or seeking, for the sake of their stubborn faith, the road to Heaven.

When André suggested that the devout man who delivered the relic accompany the Crown of Thorns to Rome, the man shook his head with firm resolve. He understood very well that Rome would likely never return the relic.

“I sent the relic away from the doors of Sainte-Chapelle,” he said. “One day, I hope to welcome it back here as well, and see it restored to its place, intact.” With that, the would-be martyr stepped down from the carriage and walked away without looking back. At that moment, the coachman had also finished replacing the broken axle.

André could almost be certain that the nameless man who vanished into the night was destined never to see the day the relic returned to Paris. Chaumette’s commune inspection committee was hunting non-juring priests everywhere, especially those who hid relics, held Mass in secret, and persisted in prayer. For the men they seized, going straight to the guillotine might be a kind of luck; more often they were tortured to death by the mob.

Though André felt deep sympathy, he still had no intention of interfering in the Paris Commune’s anti-Catholic actions. Without the lawless excesses of the Parisian mob, the God-Favoured André would not have been seen by Bishop Maury and the Catholic Church in France as a light of hope, nor would they have tolerated his swallowing up of Church lands and property.

Beginning this June, when the asset-receiving commission of the Northern Command Headquarters conducted sweeping investigations of the vast church estates in the Austrian Netherlands, some chaplains even took the initiative to assist. That was because André had signed a secret agreement with Bishop Maury: he would not loot relics or sacred vessels from churches (which André considered worthless), he would not damage church furnishings inside or out (which were worth little in any case), and he would not persecute clergy. On the contrary, he would actively protect priests and devout Catholics—because only by contrast could the injury be felt.