by Tom Anderson
To that end, if Denmark and Saxony were going to hold onto their new German empires, a good start would be to look at Francis II’s Austria as an example of ‘How Not To Do It’. If the spirit of Germania was burning strongly in the hearts and minds of her people, then the ruler who bowed to that will would not be thought of as some foreigner – a particular concern for Johannes of Denmark.
And so, in October 1807, as events came to a head in Britain, Saxony and Denmark declared war on the French Latin Republic and the Swabian Germanic Republic.
It was a moment of German unity, a brief candle… Pascal Schmidt’s “Moment of Hope”.
Chapter #73: «Impossible» n'est pas français!
From: "England's Captain, France's Saviour" by Albert Harrison (Oxford University Press, 1940)—
The end of the first Anglo-French phase of the Jacobin Wars in 1800 left many officers of the Royal Navy at a loose end. Though they were not so destitute as their men, who might wind up as hopeless drunks scraped off the cobbles of Portsmouth or Southend, it was nonetheless a crippling blow to be reduced to land duty and half-pay – particularly when many of those officers had hoped for a prolonged war and prize-money. Indeed there were not a few jealous mutterings aimed at Leo Bone, the man who had ensured that the bulk of the ancien régime’s fleet had joined with the exiled Dauphin instead of being taken by the Republican regime of Robespierre. Most Royal Navy captains, thinking of themselves rather than of the big picture and confident that Britain was capable of defeating the French at sea (regardless of what had happened during the Second Platinean War), were resentful that Bone had denied them all the rich prizes available by taking those ships in battle, from Admiral d’Estaing’s Améthyste on down.
This resentment from his colleagues was of course not the primary reason why Leo Bone decided to resign from the Royal Navy at the close of the conflict, but it may have been a contributing factor. The cutbacks to the Navy with the ascent of the Fox Ministry and its policy of rapproachment with the new Lisieux regime in France meant that even such hard patriots as Bone’s friend Horatio Nelson handed in their commissions in search of work for other powers. The number of ships on the list had shrunk and the number of captaincies with it, meaning that an officer could spend decades as a master and commander impatiently waiting for his superiors to die of old age or disease. Peace was a bad time to be an officer in the Royal Navy, and never more so than the False Peace, as the years between 1800 and 1807 were later known.
In November 1799, his ship HMS Lewisborough damaged in the Battle of Quiberon and shipwrecked on the coast of France, Leo Bone had pulled a victory out of certain defeat by taking his crew and guns ashore and forming them into an irregular artillery regiment. In cooperation with local Chouans they defeated several small groups of Republican troops and then a larger army at Angers. The event was filmish [cinematic] enough for Bone to find headlines in both British and Royal French newspapers – the fact that Bone, like his father, was a master media manipulator probably helped. The result was that in the subdued victory parades of 1800 (Louis XVII still thought of the British as having abandoned him, not entirely without reason) Leo Bone was at the forefront, and the King awarded him the title of Viscount d’Angers and command of his former crew as the core of a regiment. Most of his crew continued to follow their commander on land, the prospects of the peacetime Royal Navy unappealing to them.
It was here that the real genius of Leo Bone came into action. Just as his friend Nelson did in Naples, he began to use the media manipulation skill of the Royal Navy captain – carefully timing his reports to dominate the latest issue of the Gazette and bring him to the attention of the Admiralty, for instance – to enter politics. He corresponded regularly with his father in Britain as Charles Bone rose through the Fox Ministry to eventually become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Furthermore, for an artillery colonel supposedly on patrol he seemed to spend an awful lot of time in Nantes, Royal France’s de facto capital. And it was not long before his political skill led to him ingratiating himself with King Louis XVII; he had, after all, ultimately saved the king’s life by his actions in the Battle of Quiberon by drawing away one of Villeneuve’s ships.
The former Dauphin was at something of a loose end as far as his naval forces were concerned. Royal France still had a disproportionately large fleet, but most of the real naval leaders were gone; D’Estaing had been killed in the Battle of Quiberon, and the remaining admirals were mostly aristocratic amateurs. In 1801 the King shocked his courtiers by essentially making Leo Bone his admiral-of-the-fleet, mumbling something about an outsider having a more balanced view. It was highly controversial among the Vendeans and Bretons who made up the core of Royal France; Bone was an Anglo-Corsican, a nominal Protestant, and his father had fought against the French in Corsica years ago in what would nowadays be called a Kleinkrieg. It would scarcely have been more surprising, they muttered, if Louis had elected to appoint the corpse of Jean-Baptiste Robespierre to head his army.
However, Leo Bone was soon changing the minds of the conservative Catholics ashore, if not making many friends among the resentful Royal French captains. Unexpectedly, he wanted to cut the size of the navy. The Republican French lacked a large enough fleet to blockade the Royalists, he explained to the King, and therefore any future war between the Frances would be fought and won or lost on land. “There is a lesson in how I won my title,” he wrote in his memoirs, later on. “A ship of the line’s broadside throws as much metal as several battlefield artillery batteries, and there is nothing to stop those guns from being used for just that purpose.”
Cuts were made and Bone indeed redeployed several ships’ guns as land-based batteries, but some of the stripped ships were instead converted to merchantmen. This was the brainchild of Paul François Jean Nicolas, the Vicomte de Barras, a nobleman from Provence who had been at sea with the French East India Company when the Revolution broke out.[85] The King appointed Barras as his Comptroller-General and, unsurprisingly, his ideas for improving Royal France’s finances focused on its colonial possessions. Barras had visited Pondicherry since the Revolutionary Leclerc had rabble-roused and set Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore on Rochambeau, and he knew the provisions of the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord well. Given this situation, he suggested, the Royal French should take advantage of the loyalty of their trading colonies and the temporary lack of competition with Britain to step up the level of East Indian trade and bring gold from Indian trade goods flooding into Louis’ treasury.
This strategy was broadly successful, despite Surcouf’s ‘pirate’ colony in La Pérouse’s Land raiding the Royal French East Indiamen along with their Dutch counterparts. Barras also wanted to use Louisiana, but with France’s former holdings in Africa taken over by an increasingly abolitionist Britain, the triangular trade had been short-circuited. A smaller-scale new exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods was set up nonetheless. Barras approved of Governor-General Ledoux’s decision to hand over war-torn Haiti to the Americans in 1805, considering that, despite its plantations, the island was more trouble than it was worth. The rich sugar plantations of Guadaloupe and Martinique – held on to grimly by the French through all the wars of the eighteenth century – would have to suffice.
After initially clashing with Barras, Bone formed a political alliance with him and the two united in forcing out some of the stodgier courtiers and favourites who surrounded Louis XVII. Partly this was out of raw ambition, but it was also out of a genuine sense of responsibility for the future of Royal France – and ensuring it would have a future. Barras was loyal to his King, while Bone wanted to preserve a state in which he could see himself gaining considerable power. Bone’s motivations were not entirely self-centred, though; he intensely disliked the Revolution. It was not for the same ideological reasons as people like his friend Nelson – Bone respected the British system of parliamentary democracy but did not think it was a magic cure-all the way many Englishmen did. Instead, Bone was a cynic who thought the Rev
olution was too idealistic to succeed, even in a tyrannical mockery like Robespierre’s or Lisieux’s regimes. “That it will collapse is certain,” he wrote. “The only questions are when, why and how. If we can discern those answers, and influence events so they are the answers we need, then France may not be doomed.”
Bone looked ahead to the future. Would the Republic collapse from within into several successor states, potentially ending the very ‘idea of France’? Would several Republican factions fight a civil war? Would France be subjugated by vengeful powers after Lisieux bit off more than he could chew and lost them the war – Spain, the Italies, the Germanies, even Britain? In his former life, Bone could have cared less, but now he had an emotional investment in his adopted country. This grew markedly stronger when he married Jeanette Debauvais, a local girl, in 1802. Bone’s ultimate goal was ensuring that the King was restored to the head of all France, or at least as much of it as he could salvage. In Bone’s view, the Revolution was an unwelcome intrusion into history, something that could only hurt France. In a memorable choice of metaphor, an anti-Lisieux pamphlet he penned earthily described his feelings: “if the nations of Europe are a group of speakers, each trying to convince you that his way is right and he deserves the leadership of the group, then France has been afflicted with a plague that makes him vomit over the others. Yes, it may discomfit them for a moment, but will it endear him to the watching world over them in the long run?”
After getting his way with the navy, Bone surprised the angry French captains by turning away from it and arguing for another project from the King: border fortresses. The guns from the ships he had obtained, he said, would be more useful there than in flying batteries. “The war will come, and it will be won or lost on land,” he repeated. “If we are attacked, then we can expect another nation – Britain, Flanders, whomever – to intervene to preserve the balance of power and our legitimacy, lest our fleet fall into Lisieux’s grubby little hands. But if we are to take advantage of that aid, we must first survive. As we stand, Lisieux could easily take us in one knockout blow. We need ways to hold him off, to preserve a Royal France until he is defeated. Otherwise we will be lost to the Republic and our fleet and our colonies will be gobbled up by the powers in a feeding frenzy just like that taking place in Germany.” He referred to the mediatisation in strikingly similar terms to his contemporary, Pascal Schmidt.
By this point Bone was very much a favourite of the King. Unpredictably he had briefly aligned with a court faction, surprising everyone once more, to recommend that the King marry the daughter of the Duke of Rohan. This tied the King more firmly to the lands of Royal France, rather than adopting the more usual practice of marrying a foreign princess to try to build alliances. In Bone’s view this would simply invite an invasion by Lisieux before they were ready to resist him. For his part, the King (now in his fifties) still mourned for his wife Marie-Antoinette and their lost children, executed by the Republic, and would have preferred not to marry again if it was left up to personal choice. But the needs of the state came first, and he needed an heir. Thus, the young Queen Hélène gave birth to a son in late 1804. In contrast to tradition, the King decided not to name him Louis, on the grounds that he would achieve nothing by merely blindly holding fast to everything the ancien régime stood for. “If the old ways always worked,” he argued, “we would not be in this unhappy situation to start with.” That was not a popular position to take with the conservative Vendeans, but nonetheless the baby was named Charles Louis Philippe, to become the future Charles X. The royal marriage was fairly unhappy, Hélène distressed by her moody, older royal suitor, but it had achieved its aims and that was the important part.
Fresh from this triumph, Bone and Barras were successful in obtaining royal permission for Bone’s fort-building programme. This he engaged in with such enthusiasm that his political enemies called him “Le petit Vauban”. In truth they had trouble coming up with nicknames that kept up with his meteoric career, as he shifted from one end of Royal French affairs to the other at dizzying speeds. It was about this time that his supporters started calling him by a Frenchified version of his original Corsican name – once Napoleone Buonaparte, then Leo Bone, he would now become Napoléon Bonaparte. The ‘Man of Three Names’ had finally arrived.
What objections were raised to Bone’s fortification plan centred around the idea that this would spark tensions with Lisieux and pre-emptively lead to the feared invasion. Bone had argued that it was a risk the Royalists had to take, and there could never be a guarantee of safety if they did not take measures to prevent a swift conquest by the Republicans. In the event, the projected dangers did not occur, albeit for reasons neither Bone nor his enemies could have predicted. Lisieux had long since blocked anyone except specific army units from coming near to the border with Royal France to preserve his fiction that those provinces were “under military administration” and civilians should stay out lest they be contaminated by the remnants of counter-revolutionary ideas. His propaganda was so detailed and all-encompassing, however, that some commentators claim that he himself began to forget Royal France existed. In any case, Lisieux did not have informants in place and Bone’s forts were far enough behind the border for them not to be visible by the Republican patrols. Aside from a few rumours, and the unavoidable leak that the port cities’ walls were being strengthened, the Republican leadership had little idea of what was going on.
By 1806 Bone had effectively become Louis XVII’s prime minister in all but name. He had at least one finger in every pie, whether it be the navy, the army, or the civilian political administration. In view of his beliefs concerning the need to change the old ways to prevent another Revolution, the King experimented with some moderate form of representation of the people, a Grand-Parlement as he termed it. Barras was the chief constitutional architect of this project, but Bone also contributed, his father’s experience giving him some insight into what worked (and what didn’t) in the British model. The first trial elections, which worked under rules giving more votes to nobles and churchmen than those commoners who could vote (to compensate for the fact that there was now only one Estate) produced a predictably conservative assembly. The first Grand-Parlement nonetheless led to some strange results – for example, laws defending the status of the Breton language, reflecting the disproportionately large portion of the Royal French remnant that Brittany represented.
As is often the case, the Royal French had been waiting for the “inevitable” invasion by Lisieux for so long that when it finally came, in 1807, they were somewhat complacent. Simultaneously with Hoche’s attack on England and Boulanger’s on Flanders, General Devilliers, veteran of the Spanish campaign, led seven regiments to invade the rebel provinces to the west and finally bring them back under control. This was the final culmination of the Revolution, the entire reason behind why France’s borders had to be secured according to Lisieux’s plan. With this, all the native French-speakers of Europe would be united as the perfect core of Lisieux’s great Latin Democracy that would rule the world by virtue of their racial superiority.
The invasion came as a sufficient shock, despite the Royal French having a better spy network in the Republic than vice-versa, that Devilliers crossed the informal border unopposed and began to think that the Royalists would be a pushover. Then he ran into Bone’s fortresses. They were built on similar lines to those in Flanders, but were of more modern design and incorporated recent lessons from breakthroughs in tactics and technology. Bone’s military architects had also had to cover a smaller border, so there could be a higher density of forts. Devilliers examined whether he could bypass this ‘Bourbon Line’, observed that the major roads were all covered by fire patterns and not even his steam tractor-pulled supply carts could realistically allow an invasion without the control of these roads. He knew that he had to destroy at least a few of the forts to break the Line. So up came the steam artillery and the sieges began.
Devilliers had numbers, and Lisieux migh
t send more. He might be able to bring Royal France down.
But the invasion had been stalled. Royal France survived for the moment. And, as Bone had foreseen, that was all that mattered… in the long run.
Chapter #74: To Loose the Fateful Lightning
“A common misconception is that the Royal Navy fought particularly fiercely in the Third Platinean War out of vengeance for what was happening to Great Britain while her defenders were caught engaged in a foreign war far away. This is nonsense, because the facts of the French invasion did not reach the fleet until the naval portions of the war were long over. Nonetheless, looking at events, it is easy to see how such a view arose…”