The Radiant Republic

In the second week after André left Paris, on November twentieth, the National Convention rejected the Commander-in-Chief’s “well-meant advice.” It then adopted a proposal put forward by Citizen Saint-Just and, by an overwhelming majority, voted to establish a Revolutionary Special Tribunal to try the former King Louis XVI for treason.

André knew that once Louis XVI was brought to the dock, he would die. In the Jacobins’ frenzied propaganda, they blamed the former King—steeped in sin—and the absolutist dynasty under his rule for every suffering the French people had endured over the past decades. André had suggested national reconciliation before leaving Paris, but a few mild sentences could not move radical left-wing deputies bent on revenge.

In truth, André did not care whether Louis XVI lived or died. A cowardly king posed no real threat. Yet on his way north he received news: the Brissot faction’s Minister of Foreign Affairs had met, in the southern suburbs of Paris, the envoys of Austria, Spain, and several north Italian states. Their intent was to bargain for a “permanent peace” with Vienna, Madrid, and the Italian peninsula—at the price of confining Louis XVI for life and releasing Marie Antoinette.

If European affairs developed in that way, André and the Northern Command Headquarters—already isolated—would be forced to abandon all preparations to attack the Netherlands, and would have to continue enduring political extortion from the British across the Channel. Unless the Commander-in-Chief had both the courage and endurance to imitate the late Frederick the Great and face a mad encirclement from every direction alone—which was plainly unrealistic. Even in the Seven Years’ War, the Prussian King had survived only by leaning on the Kingdom of Great Britain as his financial patron, grinding on until the Russian Empress died, and escaping by sheer luck.

Given these domestic and international shifts, André altered his stance. Louis XVI and his consort had to die. Revolutionary republican France must not be allowed to make peace with any monarchies. Of course, the moderate André himself was the sole exception.

Therefore André resumed, with practised ease, the manipulation of plots and stratagems. Among them was a deliberate effort to provoke Robespierre and his newly risen and most capable lieutenant, Saint-Just—so that the young deputy, with no real political experience, would stumble unprepared into a trap André had designed with care.

In late November, accompanied by representatives from the political, military, commercial, and religious elites of the Marne, André attended a grand requiem mass in Reims Cathedral, held to mourn the fallen soldiers of the war of national defence, the civilian dead, and to pray for peace. Afterward, the Commander-in-Chief stood on the steps of the cathedral square and, before two thousand spectators and the clergy, delivered a short statement later known as the “Reims Pardon.”

He declared, in conspicuously high style, that on the soil of France there should be no more political bloodshed. He hoped that what he had done could promote harmony among all social estates within the nation, and foster mutual tolerance across differing religious positions, so as to achieve a great national reconciliation. He also opposed civil war in France in any form.

When André’s “reactionary line” reached Paris, Saint-Just—fired up as if drugged—rose in the Convention’s debating hall and put forward his famous thesis:

“The King must die, because the Republic must live!”

The handsome, cold-blooded “Archangel of Terror” could not punish the luck of the God-Favoured, so he directed all his fury at the miserable Louis XVI, determined to send the former King to the revolutionary guillotine.

Soon Saint-Just launched his second speech in the National Convention. Standing at the rostrum, he cried aloud:

“I believe the King should be tried as an enemy. We must fight him by the means of a trial. Between him and the French people there exists no contract. The judicial process cannot seek its roots only in the law of practice; it must also consult the Law of Nations…

“One day mankind will be astonished that the progress of humanity in the eighteenth century proved less than in Caesar’s age. Then a dictator died in the Senate without a formal trial—only thirty knives and daggers struck him down. That was not the triumph of law, but the mark of liberty.

“And today we are to try a man who has slaughtered the people, a man infamous in name; his hands, stained with blood, have reached into the abyss of crime.

“Citizens, if the Roman people—who hated kings to the bone after six hundred years of rule—and the English, who have lived through the death of Cromwell, were to see the King reborn here, what would they feel?

“And what fear would seize our great citizens?

“The friends of liberty will see the axe trembling in our hands; they will see a people newly freed praising, in every way, the days of the yoke!…

“In my view, there is no other course: this man must either continue to rule, or die!”

This was adapted from Saint-Just’s speech draft of November 1792.

By his political logic, Saint-Just demanded that more than seven hundred deputies make a single choice between Louis XVI continuing to rule and Louis XVI being condemned to death. The first option was self-evidently impossible. It would mean that most deputies would either be executed, or exiled to North America and the Caribbean colonies.

Before stepping down from the rostrum, Saint-Just—still unsatisfied—added one more line. In his view, “No ruler is innocent. Therefore the King must submit to the people’s judgment.”

As the speech ended, thunderous applause shook the hall. Saint-Just descended the steps with obvious pride; when he returned to his seat, his head was held high “like a sacred master.” Robespierre, equally stirred, also wanted to mount the rostrum, but too many deputies rushed ahead to seize the floor, and there was no room for him.

That evening, however, when the Jacobin Club reconvened, Robespierre—newly restored as the Club’s president for a second time—was in high spirits. He successfully expelled Brissot, Vergniaud, and Roland from the Club. Their crime was that they had publicly questioned whether Robespierre, together with Danton and Marat, had staged and directed the September Massacres.

Before leaving the rostrum that same night, Robespierre—growing more and more arrogant—briefly imitated Saint-Just. He shouted, boldly to the point of madness:

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“Here—who dares openly oppose me and accuse me?”

“I do!”

A voice answered from the far end of the hall. It was Louvet, a core Girondin figure: tall and thin, with sparse eyebrows and a pale face, a lawyer by trade.

The entire hall fell silent. Like a ghost, Louvet paced across the room. Once he reached the rostrum, he drew several sheets of prepared remarks from his pocket, fixed Robespierre with a sharp stare, and said:

“Yes. I, Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, am here to accuse you, Robespierre!”

Robespierre stiffened. His mind went blank. He even recalled the words André had once used to counter Saint-Just. Only at the last moment did the shred of reason he had left prevent those words—words a northern dictator could say—from leaving his mouth. Robespierre was not André. The man from Arras did not have two hundred thousand troops behind him, and would never become an autocratic dictator.

Saint-Just, below, was equally stunned. He did not know how to support his leader. Danton, more alert, tried to deflect the topic. He hinted that he knew this “friend,” who had retreated to a corner of the rostrum with his sea-green face, was skilled at oratory but lacked André’s unflappable quickness of mind. Once his rhythm was broken, he could become tense and flustered.

As Robespierre fell into silence, Louvet—his voice cutting through the air—listed one crime after another of L’Incorruptible: a dictatorial temperament, a reputation that admitted no equals, intimidation of voters, the thuggish practice of building factions, and the September Massacres. The Jacobin hall erupted. Some even began preparing ropes, intending to bind the tyrant Robespierre and drag him up to the rostrum to be judged.

Danton intervened in time. On his own authority he guaranteed that Robespierre could not be plotting dictatorship, and that the accusations were either false rumours or malicious distortions. Then Danton seized an idea: Robespierre should go home, prepare a reply to all of Louvet’s questions, and read it aloud before the Club at next week’s meeting. Unexpectedly, the Girondins present nodded in agreement.

Not long after, André heard of the incident in Reims. He described Louvet and his Girondin colleagues as “a bunch of idiots—so naïve it is almost charming, and beyond saving.” In André’s view, once they had won the propaganda victory inside the Jacobin Club, they should have pressed the advantage—rather than clinging to reputations and letting the tiger go back into the mountains.

Events unfolded exactly as André predicted. With a week’s breathing space, Robespierre—backed with full force by Danton, Desmoulins, Saint-Just, Marat, and Couthon—used a speech of strong logic and elevated tone to reverse the earlier disadvantage within the Club. At the same time, supporters of the Mountain faction took the opportunity to drive every remaining Girondin element out of the Jacobin Central Club.

On that very day, after the powerful André faction had voluntarily withdrawn two weeks earlier, the Jacobins completed their final break with the Girondins, the Brissot faction. The Mountain faction, represented by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, began to merge with the Jacobins in earnest.

…

On December first, beneath the walls of Liège. As the thick morning fog gradually lifted, the glittering Meuse looked boundless and majestic. On both banks, poplars and oaks stood like infantry holding spears.

As always, when Marshal André inspected the frontline corps, he would select two or three units that had fought with particular ferocity to serve as the review formation for his entry ceremony. Plainly, the chief credit for taking Liège belonged to General Laclos’s brigade heavy artillery regiment—Laclos having been promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General—as well as the volunteer infantry brigade under General Pichegru.

It should be explained that these troops all belonged to the Army of the North. General Moncey’s Army of the Meuse had, the day before, shifted its defence line to the border with the United Provinces, taking over from the Army of the Moselle the defence of Wesel, Duisburg, and the Rhine line. This finally created a posture for a right-flank envelopment of the northern Netherlands.

In addition, General Hoche’s Army of the North would remain in the southern Netherlands. Very well—Belgium, as it should now be called. Weeks earlier André had already required the Northern Command Headquarters and local administrators to use that standard term in official documents.

General Custine’s Army of the Moselle would be responsible for defending the vast German territories newly occupied west of the Rhine, from Landau along the left bank of the Rhine all the way to Düsseldorf, which formed the southern boundary of the Army of the Meuse’s zone.

As for General Kellermann’s Army of the Rhine, it had now redeployed back to Alsace. At Strasbourg, it faced—across a Rhine that was not especially wide—the alarmed princes of the German states in the southwest.

Under the agreement between André and the various Jacobin factions in Paris, the Army of the Rhine, far from the capital, was the only field army permitted to withdraw inside the national frontier. Alsace was the closest region to Paris, yet even it lay more than two hundred and eighty kilometres away. The boundary between the Army of the Rhine and the Alpine army lay at Basel.

While the Northern Command Headquarters conquered cities and slaughtered its way through the Austrian Netherlands and the middle and lower Rhine, the Alpine army—meeting no serious enemy—had dragged its feet for more than half a year on the eastern frontier. Its sole “achievement” was taking an empty Basel from Swiss mountaineers.

Very well. None of that was for André to consider at present. Whether the Alpine army, the north Italian army, the Pyrenees army, or the southern fleet guarding the long Mediterranean coast—the Toulon fleet—the Girondins and Jacobins in the National Convention would not allow the Northern Command Headquarters to lay a finger on them.

Returning to the matter at hand: Marshal André stepped down from a steam gunboat onto the bank of the Meuse. He took the reins offered by an aide-de-camp, swung into the saddle, and, as before, rode the mare named Bellechère—a chestnut female horse so gentle as to be almost absurd. He was preparing to review the meritorious formations of the Army of the North.

To the accompaniment of the regimental band, the soldiers lifted their chests and sang in one voice the Army of the North’s song of war, The March to Battle, to welcome the Commander-in-Chief. Along the riverside road where the review proceeded, forty-two double-headed eagle standards were displayed. They were trophies left on the battlefield by more than fifty thousand Austrian soldiers.

Compared with the first time he had captured a double-headed eagle standard, André was now long accustomed to scenes of victory. He could therefore let Bellechère canter at will, allowing her four hooves to trample over the Holy Roman Empire’s double-headed eagle flags, grinding them into the mud until they became rotten rubbish.

When he reached the troops drawn up for review, André at once dismounted. He intended to hold an intimate “conversation” with the soldiers of the Army of the North.

Standing on the open ground between the heavy artillery regiment and the infantry brigade, André planted his hands on his hips, swept his gaze around, and said in a drawn-out, ringing tone:

“My soldiers, since June of this year you have won victory after victory. You have seized forty-two standards, thirty-five cannon, and more than one hundred French-speaking cities. Like an unending surge of waves, you have crashed down from the heights, and in the end you have taken all Belgium…

“My brothers-in-arms, from this day you will receive a solemn and sacred mission. For our glory—because we carry the duty of bringing the revolutionary spark and the Tree of Liberty across all Europe, to awaken the suffering peoples numbed for centuries by every kind of servitude—this is the greatest fruit of your victories…

“Such triumphs will astonish posterity. You have brought a new face to Europe’s nations. You have shown the world the supreme majesty of the French armies, and thus you have won an immortal name. In the future, when you return home, your neighbours will point you out to others and say: Look—he was part of the army that delivered Europe!”

Almost every time André spoke a sentence, the soldiers answered as one, shouting the resounding slogan, “Long live the Commander!”

At the end, the Commander-in-Chief decided to conclude the speech with a revolutionary cry that seemed to split the sky. He raised his arm and shouted:

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!”

At once, on both flanks of the reviewed units, soldiers began waving their muskets and sabres up and down, shouting in fierce agreement, until many voices turned hoarse.