by Tom Anderson
Then, even as the sun began to dip below the horizon, red as the blood that soaked that battlefield, Boulanger triumphed. He took Wesley in the side, a glancing blow only, but one that distracted the Duke. He let out a cry of pain and the baker’s son disarmed him, twisting his own sabre out of his hand with a flick. Boulanger drew back his blade to land the killing blow–
And fell to the ground with an American Hall rifle bullet in his brain.
All heads snapped around as both sides cried out, and all eyes were upon John Alexander as he lowered his smoking weapon. Beside him, taciturn as always, was his slave, Johnson, who had just reloaded the weapon for his master. The Carolinian stared at the outraged faces of the circle of men, his allies scarcely less offended than the enemy, and they found a cold, unapologetic look in his eyes.
Before the murmurs could turn to shouts of fury and the killing could resume, Leo Bone took a step forward, as always immediately commanding attention by his sheer personal charisma. He helped the wounded Wesley back to the Allied lines, supporting him on his shoulder, as the Irishman glared at Alexander in hatred. Before Wesley could speak, though, Bone did: “General. Why did you so interrupt the duel, against all the laws of duelling?”
Alexander stepped forward and gave the circle a look of utter contempt. “Because duelling is how gentlemen resolve matters of honour, sir. Mister Boulanger,” he waved in the direction of the corpse, “threw away any chance he ever had to become a gentleman when he joined the cause of this odious revolution so many years ago. If one is to declare all nobility, and chivalry, and honour to be irrelevant, then that sword cuts both ways. He who lives by the sword,” and he drew his own, tossing it up into the air, “dies by the sword.” The blade, good Pittsburgh steel, pierced the French earth and for a moment gleamed in the evening sunlight as though it were Excalibur.
Adaptations of this battle often pretend that these words were enough to persuade everyone to stand down and peace to ensue. Of course it is never so simple. Students puzzled at the fact that the Russians obtained so much of their agenda at the Congress of Copenhagen should note that Kautzman’s force – by now having realised the extent of the battle – played a much larger role after this point. Kautzman’s men relieved the hard-pressed Irish “horns” at the rear of the battle and ensured that the surrounded Republicans knew well that fighting further was hopeless. Boulanger could still have rallied them, but Boulanger was dead, and as news of his death spread through the army, General Trenet ordered the surrender.
And with that battle, in which a man of the inferior Scots Celtic race and another of the inferior black African race, both born and raised in the inferior environment of the Americas, slew the champion of the French Latin Republic and the very Linnaean Racism that taught such lies, the Jacobin Wars finally came to an end.
Chapter #81: To the Victor the Headaches
“Monsieur Lisieux would seek to arbitrarily carve up Europe into units based on the alleged blood kinship of its inhabitants, regardless of what all historical and legal precedent say, to speak nothing of simple convenience…”
- Letter from a Concerned Gentleman #35, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough – published 1804, later mockingly quoted in The North Briton, 1810
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From: “Lines on a Map: The Congress of Copenhagen” by Dr Andreas Goransson (1969, English translation 1971)—
When it comes to considering the stability of the continent, indeed the world, towards wide-scale conflict, one should never underestimate the impact of a group of gentlemen sitting in a smoke-filled lounge and sharing port and cigars over idle conversation. One such gathering, in Paris in 1812, ensured that the citizens of Nouvelle Liége in New Gascony’s Rigaudeau Province do not live in in the Nouvelle Holland province instead. Not by design, for the line was drawn long before the town was founded, but simply because an imperfection in a ruler led to the arbitrarily drawn border curving upwards for a bump several miles across.
Yet it is not to the Treaty of Paris that our view is drawn, of course, but to the much more significant Congress of Copenhagen. From November 1809 to March 1810, diplomats from all the nations of Europe slowly hammered together a compromise postwar settlement which satisfied no-one and ultimately laid the seeds for the Popular Wars a generation later. Nonetheless we should not judge these men (and a few women) too harshly. All of them by necessity must balance their nation’s own agenda with a desire to avoid a repeat of such a devastating war in the days to come. Some, such as French foreign minister François André de Quelen de la Vauguyon, were fighting for their country’s survival; others, primarily the various Germans, were fighting for revenge; still others, like Prince Dmitri Illarionovich Kutuzov of Russia, sought a way for their nation to take advantage of the disarray of others to break through into a new position of supremacy. The resulting clash of personalities and agendas was scarcely less epic than the war which had preceded it.
Rosenborg Castle was where King Johannes II of Denmark and IV of Sweden chose to entertain the foreign ministers of all Europe as they dickered. It would be hard to point to a country which was not represented there, from the distant Empire of North America to the vanished Republic of Venice. Even the Ottoman Empire sent an observer. All such men were the best their nation could find to put their case to their peers, and most went on to have successful political careers after the Congress.
The need for the Congress had become apparent even before Marshal Boulanger’s body had cooled on the battlefield outside Paris. Not even during the Wars of Supremacy of the previous century had the de jure status of Europe been so open to debate, nor its de facto state of affairs so far removed from the pre-war maps the generals had been working from for the past fifteen years of conflict. The chaotic situation must be resolved and a new post-war order drawn up. Inevitably, there would be winners and losers.
Vauguyon saw his task as ensuring the new and restored French Kingdom did not count itself among the latter, at least not more than could be avoided after succeeding a defeated warmongering regime. Prior to the invasions of England and Flanders in 1807, most commentators had believed that if Lisieux had lost his wars, the result would be a slow grinding advance westward to Paris by the Germans and Italians, concluding with the total conquest of the former French Latin Republic and utter chaos ensuing. However, Bourcier’s surrender of what remained of the FLR to King Louis had thrown a spanner in the works of all those wartime plans and projections. Royal France was no longer a remnant kingdom, to be kept afloat by Britain guaranteeing its colonies and trade. She already controlled more than half the pre-war territory of the old Kingdom of France. The remainder was under the occupation of Austria and her new puppet Kingdom of Italy, the various northern German states and confederations, and Portuguese-backed Castile together with Neapolitan-joined Aragon, who also squabbled about the division of the Pyrenean territory they had taken as a ramshackle joint force. Vauguyon knew that if all these nations surrounding and occupying parts of France could be persuaded to align and renew the war, they could still crush the restored Kingdom and make all the King’s efforts over the years wasted. Therefore, he sought to ensure they would not align, and drove diplomatic wedges into any potential divisions he could find.
Firstly he made certain that Royal France’s allies of Great Britain, Ireland and America would remain at her side. The British remained understandably angry about the devastation of southern England during the invasion. Now there was no Republic left to take their rage out on, questions would be asked about just how many Republicans had gone over to the Kingdom, and how many were guilty of helping plan the invasion. Furthermore, now the Kingdom of France existed once more, there was no real need for Britain not to pounce on French colonies around the world, colonies she had formerly guaranteed in order to keep Royal France a going concern with its own thriving trade economy as a thorn in the side of the Republic.
Now, though, the Republic was gone and Britain might choose to pay for the costly rebuildi
ng of London and other damaged cities by snatching lucrative French possessions like Guadaloupe. Vauguyon dissuaded the British from this by offering his opposite number, Sir Frederick Windham, a deal: France would pay reparations that would be taken from a generous percentage of the profits she would raise from that same global trade for the next 15 years. This way, Britain would profit from those colonies without having to expend the ships and men to take them or work the trade routes thereafter. Combined with the symbolic sweetener of the return of Calais to the crown of Great Britain (the legal successor to the Kingdom of England that had lost it to the French in 1558), this served to ensure that the government of Richard Burke – and more importantly the regime of the Duke of Marlborough – would not turn against the Bourbons. Finally, France gave up her claim to Corsica and recognised Britain’s ally the Corsican Republic as an independent state.
With this British backing secured, Vauguyon then sought to drive a knife in a crack in the united front of Germans to the east, which was not too difficult. The Hapsburgs were already divided from the northern Germans, who saw Francis II as having abandoned the Holy Roman Empire whose title he still claimed by pursuing war with the Turks while leaving Bavaria to burn under Lascelles. Meanwhile Francis refused to recognise all the territorial exchanges and mediatisations in the north of Germany, even while using French occupation as an excuse to annex Austria’s own ecclesiastical lands such as the Archbishopric of Salzburg.
Vauguyon approached Austria’s representative, Karl Franz von Stadion, Graf von Warthausen. While Francis II surrounded himself with sycophantic favourites, there were nonetheless some men of genuine ability in the court in Vienna, and Warthausen was one of them. He took a more moderate tone than his hot-headed Archduke, who still entertained ideas of making France pay in blood and fire for the actions of her late government. Warthausen was able to use both his own plenipotentiary authority, combined with Copenhagen’s convenient distance from Vienna in a mostly pre-Optel age, to pursue his own course of action. It is testament to his abilities that he not only got away with it, but later acceded to the office of Chancellor. Throughout his years of service, he helped the fractious Hapsburg domains stay together until the Popular Wars came.
The thrust of Vauguyon’s argument was that, thanks to the Diplomatic Revolution of the last century, France and Austria had been allies as the two greatest conservative Catholic powers in Europe. For all Louis XVII’s reformist ideas, that alliance could come again. The late conflict was to be regretted, of course, but had not the Diplomatic Revolution come just after the Second War of Supremacy between France and Austria? Just as in that time, Vauguyon claimed a northern German common foe existed which the two must align against – not Prussia this time, but the whole mass of new states and confederations that had come into existence in response to the Republican invasion. To sweeten the pot, France would concede the existence of the oversized Lorraine that Austria had carved out of the provinces of Alsace and Franche-Comté, and also ceded parts of the provinces of Dauphiné and Provence to the new Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy. While all this territory was already under Austrian military occupation, the offer was nonetheless attractive to Warthausen. He knew that while the Hapsburg empire seemed quite strong at a casual glance, it was still having problems holding down Bohemia and especially Bavaria. If a war came with one or more of the new northern German entities, it seemed likely that the rebels there would join the enemy. Also, despite everything, there was some truth to the north Germans’ accusations; Francis II and much of the court in Vienna did regard retaking the lands lost to the Turks in the late war to be more important than punishing France or regaining supremacy in the Germanies.
For that reason, Warthausen also pursued an alliance with Russia. The Hapsburgs were willing to permit Russian possession of Wallachia and Moldavia in the event of Russian support in a revanchist war with Constantinople. Kutuzov for the Russians also saw this as desirable, as St Petersburg had its eye on regaining the influence over the Khanate of the Crimea it had lost during the Civil War. Perhaps outright annexation was on the table. Of course, Russia was currently aligned with Denmark, and Denmark was now part of the emerging north German party, but the alliance between St Petersburg and Copenhagen had been stretched to breaking point since Sweden’s surrender to Denmark at the end of the Great Baltic War had snatched Swedish Finland from the hands of the Russian armies ready to invade it. Furthermore, the Russians and Danes were now the two big powers of the Baltic, natural opponents, and Danish control of the Skagerrak meant that most of the Imperial Russian Navy could easily be bottled up in the Baltic.
Thanks to this piece of diplomatic jiggery-pokery, a shaky axis of alignment emerged between Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg, backed by Britain and the other Hanoverian dominions – though Hanover itself and its Alliance of Hildesheim were noticeably sullen members. In exchange for his support, however, Kutuzov demanded his pound of flesh. In order to facilitate the ‘Great Eastern Adventure’ and get around the Danes’ stranglehold on the entrance to the Baltic, the Imperial Russian Navy wanted a warm-water port. This was the brainchild of Admiral Evgeny Nikolaiyevich Vasiliev, a favourite of Emperor Paul’s and one of the masterminds behind the Adventure. Vauguyon and Windham pulled off a double stroke by also solving the issue of the dispute between Castile and Aragon over the Pyrenean land they had occupied. King Louis agreed to relinquish his title of King of Navarre, which the Kings of France had held since 1589. A new Navarrese state was carved out of the disputed territory, with some of the presently occupied land being returned to France. This new Kingdom of Navarre was given the port of Bayonne and, of course, needed a Catholic monarch. Russia’s ally Lithuania supplied one in the form of Prince Adam Konstanty Czartoryski – and thus, by a great deal of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, Russia had her port. It was a compromise that didn’t quite please anyone, especially the new “Navarrese” who still mostly regarded themselves as Frenchmen or Spaniards, but it guaranteed Russian support for the Vauguyon-Warthausen agenda. Besides, the Portuguese and Neapolitans backing Castile and Aragon breathed quiet sighs of relief, now knowing they would not have to go to war to defend their new puppets, and had fewer restless peasants to rule over.
Loose ends were tied up elsewhere. Switzerland’s partition was recognised by default, and supporters of restoring the old Confederation found no friends at Copenhagen. Malta, made a British protectorate by default in 1784, was recognised as such by the other powers, with the formerly ruling Knights of St John continuing in a purely ceremonial role. Corsica’s independence was also conceded; the same nations who had balked at its seemingly radical republic in the 1750s now realised that, compared to some alternatives, its largely conservative and Catholic constitution was quite acceptable. With the Kingdom of (North) Italy recognised by the other powers, northern Italian states which had lost their independence, notably Venice, were left without a hope. Most of their exiles either returned home to take up office with the new Hapsburg kingdom, or else remained with Naples. The Venetian navy mostly did the latter, which combined with possession of Aragon meant that Naples was now in a position to dominate the western Mediterranean. However, the House of Savoy in exile in Sardinia was unable to regain its Piedmontese possessions at the Congress and was thus reduced to that island. King Charles Emmanuel V responded by turning Sardinia into a trading nation and playing off the British and Neapolitans against each other as each sought to find naval supremacy in the western Mediterranean. His son Victor Felix would be less willing to resign himself to such a fate…
Once France’s fate was agreed upon as survival with relatively minor concessions, however, a second issue consumed the Congress: the Imperial Question. Francis II still insisted the Holy Roman Empire existed and its institutions should be restored, while the north Germans rejected this, being unwilling to surrender any of the gains in political power and sovereignty they had acquired during the war. No amount of French or Russian support for Austria could result in the Hapsburg
s regaining any prestige in the lands north and west of Bavaria and Bohemia. Bad blood remained between the factions, with Francis having been scarcely less outraged than Lisieux at Ney’s betrayal and handover of Swabia, while the north Germans saw Francis’ ensuing conquest of Lorraine – rather than trying to assist at the Battle of Paris – as a childish and paranoid gesture. Ultimately, the north Germans remained in an inferior position thanks to the fact that it had been the Russians, not them, who had saved the Allies at that battle, and that Vauguyon had reached out to the Austrians. Thus, despite their continuing mutual mistrust, they banded together as a trade unit and a loose defensive agreement against the Hapsburgs. 1811 would see the Treaty of Frankfurt and the formal declaration of the Concert of Germany. Francis of Austria would retaliate by the quixotic decree that he was stripping the various Electors of their titles and reassigning them to kingdoms within the Hapsburg domains, including Italy. Most of these new electorates he himself held as titles, reducing the once-dignified (if always surreal) Imperial election to a farce. In response, a wave of self-promotions spread across Germany, with the rulers of Saxony, the two Brandenburgs and Flanders (and the Palatinate) all declaring themselves Kings. The last electorate to follow suit was Hanover in 1817, a delay reflecting Britain’s temporary alignment with Austria.
