The Radiant Republic

Liège stood at the confluence of the Meuse and the Ourthe. Its inland port had, since antiquity, been a trans-shipment hub for trade among Europe’s states. More than fifty kilometres upstream along the Meuse, the Namur and Charleroi districts held vast reserves of coking coal for smelting and “white coal” for power, easy to extract in shallow seams or open pits. Those Belgian coalfields would remain in existence even into the mid-twentieth century. The steam gunboats on the Meuse burned that Namur “white coal” as fuel, and it outclassed Lorraine’s bituminous coal by a wide margin.

Liège itself also had some copper and iron deposits, but as in Lorraine, most of its iron ore was low-grade hematite. After the seventeenth century, aside from copper mining, Liège merchants soon abandoned nearly all of the poor iron ores whose extraction was not worth the cost.

The reason lay with Liège’s neighbour on the Meuse: the Dutch merchants known as the “carriers of the sea.” Relying on the naturally convenient Dutch waterway network and the North Sea, they shipped high-quality Swedish and Norwegian iron ore to the docks of Liège’s river port. The ore’s iron content ran as high as 60% to 70%, and the mining cost was low—mostly open-pit or shallow extraction, almost like picking it up for free. With such feedstock, Liège became highly developed in steelmaking and arms production.

From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward, many gunmaking workshops in Liège had been handed down through generations. By the eighteenth century they already had four or five hundred years of history. The Liège Gunsmiths’ Guild, founded in 1346, enforced its own rules to guarantee product quality and the trade’s reputation. It was among the world’s earliest industry associations for firearms, and an early standard of product verification. As a result, Liège produced large quantities of excellent muskets and artillery that flowed steadily into markets across Europe. The Bohemian Corps’ weapons—cannon, muskets, and even bayonets and sabres—were almost all made in Liège’s armament works.

In fact, from 1790 onward, André had been using the “secret smuggling routes” to stockpile weapons for the war of 1792. Of the standardized firearms issued to the two hundred thousand soldiers under the Northern Command Headquarters, thirty percent—and nearly half of all barrels—came from the military workshops of Liège. The Comtesse’s Liège armory alone accounted for forty percent of that share.

In another timeline, France’s three northern armies possessed less than sixty percent of the standardized firearms they should have had. That meant more than one third of French soldiers in the war of 1792 could only fight the well-equipped German coalition with spears and heavy blades. Fortunately, the French never lacked copper, and their artillery skill was still respectable. With massed bombardment and foul weather on their side, they won the Battle of Valmy by a narrow stroke of luck.

When the Reims armory produced rifled barrels for the “Green Jacket Brigade,” its gunsmiths generally did not forge them from refined iron made in Lorraine. Instead, they took Liège-made smoothbore barrels and cut rifling into them, because those barrels used peninsula iron ore of exceptionally high quality and extremely low sulphur and phosphorus. On that peninsula, besides Sweden, there was also Norway, which at present belonged to the Kingdom of Denmark.

After the northern grain crisis and the War of National Defence, André’s power had spread across the whole Lorraine plateau. Conservative iron merchants no longer dared face the Commander-in-Chief’s authority directly, and they delivered their best ore to the United Industrial Base. Yet even France’s best iron ore contained only about 42% iron—more commonly around 31% to 35%—and the most fatal weakness was still high sulphur and phosphorus content. Smelting costs remained stubbornly high, and the quality of refined iron was, at best, passable.

André did not sink into despair. He knew he had to be patient while climbing the technology tree, waiting for the Reims Polytechnic Institute—where the expert team led by Academician Lavoisier was at work—to bring his proposed “basic open-hearth steelmaking method” into reality.

This “basic open-hearth method” was, in the broader history of metallurgy, a new steelmaking technique developed in 1864, when the Frenchman Martin applied the regenerative principle invented in Germany. Before his arrival in this era, André had once used the pretext of acquiring a small United Steel Company in Lorraine to help several reckless tycoons run a string of money-losing ventures. During that period he learned, in broad strokes, how the Martin furnace worked—a point of pride for the French.

The basic open-hearth method’s main structure included the furnace head, the melting chamber, the regenerators, and the slag chamber. The reason it carried the label “basic” was Lorraine’s high sulphur and phosphorus: the lower furnace walls and the hearth were lined with basic refractory materials to neutralize impurities.

In truth, this “basic open-hearth method” had already been reproduced in the laboratories of the Reims institute. But to scale it into mass production, Academician Lavoisier and his team still had technical obstacles to overcome. Their answer to André was plain: at the earliest, it would have to wait until next spring.

Therefore, before any major breakthrough in steelmaking, André had to use what already existed. The Liège region, with its exceptional transport advantages, was a strong candidate: excellent gunmaking, and upstream metal smelting that was at least barely adequate. Liège’s traditional twin-stack blast furnaces could produce iron castings weighing two thousand two hundred kilograms every six days—little better than output two centuries earlier—and smelting costs were still as high as ever. Only a handful of works could use the more advanced crucible steel method invented by the Englishman Huntsman in 1742.

To André, Liège’s current metallurgical state looked like a crowd of hopeless incompetents. In his eyes it was slower and worse than the crude ironmaking of small rural furnaces. And in truth, until the “basic open-hearth method” emerged, even the small steelworks inside the Marne riverside United Base—built to support steam engine manufacture—was not much better than Liège’s local competitors.

As for the Liège armory itself, although the Europe-wide war sparked by France had raged for some time, its business was now poor, because the high-margin artillery trade had collapsed. This too was France’s doing. In the recently concluded siege of Liège, the duel between bronze twenty-four-pound fortress guns and twelve-pound infantry siege guns drew the attention of military observers from across Europe.

The result stunned many of them. The French twelve-pounders, with their mobility, simple and rapid handling, very long range, and respectable accuracy, actually held their own against the massive twenty-four-pound fortress guns that enjoyed thorough protective works. The mutual loss rate was 1:1.

As a result, many artillery orders that had once been sent to the Liège armory were cancelled outright. Buyers even abandoned their deposits. Sales of ordinary small arms fell as well. Procurement agents were shifting their attention toward the French twelve-pound André cannon, and toward the French 1792-pattern rifle.

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Plainly, whether Prussian, Austrian, or any other German state, none could buy French standardized weapons from the Reims armory—least of all the twelve-pound André cannon. Rifles, however, could be lost on battlefields and then captured by Prussians or Austrians. But André’s artillery was guarded with strict secrecy. To this day, not a single André cannon had been lost. No one but French artillerymen was allowed to approach these highly mobile, powerful, easy-to-handle, large-calibre field guns.

So desperate were the Austrians that they even offered third-party makers and black-market dealers an enormous bounty: twenty thousand thalers per twelve-pound André cannon, roughly eighty thousand francs. In the settlement accounts between the Reims armory and the Command Headquarters General Commissariat, the actual cost of a twelve-pound André cannon did not exceed six thousand francs. The bronze barrel alone was priced above five thousand francs; the carriage, limber, ammunition chest, and tools totalled eight hundred to one thousand francs; and the package included three basic loads of ammunition: solid shot, shell, and canister.

The use of francs rather than livres reflected a monetary shift. From November onward, the northern provinces under the Command Headquarters gradually began using the franc—an old silver coin dormant for three hundred years—to replace the assignat. In value, the silver franc was slightly lower than the livre. The reason was simple: the continuously depreciating assignat had long disrupted the financial order of the Reims exchange, and even the hard-currency silver livre had begun to be refused across European markets.

Thus, at the first Northern Alliance joint conference after the War of National Defence, fifteen provincial delegates gathered in Reims ignored Paris’s criticism and passed, by an overwhelming margin—twelve in favour, three abstentions—a resolution to restore the franc currency. From that conference onward, the Northern Alliance economic bloc became independent of France.

The exchange rate between the louis d’or and the franc was 1:25, and one franc still equalled twenty sous in copper coin. In foreign exchange terms, one thaler converted to between 3.9 and 4 francs; one pound sterling equalled 25 francs; one shilling equalled 1.25 francs. Because this new franc minted by the Reims mint bore the image of Joan of Arc and was anchored to an equivalent in gold, its exchange rate had remained notably stable since issuance.

The gold reserve itself came not only from the large quantity of gold recovered from within the statue of the Virgin at the Papal Palace in Avignon, but also from rare treasures André transported by various means from the Palais des Tuileries and from Notre-Dame. In addition, much of the war indemnity extracted from the German states was settled in equivalent gold.

In December 1792, a special group of visitors arrived at the gold reserve vault of the United Bank at the Reims Bacourt camp. They included leading figures and major shareholders from the principal European exchanges of London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, as well as representatives among bankers and great merchants. They came at the invitation of Perrier, the president of the United Bank. Accompanied by Jewish bankers, they passed through successive checks by the French gendarmerie and, within underground works built of reinforced concrete, they saw the gold—an immense quantity of gold.

For many, it was the first time in their lives that they had seen more than two hundred and fifty tonnes of bright gold bricks, laid out on racks like cheap goods one might take down by hand, displayed before their eyes in naked temptation. By comparison, the Reims Bacourt vault held less gold than the Bank of England, which possessed two million pounds in reserve, equivalent to about nine hundred tonnes of gold. The figure likely rose rather than fell around 1793.

Soon the wider European market not only accepted the new French currency labelled the “Reims franc,” it also recognised the cash cheques issued by the United Bank—backed by gold reserves—as valid instruments, in effect high-denomination banknotes, comparable to sterling. By 1793, after the complete collapse of the livre assignat, even the Paris exchange, long resistant, was forced under heavy pressure to accept the Reims franc as its settlement currency.

…

At the welcome banquet in Liège City Hall, André followed convention. He first invited the mayor’s wife, dressed in a black velvet gown, to dance the “Female Baker’s Dance.” Next came the council president’s daughter in a white dress, and then a Marquis’s… Yet these glittering women did not truly catch André’s eye. The conqueror was merely fulfilling etiquette.

About twenty minutes later, growing bored, André handed the lead of the ballroom to the more than fifty field-grade officers who had followed him. Most were from the Army of the North. Each wore a review uniform hung with gold cords and fine fringed epaulettes; combined with the hard vitality of soldiers, it drove the noble ladies and young women into shrieks of excitement. By midnight, when the rich late supper was served, most French officers had already completed their “close exchange” with the warm and hospitable women of Liège.

As for Commander André, an hour earlier he had already taken the beautiful Comtesse back to the bishop’s palace bedchamber. The two of them “talked knee to knee” on the great bed until the afternoon of the next day.

As repayment, André told the Comtesse that within this month the Reims armory would authorise the Liège armory to produce the 1792-pattern rifle. In addition, the French military stores in Reims still held substantial stocks of smoothbore muskets, which could be handed to the Liège armory for resale.

In the end, the 1792-pattern rifle was only an improved version of the North American rifle. Britain’s Ordnance Office at the Tower of London already possessed the skills to make it. Moreover, during the War of National Defence many rifles had been lost on the battlefield. And the Command Headquarters planned, from the second half of 1793 onward, to field in large numbers a muzzle-loading percussion rifle equipped with copper-based fulminate caps and Minie bullets. For these reasons, the old 1792-pattern rifle no longer required secrecy. It was better to find a reliable manufacturer and let everyone earn a fortune.

As for the French army’s most central secret weapon—the twelve-pound André cannon—André first refused the Comtesse’s impertinent request in anger. Later, after new games in bed and repeated climaxes, the satisfied Commander-in-Chief “softened” his position and said he would give the Liège armory a final answer around March next year.

That date happened to coincide with the deadline promised by the Reims institute for the basic open-hearth method. Once André’s technology tree reached an unprecedented “king-tier” in steelmaking, he would naturally have no interest in a lowly “bronze-tier.” In fact, muzzle-loading rifled artillery had existed for two hundred years. The problem was simply that iron barrels could not meet the requirements, forcing every state to rely on safe but extremely heavy smoothbore bronze guns. Among Europe’s great powers of the eighteenth century, only Britain—short of copper—persisted stubbornly in working with iron artillery.

Earlier, the British had planned to build an experimental rifled gun made entirely of steel. Yet when the Tower of London Ordnance Office submitted the cost estimate, the official in charge was cursed out jointly by the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary at War. The reason was simple: an all-steel muzzle-loading rifled gun would cost as much as its weight in gold. In the Admiralty’s words, if such artillery were mounted on HMS Victory, a first-rate ship of the line with one hundred and eight gun ports, the British Empire would go bankrupt—an exaggerated way to make the point.

In 1791, the Reims armory had also developed a small-calibre, all-steel, five-pound muzzle-loading rifled gun, paired with the integrated ammunition of 1792. Its battlefield results were excellent: accurate, and with a high rate of fire. Although the shot weighed only five pounds, in power, range, and accuracy it was not far behind a twelve-pound bronze field gun. The key flaw, however, remained the same: the cost of steel suitable for gun barrels was still far too high.

Meanwhile, research into picric acid had also made some progress. It was expected that, at some point next year, armament engineers would attempt to use stabilized picric acid as the bursting charge inside shells. To match the emergence of such a violent explosive, it would be necessary to adopt all-steel artillery capable of enduring high temperatures, high pressures, and violent detonations.