The Rush upon Europe
THERE is a curious story about Mme. de Montgerout, the most famous woman pianist of the eighteenth century. She had been arrested, but having influential friends she was brought before the Committee of Public Safety for questioning. The Committee was dubious of her, until one of its members pointed to a piano in the corner of the room and asked her to play the “Marseillaise.” She complied gladly, eager to prove both her republicanism and her talent, elaborating and enriching the theme with variations of her own. Her examiners were so impressed that they finally began to sing. Mme. de Montgerout, also singing, pounded the keys with added vigor. Clerks and secretaries rushed into the green room, stood amazed, and joined the chorus. Soon hundreds of voices could be heard from all parts of the Tuileries, in the halls, through the windows, from back rooms and attic offices, raised in the marching song of the Revolution.
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons. …
When the commotion subsided Mme. de Montgerout received her freedom, and the excited bureaucrats went back to work. The moment was revealing. It showed how at the very center of government routine labor was stirred by a tremendous faith.
The French Revolution, because it embodied a social faith, was a menace to the constituted order of Europe. It threatened everything held dear by beneficiaries of the old order, the familiar balance of power in Europe, the respect paid to monarchy and aristocracy, the privileges of class, church, town and province, the deferential obedience of inferiors to their betters. The Committee of Public Safety in its last Hundred Days opened those onslaughts upon the old Europe which ended only with another Hundred Days, at Waterloo.
The old order yielded in 1794 to the power and fanatic determination emanating from the Tuileries. But it crumbled also from its own weakness. The old society, faced with a crisis, could not, or would not, put up enough defense. To understand the triumph of the Committee it is necessary to see the conditions in Europe which made that triumph what it was. And the condition of Europe in 1793-1794 was disturbingly similar to the condition of Europe in 1938-1940.
There was a general belief that the normal state of affairs ought to be reestablished in France—in this case monarchy. There was a general feeling that law and civilization must be saved from brutality and violence. But the European governments, beneath all their protestations, had no real sense of running a danger in common. They would not rally their utmost forces, or even realize the vastness of the upheaval before them. A French émigré in October 1793 (it might have been a German refugee in 1938) denounced the ineptitude of European statesmen—“the same lack of foresight for the future, the same refusal to believe in dangers however near, the same aversion for bold measures, the same hope for a change for the better, which yet has always brought a worse state than the preceding.” The Swiss conservative Mallet du Pan demanded a Committee of Public Safety for the whole continent, equipped with full powers to annihilate the common peril. Others made the same proposal. Nothing was done; no international force existed except the coalition, the old-fashioned diplomatic alliance against France.
Unity of feeling had not yet disappeared from Europe, but in the exercise of power the strongest forces were those of division. To preserve monarchy meant preserving the old rivalries of the dynasties. To preserve civilization, as previously known, was to preserve old and rooted conflicts, and frequently meant practising the old barbarities according to the old rules. Every European government would prefer, other things being equal, to see the Revolution crushed in France, but none wished another government than itself to emerge stronger from the process.
The states in the coalition remained preoccupied with their own affairs. Each put down within its own borders everything thought to resemble Jacobinism. Domestic reforms came to an end, lest radicals be encouraged. Governments refused to imitate the Republic by raising their own peoples in a Levy in Mass, though the suggestion was heard; they feared to arm the opposition against themselves. None but the British could make a national appeal to its people. To minimize the true meaning of the Revolution they exaggerated the figure of Robespierre, portraying him as a superman, a dictator who swayed the world by his individual desire. Little was said of deeper causes for the unprecedented convulsion in which Europe found itself. “Fear,” as Albert Sorel put it, “overshadowed intelligence.”
Each power, having its own ambitions, saw in the disorders in France as much an opportunity as a menace. The British as always wanted colonies and command of the sea, in both of which France had long been the only significant rival. Russians, Prussians and Austrians were more interested in eastern than in western Europe, and the courts of Berlin and Vienna played against each other for influence in Germany. The Dutch were more vitally concerned with keeping the French out of Belgium, but fearful also of letting others in—except the Austrians, the actual owners, who were harmless to Holland because their real attention was further east. Spain and Sardinia, though dreading French aggression, hoped mainly to gain something by being on the winning side.
Russia remained apart from the coalition, technically at peace, annexing a large part of Poland while the German powers were engaged in the West, shutting Austria out of the Second Partition, yielding a fragment to Prussia to assure the deal. In March 1794 Kosciuzko made his last stand for Polish independence. The cause was hopeless; Poland was not a nation, but a split society where the rebels could not call upon their own population, which was in a state of serfdom. The French Republic, with much practical wisdom, declined to aid so unpromising a rebellion, and the three eastern powers made plans for the Third Partition, each eager to put down the revolt, and each afraid to let either of the others take the lead. Prussia therefore refused to expend its forces against France, and in Vienna the reinforcements destined for Belgium were transferred to Galicia. In 1794, as in 1793, the agony of Poland added to the strength of France.
Each ally suspected the others of intriguing for a separate peace, not without reason, for dissatisfaction with the war existed in every country. Interested parties, often French émigrés, fought against the psychology of appeasement, filling Europe with wild rumors and imagined terrors. A supposed speech of Saint-Just to the Committee of Public Safety was printed in several languages; it was probably concocted by a French royalist, and revealed, ostensibly, that the Committee was spending millions to promote treason throughout Europe. The truth is that the gold exported from France went mostly to buy food and raw materials. From its envoy in Basel the Venetian government heard alarming news. A Venetian spy, it seems, had dinner with Robespierre and Couthon, who told him that France needed the wealth of Italy, that the Republic would attack the Austrian possessions in Lombardy to speed its victory in Belgium, that the French would not openly violate Venetian neutrality but would stir up trouble as a pretext for intervention. The Committee, so the report runs, was relying not on force of arms but on money and espionage, and on the attractiveness of Revolutionary principles for the Italian people. Why Robespierre and Couthon should describe a fifth column so frankly is not clear. It is possible that the Venetian envoy at Basel invented the whole story, for he wished to be transferred to Paris, and may have chosen this means to prove his knowledge of French affairs. The Venetian government paid little attention to the alleged revelations.
Opposition to the war persisted. In England some Whigs were cool to the anti-republican crusade. Fox asked vainly for a plain statement of war aims, pointing out that to restore the Bourbons would put France in the condition of 1789, “from which all the misfortunes are derived that now make war necessary and peace impossible.” Pitt answered that there could be no peace with fanatics, and Burke stated the purpose of the war simply—“the complete destruction of the horde of scoundrels who brought the struggle on.” In Prussia some of the king’s advisers proposed an understanding with France, digestion of Poland, and “protection” of the north German states in a league of neutrality led by Prussia. In Spain there were complaints: Spain could fight only with help from England, which in return demanded free trading rights in Spanish America, and so virtually the dissolution of the Spanish Empire. In any case the collapse of France would signify, for the Spaniards, unchecked control of the Mediterranean by the British. This danger was apparent also to the Italians in Sardinia, who were obliged moreover, pending their conquests in France, to cede some of their Lombard territories to Austria. Of all parts of Europe northern Italy was most sympathetic to the Revolution, being full of educated and anti-clerical middle class people. These were inclined to think the Revolution inevitable, and to oppose the alliance with Austria against it. The Austrians themselves had little heart for the war, fighting as they were in Belgium, the least valued of their provinces, alarmed by Prussian designs in north Germany, and mortified by the thought of not getting their share in Poland. When a French adventurer claiming to be a secret agent of the Committee of Public Safety talked with Austrian diplomats and was received by the emperor, rumors flew over Europe that even the Hapsburgs, to whose stock Marie Antoinette belonged, were contemplating peace.
The Allied preparations for the campaign of 1794 were therefore not the most formidable that could be imagined. The English expressed a willingness to pay Prussia a sufficient subsidy to maintain 100,000 men on the western front. The Austrians killed this proposal, fearing to increase the power of their rivals. Their aim was to keep the Prussian army small, and to occupy it with minor diversions; for as an Austrian statesman said, if the Austrians defeated the French with the support of the Prussians, then Berlin would hold a whip over Vienna. The Viennese government therefore not only failed to reinforce Coburg, its commander in Belgium, but opposed also any close cooperation between him and the Prussians. The Berlin government in any case was not disposed to risk its precious army, which in Prussia was a bulwark of the state, in impolitic campaigns in western Europe. Meanwhile everybody depended on the British, Berlin and Vienna both asking London for subsidies in cash, and relying heavily on the British sea power to reduce France to starvation.
Against the fumbling of the coalition the Committee of Public Safety acted with decision, profiting from dictatorial advantages which no foreign ruler except Catherine of Russia possessed, and dependent on no allies, for Poland was left to its fate and the negotiations with Turkey came to nothing. The labors of the fall and winter brought their fruit in the spring. The national army, 800,000 strong, was ready to act. The recruits from the Levy in Mass were trained, and were being gradually fused with the older men, through the brigading of two battalions of conscripts with one of the old army. Suspects and incompetents had been weeded out of the officers’ corps; the old clashes between plebeian and aristocratic officers, like the old misunderstandings between conscripts and professional soldiers, were disappearing. The troops were armed, for in nothing had the Committee been more successful than in producing munitions. A navy existed, and plans were made to increase it. Where Parliament in February voted to raise the British fleet to 80 ships of the line and 100 frigates, the Committee of Public Safety, in May, resolved to build up to 100 ships of the line and 160 frigates. It is understandable that the French naval plans were not carried into effect as well as the British, since the British were supporting a land army of only 60,000, at least under their own flag.
One gathers from the reports of the representatives on mission that the French forces were as well fed as in the preceding autumn. Lindet and the Subsistence Commission had at least warded off actual starvation. But provisions were still scanty and uncertain. Not even the Decemvirs could make crops ripen in the winter. No large break in the British blockade had occurred.
A government little loved by its own people, struggling against famine, possessing the strongest army in the world, surrounded by wealthy and disorganized enemies who had tried to invade and partition the country in its moment of weakness, was a government peculiarly liable to the temptations of plunder and revenge. The Committee, to win over the mass of Frenchmen to the new order, had to relieve them of the heavy burden of supporting its armies. To show the average man that the Terror produced results, it was necessary to win victories in the field. But with victories won, and the armies living on foreign resources, Frenchmen would demand a stop to the Terror and to the Revolutionary Government, which according to Robespierre were the sole means by which constitutional democracy could be founded. The Robespierrists were aware of the paradox, and their foreign policy was therefore ambiguous. They claimed not to want conquests, but they meant to occupy foreign soil. They needed military successes, but Saint-Just warned Barère against glorifying French victories in his speeches. They wanted early triumphs, but not an early peace.
The idea of invading England persisted. Prieur of the Marne was mentioned as representative of the French people among the English. Young Julien, a lad of high-school age, hoped to continue in England his travels as political inspector. Billaud-Varenne, when at Saint-Malo, received instructions to make the Isle of Wight his next objective after the Channel Islands. But nothing was accomplished; the French fleet was needed elsewhere, the British overawed the Norman coast, and the Republic, like Napoleon eleven years later, had to defeat its Continental enemies before assaulting the modern Carthage.
Adjacent Continental territories, in the official view, were to be not annexed but exploited, stripped of portable wealth and left useless as bases of attack on France. On May 13 the Committee created four “evacuation agencies” over the sole signature of Robert Lindet. These bodies, operating with the armies, carried out the policy of plunder adopted in the preceding September. Rapine upon civilians was of course not a new form of barbarity—the Majesty of Austria, foreseeing defeat in Belgium, ordered his generals to levy forced loans before retreating and to leave nothing valuable for the French. But the methods of the French were far more thorough. The Revolution, which modernized so much else, modernized also the technique of exploitation.
From all fronts, in April and May, encouraging bulletins reached the green room. Civil disturbances in the West were subsiding; the commanding general was turning to clemency, and no longer using cannon against the brigands. From the North came word: “We have found vast resources in and around Courtrai”—Courtrai being in Belgium. From the Army of the Moselle: “We are finding hay and forage.” From the North again: “Do not be alarmed.” From the Rhine: “You may be reassured.” From the Eastern Pyrenees news arrived in May that the Spanish army was destroyed and the French streaming into Catalonia, where the people seemed ripe for revolution, and where the victors captured enough munitions to supply all the armies in that part of the south.
The Army of Italy presented more of a problem. It entered the territory of the king of Sardinia in April, forty thousand people fleeing before it, according to the younger Robespierre, who complained that the villagers thought the French would eat their babies and desecrate their religion. Not much booty was obtainable in these highland regions. The Army of Italy was not very well fed. It was heavily in debt to the Republic of Genoa, the small neighboring neutral state through which it imported much of its food. The Genoese in May were raising difficulties over credit. Genoa had long been belabored by the British. Now, with the rest of northern Italy, it ran afoul of France.
Ever since November Augustin Robespierre, who was representative on mission with the Army of Italy, had urged the invasion of Genoa as a means both of feeding the army and of coming to grips with Sardinia. The French government found it more useful to keep Genoa neutral as a channel of trade. But the Genoese, squeezed between Sardinia on land and the British at sea, were scarcely their own masters, and by June they were giving so little service to France that the elder Robespierre inclined toward his brother’s opinion. He expounded his views in a note to the Committee’s secretary for foreign affairs—an insignificant person since the abolition of the ministries, and considering that the Republic had virtually no diplomatic affairs to attend to. The Genoese, said Robespierre, must be intimidated. If the Committee is firm, then Genoa “will not persecute the friends of humanity and will find itself committed to maintaining the rights of man.” Augustin Robespierre was directed to lay plans with his young friend General Bonaparte. The general drew up a scheme for invading Italy, which was brought to Paris by Augustin. The Committee summoned the Genoese envoy and berated him for hours. But it took no action.
The Committee of Public Safety did not in fact carry the war into Italy beyond Sardinia. Nevertheless the conditions for an Italian campaign were maturing. The very general who in two years was to become famous by conquering Italy had already submitted his plans. Let the hand of civilian government be relaxed, the prestige of the army increase, the war with the Hapsburgs be prolonged, the distress of the Army of Italy become more urgent—and General Bonaparte, with a horde of Republicans, would descend into the Lombard plain.
But in the spring of 1794 the eyes of the Committee were directed mainly to two spots, one at sea and one on land, both vital in political and economic strategy, and both watched over by a member of the Committee on mission, Saint-Just with the northern armies, Jeanbon Saint-André with the Atlantic fleet.
All other naval operations yielded before the need of protecting the great convoy from America. For almost a year vessels had been gathering in the Chesapeake. There were more than a hundred of them, loaded with the produce of the United States and the West Indies. Agents of the Committee had spent millions of livres in gold in the United States, storing their purchases in the waiting ships. The Subsistence Commission counted on these supplies. Should the food-bearing argosy, as Barère called it, fall into the hands of the British, the resulting bread riots in France might endanger the government.
Van Stabel, one of Saint-André’s new rear-admirals, had sailed for America with four warships in midwinter. He was expected to appear off the French coast with his long train of merchantmen about the end of May. The British were on the alert; the usual squadrons patrolled the Bay of Biscay, and Lord Howe ranged at large with the main British fleet. The French force at Brest, hastily refurbished in the past seven months, was not ready for a major action. Yet it had to go out. The blockade had to be broken.
On May 16 Prieur of the Marne, the most betravelled of the Twelve, arrived in Brest after many conflicting orders, for the Committee had hopes of using his services in Paris. He was to rule the shipyards while Saint-André was at sea. He reached Brest barely in time. After weeks of contrary winds the day of May 16 was fair, ending in a grand sunset, toward which, at 6:00 p.m., the fleet began to move, twenty-five ships of the line led by the 120-gun Mountain, one of the most powerful war machines afloat. All Brest watched the departure with profound emotion. To make it possible the whole city had worked day and night since the mutiny in Quiberon Bay. Every resource of the Revolutionary Government, all the enthusiasm of the Republican faith, were built into the reconstituted navy, now exposed to the seasoned seamanship of the British, who cruised watchfully somewhere off Ushant. Prieur remained with his colleague until the last moment, sailing with the flagship to the mouth of the harbor, where he took leave with fervid embraces and heartfelt good wishes, hurrying back to town to send word to the Tuileries that the fleet had sailed.
The orders for the expedition were explicit. Protecting the convoy was laid down as the “sole rule of action.” The admiral, Villaret-Joyeuse, was to avoid battle unless he positively knew the convoy to be in danger. For, as the Committee wrote to Saint-André, the fleet must be kept intact for the invasion of England.
But on reaching the high seas Saint-André and Villaret entered the world of guesswork and accident in which all mariners before the days of wireless had to act. They hoped to join Van Stabel five hundred miles west of Brest, but they had no news from him, and he had in fact not received the message fixing the meeting place. All parties, Villaret, Van Stabel, Howe, the minor British squadrons and two small French flotillas that were to unite with Villaret, operated in varying degrees of ignorance of one another’s whereabouts. Villaret presently fell in with some vessels that had once sighted the convoy, but its present and future course could still only be conjectured.
None of the French captains was schooled to command a ship in naval formation. All were by past experience either under-officers in the old royal navy, or captains in the merchant marine, as Saint-André himself had once been. They practised maneuvers as they went. Saint-André, who kept a journal of the expedition in which as a member of the government he noted the performance of the officers, found little to reassure him. The maneuvers were clumsy, the signals were not always understood, the ships drifted apart in night and fog, and the frigate commanders, having more zeal than discipline, chased isolated merchantmen instead of cooperating with the admiral. The captains discovered miscellaneous weaknesses and damages in their equipment, and some of the masts proved to be unsound even without unusual strain. The haste of the past few months revealed itself in unreliable construction.
The morning of May 28 disclosed the long line of Howe’s fleet in the distance. Following orders, Villaret and Saint-André tried to withdraw. Howe moved up to force a battle; he could not establish full contact, but succeeded in cutting off the rear ship in the French line. The trapped vessel fought till its chief officers were dead, and was then let go by the British, to be picked up by a French captain who was shocked at the anarchy in which he found its crew. The survivors, when back in France, as might be expected, denounced Saint-André for incompetence and bad faith.
At dawn on the 29th the French lookouts again sighted their stubborn pursuers, this time only two or three miles away. The two fleets, after groping through the night, found themselves running parallel in the same direction. They veered toward each other in sporadic but destructive combat. Again the encounter was inconclusive. The French losses were greater, but were made up in a few hours by the arrival of one of the expected flotillas.
Villaret and Saint-André, who fortunately were in perfect agreement throughout the expedition, set their course to the northwestward, hoping to draw Howe after them in a vague belief that Van Stabel would then pass to the south. Howe followed, and two days later, on the afternoon of May 31, the two admirals prepared for battle. There is some doubt whether the French had no choice but to fight. The tactics of evasion put a strain on Republican nerves. The officers craved action, the men were enthusiastic, all wanted glory; they loathed the British, their historic enemy, now the enemy of the Revolution; they were eager to fire their new guns, to smash the aristocrats who coldly planned the starvation of the French people.
The battle which followed, known to the British as the Glorious First of June, was a contest between experience and enthusiasm, since the physical forces were equal. Both fleets were poor in lighter craft; the French had twenty-six capital ships, the British twenty-five, though the French thought they had thirty. Naval warfare was then more technical than warfare on land, and French impulsiveness was less successful against Howe than against Coburg.
The British, after introductory broadsides, pierced the French line in six places. This meant that certain French ships were virtually surrounded, while others found temporarily little to shoot at. The struggle broke up into simultaneous dogfights with vessels of each side intermixed. Responsibility fell upon the individual captains, for signals could not be read in the smoke, nor voices heard in the uninterrupted and unorganized blasts of guns. The French captains, all new at their posts, were far outmatched by the British captains in initiative and resourcefulness. The crews were emotionally unstable and overwrought, passing from exaltation to panic, in contrast to the phlegmatic steadiness of their opponents. The French gunners lost their heads, fired with wild abandon, hardly took aim, wasted their ammunition. Of the twenty-six French captains, according to a by no means hostile critic, only eleven came creditably through the ordeal. They were chiefly the men trained in the old navy, rather than the civilians from the merchant marine.
Villaret’s flagship, the Mountain, with Saint-André aboard, was attacked by five and six of the enemy at a time, including Howe’s flagship the Queen Charlotte. Built in the last years before the Revolution and now engaged in its first battle, the Mountain put up a terrific resistance with its hundred and twenty guns. The British could not disable it, though three hundred of the crew and thirteen of the eighteen officers were killed or wounded. The captain, Basire, had both legs blown off. Saint-André received a slight bruise on the hand as he tried to hail the neighboring Jacobin, the act in which Basire had just fallen. There were cases of exceptional gallantry: an ensign intoned the “Carmagnole” while his leg was amputated, and two sailors repairing a mast shouted the “Marseillaise” as the boat rocked with broadsides and shot poured through the air like rain. Basire is recorded to have said: “Assure the Representative of the People that in dying I send best wishes for the Republic.”
The firing gradually ceased on the afternoon of June I. Both fleets were out of line and in confusion, with dismasted hulks from both sides floating helplessly to leeward. Villaret, it appears, ordered the dismasted French ships to be taken in tow, but failing to get his orders enforced abandoned them, more or less voluntarily, and left the field. Howe then stepped in and collected the booty. One of the dismasted French vessels, the Vengeur du Peuple, sank as the British approached it. The British were unable to rescue all its crew, some of whom were therefore drowned, crying “Vive la République.” London newspapers reported that the Vengeur refused to surrender and went down fighting to the end. The Committee of Public Safety, finding this heroic narrative in the English papers and inclined to believe it because it came from the enemy, instructed Barère to glorify the Vengeur before the Convention. Thus arose a famous story in French patriotic annals, and one for which Barère has been called a liar.
JEANBON SAINT-ANDRÉ
The French fleet staggered into Brest on June 11. Prieur came aboard at five in the morning, with the distressing news that Van Stabel was still at sea. It seemed that in addition to the loss of the battle the whole purpose of the expedition might miscarry. So the two representatives, rallying from their disappointment, forbade the crews to leave the ships and prepared immediately for another voyage. Fortunately Van Stabel was sighted the very next day, and on June 13 the convoy filed unscathed into the roadstead, a hundred and sixteen merchant vessels bringing twenty-four million pounds of flour.
Saint-André always maintained that though the battle was lost the campaign was won, because the safety of the convoy had been its only purpose. Van Stabel reported having passed over the very spot on which the two fleets met on May 29. The strategy of drawing the British to the northwest of this spot thus proved wise. Moreover the British fleet, though it won the battle and the booty, was so shattered that Howe returned directly to Plymouth. Only the smaller squadron patrolling the French coast remained for the convoy to fear. That squadron was large enough to deal with Van Stabel’s few warships. It was by pure chance that the convoy missed it. The French expedition was successful in removing the main British fleet, but even so without luck the convoy would not have landed. As for the British, their Glorious First of June was not all profit. Their fleet was under repair, and the six captured hulks brought almost nothing when sold for junk. The real prize was the twenty-four million pounds of flour, lodged safely now in France.
The Committee of Public Safety was not altogether pleased on hearing of the battle. In the original of its dispatch to Saint-André there is a significant erasure: a phrase congratulating him on his judgment is replaced by a word of congratulation on his courage. The Committee was not convinced that the engagement had been unavoidable, or instrumental to Van Stabel’s safety. It clung to its notion that the use of red-hot shot would have destroyed the British fleet. Saint-André had consistently opposed this idea. But there was no open breach between Saint-André and the Committee. In public the Committee emphasized the advantages to be credited to the battle, Van Stabel’s safe arrival, the exposure of bad officers, the training of personnel, the whipping up of hatred for the English. The battle, said Barère in the Convention, was but the first incident in a prolonged struggle against Carthage.
In Brest the first jubilation at the arrival of the convoy soon turned to bitterness and suspicion. The officers whom Saint-André had found wanting became his political enemies. The local population was aggrieved at the crippling of its beloved warships and the seizure of six of them by the English. Despite Howe’s temporary embarrassment the British still had control of the sea, for which uninformed enthusiasts blamed Saint-André. Never able to please the extremists, Saint-André left for Paris on June 23 or 24, as he had done once before in January, fleeing a scene of ingratitude and denunciation. So the ablest man in Brest made his departure, which turned out this time to be lasting. Prieur stayed on, governing the unruly town as best he could.
On the Belgian frontier, at this same time, events unfolded toward their climax.
The months after Wattignies had seen no important shifts of position except in Alsace, from which the French entered German territory in December. Saint-Just made a rapid tour of the Army of the North at the end of January, surveying, as he had in Alsace, the state of discipline, drill, personnel and supply. Pichegru, at that time the favorite general of the Committee of Public Safety, was transferred from the Rhine to the North, where he replaced Jourdan as commander. Jourdan attended absently to his dry-goods shop in Limoges, lost in memories and anticipations, until in the middle of March the hoped for letter came, appointing him to lead the Army of the Moselle. Jourdan assumed his new duties on March 19.
The Committee of Public Safety, mapping out the campaign of 1794, planned to deliver the main blow in Belgium. Knowing that the Prussians in the Rhineland had no zest for the war, and feeling free to leave the Rhine army weak, Carnot directed northward the swelling streams of conscripts and munitions. Coburg still occupied not only most of Belgium but the French towns of Condé, Valenciennes and Le Quesnoy. Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, held court in May on the territory of the Republic, at Valenciennes.
Carnot’s strategy aimed at invading Belgium from three directions. The left wing of the Army of the North, under Pichegru, was to take Ypres and move in from the west. A mixed force, composed of the right wing of the North and the whole small Army of the Ardennes, was to operate along the river Sambre. Jourdan with the Army of the Moselle was to enter Belgium from the south, strike at Namur and Liége, and by overrunning eastern Belgium threaten Coburg’s communications with Germany. Since Namur is on the Sambre where it joins the Meuse, Jourdan was in a position to cooperate closely with the mixed force in the French center.
On neither side were operations under the control of a single commander or a central general staff. The Allies continued to wrangle and suspect each other. The Committee of Public Safety still feared to make one military man too strong. To impose unity on the generals and diplomats of the coalition was the purpose of the emperor’s visit to Belgium. Saint-Just was sent north by the Committee on April 29 for somewhat the same reason. Carnot continued to coordinate the French armies from Paris; but in the field it was Saint-Just, more than anyone else, who thought of the various generals as a unit.
The mission of the emperor, who was even younger than Saint-Just, failed completely. He had indeed an impossible task. His advisers were divided. The most influential favored concentration in Poland. A great plan for defeating the French was drawn up by Mack, the same Mack who eleven years later surrendered an entire army at Ulm, but whose reputation as a master strategist was still unshaken. He could not get his plan adopted; the Prussians would not cooperate, nor would the Austrian government accept their cooperation. Mack resigned on May 23, expressing his opinion that the reconquest of Belgium was hopeless. On the next day at a council of war the Austrian generals voted that further efforts in the Low Countries were useless. The new Prussian commander, Möllendorf, was known to belong to the peace party. The British implored action and offered money, but they had only a handful of troops on the Continent and were therefore little regarded. Coburg and the duke of York denounced and mistrusted each other. The duke accused the Austrians of leaving the small British force to French mercies, and of course no one believed that the duke, or the British envoys who urged others to fight, pursued any interests except those of England. In these circumstances the emperor returned to Vienna on June 13, leaving verbal instructions, as we have seen, which made provision for, without ordering, the evacuation of Belgium.
But the Allies, however divided, would not have succumbed to defeatism if the French had not proved unexpectedly powerful. Those historians, like Von Sybel, who attribute the French success of 1794 entirely to the faults of the Allies only vent their prejudices against the Revolution. The government of the Year Two could count on something besides the incompetence of its enemies.
Saint-Just, accompanied by Le Bas, stationed himself with the mixed central army on the Sambre. The army spent its time in pointless, or at least fruitless, crossings and recrossings of the river, for which Saint-Just was undoubtedly largely responsible, since after every repulse he insisted on an immediate counterattack. The deadlock on the Sambre was broken by a decision of the Committee on June 8. It was the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, a day on which the Committee did little business. But Carnot was as usual at his office, where he signed an order instructing Jourdan to unite, under his own command, the main body of the Army of the Moselle with the force made up of the Ardennes and the right wing of the North. Thus was created the famous Army of the Sambre-Meuse, though it did not yet receive that name. It was to be nominally dependent on Pichegru, who received a general supervision over all the armies from the Meuse to the sea.
The English authority Phipps, a retired colonel who spent his life exploring these subjects, declares that the Army of the Sambre-Meuse came into being by chance, without foresight or intention. Colonel Phipps, however, wrote to teach a simple message, that the intelligence in the Revolution lay with the army men, and that the civilians were mere revolutionists and bunglers. There is strong reason to believe that the new army was conceived of by Saint-Just, whom Colonel Phipps particularly detested.
Saint-Just, while on the Sambre at the end of May, wrote, to Jourdan almost daily. He demanded, in dispatches to the Committee, that Jourdan be ordered to integrate his movements with those of the central army. On May 31 Saint-Just was back in Paris, urgently summoned by Robespierre, who said that the factions again threatened to rise. Robespierre’s reasons for wanting Saint-Just in Paris prove nothing about what Saint-Just did or said when he got there. On June 6 the Committee again sent Saint-Just to the front, this time commissioned to all the armies from the sea to the Rhine. He left on June 6 or shortly after, joining Jourdan. On June 8 Carnot’s order created the Army of the Sambre-Meuse. From the evidence it seems safe to imagine a conference in the green room, at which Saint-Just advised the concentration of authority, with himself as general representative on mission, Pichegru generalissimo, and Jourdan in command of all French forces in the center.
Jourdan’s new army, 90,000 strong, again passed the Sambre and was again driven back. On June 18 it crossed again, the seventh time for some contingents, and the last. The siege of Charleroi, often interrupted, was resumed. On that day Ypres fell to Pichegru. From Richard, representative with the Army of the North, the Committee heard encouraging news: how the emperor declared his helplessness publicly, how he called upon his peoples for aid, how his peoples would not listen, how the enemy, torn by dissension, was amazed at the unity of the Republic.
Saint-Just exulted, supremely confident, sensing that the Republic was about to fall irresistibly on the old Europe. “Europe is decadent,” he wrote to the Committee, “and it is we who are going to flourish!” Jourdan called upon Charleroi to surrender. The garrison, not knowing that Coburg was at last marching to relieve it, sent out an officer to discuss terms. He presented conditions in writing. Saint-Just was icy.
“What I want is not paper but the town.”
“But if the garrison surrenders at discretion it will dishonor itself.”
The answer combined aloofness with a sneer.
“We can neither honor you nor dishonor you, just as you have not the power to honor or dishonor the French Nation. There is nothing in common between you and us.”
The baffled envoy returned to his superiors, who at once surrendered unconditionally. Having won his point, Saint-Just allowed terms to be made, by which the garrison received the courtesies of such occasions. His relenting did not express official policy. Carnot, at this same time, informed Richard that the Committee disapproved of the terms of surrender at Ypres. Some of the articles of capitulation, said Carnot, “show a certain esteem and condescension for enemies toward whom we must proclaim hatred and contempt, unless we wish the French soldier to turn soft and to take pity on the fate of hypocritical and bloodthirsty enemies of our liberty.” The Committee regretted that some French generals treated captured officers with consideration. The incident shows, with glaring concreteness, how professional warfare changed into the modern warfare of national hatred.
Scarcely had Charleroi opened its gates when Coburg arrived with the main force of the Austrians—if Austrians they may be called, for the irrelevance of nationality was shown in the names of the generals: Quasdanowich, Alvinzi, Latour, Beaulieu, the princes of Orange and of Kaunitz, Zopf, Schmertzing and the archduke Karl. It appears that Coburg asked the British to join him, but that they preferred to remain in west Flanders. Coburg, having Pichegru to watch, could bring only 52,000 men against Jourdan, who produced a somewhat superior number against him. Firing began before dawn on June 26 near the village of Fleurus, and continued for sixteen hours until seven in the evening. By that time Coburg’s divisions were in full retreat. They straggled northward, their second encampment being twenty miles from Fleurus, near Waterloo. The French waited several days before following, too broken themselves for immediate pursuit. Saint-Just seized a coach as soon as victory was apparent, and rode toward Paris during the night of June 26.
One feature of the battle, minor at the time, is of enough interest to the twentieth century to justify a slight digression. The Army of the Sambre-Meuse was the first in history to be served by an air corps. It was a small and primitive air corps to be sure. But the matter is of more than antiquarian importance, for it shows the eagerness of the Committee to apply the latest scientific discoveries to the art of war.
The brothers Montgolfier, paper manufacturers by trade, built the first successful balloon in 1783, by introducing heated air into a large bag made of tough paper. Hydrogen was substituted for air, and cloth for paper, within a few months. By 1785 several persons in Europe had reached altitudes of ten thousand feet, and in that year two hardy aeronauts crossed the Straits of Dover after an incredibly hazardous voyage. The great difficulty was that the new machines could be neither propelled nor steered. The problem of locomotion was attacked by many, among them Carnot, then an engineer in the old army.
Carnot presented his ideas in a memorial to the Academy of Sciences in 1784. Dismissing the various projects for oars, wings and sails, he proposed that balloons be equipped with paddle-wheels, an idea not wholly fantastic in view of the side-wheel steamer which came in later, and which in fact had already been demonstrated by a Frenchman, to no effect, in the Saône. Carnot suggested the newly invented steam engine as a source of power for air navigation in the future. He predicted that the steam engine would soon bring revolutionary changes, as it did. Meanwhile, in 1784, he asked whether the force of human muscle, mechanically amplified, might not turn the wheels to move an airship.
Ten years later Carnot was still interested in aviation. So were Prieur of the Côte-d’Or, who had also been an engineer in the old army, and the scientific men who worked with the Committee. There was much discussion of the uses of balloons in war. A private citizen submitted a plan for “bringing death and destruction from the air.” The Committee appropriated several thousand livres for experiments, which went on in great mystery at Meudon, the proving ground of the Committee’s secret weapons, where the tests were also made of the redhot shot that was to destroy the British fleet.
Prieur, in charge of matters of armament, concluded that the aeronautical experiments were successful, to the extent at least that balloons could be adopted for taking observations. The Committee created a small company of “aerostatiers” (balloons being called aerostats), headed by a captain and composed of twenty-eight men. The men were chosen from technicians of the kind then available, locksmiths, carpenters, masons, chemists’ assistants. They were sent to Meudon for special training. In May 1794 the Committee dispatched a specially constructed balloon with the attendant force to the front, together with orders that they should be used. The orders were not superfluous, because some of the military men objected to employing so unfamiliar a contrivance.
At Fleurus, therefore, both armies saw an “aerostatic globe,” a hundred feet in circumference, hovering five hundred feet above the ground, to which it was held captive by a long rope. Captain Coutelle, head of the “air force,” remained aloft for nine hours during the battle. A number of generals went up for shorter periods. Soldiers on the ground moved the balloon according to signals by tugging on the rope, along which bulletins were sent down by the observers, who viewed operations through their telescopes.
Precisely what contribution this ancestor of modern aircraft made to the victory at Fleurus is unfortunately doubtful. The French troops were encouraged by the sight, which to them was a new proof of the enlightenment of the age. In the motley and superstitious ranks of the Austrians many were alarmed, fearing a new invention of Jacobin devils. From the chief engineer of the French army we hear that the balloon gave valuable information. The representative Guyton de Morveau, who was present, reported enthusiastically to the Committee and began to organize another company of aerostatiers on the following day. Military conservatives were of course not convinced. A young lieutenant-colonel named Soult, later one of Napoleon’s marshals, looked on with disdain, if we may believe the recollections that he wrote in his old age. In the wisdom of years Soult thought the whole episode ridiculous, declared that no one at Fleurus paid any attention to the aerial proceedings, and affirmed, most improbably, that the officers in the balloon were too high up to see anything distinctly. “The sole causes of our victory,” says the marshal, “were the valor of our troops, the wise arrangements of the commander during the battle, and the unshakable firmness of the other generals.”
Soult’s notion that victory in the Year Two was won entirely by martial virtue need not detain us, but it is probably true that the famous balloon contributed little in proportion to the effort expended. The best reason for believing so is that the enemy never imitated the new French weapon. Two years later the Austrians captured the balloon that served at Fleurus. They put it in a museum. In 1812 the Russians considered using balloons, not for observation, but to carry sharpshooters to pick off enemy officers. Nothing came of the idea. The fact is that balloons were so unwieldy, so cumbersome to transport in an army that marched mostly on foot, so difficult to store, inflate and attend to, that they were not worth the trouble they cost. When Bonaparte came to power, balloons were dropped from the French army. Aeronautics made no significant progress for a century after 1785. The old problem that Carnot had faced was not solved: how to steer or propel the floating bags.
The battle of Fleurus, whether or not influenced by the balloon, was not in itself a spectacular victory, for the losses were about equal. But it was enough to turn the disgust of the Austrians into positive dismay, and it opened Belgium to the Republic. Jourdan moved in from the south, Pichegru from the west. They joined forces in Brussels with 180,000 men early in July. By the next winter the Army of the Sambre-Meuse stood on the Rhine and the Army of the North by the frozen Zuider Zee. In 1795 the British army abandoned the Continent, and Prussia, Holland, Spain and Sardinia withdrew from the war. When a constitutional republic replaced the Revolutionary Government in 1795 the annexation of Belgium was held to be guaranteed by the constitution. Thus the Revolutionaries committed themselves to conquest, identified their rule with a new balance of power, and threw themselves into the hands of a soldier dictator with whom the rest of Europe could not live at peace.
These developments came about after the fall of the Committee of Public Safety. In the month between Fleurus and Thermidor the Committee explicitly and repeatedly disavowed intentions of conquest or annexation. This fact (and fact it is) has enabled some historians to free the Committee from responsibility for the aggression which helped to perpetuate the war. The fall of Robespierre appears to these historians as a great public calamity which destroyed the last hope of peace. The historians concerned are a powerful family in the lineage of learning—Buchez, Hamel, Mathiez. It need not be said that there have always been others of a contrary opinion.
Today, in another age of revolution, and in America, far from the agitation of French politics, it is hard to believe that Robespierrism could bring peace. In any case, after Fleurus, Robespierre had less influence in the Committee than ever, and the Committee was so divided that no one can say what its policy may have become had it remained in power. Nothing is proved by quotation of its anti-annexationist intentions. Intentions do not determine the course of events. Nor do they determine responsibility, which depends rather on consequences so far as they can reasonably be foreseen. French rule in Belgium was a consequence of the actions of the Committee, and was in fact both foreseen and intended. Whether this rule should take the form of annexation is not really the chief question.
A kind of minimum program was laid before the Committee on July 16 by Carnot. Its tenor was defensive; nothing was said of the liberation of foreign peoples, whom Carnot thought unripe for a revolution like that in France. But the frontiers of the Republic were to be carried to Antwerp and to Namur, and French garrisons were to be maintained in southwest Holland at Dutch expense. French influence was to dominate Holland and the Bank of Amsterdam, whose wealth, said Carnot, was the life blood of the coalition but in French hands would make possible the humiliation of England. As for Belgium, Carnot advised “that it be not joined to the territory of the Republic, but made to contribute; that we extract from it whatever we can in both specie and goods; that the people nevertheless be spared, and their ways and customs respected, but that the country be rendered helpless to aid enemy armies; that all fortifications be razed, roads broken up, canals and locks put out of service, horses and wagons taken away, and all crops and objects of consumption removed, except what is rigorously necessary for the inhabitants.”
The Committee never acted upon these recommendations, for domestic politics in mid-July were reaching a crisis, but no new decision was needed to introduce spoliation, which spread everywhere with the triumphant armies. To Carnot’s practical proposals was added the impulse of revolutionary zeal. Carnot himself, who in private conference took care not to ruin the Bank of Amsterdam, urged the generals and representatives on mission to attack the rich.
The French armies poured over the frontiers crying “War on the castles, peace to the cabins!” The Republican government, consciously and knowingly, meant to conquer by sowing class division. The Committee repeatedly ordered that the burden of spoliation be thrown wholly on the wealthy and the privileged. It instructed its generals to avoid antagonizing the common people, to forbid looting by individual soldiers, to maintain special discipline among the troops on foreign soil, and to respect the Catholic religion. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these orders, though we may well wonder how much they were enforced. The rulers of the Republic, for the most part, expected to treat the common man beyond the frontiers much as they treated the common man in France. They believed that an aristocrat was inferior to a republican, but not that a Belgian was incurably inferior to a Frenchman.
But the French occupied the invaded regions for a purpose, whose execution could hardly leave the people undisturbed. Coming in the wake of the Austrians, who supposedly had left nothing valuable behind them, French agents assembled huge stores of hard money, food, forage, clothing, metals, leathers, blankets, horses, cattle and other commodities. Books, paintings and other art objects were carried off. Thousands of loaded wagons rolled into France.
Not meaning to punish the common people, nor believing in robbery, the French authorities paid for such belongings in the same money which they used to pay Frenchmen—assignats. No compensation was paid to nobles, absentees, government bodies and churches from which wealth was taken. The forced circulation of French paper money in Belgium, and the occasional introduction of Maximum price scales, bound together the economic fortunes of the two countries. Sometimes the inhabitants received bills drawn on the Belgian government, to be redeemed, said Carnot, when that government should pass more fully under French control. Many ordinary people, having lost most of their usable property, had therefore no hope of recouping themselves except in a régime dominated by the Republic. The troubles of the common man were not lightened when hostages were taken among local notables, gatherings of more than three persons forbidden, or labor requisitioned to dismantle old fortifications. “I shall be careful,” wrote a representative on mission to the Committee, “to exercise the right of seizure established in the interior of the Republic. I shall also take notes on persons in these countries who have distinguished themselves for hatred of the French Revolution, and I shall not fail to have them arrested and arraigned before our revolutionary courts.” So the Terror, along with the economic dictatorship, spread in the wake of the armies.
Such was the state of affairs when, on July 27, 1794, Robespierre fell, and the Committee of Public Safety went to pieces. Could the Committee, in continuing to rule, have abstained from controlling the resources, opinions and foreign policies of the Low Countries and the Rhineland? Would England and Austria have tolerated such control any more willingly than they tolerated annexation? It is not likely. The fall of Robespierre was no blow to the peace of Europe. We cannot distinguish between a defensive Republic before Thermidor and an aggressive Republic after. The shift from a spirit of defense to one of expansion came about gradually, fostered by the successes of the great Committee, which launched the epic but bloody challenge to Europe that lasted twenty years.
But the very success of the Committee undermined it. The retreat of the Allies strengthened the argument of those who thought the Terror could be dispensed with. Others, who had no intention of ending the Terror, felt it safe to bring their quarrels into the open as the military menace receded.