Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  In 1797 the French forced the Dutch to send out what proved to be their final fleet, devastated by the British at the Battle of Camperdown and bringing down the curtain on a once heroic naval power. In the summer of 1799 Holland became the scene of an extraordinary Anglo-Russian invasion led by the Duke of York. Some forty thousand troops marched down the blameless North Holland peninsula hoping that the supporters of the exiled Stadtholder would rise up and that the French army would somehow not notice. It suffered the traditional fate of amphibious forces: a few days of success just from surprise, followed by the entire power of a Continent-wide empire rallying itself very slightly to shake the intruders off. The invasion’s only success was to destroy a last, desperate attempt to rebuild the Dutch navy – but it also raised unresolvably horrible issues for the Dutch, for whom no plausible independence seemed possible ever again.

  The conundrum of London and Paris continued to play out for years, both on a global scale (with the British passing the time by gradually taking all the Dutch and French colonies) and on a local one, with telescopes trained across the Strait for a generation. In 1803 Napoleon began a serious and sustained attempt to invade. The ideally named Army of the Ocean Coasts sprawled along nine miles of encampments, backed by huge supply dumps at Amiens, Arras and elsewhere. With all the coast under French control and the Scheldt open for shipping, the now ancient and emaciated port of Antwerp became a major potential asset – ‘a pistol pointed at the heart of England’ as Napoleon gleefully pointed out – and work began on the Bonaparte Dock, which is still there. To whip up enthusiasm for the invasion, Napoleon put the Bayeux Tapestry on display in Paris, showing how it was done. The region was stripped of trees to make hundreds of invasion barges – a wonderful drawing survives showing them crowded into their special harbours, looking a bit like gaming chips. By March 1804 some hundred and twenty thousand men were encamped. A spectacular British raid on Boulogne in October, using fire-ships and ‘torpedo-catamarans’, must have looked fantastic for lucky spectators on the ramparts of the Old Town but, once the amazing bangs and sheets of flame had subsided, little damage was done.

  Napoleon had the usual problem that the eight hours or more needed to get his barges across were in military terms an age. It had to be done at night to have any chance of surprise and the night was too short in the summer, meaning the stormy horrors of a winter crossing. The risks of committing to what could readily prove just a chaotic massacre were too great. Troops rowing twenty-two miles would have in any event been totally exhausted and it was unthinkable to waste space needed for soldiers and equipment on separate teams of rowers. Tests on the barges showed they wobbled and floundered even just outside the harbour. Napoleon passed the time enjoyably, however – instituting the Légion d’Honneur in a grand ceremony at the camp outside Boulogne, and a couple of weeks later popping over to Aachen with Josephine to ponder destiny by Charlemagne’s throne. As usual he said fantastic things, perhaps best of all: ‘Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’

  As Napoleon piled up men and equipment, the British piled up fortifications, canals and weapons dumps, and Dover Castle was made invulnerable to anything except just the sort of massed heavy siege-artillery which was almost impossible to transport by sea. In a way, it was a big shame Napoleon did not try it out, as his reign might have ended in 1804. There is a similar counterfactual about Operation Sealion in 1940. The last straw was in July 1805, when the Battle of Cape Finisterre, while a draw, showed that the British navy was so powerful it was insane for thousands of seasick elite troops, exhausted from rowing, to bob about in jollyboats off Dover in the vague hope that the Royal Navy would not notice. Napoleon lost interest and marched the army off to destroy Britain’s Continental allies again. The Battle of Trafalgar then ended any future possibility of a French invasion. None of this resolved the problem of how one side was to defeat the other. It was, for both sides, like a nightmare I once had where I was somehow being forced to take a bite from a colossal apple, but it was so big that however wide I opened my jaws I could not get my teeth into its horrible flat green surface. I feel suffocated again just writing these words. The British settled on a policy of indirection, tying down French troops in Spain, a move that undoubtedly spread French troops out, but not fatally. An ambitious attempt was made to re-run the absurdities of the 1799 expedition. This time it was decided to attack Zeeland. In 1809 some forty thousand troops were landed on Walcheren. Walcheren is now simply part of the Dutch mainland, but then the Zee features of the area were much more marked, with Walcheren and its ports still an island, at the heart of the VOC network and with Middelburg a significant European town. Like the Anglo-Russian expedition, the Walcheren expedition is not part of British folk memory as it was an almost incredible shambles. The point had been to draw French troops away from Central European allies, block up the Scheldt, damage French warship construction, prevent Antwerp becoming a threat and destroy Flushing as a French base. The invasion took so long to organize that the Austrians had already been defeated by Napoleon by the time it was launched and the island proved to be merely a humiliating holding-pen in which several thousand troops could die of sickness without the French having to lift a musket.

  Some months later the force was withdrawn and the British effectively just waited for a strategy to turn up. This came in the shape of Napoleon’s pan-European invasion of Russia in 1812, its catastrophic failure, his consequent retreat and a series of annihilatory battles in Germany that broke his power. Britain was important in providing leadership, money and arms but was a bystander during these events and the Strait a military backwater, the Royal Navy patrolling the world against enemy ships that had ceased to exist. It was also plunged into a separate war with the United States. At the end of 1813 Wellington’s British-Spanish-Portuguese army emerged in south-west France, and Prussian, Russian and Austrian troops at last broke through into eastern France. Beset on every side, Napoleon gave in. Flanked by implausible young noblewomen in white dresses and holding flowers, plus a bunch of vengeful, decrepit old aristocratic roués who had frittered away their best years around Piccadilly Circus, Louis XVIII stepped ashore.

  Europe reordered

  It is unlikely that Napoleon himself particularly appreciated this, but the Battle of Waterloo was in symbolic terms the most beautifully appropriate way to end his reign. Napoleon did not stay long on his strange little principality of Elba, where he designed the Elban flag to include Childeric’s bee symbols (they remain on the flag today, ensuring that at least one little island in the Tuscan Archipelago is for ever Merovingian). His surprise return to France was dramatic but effectively pointless. Almost unlimited numbers of Austrian and Russian troops were pouring over the Rhine and would have totally engulfed him even if he had somehow won Waterloo. The symbolism of Waterloo lay in its at last providing the British with the opportunity to confront their great hate figure. As banker of the coalitions and as the most relentless of Napoleon’s enemies, Britain had of course been crucial. But, as with several of his royal French predecessors, Napoleon only had a passing interest in colonial empires and naval derring-do – in 1803 he had been perfectly happy to sell the eight hundred thousand square miles of French Louisiana to the United States. His loss of nerve with the Army of the Ocean Coasts (paid for by the Louisiana sale) showed that he could not defeat the British any more than they could him. Waterloo therefore ended everything perfectly. The Russians, Prussians and Austrians had already given him major defeats and now, outside this small Brabantine village, the British, with substantial support from the re-formed Dutch, anti-Napoleon German exiles (the King’s German Legion) and the ideally arranged arrival of the Prussians, could also feel they had a major and decisive military role, ten years after Trafalgar.

  It was therefore yet another part of Napoleon’s stylishness that, even in the manner of his defeat, as he was being packed off to the most remote spot anyone could find on a map, he was able to bring all
his enemies together in such a warm and communitarian way. For the Dutch too, their conspicuous role in the battle, marked by the heir to the throne being wounded, wiped away a generation of exile, horror and humiliation. The vast Lion’s Mound monument on the battlefield – very un-Dutch in its arrogance – has to be seen as a great sigh of relief, rather oddly expressed in thousands of tons of soil. The conclusion of the war was therefore fortunate for the Coalition and meant there was a surprising level of trust and respect between the various leaders. Just to make sure the French tried no further tricks, Wellington was put in charge of an Allied army of occupation, with the British headquarters at Cambrai, the Russians at Maubeuge, the Prussians at Sedan and the Austrians at Colmar.

  With the human and geographical wreckage of twenty-three years of war strewn across Western Europe, the Allies now had to take an absurd range of political decisions in a short space of time, almost none of which stuck. I may well be forgetting something but, aside from the unimaginative decision not to revive the ancient Republic of Gersau (a small ledge of flat land on Lake Lucerne), nothing agreed by the Allies was not drastically questioned over the following century. As with every attempt at a rational, universally agreeable final settlement, it simply created a new range of upsets and debacles.

  The reason the fighting had gone on so long remained the insurmountable one that France was gigantic and very rich and enjoyed the same geographical advantages (i.e. most of its frontiers being secured by mountains or lots of water) that it had always had. The Habsburgs took the opportunity in 1815 to express no further interest in their isolated and indefensible western territories, confirming the disappearance of Austrian rule in the southern Netherlands, Freiburg and the Forest Towns – a final farewell to the legacy of Mary the Rich. Switzerland reconstituted itself after being tugged to pieces by Napoleon’s experiments. It gained territory in the south (the Valais) and the Prussian enclave of Neuchâtel joined the federation, but with the Prussian king still in charge. The city state of Mulhouse, for many years an associated Swiss exclave, had voted to join France in 1798 and did not revise that decision – although its inhabitants’ hopes for a quiet life would be dashed from 1870 onwards.

  The litter of bits and pieces around the Black Forest which Austria had owned were split between the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Kingdom of Württemberg, making this neck of the woods look rational for the first time in its patchworky history. Of all the successor states, Baden, with its capital at Karlsruhe, has always struck me as the most plausible – geographically coherent, commanding a long stretch of the Rhine, with a good education system and a range of interesting smaller cities: Konstanz, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Mannheim. But as with every attempt to make things clean and tidy, it had problems – oddities such as the Hessian exclave of Bad Wimpfen, or an amazingly unhelpful block of territory which was essential to Baden’s integrity, but which meant that the Rhenish Palatinate, given to Bavaria to rule, was unfortunately separated from Bavaria. This could only have been resolved by in turn splitting Baden’s territory in two – so the cock-ups of yesteryear were just updated and bad blood between Baden and Bavaria was kept on the boil.

  Baden was, however, like all the western territories, simply too small. It was about half the size of what would become Belgium and faced directly onto French Alsace in a ridiculously vulnerable way. All along the Rhine lucky or unlucky princes who had once ruled a variety of micro-states ruefully looked back on their game efforts to join Imperial forces in the attack on France back in 1792, which had promptly resulted in the annihilation of their territories. Baden was fairly well run, had a convincing army and a grand tradition, but its independence next to such a potentially sulky behemoth was a negative one – it was fine only as long as France was in a good mood. This meant that Baden, far from being a reliable beacon of what became ‘Third Germany’ strength (i.e. not part of either Prussia or Austria), was always frantic to be an ally of someone bigger and stronger.

  The rest of the border with France was arranged in a sequence of botches which even on paper seemed very unlikely to hold her in – and yet the arrangements were made entirely with that aim in mind. The enormous Allied occupation army, it was briefly argued, could become permanent and be paid for by the French – but the British were anxious to go home and start inventing railways, and the Austrians were equally keen that the Russians (whose many thousands of troops were engaged in mystical religious ceremonies in Champagne under the increasingly deranged eye of Tsar Alexander I) should be safely transferred out of Western Europe and back into their snowy fastnesses. The Allies were in the fortunate position of all being aware that in different ways they had each contributed a lot to the final victory and therefore were at relative ease with each other and willing to cooperate, but some basics (like – could the Russians please leave before things went terribly wrong) united in many cases only three of the four.

  Each bit of the arrangements north of Baden came a cropper. Bavaria was given the Rhenish Palatinate as a major bolster for maintaining a tough front with France, but it was made absurd by the aforementioned Baden territory separating it from Bavaria proper. A series of crude swaps were done between Bavaria and Austria, extricating Austria completely from the Palatinate in return for Bavaria handing over chunks of the Tyrol. Incidentally, one of the very minor sadnesses of all these shifts was the disappearance of a number of beautifully named French administrative units – with the Département du Mont-Tonnerre being transferred into the history books and split between the Bavarian Palatinate and Hesse-Darmstadt. Almost as much to be regretted was the matchlessly named Département des Forêts, which just briefly put the Ardennes under a rational structure, before being divvied up again between three countries. Obviously pretty names count for less than the horrors of Napoleonic colonial oppression, etc. but still.

  Two enormous decisions were taken to deal with the rest of the rickety fence designed to stop French resurgence. Suggestions that a British force be stationed on the northern French border, perhaps garrisoned in some permanent new block of British fortified territory such as Dunkirk, were ignored by London, which was already demobilizing most of its army. Instead British strategy was based on two pillars, both of which proved in quite different ways fantastically awkward. The first was to create a large new, northern country: a rebuilt Kingdom of the Netherlands which would take over the whole of the former Austrian Netherlands and the phantom old territories of the Bishop of Liège. This brought into existence an entirely unfamiliar medium-sized unit, which would have been unrecognizable even to the Dukes of Burgundy. It made sense, both as a reward for the Dutch role at Waterloo and because a new Netherlands would have the resources to be, in conjunction with Britain and Prussia, a serious threat to France. It was a good idea for everyone except, as it turned out, the region’s inhabitants.

  The most far-reaching British brainwave, however, was the insistence on Prussia taking on border-guard responsibilities. The authorities in Berlin had been badly shaken by the previous decade’s events as their kingdom had almost ceased to exist under Napoleon. With the happy outcome of 1815 and Prussia’s central place in it, they wished to consolidate a larger Prussia in the east – for example, by swallowing the whole of Saxony, which had engaged in some very poor decision-making re staying loyal to French alliances. In the west the small but valuable Prussian territories based around Kleve had been regained, but they no more made Prussia a major western power than did its flaky little role in Neuchâtel. The British were aware that it could be awkward having a militarily vigorous new power in the west, but this seemed a lot less important than caging France. At the first sign of its getting Revolutionary or Napoleonic again, the idea was for the Allies to rush in and stop it – and this required Prussian troops with a big enough block of land to give Berlin a serious stake, although it was a long way from the rest of its territory.

  The resulting Rhine Province brought together the ancient religious electorates of Cologne and Trier, the lands
of the Bishops of Westphalia and innumerable bits and pieces, from Xanten to Aachen to Prüm. Koblenz became its capital. The Prussians also created the Province of Westphalia, a mass of disparate fragments, seemingly of little value, spread across the north-west of the German-speaking lands with its capital at Münster. Curiously, the fact that the Prussians had secured many of the key ancient Imperial sites did not really have any future cultic relevance for them, as Berlin remained much more significant – although Cologne and the completion of Cologne’s cathedral became an important goal in the 1840s. This new inheritance was a mixed bag and at least two things fell into Prussia’s lap which would have huge significance. The first was Karl Marx being born in the Rhine Province in 1818. The second was the acquisition, barely noticed at the time, of the entire Ruhr Valley. The County of Mark was an old Prussian property but the absorption of the rest of the Ruhr – most crucially the independent Abbey of Essen, ruled for centuries as a women’s religious republic and home to the quietly industrious Krupp family – quite accidentally scooped up Germany’s industrial future. As with similar areas of Britain, the Ruhr was a region that united coal, iron ore and water and which by 1815 already had a serious industrial function. But this was nothing at all compared to its mad growth in following decades – a growth which made even previously quite buoyant German states like Bavaria or Hannover into mere orbiting fragments.