by Tom Anderson
Therefore, when the Revolutionary envoy René Leclerc presented himself to Governor-General Rochambeau and demanded his oath to the Revolutionary government and to attaint himself of his countship, the Governor-General already knew something of what he spoke of. Enough, though it might come from British sources, to know that he wanted no truck with any of it. Quite apart from loyalty to the Crown and his own Catholicism, Rochambeau saw that Linnaean Racist ideas unleashed on India would make the storm of the old Goanese Inquisition look like an overcast evening. To that end, Rochambeau politely rejected Leclerc and had the frothing envoy dragged from his presence by Arcotian bodyguards.
Rochambeau, though, being a gentleman and not considering them a threat, did not impound Leclerc or L’Épurateur—a decision which he would later regret. Whilst plotting how to have his revenge for the ‘infringement of his rights of man’, as he termed it in his journal, Leclerc was approached by a messenger from Tippoo Sultan. The Tippoo had become intrigued by the tales of the French Revolution and wanted to know more, inviting L’Épurateur’s crew to Mysore. Leclerc agreed and the ship docked at the great port of Cochin, now controlled by Mysore.
Leclerc and his assistants were received at the court of the Tippoo in Mysore city by a salute of twenty rockets, which startled and astonished the French. Rockets were largely unknown as weapons in Europe at the time, but had been introduced to India by the Nawab of the Carnatic, and Tippoo Sultan had become enamoured of them while serving as a soldier. Therefore, just as Haidarabad was famous for its great artillery – the ‘Nizam’s Beautiful Daughters’ – Mysore had become legendary for its rocket brigades, or cushoons. The rockets were greatly inaccurate, but fired in large numbers they could be murderously effective. They were often equipped with either exploding tips or long knives attached to the head, which would scythe in a deadly fashion among massed infantry as the rocket spun drunkenly around in midair. Another use for rockets was to drop them in a confined space filled by the enemy, such as a breach in a wall, and they would bounce around off the walls trailing fire, burning and panicking the enemy defensive troops.
René Leclerc, a man who enthusiastically embraced the view of Lisieux—that Revolutionary political thought must go hand in hand with Revolutionary innovations in military technology and tactics—was greatly impressed by the rockets. In turn, he instructed the Tippoo in the political and administrative details of the Revolution, and the Tippoo proved to already be better informed than most in India, having questioned traders and obtained copies of Revolutionary texts from Persia. The Tippoo’s family were of Persian blood and he still read Farsi as well as the Arabic which a devout Muslim must.
The Tippoo, like the Zand Shahs, embraced some Revolutionary ideas, partly for genuinely idealistic reasons and partly to fit his own ends. Leclerc gave the Tippoo plenty of information about the FEIC which the Revolutionaries had derived from the archives in Paris, allowing the Mysoreans to exploit Rochambeau’s weaknesses, and also gave the Tippoo some Revolutionary innovations. These included Gribeauval artillery (actually invented some years before the Revolution, but associated with it in the public mind), the Cugnot steam wagon (an early model was carried along on L’Épurateur) and the standardised Moiselle Rifle that had been adopted by elite Tirailleur skirmishers under the late ancien régime and was now being revived thanks to Boulanger’s reforms de-emphasising that the army should be republican to the extent that all soldiers should be equipped identically.[188]
Though the Tippoo preferred his rockets to even the efficient Gribeauval system, he enthusiastically adopted the steam wagon and the chirurgien, and had already been using rifles (of the more bespoke variety made in India, used mainly for hunting) for years. The Tippoo organised a sharpshooting competition among his cushoons (regiments) and picked ‘those men with the Eye of the Tiger’ to form the core of his own Tirailleurs. The Tippoo had an obsession with the Tiger as a symbol of Mysorean power, India and himself. Leclerc made him an official Citizen of the French Republic.[189]
Leclerc stayed with the Tippoo for a year and a half. Then, in October 1799, the chance came that he had been waiting for. The King of Travancore, Dharma Raja Karthika Thirunal Rama Varma (known as Dharma Raja) died after a long reign and his seventeen-year-old son, Balarama Varma, became King. The Tippoo, who by this point had sidelined the Wodeyar dynasty of Mysore and claimed royal power for himself, declared that Balarama Varma was too young and also illegitimate, claiming that Dharma Raja had been too old at the time to truly sire him. Flimsy though this claim was, it was largely just a casus belli. Travancore, alone, could not hope to resist Mysorean annexation, and then the Tippoo would rule unopposed over all of Kerala, as well as Bangalore and Mysore proper. Of course, Travancore had a treaty with the FEIC, who would be obliged to either turn on their former ally Mysore, or back down and demonstrate that the Tippoo was the real power there.
Which was exactly the confrontation that the Tippoo wanted. Leclerc would sign up to anything that would hurt Rochambeau and the royalist FEIC, even if privately he worried what the Linnaean policies of the Revolutionary government towards a situation like this would be. Still, Robespierre was far away, and he wanted revenge on Rochambeau for his humiliation.
The plan of Leclerc and the Tippoo was put into place. It was an excellent plan, and by rights should have worked. The FEIC was not powerful enough, without support from Paris that would now never come, to directly challenge Mysore. Rochambeau would have to back down before a power that was aligned with the Revolutionary government, which would be the start of an inevitably slide towards the Royalist Carnatic shifting to the Republicans as well. For the FEIC to triumph, it would have to be aided by other Indian great powers, and the only ones capable of doing so – now the Marathas were no longer an option – were the FEIC’s deadliest foes. It seemed an impossibility.
Unfortunately for the Tippoo, though, in Calcutta’s Fort William was a man who would one day be immortalised by his quote “Impossible is only a word…”
Chapter 33: Alea iacta est
“The tactical doctrine of the Yapontsi[190]…a much neglected subject in western military schools…states that wars might be won by a Kantai Kessen, a single decisive engagement. In the real world, of course, the majority of conflicts do not work that way…but there is the well-known counter-example of Pierre Boulanger and the Rubicon Offensive…”
- Excerpted from a 1930 lecture by Peter William Courtenay, 4th Baron Congleton
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946)—
The 1797 campaigning season had seen the launch of the Poséidon Offensive, the first real success by French Jacobin troops in not only holding back their Austrian foe, but in putting the Austrians on the defensive. After the withdrawal of Wurmser’s army from Nancy, the Austrians held no French territory and were on the back foot in Italy and Switzerland. However, Wurmser’s dynamic thrust into Lorraine had blunted the left-hand prong of Poséidon. The French were much more successful in the centre, with Switzerland falling to Leroux’s army in days and Hoche’s brilliant outmanoeuvring of Alvinczi, no mean general himself, in the Italian campaign. As the troops retired to their winter quarters at Christmas 1797 (not that it strictly existed in France anymore thanks to Hébert’s promotion of deistic-atheism), the Republic was left in a better position than most of its generals had dared hope a year earlier.
However, a successful defence, even a proactive one, was not the same as a true victory. In this Boulanger, Lisieux and Robespierre were, for once, in full agreement. The three Consuls agreed to continue to make the war against Austria the top priority, though Robespierre feared an invasion by Britain in the west. “Without a respectable fleet to shield us,” he allegedly wrote in a private journal, “we run the risk of presenting our proud Republican face to the quailing Germans, while the mongrel shopkeepers stab us in our proud Republican arse.”
Nonetheless, even
with the conscription of the levée en masse, French troops were too few to spare any reasonable number of serious soldiers for the west, not without impairing the war effort against Austria. Instead, Boulanger suggested that raw recruits be paraded through the western lands (as yet not yet reorganised into départements) and this show display hopefully worry any British spies, while also giving the troops some experience at battle-marching. Robespierre agreed, and thus signed up to a plan that, though sensible-sounding at the time, would eventually prove to be his downfall…
The Austrians were in even worse straits, however. Ever since Prussia had been damaged so badly in the Third War of Supremacy, the Holy Roman Emperors had become accustomed to resuming a fraction of their old authority within the boundaries of the Empire. There had been few wars between German states since the 1760s, and for this war against Revolutionary France – which had united Europe against it, at least in theory – the Austrians had marched to battle with the armies of the two most powerful German states, Brandenburg and Saxony, at their side.
But this did not last. Events spilling over from the Russian Civil War in the East served to break up the unity of the pan-German force, incidentally creating an exemplar that Sanchez—at this point merely a child—would get so much mileage out of, years later. Frederick William II of Prussia died merely two months before Frederick Christian II of Saxony,[191] but they were two extremely eventful months. The death of the King in Prussia was the signal for a long planned for Polish uprising to begin, calling itself the Confederation of Lublin.[192] This was far better organised than the previous chaotic attempts at revolts which had been easily put down, even by a Prussian army that had found itself limited by treaties and the loss of land (and therefore soldier-producing families) to Austria and Sweden. The Polish rebels seized control of Lublin, Warsaw and Bielsk within the first week of the rebellion and declared a restored Commonwealth of Poland. The absence of the Poland-Lithuania modifier was significant, as the Lithuanian szlachta had refused to join with their former comrades in rebellion—although they certainly did not do anything to hinder them, either.
After some consultation among themselves, the Polish szlachta decided that electing a king from among their own number would not be a winning strategy. The Prussians were disorganised at present from their shift in kingship and the suddenness of the rebellion, but there were enough cool heads at the top of the Confederation to realise that, given time to reorganise and withdraw their troops from the pan-German anti-French force, they would easily crush the ragtag Polish soldiers. Therefore, the nascent new Poland required allies, and the best way to guarantee such allies was to offer them the kingship—which was not the position of absolute power it might be in other monarchies, so trading it away did not represent giving up on Polish independence before it began.
There were some suggestions of appealing to Emperor Ferdinand IV to either become King of Poland himself, in addition to his other titles, or send someone from one of the Hapsburg cadet lines. However, this seemed a questionable strategy, given that Ferdinand IV was determined to hold the pan-German alliance together and would not move against the Prussians. In any case, it was voted down when a far more attractive option presented itself. Frederick Christian I of Saxony had failed to be elected King of Poland on the death of his father, Frederick Augustus II, who had also been Augustus III of Poland. His own son Frederick Christian II had been an even less likely candidate for King of Poland had Poland still existed: he was concerned mainly with expanding Saxon power throughout all the Germanies, investing heavily in developing the western enclaves Saxony had acquired from Prussia after the Third War of Supremacy. This policy would prove to be of questionable value in the years immediately following.
Two months after the death of Frederick William II of Prussia, Frederick Christian II of Saxony died of an illness and without issue. The throne passed to his brother, who became Elector John George V. A more contrasting sibling it is hard to imagine. John George was both more dynamic than his brother and concerned with establishing Saxony as a power full stop, not merely one within the Holy Roman Empire. After all, Prussia had risen to such heights (before crashing down again) by building power in Poland, outside the borders of the Empire. When the newly-summoned Polish Sejm offered him the crown of Poland, not long after he had succeeded to that of Saxony he immediately accepted with the tendency for audacious gambling that would characterise him in later life.
The Saxon army was withdrawn from the front against France at almost at the same time as the Prussian messengers (who had had further to go) got through and recalled their own army to help put down the Polish rebellion. Ironically, the Saxons did not know why they had been recalled, and the Prussians had not yet heard that Saxony had declared war on Prussia, so the two armies infrequently camped together on the way back east before returning to their homeland and learning they were to fight each other. This rather surreal affair has unsurprisingly also been quoted by the disciples of Sanchez as support for their ideologies.
Losing one of their biggest allies at such a critical time would have been bad for Austria; losing both was a disaster. Furthermore, the image of pan-German cooperation shattered along with it, and the more minor German states began to hesitate and pull back their own armies, alarmed at the prospect of a Prusso-Saxon war spilling over their own borders (as such wars invariably did). The withdrawal of the Hessian and Thuringian states began a domino effect, with each statelet worrying about the armies of their neighbours being at home when their own were still abroad. Soon, only the Austrian army and those of other Hapsburg-ruled and vassalised states were in play – as well as those of the states directly threatened by the encroaching French. The Hanoverian army remained in place, on the direct orders of Britain’s King George III, but fought rather half-heartedly—more concerned about reports of Dutch and Danish activity worryingly close to their home electorate.
Thus, the Rubicon Offensive can be thought of as not merely a triumph for Revolutionary France but also a disaster for Austria—a disaster that was already unfolding before the first Sans-Culotte walked out of his barracks in Spring 1798. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that, as with Poséidon (which the Allies had thought was a sea operation, presumably aimed at Britain), the code name fooled the Austrians’ spies, who thought that it must literally refer to a further French offensive in northern Italy, as Caesar’s prototype had been. However, Boulanger (or more likely one of his subordinates, as he did not have a classical education) was simply referring to the idea of a single decisive throw. Rubicon was certainly that.
Aside from garrison troops, French forces were steadily withdrawn from Switzerland over the winter of 1797. Robespierre ordered the burning of the Habichtsburg, the ancestral Hapsburg castle in Aargau, as a symbolic spite to Ferdinand IV. The French were able to hold down the rebellious Swiss effectively enough, but gave ground to the Austrians when they attacked in the spring of 1798. However, even a small number of troops could slow down an enemy offensive in Switzerland’s Alpine terrain, and the Austrian advance was itself half-hearted. Hoping to match Wurmser’s success the previous year, the Austrians focused on Italy, believing it would be where the French massed their army. This miscalculation would cost them dearly.
The Austrian army in Italy was placed under the command of Archduke Ferdinand, a younger brother of Ferdinand IV’s who was also the Duke of Krakau (and hence the most likely candidate to be suggested as King of Poland if the Poles had succeeded in getting Austrian support for their rebellion). Ferdinand had not received his position purely through family connections; he was genuinely one of Austria’s best generals. He demonstrated this throughout the 1798 campaigning season as he fought Hoche’s mercurial brilliance with a more stolid, logistically-based but no less effective style. When Ferdinand led his army from Hapsburg Tyrol, through the Venetian Terraferma and into French-occupied Mantua and Milan, Hoche struggled to repel him. The French general had not expected such a large Austrian army so soo
n, and a third of his own force was away south, pacifying the former Spanish Parma.
Hoche, for one of the few times in his career, hesitated. There was the possibility of withdrawing his own forces to Parma in order to then give the Austrians battle with his full force, but that would put the French army in a sticky position. Hapsburg Tuscany lay to the south, a potential threat, and the Austrians could easily bottle him up in Parma and cut off the French army from its supply chain. Hoche therefore decided against such a strategy. He sent messengers to his forces in Parma, telling them to regroup and then cause as much trouble for the Austrians as possible, then led his men on a retreat westward, back into French-occupied Piedmont. Hoche intended to resupply his army and hopefully rest his men in the newly set up Revolutionary depots at Turin, before the tired Austrians would then attack him on a battlefield of his own choosing – and lose.
All but the most disciplined armies find it difficult to sustain morale on a retreat, seeing the places they have already seen before, heading back the way they came. Hoche’s charisma helped to some extent, but his men almost mutinied nonetheless when his plan was scuppered. A second Austrian army under Wurmser came down over the Alps through Graubünden and blocked his retreat. Once more Hoche hesitated. Wurmser’s army could, in his estimation, be defeated, but to give battle would give Ferdinand enough time to catch up.
Hoche then considered turning south and heading for Genoa, but Ferdinand anticipated this and divided his army into two parts, the larger blocking the road south. Hoche seized even this tiny opportunity, though, wheeled about and attacked the smaller portion of Ferdinand’s army, the one that remained in pursuit. Despite the French army’s troubled situation, Hoche’s audacious attack stunned the Austrians and Hoche managed to win a victory at Pavia, at the cost of a fifth of his army and half his artillery. The other half was abandoned days later to speed up the pace of the march, as Hoche’s wounded and tired men fled the other two Austrian armies.
