by Tom Anderson
I felt a thrill run down my spine, and I was unable to say whether it was apprehensive or hopeful. “Then what shall you do, Pierre? What shall we all do?”
The Marshal bent down and pulled his dagger from the floor, tossing it from hand to hand. “We shall do the only thing we can do in conscience, Pierre. I doubt we shall succeed, for even if we win now, we shall still face the Germans. But at least we shall persuade the world that the Revolution does not cravenly surrender. We can make a name for ourselves, encourage the next generation of oppressed poor to remember us. What we have done shall never be forgotten…
“No, the men of the Revolution shall not surrender. If it comes to it, the men of the Revolution shall DIE!”
The next day, the orders began flying. To their surprise, the armies were going into quick-march mode, as though we were practicing the Guerre d’éclair once more. As indeed we were. But this time, the Marshal’s signature attack strategy would aim to take and hold the heart of a country none of us had ever thought we would need to invade.
France.
Chapter #80: For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…
And if any man who would allow himself to believe that warfare is an acceptable manner of serving his country’s needs, or his own desires for power and ascendancy, let him be humbled by one word whispered into his ear: Paris.
- Michael Hutchinson MP, In Defence of the Congress,
speech at the Hyde Park Rally in Doncaster, 1829
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From: “A Glossary of Terms in Warfare” by Peter William Courtenay, 4th Baron Congleton (Vandalia-shire, Virginia), 1921—
The War of the Nations: Commonly accepted term (coined by contemporary commentators) for the final stages of the Jacobin Wars, in which the tide of war had decisively turned against the French Latin Republic. Generally considered to extend from the collapse of the English Germanic Republic at the end of 1807 until the Battle of Paris in 1809, although some Continental commentators instead choose a later starting date, working from the failure of Boulanger’s campaign in the Low Countries almost a year later.
Regardless of arguments over definitions, there is no doubt that this is an apt name. While the FLR had been continuously engaged with numerous powers since its inception, this was when countless nations piled onto Lisieux’s state, sensing weakness from the failures and desiring a piece of the peace (if one will forgive the crude wordplay) that was to be obtained when the smoke had cleared. Several of these powers had been at war with France earlier in the wars, while others joined for the first time. Dates of declaration of war can be found below; note that in the case of Flanders, the Dutch Republic and Great Britain, a state of war was entered without a formal declaration of war thanks to the French surprise attacks.
Naples (Kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Aragon), Castile, Portugal: Already at war with France.
Austria and other Hapsburg possessions inc. Kingdom of Italy, Mittelbund, Alliance of Hildesheim, most remaining unaligned minor German states: Already in continuous state of war with the French and their puppets, though more direct intervention commenced with the launch of Le Grand Crabe (q.v.)
Duchy of Flanders: March 17th 1807 (by default, due to invasion by Boulanger)
Republic of the United Netherlands: March 20th 1807 (by default, due to attack on Carnbee’s fleet by Villeneuve)
Kingdom of Great Britain: March 23rd 1807 (by default, due to invasion)
Kingdom of Ireland and Empire of North America: Not formally declared until late 1807, but considered retroactively to date to Britain’s. Irish and American troops were involved in the fighting long before official pronouncement due to contemporary communications delays.
Corsican Republic: April 12th 1807.
Electorate of Saxony (and de facto acquisitions): October 4th 1807.
Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden: October 7th 1807.
Empire of All Russias and Grand Duchy of Lithuania: February 3rd 1809 (see Petersburg Colloquy).
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Petersburg Colloquy. Informal name given to a meeting between Emperor Paul I and his ministers and advisors in St Petersburg, late January 1809. The object of the meeting was to discuss the possibility of Russian intervention in the latter Jacobin Wars (the War of the Nations, q.v.). This had previously been impossible firstly because of the Russian Civil War and secondly because of the need to recover from said conflict, though at all times the country had remained steadfastly opposed to the French Republicans in terms of ideology and propaganda (e.g. Paul’s discouragement of, and then total ban on, Russian court French). At the time of the Colloquy, a large part of the Russian Army had already been committed to sabre-rattling operations against the Ottomans and their Crimean vassal in the Caucasus and Ruthenia (respectively) along with the ‘Great Eastern Adventure’, so it was unlikely Russia could provide that much of a force to the anti-Republican coalition.
However, while Marshal Saltykov pointed out that any intervention at this stage could only be minor, foreign minister Grigory Rostopshchin argued that the existence of such a contribution as a propaganda symbol would far outweigh its actual combat usefulness, and would send a message to the powers of Europe that Mother Russia had licked her wounds and could once more stretch out her hand to do the tsar’s bidding. Also, Heinz Kautzman (popularly known as “The Bald Impostor”) pointed out that Russia could not dare risk being left out of any peace negotiations lest she be sidelined in post-war European politics, and that the tsar’s steadfast condemnation of the Revolution would be made to sound hollow if the British and Royal French secured a mild, compromise peace. The fact that this argument was made months before Bourcier made his peace overture illustrates that Russian intelligence in France in this period was perhaps more extensive than it is often given credit for.
In the end, a decision was made; seven Russian regiments and three Lithuanian ones would be sent to France. Emperor Paul ruled out the obvious land route for several reasons. Firstly, he distrusted the new northern German polities. Secondly, Austria remained theoretically hostile towards Russia under the mercurial and unpredictable Francis II. Besides, in the vast and multinational battles raging on the eastern front, it seemed likely that the token Russo-Lithuanian force would be lost and its exploits unreported upon. For that reason, the Russians pursued the more audacious strategy of sending transports from Petersburg and Riga through the Baltic, the Skagerrak and the North Sea to land the troops directly in France. Though somewhat risky on the face of it, the Russians knew that the Republican French fleet had been almost completely destroyed. An escort was also provided by the Danes, who contributed a few additional troops; Denmark had remained in the war largely simply to have a voice at the peace settlement, once her primary objective of ejecting French ambitions from the Germanies had been secured. Finally, in a gesture of reconciliation following the Civil War, Grand Duke Alexander Potemkin of Courland also scraped together a token regiment and a few ships to contribute.
This combined force traversed its sea route and landed its troops near Dieppe in June of 1809. Bare days later, Kautzman – who had chosen to command the force personally, believing Russia now stable and safe enough for his people to leave – learned of Bourcier’s peace offer. Urgent to ensure the Russians were blooded before the war could end so they would have a claim to a seat at the peace table, he immediately ordered a march on Paris, hoping to run into Republican units en route…
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From: “Knife’s Edge: The Republic, the Kingdom, and the Battle of Paris 1809” by Paul Ramsbottom (1980)—
On the 4th of August 1809, a quiet summer’s day, two of the greatest armies the world had ever seen clashed in an epic struggle to decide the fate of Europe. Few of the great wars have ended in such a fashion. The earlier Wars of Supremacy, for all that they contained many large battles, had a tendency to peter out for several years into inactivity before an anticlimactic peace was reached by default. The Jacobin Wars, by contrast, ended with the single greatest battle
of their course, eclipsing all earlier matches in the long years of conflict. Indeed the man in the street seems frequently only to know of this battle, greatly overrepresented as it is in film and other adaptations, and may be ignorant of all that came before, the war and the ideological conflict that set the stage for what some of our forefathers optimistically mistook to be the ‘end of history’.
On one side was all that remained of the Grande Armée de la République: eighty thousand strong, late of the campaign in Flanders, commanded by none other than Marshal Pierre Boulanger and his twelve generals, some recently promoted, universally known in the anglophone world as “the Baker’s Dozen”. Some Neo-Jacobins of the Oporto School have fallen upon the obvious comparison to Christ’s disciples and the subsequent messianic image attached to Boulanger has only been amplified by the account of Michel Chanson in Avant le Déluge. Chanson presented Boulanger’s last meeting with his generals on the day before the battle in terms clearly meant to evoke the Last Supper, doubtless being responsible for much of the mysticism surrounding the thirteen, not one of whom died of old age. Of course, Chanson’s account must be dismissed in a more cool-headed analysis of the pieces in play.
On the other side were the combined forces sometimes known by that point as “The Western Allies”; twenty thousand Republican French loyal to Bourcier, twelve thousand Royal French, twelve thousand Britons, three thousand Irish and three thousand Americans. All in all, there were approximately 55,000; sorely outnumbered by Boulanger’s force, and lacking much of a defensive position. Paris was not a city designed to be defended easily, much less Lisieux’s reconstructed Paris which, it had always been assumed, would sit at the heart of a peaceful Latin Democracy forever. It was obvious that the only way the Allies would have any chance at all was if a strong and unified chain of command could be implemented, which immediately caused problems as the commanders struggled to organise in response to Boulanger’s approach. The Allies knew of this only by the rudimentary Optel semaphore network created by the Chappe brothers; working to Guerre d’éclair standards, Boulanger’s army moved swiftly and outran all but the fastest horseback messengers. In order to permit such a rapid movement, Boulanger had left his supply train behind and allowed la maraude to be perpetrated on France herself. By the time the Grande Armée left the northeastern part of France it had controlled, Boulanger had made himself a very unpopular man with its people.
Of course to Boulanger himself this was unimportant; his goal was to destroy the Allies, to take Paris, and if nothing more was possible, at least to go down in flames and create a new Revolutionary symbol for the future. On the night before the battle which Chanson wrote about, General Trenet advocated a pause in their march, outlining a strategy by which the bulk of the army would engage the Allies while he took ten thousand and looped around to hit Paris from the rear. This would prevent the enemy from having any chance to fire the city, and would allow Boulanger’s forces to surround the enemy army. Boulanger vetoed this. “We shall not gain victory by ‘tricks’,” declared the man who had once saved the nascent Republic by a rather underhanded deal with Charles Theodore. “All the world shall see us defeat the counter-revolutionaries and traitors on the fair field of battle. All shall see our system is superior. What follows after matters little.” Many biographers have tried to explain the change in character in the Marshal from pragmatic tactician to stubborn ideologue, but most broadly concur on the idea that Boulanger had been profoundly affected by his failure in Brussels and the ensuing retreat. He was determined to win one last victory by straightforward means to indeed ‘prove the superiority’ of Jacobinism, the ideology which, regardless of its crimes, had allowed a mere baker’s son to rise to the highest military position in France. Whatever the reason, Trenet and his supporters amid the Dozen could not dissuade Boulanger.
In Paris, King Louis held an emergency meeting while the overall supreme commander was chosen. The King himself favoured Leo Bone, but this was objected to on multiple grounds. His naval background was held by some to reflect lack of land warfare experience, while some among the Royal French remained associated with political factions opposed to ‘le petit Vauban’ and instead advocated the veteran Royalist general Henri Grouchy as leader. However, Grouchy was unpopular among the Republicans of Bourcier, who muttered allegations of his going against the laws of war during the late campaign in the Vendée. Of course the Republicans wanted Bourcier himself, but this was politically impossible. The British commander Sir John Moore was considered to be too closely aligned with the Royal French to be a neutral arbiter, while his lieutenant Thomas Græme had been associated with pamphlets condemning the Republican system very severely in the past. That left the Irish and Americans as obvious neutral choices, as being too obscure and exotic for any of the fractious Allies to get too excited about. The American commander John Alexander was too young and too recently promoted; furthermore, lingering snobbish prejudices about the Americas’ queried ability to produce great men ran deep in both French forces, especially the Republicans. The logical choice was therefore the Duke of Mornington, Richard Wesley. He had experience in leading outnumbered forces during the rebellion of the United Society of Equals in Ireland, and he had experience of leading divided and diverse forces both in that war and in India.
Wesley had never commanded a battle on this scale, of course; but then, nor had anyone else. King Louis granted him the temporary rank of Marshal of France, matching Boulanger’s status and allowing him to give orders to both sets of French commanders. In a conference with the other generals, Wesley outlined the problem they faced: “Point number one: Paris is not readily defensible. Point number two: We cannot afford to abandon the city on tactical grounds lest the enemy win a punishing propaganda victory and cancel our earlier triumphs. Point number three: Our only recourse is therefore to give the Baker and his Dozen a damn’ good thrashing.”
Fortunately, Allied intelligence was good enough to discern that Boulanger’s rapid march showed no sign of slowing down as he neared the city. The Marshal of the Republic, it was clear, must be planning a simple frontal assault. In response, Wesley devised a strategy after consultation with the others, especially Grouchy and Bourcier. “Our objective is to hold them. We cannot hope to defeat a more numerous, veteran, homogenous army with a clear chain of command, even if it is fatigued from its late march. But we can hold them. Hold them, perhaps, until reinforcements arrive.” That was the key to the plan. Whereas before the British and Royal French had hurried to Paris to ensure the vengeful Germans did not get there first, now they pinned their hopes on reinforcements from the east.
Responses in that quarter to Boulanger’s turnaround were complex: in Flanders, the armies of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim began an immediate pursuit, though hampered due to being unable to match Boulanger’s Guerre d’éclair speed. However, the Flemings and Dutch themselves mostly remained in place, struggling to rebuild their countries after the ravages of the Grande Armée. General von Wrede in particular was tasked with the military governorship of Flanders’ French-speaking region, Wallonia, which had largely been sympathetic to French rule, at least at first. In response to the repeated ‘betrayals’ of Liége since the 1790s, Duke Charles Theodore II ordered the formal dissolution of the archbishopric – which had formerly remained de jure an independent entity within the Wittelsbach possessions – and its direct annexation into the Duchy, one of the most important mediatisations in this period in the Germanies.
The Danes and Saxons operating in Swabia also responded by sending armies towards Paris, though it was doubtful whether they could arrive in time to do any good. Recognising this, Saxon commander Franz Wagner sent his Polish flying cavalry, under the command of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, in an advance attack in the hope that they might arrive in time to attack Boulanger’s flank. Meanwhile, the Hapsburgs seized this opportunity to achieve a more oblique objective. Still smarting over the failure of the scheme to attack Swabia, the Archduke F
erdinand ordered General Alvinczi to once more attack through the former Switzerland, but this time to go through the French-speaking regions and take Lorraine. Francis II remained paranoid about the Saxons and Danes using newly friendly Swabia as a base for further operations, and Lorraine was the obvious target for future expansion. Furthermore, as a former possession of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, a definite claim could be made – for all that Alvinczi’s occupation extended well past the old legal definitions of the Duchy. Meanwhile, the Neapolitans, Portuguese and their Spanish allies could not move fast enough to affect the outcome of the coming struggle, for all that it frustrated Horatio Nelson. “Damn that man,” he wrote, meaning his friend Leo Bone, “for having the audacity to forever be at the centre of everything.”
Battle was joined on the morning of August 4th and continued the whole day. Wesley positioned his forces on the Montmartre Heights north of Paris proper, the only reasonably defensive position. It was a clever ploy, as even if Boulanger did choose to circumvent the massed Allied armies to take Paris after all, mortars positioned on Montmartre could easily shell Paris. Either way, Boulanger would have to destroy the Allied army. It was a surreal experience for Wesley and his officers, who moved their headquarters into the half-completed Maison de Montmartre, the new government house which Lisieux had ordered constructed for his future residence at the heart of his perfect Latin Democracy. Ironically enough it would one day be completed and become the residence of the Prime Minister of France, likely helped by the fact that damage to the building during the battle helpfully removed some of the more politically awkward statues dotting the otherwise Utilitarian structure.
