The Radiant Republic

The National Convention’s interrogation of Louis XVI (an examination rather than a trial) began on the second day after Christmas. It was a gloomy day wrapped in mist; the damp air seemed heavy with dust.

Chambon, the newly appointed Mayor of Paris from the Girondin camp, arrived at the Temple Prison under instructions from the Convention’s special committee. At that moment, the former king—already deposed for months—was still patiently teaching young Charles geography and Latin, the one pursuit Louis XVI had always loved most. Hunting rabbits in the woods had once pleased him as well, but that belonged to a fond memory from three years earlier at Versailles.

The Paris mayor, wearing a broad-brimmed hat adorned with a fine plume, spoke with open arrogance to the high-born prisoner.

“Louis Capet,” he declared, “given that the people will publicly try you for treason, from this day forward you must be separated from your family.”

As he said this, Chambon could not help glancing at the young Dauphin, crouched on the floor and absorbed in a puzzle. His tone softened slightly.

“For the avoidance of doubt, this includes your son as well.”

Louis XVI seemed provoked. He sprang to his feet, visibly agitated, and stepped forward without the least fear.

“Gentlemen—no law, from the Bible to any law made by men, can sever the bond between father and child!”

Chambon, a lawyer by training, fell silent, and a long pause followed. It was Chaumette, who had just been elected Paris’s Prosecutor and had accompanied the mayor, who stepped forward and said:

“Of course, your son has the right to remain here and stay with his father. But until the proceedings are concluded, he may no longer see his mother.”

In the end, Louis XVI—weak-willed by temperament—had to submit once again. In bleak resignation he said, “Very well. You decide everything.”

He kissed his child’s cheek, put on a deep-blue coat, and boarded a green carriage. Accompanied by the Mayor of Paris and the Prosecutor, he was taken to the Manège Hall to undergo a public interrogation before the Convention’s deputies. Along the route, the security commander was General Santerre. In the name of the commander of the Paris self-defence forces, he ordered infantry and cavalry to patrol the streets on both sides with weapons loaded, and at several key intersections more than twenty guns were deployed.

The special committee’s chairman in charge of examining Louis XVI was Barère. This deputy—who had once wept with emotion when the French monarch accepted the constitution—now looked down from the high rostrum upon the man to whom he had once sworn loyalty. After studying Louis XVI for a moment, Barère said with cold indifference:

“Louis, you may sit.”

Louis XVI sat down directly opposite the rostrum, with the lectern looming above him. The chair was unremarkable. The old throne, once inlaid with precious gems, had been pledged as collateral for wartime expenses during the War of the Republic’s Defence and was now stored in the treasury vault of the joint bank. Yet Louis XVI, long stripped of his crown, no longer cared about such hollow symbols.

The interrogation proceeded intermittently for more than twenty days. Barère put nearly two hundred questions to Louis XVI, covering all his actions since the Estates-General convened in May 1789. The accusations rested mainly on evidence drawn from a mass of documents, including those seized at the Tuileries on August eleventh, as well as secret papers recently recovered from an iron cabinet—more than two thousand documents in total. Most of them concerned alleged acts by the former king and his intimates: moving troops, recruiting accomplices, buying representatives, strangling the Revolution, inciting rebellion, and harming the people.

At the hearing stage, the special committee refused to assign a defence lawyer to the former king. Louis XVI therefore believed his only weapon was repeated denial. Confronted with each challenge, he would answer after careful thought:

“No, I do not acknowledge this document… I never signed it. I did not do this; it is all lies… I acted according to the duties entrusted to me by the supreme constitution.”

When night fell and the day’s examination was adjourned, Louis XVI was taken back to the Temple Prison in the same carriage, under the escort of the same officials and soldiers. Only now, his room no longer held the presence of his youngest son, Charles.

Under the special committee’s schedule, the public examination of Louis Capet was to end on January twentieth, and the formal trial procedure would begin the following day. However, after the assembly hall had sent Louis Capet back to prison, Thuriot—a legal specialist who had just returned to Paris from Reims—immediately raised a pointed question.

“Why has the suspect not been given defence counsel? That is his basic right… Even if he is an openly heinous criminal, he must still receive the law’s fair treatment. Otherwise, the law is meaningless.”

Thuriot’s words at once struck a strong chord in the chamber. Many deputies of the National Convention were lawyers with formal higher education; they understood the foundations of a national judicial system, and they knew that a trial conducted without defence counsel violated the principle of fairness and justice and was invalid and unlawful.

The deputies rose one after another and unanimously supported Thuriot’s view. They resolved to appoint two to three defence lawyers for Louis Capet and to postpone the trial date by three weeks so that counsel could gather evidence and prepare for court.

Of course, there were dissenters. The bloodthirsty journalist who endured a skin disease, reeking of vinegar, was the first to leap up in furious opposition. Marat demanded that the trial begin at once and that no precious time be wasted when enemies still needed killing. His obstinate outburst earned nothing but jeers throughout the hall.

When the uproar ebbed a little, Marat flung his arms about wildly and shouted in a hoarse, murky voice, “Yes, I understand, I understand—there are many enemies here, many enemies!”

“Everyone—everyone—everyone is your enemy!” came a chorus of bright, taunting voices around the Swiss. Cornered, Marat tried to seek support from men of his own side such as Robespierre and Couthon, but almost all of them carefully avoided the abandoned man’s gaze.

In truth, Robespierre also despised Marat’s bloodlust and cruelty. Yet after Robespierre had gone to war with the Girondins, he urgently needed the backing of the Paris sans-culottes. That was why he chose to ally with Marat and used his influence to bring Marat into the National Convention. Even so, it did not mean Robespierre was willing to violate, of his own accord, the natural principles of a lawyer’s profession.

The opposition to delaying the trial was not limited to Marat. Saint-Just also opposed it. However, he was not present at the Convention at the time. As a Plenipotentiary of the National Convention, he had been sent on official business to the Army of the Alps (the Swiss Army) and did not return to Paris until January twenty-third. His main purpose in coming back from the front was to take part in the criminal trial of Louis XVI—only to find that the proceedings had unexpectedly turned into an intermission while defence counsel were put in place.

Before Saint-Just could even submit his report to the presiding officer on duty, he stormed in anger to the home of the old craftsman Duplay. He went straight up the external staircase to the second floor and into Robespierre’s room. This seemed to have become Saint-Just’s privilege: the handsome and formidable young man had won Robespierre’s affection through unbounded loyalty, while other visitors would cautiously pass through the rooms on the ground floor.

In the small sitting room, besides Robespierre himself, there were Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin, Le Bas, and the disabled Couthon. Augustin and Le Bas were of similar age; their feelings toward Robespierre were those of younger men admiring an elder—an admired sage. Couthon and Saint-Just, by contrast, were the closest comrades of L’Incorruptible, his right and left arms. Saint-Just most of all: Robespierre trusted him more than anyone else. Indeed, since December 1792, most of Robespierre’s decisions had been carried out by Saint-Just, because Robespierre himself often hesitated.

“Why—why delay the trial of Louis?” Saint-Just’s tone sounded as though he were reproaching everyone, yet his eyes never left his mentor, Robespierre.

Le Bas tried to speak in explanation, but Augustin quietly stopped him; the matter involved someone whom Saint-Just hated most. Couthon, seated in a small wheelchair, sighed inwardly and also kept silent.

Robespierre was quiet for a long while before he finally said, “A few days ago, Danton returned from Brussels. He brought André’s promise… Northern Command Headquarters will, without charge, provide at least thirty thousand rifles and one hundred and fifty guns to our southern brothers before May of this year. 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 will be increased as appropriate. In return, the Convention’s special committee must postpone the final trial date for the former king, Louis XVI, until mid-February—that is, after February fifteenth.”

“What is he trying to do?” Saint-Just was deeply puzzled.

Trading large quantities of arms and cheap grain for a three-week delay was, for Paris and the National Convention, plainly a very profitable bargain. Besides, André had not demanded anything excessive—such as releasing Louis XVI or exiling him to the North American colonies. Saint-Just had just come back from the front and knew how badly the southern armies lacked weapons; thirty thousand rifles and one hundred and fifty guns were enough to equip a large part of an army.

If André meant to use the presence of defence lawyers to cleanse the nation’s enemy of guilt, then he would be astonishingly naive; it did not fit the character of the northern dictator at all.

“So he must be scheming for something,” Saint-Just said with certainty.

It had to be admitted that jealousy was a terrifying poison, a snake that devoured the heart without one noticing. Each time Saint-Just compared André to himself, he found that André’s achievements had again pulled far ahead—so the snake in his heart grew another inch.

…

Aachen, the valley of hot springs.

Steam rose thickly. The sulphur-scented water washed over André’s body with a smoothness like silk, and it loosened him entirely, as though every pore had opened at once. After days of soaking, the cold he had caught had eased noticeably.

The only drawback was that the pool was too large, ringed by jagged rocks left untouched, with no flowers or greenery to soften the scene. It lacked the quiet refinement of an eastern-style bathhouse and felt almost brutish. Still, it was unquestionably a true natural spring, not some “swimming pool” made by German swindlers mixing hot and cold water.

“All right. This is still the eighteenth century.” André opened his eyes and returned once more to January 1793.

Perhaps the hurried journey from Brussels to Koblenz—some 300 kilometres away, the former capital of the Electorate of Trier—had been too rushed. On the second day after André passed through Liège, he carelessly caught a chill. In the eighteenth century, without antibiotics, even an ordinary cold could be a fatal threat.

With his head spinning and his whole body shaking, André had no choice but to order a halt at Aachen, hoping that sulphur springs could help him resist the illness. For that reason, he could not attend the Northern Command Headquarters meeting in Koblenz in person; he could only send word for General Berthier, the Chief of the General Staff, to preside.

When André stepped out of the spring, he dried himself briefly, took the bathrobe handed to him by a guard, and walked—leaving wet footprints—toward a wooden cabin more than thirty metres away. Five days earlier, even the simple act of walking had required a guard at his side to support him. Fortunately, the symptoms were steadily fading: the cough had become far less frequent, and for days he had shown no sign of fever.

Inside the cabin, the fireplace roared, baking the whole room warm. The guest on the sofa felt painfully uncomfortable. Wearing a fur robe, his undershirt was already soaked with sweat. Yet as a hereditary French nobleman, it would have been impolite to undress in another man’s room without permission.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelFire; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

So the unfortunate Comte de Narbonne—an ageing handsome man—could only endure the heat for some time, until the door opened and a rush of cold air rescued him from the brink of being cooked alive.

Seeing his guest’s predicament, André burst into laughter.

“My dear Comte,” he said, “it’s far too hot in here—make yourself comfortable. André is not a demanding host. And besides, how do those Englishmen describe me? ‘A Reims upstart blessed with endless good luck.’”

Comte de Narbonne smiled awkwardly, then removed his fur robe and coat and finally felt at ease. André handed him a cup of hot coffee that a servant had placed on the tray two minutes earlier.

“Now speak. What have you come to see me about?” André asked. In early August of the previous year, among the Constitutionalists whom André had ordered exiled to overseas colonies, the former Minister of War, Comte de Narbonne, had not been included. Yet under André’s hint, Narbonne and Madame de Staël still chose self-exile and later lived quietly in England.

André added at once, “But don’t come to me about the former king.”

Even so, Narbonne did not give up. He had chased André from London to Brussels and found nothing, then to Liège, and only finally caught him in Aachen. He would not abandon his efforts because of a refusal. He tried to persuade his sole friend among the Jacobins—though in truth André and the André faction had already detached themselves from the Jacobins—that the benevolent Louis XVI had good virtues (that was true), that he was innocent (not entirely wrong), and that the revolutionary regime had no right to judge a king (that was utterly wrong).

André did not wish to deceive a friend with lies. He shrugged.

“A childish idea. Charles I across the Channel did not reach the scaffold through a parliamentary trial, either.”

Narbonne grew more anxious. “Do you truly believe the deputies of the National Convention will sentence a sovereign king to death?”

André nodded. “Without doubt. Once Louis XVI leaves the Temple and walks toward the Convention’s dock, he is destined to die. He is the lamb appointed for sacrifice on the altar of the Republic.”

“If Louis XVI is executed, revolutionary France will draw the bitter hatred of every monarchy in Europe—and their revenge in war,” Narbonne warned.

“In fact, the Holy Roman Empire already tried four months ago,” André said smugly, “and the result was disaster. Their army of 140,000 was almost annihilated.”

“But the British will join in the end,” Narbonne said, unable to hide his concern. “All of Europe’s monarchies—from London, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm… France will have enemies everywhere.”

André answered, word by word, “When we chose a republic, we already considered this. It is not frightening. And I do not agree with your claim that the king is innocent. Anyone who sits on that throne is not innocent. Louis XVI’s greatest crime is that he failed to govern the country; the price is his life.”

After speaking, the northern dictator lightly patted Comte de Narbonne on the arm and went into the adjoining dressing room. When André came out wearing his Marshal’s uniform, Narbonne was still seated, deep in thought.

After a suffocating silence, André’s voice sounded again by Narbonne’s ear.

“My dear friend, one must always look ahead. If you have done all that lies within your power, your conscience is clear. As for what comes next—only God knows.”

At that moment, Kellermann the younger, the adjutant, entered and spoke a few words close to the Marshal. André soon turned back with a smile and asked Comte de Narbonne, “I am going to Aachen Cathedral, and I will pay my respects to Charlemagne as well. Comte—would you like to come with me?”

Comte de Narbonne touched, by habit, the high straight Bourbon nose and replied with lips that carried a hint of slyness, “It would be my honour. It is my first time in Aachen as well.”

In the carriage, André looked out through the window at the outskirts of the city. Remembering something, he asked casually, “By the way—Madame de Staël is still in London?”

The Comte shook his head with faint sadness. “A week ago she returned to Switzerland. Her mother died on Christmas Eve at the family estate in Geneva.”

Among all his mistresses, Madame de Staël was the one who most occupied Comte de Narbonne’s heart. André found that baffling. To André, that “queen of salons,” fat, heavy, and ill-tempered, was not a woman he would ever look at twice. Perhaps it was simply Bourbon blood: the handsome man of forty, a bastard of Louis XV, seemed to favour voluptuous “Paris cheese,” a taste as peculiar as it was fixed.

Once André opened the topic, Narbonne also spoke of his experiences in London. He told André that the British cabinet was authorising a committee to investigate, in secret, the production and manufacturing situation of the steam engines in the French département of Marne. A Member of Parliament from Birmingham had declared that the integrated steam-engine works based at Châlons and Reims would, in 1798—five years later—surpass the output of Britain’s Watt steam-engine company for the first time.

André laughed loudly when he heard it.

“They are all wrong, my Comte! Not five years later—this year we will surpass them across the board. Watt can produce at most 800 engines a year, while the United Investment Company will exceed 900 engines by the end of the year. In fact, orders are already booked through the second half of next year.”

In the northern French départements and the Belgian lands, besides traditional mining and municipal water systems, steam engines were also widely used for regulating water levels in man-made canals, for metal smelting, and as power sources for textiles, food production, and processing machinery. In particular, after the “Meuse No.1” steamboat achieved great success in the Battle of the Liège Fortress in 1792, the joint shipbuilding company—relocated from Reims to Sedan—had already received more than five hundred orders.

Meanwhile, Fulton and his engineering team were accelerating tests of the “Meuse No.2” steamboat using a new high-pressure engine. In addition, experiments at the Reims Polytechnic Institute showed that if the surface of an underwater screw propeller made from Swedish manganese iron was coated with an anti-rust layer containing chromium and lead, its service life could be extended to 2,000 kilometres. Of course, to push unobstructed testing beyond 8,000 kilometres—and to ensure that future steamships and steam fleets could appear in the Atlantic in an unending stream—one would have to rely on a manganese-iron-copper alloy.

Even more pleasing to André was that, after a series of redesigns, Cugnot’s high-pressure steam locomotive could now make a round trip from Reims to Châlons without interruption, a distance of more than 150 kilometres. Even though, when hauling several wagons with less than one hundred tons of cargo, its average speed was only about 15 to 20 kilometres per hour—barely faster than an ordinary carriage—the result was enough to exhilarate André. Only yesterday, the dictator had issued orders to the newly established Northern Railway Transport Bureau that the laying of rails must be accelerated.

Seeing André speak with such animation, Narbonne felt bewildered. He asked in return, “Are you not worried about British sanctions? Even your former principal business partner, Sir Watt, is now lobbying Mr Fox, the leader in the House of Commons, to launch a patent lawsuit investigation against the Joint Steam Engine Company.”

Narbonne’s point was something André understood perfectly and did not find strange. The British accused the United Investment Company of unlawfully using multiple Watt steam-engine patents; in truth, that was not wrong. Of the twenty-one valid patents involved, the French had paid less than half of what was due. Yet at the same time, Watt’s company and other British firms had also used, without payment, multiple patents owned by the United Investment Company—Bordeaux mixture, milk powder (malted milk), the self-filling fountain pen, the steam turbine, asphalt road paving, and high-pressure boilers among them. In a normal judicial system, an international tangle like that could not cleanly yield a winner.

For that reason, André said with a bold, open expression, “My friend—when our steel output, our number of steam engines, and our railway mileage surpass Britain entirely, France and I will fear no challenge of any kind from all of Europe.”

Then André tilted his head and asked, “Have you read the latest issue of Le Figaro? There is a passage of mine on the historical contribution of the steam engine. I can recite it for you:

The steam engine, with its immense and tireless power, has driven methods of production onto a mechanised path on a scale previously unimaginable… It has armed mankind, making weak hands mighty, and it has strengthened the human mind to grapple with every difficulty. It has laid a solid foundation for mechanical power to create wonders in the future, and it will aid and repay the labour of later generations.”

…

Aachen Cathedral, standing for a thousand years, was built in a Carolingian octagonal design, richly adorned. Its interior was defined above all by its vaulted structure, one of the most celebrated masterpieces of medieval vault architecture. Because it was long believed to be the final resting place of Charlemagne—the “Father of Europe”—it also became a renowned pilgrimage site for the monarchs of France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia).

In the cathedral’s core structure, the Palatine Chapel, Charlemagne’s marble throne was placed in the corridor—plain to the eye, yet immense in meaning. Since Charlemagne, no king of France and no emperor of the Holy Roman Empire had dared to mount that marble throne in public while wearing the Iron Crown of Lombardy—unless Germany (East Francia), France (West Francia), and Italy (Middle Francia) had truly merged into one again, restoring the splendour of the old Frankish Empire.

“That is impossible,” André rejected Comte de Narbonne’s speculation. Smiling, he said, “One important reason Europe broke free from the dark restraints of the Middle Ages and gradually moved ahead of the Ottoman Empire in the East is that God no longer ruled the secular world. Europe’s divided condition also preserved a form of competition that looked bloody and cruel, yet was necessary and orderly. So no—I have no desire to reunify the Frankish Empire. And you should stop testing me.”

Indeed, André had never had the ambition—nor the dream—of uniting Europe. Napoleon and Hitler were cautionary examples. At most, André took inspiration from the economic development model of the European community.

André and the André faction continued to expand, but at its root it was forced by circumstance. At the beginning, André had only wanted to protect himself in the age of revolution and live as a wealthy man. Yet the snowball grew larger and larger. At the same time, obstacles multiplied; to avoid being crushed to pieces, André could only grit his teeth and push on. His enemies also shifted from domestic to foreign. [FLAG: domestic vs abroad comparison] Fortunately, radical Jacobins remained in Paris, and André’s foresight ensured that he was not the enemy of all Europe.

Now, André could hardly stop even if he wished to. The radical revolutionaries in Paris detested André as a Jacobin heretic, while France’s many enemies would not pass up a chance to strike at the revolutionaries. Take Prussia: André had no desire to fight that militarised kingdom to the death. That was why the Secret Treaty of Valmy was generous toward Berlin. It not only allowed the Prussian army to burn its own standards, but also reduced the indemnity to the lowest level and even permitted Prussia to offset reparations by ceding its worthless western territories.

Yet those damned Prussians treated André’s sincerity like filth. With nothing more than provocation from the fat woman in St Petersburg, Wilhelm II decided to tear up the Secret Treaty of Valmy unilaterally. It infuriated André; without meaning to, he had been tricked by rigid, pedantic Germans.

Therefore, André’s operational requirement to General Berthier, the Chief of the General Staff, was clear: strike at Berlin, seize it, and carry the fire of war into Prussian territory—either to dismantle the kingdom entirely (which was likely difficult) or, at the very least, to weaken that aggressive state as much as possible and teach the rule-breakers a lesson they would never forget, as a warning to the other German states.

However, Koblenz on the Rhine lay some 600 kilometres from Berlin. To attack Berlin, one had to march through German states, with two possible routes. The northern route would pass mainly through the Electorate of Hanover and the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, heading east to Berlin. The southern route would pass mainly through the Electorate of Saxony and the Thuringian princes under its influence, reaching Leipzig and then turning north to approach Berlin.

Geographically, the northern plan was better: the distance was shorter; the roads of the North German Plain suited marching; and ancient man-made canals linked the Rhine and the Elbe river systems, meaning that an expeditionary army of 100,000 need not fear for rear-area supply.

However, under London’s influence—and given Hanover’s close economic ties with Prussia—Hanover would certainly refuse passage to the French. The Duchy of Brunswick, bound to Prussia by more than a century of dynastic marriages, would be the same. Unless André wanted to drag the British into the war, that route was rejected at once.

As for the southern route, it was longer and rougher, and it was blocked in the middle by the Thuringian Forest, roughly 80 kilometres long and 15 to 30 kilometres wide. Yet Saxony’s relations with Prussia were poor—indeed hostile—because Frederick the Great had repeatedly occupied Dresden during the Seven Years’ War and tried to swallow Saxony whole.

Although Saxony’s Elector, Friedrich August I, did not dare to confront powerful Prussia directly, he would gladly seize any chance to strike back at the House of Hohenzollern. In addition, André authorised the envoy Basseville to carry out another important mission to increase the likelihood of an alliance.

To secure victory, André accepted the General Staff’s proposal: to draw the entire Army of the North and Army of the Meuse, plus half the Army of the Moselle, to form an Elbe Army Group of 100,000 men, with General Moncey as its commander. Under André’s instructions, the war had to be decided quickly: by taking Berlin at speed, Prussia would be forced to seek peace. Above all, the war had to end before February twenty-first, because that date marked the deadline for the National Convention’s final trial of Louis XVI.

Beyond military and diplomatic planning, Northern Command Headquarters also noted how thin the northern forces would become. General Kellermann and his Army of the Rhine, forty thousand strong, could not be pulled north; they were needed to prevent the Austrians from taking advantage and invading France again from Alsace.

At this time, counting the garrison corps left in Belgium, the German garrison corps west of the Rhine, the small remaining portion of the Army of the Moselle, and André’s own Guards division, the total defensive strength was only fifty thousand men, most of them recruits. André was deeply concerned that the Dutch, Hanover, and Brunswick would attack south once they grasped the French weakness, thereby tying down French forces and hampering the eastern offensive against Prussia.

So André devised a careful scheme of strategic deception.

First, he sent the notoriously slippery Comte de Talleyrand to Berlin under the pretext of bilateral negotiations, to mislead and delay Prussia’s mobilisation and preparation and to dull Berlin’s sense of danger at home.

Second, André dispatched Basseville to Dresden to persuade King Friedrich August I of Saxony to open a marching route for the Elbe Army Group to reach Leipzig and to provide supplies along the way.

Next, André ordered the two local garrison corps in Belgium and west of the Rhine to pose as the Army of the North and the Army of the Meuse. At the same time, André would appear frequently in the Aachen, Bonn, and Cologne area to cover the main French movements between the Main River and the Thuringian Forest.

Finally, André needed an envoy—polished in manner, handsome in bearing, and strong in personal charm—to go to Hanover and Brunswick to mediate, with the aim of lowering the vigilance of Prussia’s two allies. Until the war’s outcome was decided, Hanover and Brunswick had to be neutralised as threats west of the Rhine.

“My friend,” André asked Narbonne, “will you accept this mission?”

As expected, the Comte did not take long to decide. He accepted the task of travelling to Hanover and Brunswick.

As for the Dutch, MI6 agents were stirring up the Patriot faction in Amsterdam against the Prince of Orange in Rotterdam. The reason was that, under the terms of the Anglo-Dutch alliance, the prince intended to transfer certain privileges in the South African colony and the East India Company to the British, provoking intense resentment among Dutch merchants.