Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  In those early, heady days, the revolution was pure, if nonetheless horrific. Slavery was abolished and women were emancipated, as defenders of Revolutionary thought have cited ever since (particularly those of the Monterey school). Freedom of religion was guaranteed, which in Britain both intrigued the large Huguenot-descended population and was used by the Radical Party as an argument for Catholic emancipation at home.

  Robespierre, still acting as de facto chief minister in a government that had imprisoned its own king, argued for “la rupture tranquille” (a clean break) with the past, adding “In ten years’ time, we should not be able to recognise France”. These two innocuous sentences would come to drip with blood in years to come...

  The policy was implemented in numerous ways. Initially, the NLA severed all links with the Estates-General that had preceded it, incorporating or ejecting all the members of the First and Second Estates. The democratic constitution adopted the previous year was reformed entirely: democracy remained the central pillar of the constitution, although a quiet provision for the suspension of elections “in times of emergency” would cause troubles in years to come. In addition, the English-born radical Thomas Paine co-authored his “Declaration of the Rights of Man” which would be the French constitution’s answer to the English Bill of Rights. The Declaration embodied the rights to representation, to be tried by a jury of peers, and to freedom of worship.

  At the same time, Jacobin thinkers were devising new ways of measuring the world, known as the Rational System.[141] Decimalisation was applied to measurements of length, weight, even time. A new calendar with purely descriptive titles of months was implemented. This is illustrative of another feature of the Revolution: while initially there was some identification with the Athenian democracy of the ancient world and therefore other classical culture, this was swiftly rejected by mainstream Jacobin opinion as characteristic of the aristocratic culture they sought to abolish.[142]

  The NLA rejected a presidential system like that of the United Provinces, which was otherwise regarded as the only halfway pure republican influence in the world, with the Dutch, Genoese and Venetians being merely merchant oligarchies. The French people remained wary of concentrating all power in one man after their experiences with Bourbon absolutism. What emerged was closer to the British parliamentary system but perhaps also showed some influence from Rome, despite the supposed rejection of classicism. A three-man Consulate was elected by the NLA, which would collectively possess presidential powers but all three members must agree in order for decisions to take place. This was widely referred to as the Triumvirate, especially in the English-speaking world.

  Although the Consulate was intended to moderate and provide checks and balances on power, in practice the large radical Jacobin majority meant that Robespierre was able to manipulate the NLA into electing those of his choice: himself, of course, plus Hébert and Jean Marat. Other radical Jacobins remained in positions of power, such as Georges Danton and the then relatively obscure Jean de Lisieux. Moderate voices were shouted down. A Revolutionary Tribunal was established to try ‘enemies of the revolution’, a category which seemed to swell day by day in an attempt to implement Robespierre’s “clean break”—and his paranoia at the revolutionary genie turning against him.

  At the same time, voices in the NLA who supported Paine’s Rights of Man advocated that a more humane means of execution be devised, arguing that capital punishment should be seen mainly as a means of removing criminals from society rather than actually inflicting pain. Accordingly, breaking on the wheel and execution by axe and sword were both abolished. The invention of “Le Chirurgien” has never been accurately credited to any one man, although it clearly showed influence from existing ‘humane gibbets’ such as the Scottish Maiden and Halifax Gibbet. While similar devices had existed for a long time, they had never been used so extensively before. Le Chirurgien’s first patients were minor nobility and royal ministers who had been unable to flee or convincingly convert to the revolutionary cause. On trumped-up charges, the king’s own surgeon, Antoine Louis, was ironically among them.

  However, another range of opinion in the NLA argued instead that there should be a more “Scientific” method of execution. Hébert approved the creation of the “Chambre Phlogistique” (later “Phlogisticateur”), in which the corruption of the criminal would be visited back unto him by means of phlogisticated air. Thus the humanitarian work of Joseph Priestley on the Aerial Economy was turned to darkness, and the Revolution forced Antoine Lavoisier and his assistants to build the machine. It took the form of a large glass bell-jar, entirely airtight. Whereas Priestley’s experiments on airs had used mice in jars, this one was large enough for a human to stand inside. And then? A powerful air-pump could be applied to remove all the air, but that was so “seventeenth-century”. Better for burning glasses to be directed on the Chambre. They could be used either to attempt to ignite the clothes of the victim, or merely to burn fuels placed inside, creating phlogiston with no need for a naked flame. Thus the hands-off means of execution was created, in which the sun itself made the killing blow instead of any human.

  The first “criminal” to be subject to the Chambre was Citoyen Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries mockingly titled their former King. Louis XVI’s quiet defence, self-delivered, remained a rallying cry to French Royalists ever afterwards. In its most momentous exchange, the fiery Danton accused “Capet” of treason against the state, and Louis simply quoted his great-great-grandfather in response: “I am the state.”

  It made no difference, of course. Louis XVI was led out to the first Chambre, in Paris’ Place du Louis XV, recently renamed Place de la Révolution. In a grim irony, the Chambre stood on a stage not far from where nobles and bourgeoisie had once watched convicted criminals being dismembered alive. The Revolutionaries were fortunate in that the 15th of May was a hot, sunny day. “Citoyen Capet” gave his last words, clearly inspired by those of Charles Stuart one and a half centuries earlier. “Remember this day,” he said. “One day, not too long from now, you will look back on the darkest and hardest days of my reign with envy.”

  Prophetic words, but they made no impression on a crowd that was baying for blood. “Capet” was sealed inside the Chambre and the great burning glasses were directed against the sawdust piled on the floor of the glass room. The sun set the dust alight and smoke began to rise. Unlike later victims, “Capet” did not try to beat out the flames or otherwise prolong his death. Ten agonising minutes later, he succumbed to asphyxiation from the phlogisticated air.

  And as the crowd cheered, the Chambre was opened, the smoke billowed out over the Place, and the glasses began to burn the corpse also, in its simple prisoner’s garments. Royalists have claimed ever since that a white dove rose with that smoke, taking the king’s blameless soul to heaven where he would look down on what became of his nation, and wept.

  That night, Antoine Lavoisier took his own life, swallowing a fatal dose of an arsenic compound he was studying. But the Revolutionaries had enough clever artisans to duplicate the design now it had been built once.

  The blades of the Chiurgiens hissed and the belljars of the Phlogisticateurs burned, and war rumbled on the horizon.

  Chapter 21: L’Étrangerie

  From: “Foreign Reactions to the Jacobin Revolution” (Dr Jacques Desaix, Université de Toulon; published 1974 in the original French, authorised English translation 1986)–

  The Revolution in France can always only be truly understood in a wider European, even global, context. In the most obvious instance, the Revolution took much of its inspiration from other foreign republics derived partially from Enlightenment principles, such as Paoli’s Corsica and the United Provinces of South America. Both of these had had French troops serving against them at some point, and it is unsurprising that ideas were paradoxically brought back to France by those same soldiers. However, most writers focus on the intellectuals among the troops, primarily the officers, who wrote those ideas down
and went on to organise the Armée de la République. While their influence is unchallenged, we cannot ignore the enlisted soldiers, either—had they not been exposed to an actual Enlightenment republic while serving in Corsica and South America, it is unlikely that there would have been such support for the Revolution in the Royal Army.

  The Navy had always been less keen—after all, the French Navy’s conduct in the Second Platinean War had firstly been at sea, away from the South American revolutionaries, and secondly the Navy had enjoyed several victories over the British under de Grasse and Picquet de la Motte. Unlike the Royal Army, humiliated by the surrender on the River Plate to U.P. and British forces, the Navy had little reason to resent the ancien régime and what it stood for. This would have important consequences a little later on, but for now, let us return to the subject of foreign reactions to the Revolution.

  At first, perhaps unsurprisingly, the import of the Revolution was not completely understood in other European countries. The British in particular tended to view the Revolution as a logical consequence of the failure of Bourbon absolutism, and according to the Whig interpretation of history, France would now slide towards a constitutional monarchy of the British model. Indeed, much British opposition to the Revolution in its earliest form was simply an alarmed national chauvinism that the French might acquire the same ‘state of perfect government’ as Britain was thought to enjoy under the 1688 settlement, with a comparable boost in military fortunes. In particular, Britain’s large Huguenot-descended population wondered if the Revolution, with its attacks on Catholicism, would finally begin using the resource of French Protestants rather than condemning them. The drastically different character of this Revolution would not become apparent to the British until mid-1795.

  Spain, which accepted Louis the Dauphin into asylum after the execution of the French royal family, initially viewed the Revolution as just another peasant revolt. Spain herself had suffered similar outpourings of the popular will, mainly rooted in francophobia, against the attempts by her own Bourbon kings to introduce reforms or fashions perceived as French. Given that the French Revolution incorporated a certain element of ultra-Linnaean xenophobia and Racist nationalism, this was perhaps an understandable assumption. The Spanish government, led by Floridablanca (who had continued to serve under Charles III’s successor Philip VI) believed the revolutionaries to be absent a guiding ideology and that the “revolt” would soon be crushed. Floridablanca publicly condemned the violence; as a great supporter of liberal ideas himself, he argued that the Revolutionaries had squandered their capital and missed the chance to institute a stable constitutional monarchy by instead reverting to barbarism. In this, the official Spanish response was ironically not unlike that of the British, though approached from the other direction.

  Austria was the greatest source of opposition to the Revolution from the start. This opposition stemmed from many roots: Ferdinand IV ruled over a massive, multi-ethnic empire and Linnaean Racist nationalism of the type growing in France could only undermine that; Marie-Antoinette, the Dauphin’s consort, was Ferdinand IV’s sister Maria Antonia of Austria; and the Revolution’s nationalisation of and attacks on the Catholic Church also sent shockwaves throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Great swathes of land were still under ecclesiastical authority, and the French idea of the Church becoming subordinate to the State would lead to chaos if it spread to the Empire, with every prince and duke and landgrave squabbling to carve up those Church lands. In summary, it was obvious from the start that it was in Austrian interests to oppose the Jacobin Revolution at every turn.

  Speculative romantics have suggested that, had Louis XVI called for Austrian military assistance at an earlier stage, the Revolution could have been crushed—though doubtless the resentment of a king kept in power by foreign forces would have continued to simmer. In any case the question is academic: insulated from current affairs by his entourage of sycophants and the Palais de Versailles, Louis had been unaware of the scale of the situation until it was too late. Therefore Ferdinand IV, though gathering an army, was unable to act until a suitable casus belli—the death by phlogistication of Marie-Antoinette on August 12th 1795. Then, an imperial proclamation was issued ‘in support of the rightful King of France’—Austrian refusal to recognise the Revolutionary government meant that no declaration of war could be legally possible—and Austrian troops began to move into France from Baden and the Duchy of Flanders, first crossing the Rubicon (as latter historians would put it) on the 3rd of September.

  As for the Dauphin’s reaction, a rather inaccurate picture of the situation has been (deliberately) engendered in the years since by the proliferation of prints of the painting Who Hath Unleashed The Hounds? by Joseph Ducreux, Louis XVII’s favourite painter, showing the young exilic king pointing dramatically at the unseen Jacobin hordes with an accusing look on his face and one hand on his sword. Though the painting depicts Louis in Navarre, supposedly hearing the news of the latest Jacobin outrage, it was in fact painted several years later in 1801, shortly before Ducreux’s death and when the character of the Revolution had become undeniable.[143]

  Further abroad the French Revolution as yet had little effect. Russia would not hear of the full import of the Revolution until the end of that year, although by then it would lend a distinctive character to the Russian Civil War, already rumbling on the horizon as the aged Peter III, having survived innumerable assassination attempts, finally fell into a terminal decline.

  Just as the UPSA had inspired the Jacobins, so the reverse now took place, with Jacobin ideas driving more radical notions in the UPSA. Egalitarian notions, which had originally mainly focused on equality between peninsulares and criollos, now began to spread to questioning the basis of the blood caste system as a whole. One import of much broader character was an increase in calls for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself, everywhere from the UPSA to the Empire of North America to Portugal to Britain. In practice, though, this probably harmed the abolitionist cause in the long run—as the greater excesses of the Revolutionaries became known, it was easy for those with vested interests in the slave trade to tar their opponents with the brush of Jacobinism.

  And what of France herself? As the Jacobin-dominated NLA meeting in the old Palais de Tuileries continued to make ever more radical reforms and changes, these spread out across France in waves. Before people in Lyon or Bordeaux had even heard of Le Diamant’s death, Louis XVI had gone to the chambre phlogistique, and many similar situations prevailed in this age before rapid communication. France could have so easily slipped into utter anarchy, and yet in an ultimate irony, the Jacobins were assisted by the very Bourbon absolutism they had overthrown. The centralisation of the French state, proceeding in several stages since the end of the Hundred Years’ War and most prominently under Louis XIV, had focused power in Paris as much as the person of the king. Thus, what came out of Paris was generally accepted, no matter how shrill its tone. The exception was in those provinces which retained feudal privileges of autonomy, had held onto them stubbornly throughout centuries of centralisation, and were not about to let go of them now. Brittany would be the exemplar, but it far from alone.

  Realising the import of the Austrian invasion (together with some Spanish inroads, possibly aimed at trying to reclaim Navarre with the tacit consent of the Dauphin), the NLA immediately shifted to a war footing. The Consulate understood that an external war would give them carte blanche to push through further reforms and it would provide a rallying call for the French people. Though the Jacobins were still busy purging or attainting aristocrats from the Royal Army, vast numbers of Sans-Culottes (the so-called Légion du Diamant) volunteered as recruits. Thus the character of the Revolutionary Army, possessing overwhelming numbers but of poorly trained soldiers, came to pass.

  Initially the old royal regimental flags were simply turned upside down. However, realising that the men needed a truly Revolutionary symbol to fight for (and finding an excuse for another attac
k on the symbols of the Church, as the old flags bore white crosses), Hébert designed a new series of regimental flags, based on squares of white cloth that were dyed reddish-brown. The legend was that the ‘dye’ was in fact the blood of executed nobles from the chirurgien and/or the blood of the martyrs before the Bastille, although historians have continued to debate whether this was really the case. The new flags bore simple designs, usually either one or more inverted fleur-de-lys to symbolise the downfall of the ancien régime, or else rerpresentations of Le Diamant or L’Épurateur. They also always bore words, usually illegible in battle, which spelled out Revolutionary slogans. Finally, a new finial, based on a representation of a Phrygian cap in bronze, was added.

  The new colours were ‘blessed’ by NLA vote rather than Church sacrament, and the Revolutionary armies marched forth to meet the Austrians for the first time. They wore the same uniform that L’Épurateur had ‘created’, albeit for the moment somewhat haphazardly and inconsistently adopted: the same blue and white uniforms as their Royal predecessors, but with all the white parts dyed red, and their shakoes replaced with a standardised Phrygian cap. They bore the white cockade of the Bourbons also dyed revolutionary red. It was not surprising that they soon received the nickname of Les bleus et les rouges (which became a nostalgic phrase after the blue parts of the uniform were changed to black under the later Administration).