by Tom Anderson
Hoche found there was only one realistic destination his men could make while avoiding Hapsburg forces: Venice. Even the tired and wounded French easily defeated the inexperienced army of the Republic at Padua and then fell upon Venice the city. Such was the Violation of Venice, as is lamented in song. The relief of Hoche’s men at the end of the great race, at escaping their captors, was such that they gave themselves over to a spree of looting, rape and arson. It is certainly true that we only know what the original St Mark’s Square looked like from old illustrations…
The end of the Republic of Venice’s thousand-year history, significant though it was, was ultimately overshadowed by events further to the north. Ferdinand was preparing to besiege Hoche in Venice when an urgent recall came to him from Tyrol. Rubicon had not been aimed at Italy, after all, but through Lorraine.
The hammer blow that Boulanger assembled consisted of two great armies under Ney and Leroux, intended to sweep around to the north and south and pocket any Austrian defenders between them. The free city of Strassburg was taken in March and annexed to the French Latin Republic as Strasbourg; the Austrians were ejected from Haguenau mere days later. The rapidity of the French advance outdid even Hoche’s stunning manoeuvres in Italy, and illustrated two important innovations by the French Revolutionary Army: the Cugnot steam wagons for transport of artillery and important supplies, and also a slimmed-down supply chain, with troops encouraged to live off the land (la maraude). This did not endear them to the locals, but meant they could move further and faster, not having to worry about outrunning their own rations.
On April 1st 1798, the northern army under Ney took Karlsruhe, capital of the Margraviate of Baden. The French advance had been so rapid that the Badenese army had literally been overtaken and the people of the city were unaware they were in danger until the first Bloody Flags were seen on the horizon. The Margrave and his family were captured by the French and, on Robespierre’s orders, publicly executed by chirurgien in the market square. The Schloss was then taken over by French troops and a military administration imposed. However, the bulk of the army was still moving forward. The staggered Germans named it Blitzkrieg, the War of Lightning. The name was so apt that the French soldiers soon adopted it themselves in translation, naming Boulanger’s mode of warfare the Guerre d’éclair.
Ney’s forces were in Stuttgart a month later, though the Duke of Württemberg had the sense to flee before their advance. It was not a case of the French necessarily defeating the Austrian and local Swabian armies sent against them, but simply manoeuvring around them and threatening to isolate and surround them. The Austrians were forced to keep withdrawing as cities ever deeper into the Germanies were threatened. In the few set-piece battles that took place, the Austrians were generally disorganised enough to suffer defeat. Also, as they were now out of the mountainous regions of Lorraine, the Cugnot steam-wagons could be used to full effect. The Austrian tactics of fighting in line collapsed when hit with the French columns and the steam artillery trundling along beside them, moving into positions where they could enfilade the thick Austrian lines. Battle after battle was lost for the Austrians as France focused her full might on this new breakthrough. The Austrian armies continued to reconquer France’s previous gains in Italy and Switzerland, but what was that compared to the double-edged sword driving straight for the heart of Germany?
As Ney’s army reached Franconia and brushed up against the territory of the neutral Palatinate, Boulanger ordered that the forces be divided. Leroux continued eastward and Ney’s army spread out to hold down the vast swathe of territory that had been gained. An Austrian army was pocketed near Hechingen but managed to fight its way through Ney’s thinly spread forces to rejoin the rest of the Austrian force regrouping in Bavaria. This illustrated the effect of panic that made Guerre d’éclair so effective – if the Austrians had continued fighting instead of retreating, Ney’s forces were too thinly spread to stop them, and all of the Republic’s gains could have collapsed. But they did not, for the speed of the French advance meant that no-one would have been surprised to learn that Leroux was in Warsaw by next Sunday. Captured printing presses industriously turned out Jacobin propaganda in Fraktur text to aid such an impression.
In truth, the French invasion slowed. Even with Boulanger’s ruthless approach to supply trains, Leroux was outrunning his essential supplies and ammunition, and also was away from the coal depots that had been set up to fuel his Cugnot-wagons. Germany’s own coal supplies mainly lay to the north, out of French reach for the moment, and so Leroux paused lest his army reach Vienna only to be without artillery. This was the moment in which the French invasion could have faltered, had the Austrians had delivered a decisive hammer blow to the French flank— now that there was only one French spear rather than two driving eastward. But the only Austrian general with the skill and temperament for that was Archduke Ferdinand, and he was still obliviously chasing Hoche around Italy.
After the fall of Ulm in July, Ferdinand IV desperately reinstated the formerly disgraced General Mozart as head of Austria’s armies, but by that point not even Mozart could entirely salvage the situation. Having stared at a map for an hour, Mozart simply told the Emperor pointedly that Vienna, perhaps, could be defended againstthe French onslaught – but only if they pulled everything back now.
Ferdinand IV was appalled by this pessimism on behalf of his Salzburger general, but a few days later was forced to agree. Davidovich had scraped an army together and attempted to blunt Leroux’s march at Burgau. The battle, fought on 2nd August, saw the almost total annihilation of the Austrian forces as Leroux used his Cugnot-artillery in Boulanger’s patent style, positioning them on flat ridges adjoining the battlefield and moving them around so as to direct plunging fire down onto Davidovich’s lines. Mozart warned that now the magnitude of the task he faced was even greater. With a heavy heart, Ferdinand IV gave the order and then left for Regensburg, calling what would be the last Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire…
Chapter 34: Eire and Water
“Just because a man is born in a stable does not make him the Lord.”
– Richard Wesley, 2nd Earl of Mornington
*
From: “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)–
Ireland. The Emerald Isle, Hibernia, the nation that had saved the English from the Vikings in the year 873 and had regretted it ever since. Though scenic, it had never been a particularly good place to live even before the First anything-but-Glorious Revolution disenfranchised most of its population: wet, swampy, unable to support many people before the introduction of the potato changed everything. Ireland might be poetically green, but only because of all the rain. And since 1689, thunder and lightning had been added to that rain. Oh, the English had sought to expand power in Ireland ever sincec the Norman Conquest, but the rules of the game had changed since William III had become King of England. Once upon a time, to the English, Ireland had been that wild island full of cannibal barbarians, but now it was that desolate island full of priest-ridden traitors.
The intervening century had only served to deepen the divisions in Ireland between the relatively prosperous Protestants – concentrated in the old Plantations in Ulster – and the Catholics, who had been poor enough to begin with and suffered under a great deal of discriminatory laws. With each rising the situation got worse: Ireland had been a front in both the First Glorious Revolution and the Third Jacobite Rebellion that had formed part of the Second. Even when reform-minded Englishmen sought to end Catholic suffering in Ireland, they were angrily opposed by the Protestant Ascendancy Irish, who feared the fact that they were in a minority and jealously guarded their power.
It was fairly obvious to any objective commentator what had to happen. The Catholic Irish would rise again at some point. The last Jacobite rebellion had been cut down in 1750, almost fifty years ago, allowing plenty of time for angry young men to grow up and for old men to forget the sorrows of what had fo
llowed the past risings. All they required was something to distract the British, and that something was the Jacobin Wars with France.
Except. And it was a big except. Many historians today believe that the Catholics would have risen in their old manner, given a few more years as their organisations planned patiently…
Except the Protestants rebelled first.
On the face of it this was madness. Irish Protestants had a uniquely privileged position under the order imposed after the Williamite War and the following conflicts. They could both vote and serve in Parliament, enjoyed a disproportionate fraction of the island’s scant wealth, and could go off to Britain and have more distinguished political careers there – as many did, not least Edmund Burke. To do anything to jeopardise that, to bite the hand that fed them, was inconceivable. But then so were many things that spun off the jagged wheel of Revolution.
Many Protestant Irish, especially the most politically active Presbyterians in Ulster, resented the fact that their parliament had little power compared to the one in London, which could go head-to-head with the King and win (and often did). By contrast, the Lords Lieutenant in Dublin, though often quite competent men, remained in an old-boy’s-club network with the Irish parliamentarians and little ever really got accomplished. Those Protestants seeking reform initially cast themselves as Liberals, aping the moderate path that Burke had carved out in England. (Burke himself had spoken of the miserable situation of Irish politics, but not done a great deal himself about it). Many of these reformers hesitated at the question of Catholic emancipation, though. Even the most open-minded Irish Protestants were concerned at the thought of being out-voted by at least three to one, by men they considered to be ill-educated, superstitious and priest-ridden. Clearly, they could not be expected to understand modern enlightened politics.
The Revolution changed all that. France was undeniably a Catholic country and yet had launched the most radical political force ever witnessed in Europe. Revolutionary principles were far more popular in discussion in political circles in Scotland and Protestant Ireland than they were in England, not least because of the influence of Burke’s bald condemnation: there was a paradoxical urge to see what all the fuss what about. Scotland had also suffered in the Jacobite Rebellions and had had a new road network built in King Frederick I’s reign specifically to move British troops around more easily, putting down any future rebellions. However, these roads also meant that trade between Scottish cities picked up throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, and by the late 1790s, Edinburgh and the newly industrialising Glasgow had as much of a trading class as London. And the men composing such a class both have the money to exert a sizeable political influence as a whole, and are singularly hostile to anything that constitutes a change in policy, much less a revolution. It might endanger their profits, after all. So in Scotland French Revolutionary ideas remained just idle talk—for now.
Not so in Ireland. Despite the Third Jacobite Rebellion, British attempts to build a new road network there had stalled, partly because of the more difficult terrain and partly because of the intricate land-ownership laws that meant getting permission from fifty landlords to build a mile’s worth of road. Ireland remained a backwater relative to Britain, sleepy, impoverished, and with more longstanding grudges than you could shake the proverbial stick at. Ireland was ripe for revolution.
And yet among the Catholics who had the most grudges to hold, French ideas took little root. Partly it was simply that Protestant propaganda was not entirely a lie: many Catholics were illiterate and poorly-informed, and only heard about the Revolution through their village priests, who naturally took the Pope’s orders and condemned the Revolution. However, there were also plenty of Catholics well-informed enough to make their own decision, and the vast majority rejected the Revolution. No-one with anything more than the most desultory belief in his own religious identity would be anything but horrified by the treatment of Catholicism under Hébert and Robespierre. The vast majority of Catholics who would ignore such things in favour of Revolutionary fervour were typically those who had already converted to Anglicanism in order to gain greater powers and freedoms. Those that were left mostly held their faith sufficiently paramount to reject such compromises, much less endorse the ruthlessness of the Jacobins.
So it was that while the nascent United Society of Equals was theoretically a joint Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican organisation, its membership was made up almost entirely of Presbyterians and Anglicans. A few unorthodox Catholic priests and others did join up, but more for symbolic reasons than anything. The Society was led by Tom Russell,[193] who notably said that “Religion has led to so many divisions, so many wars, on our island this last century…the only solution for peace is to do away with it.” And as Sanchez later observed, they fulfilled the historical imperative common to most atheist movements, successfully achieving their goal of uniting the isle – against themselves.
Although rumours of the USE’s existence were flying as early as 1795, the scale of the organisation did not become apparent until the summer of 1798. By this point, Robespierre in Paris was becoming increasingly paranoid about the possibility of a British invasion on the western coast of France, attacking the poorly defended lands while most of France’s armies were committed to the invasion of Germany and Italy. As well as fatefully suggesting his strategy of marching raw recruits up and down the coast to persuade the British that there were troops stationed there, Boulanger stated that the best way to avoid a British intervention would be to give les rosbifs something to chew on closer to home. A naval attack, even a feint, was simply impossible for what was left of the Republican French Navy, which would be annihilated in combat with the Royal Navy even if the Royal French Navy stood aside rather than fighting their former comrades. With such a direct option off the table, that left a more subtle stirring up of trouble.
Lisieux had been using the ‘Boulangerie’ to build an intelligence network separate to Robespierre’s (and superior to it, as it did not rely on flaming ideologues). He now learned of the activity of the Society, and how they desired a united republican Ireland without state religion and fully independent of Britain, with a powerful parliament. Robespierre signed up readily enough to the notion of spreading the revolution, his particular ambition, and was enthusiastic enough not to think to question where his information had come from.
Privately, though, Lisieux and Boulanger were certain that any rebellion launched by the Society would fail and they had no intention of supporting them any more than they had to. The important thing was that such a revolt would alarm the British and force them to divert troops to Ireland to subdue it, discouraging or delaying any planned offensive moves. Token support for the USE could be given with just a few smuggled shipments of weapons and printing presses for the production of propaganda pamphlets. Lisieux consulted the Boulangerie, and after patiently rejecting a helpful suggestion by Jean-Pierre Blanchard that they fly the supplies to Ireland in a fleet of balloons, secured the contacts they needed to effect the plan. It was almost impossible for French ships to sneak past the British blockade, at least in any numbers (isolated ships, as with L’Épurateur and Le Rédacteur, did manage to make it through on missions to the colonies).
Therefore, Lisieux co-opted Breton smugglers, little realising the import of his own actions at the time. But then how was he to know that one crate of pamphlets would be mistakenly left behind, opened by the Bretons’ curious relatives, and then taken to Nantes for translation as few of them spoke good French?
The Society was contacted and, in October 1798, an already-planned rebellion was accelerated and amplified in scope by the French assistance. The French also sent some elite troops as token help along with General O’Neill, a politically suspect ancien régime Irish-exile general who had previously fought in Ireland during the Third Jacobite Rebellion.[194] What the British later referred to as the Great Ulster Scare exploded into existence with the USE seizing control of much of U
lster and parts of Leinster in the early days of its actions. The French supplies had helpfully included disassembled chirurgiens and they were soon reassembled and put to work, executing British- and Irish Parliament-appointed officials all across the province. Belfast was made the temporary capital of the new Revolutionary Irish Republic, but already USE forces were moving on Dublin. The relative speed of their offensive (and the fact that communications in Ireland rarely moved much faster than an army) meant that a large number of Irish MPs and Lords were in session in Parliament when the city fell to the USE and the building was burned down – with the lawmakers still inside it.
The British garrisons in Dublin and Belfast both fought hard, but had been cut back severely in recent years as Whitehall had moved more troops back to the South Coast in fear of an invasion—the Admiralty’s estimates of Republican fleet strength were considerably exaggerated. Despite their valour, the remaining troops eventually succumbed to the USE fighters. Worst of all, and widely reported by Liberal Whig newspapers in England, was the fact that the USE fought harder and more skilfully than previous Irish rebellions. Why? Because so many of its members were veterans of Britain’s wars in India and America. Protestant Irish could serve in the British Army, after all. This was no longer peasants with pitchforks territory: anyone could be under suspicion, even the titled gentleman with the whimsical accent in the corner of your club’s bar.
