Austria’s unexpectedly belligerent stance took the responsible Feuillant ministers aback. Their confused reaction was seized upon by the more reactionary elements of the Girondins, who were pressing the assembly to charge certain ministers with treason. One, the minister of marine, was a favourite of the king, who responded to the scheme by dismissing one of the instigators, the minister of war. This bold action resulted in a train of ministerial appointments. Reading into this reshuffle preparations for war, the Austrians moved an army to the frontier in Belgium.
Beset by circumstance but, no doubt, with secret hopes for an Austrian success, Louis, loudly cheered by the assembly, declared war on 20 April. In its ‘crusade for universal liberty’ the French army, fully mobilized, could outnumber the coalition Austro-Prussian forces three to one. It was, however, unfit for war. Many officers, intimidated by the new order, had fled or left the service. Those remaining had little control over their newly enfranchised citizen troops, ever inclined to mutiny and poorly equipped. The first clashes with what might be called the German army were disastrous, even through the French had proven commanders such as Lafayette and Rochambeau. Following one of several reverses, a French general, Theobald Dillon, was actually murdered by his own men.
Louis’s recent robust treatment of ministers was used as a pretext for a particularly threatening demonstration on 20 June. An estimated 8,000 workers, skilled and unskilled, mostly armed, invaded the assembly, read a new declaration of rights, sang revolutionary anthems and generally disrupted proceedings. Its more extreme elements probably not uninvolved behind the scenes, the assembly awaited the mob’s departure. The mob then marched on the king’s quarters at the Tuileries where, bursting in, it subjected the royal family to a humiliating and frightening ordeal. Harangued to his face for his actions, Louis was obliged to toast the nation directly from a bottle while wearing the red Phrygian cap that had become the universal symbol of the Revolution. Louis reacted with what good humour he could muster, maintaining a degree of dignity and even earning some grudging respect. He knew, however, that he retained only as much power as the people were prepared to tolerate.
The quasi-war was still not going in favour of the French army and the assembly anticipated the imminent Bastille anniversary by issuing a proclamation. Entitled La Patrie en danger, it was a declaration of a state of emergency, a licence to conscript every able-bodied Frenchman. News spread that the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the coalition army, had threatened the total destruction of Paris if the royal family was harmed or again intimidated.
As armed Fédéres swarmed into the capital for its defence, the general mood became ugly, with widespread breakdown in order. The so-called Brunswick Declaration roused tempers everywhere for, if an enemy army was advancing to succour the monarchy, then surely the monarchy must be an enemy of the nation. Neither king nor assembly could withstand the carefully choreographed fury which fuelled the city’s militants in their establishment of an Insurrectionary Commune which effectively replaced the council, issuing instructions to the forty-eight regional sections where the real authority now lay. The commune demonstrated its power by arresting, executing and replacing the recently appointed head of the National Guard, held to have royalist sympathies.
In the heat of mid August, a crowd estimated at 20,000 marched on the Tuileries, inflamed by street orators denouncing the king as an enemy of the people. To steady the force of National Guardsmen, whose task it was to guard him, Louis held a review. Even as he inspected them, however, groups were defecting to join the general upheaval.
The royal family slipped away in time to take precarious shelter in the Legislative Assembly as the mob burst into the Tuileries with bloody intent. The king’s elite Swiss Guard mostly fought to the death to defend first the building, then their lives. Now aroused to a frenzy, crowds surged around the corridors, hunting down the palace staff who, to the last manservant, were clubbed or hacked to death. Some were thrown from windows, others burned. The appalling circumstances of the blood-letting of 10 August became a symbol of the Revolution. The better part of one thousand died on that day, mostly in horrific circumstances. In their shared experience, the Revolutionaries were united in a sort of euphoria, assuming an aura of invincibility. Like mutineers, they now had to succeed or perish.
Astonishingly, the assembly continued its debate throughout this nearby carnage. The royals were given temporary lodging for the night and brought back the following day to hear the deputies, under heavy pressure from the Insurrectionary Commune, approve the king’s suspension. All decrees vetoed by him would be reinstated. Rule would be vested temporarily in the Provisional Executive, a council of six ministers, pending the election of a National Convention, whose objective would be universal suffrage. Five of the six caretaker ministers were prominent Girondins. The sixth, ominously occupying the post of minister of justice, was the forbidding lawyer Danton, late of the extreme Cordeliers Club.
There began a round-up of all who could be branded enemies of the Revolution. Old scores, prejudice, envy – all contributed to a mass of detentions so comprehensive that moderate elements of the assembly were moved to query the motives of the commune and its sections. This provoked the Montagnards, who included the influential Robespierre and Marat, to charge their colleagues with undermining the Revolution and shielding the guilty. Deterred by the implicit threat of bloody force, the assembly capitulated, agreeing to the formation of a National Convention, selected by a free vote and charged with finalizing a new constitution.
The coalition army, meanwhile, galvanized by the savagery of 10 August, advanced against the fortress town of Verdun. In response and propelled by the fierce energies of Danton, the Provisional Executive raised a force of 30,000 volunteers, who created a powerful new Revolutionary image as they threw up defences on the approaches to the capital.
In the prevailing excited atmosphere, the city’s café orators and the pamphleteers then scared the populace into believing that the departure of many of the able-bodied had left in their midst prisons full of traitors and conspirators, the newly incarcerated ‘vile slaves of tyranny’. As, somehow, these were claimed to pose an immediate threat from within, there came the unequivocal signal: ‘In advancing to meet the common enemy … leave nothing behind to disquiet us.’
The news, received on 2 September, that Verdun had fallen was sufficient to trigger several days of merciless butchery. First, recalcitrant priests were detained in large numbers in convents. Then, with the complicity of guards, the mob gained access to the city’s prisons. Common vagrants, prostitutes, adolescents, imbeciles – none was excepted. In the course of five days of methodical slaughter, perhaps twelve hundred, half of the city’s prison population, were murdered. The perpetrators of these, the September massacres, were never brought to book, the commune supporting them with the usual justification that the victims were enemies of the nation. Some shame was evident in that the Girondins, in general, blamed the Jacobins for inciting the killings, but none was free of guilt. Foreign governments reacted with outrage with some, including the British, withdrawing their ambassadors. It was apparent to many that raw violence and terror was becoming the engine that propelled the Revolution forward.
Patriotic fervour reached a new pitch when, on 20 September, the French army engaged the Prussians at Valmy in the Argonne. The Duke of Brunswick’s leisurely advance had allowed his opponent, Kellermann, to move his regular troops across the Prussian line of retreat. Both sides were affected greatly by sickness and a paucity of supplies, and the battle itself was a lacklustre affair with Brunswick deciding to disengage rather than risk attacking the superior position of the French, who were using their artillery to demoralizing effect.
In Paris, Valmy was hailed as a victory of a new citizen army over an international league of hostile monarchies. On the same day as the battle the new National Convention met for the first time. Not unlike preceding assemblies in that provincial delegates included a fair proportion of
pliant clergy and late nobility who deplored extreme violence for political ends, it was none the less dominated by the representatives from the capital. These, almost to a man, were Jacobins; moderates had been carefully disenfranchised.
One of the Convention’s first actions was to abolish the monarchy. It then followed up by declaring that the new French Republic would ‘grant fraternity and assistance to all people who wish to recover their liberty’. Through the export of revolution and terror its own sins would, perhaps, be diluted.
Though lacking discipline, the French army was highly motivated. It now saw itself not so much as political instrument as the embodiment of the embattled state itself. On 6 November 1792 it worsted the Austrians at Jemappes, retained its momentum and, within days, had occupied the Austrian Netherlands. Virtually throwing down the gauntlet to the British, the Convention declared free navigation on the Scheldt, quickly underlined by the ostentatious passage to Antwerp of a French naval squadron. By now seriously concerned, the British government stated that it could not tolerate with indifference France creating herself sovereign of the Low Countries ‘or the general arbitress of the rights and liberties of Europe’. Uncaring of rumbles abroad, meanwhile, the victorious French army swept eastward to secure all territory to the west of the symbolic barrier of the Rhine. French ambitions were not confined to the north and the centre. In the south, hostilities having commenced against Sardinia, the Revolutionary horde pushed into Savoy and toward the Swiss border and through Nice on the Mediterranean coast.
THE NATIONAL CONVENTION functioned in anything but harmony. With greater diplomacy, the influential Girondins could have emerged dominant. Their attacks on the Jacobins were incessant and immoderate, however, and they did little to appeal to the great number of the citizens of Paris who were appalled and fearful at what was happening around them. They also made no effort to woo the neutral members of the Marais or bring together the capital and the remainder of the nation which increasingly appeared to be separate political entities.
Instead, the militants, ever more heavily criticized, were pushed into acting in a manner even more extreme in order to maintain their position. The continued presence of the deposed king and his family, under conditions of demeaning house arrest, was a lasting reproach to the Convention and calls for their trial and even execution became more strident. A high proportion of the Convention’s members were, however, lawyers by profession. To justify the trial of the monarch and his ultimate punishment a convincing case needed to be made.
Committees created for the purpose satisfied themselves, firstly, that the king could legally be tried by the Convention. As he had been deposed and the Convention had made itself the highest court in the land, there was no impediment. A second committee exhaustively trawled a mass of documentary evidence. It was not difficult to demonstrate that the king had used his extensive connections to explore every means to quell the Revolution and, by definition, to maintain the status quo. His status as an ‘enemy of the Nation’ was assured.
The trial ran for three weeks and on 16 January 1793 the death sentence was passed by a majority vote. Appeals being dismissed, Louis XVI was executed on the 21st before a crowd of 20,000. The instrument of his death was the recently introduced guillotine, an apparatus which brought new standards of efficiency to judicial murder and which became, in itself, the most powerful icon of the agony of France and the greater frightfulness which was yet to come.
In London, meanwhile, far from the clamour of the mob, diplomatic relations, politely but icily, explored new depths. Reacting to the events of 10 August 1792, the British had withdrawn their ambassador from Paris. With the suspension of the French monarchy, the Foreign Office then deemed the French ambassador in London to be no longer accredited. His own administration was now engaged on more heroic business than to issue any alternative form of credentials and he was, therefore, regarded in London as an unofficial representative of an unrecognized regime.
The reopening of the Scheldt to free navigation had been sufficient in itself to cause the British to consider hostilities but now, in addition, French armies were on the rampage, their weapons a lesser threat than their ideology. During January 1793 British attitudes hardened. An Aliens Act was passed, severely circumscribing the freedoms of foreign nationals in Britain. Deeply concerned at events in France, members rallied to Pitt, who appeared to be ready to oppose Revolutionary principles. With the news of the king’s execution, the British government finally expelled the long-suffering French ambassador, an action sufficient for the Convention to declare war on 1 February 1793. For good measure, hostilities were also opened with the Netherlands.
Intoxicated with the sheer momentum of the Revolution, France appeared heedless either of offence being caused or of the number and strength of forces being arrayed against her. A fortnight after declaring war on Britain, France annexed Monaco and, in the following month, opened hostilities with Spain, whose Bourbon monarchy was already planning retribution for the death of Louis. By March 1793, therefore, almost every French border looked on to enemy territory. What developed became known as the War of the First Coalition, although it was a coalition of states with little in common except a repugnance and fear of French Revolutionary fervour.
chapter two
War, Revolution and the French Navy
THIRTY YEARS EARLIER, the Seven Year War had taught France that her ambitions to acquire a major overseas empire were insupportable in the face of hostile British sea power. Her fleet, although large, had not acquitted itself well and, from 1756, over fifty of its fighting ships had been captured by the Royal Navy. Most of these losses had resulted from small-scale encounters, but the main battle fleet had fared no better and was still haunted by the disaster of Quiberon in 1759. Here, in a rising gale, Hawke’s ships had risked stranding in their determination to pursue the French fleet under Admiral Conflans into the very estuaries of the Vilaine and the Charente. A huge blow to French morale, the battle was rightly described by Mahan as ‘the Trafalgar of the Seven Years’ War’.
Sea power underpinned British success from India to Canada, from the West Indies to West Africa. France would probably have lost further foreign possessions had she not made a Bourbon alliance with the Spanish. Their territories, including the veritable eldorado of Havana, proved to be a greater (and less challenging) attraction.
On land, the French, Austrians and Prussians had in total sacrificed half a million men, yet at the peace it suited the politicians to sign away territorial gain and to restore the situation to virtually what it had been at the outbreak of hostilities. From her strong position at the peace table, Britain could, perhaps should, have ensured that France was reined back to being a still-substantial continental European power. Restoration of her overseas interests, however, gave France every reason to revive both trade and fighting fleet. In parallel, there burned a French desire to exact revenge for injuries and humiliations suffered.
Through years of parsimony before the Seven Years’ War, the French had allowed their fleet to slide into a state of inferiority and for this the nation had paid dearly. Too late in the day, in 1761, the duc de Choiseul, already minister of war, took over as minister of marine. Defeat for him was bitter, but by 1763 he had already begun the process of reform which the comparatively mild demands of the peace plan permitted him to continue.
The French navy still possessed about forty ships of the line and a dozen frigates. None the less, however powerful a force on paper, individual vessels were in various states of disrepair. As it stood, the naval budget would barely fund the replacement of existing ships as they were condemned; to increase the size of the fleet demanded further measures.
Using his aristocratic connections, Choiseul approached the great provincial councils with a patriotic appeal for assistance. It struck a chord, persuading administrations, municipalities and guilds to fund near a score of new vessels. Many, such as the Ville de Paris, Commerce de Bordeaux and Languedoc, carried the names
of their benefactors. By British rating, the French navy was thus augmented by the addition of one first and one second rate, eight third rates and six fourth rates, besides benefiting from lesser donations to renew the service’s decayed infrastructure, including a new base at Lorient. In its heyday, the French East India Company had developed elaborate facilities adjacent to its fortress-headquarters at Port Louis. However, the Seven Years’ War had seen the company’s fortunes collapse as the British tightened their grip on India and the routes to the east. It was thus obliged to bargain its facilities into official ownership.
Shortly before the war Bigot de Morogues had established a new Marine Academy at Brest. Morogues was an enthusiast for the application of new tactical and signal procedures being proposed by the navy’s intellectuals. Choiseul’s interest was engaged, ensuring that they were adopted by the French navy at least two decades before similar action by the Royal Navy, which considered intellectual input as slightly effete. French scientific commitment was underlined by the foundation, in 1765, of a Corps of Naval Constructors.
Even after his departure from office, Choiseul’s influence continued in such as the establishment of naval medical schools. Their institution was, however, less a sign of concern for the welfare of seamen than a measure to combat the truly horrific mortality rates which, above all on long commissions, greatly reduced fighting efficiency. Choiseul also attacked the navy’s great social divisions, principally those between administrators and seagoers, and those separating nobility from commoners in the officer corps. Reform was very necessary, but the minister’s own aristocratic background limited his effectiveness. Despite his success in raising private funding to revitalize the fleet, government votes remained insufficient. Much was soaked up in the salaries of over-age senior officers who thickly populated the upper reaches of the Navy List (a problem by no means unique to the French).
The Fall of Toulon Page 4
