Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  1809 saw the new French army under General Stéphane Pelletan, an overpromoted, overly-cautious commander, take a defensive posture against the Royalists and their allies. In part this was a move born of pragmatism and desperation, as Boulanger’s Grand Army had sapped the Republic of her remaining troops and there were simply too few men to attempt an offensive against the western foes, particularly given the Republic’s manpower-heavy tactics. This, though, was seen as a sign of weakness by the allied commanders, particularly Leo Bone. Furthermore, the British were now beginning to deploy their own steam vehicles from the ‘Whistler’ project to Europe, lending a powerful alienistic [psychological] weapon to the people in Republican lands that were conquered. They knew now that what they had been told, about the Republican armies being innately and uniquely technologically superior, was a lie; and if that was untruth, how could any of the proclamations issuing from their local semaphore tower be trusted?

  On a more prosaic level, Wesley’s determined campaign against thievery – in contrast to the Republican armies cheerfully practicing la maraude no less brutally on their own countryside as they did on other countries – lent the encroaching Allied armies a positive mystique in the eyes of many of the civilian populations they liberated. Of course the familiar paintings of the victorious Royalists being welcomed with showers of lilies by formerly Republican villagers are largely after-the-fact propaganda, but the depth of feeling should not be underestimated. Lisieux’s own propaganda had backfired; his continuous painting of the enemy in dark but vague terms, while suppressing all real knowledge, had only made them seem like the attractive forbidden fruit to the common folk of the Republic. The armies of the Revolution no longer enjoyed the support of the People with a capital P that Robespierre had talked so much about.

  It has been debated whether the Royalists and their allies struck too hard and too fast and perhaps lost more men than they might have done, but nonetheless after a series of engagements in March and April, Pelletan’s army was shattered and the general was fleeing back to Paris…

  *

  From: “Jean de Lisieux: Dark Fire” by François Garnier (1926, English translation 1931)—

  …General Pelletan arrived in the city on May 4th of that year. It is, of course, not known for certain what his thoughts were, but most commentators believe that the inexperienced general was certain he would face a labour camp for his failures. Or perhaps Lisieux might even break his usual rule against killing and send him to the chirurgeon or the phlogisticateur. Rather than being fearful, though, it appears Pelletan had resigned himself to his fate. Having decided he was doomed anyway, he chose to approach Lisieux directly to make his report.

  By 1809 Lisieux had long since secluded himself in his offices, originally an anonymous house which had long since expanded through walls to fill several streets’ worth of former homes. However, they were all buildings that predated the Revolution. Ironically, this was one of the few parts of Paris which had not been razed and rebuilt from the ground up thanks to Lisieux’s insistent desire to remake the whole of France in his own image. Some other biographers have speculated on why that might be, such as Lisieux alienistically considering his rule to be an abstract project and thus disliking being confronted with actual physical evidence of his decisions. For whatever the reason, Lisieux continued to hold court in his anonymous offices, while the project to construct a dedicated residence on Montmartre remained stuck in its early stages.

  Lisieux had held his fateful meeting with the Boulangerie in March 1807, the meeting which decided to turn Le Grand Crabe against Britain instead of the Dutch Republic and made history. After that meeting, L’Administrateur was seen less and less, even by his closest confidantes. Boulanger returned from the front in November to consult with him and, it is rumoured, rant about the invasion of Britain, which he privately considered a futile enterprise doomed from the start. After that time the two old political allies became estranged. Lisieux had not addressed the rubberstamp National Legislative Assembly or the Council of Moderators since 1806 and their members continued to meet more out of habit than of any sense of political power.

  The last meeting of Lisieux with what was left of the Boulangerie, lacking the member which gave it its name, as well as Surcouf and others, took place in January 1808. After this point the group split up to take on other roles, all part of the desperate attempt to prevent the Republic from collapsing. Few records survive from these secret meetings, but Boulanger’s adjutant Michel Chanson, attending in lieu of his superior, did note that Lisieux looked very pale and drawn, presumably due to never setting foot outside.

  But now, for probably the first time since the meeting with Boulanger, a man actually sought out L’Administrateur on purpose. Upon arriving at the offices, Pelletan was treated with disbelief by the Republic’s civil servants, who all lived in fear of Lisieux; it was rumoured that he had once sent a secretary to one of the shipbuilding labour camps for improperly punctuating one of his directives. Eventually, though, Pelletan made himself clear and a brave senior adjutant, Gaspard Coureau, stood up and offered to take him to the man who ruled France.

  The journey through the complex of houses was circuitous, and Pelletan was astonished when they went underground; Coureau told him that Lisieux had been excavating Parisian catacombs since at least 1804, preferring to dwell underground away from the noise of the increasingly mechanised city.

  At one point they met another courier (whose name is not recorded), bearing a sealed missive. Coureau recognised the seal. “This is for the general commanding the western front,” he said grimly, turning to Pelletan. “That’s you.”

  Pelletan gulped, but then took the letter and read it.

  After a moment he frowned in confusion. “This says I am to prioritise the siege of Nantes,” he said. “And it is addressed to Etienne.”

  The men shared a moment of uncomfortable realisation, which none of them dared voice. Etienne Devilliers had been killed last year. Either L’Administrateur had become insane, or…?

  Coureau noticed that the date had been carefully adjusted by a second hand, and decided it must be a recirculated older missive. “But why?” They continued on towards Lisieux.

  They met another courier, this one with a message addressed to all occupation troops, which said that Lisieux had decided to step up the 25-year plan and all the puppet republics in the Germanies should be merged into a great Germanic Democracy, while all those in Italy should be joined to France as the Latin Democracy, which Spain would swiftly be added to. It gave orders to places that had not been under French occupation for years.

  This was even worse, but Pelletan swallowed and continued onwards.

  Finally they found Lisieux’s office, in the deepest catacomb, dug and blasted by miners some years before. There was a door, with a letterbox. A larger office outside was constantly staffed by clerks, who would take the directives L’Administrateur pushed through the door to the the big semaphore tower L’Aiguille in the centre of Paris. There, they would be transmitted throughout the Republican Empire.

  Pelletan asked the clerks about the outdated letters, and the frightened men – most of them as pale from living underground as Lisieux was rumoured to be – avoided his gaze and refused to speak for a long time. One of them finally confessed under the threat of action by Coureau. Letters had stopped coming through the box some time ago, said the clerk. Out of fear that someone higher up would ask what was going on, and much too terrified to disturb Lisieux, they had simply started copying old orders and sending those out instead. The frightening thing, Pelletan realised, was that no-one had even noticed until now. France’s remaining armies were probably marching in the wrong direction, thrown off far more by this rot at the heart than any clever plot by Britain’s Unnumbered spies could have concocted.

  What had happened to Lisieux?

  Of course everyone knows the popular theories. The poetic one suggested by Maria Pichegru in her work La République, in which Lisieu
x chokes on a fishbone and none of his clerks dare open his door to save him. The outlandish one advanced by Dr Lars Jenssen in which he suggests that Lisieux quietly slipped out of the city and left for America, to live out his life as a tyrannical schoolteacher named Pablo Juarez in the United Provinces. None of these theories seem to hold water, but even the most sceptical scholar is at a loss to devise one that actually explains the undeniable evidence.

  For the offices were empty. Lisieux was not there. There was no body, no remains, not even a note, and the clerks staffed the office twenty-four hours a day; surely they would have seen him leave. There was no secret passage, either, at least none that anyone then or since has ever been able to find. Pelletan was at as much of a loss then as we remain today, and all he could think of was the crushing realisation that the insane path that lay before the Republic, it turned out, had no-one directing it…

  *

  From: “La Chute: Fall of the Republic” by Dr Jules Perrault (1930, English translation 1936)—

  …into this power vacuum, Olivier Bourcier emerged as an unlikely leader. Having observed the effects of both moderate and radical rule in Spain, the Germanies and Italy, Bourcier knew that the headless Republic must act fast if she was to escape being ground into the dirt for a thousand years by the vengeful Germans and Italians.

  Supported by Pelletan, Bourcier convened the National Legislative Assembly. Though long since reduced to a talking shop, the NLA proved to harbour one or two decisive leaders who had slipped through the net of terror. Of these René Apollinaire rose to the forefront, endorsing Bourcier as First Consul. This shocking move, casually sweeping aside all Lisieux’s constitutional changes, harkened back to the early days of the Revolution. Some speculative romantics may suggest that if the Republic’s death could have somehow been staved off, it could perhaps have developed into a proto-Adamantine state by these means – but this seems unlikely.

  Bourcier immediately seized command, using the remnants of his troops to crush Lisieux’s fanatically loyal Garde Nationale in the streets of Paris. This was a street battle rather symmetrically reminiscent of the one that had set Lisieux on the path to power in 1796. Then as before, Tortue steam-powered armoured wagons proved a useful weapon against the Garde’s fighters, and soon Bourcier held the heart, according to revolutionary doctrine. He did not, however, hold much else. By May 1809, though Boulanger still held a toehold of Flemish soil and his armies continued to defend northeastern France, the bulk of the Republic had fallen to foreign troops: British, American, Irish supporting the Royalists in the west, the Austrians and Neapolitans in the south, the nascent Concert of Germany in the east. Boulanger continued to enjoy quite solid support from the local Frenchmen in the northeastern départements, largely thanks to Francis II shooting himself in the foot in an attempt to make up for his earlier betrayal of Bavaria. The claimant Holy Roman Emperor quoted the Book of Revelation: “Give back to her as she has given! Pay her back double for what she has done! Mix her a double portion from her own cup!” In the face of such revanchist talk, the French were scarcely going to welcome the Austrians as liberators as they sometimes did the Royalists and their Anglo-Hiberno-American allies. Recognising this, the emerging Concert of Germany (the Dutch, Mittelbund and their allies) sought to distance themselves from the Austrians, widening a rift that would soon turn even more bitter.

  Bourcier was a realistic man. He had served under Drouet in Spain, a man who had tried to work with the locals rather than against them, albeit not to the same extent as the now-treacherous Ney. He saw that the Republic was doomed. All that mattered now was whether France would survive, and that would take a courageous move; the move to act knowing that he might be reviled by generations to come.

  On June 2nd 1809, Bourcier’s government sent a letter to the Allied troops advancing from the west, which was read by Leo Bone and Richard Wesley two days later; an offer of surrender, and an invitation for King Louis XVII to return to Paris and take up his rightful throne. It was a greater version of the coup Ney had pulled in Swabia to yank his country out from under Austrian retribution, and it was the Republic’s last chance.

  When Leo Bone read the letter, he mused for a moment: “Horatio will be unhappy they do not pay more for their crimes,” he said, “but I have other loyalties now. I can only trust that history will see things my way.”

  Then he turned to Wesley and offered the gruff Irishman a glass of wine, unable to resist a grin. “This does not change the fact, my friend, that after fifteen years of total war…we have won.”

  Yet Bone’s words were of course premature.

  For there was one throw of the dice left to come…

  Chapter #79: The Last Gambit

  Je reprends à présent la couronne qui me revient de droit, et sache, ô mon peuple, que désormais mon règne et celui de mes fils après le mien dureront jusquà la fin des temps; et sache aussi que le monde nous regarde, et quensemble nous veillerons à ce que les puissances ici-bas comprennent que, malgré les souffrances endurées au cours du long cauchemar de ces dernières années, malgré les ravages commis par les fauves et les insensés qui prétendaient parler au nom de ce même peuple quils décimaient, malgré tout ce que nous devrons reconstruire… le royaume sera toujours là.

  - King Louis XVII of the Restored Kingdom of France, coronation speech[103]

  *

  From: “A Disagreeable Interlude – the Aftermath of the Jacobin Wars in France” by Antoine Chabrol (1941)—

  On Leo Bone’s advice, King Louis accepted Bourcier’s offer and a message was sent on June 5th 1809 via the Republican semaphore network. This was still functioning, thanks to the absence of Lisieux; his all-controlling domination of the system meant that no-one had dared send any orders for it to be disabled as the enemy advanced. Bourcier immediately brought the matter to the National Legislative Assembly and announced a secret vote, something which had not been practiced since the early days of the Revolution. Each deputy was free to vote with his conscience, and did not have to fear Lisieux’s clerks sifting through his records for signs of unreliability – for all that his vote had been effectively worthless for years in any case.

  The NLA was still quite revolutionary in character, for all that its more hotheaded elements had been weeded out over the years by slamming into the brick wall that had been Jean de Lisieux’s iron rule. It is unlikely that more than perhaps a third of its members genuinely thought bringing back the king would make things any better, particularly fearing revisionism and reprisals for everything that had happened since 1794. However, the NLA’s deputies were also canny enough to realise that the Republic was doomed; the idea of France itself was at risk if they continued to try and fight both the Royalists and their allies in the west and the less forgiving Germans and Italians in the east. The sole, slim hope for French survival was to surrender to one side and hope disagreements broke out among the fractious, largely notional international coalition, sufficient to prevent any concerted effort at tearing France apart at a peace treaty.

  Therefore, the NLA voted by 231 to 172 to approve Bourcier’s plan, officially reinstating the King. Charismatic deputy René Apollinaire also tabled a resolution calling for the people of France to require the King to approve an enlightened constitution before taking his throne, arguing that all their efforts and suffering would be for naught if matters simply reset to the Bourbon absolutism of 1793. In the end, although there was much sympathy for it, this motion was narrowly defeated when Bourcier appealed that, at present, France could not afford to set terms to her only hope for survival.

  In truth King Louis would almost certainly have agreed to this. The King was a fairly modern thinker, indeed had been (by Bourbon standards) even as the Dauphin in the early 1790s. His sojourn in Great Britain prior to the Seigneur Offensive had also impressed upon him the idea that a Parliament could work to a monarch’s advantage and serve the stability of the state, not necessarily by actually doing anything but simply being there and th
us sapping all but the most fervent revolutionaries of their cause by reminding them there was a slim but real chance they could achieve it through legitimate means (it has therefore of course been argued that Louis was an early adopter of proto-Reactivism). Having experimented with the Grand-Parlement in Royal France, Louis was convinced that attempting to restore the absolutist system as it once had been would be constructing a fragile house of cards, ready to totter and fall once more at the slightest sign of discontent. Therefore, compromises were inevitable, for all that his ultraroyaliste supporters in the Vendée would rather have matters arranged so that every trace of the Revolution could be wiped and expunged from the planet altogether, every page mentioning it torn out of the history books.

  Leo Bone, whose opinion was increasingly becoming scarcely less relevant to Royal French policy than the King’s, concurred for different reasons. A political conservative by default (being a classical Royal Navy man: if it is not broken, do not fix it), Bone nonetheless disliked the idea of Royal France that the ultraroyalistes espoused, not because it was tyrannical but because it was disorganised. Like the King and his fellow minister Barras, Bone was acutely aware of how powerful some of the ideas of the Revolution had been and how well they had served the ambitions of Robespierre and Lisieux. Strong nationalism delivering a single, simple, national flag and anthem, everything set down in black and white, structured government – this message had appealed to a population used to governance by a mess of impenetrable tradition, corrupt nepotism and arbitrary power. L’état, c’est moi could not continue, not when a French State had existed under the Republicans without the King. Indeed Le Diamant had the last laugh, for it was his take on the Sun King’s catchphrase, L’état c’est le peuple, that was bandied about for the first time since the 1790s.