The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Requisitions and extraordinary taxation now stopped. The Belgians had become citizens of the land of liberty, and were to enjoy all its benefits. Patriots soon overcame their disappointment at not being allowed to re-establish their independence, and threw themselves into making the new order work. But, as the more controversial laws of the Republic were progressively introduced, they found themselves increasingly isolated as the tools of a state bent on more than administrative reorganization. Above all, administrators in Belgium were charged with introducing French religious policy. The French had not been heedless of the notorious devotion of the Belgian population during the conquest, and although blasphemous outrages inevitably occurred and churches, particularly monastic ones, were sometimes stripped of their more lavish ornaments, official policy was one of restraint. The Belgians felt reassured when the Republic officially turned its back on both dechristianization and factitious deistic cults to declare itself religiously neutral. Yet with a paper money nominally backed by ecclesiastical properties spiralling downwards out of control, the rulers of France looked with growing greed at the still intact church lands of Belgium. In September 1796, therefore, most monasteries were dissolved and their lands put on the market. Ten thousand of their inmates were turned out. At the same time parish priests lost the function of registering births, marriages, and deaths. But buyers for confiscated church lands were not easily found, and in the first French elections in which the new departments participated, those of 1797, Belgian hostility to these policies was reflected in the return of right-wing candidates. After the Fructidor coup neutralized these results, the Belgian clergy were further traumatized by the oath of hatred for royalty, which met with a massive refusal, particularly in Flemish-speaking areas. The post-Fructidorian Directory had no patience with such resistance, and a special effort was made to purge the presumed leaders of this movement. Almost 600 Belgian nonjurors were condemned to deportation and thereby, of course, lost their benefices. The mistakes of the Vendée were being repeated in a territory where the prestige and authority of parish priests was just as strong. The Jourdan Law on conscription of September 1798 completed the familiar picture. The first attempts to apply it, drafting able-bodied young Flemish peasants into the French army, provoked riots early in October, and by the end of the month they had blossomed into a full-scale revolt.

  With a tame sister republic to the north, the Belgian departments were lightly garrisoned by troops not expecting to be used to keep domestic order. So no sooner had the initial outbreak been contained at the end of October than there were new disturbances further west, perilously close to the coast off which the British were cruising. Further inland, a peasant army had assembled, 10,000 strong at its height, marching under white flags bearing red crosses. They were very poorly armed—although the British hurriedly attempted to smuggle supplies in to them—and attracted few leaders from the upper ranks of society. Nor did many townsmen join them, and when they took towns they scarcely had time to burn archives, cut down trees of liberty, and sack the homes of public officials before hurriedly withdrawing again at the first approach of troops. Modelling themselves quite consciously on the Vendéans, they also shared their lack of long-term objectives. Though some shouted Long live the Emperor, most adopted the slogan For land and religion, merely wanting to be left alone with their familiar priests and their sons not being butchered on distant battlefields for the benefit of a Republic once more exulting in its own Godlessness. But they had none of the Vendéan savagery, and caused little bloodshed. The same was true of a contemporaneous uprising which took place further south in Luxembourg. The response of the French, however, was not so gentle. Flying columns harried rebel territory throughout late November, and on 5 December the remnants of the peasant army were surrounded at Hasselt. Lacking cavalry themselves, over 700 were hacked to death by French horsemen. Others scattered and went to ground, imitating the chouans. But by July 1799 the last of them had been caught, and open resistance was over. Harsh repression followed. Rebels found with arms in their hands were shot. Altogether the casualties of the rebellion numbered around 5,600, and the mass deportation of the entire Belgian clergy—7,500 priests in all—was decreed. In the event not more than 500 were rounded up, but the drive against them did nothing to conciliate those who had rebelled. And passive resistance to conscription continued. Of the 22,000 recruits expected from the Belgian departments, only just over 5,000 had materialized by the end of 1799, and these came overwhelmingly from the towns.

  Rural Belgium, therefore, remained unreconciled to French rule. The urban response was more pragmatic. Despite a 50 per cent rise in taxes since the time of Austrian rule, and considerable economic disruption, free access to the French national market promised opportunities for recovery in calmer times. Within a few years they materialized, and Belgian industry, undisturbed by the ravages of armies again until 1814, was able to take profitable advantage of them. Nor were the Belgian bourgeoisie as reluctant as the peasantry to buy nationalized church lands. In Flemish areas they even embraced the French language as never before. Yet they showed little interest in public affairs, and were content to be administered by French officials as they previously had been, until the reforms of Joseph II, by imperial ones. They no more felt French than they had previously felt Austrian. It might have been different if the calm times of rule from Paris after 1799 had not been preceded by six years of rapine and exploitation from the same quarter.

  When the annexation of Belgium was decreed on 1 October 1795 the mover of the proposal, Merlin de Douai, also recommended the annexation of the entire left bank of the Rhine. After all, it too lay within the natural frontiers, and French armies were in occupation of it. Much of it had been annexed once before, in 1793, just like Belgium. But those who were unhappy about even Belgian annexation on the grounds that it would prolong the war indefinitely saw greater disadvantages still in incorporating the Rhineland. The Austrians had already written Belgium off, so only Great Britain would now oppose its annexation to France, and with no footholds left on the Continent she could be ignored. But innumerable states had territorial interests and claims in the Rhineland, and to brush them aside would create countless perpetual enmities. Far better to use the occupied territory as a bargaining counter to secure a lasting peace. Besides, French agents on the spot were uncertain about the likely benefits of annexation. ‘All these people’, wrote a civil commissioner with the occupying army of the Sambre-et- Meuse,5 ‘detest us most cordially, they love only their priests, their princes and their emperor. Let us deal with them as we deal with a vanquished enemy … Besides, what purpose would be served by joining the country to France?’ Such arguments prevailed in 1795, and the Rhineland remained outside the Republic’s frontiers. In the spring of 1797, it was even briefly suggested that a ‘Cis-Rhenan’ sister republic be created. The idea came from Hoche, now commanding on the Rhine and looking for any opportunity to offset the ever-growing personal empire of Bonaparte in Italy by creating a puppet state of his own to rival the Cisalpine Republic. The idea died with Hoche in September 1797, the same month that saw the removal of Carnot, the main opponent of the natural frontiers, from the Directory. Among those remaining was Reubell, himself from Alsace and a long-standing advocate of Rhineland annexation. But even he could not secure immediate satisfaction. While at the peace of Campo Formio the next month the Austrians recognized that the left bank should be French, the consent of the Holy Roman Empire (including Prussia, which also had left-bank territories) was left to be worked out at the Congress of Rastadt. It was only obtained, and then under threat, in December 1798. It remained provisional until France had overcome the second coalition in 1801. But long before then practical assimilation had begun: in January 1798 the occupied territory was divided into four departments, and thenceforward the region was governed to all intents and purposes as part of France.

  The Rhineland, however, was very different from Belgium. It had no history of resistance to established author
ities before the French arrived, and there were hardly any local Jacobins or self-styled patriots sympathetic to the Revolution on whose collaboration they could rely. None of the inhabitants spoke French as a native tongue, and few understood it. Above all, the Rhineland was front-line territory for as long as hostilities lasted, and expected to sustain huge French armies long after the garrison of Belgium had been reduced to a few thousands. Consequently the military exploitation which in Belgium lasted for scarcely three years in all went on in Germany for at least twice that length of time. It reduced an area that had been prosperous and flourishing before the 1790s to an enfeebled shadow, systematically stripped and re-stripped of its wealth and assets in order to sustain armies that the home government could not pay and positively urged to live off the country.

  We had no kind of financial resources whatsoever [reminisced one veteran of Rhineland campaigns] … we had no kind of administrative organisation to deal with requisitions; we had to live as best we could, and off the resources of the region in which we found ourselves—resources which were soon exhausted, especially as the armies had crossed and recrossed this territory several times … one can imagine the distress of the army; it could exist only by plundering.6

  Everything useful to an army on the move was taken—horses, fodder, carts, grain, livestock. Troops were billeted on households and pillaged and abused their hosts without compunction. Able-bodied men and boys were requisitioned for forced labour to dig fortifications and establish camps. The arrival of more ordered conditions simply meant that exploitation became more systematic. Forced loans and military taxes were now imposed, and requisitions were now paid for—in assignats. Attempts to pay the new levies in assignats, however, were understandably not welcomed. And moves towards incorporating the Rhineland into the Republic, the salvation of Belgium, only compounded the problems of France’s German subjects. In July 1798 French customs posts were established along the Rhine. They transformed it at a blow from an artery of commerce holding together an economic region comprising both banks, into a frontier—as in the south of the former Dutch Republic. Nothing, noted observers of the Rhineland scene, had done more to alienate the Rhinelanders from French rule, and only smugglers made any gains. But a large portion of the riverbank population now fell into this category, and constant clashes with customs officers almost institutionalized their hostility to the new order.

  Much of the economic life of the pre-revolutionary Rhineland had revolved around servicing the lavish courts of ecclesiastical princes; such as the archbishops of Trier and Cologne, and the ‘residential towns’ where they were located. The French invasion shattered this pattern for ever. The prince-bishops, their courtiers, and their chapters fled beyond the Rhine, and their goods and lands were confiscated by the invaders. Overnight thousands were deprived of employment in the luxury and service trades that were the lifeblood of these little capitals. Even those who might have hoped to benefit from the secularization of so much church property were disappointed. The French maintained the feudal dues payable to former lords until the spring of 1798—a source of revenue too valuable to be sacrificed to universal principles. The same applied to the tithe, levied no longer for the upkeep of priests, but for that of the French armies. As in France, when tithes were abolished in March 1798 an equivalent sum was added to rents. Thus there were no compensations for the sacrilege visited on the Church, its buildings, and its customs by the invading armies—always the last bastions of a dechristianization long burnt out in France. Even when local laws were brought into harmony with those of France, from 1797 onwards, it was at a time when directorial policy was fiercely anti-clerical and parades of devotion, so characteristic of Rhenish Catholicism, were prohibited. Priests naturally bore the brunt of these policies, and French suspicions that they were the main ringleaders of resistance were entirely justified. Throughout the occupation, therefore, German priests were expelled, exiled, and arrested—not, certainly, on the scale attempted in Belgium, but quite enough to keep the resentment of their pious congregations simmering.

  Yet the Rhineland experienced no mass uprising of the sort seen in Belgium and Luxembourg. Rumours of these outbreaks spread into Germany rapidly enough in the autumn of 1798, and led to an upsurge in lawlessness and defiance of French authority. Liberty trees were cut down, officials intimidated, and inflammatory leaflets circulated urging all good Germans to rise up against the oppressors. The authorities were genuinely alarmed. But no general movement emerged. There were too many French soldiers in occupation, and the last straw in the Belgian case—conscription—was not introduced in a territory not yet fully part of France. Passive resistance was the German way, but even that was effective enough to make French officials compare parts of the Rhineland to the Vendée. ‘I have not yet found one district’, reported a French general on his arrival in 1792,7 ‘which really wants to be free.’ Five years later nothing had changed. ‘Never expect any affection’, warned a civil official, ‘from people who yearn for slavery.’ Clearly the Revolution had even cast a blight on language; if the German experience of French rule was freedom, words were losing their accepted meaning.

  For the Great Nation, however, staggering though she was from one coup against representative institutions to another, liberty could only be French. Particular problems arose when she confronted peoples with their own traditions and rhetoric of freedom. The Dutch were one such case. The Swiss were another. The Swiss Confederation was a loose association of sovereign territories unequal in every way. Its complexity almost beggared description, and it had no central authority to lend it coherence. Any such authority would have set unacceptable limits to the vaunted freedoms of each constituent part. Nor had external threats led the Swiss to think within living memory that such an authority was desirable for other reasons. No great power coveted this mountainous heart of Europe, and it had no great strategic significance—until 1796. It was French conquests in northern Italy that transformed the situation. Switzerland now bestrode the Alpine passes which linked France most conveniently with her client states in the plains of the Po. More perceptive Swiss saw at once that this would mean increased French interference in their affairs. In order not to be overwhelmed, thought Peter Ochs, a leading member of the Basle patriciate, the Confederation must transform itself into a unitary state. Inevitably that would mean adopting many French-style institutions and principles, and abandoning many hallowed traditions and liberties; but if Switzerland did not to some degree imitate France, she would remain the helpless prey not only of France itself but equally probably of her Austrian rival. No sooner had the peace of Campo Formio been signed, in fact, than the Directory turned its attention to Switzerland. La Harpe, an exile in Paris for long-standing advocacy of French intervention to emancipate the francophone Vaud district from the tutelage of German-speaking Berne, urged Reubell to invite Ochs to Paris to discuss the reform of what the Directory already regarded as a ‘crazy formless assemblage of governments without any connection, some oligarchic, others democratic, all despotic and all enemies of the French Republic’.8 When Ochs arrived in December 1797 he found that Bonaparte was also party to the discussions. He was asked to draft a constitution for a ‘one and indivisible’ Swiss republic which would come into being when the Swiss themselves, on a signal from France, rose up to overthrow the old order. That signal would be the annexation by France of outlying northern and western parts of the confederation, the cities of Mulhouse and Geneva.

  On 28 January 1798 Mulhouse was duly annexed: Geneva followed on 26 March. Rural revolts against urban domination broke out in the hinterlands of Basle and Zurich, while in the Vaud patriots proclaimed the independence of Berne. But none of these outbreaks, except in the Basle district, had as much to do with establishing a unitary republic as with pursuing far older antagonisms. The Vaud rebels proclaimed their own tiny ‘Leman Republic’, oblivious of wider loyalties. And, again with the exception of Basle, the urban patriciates showed unexpected vigour in moving to repr
ess the rebels. The French had to intervene directly, and in February General Brune was ordered to occupy Berne. Confusion followed. Brune was at first ordered to establish no fewer than three separate sister republics, conforming roughly to linguistic divisions. In Catholic mountain districts, peasants led by their priests now rose against the invading French and were cut down in their hundreds. The appalled Swiss patriots in Paris protested that only a single, centralized sister republic could hope to contain such outbreaks in the long term, and the Directory yielded to their calls. On 22 March Brune proclaimed the Helvetic Republic and declared its constitution to be that drafted by Ochs and French collaborators. No convention was called to ratify it—the Dutch example had demonstrated the perils of that. With its 23 equal cantons, bicameral legislature, and executive of five Directors, it was simply imposed. When the legislature first met a month later, with Ochs as president of the Senate, only ten cantons were represented, the others refusing to condone a system on which they had not been consulted. Once more French troops had to intervene to coerce them. And the first international act of the new state, the treaty with France of 2 August which granted her perpetual access to the Alpine passes, guaranteed the presence of such troops for the foreseeable future.