by Tom Anderson
Upon hearing the story from the scorched, shaking girl, Hiedler’s mind initially simply shut down. He stared blankly at the burned wreckage of his house, his life. For hours he did so, until Schickelgruber came to her senses and led him, like a child, away by the hand. Down to Strones, though flames and smoke were rising there, too…
Schickelgruber had lost members of her family, too. Her father had been shot out of hand by a French grenadier who had broken into his smithy for any valuables. Her mother and siblings, though, had escaped by hiding in a nearby cave. They did their best to care for Hiedler, who continued to remain silent, not talking, not eating, not drinking, just staring blindly at the world.
Perhaps Michael Hiedler died that day, and what eventually returned was something else entirely.
The next day, Bolognesi’s army marched through the town. The surviving people of the village, still in shock, darkly cheered them on, shouting in graphic terms what must be done to the French.
A week after that, Lascelles finally gave battle. He had not retreated as far as he had hoped – Bolognesi was well supplied, and Lascelles’ marauding strategy had not worked – but the French did find a good defensive position near Ischl. The Austrians attacked the French army in deep line, as was their wont, and the more aggressive-orientated strategies of the Sans-Culottes failed. Lascelles accepted defeat and retreated, but managed to hurt Bolognesi enough to slow the Austrian pursuit somewhat.
It was not until April 1800 that the two armies met again – this time at Rosenheim in Bavaria. This time, Lascelles’ troops won the day; they had acquired artillery from Bavarian depots, which put them on a level footing with the Austrians. Bolognesi retreated in good order to Reichenhall and sent word to Vienna, asking for more orders.
But Emperor Francis was displeased with the conduct of the war in other quarters. Lascelles was no longer in a position to threaten Vienna, and the core lands of Austria were safe. That was sufficient. Bavaria was not yet reclaimed, but then Bavaria had not been Hapsburg until 1783. It could wait. Yes, to the Hapsburg mind, the Turk was everything – everything. It was an attitude that had cost them before in the Germanies, but never, perhaps, as much as it did on this occasion.
When word of the Bolognesi campaign reached Strones, Petra Schickelgruber tentatively told Michael Hiedler. He had ceased his catatonic state, and would eat and drink, but continued to speak only in monosyllables and stare into space. Schickelgruber had been tending to him in this state for months. When she told him that the French had been driven out of Austria, she hoped that he would be satisfied with this victory.
But then something snapped inside Michael Hiedler. He rose to his feet in anger, and damned the Emperor “down to the deepest pit of hell!”
In shock, Schickelgruber stared as Hiedler went out into the village square, stood upon a makeshift podium, and began an angry, defamatory, amateur yet passionate speech that began with a tirade against Emperor Francis II – which attracted and shocked most of the village people. Hiedler went on to speak of his family’s deaths for the first time since the event, and added that right now the French would be doing the same thing to thousands more innocent Germans – that was the word he used, ‘Germans’ – across still-occupied Bavaria. Lascelles’ army was mostly intact – the same ‘bastards’ who had ravaged their town continued to do so with impunity elsewhere. Francis was satisfied with progress so far – “well I am NOT!”
He concluded by stating his own aims: “I will not be satisfied until we have marched all the way to Paris, strung up Robespierre” (at this point the knowledge of Lisieux’s rule had yet to penetrate to Bavaria) “and hacked off the heads of every last stinking Frenchman in the world!”
The atmosphere was epic, the people drawn in by his fiery rhetoric, not learned and polished in the college, but coming from the heart of an erratically educated and formerly unassuming man. His eyes, blank and unseeing for so long, suddenly seemed to pierce the hearts of men’s souls.
And at the last, Hiedler – in a shout that was more like a scream, coming straight from the heart that the French had torn apart – declared the battle cry that would be associated with him throughout all of history:
“If the cannon and the sword are too faint-hearted to do what must be done, then let it be WAR UNTO THE KNIFE!”
And with that cry, the Kleinkrieg, the Little War, began.
Chapter #55: A Delicious Irony
From: “The Administration: Life and Death in Lisieux’s Republic” by Jean Daladier (1921)—
The fallout from the Rape of Rome in November 1802 was both a problem and an opportunity for Jean de Lisieux. On the one hand, the action of radical Jacobin troops (which, everyone knew, had been loaned to Hoche by France) threatened to stir up resentment and even uprisings throughout France. It soon became apparent that the attempts by Robespierre and Hébert to suppress the Catholic Church had been much less successful than appearances had suggested. They might, perhaps, have taken on and defeated those who were willing to violently oppose the Revolution in all its aspects on the principle of their religion; but a much larger group had lain low and accepted the Revolution, despite (or because of) the bloody reign of Robespierre, but now arose in anger over the crimes committed against the Papacy.
The actual rebellions were diffuse, disorganised and quite easily defeated by Lisieux’s Garde Nationale, which was loyal to him alone. But they nonetheless pointed to a strong Catholic undercurrent in French society that could not be undone in eight years of deistic-atheist rule. A problem for Lisieux, then – but also an opportunity, indeed. He had been plotting to undermine the Sans-Culottes ever since his street campaign in Paris to suppress the revolts after Hébert’s death in March 1796. Initially this had been because they were Robespierre’s base of support, and Lisieux (who had always coveted the supreme power) wanted to supplant them with his Garde Nationale, which had made their name in the same campaign. Now Robespierre was dead and Lisieux ruled the Latin Republic, but he continued to work against the Sans-Culottes. He was afraid of their independent spirit, seeking to personally control all agencies in France himself, and also their idolisation of Le Diamant. Though Le Diamant was long dead, his ideas lived on in his great work, La Carte de la France, which set forward a literal road map towards a free and equitable new French state.
Lisieux detested La Carte. It was everywhere, it was bound up with the symbolism of the heady days of the initial revolution, and he could not control it. Its ideas were somewhat incompatible with his own: when Le Diamant had drawn it up, of course, ideas for reform in France had still centred around a constitutional monarchy. Few had dreamed of a Republic, and the terminology in La Carte reflected this. Robespierre had managed to justify his hijacking of Le Diamant’s legacy by twisting the meaning of the map – he ever cast himself in the role of interpreter of Le Diamant’s dying wishes to the Sans-Culottes – but this did not appeal to Lisieux, who wanted everything to be set down unambiguously, clearly, and understood by everyone (this aspect of his personality can perhaps be held responsible for his strong support of the Rational measuring system, Thouret’s square départements, and his scheme for French spelling reform, which never really took off). After all, if Robespierre could twist La Carte to make it closer to his aims, so could anyone. In theory, even that so-called king ruling over a few rebel départements in the west could seize it and achieve the adoration of the same Sans-Culottes who had cheered his father’s phlogistication…
Thus, Le Diamant and La Carte had to go, along with the Sans-Culottes themselves, if France was to remain on the correct course. Besides, Lisieux did not like how La Carte enshrined such rights as regular elections and term limits for representatives. Again, Robespierre had got around that, partly by using the threat of war to justify his excesses, but Lisieux wanted it stricken permanently from the Republic’s constitution. He would need a long time in power to set France on the right path for his 25 Years’ Peace. Only, of course, so that a truly free and equitabl
e state might result at the end. Naturally.
Lisieux surprised many commentators, though he had been planning the move for a long time, on the night of December 25th 1802, what had once been Christmas. Even as hymns rose into the night from the Vendée and Brittany under their Royalist Catholic rule, though, the knives were being unsheathed in Paris. A chorus of an altogether different kind filled the air as Sans-Culotte leaders, many of them senior army officers, were assassinated throughout Paris, and, thanks to Lisieux’s new semaphore network (q.v.), many more were taken down almost simultaneously in other cities. The death toll for that night is unconfirmed, but J. J. Schröder places it at a conservative seventy-nine. Ever afterwards, it was known as La Nuit Macabre.
In the morning, as the Royalists celebrated the Feast of Saint-Étienne, Lisieux began issuing decrees in the form of direct pamphlets to the people of Paris, as was his wont – bypassing the toothless National Legislative Assembly. He finally launched the coup that he had been planning for almost a decade, declaring the Sans-Culottes to be persona non grata and their ‘organisation’ disbanded. Taking advantage of the Sans-Culottes’ confusion, deprived of most of their leaders, Lisieux’s Garde Nationale went to work. Some Sans-Culottes joined the Garde at musket-point, while the diehard radicals were battled in holdout actions by the Garde throughout Paris. There were far fewer of them than there had been just a few years ago; Lisieux’s plans had worked well. Slowly, subtly, he had used the Sans-Culottes as cannon fodder against Austria, Spain and Naples in order to thin their ranks and get them away from the centre of political power in France. The Sans-Culottes fought more successfully outside Paris, which Lisieux ruled with an iron grip, but in the end were defeated. The republican civil war also served to distract attention from the slightly earlier risings of Catholics in the wake of the Rape of Rome.
Some Sans-Culottes were captured alive, especially outside Paris, and were sent to Marseilles and Toulon. There, though Lisieux’s regime described their activities with a paragraph of euphemism in the official pamphlets, they were put to work as slave labourers. Once upon a time, they might have become galley slaves, but no longer. Most of France’s remaining conventional galleys had been committed to the Spanish invasion, and were then lost in Nelson’s rocket attack on Minorca in June of 1803. All the new ships being built, with a great sense of urgency and hammering that resounded across the Mediterranean, were steamships. They did not need chained oarsmen, though they did need men to shovel the coal, which was almost as bad.
Mostly, though, the Sans-Culottes were employed in the shipyards, learning the simpler and more repetitive processes of the shipbuilding process that did not require skilled labour. It was at this time that the great economist and scientist Phillipe de Coulomb[18] worked with the Boulangerie members on the project. Coulomb used his father’s works and principles to help determine the most efficient means of using unskilled workmen on a project. In doing so, he improved upon the Carltonist “Division of Labour” and developed process production.[19] It all sounds very bloodless set down in this manner, but the work of the effete and somewhat squeamish Coulomb was ultimately built on a mountain of men who had been worked to death, a horror as great as any African tale of the slave-days.[20]
What is also true is that the year between July 1803 and July 1804 was perhaps the most successful and prolific period of shipbuilding in French history, with countless new steam-galleys of the ‘Surcouf’ class being constructed. Their design had been much improved by Cugnot and Jouffroy over the earlier ones employed against Spain, and they were fitted with the new screw propeller, discovered by chance during the Battle of Cadaqués. The ‘Surcouf’ was a slim, narrow ship, compared by some to a Viking longboat rather than resembling a Mediterranean galley as the earlier designs had. In truth that description was not too far off. The ‘Surcouf’s were designed to be capable of traversing shallow water, including travelling upriver. They were designed around a single, large, forward-facing gun deck, with the intention that this could easily be swapped out and modified for different armaments.
The standard main armament of a ‘Surcouf’ was three super-heavy cannon, usually at least fifty-pounders, and five smaller cannonades for volley fire. This was derived from the manner in which Mediterranean galleys were armed. Unlike those, however, the ‘Surcouf’ had no oars blocking her flanks (or paddle-wheels, like some of the earlier steamers) and thus had room for a lateral armament as well. This was, however, usually an afterthought, consisting mainly of carronades for opportunistic attacks at point-blank range.
Other optional main armaments included, from the start, a mortar package designed to turn the ‘Surcouf’ into a bomb-ship,[21] as well as a shrapnel-lined powder magazine that could be fitted into the gun deck for the craft to be turned into an explosion ship. Admiral Lepelley commissioned research into investigating spar torpedoes to permit the use of a less drastic and suicidal means of ramming, but the initial results were disappointing, and spar torpedo technology would not be perfected until the late 1820s.
Later developments, which did not make their first appearance until the Conquérant offensive, included a gundeck lined with steel wire grids and asbestos, permitting the use of a forge to heat hot shot (as already used by Casanova’s Cacafuego). Although hot-shot ships had been experimented with before by several navies, they had always been judged too dangerous, too likely to set fire to themselves, to be of any use. The first navy that could use hot shot in the middle of a blue-water battle far from land fortifications would have a serious advantage. Another new weapon, designed according to plans sent back by Leclerc out of Mysore, consisted of a rocket battery. This also required shielding the gundeck against fire, but was designed on Lepelley’s explicit orders. The Admiral was furious at Nelson’s audacious attack, and was determined to repay the Englishman in his own coin.
The ‘Surcoufs’ were built on the blood of Sans-Culottes slave labourers, but so was the Canal de l'Épurateur in which they swam. Lisieux ordered the completion, widening and deepening of the Canal de Bourgogne, which had started construction in 1727 but remained unfinished eight decades later. Under Lisieux and the Boulangerie, work resumed in 1800 and the Canal reached its intended state at the end of 1804. The canal was not intended merely to improve the transport of goods and troops within France, though that was certainly a positive. The design of the ‘Surcouf’ meant that they could steam all the way through such a canal, as their Viking inspirations had once sailed up the Seine to burn Paris. And the Burgundy Canal, via the Yonne and Seine to the Saône and Rhône, ultimately connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly, providing one possessed a fleet of warships capable of traversing the canal, the Pillars of Heracles no longer existed. British possession of Gibraltar meant nothing. Ships built in the Mediterranean ports could appear in the Atlantic without ever entering the Gulf of Lion. It was a novelty that other powers were slow to pick up on – to their cost.
Lisieux renamed the Burgundy Canal in honour of l'Épurateur, and for good reason. With his purge of the Sans-Culottes, L’Administrateur publicly disowned Le Diamant, and embarked on a surge of rewriting the history books – hence why our own handed-down knowledge of the 1794 revolutionary period is so sketchy, for Lisieux was very thorough when it came to controlling public perceptions. The Administration claimed that Le Diamant was a traitor and a faint-heart, a Royalist and a betrayer of the Revolution. This despite the fact that the Revolution was begun by Le Diamant. Lisieux got around that problem by inventing an earlier role for l'Épurateur, the half-mythical symbolic figure of France witnessed (or made up) by Hébert flying the first Bloody Flag over the Bastille. According to the new official version of history coming out of Paris, it was l'Épurateur who had started the Revolution, and Le Diamant had almost doomed it by surrendering to the King, who had betrayed him in turn and shot him (personally, if you believed some accounts).
It was not the first time that a new regime had attempted to rewrite history, but L
isieux was remarkably successful, at least in the short term. This was largely due to the semaphore system throughout France which allowed him to coordinate the activity of his agents and Móderateurs in the distant départements. The earliest system had been set up in 1796 by Louis Chappe, who had successfully convinced the NLA (of which his brother was a member) of the virtues of a system that would allow Paris to know of the outcomes of battles against the Austrians almost before they happened. The initial semaphore tower lines were modest, mainly linking the Île-de-France to the front lines of the Flemish border and Alsace.
Lisieux poured more money into the Chappe project after he seized power, by which time crude lines extended as far as Toulon and Bordeaux. Lisieux’s funding allowed Chappe to refine and improve the system, using the first experimental shutterboxes rather than simple swinging arms in order to convey much more information and faster. This meant that even Lisieux’s pamphlets, once encrypted, could be transferred across France in the form of raw data flying through the air, then reconstituted in the départements and re-printed. This miracle of modern technology was praised by the Revolutionary poet Monteferrier, who said “behold, our nation is the first to truly live, for the blood of words and deeds runs in her veins of light”. He referred to how, at night, lamps were hung from the arms and used to illuminate the shutterboxes. When viewed from a high vantage point, the lines of lit towers indeed resembled the glittering veins of the body of Republican France.
