The Radiant Republic

Saint Petersburg, the Winter Palace—this was a Russian imperial residence whose grandeur and scale could shock the world.

Its main façade faced the Neva. Three arched iron gates opened onto an entrance guarded by a group of Atlas giants. Colonnades ran along the palace on both sides, imposing and majestic. Inside, marbles of many colours, malachite, lapis lazuli, porphyry, and jasper were inlaid everywhere; gilt and copper plating adorned the halls; sculptures, frescoes, and embroidered draperies of every material completed the display.

In André’s memory, Catherine II—already in the late autumn of her life—was nothing more than an old, foolish, lustful, eccentric, and wildly ambitious woman. This time, however, it was André who had been wrong. A ruler whom later generations could salute as “the Great” was never a tsar who could be ignored. Even if she was now advanced in years, and perhaps had little time left.

After signing the Russo–Prussian treaty for the second partition of Poland together with her cousin, King Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia, Catherine II dismissed her guest and remained alone in her great study, lost in thought. Before long, she moved to the next room, where a brand-new panoramic map of Europe had just been hung on the wall. It had been drawn in haste a quarter of an hour earlier by the imperial surveying office, in accordance with the clauses of multiple treaties. Standing before the new map, Catherine II swept her eyes over it and saw that the first obstacle to Russia’s march into the European interior—the Kingdom of Poland—had become “a little smaller” once again.

In January 1793, under a treaty among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Russia took White Russia (including Minsk), most of the Dnieper’s west-bank Ukraine, and part of Lithuania—an area of two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres and a population of three million. Prussia took the cities of Danzig and Toruń, several provinces of Greater Poland, and part of Mazovia—an area of fifty-eight thousand square kilometres and a population of one million one hundred thousand. Poor Austria received only a few small scraps of land, with a population of fewer than two hundred thousand. This was the second partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria—and compared with the first in 1772, it was even more ruthless and brutal.

Yet when Catherine II’s gaze turned to Western Europe, she saw that the French, marked in red, had somehow obtained Belgium and the German lands west of the Rhine—an area of more than one hundred and twenty thousand square kilometres, with nearly eight million new subjects. At once, the mood of the ambitious “female tsar,” who dreamed of leading Russia to conquer all Europe, turned distinctly sour.

Catherine soon turned back to the desk, put on her spectacles, took a magnifying glass in hand, and stood before the Western European portion of the map. She began to examine, inch by inch, the Russian letters no larger than grains of rice, while her mind worked in tense calculations.

“We must restrain that French conqueror called André.” After a long while, Catherine set down the magnifying glass, returned to her own velvet seat, and continued thinking—carefully, thoroughly, and in detail.

Brussels had once given the Russian envoys solemn assurances that Andréan France would never aid the Polish kingdom, which was destined to perish. Catherine II did not believe a word. She trusted the faith of Frenchmen no more than she trusted the promises Paris had been repeating for more than one hundred years: that it would never ally with the Ottoman Empire. And yet, in every Russo–Turkish war, the Turkish armies always seemed to be holding France’s newest rifles and cannon, killing tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

Catherine’s talk of sending a great Russian army to France “to extinguish the flames of revolution” was merely a lie with which she had fooled the monarchs of Prussia and Austria. At the very least, the Russian general staff had never even drafted such a scheme—an absurd plan that would have required marching more than two thousand five hundred kilometres, passing through dozens of Protestant states and free cities along the way.

Thus, “before Poland is fully annexed and thoroughly digested, Russian troops must not cross the left bank of the Niemen by one hundred Russian miles”—this was the guarantee Catherine II gave to Marshal Suvorov.

Nor could one expect anything from the Austrians. Vienna received so little at the international conference on the partition of Poland that Emperor Francis II was deeply dissatisfied with Saint Petersburg, and even refused to attend the trilateral meeting in person. In fact, after Schönbrunn signed the Brussels Convention with Andréan France, it had little interest in restoring its rule over the French-speaking Netherlands. Emperor Francis II would much rather bring the equally rich, but closer, northern Italian plain completely under Habsburg control.

It should be noted that most of northern Italy at present belonged to the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia. This was a wealthy kingdom of the Bourbon line (a branch that split from the Spanish Bourbons). Its capital was Turin, and its domains included Piedmont, Savoy, and the island of Sardinia.

After weighing everything, Catherine II could only make the Prussians do her work for her. For more than two months now, she had been secretly urging King Frederick Wilhelm II to launch a war of revenge against Andréan France: to recover the German lands west of the Rhine and annex most of them into the Kingdom of Prussia. At least this advice truly tempted Wilhelm II.

Yet Russia’s sinister intent met firm opposition from the Duc de Brunswick. It was not that this Prussian Marshal refused to fight France. Rather, he knew Prussia had not yet recovered its national and military strength—above all, its morale. The German soldiers who had marched out to war would never forget the French artillery’s overwhelming, sky-filling fire. As the Duc de Brunswick put it, “Unless one can effectively restrain the ferocious artillery within the French army, no European army can defeat the French on the battlefield by itself.”

Unfortunately, after the two campaigns of 1792, the Duc de Brunswick fell ill from exhaustion at the beginning of the new year and had to return to his own lands to recuperate. At the Saint Petersburg conference, with no voice left to oppose her, King Wilhelm II finally accepted Catherine II’s proposal to march—and in return received a military loan of three million florins in gold, worth roughly fifteen million thalers. Wilhelm II promised that Prussia would, in two months’ time, launch a new offensive against revolutionary France stationed west of the Rhine.

“Foolish Prussians.” At this thought, a faint smile appeared on Catherine II’s wrinkled face. One must remember: before marrying into Russia, Catherine II had been, in truth, a Prussian girl through and through. Once the great affairs of state were handled, she turned her mind back again to the internal affairs of the Romanov dynasty.

For a long time, Catherine II had believed that the heir, Grand-duc Paul, had been fathered by one of her lovers, and not by the late Tsar Peter III—Catherine’s husband. Yet Paul’s nose had grown flatter, his lips thicker; he was practically a living copy of Peter III reborn.

What worried Catherine even more was that in recent years Grand-duc Paul had shown intense curiosity about the cause of Peter III’s death. He frequently asked attendants whether he had any chance of ascending the throne. Not long ago, while visiting Prussia, Grand-duc Paul kept asking others why Catherine II had killed his father, and why the crown that should have belonged to him had been placed on his mother’s head instead.

After returning, Grand-duc Paul remained trapped in a misery he could not escape. At times he would wail and scream; at times he would sink into bleak depression. The only thing that interested him was playing at military games and brawling drills. He scoffed at the court gossip that he was the son of Sergei Saltykov, and became even more convinced that he was the true son of the murdered Peter III. As if to prove it, he imitated Peter III’s quirks with increasing zeal. From that point on, he openly declared his love for everything Prussian, issued orders with violence, treated soldiers with cruelty—in short, whenever he had the chance, he copied Peter III’s evil conduct, only doing it even more excessively. (This passage is drawn from Russian historical sources.)

Catherine II was deeply disappointed by the heir Paul’s incompetence and dullness, and placed her hopes on her grandson Alexandre instead—hoping to prevent the imperial legacy founded by Peter the Great from falling, after her death, into the hands of Paul, whose temperament was warped and who worshiped Prussianism.

And yet this very morning, Alexandre declared that he had no interest at all in ruling Russia. He stated plainly that he loathed autocracy, violence, and palace intrigue. He said he was naturally easygoing and preferred a quiet, detached life. Those words made Catherine II tremble with rage. For the first time in her life, as a grandmother, she struck Alexandre across the face—then, at last, held the young grandson and burst into tears.

At dusk, Catherine II summoned the aide waiting outside and ordered him to draft a state document, declaring that, in order to continue the fine tradition founded long ago by Peter the Great, Grand Duke Alexandre would follow the path Peter the Great had once walked and visit Germany and the Netherlands and other lands. During the journey, Alexandre would also visit the Duchy of Baden to see Princess Louise Maria Auguste, who was already betrothed to the Russian heir.

…

That night, in Brussels City Hall, the lights blazed and the guests filled the rooms.

The moment they entered the hall, beautiful women could hardly wait to shed their fur coats, eager to display their proud figures and bosoms. Men, meanwhile, were required to hand their riding whips, pistols, and sabres to the city gendarmes guarding the antechamber—then hurried after their companions.

Soon, guests in groups of three or five, guided by attendants carrying fresh flowers, climbed the brightly lit stairs into the splendid, dazzling golden ballroom. Music, flowers, cold dishes, dancing, joy, magnates, diplomatic envoys, high clergy, and the city’s handsome men and beautiful women formed a vivid tableau.

Perhaps out of mourning for his late wife, or out of guilt in his heart, Danton—the envoy from Paris—had accepted the invitation jointly issued by André and Brussels City Hall, but he brought no female companion. In earlier days, Danton had enjoyed seeking pleasure in such settings, sometimes until dawn.

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Before long, as Danton stepped through the second gate of the City Hall, a uniformed attendant at the door—whose duty was to chant each guest’s name and title—cried in a loud voice: “Plenipotentiary of the National Convention of the French Republic, the esteemed Citizen Georges Danton!”

The noisy gaiety of the hall froze almost in an instant.

Men and women alike—and boys and girls not yet grown into men and women—stared at the hulking, unpleasant-looking republican envoy. More than half of those gazes were disdainful, jealous, repelled, even hateful. In their eyes, this Jacobin core figure, who had once served as Minister of Justice in an illegitimate cabinet, had conspired with Marat and others to plan the horrific September Massacres.

None of them imagined that the so-called “great hero who saved France,” the Marshal André—who spoke of law with every breath and justice with every sentence—was the true mastermind behind the Paris massacres. Of course, even if someone had suspected it, they could never have produced solid proof, nor persuaded others to believe it…

The other half of the banquet crowd wore expressions far more complicated. The officers of the Northern Command Headquarters were cautious by nature. They were grateful for Danton’s strong support for the army during the war, yet they did not wish to have any connection with Paris’s political grandees. Marshal André detested soldiers meddling in politics above all. For that reason, many senior commanders—including General Fardel and General Beauharnais—had been removed from the northern armies.

By contrast, a small number of bold and pretty young ladies and women seemed to admire Georges Danton’s powerful, savage physique. From time to time, they let slip an ambiguous, desirous look. Danton, however, remained unmoved. Likewise, because of the September Massacres, most foreign envoys showed little interest in Danton—except for Metternich, the Austrian Kingdom’s commercial chargé d’affaires, who raised his glass toward the former French Minister of Justice in salute.

A self-mocking smile rose at the corner of Danton’s mouth. He walked, indifferent to all, to a table on the far side, selected the food he liked, took up a plate, and leaned against a velvet gold-thread tapestry, eating with hearty appetite. After this minor interlude, music resumed, men and women danced again, and amid the music and the dance there was no shortage of whispered judgments about the envoy of the French Republic.

Although all of Belgium had already been incorporated by Paris into the great family of France, Brussels’s magnates, rich men, and clergy still insisted that they “belonged only to the conqueror’s Frankish kingdom, not to the Jacobins’ French Republic.” This was The Times reporter’s apt description of Belgium’s political climate.

For in Brussels, in Belgium, there was no food shortage, no restless masses thrown into turmoil by unemployment, no worthless livre assignat; there were no swaggering Jacobins, no speeches preaching violence; there were no bloody, frenzied sans-culottes, and still less any desecration or destruction of Catholic churches…

Danton suddenly lifted his head and saw an old acquaintance standing before him. More than two years earlier, it had been at Danton’s strong recommendation that Captain Brune was permitted to enter the Champagne Composite Brigade. Now, the former junior officer had become a general. Two days earlier, Brune had been ordered to return from the Army of the Meuse to Brussels. At the Aerschot camp on the city’s western outskirts, he would take over the Army of the Belgium, now being formed as a garrison force. At the same time, General Augereau, stationed around Aachen and Düren, had been appointed commander of the West German Corps, likewise a garrison force.

“Georges—truthfully, you and your family could stay here,” Brune urged his former patron in a low voice, with a hint of apology. With André’s tacit consent—indeed, his indulgence—Brussels’s propaganda machines had already painted French Paris as a wasteland crowded with mobs. The old praises—capital of art, fashion, culture, and romance—had drifted farther and farther from the Paris of today.

Danton smiled. He reached out and patted his old friend’s arm. “Guillaume, you’re not a persuasive man. Your intelligence belongs in the army, on the battlefield. Remember this: politics is not a good thing.”

After the war, Danton had once hoped Brune would apply to return to Paris, and he had planned to recommend him as commander of the Northern Italy Army. Brune declined politely—because half a year earlier he had already moved his family to Reims, binding his interests to André’s.

This, too, was one important reason André valued Brune. Though Brune commanded only a reserve army, the future targets of the Army of the Belgium would be the Netherlands, the Electorate of Hanover, and Britain. The Army of the North might, at any time, be transferred toward the Rhine to join a war against Prussia.

A week earlier, under Saint Petersburg’s prompting and instigation, the Prussian envoy demanded that Marshal André renegotiate the Secret Treaty of Valmy—either to return unconditionally several Prussian enclaves near the Rhine, or else to have André pay twenty million thalers to purchase them. For this ugly attempt to sell the same land twice, the Northern Command Headquarters issued a stern refusal.

Thus, on Berlin’s orders, the Prussian envoy announced the unilateral tearing up of the Secret Treaty of Valmy. That is to say, from that day onward, France and Prussia returned to a state of war.

André immediately struck back. He ordered the Army of the Meuse and the Army of the Moselle to move fully into Gueldre, East Frisia, Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg. When news arrived that Prussia planned to recruit, train, and assemble a force of one hundred thousand near Brandenburg, west of Berlin, the Northern Command Headquarters ordered the field armies to suspend their reorganization and, from the day the order was received, raise readiness to the second level.

At the same time, André instructed Talleyrand—who was visiting the Free City of Frankfurt—to hurry to Berlin at once and hold emergency talks with King Wilhelm II over the crisis, in the hope of dispelling the shadow of war. Meanwhile, André dispatched Basseville, who had just resigned as ambassador to the Netherlands, appointing him plenipotentiary and sending him to Dresden for secret diplomacy, preparing to pass through the Electorate of Saxony in order to strike Prussia.

In fact, the first to propose this strategy was General Berthier, the Chief of Staff. He consulted with two army commanders, General Moncey and General Custine, and produced the plan. Major Scharnhorst, who was conducting field research around Aachen, also wrote to Marshal André in support of drawing the war toward Prussia’s western frontier—then seizing Berlin by surprise and shattering Prussia’s will to fight within a short time.

André understood as well that if the war dragged on, it would be extremely unfavourable to the Northern Command Headquarters. On the very day he learned that Prussia had torn up the armistice, André also instructed the representatives of the fifteen northern provinces who remained in the National Convention in Paris to intervene collectively in the Convention’s public trial of Louis XVI. Of course, this was only an attempt to delay the final judgment on the former king and win precious preparation time for the Northern Command Headquarters. For once Louis XVI went to the guillotine, every monarchy in Europe would resume war against France.

On that basis, the Northern Command Headquarters accelerated the build-up of the two garrison corps in Belgium and West Germany. If the situation required, those garrison corps could be reorganized into regular field armies within two weeks. In addition, André authorized the gendarmerie to plan a foreign legion composed chiefly of Irish exiles and Poles.

It should be made clear that even a garrison corps under the Northern Command Headquarters was far stronger than the Northern Italy Army. After half a year of formation, the Northern Italy Army’s total strength was still fewer than thirty-five thousand men, and only half of them possessed standard-issue firearms. As for artillery, it had less than even a single infantry division of the Army of the Meuse.

In fact, since the victory in the war, the southern provinces, at Paris’s demand, had replenished the Northern Italy Army with sixty to seventy thousand men in succession. Yet after only one month, nearly half of the new recruits would choose to desert. Pay had been in arrears for a long time, and the corps was riddled with slack morale and low spirit. Even its commanders had been replaced several times. The first, General Montesquiou-Fézensac, would rather remain in the Pyrenees Army throwing stones at the Spaniards than take over this cursed beggar corps.

In a report submitted to Paris, a commissioner of the National Convention described the Northern Italy Army’s soldiers as “all in rags, shoes full of holes, weapons laid about carelessly, rarely maintained with any seriousness… in truth, they look like a gang of bandits, crude and rude.”

Not until mid-December of the previous year was General Fardel, former commander of the Army of the North, who had been idle in Paris, appointed commander of the Northern Italy Army. Upon taking office, the Northern Italy Army, relying on its superior numbers, successfully occupied the Duchy of Savoy, which had only a few thousand defenders. But when it split its forces and marched south into Piedmont, it suffered a setback. General Fardel had to halt beneath the walls of the rich city of Nice and wait for reinforcements.

It was precisely this campaign that made the Austrians begin to realize that the French army—at least the French of the south—was not terrifying. What was truly terrifying lay in the north of France: Marshal André’s well-equipped, high-spirited army.

In a secret memorandum sent to Vienna, Metternich boldly advised that in the conflict between Andréan France and Prussia, Austria should remain outside the matter, and at the very least refuse to involve itself in fighting along the Rhine. If necessary, Austria could provide security guarantees to the Electorate of Saxony and thereby divert the northern flood toward Berlin.

Before long, on the advice of Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg, Schönbrunn began to re-evaluate Metternich, the young diplomat left in Brussels—only twenty years old. After consideration, the Austrian foreign ministry prepared to upgrade the Brussels commercial mission to a consulate-general before March.

Good fortune lifts the spirit. At the very least, the future Consul Metternich would no longer be short of money—Vienna had given him a special diplomatic fund worth one million thalers. It had only one purpose: to encourage Andréan France and Prussia to fight a great war. Who won and who lost did not matter; the best outcome was mutual ruin.

…

Suddenly, the crowd in the ballroom began to stir. People whispered excitedly. Many tried to surge forward, only to stop halfway. The crowd soon parted like the tide, leaving a passage down the middle.

In the golden hall, the music changed into a bright, lively tune. The other door of the ballroom opened. André, smiling, entered lightly from the sitting room with Madame Marguerite on his arm, walking between the lines of guests, while the nurse carrying little Marie followed closely behind.

André walked slowly, because Madame Marguerite, as hostess, needed to smile and greet the guests on both sides again and again. Metternich, standing at the front, hurriedly released the arm of his companion, stepped back two paces, and bowed to the honoured masters treading upon the red carpet. Not only Metternich—every guest did the same. Men stepped back two paces and bowed; women lifted their skirts with both hands and bent their knees slightly.

When André and Madame Marguerite reached the centre of the dance floor, the orchestra began a strolling waltz. André gently released Madame Marguerite’s arm, moved forward a few steps, and took the wife of the commercial-industrial leader Comte de Simon as his first partner, waltzing to the rhythm.

When the first waltz ended, André’s temporary partner became the wife of the Brussels mayor and commoner-party leader, Vonck. But before the third set began, André politely declined the invitation of the city speaker’s wife. While men and women on the floor paired off with partners, he slipped out through gaps in the crowd.

André went straight to Danton and told the envoy from Paris his final decision.

“Before May of this year, the Northern Command Headquarters will provide our southern brothers, free of charge, at least thirty thousand rifles and one hundred and fifty artillery pieces. In addition, beginning next month, every two weeks, Reims will ship five thousand tons of cheap grain to Paris by merchant vessels on the Marne. If an emergency arises, the volume can be increased as appropriate.

“In return, the Convention’s special committee must postpone the final judgment date for the former King Louis XVI until the middle to late part of the next month, rather than the scheduled two weeks from now.”