Externalization of the French Revolution: The Napoleonic Wars
SINCE 1945, with few exceptions,1 historians of the French Revolution have tended to minimize if not ignore the fact of war with foreign powers for being extraneous or unessential to the revolutionary phenomenon. With their French-centered, not to say Paris-angled perspective, they have all but shut out foreign policy, the international system, and war in order to closely focus, first on the economic and social causes and dynamics of the French Revolution, and then on the sway of mentality, discourse, ideology, culture, and everyday life.2
In fact, revolution and foreign war are inseparably linked. Although there can, of course, be war without revolution, there can be no revolution without war. The fate of revolutions in small or medium-sized powers perhaps best dramatizes the centrality of interstate relations and war: they are either crushed by military intervention from abroad or, alternatively, shielded or imposed by foreign bayonets. But the fact of war is equally essential to the life of revolutions which have their epicenter in a great power. Defeat in war was the incubator of the Russian Revolution, and the flux and reflux of foreign policy, diplomacy, and war significantly shaped and radicalized the French and Russian revolutions. Both revolutions survived infancy less by virtue of the inherent military strength of their fledgling regimes than because of the divisions between and among the powers seeking to strangulate them by military force and quarantine. In turn, the termination of the French and Russian revolutions, including the configuration of their respective after-revolutions, significantly hinged on the policies of the outside world.
Not only at the beginning and end, but at every point in between, international politics impinges on the course of a revolution. Precisely because France and Russia were great powers, their internal upheavals severely unsettled the world system, to the advantage of other states, large and small; the collapse of both countries into dual or multiple sovereignty greatly weakened their diplomatic and military muscle. Besides losing their ascendancy in the concert of nations, France and Russia became vulnerable to secession, intervention, and amputation. In turn, the context and play of international relations, or of power politics, affected the internal life of their revolutions: they bore, above all, upon the struggles over the construction of a new civil and political society. In addition to disturbing the international system of their time, the French and Russian revolutions troubled the internal political, social, and cultural life of the other states by threatening them with epidemic contagion.
There simply is no denying “the reciprocation and mutual dependence of war and revolution,” nor are they “ever conceivable outside the domain of violence,” since violence is “a kind of common denominator for both.”3 Jacobins and Bolsheviks treated this interconnection of revolution and war as a fact of life, and so did their enemies. Jacques Mallet du Pan claimed that “revolution and war were inseparable because they had a common root.”4 As for Maistre, he went so far as to insist that once the “revolutionary movement” had won the upper hand, alone Jacobinism, favored by “Robespierre’s infernal genius, could accomplish the prodigious feat of saving France from a coalition bent upon destroying its integrity.”5 Of course in this vital sphere, Lenin was guided by his own critical reading not only of the Jacobin moment but also of On War by Carl von Clausewitz. Specifically, Lenin, following Engels, emphasized that steeped in the warfare of the French Revolution, Clausewitz considered war less a mere extension of foreign policy and diplomacy than an agency of political reason. Lenin even went so far as to argue that because war is grounded “in a set of political circumstances, it is not only a political act, but truly a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, an implementation of these [relations] by other means, … [or] rather by the admixture of other means.”6
Clearly, in this conceptual construction, in revolutionary moments the purposes and methods of war are singularly varied and changeable. In 1791–94 and 1917–21, when debating questions of war and peace the stakes were, above all, political: the logic and reason of politics prompted Brissot to press for war; Robespierre to oppose going to war; Kerensky to persevere in war; and Lenin to disengage from war. This is not to say that the protagonists dismissed the reason of state and were blind to the diplomatic and military realities of their time. But it is to insist that their perceptions and evaluations of these realities were significantly skewed by their political and ideological prepossessions. Needless to say, such prejudgments also colored the views of foreign leaders who had to assess, from afar, developments in the homeland of the revolution and their impact on the international system. In the course of time, in the epicenter of revolution as well as in the surrounding world, ideology assumed increasing importance as both a distorting mirror and an instrument of international politics.
The aphorism that “war revolutionizes revolution” is as applicable to the French as the Russian Revolution.7 Of course, revolution-related foreign war is particularly perverse by virtue of being not only intrinsically ideological and absolute but also entwined with civil war, which is likewise inseparable from international relations. Such being the case, foreign war is not merely a “locomotive of history” or a “midwife of revolution.” It is also a hothouse for terror.
The causal relationship of war and terror in revolution is of course highly complex. Prima facie it would seem, however, that in 1789 as in 1917, entanglement in war preceded the crescendo of terror. Even in ordinary times, warfare entails hardening the state and curtailing liberties, both individual and collective. This is all the more the case when vulnerable and untried revolutionary regimes are embattled at home and abroad: they find it particularly difficult to mobilize and discipline a country for war. Reflecting on developments in France, Mathiez considered it unexceptional that “the governors of a country fighting a foreign war complicated by civil war should have resorted to summary and emergency justice to repress treason, conspiracies, and revolts.”8
Although terror was present from the outset in 1789 and 1917, it only became systemic with mounting complications in civil and foreign war. Of necessity there is a strong but not perfect or automatic correlation between escalating strains of war and spiraling pressures for terror. Indeed, when considering the linkage of war and terror, it is well to remember Quinet’s dictum that to study them in isolation from each other and without close attention to the diachrony of their interaction is like “telling the story of a military battle without taking account of the enemy army.”9
Just as the fortunes of foreign war act upon revolution, so the internal dynamics of the revolution act on foreign policy and war. Revolution is a peerless forcing house for the primacy of domestic politics, with all sides exploiting foreign policy, diplomacy, and war for partisan purposes. Louis XVI did so up to his trial, and so did the Brissotins and Robespierrists, judging by their war of words over war and peace in 1791–92. In the dawn of the Russian Revolution issues of international politics forced apart first Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and then Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, at the same time that they tested the coherence of the Bolshevik leadership. Similarly, after 1789 and 1917, on the counterrevolutionary side, the reason of diplomacy and war soon became essentially political for much of the internal resistance as well as for the émigrés and their foreign sponsors.
In France revolution and war were closely linked for nearly a quarter of a century. Between 1792 and 1815, war first revolutionized the revolution before saving and sustaining it. As suggested before, had France been a small power the revolution of 1789, not unlike the Dutch revolt of 1787, would most likely have been aborted by external intervention. But France was Europe’s most powerful state in demographic, military, and economic terms; besides, for twenty years the other great powers of the European system were too much at cross-purposes to be able to mount a winning challenge.
In any case, the fact of war was as central to the fall of the monarchy and establishment of the Jacobin reign as it was, after Thermidor, to the rise and fall of the Directory, Consulate, and Empire, as well as to the Bourbon restoration in 1814–15. The rulers of all these would-be regimes considered successful war necessary to save the Revolution, or, in the case of the Bourbons, to strangle it. Not that one and all envisaged war in the same spirit and for the same purpose. Initially it took foreign invasion to convert the Jacobins to the war whose reverses became their great reason to intensify the terror. The Girondins, for their part, looked to war to unite France and consolidate the fragile revolutionary regime, thereby obviating terror at home. A similar way of thinking came to the fore after the fall of Robespierre: from Thermidor until 1814, war served at once to consolidate the political, social, and cultural gains of 1789 to 1792 inside France and to impose them, along with Napoleon’s pioneering measures, beyond France’s expanding borders. Paradoxically, the wars of the Grande Nation and Grande Empire were in the nature of a diversion of pent-up and unresolved internal conflicts into the international environment. The Thermidoreans, including the Bonapartists, meant to contain both revolutionary Jacobins and counterrevolutionary royalists. Forever fearful of their respective conspiracies, they presumed that successful war, which few wanted or dared to end without an extravagant victory, was indispensable for the survival of a middle course at home: military setbacks invited a hardening of government designed to defuse a Jacobin resurgence in the face of the triumph of royalism and the return of the Bourbons in the train of enemy armies; military successes favored measures of political relaxation calculated to win the support of moderate elements which might be tempted to join the monarchist opposition.
Obviously, the war continued because Thermidor marked the ascendance of members of the Convention, most of whom shared a proud if burdensome past as well as a minimum but firm consensus as to where and how to steer the ship of state. They had stood together not only to liquidate the seignorial system, overthrow the monarchy, and behead the king, but to save the republic by tempting war and establishing a dictature de détresse. Here and now they were agreed not to tolerate or risk a return of the old regime, also because not a few Thermidoreans had enriched themselves by way of bargain-basement purchases of biens nationaux or nationalized property, most of it former church lands. But above all, they embraced the Girondin view of the interrelation of domestic and foreign policy, which had framed the thrust into war in 1792: to have the glories and benefits of a crusading war against monarchic Europe reduce domestic strife in favor of a moderate or anti-Jacobin (if not anti-sansculotte) settlement of the Revolution. The Thermidoreans purged Robespierre without heeding his warning about the two-fold peril of a war of liberation: caesarism at home and resistance to freedom-bringing armies abroad. Ironically, they brought down Robespierre largely because the Jacobins had put the revolutionary armies on the road to victory beyond the northeastern borders, thereby legitimating the Girondin stratagem of exchanging the use of the guillotine within France for the arbitrament of the sword on the far side of France’s frontiers. On this score of beating guillotines into swords, the Directory, Consulate, and Empire were essentially seamless, with Napoleon the master blacksmith.
The balance between the grim realities and constructive engagements of Napoleon Bonaparte has been controversial ever since his extravagant reign. Pieter Geyl, who lived in the time of Hitler, recalled the difficulty of coming to an equitable reading: “The difference is that under Napoleon French civilization, albeit stifled and narrowed by him, still accompanied his conquest, while the character of the conquest that it has been the lot of our generation to endure is incompatible with any civilization at all.” Evidently he agreed with Tocqueville that as “propagandist as well as conqueror” Napoleon at least partially continued the “ideological character of the wars of the Republic, mixing violence with philosophy and enlightenment.”10 Although he stressed the “constraints and atrocities” of the Jacobins and of Napoleon, Geyl wondered whether these had any common measure with the Third Reich’s “annihilation of all opposition parties in jails or concentration camps … [and its] persecution of the Jews.” Geyl wanted to make sure that this comparison should not unduly benefit the “reputation” of Napoleon. Having experienced, firsthand, Hitler’s subjugation of his native Holland, which had also come under Napoleon’s heel, Geyl emphasized that except for the persecution of the Jews, which “remained singular,” there was a “difference in degree, not in principle” between the French and German drive for the mastery of Europe.11
This caveat against reading the past through the warped lenses of the present also applies to the comparison of the military furors of the epochs of the French and Russian revolutions. Admittedly, the ravages and miseries of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars pale next to those of the Thirty Years Wars of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. On the whole, except in Spain, where they met with popular resistance, the French armies spared civilians and there was little scorching of the earth. Also, military casualties were short of catastrophic by the standards of religious wars. Still, even if the wars of 1792 to 1815 did not escalate into total warfare, they were, as Clausewitz made clear, thick with novelty and unprecedented in scale: the Jacobin revolutionary regime pioneered in forging, even if imperfectly, the nation-in-arms and the conscript peasant army; and taking account of these innovations under the Directory, Consulate, and Empire, Napoleon developed new strategies of warfare, notably the speed of movement and concentration of superior force. One result was a quantum jump in human sacrifice in international conflict. Especially starting in 1812, when his military fortunes along with his reformist intentions began to falter, the imitation emperor held cheap the lives even of his own soldiers.
None of this is to minimize Napoleon’s social and administrative reforms not only in many of the distant provinces of the makeshift and refractory empire but also at home, where his violence was less deadly, precisely because so much of it was channeled abroad. For Napoleon Bonaparte was the heir and executor of the French Revolution, not its gravedigger or liquidator. His stewardship of the revolutionary legacy was so effective that when the Bourbons were restored in 1814–15 some of its principal elements were preserved, even if reluctantly and at the insistence of their foreign sponsors. To be sure, France was forced to settle for the borders of 1789, which meant renouncing all recent territorial conquests and spheres of influence. Still, notwithstanding their ultimate cost as well as their “lame and impotent conclusion,” the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars contributed significantly to the survival and consolidation of the Revolution. To the extent that Napoleon had a clear aim, it was not to “rationalize” the old regime in the interest of “the society of orders … based on inequality and privilege.” Rather, he emerged, in the first instance, as the executive agent of an untried political class which had swept away France’s “traditional social structure, along with noble privilege, the guilds, the parlements, and provincial autonomies.”12
Above all, Napoleon never even considered undoing the sweeping political and social changes of 1789 which cost the nobles their tax exemptions and fiscal privileges, their time-honored deference and preference, and their right to separate political representation and corporate powers. For them, this headlong degradation was at once massive and traumatic: well over 15,000 nobles emigrated, some 1,200 were executed, and many more were imprisoned. Admittedly, after Thermidor not a few of the émigré nobles returned and bought back some of their lands or purchased other landed properties, not unlike the members of the bourgeoisie and liberal professions who braced their class and status position by acquiring more than their share of the biens nationaux.13 But rather than recover their hegemony, the prescriptive nobles of before 1789 folded into an imperial nobility of old and new men—a “mass of granite”—which Napoleon turned into one of the main pillars of the post-Thermidorean state. Although they were the core of the power elite under Bonaparte and the prime beneficiaries of his rule, the members of this new nobility were more in the nature of a ruling than governing class, a social amalgam in which the inveterate nobles weighed disproportionately in both city and country, both before and after 1815.14
As heir of the secular state, Napoleon charged a professional bureaucracy and magistracy, heavily drawn from the incipient imperial nobility, with “substituting interest for privilege and contract for hereditary dependence and protection.”15 The Code Napoléon became symbolic of the spirit and intention of the rationalization of public administration and the rule of law. The regime brought to an end the fragmentation of political and judicial sovereignty: western France was pacified, and factional conflict in the central executive and legislature died down.
Napoleon certainly betrayed the Revolution by violating the political and civil liberties of 1789. Encouraged by his sponsors in the Directory and driven by his own despotic temperament, Napoleon throttled parliamentary institutions as well as political and intellectual freedoms. His reach for authoritarian rule was marked by successive coups which were ratified by specious plebiscites and which intermittently entailed the execution, deportation, and imprisonment of ever-suspect Jacobins and even more suspect royalists.16 But overall, Bonapartism took infinitely fewer lives at home than abroad. Whereas the victims of the coup d’état of the 18 Fructidor of the Year V (September 4, 1797) and of the 22 Floréal of the Year VI (May 11, 1798) ran into the hundreds, the casualties of the wars of the Directory, Consulate, and Empire ran into the millions. As previously noted, the human costs of internal and foreign war are forever judged differently: the killings and horrors of external conflict are considered more natural, justifiable, and intelligible than those of civil strife. But this double standard becomes all the more problematic when applied to the dyadic violence between 1792 and 1815, when internal and external war were intensely intertwined, with the discords of domestic politics conditioning and causing foreign war as much as the vicissitudes of foreign war bore upon the heartbeat of violence back home.
In any case, as Engels and Marx made a point of stressing, there was a strong correlation between, on the one hand, the small toll of Napoleon’s internal repression, and, on the other, the heavy casualties of his foreign wars. Friedrich Engels posited that in Germany Napoleon had been “the representative of the Revolution, the propagator of its principles, and the destroyer of the old feudal society.” Although Bonaparte had proceeded “despotically, … he had been only half as despotic” as the deputies of the Convention and the “princes and nobles” he brought to heel. In fact, Napoleon’s stratagem was to “apply the reign of terror, which had done its work in France, to other countries in the shape of war.” As Engels saw it, the Revolution having been “stifled” in Paris, his armies carried it across France’s borders. In the Germanies, in addition to “dissolving the Holy Roman Empire and reducing the number of little states,” Napoleon spread around “a code of laws which was vastly superior to all existing ones and which recognized the principle of [legal] equality.” Ultimately, however, rather than “destroy every vestige of Old Europe … he sought to compromise with it … by assimilating his own court as much as possible” to those of the other ruling monarchs.17
Jointly Marx and Engels carried this analysis one step further. They suggested that precisely because he had understood that the essential basis of the modern state was “the unhampered development of bourgeois society … [and] the free movement of private interest, etc…. Napoleon decided to recognize and protect [them].” While considering the “state as an end in itself,” which Bonaparte had meant to keep “subordinate” to himself, he had “perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution.” In so doing he had “fed the egoism of the French nation” at the same time that he demanded the “sacrifice of bourgeois [interests]” whenever necessary “to advance the political aim of conquest.”18 Presumably the consolidation of the Revolution at home and its export by means of endless foreign war were closely connected.
Because of his deficit of legitimacy, Napoleon was acutely aware of his dependence on the inexorable logic and hazard of war. As he noted himself, whereas a “sovereign born on the throne can be [militarily] defeated twenty times and still return to his capital,” as “an upstart soldier” he could not do so, his “domination” being based on “fear” of his arms.19 Bonaparte knew that his regime hinged on “continual warfare and repeated victories” which helped him maintain his political position in Paris.20
Meanwhile, beyond France’s old borders, wherever Napoleon took his armies his reception was mixed. He was at once feared and hailed: general on horseback and Jacobin missionary of Girondin inflection. Ironically, when transplanting French reforms abroad, Bonaparte tended to find more collaborators among the classes of the cities than the masses of the countryside. In fact, most of the Continent being even more in the grip of rural obscurantism, illiteracy, and insularity than France, to press parts of the agenda of 1789 to 1791 and of 1800 to 1804 was to call forth resistance driven by a Vendée-like logic.
Almost from the outset of the Revolution the partisans of the old order, notably the crown and court, expected the European powers to come to their rescue by threatening or using armed intervention. While the king eventually looked for what he was confident would be a short and easy war to reclaim the old order, Lafayette envisaged it to further the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Brissotins, for their part, proposed to induce a “splendid little war” for the purpose of strengthening and consolidating their political power, discharging unmanageable internal problems into the international environment, and terminating the Revolution on their terms. In turn, Robespierre, Marat, and (until December 17, 1791) Danton advocated avoiding war in the interest of giving first, if not absolute, priority to anchoring and radicalizing the Revolution at home. To the extent that both Brissotins and Robespierrists meant to master the common enemy, they advocated opposite strategies to that end: the former looked to make war on the Revolution’s external enemies, including the émigrés, and to spread its physical reach as the best way to defeat domestic enemies and win support abroad; the latter insisted that the war against domestic enemies and the construction of a new order at home were the key to success. Michelet saw a stark contrast between the Gironde, which called for “a crusading war abroad, [complete with] propaganda,” and the Mountain, which wanted a “war against traitors and enemies at home” in the form of “domestic purification, the punishment of bad citizens, and the crushing of resistances by way of terror and inquisition.”21
The Girondins were plainspoken about being partisans of foreign war. Starting in the early fall of 1791 and until France declared war on Austria in April 1792, they raised and orchestrated a strident appeal to arms. Their chief drumbeaters—Brissot, Roederer, Vergniaud, Hérault de Séchelles—charged that the foreign courts, incited by the émigrés, were encircling revolutionary France and conspiring with internal enemies sworn to foment political strife, economic chaos, and social unrest. They created a sense of hostile beleaguerment and fear in the face of what they portrayed to be a virtual state of war or murderous peace. According to Roederer, this confrontation was as much a “foreign war … as a civil war between Frenchmen,” since the émigrés, who had their collaborators inside France, were being welcomed by Europe’s kings and princes. The time had come to convert this “ruinous and debasing” hidden conflict into an “overt” war, for, given the circumstances, “to attack is to defend ourselves.” Roederer thundered that to launch out against “Koblenz” was to strike at the “most dangerous enemies … among us.” In addition to “disguising” themselves, these internal enemies were using the constitution, which they “hated,” to further their counterrevolutionary ends. Roederer claimed that “a state of open war” would have the great merit of unmasking these traitors and of enabling all “real friends of the constitution” to declare themselves.22
Brissot, the war party’s most prominent spokesman, was quite direct about the reasons for France to go to war: “to bolster its honor, external security, and internal tranquillity; to restore its public finances and prosperity; and to put an end to terror, treason, and anarchy.” Besides, in a war that would be unlike any other in history, French soldiers would go forth not as conquerors but as liberators of oppressed peoples yearning for help to throw off their chains. Brissot feared, above all, that unless France went to war, society would continue to be “consumed by the poison of subversion.” As for a diplomatic solution, it could neither root out this poison nor “overthrow the aristocracy, consummate the Revolution, cement independence, and stimulate prosperity.” But there was also a tactical reason for launching a preemptive war: time was on the side not of revolutionary France but of the concert of powers.23
Although virtually drowned out, the antiwar party kept raising its voice. Robespierre countered Roederer’s and Brissot’s summons to march upon “Koblenz” by asserting that the counterrevolution’s main headquarters and recruits were inside France, not outside. Following Marat, who stressed that to “crush the enemies within” was an essential precondition for proceeding “against those abroad,” Robespierre maintained that the consolidation of the Revolution’s gains at home was essential for its éclat in foreign parts. He warned, in particular, that most likely war would strengthen the executive—king, ministers, generals—at the expense of the fledgling republic, perhaps even in favor of a military despotism. Robespierre disputed the “airy hope of rapidly spreading the Revolution abroad” by means of bayonets: the military campaign would be risky and costly, not least because “nobody likes armed missionaries.” He advocated furthering the Revolution by defeating the men of Koblenz within France and their outside supporters rather than aborting it “by taking the scourge of war to [foreign] peoples, who, not having attacked us, should be seen and treated as friends.”24
Of course, cross-border war results not from the actions of a single state but from the interaction of two or more states. The mounting war fever in France was the product of an intensifying friend-enemy dissociation, which had two poles: the unfixed new regime in Paris and the inveterate old regimes of the European concert. From its creation, the French Revolution was at minimum a trans-European event, as measured by its reverberations abroad. Far and wide it stimulated both avowed and latent critical spirits to challenge the accepted, if not God-given, conventions and institutions of established civil and political society. At first, following the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of seignorialism, and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, these free thinkers rejoiced and were heartened by what they perceived to be a promising new dawn breaking over France. The response was particularly enthusiastic and vocal in intellectual, artistic, and scholarly circles, which were moved to imagine and debate the recasting of the unbending world of the established order. Indeed, the roll call of idealistic and supportive voices reads like the Gotha of the European intelligentsia. Not surprisingly, “the most radical of the ‘foreign’ revolutionaries or sympathizers, whether … those who congregated in Paris or those who in greater numbers remained in their own countries, were seldom more than advanced political democrats.”25
Early on, even the chancelleries of the great powers were well disposed toward the Revolution, not least because they expected the turmoil in France, which they viewed as mere chaos, to weaken Paris in Europe and overseas to their benefit. But before long the rush of political, social, and cultural changes began to trouble them for being dangerously liberal-minded and progressive. At this point, it was the outward projection of exemplary principle and reform, not of power, that bewildered the European governments and establishments. Even at that, the fear of the new reason bursting forth in Paris did not immediately become an important factor in the diplomacy of the great powers, nor did it prompt them to prepare for war.
Especially with foreign and military affairs reserved to the executive, Europe’s staid political class did not debate questions of war and peace with the same abandon as the new men of power in Paris. Even in England, with its parliamentary institutions, the discussion was muted, certainly until Burke set it on fire. Not that the royal courts and chancelleries were unaccustomed to political in-fighting. But since all factions belonged to a relatively narrow ruling and governing class, their discords were intramural, undisturbed by the clamor of counter-elites and popular crowds.
This internal calm conditioned the continuity of traditional statecraft. While the mental sets and diplomatic precepts of old-regime statesmen and generals were adequate to exploit France’s foreign-policy paralysis between 1789 and late 1791, they were ill-suited to assess the domestic developments which hereafter contributed to its uncommon foreign-policy bellicosity and novel ways of generating military energy. The chancelleries eventually understood and certainly welcomed the massive defection and emigration of French army officers. At the same time, they were disconcerted by the weakness of counterrevolutionary resistance, the upward spiral of radicalization, the groundswell for war, and the conscription of a vast army. Imprisoned in their traditional worldview and mentality, ultimately Europe’s political class continued to “believe that the end of monarchy could only lead to anarchy and powerlessness.”26 Indeed, the emergence of the nation-in-arms and citizen army staggered their belief of the old elites even more than it staggered the belief of the new men of power who invented and organized them. The external world’s civil and military leaders needed time and the march of events to shed their incredulity and to take a more realistic measure of things. But this reorientation was complicated by the unforeseen intrusion of ideological predilections which soon fed a chronic fear of revolutionary contagion and subversion. Since a similar mixture of realism and intoxication crystallized in the minds of the revolutionary leaders, the stage was set for mutual misperception, miscalculation, and miscommunication.27
From 1789 until mid-1791 the major capitals welcomed France’s impaired position in the international arena.28 Actually this unsteadiness was prefigured in 1787, when Paris had failed to deter Frederick William II from sending Prussian troops, commanded by the Duke of Brunswick, to the United Provinces to restore Prince William V, his brother-in-law, to his throne. But the Tennis Court Oath and the fall of the Bastille foreshadowed even greater diplomatic and military irresolution, which the great powers hastened to feed on: Russia and Prussia maneuvered to promote their interests in Eastern Europe and the Balkans; Austria in the Low Countries, Central Europe, and Italy; and England overseas. Characteristically, with France preoccupied with domestic affairs, Russia and Prussia felt free to thrust and parry over Poland, in preparation for a second partition. Of course, developments in France touched the Habsburgs much more directly: Marie-Antoinette was the sister of Leopold II, and the émigrés played on this dynastic link; further, Austria’s Belgian provinces were particularly endangered by France. Even so, the Emperor and Prince von Kaunitz, his chancellor, followed a cautious and moderate course as long as it looked as if France would continue to be disabled. To the extent that they expected the dislocation to last and disquiet the surrounding world, they proposed to “encircle France with a solid cordon sanitaire which gradually turned into a thick wall of bayonets or, in their own words, un cercle de fer.”29
London was even less eager to intervene than Vienna, though for strategic reasons England also closely watched developments in the Low Countries. By contrast, Russia was the most aggressively hostile of the great powers. But the bellicosity of Catherine II took the form of urging Austria and Prussia to intervene in France with a view to keeping them from interfering with Russia’s designs in eastern Europe, notably in Poland.
The first concrete diplomatic engagement between France and the European powers was a by-product of an essentially domestic measure adopted by the National Assembly. The “abolition” of feudal rights and privileges during the night of August 4–5, 1789, bore upon several German princes of Alsace, which in 1648 had been ceded to Louis XIV. Having previously contested French violations of their rights, these princes now loudly protested the application of this radical enactment to their domains. Rather than court a confrontation, the diplomatic committee of the Assembly encouraged Count de Montmorin, the foreign minister, who was close to the Court, to seek a negotiated settlement. In May 1790 he offered the princes an indemnity in exchange for their recognition of France’s full sovereignty over Alsace. Rather than treat with Paris, however, the princes called on the Imperial Diet to back their demand, if need be with the sword, for the unconditional restoration and guarantee of their prescriptive rights. Although Leopold II issued an official protest, he would go no further. He refused to turn the clash over the feudal rights of several princes in Alsace into a conflict of values, all the more so because as yet he did not consider the upheaval in France a threat to the European order.
It took the royal family’s abortive flight to Varennes in June 1791 to galvanize the existential fears of the great powers and embroil them in the rising friend-enemy dissociation of the French Revolution. It deserves special emphasis that when Louis XVI decided to make his escape, the Revolution was nowhere near its fever stage. To be sure, on October 5–6, 1789, popular pressure had prompted him as well as his court and the Assembly to move from Versailles to Paris. Moreover, a year and a half later, on April 18, 1791, a crowd had prevented Louis XVI from leaving the Tuileries for Saint-Cloud. Quite understandably his supporters, and particularly the ultras among them, considered the king to be a prisoner in his own realm. Even so, the historical possibility of a constitutional monarchy was by no means foreclosed, its champions being neither inconsequential nor dispirited, even if divided. Admittedly, the price for such a settlement would be severe restrictions on the prerogatives of crown and church. Still, when Louis XVI opted to take flight, the fusillade of the Champ de Mars, the decrees against émigrés and refractory priests, the declaration of war, the storming of the Tuileries, and the prison massacres all lay in the future.
Within France Varennes strengthened the suspicions of radicals and their sympathizers concerning the intentions and capabilities of the old guard. Naturally they dismissed out of hand any suggestion that the king had either been trapped into fleeing or had escaped à contrecoeur, for the good of his subjects. Indeed, Varennes gave the idea of an “aristocratic plot” added credibility.
It was reinforced by the vengeful rhetoric of the letter of General Marquis de Bouillé, commander of the armies on the northeastern border, to the National Assembly on June 26, 1791.30 Bouillé had played a key role in organizing the escape: since his theater of command was not too far from Paris and faced the Austrian Netherlands, it was a natural destination for the royal family. But there was another reason why Bouillé was suited for his assignment: when repressing a military mutiny at Nancy on August 31, 1791, he had not hesitated to have “one soldier … broken on the wheel, twenty … hanged, and forty-one sentenced to galleys for life.”31 His was an authentic and representative counterrevolutionary voice when he denounced the members of the National Assembly for having spent two years “giving birth to a monster,” by making the common people “ferocious, bloodthirsty, … delirious, … [and] cannibalistic.” In addition to the royal family being at the mercy of “bloody savages,” France’s polity and society were rife with “injustice, extortion, and crime.” In Bouillé’s telling, the king had fled to Varennes with the intention to forestall a dangerous if understandable attack from abroad by acting as a “mediator between the foreign powers and his people.”
Now that the escape had failed and Louis XVI and his family were again in the hands of the Assembly, its members would have to answer to all the kings of Europe for their safety. Bouillé served notice that should any member of the royal family “be harmed ever so slightly, before long not a single stone would remain standing in Paris” and the members of the Assembly “would be made to pay with their heads.” Insisting that “the King had not issued a single order,” Bouillé assumed full responsibility for the Varennes strategem and adjured the deputies “not to charge anyone with any so-called plot or conspiracy against what you call la nation and against your infernal Constitution.” In accordance with the heightened friend-enemy dissociation, Bouillé concluded his letter “without sending my compliments, my true sentiments being all too well known to you.”
Meanwhile, the fiasco of Varennes reinforced the European courts’ apprehension about the apostasy in Paris. Heretofore hesitant, Leopold II now edged toward military intervention. On July 6, 1791, he issued the Padua Circular, summoning Europe’s crowned heads to confer about concerted actions to “secure the liberty and honor of the Most Christian King and his family and to set bounds to the dangerous extremism of the French Revolution.” Soon thereafter, on July 17, Kaunitz called on the great powers to break all commercial and diplomatic relations with France. A week later, on July 25, Austria and Prussia signed a convention in Vienna laying the groundwork for the meeting of Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William II at Pillnitz, near Dresden in Saxony, in August 1791, after the two had settled their disputed Ottoman affairs.
By this time the situation in France was becoming increasingly explosive: the furious and divisive debate about the so-called abduction of the king (who was suspended by the Constituent Assembly); the massacre of the Champ de Mars; the summons by the National Assembly to the émigrés to return within two months; and the secession of the Feuillants from the Jacobin club to found their own group. Although the death of Mirabeau unsteadied the “vital center” caught between militant Jacobins and hard-line royalists, it was by no means exhausted. While Europe’s statesmen became increasingly skeptical about a quick and auspicious denouement of the crisis in France, whose military disablement they had overestimated, the émigrés and moral-ideological censors—Burke, Mallet du Pan, Pius VI—won an ever wider hearing among the classes, not the masses.
Significantly, though self-invited, the Comte d’Artois was at Pillnitz when the Emperor of the Habsburgs and the King of the Hohenzollerns framed a policy of active support for the Bourbon King of France but short of systematic containment or direct military intervention.32 Declaring the situation of Louis XVI “a matter of common concern to all European sovereigns,” they proposed to explore with them ways of “employing, in proportion to their forces, the most effective means to enable the King of France to consolidate with complete freedom the foundations of monarchical government.” Admittedly, Leopold and Frederick William were “resolved to act promptly, in mutual accord, with the forces necessary to secure the proposed common objective [only] if and when (alors, et dans ce cas)” the other monarchs answered their call. But not too much should be made of this proviso. In keeping with the normal diplomatic practice of raising pressure by degrees, the two sovereigns announced that in the meantime they would “give their troops such orders as are necessary to have them ready for active service.” That they did not just say one thing and mean another became clear on February 7, 1792, when they met again to sign an alliance under which each partner committed 40,000 troops for joint “defense.”33
But of equal importance, the Pillnitz Declaration of August 27, 1791, was less a conventional and confidential diplomatic dispatch addressed to the French foreign office and other chancelleries than a radically new departure in European statecraft. Indeed, this declaration—nay, proclamation—was intended to intervene, indirectly, in the internal affairs of France by going over the head of its established government, much as the revolutionaries in Paris, both French and foreign, were issuing appeals to incite popular rebellion against the old regimes. Pillnitz inaugurated the politicization of foreign policy and diplomacy, changing international relations for all time, most intensely during revolutionary epochs.34
Besides signaling a mounting vigilance and potentially coordinated action by the concert of European powers, the Pillnitz rescript was meant to frighten the moderates in Paris—constitutional monarchiens and feuillants—into abandoning their search for a vital center. In other words, external pressure was brought to bear to further the termination of the Revolution along essentially restorative lines. The démarche of Pillnitz was based on a misreading of political conditions in France by old-regime statesmen influenced by the tendentious advocacy of the émigrés, which any reader of Machiavelli would have taken with grains of salt. It backfired in large part because in the wake of Varennes it was all too easy for reformists and revolutionaries to perceive and portray this latest foreign intervention as confirming, once again, their worst suspicion: the convergence of a major threat from abroad with a refractory resistance at home to make for a seamless counterrevolutionary defiance.
Whereas the outside world could still get an open hearing in the Constituent Assembly, which was anything but a hotbed of extremism, the other spheres of France’s fragmented polity were beyond its reach, except the high cadres of the army, state administration, and church, as well as nascent centers of royalist resistance. In mid-September Louis XVI accepted the Constitution, and his suspension was lifted. The new Legislative Assembly, which convened on October 1, was more volatile and impatient than its predecessor. Within three weeks, on October 20, Brissot and his colleagues began their parliamentary campaign for war, and in November the Assembly voted hardened decrees against émigrés and refractory priests, which Louis XVI vetoed, ever hopeful of support from abroad and the provinces.
And yet the sovereignty of Europe’s strongest state continued to crack. During the winter of 1791–92, aggravated social, economic, and fiscal problems fueled political unrest in Paris and many parts of the country. Some of the plebs who were being radicalized expressed their protest by joining the cry for war, and certain economic interests had equally contingent reasons for supporting a forward course in foreign affairs. The Girondins did not hesitate to use this popular agitation and special-interest pleading to bolster their own bid for power in which the clamor for war played an increasingly central role. As noted, they propounded war as a cure-all at a time when they—and scores of other politicians and public intellectuals—were ever more baffled by the complexity of France’s protean crisis. The problem was less that they and the better part of the deputies were political novices—large numbers of them had considerable experience in public affairs on the provincial and local level35—than that they came face to face with the “pathos of novelty.” As if calling for a fuite en avant, the Girondins commended preventive war as a panacea: to forestall a military attack; to choke off resistance by striking at “Koblenz” abroad; to create an union sacrée around the Host of the patrie; and to channel mounting domestic difficulties into the world at large. Ultimately they propounded foreign war as the master key to the consolidation—the termination—of the Revolution on terms they never really spelled out.
When Robespierre proceeded, unsuccessfully, to oppose war, he was no less bewildered than Brissot and no less vague about his end purposes. He gave first priority to securing and enlarging the gains of the Revolution at home, not least because war risked strengthening the king and the generals. Besides, Robespierre was less confident than the warmongers of a swift and easy victory.
In this rampant time of troubles, the issue was less the “real” circumstances than the perception and construction of them by the chief actors. By a feedback process, mutual distrust and hostility kept escalating and, short of one or the other side backing down, only a miracle could have checked this polarization. The flight to Varennes, the Pillnitz Declaration, and the Austro-Prussian alliance merely confirmed the revolutionaries’ self-fulfilling prophecy regarding their enemies’ intentions. Inside France, issues of principle were crowded out by questions of political strategy, to be resolved in an atmosphere of utmost urgency.
The crowns and statesmen of the concert of Europe certainly were less pressured and more poised, all the more so since they continued to consider time and the military advantage to be on their side. Their traditional notions of society and statecraft made it difficult for them to discern that the political transformation in Paris was making France into a radically novel state in the world system. Nor could they imagine that the upstart foreign-policy actors of this so-called government, paralyzed by chaos, would ever dare or manage to measure themselves with Europe’s experienced diplomats and generals, especially since the cream of the French officer corps had gone into emigration. Leopold II died on March 1, 1792. Even if Francis II, his son and successor, had been less hawkish than his father, Vienna would disdainfully have rejected Paris’s ultimatum of April 5, following the formation of the Girondin ministry, demanding the instant removal of émigré military formations from along the Rhine. Clearly, here was the reverse side of the “pathos of novelty”: unshaken in their worldview and their scorn for the revolutionary pretense, the officials of the European chancelleries kept taking diplomatic steps which could not help but play into the hands of the war party in Paris. Whereas at the outset the hawks had been able to count on at most one-third of the deputies of the Legislative Assembly, on April 20, 1792, the vote for war with Austria and Prussia was nearly unanimous. No doubt, though perhaps innocently, the Brissotins had rallied this overwhelming support by forcing the friend-enemy dissociation and interweaving its foreign and domestic aspects: in this “war assembly” and beyond, they exalted the thaumaturgic powers of war as part of their effort to fuel a “national élan against the enemy at home and abroad.”36
It would seem, then, that the war of 1792 originated in the political struggles attending the crisis of instability inside France, intensified by the purblind policies of the European courts. Although the ideological factor contributed to both, it cannot be said to have been the final or prime mover. It did not really burst forth until hostilities were under way: hereafter the war revolutionized the Revolution as much as the Revolution revolutionized the war.
Within ten days following the declaration of war the French armies suffered their first setbacks along the northeastern border, casting doubt on the optimistic assumptions and expectations of the Brissotins. These reverses were bound to complicate the search for a third way. Defying Louis XVI, on May 27 the Assembly adopted a decree intensifying the drive against refractory priests. The king vetoed it on June 11 and two days later dismissed the Girondin ministry in favor of an essentially feuillant cabinet. A week thereafter, on June 20, a throng of sansculottes invaded the Tuileries to protest the monarch’s renewed self-assertion which on July 8 marked the royalist mass rally at Jalès, in the southeast. But above all, pressed by the embattled Girondins, on July 11 the Legislative Assembly declared la patrie en danger. Almost overnight the street construed this credo as a call for the defense of both Nation and Revolution, which hereafter were extolled for being indivisible. Here, then, were the twin pillars of the forcing house of emergency rule in which the symbiosis of war and terror would be nurtured.
The Padua Circular and Pillnitz Declaration paved the way for the Brunswick Manifesto of July 25, 1792, in which the European sovereigns specified their bill of indictment, attainder, and retribution against the Revolution. Whereas the Comte d’Artois had been in the wings at Pillnitz, the émigrés wielded considerable influence in the precincts in which this latest diplomatic document was formulated. That it was drafted by the Marquis de Limon, an inconsequential financier moving in émigré circles, was less significant than that it was endorsed by Count de Fersen and Charles Alexander de Calonne, who hailed it for speaking in an idiom at once European and French. After approving the draft submitted to them, Francis II and Frederick William II had it published, in their names, over the signature of the Duke of Brunswick, the commanding general of the combined Austro-Prussian armies. By late July his troops, after taking Valenciennes and Cambrai, were closing in on Saint-Quentin and Péronne. Although subsequently Brunswick allegedly claimed that, skeptical of the émigrés, he had signed the manifesto with great reluctance, his name and position gave it enormous weight.37
Three months after France had declared war, the leaders of the Austro-Prussian coalition, with their troops on French soil, laid out the full range of their intentions in a conflict that they claimed, one-sidedly, had been forced upon them.38 They wanted the people of the French kingdom to know that they had no purpose other than to stand up to their illegitimate governors who had taken a long series of illegal and provocative actions: “the arbitrary suppression of the rights and possessions of the German princes in Alsace and Lorraine; the disturbance and overthrow of public order and legitimate government in France; the perpetration of daily outrages and violence against the sacred person of the King and his august family; and finally, the last straw, the declaration of an unjust war against His Majesty the Emperor and the attack on his provinces situated in the Low Countries.” But the two sovereigns had one additional “and equally important” concern: “to put an end to anarchy in the interior of France, to check the attacks on Throne and Church, to reestablish the legal order, and to restore the King’s security and liberty … so as to enable him to exercise the legitimate authority which is his due.” They felt sure that abhorring the “excesses of a small faction which subjugates them, … the sane and … great majority of the French nation … and people were impatiently waiting [for external help] to declare openly against the odious actions of their oppressors … and return to the ways of reason, justice, order, and peace.”
Spuriously, but also brazenly, the Continent’s two peerless sovereigns declared that “they had no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of France,” their sole objective being “to deliver the … [entire] Royal Family from captivity.” The manifesto promised that the liberating armies “would protect the cities, towns, and villages, as well as the persons and properties of all who submit to the King and support the immediate re-establishment of order and security throughout France.” To the contrary, resistance would be dealt with severely: not only national guardsmen “captured bearing arms would be treated as enemies and punished as rebels,” but public officials would have to “pay with their lives and property … for not exerting themselves to prevent [abuses and acts of violence] in their territories.” As for those individuals “daring to defend themselves by firing on the advancing armies either in open country or from … their homes, they would be punished instantly according to the rigor of the laws of war, and their houses would be demolished.”
But, of course, the city of Paris was the nerve center of the revolutionary dragon to be slain. The capital’s inhabitants were admonished to instantly submit to the king and “place him fully at liberty.” Their “Imperial and Royal majesties” gave warning that “all the members of the National Assembly, [officials] of the municipality, and [members of the] National Guard of Paris” would be held strictly accountable for the king’s welfare. If need be, they would have to “answer with their lives,” after being tried by military courts, “without hope of pardon.” But above all else, “should the Palace of the Tuileries be entered by force or attacked,” or should the king and the royal family “suffer even the slightest violence or outrage,” the Habsburg and Hohenzollern Majesties vowed to wreak “an exemplary and ever-memorable vengeance”: Paris would be subjected “to military punishment and total destruction, and any rebel guilty of an outrage would be given his just deserts.”
To the extent that it was issued in a time of resurgent “religious” strife transcending national borders, the Brunswick Manifesto recalled the ways of medieval crusades and modern wars of religion, not unlike the crusading rhetoric of the banners and marching songs of the French armies. But it was also characteristic of the “first epoch of the counterrevolution,” which was singularly artless. Quite unwittingly the Duke of Brunswick and his principals had “revealed the essence of [their] designs, thereby ruining them in advance.” To have a chance at success, “instead of threatening the Revolution Brunswick … should have caressed it … by loudly proclaiming that his peaceable troops were charged with strengthening the liberty of the noble French nation.” At the time, however, the counterrevolution had not yet learned to “cover its hatreds and projects … [or] to lie with serenity.”39
The Brunswick Manifesto, like the Pillnitz Declaration, was meant to bear upon the political situation inside France, particularly in Paris, which was once again misread. Since Pillnitz the caucus of the center had contracted, and so had that of the king. Even though he and his champions more than ever looked to the outside world for salvation, Louis XVI continued to protest his innocence. The royalist press, which published the Brunswick Manifesto, was not nearly so discreet. It conjured the specter of an imminent and devastating military onslaught, unless “the sane part of the Nation” preempted it by itself putting an end to the madness.40
This ultimatum by old-regime Europe—“a milestone in diplomatic impertinence”41—enraged and provoked more than it unnerved or terrified the temperate revolutionists who, though fearful of true believers, were not prepared to knuckle under and risk a return to the status quo ante. Besides, the thunder of the Brunswick Manifesto was so undiscriminating that throughout the land even the champions and architects of radical reform—of revolution without revolution—feared that the impending lightning might strike them as well.
Above all, however, the manifesto radicalized the radicals and their sympathizers when the news of it fell upon an increasingly restive Paris on July 28–29, 1792. The clubs and sections of militants were lashed into fury by this conspicuous confirmation of the complicity between the king and Europe’s crowned heads, or the collusion between the internal and external “Koblenz.” They now became the principal centers of agitation for the dethronement of Louis XVI. At the Cordeliers, Danton, who had vacillated all along, now sounded the trumpet for both war and deposal.42 Within less than a week the Assembly was flooded with petitions calling for the king’s removal and the Bourbons’ dispersion.43
It is not too much to say that the Brunswick Manifesto triggered and focalized the popular demonstration and rush of the Tuileries on August 10 which culminated in the overthrow of the throne and the convocation of a National Convention. This extraordinary journée produced a watershed in the French Revolution: “the first period was dominated by the Revolution’s struggle against the Monarchy; the second by its struggle against Europe as well as against itself.”44
Following the Brunswick Manifesto the revolutionaries, with notable exceptions like Robespierre, forgot about their own contribution to the coming of the war. They not only put the entire blame on the foreign powers but portrayed these as being diplomatically united and primed for an all-out military assault. In actual fact, although the powers were determined to curb, if not crush, the new regime in France, they were not about to sacrifice their conflicting interests to this common cause, which also meant that they committed only limited military forces to it. Although they kept their eye on, for example, the Polish imbroglio, in the Brunswick Manifesto they spoke as if they were sworn to restore the old order in France and tranquillity in Europe. This ideological hyperbole played into the hands of the war party in Paris, which used the threat of the oncoming counterrevolutionary armies to justify and energize their own drive to transform a conventional war into a revolutionary crusade.
Soon after the overthrow of the monarchy, the fall of Longwy on August 23, 1792, and Verdun on September 2 dampened the crusading impulse and fed the fear and fury that found expression in the September prison massacres.45 Indeed, for the crusading spirit to be fired, it had to wait for the unexpected military successes of the French armies during the fall of 1792: in September Valmy, Chambéry, Nice; in October Speier, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt; in November Jemappes and the conquest of Belgium.
On November 19 the legislature of the fledgling Republic, proclaimed on September 22, issued a decree vowing fraternity and promising help for the would-be rebel peoples of Europe.46 Four weeks later, on December 15, it declared that far and wide the armies of the Republic would, “in the name of the French nation, proclaim the sovereignty of the people and the suppression of all existing imposts … and privileges.” In occupied territories the military command would see to the convocation of “primary or communal assemblies in order to create and organize a provisional administration and judiciary.” The new civil authorities would “be in charge of regulating and paying local expenses and those necessary for the common defense,” with tax levies sparing “the indigent and hard-working portion of the population” but also with “security for person and property.”47 According to Michelet, with the decree of December 15 the Convention gave its war “of conquest, nay, liberation … a social character.” Raising “the true flag of France … above all parties,” it proclaimed a “crusade” to set the world free of all tyrants. Although Michelet applauds this project, he anxiously asks “when and how such a war could ever be brought to a close.”48
Overall the same calculations and purposes which had informed the declaration of war on April 20 informed the decrees of November 19 and December 15. The Brissotins, though out of government, continued to lead the charge. But now Joseph Cambon and Danton, as well as their followers, did not merely intone the call to arms but beat the war drums, even if for a different agenda. An all but unanimous Convention, not the street, put the revolutionizing of Europe à l’ordre du jour.49
Although Robespierre did not organize opposition to this externalization of the Revolution, he did, once again, criticize it, marshaling most of the same arguments he had adduced before. He not only stressed that each of Europe’s many peoples had its own individuality, but also wondered how many of them had “the degree of enlightenment and predisposition to adopt the constitution which the French people favored.” To simultaneously warrant and violate a people’s “sovereign right to freely give themselves a constitution … was to run the risk of alienating them”: it was unreasonable to expect to “found liberty with the help of outside violence … [since] those issuing laws by force of arms would be considered foreigners and conquerors.” Rather than make a stand against the universalizing war as such, Robespierre urged that France’s “generals and armies be enjoined not to interfere in the political affairs” of foreign peoples.50
The radicalization of foreign and military policy of late 1792 was not an alternative to a general radicalization of the Revolution, as envisaged by the Brissotins, but an integral part of it: the thrust into absolute war and the rush to regicide were linked and coincided to make for one of the crucial defining and irreversible moments of the epoch.
Hitherto terror had been largely spontaneous and random in the provinces and in Paris: the violence of the Bastille, the grande peur, the successive journées, Nîmes, Avignon. This terror was, in the first instance, a terror from below. It took place in the absence of war, without imminent and credible threats from across the borders, except for the agitation of the émigrés of the first hours.
Even if war was not the incidental, sufficient, or final cause for the Great Terror, it was certainly a necessary cause. Just as war became an instrument of policy—both foreign and domestic—starting in mid-1792, so did terror. It ceased to be a string of irregular outbursts of popular violence to become, in Quinet’s words, “a cold instrument of government and salvation” wielded from the top and directed from the center. The switches were set for an accelerated and intensified reciprocation of war and revolution and of foreign force and internal violence. The correlation was uneven and erratic, as well as opaque, particularly because of the undisciplined mix of “reality” and “perception” in the ways of the principal actors. Still, it defies common, conceptual, and temporal sense to deny a strong if indeterminate correlation between the facts and atmospherics of war and the revolutionizing of the Revolution: the proclamation of la patrie en danger; the September massacres; the trial and execution of the king; the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety; the call for the levée en masse; the placing of terror à l’ordre du jour; the adoption of the Law of Suspects; the edict of the general maximum; the trial and execution of thirty-one Girondins; the avenging reprisals in the cities of the Midi; the infernal columns in the Vendée.
At the very least, in the same way as the Pillnitz Declaration contributed to the ascendancy of the Girondins, the defeat at Neerwinden and the defection of General Dumouriez furthered the ascendancy of the Mountain. Likewise, the “close interrelatedness of war and revolution,” which was “bound to counterrevolution as reaction is bound to reaction,”51 both at home and abroad, in some significant measure conditioned the interactive resistance and counterresistance in Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Toulon. While this interrelatedness is least transparent in the singularly tangled dynamics of the origin and course of the Vendée, given “the logic of the situation,” it certainly played a role there as well.
The Girondins had politicized and ideologized the war, and in the process accentuated the externalization of the Revolution. Savoy, Nice, Brussels, and Mainz were the first way stations of the incipient crusade for the liberation of Europe from tyrannical rule. But then the untoward military reverses of early spring 1793 put Robespierre in the saddle, all the more so since they coincided with the eruption of the Vendée and Federalist defiance. More than ever anxious about the fragility of the revolutionary regime, and obsessed with the perils of conspiracy, both domestic and international, Robespierre tried to reverse priorities. In the winter of 1791–92 he had warned of the risks of using external war as a prophylaxis for the growing pains of revolution. By now, however, the Mountain needed to address France’s urgent domestic problems and stresses at the same time that they needed to master the headlong war which was aggravating them.
Accordingly, Robespierre and the Jacobins steered a course halfway between the primacy of domestic politics and foreign policy.52 They revolutionized the ways and means of fighting an essentially defensive war. Instead of billing the war as a messianic crusade, the Jacobins increasingly defined the war in super-patriotic terms, firmly yoking the nation and the Revolution to each other. In fact, the Jacobins sacrificed the radical political, economic, and social revolution within the Revolution on the altar of the nation’s war effort. By freezing the Revolution in the interest of military necessity and efficiency, they also consolidated and exploited their hold on power in a still-festering predicament of multiple sovereignty.
The Girondins were, then, the chief architects of a crusading foreign policy and war as an expression of the Revolution’s inborn universalism. Apart from the intrinsic enormity, if not impossibility, of their project of “regenerating the world,” they were rather ingenuous about it. Brissot and his confederates assumed or pretended that this task would be child’s play. Theirs was the temperament of prophets trusting in “the word” as well as in popular “enthusiasm” and élan vital. They were all the more “confounded when they ran into the first obstacles.” Since the Girondins expected an “effortless triumph,” they envisaged using “ordinary means” to achieve their “extraordinary” ends. For them, the benefits of foreign success could be applied to solve the internal problems which they had, to begin with, channeled abroad.53
By contrast, the Jacobins had “a clearer feel for reality.” They saw themselves “confronted with a superhuman task which they pledged to accomplish with honor and barbarism.” Theirs was an “ancien-régime temperament” in that they proposed to use “despotic” means to establish a new order. Robespierre and his ilk realized that “liberty could be founded neither without mastering the nature of things” nor without “forcing a people to be free.”54 They were “neither the apostles nor prophets” of the Revolution but its “rabid advocates and prosecutors.” Not surprisingly, therefore, they were not among its prime founders and movers. They had not been in the vanguard either of the Bastille or the federalist movement; had opposed the war; and had “played only an indirect role on August 10 … [and in] the foundation of the republic.” Not that they lacked “faith.” But their faith was “neither caring nor inspired.” In sum, whereas the Brissotins were prophets, the Robespierrists were zealots.55
The crusading war soon assumed a life of its own. Between February 1 and March 7, 1793 war was declared on England, Holland, and Spain. With the French armies on the march, there was need to raise, equip, and deploy additional men. In early spring there were growing signs of hypertrophy: the defeat of Neerwinden; the conscription of 300,000 men which intensified the insurgency in the Vendée; and the overheating war economy and finances, which gave rise to shortages, inflation, and social unrest. The prophets having overreached themselves and being bewildered as well as discredited, the zealots took over, perhaps because there was no one else to assume the Brissotins’ poisoned legacy.
The situation they faced was grim. Summoned to both save the Revolution and win the war, the Jacobins saw themselves “forced to organize, in the midst of anarchy, a violent minority government,” to be driven by “an explosive combination of interest and fanaticism.”56
The Thermidorean Convention and the Directory were the incubators of Bonapartism. After toppling and executing Robespierre in the name of reclaiming the republic, the Convention proceeded to put an end to the terror, the maximum, and the levée en masse. But although there was broad agreement on the dismantlement of the Jacobin emergency dictatorship, whose purport remained controversial, there was little concord on the direction in which to take the ever-unsteady republican commonweal. The core of the ruling political class, centered in successive legislatures, consisted of new men of new landed wealth bent on conserving the essential social, economic, and political gains of 1789. Lacking broad popular support, this political class felt threatened by unreconstructed ultra-Jacobins, lying in wait on the left, particularly in Paris and a few other cities, and by resurgent monarchists, on the right, principally in the provinces, heartened by the rifts in the revolutionary camp. Although the Thermidoreans overestimated both perils, they were particularly nervous about the royalist danger. Its multiple and potent components at home and abroad seemed all the more awesome since the moving spirits of both the Convention and Directory disregarded the deep divisions between moderate and intransigent royalists. Because of the weakness of political society’s executive authority, there was constant concern that the center, which itself was faction-ridden, might not be able to hold fast long enough for a sober republic to at last consolidate a full and effective political and legal sovereignty.
It is of capital importance that Thermidor’s dismantlement of the dictature de détresse did not include the termination of the war which had been one of its chief reasons and radicalizers. Presently the issue of war and peace became the touchstone of political debate, with each faction using it and structuring it to advance its own goals. In fact, this issue lost its autonomy, to become a pawn on a political chessboard that was increasingly polarized between royalists and Jacobins. The former were the doves of their time, advocating a negotiated settlement with few if any territorial annexations, in the conviction that an early peace without victory would be most likely to further some form of monarchist restoration. By contrast, the Jacobins stood forth as hawks: the more moderate elements among them pressed for “natural borders,” while the war aims of the ultras were without precise limits, except that for them the Rhine became something of a polestar. But by and large the Mountain, torn between minimalists and maximalists, looked to successful war and expansion to rally popular support and to cement the inchoate political class around the Directory and its executive committee. Whereas the doves, counting on the great powers and the Bourbon pretender, considered an early and self-renouncing peace the key to the overturn of the Revolution, the hawks, confident in the nation-in-arms and the revolt of the liberated peoples, considered limitless warfare and enlargement of the Grande Nation necessary to preserve its essential gains. On the whole both doves and hawks treated foreign and military policy in purely instrumental terms, their eyes firmly fixed on its domestic political dynamics and consequences.
Actually, the fall of Robespierre was in keeping with this logic. The war with the First Coalition of enemy powers (Austria, Prussia, England, Holland, Spain) began to take a favorable turn with General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan’s victory at Fleurus in southern Belgium on June 26, 1794, followed by the capture of Brussels on July 10, some two weeks before 9–10 Thermidor. This was the first of many dramatic interplays between the erratic course of external war and the vicissitudes of the political struggle in Paris. In this instance, military victory prepared the ground for the relaxation of the revolutionary regime.
Although this correlation between the twists of domestic politics and the turns of foreign war was rarely perfect, there is no denying its dynamic. The capture of Koblenz in October 1794, Russia’s recognition of the French republic in April 1795, and the defeat of the émigré landing at Quiberon in July encouraged the Thermidoreans to forge ahead with the normalization of the regime, culminating in the adoption of the directorial Constitution on August 22. But then, following the annexation of Belgium, during the autumn and winter of 1795–96 the campaign against the First Coalition ran aground in both southern Germany and northern Italy. It was in this period, on October 5, 1795, that Napoleon, seasoned by his participation in the recapture of Toulon in December 1793, directed the repression of a would-be royalist rising in Paris. Almost simultaneously the Convention reactivated the curb on refractory priests.
The French armies resumed their offensive in the spring of 1796, and Bonaparte was given the command of the Italian army. He won a succession of victories over the Austrians in the Piedmont, and on May 15 seized Milan, forcing the payment of a heavy indemnity. The French forces then moved east to take Verona and Venice before closing in on the northern Papal States, which brought financial dividends as well. In the meantime they also resumed their offensive on the German front, with Jourdan capturing Frankfurt in mid-July. But then, during the autumn and winter of 1796–97, although Napoleon continued to prevail over the Austrians in Italy, on the other fronts the French armies once again failed of success. On August 24 Jourdan was beaten at Amberg, east of Nuremberg, his troops being forced to fall back south of the Rhine. In December Hoche’s amphibious expedition to Ireland, aimed at England, suffered shipwreck. Clearly, Bonaparte was the rising star among the generals, with the Austrians signing a preliminary peace with him at Leoben, southwest of Vienna, on April 18. By now he was taking considerable diplomatic and political liberties in what had become his military realm, with the Directory disinclined, if not powerless, to restrain him.
In May 1797 Bonaparte resumed his attack, which culminated in Austria finally signing the Treaty of Campo Formio on October 17. In this treaty, which marked the end of the First Coalition, Vienna not only ceded Belgium, the Ionian islands, and the Austrian part of the Rhine’s left bank, but recognized France’s hegemony over Italy. With Prussia neutral and Russia watching from the sidelines, England was the only great power to remain an active enemy. But without a major continental ally London was relatively unthreatening, its capacity for a cross-Channel strike being nil. Everything now depended on whether the Directory could muster the cohesion and resolve to press a foreign and military policy designed to keep England isolated while proffering reasonable peace terms. Such a course would require reining in the generals, in particular Bonaparte, whose standing was boosted by the stunning victory over the First Coalition.
Predictably the triumph of French arms appeased or disarmed neither doves nor hawks. The doves, troubled that military and diplomatic accomplishments were bolstering the legitimacy and viability of the Republic, spared no efforts to destabilize it. At home the royalists took advantage of the relaxation of the regime to activate the ex-émigrés, the chouans, the refractory clergy, and the déçus of the Revolution, while abroad the Bourbons and émigrés urged England to stand firm and the other powers to resume the struggle. As for the hawks, they were dissatisfied with the terms of Campo Formio, particularly because it did not secure, outright, the whole left bank of the Rhine. But above all, they feared that a peace without victory, or the absence of war, would pave the way for an all-out de-Jacobinization, perhaps even counterrevolution.
At this juncture, however, the inchoate executive of the weak Directory considered the royalist fronde to be a greater danger than the Jacobin defiance. Accordingly the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor of the Year V, or September 4, 1797, was intended to put the royalists and their sympathizers hors de combat. In the partial elections of April 1797 royalists of all stripes had won 180 out of 260 contested seats, giving them considerable leverage in both chambers. Not willing to take a chance on an anti-republican challenge, and confident of legislative support, three of the directors resolved to strike preemptively. They called in the capital’s army garrison, under the command of a Bonapartist general, to arrest some fifty royalist representatives with a view to their deportation to Cayenne in French Guiana. There followed the annulment of elections in forty-nine departments, the arrest of thirty-two journalists, and the proscription of forty-two Parisian and provincial newspapers.57 But perhaps most telling, the two most prominent members of the Directory’s five-man executive, Lazare Carnot and François de Barthélemy, were targeted for arrest for favoring an early termination of both the war and the Revolution along moderate lines. Whereas Carnot managed to flee abroad in the nick of time, Barthélemy wound up being deported. The months following 18 Fructidor saw a renewal of the persecution of émigrés and refractory priests, with over 150 put to death and between 1,400 and 1,800 sent to the islands of Ré and Oléron off France’s western coast, the British fleet blocking their joining the vanguard of prisoners in the embryonic penal archipelago overseas.58
Of course, the left benefited from this repression of the right, which was coupled with a resumption of official “anti-clerical and anti-Christian persecution and propaganda, the worst since 1794.”59 In this climate of resurgent Jacobinism, and mindful of the difficulty of bridling the military to which it was increasingly beholden, the Directory stayed on a forward foreign-policy course. Determined to emend Campo Formio, from late November 1797 it pressured the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire to recognize France’s sovereignty over the entire left bank of the Rhine. In early 1798 French troops intervened in Switzerland to help found a kindred regime and occupied Rome, exiling Pope Pius VI to Tuscany. In other words, the Grande Nation continued its policy of expansion, not to say conquest, fully aware that it risked driving two or more of the major continental states to again stand together, providing England with the land forces without which its leverage for intervention was slight. To boot, on May 19 Bonaparte and his expeditionary force of 30,000 men set sail for Egypt. The objective was to strike at British world power. On August 1, 1798, in the battle of the Nile, Nelson destroyed the French fleet off Aboukir, ending all hope of seizing colonial holdings from Britain or seriously damaging its economic lifeline. But the harm was done, in that the antirevolutionary government in London was confirmed in its estimate of France’s resolve to challenge England’s position as primus inter pares in the concert of great powers. By late December 1798 Russia and England signed a treaty of alliance prompted by expediency.
In the meantime the Second Directory, having seen the infant republic safely past the Scylla of the right, became alarmed about the ship of state veering toward the Charybdis of the left. Indeed, the outcome of the partial elections of May 1798, which renewed about sixty percent of the membership of the assemblies, was the obverse of those of the preceding year: they brought forth a sizable if loose group of democratic and Jacobin representatives. This time the directors raised the specter of a revival of the Terror to justify the coup of 22 Floréal of the Year VII, or May 11, 1798. Confident of the army, they “purged 127 deputies from the legislature even before they took their seats.”60
Whereas “at the time of Fructidor [the Directory] had accused the assemblies of being excessively royalist, at Floréal they were charged with being excessively republican.”61 Even if for a noble cause, these two coups subverted the Constitution, cheapened elections, and heartened the army. To be sure, “France was still a republic, with the widest franchise in Europe.”62 Although “the sword replaced the law,” the Directory did not reinstate “the scaffold.” Instead, it chose to deport political prisoners to an overseas island, albeit with a “homicidal” climate. Clearly, it continued to oscillate between two extreme parties “without ever considering annihilating either one at a time or both simultaneously.”63 Still, “having antagonized the Right in 1797 and the Left in 1798,” the Directory, the unsteady bulwark of the republic, “stood alone,” except for the army, whose achievements braced the government at the same time that they paved the road to Brumaire, or the overthrow of the Directory.64 In hindsight, Tocqueville judged the Directory’s repressive measures very severely, insisting that they were more “barbarous … than the cruelest laws of 1793”: whereas the latter were “heatedly debated” and widely opposed, “the laws of the Directory were silently accepted.” All in all the scaffold was replaced by deportation, “a penalty often more severe than death,” which satisfied “popular vengeance” but spared it “the unpleasant sight of suffering.”65
Although the war was not without reverses, these were never serious enough for the second or third Directory to earnestly consider ending it short of an outright victor’s peace. Still, between 22 Floréal and 19 Brumaire France suffered the most serious setbacks since the summer of 1792, reaching a climax in the spring and summer of 1799. In early March Paris resumed its offensive on the German front and again declared war on Austria, confident that the Second Coalition (England, Russia, Austria, Turkey, Portugal, Naples) would be as divided and ineffective as the first. But within a matter of weeks Jourdan was once more forced to retreat to the Rhine. At about the same time French forces had to yield ground in Italy and evacuate Milan. Although General André Masséna managed to foil an Austrian offensive in Switzerland in early June, his situation remained precarious. Meanwhile the occupation of Naples had precipitated a Vendée-like rebellion in Calabria, and Bonaparte continued to flounder in the Near East.
This adverse military situation “revived memories of the imperiled patrie” and fostered a “Jacobin atmosphere.” By this time patriots experienced the real and potential losses of recently conquered lands as wounds inflicted to the very heart of the French nation. In any case, the government adopted the elements of a “levée en masse, … an emergency loan, … a law of hostages, … a rhetoric of apprehension and passion.” Presently, in August, “there were [also] scattered royalist disturbances in the Midi.”66
In late September Masséna defeated Austrian and Russian forces near Zurich, the Egyptian foray having prompted Russia to join the war to contain France. Not that this military success, though important and welcome, completely redeemed the situation. Meanwhile, having left Egypt a month before Masséna’s victory, Bonaparte arrived in France on October 9, and a few days later in Paris. Despite the glaring failure of his grand expedition, whose troops he abandoned to their fate, his reputation was essentially untarnished in Paris, as well as among the bevy of obsequious intellectuals, scientists, and artists who had followed in his train. France was about to live through her third coup d’état since 9 Thermidor, and once again there would be little if any popular or organized opposition.
Bonaparte did not seize the government by force of arms or by raising the masses against the Directory. To the contrary, leading members of the political class maneuvered to have him enter the inner sanctum of power. The Abbé Sieyès, by now the most influential member of the Directory’s five-man executive cabinet, articulated their view that the regime needed a stronger executive if it was to uphold the political center, protect the social compact, and confront the enemy powers in pursuit of a strong—a victor’s—peace. Needless to say, Sieyès and his associates were confident that they would keep the upper hand over their chosen military coadjutor.
In the coup of 19 Brumaire (November 9–10, 1799), much as in the preceding coups, the army played a certain but not leading role. It provided the show of force attending the violation of the assemblies, with only a platoon of soldiers needed to remove a few defiant deputies who, unwilling to say amen to the liquidation of the severely battered Republic, including representative government, refused to comply with the order to disperse. Once again the imminent danger of a renascent Jacobin terror served as justification. The engineers of the coup, with Sieyès in the lead, were “like men who, having seen a specter … in the form of all the ghosts of 1793, threw themselves, with their heads bowed, at the feet of the general designated to protect them.” Countless champions of freedom shared Sieyès’ obsessive and exaggerated fear, among them “Daunou, Cabanis, Grégoire, Carnot, and even Lafayette,” thereby signing their political death warrant.67 The Brumaireans, many of them “new men who had made it rich thanks to the Revolution,” were prepared to sacrifice all moral advances “to material gains.”68 To the extent that the essence of the project was “conservative” it seduced moderate royalists, including the peasantry determined to safeguard the land settlement.
Immediately before the forced dissolution, the deputies of the Directory dutifully designated Napoleon, Sieyès, and Pierre Roger Ducos consuls of a provisional executive charged with drafting a new constitution. Not surprisingly, the Constitution of the Year VIII, proclaimed on December 15, 1799, turned out to have a distinctly authoritarian bent. Of the three consuls of the executive, only one exercised real power, and by August 2, 1802, Napoleon was the sole and lifetime First Consul. As for the three chambers of a putative legislative branch, they were designed to offset each other. In addition, the Consulate’s electoral system was far and away more restrictive than that of the defunct Directorate. France now had a nondemocratic government with a strong executive which stood fair to overcome the breakdown of political and judicial sovereignty dating from 1789. To this end, and building on a strong legacy of centralized government, it streamlined the administration, established a police force, and restructured and unified the judicial system. Eventually, in March 1804 this new judiciary was capped with a civil code, or the Code Napoléon, which became a model for much of Europe. As we will see, the Concordat of July 15, 1801, with Pope Pius VII was in keeping with this nondemocratic and unifying design. Somewhat outrageously, Quinet considered this bid for a revived if rationalized sovereignty a throwback to the ancien régime. In his reading, “the thunderstorm having passed, with the beginning of the century three weighty elements glaringly resurfaced: absolute power with the First Consul; Roman Catholicism with the Concordat; and centralization for the new administration.”69
In fact, the reality of Napoleon’s position and task was far more complex. In the words of François Guizot, it is “no small matter to be, as one man, the incarnation of the nation’s glory, a guarantor of revolution, and a principle of authority.”70 As warrant of the populist, democratic, and secularizing sides of the Revolution, Napoleon appealed to the left. In his authoritarian guise he rallied those “terrified by a second terror” and those looking for a resolute defense of the new social order. Last, but certainly not least, with his representation of the super-patriotic conceit, Napoleon “rose above all parties and used the blinding light of national grandeur to eclipse their petty partisan quarrels.”71
But while the 19 Brumaire ushered in the calm after a furious storm at home, the atmosphere remained charged with thunder and lightning abroad. Indeed, the domestic appeasement and realignment along centrist lines, which consolidated some of the basic political and social gains of the Revolution, was contingent on the future course of diplomacy and war. There is no separating the constructive side of Napoleon’s internal reign, especially between 1799 and 1804, from his external design and strategy. Napoleon was, above all, a soldier, and he was appointed consul above all for his military genius of proven anti-Bourbon and anti-aristocratic persuasion. At the outset Sieyès is likely to have envisaged keeping political affairs mainly in his own hands while leaving war and diplomacy to his martial confederate. This division of labor was premised on their agreement that a peace without victory, or without at a very minimum natural borders, was precluded, not least for domestic reasons. In any event, there was no question of renouncing the annexations and forward spheres of the revolutionary decade.
When Napoleon became consul, France had annexed Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Savoy, and Nice. Furthermore, with its unmatched army, France exercised considerable influence beyond these expanded borders, in Switzerland, Holland, and parts of Italy. After the great powers of the Second Coalition spurned an unrealistic peace proposal from Paris, Napoleon resumed personal command of the Italian campaign, which on June 2, 1800, culminated in victory over the Austrians at the Piedmontese village of Marengo. His aura reinvigorated, he consolidated his hold on power in Paris and summarily spurned Louis XVIII’s feelers about a restoration while waiting for Vienna to back down. On February 8, 1801 Austria made a separate peace, in the Treaty of Lunéville, which recognized not only France’s annexation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine but the independence of several satellite states along with French hegemony over most of northern Italy. A year later, on March 25, 1802, with the Treaty of Amiens, even Britain, now completely isolated, agreed to swear off all further seizures of overseas colonies, except Dutch Ceylon and Spanish Trinidad, in exchange for France yielding Egypt.
If the Second Coalition went the way of the First, it was primarily because the great powers were chronically weakened by conflicting interests and war aims, mutual distrust, and lack of military coordination. Should they ever pull together, even the excellence of the French armies and Napoleon’s mastery would be insufficient to stay France’s extravagant course. Meanwhile, the treaties of Lunéville and Amiens must be reckoned a cessation of hostilities rather than a genuine peace: the ex-belligerents and old-regime Europe in general considered them excessively unequal, France having given up very little. Here was a clear sign that the ever-suspect government in Paris had no intention of abandoning France’s bid for European hegemony. Besides, the French violated both the letter and spirit of the treaties. They fed the chancelleries’ worst suspicions by repeatedly intervening in Switzerland, refusing to evacuate Holland, proceeding to several annexations in Italy, and remaining intrusive in the eastern Mediterranean. In addition to their ideological disquiet, the great powers were centrally concerned for their own interests and security. England was, of course, the most disposed to look for ways to mount another anti-French coalition, its own hegemonic pretensions clashing with those of its chief rival.72
Ultimately, Paris was the chief hector of the European system. There was, to be sure, Napoleon’s insatiable quest for glory, peculiar to the warlord whose legitimacy is contingent on his continuing to “perform heroic deeds.”73 In this instance this personal dynamic was all the stronger by virtue of its being grafted onto the persistent interdependence between the internal life of successive revolutionary regimes, since 1792, and their aggressive strategy abroad. More than ever there was the fear that a no-win peace, let alone a defeat, would result in a restoration or counterrevolution at home. Whatever the strains of perpetual war, there was no danger of an “internal” revolution as long as the armies were successful. Indeed, “Napoleon was never imperiled from within, and … his empire would never have collapsed from domestic difficulties.”74
Under the Consulate, not unlike under the Directory, military success underwrote the ongoing consolidation of regime and state.75 In the wake of his victory at Marengo, Napoleon pressed ahead with his search for a reconciliation with Pope and Church. Not unlike Voltaire, Napoleon believed in the ultimate rationality of man and society at the same time that he disdained and feared the masses, which for their own good and for the good of society needed to be kept in check by religion and church. Short of a perpetual use of force, not to say violence, Napoleon saw no way of consolidating the new order without defusing the religious schism precipitated by the clerical oath; but he felt no less sure that the state should have control of the church. At this time, standing strong, he could afford to ignore the left and proceed to heal France’s religious rift with a view to depriving the advocates of “a return to the ancien régime” of “millions of potential recruits,” the Roman Church remaining “one of the main pillars of counterrevolution.” Meanwhile, with the French in control of Italy, Pope Pius VII, who was less intransigent than his predecessor, was likely to be open to an accommodation. In any case, following arduous negotiations, Napoleon and Pius VII reached a settlement which, unlike Lunéville and Amiens, was equitable save in the eyes of the ultraroyalists and ultra-Jacobins. Under the Concordat of 1801, concluded and ratified in the exultation of Amiens, the Vatican accepted that in France the episcopate and clergy be appointed and paid by the state, and swear loyalty to it. The Holy See also agreed that confiscated church properties not be returned. Although, in exchange, Napoleon recognized Roman Catholicism to be the “religion of the greater majority of French citizens,” he insisted upon its being only one of several religions.
Catholic true-believers and Louis XVIII opposed the Concordat because besides treating with an ungodly and regicide government, the Vatican sapped support for an all-out restoration by depriving the refractory church and clergy of the aura of martyrdom. As for the fundamentalist liberals and Jacobins, they decried the attenuation of the separation of church and state as well as of state-supported anticlericalism. In their eyes Napoleon had put the secularization of civil and political society in jeopardy, along with religious toleration. Meanwhile, with the “triumphant re-establishment of Catholicism” Napoleon braced his authority with what he considered an “essential foundation, consecrated by the Concordat.”76
All things considered, the Concordat was the domestic expression of the centrist alliance and dynamic driving the external war. In this logic, having dealt a blow to the far right, there was need for a corresponding strike against the far left. Dead against the politics of the streets, Bonaparte seized upon the unsuccessful attempt on his own life on December 24, 1800, to proceed against the presumably ever-lurking enragés. He backed his charge that the Jacobins and Babouvists, or proto-Communists, were responsible for this would-be assassination with the claim that he had “a dictionary of the September murderers, conspirators, Babeuf and others who had figured at the worst moments of the Revolution.”77 Napoleon hastened to tell the Council of State that the procedures of “a special tribunal would be too slow and limited … [to punish] this atrocious crime, [which called for] a vengeance as swift as lightning.” The time had come “to purge [these wretches] from the republic,” all the more so since “to make ‘a great example’ of their chiefs would help dissolve the party, persuade ‘workers’ to return to work, and ‘attach the intermediate class to the republic.’ ” The Council decided to summarily deport 129 presumed Jacobins to the Seychelles and to Cayenne at the same time that former terrorists or revolutionaries were arrested in several cities. Within two weeks Joseph Fouché provided Napoleon with conclusive evidence that ultraroyalists, not neo-Jacobins, were responsible for the outrage, as part of an effort to destabilize the moderate regime that seemed to take hold with Marengo and the Concordat. But the First Consul stood fast, and so did the Council and the Senate. Napoleon was quoted as saying that “we deport them for their share in the September Massacres, the crime of 31 May, the Babeuf Conspiracy, and all that has happened since.”78
With renewed confidence in the strategy of harnessing the prestige of successful warfare, sanctified by blood, to consolidate and energize the regime, Napoleon resumed the war that had started in 1792 and was to last another decade. He made the most of the rivalries among the great powers, engaging and defeating them almost one by one. Napoleon continued to reap the political benefits of successive victories, all the more since he fought all his battles on foreign soil and financed them by imposts on conquered lands, so that “the French population was spared the heaviest burdens of warfare.”79
As we saw, with the balance of power impaired, each of the great powers had good reason to distrust Paris: England feared for its primacy; Austria was “deeply concerned about the growth of French preponderance in Germany and Italy; Prussia found itself with a French army in the midst of its dominion and cheated of a prize which had always been one of its major foreign-policy goals; and Russia objected to any move that presaged renewed French interest in the Levant as well as a destabilization of the German settlement.”80 On top of engaging in this unexceptional calculus of realpolitik and geopolitics, the governments of the great powers took exception to the insolent pretense of France’s upstart ruler: on May 18, 1804, Napoleon declared himself hereditary Emperor of the French, with Pius VII celebrating the Mass at which Napoleon crowned himself in Notre Dame on December 2. The political and ruling class acquiesced as meekly as during the recent coups d’état.
Provoked by several additional annexations on the Italian peninsula which violated the Treaty of Lunéville, England and Russia issued a joint warning to Paris while Austria, falling in with this nascent Third Coalition, invaded Bavaria in September 1805. By October 20 Napoleon defeated the Austrians at Ulm. Three weeks later he solemnly led his troops into Vienna, his greatest prize to date. Heartened by this triumph, he went on to defeat, on December 5, the Russian and Austrian forces in the Battle of the Three Emperors, at Austerlitz, halfway between Vienna and Prague. Characteristically, the Allies had nearly three times the number of killed, wounded, and prisoners as the French, or a total loss of between 25,000 and 30,000 men. Two weeks thereafter Austria signed another humiliating peace agreement: by the Treaty of Pressburg (Bratislava), in addition to paying an indemnity, the Habsburgs ceded considerable lands to the Kingdom of Italy, now ruled by Napoleon, and to Baden, Bavaria, and Wurtemberg, which became independent kingdoms. For all intents and purposes France supplanted Austria in both Italy and southern Germany. All in all, the second half of the year 1805 was one of Napoleon’s most brilliant seasons, except that on October 21 Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, near the northwestern shore off the Strait of Gibraltar, confirmed Britain’s naval supremacy.
Prussia had stayed out of the conflict, and Frederick William III’s indecision had facilitated Napoleon’s defeat of the Third Coalition. But following Pressburg the Prussian king could no longer temporize without risking either gradual subdual or outright defeat, should his armies have to fight Napoleon by themselves. In any case, in mid-July, as Napoleon went about creating the Rhenish Confederation and unhinging the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick William united with Russia and Saxony in a Fourth Coalition. As was his wont, Napoleon promptly attacked the Prussian-Saxon forces, decisively defeating them in the twin battle of Jena and Auerstadt in mid-October 1806 before triumphantly riding into Berlin on October 27. Especially when outnumbered and without the support of its main ally, even Europe’s strongest and most sophisticated old-style army was no match for France’s new-model legions. Napoleon pursued the retreating Prussians to the northeast. In early February he fought a bloody but inconclusive battle against a combined Prussian and Russian force at Eylau, near Königsberg. This time the French counted some 25,000 to the Allies’ 15,000 casualties, with the inclement weather intensifying the fatal but normal agony of the wounded. Still, not long thereafter, in mid-June, he managed to crush a Russian army further east, near Friedland.
The time had come for both Russia and Prussia to bend the knee in a landmark treaty signed in July 1807 at Tilsit, a port on the Niemen. Napoleon extended France’s hegemony to central and eastern Europe, in the process sponsoring the establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw. Whereas he imposed harsh territorial, financial, and military terms on Prussia, Napoleon was rather lenient with Russia. At present his primary concern was to win over Alexander I for his compulsive but uphill struggle with England. Russia was given a free hand in Turkey and the Baltic in exchange for joining the Continental System. Except for a shared hostility to England, this tacit alliance between the two emperors and polities was contre-nature. But be that as it may, Tilsit marked Napoleon’s apogee, with a multinational army of nearly one million men mounting guard over a French empire extending from the Pyrenees to the Pripet Marshes. No one inside France even dreamt of challenging him, particularly since except for the limited conscription and casualties of native Frenchmen, the domestic costs of perpetual war were as yet minimal.
With nearly the entire Continent under French military sway, England was the last holdout. Basking in the hubris of his recent triumphs, Napoleon was not about to be daunted by the difficulty of bending or breaking London’s will. Emboldened by his diplomatic marriage of convenience with Alexander I and by England’s utter isolation, Bonaparte proposed to high-pressure Britain with a blockade and boycott of its exports, the lifeblood of its domestic and imperial economy. Napoleon issued the Berlin decrees proclaiming his strategic economic policy on November 21, 1806, during the months separating Jena and Tilsit. To implement this policy Napoleon needed to convince and, if necessary, coerce all European coastal states to help enforce the Continental Blockade or System, the objective being French control over every state fronting the seas between the Baltic and the Mediterranean.
After Tilsit Napoleon’s unflagging bid for European hegemony was heavily driven by this strategic plan, which England was determined to thwart with a counter-blockade, neither of the two great powers being fitted for autarky. It took French pressure to see to the closing of Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen, and Rotterdam on the North Sea; and Genoa and Livorno on the Mediterranean. In late 1807 the French began their intervention in Spain and Portugal, the objective being to close in particular the Portuguese coast which remained open for trade with Britain. Even if costly in lives, the march to Lisbon was easy enough. In Spain, to the contrary, the French intervention from the outset intensified a severe rift in the Bourbon ruling house which destabilized its ancien régime. By May Napoleon had removed both the ruling king, Charles IV, and his son, Ferdinand VII, in favor of his own brother Joseph Bonaparte, who entered Madrid as King of Spain on July 20.
Meanwhile the French became caught up in Spain’s internecine struggle between the immovable governing and ruling classes and the high-spirited champions of enlightened but moderate reform.81 Whereas the former resisted the invaders for being armed crusaders for the ideas of 1789, the latter proceeded to collaborate with them to further their liberal(izing) cause. At the same time, there were popular uprisings in Asturias and Andalusia analogous to yesterday’s rebellion in the Vendée. Localist and variably spontaneous, some of these risings were incited; others were led by traditional clerics, notables, and officers who cursed the French and their collaborators as unbelievers, Freemasons, and demons, and Napoleon as Antichrist. In every respect the forces of the old order, both well-born and popular, were vastly stronger than the forces for change: journalists, lawyers, and intellectuals without much of a social base, their fortunes rising and falling with those of the enemy armies. Indeed, the strife surrounding the French presence was entangled in an incipient civil war with vast regional and local variations. But by and large the struggles in Spain, even more than those in France from 1789 to 1795, were fueled by unexceptional strains between city and country, cosmopolitanism and provincialism, enlightenment and obscurantism, tolerance and zealotry.
From mid-1808 through early 1814 the French forces were bogged down on the Iberian peninsula, fighting both regular armies and partisan bands.82 On July 20, 1808, at Bailen, in northeastern Andalusia, General Dupont’s army of fewer than 10,000 men was overpowered by General Castanos, whose force of fewer than 20,000 men was a loose mixture of trained soldiers and raw peasant recruits, many of them wielding not rifles but pitchforks. Not unlike the rout of General Marcé at the start of the internal war in the Vendée, this defeat was fortuitous, and for similar reasons.83 Both times distant citified leaders disdained and underestimated the back-country enemy, with the result that they committed insufficient and ill-trained troops. The situation worsened in August when Wellington landed north of Lisbon and drove French troops out of Portugal as he advanced into Spain. Hereafter Napoleon had to battle the divisions of Spain’s regular army, Wellington’s expeditionary force of some 40,000 men, and countless bands of primitive rebels. Although totally uncoordinated, these three arrays of armed resistance pinned down large French forces—some 300,000—beyond the time they would be urgently needed elsewhere, particularly in the Russian campaign. This, then, was the bleeding “ulcer” which kept draining Napoleon’s strength: in excess of 200,000 casualties over seven years.
Napoleon’s style of warfare was not suited to battling irregulars, with the result that when engaging them in battle the French forces came to grief. Indeed, the guerrilla side of the war in Spain became characteristically brutal and savage. The line between soldier and civilian was blurred, and it was open season for terror and counter-terror, vengeance and re-vengeance, by both sides. The brutalization of war carried over to the sieges of Gerona, Saragossa, and Tarragona: especially after the French finally stormed them, these cities suffered cruel punishment. This intermittent conjunction of regular and irregular warfare is reflected in Goya’s Disasters of War. Goya was emblematic of the dilemma in the several Spains. He was neither a supporter of Ferdinand VII nor a partisan of Napoleon and the afrancesados. Goya was at once a critically minded patriot for Aragon, his regional homeland, and an enemy of obscurantism, if not a champion of enlightenment. Not unlike Jacques Callot in his Miseries and Calamities of War during the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, Goya came face to face with the sheer horror of crusading warfare, both international and civil, which his mind’s eye viewed as eclipsing the political reason of the opposing sides. In the terrifying etchings of the Disasters of War he transcends and universalizes the Peninsular War by showing that it brought out the beast in both man and soldier.84 In any case, this conflict wrought enormous physical and mental suffering on both sides, and casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands.
Ultimately the fate of constitutional monarchy and liberalism in Spain was tied to the fate of Napoleon, which the multiple Spanish resistances and Wellington helped to seal only to a small extent. Keeping in mind the different starting points, it is hardly surprising that following Bonaparte’s defeat and the withdrawal of the French armies the restoration in Spain should have become considerably more far-reaching than in France. Unmindful of his own collaborationist past, Ferdinand VII imperiously abrogated the Cortes of Cadiz and its constitution. Indeed, he all but reinstated absolutism. With the support of most of Spain’s power elite, Ferdinand not only ordered the purge of liberals and afrancesados and the abrogation of all freedoms but reestablished the full rights of the landed oligarchy and the Church, including some of the latter’s most benighted features.85
Napoleonic France was Europe’s Land der Mitte of its time. In pursuit of its hegemonic designs on the Continent, Paris had to keep at bay both London and St. Petersburg or gain ascendancy over either the one or the other. By late December 1810 not only was England holding out and pressing its intervention in Spain, but Russia was becoming restless. Alexander I was chafing at the humiliation of the Treaty of Tilsit and at Napoleon’s continuing meddling in Poland, now compounded by the latter’s marriage to the Austrian emperor’s daughter. But above all, increasingly concerned by the economic fallout of his unholy alliance with Bonaparte, the tsar bolted from the Continental System. Not about to tolerate this defiance of his strategic design, Napoleon set out to close the breach. Still in a position to divide and conquer, he prevailed on Frederick William III and Francis II not to unsheathe their swords as he moved to bully Alexander back into line. In case of war he was, as always, confident of a quick victory, which would also redound to his benefit at home, where the impasse in Spain was beginning to dampen some spirits.
At any rate, Napoleon readied the greatest military force ever assembled to face down Moscow. The French army had first expanded, by conscription, to 750,000 in 1794. Though falling short of the vaunted nation-in-arms, this army was unprecedented in both scale and social makeup. Napoleon was the heir of this army, whose organization, personnel, and strategy he recast to fit his intentions. After shrinking in size following the Year II, it rose from 400,000 under the Consulate to 500,000 in 1808, to reach to over one million in 1812. Satellites and conquered lands were forced not only to provide their share of this cannon fodder but also to bear a large part of the expense, since the Napoleonic armies, apart from living off the land, also levied war indemnities, maintenance costs, and taxes.86
Napoleon deployed 700,000 men for the assault on Russia, 350,000 of them in the front lines. There were soldiers of at least ten “nationalities” among the troops primed for battle. Opposite them was a Russian army of 175,000 men which Bonaparte disdained; he also made light of road, logistical, and weather conditions. The campaign was expected to take no more than a month when on June 22, 1812, the Grande Armée, without declaration of war, crashed into Russia. Its main force crossed the Niemen between Vilna and Minsk in the direction of Moscow. Smolensk was captured on August 18, several weeks later than anticipated. Casualties were heavy on both sides, with Napoleon losing 100,000 men to combat, disease, and desertion. He lost another 60,000 men before the battle of Borodino on September 7, in which each side sacrificed some 40,000 killed and wounded. A week after this bloodbath, the vanguard of the French army entered Moscow, parts of it, including the Kremlin, in flames. His overextended army facing decimation by starvation and exposure to freezing weather, on October 19, in the eleventh hour, Napoleon ordered a total withdrawal. During this inglorious retreat countless thousands of soldiers—fewer officers—were killed by enemy soldiers and Cossacks, and many more died from disease and exposure. The Grande Armée was reduced to 60,000 men by the time it retreated across the Berezina river in late November, and to 30,000, in late December, as it fell back over the Niemen, or a mere fraction of the legions which had crossed this river in June. Overall the Russian campaign cost the French side about 400,000 casualties and prisoners, the vast majority of whom must be counted as dead.
Not surprisingly, first Prussia and then Austria joined Russia in the pursuit of Napoleon. In May 1813 at Lützen, southeast of Leipzig, and Bautzen, on the Spree river, Bonaparte still managed to hold off the Prussian and Russian forces with heavy losses on all sides. Even so, the renascent coalition held. Napoleon sought to gain time for reinforcements to reach him, but in vain. The three-day battle of Leipzig, the most awesome and costly of the Napoleonic wars, was fought in mid-October. A combined force of 300,000 Russians, Prussians, and Austrians came together for this supreme clash of arms. By now Napoleon was reduced to fewer than 200,000 men, among whom in particular the foreign conscripts and volunteers began to hang back. For the first time he failed to hold the line, and his troops were torn to pieces and routed: barely a quarter of them managed to retreat west of the Elster river. Although the Allies had suffered about 50,000 casualties, they stayed on the heels of Napoleon, whose remnant of 60,000 men fell back across the Rhine. By early January the 250,000 troops of Field Marshal von Schwarzenberg and General von Blücher had crossed into France and forged ahead practically unopposed. On March 31, 1814, they entered Paris. In the meantime, Wellington had occupied Narbonne and Toulouse in southwestern France. With the “liberation” of Germany, Holland, and northern Italy, the grand empire and nation came to an inglorious end, along with the Continental System.
This vast revolutionary and Napoleonic reflux did not set off popular uprisings anywhere in Europe to either stem or quicken the tide. Except in Spain, the fighting was not attended by significant partisan warfare. The formidable and new-model French armies were defeated by the at best partially remodeled armies of the unchanged old regimes. Terrified by the plebeian irruptions during the high tide of the revolution in France, Alexander I, Frederick William III, and Francis II had no taste for a levée en masse. Nor had conditions ever been propitious for popular risings in support of the French armies, even in the event Napoleon had proclaimed the end of seignorialism. It is equally striking, however, that faced with the invading royal armies and the return of the Bourbons, there was no patriotic or neo-Jacobin irruption in support of the French armies during the terminal battle of France from early January through late March 1814.
Predictably, starting with the rout at Leipzig, the rising prospects of defeat fed pressures in France, particularly from within the new political class, for a timely negotiated peace and political re-formation. Besides, fiscal problems were breaking forth, civilian morale was flagging, and military desertions and draft evasions were on the increase. Indeed, there was no avoiding the political consequences of military defeat: Napoleon’s glaring defeat was bound to spell his downfall along with that of the imperial regime. What was undetermined was the form of the successor regime, the course of the transition, and the role of the victorious Allies.
During the week following the fall of Paris, the Senate dethroned Napoleon before he abdicated on April 6. As part of their effort to facilitate or smooth the transition, the Allies granted him full sovereignty over the Island of Elba, to which he repaired with some one thousand soldiers sworn to him. Meanwhile, in Paris, under the watchful eye of enemy troops, an improvised provisional government assumed power, presided over by the protean yet steady Talleyrand. This government proposed to facilitate a “soft” Bourbon restoration acceptable to both the Allies and the composite elite of notables which had crystallized inside France since Thermidor. Clearly, the Bourbons were brought back not by reason of a royalist groundswell but because Viscount Robert Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, and Talleyrand, the self-appointed chief mediator, considered them indispensable for a compromise settlement, in France and in the concert of Europe.
Louis XVIII may be said to have countenanced rather than espoused a measured restoration.87 After nearly a quarter century of exile and surrounded by ultraroyalist émigrés, headed by the Comte d’Artois, this position was neither natural nor easy. In any case, touched by the constitutional monarchy he had observed firsthand in England since 1807, Louis XVIII was open to a “compromise between, on the one hand, the new society forged by the Revolution and the Empire and, on the other, the old society grounded in a feudal, monarchist, aristocratic, and religious past.”88
Ten days after landing in Calais, on April 24 Louis XVIII stopped in Saint-Ouen to meet with emissaries from the Senate and Corps Législatif, the chief pillars of the provisional government. But rather than accept their constitutional proposal, which would have made him king by their leave, he insisted on defining his legitimacy and authority himself. In a solemn proclamation he claimed not only to be “King of France and Navarre by the Grace of God,” but to have been “recalled by the love of our people for the throne of our fathers.” Having called to mind his divine right and lineage, he promised to adopt a “liberal constitution.” Meanwhile, “representative government” would be maintained in its present form, along with an “independent judiciary” to guarantee the full range of civil liberties and rights, including access to the civil and military service for all Frenchmen. Louis XVIII declared property to be “inviolable and sacred,” and the sale of biens nationaux “irrevocable.”89 Judging by his words, and on the face of it, Louis XVIII, like Napoleon, proposed to preserve and enlarge vital elements of the revolutionary heritage.
Ironically, although this declaration of distinctly liberal-minded intentions stood in contrast to the illiberal rule in three of the four great powers, the Allies continued in their support for an orderly transition in Paris. They did so by framing a peace settlement that was neither vindictive nor punitive.90 The Treaty of Paris, signed on May 30, 1814 well-nigh recognized France’s borders of 1792, which included some of the territorial accessions and conquests of the Revolution’s first hours, and most of overseas France was left intact as well. Besides, the victors spared the embryonic successor regime the shame of foreign occupation and financial reparation. Presently the Congress of Vienna began to act in this same conciliatory spirit, and France’s readmission to the Concert of Europe happened almost overnight when Austria and England signed a treaty with post-Napoleonic France against Prussia and Russia. Evidently France’s soft restoration at home and pragmatic reintegration abroad were closely linked.
On June 4 Louis XVIII made good on his Saint-Ouen declaration by presenting the holdover “legislative” chambers with a Charter which became France’s fifth constitution since 1789.91 In addition to embodying the promised rights and freedoms, with an eye to the new political and ruling class this Charter safeguarded all imperial ranks, honors, and pensions. But it also laid down two major, if partially incompatible, defining precepts. Although Article 5 of the Charter assured religious toleration, Article 6 defiantly restored Catholicism as France’s state religion. Probably with the best of intentions, but also unrealistically, Article 11 prohibited “all investigations of opinions and votes expressed before the Restoration” and asked “both the courts and the citizenry” to heed this injunction.
As to the system of government, it was less liberal than its professed spirit. Though constitutional, the old-new monarchy of the Charter was not really parliamentary. His person sacred and inviolate, Louis XVIII repeated and refined his claim that the people had freely called him, “the brother of the last King,” to assume the throne of France. The king had the power to sanction, promulgate, and emend the laws. As regards the bicameral assembly, he and he alone appointed the members of the upper house of peers, whose tenure was hereditary and whose membership had no upper limit. The members of the chamber of deputies were to be elected by a narrow property-based franchise entitling fewer than 100,000 Frenchmen to vote; the property qualification for candidates for the lower house was three times higher than for the voters, restricting the pool to about 15,000. Further, the king’s ministers were responsible to him, not to the house, which he could dissolve. Ultimately Louis XVIII, not unlike Napoleon, embraced the principle or pretense of parliamentary government, not its essence.
Even so, from the very outset the ultraroyalists, the only effective opposition of the time, fiercely criticized him for steering a treacherous middle course. Determined to excise the revolutionary legacy and purge the state bureaucracy, and with hardened and avenging émigrés setting the tone, they were supported by large sectors of the nobility and church. These diehards were not about to be appeased by symbolic gestures attuned to their sensibility, such as the solemn commemoration, on January 21, 1815, of the death of Louis XVI in the form of a stately reburial of his and Marie-Antoinette’s remains in the royal sepulcher at Saint-Denis, “with the bells of all the churches throughout the land ringing the hour of national expiation and repentance.”92 Slighting the spirit of Article 11 of the Charter, this high celebration was to expunge the memory of the dramatic reburial of Voltaire’s remains in the Pantheon in 1791.
Within less than a year of the Bourbons’ return, during his renewed rule of the Hundred Days, Napoleon wrecked what was a temperate if contested restoration. The ex-emperor and his armed retinue sailed from Elba on seven ships, to land near Cannes on March 1, 1815. Rather than meeting with resistance, in not a few places Napoleon actually was cheered on his march to Paris, where he arrived on March 20. In addition to the popular enthusiasm, especially among the lower classes of certain cities, there was the acclaim of part of the military, including twelve of France’s twenty imperial marshals.
While Napoleon was again lionized, Louis XVIII was virtually abandoned. During the night of March 19–20 he stole away from Paris, and eventually, at the end of the month, settled in Ghent for his second exile. By then he had delegated the Comte d’Artois and his two sons—the Duc de Berry and the Duc d’Angoulême—to go to the Midi where, as in the west, King and Church were in disproportionately high favor. Although Angoulême managed to raise several regiments to fight local Bonapartist forces, the entire enterprise instantly misfired. In his predicament, with the moderate restoration shattered, Louis XVIII viewed his ultras with indulgence mixed with trepidation.
As was to be expected, the Allied statesmen gathered at the Congress of Vienna were dumbfounded, by the apparent recrudescence of pro-Bonapartism in France as much as by Napoleon’s actions.93 They momentarily suspended their rivalries to declare Napoleon a European outlaw and order their generals to prepare to reduce him once and for all. Each of the great continental powers pledged 150,000 men, and England agreed to finance much of the combined operations.
On his arrival in the capital to reclaim power, Bonaparte faced a problem similar to Louis XVIII’s in 1814. He had to decide upon his political allies and compromises. Taking up where he had left off, Napoleon sought to chart a middle course between two extremes: the royalists whom he loathed and feared; and the neo-Jacobins whom he scorned and distrusted. Actually, he lacked a commanding public reason for this, his ultimate wager, also because the imperial notables of office and wealth were loath to tempt Providence. Still, and as usual, Napoleon had no difficulty finding respectable and obeisant paladins to provide him with an uplifting purpose. Lazare Carnot accepted to serve as interior minister and Benjamin Constant as member of the Conseil d’Etat. The mere presence of Carnot, the “architect of the victory” of 1793–94, in Napoleon’s inner council spoke volumes. Driven by a febrile Sieyès-like ambition, Constant supervised the drafting of a constitutional warrant to justify defying not just France but Europe. In any case, by this time Carnot and Constant were advocates of a moderate constitutional settlement. They gave their tacit blessing even though they and their soul mates understood that Napoleon redivivus was a most unlikely agent to this end. In particular, they must have realized that in his logic, the drive for the preservation of the core ideas and interests of 1789 at home was contingent on the resumption of deadly and endless war abroad.
Benjamin Constant and other “liberals” were prepared to blink at Napoleon’s quest for European hegemony and military glory, the source of his erstwhile legitimacy, in exchange for his dubious promise to uphold the founding principles of 1789 and the essentials of parliamentary government. In effect the “Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire” amounted to little more than a somewhat liberalized version of the Bourbon Charter: the Emperor replaced the King as the principal fount of power, leaving little scope for legislative control and initiative. The act was approved by a spurious plebescite, followed by the hurried election of a new lower chamber with a large majority of soi-disant liberals and nonroyalists.
Napoleon was not uninterested in this political remodeling. But he was first and foremost concerned with the ominous military situation. With a negotiated peace on Napoleon’s hazy but ambitious terms precluded, a military showdown was inevitable. Whereas the Allies could, in fairly short order, put one million men in the field, Napoleon could muster at best 200,000, of whom some 30,000 would have to fend off royalists in the west and the south. Under the circumstances he needed to strike preemptively: he proposed to defeat the British and the Prussians, preferably one at a time, before taking on the Austrians and Russians. Napoleon hurriedly moved his core army, with seasoned veterans, into southern Belgium, to prevent Wellington and Blücher from joining their forces, for a total of nearly a quarter million men. Although he worsted Blücher at Ligny in central Belgium, the latter pulled around and managed the decisive juncture. On June 18 the combined English and Prussian armies defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, south of Brussels. The casualties ran to some 60,000 out of a total of 350,000 combatants, with 25,000 for the two Allies and 35,000 for the French.
Four days later, on June 22, Napoleon abdicated a second time. This time, to make doubly sure, the Allies banished him to Saint Helena, a British island in the south Atlantic, remote from Europe. Once more the form of the regime was at issue in a situation in which a provisional government, with difficult relations with the Allies as well as with the chambers, was called upon to rule in a vacuum of power. Having crossed into France on June 21, Wellington followed on the heels of the retreating French armies at the same time that Louis XVIII prepared to return to Paris. Again the Allies saw no alternative to Louis XVIII. Presently Wellington urged the French king to follow close upon his forces. Just as in late May 1814 Louis XVIII had stopped at Saint-Ouen to negotiate and proclaim the conditions of his return, so in late June 1815 he stopped at Cambrai to issue a policy declaration, countersigned by Talleyrand, who was about to head the king’s new ministry and renew negotiations with the Allies. In fact, this declaration was grafted on to the Charter. But whereas the original Charter, in a spirit of unreal appeasement, had prescribed a massive amnesia and remission of past sins, the revised version vowed that the Chambers would subject all those responsible for the return of Napoleon “to the vengeance of the law.”94
In any case, the Allied armies continued their advance into France. By July 3 Paris capitulated, and in no time over one million foreign soldiers occupied large parts of the country: the Russians the Île-de-France, including Paris, and Lorraine; the Prussians Normandy and Brittany; the Austrians Burgundy and the Languedoc; the English the Aisne and French Flanders. Meanwhile, on July 8, Louis XVIII returned to Paris “in the baggage of the Allies.”95 Talleyrand’s provisional government was equally beholden to the victors.
The diplomatic consequences of Waterloo were, of course, considerable. The second treaty of Paris, signed on November 20, was distinctly harsher than the first. France was now forced back from her borders of 1792 to those of 1789, the loss of the Saar to Prussia ending the dream of a Rhine frontier. This territorial cutback was compounded by a war indemnity of 700 million francs and a yearly payment of 150 million francs to cover the cost of 150,000 Allied soldiers occupying strategic zones of the northern and eastern departments for five years. In addition, France was to return some of the art treasures the Grande Armée had looted throughout Europe.
Though punitive, this peace was not Carthaginian. The four victors were still and always eager to reintegrate a chastened and normalized France into the concert of powers at the same time that, appalled by the widespread support for Napoleon during the Hundred Days, they signed the Quadruple Alliance committing themselves to military collaboration in the event Paris violated the terms of the peace treaty.
It was not, however, the Treaty of Paris and the Quadruple Alliance but the Holy Alliance of the Throne and the Altar which signaled the twilight of the revolutionary epoch. The former two were consistent with the diplomatic practices and rules dating from the Treaty of Westphalia which had ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The Holy Alliance, for its part, enlarged the mission of foreign policy and diplomacy, investing the reason of state with a religious or moral imperative prefigured in the Brunswick Manifesto. Proposed by Alexander I, and inwardly approved by all the crowned heads and the Pope, it caught and propagated the spirit of Europe’s retour à l’ordre. It marked the spillover into the international system of the triumphant restoration and regeneration of domestic institutions and values throughout Europe and prefigured by the reinstatement of Ferdinand VII rather than Louis XVIII. Having thwarted and defeated the foreign and domestic challenge of the new order, the old regimes stood tall and strong, probably taller and stronger than before 1789. All of them experienced some degree of rebirth of monarchy, nobility, and church, with religion serving as the principal cement of civil and political society. This revival inspired their majesties to declare, “in the face of the whole world, their fixed resolution,” in both domestic administration and relations among states, “to take for their sole guide the precepts of [their] Holy Religion; namely the precepts of justice, Christian charity, and peace, which … must guide all their steps, as being the only means of consolidating human institutions, and remedying their imperfections.”96 Although at first Metternich sympathized with Castlereagh’s caustic quip that the Holy Alliance was a “piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense,” with time he valued it as a useful premise for antiliberal or antirevolutionary intervention in the internal affairs of destabilized states.97
The political costs of the fatal Hundred Days were much greater than the diplomatic ones. Whereas the first restoration had been essentially conservative and nonconfrontational, the second was reactionary and fiercely contentious. It even precipitated a renewal of civil strife. Particularly the ultraroyalists benefited from Napoleon’s brazen return. They underscored his support among senior state servants, military officers, ex-Jacobins like Carnot, and shameless political trimmers like Constant to vindicate their alarm about the perils of moderation and their call for a radical purge of the bureaucracy, army, and chamber. The legislative elections of August 14–22, 1815, at once reflected and encouraged this ultraroyalist resurgence. Of the 380 deputies in the new chamber, close to 90 percent were royalists, nearly 50 percent nobles, and 20 percent ex-émigrés. The mood of the vast majority of this house, swamped with political neophytes, was uncompromising and avenging. In the fall and early winter of 1815–16 the deputies voted four emergency laws to facilitate the implementation of their purifying and retributive agenda. They thereby legalized and encouraged the “second White Terror” which had broken out in the summer of 1815, immediately following Napoleon’s second abdication, and which lasted through much of 1816.98
This nonofficial terror was centered in the Midi, where the Napoleonic relapse not only was quite marked but was also countered by the Duc d’Angoulême’s regiments and the Chevaliers de la Foi, a secret royalist society. Especially in the power vacuum following the Hundred Days, royalist militias, bolstered by volunteers from the surrounding countryside, easily overwhelmed the National Guard constabularies in several cities, including Marseilles. These militias, in turn, connived at attacks against Bonapartists and their fellow travelers. They took a considerable human toll, with Marshal Brune and General Ramel among the most notorious victims, in Avignon and Toulouse, respectively. This was the context and atmosphere in which Nîmes once again suffered the agony of religiously charged civil conflict.
We had occasion to examine the conflict between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries in Nîmes in the summer of 1790, its Furies fired by the deeply rooted enmity and distrust between Catholics and Protestants.99 Back in the dawn of the Revolution, not unlike in its twilight, the enragés among the majority Catholics would not tolerate the emancipation of the local religious minority. From 1789 through the empire the Protestants of Nîmes seized the hour to put their segregation and persecution behind them. In short order, besides enjoying full religious freedom, they secured more than their share of influence and power, judging by their weight in the municipal council and National Guard, as well as in the state administration and judiciary.
This integration continued during the first restoration, which accepted the local Protestant leaders’ professions of loyalty. But in Nîmes, as in so many places in the south, the return of Napoleon from Elba proved profoundly divisive. Alarmed by the rise of ultraroyalism, which was confirmed by the Duc d’Angoulême’s regional inroads, Protestants struck in with the Hundred Days. Inevitably they became prime victims of the anti-Bonapartist and counterrevolutionary backlash during the second restoration. Unlike in 1790, the Protestants of Nîmes were without defense, having been expelled from the local regiment of the National Guard, with the result that royalist bands had the run of the city as they did of the entire department. In July and August 1815, some 100 civilians were killed in the department of the Gard, “most of them Protestants from Nîmes.” In addition, these bands backed the vigilantes who “carried out citizen’s justice” and participated in the plunder and destruction of Protestant homes, helped by the absence of a protective police force and the paralysis of the law courts. In the face of this violence, which was half spontaneous and half organized, and which was “abetted by the royalist authorities,” an estimated 2,500 Protestants fled the city between July and October 1815.100
Clearly, in this White Terror, as in the original bagarre de Nîmes, zealous anti- and counterrevolutionaries instrumentalized anti-Protestantism for political ends. Both times local notables of the old order enlisted popular anti-Protestantism, leavened by the thirst for vengeance, in a drive to reclaim lost political, social, and cultural ground, including above all the undiminished hegemony of the Catholic Church and religion.
During the second restoration the unofficial White Terror from below coincided with an official White Terror from above. In line with the promise of the Cambrai declaration, and with an eye to the Allies, the chambers prepared to try and punish the Bonapartists of the last hour. As a first step they accepted a government proposal to court-martial some twenty promoters of Napoleon’s return and to place nearly twice that number under police surveillance pending agreement on an appropriate venue. Meanwhile, what Marshal Brune was to the unofficial terror, Marshal Michel Ney was to the official terror: for having thrown his weight to Napoleon during the Hundred Days, the house of peers found Ney guilty of treason, for which he was shot on December 7, 1815.
Ney’s execution was merely the most dramatic retributive punishment. Between mid-1815 and mid-1816, nationwide, ordinary courts condemned 5,000 to 6,000 persons for political offenses. In addition, under the chamber’s emergency laws over 3,000 individuals were arrested and kept under surveillance, and special courts tried about 240 political cases, though the sentences were light. Over and above this legal repression, between 50,000 and 80,000 public servants were dismissed. This purge, which affected “a quarter to a third of those on the government payroll,” struck nearly every branch and level of the state apparatus, “civil or military, local or national.”101 Unless added up with the first White Terror, the second White Terror, including the épuration of the civil service, cannot be compared with the great Red Terror, even if it was far from inconsequential.
Louis XVIII was no more popular and respected after the Hundred Days than before. If he resumed his reign after the interregnum of his second exile it was because neither the Allies nor the political class could think of a credible alternative. Once again, Talleyrand was the chief intermediary in triangular negotiations between the Bourbons and the Allies, only this time the victors weighed even more heavily than the year before. Indeed, the king had to rule in the face of two impediments: the heavy and embarrassing intervention of the foreign powers, evinced by the military occupation and war indemnity; and the relentless censure by integral royalists who questioned his bona fides. Certainly, with the army and police still in disarray, he was at once hesitant and helpless to join issue with the ultras. It was not until September 1816, after their rage had crested, that, nervous about the Allies, Louis XVIII affirmed his ascendancy by dissolving the chambre introuvable. The removal of an intractable “parliamentary” majority was in the nature of a coup d’état, all the more so with the king’s ministers brazenly manipulating the elections, as was becoming common practice.
In any event, in the new lower chamber the ultras were reduced to ninety out of 238 members. This did not mean that they were fatally weakened. A like-minded and coherent political family, also in the house of peers, they were tied to the Comte d’Artois, who was the lodestar for all hardened royalists nationwide.102 By comparison, the new majority of moderate royalists, sworn to the Charter, lacked cohesion: half of them accepted the existing constitutional balance, with the king, backed by the clergy, firmly in charge; the other half looked to protect and expand the scope of individual freedoms. François Guizot and Pierre Paul Royer-Collart, respectively of Protestant and Jansenite background, were emblematic of this variety of moderate royalism. On the far left of the lower house there was a handful of liberals who were wary of the embers of the ancien régime and championed the principles of 1789. After another change of mind, Benjamin Constant, also of Protestant background, stood out among them.
The king had “found” a relatively moderate chamber with which his first ministers, the Duc de Richelieu and the Duc Decazes, were expected to consolidate a sober restoration. Between 1816 and 1820 the chamber voted to slightly liberalize the electoral and press laws. It also adopted a law establishing a new system of recruitment and promotion for France’s army, in which the soldiers of yesterday’s grand campaigns would have pride of place. Guizot drafted the speech in which Marshal Laurent Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, the minister of war, justified this law, which was fiercely contested. With this speech the restoration government made its own the glories of the soldiers and officers of the revolutionary and imperial armies. Their “ardor, courage, and heroism” were woven into a seamless national destiny by virtue of their never having “doubted that they were sacrificing their lives for the honor of France,” and for which “all of Europe admired them.”103
Louis XVIII and his ministers also sought to reconcile the nation by reclaiming its untrammeled sovereignty, thereby bolstering the regime’s legitimacy. Especially Richelieu labored to remove the stigma of the continuing Allied intervention. By contracting loans with private foreign banks, he managed to pay off the war indemnity well in advance, with the result that the military occupation ended in 1818, two years ahead of schedule. Simultaneously, at the Congress of Aachen, France was readmitted to the concert of great powers.
There was, however, no appeasing the ultras. Smarting from their defeat at the polls, they spurned anything less than a wholesale excoriation of the Revolution and a pervasive restoration of the ancien ŕegime. Their fortunes were at a standstill but far from hopeless when, on February 13, 1820, Louis Pierre Louvel, a lone Bonapartist faithful, assassinated the Comte d’Artois’s younger son, the Duc de Berry, who was third in the line of succession. The ultraroyalists seized on this assassination, much as they had seized on the Hundred Days, to denounce the king’s ministers for being soft on political enemies. In their telling, Louvel was part of a vast liberal conspiracy against the monarchy whose ideas and intentions were being freely diffused by the lower chamber and the press. Intimidated by this rising furor, which brought down Decazes, the chamber voted to reinforce the executive, tighten censorship, and revise the electoral laws to favor true royalists over constitutional monarchists and liberals. Thanks to a radically narrowed franchise and the usual government manipulation, the elections of November 1820 spelled the rebirth of the chambre introuvable. Starting in December 1821, when Joseph de Villèle, a confirmed but astute ultraroyalist, replaced Richelieu as the king’s first minister, the second restoration kept moving to the right, as if to anticipate and prepare the accession of the Comte d’Artois to the throne.
The European context was not without influence on the strife between moderate monarchists and ultraroyalists inside France. All things considered, Castlereagh and Wellington were distinctly more supportive of the former than Francis II, Frederick William III, and Alexander I. Indeed, as intimated before, despite their conflicting national interests, after 1815 the three emperors gradually warmed to the idea of forging the Holy Alliance of Throne and Altar into an instrument of statecraft. During the postrevolutionary years they took the slightest liberalizing flicker at home and abroad as evidence of continuing life in the embers of the Great Revolution. Presently they construed any pressure or revolt for a quasi-parliamentary monarchy as a harbinger of more radical things to come. Nervous about the dangerous example France continued to set with Louis XVIII’s measured restoration—especially between 1816 and 1820—the crowned heads of the Continent’s three major unreconstructed anciens régimes warmed to the critique of his ultraroyalist adversaries.
In any case, in the fall of 1819, in Carlsbad, under Metternich’s guidance, the delegates of several of “Germany’s” princely states decided to curb anti-absolutist agitation with censorship of the press as well as with police surveillance of student fraternities, university curricula, and political dissidents. The following spring, at Laibach, with Britain hanging back, the powers of the Holy Alliance authorized Austria to send military forces to bring under control political unrest in Naples and Turin. By 1822, at the Congress of Verona, France was asked to prepare to intervene in Spain, where following Napoleon’s ouster the integralist restoration of Ferdinand VII, noted above, called forth a political backlash. When an unholy alliance of disgruntled generals and constitutionalists forced him to restore the Cortes, encouraged by the nobility and clergy Ferdinand looked to the Holy Alliance for help to stem the tide.
Meanwhile the issue of French intervention became caught up in the struggle over the future orientation of the restoration regime in Paris. At this juncture the ultras were the hawks: they advocated a timely military operation to save Ferdinand VII as Louis XVI could and should have been saved in 1792. Such a move would, in addition, rally the army behind the fleur-de-lis, give the government an explicitly counterrevolutionary coloration, and commit France to the precepts of the Holy Alliance. Presently Villèle, pressed by Chateaubri- and, the unabashedly combative and ambitious foreign minister, hearkened to the ultras. In April 1823, under the command of the Duc d’Angoulême, an army of over 100,000 men marched into Spain. Unlike in the days of Napoleon, this intervention encountered little popular resistance and, with the Spanish forces no match for the French, it was terminated, successfully, within six months. In Madrid Ferdinand resumed his absolutist and clerical reign, distinguished by purges and reprisals. In Paris the military success and political outcome in Spain benefited and heartened the ultras in their drive against the moderates. Villèle seized the moment to further increase the ultras’ hold on the upper house and to call elections for early 1824. Probably even without the government’s brazen perversion of the election, the “left,” which had fiercely opposed the intervention in Spain, would have been routed. A few months before his death Louis XVIII, whose health was failing, faced a chamber that was at least as introuvable as the one of August 1815, and his ministers were relying increasingly on the Comte d’Artois, who, like Ferdinand VII, had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Both embodied the spirit of the Holy Alliance, which was permeated with religion even if Metternich swore more by the axioms of Machiavelli than the teachings of the Gospel.
There is no explaining the tenacity and irresistible rise of ultraroyalism, focused by the Comte d’Artois, without close attention to the life and role of church and religion.104 Between 1789 and 1815 the Catholic Church had suffered more than any other institution. Even Napoleon’s concordat with Pius VII had at best closed minor wounds. To be sure, during this quarter century the Church had lost more power than influence, since mentalities and creeds weather even the worst of times. In fact, the losing battle against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the clerical oath had fired the faith of not a few believers, many of whom went underground, encouraged by their priests. Pius VI’s anathema of the Revolution had a lasting impact and most certainly carried over to the Empire.
After 1814 Church and Vatican quite naturally portrayed the defeat of the Jacobins and Napoleon as a divine punishment and a triumph for the Scriptures over the Enlightenment. The clergy, high and low, were not about to be either charitable or forgiving. Rather, they were self-righteous, irate, and vengeful, and they were determined to resume and intensify the battle against the philosophical, political, and cultural ideas of 1789. Upon his return to Rome in 1814, true to form and swept along by ultramontanism, Pius VII reestablished the Jesuit Order and reinstated the Index. In the ecclesiastical realm, unlike in the political, there was no struggle between advocates of a moderate and integral restoration. The twilight of the revolutionary epoch faded into the dawn of a religious reaction seeking a stark return to the status quo ante. Neither pope nor cardinal could be expected to do battle for religious equality and toleration.
Needless to say, the French clergy could not hope to reclaim their privileges, positions, and properties by themselves. As a matter of course they enlisted the help of the king and the clerical nobility in their effort to recover church lands as well as to regain control of education and the parish register. In turn, king and noble eagerly “used the influence of the Church [and of religion] to impose their political regime,” convinced that these were an essential bulwark of the state.105 The common fortunes and interests of altar and throne made them natural partners, as they had been in good times past.
Although Louis XVIII and the moderates prized this mutuality, at first they drew, above all, on the Church’s symbolic capital to further the restoration. By contrast, the ultras were altogether more far-ranging in their instrumentalization of the symbiosis of throne and altar. Partly under their pressure, primary education was placed under clerical control in early 1821. The pace of clericalization quickened with Villèle’s premiership. On August 24, 1824, immediately before the death of Louis XVIII, he set up a Ministry of Public Instruction and Religious Worship (Cultes), headed by Monseigneur Comte de Denis Frayssinous, with close ties to the Comte d’Artois. During the two years preceding this appointment, as grand maître of the university system, Frayssinous had pursued a clerical policy involving a selective purge of the faculty, the suspension of courses, and the closing of certain schools. In his new office he had the power and funds to press the clerical cause at all levels of education as well as in the revival of the Church.
When Louis XVIII died on September 16, 1824, the Comte d’Artois succeeded to the throne as Charles X. During his long exile he had made no secret of his religious-mindedness, which bolstered his predisposition to put church and religion at the center of his counterrevolutionary vision and formula. After their return he and the exiles who had rallied around him had severe reservations about the Charter for being both too “liberal” and, above all, too secular and profane. As leader of the ultraroyalist opposition he had pressured the king and his ministers not only to reinforce the royal prerogative over the legislature but to expand the political and social role of the Church.
Once at the helm of the state, Charles X hastened to implement his agenda. Besides seeing through to final passage a law contrary to the Charter, to indemnify especially ex-émigrés for confiscated properties, he introduced a highly controversial bill to punish sacrilegious acts committed willfully and in public. The bill, which was slightly softened before adoption, prescribed forced labor for the theft of sacred objects, the death sentence for the theft of receptacles containing hosts, and the amputation of a hand followed by public execution for profanatory actions. This law, making the state the guardian of the official religion, was of course more symbolic than practical in its effect. As such, it paralleled another act with which the counterrevolutionary king opened his reign: his sacre, performed on May 29, 1825, at Rheims.
Earlier we discussed the sacre of Louis XVI, exactly fifty years before, which the Comte d’Artois had, of course, witnessed.106 The youngest brother of the martyr king proposed to reenact exactly the same ceremony except for three changes, each of them reflecting the impossibility, even for him, of blotting out the last quarter century.107 First, for fear of gratuitously provoking his irreconcilable foes, Charles X dropped a clause of the royal oath which even in 1775 had been superannuated: “to extirpate heresy and combat infidels.” Second, although he had never relented in his criticism of the Charter, Charles X decided to swear to uphold it. Third, four marshals of the army only too eagerly took the place of the grand peers near the climax of the ceremony: Moncey, Soult, Mortier, and Jourdan carried the crown, the sword of Charlemagne, the scepter, and the main de justice. All four had served Napoleon—with time in Spain—and some of them had been at his coronation in 1804. Save for these modulations, the time-honored crowning ritual was unchanged, complete with prostration and unction, followed the next day by Charles X going to Saint-Marcoul to attest to God’s healing powers by ministering to the swellings of wretches suffering from scrofula. Over and above the generally affirmative intent of past coronations, this one had a polemical purpose as well. The dramatization of the reforging of the bond between throne and altar was intended to further the exorcism of the demons and the reparation of the injuries of the Revolution, including the Empire. Inevitably the opposition of moderate constitutionalists and liberals saw the coronation for what it was: metaphor and way station for the forced march back to the ancien régime. The hereditary and divine monarchy bolstered by the political Catholicism of the Church was stealing a march upon what there was of semi-parliamentary government.
It is, of course, easier to fix a clear-cut and meaningful beginning than a pregnant end of a revolutionary epoch. The French Revolution began sometime between the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and April 20, 1792, the critical turning point when it “sallied forth beyond Paris and France into the Continent which opposed it and to which it needed to impart itself if it was not to be destroyed inside France as well.” As “decisive historical hinges 1792 and 1917 were of a kind, except with signs pointing in opposite directions”: whereas “three years of European war preceded the revolution within Russia,” with the French Revolution “three years of revolution at home preceded the quarter-century war with Europe.” Accordingly, as of 1792 “the French Revolution became more and more a European event,” whereas after 1917 the Russian Revolution became increasingly “a Russian affair,” especially judging by developments from 1918 through the early 1930s.108
The French Revolution roamed all over Europe, “planting the nation-state, establishing the supremacy of the city over the country, and liberating the bourgeoisie from the nobility and clergy.” It proceeded both peacefully and by war, with Napoleon “the military pioneer.” Bonaparte pulled back from Russia in 1812 less because he was militarily defeated than because “the actions and ideas of 1789” could not penetrate and take root there as they had in “Westphalia, Venice, or Poland.” Subjugated by “neither Church nor nobility,” the ruling and governing classes of this Russia had “altogether different worries” than their counterparts in France. By virtue of this unreceptive “vacuum,” the Russian campaign was without reason, and there is nothing more “unsettling than the discovery that a heroic action is politically senseless.”109
From the turn of the century through 1812 Napoleon had ascendancy over most of western and central Europe, making his strongest mark on the lands of western “Germany,” northern “Italy,” and the Low Countries. As noted, the Treaty of Tilsit confirmed that imperial France remained the Land der Mitte, without the capability to gain a hold upon either Russia or England, let alone upon both. Accordingly, when Napoleon “consummated the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution,” depending on the location and time of the French occupation the impact of his rule varied enormously, with some places not touched at all. He saw to the consolidation of the Revolution in France at the same time that he exported it to the heartland of his empire. The two processes were closely linked, though with time perpetual and successful war abroad became the lifeblood of the imperial regime. Whereas the revolutionary wars revolutionized the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars—the externalized terror—provided the union sacrée, strong government, and necessary time for the consolidation of some of the Revolution’s principal reforms, and perhaps ideas as well. In turn, Napoleon’s defeat and the attendant territorial retrocessions had the opposite effect, culminating in the third restoration, or the ascendance of the ultraroyalists, confirmed with the sacre of Charles X.
Strangely enough, the crowned sovereigns and elites of the anciens régimes perceived Napoleon in much the same terms in his time as Marx and Engels did in the 1840s. Blind to his antiparliamentarism and his constant repugnance for not only kings—notably Bourbons—and aristocrats but also Jacobins, like Germaine de Staël they saw Bonaparte as “Robespierre on horseback,” riding full tilt against monarchy, feudalism, and religion. This viewpoint informed the debates and decisions of the Vienna Peace Congress, which aimed to guard Europe against a renewal of a military and revolutionary threat from Paris until Metternich considered France sufficiently conservative and reliable to help carry out the emergent policing mission of the Holy Alliance.
If in crucial respects Europe’s old regime persisted until 1914—in some countries until 1945—it did so in large part because of its remarkable recovery from the stormy epoch of the French Revolution. Overall the time-honored ruling and governing classes, including the dynasts and prelates, effectuated a restoration in which the balance between continuity and reversion, on the one hand, and discontinuity and reform, on the other, decisively favored the former. Certainly until 1830, with the lower orders of city and country quiescent, the restoration era was one of political reaction, with the principle and practice of hereditary and sacred kingship rehabilitated. This revival was not incompatible with the rationalization—modernization—of the state apparatus, including the armed forces, and the administration of justice, Napoleon’s principal legacy. Political reaction, which had its social side in the reinforcement of the old elites, went hand in hand with a religious revival and the restrengthening of the official churches, which worked against toleration and emancipation. Culturally and intellectually, the backlash against the Enlightenment was in full force. Burke triumphed over Voltaire.
If the French Revolution, including the Napoleonic wars, was a tragedy, so was the Restoration. It spoke volumes about the resistances to revolution, including their counterrevolutionary variety, all too often estimated and represented as inconsequential, impolitic, and innocent. In assessing the costs of revolution, there is no ignoring or minimizing these resistances abroad and at home, for without them there would have been neither foreign nor civil war, neither red nor white terror. Needless to say, in 1789–90 the governing and ruling classes of the anciens régimes could not be expected to be indifferent to either the humbling of king and monarchy or the proclamation of the Rights of Man and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Considering the enormous power of the elites—in France and outside—it is nothing short of astonishing that the challenge of the revolutionaries was not snuffed out straightway. With time both sides gathered strength and resolve, escalating and hardening the showdown between them.
The nature and scale of the casualties and horrors of the Great Terror and the Vendée, entwined with the war with the European powers, are essentially indisputable, even if their mainsprings and reasons remain highly controversial.110 As for the casualties and miseries of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, they elicit little interest and even less debate. While the intelligentsia, including historians, are horrified and perplexed that death and destruction should be the wages of civil conflict, they consider these altogether normal as the wages of foreign war. The murderous dragonnades of the Vendée are a black page in the history of France, but not the deadly battles of the Grande Armée, which are grandiosely, not to say shamelessly, exalted, mythologized, and memorialized. And yet both were an integral part of the struggle for the survival of the Revolution. To repeat, the Napoleonic rule, including its wars, provided extra time as well as the political, administrative, and legal climate and conditions for the crystallization of several revolutionary measures that even Charles X could not deracinate, most notably the radical land settlement inaugurated in August 1789. But the blood-tax of the wars of the Grand Empire was many times that of the Great Terror and the Vendée. Indeed, “the bloody scenes of the Terror were episodes of relatively small import compared to the enormous hecatombs of the wars.” To boot, “the resounding triumphs of the revolutionary imperial armies precluded all adverse criticisms.”111
Indeed, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars took several million French and other European lives. Even if the nation-in-arms was largely a myth, these wars saw the dawn of the mass army, engaging more men in set battles than ever before. Probably as many soldiers died from hunger, disease, and medical neglect as from outright battle injuries, making the warfare of the time doubly cruel, also for the prisoners of war. It is gratuitous to suggest that compared to the warfare of the twentieth century it was child’s play because weapons were less lethal, battles were shorter, civilians were rarely directly targeted, and wrack and ruin were the exception.
Certainly measured against the armed conflicts of the eighteenth century the toll was very high.112 French losses ran to about one million from 1792 to 1802, with perhaps another million by 1814, or a total of some two million out of a population of less than thirty million. To be sure, these casualties were spread over nearly a quarter of a century. Still, the bloodletting was considerable, especially in certain age groups. Besides, many of the battles were singularly deadly. In June 1800, at Marengo, the French and Austrians lost about 20 percent of their respective effectives. Of course, the slaughter rose dramatically during and following the Russian campaign. In September 1812, at Borodino, outside Moscow, the French suffered between 30,000 and 50,000 casualties, and so did the Russians. Napoleon sacrificed at least another 100,000 men during his impossible retreat. Altogether the Russian campaign cost the French armies between 400,000 and 500,000. A year following Bonaparte’s defeat on the Moskva, some 300,000 Allied troops defeated about 170,000 French troops in the greatest and goriest battle of the epoch, near Leipzig, at the cost of over 100,000 casualties, nearly evenly divided between the belligerents. Estimating the “dead amongst the military alone … [on all sides at] nearly 3,000,000,” and adding nearly “another 1,000,000 for civilian losses,” the wars between 1792 and 1814 are likely to have claimed “little short of 4,000,000 dead.”113 This total does not include the relatively large number of non-combatants who were killed and died in the peninsular war in Spain which may be said to have been less of its own time than of the future.
Except for the cost in lives, the wars were relatively inexpensive for France, at any rate until far down the line, when the British counter-blockade began to tell. In the liberated, conquered, or occupied territories the French lived off the land, collected war indemnities, levied special taxes, and conscripted manpower. Most certainly this displacement of the economic and fiscal burdens of the bid for European hegemony combined with the psychic dividends of military glory facilitated the “consummation of the Terror by the substitution of permanent war for permanent revolution.”
1. Jacques Godechot, La grande nation, 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1956); and R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959/1964).
2. It is not to depreciate the recent and current historiography to point out the confining limits of its major paradigms. See Michael Wagner, England und die französische Gegenrevolution, 1789–1802 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1994), pp. 2–4.
3. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 7 and p. 9.
4. Mallet du Pan, Considérations sur la nature de la révolution en France, et sur les causes qui en prolongent la durée (London, 1793), ch. 4.
5. Joseph de Maistre, Écrits sur la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1989), p. 106.
6. See Werner Hahlweg, “Lenin und Clausewitz,” in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 36:1 (1954): pp. 30–59; and 36:3, pp. 357–89.
7. This is Marcel Reinhard’s formulation, which informs both Godechot, La grande nation, and Palmer, Democratic Revolution. See Elisabeth Fehrenbach, “Die Ideologisierung des Krieges und die Radikalisierung der französischen Revolution,” in Dieter Langewiesche, ed., Revolution und Krieg: Zur Dynamik des historischen Wandels seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989), pp. 57–66.
8. Albert Mathiez, La Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris: Denoël, 1985), vol. 3, p. 90.
9. Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), p. 71.
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 146.
11. Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 8–10.
12. Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), pp. 296–97.
13. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 395–96.
14. See Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), passim.
15. Norman Hampson, The First European Revolution, 1776–1815 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 136.
16. Maurice Agulhon, Coup d’état et république (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997), pp. 23–35.
17. Engels, “The State of Germany,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 19–21 (italics in text).
18. Marx and Engels, “The Holy Family,” in Collected Works, vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 123 (italics in text). By “ending the permanent revolution” at the price of “transforming it into permanent war,” Napoleon substituted “conquest … and the cult of the state for virtue.” François Furet, Marx et la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), p. 35.
19. Cited by Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (London: Longman, 1995), p. 10.
20. Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 299.
21. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, p. 660.
22. Roederer’s speech of December 18, 1791, is cited by Anne Sa’adah, The Shaping of Liberal Politics in Revolutionary France: A Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 139–40.
23. Brissot’s speeches of December 20 and 30, 1791 and January 17, 1792, cited by Georges Michon, Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire, 1791–1792 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1937), pp. 46–48, 65.
24. For Robespierre’s speeches on the issue of war and peace of December 9, 11, 12, and 18, 1791 and January 2 and 11, as well as February 10, 1792, see Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. 8 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953), pp. 35–116 and 157–92.
25. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, vol. 2, p. 35.
26. Mathiez, Révolution, vol. 2, pp. 80–81.
27. T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), esp. pp. 208–9.
28. For the coming of war between revolutionary France and the European powers, see Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 2 (Paris, 1885); Kyung-Won Kim, Revolution and International System (New York: New York University Press, 1970); T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London: Arnold, 1996); Frank Attar, La Révolution française déclare la guerre à l’Europe: L’embrasement de l’Europe à la fin du XVIII siècle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1992). See also Stephen Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 46–89; and David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), esp. pp. 79–84.
29. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 607.
30. For the full text of this letter, written in Luxembourg, and discussed in this paragraph and the next, see Eugène Bimbenet, Fuite de Louis XVI à Varennes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1868), pp. 251–55.
31. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 551.
32. The text of the Pillnitz Declaration is cited in John Hall Stewart, ed., A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 223–24.
33. See Sorel, L’Europe, pp. 369–71; and H. A. Barton, “The Origins of the Brunswick Manifesto,” in French Historical Studies 5:2 (Fall 1967): pp. 146–69.
34. See Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), passim.
35. See Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 3.
36. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 598.
37. Sorel, L’Europe, pp. 509–10.
38. The full text of the Brunswick Manifesto is cited in Stewart, ed., Survey, pp. 307–11; and in Jean-Paul Bertaud, Les amis du roi: Journeaux et journalistes royalistes en France de 1789 à 1792 (Paris: Perrin, 1984), pp. 240–43.
39. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 329.
40. See Bertaud, Les amis, pp. 244–47.
41. Sorel, L’Europe, p. 510.
42. Ibid., pp. 512–13.
43. Bertaud, Les amis, p. 245.
44. Sorel, L’Europe, p. 515.
46. The text of the decree of November 19, 1792, is cited in Stewart, ed., Survey, p. 381.
47. The text of the decree of December 15, 1792, is cited in ibid., pp. 381–84.
48. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 188 and p. 190.
49. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 191; and Michon, Robespierre, pp. 128–30.
50. Cited in Michon, Robespierre, pp. 130–32.
51. Concern with the nexus of war, revolution, and counterrevolution is central to the introductory chapter, titled “War and Revolution,” of Arendt, On Revolution, esp. pp. 8–9.
52. See Kim, Revolution, pp. 88–89.
53. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 348–49.
54. Ibid., p. 349.
55. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 150–51.
56. Ibid., pp. 378–79.
57. D.M.G. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 302 and p. 305.
58. Ibid., p. 306; and Doyle, Oxford History, pp. 334–35.
59. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, vol. 2, p. 257.
60. Doyle, Oxford History, p. 336.
61. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 689.
62. Hampson, European Revolution, p. 119.
63. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 688–89.
64. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, vol. 2, pp. 259–60.
65. Tocqueville, “The European Revolution,” pp. 119–20.
66. François Furet, La Révolution française: De Turgot à Napoléon (Paris: Hachette, 1988), p. 207.
67. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 700 and pp. 715–17.
68. Ibid., p. 674.
69. Ibid., pp. 729–30.
70. Cited by René Rémond, Les droites en France, 4th ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1982), p. 107.
71. Ibid., pp. 106–8.
72. Esdaile, Wars, pp. 12–14.
73. See Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 245–52, esp. p. 249.
74. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 734.
75. This paragraph and the next follow Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte, pp. 78–92.
76. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 722–26.
77. Cited in Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 21.
78. Cited by Sutherland, France, pp. 352–53.
79. Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 196.
80. Esdaile, Wars, p. 22.
81. For developments in Spain, or rather in “the Spains,” see Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), chs. 2 and 3; Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), esp. vol. 2; Jan Read, War in the Peninsula (London: Faber and Faber, 1977); David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (New York: Norton, 1986); Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte, pp. 220–25; Esdaile, Wars, pp. 218–31.
82. John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Claude Morange et al., La Révolution française: Les conséquences et les réactions du “public” en Espagne entre 1808 et 1814 (Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon [no. 388], 1989).
84. Jean-François Chabrun, Goya (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965); Gwynn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution (London: Penguin, 1976); James A. Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Hilliard T. Goldfarb and Rava Wolf, Fatal Consequences: Callot, Goya, and the Horrors of War (Hanover, N.H.: Hand Museum, Dartmouth, 1990).
85. Carr, Spain, pp. 115–29.
86. See Esdaile, Wars, passim; and Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 156–71.
87. For the politics and diplomacy of the restoration(s), see G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, La Restauration, rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1955); and Emmanuel de Waresquiel and Benoît Yvert, Histoire de la Restauration, 1814–1830: Naissance de la France moderne (Paris: Perrin, 1996).
88. Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, p. 457.
89. Cited by ibid., pp. 56–57.
90. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 495–509.
91. For an analysis of the Charter, see Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, pp. 68–74; and de Waresquiel and Yvert, Restauration, pp. 56–63.
92. Furet, La Révolution, p. 278.
93. See Schroeder, Transformation, pp. 548–57.
94. Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, p. 117.
95. Ibid., p. 126.
96. The text of the Holy Alliance is cited in G. A. Kertesz, ed., Documents in the Political History of the European Continent, 1815–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 8–9.
97. See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812–22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 175–90, esp. 189–90.
98. Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, pp. 129–31.
99. See chapter 13 above.
100. Daniel P. Resnick, The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 50–54.
101. Ibid., p. 118.
102. André Castelot, Charles X: La fin d’un monde (Paris: Perrin, 1988), ch. 16; and J.-J. Oechslin, Le mouvement ultra-royaliste sous la restauration: Son idéologie et son action politique, 1814–1830 (Paris: Pichon and Durand-Auzias, 1960).
103. Cited in Charles H. Pouthas, Guizot pendant la restauration: Préparation de l’homme d’état, 1814–1830 (Paris: Plon, 1923), pp. 184–85; and de Waresquiel and Yvert, Restauration, pp. 216–19.
104. Oechslin, Mouvement ultra-royaliste, ch. 4.
105. Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, p. 321.
106. See chapter 11 above.
107. For the sacre of Charles X, see Bertier de Sauvigny, Restauration, pp. 377–79; Castelot, Charles X, pp. 394–409; Landric Raillat, “Les manifestations publiques à l’occasion du sacre de Charles X ou les ambiguités de la fête politique,” in Alain Corbin, Noëlle Gérôme, et al., Les usages politiques des fêtes aux XIX–XX siècles (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1994), pp. 53–61.
108. Eugen Rosenstock, Die europäischen Revolutionen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1931), p. 22.
109. Ibid., pp. 436–37.
110. See chapter 7 and chapter 9 above.
111. Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 90.
112. This discussion of the human cost of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars follows, in particular, David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Macmillan, 1966); and J. Houdaille, “Le problème des pertes de guerre,” in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 17 (1970): pp. 411–23.
113. Esdaile, Wars, p. 300.