Re: The French Revolution

[Ottoman]

Mid 1794

The taking of Church property and lands will net the French government 15 points.

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France Secured and a Revolution Half-Done

1794: The Trial and and Insurrection

The French body politic is engulfed in the political machinations of an almost-unprecedented event: the trial of a former monarch. With the example set by the English execution of Charles I, the specter of a repeat execution is enough to set the kingdom on edge. Philippe VII, as the King of the French, is aware of the tightrope on which he walks. On the one hand, his broad base of support is built on an alliance of disparate forces: monarchists who cling to the idea rather than the person, the bourgeoisie who look to him as the protector of their values and interests, and moderate revolutionaries who are satisfied with the gains they have achieved with him as an increasingly-marginalized figurehead. However, on either side a yawning gap has emerged. Bourbon supporters on the right, particularly those of devout faith who oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, have begun to take up arms to defend their ancient rights and particularisms. To the left, the radical forces have begun to argue more forcefully for the complete eradication of the royal edifice. They are divided in many factions -- Jacobins, Girondins, Enragés -- but they share enough goals to make their opposition a potent force.

In July 1794, the trial gets underway to much fanfare. The crowds clamor into the National Assembly as a litany of accusations are leveled against Louis Capet, the former king. While the list of crimes is long, they hinge primarily on the assertion that Louis sought to leave France and take shelter with Austria to wage war against France, as his brothers in exile sought to do. The key point of evidence is in his flight to the Austrian border, during which he was intercepted, after leaving a scathing denunciation of the Revolutionary cause. The former monarch’s defense hinges upon a curious mix of obstinancy, still refusing to recognize the authority of the National Assembly, and an appeal to the very rights offered by the revolution. He notes his personage is free to hold any opinions he thought appropriate, and that, regardless, at no point did he seek to engage in military actions against France itself. Finally, after his lawyers outline his defense, Louis Capet himself takes the stand to declare:

“You have heard my defense, I would not repeat the details. In talking to you perhaps for the last time, I declare that my conscience reproaches me with nothing, and my defenders have told you the truth. I never feared the public examination of my conduct, but my heart is torn by the imputation that I would want to shed the blood of the people. I avow that the many proofs that I have always acted from my love of the people, and the manner in which I have always conducted myself, seemed to prove that I did not fear to put myself forward in order to spare their blood, and forever prevent such an imputation.”

The National Assembly as a body then proceeds to vote on the former King’s fate. Philippe’s role in the trial is unclear, as the Assembly has claimed for itself the authority of the French people, but he works tirelessly behind the scenes to secure his optimal outcome. Though some of his advisors note that the surest way to secure his throne against the threat of Bourbon restoration is to kill his cousin, Philippe is either unwilling or unable to bring himself to that same conclusion. Instead, he begins leveraging his ties to secure a different outcome.
In the end, after a week-long trial, the assembly votes on the former king’s guilt on July 13, 1794. Out of the 745 delegates, 713 vote guilty and 32 abstain -- it is hard, after all, to deny the clear evidence that the king had attempted to defect to Austria just as Austria began its war against France. The question of the king’s fate, however, is more difficult to settle. On the morning of July 14, the Paris faction, led by the Jacobins and especially their new leader, Maximilien Robespierre, votes 19 to 5 in favor of executing the king. As the vote extends to other regions, however, Paris’ out-of-step radicalism becomes increasingly apparent. By late morning, the vote is 380 in favor of imprisonment (to be followed by banishment after the war), 311 for immediate execution, 24 for delayed execution, 19 for life imprisonment and 11 abstentions.

Philippe, who has obtained his desired outcome, is quick to graciously affirm the “will of the French people” and signs papers to that effect. Recognizing the risk posed to the former king by his extended presence in the capital, Philippe orders an elaborate play to whisk the Capets out of Paris immediately following the trial. As news of the outcome spreads through the city, the enrages and other radical groups begin mobilizing mobs for action. The Bastille prison, where Capet was previously being kept, is the target -- if Philippe and the cowards of the National Assembly were unable to see justice done, the people would have to do it themselves.

Egged on most vociferously by Jean-Paul Marat and Georges Danton, the crowds begin overwhelming prisons throughout the city on their way to the Bastille. The National Guardsmen, led by the Marquis de Lafayette, engage in running battles across the city throughout the afternoon. Prisons that do fall to the mob are ransacked; nobles and other conservative voices, especially priests, imprisoned for counterrevolutionary thought are summarily executed, their guards often following suit, as weapons fall into the hands of the mobs. By late afternoon, multiple columns arrive at the Bastille, where the Marquis de Lafayette has made his headquarters and heavily reinforced.

Earlier in the year, the National Guard had received a large influx of training, arms and materiel from the National Assembly, which it now puts to good use. Light cannons, strengthened barricades and a detachment of cavalry all serve to help defend the prison from the converging mobs. Lafayette, after the insurrection at the Tulieres Palace, is well aware of the potential for the mob to overwhelm his forces, and he makes quick orders to engage the assaulting mobs. The National Guardsmen, by this point an almost entirely bourgeoisie body largely sympathetic to the decision of the National Assembly, follows the orders quickly. Bloody street fighting ensues well into the night, but surging and retreating bands of sans-culottes are unable to make it further than occasional sallies up to the moat before being pushed back into the streets. As night falls, the National Guardsmen secure the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the Bastille and stand guard into the morning.

Over the following week, dubbed la semaine sanglante sees Paris struck by widespread unrest and street battles. The 25,000 armed and trained members of the National Guard are able to confine the insurrection to areas surrounding the Hotel de Ville on the north bank of the Seine, the Île de la Cité and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When radical members of the National Assembly, led by Robespierre, attempt to force the body to condemn Lafayette’s actions and turn the force in favor of the rebellion, the King authorizes the Marquis to send in the Guard. After years of being intimidated by Robespierre’s mobs, the other members of the National Assembly largely acquiesce, leaving only the radical left to vociferously denounce the attacks. Many of the Jacobin delegates were already absent from the halls of the assembly, instead coordinating the insurrection from the Hotel de Ville, and are horrified when they find that a glorified bill of attainder has been passed disenfranchising them and ordering their arrests.

By July 20, the city is pacified and the major leaders of the Jacobins either imprisoned, in hiding or streaming out of the city. Louis Capet, meanwhile, has long since left Paris; instead, immediately following the trial he and his family were whisked out of the city and towards Le Havre, where they are imprisoned in the fortress and kept under close guard, though in comfortable habitation. Within two months, the great grandees of the Radical Left -- Robespierre, Danton, and Marat -- are granted a date with madame la guillotine that they had so dearly wished to bequeath unto the former king.

The crushing of the insurrection and news of victories from the front continue to bolster Philippe’s reign and the new governmental order, but Paris seethes into the fall of 1794. The former king’s escape, the wholesale attack on the radical left and the rise of the role of the military all lead to fervent denunciations by those who believed themselves the guardians of the true voice of the revolution. All the while, the Feuillant majority in the National Assembly proved itself unable to establish a working majority, and much of the legislative process began to sputter and stall. Anticipated land reforms foundered and bold plans to outline a new calendar are shelved. However, the army is able to ensure that it continues to receive the allocations necessary -- and, in fact, is able to use the risk of a resurgent Prussian invasion to compel the National Assembly to issue a declaration of “la patrie en danger,” granting it wide ranging powers to recruit men and requisition materiel.

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1795: Victory, Peace and Dissent

1795 finds the French state and people embroiled in a final push for victory over the enemies of France. Napoleon Bonaparte’s victories in Italy leave France as the unchallenged master of Northern Italy and the Alps, while British moves to secure the Netherlands mean that only Prussia and her North German allies stand in the way of final French victory in these wars of the revolution. However, unlike the sclerotic and unmodernized Austrian armies, the Prussians and their allies have forged a mighty machine capable of defeating both the British and Austrians. The French nation becomes consumed with its war against the Teuton, leading to an overwhelming military mobilization to fight the already-mobilized Germans.

The Rhineland campaign of 1795, culminating in the victory at Cologne, captivates the French nation. The heroes of that campaign, more so than the dashing battles in Italy, secure for Philippe and his allies in the Assembly a great deal of legitimacy. This legitimacy is sorely needed, as the purges of 1794 and the chaos surrounding the trial of Louis Capet leave the King’s regime deeply unpopular with certain segments of the population, particularly in Paris.
As the year progresses, the good news from the front and the rapid exodus of combat-age men impressed into national service is all that keeps Paris from descending once again into insurrection. In the absence of meaningful legislative representation -- the chaos of 1794 leaves only 100 or so delegates who voted for the execution of Louis, and almost none of them were formally members of the Jacobin club -- the far-left enrages turn to Jacques Roux, a former Catholic cleric, as their primary orator and motivator in the streets. Demonstrations increase in frequency throughout the summer, further paralyzing the National Assembly.

In September, by the time Napoleon is besieging the last North German field armies at Cologne, the city is once again on a knife-edge. Roux orders a campaign of repeat raids on prisons to free those radicals who weren’t caught up in the executions of 1794, resulting in low-level chaos spinning nearly out of control. The National Assembly is unable to marshall a majority in favor of decisive action and Philippe finds that even his cajoling does not make much headway with the body. It is only when Lafayette’s men fight off a moderate-sized crowd that is marching on the Assembly that the body finally votes in favor of imposing martial law on the city, and Lafayette assumes near-dictatorial powers over Paris and its environs. After the bloody shows of the last few years, all ending in sans-culotte blood and a victory for the entrenched new “revolutionary” regime, the radical mobs ultimately melt away after a single afternoon of street battles. Jacques Roux himself is betrayed by his collaborators and has his own date with madame la guillotine in October.

1796: A Revolution Betrayed

By 1796, the major political questions of the day appear to have been addressed. France has a new system of government -- constitutional monarchy -- and a new identity forged in common civic patriotism rather than feudal loyalism. This new French identity, of loyalty to the patrie, supersedes the ancient particularisms of religion, region or language. In return for this new loyalty to the state, the French people are granted extensive civil liberties, a reordering of the sclerotic economy and the glory of expansion and military victory. King Philippe VII, an enlightened monarch if there ever was one, with a deep and abiding love for his people and their freedoms as citizens, presides in equitable harmony with a like minded legislature. Indeed, to the outside eye, France has been reborn almost entirely for the better.

In reality, France’s revolution is an abject failure that has left the state in a bizarre halfway house between reaction and revolution. Philippe, as king, is an increasingly impotent figurehead who rules at bayonet point. The values of the revolution, such as they are, reflect an increasingly small slice of the French population: the urban bourgeoisie, the mercantile classes and rural landholders. Unable to rely on the old royal support base of the nobility (which has either fled into exile or, slowly has return to sit in dissatisfied impoverishment), the rural peasantry (which has been upended by the economic and societal collapse of the last few years) and the church (which has still refused to accept the civil constitution of the clergy), the new royal regime’s narrow popular support is propped up only by the military and petty nobility. Bands of muscadins, finely-dressed youth from the upper and middle classes armed with canes, knives and a disdain for both traditional morality and revolutionary fervor, establish a form of reactionary gang rule over much of Paris, engaging in their own low-level street battles with gangs of sans-culottes holding out hope for a new dawn that may never come.  

Military success in the field and brute force in the cities have kept Philippe’s government intact despite the abject inability of the legislature to act on anything other than ensuring the armed forces remain supplied. As the war draws to an end, however, even that raison d’etre fades away. The rapid demobilization of the greatly expanded military sends tens of thousands of veterans home, either to their barracks or out of armed service entirely. The French state is forced to keep tens of thousands of soldiers on active duty, however, as the generals swear that a potential foreign threat is just around the corner at any moment. Cowed into submission, the increasingly-atrophied National Assembly dutifully passes repeated budgets to keep the military at least partially active, but questions continue to circulate about who really runs the show in France.

Indeed, in 1796 it is not entirely clear who runs France. The National Assembly, nominally led by First Minister Lazare Carnot, is an essentially incapable body thanks to arrests, defections and absenteeism. Even establishing a quorum is difficult. Philippe VII, as king, still operates in a vague vacuum where his powers are delineated but not proven -- he has not had to attempt a veto, nor has he carried out independent foreign policy beyond that approved by the National Assembly. Lafayette, as commander of the National Guard, has emerged as the de facto administrator of Paris, and perhaps, in some eyes, the country, but he remains steadfastly opposed to any move to formalize or expand his position. Maybe it is due to his revolutionary credentials, first fired in the Netherlands, or maybe it is due to his fealty to the monarchy, but there is little evidence that Lafayette seeks to emulate England’s Cromwell and establish himself as protector of the realm.

Other claimants, of course, sit on the periphery of France and could themselves seek to dominate this vacuum. Louis Capet, once Louis XVI of France, is finally sent into his promised exile with the end of the war. In March 1796, he sets sail as part of a small fleet bound for the French colony of “Rivière des Cygnes” on the west coast of Australia, which has grown up as the premier destination for exiles of all stripes. His brothers, meanwhile, continue to float around the minor courts of Europe, pleading ostensibly for aid in retaking their birthright but, in reality, trying just to stay one-step ahead of French agents.

Within France itself, the grandees of the Army -- Bonaparte, Dumouriez, Kellermann -- establish a de facto triumvirate to administer the new frontiers of the kingdom. Bonaparte, as the Italian, is naturally given command of the North Italian lands, while Dumouriez presides over the Rhineland and Kellermann establishes his powerbase in Flanders and Wallonia. None of the men are powerful enough to overshadow the others, though Kellermann is at a disadvantage due to his absence from the most impressive victories and Bonaparte’s charge is technically not within the bounds of France proper. Each man, however, is in turn surrounded by a coterie of lesser officers eager to prove themselves and scramble up the clear path in the cursus honorum of the “new” France. The fact that France presently finds itself at peace is a source of some frustration -- one that some seek to soon rectify.

Thus, as 1796 progresses, observers believe that what has been called the “French Revolution” has clearly drawn to a close. Indeed, with the presence of hindsight, it perhaps has been dead since July 14, 1794, when the Marquis de Lafayette ordered the National Guard to quell a popular insurrection on the orders of a new king defending the life of the old. France is certainly well beyond where she was in 1790, and it is difficult to say that the assembled delegates of the Estates-General in 1791 knew that this would be the outcome. However, despite the closing of a chapter in French history, it is clear that the forces unleashed are by no means exorcised from France. With festering religious tension, a disgusted noble class, an all-too-disenfranchised lower class and a divided new elite, the Kingdom of France under Philippe VII is barely any more stable than the Kingdom of France under Louis XVI.

However, for all that has stayed the same, much has changed. On July 14, 1796, Philippe VII presides over a patriotic ceremony marking the second anniversary of the Defense of the Bastille. Dubbed “Bastille Day,” the ceremony consists of a military parade, led by Lafayette and his National Guard and ending with a joint procession by the triumvirate of generals and their representative honor guards, around the fortress, which is now festooned in the Red, White and Blue tricolor of France. The procession continues past cheering crowds to the revolutionary tune of France’s new anthem, “Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin” Absent is the royal pageantry, the clerical droning or the noble aloofness that would have marked such an event under Louis, had he bothered to stoop so low at all. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you would think it reflected that a new day had truly dawned in France.

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