by Tom Anderson
After Ney had set up the Swabian Germanic Republic and France made more attempts to expand into Germany, groups of small states turned away from Austria. Instead they came together to form the military alliances known as the Mittelbund and the Hanoverian-dominated Alliance of Hildesheim. With tacit assistance from theoretically neutral Flanders and the Dutch Republic, the French advance was driven back and peace was had by the end of 1801. This had a powerful effect on wider German thinking, and encouraged others to fight back. As the French became distracted by events in Italy and Spain, and Lisieux’s plans shifted towards securing the Low Countries as a buffer zone, central Germany was pushed to the bottom of the priorities pile and German patriots had a chance to make their mark.
It was Michael Hiedler, Der Führer, who had begun the first Kleinkrieg in 1800. By 1802 and the abandonment of French expansion in Germany, his methods had already become renowned enough to be copied by Spanish fighters under French occupation. While Austria struggled with the Ottomans, Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers took encouragement from the Mittelbund’s defeat of Ney and stepped up their attacks on Lascelles’ fanatics. That conflict grew ever bloodier as Lascelles’ extreme reprisals reached the stage of burning down an entire village because one Kleinkrieger, who had attacked French troops somewhere else entirely, was thought to have been born there. Perhaps. Come to think of it, maybe the informant had said it was that village over in the next valley…
Naturally, this draconian approach only encouraged more resistance, as it swiftly became apparent to even the most timid Bavarians that it was simply impossible to safely collaborate with the Bavarian Germanic Republic regime – if Lascelles didn’t randomly decide one were suspect and kill one, a Kleinkrieger would slit one’s throat, hack off one’s genitals, stuff them in one’s mouth, and then hang one’s corpse upside down from the nearest tree with a sign reading “VERRÄTER” around its neck. And as the fight became yet more bitter, it also seemed that it was impossible to simply sit quietly and hope one wouldn’t be noticed. In the face of Lisieux’s propaganda slowly disseminating across Europe, and particularly the aspect about execution being immoral due to the state having a responsibility to extract all the work it could out of any citizen, Lascelles’ shrill counter-rhetoric reached new extremes. At one point he openly declared that he intended eventually to euthanise any citizen of the Bavarian Germanic Republic who could not prove a sufficient level of Latin ancestry. Ultimately, though the Kleinkriegers were ragtag bands with little organisation, they could not have asked for a more self-defeating enemy.
At the end of 1803, even as Austria’s armies were disconsolately trudging home from the Balkans, the Kleinkriegers made their greatest coup yet: Nicolas Cavaignac, Lascelles’ brutish Grand Marshal and former sergeant, was killed. As part of one of Lascelles’ typical disproportionate retaliations for another Kleinkrieger attack, Cavaignac had been assigned to take a thousand troops and lay waste to the town of Dachau. By this point of course the Bavarian civilians had become resigned to the fact that such attacks were commonplace. As soon as French troops appeared on the horizon they would either try to make a hopeless stand – nonetheless still whittling away at Lascelles’ precious number of irreplaceable Frenchmen – or flee, despite Lascelles setting up cavalry patrols to sabre down any man, woman or child trying to leave his hellish republic.
So Cavaignac tried subtlety, saying that they were searching for a single individual, a Kleinkrieger named Der Hexenmeister (‘the Wizard’). He declared that the French would check all the men in the town against a description, and execute only those who matched it. Cavaignac’s soldiers herded them into the old Wittelsbach palace there supposedly for this purpose. They then promptly set it on fire and shot any Dachauer who tried to escape. With the menfolk thus disposed of, the French set about the women and children in the way victorious armies have throughout history. Lascelles didn’t mind, providing (he warned them) they made sure the girl was dead afterwards, as he didn’t want any filthy half-breed children toddling around his perfect pure Latin state.
And as the leader of the party, Cavaignac naturally got first dibs on Dachau’s prettiest girl. What happened next is uncertain and subject to Kleinkrieger romanticisation and propaganda, but apparently it turned out that the Kleinkrieger the French had been searching for was not, in fact, a man. Der Hexenmeister was in fact Die Hexe. She had carried a poisoned needle to commit suicide in cases just like this, but recognising Cavaignac, she elected to instead scratch him with it as he grabbed her. Though she met her fate at the hands of some other, anonymous French soldier, Cavaignac was dead within the hour and the Kleinkriegers had scored a huge victory, proving the Republic’s leadership was not untouchable.
Throughout the latter part of 1803, and 1804, Austria could still perhaps have pulled something out of its collapsing public image if Francis II had sent troops to liberate Bavaria; with Lascelles’ men weakened by the Kleinkrieg, it would not have taken many. But he sent only a token force to push back the front, safeguarding Vienna. He also refused pleas from Prague to return a Bohemian regiment to deal with the Cougnonistes extracting tribute from half the kingdom. It was understandable to some, perhaps, if Bavaria was not at the top of Austria’s list of priorities, only having been acquired by the Hapsburgs in 1783. But Bohemia…! Bohemia was the reason why the Archdukes of Austria also held a kingship. It was key to how the theoretically elected Emperor had become a hereditary Hapsburg role. And yet Francis II cared not, focusing purely on where he thought his armies could win dramatic victories to try to rally the nation (or rather the upper classes of Vienna, which was essentially his personal definition of the nation). And so the armies of the Hapsburg possessions focused their efforts on Italy, as Lazare Hoche committed his fatal faux pas at Rome and his position disintegrated. That obtained a Hapsburg Kingdom of (North) Italy by 1806…but at what cost elsewhere?
In 1804, frustrated with Vienna’s intransigence, the Bohemian Estates convened. They appointed Jozef, Graf Radetzky von Radetz, a decorated colonel who had been wounded in the first year of the war and been forced to retire, as leader of a new militia regiment.[82] This would not perhaps have been so controversial if the Estates had not daringly used provocative language suggesting that this was proclaimed with the plenipotentiary authority of the King of Bohemia, as though such authority resided in the Estates and the throne were empty. After all, it was whispered, with Ferdinand IV’s declaration of the end of the Empire and the turmoil and reorganisations in the west, who was to say Francis II had any claim to be king of a land he seemed determined to abandon?
Though the training regime was ramshackle and the Hapsburgs’ earlier press gangs had naturally taken many suitable recruits in the first place, Radetzky managed to whip up a halfway-functional regiment. Initially he focused on cavalry and used small raiding parties to attack Cougnoniste “tax collectors” as they extracted protection money from the lands around Budweis; when St-Julien assembled his troops and faced Radetzky directly, the Bohemian general decided this was too much of a risk and withdrew from the field of battle. Though he was much derided for this ‘cowardly’ decision, the following year (after another winter’s worth of training and recruitment) the Bohemian militia fell upon Budweis and liberated the town from the complacent Cougnonistes. St-Julien was taken to Prague and executed by a manner which is unclear, though the claim that he was taken to a tower of Prague Castle and defenestrated is almost certainly hyperbole.
At the same time, 1805 saw the disintegration of the Bavarian Germanic Republic, as Lascelles’ soldiers began to fear the Kleinkriegers more than vice-versa; they could not let their guard down for one moment, lest the local baker poison their rations or the barmaid take them to bed and slit their throats in the dead of night. In the face of this (entirely justified) paranoia, many French soldiers took to learning German as best they could and then deserting, hoping to make it out of the country before being discovered. Lascelles naturally declared that the deserters must have ha
d bad Germanic blood. Many troops still rallied to him, though, cleaving to his confidence and charisma in that hour of shadows even if it was the product of an addled mind.
By the autumn of that year, the Republic was essentially gone, with Lascelles having withdrawn his remaining loyalists to his capital at Eichstätt, a ghost city with most of its native population dead or fled. Lascelles devolved into paranoid muttering, being (as that wit Giovanni Tressino put it) a man whose only purpose in life was to make Jean de Lisieux look sane by comparison.
Finally the Kleinkriegers came out of the woodwork, and even as the Austrians sent some troops into eastern Bavaria, Hiedler launched a direct attack on Eichstätt. His numbers were such that not even Lascelles’ artillery could prevent Hiedler’s mass march,[83] a tactic ironically a product of the early French Revolution’s similarly untrained and undisciplined fighters. Though the French undoubtedly killed four or five Kleinkriegers for every one of their soldiers killed, Hiedler had ten more.
Lascelles was found lying in a church which he had long since ordered converted to a Temple to Reason. The self-proclaimed Sole Consul had found an old cask of communion wine and got himself roaringly drunk before trying to shoot himself with a pistol and repeatedly missing. Hiedler was brought to him by the Kleinkrieger who found him, who assumed that Der Führer would want to dispatch the great murderer himself.
Hiedler gave him one look with those penetrating, implacable eyes of his, then pronounced: “You bring me here to ask me to do the petty chore of slaughtering an animal for the pot! Sir, do you believe me to be a common labourer? A cook? Let my wife do it.”
There was confusion over this, as Hiedler’s wife had of course died in the attack on his house at the start of the terror, and he had taken no other. Some thought that he had gone mad, or at least his madness had become apparent. But instead Hiedler fetched Petra Schickelgruber, the former maid who had been the only other survivor of his household and had become a Kleinkrieger beside him. Without a trace of compassion, she did as she asked him and slit Lascelles’ throat. According to accounts, the Frenchman was so dead drunk that he didn’t even resist.
It is almost certainly an exaggerated rumour that Hiedler actually went on to put Lascelles’ corpse in a pot, cook and eat it, as his rhetoric had suggested. It is only a question whether this story was told by his fanatical supporters as a positive or by his Austrian detractors as a negative. But it is true that Michael Hiedler married Petra Schickelgruber over the cooling remains of the tyrant of Bavaria, using the ring cut from his finger.
At least it was in a church…
*
From:“The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946)—
1807: The Battle of La Belle Alliance and the Dutch-Flemish defeat was a wake-up call to the German states. The leaders of those states had long assumed that attack from France could come only via Swabia or Italy; the Dutch-Flemish alliance had been thought strong enough to provide a barrier. Few knew the mind of Lisieux, though there were plenty of hints about his priorities in his endless pamphlets.
For all the hatred and bitterness of the past, there was still the slim possibility that Francis II’s Austria might belatedly rally the Germanies to its banner and proclaim that the Empire lived on. Indeed there were some attempts to do so, but they were halfhearted and fruitless. Ultimately the problem lay in that Francis was convinced that he was already Emperor by right, no matter that he had never been elected. Clearly there was no need to convince others of the fact; indeed to suggest that it might be necessary was tantamount to being a traitor and revolutionary sympathiser! Besides, most of the Austrian armies were already engaged in what should have been non-war operations: occupying the restless new Kingdom of Italy, enforcing Francis’ authority on Bohemia after the controversial arrest of Count Radetzky, and attempting to proclaim Hapsburg power over Bavaria when Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers had decided that if they could defeat one invading army, another from the land of backstabbing traitors would meet the same fate.
The other states and alliances of Germany now saw their positions, and ultimately the gains they had made through conniving mediatisation in the last few years, threatened. Accordingly, the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim both declared war in support of Flanders and the Netherlands, sending troops to Brussels to hold the jittery Flemish capital against the advance of Boulanger’s army.
There was limited sympathy from the local Walloons for their co-linguists’ cause. The fact that Lisieux’s propaganda could disseminate without translation over the border doubtless helped. Then as in 1796, Liége proved to be a radical hotspot. Its people rose up and helped the invading French push out the Flemish garrison.
The Alliance of Hildesheim also had another reason for going to war, of course: Britain, ruled by a Hanoverian king (if in name only, for Henry IX cared no more for Hanover than had his father or grandfather) had been invaded. De facto Hanoverian ruler William FitzGeorge, the Duke of Cambridge,[84] duly threw his weight behind hurting the French elsewhere. However, neither the Alliance nor the Mittelbund declared war on the Swabian Germanic Republic. The reasons for this were multitudinous: Swabia was closer by and a war would spill over into the Alliance and Mittelbund’s own lands rather than being fought at arm’s-length; Ney had been quietly rebuilding his forces since his defeat in 1802; and, furthermore, Ney’s moderate style of rule, incorporating popular local figures into government, meant that Swabia was in fact an important trading partner for the Mittelbund, despite the conflict a few years before. Ultimately not even war could stop the wheels of trade from turning for long.
Recognising this, and amid reports of the war in Britain taking a turn for the worse, Lisieux ordered Ney to attack the Mittelbund. He hoped that this would draw off sufficient Mittelbund forces to make Boulanger’s task easier in Flanders. Ney, reluctantly, carried out his orders and began a dramatic chain of events. Lisieux, so insulated from reality by his own propaganda and isolation, had no inkling of what would come to pass. Ney, a keen student of the internal politics of the Germanies, had a little, though not even he could guess its full extent.
Denmark and Saxony had almost come to blows over the Second War of the Polish Succession, when both powerful states had been mediatising their way towards empire-building in the Germanies. Denmark had wanted the Mecklenburger coast, but the Mecklenburgs had appealed to Saxony for help and thus had aligned with John George V, now ruling Poland and with suzerainty over Thuringia along with a greatly expanded Saxony proper.
Saxony had had a good eighteenth century on the whole, profiting greatly by Prussia’s reverses in the Third War of Supremacy and becoming second power in the Empire after Austria. Up until that point, though, much of those successes had been blind luck. The House of Wettin had acquired all those former Prussian possessions not because they were strong, quite the opposite – the Hapsburgs wanted them for themselves, but this was politically impossible, and so they were handed over to what was considered to be a properly subordinate ally. But then Saxony and the Wettins had begun to stick up for themselves more, be more of an equal to Brandenburg-Prussia. The Second War of the Polish Succession had pulled both out of the war with France and set them to blows. Now, with Prussia on the edge of defeat, the Saxons began actively working towards moving their nation onto the path of supremacy.
John George V negotiated a masterstroke, heading off the Saxon-Danish confrontation by dividing Brandenburg between his own state and the Mecklenburgs, while Denmark received the Mecklenburger coast that Johannes II so wanted. So, if Saxony and Denmark were not quite allies, they were at least on passable terms. (It is easy for a modern observer to argue that the Saxon-Danish confrontation had only been delayed, but we must not imprint history with hindsight). At the same time, Saxony had negotiated with the Netherlands for a land exchange which ultimately aligned the two in their mediatisation ambitions – something which had been part of the driving force behind the
formation of the Mittelbund. Ney and the French were not the only invaders feared by the remaining small German states.
Things had changed. The Netherlands were threatened, though Lisieux’s redirection of Hoche’s seaborne invasion to Britain meant that Villeneuve’s cursory landings on the Zuiderzee soon bogged down into miserable pockets of land and islands held by the French. The Mittelbund was invaded by Ney, and with most of its army in Flanders, it was questionable whether it could hold. And Hildesheim was also at war.
Ultimately the motivations of Denmark and Saxony at this point were not for more territorial aggrandisement; both had already obtained large spheres of influence in the former Holy Roman Empire and both had competent monarchs who knew that the trick would be in holding it for the long term, in turning it into functioning, integral territories. And both decided that, in the wake of how Der Führer’s antics were turning philosophical discussions upside down from Flensburg to Tyrol, Germania was on the rise. The Empire might be dead, but the idea of Germany had never been stronger. Bohemian Kleinkriegers were inspired by the example of a Bavarian, while Hessians (including, of course, the young soldier Pascal Schmidt) fought in the defence of Flemings. There was a commonality there which had not existed a century before. Religious and linguistic distinctions had become secondary. Ironically, this was partly due to the Hapsburgs’ efforts in the latter half of the eighteenth century to turn the Empire back into a serious political entity with themselves at the head. The second part of the plan had collapsed, but the first might be salvageable…