by Tom Anderson
When the Cacafuego approached Mahon, site of the French naval base, the French thus remained blissfully unaware. Many of the steamships’ crews were ashore, enjoying the attractions of the island just as the British had a couple of generations before. Lepelley himself was in Ciutadella, on the other side of the island, for a romantic rendezvous. It was sloppy practice, but understandable – the French had defeated Spain and scattered its fleet, and were no longer at war with Britain or Royal France. The Algerines would certainly not attack a harbour these days. Who did that leave?
It turned out that it left the Neapolitans. Nelson ordered the rockets fired after his jolly-boat scouts had confirmed the position of local landmarks; Nelson, with the command of geometry common to all British high-seas sailors, calculated the optimum angles in his head based on Casanova’s information. Casanova himself personally lit the fuses, and the rockets screamed out into the night.
Perhaps a quarter of them exploded in midair – one dangerously close to the Cacafuego’s own sails – but the rest all hit somewhere near the harbour, and with the density of French ships there, ‘somewhere near the harbour’ was almost certain to be a target. Before they knew what was happening, the French were faced with whining bolts from heaven cascading down from above, striking their ships and igniting their sails.
Only a few crews were ready to respond. In any case, Nelson did not simply sit back and let them. Giving his famous command of “Damn the tactics, give me the wind, go right at ’em!”, he took the Siracusa into Mahon harbour itself. There, he blasted broadsides into steamship after steamship – the small size of the Neapolitan frigate now helped it, for she did not tower uselessly over the steam-galleys as some of the Spanish ships of the line had. Nelson finally faced one of the steamships that had an alert crew. He suffered the disablement of his left arm after a shard from a mast hit by a French cannonball scored across it. Ignoring this, he led the boarding operation to take the ship. He had hoped to return it as a prize, but had no-one left alive who understood how to operate the steam engines, and so scuttled the ship.
By the time the Neapolitan fleet – having suffered some losses, but not grievous ones – retreated from Mahon on the morning of the 16th, the position had radically changed. Admiral Lepelley’s invincible fleet was mostly lying on the bottom of the harbour, reduced to scorched timbers and melted boilers. French dominance of the Mediterranean was no longer assured.
Admiral Nelson was feted as a hero in Naples the city, and Acton pressed the conduct of the war against Hoche all the more earnestly, knowing there was no possibility of a stab in the back anymore.
Nelson had saved his adoptive country but, unbeknownst to him, he had doomed his own.
Chapter #54: Der Führer und der Kleinkrieg
From: “French Strategy in the Jacobin Wars” by Åke Comstedt (original Swedish 1974, English translation 1982)—
In April of 1802, Jean de Lisieux wrote a monograph. This in itself was not a remarkable occurrence, for L’Administrateur spent most of his time writing monographs. When he was not writing himself, he was dictating to his most trusted secretaries, ever paranoid about the possibility of his words being intercepted and twisted between himself and his people. Given the tone of some of his later writings, some men even suggested that Lisieux desired not to look upon the imperfect reality of his Republic until his declarations had converted it into the perfect state he desired. A joke sprung up in some of the regiments – the ones farthest away from Paris and out of earshot of political officers – to parody the old Catholic liturgy declaring Christ would come again at the end of the world, replacing his name with that of Lisieux. He was certainly rarely seen outside his own unprepossessing apartments, except on the occasions when he visited the National Legislative Assembly to perpetuate the illusion that that body still had any power.
But this monograph had a significance which outweighed most of Lisieux’s often nit-picking and self-contradictory pronouncements on the future of France. In it, he openly declared his intentions for foreign and domestic policy. The document became known as “the 25 Years paper” in reference to the most prominent date contained within it. Lisieux stated that, for the present, exporting the Revolution to other states was meaningless, counterproductive and indeed wasteful of human lives (for he always remained conscious of their value, albeit in a clinical and mathematical way). He wrote that it was absurd to do so when the Revolution had not yet produced the perfect state at home: “It is the role of the superior Latin race, and of the purest strain within that race – the French – to create the true Utopia. Only once this is complete may that Utopia be replicated elsewhere. It must also be adapted to the different and inferior characteristics of the other races upon which it is imposed. This cannot come until after the first and highest Republic has reached its truest and purest form.”
Lisieux was vague upon the subject of precisely how this truest Republic would come about, but he was clear on the requirements for it. He declared that France would require 25 years of peace to reorder herself. This would in turn require that France’s borders be secured beyond all possibility of incursion. So far, France had neutralised a number of its neighbouring regions – Spain, Swabia, and to some extent Piedmont, although Hoche could no longer be counted upon as an ally. The chief frontier that remained was that of Flanders, which had remained at peace with France since June of 1796. That had been a necessary strategy on the part of Pierre Boulanger to help preserve the young republic in its war with, at that point, practically all of Europe. Now, however, the situation had changed.
Flanders, and her ally the Dutch Republic, would not be a pushover. Not for nothing had royalist France tried and failed to conquer then-Spanish or Austrian Flanders multiple times throughout the last two centuries. Besides, the French Republican fleet could not stand up to that of the Dutch. To that end, Lisieux pursued a different strategy on several fronts. Surcouf took his frigates to La Pérouse’s Land and used it as a base to raid Dutch shipping as a privateer, attempting to goad the Dutch into a unilateral declaration of war on France. He hoped to drive the Dutch apart from the Flemings, who did not share their northern neighbours’ commercial interests.
Meanwhile, in 1800 Lisieux ordered Ney, in Swabia, to attack northwards into the German lands in an attempt to establish a French presence in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Lisieux planned to use this as a beachhead to invade the Dutch Republic from the east, thus avoiding both the Dutch system of flood-based defensive lines aimed at invaders from the south-west, and also the war spreading to Flanders. If the Dutch and the Flemings could be handled one at a time, the conquest would be much easier: and attacking the Flemings first would almost force a Dutch intervention on their side, whereas the reverse was not necessarily true.
Ney’s war was largely unsuccessful, securing Ansbach, Bayreuth and Nuremberg for the Swabian Germanic Republic by 1802, but ultimately failing to penetrate into the northern Rhineland and being held back by the Mainz Pact states, which eventually renamed themselves the Mittelbund or Central League. This consisted of all the various Hessian states plus Würzburg and Nassau. Ney’s aggression had inadvertently triggered the formation of this alliance of small states, which provided a new rallying point for Germans in the face of French dominance, Prusso-Saxon conflict and Austrian incompetence and distraction.
The effects of the Mittelbund would not be glimpsed farther east for a while, though. For the present, Lisieux revised his plans and his “25 Years Paper” instead favoured a strike from Bayreuth up through the weak and divided small Saxon duchies of Thuringia, terminating in Anhalt. Lisieux envisaged that this position could then be turned into either an encirclement of the Mittelbund, an eastward attack on the Dutch (who had occupied the imperial bishoprics between the Ems and the Weser as a pre-emptive move against the Hapsburgs, back in 1797) or an attack on Hanover if a casus belli was needed against Britain. The French Republican Army, and Marshal Boulanger in particular, viewed this plan with extreme scep
ticism. Lisieux would be sending French armies deep into hostile territory with Saxony in the east and the Mittelbund in the west. A Prussian or Austrian revival also could not be ruled out at that stage, and sending troops through Bayreuth might bring France into conflict with Lascelles’ alleged Bavarian Germanic Republic in the Upper Palatinate – a move which Ney had thus far carefully avoided. Even at this stage Lisieux was beginning to turn into a similarly dictatorial figure as Robespierre, with few daring to publicly contradict him, but Boulanger did manage to persuade L’Administrateur that the plan was too ambitious and should at least be postponed. Boulanger noted that it would certainly require more troops than France had in the region. Lisieux responded to this by stepping up his timetable for the withdrawal of French troops from Spain, rather premature as in April 1802 they had not yet even entered Madrid and begun their occupation yet. It was this continuous urge to pull troops out of Iberia and focus on Germany that dogged Republican France’s attempts to hold down Spain from the start.
Of course, there was also another frontier to consider, one which Lisieux almost deliberately forced himself to forget about most of the time. In the north-west of France, hanging insolently over Lisieux’s great Republic like the Sword of Damocles, was the restored remnant of the Bourbon monarchy under the formally undeclared King Louis XVII. That would have to be dealt with eventually.
But this resolve was faced with a problem. Even under Charles James Fox, Britain would almost certainly respond with war if the Republic attacked Royal France. Britain, therefore, would also have to be neutralised, and that required considerable planning. This, however, was stepped up in priority after Horatio Nelson’s Neapolitan raid on Minorca in summer 1803. Lisieux and Boulanger were both landsmen by thinking and had not considered the frontiers of France that they could not control – those which looked out on the seas. Lisieux considered simply separating the coastlines of France from the Republic and turning them into a military regime, thus ensuring the Republic inside could remained unmolested by the impure outside world. However, judging this to be an unacceptable solution – as it forced thousands of Frenchmen to live apart from their pure Republic – a different path was settled on
Britain and Naples had both proved themselves to be capable of harassing France from the sea. Therefore, both would have to be eliminated. And, Lisieux wrote secretly, Britain was an island. It was not like dealing with Austria or even Naples, which could be allowed to remain in a weakened state, as the French knew that they could easily send an army over land to kick them down again if they became belligerent. Britain could be defeated, yet La Manche would be a powerful guarantor against such a punitive expedition if she decided to break the terms of a treaty (it has been observed by many commentators that, ironically, Lisieux’s isolation ideas would have been much easier to implement in an island nation like Britain).
Therefore, the only way to truly neutralise Britain was for French troops to be stationed there, as they were in Spain. Therefore, Britain must actually be conquered rather than merely forced to the negotiating table. Another headache, another grand aim which the Bourbons had tried and failed to achieve for centuries. But then the Republic was not the Bourbons…
*
From: “Herz aus Eisen: Der Führer” by Joachim Lübke (1959)—
It is a strange and compelling fact that many national heroes were not, in fact, born in the nations that they eventually grew to symbolise. Simon de Montfort was no more English than Jean-Charles Pichegru was Meridian. And then there is the man whom history knows as Der Führer: national hero of Bavaria, yet born in Austria.
There is no denying the fact, of course, that Michael Hiedler’s family was in origins a Bavarian one: the vast majority of Hiedlers (or Hittels, or Hitlers) can still be found around Munich. But as the third son in his family, Michael had not inherited much of his father’s wealth, and had thus sought his fortune elsewhere. He moved to Lower Austria in 1785 and married into money, then joined the Austrian army and served as a cavalryman in a desultory campaign against Wallachia in 1791. During that brief and pointless war he was wounded in the leg, giving him a slight limp, and commended for bravery in the face of the enemy. He was pensioned off and given the minor title of Edler von Strones, the name of a nearby village to his home arbitrarily being picked.
Hiedler lived comfortably and unremarkably enough for the next decade, fathering a son and daughter with his wife Maria Margaretha, and it seems likely that under other circumstances he would have been unremembered by history. Events conspired, however, to turn this man into the pivot of destiny – but at a terrible cost.
Bavaria and Lower Austria were overrun by the French army of Thibault Leroux in 1798 and 1799 as part of his War of Lightning strategy against the Austrians. Initially, the country around Strones, the Waldviertel, escaped much attention by the French, who were still focused on Vienna. Hiedler recorded in his diary that a French army was seen passing through the country, but at a distance from the village, heading for Vienna. Rumours of the rapacity of la maraude circulated, but Hiedler believed that the best way to escape such damage was to keep his head down and wait for the war to blow over. How a man can change.
It soon became apparent, however, that this was no ordinary war. Leroux was, at the last, defeated by Mozart before the gates of Vienna in April 1799, being slain in the process. His army broke up into two main factions: the Cougnonistes under St-Julien, who were mostly professional veterans of the ancien regime army, and who retreated into Bohemia to the north; and the larger group under Major Fabien Lascelles, who despite his low rank managed to dominate the troops. They were mostly Sans-Culotte conscripts, and Lascelles was a dynamic and maniacal orator capable of whipping them up into an ideological frenzy. Lascelles drove off or killed all other surviving officers higher in rank than himself, then declared a Bavarian Germanic Republic and appointed himself as sole Consul. His bloodthirsty assistant and former sergeant, Nicolas Cavaignac, was appointed as Grand Marshal.
Lascelles’ Republic did not exist in any technical sense and was certainly not recognised by any other power, but this was not to say that it was a paper tiger.[17] Although the Austrians were mainly concerned with the new conflict with the Ottoman Empire that blew up in May, the new claimant Holy Roman Emperor Francis II did send some troops into Lower Austria in an attempt to drive back Lascelles’ army. Lascelles’ men were encamped on the Enns, near Admont. The outnumbered Austrians were bloodily repulsed; the French had regrouped and rallied around their new leader, and had regained their old discipline. One Austrian officer later likened the Republic to one of the old nomad khanates that had once ruled over Asia (of whom the Khanate of the Crimea was the last remnant in Europe). The army was the country, much as Voltaire had said about Prussia.
Of course, it was inconceivable that the French could be allowed simply to retain Lower Austria, and in October 1799 a new Austrian army was drawn up under General Giuseppe Bolognesi to drive Lascelles from spitting distance of Vienna. This also meant that the Austrian armies fighting desperately in Bosnia and on the Mureş lacked reinforcements, further hampering Francis’ erratic attempts to fight a war on two fronts. Bolognesi was, however, successful; Lascelles chose not to give battle against the more numerous Austrians, but initially retreated. In the process, his armies passed through the Waldviertel. As usual, they had their standing orders to practice la maraude to feed themselves, and Lascelles ordered them to stock up as much as possible due to the possible long retreat. Furthermore, he hoped to lay waste to Lower Austria’s food supplies and thus hamper Bolognesi’s pursuit, giving him time to set up a stronger defensive position elsewhere. This was considered by the Jacobin Sans-Culottes as a licence for all hell to break loose.
Michael Hiedler was one of thousands to suffer as a result of Lascelles’ bloody retreat through Lower Austria. However, his fate was particularly cruel. Using their Guerre d’éclair rapid marching, the French fell on the Waldviertel so quickly that they were in and out i
nside a couple of hours. Hiedler was out riding, hunting to supplement his family’s table, for since Leroux’s army had been through marauding in the other direction, the harvest had been less than expected. He returned home with a brace of pheasants to find his house consumed by a funeral pyre of burning ashes and smoke. He dropped the birds in shock and attempted to force his way into the building, but it was already too late; the fires had done their worst.
There was one survivor, his servant Petra Schickelgruber. Her father, Johannes, was a blacksmith in the village of Strones. She had hidden in a cupboard in the scullery from the French soldiers who had stormed the house looking for food and valuables. She later claimed that they had been led by the butcher Cavaignac himself, though that seems rather unlikely. The Sans-Culottes had taken everything the Hiedlers owned that they could carry away; when Hiedler’s teenage son Johannes tried to stop them, they killed him – and then, out of revenge, had assaulted and murdered his mother and sister. Setting the house on fire out of spite, they had fled not ten minutes before Michael Hiedler returned from his hunt.
