Spark's Notes: Credit goes to Cmmdfugal for inspiring the twist at the end, once it was brought up it was much too good to resist.
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Excerpt from “Arise, Children of the Fatherland!: The First Coalition War”
The Darkest Winter
This great republican experiment, however, relied on the continued existence of the Republic itself, and by 1791 that appeared far from assured. It was abundantly clear that the enthusiasm and revolutionary zeal of the National Guard could not yet fully the gap left by the loss of much of the Army. Whilst many of the rank and file soldiers and junior officers remained loyal to the Revolution, the majority of the senior officer corps and virtually all those of colonel’s rank or above defected to Louis. Those who chose to remain did so out of loyalty to Lafayette, not the Republic, and they were a poor fit for the enthusiastic but poorly trained citizen militias that constituted the National Guard. Moreover, many were not at all fond of democracy; whilst Lafayette did demonstrate at times a fondness for the trappings of militarism, it is a testament to Lafayette’s belief in democratic governance that he did not take the obvious opportunity feared by Robespierre to establish a military dictatorship. He would have had the overwhelming support of the French Republican Army and most of the populace had he done so, even at the cost of strangling French democracy in its crib.
Indeed, Lafayette was much too busy fighting the actual war to give time to such schemes. Leaving the question of the new Constitution and the administration of France in the largely capable hands of the Assembly, he had gone to personally lead the defence of Clermont-Ferrand in November 1790, the fall of which would have rendered all of central France vulnerable. His presence galvanized the local defenders into a successful defence of the town against a royalist Army led by the much-despised Marquis de Bouillé, but he could not be everywhere. Nevertheless, the sight of the President of France himself “walking the walk” and leading men into battle personally was a much-needed morale boost for the populace, who needed to see that their leaders, too, were in this fight. France still had no lack of enthusiasm amongst the citizenry for the defence of the Republic. What it lacked were good military leaders capable of channeling that enthusiasm in militarily productive ways; mere revolutionary fanaticism was not in itself a solution.
The vast imbalance in the quality of military leadership ensured that the winter of 1790-1791 was a grim one for the Republic. Every month, more and more of France “went dark”, falling under royalist control. Whilst the Republic had successfully stabilized in the first half of 1790, the National Guard’s campaign to retake southern France had ground to a halt in the summer, once Austrian mercenaries and the emigré armies that had been building throughout 1789 returned under the Prince de Condé and the Bouillé. Once those armies turned to offensive campaigning in the autumn, the fortunes of war turned decisively against the young Republic The first true battles of the Civil War between armies in the open field ended in disaster for the Republicans, with the citizen militias that constituted the National Guard-led armies being poorly trained, poorly led and largely incapable of standing up to a real army despite their numbers. At Carcassonne, a National Guard force of twenty thousand was routed by a Royalist army under the Comte de Provence that was half its size, leading to the fall of Toulouse. Similar ills would befall a relief army of fifteen thousand near Montauban several weeks later. Most distressingly, the town of Valence fell to Condé on Christmas Day 1790, ceding control of the lower Rhône to Louis and leaving the city of Lyon, France’s second city and a major center of manufacturing and trade, open to attack.
By the end of 1790, virtually all of le Midi, France south of a line from Bordeaux to Lyon, was in King Louis’s hands, and Lyon itself was under siege. On the 18th of January, Lyon itself fell, and a wild panic swept through the country as fears of a second purge consumed the populace. No purge was forthcoming, however — Louis had been stung by the harsh international criticism and public epithets now being attached to his name, and was furious at Artois for being so heavy-handed with his subjects. He made it absolutely clear that the population of Lyon was to be well-treated as the loyal subjects of France that he was sure they were. The damage to Louis’ public reputation, of course, had already been done a year earlier and could hardly be repaired now.
It is worth pausing for a moment to note that this marked the sad end of one of the sadder subplots of French history, for starting in late 1790 and accelerating dramatically through 1791 and 1792 the vast bulk of French Protestants, still largely living quietly in southern France, began to migrate en masse to the United States. Set upon by angry, paranoid ultra-Catholic mobs looking for scapegoats and given little protection by royalist authorities, the much-abused Huguenots overwhelmingly decided that enough was, at last, enough, and almost all would flee their homes and make their way north. A few would settle in the cities of the Republic, where the Constitution of 1790 gave them at least solid legal protection to practice their faith. Unfortunately, anti-Protestant prejudice was no less asphyxiating in the north despite the enlightened religious tolerance espoused by the Assembly, and they were given the cold shoulder by their new neighbors. As such, thousands upon thousands would continue their journey across the Atlantic over the next twenty years and end up settling in the vast empty spaces of the American north and west, with the state of Quebec and the Ontario territory especially eager to welcome French speakers to fill their lands. Excepting the Lutherans living as they had done for generations in the religiously tolerant Alsace territory, this ended the story in France of a community that had once made up a tenth of its population and dominated its elite.
The Army of the Rhône
When the news of the fall of Lyon reached Paris, a large crowd — likely organized by the Montagnards — packed the Place du Hôtel de Ville, the very same square that had been the site of the most intense and vicious fighting during the Battle of Paris, and was already being seen by the Parisians as a near-sacred space. They demanded that Lafayette take immediate action to rescue the war situation. The First Republic needed a real army, and it needed it fast. Two days later, the Army of the Rhône, a hastily assembled collection of five thousand Army regulars — many of whom had fought in the Battle of Paris on the losing side — and fifteen thousand National Guards who had been training in the city marched out of Paris under the leadership of the most capable senior officer Lafayette could find: a promising 24-year-old National Guard colonel named Joachim Murat.
Murat had been born in 1767 to a wealthy innkeeper and been serving as a provincial clerk when the Revolution began. Drawn to excitement and action as young men often are, he quickly joined the National Guard, and rapidly through the elected ranks by virtue of his keen intellect, fearlessness, and charisma. His first distinction of note, however, came during the Battle of Paris, where on his own initiative he had personally led detachments under heavy fire and grapeshot to rebuild barricades. Not long afterward, he was elected to the rank of colonel by his fellow Parisian National Guard officers, as the previous occupant of the post had been killed in the battle. In the space of a little over a year and a half, Murat went from minor haberdasher's clerk to third-in-command of the Parisian National Guard. Evidently seeing a spark of genius in the enthusiastic and courageous young man, Lafayette elevated him to General of the Republic at the end of January and gave him command of the hastily assembled army with orders to retake Lyon and secure the upper Rhône Valley. Lafayette expected the campaign would take at least six months.
It would take half that time. Murat’s army first met the Royalist army marching northward at Creancy, about 40 kilometers west of Dijon, on the 12th of February. The Royalist army, under the recently returned Prince of Condé, was of roughly equal size and qualitatively superior strength. However, they were totally unprepared for actual combat against a real army, let alone one led by a general of Murat’s caliber. The Prince quickly broke contact and retreated for the safety of Mâcon, where they had previously been encamped and where fortifications were quickly constructed along the Saône River. Murat, however, had no intention of repeating the mistakes of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Rather than attacking the fortified position directly, he instead surrounded the town in the dead of night and conducted a small, seemingly inept attack from the north. Once this false attack “broke” and Condé pursued, thinking he had the opportunity to smash the Republican army and march on Paris himself, Murat unleashed the bulk of his force from the south. In the dead of night, fifteen thousand men swept into the town and its fortifications with only minimal resistance. Surrounded and with their supplies having been seized, the Royalist army capitulated after three more days of intense fighting, and the road to Lyon was open.
So began one of the most famous military careers in European history.
After Mâcon
Murat’s brilliant victory at Mâcon was a vital one for the long-term survival of the Republic. Had Murat been defeated, it is quite possible that Condé would have marched directly on Paris, and there would have been little to stop him from reaching the city. At best, a second, bloodier battle of Paris would have broken out. At worst it would have ended democracy in France. Although for several reasons Lyon is the more celebrated victory in France these days, as we will soon see, Mâcon is generally considered the greater military achievement. With a single, brilliantly executed night attack, he likely ensured the safety of the Republic at least until the formal declaration of war by the First Coalition a year later.
It had, however, come at a tremendous cost. Roughly a fifth of Murat’s army — at least three thousand men — had become casualties, mostly due to repeated and costly frontal assaults on the surrounded but entrenched royalist army in the final stages of the battle. Whilst the royalist army fared even worse in the final accounting, Murat was in no doubt that his army was in no shape to march anywhere, let alone take a large city by force. For that, the Army of the Rhône would need to recuperate and grow far beyond its original size. It is likely that the experience of this battle and the subsequent Battle of Lyon, wherein victory came only at a staggering cost in lives, heavily shaped Murat’s subsequent views of how modern warfare worked. Coming to the same realizations as General Kim had in America 15 years earlier, Murat would write that “to leave a man exposed to enemy musket and cannon on the modern battlefield is to condemn him to death”, and would become one of the most proficient and capable generals in Kimian trench-and-flank doctrine throughout the First Coalition War.
For now, though, with the Sâone secured and the road to Paris blocked, Murat decided to encamp at Mâcon to rest, recover, and reinforce. Hearing news of a great victory achieved over the royalists, men from all over northern France converged on Mâcon to enlist under Murat’s banner, and over the following month Murat’s army recovered all its former strength and beyond. It would not be until early April, however, that the Army of the Rhône was of sufficient strength to finally march on Lyon.
For his part, Condé had managed to escape the carnage at Mâcon by boat down the Sâone, arriving in Lyon several days later. According to the diary of his aide-de-camp, it took well over a week for the shock of the defeat to wear off. Once it did, however, he resolved that the road to Lyon and then the city itself would cost the Republicans as much blood as was humanly possible; he was determined to do to Murat what the Parisians had done to Artois, to whom he was related by blood. Both sides thus spent March and early April making preparations for the battle to come.
The Battle of Lyon
Other victories soon followed Mâcon in early March for the re-energized Republican armies. The royalist Army that had beaten two Republican armies on the way to Bordeaux was beaten back from the outer districts of the city and pushed back to Marmande. A second attack on Clermont-Ferrand by the Marquis de Bouillé, hoping to relieve Lyon by outflanking Murat’s army from the west, was repulsed by the National Guard. The seemingly inexorable northward advance of the royalist armies was decisively halted in the four weeks between mid-February and mid-March. Lyon would mark the beginning of their retreat.
On April the 7th, the Army of the Rhône decamped from Mâcon and began the march south. It had swelled enormously in the previous weeks; it had numbered roughly fifteen thousand fit and battle-ready soldiers after the Battle of Mâcon; it now had over thirty thousand. Men — and, as would soon be discovered, several hundred women — had come from all over the Republic to join the Army. Despite the obvious irregularities, Murat welcomed all with open arms and a blind eye; with such an acute manpower shortage nationwide, beggars could not be choosers and he knew he would need every warm body and every gun he could get his hands on if he was going to take Lyon. He had been thoroughly disabused of the notion of an easy victory by the cost of such a victory at Mâcon.
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Condé had not been idle either. Having been soundly beaten twice in the field by Murat, he was not about to make the same mistake a third time. A largely new army of twenty thousand, a mixture of levied troops from Provence and Languedoc, genuine royalists, and mercenaries funded by Austria now garrisoned the city, and he had every intention of making it as unpleasant for Murat as Lafayette had made Paris for Artois. All manner of defensive fortifications and traps were built, especially around the confluence of the Rhône and Sâone rivers. Heavily outnumbered, Condé knew that he could not feasibly defend the right bank of the Sâone and probably not even the Rhône, but he intended to make the Rhône itself a virtually impassable barrier, using his substantial advantage in cannon to make the narrow bridges across the Rhône a killing zone. He very nearly did so.
Whilst there were some small blocking engagements carried out to slow Murat north of the city, by and large, the Army of the Rhône reached the outskirts of the city unmolested on the 14th. From there, it took a week for the defensive fortifications surrounding the city to be methodically destroyed by cannon and for the west city to be surrounded. Then the real fighting began.
The Battle of Lyon was a long, drawn-out and truly bloody affair, far too complex for concise description here. Many books have been dedicated simply to this battle alone. However, suffice it to say that over the course of the remainder of April and into early May, Condé’s men were slowly pushed by brutal street fighting out of the western half of the city and across the Rhône. A mass uprising of the residents instigated by Republican agents on the 27th of April helped speed this process along, but Condé was able to put down the rebellion in the eastern half of the city by the 2nd of May.
By the 10th of May, however, the situation had stabilized, with Murat’s forces holding the right bank of the Rhône and Condé the left. This suited Condé just fine; he was perfectly willing to hold his half of the city and effectively deny its use to the Republic. In doing so he would ensure the security of the lower Rhône valley and the approaches to Marseille, and he would steadily whittle down the Republican Army by sheer attrition. Indeed, desertion rates throughout early May rose precipitously in Murat’s army as many of the peasants and craftsmen who had swelled his ranks throughout March decided that vicious urban warfare was not what they had signed up for.
Murat, therefore, decided that he had to try something more unorthodox.
Breaking the stalemate
In early May, while the Army took a much-needed opportunity to rebuild ammunition supplies, small detachments of men secretly crossed the Rhône in the dead of night and entered the sewers below the eastern city. Their goal was simple: place as much gunpowder as they could in the cellars and basements of the buildings on the left bank. On the 26th of May, all was ready, and at 7 o’clock in the morning, six massive explosions ripped through eastern Lyon. Several hundred royalist soldiers were killed instantly, with many more wounded.
The result was pandemonium. Many in the royalist army thought the Republicans had crossed the river and were attacking them from behind and ran; many were too stunned to even do that, suffering from what later historians would describe as the first recorded instances of shellshock. Amidst the chaos, smoke, and fire, Murat sounded the charge across the now-unguarded bridges across the Rhône. The battle, he thought, was turning in his favor.
Condé, however, had other ideas. Having faced Murat on and off for over three months now, he knew his enemy well, and he was fully aware that Murat was likely to try some trick to try and dislodge him from his defensive positions. He was as shocked as any when he saw those defensive positions blown to smithereens, but he had already prepared an answer: a reserve of two thousand of his best men and, more importantly, thirty cannon, kept secret and safe about half a mile from the river. He ordered them deployed to the bridgeheads immediately.
Within minutes, the Republican battalions that had crossed the Rhône ran headlong into a wall of steel from the royalist reserve. Cut down by terrifyingly accurate musket and grapeshot, they broke and ran back across the very same bridges they had crossed just fifteen minutes beforehand. Murat was able to rally his men and stabilize before the retreat could turn into the rout that Condé had been hoping for, but the left bank of the Rhône was soon back in Royalist's hands. Many of the royalist soldiers who had run or been shellshocked recovered either their nerve or their wits and returned to their posts at the east bank of the Rhône, now with several large, smoldering craters and piles of rubble as cover. A huge firefight at close range now broke along the entire riverbank, the uneasy quiet that had prevailed for the last fortnight has been well and truly shattered. However, the royalists still had the decisive advantage in cannon, and for a time it seemed like they would prevail.
At the La Mulatière Bridge near the confluence of the Rhône and Saone, the royalists had gained the upper hand. Liberal use of grapeshot from their cannon had driven off or killed many of the Republican defenders, and the last battalion defending the west end of the bridge was on the verge of breaking. However, the royalists too had taken grievous casualties and had likely not fully recovered from the psychological shock of the explosions, and when a lucky shot killed the artillery commander at the scene, the artillery company broke and ran. The intensity of grapeshot aimed at the Republicans across the bridge died down at once.
That in itself may not have been decisive, however, for the remaining Republicans were still heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Yet it was, for one soldier on the Republican side chose that moment to enter the historical stage. That soldier was a 22-year-old woman who was determined to prove that women too had their place in the Revolution, and was equally determined to do so in the most dramatic fashion possible. She was one of the several hundred who had surreptitiously joined Murat’s army, and she would not leave the historical stage for many years yet. French Republican propaganda would call her “l’ange de l’égalité”: the Angel of Equality. Her real name was Charlotte Corday.
L’Ange de l’Égalité
Charlotte Corday was, in many ways, an unlikely revolutionary hero. Born Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont in July 1768, she was the daughter of nobles from Caen. Her mother and older sister had died when she was still a child and her father, consumed by grief, sent young Marie-Anne and her surviving younger sister to an abbey. There, she immersed herself in the abbey library where she was exposed and transfixed by, the greats of Enlightenment-era political literature: Voltaire, Rousseau, even Plutarch. Rendered independent, hard-headed, and intelligent by the necessities of her childhood, d'Armont took to her learning with a single-minded intensity that she would later devote to far more dangerous practices than mere reading. When the Revolution broke out in 1789 she became a keen supporter and was eager to see the principles of liberty and reason applied to her country, which she loved dearly. Like many in France, d'Armont idolized Lafayette, both for his (exaggerated) military exploits during the American Revolution and now the sweeping democratic reforms he was pushing through the Assembly. However, she was by no means a radical and admitted later that she even supported a constitutional monarchy. That is, until word reached Caen of the Purge of Marseille.
Horrified and revulsed that a King would be so merciless to his “own” people, and convinced now that saving France meant saving the Republic, d'Armont renounced any royalist sympathies and now went only by the commoner name Charlotte Corday. She packed up her belongings and a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, left the abbey, and made her way to Paris. Once there, Corday bought a small apartment and began attending Girondin meetings at Madame Roland’s salon. She had been deeply impressed by arguments from the Girondin newspaper Le Républicain as well as speeches by the leaders of local Girondin groups in Caen, and wanted to find out more in person. Upon arrival in Paris, she became a full-throated convert to Girondin “muscular republicanism”. A true believer in the twin Girondin pillars of revolutionary militarism and the Constitution of 1790, she was enraptured by the arguments of Brissot and the Rolands. Equally, she was disturbed by the radical maximalism of Robespierre and the Montagnards, believing them the flipside of royal tyranny. Corday held a particular dislike for Jean-Paul Marat, believing him a demagogue who would destroy the Republic from within if given free rein.
There was, however, one small problem: she was also one of the first of the French revolutionary feminists, believing that women were not just the equal of men politically but militarily too. Women, she argued in the salons, had been the ones to march on Versailles in October 1789. Women — in very small numbers, granted, and in no organized capacity — had fought with valor in the Battle of Paris, and they had been purged along with the men in Marseille. It was only right, therefore, that they are given the full spectrum of political rights guaranteed them in the Constitution of 1790 — including the right to die for their country in battle if they so wished. Whilst she generally impressed with her sharp, witty oratory, and even had some sympathy for her actual arguments from the leaders of the Society of 1789, particularly Brissot and Condorcet, by and large, the Girondins were far more interested in stabilizing what already was rather than rocking the boat further with something so radical as gender equality. And even this was restricted to her arguments for political equality — at this stage, virtually no respectable politician outside of the most extreme Montagnards would publicly countenance allowing women into the National Guard.
However, upon hearing that Murat was recruiting anyone with a pulse to the Army of the Rhône, she found an opportunity to prove her point in the most unmistakable way possible. She packed her bags once again and headed to Mâcon. Once there, she found that the rumors about Murat’s lax recruitment policy were true, and she joined the National Guard as Charles Corday, private in the 1st Norman Battalion of the Army of the Rhône. From all reports, many noticed that she was, in fact, a woman, but there were hundreds of those in the army now and everyone had more important things to do than worry about that, especially once the fighting began. She was otherwise largely anonymous to history until this critical moment in the heart of Lyon when the royalist artillery on the east bank of the Rhône fled.
Corday’s charge
Noticing that the booming of cannon had ceased from across the bridge, and perplexed that her more “manly” comrades were doing exactly nothing in reply, she found a blood-stained tricolor flag that had fallen when its owner had been cut to ribbons by grapeshot. With a primal — and unmistakably feminine — scream of “Vive la révolution! Vive la France!”, she took the flag and charged across the bridge. The remnants of the battalion, shocked that a woman — no, a girl — was showing up their courage, followed across with battle yells of their own. It was, by any objective analysis, a suicidal charge at a superior enemy across a narrow bridge. However, the royalist defenders, shaken by the loss of their artillery, saw the Republicans changing them head-on and presumed that their enemies opposite had been reinforced somehow. Rather than chopping Corday’s charge down, they wavered, their wild, panicked shots missing all their targets. When they were set upon with bayonet and knife, they fled.
The effect on the royalist fortunes was immediate and ruinous. Seeing their comrades flee and seeing Corday’s tricolor flying over the west bank, the soldiers manning the bridge adjacent also broke and fled. Although Condé managed to contain any further panic, and a single breakthrough may have been enough for Condé’s depleted and battered army to contain, two was fatal. By noon, Murat had six thousand men firmly in place across the Rhône and the result of the battle was sealed. It would take several more days to fully clear out the royalist army from the city, but by the end of the month, the blood-stained Republican flag — the Corday tricolor, as it was soon universally known — was flying uncontested over Lyon’s town hall. A standardized version, consisting of a dark-red diagonal slash over the original Republican tricolor, was soon adopted as the popular symbol of the National Guard and of Murat’s army. As a testament to the importance of this battle to the people of the city, this standardized Corday tricolor still flies over the city hall by official decree today.
Lyon had been, by far, the most bloody battle of the war. In six weeks of largely unrelenting street fighting at close ranges, Murat’s army had suffered over seven thousand casualties, Condé’s had suffered over five thousand and upwards of six thousand citizens of Lyon had been killed, mostly inadvertently in the crossfire or in the uprising of April 27. The city, famous for its silk artisans and a center of both manufacturing and banking, would take many years to recover from the death and destruction inflicted upon it during April and May 1791. Despite this, the citizens of Lyon took immense pride in the years to come for their part in the battle and the central place the battle held in the narrative of the broader war. Lyon would immediately join Paris in the pantheon of the most famous battles of the French Civil War and indeed the First Coalition War. It made Murat’s reputation as the finest general in the Republic — even if, militarily, Mâcon was the far more impressive achievement.
For all that, however, Lyon is not just a famous battle in France, but a renowned battle the world over a simple reason: it would not be the last the world heard of Charlotte Corday…
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[1] Corday is one of the most mythologized figures of the Revolution relative to how much we actually know about her life; she has been depicted and propagandized and adapted in any number of ways. What is clear though is that this was a young lady who was clearly intelligent (the little tidbit about Parallel Lives is from OTL, and even her would-be executioners remarked on her intellect), absolutely single-minded, highly patriotic, overtly and consciously feminist and with no fear of physical death at all if it meant saving France and advancing her feminist Girondin ideals. As such I think her actions in sneaking into the National Guard and seizing her Moment during the battle are relatively plausible.