by Simon Winder
Goethe gives a startling description of the post-Valmy shambles, dwelling on the awful details that attend defeat: desperate horsemen riding their coaches over the bodies of dying horses; blacksmiths frantically trying to fix broken axletrees; Goethe himself trapped in a great wallow of red mud (where he felt like Pharaoh in the Red Sea); wounded, looters and the infected ill staggering about in the endless rain; starving troops leaving heaps of dead horses by the roadside with strips of flesh torn from them with bayonets; dead troops stripped naked for their uniforms. The Allies marched back into the devastated remains of Verdun less than six weeks after they had so gleefully headed out of it. Goethe talks about the conflicts of loyalty that would now be the defining horror of European life for a generation: the fates of those who cheer the wrong side: the families ruined by a single incautious gesture; the families thrown out of their homes by the failure to make that same gesture. He also describes the hatred now felt for the French émigrés (their ‘mischief, insolence and waste’) as their credit collapsed, ruining stables, inns and dressmakers and wiping out pro-royal goodwill across the Palatinate and Rhineland.
More or less by accident Mainz became in the following year the focus of Europe’s hopes and fears. Easily captured by the French during the post-Valmy chaos, it became the Republic of Mainz, filled with French troops but also with excited pro-Revolution German ‘Clubbists’. These included the very wonderful Georg Forster, who had accompanied his father as the botanist on Captain Cook’s second voyage, written a magical account of his experiences, been the inspiration for the young Alexander von Humboldt and was almost certainly the only Mainz insurrectionary to have personally seen the sea-ice fields of the Southern Ocean. The siege was one of the first major shows of strength in the wake of the killing of the French royal family in January and Goethe’s account has an unmistakable sense of Europe’s now wading into something like Brueghel’s Triumph of Death – a vast and seemingly endless contest between two sides who to win must be willing to destroy everything. In three ruinous months Mainz was essentially burned flat, with the huge cathedral’s bulk making it an easy target for banks of Allied cannon. To conserve food, the Clubbists expelled all women and children across the Rhine and the city as an Imperial, ecclesiastical, artistic centre effectively came to an end (‘Ashes and ruins were all that was left of what it had cost centuries to build up’).
Eventually the French surrendered, their troops marching out west under condition of not fighting the Allies for a year (they were used to crush the counter-revolution in western France instead), singing the now already rather gratingly over-familiar ‘Marseillaise’. A stream of carriages followed, carefully picked over by the Allies hunting for Clubbists (Forster had gone to Paris, where he died of rheumatic fever in January during the Terror). The French deputy Merlin de Thionville, as he was leaving, stopped and addressed the furious anti-Revolutionary crowd, pointing out that it would best for everyone just to stay quiet and not look for vengeance, as they would all be held responsible when the French returned, very shortly.
The subsequent course of the war bursts this book’s banks. The Austrian Netherlands became definitively French after the Battle of Fleurus in June 1794. Antwerp became Anvers, Brussels Bruxelles, Ghent Gant, Mechelen Malines, Leuven Louvain. Just as terrible rain had played into Revolutionary hands at Valmy, so at the end of 1794 disaster struck Dutch royalists as their traditional defences, the great river systems, all froze solid and a French army simply marched unimpeded from south to north with somewhat cold feet and hooves. Stadtholder William V fled by fishing-boat to England, dying there unmourned eleven years later. The old Dutch Republic, that had reshaped Europe and much of the world, that had once provoked more expiatory pilgrimages and angry scenes in confessionals in Spanish ruling circles than any other country, now came to an end.
The west bank of the Rhine was occupied definitively by the French in the autumn of that year. Mainz became Mayence; Speyer Spire; Koblenz Coblence; Aachen Aix-la-Chapelle. In 1797 the great magic circle of fire the Swiss had successfully put around themselves, based on military heroics from many generations before, sputtered and went out. Their independence was swept aside under conditions of absolute humiliation. Among the many wonders being carted to Paris were the poor bears from the Bern bear-pits. There remains in Bern today a wistful little monument: a bear cub, left behind by the French, stuffed and equipped with a tiny sword and laurel-wreath and holding a little shield inscribed: The old times have gone 1798.
The great French gingerbread-baker
It is tempting to start talking about Napoleon, but the dilemmas of the era are just as readily dramatized through the figure of the Abbé Grégoire. Born in the Duchy of Lorraine under the reign of Stanisław Leszczyński, he was elected on behalf of the clerical estates of Nancy to go to the Estates-General meeting in Paris which initiated the Revolution. His achievements were many and extraordinary, perhaps the least of which was the invention of the word ‘vandalism’ to describe what the Revolution was doing to Europe’s art. He was a republican, a hater of privilege, in favour of the abolition of the monarchy and of Louis XVI’s trial. He helped found the Institut de France, he was in favour of universal suffrage and crucial in developing new arguments against slavery and against anti-Jewish and anti-black discrimination.
What could the anti-Revolutionary Allies do against such a man? He manages to be both a highly attractive and thoroughly sinister figure, but his beliefs meant ruin for the powdered types who had once so confidently gathered at Mainz. As the French rolled out their new ideas and practices across Europe, the world of Stanisław Leszczyński quickly came to seem palsied and remote and the Allied heads of state mere panicked sheep. Napoleon systematized and fixed in place the French Empire (which Grégoire voted against) but intellectually most of the heavy lifting had already been done. It found, as in Mainz, many supporters across Europe, some creepy and opportunistic but many simply excited to wave goodbye to the old patchwork of privileges, exemptions and oddities.
The French task was also much helped by the creepy and opportunistic nature of its opponents. The Prussians, Russians and Habsburgs may have been proclaiming legitimacy, decency and old-school standards but they were in practice just as wolfish as anyone else. Others watched in disgusted amazement as they carried out the final partition of Poland in October 1795, the end of a generation-long process of destroying one of Europe’s great states. They all greedily increased their holdings and Prussia gave itself for the first time a long land border with Russia, an almost unnoticed decision which would have world-changing implications. Everything seemed up for grabs, from a legitimist just as much as a revolutionary point of view. The Habsburgs agreed in 1797 to acknowledge French rule over the Austrian Netherlands and in return were tossed Venice – another of Europe’s most ancient, grand states (but with Napoleon having already picked it over for artworks, including – a gratuitous piece of information but it is my favourite painting – Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, conveniently accessible in the Louvre as a result). The disappearance of Venice filled the Dutch with horror. The two states had always matched each other – one maritime republic in the Mediterranean, the other in the North Sea. The Dutch suddenly felt very vulnerable – and would indeed, after a short period as a kingdom under the rule of Napoleon’s younger brother Louis (or, temporarily, Lodewijk), end up as a mere northern part of France (with ’s-Hertogenbosch Bois-le-Duc; Nijmegen Nimegue, etc.).
One of the great commentators on these years was the splenetic and very funny British cartoonist James Gillray. He had always portrayed the world as a sort of chimps’ tea-party, and professionally could not believe his luck with the arrival of the French Revolution and then Napoleon. You can sense his almost gagging with happy disgust as each further degradation and brutality kicked in. It was all a tremendous upgrade from having to hate the French just because they were Catholic and ate frogs. In the palace museum at Rastatt someone has recently had the superb idea of taking
one of Gillray’s greatest cartoons and blowing it up to fill an entire wall, printing it on cloth. It was in this palace in 1797 that the serious business of ‘compensation’ began to be discussed by the princes of the Empire now that so many of them were losing their properties to the west of the Rhine. Gillray’s cartoon of 1806 shows the culmination of the horse-trading and bad faith which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire. A little Napoleon (Gillray always showed Napoleon as little, but he was in fact a perfectly normal height) in outsize hat and boots is shown as ‘the Great French Gingerbread-Baker’, taking from the oven little gilded gingerbread new monarchs: the King of Württemberg, the King of Bavaria and the Grand Duke of Baden, decked out in trashy cake decorations from a bag Napoleon has on the floor: tiny crowns, sceptres, etc. In the background Talleyrand is kneading the dough, helped by a Prussian eagle. Fuelling the oven is a pile of easily flammable garbage that has been swept there: a fat-bottomed Dutch doll, a skull with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, a dirty piece of flag from the French Republic. Behind him is a wicker basket filled with ‘True Corsican Kinglings for Home Consumption and Export’. There are endless funny details, made more visible when blown up to wall-size: on a side table there are some ‘Little Dough Viceroys’ waiting to be baked, including Gillray’s lifelong bugbear Charles James Fox, whose early enthusiasm for the French Revolution had previously led Gillray to draw him on numerous fun occasions as a regicidal poltroon and traitor.
Napoleon’s genius lay in nudging everybody who had any power into helping themselves to weaker elements in the Empire. Nobody could hold back, but by grabbing that monastery or those pretty vineyards, they were not only agreeing to France’s eternal ownership of the Left Bank, but making Napoleon the sole real guarantor of their own new holdings. If the Austrians conceded the southern Netherlands to France in return for getting a cheerful place like Venice for themselves, they effectively admitted that Napoleon was the arbiter of anything that attracted his gaze anywhere in Europe. This was much more poisonous and deep-rooted than simply losing a battle and giving territory to the victor. Prussia waved goodbye to Jülich and gained Essen, but at what cost? Everywhere ancient families in their tiny castles and ecclesiastical oddities dating back to the Carolingians found themselves dispossessed. Nothing about this process was progressive let alone revolutionary as these bits of Toyland were simply being gorged on by other, luckier, equally feudal characters. One of the great beneficiaries was Baden, which went from being a classic sad patchwork to a compact, plausible state, absorbing Konstanz, Freiburg and the Black Forest as well as the territories on the Right Bank that had belonged to the Bishops of Speyer, Strasbourg and Basle. Its Grand Duke, Charles Frederick, who had started off as plain little Margrave of Baden-Durlach, died in 1811 at just the right point, having quadrupled his territory and created a magnificent inheritance for his successor, who then had to deal with such unhappy bills-falling-due issues as the death of thousands of his subjects fighting in Russia and Germany for Napoleon.
The genius of Gillray’s cartoon is to show these new monarchs not just as gilded bits of cake, but as passively plopped down on Napoleon’s baking paddle. It shows how it would be the easiest gesture in the world for him to tip them into the ‘Ash-Hole’ with other regimes that had failed him. The fast-forward atmosphere of life in Napoleon’s Europe was exemplified in 1804 by his crowning himself Emperor of the French. In a blind panic (there can only be one emperor) the Habsburg family scrambled to get all their Holy Roman regalia out of Regensburg and safely stowed in Vienna where the Emperor Francis II rustled up the new title of Emperor of Austria as, confusingly, Francis I. Both Napoleon and Franz could draw on the Treaty of Verdun as the French and German inheritors of Charlemagne, although Napoleon had pole position in now owning Aachen and the Rhineland imperial sites. The Holy Roman Empire, with its ancient, confused roots, was at an end and the Habsburgs reduced to being a regional power, albeit a very large one. Their centuries-long role in Western Europe now stopped. If German-speakers were no longer living in a patchwork quilt of small-to-medium polities, then what should be the replacement? Who now owned the quilt? Effectively people have been writing in with answers on a postcard ever since, with sometimes dire results.
The immediate solution was the Confederation of the Rhine of 1806, by which Napoleon began to call in favours from his brittle little gingerbread friends. It was through the Confederation that over a hundred thousand of its most luckless inhabitants found themselves marching into Russia, together with some twenty-five thousand from the Low Countries. The jaw-dropping sequence of events that began with the Grande Armée crossing into the Russian Empire on 24 June 1812 and ended with the Battle of the Nations outside Leipzig less than sixteen months later destroyed Napoleon’s Empire. It also pitted ‘his’ Germans against the Germans fighting with the Sixth Coalition forces, both sides thinking of themselves as standing for truth and justice. For the first time Prussia and Austria were entirely eastern forces, facing a Confederation of the Rhine allied to France. The Confederation marked yet another, as it turned out, transient phase in shaking the Rhineland to bits and nobody, from the Swiss cantons to the North Sea, could have any idea what the right political order really ought to be.
Nationalism was the obvious answer, but this presupposed clear, crisply defined blocks of homogeneity, with no mixing of language or religion or custom and a smooth relationship between town and country, none of which existed anywhere. The Abbé Grégoire had once thought about this a lot. Looking at Revolutionary France’s now complete ownership of Alsace, Saint-Just had said that Alsatian women should be forced to remove their traditional bonnets as these were ‘not French’. Grégoire had gone further: the German ‘patois’ spoken by so many Alsatians was itself unacceptable. Indeed all non-French speakers – Basque, Breton, Flemish – were, simply through speaking or writing, disloyal. French citizenship could only be expressed in the French language. The stage was being set for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Armies of the Ocean Coast
The fate of Calais has not lost its power to shock. It was one of the string of coastal towns – with Boulogne, Dunkirk, Middelburg and Rotterdam – where, during a few weeks in the summer of 1940, the full impact of new aerial technology showed itself in the West. Calais was then also repeatedly bombed in 1944 by the Allies, leaving a town which has almost nothing to indicate that it was once ancient and complex. Outside the old centre there are a couple of striking things, most immediately the colossal late-nineteenth-century town hall, its architecture of neo-Assyrian-Venetian-Byzantine-Burgundian inspiration, with a bit of LSD thrown in, making any sane viewer question the whole idea of civic government. There is also Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1895), now positioned in front of it, seemingly to create a dialogue about the merits and demerits of nineteenth-century aesthetics. Of course, the Rodin wins – not only as a monument to Calais’s epic siege by the English during the Hundred Years War but, inevitably, as an accidental preview of Europe’s terrible future, the six anguished figures having more in common with the 1940s than the 1340s, and looking almost unrelated to the bourgeois stolidity of the 1890s, when the sculpture was loathed by all those who had commissioned it.
While central Calais cannot escape being a place that has been pounded into the ground and then hastily rebuilt, it remains also unavoidably exciting, because it is a port, with beaches, moles, cranes, seawalls and the frequent, magic spectacle of ferries manoeuvring into terrifyingly restricted harbours. Seeing the colossal Côte des Flandres churning and hooting away, crazily out of scale with its surrounding buildings, en route to Dover, made me wonder if I should simply get a flat in Calais and spend my days sitting on its balcony, flanked by machines that delivered cans of beer to one hand and bowls of nuts to the other, just staring at ferries.
This is by way of preamble to mention an elegant column, topped with a bobble, on the harbour front. The column only survived the Second World War because of the transformation of Calais i
n the autumn of 1939 – huge modernizing works were carried out to allow a constant flow of British troops and matériel into France. The column was taken away for safe-keeping and re-emerged after 1945 as almost the sole decorative survivor. It commemorates what could be seen as one of the most politically freighted moments of the nineteenth century, when on 24 April 1814, King Louis XVIII stepped back onto French soil. Days before, Napoleon had signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, resigning as Emperor and going into exile on Elba. The monument has an engagingly kitschy bronze royal footprint decorated with fleurs-de-lis and announces that it was here that Louis ‘finally returned to the love of the French’. It was more than twenty-one years since his elder brother had been executed in Paris. His own age, bulk, habits and realism accidentally made him an ideal returning king, even if he had to flee again indecorously less than a year later, this time to Ghent, returning once more after Waterloo had been won.
That Louis should have landed at Calais was symbolically perfect. The story in the west of the previous two decades had in many ways been that of how two opponents – Britain and France – tried but could not get to grips with each other. Other enemies the French could deal with, but Britain remained out of reach. Equally Britain – while it handed out huge sums of money to Continental allies so that they could be beaten again by Napoleon a bit later on – could never work out the means to land anything more than glancing blows itself. From Calais, the two great adversaries could on a clear day see each other across the Strait, but neither could come up with a winning plan. Both sides massively fortified their most vulnerable point – the hulk of the Fort de l’Heurt can still be seen on a shoal off the beach at Boulogne, a monstrous eroded block built by Napoleon, used as an anti-aircraft platform by the Germans and eaten away by countless storms into its current, surreal shape. Control of the Strait remained for years the central issue. The British had the advantage that their security always lay in their navy and could therefore focus purely on turning out heaps of ships, crewed by sailors from the kingdoms’ innumerable harbours. The French, as was traditional, had to split their resources, in the end always plumping for their land army – but therefore ensuring British supremacy at sea.
