Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  Therefore, by the end of June fighting had effectively died down in the west of France. The armies of Royal France and her allies formed a large honour guard of around 50,000 which then marched on Paris. This was escorted by two smaller Republican forces made up of confused and terrified conscripts, the last scrapings of the barrel thanks to Lisieux’s ambitions having virtually emptied France of her young fighting men. Few really knew what was going on, and for all Bourcier’s attempts at an information campaign, rumours spread wildly about the Allies coming to sack Paris and turn the City of Light’s name macabre by means of matches and pitch. However, the general was no Jean de Lisieux, and the semaphore network and its corollaries remained out of any control Bourcier had imposed; half the codes had been known solely to Lisieux and a few of his chosen secretaries anyway.

  Bourcier thus kept the peace not by informing Parisians of the situation, but by putting even more troops on the streets. Lacking civil police after the destruction of Lisieux’s loyal Garde Nationale in the street fighting days earlier, the soldiers were among the few who knew something of what was to occur. One man who remembered the heady days of the Revolution after Hébert and L’Épurateur had stormed the Bastille noted wryly that the troops were a bizarre inversion of what he had seen at that time. Whereas then troops had haphazardly slathered their blue-and-white Bourbon uniforms with red dye to represent martyrs’ blood and produce the black-and-red associated with the Revolution, now soldiers wearing the long-since standardised uniform cut from black and red cloth hastily attached blue-white-gold Bourbon cockades to their Phrygian caps. Flags were an even greater problem, given how all symbols of Royalism had long since been erased from the city. The eventual compromise was simply to turn the Revolutionary Bloody Flag upside down, thus producing a single fleur-de-lys similar to the potent ‘France Ultramodern’ symbol Louis had adopted in Royal France. Another diarist records banners that had been cut up and stitched back together so that the motto “Vive la Révolution et mort au roi” had become “Vive la [sic] roi et mort au [sic] Révolution!”

  The Allied troops entered the city on July 2nd, being welcomed by an uncertain display on the part of the Parisians, who were clearly even now debating between cheering and fleeing. The King and Leo Bone met with Bourcier and Apollinaire in the NLA’s ‘Palais de la Peuple’ (today home to the Musée de la France), and military commanders from the other Allies were invited to discussions the following day. It is instructive to look at how those men recorded their impressions of what they saw. General Græme for example had visited Paris as a young man on his Grand Tour before the war. “Either my memory has faded beyond all recognition, or this city has,” he wrote. “While we have all heard of L’Administrateur’s grand schemes, it is a shock quite beyond description when one recognises nothing of that great city of story and of song. L’Aguille rises atop the Île de la Cité where Notre Dame once provoked the envy of Europe. The Pont Neuf is torn down and a new, ugly bridge built a few dozen feet away for no other reason than to be different. New streets are carved through the beautiful heart of this ancient city like sword-cuts, and then buildings are slowly but relentlessly torn up and replaced with anonymous blocks with all the architectural sensibilities of the Picts.[104] His Most Christian Majesty might have agonised over the symbolism of entering Versailles, but Lisieux has taken that away from him. After Robespierre’s suspicious death there, the palace was torn down and replaced with a few streets of mean little houses. This is not Paris. It is a different city built upon the Seine, a city built by men so full of ambition that they lack any sense of imagination.”

  General John Alexander,[105] with no such preconceptions, noted: “In England the people are understandably filled with hate for what the Republic has done to them, and seem to believe that every house here is filled with vicious ideologues who spend all their time plotting how to hurt others… the reality is very different. Gen. Bourcier is charming although he still seems in a state of shock. Most of the people of Paris share it. It’s as though Ol’ Delicious had them all entranced in some shared nightmare, and they’re just waking up. And everything’s so gray. Col. FitzGerald from the 5th Irish says it reminds him of the way the Jews live in the Russias, for all that these people are actually quite well fed and dressed. It’s that same climate of fear and hopelessness, he says. I don’t know about that, but I tell you what it reminds me of: white folks living with the mentality of slaves, and that ain’t right.”

  Wesley, on the other hand, simply wrote an abrupt semaphore message to his wife: “My dearest Katherine – have arrived in capital – weather good – food terrible – Paris’ charms exaggerated.”

  Paris indulged in subdued celebrations as the King was crowned by the Bishop of Nantes (soon to be made the first Archbishop of Paris since 1795) in the square once called the Place de la Bastille, now known as the Place de l’Épurateur, and soon to be renamed once more as the Place du Ségur after the Royalist commander who had been martyred in the attack. The Bastille itself had stood as a burnt-out wreck during Robespierre’s reign, being left as a reminder of the Revolution’s bloody birth; Lisieux, less sentimental, had demolished it. In its place he had built a blocky pedestal upon which was placed a statue of L’Épurateur holding his ragged Bloody Flag high. It had been part of his practice of using the cult of L’Épurateur to undermine the iconography of Le Diamant that had been a threat to his Administration. Now, the statue was rather embarrassing, but too large to easily demolish, so local organisers simply stripped him of his Bloody Flag and replaced it with a Royalist one, thus completing the ultimate irony. What with one thing and another, the process was never completed, and the statue stands to this day – in the ultimate irony, reconstructed after a twentieth-century bombing purely because Parisians had become accustomed to it. A statue meant to depict the triumph of revolutionary rationalism over romantic traditionalism ended up embodying the reverse, as observed by the poet Christophe Lequiller in his 1968 poem Le Bastillic.[106]

  There were at least three assassination attempts on the King, mostly by Garde Nationale fanatics who had escaped Bourcier’s sweep. These were all caught in time by the large number of soldiers on the streets – some of whom were now wearing the modified Bourbon uniform used in Royal France. One can only imagine the chaotic history that would have ensued if any of the assassins had been successful, both of Paris and of the world…

  After King Louis’ coronation and his legendary speech, he more privately announced plans to establish a constitutional monarchy in France as a hedge against future disaster. He further noted that this would be a difficult balancing act, trying to incorporate moderate former Republicans without either pandering to bloody enemies of civilisation or alienating the Vendean ultraroyalistes who had stuck by their King through thick and thin. However, Louis would have the advantage of Leo Bone, who was given the new formal post of Prime Minister. Previously, like most European countries, the ancien régime had only possessed an informal predominant chief minister among several. Barras was made Comptroller-General of Finances, and thus given ‘the biggest headache in the world’, as he joked, of making sense of the Republic’s complex and much-drained treasury. “It is small wonder,” he added, “that problems arise when one considers that the Revolution was ultimately triggered by the absence of state funds, and its leaders then proceeded to spend those nonexistent state funds incessantly for the next fifteen years. I was always taught that negative numbers were purely a mathematical conceit, but evidently Messieurs Robespierre and Lisieux discovered a way to put them into practice.”

  General unrest was unavoidable. There were a few small fires, hastily contained by the city pompiers, who had become very good at preventing fires thanks to the inevitable accidents caused by Lisieux’s urban clearance over the years. There were also some brawls, mostly started either by ultraroyaliste Royal French angry with the King being ‘soft’ on the Republicans, or English soldiers wanting revenge for the depredations of Modigliani. The peace w
as generally kept by the Americans and Irish, who were considered relatively neutral thanks to being too exotic and too concerned with their own divisions, respectively.

  All the same, as July wore on and the news reached the troops on the Eastern Front, it seemed as though the Restored Kingdom was shakily coming to life. The King continued to steer his perilous course between the extremes of mindless Royalist revisionism and surrender to the bloodier ideals of the Revolution. Leo Bone, with the assistance of Royal French spymaster Philippe de Bougainville, constructed a network of informers throughout Paris to help stop trouble before it started. The NLA was reconstituted into a new Grand-Parlement covering, at least in theory, the whole of France. The Conseil des Moderateurs turned into a vaguely defined Estate Regionale, intended to be a sop to the Bretons’ fiery defence of their traditional autonomy in the fact of Bone’s broadly centralising agenda. This back-of-the-envelope approach pleased no-one and ultimately laid the ground for the later reforms of the 1830s.

  It seemed as though the problems with reintegrating France would inevitably take second place to the issues arising in the east: would the German alliance accept this restoration? Would they accept peace? At what cost? In particular there was the unpredictable Francis II of Austria, who would clearly like to see Paris burned to the ground. There were even murmurs of discontent back in London, as the city slowly rose once more from the ashes under Churchill’s domineering but decisive rule as Lord Protector, and the boy king Frederick II returned from America. Would Britain be drawn into a war against her former coalition allies in defence of a France made up mostly of the sort of people who had burned her capital? Freewheeling out of all control, with many of the provisions of her Bill of Rights suspended, anything could happen in Britain if such an outrage were to be promulgated. Ironically, at a time when Louis XVII was seeking to bring British constitutionalism to France, Churchill’s heavy-handed approach was bringing French absolutism to Britain.

  But, of course, even as the would-be opponents drew up in their battle lines and began to eye one another, events overtook them.

  Like all the French troops in the east, Marshal Boulanger’s Grande Armée, still consisting of 80,000 men even after its losses in Flanders, received a semaphore message in late July about the quiet revolution in Paris and how the King had taken up his crown once more. The message, which had been composed after some consideration on the part of its writers, emphasised the fact that Louis was merciful and had already pardoned Bourcier for his actions during the Revolution and allowed him to keep his general’s rank.

  Boulanger sat tiredly in his tent on the night of July 31st after the battlefield of Cambrai and looked for the next strategic point he might find at which to delay the grinding advance of the armies of the emerging Concert of Germany. He read the message by flickering candlelight…

  *

  From: “LE SOLDAT: Pierre Boulanger, A Life” by Michel Chanson, 1830—

  I approached the Marshal at midnight, expecting as usual to have to persuade him to catch a few hours’ sleep in order to be his best in the morning. Although he had thrown back the Hessians and Hanoverians at Cambrai, it could not be long before the Germans attacked once more, and we needed our miracle worker to be there for us, not obsessing over what might have been. It was a new and unwelcome aspect to his character, but then, how often had the great Boulanger ever enjoyed anything other than strategic brilliance? The spectre of Brussels haunted us all, but none more so than our leader.

  However, I found Pierre reading and re-reading a scrap of telegraph paper, his bloodshot eyes blank as though staring at something far away. Fearful, and noting the paper bore the mark designating it was for general distribution, I took it from his unresisting fingers. I wondered what might provoke such shock; I would have thought a death in the family, but Pierre had never married and his parents had died years before. There were those strange rumours from Paris of course, but–

  I still remember the feeling that came over me when I looked at the paper and took in the fact that the usual stamp at the top was different. Someone at the office had turned it upside down, so the fleur-de-lys was now in its ancien position once more! My first thought was actually to laugh at the irony of the inept clerk and how someone paranoid like Robespierre would have had him shot for being ‘impure’. It never entered my wildest dreams that it might have been deliberate.

  Then I actually read the semaphore note and found myself in the same position as the Marshal. I blinked, read and re-read it. It was impossible, a bizarre fantasy. L’Administrateur dead? No – not dead, but vanished? Bourcier having taken over? The King having returned?!

  “This is ridiculous,” I said aloud.

  “No,” said a husky voice, and I was shocked to find it was Pierre. “It is incredible. Yet it is true. A rider came up from Paris a few hours ago and confirmed it. A good man, a trustworthy one. The things in that message,” he tapped it with the captured Spanish Kleinkrieger’s dagger he used to open envelopes, “have happened.”

  I remember shaking my head, trying to fit my mind around these impossibilities, not sure whether I even wanted to. “But… what are we to do?” I gabbled. “It talks of returning to Paris while they attempt to talk peace with the Germans! And if they do not succeed, we are to join up with the traitors and the English!” The very idea turned my stomach.

  Pierre nodded, his cheeks hollow. This campaign had been hell on him; through his own inner taskmaster, he had suffered scarcely less than the privates harried by German horse on the long retreat. “It is madness.”

  Then, to my astonishment, he opened his mouth and let out a croaking chuckle. “Madness…” he repeated slowly, and then abruptly leapt to his feet, in one second regaining all the energy and vitality that had fled him since the debacle of Brussels. He tossed the thin telegraph paper in the air, and with one stroke of his Spanish dagger, cleaved it in two. “This is FRANCE!”

  He spun towards me and spoke in a manner more rapid-fire than any prototype revolving pistol. I knew he was just sounding his thoughts at me, as he had so many times in the past, and I felt a faint glimmer of hope and excitement. The world had been turned upside down, but Marshal Boulanger was back.

  “Michel,” he said, “we are both children of the Revolution, you and I.” He shook his head wearily as he thought back. “I was a baker’s son. Under the old regime, I would have died a baker. If I had joined King Louis’ army, I might have made sergeant if I was lucky.”

  I nodded along, uncertain where he was going with this.

  “And you, Michel,” he added. “You were what, a clerk?”

  “In the Comptroller-General’s office,” I agreed. “Too junior for even Robespierre to put on a list, fortunately.”

  The Marshal smiled weakly. “And isn’t that it,” he said. “Under the old regime, I would have had to bow and scrape to you, a lowly tradesman to a clerk of the state. But now I command all France’s armies, for better or for worse,” he turned bitter as Brussels reared its ugly head once more, “and you are my subordinate, because it turns out that I have a talent at this.”

  He waved his dagger around to illustrate his comments, a little alarmingly. “That’s a talent I’d never have discovered, under the old regime.” He looked down for a moment. “How many lowly sons do you think never reached their full potential over the years? How many died doing the same as their fathers always did because there was nothing else they could do? For that matter, how many aristocrats spent their time in idle decadence when a talent might be concealed within? Think how many great generals drawn from the nobility served the kings of the past. And those aristocratic commanders who were useless – they would have had other talents hidden within, at a trade perhaps, the sort of thing nobles do not do under the old regime.”

  He looked my way again. “They’re bringing it back, Michel,” he said bleakly. “They’re bringing it back, and now everyone will go back into their little box and be told to shut up and be happy while they c
lean up the mess.”

  His words were powerful, but I shook my head slowly. “Bourcier has kept his job–” I began.

  “Olivier!” Boulanger said in sudden fury, throwing down his dagger as I flinched. It stuck in the stony ground beneath the tent and vibrated for a moment with a metallic sound. “Olivier! The young colonel who I promoted for what he did on the drive to Vienna! And how does he repay me? With this!” He pounded his fist on the table. “Michel, I doubt they would grant me my life. I am too… central to the legend. But even if they do, I would not take it. I will not cravenly keep what I have fought for and then allow them to put back the system so that all the bakers’ sons with a hidden talent who come after me will die poor and unhappy. To do that would be like the first Frankish warriors who came to our country, who fought and worked hard and gained positions of power for themselves, and then told their people that that was an end to that sort of thing, and from now on their sons would inherit it regardless of their merits.” He shook his head firmly. “I am not going to do that, Michel.”