Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  Which was, of course, exactly what Lisieux had desired…

  *

  From: “The Double Revolution” by Daniel Dutourd (Université de Nantes Press, 1964)—

  When the news of the defeats at Cholet and Laval reached it, Paris began buzzing with discontent. Fatally, this word came on the back of the news of the defeat at Vienna, when the government desperately needed a victory to restore morale. The Revolution was imperilled once again, and a scapegoat was needed, someone to be burned in L’Épurateur’s flame of liberty. Robespierre had had no trouble finding them in the past. Now, having left a trail of corpses longer than that of any king, he was struck down by his own success: with no credible political opponents left, only one man could be responsible for the defeats.

  Traitor. Impure…

  Paris had seen several uprisings in recent years, this one no less confused than those that had preceded it. Chroniclers report that, despite the purges after Hébert’s death, part of the uprising was Royalist and Catholic in character, spurred on by the Royal successes in the Vendée. More of it, though, was made up of Republicans who sought to overthrow Robespierre and elect a new leader – for at this point most of them still thought of elections as a realistic prospect in a Jacobin state.

  Both risings were held back by Lisieux’s loyal Garde Nationale. Lisieux advised Robespierre that it would be best if he remained in a secure area until the rebellion was put down. Robespierre argued, saying that he would not be seen to be hiding from his enemies. Lisieux…insisted. And Boulanger ‘happened’ to recommend the old Château de Versailles, now long since looted-out and used for storage of ammunition and troops’ rations. Robespierre, belatedly realising that power had shifted and he was being forced, attempted to call upon the Sans-Culottes, over whom he had always held supreme authority. His great political act had been to skilfully slip into the shoes of Le Diamant, a man who would almost certainly have found him repugnant if they had ever met, and control Le Diamant’s powerful supporters. Now, though, those supporters had been sent away: the competent to Germany, the incompetent to the west. Robespierre found himself without allies. He submitted.

  The morning of July 31st, 1799 (Abricot Thermidor of the year 5) dawned with the news – not whispered, but shouted from the rooftops and trumpeted in the state-controlled newspapers – that Jean-Baptiste Robespierre was dead. He had hanged himself while hiding in Versailles, the editorials (controlled by Lisieux) said. The implication was clear, that Robespierre had begun to see himself as the very thing he had sought to destroy. A suicide note supposedly found on his body showed that he had literally signed his own death warrant, declaring himself an Enemy of the People, before summarily carrying out his own execution.

  The vast majority of commentators, then and now, believe that Robespierre was murdered by Lisieux’s men and the death disguised as a suicide. Some modern revisionist historians have suggested that Robespierre’s suicide might in fact have been genuine – there had long been rumours that he kept a signed copy of his own death warrant about his person in case he ever found an impure thought entering his mind. Depression stemming from the realisation he had lost power might have pushed him over the edge. Whether Lisieux’s hand truly slew him, though, it is certain that Lisieux had planned to do so, and whether Robespierre pre-empted him is ultimately unimportant.

  Almost from the first day of the new regime, proclamations filled the air like cannonballs on one of Boulanger’s battlefields. Lisieux had already been the Republic’s main writer of pamphlets and propagandists, and now he turned them out for his own ends. The ‘erring’ period of Robespierre was over, it said. The corrupt Consulate was dissolved and the National Legislative Assembly would convene after fresh elections to confirm a new constitution. Until that time, that constitution would take temporary effect. Who, exactly, had drawn up this constitution and when was never quite stated.

  In any case, the constitution of the ‘Apricot Revolution’, as it was termed, reorganised the Republic considerably. Instead of a three-person Consulate, it saw a single ruler given the deliberately lowly-sounding title of ‘Administrateur’. The Republic was then divided into départements according to a system that had been drawn up by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret. Thouret, a Norman, was a great Rationalist who had been instrumental in the creation of the metric system. He was one of the few members of the National Legislative Assembly who had not been cowed by Robespierre. His new division of France ignored the existing provincial boundaries and, indeed, geography – he simply divided France into squares based on lines of latitude and longitude. These square départements were named after the Revolutionary calendar’s days – Paris was assigned as Abricot, of course…—and would each be ruled by a Modérateur, a theoretically locally-elected official loosely equivalent to the Bourbon-era Intendants.[228]

  The Thouret plan was an attempt to balance the local privileges of the ancien régime, whose loss had been part of the reason behind the Breton rising, with the strongly centralised structure of the existing Republic. The Rationalist squares spoke of Thouret’s agreement with Lisieux’s philosophy that Revolutionary ideals could not be softened by compromise. “If we let the status quo affect our principles,” he wrote, “our principles will be worn down…but if we stand firm, we will sculpt the world until it is fit for the Revolutionary system.” Some less well educated Revolutionaries apparently thought this was literal, and there were rumours that Lisieux planned, after the conquest of Britain, to cut up the island and use its parts to build up all the partial départements along the coasts to perfect squares. Lisieux’s control of propaganda was such that an impression soon emerged that there was nothing he could not do.

  Lisieux’s first act as Administrateur was to use his loyal Garde Nationale to complete the crackdown on the Paris rising, its usefulness to him now passed. He then appointed Boulanger as First Marshal of the Army, a new post which would give the former general enough independence to form a more coherent response to the British invasion. Lisieux picked out those competent but awkward members of the NLA and other politicians – usually Robespierre loyalists – and made them Modérateurs of départements. This was central to Lisieux’s political philosophy. “The former regime,” he wrote, speaking of Robespierre, “thought that the wheels of revolution must be lubricated by the oil of sacrifice. Such a view ignores the fact that the ‘oil’ is in fact made of destroyed wheels. If it had been allowed to continue, soon we would have a great deal of oil and no wheels to lubricate…the correct view must be that men are a resource, just like wheat or iron or coal,[229] and should not be wasted. It is a gross irresponsibility not to extract their usefulness, whatever the circumstances.”

  These relatively mild words ultimately presaged a terror in some ways worse than Robespierre’s, but for now Lisieux remained focused on the British problem. In August, the main Anglo-French army invaded Normandy. Support for the Royalists was more lukewarm there, as Normandy had had no particular special status before the Revolution as Brittany had, but the majority of Normans saw which way the wind was blowing and supported the King. Lisieux demanded a response from Boulanger, knowing that many more Royal successes could tip the balance of the mood of Paris towards royalism. He, more than anyone, knew how fickle the mob could be, and how fragile his position was.

  Boulanger was already worried that his friend was heading towards becoming another Robespierre, with such demands, but agreed that something had to be done. He had assembled another army, one almost as capable as the ones operating in Germany, made up mostly of troops who should be going as reinforcements to Leroux and Hoche. Lacking an experienced command general, Boulanger went himself, in the face of Lisieux’s protests.

  As Lisieux built his power in Paris, Boulanger’s army moved into Normandy, occupying Évreux and easily defeating a small Anglo-Royal French force that had been sent ahead. The bulk of the Allied army was in Caen, having taken the city from loyal Revolutionaries at the end of September. Boulanger fought another
small, filmish [cinematic] action near the town of Lisieux, Jean de Lisieux’s home town – with which the propagandists, not least Lisieux himself, had much fun. Rather than trying to hold the damaged Caen against siege, the Prince of Wales ordered that the British army decamp and meet Boulanger on the field of battle. The British had not fought Cugnot engines before. They would soon find out what it was like, to their cost. Sir Ralph Abercromby held to traditional strategy of holding high ground and letting the enemy approach over a flat plain, a killing field. Just as Mozart had learned a few months before, this was not the winning tactic it had been before.

  According to Michel Chanson, Boulanger called Caen ‘my second Lille’, referring to the victory he had won there, the first victory of the Jacobin Wars, by his use of the Cugnot-wagons. Now he had access to far more advanced Cugnot engines: Cugnot, Surcouf and the others had been working feverishly, spurred on by unlimited funding and the fear of failure.

  Boulanger had many of the old-style fardier wagons, essentially just steam-driven alternatives to the horse, which could tow guns into position and then unlimber to allow them to fire. But now he also had what Cugnot called his char de tir, gun-chariot. These were larger, more cumbersome Cugnot-wagons that, rather than simply towing an ordinary gun, were actually built around large pieces of artillery (six- to twenty-four-pounders) and consisted of a large flatbed on tall wheels. Chars with trained crews could fire their gun whilst moving, a truly revolutionary development – though dealing with the recoil remained a problem, as the chars had a tendency to flip over. Cugnot’s experiments with rotating cannon had been disastrous; in order to take the recoil, the wheels had to be aligned with the axis of the gun, allowing the wagon to roll backwards. Thus, Boulanger’s chars had only fixed-focus guns, but it was enough to make a crucial tactical difference.

  It was the novelty, the unknown of the Republican weapons more than their objective effectiveness which intimidated the Allied forces. Abercromby remarked “Have the Jacobins placed mills on wheels?” The French bombardment was no greater than many the veteran British and Royal French troops had weathered before, but the fact that it came from moving cannon was unnerving to troops experienced in fighting conventional artillery. It also meant that the British artillery found it harder to reply to the guns. Abercromby ordered the cavalry to sweep in and take the chars, if they could. Boulanger was reliably informed of all this, as he had a Blanchard observation balloon floating over the battlefield and signalling to him by flags, giving him an intelligence advantage over his opponents.

  The British and Royal French cavalry did succeed in destroying several of the chars, though they were hampered by the sheer size of them (“Like trying to sabre down sailors standing on the deck when you are on the pier below” recalled one cavalryman, a native of Portsmouth). More were immobilised by lucky shots from British galloper guns, one-pounder cannons that could be shifted around the battlefield even more rapidly by being hitched up to fast horses. The chars were fragile in places, in particular vulnerable to having their steam-boilers punctured by roundshot, which could potentially spray their crews with boiling water.

  But Boulanger had anticipated this. Behind and among the chars rolled the tortues, the same vehicles Lisieux had used to crush the uprising after Hébert’s death. They were armoured carriages, somewhat inspired by those developed by the Bohemians during the Thirty Years’ War, but were driven by steam engines. Inside were troops with muskets and rifles firing through slits, protected by the armour from anything but a direct hit by a cannonball. The tortues were slow and cumbersome, of little use as a real weapon of war, but the Allied cavalry did not realise what they were until it was too late. Countless British and Royal French cavalrymen were volleyed down, the Republicans holding their fire until the last moment. Then, unable to reply to this unseen assault, the cavalry fled.

  This started a panic through the Allied ranks. Men who would stolidly march against armies five times their size did not know how to react to these new terrors. Privates became newly nervous when they realised their sergeants and officers had no more idea of what was happening when they did.

  The irony was that Boulanger’s vehicles could certainly not have climbed the high ground that Abercromby held. Yet the cautious Scottish general ordered a fighting retreat, while he worked out how to defeat the Republicans’ new war machines. Despite the anxiety in the ranks, the British and Royal French (the latter led by Colonel Grouchy, an exile ally of Louis XVII) made an orderly withdrawal from the ridge and retreated westward.

  Boulanger could not believe his luck. His infantry, marching in columns behind the vehicles, quickly seized the ridge and then unlimbered their conventional artillery, those towed by horses capable of climbing the ridge. The Republicans now directed a withering fire against the Allies as they withdrew, killing dozens of men with each plunging cannonball. If Boulanger had had cavalry of his own, the retreat might have become a rout – but the Revolution still had trouble recruiting trained horsemen.

  Nonetheless, the engagement might never have been so well known if one of the last cannonballs fired had not come down in the middle of the British command. Ironically, it was not the ball that killed the battle’s most famous casualty; it struck the ground before his horse, toppling it over on top of him, and it was this which broke his neck. In the confusion of the retreat, few except General Abercromby and his aides were aware of the incident, but the Prince of Wales had just ignominiously died.

  The incident would have shockwaves far greater than Boulanger’s successful repulsion of the Allies from Normandy. In Britain, King George collapsed upon being informed of his favourite son’s death, and fell into an illness from which he never recovered. This came at the worst possible time, as Britain simultaneously entered a constitutional crisis. The Marquess of Rockingham’s government had shed support throughout the war, with the old marquess now holding only the slimmest majority in the Commons. Liberal and Radical Whigs who supported the Revolution found themselves strange bedfellows with reactionary Tories who opposed the alliance with Catholic France, but nonetheless much of the Commons was united in opposition regardless of reasons. The victories in France initially made this opposition waver, but they were swiftly followed by the defeat at Caen. Rockingham worked frantically to prevent his government losing its majority. Too frantically; he worked himself to death, at a time when George III was beginning to lose lucidity, consumed by the death of his son.

  London held its breath. The British Constitution relied on a balance of power between monarch and Parliament, but now Parliament had lost its Prime Minister and the King was in no state to perform his functions. There was talk of appointing a regent, but the authorisation for such an act would require a coherent government, which did not exist – and could not exist until a King or Regent asked someone to form one. The British political system was trapped in a vicious circle. The crisis was such that the previous topic of debate, whether Richard Wesley’s calls for Catholic emancipation in Ireland should be granted (opposed by the King, who saw it a violation of his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith), was temporarily forgotten.

  From the chaos, Charles James Fox emerged. Leader of the parliamentary Radical faction among the Whigs, and a strong supporter of Revolutionary ideals, he spoke in favour of Lisieux and said that the excesses of the Robespierre period were now over. “We have fought the tyranny of the Bourbons for decades,” he said in a speech to the divided Parliament. “Now shall we side with them against the liberty that we have been so rightfully proud of for so long? I say no!”

  Fox’s radical wing would normally not have received much support, but he was one of the few great orators in Parliament after Rockingham’s death, and a natural leader. Liberal Whigs who had defected from Rockingham saw him as the lesser of two evils, and though Tories despised him, their desire to end the war was such that they temporarily supported him. The Whigs struggled to find a credible candidate for prime minister to oppose Fox, but could no
t. Richard Burke was too young and too Liberal, though he fiercely opposed the French Revolution as his father had. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Townshend, was politically suited but lacked charisma, having failed to come out of Rockingham’s shadow. There was even talk about rallying around Frederick Grenville, the ambassador who had escaped from the Republican French mob (his American colleague Thomas Jefferson not being so fortunate) and was now an MP, as a leader. But though Grenville had both charisma and a burning desire to oppose the Republic, he could not match Fox’s oratory or ready political skill. Parliament remained paralysed, as news of further victories by Boulanger poured in.

  The deadlock was broken on November 9th, coming on the same day as the news that Boulanger’s lightning advance into Brittany had been halted by the combined British and Royal French forces near Mayenne. Boulanger, like Leroux in Germany, had outrun his supply lines and his army had become too dispersed. For example, he no longer had access to observation balloons, their transports being too large and cumbersome to move at his army’s marching speed. The Royal French had scored a propaganda victory by managing to capture several of Boulanger’s steam engines, denting their image of unknowable invincibility. The Jacobin French columns had also for the first time come up against well-drilled British infantry under Colonel Sir John Moore. British Riflemen picked off French officers as they tried to rally their men, and the machine-like volleying of the redcoats – twice as fast as any continental army, thanks to the British Army budgeting for them to train with real cartridges – had ground down the columns until even their well-trained soldiers turned and fled. It was far from a rout, but Boulanger was forced to retreat. The ultimate outcome of the war remained to be decided. On that day, George III finally slipped from life. His last words, spoken in a fever, were reported to be “I am and always will be a Virginian, and let no man speak ill of that.”