The Radiant Republic

Like Poland, the ancient Kingdom of Sweden was also one of those odd states governed jointly by the King and the nobles. The difference was that, having witnessed Poland’s dreadful fate, Sweden’s noble estates ultimately preserved hereditary monarchy. After Gustavus II—also known as Gustavus the Great, the most outstanding monarch in Swedish history—was killed at the Battle of Lützen in the Thirty Years’ War, Sweden, once formidable, slid swiftly into decline.

For the past one hundred and sixty years, Sweden’s military strength had seemed imposing, as though it still ruled the Baltic; but in reality, the northern lion had been beaten in turn by the Russians, the Poles, the Danes, the French, and the Prussians. On the southern shore of the Baltic, Sweden had been reduced to half of Pomerania.

Under the Peace of Westphalia, Sweden was supposed to receive Western Pomerania (today’s coastal northeastern Germany), while Prussia would take Eastern Pomerania (today’s northwestern Polish coast). Yet the dispute between Berlin and Stockholm never truly died. Then, after Russia and Denmark formed an alliance, Sweden—fearing a three-front encirclement—chose to compromise first with Prussia, which still claimed neutrality. Through a political marriage, King Adolf Frederick of Sweden married Louisa Ulrika, the sister of Frederick the Great, and by ceding Stettin, Sweden and Prussia were brought into an anti-Russian alliance.

Gustavus III, however, regarded this as a humiliation and swore to emulate his ancestor Gustavus II den Store. With the support of his brother, the Duc de Södermanland (later Charles XIII), he launched a “bloodless” coup. Gustavus III successfully seized state power from the noble estates, dreaming of restoring the glory of the House of Oldenburg and Sweden’s former status as a great power. Yet he was born into the wrong age: national decline and an empty treasury made it impossible for him to realize that dream.

Before the French Revolution, Gustavus III had attempted top-down political and economic reforms—currency reform; land reform (abolishing serfdom and allowing peasants to buy and sell land freely); the abolition of cruel punishments; and the promotion of press freedom. Great thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau applauded him for it. But the reforms began and then sputtered out. Under fierce opposition from the high nobility, measure after measure was halted. In March 1792, Gustavus III was assassinated by aristocratic opponents at a masked ball. Even so, he built a powerful Baltic fleet and repeatedly defeated both the Russian and Danish navies.

After Gustavus III’s death, the Swedish heir Gustavus IV ascended the throne. Since Gustavus IV was only fourteen, Sweden’s old royal statutes required that the country be governed by the Duc de Södermanland—Prince Karl, later Charles XIII—as regent until Gustavus IV reached twenty.

Yet at the Stockholm court, a “rumor” circulated: that Gustavus IV was actually the son of Queen Sophie-Magdeleine de Danemark and Comte Adolf Fredrik de Munck, not the son of King Gustavus III. The most conspicuous “evidence” was that Gustavus IV lacked the broad Oldenburg forehead; his nose was not high but depressed, his eyes were pale blue rather than deep blue, and his hair appeared thin. There was also a key factor: the previous monarch, Gustavus III, was said to have been homosexual.

Some senior officers and noble deputies proposed changing the heir and having the widely respected Duc de Södermanland become King, but he refused. Frail in body yet shrewd in mind, Prince Karl understood that prolonged wrangling over succession would plunge Sweden into internal turmoil and give the Russians their opening. In the end, the Duc de Södermanland accepted only a parliamentary appointment: no more than six years as regent. Gustavus IV was still crowned without obstacle as the new King of Sweden.

There was another reason the forty-four-year-old Duc de Södermanland gave up a crown that lay within reach: he and his cousin Hedwig Elisabeth Charlotte had been married for more than twenty years, and though they had two sons, neither survived the winter. Childless, he had little attachment to a cold, uncomfortable throne.

Yet the young Gustavus IV did not seem grateful for his uncle’s forbearance. At an official court ball last October, the King excluded the Regent from the quadrille—a dance for four couples, drawn from the collective dances of Versailles. It must be said that being left out of the quadrille touched directly on the Regent’s political standing and the privileges attached to his office, and it could only provoke fierce criticism at home. After the ball, the King sent word that the omission was a mistake; but from the Keeper of the Seals’ secretary who compiled the list, the Duc de Södermanland learned that his nephew had done it on purpose.

From that point onward, the friction between Gustavus IV and the Regent grew sharper by the day. To prevent a royal quarrel from splitting the country, the Duc de Södermanland rarely entered the Stockholm Palace thereafter, conducting state affairs instead at Drottningholm Palace outside the city. Drottningholm had been a birthday gift from King Gustavus III to his brother, meant to honor the Duc de Södermanland’s support in that great Oldenburg struggle against the parliamentary nobility—brothers united, standing together against their enemies.

But the Duc de Södermanland knew that Gustavus III had also acted from guilt. Looking back, it had been more than twenty years ago. He had been only seventeen then. At a ball at Drottningholm, the tall, handsome Prince Karl met a young French noblewoman—Marie—Franck, the daughter of the French embassy counsellor, Vicomte de Franck. She was in Stockholm only for a short visit.

When noble boys and girls spend time together, it does not take much for a single reckless moment to change lives. On the night before Vicomte de Franck was to leave Stockholm with his daughter, Marie secretly told Prince Karl that she was pregnant—and that, by the Virgin Mary’s instruction, she would keep the innocent life within her. She asked only that Prince Karl come to Paris the following year to see her and the child.

A year later, as Prince Karl prepared to keep his promise and depart Stockholm, he told his brother Gustavus III. Yet the Swedish heir “accidentally” revealed to their father, King Adolphe Frédéric de Suède, that his younger brother was about to flee Sweden. Prince Karl was then forcibly placed under house arrest by the King’s order.

Only years later—on the eve of Prince Karl’s marriage to his cousin Charlotte—did he regain his freedom. He sent men to Paris to inquire at the former residence of Vicomte de Franck, the one-time French embassy counsellor to Sweden, but discovered that the diplomat and his wife, and their daughter Marie, had all died in a severe cholera outbreak in Paris.

Prince Karl’s envoy later told him that there were rumors: Marie had borne a baby boy out of wedlock. But a week later, Vicomte de Franck had sent the infant into the provinces, and from that day onward there was no trace. Over two decades, the young Prince Karl became the middle-aged Duc de Södermanland, yet he never stopped trying to learn what became of that child.

France was too vast; the trail of a bastard son was almost impossible to follow.

Then, a few months ago, the Regent’s confidant—Vicomte Karl Otto von Mörner, the current assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs—visited Brussels and, in an informal capacity, paid his respects to the “Conqueror of Belgium and Western Germany.” Mörner returned with a startling surprise.

“Your Highness—I think I found a younger you. A broad brow, deep blue eyes, golden curls, cheeks as rosy as roses, teeth as white as ivory...” These had been the diplomat’s exact words, and the Duc de Södermanland still remembered Mörner’s incoherent, ecstatic expression.

Among the Swedish court and the middle and lower nobility, Oldenburg loyalists deeply despised the present King Gustavus IV, whom they considered of non-royal blood, incompetent, and impulsive. If the Duc de Södermanland had not repeatedly refused their urgings—going so far as to threaten to leave Sweden—Gustavus IV might long ago have been exiled to some small island in the Mediterranean. Even so, men like Mörner insisted that Prince Karl refused the throne only because he had no heirs.

Now, Prince Karl’s French bastard son had finally been found. Moreover, Mörner had secretly sent people to Reims to verify that the date when Abbess Sophia took in André Franck closely matched the day Vicomte de Franck abandoned the infant. As for the origin of the name André Franck, it was said to have come from a line of bloody writing found among the infant’s clothing—likely something Mademoiselle Marie hurriedly wrote before the child was carried away.

The problem now was that André Franck’s power and position seemed to place him beyond any need to cling to kinship with Sweden’s House of Oldenburg. Furthermore, as one of the principal leaders of revolutionary France, André was hated by Sweden’s conservative nobility—especially by Comte de Fersen, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette. If this secret were exposed, the Duc de Södermanland would face a combined opposition from the great noble families of the estates and King Gustavus IV himself.

For this reason, the Duc de Södermanland did not rashly acknowledge the relationship. Instead, he quietly aided André and his European war. When André’s war bonds could not be sold, the Duc de Södermanland sold off most of his property, scraped together an enormous sum, and—through Frankfurt securities brokers—underwrote 28,000,000 francs of French war debt. (chapter 183)

He also stirred the noble estates into pushing Sweden to declare war on Prussia, hoping that while Berlin was besieged by Andréan France, Sweden could seize Prussian Pomerania and bring all of Pomerania under Swedish control. The plan—profit without risk—passed the estates without obstruction. 20,000 Swedish troops were transported to the continent by the Swedish Baltic fleet and joined the war against Prussia.

However, under a secret alliance agreement reached by André’s envoy, Comte de Narbonne, and the Regent’s envoy, Vicomte de Mörner, those 20,000 Swedish troops did not follow the estates’ original plan of marching east to recover Eastern Pomerania. Instead, at Mörner’s request, they turned south and—without warning—attacked one of Prussia’s most loyal allies: the Duchy of Brunswick—Lüneburg. At the same time, André ordered the Western German Corps and the Guards Division of the Command Headquarters to attack the Duchy of Brunswick—Lüneburg from the Rhine and its tributaries, advancing northeast in coordination with Sweden.

As expected, Brunswick—Lüneburg, attacked from both front and rear, could not hold out for long. It abandoned its assistance to Prussia and chose to withdraw from the war first. After Andréan France, Sweden, and Brunswick signed a peace agreement at Hanover, Brunswick—Lüneburg also promised to pay war indemnities of two million thalers each to Sweden and France within one month.

Thus, Prussia’s four most loyal German allies—the Landgraviate of Hesse, the Duchy of Anhalt, the Duchy of Magdeburg, and the Duchy of Brunswick—Lüneburg—were either dismembered first by the French and reduced to one-fifth of their territory (Hesse), reabsorbed by the Electorate of Saxony (Anhalt and Magdeburg), or forced to withdraw from the war on their own initiative (Brunswick—Lüneburg).

The value of the Swedish alliance did not lie in the northern lion’s army numbers, but in its Baltic fleet. On July ninth, 1790, Gustavus III defeated the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Svensksund, winning the greatest victory in Swedish naval history.

Russia lost 7,000 soldiers and one-third of its fleet in that battle. From 1790 onward, for roughly eighteen years, the Russian navy did not dare enter or leave the Gulf of Finland freely without Swedish consent, and could only remain obediently in the harbor of St Petersburg as a fleet in being.

Even Admiral Ushakov—Russia’s greatest naval commander—would rather build a new fleet in the Black Sea to harass the Ottoman Turks, or fight a raiding war in the Mediterranean to trouble the French Mediterranean Fleet, than challenge Swedish naval supremacy in the Baltic before 1807.

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It should be noted that Sweden’s current Regent, the Duc de Södermanland, had for ten years been the foremost figure in the Swedish navy. At Svensksund, when Sweden crushed the Russian Baltic Fleet, King Gustavus III was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, while his brother, the Duc de Södermanland, served as the forward commander. It was the brothers’ last cooperation—and also their most glorious.

Note: As Sweden’s former King, Gustavus III was not only the elder brother of the Duc de Södermanland (Charles XIII), but also the nephew of Frederick the Great, the cousin of the current Prussian King Wilhelm II, and a cousin of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.

In fact, as early as the end of 1790, André had already learned the rough outline of his origins from Marey, who was still a priest at the time—though this concerned only the maternal side of the Franck family. Using his power, he had the remains of Vicomte de Franck, his wife, and their daughter—who had died in misfortune—exhumed from a public grave in Paris and quietly reinterred in the cemetery of Reims Cathedral. It was, in its way, the settlement of one of André’s private debts.

Afterward, the dictator of Reims ordered the gendarmerie to seal all childhood records connected to him. After consideration, he did not destroy them; he merely forbade anyone from consulting them. As for the “so-called father,” André could not be bothered to search, only for that figure to appear later in a way he had never expected.

Around Christmas last year, Marey of MI5 wrote to André that a Swedish diplomat had been making inquiries into André’s childhood at the Reims orphanage. As André had previously instructed, neither the gendarmerie nor the Military Intelligence Office obstructed the investigation; they merely verified the diplomat’s true identity in secret: Vicomte de Mörner, the Regent’s envoy. The Military Intelligence Office then followed the thread and finally confirmed the blood relationship between the Regent, the Duc de Södermanland, and André himself.

If it had been four years earlier, when André was still an insignificant nobody, the chance to attach himself by blood to Sweden’s exalted royal house would have filled him with joy. But times had changed. After reading the confidential report from the Military Intelligence Office in silence, the dictator merely tossed it into the fireplace and burned it. At first, he pretended not to know anything.

Just as the Duc de Södermanland had foreseen, everything André possessed had been won by André himself—carrying his head in his hands, trudging through thorns and mire, fighting for it on battlefields of corpses and blood. As the sole dictator of the fifteen northern provinces of France, the great conqueror of Belgium and Western Germany, André Franck’s power and status were no less than the Swedish Regent’s—indeed, in many respects, far greater.

Yet when the Prussians, at the instigation of the Russian Empress, shamelessly tore up the Secret Treaty of Valmy and prepared to launch another war against France, André—habitually cautious and methodical—decided to strike first. He secretly formed the powerful Elbe Army Group, marched more than 500 kilometres from Mainz to Potsdam (Berlin), and took the war onto Prussian soil.

To ensure final victory in the Second Prusso-French War, André and his France urgently needed firm political and military allies in Europe. Once, André—who styled himself “Charlemagne the Second”—had openly mocked the Habsburg marriage game. Now, as a political animal determined to win, he chose first to “sell” himself. He dispatched Basseville as Plenipotentiary and proposed a marriage alliance to the Elector of Saxony, stating that he would marry Princess Maria Augusta of Saxony in two years.

Moreover, given Sweden’s powerful Baltic fleet, its coveted high-quality iron ore, and its natural hatred of Russia, André decided to put old grievances aside. He sent Comte de Narbonne to make clandestine contact with Swedish representatives and discuss an alliance between Andréan France and Sweden.

As the first step of mutual sincerity, the Duc de Södermanland—acting as Regent—nearly ruined himself. He borrowed heavily, raised money without counting the cost, and bought 28,000,000 francs in war bonds for the bastard son he had never met. In return, André agreed to restore to the House of Oldenburg a pure-blooded descendant—a true heir.

In June 1791, before the royal family’s flight, and under André’s planning, the Marquis de Demoë and his wife escorted the pair of twins born to André and his sister—four-year-old Louis and Pierre—into exile, following Comte de Provence and Princess Élisabeth to Brussels. One year later, the Marquis de Demoë and his wife chose to leave Belgium and go north to Copenhagen, the capital of the Kingdom of Denmark, where they continued to seek refuge until the beginning of 1793.

In fact, from the moment the Marquis de Demoë’s family fled France, they had been under close surveillance by the Military Intelligence Office. When the war of 1792 broke out, the Marquis de Demoë tried several times to escape across the Channel to London, or even to distant St Petersburg; but the Military Intelligence Office quietly blocked him, declaring that unless the Marquis and his wife voluntarily surrendered custody of Louis and Pierre, they could not leave the European continent.

One day in late January 1793, the Marquis de Demoë and his wife—together with the twin brothers, now six, Louis and Pierre—were “kidnapped” by Military Intelligence Office agents onto a Swedish merchant ship bound for Stockholm. Vicomte de Mörner, a trusted man of the Swedish Regent, was also aboard this merchantman, named New Hope.

A few days later, news—not large, not small—spread at Drottningholm: at a diplomatic dinner in Stockholm, the Duc de Södermanland and his wife had “happened” to meet the exiled French nobles, the Marquis de Demoë and his wife, and had also seen their adorable twin boys.

After a period of cordial and warm contact, the childless Regent’s wife decided to adopt the Marquise de Demoë as her goddaughter, and to raise little Louis, not yet six, as her grandson. In addition, the Marquis de Demoë was created a Swedish court Comte, with an annual pension of 20,000 thalers and an estate besides. Swedish court nobility, after all, was nobility without inheritance rights.

Of course, all of this had been arranged in advance by André and the Swedish Regent. After innumerable hardships in flight, the stubborn Marquis de Demoë finally chose to yield. Otherwise, André would not have continued to treat him politely; he could have ordered Military Intelligence Office agents to take the twin boys to Sweden by force and hand them to their biological grandfather.

The Swedish alliance removed one anxiety that had weighed heavily on André: the danger of being forced into an early war with the vast and terrifying Russian bear. Once 20,000 Swedish troops landed in Western Pomerania and the Swedish Baltic fleet began frequent activity in the Gulf of Finland, Catherine II in St Petersburg tore up—furious—the operational orders she had drafted only hours earlier: to send Feldmarschall Suvorov and the Polish corps at speed to reinforce West Prussia and Berlin.

The reason was simple. Ushakov, the Black Sea Fleet commander who had come to the Winter Palace to report, told the Empress bluntly that for the next ten years, without Danish naval support and without Swedish mistakes, Russia could not defeat Sweden’s powerful Baltic fleet on its own. Denmark, having only recently signed peace with Sweden, would not pull chestnuts out of the fire for Russia.

Thus, in the Second Prusso-French War, Prussia was left to fight alone. André’s France not only had Saxon assistance, but had also allied with the traditional great power of Sweden. This not only forced Brunswick—Lüneburg out of the war, but also meant that the Swedish Baltic fleet held down Russia’s great army, which did not dare cross the Neman River.

...

On February seventeenth, the central column of the Elbe Army Group (the Second Column), commanded in person by General Moncey, occupied Niemegk, only 52 kilometres from the Prussian main headquarters at Potsdam. The fighting at Niemegk was, in truth, effortless: under the covering fire of two artillery companies, General Masséna’s infantry brigade needed less than forty minutes to compel the 2,000 Prussian troops defending the town to march out and surrender their arms.

French losses in the whole action were under a little more than 100 men. The Niemegk garrison, however, consisted largely of newly conscripted Prussians with fewer than twenty days of service. In fact, from the moment fighting began at Roßlau on the north bank of the Elbe, nearly all the Prussian troops who met the French were raw recruits; the veteran units with real fighting strength were nowhere to be seen.

Once the war pushed into enemy territory, Prussia’s Command Headquarters began to imitate France’s information blockade strategy of 1792, sharply reducing every channel of intelligence. On that basis, the Army Group chief of staff, Colonel Scharnhorst, asked General Moncey to send reconnaissance forces directly into the heavily defended Potsdam area to obtain precise military intelligence for the next decisions. Newly assigned to a light cavalry regiment as a commander, Colonel Suchet volunteered to take on this mission.

Suchet’s nerve was extraordinary. He obtained a Prussian captain’s uniform from the gendarmerie, and with fluent northern German—claiming to be an officer of the Duchy of Dessau fleeing the disaster—rode openly through the Prussian lines south of Lake St Vinault. He went as far as the very outskirts of Berlin.

More than once, Prussian sentries, hearing the complaints of this “allied” officer, merely waved him through. Suchet made his way to the vicinity of the Potsdam palace, where he discovered the Prussian King and the base of the Prussian Army’s Command Headquarters.

On his return to the Elbe Army Group from the outskirts of Berlin, Suchet altered his dress to suit the moment and became, in effect, a major serving as a dispatch rider from the Potsdam headquarters. In a small tavern in the town of Michendorf, Suchet unexpectedly learned—from a Prussian officer drunk beyond sense—that the Prussian commander holding the Michendorf–Nuthetal line, General Blücher, planned to launch a pitched battle against the French main force within forty-eight hours, near the town of Beelitz, about fifteen kilometres south of Michendorf.

“This battle is not the private whim of the Prussian commander, nor is it the demand of officers and men; it is the result of crushing pressure from the Potsdam headquarters,” Colonel Suchet reported at once to General Moncey and Colonel Scharnhorst as soon as he returned to the camp at Brück.

He continued, “In fact, because of the lack of pay—together with their bitter experience in the war of 1792—war-weariness is widespread among Prussian junior and middle-ranking officers. Among the many Prussian soldiers I encountered along the way, and among most of the common people, I saw none of the national resistance we had feared.”

This broadly matched the intelligence previously gathered by the Military Intelligence Office. As for the Prussian plan to move south and fight, the French actress whom Talleyrand had placed beside the Prussian King also quietly informed her contact agents: unable to resist the civilian ministers’ urging, Wilhelm II had ordered Feldmarschall Wichard von Möllendorf to instruct General Blücher to take the offensive and encircle or smash the French main force south of Lake St Vinault.

Combining the intelligence, the final window for battle would fall between February twentieth and twenty-first. Colonel Scharnhorst therefore urged General Moncey to adjust the deployment: concentrate the central column, accelerate ammunition resupply, mass the artillery, and draw the full 30,000 men of the reserve column to serve as the battle reserve—making ready for the fight twenty-four hours ahead.

As for the terrain around Beelitz—landforms, rivers, lakes, marshes, grasslands, forests, and roads—Saxon jägers and French light infantry (rifle regiments) were already tasked with a more detailed reconnaissance.

Scharnhorst dared to strip away the entire reserve because Austria, tempted by part of Lower Silesia, had chosen neutrality; after Sweden allied with Andréan France, Russia used Berlin’s alleged treaty violation as a pretext to refuse to honor its security alliance with Prussia; and soon after, Prussia’s only ally within the German lands, Brunswick—Lüneburg, also announced its withdrawal from the Second Prusso-French War.

At the same time, General Blücher knew very little about the French central column. Even after the Battle of Beelitz broke out, he still insisted that the French main force was no more than the 40,000-man Army of the Meuse, and that the Saxon auxiliaries were only 20,000 to 30,000. Thus, he believed the Franco-Saxon Coalition numbered at most 70,000 in total; and since the enemy was pushing deeper into Prussian territory, at least 20,000 would have to be scattered to secure the communications and supply line. Therefore, Blücher and his chief of staff firmly believed that the Franco-Saxon Coalition could field no more than 50,000 in battle—and that the French would be, at most, 30,000 of that number.

But in fact, the French central column alone contained 55,000 French and Saxon troops (the Second Column), with 25,000 more from the reserve (the Fourth Column) about to arrive—an 80,000-man force in the center. On the left, the First Column under General Hoche had 20,000 French and 5,000 Saxons; on the right, the Third Column under General Nansouty had 5,000 French and 5,000 Saxons. The Franco-Saxon Coalition thus totaled 110,000.

Moreover, the Coalition’s strength would continue to grow. Within a week, Saxony would mobilize at least 20,000 more. André’s 10,000-strong Guards Division, after joining the 20,000 Swedes beneath the walls of Brunswick, would cross most of Brunswick—Lüneburg and enter the Prussian front from the direction of Magdeburg. In short, by late February, the combined forces of Andréan France, Sweden, and Saxony would reach an unprecedented 160,000.

When André lifted his gaze from the operations map, his mind was already turning to how to deal with the defeated Kingdom of Prussia. Total dismemberment would be difficult, but he had to weaken, as far as possible, “an army that has a country.” Even if André himself seemed to have no small share of blood ties to the Prussian royal house—the Hohenzollerns—since his grandmother had been the sister of Frederick the Great.

But before absolute interest, what did a few decades of kinship matter? A century later, in the Great War, Europe’s royal cousins would slaughter each other in the trenches, losing ten million soldiers and nearly the same number of civilians.