Europe: A History (147 page)
STRASSBURG
O
N
24 April 1792 news reached the French army at Strasbourg that war had been declared against the First Coalition. That night, during revels in the house of the Mayor of Strasbourg, a Captain of Engineers from the Jura, Claude-Josèphe Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836), improvised both the words and the music of ‘Le Chant de Guerre pour l’Armeé du Rhin’ (The Battle Song for the Army of the Rhine). Its rousing stanzas would soon be sung wherever the revolutionary cause was in danger:
Allons, enfants de la Patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé,
[bis]
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ees féroces soldats?
lis viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils et nos compagnes
Aux armes, Citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.
(Forward, children of the Fatherland! | The day of glory has arrived. | Tyranny’s bloody standard has been raised against us. |
[Repeat]
Do you hear those ferocious soldiers bellowing in the countryside? | They are coming right into our embrace | To slaughter our sons and daughters. | To arms, citizens! Form up in your battalions! f Come on, let’s march! | To water our furrows with tainted blood.)
To be sung in Strasbourg, the song had to be translated into German as the
Strassburgerlied
. By the summer, as
La Strasbourgeoise
, it had reached the Midi. On the evening of 22 June it was sung at a banquet in Marseilles by a medical student from Montpellier, François Miroir. It proved so seductive that it accompanied a battalion of volunteers from Marseilles all the way to Paris. When they entered the capital on 30 July, singing their song, it was immediately called ‘The Hymn of the Massilians’, or simply
La Marseillaise
. There is no doubt about its subsequent career. But there is some doubt whether that battalion of volunteers from the Midi could actually have spoken French.
1
La Marseillaise
quickened the step of the revolutionary armies as they marched round Europe. It was translated and sung in many languages, from Italian to Polish. It was formally adopted by a decree of the Convention on 26 Messidor III (14 July 1795), thereby initiating the custom of national as opposed to royal anthems (like ‘God Save the King’).
La Marseillaise
, Napoleon used to say, was the Republic’s greatest general.
As for Rouget de Lisle, he was arrested in 1793 for royalist sympathies; survived; and died in poverty. His monument stands in Lons-le-Saunier.
Russia alone showed no hesitation. The Empress Catherine was cramped by her Turkish war, which did not end until the Treaty of Jassy in January 1792. But after that she immediately turned her gaze to the West. Her contribution to the anti-revolutionary crusade was to be directed against the Polish Constitution, ‘which she could not for one minute accept’:
The Polish Constitution was in no sense Jacobinical. But to Catherine there was not, in spring 1791, much to choose between revolutionary Poland and revolutionary France … [She] sensed the revolutionary undercurrent in Poland… and she crushed the Revolution where she could most easily reach it.
35
Summoning a bogus confederation of traitorous Polish notables to St Petersburg, and pressing the King of Prussia to drop his Polish sympathies or else, she ordered the Russian army to march at precisely the time that Louis XVI was ordering the French army to do the same. Thus the revolutionary wars began simultaneously in East and West. Twenty years were to pass before the initiators, France and Russia, were to meet in the decisive trial of strength.
The Russo-Polish War of 1792–3, therefore, was an integral part of the revolutionary panorama. It largely determined the balance of forces which were later to be waiting for Napoleon in the East. The outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Commanded by the King’s nephew Józef Poniatowski, and by the veteran of the American wars Tadeusz Kościuszko, founder of West Point Academy, the fledgeling Polish army acquitted itself with distinction. A masterly victory was achieved at Zielence in Podolia on 18 June 1792, one month after Russian forces had crossed into Polish Ukraine. The Polish position continued to look tenable until surrounded by the Prussians from the rear. In the end, the matter was resolved by the King’s capitulation rather than by force of arms. Joining the Russian-backed Confederation of Targowica to end the shedding of blood, Stanislaw-August accepted the terms of the Second Partition, signed in St Petersburg on 4 January 1793, and undertook to put them into effect. Six months later the last Sejm of the Republic’s history met at Grodno in Lithuania, under the shadow of Russian guns. Representatives of the nobility, threatened with sequestration, gave legal form to their country’s humiliation. The Constitution of Third May, duly reviled, was annulled. Russia annexed a swathe of territory half the size of France. Prussia took Danzig (which promptly rebelled),
[TOR]
TOR
T
HE
Brandenburger Tor
was built as one of the nineteen gates of Berlin’s old walled city in 1793, the year that the Kingdom of Prussia entered the revolutionary wars. Its elegant Doric colonnade was modelled on the Propyleia in Athens. Surmounted by its
Auriga
—a group of giant bronze figures portraying ‘the Chariot of Victory’—it was destined to preside over Germany’s modern tragedies and triumphs. It saw Napoleon’s grand entry into Berlin in 1806, and all the other military parades which crashed and boomed their way along the avenue of Unter den Linden for King, Kaiser, President, and Führer. In 1871, it welcomed the victorious troops returning from the Franco-Prussian War to a city still described as ‘insanitary’ and ‘irreligious’—an event which spurred the first rebuilding of Berlin as Germany’s imperial capital. In 1933, it hosted Chancellor Hitler. During the Battle for Berlin in April-May 1945, it stood on the dividing-line between the rival Byelorussian and Ukrainian ‘Fronts’ commanded by Marshals Zhukov and Koniev. On the day when two Russian sergeants from Zhukov’s army planted a red banner atop the nearby Reichstag, its ruins received a red-and-white pennant from soldiers of the 1st Polish Army fighting under Koniev. In 1953, it towered over the fatal protest march of East German workers. From August 1961 until November 1989, it formed the captive centrepiece of The Berlin Wall.
Across the centuries, the
Auriga
has been seen as an unwitting weathercock of the political climate. In 1807 it was carried off to Paris. Restored in 1814, it was re-erected with the Chariot facing west. In 1945 it was destroyed only to be replaced in 1953 with new sculptures cast from the original moulds. This time the Communist authorities allegedly set the Chariot facing east. At all events, as the third rebuilding of Berlin began in 1991, in preparation for the government of a re-united Germany, the
Auriga
was firmly facing westwards. Its stance marked the condition, not only of relations between the two halves of Berlin, but of the two halves of Europe.
1
Symbolic gestures in bronze or stone can be found in many places. In Zagreb, for example, the statue of the Croatian champion, General Jelacič;, was first erected in the late 19th century with his accusing finger pointing unmistakably towards Budapest. In 1991, it was re-aligned to point towards Belgrade. In 1993, reports stated that it had been turned once more to point towards Knin, the capital of the self-styled Serbian Republic of Krajina.
In the West, the revolutionary wars grew into a titanic complex of conflicts engulfing almost the whole Continent. The campaign of 1792 gave France a thorough scare which spurred the revolutionary leaders first to depose the King and then to organize an open-ended war effort. The initial French incursion into Austrian territory was soon reversed by the advance of Prussian and Austrian columns into France. But the vigorous political manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick was not accompanied by vigorous military action. The Prussians moved so slowly that Goethe, who was travelling with the detachment from Weimar, had time to set up his experiments on the psychological effects of cannon-balls. They were still in the Forest of Argonne, within twenty miles of the frontier, when, at the Battle of Valmy on 20 September 1792, they were repulsed by the famous ‘revolutionary cannonade’. After that, war fed off the Revolution, and the Revolution fed off a successful war. Before the year was out the revolutionary armies were back in the Netherlands and had seized Savoy. They marched on and on and on, for nearly twenty years.
The progress of the revolutionary wars is often described in terms of the three great coalitions mounted against France in 1793–6,1799–1801, and 1805–14. This is misleading, partly because each of the coalitions tended rapidly to disintegrate, and partly because fighting often continued in the intervals between the coalitions. The interests of the Continental powers which supplied the backbone of the coalitions’ forces—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—did not always coincide with those of the coalitions’ principal organizers, the British, and their great war minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806). According to varying criteria, there were not just three but five, six, or seven coalitions. Britain’s coalition partners repeatedly suffered invasion and occupation; the British, on their impregnable islands, did not. The conflict assumed important economic as well as military dimensions. On several occasions it spread beyond the confines of Europe, and showed signs of global, intercontinental strategy.
The First Coalition, 1793–6, demonstrated how difficult it was to hold the allies together. Russia made little contribution, being preoccupied with the digestion of Poland. Prussia dropped out in 1795 for the same reason. Austria was left exposed to devastating French attacks both in the Netherlands and in northern Italy. In 1795–6 Spain changed sides, and Britain was left alone, with only the navy staving off disaster. The French, whilst destroying the Counter-Revolution at home, began to manufacture revolutionary regimes abroad. The Batavian Republic (1794) in the Dutch Netherlands was the first of many. The French also began to field youthful generals of astonishing skill and energies. Of these, the first was General Lazare Hoche (1769–97), who conquered the Rhine, crushed the Chouans, and once set out to capture Ireland.
In the East, despite the Second Partition, Poland-Lithuania still refused to surrender. Early in 1794 Tadeusz Kosciuszko returned from exile, and on 24 March, on the old Market Square of Cracow, read out the Act of Insurrection, ‘for national self-rule… and for the general liberty’ In May he issued a manifesto granting
emancipation to the serfs. The victory of his peasant scythemen over a professional Russian army at Raclawice (4 April) echoed the Vendeans’ triumph at Cholet. Yet in Warsaw and Wilno the mob went on the rampage. Popular courts sentenced bishops, Russian agents, and confederates to death. Here at last was open revolution: the monarchs had to act. Warsaw was besieged by Prussians in the west. Two Russian armies advanced from the east. On 10 October, at Maciejowice, a wounded Kosciuszko fell from his horse, and was (wrongly) reported as crying
‘Finis Poloniae’
. Suvorov stormed Warsaw’s eastern suburb of Praga, and put the inhabitants to the sword. He sent a three-word report to St Petersburg—
HURRAH, PRAGA, SUVOROV,
and received a three-word reply—
BRAVO FIELDMARSHAL, CATHERINE.
[METRYKA]
On this occasion the Third Partition proceeded on the assumption that the Poles and their Republic no longer existed; so, no consent was sought. The Prussians took Mazovia and Warsaw and called it ‘New South Prussia’. The Austrians took another huge slice and called it ‘New Galicia’. The Russians contented themselves with a slice the size of England. The final treaty, signed in St Petersburg, was followed by a secret protocol:
In view of the necessity to abolish everything which could revive the memory of the existence of the Kingdom of Poland … The high contracting parties are agreed … never to include in their tides the name or designation of the Kingdom of Poland, which shall remain suppressed as from the present and forever.
36
By that time, with Bonaparte already on the march, no one in Western Europe could spare a thought for the injustices of Poland’s fate. Russia had established its reputation as the most unbending opponent of revolution, the champion of monarchy. The Poles had been cast in their role as the most obdurate opponents of sound government. They were to supply the largest of numerous foreign contingents who fought in the French ranks throughout the revolutionary wars.
The Italian campaign of 1796–7 was launched by the Directory against the possessions of an Austria already isolated by the collapse of its coalition partners. It was notable for the international debut of General Bonaparte, one year younger than Hoche. In the course of a few weeks the ragged French army on the frontier of the Maritime Alps was transformed into an invincible force. ‘Soldiers of the Army of Italy’, the youngster told them, ‘I will lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. You will find honour, glory and riches. Will you be wanting in courage?’ Within twelve months the whole of northern Italy was overrun. Bonaparte’s tactical mastery, first demonstrated on 10 May 1796 at the Bridge of Lodi, delivered him strategic domination. Milan was liberated; Mantua was reduced by siege; Austrian resistance was broken at Rivoli. The road was opened into Carinthia, and Vienna itself was awaiting attack,
[GRILLENSTEIN]
Bonaparte showed an interest in all matters contiguous to war. Revolts and mutinies were repressed with swift and purposeful brutality. On entering the territory of the Duke of Parma, he demanded the instant surrender of all art treasures. This policy was to make the Louvre pre-eminent among art collections. On
entering into the negotiations preceding the Peace of Campo Formio (October 1797) he insisted on dictating the terms without reference to Paris. This sort of conduct was to give him the upper hand over the politicians at home.
