Excerpt from “Arise, Children of the Fatherland!: The First Coalition War”

The Republican Army in 1792

The news that women would now be openly fighting on the Republican side stunned and horrified the Royalist commanders. Women had always fought around the edges and in disguise in war, of course, but that was one thing, endorsing it was quite another. Many had heard the rumors that had come from Lyon but all had dismissed them as fanciful. Then the word of Lafayette’s order of 9 December reached Marseille, and the reaction was unanimous revulsion. “Not content with corrupting the people,” Artois remarked with despair, “Motier now defiles our women as well!”. That the women of the National Guard were all there entirely of their own volition presumably did not occur to the King’s brother.

The general attitude and zeal of these women is summed up best by the mottos inscribed on the flags of the scattering of all-female battalions raised through 1792 and 1793: “in France, all are equal to defeat tyranny”, “free women”, “live free or die” and, most famously, “the Republic or death” [1]. Some cut their hair short to avoid wasting time that would otherwise be spent fighting, others emulating Corday chose to keep their femininity on full display. All wore the tricolor cockade on their bosom. Their elected officers were hard taskmasters, demanding abnormally high standards of discipline and marksmanship from them. Failure was abhorred, cowardice a moral sin, lest the women of France disgrace themselves in battle. Far from being a token or an ornament, these battalions would become of the most distinguished available to French generals once they deigned to actually use them.

On the flip side, although they remained a small minority the addition of thousands of women added further complications to the National Guard’s already-severe discipline issues. It soon became clear that the rank-and-file men did not react well to losses amongst their female brethren, and loss of morale or further costly “vengeance” attacks would often result. It should be noted, however, that their enemies often suffered the same problem; many a Coalition officer would write with despair at the “lack of fighting spirit” when his men learned that the company they had just routed had been full of women. Moreover, the sight of an all-female battalion obstinately holding the line whilst their male colleagues wavered was often enough to shame their male comrades-in-arms into showing similar fortitude.

Nevertheless, the problem of poor discipline and recklessness persisted. If the Republican armies wanted to become a truly effective fighting force capable of standing up to the armies of Europe, standards needed to improve. Leaning heavily on the organizational brilliance of the mathematician Lazare Carnot, over the first half of 1792 the French army was overhauled. This was not easy, and on more than one occasion small sub-units went into outright mutiny, but Lafayette ensured the senior officers were understanding as the new rules were bedded in. Officers continued to be elected, of course, but the process of officer election was standardized, time requirements placed for eligibility, and the common practice of battlefield promotion ‘by acclamation’ greatly curtailed. Moreover, the structure of the Army was overhauled: no longer would there be two entirely distinct institutions — the professional Army and the all-volunteer National Guard — serving alongside each other but not under the same banner, as Lafayette merged these two institutions into a new Republican Army. The National Guard would now become the main rank-and-file of the French armies, while the professionals were now subsumed into the Republican Army as the Revolutionary Guard.

The Liège Revolution

The reorganized Republican Army would soon be put to its most challenging test. On January 5th, the so-called Liège Revolution began, whereby a large mob in the city of Liège in the Austrian Netherlands stormed the town hall, seizing it and proclaiming the “First Republic of Liège”. Over January sporadic fighting in and around the city would see the Prince-Bishop flee and the Liège republicans declare victory. A delegation from the city arrived in Paris on the 22nd and presented their credentials to Lafayette along with a request for a declaration of friendship from a fellow Republic. President Lafayette, well-aware of the potential consequences but also not seeing a reasonable alternative, agreed, with the stipulation that the declaration not be made public for the time being.

Unfortunately, if Lafayette’s intentions were to avoid provoking the Austrians, then he may as well not have bothered with the stipulation. On March 1st, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II died after a reign of just two years. A shrewd monarch of the “enlightened despot” mold, he was genuinely interested in many of the social reforms coming out of France when he came to power in 1790, believing firmly that some measure of modernization and reform was vital to ensure the long-term stability of the Habsburg empire. He had permitted thousands of men to travel to Marseille to fight as “mercenaries” under the Royalist banner at the urging of his sister Queen Marie Antoinette, but for various reasons, he had no intention of declaring war on the Republic unless it moved first, and Lafayette ensured that France did not.

The new Habsburg Emperor, Francis II, had a quite different attitude to the Republic. Whereas Leopold II had treated the emigrés as an annoyance at best and thought Artois a pompous fool, Francis II essentially agreed with Artois on the Republic. He was particularly incensed by the events in Liège and felt that if not contained then republicanism would become a wildfire that swept through all of Europe. He immediately declared the Liège Republic Geächtete [2] and began preparations to invade Liège and reinstall the Prince-Bishop. On May 1st Austrian troops marched into the territory of the Republic of Liège to retake the city.

As chance would have it, a brigade of the French Republican Army from Metz had just arrived in Liège by request of the increasingly nervous government. Metz was one of the most enthusiastically pro-radical cities in all of France, having long embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment in totality. Robespierre had made his name there as a young lawyer by writing a stirring essay on the evils of capital punishment. It had also been one of the cities in France that had wholeheartedly embraced the enlistment and election of women in the National Guard. Thus, Lafayette chose a newly-raised brigade that was at least one-fifth female to trumpet the latest great social advance of the Revolution to France’s new ally. In particular, a mixed-gender troop of dragoons had elected one particularly pugilistic female officer, a Lt. Alicia de Villepin.

Upon seeing an advance company of Austrians marching up to the gate, de Villepin, a humorless terror of a woman, rode to the gate and demanded that they explain their purpose and, if not there on the request of the Republican government, leave immediately. At this, the commanding Austrian officer, presumably thinking her a jumped-up townswoman, did probably the worst thing he could have done: he laughed at her. It is difficult to be sure what exactly happened next. The most eye-catching claim is that de Villepin pulled out a pistol and shot the insolent Austrian colonel dead on the spot. Others say that the rank-and-file dragoons, outraged by the disrespect given by the Austrian pig to their commander opened fire and killed him. Either way, a small pitched battle was soon underway at the city gate. Outnumbered, the small Austrian force was forced to retreat. Casualties were not high on either side, amounting to a few dozen spread across both sides including de Villepin who suffered a broken arm, and with a much larger Austrian force mere hours away the French brigade was forced to withdraw regardless. With this small action, the French Civil War was now the First Coalition War.

The news hit Paris a week later like a bomb. The Assembly descended into pandemonium when they learned that French blood had been spilled by the hated Austrians — not on French soil, granted, but on Republican soil, which was close enough. A draft declaration of war was immediately drawn up by the Girondins, and all other business adjourned until it could be passed. When the Liège government-in-exile and the Metz regiment reached Paris, they were treated to an impromptu parade by the cheering Paris crowds, with de Villepin and her broken arm being a particular talk of the town.

Lafayette had not wanted the coming war. He had intervened decisively against one in October 1790, he had done so again after the Declaration of Pillnitz. Now, however, he could see that the war he had so dreaded was inevitable. His diaries would later reveal that he had already come to this conclusion before Liège had even fallen. On the 18th of March, he had written: “Grim tidings from Vienna. Leopold is dead, Francis is King of the Romans now. I fear that he will move to make war on Liège and on France as soon as he can. Prussia and Spain will most certainly join him. I must act quickly to ensure that Great Britain does not. France faces its greatest test.”

With the general European war now clearly inevitable after the confrontation in Liège, President Lafayette thus made his move. His first meeting was with the American Ambassador, John Laurens. Laurens was not in a position to offer military aid or alliance, and in any case, Lafayette seems not to have sought either, but he quickly secured continued financial and non-military assistance from the United States. Lafayette was thus able to focus on continuing the expansion of France’s fledgling war industry. His second meeting was with the British Ambassador. It was there that Lafayette secured what he craved above all, even more than American support: British neutrality.

Anticipating many of the same arguments the British diplomatic corps would soon be using to explain perfidious Albion’s decision to irate European monarchs, Lafayette pointed out that, with Spain and France locked in bitter war and the Netherlands nervously watching its back, Britain would have a largely free hand to do as it pleased in the colonial sphere — if she stayed out of the war. The Ambassador promised to convey Lafayette’s arguments to the British Cabinet — but informally, he also told Lafayette that Cabinet had already informally decided on neutrality, for “We have only recently extricated ourselves from one tangle with a Republic. We have no intention of finding ourselves in another.”.

The European monarchs were indeed furious with this decision. Without the backing of the powerful Royal Navy, they could not possibly hope to blockade France and prevent trade with America, particularly as said trade was largely happening on American-flagged ships. France could therefore not be strangled into submission, it would have to be ground down in the field of battle, slowly and painfully. Nevertheless, Francis proceeded with his plan, and in Vienna on June 29th, Francis along with envoys from Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, and several Italian states under Habsburg dominion signed the Declaration of the First Coalition. Lafayette was now fighting the war against Europe that he had so wished to avoid.

Strasbourg

By mid-July, all was ready for the Coalition attack. A force of over forty thousand, consisting of twenty-five thousand Prussians, fifteen thousand Austrians, and a smattering of Italians assembled near Frankfurt. On the 18th of August, the Coalition Army crossed the French border. The plan was straightforward: defeat the Republican army massing near Strasbourg then march on Paris and end the upstart Republic. The army was led by the Duke of Brunswick, and he was so confident of victory that he even made an inflammatory proclamation threatening the National Assembly with “exemplary” punishment if they did not surrender. This proclamation stirred up great unrest in Paris, as many interpreted it to mean that royalist plotters were planning a coup.

Lafayette, however, had no intention of surrendering. All year he had been making preparations for the coming attack by the Austrians. Indeed, when Murat and Jourdan had begged Lafayette for reinforcements so they could continue their offensives, Lafayette had refused, instead focussing on his army reforms and building up reserves. Now that the moment of truth had arrived, he recalled Murat from the Rhône and gave him one job: protect Paris at all costs. To do so Murat had been given he had the finest army the Republic had yet assembled: five brigades totaling over twenty thousand men and women, a mixture of battle-tested battalions, fanatically devoted and comparatively well-trained newcomers, and elite Revolutionary Guard cavalry. Some of the greatest French generals of the First and Second Coalition Wars — Kléber, Dessaix, Marceau, Augureau, and Masséna — would cut their teeth as chefs de brigade in the battle to come.

About 20 miles north of Strasbourg, Murat had chosen his battlefield. Picking a site where the gap of open country between the Rhine River and the thick forest was at its narrowest, he had dug multiple lines of mutually supporting trenches with overlapping fields of fire, makeshift earth ramparts and barricades to slow enemy progress and channel enemy soldiers into pre-arranged killing zones covered by artillery. It was a veritable fortress, although one mostly hidden from view, and the only task now was to dangle the final bait.

That bait would be one brigade of infantry under the manifestly brilliant and tenacious shopkeeper’s son, André Masséna. This brigade would in fact contain the 1st Norman Battalion, whose chef de battalion was now none other than the Angel of Equality herself, Charlotte Corday. On the morning of August 20, against the backdrop of the rising sun, six thousand men rose out of their trenches and towards the assembled Coalition Army. Spreading out to create the illusion of a larger force, they followed their orders to the letter and attacked head-on, with predictably ugly results. Of the five thousand who made the charge, over fifteen hundred became casualties of battle. Corday herself was one, having been hit in the shoulder and then bodily carried to the field hospital by her adjutant who had personal orders from Murat to “not let Cmdt. Corday get herself shot to pieces trying another ridiculous stunt”, so worried he was about losing one of his bravest and best officers. And yet for all that, the attack was a complete success.

Many have remarked on just how unprepared Brunswick was for the tactics used by the enemy that day. How, historians have wondered, had he completely missed the revolutionary shift in military doctrine brought about by Kim, and then given life in Europe by Murat and Jourdan? A Prussian delegation led by Baron von Steuben (of von Stueben vs. New York fame) had even visited Bermuda years before and observed first-hand the power of the new tactics. The answer is simple: like many Prussian and Austrian nobles, he considered America beneath his notice and the Revolutionary War an irrelevant colonial squabble. That the Republicans had done so well in 1791 was just confirmation of the low opinion these nobles held of King Louis and Artois as military men. Also, failed attacks that quickly turned into full-on routs of the Republican Army had been a hallmark of the first year of the French Civil War. Brunswick had simply assumed the same would happen again.

It did not. Instead, Brunswick chased after the “fleeing” Republicans and blundered straight into Murat’s killing zones. The Coalition soldiers were channeled by the cleverly disguised ramparts into the artillery’s field of fire, and barriers slowed their progress whilst the well-protected French infantry cut them down. They did manage to take the first line of trenches but the French simply fell back to the second line, protected by comrades behind them. Saint-Just would write that this was less a battle than “the ruthless new philosophy of industry applied to battlefield slaughter” — prescient words given what would follow in the Second Coalition War and especially the Anglo-American War. With the trap sprung, Murat slammed the steel jaws shut. His Revolutionary Guard cavalry had driven off their opposing numbers on the flanks, and in a maneuver reminiscent of Cannae he surrounded the benighted Coalition army.

That was the last straw for the Italians. Seeing calvary behind them, dead comrades all around them, and pinned in place, they threw down their arms and surrendered. As it often did, the stench of defeat spread like wildfire through the army. The Austrians wavered, then unit-by-unit also surrendered or ran, effectively halving the size of the Coalition army. The Prussians held out the longest, but by day’s end, Brunswick was in full flight, having lost well over half his army dead, wounded, or captured. Murat’s army had also suffered from a thousand dead and many more wounded, the largest portion of whom had taken part in Massena’s charge. But there was no mistaking it: the French Republican army had won and won fairly easily, having never been seriously challenged in the second line or forced to retreat to the third and final line of trenches. The Coalition army, on the other hand, had been shattered numerically and psychologically by the battle, and would not be able to conduct serious offensives on northern France for a full year.

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Brunswick was in shock. How exactly had he lost, and lost so badly, to a filthy mob that included women? To his dying day, he never truly processed what happened at Strasbourg, blaming spies, bad weather, dirty tricks, the cowardice of the Austrian and Italian soldier compared to the Prussian, and even the unwillingness of his men to fight against women for the outcome of the battle. In truth, he had been decisively outwitted by a vastly superior commander fielding a smaller but far more committed army.

Strasbourg immediately became known as Murat’s masterpiece. With the threat to the north secured, Lafayette allowed Murat and a contingent of his soldiers to parade through Paris. Over three hundred men and a tiny handful of women were publicly presented with the newly established legion d’honneur before cheering crowds. For her part, a recuperating Corday had been one of those recipients, and she was delighted that she was not the only woman to have been so. The other three were a corporal who had led a detachment to retrieve four wounded men from the first trench, a private who had saved a commandant’s life by bayonet-charging a Prussian soldier who had bested him in hand-to-hand combat, and the lieutenant who had saved Corday’s life was the third.

On top of her adjutant’s heroics, Corday was fortunate indeed to have been on the Republican side of the battle, for her wound would doubtless have been a mortal one without the great advances in battlefield medicine imported from America. Following the shocking casualty rates at Lyon, President Lafayette, undoubtedly drawing from his personal observations in America, had invited dozens of Quebecois doctors to France to help institute a wide-ranging program of importing best American medical practice into the Republican National Guard and Army. The introduction of battlefield ambulances, field hospitals, much-improved hygiene practices and even an early version of saline intrusion likely saved many hundreds of lives at Strasbourg and elsewhere. With such practices — and everyone made an extra effort to save the Angel of Equality — Corday was soon on the slow path to recovery, and even retained all her limbs.

But her time as a soldier was at a close for now. She struggled to hold a musket properly for at least a year and her wound would cause her great discomfort for the rest of her life, though needless to say she wore it with great pride. Besides, her true calling was in the political sphere, and it was there that she now devoted all her energies until her recall to the Army in 1794. In a way, it was a blessing, for it allowed her to return to her true passion: fighting for political equality for women, and beyond that left-Girondist republicanism. This time, she was given no cold shoulder in the Society of 1789. Instead, she was treated to a standing ovation upon her arrival and immediately elected to the Coordinating Committee, although she and Madame Roland would never see eye to eye, and neither would trust the other.

Excerpt from "Founders of Two Republics: Lafayette and Danton, 1789 — 1806"

The Decrees of 26 September

Despite the stunning victory at Strasbourg, the atmosphere in Paris becoming increasingly fractious in the spring of 1792. The Spanish had invaded at both ends of the Pyrenees, and Jourdan’s sole army was now faced with the prospect of fighting off three separate Coalition armies. Sensing the danger of encirclement, Jourdan abandoned Toulouse and conducted a fighting retreat all the way back to Bordeaux, only narrowly avoiding being cut off by the Spanish on two separate occasions. A new Army of Auvergne under Augureau reinforced Jourdan and stabilized the situation, but nonetheless the Republic was now firmly on the defensive in the south.

It was in this environment that the Montagnards began to rapidly gain political momentum. France was standing at the precipice, they argued, now was the time to ditch all half-measures and all unnecessary scruples. Demands to fill the entire Montagnard program were constant: full nationalization of church property to fund the war, universal conscription — which now included women — unless involved in work crucial to the overall war effort, and the permanent banning of all “counterrevolutionary” displays of social distinction such as nobility or non-military rank or station and, most disturbingly, the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal to dispense “revolutionary justice” to “enemies of the Republic”. The most direct challenge to Lafayette came in the form of a series of proposals that sought to devolve power from the “monarchical” Presidency and place them back in the hands of the Assembly.

It truly seemed like the Montagnards were about to sweep all opposition away. On 15 September, an emboldened Robespierre gace a highly controversial speech which included, following a long denouncement of the Girondin ministry, the famous line outlining his vision for the Montagnard government that seemed increasingly inevitable:

“Weakness is the road to monarchy, and incompetence the path to tyranny. The driving force of the revolutionary government must be both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is deadly, terror without which virtue is impotent. What is terror, applied to the enemies of the Republic, but an emanation of justice? It thus must be terror, less a distinct principle than a general consequence of democracy, that must also be applied to the questions facing our nation.”

This speech was delivered with none other than Jacques-Pierre Brissot sitting directly opposite, and it was abundantly clear what Robespierre’s point was: Brissot’s leadership of the Assembly had been so weak and ineffectual it amounted to treason. Having agitated like no other for this war, Brissot had no clear plan for its conduct and had failed to capitalise on the opportunity given by Strasbourg. Whereas this speech would have been drowned out with jeering a year before, now the Plain hung off Robespierre’s every word and the Gironde could only sit in stony silence. He even received a standing ovation afterward. It seemed that Robespierre, not Lafayette and certainly not Brissot, would be running France soon.

Alas, Robespierre, in his hatred of Brissot, well-founded though it might have been, had finally gone too far. For it was then that Lafayette decided that enough was enough and the Mountain needed to be brought to heel.

Lafayette had one huge trump card in his pocket: he was still widely popular with every part of the public. Even the radical sections of Paris and the National Guard who despised Brissot, Condorcet, and all the other moderate nobles who dominated the bulk of the Gironde adored Lafayette as “one of their own”. He had deliberately steered the First Assembly to adopt aggressive democratic reform, he had led men into battle, he had personally declared the two great "Equalisation Orders" for the poor and for women — soon to be three, once slaves and people of color [3] were counted. There were some grumbling and suspicion about how close Lafayette was to the Gironde in the more radical battalions of the National Guard, but by and large, they forgave him that one oversight. If he led, they would follow.

On the 25th of September, some much-needed good news reached Paris: Valence had been liberated. Lyon really now was truly secure from attack, and hopes were even raised that Kléber would be able to march on Marseille and end the war. This was, of course, not remotely possible — the arrival of a large Italian army prevented any further progress — but the brief hope it created gave Lafayette the political space he required. The very next day, Lafayette personally introduced a famous set of bills known as the Decrees of 26 September.

These were stunning in their scope. Firstly, women were granted the right to vote, albeit in a very restricted manner. Corday, hearing from her astonished friend Méricourt, is said to have walked down to the National Assembly to see with her own eyes whether it was real or not. Slavery was abolished in all forms and in all French territory. Property belonging to those nobles who had become emigres or fled for Marseille in 1789 was regarded as forfeited forever; the decrees stipulated how the properties would be eventually divided amongst the local peasantry and communes. Bowing to military reality, the decrees even called for a small measure of conscription by lottery. It seemed an overwhelming Montagnard political victory.

And it may have been, had it not been for the content of the remainder of the decrees, for they were a complete and total repudiation of the rest of the Montagnard philosophy of radical maximalism. The property of the church was clarified as explicitly protected by Article XVI of the Constitution of 1790. A wide variety of exemptions for religion and conscience were permitted for the conscription lotteries; the Mountain believed such exemptions “creeping royalism and aristocracy”. Most stunning of all, “inciting terror” and “deliberately turning citizen against citizen” were explicitly listed as unprotected by Article X of the constitution and thus legitimately punishable by law.

No one had any illusions about the true target of Lafayette’s decrees. With a single stroke, Lafayette had flanked the Montagnards from both left and right; he had drained their political program of its urgency and rendered their governing philosophy de facto unconstitutional. The message was clear: I have given you most of what you wanted, now get back in line or face the consequences. For many in the Mountain — led, as we will soon see, by the Cordeliers Club and Georges Danton — the correct reply was simple: declare victory and do as told.

The Montagnard coup

But, fatefully, Robespierre did not get in line. Instead, at emergency meetings of the Jacobin Club’s executive council on the 26th and 27th, he and the other Montagnard leaders called for the tocsin bells to sound at noon on the 28th and have the National Guard march on the Assembly and force the withdrawal of the anti-Montagnard decrees. It was, in effect, the calling of a second Revolution, one against Lafayette himself. No one was under any illusions as to what a successful push to withdrawal the decrees would mean: Lafayette would effectively have lost the confidence of the Assembly, which under the Constitution of 1790 would render him little more than a figurehead. The executive committee of the Jacobin Club, backed by the most radical battalions of the National Guard, would be the true executive body of France.

There were two people who had comparable popularity in Paris to Lafayette and could thus feasibly turn the National Guard against Lafayette. One was Charlotte Corday, and she was not about to facilitate a coup on behalf of the Jacobin Club. The other was Georges Danton, who everyone believed had the Paris garrison of the National Guard in his back pocket since 1789 through this control of the Cordeliers Club, of which more than half the officers of the Parisian National Guard were members. He even had de facto control over the Paris Commune, which since 1790 had been the real governing body of the city.

Danton was present at both meetings of the Jacobin Club. He was on the executive council of the Jacobin Club and the unquestioned leader of the Cordeliers Club; on paper, at least, he was an enthusiastic and committed radical Montagnard and would wholeheartedly support such a coup. This was especially so as Robespierre had promised him the coveted posts of Minister of Justice and Minister of Information in the new Montagnard ministry. The future and fate of the Republic thus came down to the decision of a single man, Georges Danton.

But he would not make the choice everyone was expecting, and in doing so would permanently shape the course of both the First and Second Republics. To understand why we must go back to 1790.

During the great Gironde-Mountain split of late 1790, Danton had publicly supported the Mountain’s position on the possibility of war, as he firmly believed that war with Europe was both unnecessary and extremely risky. However, he had not been by any stretch the most vociferous contributor to that great debate, being content to make his position well known and not go further beyond that. Privately, however, he despaired. To him, the war was a vital issue, indeed a life-and-death issue for the Republic, but it was not worth tearing the Assembly apart over it. He had counseled Robespierre to tone down his rhetoric, but Robespierre, stubborn and single-minded as ever, had not listened to his advice. The two would never fully connect at a personal level; Robespierre thought Danton venal and of dubious character, Danton for his part thought Robespierre puritanical and severe, the one milk-drinker in a Republic full of taverns. Frustrated, Danton privately reached out to the Girondins to reach an agreement and keep some semblance of unity in the Assembly, but Brissot, feeling he was about to win, had summarily dismissed his overtures with alas all-too-typical arrogance. That was a slight Danton would not forget, and he would come to disdain Brissot almost as much as Robespierre did, but it did not change Danton’s underlying conviction that the loss of unity was a grave development. “We have our Republic,” he liked to say at the Cordeliers Club, “we should come together to enjoy it.”

Danton had already been impressed by Lafayette’s leadership during the Battle of Paris, and his intervention confirmed that he was fundamentally more motivated by the protection of France than political advantage. He still vehemently disagreed with Lafayette politically, but he understood now that the President was irreplaceable as a unifying figure for the Republic. Shortly after, he began a private correspondence with Lafayette, believing that it was important that the President have someone “inside” the radical sections of Paris keeping him in the loop. Lafayette was suspicious at first, but there is no doubt that his adroit refusal of the confrontation with a large mob early 1791 was shaped by knowledge slipped to him by Danton. Before long, Danton became the eyes and ears of Lafayette inside the radical sections. In return, men close to Danton gained influential posts inside the Ministry of Information — whereupon they likely instigated the Liège Revolution, ironically sparking the very war Danton had spoken against.

Nevertheless, cultivating this relationship would pay enormous dividends for Lafayette now in late 1792. Dramatizations often present Danton’s choice as an agonized one but these are entirely products of poetic license; in truth, the choice was easy for Danton. He firmly believed that the greatest disaster France could suffer was a coup against Lafayette, and Robespierre planning one was the final straw for him. Thus, on the 27th of September 1792, Danton slipped word to Lafayette that the coup Lafayette was fully expecting would begin with the ringing of the tocsin bells the following day. The most hardcore radical battalions of the National Guard, those supposedly in Danton’s pocket, would converge on the Assembly and force the withdrawal of the anti-Montagnard decrees and the resignations of the Girondin Ministry. That, at least, was Robespierre’s plan.

It never even got to the starting line. At dawn on the 28th, Robespierre, Barère, Billaud-Varenne, Couthon, and other prominent members of the Jacobin Club were arrested in morning raids by the National Guard. In a bitter twist of fate, some of the battalions called out to escort the Montagnard ringleaders to prison were the very same battalions Robespierre had been relying upon to enforce his coup. He realized the game was up immediately. “Danton! He has betrayed us!” were reportedly the first words from his mouth upon having his door beaten down by the National Guard. The coup had failed before it had even started.

Following the failed coup, the Mountain descended into bitter acrimony but it was not directed at Lafayette, the National Guard, or even the Girondins. No, instead the ire was directed inwards at one Georges Danton. None of the leadership of the Cordeliers Club had been swept up in the arrests, and many guessed correctly that Danton had been the one to slip the details of the coup to Lafayette. Combined with the fact that the Dantonist National Guards had come out decisively against the coup, and the picture for the remaining Jacobins in Paris was crystal clear. Danton, Desmoulins, and d’Eglantine were expelled from the Jacobin Club and physically shunned in the Assembly by the remaining deputies of the Mountain. Shorn of all its leaders, the Mountain would rapidly decline into near-irrelevance in the Assembly, and the Gironde would become more politically dominant than ever. Indeed it would be until the Second Revolution before the Gironde would finally lose its iron grip on French politics.

For Danton’s part, he was now thoroughly sick of politics. Hated as a traitor by many on his own side, cynically instrumentalized by those opposite, and with his beloved National Guard morphing more and more into a traditional — if highly democratic and egalitarian — army than the citizen militia he so adored, he felt that his time was done. He would continue to make contributions from a distinctly radical perspective in the Assembly and was broadly treated as a respected elder statesman, ceaselessly advocating for the welfare of the poorest and most marginalized citizens of the Republic. He chose not to run for re-election in 1793, instead of retreating to a quiet retirement with his family back in northeastern France. His betrayal of Robespierre’s coup was his last contribution of note to the First Republic, and his part in the history of France, everyone felt, was over.

However, they would all be proved very, very wrong…

[1] All lifted from OTL from a petition by Manette Dupont in 1792 lobbying for the creation of, well, this. There was a nice marching song I wanted to include that was written by Manette Dupont but I decided not to, this post was super long as it is. The “Revolutionary (Female) Republicans” organization is lifted from OTL too. A fair few people really did fight very hard and put a lot of effort into trying to make women in the French National Guard a thing in OTL 1792, although the constant references to “Amazons” in the histories are IMO a little unseemly.

[2] “Free as a bird”, meaning in breach of Imperial Law/Imperial Bans and thus subject to military sanction.

[3] Not an anachronism; this has a fairly specific meaning in this time and place (freed slaves and the born-free descendants of slaves).