The War of Wars (7 page)

Prussia’s Frederick William, however, had fewer inhibitions. The inheritor of the legacy of Frederick the Great, a superbly trained and disciplined army, he lacked both the military skill and the wisdom of his predecessor. He was out to make his mark on Europe, and his absolutist mind was appalled by the Revolution, while discerning the opportunities that he believed France’s new weakness would offer him. He also wished to show up the caution of his fellow German rival, the Austrian Emperor.

A large number of French émigrés descended on these neighbouring courts and set themselves up in armed militias at Trèves and elsewhere. At the Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 these émigrés organized an expression of concern from Prussia and Austria for the fate of the King of France. However, Leopold had been cautious, offering to prevent the émigrés training on his territory in exchange for France reining back the activities of the Jacobins. His successor, young Francis II, was keener on joining Frederick William in threatening war on France, particularly as the circumstances of the French royal family deteriorated.

To the astonishment of both, it was the French, mired in revolutionary turmoil and with their army apparently disintegrating, having
lost many of their aristocratic officers, that declared war. The reason for this lay in internal French politics and, to begin with at least, the perverse nature of Lafayette, who sought to restore his fading political fortunes by a glorious war; he was backed in this by the constitutionalists and the Girondins, although surprisingly the Jacobins were divided. The Assembly in the autumn of 1791 passed a measure to force the King’s Financial Adviser, Xavier Stanislaus, who had declared war on the country, to return to France, and pronounced a death sentence on all émigrés found in arms at the beginning of the following year. The King refused to sign this.

The French foreign minister, de Lessart, had tried to avert war by telling the Austrians that the King would soon establish his supremacy over the extreme republicans. Meanwhile an unholy combination of Lafayette and the minister of war, the Comte de Narbonne, tried to secure Assembly support for the war. Louis summarily dismissed the Comte de Narbonne. The Assembly was furious at this sudden reassertion of the royal prerogative and promptly accused de Lessart, a moderate royalist, of intriguing with the Austrian court. The unfortunate foreign minister was condemned to death and guillotined, and his successor appointed from among the Girondins: this was Charles Dumouriez.

Dumouriez was no friend of the Austrians and conceived a highly intelligent strategy of establishing a pact with Britain to keep it neutral. This was based on setting up a constitutional monarchy in France and respect for mutual trading arrangements, while detaching Belgium from Austria and setting it up as an independent state. The Austrians under their new young Emperor were incensed and demanded the return of the French King to the powers he enjoyed before 1789, the return of lands and buildings taken from the church and compensation for the German princes recently expelled by the French from Alsace and Lorraine. This was unacceptable to the French. On 29 April 1792 the French King was forced to declare war against his own brother-in-law, the Emperor, as well as against his two brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, who were leading the sputtering insurrections within France itself.

No one could have predicted that the subsequent general European
war would last twenty-three years. Who was to blame? Undoubtedly the French had acted badly in expropriating German landowners and the clergy, particularly in the historic city of Avignon, where a bloodbath had taken place. Austrian fury at the treatment of the Queen, the Emperor’s aunt, was also understandable. But up to now the French had not violated other borders or pursued a policy of aggression. Such certainly was the view of the British.

Nevertheless, as Dumouriez and, before him, Lafayette had seen, there was an advantage to be had out of war – not least in strengthening the hand of the army in domestic politics. They had goaded the Austrians, and the latter and their war-hungry Prussian rivals had been all too happy to respond. However the Austrians still held aloof from any full-scale assault, although they immediately secured victories against the disorganized French army.

The Duke of Brunswick was appointed to command the joint 365,000 strong Austrian-Prussian forces: after his victories at Maastricht, Liège and Neerwinden in the Low Countries, he was a commander to be feared. However, for reasons which remain obscure, he placed a force of 15,000 French émigré cavalry, which ought to have been the elite of his force, in the rear. There were suspicions that Brunswick was waging a war of aggression: for when he captured Longwy and Verdun he did so in the name of the Emperor of Austria, not the King of France. He had a splendid army of Prussian troops and Austrian dragoons under General Clairfait; but he launched no immediate attack to disperse the raw recruits which Dumouriez, now minister of war, had raised from a levy of men from across provincial France, nor the hesitant regular army, which had lost most of its royalist officers.

Brunswick’s army was blocked at the fortress of Thionville: he had too few cannon. He then moved into the Champagne region, one of the poorest in Europe, where his men fell upon a profusion of melons and grapes which immediately caused an epidemic of dysentery in the army, killing hundreds. Nevertheless the émigré cavalry scored a notable success in ambushing a column of
carmagnoles
, as the raw republican conscripts were called.

The Duke himself only took part in one action, the Battle of Valmy,
before being rebuffed by Dumouriez’s forces and deciding to order a retreat. This deeply demoralized the émigrés, who had no choice but to obey the orders of their foreign commander, and the Prussians, who had obeyed the call to arms of the Emperor at great expense. The French resistance, however raw, was stiffened by the fear that any restoration of Louis XVI to his absolute powers by the émigrés would inevitably have resulted in years of revenge, bloodletting and the reimposition of feudal rule.

With the Prussian retreat, the formerly uncertain French army found new hope: they had repulsed the enemy. Recruits flowed into the surprisingly successful French armies controlled by Generals Custine in Paris, Montesquieu in Savoy and Dumouriez in the Netherlands. Montesquieu, an aristocrat of the old school but a patriot, repulsed the Savoyan army ordered into France by the King of Sardinia and took Nice and Chambery, threatening to invade Italy.

On the central front Custine struck forward against the seven German kingdoms, capturing Worms, Oppenheim and Spiree and the stronghold of Mentz. Custine had no hesitation in urging the people of central Germany to overthrow their rulers. In the north Dumouriez, ably supported by his Spanish deputy Francisco de Miranda, struck forward against Clairfait’s soldiers, spectacularly winning the Battle of Jemappes on 6 November 1792. Clairfait was forced to retreat from the Austrian Netherlands with its towns undefended thanks to Joseph II’s ridiculous decision to dismantle the fortifications along the frontier. The French army under Dumouriez remained firmly disciplined in its new conquests, but a shower of revolutionary officials descended on the area, pillaging the churches, plundering the land and setting up republican forms of government.

Dumouriez rushed to Paris in an effort to save the King. Bravely, and well aware that his own head was at stake if he lingered too long, he now privately proposed setting the Dauphin or the Duc d’Orleans’ son – who had served under him – on the throne. But he was ordered to return to invade Holland.

At first the campaign went well: Gertruydenberg was seized and Bergenop-Zoom blockaded. But Dumouriez was blocked at Williamstadt. Moreover an Austrian army had at last arrived under the Prince of
Saxe-Coburg and was threatening Belgium. Dumouriez veered about, but his army was mauled at Aix-la-Chapelle. Where before he might have been able to restore the French monarchy, his reputation was now endangered. He made a further blunder by threatening to march on Paris in a letter of 12 March 1793, in support of the King. Only six days later he was defeated in the Battle of Neerwinden. His sieges of the fortresses of Lisle, Valenciennes and Cond all failed.

He entered into serious negotiations with the Austrians and arrested four commissars sent out by the Convention to keep an eye on him, sending them to the Austrians as prisoners. He tried to persuade several commanders, including Miranda, to join him in seeking to seize control of Paris. Most refused, and the army showed no disposition to follow him as he negotiated with the enemy. He realized the game was up and fled to the Austrians, and then into exile in Britain, where he spent nearly twenty years acting as a wise counsellor to the British government during the Napoleonic war.

So ended the career of one of the most redoubtable figures of revolutionary France, a potential military dictator long before Napoleon. Far more than the feeble Lafayette before him, he had shown that revolutionary France could be great if order was restored. It was far too soon, but the lesson was not lost on the men who were later to bring Napoleon to power.

Dumouriez’s early victories halted any occupation of France while it was at its most vulnerable and showed that the new popular army, with its officers promoted through merit from the ranks and its soldiers believing they were fighting for the Revolution, not merely to serve the King or the aristocracy, could be a potent force. Again, Dumouriez’s successors and Napoleon were not slow to imbibe the lesson.

If the British had lent their support to the joint Austrian and Prussian forces, the Revolution might have been nipped in the bud at this early moment. However the British had absolutely no intention of intervening at this stage, and the opportunity passed. Dumouriez had certainly entertained the hope of an alliance with the British and the Austrians against the Convention, but his revolt had failed and he was forever to be damned as a traitor to France. The course of history would have been very different had he succeeded.

Francisco de Miranda, one of Dumouriez’s best generals, enjoyed a career not unlike Napoleon’s early one, emerging as a potential French leader himself. The Venezuelan-born Miranda had deserted from the Spanish army and travelled extensively in the United States, Europe and Russia, where he became Catherine the Great’s lover, seeking support for his goal of Latin American independence from Spain. He had previously spent three years in London pursuing this cause, but all his talk of leading South America to revolution had come to nothing. He switched his attention to the revolutionary ferment in France: a group of monarchists there had tried to get him to join a counter-revolutionary mercenary army of Russians, Swedes, Germans and Frenchmen partly backed by Catherine the Great, who had suggested Miranda’s name. However, Miranda’s intellectual sympathies lay with the revolutionaries.

He made a good impression on Brissot when the Girondin leader visited London, and between them they developed the idea that the Revolution in France could be spread both to mainland Spain and to Spanish America. Brissot lobbied the commander in northern France, Dumouriez, to appoint Miranda as head of an invasion force of 12,000 French infantry and 10,000 mulattos then garrisoned in Santo Domingo who, with the assistance of the French navy, might be expected to topple Spain’s hold on her colonies, something France wanted almost as much as Britain.

Crossing to Paris, Miranda had found little enthusiasm for the plan there, however, and was considering a return to London when the
Austrian and Prussian armies invaded France from the east. In August 1792, as the country reeled at the prospect of defeat, Miranda, who had perhaps sold his military credentials a little too successfully, found himself offered the rank of marshal in the French army and the title of baron, as well as a fat stipend, very attractive to a man now hard pressed for the money to live in the grand style to which he had become accustomed. At the age of forty-two he was at last a real general – in the service of revolutionary France. His Russian supporters, who loathed the French revolutionaries, were appalled at the transformation, but did not sever their links with him altogether.

To his own surprise, in his first engagement, along the border between Belgium and Holland, his force of 2,000 men succeeded after seven hours of fighting in putting to flight some 6,000 Prussians led by the Graf von Kelkreuth, a capable commander. It was the first French success of the war. With uncharacteristic modesty, Miranda spoke of his ‘beginner’s luck in the French army’; he was promptly appointed to command a division in the front line, under Dumouriez’s overall command. En route to Vaux the 10,000-strong division commanded by General Chazot suddenly encountered 1,500 Prussian hussars. The French panicked and fled; a rout seemed imminent, until the retreating forces reached Miranda’s position at Wargemoulin. There, sword in hand, he stopped their flight, and reorganized the two forces into three columns to march on Valmy.

Dumouriez boldly attacked, believing that he faced a Prussian army of 50,000 men, and a major battle. Instead he was met only by covering fire; the Prussians had retreated after the French rally. Miranda’s reputation soared. However, he viewed with distaste the rise of the revolutionary party in France, in particular the Jacobin faction led by Robespierre and Marat. He wrote to the American Alexander Hamilton: ‘The only danger which I foresee is the introduction of extremist principles which would poison freedom in its cradle and destroy it for us.’

Miranda moved up to join Dumouriez as second-in-command of the French army in Belgium. He went to the relief of Dumouriez’s army at Anderlecht, and was appointed to take over General La Bourdonnais’s command of the Northern Army. As the grip of winter
intensified Miranda’s forces reached the outskirts of Ambères, where he personally supervised the digging of trenches, encouraging his men while maintaining rigid discipline. Ambères was heavily fortified; on 26 November the French guns opened up and were answered from within, but not a single besieger was killed. By five in the afternoon, as plumes of smoke from the burning city curled into the sky, the Austrians were seeking terms. These took four days to negotiate and amounted to unconditional surrender, at the cost of just thirty casualties to Miranda’s army.