Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  And so, the terrible fiasco of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War unfolded. For those brought up on the magic deeds of earlier struggles, the innumerable engravings and popular tales of Admirals Tromp and de Ruyter, it was too much to bear. The British swiftly swept up Dutch ships and colonies, and destroyed the boom entrepôt of St Eustatius, which has not troubled history further. The antiquated Dutch navy was simply unable to risk its total destruction and stayed in harbour, allowing the British to blockade the coast and wreck the Dutch economy. The only plus was that the disappearance of Virginian tobacco gave a brief and highly delusive boost to Dutch tobacco. In 1782 the Dutch Republic became the second country, after France, to recognize the United States.

  The Austrian Netherlands took advantage of this struggle to end the ancient Barrier Treaty with the Dutch, kicking out their garrisons and demolishing the forts. The forts were useless in any event – a victim of the same malaise that meant the Dutch could not pay for anything else. Normally the British would have objected vociferously, as the Barrier was central to their Continental policy against France, but this obviously was unlikely to happen given that the British were fighting the Dutch too. The Austrian Netherlands therefore gained what proved to be a very short period of full if local sovereignty at last.

  The independence of the United States, finally agreed to in 1783, was an odd result for the French. Versailles could not have been more buckled-shoes/gateaux-in-the-shape-of-palaces/tinkly music, a queasy blend of self-indulgence and frosty protocol. There must have been more than one beautifully manicured hand drumming on a cherry-wood desk in some impatience, mulling over the fact that France had lost thousands of troops and bankrupted itself to help bring into being a huge new republic, already much larger in area than it and standing between France and its rickety, thinly held colony on the Mississippi. In even the short term the British seemed oddly undamaged by this – certainly humiliated, but with the rest of their empire intact and with continuing cultural, linguistic and financial links to the United States which France could not break. It was though the republican bit that was most striking. Republics had been small historical oddities – the Swiss, stagnant Venice, some bits of religious obscurantism inside the Holy Roman Empire such as the Abbey of Essen – and now they suddenly seemed chic, big scale and workable. As the Dutch wound up their war with the British, they looked askance too at the hapless William V, who while not a monarch was, as hereditary Stadtholder, close enough. He was so widely despised that he managed to be both personally against the war and yet blamed for its disasters. Before the end of the decade, the overwhelming implications of these events would sweep up first the Dutch and then the French and a new era would begin.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Heroic and ominous » ‘The old times have gone’ » The great French gingerbread-baker » Armies of the Ocean Coast » Europe reordered » ‘What is there to fear if you are a slave?’

  Heroic and ominous

  In 1781, through sheer bad luck, one of the great unintentionally comic figures of the eighteenth century decided to visit Ghent. The Emperor Joseph II was absolutely in earnest about everything he did but, like a Habsburg Monsieur Hulot, left a trail of chaos behind him. The vagaries of death dates and Salic law meant that he inherited from his father Francis I the role of Emperor in 1765 but continued under the watchful eye of his mother, the wise and experienced Maria Theresa, for a further fifteen years as she ruled the Habsburg lands, sometimes allowing him to help for an afternoon just to be kind. Joseph emerged from this unlooked-for tutelage in a rage of thwarted energy. It was probably fair to say that his mother’s court had become rather old-fashioned by the end (a sort of wilderness of hassocks, incense, spindly, flower-motif chairs and singing children) and Joseph, once off the leash, set out to drag this inheritance into the fresh air. A devout Catholic, Joseph wished to axe what he viewed as all the uselessness and mummery of the rococo Church. He ejected monks from their monasteries and turned the buildings into schools; he kept up a quixotic battle with Tyrolean Christmas-crib-makers; he yearned for his subjects to be ‘useful’ and to shock them into becoming devoted servants of his state.

  It had never crossed his mother’s mind as a good use of her time to visit the Austrian Netherlands, but Joseph was different. Characteristically he had two contradictory projects in mind. One was to drag the province from its priest-ridden, obscurantist mire and make it into a wealthy, humming part of the Empire. The other was to get rid of it completely, swapping it for Bavaria, which was experiencing inheritance problems of a kind that made it vulnerable to its incorporation in the Habsburg lands. In 1781 he arrived in Ghent, having already left a long trail of outraged feelings and bafflement behind him. As was traditional he went to St Bavo’s to see the Adoration of the Sacred Lamb – and was appalled. Van Eyck’s extraordinary figures of Adam and Eve (naked as per Genesis) struck him as obscene. Tangled in his own sexual misery, Joseph seems to have had a sort of breakdown in the face of these admittedly harshly, near medically nude figures. He commanded that they should be repainted but in animal furs (i.e. as per a bit later in Genesis). Luckily he wanted fresh panels done rather than getting a modern painter to treat them like paper dollies and stick clothes on the originals. The result was magnificently silly, with Eve in a proto-mini-skirt and the two of them transformed from being the burdened, austere parents of humankind into Flintstones swingers.1

  This sort of plunging, chaotic intervention wrecked all Joseph’s initiatives. Nobody thought the Bavaria swap was a good idea and ultimately a coalition of smaller states plus Prussia prevented it. By then Joseph had long lost patience with the Austrian Netherlands. He had banned gambling, closed down over a hundred and fifty monasteries, dumped a whole range of attractively old-fashioned religious practices and drawn universal hatred on himself. He railed against ‘provincial dullards governed by women and monks’ and attacked Flemish speakers as ‘narrow-minded … obstinate … lunatics … idiots’. He seems to have entirely failed to notice that places such as Namur and Brussels were growing and industrializing in a British way (as was Liège, in the neighbouring diocese). The British were mischievously involved, encouraging Joseph to force the opening of the still-closed Scheldt just to wind up the Dutch (the farcical ‘Kettle War’). Indeed, the British became strongly in favour of Joseph’s rule and against the Bavarian swap for the unacknowledged reason that continuing Habsburg incompetence in Flanders was just right for them. Being treated in this way – patronized, bullied, derided and viewed as something to be swapped – the inhabitants in the end revolted, inspired by the French Revolution. Within weeks all the provinces except Luxembourg had expelled Habsburg power and Liège had chased out its prince-bishop and become a republic. On 11 January 1790 the United States of Belgium was declared, news of which reached Joseph in Vienna as he was dying of TB contracted while fighting the Turks at the other end of his now collapsing empire.

  The Belgian recoil from Joseph’s poorly thought through ideas of modernity was increasingly national but also wholeheartedly Catholic and viewed with bafflement and distaste by more radical neighbours. The situation in the Dutch Republic in the same decade had, in the wake of the tremendous strain and humiliation of the war with Britain, resulted in a left-wing revolution in 1787 as the Patriot party ejected the weakened and periwigged Orangists, with William V fleeing across the Channel, using I think the very same beach outside The Hague that Charles II had used in a more positive and exciting context in 1660. Tragically both Patriots and Orangists viewed the values and decisions of the other as the reason for Dutch shame and each could create narratives where they alone were the true inheritors of the heroes who fought the wars with Spain (Wedgwood’s factory made a lot of money from selling the appropriate commemorative china figurines of William III, de Witt etc. to both sides).

  As the area weakened and become more unstable and incoherent it oddly became absorbed again by the Holy Roman Empire. The Austrian Netherlands had never left it, but to the horror of
the new Dutch Republic a fresh page in its abasement was turned by the invasion in 1787 of a Prussian army led by the Duke of Brunswick, a German who had been for many years William V’s adviser. Having successfully fended off the Spanish for eighty years, the Dutch now found that the Orangist-backing Prussians were able to cross the country and reach the sea in about four weeks. In 1789 a Prussian army under Brunswick crushed the newly declared Republic of Liège and in 1790 an Austrian army ended the United States of Belgium, the Habsburg Empire having immediately regained its sense of purpose and ruthlessness under Joseph’s younger brother, Leopold II. These were all traditional Reichsexekutionen: Imperial interventions to re-impose ‘order’, loosely defined. The Liège and USB actions post-dated the most important event of all – the French Revolution. But the Revolution was itself created in part by the sense of total shame and failure in Paris at seeing France’s ally, the Dutch Republic, overrun by the Prussians without even consulting what was meant to be Europe’s premier state.

  The pace of change was now simply extraordinary. The opening phase of the French Revolution was generally met with pleasure – for good reasons (a New Dawn) and bad (British glee at what appeared to be the total collapse of their generations-long enemy). In many ways the fizzing hysteria of the next few years bursts the bounds of this book. Everywhere had its weeks of excitement/terror/betrayal/recrimination. Decisions and loyalties which seemed rational one day became fatal the next. Society after society became shaken apart, each town suffering its own mini-drama. Just in the Austrian Netherlands, the process which caused revolution in 1790 resulted in an Austrian army restoring order, followed by a French invasion in November 1792 that expelled the Allies (the Battle of Jemappes), a counterattack in March 1793 that expelled the French (the Battle of Neerwinden) and a further and (as it turned out) decisive French invasion in June 1794 that resulted in the province becoming part of France (the Battle of Fleurus).2 These repeatedly shook to pieces every social assumption. All the little town halls, guilds and civic militias lay in ruins and the habits of obedience, heredity and order were lost. By the time of Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 an entire generation had grown up who simply could not understand what the ‘periwig’ obedience and hierarchy of the eighteenth century had meant.

  With the French royal family trapped in the Tuileries palace in 1792, the allies and aristocratic émigrés clustered along the Rhine decided that the invasion of France could not be delayed and were buoyed up by the ease with which invasions had been so readily achieved in the Dutch Republic, Liège and the Austrian Netherlands. The Duke of Brunswick was once more in charge and put his name to an unhelpfully apocalyptic manifesto that stated that if a hair on the head of the royal family was harmed Paris would cease to exist.

  We have the great good luck that Goethe was in the Allied invasion army (as was a young Kleist) and wrote an account, The Campaign in France, which captures the chaos and horror of the proceedings brilliantly. It is also unintentionally funny about him – with his leather-doored coach and carefully cut out little paper maps of each campaign. He knows very well that he is Germany’s Mr Famous and between the lines there is some amazing special pleading and scrounging. One can imagine that he left a bitter trail behind him of soldiers, servants and inn-keepers swearing never to read The Sorrows of Young Werther again. But their rage is our gain as Goethe records the creeping unease of the Allies marching west into an unrecognizably strange France. Very early on this is shown in the devastating Siege of Verdun, held by a revolutionary garrison and with the Allies effectively destroying the town to force its surrender. In an unprecedented gesture, the French commandant commits suicide; a captured soldier kills himself by throwing himself off a bridge (‘heroic and ominous’ as Goethe called it). This was not the sort of choreographed, ‘reasonable’ fighting which had in some measure prevailed in the eighteenth century. It was also impossible not to be appalled by the news from Paris, where the Tuileries palace had been stormed, the royal family imprisoned and hundreds of their Swiss bodyguards slaughtered.3

  As Goethe negotiated with various military couriers to take back to Germany for him boxes of looted Verdun sugar-plums, extraordinary scenes were unfolding in Paris, with thousands of volunteers (whipped up by Danton’s ‘Audacity! Always audacity’) pouring in from the provinces to take on the lumbering Allied army. Even worse, back in April Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, sitting in Strasbourg, had written what would become the ‘Marseillaise’, that sinister precursor to the frenzies of nineteenth-century opera. Nobody had really sung in public before about the desirability of soaking France’s fields with the enemy’s blood. Although it should really be called the ‘Strasbourgeoise’, it was carried to Paris by Marseilles volunteers answering the call and ever since they have had the credit.

  Goethe picked up a recent copy of the Paris newspaper Le Moniteur which gloatingly stated: ‘The Prussians may reach Paris, but they will not leave’. In scenes reminiscent of Charles the Bold heading towards the Swiss cantons, the Duke of Brunswick marched into disaster. At the Battle of Valmy it proved completely impossible to break the French lines. Even if the Allies had done so, they were now massively outnumbered, under-supplied and marooned in hostile territory – had they somehow reached Paris they were not remotely equipped to besiege it, let alone, as Brunswick had once suggested, erase it. In pouring rain (which Brunswick blamed for the fiasco – and which certainly did not help), the Allies turned back. It turned out to be a little under twenty-two years before they would return.

  ‘The old times have gone’

  The ecclesiastical Electors along the Rhine had a fantastic time in the wake of the French Revolution, a frenzy of enjoyment before their world disappeared for ever. Long used to being somewhat disregarded backwaters, Trier, Mainz and Cologne filled up in 1789 with frightened, vengeful and confused French émigrés. There was also the double-dip fun of two Imperial elections in quick succession, with Leopold II crowned in October 1790, dying fifteen months later, and his son, Francis II, crowned in July 1792. This was a disaster for the Empire as Leopold was exactly the sort of experienced, pragmatic and clever leader the Allies needed and his death left behind a pretty sorry bunch. The hysterical, freewheeling dynamism of the Revolutionaries and then of Napoleon was genuine, but it was also made possible by the accident of duff, charisma-free opponents. For the ecclesiastical Electors however, it was all too good to be true – vast, elaborate ceremonies, crates of incense, the best china, top-drawer house guests. This mêlée of Imperial dignitaries and angry French émigrés was unique. Francis’s coronation proved to be a last hurrah, but at the time it seemed to show the robust nature of Imperial life and be a model of decorum, protocol and tradition to set against the Paris funny-farm.

  Klemens Wenzeslaus of Trier was Louis XVI’s uncle and his territories, particularly the city of Koblenz, were overrun with French aristocrats. Friedrich Karl of Mainz was frenziedly opposed to the Revolution and his extensive palaces were soon also turned into a bedlam of aristocrat spongers and weirdos who were not used to earning a living but who, cut off from their estates, soon ran out of money. In a move that destabilized the entire region’s credit, they increasingly issued ‘assignats’, which promised future payment by Louis XVI. The initial warm welcome became increasingly strained as mobs of aristos and their increasingly desperate dependants day after day cleared the ham from Friedrich Karl’s to-start-with generous buffets. He became ever more upset as his very small tax base failed and unemployed Frenchmen trampled all over his pretty riverside gardens and stole his silverware.

  Nonetheless Mainz and Trier had never been more glamorous, with the Emperor, the King of Prussia and any number of Imperial figures major and minor. The émigrés included the future Louis XVIII and Charles X, who stayed for a while in the monastery attached to the wonderfully zany Trier church of St Maximin. One of the great oddities of this period was that Louis XVI himself, as head of the French state, was obliged at the end of 1791 to decry Friedrich Karl
and Klemens Wenzeslaus for treacherously harbouring the enemies of France, such as his own brothers. The archbishop-electors were, against the backdrop of the unfolding disaster at Valmy, living on borrowed time and after the chaotic retreat, the Count of Custine’s French Revolutionary army swept through Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Frankfurt in the autumn.