The Radiant Republic

André, smiling just as broadly, stepped forward a few paces and opened his long arms to embrace his friend who had come from far away—Georges Danton, in a wide-brimmed formal hat and a brown coat.

The conqueror of Belgium patted the Titan hard on the back and said, “I’m truly glad to see you in Brussels, Georges!” In his words, André deliberately ignored the fact that Danton had recently lost his wife.

“No one else was willing to come, so I had to come myself!” Danton wore an aggrieved expression, which made André burst out laughing.

The northern dictator raised one finger before his guest and waved it back and forth in good cheer.

“No, no, no, my dear friend. It’s that no one dares to come. Now let me think—what are they doing? Ah, yes. Desmoulins says in The Old Cordelier that I’m a merciless plunderer with no moral bottom line. Gensonné, in a pamphlet called The New Roman Republic, accuses me of being a savage executioner. As for Hébert’s Père Duchesne, it even describes me as a disgusting son devoted to the Catholic Church. And Saint-Just—at a Jacobin gathering—actually cursed me as a libertine who thinks only with the lower half of his body…”

When André noticed that Danton’s expression had grown slightly unnatural, he turned the topic aside at once, toward Major Scharnhorst, and instructed him: “Major, I approve your request. Go and make preparations for departure. Once Major Kellermann returns, you may go to the various armies for two months of field investigation.”

A week earlier, Major Scharnhorst had carefully reviewed the intelligence reports that the Sixth Section of the Military Intelligence Office had sent back from Poland and Saint Petersburg and elsewhere. Based on his own understanding of the German states, Scharnhorst insisted on one point: once Prussia reached an agreement with Russia on a second partition of Poland, Berlin would very likely turn its eyes back toward the Rhine.

In that situation, if someone provided funding—Britain, for example—or encouragement—Russia and Austria—then the monarch at Sanssouci would be highly likely to tear up the armistice previously signed with André, the Secret Treaty of Valmy, and launch a new war to restore the dignity the Prussian army had lost in 1792.

Therefore, Major Scharnhorst wished to go to the Army of the Meuse and the Army of the Moselle, stationed on the left bank of the Rhine, and join General Berthier, the Chief of Staff, who was inspecting matters at Koblenz, in order to discuss the next response plan.

Yet André had not granted approval. It was not a question of loyalty. Rather, André feared that an upright farmer type like Scharnhorst would ruin relations with an arrogant noble like Berthier. Although the two excellent staff officers had not yet met, they had repeatedly clashed fiercely in official correspondence over the reform of the general staff system.

There was also another important reason, and it lay in Paris. André did not want, at the moment a Rhine war broke out, those National Convention deputies who resented him to make trouble in the shadows and conduct raids and harassment against Reims and Châlons. André was entirely confident that Paris would gain no advantage militarily; however, once a civil war began, he would be forced to overturn his strategic deployment and shift his attention back to France itself.

Now Danton had been sent to Brussels. That meant the National Convention had already reached a unified position: under the same tricolour flag, Paris would continue its good cooperation with the André faction.

After sending Scharnhorst away, André invited Danton into the private study of the administrative palace. The room was furnished quite plainly. The most striking object was a carved bookcase against the wall, five tiers from top to bottom, crowded with books of every kind—from Diderot’s Encyclopédie to the complete works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers.

With André’s permission, Danton, full of curiosity, stepped up and leafed through a few volumes at random, only to discover that a fair number were German editions. Among them were Opitz’s Book of German Poetics and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus from earlier centuries; then, in the Enlightenment era after the eighteenth century, Wieland’s The History of Agathon, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Schiller’s The Robbers and Intrigue and Love, among others.

The most famous of all, however, was a German Bible compiled three centuries earlier by Martin Luther—the first German edition of its kind. Danton even noticed that the pages were covered with long annotations written in German by André himself. The guest raised the German Bible in his hand and teased the northern dictator: “André, when do you plan to convert to Lutheranism?”

André only smiled and said nothing. The books on the shelf were merely his leisure reading. In a few days, he would tour the German lands west of the Rhine in the name of the Northern Command Headquarters. Learning more about the history and literature of the Holy Roman Empire before the nineteenth century would always be useful to him.

André heard Danton continue, “Do you know which sentence of Martin Luther’s I admire most?”

“My words are God’s words,” André replied at once, then explained, “But you know as well as I do that this is an epitaph Protestants composed for him. The sentence he himself intended should be: ‘I am a servant of God’s word.’ The first is arrogance; the second returns to humility—but the implied meaning is similar.”

Reims University, though a Catholic school known for its conservatism, was still deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought. Students continued to explore the doctrines of various Protestant traditions in private, and law students, in particular, were bold to the point of recklessness. In the two years before the Revolution broke out, they had already held open debates on campus over the gains and losses, the sin and punishment, of Catholicism and Protestantism. The only condition was that such debates could not be held openly inside a Catholic church.

“In Brussels now—perhaps in all of Belgium—you are God,” Danton said. He set down the German Bible, took a cup of hot cocoa from a servant, sipped a little, and continued, “On my way to the administrative palace, I passed the City Hall square and saw Madame Marguerite and little Mademoiselle Marie—two years old—helped by a crowd of officials, changing clothes for that ‘first citizen of Brussels,’ little Julien. The whole style looked much like what you wear. A miniature republic Marshal’s uniform. And, on top of that, a small dark-blue soft bicorne.”

Little Julien—also called the Manneken Pis—was a symbol of Brussels. The famous little bronze boy was a small statue and fountain in the city centre. The figure, about the size of a five-year-old child, was not large, standing at roughly fifty-three centimetres, but it carried nearly four centuries of history. In 1619, a new bronze version was made by the sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy of the Southern Netherlands. In 1747, Louis XV of France had dressed him “for propriety.” Since then, every conqueror who visited Belgium had made a point of changing a new outfit for this “first citizen of Brussels.”

In fact, it was the idea of the great magnate Comte de Simon . It looked formulaic, but the effect on public sentiment was obvious. Among the thirty thousand Brussels citizens watching the ceremony, almost no one booed or jeered. Two years earlier, when the Austrian governor, Duc de Teschen, returned to Brussels, he had done the same thing, yet only four to five thousand citizens participated, and half the crowd shouted curses at Austrian shamelessness.

At Danton’s compliment, André only smiled and did not answer. Still, he had to admit that the presence of Madame Marguerite and little Marie added considerable points toward establishing a favourable image of André the conqueror among ordinary Brussels citizens. Even so, no one—including Comte de Simon —proposed that André marry Madame Marguerite. Everyone had been informed in private: the conqueror of Belgium and the Rhine would form a political marriage only with an old European royal house, or with some distinguished princess of the German states.

“Now speak, Georges,” André said, motioning his guest to sit on the sofa. “Tell me why you came to Brussels.”

Danton raised three fingers. “Mainly three matters. First: at my initiative, the National Convention has decided to grant you, André Franck, the status of an honorary deputy. Apart from having no vote, and the daily living stipend of eighteen livres, everything else remains unchanged. Of course, we both know you do not care about such things. But before I left, this was the greatest sincerity I could extract from both the Girondins and the Jacobins…”

André nodded and stayed silent, waiting for Danton to finish, though he already knew the broad outline. Nearly half of the deputies from the fifteen northern provinces still remained in the Paris assembly; it was not difficult—indeed, it was quite easy—for André to learn what was happening inside the National Convention.

Once the Convention began judicial proceedings to try Louis Capet, all of Europe abandoned any thought of negotiating with Paris and once again became the enemy of revolutionary France. The House of Commons in Britain, long neutral, also sent a sternly worded warning, threatening its French counterparts not to harm the former King Louis XVI and his family.

On that basis, the leaders of the two major factions in the assembly—Brissot and Robespierre—both realized that they had to unite every force of revolutionary France to repel the next frenzy of feudal monarchs. And the northern dictator, who held two hundred thousand soldiers, once again became the object the Convention leaders sought to draw in.

At the proposal of Thuriot and others, the Convention quickly passed a resolution accepting the people of the Belgian administrative region into the great family of Free France, including nine provinces: Lys, Escaut, Dyle, Deux-Nèthes, Basse-Meuse, Gueldre, Sambre, Jemappes, and Luxembourg. The Committee of Internal Affairs also authorized the Northern Command Headquarters to lead Belgium’s politics and military affairs for the next two years. Moreover, in the former German-state territories west of the Rhine, the Convention also declared that it would accept these Germans as part of the French Republic as well.

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Danton raised his second finger. “Second: not only I, Brissot, and Robespierre—indeed, every deputy—wants your true attitude toward the Convention’s trial of Louis XVI. This is extremely important.” On the last sentence, Danton spoke almost word by word, heavily.

“As for me personally, I will accept the title of honorary deputy, and I will respect any correct decision made by the National Convention,” André replied, without the slightest pause or hesitation, in a deliberately ambiguous line.

Danton smiled, unconvinced. That was the real posture of a seasoned politician. What counted as a “correct decision”? It was whatever André judged to be correct according to his own political interest. In truth, the Jacobins under Robespierre and the Girondins organized by Brissot only needed André not to cause trouble in the north; beyond that, it was impossible to force the northern dictator into major concessions.

“And finally,” Danton stood up and said, “André, my friend—the French Republic urgently needs the aid of the Northern Command Headquarters!”

Requests for aid—this was the third wave André had heard within the administrative palace in Brussels.

The first had come from the Polish version of Lafayette: Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish officer who had fought in the American War of Independence, held the rank of General in the Continental Army, and possessed American citizenship.

In October 1792, angered by the Russian empress’s slanders against the French revolutionary government, the National Convention decided to grant Kościuszko, the Polish hero of resistance, the title of “honorary citizen of France,” to commemorate his struggle for his country’s freedom and his egalitarian, liberal ideals.

Yet when Kościuszko arrived in Paris in late November, after being driven out of Leipzig, he did not receive the generous support for his Polish uprising plan that he had imagined. Paris, in political chaos, had no capacity to assist a traditional ally two thousand kilometres away. In fact, in the Alpine Army, the Northern Italy Army, and the Pyrenees Army of the south, roughly thirty percent of the soldiers still had not received standard-issue firearms, and artillery was extremely scarce.

Kościuszko did not give up hope. Under the guidance of someone with an agenda, he came specifically to Brussels, hoping to persuade Marshal André to support his suffering Polish homeland. The northern dictator did not take the bait. He quickly learned that General Kościuszko—who, in Poland, held the rank of Lieutenant General—was not an official representative of the Kingdom of Poland at all, but merely an exile in France, a fervent patriot trying to get something for nothing and swindle eight thousand rifles as “free aid.” Therefore, in front of envoys from Prussia, Russia, Austria, and other states, André harshly rebuked Kościuszko, and finally ordered his guards to throw the Polish “fraud” out of the administrative palace.

That same night, the humiliated and furious Kościuszko was preparing to board a ship and leave Brussels. At the docks, General Penduvas of the Military Intelligence Office stopped him with ease—and then explained André’s intention: before the uprising erupted, every related action had to remain strictly secret.

In the friendly meeting that followed, Penduvas, on Marshal André’s behalf, stated that MI6 would, over the next fifteen months, provide the Polish people fighting for independence and freedom with fifteen thousand rifles fitted with bayonets, as well as sixty artillery pieces. Most of these weapons came from standard-issue arms captured by French forces on the battlefield during the war; Prussian weapons, by contrast, had largely been redeemed by Berlin.

When this joy fell upon him from the heavens, Kościuszko did his best to remain clear-headed. He asked Penduvas, tensely, what political, military, and economic demands Marshal André would make of liberated Poland and the Polish people.

Penduvas replied frankly: “At present there are only three. First, the Polish resistance’s cooperating partner must be—and can only be—Marshal André. Even if Paris joins in the future, it must first obtain the Northern Command Headquarters’ approval. Second, when the Northern Command Headquarters confronts Russia, Prussia, or Austria, the Polish army, as an ally, must give assistance without reserve. Third, if a future Polish kingdom still insists on a constitutional monarchy, then Marshal André’s descendants should be included among the candidates for the Polish crown prince.”

After the government of Stanisław II had, in a modest but real way, tricked France once, André no longer regarded Poland’s great nobles as his primary partners. Instead, he looked for “bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” among Polish exiles—and Kościuszko and Dąbrowski were among the best choices.

After hearing General Penduvas relay Marshal André’s conditions, Kościuszko did not hesitate for long before accepting them all. After all, neither the former Kingdom of France nor the current French Republic needed an inch of Polish land; on the contrary, in moments of crisis France had repeatedly aided Warsaw.

First: after the Northern Command Headquarters annihilated the one hundred and forty thousand-strong intervention force of Prussia and Austria in 1792, many Polish patriots already regarded the young French Marshal as an idol. With the support of the God-Favoured, morale would surely be lifted. Second: allies were meant to help one another; and among the European great powers, France was one of the most reliable allies Poland had. Third: the last point was even less of a problem. It was merely a nomination for the Polish heir. That Slavic country had a remarkably fine tradition: it loved inviting foreigners to serve as kings of Poland.

If Poland was to be pushed toward revolution, Penduvas had no desire to see Kościuszko’s anti-Russian uprising become hasty and blind, ending in total defeat. The head of the Sixth Section of the Military Intelligence Office told General Kościuszko that he must first establish a strong and effective insurgent organization, then unite Polish patriots across Europe beneath it. As for the name, Marshal André had already chosen it in advance: the Polish Liberation League. Under it would be a military body: the Polish Free Legion.

Beyond weapons aid, André also secretly dispatched a large number of military instructors to Poland to train the soldiers of the Free Legion and help the Poles build arsenals and ammunition workshops locally. At the same time, the Polish Liberation League would regularly send capable Polish officers to the armies under the Northern Command Headquarters for specialized training and for combat experience with units in the field—especially in technical branches such as artillery, staff work, communications, and engineers.

Penduvas emphasized: “First, in the name of the state—Poland—contact the anti-Russian nobles. Then, in the name of revolution, unite the republican forces of the middle and lower strata. Finally, in the name of freedom, awaken the roughly forty percent of the country who are serfs or semi-serfs.”

…

The second request for aid was purely military, unrelated to politics: it came at the request of Selim III, the new Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Selim III ascended the throne in 1789 after the death of his uncle, Abdul Hamid I. His luck, plainly, was poor. At the start of his reign, the Ottoman Empire fought Russia and Austria of the Holy League. More unfortunate still, the imperial armies suffered defeats on both fronts.

In August 1791, the Treaty of Sistova with Austria cost the Ottomans much of Bosnia. In January 1792, the Treaty of Jassy with Russia cost them Crimea and Georgia; Russia then built bases along the Black Sea coast and developed its navy.

In May 1792, once the war between the Holy League powers ended, Selim III—tall, powerfully built, and young—attempted, in order to revive the old empire, to implement a series of reforms in domestic administration, foreign affairs, and the military system, taking the Western powers, and especially France, as a model.

In August and September of that year, the Sultan’s envoy, Omar, went to Paris seeking French assistance, but at precisely that time the one hundred and forty thousand-strong Prusso-Austrian coalition invaded France, the war began, and no one had any attention to spare for a distant Ottoman emissary. Omar had no choice but to return disappointed.

In late October, back in Istanbul, Omar received news of France’s victories. He volunteered at once to go to France again. After failing to find his target in Paris, Reims, and Sedan, Envoy Omar finally met Marshal André in the administrative palace in Brussels.

Unlike the secrecy surrounding aid to Poland, André immediately agreed to continue the alliance the two countries had maintained for centuries, and to provide military assistance to Selim III. This included providing twenty-three thousand standard-issue Austrian rifles captured by the French, as well as eighty-five artillery pieces. The Austrians were wealthy and had always been willing to redeem soldiers and officers, but they seldom redeemed weapons.

In addition, André agreed to arrange one hundred and twenty military instructors to travel to Istanbul to serve the Ottoman Empire’s new-style army. Yet after consecutive defeats against Austria and Russia, Sultan Selim III clearly lacked sufficient gold to pay for such a large purchase of arms.

André, however, was considerate toward a major arms buyer’s difficulties. He proposed that long-staple cotton from the Middle East (chiefly Egypt), Ankara wool, and chromite ore could be used to offset the cost. In return, Selim III’s empire had to understand and support the French fleet—its privateering fleet—in its anti-piracy campaigns in North Africa. Put plainly: as the suzerain of the North African states, the Ottoman Empire needed to acknowledge the overseas footholds that the French privateering fleet had already established, or was about to establish, in North Africa.

As for the Sultan’s political and economic reforms, André had no desire to interfere at all. He knew that the young and hot-blooded Selim III, lacking restraint and political experience and incapable of endurance, would easily throw his country into chaos under the combined opposition of powerful religious forces and conservative elements within the army. Once the “cauldron was overturned”—the signal of rebellion—the Ottoman Empire, burdened by accumulated rot, would slip from hope back into bitter despair, waiting to be battered again by Russians, Austrians, and French alike.

History had proven one point: without long-term cultivation by Enlightenment thought, political reform could not succeed.

…

Returning to the present, the emergency aid Danton described to André was not merely political and military. It was economic as well. Put simply, Paris was again suffering shortages of grain, sugar, coffee, and cocoa. It was not that supplies did not exist. It was that the livre assignats issued recklessly by the Minister of Finance had turned the French economy into a mess and triggered vicious inflation.

Because merchants refused to accept the livre assignat, which had nearly become waste paper, and because French customs then barred them from entry, prices in Paris—grain, coffee, cocoa, cane sugar, and indigo—rose in wave after wave. At the same time, smuggling grew increasingly rampant, and primitive barter trade revived.

To this, André said he could do nothing.

This was the third time that the National Convention and the Minister of Finance had rejected the comprehensive economic recovery plan proposed by Perrier, the Secretary-General of the Joint Finance and Taxation Committee of the northern provinces and the President of the United Bank. The key clauses included: treating the United Bank as France’s sole central bank authorized to issue currency; abolishing the circulation of the livre and the assignat; and establishing the Reims franc, backed by gold, as the Republic’s legal tender.

Deputy Cambon had wrecked France’s economy, yet he understood perfectly well André’s bloodless strategy of economic encroachment. If the Convention and the Minister of Finance accepted the “Perrier plan,” then Paris—and even the central and southern regions—would quickly become an economic colony of the Northern Command Headquarters. Put in direct terms: with a single order from Marshal André, the entire French army would turn its guns on Paris, because it was Reims that paid their wages.

As for Paris’s stubborn posture, André was unimpressed. He knew clearly that Brissot, Robespierre, and their like would not yield easily; the tug-of-war between two sides, and even three sides, would continue for a long time. Afterward, the Jacobins would find an unprecedented “good method”: to impose the Law of Suspects and a general maximum, using political terror to replace economic panic.

As for military assistance, André told Danton to rest well in Brussels for a few days first. He would appoint someone to arrange the matter.