The Beginning of Victory
AS IF the Hébertist uprising of September 5 were not enough to occupy the Committee, it was on that same day that a depressing message came from Houchard, general in command of the Army of the North. Writing on the 3rd, Houchard knew that he was on the eve of a decisive battle. His letter was a tale of woe. He shuddered, he said, to learn that the troops sent to reinforce him were 10,000 fewer than he had been promised. Those who arrived from the neighboring Army of the Moselle had brought no cannon. The artillery was in poor condition, and could not be moved without six hundred more horses; yet whether more horses would help was doubtful, for those already with the army had had no oats for fifteen days, and in any case the cavalry and field guns could probably not maneuver in a country cut to pieces by hedges and canals. The army was using up its food reserves, for the local political authorities would not cooperate in furnishing supplies. Worst of all, the quartermaster-general had just been denounced and arrested; his successor was a man without experience; and though ten million livres had just arrived from Paris, Houchard was not at all sure how his army was going to eat.
To this pessimistic communication Carnot had to draft some kind of reply, distracted though he was by the news from the Convention, which sent word that he must submit a plan, instantly, for a Revolutionary Army of Parisian sans-culottes. He contented himself with writing a few words on general strategy to Houchard, who, for all his gloom, had no intention of not fighting.
That afternoon, at four o’clock, while insurrection raged in Paris, Houchard sat at his new headquarters (for he had somehow managed to move) penning another note for his superiors. Contact with the enemy had been established; the outposts had already exchanged shots. But Houchard was still dejected. His generals were afraid to assume responsibility. They sometimes declared themselves unfit for their work; they declined important assignments, or raised petty difficulties and objections. Houchard said that he wished he could point out, among his subordinates, three good divisional commanders and half a dozen good brigadiers.
Such were conditions, as described by the commander, in the army which during the next three days fought and won the battle of Hondschoote. This battle was a turning point. It checked the progress of the Allies that had gone on since the preceding winter, and it led to a succession of triumphs which by 1794 put the French forces clearly on the offensive.
Victory began before the Terror was organized, before the Levy in Mass could become effective, before the Committee of Public Safety achieved a position of dictatorship. But of course no one knew in September 1793 that Hondschoote was a turning point; and it is extremely improbable, in view of the domestic situation in France, that without dictatorial government victory would have continued.
The Republic had about 500,000 men under arms at the end of the summer. They were grouped in eleven armies, each named after the scene of its proposed operations. Four of the largest were stationed on the northern border, those of the Rhine, the Moselle, the Ardennes, and the North. Over these eleven armies there was no centralized military command, not even a general staff, but only the Ministry of War and the Committee of Public Safety. The revolutionists were afraid to make one general too strong.
The troops were in want, and to all appearances were undisciplined and demoralized. Few people, either in the ranks or in Paris, had much confidence in the higher officers; for the experienced ones were not republicans, and those who were politically suitable were seldom trained for responsible positions. The officers reciprocated by having little trust in their men. A core of the old professional army remained; but there were thousands of volunteers who, having enlisted in the excitement of revolutionary patriotism, often had aggressive political ideas; and thousands of conscripts, unwilling to serve and hard to train in the prevailing atmosphere of liberty; and, as time passed, thousands of recruits raised by the Levy in Mass, a mixed throng of young men under twenty-five, of all shades of political opinion.
Generals complained—and it was not only aristocratic generals who did so—that their men were impossible to control. Soldiers broke hours, sat idly in cafés, joined the local Jacobin societies formed political cells of their own, read the radical newspapers from Paris, quarreled with each other over politics, corresponded with the Paris Commune, reported their superiors to the travelling representatives on mission. Careless of their equipment, they would abandon valuable cannon without making an effort to save them, thus wasting the substance of the Republic. If an engagement were lost, there was always danger of panic, led by the newer men, who were not brigaded with veterans but formed units of their own. Should there be a small success, the troops were inclined to relax prematurely, think unnecessary the further efforts that their officers called for, refuse to deliver a finishing blow, and sometimes, in the shortage of provisions, break up into marauding bands. One French village, redeemed from the “satellites of despots,” saw its food, beds, assignats and all other valuables vanish before the onslaughts of its liberators. Lawlessness prevailed especially in the Army of the North, after Custine, an ex-nobleman, was relieved of the command.
If the troops were undisciplined it was in part because they thought themselves free men. The hordes of the Republic were very different from the hosts drawn up against them. The armies of Austria, Prussia, England, Holland, Spain and Sardinia were alike in one respect: they were all composed of two classes that could not mix, a vast concourse of rustics and of unfortunates lifted from the streets of towns (even of serfs, in some of the German regiments), and a small film of hereditary aristocrats, gently bred people who gave the orders. In the French armies every man from drummer-boy to commander-in-chief took care to address everyone else as “citizen.” The familiarity that thus ensued was not altogether a military advantage; but it made the Frenchman feel that a gulf divided him from his abject opponents.
The French army was a nursery of patriotism. Not all were patriots when they joined it; but the bewildered or sullen recruit could not resist forever the influence of the more emphatic personalities, nor could he, if a normal man, long belittle a cause for which he was obliged to risk his life. He heard everywhere the great words Liberty and Equality, the Republic and the Nation, the rolling thunder of the “Marseillaise” and the lighter strains of the “Carmagnole.” He saw the tricolor every day at his barracks, and again in the battlefield where it fused into his moments of most tense excitement and seemed to protect him in the hour of mortal danger. He would observe also, if a man of sense, his sergeants receiving commissions and his lieutenants rising to be generals; and while his attitude to officers thus created might not always be respectful, he could at least reflect that the men who led him were men of his own kind.
Unruly but patriotic, undisciplined but enthusiastic, discouraged by defeat and by the ineptitude and colorlessness of its generals, extremely political but inclined to take a low view of politicians, the army in August, like France itself, was a formless and fluctuating mass, a new and unknown quantity in eighteenth century calculations, potentially something that might revolutionize Europe, but as yet no one knew exactly what.
The Committee of Public Safety organized the army as it organized, or tried to organize, everything else. With respect to the army it acted chiefly through Carnot.
Carnot is the one man of the Twelve who today is a French national hero. He is also one of the figures about whom controversy rages. Modern conservatives, in admitting him to the national shrine, like to believe that he was not at heart a revolutionist. They represent him as a painstaking patriot who did his duty while the world tumbled about him, surrounded by ferocious Terrorists and suckers of human blood, obliged against his will to cooperate with radicals whom he despised. Carnot the republican disappears in Carnot the organizer of victory.
In truth, however, Carnot was a republican, a radical and a revolutionary, not as brutal as Collot to be sure, nor as doctrinaire as Saint-Just, but a man who believed that the glory of the Revolution lay more in the principles that it announced than in the battles that it might win. He never went to the Jacobin club, though he was a member; he rightly believed that the Jacobins often wasted their time in futile recrimination. He resembled Barère and Saint-André, and differed from Robespierre, Saint-Just, Collot and Billaud, in having a reasonably well adjusted personality. He was not subject to complexes, phobias or obsessions; he had no delusions of grandeur; he was as free from messianic ideas as any ardent revolutionist could be. He was not a party leader, and so, like Barère, he survived many changes of régime. He was indeed rather innocent in politics, a fact of which shrewder heads were in time to take advantage.
Carnot was ably assisted by the Minister of War, Bouchotte, who transacted much of the routine business. Bouchotte occupied a somewhat ambiguous position. He was repeatedly attacked for being insufficiently revolutionary, yet during his ministry the War Office became a hive of Hébertists and extremists. The Committee considered him indispensable and defended him publicly. Bouchotte had both administrative ability and constructive intelligence. He was a good judge of military talent. He could draw up and execute far-reaching plans. Under his orders the French army first used balloons; and it was he who built the first “telegraph” from Paris to Lille, a series of semaphores placed on hilltops which reduced to a few minutes the time needed for communication between the two cities. On this matter he had the full support of Carnot, who encouraged the inventor, and who, on August 25, transmitted 166,240 livres to Bouchotte to pay the costs.
The Committee kept watch over the armies either through Bouchotte’s agents, who after September 11 were obliged to report directly to the Committee once a week, or for more important affairs through itinerant members of the Convention, who outranked all generals in the field. Sometimes the Twelve dispatched one or more of their own number. Prieur of the Marne and Saint-André made a rapid tour of the northern armies in August. Couthon left shortly after their return to carry through the reconquest of Lyons. Usually, however, the Committee worked through ordinary representatives on mission. The spirit of the relationship is shown in a conversation reported by René Levasseur, deputy from the Sarthe.
Levasseur tells how he was summoned by the Committee, and found Carnot alone. He was writing many years later, and perhaps exaggerates his own modesty.
“The Army of the North,” said Carnot, “is in open revolt. We need a firm hand to put down this rebellion. You are the man we have chosen.”
“I am honored, Carnot,” said Levasseur, “but firmness is not enough. Experience and military ability are needed, and I lack these essentials.”
“We know you, and we know how to value you. The sight of a man who is esteemed, a friend of liberty, will be enough to bring back those who have been led astray.”
“But the truth is, Carnot, that I lack the physical powers. Look at my short stature, and tell me how I can inspire the respect of grenadiers with such an appearance.”
“Alexander the Great was small in person,” answered Carnot, quoting in Latin.
“Yes, but Alexander had spent his life in camps. He had been apprenticed to arms. He knew how to manage the minds of soldiers.”
“Circumstances make men. Your strength of character and devotion to the Republic are our guarantee.”
“Very well, I accept. In place of military knowledge I promise you zeal and courage. When must I go?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I will be ready.”
“Tomorrow you will receive the decree of the Convention, and the arms and uniform of a commissioner of the government.”
“And my instructions?”
“They are in your heart and head; they will come out when needed. Go on, and succeed.”
So Levasseur departed, exhilarated and eager, carrying with him in his luggage the odd costume of a representative commissioned to the armies. The costume was designed to make its wearer stand out, without seeming too military. It consisted of a blue coat with brass buttons, a flowing tricolor sash, and a soft hat adorned with tricolor feathers.
The main problem with the army, as Carnot saw it, was the problem of personnel. To this even the question of supply was secondary. Above all else, the government had to be sure that the armed forces were fighting on its side. It was necessary, therefore, to liquidate most of the older officers, and to carry on a vigorous propaganda among the troops, who, though generally revolutionary in their ideas, were not necessarily much attached to the Mountaineers who ruled in Paris.
According to Jacobin estimates, almost a thousand nobly born officers still remained, despite the waves of emigration of preceding years. These men were for the most part patriotic enough, in the sense of wanting to defend France against spoliation by foreigners. But they were rarely patriots in the Jacobin sense. The Revolution had long since gone beyond any program that they favored. They were prone, therefore, to engage in conspiracy or to lose interest in the war, not being eager to win victories for a government which they thought was ruining the country. They resented, moreover, being spied on by their enlisted men and ordered about by civilians in colored sashes. Custine, arrested on July 22, was put to death on August 27. The other generals were demoralized, fearing to assume responsibility when failure might mean the guillotine.
The purging of the army officers was one cry that could rally all the factions in Paris, the panacea from which all politicians promised a restoration of confidence. It was, however, not easy to carry out. Bouchotte went at it wholeheartedly, but with such caution as national urgency and Jacobin agitation would permit. He was aware that denunciation often sprang only from jealousy, petty irritation or personal vengefulness. He knew also that to dismiss officers wholesale, when successors were hard to find, might easily be suicidal. He therefore temporized; as late as September 7 he had only reached the point of removing officers who persisted in wearing the uniform of the Bourbons. Shortly after, as one of the many consequences of the Hébertist uprising, all officers of noble birth were suspended without more ado. On November 4 the Committee of Public Safety, feeling that the problem had become routine, turned over to the Committee of General Security the task of watching over the loyalty of the officers, and transmitted to that body its bulky records on the subject.
Houchard’s complaints about his generals showed the difficulties in finding able men. Houchard was himself a proof of the same difficulty. He was not, and did not believe himself, qualified to be Custine’s successor. He was timid from the fear of failure, slow from the want of experience. But no one had ever questioned the purity of his politics up to July 1793, and he was not a noble, though sufficiently well born to have been an acting captain before the Revolution. Fifty-five years old, he was a veteran of many campaigns, but had never commanded more than a company until the last few months, when, with some success, he passed through the ranks of colonel and brigadier.
He looked like a royalist’s nightmare vision of a sans-culotte. He was six feet tall, crude and gruff in manner, and being of German background he spoke French incorrectly. His face was hideous with the scars of three saber cuts and a bullet wound, with a mouth twisted toward the left ear, an upper lip split in two, and a right cheek carved by long parallel gashes. A modest man, no more nor less than an old soldier, he leaned heavily and frankly upon the shoulders of his subordinates. He was naïve enough one day, shortly after taking command in the north, to wear an enormous cap of liberty as he reviewed the troops. The soldiers laughed, and poor Houchard was embarrassed.
No reasonable person to look at Houchard would take him for an aristocrat, but he had scarcely been appointed to the Army of the North, and had not yet joined it, when denunciations began to be heard, especially among the Jacobins of Strasbourg, who, as Saint-Just was later to find, were given to extremes. The day before he left his home in Sarrebourg, local vigilantes denounced him as a traitor, threatening to tear down his house and hang his wife and children. Prieur and Saint-André, during their mission in August, found that Houchard was no longer trusted by the more vehement patriots. Goaded into desperation he became ineffectual, failed to win respect, and viewed the future with apprehension.
He was the first and most unhappy of the commoners that the Committee of Public Safety called to high command.
With the enlisted men the management of personnel took the form of propaganda to build up loyalty to the government. Never before, except possibly in some religious wars, had a government gone to such lengths to assure its solidarity with the men who did its fighting. There was no such problem in the enemy armies, where common soldiers were seldom politically conscious and were indeed usually illiterate. The soldiers of the Republic—aroused by a new sense of freedom, feeling themselves to be citizens, aware of possessing rights (did not the Declaration say so?), half of them able to read, most of them until recently civilians, many of them volunteers—would not, like professionals, deliver their full powers merely at a word of command, but had also to have an idea of why they were fighting and to believe that the war was conducted for their own good.
Few allegations therefore are more doubtful than the theory of some modern French nationalists, who maintain that the Republican armies were not politically minded, and fought simply for the glory of France and the frustration of foreigners, while chatterers and cutthroats reigned in Paris. The armies were by no means likely to underrate the glory of France, but it was the new France, not the old, that aroused their emotions. They were nationalistic, but the “nation” in those days was a word of challenge to the old order.
Bouchotte and the War Office, under direction of the Committee, spent every effort to keep up revolutionary enthusiasm among the troops. Their agents were in every camp. The government took the side of enlisted men against officers, and of the volunteers against the decaying professional regiments. Between June and the following March, with funds assigned to him by the Committee, Bouchotte inundated the armies with 15,000 subscriptions to Paris newspapers. He virtually subsidized Hébert by buying up, and sending to the front, thousands of copies of Hébert’s vitriolic paper, the Père Duchesne. He circulated 400,000 copies of the Constitution and its accompanying Declaration of Rights. Carnot himself eventually founded and edited a special journal to be read by soldiers.
The representatives on mission, men like Levasseur, had many tasks, but none was more important than their work as evangelists. They carried out the gospel from Paris. They preached hatred of tyrants, detestation of aristocrats, rigor toward suspects, dark threats for the lukewarm and the faint-hearted. They appealed to the soldier’s attachment to the broad changes brought in by the Revolution, and from this vague feeling tried to create something more concrete and more impassioned—loyalty to the Republic. And they sought to identify, in the soldier’s mind, the Republic with the Mountain, the purged Convention, and the Committee of Public Safety.
August 1793 saw the course of the war, for the Republic, at its nadir.
In the south the Spaniards and Sardinians threatened invasion. Toulon was occupied by the English on August 29. Lyons and Bordeaux were unsubdued. Blood flowed freely in the Vendée. But the chief menace was in the north and east, along the borders that separated France from the Austrian Netherlands and the German Rhineland. The Prussians had taken Mainz and pushed the Army of the Rhine back into Alsace. The Austrians and British, led respectively by the Prince of Coburg and the Duke of York, had captured Condé and Valenciennes. The Army of the North stood by seemingly powerless to resist.
Condé and Valenciennes were fortified towns about five miles apart, on the upper waters of the Scheldt, just within the frontier, and little more than a hundred miles north of Paris. It was only a step from Valenciennes over low watersheds into the valleys that led southward. Austrian cavalry patrols rode through the northern departments, some ranging as far south as Saint-Quentin. The Allies, early in August, had over 160,000 men along the Netherlands border between the Moselle and the North Sea. The force opposed to them was neither so numerous nor so compact.
It seemed that York and Coburg, ignoring the other forts in the line which they had pierced, would drive on with overwhelming forces toward their main objective, Paris. Arriving there in a few days, they could disperse the Convention and annihilate the Committee of Public Safety; and since the country was already torn by anarchy and civil war, holding together only through the predominance of Paris, the Allies could then proceed to dictate such peace terms as they chose. The Revolution might be quashed, and the Bourbons restored to a weakened and partitioned France. In that case an era of relative peace might conceivably have followed; there might have been no Napoleon; and without Napoleon all history since 1800 would undoubtedly have been different, not only in France, but even more significantly in Germany and Central Europe.
As a matter of fact, to the amazement of the French, York and Coburg did nothing of the kind. The Duke of York was under orders from London to capture Dunkirk, which the English hoped to gain as a permanent base on the Continent. The Duke therefore strained at the leash, replied to all Coburg’s remonstrances by citing his instructions, participated for a few days in minor actions near Valenciennes, and on August 12 marched his English, Hanoverian and Hessian regiments to the sea. The Austrians, turning in the opposite direction, threatened Le Quesnoy and Maubeuge. Thus the main Allied army broke in two, pursuing centrifugal lines, losing the strategic advantage of concentrated power.
This gigantic blunder, which can be traced to William Pitt and the necessities of English politics, saved the French Republic from extinction. The Allied armies, it became clear, suffered as much as the French from internal discord, military incompetence and political interference. The crowning irony is that, had York and Coburg combined in an attack on Paris, the English could probably have taken Dunkirk with the other spoils, whereas they lost it by being hasty and independent.
The French now had an opportunity for a counterattack. What form this should take was a question which, in the absence of a general staff in command of the eleven armies, had finally to be answered by the Committee of Public Safety and especially Carnot. Some authors have therefore attributed to Carnot’s strategical ideas the victories of 1793.
Carnot, however, did not take the initiative in drawing up strategic plans. He was not even in accord with the advanced military thought of the time. Writers for a generation had been calling for a new system of warfare. They recommended the abandonment of the old strategy based on fortresses, each with a full garrison and store of provisions, commanding some geographically important position—town, valley, road or bridge. The new idea was to assemble large mobile masses, if necessary by depleting the garrisons and leaving some spots uncovered; to support these great armies by requisitions on the country; and to decide the issue less by intricate maneuvering of small units over a wide area than by gathering an overwhelming force in a single field. The French Revolution and the nationalizing of warfare made this new strategy feasible. The great Napoleonic victories embodied it.
Carnot was by training an engineer, and was partial to fortresses. While still a captain in the old army he had spoken out against the innovators. His arguments were both technical and humanitarian. The principle of fortification, he maintained, should be preserved because it was useful chiefly in defensive wars, which alone were just; because it put aggressors at a disadvantage, reduced slaughter to a minimum, and lightened the hardships of the defending troops by providing food reserves, living quarters and hospitals. As late as the spring of 1793, before joining the Committee of Public Safety, Carnot, sent on mission to help save Condé and Valenciennes, gave no evidence of wishing to employ the newer strategic ideas.
CARNOT
When York and Coburg parted, and a new French plan was called for, it came not from Carnot but from the professional officers on Houchard’s staff. The plan was to enlarge the Army of the North into one of the overwhelming mobile masses that the new strategy favored. Troops were to be transferred from the Armies of the Rhine and the Moselle, which, filled in with recruits and volunteers, were temporarily to assume a purely defensive position. Carnot remonstrated; he thought the Army of the North large enough already. Others on the Committee, Barère, Couthon and Saint-André, were partisans of the new policy. Carnot yielded to the advice of colleagues, generals and representatives on mission; and the Committee of Public Safety sent the necessary orders to the Rhine and the Moselle.
To strengthen the Army of the North the garrisons were withdrawn from a number of towns. Lille and others protested; the inhabitants were not used to the new system; and local revolutionary leaders suspected some kind of snare. They had to be pacified by representatives on mission, of whom at this time there were no less than twelve attached to the Army of the North. Twelve such sovereign personages were likely to cause confusion, but in the prevailing chaos and atmosphere of suspicion there were difficulties which only a member of the Convention could overcome.
Carnot followed developments at the front rather passively, too sensible to interfere unduly with the men on the spot. Houchard’s council of war decided first to strike at the Dutch at Menin, then to move north to Furnes, thus encircling the Duke of York and cutting off his retreat from Dunkirk. This move, if successful, would put both the Dutch and British forces out of commission, leaving the French then free to turn south against the Austrians. But Houchard at the last moment changed his mind. He was cautious and dispirited; the plan was risky, and failure might mean the guillotine; the troops, moreover, in preliminary engagements showed themselves hard to manage in orderly fashion, being likely to fall into confusion in executing difficult movements, or to be distracted by the chance to plunder. Houchard therefore decided to proceed directly against the English.
This change of plan was fatal to Houchard. He announced it in the letter which Carnot received on September 5. Carnot in reply expressed disappointment that the plan to surround the English had been given up, but gave Houchard a free hand, and reaffirmed his confidence in him. He instructed him to avoid dispersing his forces, and added somewhat ambiguously: “Try to deal the enemy a terrible blow, but without risking any decisive action if it be at all doubtful.”
Houchard, in extenuation for what soon happened, could plead that Carnot had always set great emphasis on the relief of Dunkirk. Dunkirk had assumed in Carnot’s eyes a place out of all proportion to its military value. For one thing, Dunkirk was a fortified town; but it had become also a political symbol. Carnot, like other ardent revolutionaries in 1793, greatly exaggerated the signs of unrest that he saw in England. He adjured Houchard to consider the campaign more in a political than in a military light. If the Duke of York should be foiled before Dunkirk, he wrote, the English people would inevitably rise up in revolution against George III.
The Army of the North joined battle on September 6. Its main attack was directed against York’s “covering army,” a force of Hanoverians that shielded the troops before Dunkirk. The French outnumbered these Hanoverians by more than two to one; yet the fighting was indecisive for two days. Military critics agree that Houchard lost his advantage by excessive scattering of his divisions. Finally on the third day, near the village of Hondschoote, in a sharp struggle in which the representatives Levasseur and Delbret rode in the front lines, and numerous acts of heroism were reported (as of a French soldier who, when one arm was cut off, rushed on waving the other, shouting “Vive la République!”), the Hanoverian force was routed and withdrew pell-mell with heavy losses across the frontier to Furnes.
Two courses were now open to Houchard. He could pursue the Hanoverians, take Furnes, and block the Duke of York, who prepared to retreat as soon as the covering army began to yield. Or he could send men north to harry the retiring English, who were obliged to hug their way along the coast. Levasseur urged him to move on to Furnes. Houchard replied with unaccustomed tartness: “You are not an army man.” Levasseur, accepting the rebuke, went about the less martial business of restoring order to the disorganized French battalions. Houchard, declaring that his men were fatigued, that the advance to Furnes would be risky, and that swollen marshes obstructed the routes to the sea, in the end did nothing. The Hanoverians were not pursued, and the Duke of York’s force escaped intact.
Hondschoote was therefore a somewhat qualified victory, though Dunkirk was saved, and for the first time in months the Allies were worsted. Had Carnot been right, and had the English people now overthrown their government, the French gains at Hondschoote might have been sufficient. As it was, however, though York was seriously disabled, having abandoned most of his artillery and supplies before the walls of Dunkirk, and lost large numbers of his Hanoverian contingents, his army was nevertheless still in existence. The higher strategy of the campaign had miscarried. The Army of the North had not functioned as a mobile mass. Its achievement was small in view of the superiority of its numbers. Houchard had not unified its efforts, nor had he moved it when a rapid blow might have been decisive. He was not entirely at fault, considering the intractableness of his troops, the division of authority produced by the presence of twelve representatives on mission, and Carnot’s explicit warning against embarking on dangerous enterprises. He was, indeed, pleased with the results because he had expected little.
The Committee of Public Safety congratulated Houchard on his “brilliant success.” But Carnot, Bouchotte and the others were not satisfied. They believed, like Levasseur and other representatives on the spot, that the English force could have been captured or destroyed. Their discontent deepened when, in the next few days, Houchard involved himself in further bloody and inconclusive fighting. Nevertheless, for two weeks Hondschoote was celebrated in Paris as a victory. No adverse comment came from the representatives on mission—until September 20, when Hentz, who was one of them, arrived in the capital to accuse Houchard of treachery. The Committee issued the order for his removal two days later.
It was undoubtedly wise to remove Houchard. But more was to follow.
An established government, when it removes a general, can afford to admit that it made an error in appointing him. Revolutionary governments cannot so easily admit mistakes. Had the Committee simply given out that Houchard was unequal to his task it would have told the truth, but almost every Jacobin in France would then have denounced as incompetent the Committee which made such a selection. Had the Committee declared that one cause of the troubles in the north was the indiscipline of the troops it would again have stated a fact, for which it had ample evidence in its own files; but it was not politically expedient in September 1793 to cast public aspersions on common soldiers. Patriots were convinced that their armies were fierce with a holy rage against tyrants, that moral enthusiasm was the chief means by which victories were won, and that defeats were to be explained by the perfidy of commanders.
Houchard was charged, therefore, not only with failure but with treason. A few in the Convention remonstrated at his dismissal. They feared that the removal of army officers was reaching the point of endangering the country. Their protests raised the parliamentary crisis of September 25 which has been described. To Houchard’s ruin, his case became part of the larger question of the stability of the Committee. Barère, Billaud, Robespierre and Saint-André, fearing that the Committee would lose the confidence of the Convention, were unanimous in asserting Houchard’s guilt. Did they believe in it themselves? Perhaps they did—these were the days that produced the Law of Suspects. Perhaps not—even Collot for a moment doubted whether the evidence against Houchard offered anything but a presumption.
Houchard was accused of not having followed, in the Dunkirk campaign, the plan of the Committee of Public Safety, and of having failed, through this disobedience, to “hurl the English into the sea.” The issues here were confused. The plan which Barère and the others claimed as their own had not originated with the Committee; it had been conceived by one of Houchard’s aides, Berthelmy, who was now under arrest with his chief. The Committee had sanctioned the plan, which thus became the official program of the government. Houchard, apparently with the approval of at least one representative on mission, Duquesnoy, had then changed his strategy and decided to attack the Anglo-Hanoverian army directly. He notified Carnot of the change, and received Carnot’s somewhat reluctant approval. But after the plan was changed in a council of war on August 30, he had waited until September 3 to send the news to Carnot. Carnot answered on the 5th, and before the reply could reach him Houchard was already engaged in the battle of Hondschoote. It seemed in retrospect that Houchard had wished to take from the Committee the power of independent decision. Carnot had approved, but his approval had nothing to do with the events that followed.
Barère and the others, in denouncing Houchard before the Convention, concealed the fact that their colleague Carnot, on the eve of Hondschoote, had endorsed Houchard’s new plan and reaffirmed his confidence in Houchard’s judgment. They concealed, too, the true origin of the first plan. They thus presented a false picture of the situation, a picture in which a wise government was frustrated by a disobedient general. The justification for this procedure, if any, is that it was better for the Republic to lose Houchard than to lose faith in the Committee of Public Safety. Houchard was to be sacrificed to the stability of the government.
To prove him treacherous as well as disobedient the Committee produced a packet of letters found at his headquarters. Some of these letters had been addressed to him by the Prince of Hohenlohe and other foreign commanders. They dealt with such matters as the exchange of prisoners; one, from a small German ruler, raised the problem of how French forces could purchase supplies in Germany when Germans would not accept their assignats and the French government prohibited the export of goods. But the letters were written with the ceremonious politeness of the old régime. Enraged sans-culottes found their citizen-general apparently the dear friend of foreign aristocrats. It is incredible that the educated men of the Convention and the Committee should have shared in this ridiculous idea.
But the cry went up, “He is the friend of our enemies!” He was the new Custine, the new Dumouriez, one more in the long line of hypocrites and seducers of the people. And the Committee—even if it knew, as Carnot must have known, that Houchard’s fault was not his own, that the error lay rather with the men who, determined to have a non-noble general, had hurriedly raised him to a position for which he was unqualified—could not face the truth, still less make it public, without exposing itself to the wrath of patriots and perhaps itself incurring denunciations for treason.
So Houchard went to prison, where he found twenty-four other generals already confined. The bewildered old soldier protested his innocence, boasted of his plebeian birth, pointed to the scars that marred his face and body, declared that he had never wished to be more than a captain of dragoons. Nothing availed; on the 15th of November he appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and on the next day went to the guillotine.
He had commanded in the north for only six weeks. The first brief experiment with a non-noble general had ended in tragedy and failure.
The Republic now faced a tremendous interrogation mark. In a world where generalship had been the business of aristocrats, could a régime that denounced aristocracy conduct a successful war? Was it possible to find commoners who could lead armies? Could the middle class, which had replaced the aristocracy in so many other ways, now replace it on the battlefield? If it could, then aristocracy, as known before the Revolution, would have lost still another reason for existence. If not, democratic ideas would remain a dream.
The right men were soon found. Representatives on mission sometimes commissioned promising young officers tentatively as generals, like medieval kings knighting the valiant on the field. It was thus that Bonaparte became a brigadier at the end of 1793. Sometimes the agents of Bouchotte, acting through local patriotic clubs, sent in glowing reports to the War Office. Bouchotte and Carnot digested and compared these reports, confirmed appointments, rectified mistakes. Somehow they discerned the men of ability amid the vapors of patronage, favoritism and suspicion. It may be doubted whether any other government, in an equal time, has matched their record, for before the end of 1793 they raised to the rank of general (among others) Bonaparte, Jourdan, Hoche, Pichegru, Masséna, Moreau, Davout, Lefèvre, Perignon, Serrurier, Augereau and Brune. One of these became an emperor, eight others marshals of his empire; the remaining three (Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau) rose to be distinguished commanders under the Republic.
These twelve were all new men. Their average age in 1793 was thirty-three—four years less than that of the twelve who made up the Committee. A few were well enough born to have been officers in the Bourbon army. None, however, could have attained high rank under the old régime. They were among the first to profit from the removal of class barriers from their careers. In that respect they were successors to Houchard, and it seems fitting that Bonaparte, when he came to power, cleared Houchard’s memory and granted his widow a pension.
Jourdan was Houchard’s immediate successor in September 1793. Twenty-four years younger than Houchard, though possessed of as much experience in leading armies, he was a firm believer in the Revolution, which had snatched him from a humdrum life. His father, a surgeon, was of a profession then only coming into repute. The young Jourdan had worked for an uncle in the silk business, run away at sixteen to join the army, served six years as a common soldier, fought five campaigns in the War of American Independence, and then, seeing no military career before him, had retired to Limoges and set up a dry-goods shop. Revolutionists at Limoges made him a lieutenant in their national guard in 1790. Three years later he was a major general. He led a division at Hondschoote, and on September 24, aged thirty-one, accepted the command over the Army of the North, to which was soon added the Army of the Ardennes. Jourdan was confident in his own powers, full of zeal for the Revolution and of faith in the future. Otherwise he might excusably have been downcast, considering the fate of Custine and of Houchard in the office which he now took over.
He reached his new headquarters on the evening of the 25th. Carnot was already there, just arrived from Paris to meet face to face the man in whom the Committee now placed its hopes. He was won over to him at once. The young general was modest in manner, deferred to the judgment of the Committee, expressed appreciation for the services of the civilian representatives on mission. He declined, however, to arrange immediately with Carnot a plan of operations. He needed time, for, like Houchard before him, he found affairs in a high state of disorder. Carnot could not linger, and left for Paris within two days.
Jourdan had no means of knowing how many men he commanded, nor could he tell who his subordinate generals were. Most of Houchard’s staff was under arrest. Some divisions had no brigadiers at all. The cavalry had no commander. At Maubeuge, a stronghold threatened by the Austrians, there were 17,000 men; but of the four generals in charge one was wounded, one arrested, and one sick; of the fourth, for some days, Jourdan did not know the existence. When Jourdan tried to send another from Dunkirk, the representatives there interfered to prevent him.
On September 29 the Austrians crossed the river Sambre and besieged Maubeuge. That day in the French army two hundred horses were reported dead of starvation; a plot was discovered at Lille to betray the city to the Allies; and at Maubeuge, according to the representatives there, conspirators were undermining the morale of the recruits.
It was vital for the Republic to save Maubeuge. Coburg occupied Valenciennes, Condé and Le Quesnoy. With Maubeuge he would have a compact group of fortresses, a base for an advance on Paris, or at the least a place to winter on French soil. In proportion as Coburg succeeded, the Committee of Public Safety would be accused of having failed. If Coburg took Maubeuge the Committee might be ruined; moderates would blame its policy of suspending army officers; radicals would cry out for the thousandth time, “We are betrayed!” The Jacobins and the Commune would again storm the Convention, demand more terror, more vigor and more purity—perhaps (who knows?) even Robespierre would find himself branded as the slave of despots. In short, politics, as well as the public safety, demanded that the Committee be triumphant.
Yet what was there to fight with? About 130,000 nondescripts—ragamuffins and heroes, veteran troops and boys just off the farm, strewn along a front from the Ardennes to the sea, and led by an ex-private and dry-goods dealer thirty-one years old.
Carnot rejoined this host at Péronne on October 7. He experienced for himself the difficulties that his generals faced. Food was hard to get. Buyers for the army, scouring the northern departments, competed with those of the Commune of Paris for the farmers’ crops. The agents of the Commune usually won out; the Committee decreed, while Carnot was away, that requisitions for Paris must take precedence over those made for the army. By herculean effort a six-weeks supply of provisions was assembled for the soldiers on whom the existence of the government depended.
Horses were desperately needed. Without them there could be no cavalry, no usable cannon, and no movement of heavy loads. Jourdan, like Houchard, demanded eight hundred more. In time several hundred came in, but some meanwhile had died, and to add to the confusion a great many of the new ones arrived without harness. The Committee created twenty special commissioners to travel through the country with no other function than to requisition horses.
Munitions were scarce, and many soldiers were unarmed. Carnot sent for fifteen thousand bayonets. On his first day at Péronne he wrote to Paris asking for the muskets available there, and urging that men be sent to Lille to work in the repair shops. Artillery was immobilized by the lack of horses. There was an alarming shortage of cannon balls and cartridges. Carnot, on discovering it, arrested the general responsible, Merenveüe, charging him with a plot to paralyze the approaching campaign. Merenveüe soon cut his own throat in prison. Jourdan, in his memoirs written years later when he had become more conservative, declared that Merenveüe had been simply negligent, though it is hard to see how negligence in such circumstances could be excused.
Clothing was in worse condition than armaments. Many battalions were in rags. The worst shortage was in shoes. Some shoes were shoddy, palmed off through collusion of government agents with the contractors. Veterans had worn their footgear out; recruits sometimes arrived in their customary shoes of wood. Carnot reported to the Committee that three-quarters of the men were barefoot. Two days later the army received eight thousand pairs.
The Levy in Mass was beginning to swell the ranks, but the new men were not of much value. Undisciplined, untrained, at times unarmed, hardly knowing each other, ignorant of what to do in a battle, they could be employed only to relieve the better troops in places where there was no danger. Half of them deserted soon after reaching their encampments. The experienced troops, if they gave patriotic cheers, viewed them also with disgust. Tattered campaigners grumbled at the fine uniforms of the new arrivals. Regular soldiers resented the partiality shown by the government to the citizens in arms. The new recruits, Carnot wrote to the Committee, “are perfectly useless, for they do not so much as have sticks in their hands; they are fine looking, but they only consume provisions that are hard to procure.”
One incident well shows the troubles of the time, the myriad fears, and the close watch kept by the Committee over details of every kind. Word reached the green room that some of the brandy lately dispatched to the north was poisoned. Robespierre, Barère and Hérault sent a circular letter to the representatives concerned, asking them to investigate quietly. Duquesnoy immediately shipped some of the suspected brandy from Péronne to Paris. The bottles were turned over to the chemist Berthollet and the mathematician Monge, Carnot’s onetime teacher. These two, in the presence of Prieur of the Côte-d’Or acting for the Committee, submitted the brandy to laboratory tests, pronounced it free of poison, and drank some themselves to demonstrate their good faith. The Committee rushed a special messenger with the good news to Péronne.
Meanwhile Jourdan had been making his preparations for the battle. French columns were moving toward Maubeuge. Fifty thousand men (the rest of the 130,000 being either useless or stationed elsewhere) in ragged garments, with lean horses, led by novices, their artillery and their cavalry both generaled by hastily found substitutes, marched and countermarched for a week to find advantageous positions, and on October 13 prepared to fall, as Jourdan said, “upon that horde of slaves, whose courage comes from our weak resistance to their efforts and the perfidy of our chiefs.” Coburg had about 65,000 including the Duke of York’s force and some Dutch regiments under the Prince of Orange, who was not an obedient subordinate. The French were counting on their 17,000 compatriots shut up in Maubeuge, expecting them to attack the Allied rear as soon as operations were opened.
On the day before the battle Jourdan published a proclamation to the army just received from the Committee. It announced the fall of Lyons a few days before. It was an early specimen of modern war propaganda and was signed by all those of the Twelve who were then in Paris.
Paris, 20th of the 1st month, Year II of the Republic [October 11, 1793]
Republicans,
The army of the Republic has entered in triumph into Lyons. Traitors and rebels have been cut to pieces. The standard of liberty floats upon and purifies the city’s walls. See in it a presage of your victory.
Victory belongs to courage. It is yours. Strike, exterminate the satellites of tyrants. Cowards! They have never known how to conquer by force or by valor, but only by the treasons that they have bought. They are covered by your blood, and still more by that of your wives and children. Strike! Let none escape from your just vengeance. Your country watches you, the Convention supports your generous devotion. In a few days tyrants will be no more, and the Republic will owe to you its happiness and its glory. Vive la République!
HÉRAULT, COLLOT D’HERBOIS, BILLAUD-VARENNE, B. BARÈRE, SAINT-JUST, ROBESPIERRE.
From this timely exhortation, from the feeling that the home front was solidly behind them and that rebels were being punished, from memories of success at Hondschoote, from faith in Jourdan, who was popular with his men, from the sight of Carnot, war lord of the Republic, toiling indefatigably in their midst, the French now faced their enemy with eagerness and determination, with a spirit better than at any time hitherto in the war, and a patriotic enthusiasm that seemed strange and fanatical to the old-fashioned Austrian commanders.
The skill of Jourdan and the fierce ardor of his men, plus Coburg’s timidity and inability to profit by his enemy’s mistakes, overcame the handicaps under which the French army labored, and won for it, on October 16, the famous battle of Wattignies. The fighting lasted for two days, until Coburg somewhat unnecessarily retreated in a heavy fog. His successful retirement meant that Wattignies, like Hondschoote, was not a decisive triumph. The republican army, though its patriotism was increasing and some of its new leaders giving promise of success, was not yet a smoothly functioning organization. Miscarriages and misunderstandings made its victories incomplete.
Fromentin bungled with the left wing. He was a patriot, Jourdan boldly reported, who “believed firmly what was constantly repeated in the tribunes of the Convention and the Jacobins, that the whole talent of a general consists in charging headlong against the enemy troops wherever found.” Carnot added to the confusion by causing Jourdan, against his better judgment, to attack prematurely in the center. Useless slaughter resulted, and the day might have been lost had Coburg seized his advantage. More trouble arose on the right wing, where Gratien, ordered to advance his brigade, retreated instead. For this flat disobedience he was arrested by Carnot. He was tried later in a revolutionary court, but was acquitted.
The worst misfortune for the French army was that the troops in Maubeuge failed to come to its assistance. Had they done so, the Allied force might have been divided and a large part of it destroyed. That they did not was due to the decision of their generals, who concluded, on hearing the sound of distant cannon, that the Allies were trying to lure the garrison into a trap. The man thought to be responsible for persuading the others to accept this idea was soon guillotined in Paris. There is reason to believe that he really intended to let Jourdan go unhelped.
But Maubeuge was saved, as Dunkirk had been before it, even if the victory was somewhat unsatisfying, and the incompetence of the enemy one of its main causes. Carnot wrote a glowing message to the Convention, praising the troops, eulogizing Jourdan. “We have just entered Maubeuge,” he said, “to the acclamations of the people and of the large garrison that we have delivered.” He himself described this letter as “succinct.” It was something less than candid.
He sent a more confidential and more truthful dispatch to the Committee on the same day. “Triumph of liberty, glory to the arms of the Republic!” So he began, but his real news was disquieting. The people of Maubeuge, it appeared, were not very anxious to be saved. “The citizens of Maubeuge have not received us with the transports which it seems they should manifest toward their liberators.” They were not very good Jacobins, not even good republicans. “We must work to electrify these regions a little and to rebuild the public spirit.” This was a recommendation to bring the Terror to Maubeuge.
Carnot praised Jourdan highly to the Committee. Jourdan likewise extolled Carnot in his report to the War Office. Jourdan, said Carnot, was an exceptionally able man—also “a brave and honest sans-culotte.” Nevertheless, Carnot went on, “success was necessary to him: he was lost if he failed; he was already being denounced as a traitor, and so was I, for withdrawing garrisons from the cities to join them to the main army.” Even Carnot, to say nothing of Jourdan, looked upon the abyss into which Houchard had been swallowed. These men walked precariously upon a brink, living in mortal danger; but the most immediate danger was from their fellow revolutionists, not from the reactionaries and the foreign powers. The Jacobins had to win victories in order to protect themselves from each other. They had to check counter-revolution, or be denounced for supporting it themselves. Their fear of each other drove them relentlessly to more extremes; hence came the terrific crescendo of the Terror.
The Committee of Public Safety sat up the whole night of the 18th-19th, awaiting word from the north, in a state of helpless suspense, since the telegraph to Lille was not yet finished. Carnot’s two letters arrived together at six o’clock. By the late twilight of an October morning the Committee learned that the Austrians were retreating. Reassured by this knowledge all except Billaud went home to bed. Carnot’s confidential report was quietly filed away; the public announcement was read by Billaud to the assembled Convention a few hours later. The Convention, kept ignorant of details, purposely not even told how many troops had been engaged, applauded wildly what it took to be a colossal triumph, and decreed that the Army of the North had deserved well of its country.
Seen from the Tuileries, the campaign in the north, though of the utmost importance, was only one phase in an immensely complicated game. Every day the green table was piled with dispatches from all over France—from Toulon, Lyons, the Vendée, from commissioners charged with raising horses or recruiting men, from the Armies of the West, the Rhine, the Alps, the Eastern Pyrenees. Against this background the battle of Wattignies became hardly more than an incident. Like Hondschoote it settled nothing finally.
To save Dunkirk and Maubeuge men had been transferred from the Armies of the Rhine and the Moselle. The Prussians in those regions had then risen from their torpor. Almost simultaneously with the Allied retreat in Flanders an Austro-Prussian force broke through the French lines about Wissembourg. Alsace was threatened. Invasion checked in the north seemed now impending in the east. The French armies there, as elsewhere, were poorly organized, inadequately armed, irregularly fed, in part shoeless and in rags, commanded by perplexed beginners, and harassed by local politicians.
Various ways were open for meeting the new danger.
One was to strengthen the direct resistance. For this purpose the Committee decided to employ one of its own number. On October 17 Saint-Just was sent on mission to Alsace.
Another was to undermine the coalition by creating an alliance to oppose it. Reverting to old-fashioned diplomacy, the French Republic, which was ideologically so pure as to keep ambassadors only in Switzerland and the United States, entered into secret negotiations with the Turkish Empire. French officers went to Constantinople to instruct the sultan’s sans-culottes. A sum of 4,000,000 livres was offered to the Turks to attack the Hapsburg dominions along the Danube.
A third method was to follow up the success at Wattignies by an offensive campaign against Coburg. Perhaps Condé and Valenciennes could be won back. At any rate the Austro-Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian armies might thus be kept from reinforcing the Allied forces in the Rhineland. Orders were therefore sent to Jourdan a week after Wattignies, instructing him to pursue Coburg but not to do anything risky, to surround the enemy but not to divide his own force, to carry on a vigorous offensive but not to advance far into Belgium. Jourdan considered these orders impracticable; so did the representative Duquesnoy. Military historians have been of the same opinion.
Tension developed between the Committee and the victor of Wattignies. The Committee demanded action; it had reasons of general strategy which were more apparent in the Tuileries than in Flanders; and, being subject to agitation and clamor in Paris, it could not afford politically to assume a passive rôle. Jourdan insisted that the Army of the North must go into winter quarters. He rehearsed the long tale of its afflictions: desertion continued; dysentery broke out, attributed by the doctors to bad bread; the hospitals were overflowing; unshod soldiers, as the weather grew colder, were wrapping their feet with straw. Moreover, as usual, it was raining in Flanders; the stores were damp, and the roads all but impassable. Jourdan declared that before he would lead his men to butchery he would resign.
The Committee at this juncture was not quite the group of obtuse civilians and stubborn dictators that some historians have drawn. Jourdan’s offer of resignation was waved aside as unworthy of a patriot. He was given more liberty in executing his instructions. On November 17 he was authorized to follow his own plan. The army therefore went into winter quarters to rebuild its strength for the spring. But strained relations continued. When the Committee ordered 15,000 men sent from the north to the Vendée Jourdan was slow to comply, complaining of the weakness of his army and pointing to the danger of an Austrian counter-maneuver. The Committee protested. The Republic, it wrote to him, is paying 140,000 men under your command. Where are they? Jourdan could only reply that whatever the books said in the War Office the number of his men was nowhere near 140,000. Desertions, sickness and fallacious accounting must be to blame. The Committee reprimanded him for not keeping it informed, denounced the prevalence of graft and corruption, observed that enemy patrols were again reaching Saint-Quentin, and on January 10 put Jourdan under arrest. The order was written by Carnot, who had seen Jourdan’s merit at Wattignies.
It is hard to see any good reasons for the removal of Jourdan, who was both competent and loyal. Perhaps those are right who say that Robespierre and others wanted to put their favorite Pichegru in his place. On this matter, as on many others, our knowledge comes from rumors and allegations. For the historian, one of the most distressing features of the French Revolution is that the revolutionists, excited, factious, unscrupulous in their use of means, are almost the worst possible candidates for the witness stand.
Jourdan escaped the fate of Houchard. He was sent into retirement at his home in Limoges, promised a pension, and told that he might some day be reemployed. Meanwhile he returned to his dry-goods shop, where, according to the story, he displayed in a prominent place his sword and his uniform as a commander-in-chief, awaiting the day when he should again be called upon to wear them. That day, as it turned out, was not far off.
The battles of Hondschoote and Wattignies put the Committee of Public Safety more solidly in power. The Revolutionary Government proclaimed on October 10 could now enjoy the credit for success. But victory was only beginning; the enemy was still on French soil; the government could still appeal to national emergency to justify its dictatorial methods. Enough had been done to make the Terror seem useful, not enough to make it seem superfluous. After Wattignies the party of the Mountain felt itself less desperately on the defensive. The Mountaineers could proceed to something more constructive than the repelling of invaders. Torn by distractions, fighting among themselves, resorting often to pure expedient, obstructed by counter-revolution and never forgetful of the war, they could still in some measure begin to create the France that they desired.
As the Twelve became more firmly entrenched, and needed less vigilance at the Jacobins and in the Convention, some of them could safely turn their backs on Paris. For a time at the end of October it looked as if only five would be left in the city, though the number never actually fell below six. Couthon had been in Auvergne and Lindet in Normandy since August. After the vote of confidence on September 25 Saint-André and Prieur of the Marne went on mission to Brittany. Carnot was absent during the Wattignies campaign. Upon his return Saint-Just and Hérault-Séchelles departed separately for Alsace. Prieur of the Côte-d’Or was in Nantes for a few days. Collot d’Herbois stormed off to Lyons on October 31. Since Billaud was away at other times, there were only two of the Twelve who never executed a mission in the provinces—Robespierre, who was indispensable for watching over Paris politics, and Barère, who was indispensable in the administrative business of the Committee.
We have observed Carnot in action in Flanders. We shall have to follow the others to their various destinations. There we shall see them as individuals away from the crowded stage of Paris. We shall see also what the Terror of which they were emissaries really meant in some parts of France.
Meanwhile in the next chapter it is necessary to linger with those who remained in Paris, with Robespierre primarily, but with Barère and Billaud also, and the others who at one time or another were with them until the end of 1793.