The Radiant Republic

“Merry Christmas, my dear friend. What does Christmas cheer? It is not the cheerful sunshine, nor the birds’ chirping. It is a happy thought and a blessed smile; it is a warm, affectionate greeting between friends. Your friend, André Franck, on the road to Brussels.”

After writing the last line, André rubbed his right hand, which had grown sore and weak. He glanced at the mountain of Christmas cards piled on the desk, then asked Kellermann the younger, his aide-de-camp, “How many are we still short?”

“We still need to fill out three hundred and sixty-two, Marshal,” the major replied, slipping the completed cards into large envelopes as he counted them.

“Damn it. I’ve brought this on myself,” André said, shaking his head in helplessness.

On the eve of Christmas 1791, André had once commissioned several painters to make a very special gift—Christmas cards—for the provincial agricultural experts who were stranded in Châlons-en-Champagne (see chapter 110). Naturally, this novel manner of holiday greeting soon swept all of France, and even all of Europe.

From that time onward, whenever families gathered to celebrate Christmas, believers—Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican alike—never forgot to mail a Christmas card of André’s invention to their relatives and friends. Thus, after “the God-Favoured” and the “northern dictator,” Marshal André gained yet another nickname: “the Christmas angel.”

Before Christmas 1792, André did the same again. Two months in advance, he had the printing house of the newspaper Figaro prepare two thousand cards and deliver them to the outskirts of Liege. After writing the greetings and his signature, André planned to send them to friends or lovers far away in Paris, Reims, and Sedan, as well as to every regimental commander of the four field armies stationed across Belgium and the west bank of the Rhine.

Now that finely made cards could be mass-printed, there was no need to hire painters to draw each one by hand, and the cost of a card had dropped sharply; it was no longer the exorbitant price of several livres as in the beginning. Yet copying the Christmas message and adding the signature still required André to do it personally.

It was an excellent way to win hearts and minds, and the dictator naturally would not entrust it to anyone else. André never forgot the incomparable joy he had felt in another world when he received the first Christmas and New Year card mailed by a friend.

Before long, André noticed that Scharnhorst’s gaze had been fixed for several minutes on the neat stack of blank cards at the other end of the desk. André smiled and said, “Including the guards, each of you may take twenty. I prepared two thousand this year; I cannot possibly use them all. But there is a condition: imitate my handwriting and copy the remaining message. Naturally, I will sign my own name.”

As for the address on the cards—“at the Jiai Estate, on the road to Brussels”—it referred to a small village on the east side of the Brussels–Charleroi highway. From the name alone, probably hardly anyone in Belgium would know what sort of place it was. Yet once Waterloo was mentioned, after 1815 in another world, all of Europe would know it.

In fact, the main battlefield of the Battle of Waterloo lay near the Jiai Estate in Belgium. Yet here and now, the surroundings of Jiai Estate were nothing but endless fields and low hills. There was no earthen mound forty-five meters high with two hundred and twenty-six steps, and no museums of every kind—most of them built to commemorate Emperor Napoleon, while the British victor, Marshal Wellington, had long since been forgotten.

The reason André ordered the coachman to detour through Waterloo—Jiai Estate—was not only to indulge a remembrance of a plotline unlikely to repeat in this world, but also deliberately to prolong his entry into Brussels and leave Talleyrand more time to consult with the Austrian plenipotentiary. For the two sides had far too many, far too serious differences over the details of the peace treaty.

A week ago, after Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg received in Amsterdam the news that his eldest son-in-law, Comte de Latour—the commander of the Bohemian corps—had been killed at the fortress of Liege, he fainted on the spot. Though he was rescued in time, the accompanying physician still warned the old prince’s third son, Comte de Rietberg, who served as deputy head of the mission: the eighty-one-year-old Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg could not be overworked, and above all could not endure any violent emotional shock.

Thus, after the Austrian mission sailed from Amsterdam to Antwerp, Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg, still confined to his sickbed, appointed Comte de Rietberg as acting plenipotentiary, leading the Austrian mission south to Brussels to conduct bilateral peace talks with André’s representative, Talleyrand.

Perhaps because his brother-in-law Comte de Latour had met such a fate, and because his father Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg had fallen ill for it, Comte de Rietberg, an Austrian lieutenant general, nursed an intense hatred of the French. At the very beginning of the Brussels City Hall negotiations, this Austrian soldier put forward terms that could not be accepted: that the French army withdraw to its original borders; that the German lands west of the Rhine and the Austrian Netherlands be returned to the Holy Roman Empire; that the captured soldiers of the German states be released as soon as possible; that the property and lands of the French émigré nobles and the Catholic Church be returned unconditionally, and so forth.

If an ordinary man had taken part in the talks, he might have risen in fury and smashed the room, postponing the negotiations indefinitely; or he might have felt guilty and made a major concession, haggling with the Austrian mission. But Talleyrand would do neither. No matter how the Austrians raged, he always received them with a courteous smile, ignoring their threats and intimidation.

Afterward, Talleyrand wrote to André. He judged that Comte de Rietberg’s conduct was not driven by any public, personal reason, but rather was directed from behind the scenes by Prince Kaunitz himself, intentionally advancing these baffling and excessive demands. Thus, in Talleyrand’s view, the root of the problem most likely lay in Paris—perhaps the Girondins in power had held a secret meeting with the Austrian Foreign Office and achieved some unexpected progress.

Based on his own understanding of history, André accepted his private envoy’s judgment. Ordinarily, such information should have reached André from Section Five of the intelligence bureau before Talleyrand issued a warning. Yet after Javert left Paris, the entire municipal police bureau suffered an unprecedented purge, and those inclined toward André were dismissed one after another. Fortunately, André had already arranged for Javert to re-recruit these men and place them in the northern provinces or in Belgium, so that loyal people would not be left disheartened. Still, MI5’s intelligence collection in Paris was now always half a step behind; many state secrets once within easy reach had become difficult to obtain.

On the very day he received Talleyrand’s report, André hesitated for twenty minutes, then personally drafted a dispatch. Through the semaphore station on the nearby hills, he sent it to Colonel Marey in Reims, ordering the agents embedded in Paris to launch the “Electric Current Operation,” and thus send Louis XVI and his wife, together with the Girondins, straight to hell.

From the moment France began its counteroffensive within Belgium, French engineers had started building semaphore bases across the eastern Flemish plain, the central hill country, and the southeastern Ardennes plateau, linking them into the communications network of the northern provinces. The distance from Brussels to Reims was only a little more than two hundred kilometres; under normal circumstances, an urgent message could be transmitted in six to eight hours.

…

All along, the Girondins had shown conspicuous leniency toward the deposed Bourbon royal house, and their criminal review of Louis XVI and his Austrian woman was little more than a cursory gesture. At the revolutionary tribunal established in the Palais de Justice, more than two months had passed without their finding— or perhaps without their wishing to find—any evidence of treason by the former king.

In the eyes of Brissot and his circle, once the monarchy had been overthrown and the republic established, it was time for the Revolution to end. As “republicans under monarchy, monarchists under a republic,” they had no desire whatever to see the king’s family come to harm. They only intended to keep the Bourbons as hostages, to deter a second invasion of France by the anti-French coalition.

After all, Louis XVI’s fate was not a matter of concern to a few individuals. Paris, France, and indeed all of Europe were watching. Whether it was London, Washington, Rotterdam, and Stockholm—still maintaining diplomatic channels with revolutionary France—or Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Saint Petersburg—having severed relations—Europe’s monarchs were sending the National Convention one clear message: they opposed putting the King of France on a revolutionary court, and they would not permit a monarch to be executed.

Although Robespierre and his allies had successfully driven Brissot’s Girondin faction out of the Jacobins, within the National Convention Brissot and his friends still held a formidable advantage. Of the nearly seven hundred and fifty deputies, more than two hundred were Girondins, and when joined by the Marsh—those who claimed neutrality but privately sympathized with the king—more than six hundred deputies did not support a public trial. This was nowhere near the support the radical Jacobins required.

Even as Marat, Robespierre, and Saint-Just delivered speech after speech in the Convention hall, threatening the moderate deputies in near-hysterical tones, they still could not change the fact that the Convention rejected, for a second time, taking up the case for trying the former king, Louis Capet. Under the rules, if a proposal failed its third reading, it would be postponed until November of next year.

Yet just as the Girondins were celebrating their victory in this round at the Interior Minister’s lavish townhouse, a sudden, unavoidable accident struck them off balance—while also pushing Louis XVI ruthlessly toward the dock.

On December first, several workers renovating the Tuileries inadvertently triggered a mechanism while dismantling the former king’s bedchamber, exposing an iron cabinet hidden inside the fireplace surround. Beyond doubt, it was the secret safe in which Louis XVI kept his most confidential papers.

Only fifteen minutes later, the Interior Minister, Roland, arrived and ordered the National Guard garrisoning the palace to move every document from the cabinet to his own office. Yet during the transfer, Marat’s people sent Hébert, who directed armed sans-culottes to intercept the carriage carrying the secret papers.

As the sans-culottes and the National Guard faced off, the National Convention convened an emergency session. The decision was to place all the documents from the carriage in the Convention hall itself, under the collective supervision of all deputies, in full public view.

Once those papers were exposed in broad daylight, the Convention hall erupted at once. Men who had been respected yesterday suddenly became traitors to the Revolution. The most famous of them was Mirabeau, the revolutionary mentor whose body had been borne by two hundred thousand Parisians into the Panthéon. The secret cabinet contained at least more than one hundred documents and letters discussing Mirabeau’s private urging that Louis XVI muster troops to suppress the revolutionaries, or imitate Louis XIV and flee to a frontier city so as to rise again.

That night, Paris, the Jacobins, and the sans-culottes were seized by furious rage. With one impulse, they rushed to the Paris City Hall and smashed more than twenty busts of Mirabeau into powder. In the National Convention itself, Mirabeau’s portraits and busts were draped in black cloth. The Paris prosecutor signed arrest warrants, throwing into prison Mirabeau’s personal attendants who had not escaped in time, along with multiple agents, for further examination.

By the time the “cabinet incident” in the king’s bedchamber had reached this stage, it had plainly derailed the Girondins’ national strategy. Now it seemed that putting the king on trial had become unavoidable. Even so, Brissot and the rest still struggled desperately to stop it, for otherwise peace talks with Austria, Spain, and the others would recede into the far distance.

This was plainly unrealistic. The newly elected Paris Commune, together with the Paris City Hall under its control, arrived at the Convention and forcefully demanded that all secret documents be made public, and that “Louis Capet” in the Temple prison—the revolutionaries’ contemptuous name for the king—be put on trial before the people.

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Robespierre, already prepared, rushed first to the speaking platform with the help of his comrades, seizing the floor. Facing the inflamed crowd, he cried out:

“When the Republic was born, Louis was still a king; but the great question in all your hearts has already been resolved by one fact: Louis has been dethroned for his crimes. From more than five hundred secret papers now revealed, we see Louis denouncing the French people as traitors, and seeking by every means to gather other tyrants to punish them. Yet our victory and the people’s will prove that he is the sole traitor.

“The king has no need to be tried, because he has already been judged guilty; otherwise the Republic cannot cleanse its honour. If Louis is innocent, then where is the Revolution? Though I admit that the name of the dethroned king will draw countless threats of war from Europe’s monarchies, I must regretfully expose this unanswerable, cruel fact: Louis must die, so that the nation may live!”

After this splendid speech—borrowing Saint-Just’s reasoning—the hall boiled over, and the great majority of deputies rose to applaud. At once, a third vote was held on whether the former king should be tried. Without suspense, the National Convention passed a resolution by an overwhelming majority:

“The National Convention shall, within one week, formally initiate the trial proceedings against Louis Capet!”

While a special committee of the Convention threw itself into drafting the indictment against Louis XVI, Georges Danton—who had just resigned as Minister of Justice—was far away in his hometown of Arcis. He had received a letter from his father-in-law stating that his wife Gabrielle’s illness had worsened again.

Half a year earlier, on the advice of the British doctor Edward Jenner, who happened to be returning from Paris to London, Danton had sent his wife, who suffered from heart disease, together with his parents-in-law, to a small town with pleasant surroundings and clean air, hoping her condition would improve. For that purpose, Danton and the agents he appointed kept purchasing houses, land, and forests in Arcis. By November, they had already signed more than twenty notarized deeds for rural properties.

The father-in-law Champentier’s letter was sent in early December, but Danton could not leave for Arcis at once. For while transferring the Justice Ministry’s authority to the National Convention, he was publicly accused by the Interior Minister Roland—based on testimony from Cambon—at the committee for judicial affairs. Roland alleged that Danton and many of his subordinates were involved in a corruption scandal.

Although a few days later, under Robespierre’s protection, Danton barely escaped a committee order for formal review, his journey home was delayed by a full seven days. Only on December eighth did he reach the luxurious villa at Arcis, yet no one came out to greet him, and the gate was locked.

When Danton pounded the doorframe in desperation, his grief-stricken father-in-law finally emerged and told him the terrible news: Gabrielle had died three days earlier, and had been buried yesterday.

Danton was shattered. He ran madly to the churchyard and dug up the coffin, clutching the wife who would sleep forever to his chest. Tears rolled from his deep-set eyes. In that moment, Danton’s heart overflowed with regret. He should not have been a bad husband—driving himself mercilessly by day, seeking pleasure by night, taking into his arms either the lowest prostitutes of the Palais Royal or the glamorous ladies of high society, while neglecting everything at home.

What he recalled most were Gabrielle’s eyes—dim, intent, and faintly reproachful. Yet from beginning to end, she had spoken not a single word of blame. She had only waited—in the home, in the business courtyard, in the Minister of Justice’s residence, in the Arcis villa—waiting quietly.

For a full two weeks, Danton remained at Arcis, keeping vigil for his dead wife. Only when he regained a little composure did his family hand him a letter from Paris: a eulogy for Gabrielle written by Robespierre. Yet at the close of the letter, Robespierre—just elected as the National Convention’s presiding chairman—changed his tone and expressed his hope that Danton would end his mourning, bid farewell to the past, and return to Paris as soon as possible.

Since early December, when the Convention formally initiated the trial proceedings against Louis Capet, the Austrian and Spanish envoys had decisively abandoned peace talks with France. Before leaving, the two countries’ diplomats issued a warning to Paris: the day the King of France was judged guilty would be the day Austria and Spain formed an anti-French alliance.

Not only that. The ambassadors and envoys of Britain, the United States, Sweden, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic—still maintaining normal relations with France—came to see Minister of Foreign Affairs Lebrun under instructions from their monarchs or parliamentary governments, stating that they watched the trial of the former king with deep concern and did not wish to see any tragedy occur.

Though Robespierre’s passionate speech in the Convention showed open contempt for the armed intervention Europe’s monarchs were preparing, once returned to reality, the Incorruptible also acknowledged that Paris was not ready to face a second War of National Defense. Without André and the northern provinces, those feeble French armies in the south and center would struggle to perform on the battlefield at all.

In truth, Robespierre feared even more André the moderate and his André faction. If that republican marshal seized the moment and marched south, striking from within, it would be a nightmare for the Paris revolutionaries. No one could stop this contemporary Caesar, André, and his “two hundred thousand Caesar’s legions crossing the Rubicon.”

For this reason, Robespierre hoped that Danton—who was closest to André within the Jacobins—would travel to Belgium and reach some political arrangement with the northern dictator in Brussels. Southern France not only needed mass-produced weapons, supplies, and ammunition, but also hoped to reunite the strength of the André faction, who were no less French, and thus prepare in advance to counter the second round of armed intervention by Europe’s monarchies after the National Convention tried Louis XVI.

In his heart, Danton held Robespierre’s cautious, short-sighted, crisis-driven policies in contempt. He had repeatedly warned Robespierre not to estrange André and not to provoke him—unless Paris had truly completed the unification of France and could form an overwhelming advantage over the André faction. Now, however, Danton had no choice but to follow the Jacobins’ arrangements and fulfill his duty.

Before long, Danton’s confidants—Desmoulins, Fabre, Lacroix, and Séchelles—also arrived at Arcis. While mourning Gabrielle and comforting their leader, they also urged him to return to his post quickly. For Roland and his allies had already swallowed up the Justice Ministry’s affairs bit by bit, and Danton’s confidants were receiving threat after threat of prosecution from the ministry. If not for the fact that the committee for judicial affairs under Robespierre was locked in open conflict with the Girondins, Desmoulins, Fabre, Lacroix, and Séchelles might already have faced imprisonment.

Strictly speaking, Danton—broad-minded by habit—did not take to heart the judicial harassment from Roland and his people acting under Brissot’s direction. Factional struggle was natural. But the fact that Roland and the others had prevented him from seeing his wife alive for the last time was a hatred that could not share the same sky. From that moment onward, Danton, long wavering and ambiguous, decided to break with the Girondins completely.

…

On December twelfth, Marshal André’s carriage arrived in Brussels.

The entry ceremony was scheduled for the afternoon. It must be said that the entire spectacle, carefully designed by Talleyrand, was luxurious and splendid, possessing the magnificence a conqueror could display. Two thousand grenadiers in bearskin caps served as the vanguard, marching before Marshal André’s richly decorated carriage, while dragoons in gleaming steel helmets followed behind. The soldiers advanced in perfect step to the blare of the band.

Staff and senior officers, fully armed, rode tall horses on both sides of the great carriage drawn by eight white horses fitted with parade harness. These magnificent white horses were trophies from the battle of the fortress of Liege. Inside the carriage with André sat Major Scharnhorst, his staff aide, Envoy Talleyrand, and Javert, the minister responsible for police affairs in the Belgian administrative region.

Javert had arrived in Brussels a month earlier. The moment he stepped down from his carriage, he did two things. First, he established a general police bureau near the Brussels City Hall, and prepared, beginning in January next year, to dispatch regional police directors across Belgium. Second, he began organizing a professional police academy to train modern career police.

Under André’s plan, beginning in March next year, the gendarmerie headquarters would gradually lift military supervision across Belgium and hand domestic affairs—trade, finance, transport, the economy, culture and education, medicine and public health—to a civilian team that had pledged itself to André. Only key departments—national defense, policing, justice, and diplomacy—would remain under the direct control of the Northern Command Headquarters.

In the fifteen northern provinces under André’s control, to avoid provoking Paris, he had always maintained provincial self-government through inter-provincial assemblies permitted by the national constitution. But in the new territory of Belgium, André had far fewer scruples. He was operating the administration and economy of the future Greater Netherlands region according to the advanced management model of a modern state.

Belgian people, belonging to the same broad French-speaking sphere, largely welcomed the conqueror André with enthusiasm. In the winter cold, the welcoming crowds filled both sides of the streets. Everywhere were cheers André knew well, and loud slogans such as “Long live André!” and “Long live the supreme commander!”

Hundreds of patrolmen in tall hats and black uniforms, with proper police-rank insignia, each carried a short baton and maintained order with disciplined precision. The very few dissenters opposed to André had either fled abroad with the Austrians in advance, or were removed by the gendarmerie and the police bureau. Meanwhile, Belgian radical Jacobins were likewise kept under close police surveillance.

In short, whether in Reims, Châlons, Lille, Calais, Saint-Quentin, Metz, Strasbourg, Dunkirk, and other cities of the fifteen northern provinces, or in Brussels, Bruges, Namur, Mons, Liege, Ghent, and other cities of the Belgian administrative region, any organization or individual that preached armed violent resistance or radical ideology would be suppressed, expelled, sent to hard labor in the quarries, or simply made to vanish.

To ensure that all Brussels knew of André’s arrival, the procession detoured to enter through the north gate, passed the central square and the City Hall, and finally reached the Belgian palace in the southwest. No—the most accurate name was the administrative palace of the Belgian administrative region of the French Republic.

Diplomats waiting in the administrative palace for André included not only more than thirty envoys from the German states, including Prussia and Austria, but also special envoys from the United States, Britain, the Dutch Republic, Denmark, and Sweden. Time was limited, and André could usually speak to each visitor for only a few minutes.

Yet the British parliamentary envoy, Earl Fox, was plainly an exception. The “conqueror of Belgium” coldly brushed aside the flattering Germans at his side and invited the British member alone into a back chamber behind the great hall for a private discussion. There, they sampled the strongest Saint-Domingue coffee and Cuban Cohiba cigars.

An hour later, Earl Fox emerged, thoroughly satisfied, with a purchase order worth one million pounds in his pocket. It included British-made steam engines, spinning machines, weaving machines, and natural saltpeter and sulfur ore—and also one special commodity: ten thousand tons of natural rubber from Brazil. It should be noted that since Portugal regained independence from Spain, Lisbon had effectively sold itself to the British and become their economic colony on the European continent; British merchant ships could roam freely throughout Portugal’s colonies.

Earl Fox was perplexed as to why André needed rubber—an item used chiefly as a pencil eraser or as a child’s bouncing toy—but he quickly cast the question aside. The contract was real, and André’s reputation, along with the cheques issued by the united bank, were genuine.

After seeing off the British envoy, André returned to the great hall once more. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the rotunda, he looked out at the garden shrouded in thick fog. Winter darkness fell early; the roaring fireplace lit and warmed the hall. The noise behind him did not disturb André’s longing for his family in another world.

Madame Marguerite—the wife of the late Judge Vinault—skilled in receiving guests, had moved into the newly refurbished administrative palace a week earlier with her two-year-old daughter. At this moment, dressed with stately elegance, she stood by the fireplace, smiling as she moved among the envoys, chatting with them and urging patience as they awaited André’s audience. Madame Marguerite was attentive and courteous to every guest, praising them without pause and warmly inviting those who came to take their leave to return on another day.

To one side, Javert’s wife, Anna—who now carried the duties of the palace’s chief housekeeper—was calmly directing more than a dozen French chefs and over one hundred attendants and servants as they prepared food, served tea, and supplied refreshments to the guests and diplomats.

Before long, Talleyrand came over and softly roused André from his reverie. He told the dictator that two Austrian envoys were waiting in the small meeting room next door.

“How is it?” André asked in a low voice.

Talleyrand shook his head with resignation. Comte de Rietberg, acting as plenipotentiary, remained stubborn. Though he no longer proposed outrageous demands, he still refused to yield on certain major positions in terms favourable to André, including recognition that France possessed Belgium and the German lands west of the Rhine. In the Austrian envoys’ words, they would rather pay more gold florins to redeem those occupied territories.

At once, André’s temper rose. Those Austrian diplomats with their noble titles had been dragging matters out for more than half a month, and still had not settled the negotiations. A surge of rage flooded up within him, and he decided to vent it, to let the molten resentment in his heart pour out and drown all who resisted.

André strode into the small meeting room next door. Talleyrand, following behind, smiled faintly. With his usual elegance, he turned and remained outside, letting only Major Kellermann the younger follow.

The moment André entered, he launched into a sudden frenzy of punching and kicking. He overturned the one-legged round table and sent the coffee tray flying to shatter on the floor. Then he wheeled on the two stunned Austrian envoys and roared:

“Damn you! Your empire—neither holy nor Roman—is like an old whore, accustomed to being pinned down and violated by every great power in Europe… Have you forgotten that France won the war, and you are the defeated nation? Have you forgotten you came here to beg me for peace? Two months ago, one hundred and forty thousand men of the German Empire lay at my feet like a pack of stray dogs, lowering their heads to me. Now my two hundred thousand men are under arms and ready; at any moment they can cross the Rhine, strike southeast, reach Schönbrunn, and take Vienna and the Danube into my embrace!

“Remember this, you waltzing Austrians: all justice and right exist only within the range of cannon!”