The War of Wars Read online

  In 1788 Europe was peaceful and prosperous. There was little sign that anything would disturb the tranquility of the settled alliances between its seven great powers and the host of lesser princedoms. In Britain alone was the monarchy little more than a façade for rule by a parliament dominated by factions, commercial interests and, in the still-powerful House of Lords, the aristocracy. While the humdrum and egotistical George III had prestige and influence, he did not rule. Britain had recently suffered the grievous loss of its rebellious, although small and comparatively poor, North American colonies, but still presided over a far-flung and growing global empire.

  Elsewhere in Europe, royal absolutism held sway, usually centralized around a royal court. The most powerful of these was the magnificent monarchy of France, where the tall, fair-haired, snub-nosed and acerbically intelligent King Louis XVI presided over fabulous Bourbon Versailles, with palaces so large that they bristled with whole villages of intriguing, cavorting and amorous courtiers. The King was married to a haughty Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette, cementing France’s alliance of convenience with the other greatest dynasty in Europe, that of Austria’s ruling Habsburgs. France was Britain’s great continental rival, having just lost the Seven Years War, then outwitted the British during the American War of Independence. Although the two nations were currently at peace, Franco-British trade, naval and military rivalry continued to be played out across the globe, from India to the West Indies.

  France’s greatest continental ally and rival was Austria-Hungary, a polyglot empire that dominated northern Italy, the Balkans, and most of eastern Europe. Its Emperor, presiding over a court at Vienna second only to France’s in its extravagance and beauty, was soon to be the indecisive, garrulous Francis II. To the north, completing the trio of great nations that dominated the central massif of the European continent was Prussia. A newly emergent and aggressive military power under Frederick the Great, threatening the host of German principalities and buffer states between itself and France, it was now at peace with its neighbours, and ruled by the weak and vacillating Frederick William.

  To the south-east lay the declining power of the Turkish Ottoman empire, still ruling a vast swathe of the Middle East but long incapable of challenging a major European nation, hundreds of years after the great Saracen offensives had petered out. The Ottomans’ very weakness posed a threat to Europe simply by offering a tempting vacuum to others, in particular the quasi-barbarian power to the north, Catherine the Great’s Russia, which was embarked on a policy of imperial expansion that seemed to pose the greatest threat to European stability. This strong-willed, shrewd and capricious woman had long ruled with great firmness. Now her reign was coming to an end, and the paranoid, half-insane Tsar Paul was to provide an unhappy interregnum before the accession of his strange son and probable murderer, Alexander, a young man of almost feminine beauty who alternated visionary ideas with religious fanaticism.

  Finally, to the south-west was the seventh great power, now in decline but possessed of an overseas empire of fabulous wealth. Over the centuries shipments of silver to Spain had served to corrode the country’s warrior ruling class. Spain was ruled by a decent but vacuous Bourbon king, Charles IV, his lascivious wife Maria Luisa and her opportunist lover, Manuel Godoy. The monarchs were to be succeeded by their brutal and reactionary son, Ferdinand VII.

  These were the seven great powers of Europe, all of them absolute monarchies save one, Britain, which was a republican oligarchy in all but name. Three of them were strong and entrenched across the prosperous heartland of central Europe; the two in the south were in advanced stages of decline, while Russia in the east was regarded as primitive and potentially predatory to its Baltic neighbours in the north and the Ottoman empire in the south.

  The rest of Europe was carved into a host of lesser monarchies, princelings and duchies. Sweden, Saxony, Bavaria, Portugal, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Parma and Piedmont were its most significant states, most of them satellites gravitating around the orbit of the greater powers. The Pope presided as Europe’s greatest spiritual prince, with his own fiefdom in central Italy, although Catholicism was under challenge from northern Protestantism. It seemed an apparently unbreakable façade of monarchical absolutism, locked in alliances, rivalries and dynastic marriages, presiding over a continent as peaceful and well ordered as at any time in its turbulent history.

  In 1789 the very centrepiece of this intricate structure of peace and prosperity, Louis XVI’s court at Versailles, cracked and was soon shattered into a thousand pieces. In its place there emerged first an elitist struggle for power, then an uncontrolled mob, and then the massed formations of brutally disciplined armies the like and size of which had never been seen before to pour over France’s borders in a frenzy of uncontrolled warfare, initially in defence of the Revolution, then to promote its ideals, finally in torrents of outright aggression and conquest.

  Within the space of a couple of years, Europe was plunged into one of the largest and longest wars of its history that was to last the best part of a quarter of a century and threaten to overturn the entire social order of monarchy and aristocratic rule and place the continent in the grip of a single militarist nation. With vast conscript armies moving at unprecedented speed and overwhelming force against the parade-ground armies of Europe with their aristocratic officers and traditional military tactics, it seemed that the militarist juggernaut would sweep all before it. The continent was plunged into a seemingly endless confrontation which ravaged whole countries from Spain and Italy in the south to Belgium in the north-west, to Prussia and into Russia in the east, to Austria in the centre.

  It was as though a volcano had erupted at the heart of Europe, belching out destruction and threatening everything in its path. It was to be perhaps the biggest bloodbath in European history, killing millions, levelling and looting, obliterating the livelihoods and homes of entire nations. This was the birth of the modern age of mass politics, revolution and total warfare, the foreshadower of the destructive wars of the twentieth century.

  Although he was only a secondary player during the first phase of the revolutionary war until 1800, the carnage became associated eventually with the single man who to his friends and enemies alike seemed to incarnate the spirit of that unstoppable, relentless war machine, Napoleon Bonaparte. Throughout the war only one country stood almost continuously against him. It was the greatest challenge that the islands of Britain had faced since the Norman invasion and Spanish Armada. To the growing alarm of its leaders and people, as France’s neighbours were ruthlessly cut down one after another, the struggle soon appeared to be hopeless, inviting first economic strangulation and then a murderous invasion.

  Part 1

  FRANCE IN TUMULT

  1789–93

  Chapter 1

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANCIEN REGIME

  In the beginning there was a spark. That spark was the English Revolution of 1640–60. Flaring up fiercely and briefly, it left three embers smouldering: the rhetoric and republican ideals of its main instigators, at a time when it was virtual blasphemy to challenge the divine right of kings; the proof that social and economic forces could converge to knock even the embodiment of the power of the central state off its pedestal; and, last but not least, the elemental force that was forged from the fires of revolution, so necessary to advancing it, mastering it and ultimately destroying it – that of a powerful standing army. The English Revolution of course ended with the Restoration of 1660 but the underbrush continued to burn, re-emerging in the assertion of the rights of parliament that deposed James II and the eventual establishment of a virtually powerless monarchy under the Hanoverians.

  The embers of revolution, however, still smouldered to be blown by Atlantic winds across to Britain’s north American colonies. There, as in Britain before the Civil War, rapid economic and demographic change in the mid-eighteenth century suddenly collided with the attempt of a centralizing state to extend its authority in 1776. The resu
lt was inevitable: the latter was swept away in a torrent: only in calmer waters further downstream, could it re-emerge in very different guise.

  If the American Revolution can be described as a distant descendant of the English Revolution, the French Revolution was undoubtedly a firstborn child of the American one. It was no coincidence at all that it began when Benjamin Franklin – lecherous, egotistical, homespun, brilliant Franklin – was America’s longstanding envoy to France (where he subverted the French court by wearing shabby republican clothes amid the finery, becoming a cult figure for intellectuals), nor that Thomas Paine was to be swept up in the tumult of the French Revolution, nor that one of the first revolutionaries was the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence.

  Franklin, a representative of men who had rejected the authority of a monarch altogether and preached a republic was a lethal cancer in the body politic of the French monarchy, and it was almost suicidally obtuse of Louis XVI and his courtiers not to realize it, obsessed as they were with the old power struggle with Britain.

  France had sought to turn the American Revolution into a dagger aimed at Britain’s breast, but succeeded in striking only a glancing blow before falling on the weapon itself. For in an age of press, printing and pamphleteering the ideals of the American Revolution soon found a following among intelligent and dissatisfied men in France. The immediate catalyst for the French Revolution, however, was the French court’s need to raise money – an exact echo of the cause of the English Revolution, when Charles I had had to summon parliament to raise revenue. The cost of French participation in the American war had been prohibitive, and had been met by loans. The French government afterwards ran out of ready access to lenders and in 1786 the minister of finance was forced to inform the French King that the situation could only be corrected by imposing taxes. In 1788, the ancien régime for the first (and last) time drew up a budget, which showed there to be a shortfall of some 20 per cent between expenses and revenues. Of the total budget, some 6 per cent was being spent on the court itself, some 20 per cent on administration, and 26 per cent on defence and foreign affairs. Nearly half was being swallowed up on debt service of some 318 million livres.

  It was thought necessary to reduce the debt through taxation – not through a general increase of the taxes that already fell almost entirely on the poor classes, whose wages had risen only by 22 per cent, compared to average price increases of 65 per cent over the previous half century – but by extending taxation to the wealthy bourgeoisie and to the nobility. The cause of the French Revolution was thus not the state’s attack on the poor, but on the rich!

  The minister of finance, Calonne, proposed an eminently progressive taxation regime: a uniform tax on salt and tobacco across the nation, a land tax and an end to internal tariffs and freedom for the grain trade (which affected the all-important price of bread) as well as the selling off of manorial properties possessed by the church so that they would be able to pay tax. Finally tax was to be administered by provincial assemblies in which the traditional ‘three estates’ of France – the clergy, the nobility, and all property owners – should be represented equally.

  Exactly as occurred under Charles I’s exactions, and George Grenville’s attempts to raise taxes in America through the Stamp Act the King’s plan provoked a furious outcry from the men of property – in particular, in France, the nobility. After bitter exchanges, the King was forced to summon the Estates-General, a kind of national assembly of the three estates, which had last been convened at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to get his way. At that stage the dispute was between the modernizing centralized royal court and the reactionary nobility – not the popular image of the people against King and aristocracy.

  France was in the throes of a social and economic revolution – a huge increase in population and in property: unfortunately the new prosperity was not well distributed among the expanding population. Worse, the economic boom was disrupting existing social arrangements: an urban working class had sprung up in the cities, in particular Paris, estimated at around 300,000 or around half the population of 600,000. Many of these benefited from the economic revolution, but this new concentration was also a powerful force in its own right. While the new property created a large urban bourgeoisie, the inequalities between the bourgeoisie and the workers also became obvious where they rubbed shoulders together.

  In the countryside there existed a large independent peasantry which possessed few of the feudal characteristics of its English neighbours: the peasants had for centuries been emancipated from serfdom, although a few traits lingered as well as their obligation to do military service. Whereas in Britain huge landholdings and a paid agricultural workforce were, in many ways, an extension of serfdom, the French peasant was a fiercely independent proprietor: but he was also poor, with a landholding barely capable of supporting him. This naturally conservative class was baffled by two aspects of the economic revolution France was unleashing during the mid-eighteenth century: bread shortages caused by the archaic and corrupt system of regulation and distribution of grain, which Calonne was determined to reform, as well as by the increased appetites of the cities; and taxation at a time when purchasing power was diminishing. To the peasant it seemed that Calonne was preparing further to exacerbate their problems by levying new taxes and instituting a free for all on prices (which would actually have improved supply but lowered prices for the peasant producer). Thus another class was added to those with grievances against the ancien régime.

  A third class of malcontents came from the lower ranks of the nobility – of which Napoleon Bonaparte was himself to be a rather atypical example. The nobility in France was very different from that in Britain where it consisted of a select group of around 1,000 hugely wealthy landowning families. There were no fewer than 400,000 ‘nobles’ in France out of a population of some 23 million, with perhaps a fifth of the land. With the exception of the ‘nobility of the robe’ – high court officials of bourgeois background ennobled by the court – they were a caste.

  A large part of the nobility, however was extremely poor and would lose status if they worked for a living. For these people, the King and his court were an enemy, the new moneyed classes a source of envy, and the new wealth injected into the country something of which they were not a part.

  Thus France in the dying days of the ancien régime was a paradox – a newly enriched and developed society in which large numbers of people were alienated from the new prosperity – among them many of the squirearchy, most of the peasantry and part of the new urban working classes, as well as that part of the bourgeoisie with more or less fixed incomes. Meanwhile the newly prosperous merchant class – such as lower civil servants, professionals and lawyers – made up the overwhelming bulk of the elected members of the Third Estate in the newly convened Estates-General. The great French historian Georges Lefebvre has brilliantly summed up the bourgeoisie on the eve of the Revolution:

  For centuries the bourgeois, envious of the aristocracy, had aimed only at thrusting himself into its ranks. More than once he had succeeded, for a great many nobles descended from ennobled bourgeois. This ambition was not extinct. The Rolands put themselves to much trouble to get themselves recognized as nobles; the Derobespierres cut their name in two; Danton spelled his as d’Anton; Brissot, son of an innkeeper of Chartres, blossomed forth as Brissot de Ouarville, or still more fashionably, de Warville. Such were the marks of gentility. Bourgeois of old stock were frankly proud of their lineage, careful not to form an improper marriage. Officeholding and the professions established among them a hierarchy of which they were exceedingly jealous . . .

  Since at best only a small number of bourgeois could enjoy the advantage of becoming nobles, the rest of them wound up by execrating what they envied without hope. The exclusiveness of the nobility in the eighteenth century made the ascent even more arduous than before, especially when the nobles tried to reserve the most distinguished public e
mployments for themselves. At the same time, with increasing wealth, the numbers and the ambitions of the bourgeois continued to mount. Sacrifices willingly made for the education of their children were meeting with disappointingly little reward, as the correspondence of Sieyès with his father testifies, and still better the examples of Brissot, Desmoulins and Vergniaud. The young Barnave wrote, ‘The road is blocked in every direction.’ Throughout the century government administrators had expressed alarm at the spread of education, and even in the Year III (1795) Boissy d’Anglas was to fear that education would result in forming ‘parasitic and ambitious minorities’.

  With the doors shut, the idea arose of breaking them down. From the moment when the nobility laid claims to being a caste, restricting public office to men of birth, the only recourse was to suppress the privilege of birth and to ‘make way for merit’. Pure vanity played its part, we may be sure; the most insignificant would-be noble nursed the wounds of his injured pride at the mere sight of the social distance above him. Among bourgeois of diverse kinds was forged a link that nothing could shatter – a common detestation of the aristocracy.’

  The bourgeoisie put its emphasis on earthly happiness and on the dignity of man; it urged the necessity of increasing the former and elevating the latter, through the control of natural forces by science and the utilizing of them to augment the general wealth. The means, it was believed, consisted in granting entire freedom to investigation, invention and enterprise, for which the incentive was to be personal gain, or the charm of discovery, struggle and risk. The conception was dynamic, calling upon all men, without distinction of birth, to enter into a universal competition from which the progress of mankind was to follow without end. The ideas appeared in a confused way in the France of the Renaissance; subsequently Descartes inaugurated a new humanism by opening up a magnificent perspective, the domination of nature by science; finally, the writers of the eighteenth century, encouraged by English and American influences – here we must note Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the economists – set forth with spectacular success the principles of the new order, and the practical conclusions that it seemed fitting to deduce.