The Radiant Republic

In the end, however, the diplomats stationed in Berlin did not have to leave the city. Driven to the end of his road, Wilhelm II, under the urging of his cabinet ministers, decided to accept the French ultimatum. The Prussian generals had already made it plain that they would not command another battle or drive their soldiers into that bloody and pitiless slaughterhouse again. Moreover, the diplomats of the various countries, including the British and Russian ambassadors, all agreed that under the present circumstances any form of resistance had become meaningless, and would result in nothing more than another massacre on an even greater scale. In private, however, the British and Russian ambassadors made it clear to the Prussian monarch that they would continue to work together to restrain the swelling ambitions of Andréan France.

In his diary, the Spanish ambassador in Berlin, Baron de Varennesia, wrote:

“I can now say with certainty that the military confrontation carried out by the French and Prussian armies on the north bank of the Spree was, in essence, nothing but a slaughter of Prussians wholly unable to strike back. It may be compared to Governor Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire of some six million souls with only 180 men more than two hundred years ago, or Governor Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Mexican Empire of fifteen million with merely six hundred men. All these belong among the most astonishing miracles in military history.”

Plainly, the duel beneath the southern walls had frightened everyone present out of their wits. No one any longer doubted that Andréan France possessed the military strength to conquer all of Prussia. At least in the eyes of the diplomats, it was far better to hold armistice talks now than to pay the price later, after the French had taken East Prussia and Königsberg as well.

Delivered together with the ultimatum was the Berlin Treaty of the Five Powers, which André required Wilhelm II to accept within twenty-four hours, with territorial cession, indemnity, and labor export as the price of peace. Thanks to the active mediation of the British and Russian ambassadors, André’s envoy, Comte de Talleyrand, agreed to modify several of its clauses and then resubmit it at ten o’clock on the morning of February twenty-fourth to the Berlin City Palace for the signature of Wilhelm II.

Talleyrand stood to one side, tapping the floor again and again with his cane, reminding the wavering Prussian king of the time. “Your Majesty, you have ten minutes to decide whether you will sign.” As for the contents of the treaty, they had already been announced to everyone present half an hour earlier, including the diplomatic envoys stationed in Berlin, who were there as witnesses.

Several Prussian officers, their faces full of grief and rage, wanted to rebuke the insolent French envoy, but Talleyrand ignored them completely. He stepped forward and faced Wilhelm II directly, threatening him in an extremely hard tone. “Your Majesty, let me add one more thing. If, in another thirty minutes, I have still not brought the signed original of this peace agreement back to the headquarters of the French Commander, then tomorrow’s ceremonial entry into the city will become a brutal assault instead.” For Prussia, there was in truth no room for bargaining at all. It had no leverage from beginning to end.

Having said that, Talleyrand simply took out his fountain pen and tossed it to the silent Wilhelm II, making it plain that he was to stop reading and sign the thing at once. Commander André was not prepared to yield a single further clause. The miserable “Fat Giant,” tears in his eyes, looked around him as though seeking help from his generals and from the British and Russian diplomats, yet every person there avoided the Prussian monarch’s pleading gaze with all possible care.

In the end, the Prussian king stretched out his right hand. Trembling, he picked up the pen the Frenchman had thrown down and, before the eyes of all, hastily signed his name in the blank space on the treaty and stamped it with the seal of the King of Prussia.

On February twenty-fourth, 1793, France, Sweden, Saxony, Austria, and Prussia signed in Berlin the Treaty of the Five Powers. Its principal provisions were as follows:

First, Prussia was to transfer the rule of the Duchy of Hesse, the Duchy of Anhalt, and the Duchy of Magdeburg to the Electorate of Saxony. Upper Silesia was to belong to the Kingdom of Poland, but for the next three to five years that territory would be administered on its behalf by the Duchy of Saxony. The Kingdom of Austria was to recover its traditional rule in Lower Silesia, while Sweden was to regain Eastern Pomerania. In addition, the treaty confirmed that the Secret Treaty of Valmy remained in force.

In fact, the Duchy of Hesse had already been forcibly broken up by the French army and partitioned among a number of subordinate states loyal to the Elector of Saxony. The land that still remained to Hesse amounted to less than one-fifth of its former territory, while the Duchy of Anhalt and the Duchy of Magdeburg were already under the direct control of Dresden. The only Prussian dependency spared was the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, because its intricate ties to the Duchy of Hanover and the British royal house made André cautious. In the end, he merely extorted eight million francs from that duchy and then withdrew.

Because the Secret Treaty of Valmy was reaffirmed in the Berlin Treaty of the Five Powers, territories including Upper Guelders, Cleves, Mark, Ravensberg, and East Frisia now formally belonged to Andréan France under international law. By this point, most of the Ruhr was under the control of the French army.

Second, within six months Prussia was to pay fifty million francs in war indemnity to Andréan France. Thanks to the efforts of the British ambassador, the Bank of England undertook the guarantee for the Prussian kingdom’s indemnity payment. Until the indemnity and all other treaty obligations had been fully carried out, Berlin, the capital of Prussia, together with all of West Prussia, would remain under the supervision of the French, Swedish, and Saxon armies. As for Sweden, once the question of Lower Silesia had been settled, it voluntarily withdrew from the four-nation coalition and did not intend to maintain a garrison on the North German Plain.

Out of respect for Frederick the Great, from the day Berlin was declared an open city and the Treaty of the Five Powers was signed, André’s Guard Division was also to withdraw entirely from Potsdam and Sanssouci. That evening, Wilhelm II and his Council of State, meaning his cabinet, returned to live in the Potsdam Palace under the escort of five hundred Prussian troops. Even so, three French light cavalry regiments and two river gunboats remained outside the city and the palace. In truth, until the debts were repaid, Wilhelm II still remained under French house arrest.

Third, the Prussian army was not to exceed eighty thousand men in total, and no more than twenty thousand troops were to be stationed west of the Oder, that is, in West Prussia. To prevent Prussia from evading the restriction, the treaty also set limits on the size of the reserve and militia and on the terms of service. In fact, André had at one point intended to declare Danzig, formerly Polish, a free and demilitarized port city, but firm opposition from the British and Russian sides forced him to abandon the idea.

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Fourth, over the next five years, Prussia was to send one hundred thousand young and able-bodied laborers to seek work in France.

These so-called one hundred thousand laborers were in fact Prussian soldiers being held in French prisoner-of-war camps, half of them German mercenaries. Under the terms of the agreement, they were to be employed in northern France, Belgium, and western Germany in heavy labor such as the building of bridges, workshops, roads, and rails, the dredging of inland waterways, the digging of transfer canals, and mining.

Once inside France, these Prussian prisoners would become construction and industrial workers. During their employment there, the Committee of the Northern United Provinces, acting as employer, would pay them wages, though only at the local Prussian rate, which amounted to merely half the level of the French market in Reims. After five years, these Germans, no longer prisoners of war, would be free to choose their path, either to return to Prussia or to remain in France.

By doing this, André was not only addressing the severe shortage of labor under his rule, but also limiting any future resurgence of the Prussian army. In addition, these one hundred thousand German workers, who were former prisoners of war, could, if necessary, at any time be turned into German and Prussian legions serving Andréan France.

This Berlin Treaty of the Five Powers cost the Kingdom of Prussia one-third of its territory, chiefly concentrated in West Prussia, and forty percent of its population. For a very long period to come, all of West Prussia, including the capital Berlin, would remain under the strict supervision of the armies of France, Sweden, and Saxony, together with the Polish forces.

To secure the fruits of victory in the war against Prussia, André appointed General Moncey Commander-in-Chief of the French-Swedish-Saxon coalition, General Senarmont Director General of Ordnance and Artillery, and General Scharnhorst, now promoted, Chief of Staff of the coalition. This Army Group had a total strength of one hundred and twenty thousand men, under which served General Macdonald’s Second Army, forty thousand men stationed in Berlin and Brandenburg, Saxony’s Oder Corps, thirty thousand men stationed between the Oder and the Elbe, Sweden’s Pomeranian Corps, twenty thousand men stationed in Pomerania along the southern Baltic coast, and the free Polish Corps, now expanded to thirty thousand men and stationed in Upper Silesia.

In addition to the traditional arms of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, the Elbe Army Group would also command an inland flotilla built around eight steam gunboats. At the same time, in the Stettin Bay and the Bay of Pomerania, France and Sweden were secretly building a powerful joint Baltic fleet of steam ironclads.

In order to coordinate the cooperation and training of these multinational forces, Commander Moncey proposed the establishment of a coalition headquarters near Brandenburg on the North German Plain, where the armies of the various states could be brought in at intervals for live field exercises. Once the Prussian side had fulfilled all the treaty obligations in the second half of 1793, the coalition headquarters would then be moved to the Oder plain in Upper Silesia. Meanwhile, semaphore telegraph lines were being actively erected between the coalition headquarters and the encampments of the various corps so as to coordinate military operations in every direction.

In fact, from March onward, the principal object of vigilance for the four-nation coalition, including the free Polish Corps, was no longer the emasculated Kingdom of Prussia, but the Russian Empire, which had openly declared its support for East Prussia in continuing resistance against the French army. After returning to Sanssouci, Wilhelm II soon fell gravely ill. By the middle of March, once he had only just recovered, he publicly announced that he would abdicate and pass the throne to his son, Wilhelm III.

At that time, Crown Prince Wilhelm III, who had remained in Königsberg throughout, was determined to avoid any further eastward advance by the French army. Though he ultimately recognized the Treaty of Berlin signed by the five powers, he himself, acting on the advice of British diplomats, refused to return to Berlin and therefore postponed his accession and coronation. Even so, the Prussian army under General Blücher was reduced to fifty thousand men.

In late February, at the request of the Regent of Sweden, André dispatched a large military mission, numbering as many as two thousand officers and non-commissioned officers, and appointed General Penduvas its head, while also making him Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Duchy of Saxony to Sweden. The mission’s first task was to carry out a two-year modernization of the long backward Swedish army. In addition, it was to establish in Stockholm a senior non-commissioned officers’ school, an artillery school, and an engineering school. Most crucial of all, it was to assist the pro-French faction in gaining full control of Sweden’s armed forces and, when necessary, to suppress the conservative noble factions inside Sweden swiftly and decisively.

...

On February twenty-fifth, 1793, the day after Wilhelm II left Berlin, André planned to make a triumphal entry into the Prussian capital. It should be said that he meant to enjoy to the full, before the eyes of the diplomats of all nations, the supreme privilege of a victor. He intended to parade his most elite troops and send one hundred thousand soldiers into the city in full procession. The Commander-in-Chief of the French army had gone to great lengths to arrange every detail, all for the sake of leaving a deep impression. Naturally, at the head of the column would be the Guard Division directly attached to Command Headquarters, which had displayed such tremendous power in the duel south of the city.

Before that, however, André had to deal with a difficulty so absurd that even he could only laugh at it. The French Command Headquarters, so accustomed to emphasizing supplies and provisioning, had somehow forgotten the volcano of long-repressed desire within the great army. It had to be admitted that the one hundred and twenty thousand coalition soldiers in the camps around Berlin had long been eyeing the women of the city with intense longing, and the camps were filled at all hours with every kind of bawdy joke.

The Prussian women, it seemed, felt much the same. Their husbands had long been absent from their sides, whether dead in battle or carried off into French prisoner-of-war camps, and many of them appeared almost to hope that one day some French soldier might sweep upon them without warning in an outbreak of violent passion. Later generations would say that among European women, the French type showed desire openly and almost brazenly, while the English and German type was more covert, more pent-up, and more repressed.

When large numbers of French troops entered Potsdam and Sanssouci, even the most proper Prussian women leaned out over their balconies and screamed themselves hoarse. At the sight of those fierce and splendid French soldiers, one after another, the fire in their breasts seemed to rise at once.

Yet a full week passed, and under the strict watch of the gendarmerie hardly any of those disciplined French soldiers dared so much as to lift a Prussian woman’s skirts. But once Berlin had been declared an open city, the women, now wholly unrestrained, finally cast off all reserve and made their way into the tents of the French soldiers to seek their pleasures to the full.

In itself, this might have meant very little. It was a matter of mutual consent, and even the gendarmerie, once it understood the situation, had no wish to interfere. The problem was that the frenzied Prussian women, competing over one handsome soldier or another, began a civil war of their own. Women from Berlin and women from Potsdam actually started fighting each other outside the French camps.

Once begun, the affair quickly spun out of control. An hour later, when the French soldiers finally managed to pull the female combatants apart, the “battlefield” was already a ruin. Eighty women had lost teeth, seventeen had been choked until they were barely conscious, five were left bruised and swollen, and two had been stripped completely naked and exposed before the eyes of all.

As for André, when he received word of this “tragedy,” he could only give an awkward smile and let it pass. But soon afterward, unwilling to let any fresh trouble arise, the dictator decided that at first light the next morning he would lead his troops into the city with the utmost discretion.