Excerpt from “The Republic of Virtue: France 1788 – 1834”
The Great French Wall
After the Second Revolution had been essentially completed by the expulsion of Louis from Versailles and France and the Constitution of 1793 officially restored, although now with the removal of direct elections of the President, the summer of 1806 was a challenging one for the re-established French Republic and the newly-minted President Georges Danton. In accordance with the treaties that were supposedly secret but that everyone knew – or assumed – existed, the members of the First Coalition (minus some Italian minors who had drifted away from Habsburg domination since 1796) declared war on France on May 1st, 1796, just as Louis’s entourage reached London. Faced again with the same enemies as ten years previously, the chaos in the immediate post-Revolutionary period meant that France was not able to bring her full weight to bear to the newly-erupting war and, once again, France found herself defending her own soil on multiple fronts.
However the Girondins, despite appearances, had not been idle during the Interbellum. Knowing well that Francis and Frederick William viewed the Treaty of London as more of an enforced truce than a peace treaty, especially if the Republic returned, a great deal of the increased tax revenue had been invested in a program of military modernization. The first of these was a new program of fort-building along the coast and the new French frontiers, which would bear immediate fruit as the Coalition attacked. The other major modernization program was in introducing newly designed small arms to general service, which the Coalition would find a highly unpleasant shock when full combat between French and Coalition armies took place later that year.
But that was yet to come. Through June and July of 1806, the war on the continent mostly consisted of protracted sieges of the great and newly constructed French fortresses along the Rhine and in the Pyrenees. These hugely expensive edifices were the great interwar Girondin contribution to the French defensive strategy, especially in the newly acquired Belgian departments where the country was flat but defensible rivers were common. These were built to the highest standard of Franco-American engineering, great polygonal bastions with large banks of enfiladed high-quality French artillery and requiring only small garrisons that could successfully hold out against far more numerous besiegers for weeks without support.
For the most part, these fortresses worked as advertised, and the Austro-Prussian armies were forced to sit and lay siege to these large fortresses lest they suffered constant bombardment at will by the oversized and expertly handled howitzers positioned within these forts. Contrary to myth, however, the intention of these great forts at Metz, Sedan, Luxembourg, Liége and elsewhere were not to make the new northeastern border of France “an impenetrable wall”, for any fortification is only ever as good as the men and women who are charged with its defense, as well as the timeliness of the relief force when a siege occurs. Indeed this myth was essentially disproved in late July, when the massive new fortress at Strasbourg – built on the site of the great victory of 1792 – was forced to surrender to a massive Coalition army of a hundred and fifty thousand. Nevertheless, the other fortresses held out, especially in the Pyrenees and Alps, until the mobilization of the National Guard had finally been completed in mid-August. Together with the ring of coastal forts that made direct naval invasion seemingly impossible, the myth of the “Great French Wall” would gain great popular currency and impact strategic thinking in places well-removed from France, to the great regret a generation later of those who had bought into it.
The surrender of Strasbourg shocked and dismayed the French public, who had fully bought into the myth of the Great French Wall, even if they gave little credit to those who built it. Luckily for France, the Girondins had been dutiful in their plans, and a second, albeit lesser line, of fortifications along the Meuse and Moselle rivers meant the Austrians and Prussians, who had already spent an alarming amount of their offensive energy in the effort of breaching the first line of fortifications, were unable to push deep into France as they hoped and fully take advantage of their big head-start over the Republican armies. A two-pronged attack on the Nancy-Épinal defensive line ended in failure, and by then Corday finally had the French armies on the march.
This was none to soon, as in August 1806 the war took a critical turn which, whilst not enormously important for the situation on the continent, would have enormous long-term consequences across the world. For on August the 12th, the United Kingdom entered the war in response to the Batavian Revolution, which had erupted the previous month.
The Batavian Revolution
The so-called Batavian or Dutch Revolution is striking in the extent that it mirrors the First French Revolution seventeen years before. The Dutch Stadtholderate, despite having the richest banks in the world and holding an enormous share of global capital, was thus in the grips of deep deficits in 1806. However, in truth, troubles had started decades before. As in France, a middle-class Enlightenment-inspired movement, known as the “Patriots”, grew in opposition to the autocratic, authoritarian rule of the Stadtholder William V. Indeed, in 1787 a Patriot uprising had to be put down by force with the assistance of a Prussian army under the later-infamous Duke of Brunswick – an action that, ordinarily, would have been highly provocative to the French Bourbons but, in a sign of just how weak the ancien régime was by that stage, the Prussians marched into the Netherlands and put down the Patriot revolts largely unchallenged. Most Patriot leaders fled to France, lest they be caught by Stadtholderate authorities and hanged.
During the First Coalition War, these Patriot leaders urged permission to return to the Netherlands to start a pro-French revolutionary uprising there. While Lafayette was happy to let them leave, and Danton’s men in the Ministry for Information constantly tried to manipulate the government into supporting such a move, Lafayette proved utterly inflexible in refusing to provide any assistance to such a project, without which any Patriot uprising would fail as in 1787. His reasoning was simple: he refused to take any action that risked dragging Britain into the war, and Britain had made it abundantly clear that it would not tolerate any interference with the Dutch Stadtholderate.
It is easy to understand why Britain took such a stance. In the late 18th century, Amsterdam was the world’s great capital store, with Dutch banks holding over two-fifths of British national debt. While Britain looked at the First French Revolution and republican experiment across the channel with a mixture of caution, amusement, and opportunism – Great Britain had, of course, no great love for the Bourbon dynasty – it viewed any such potential revolution in the Netherlands as the matter of grave concern. A French-sponsored government in Amsterdam, however, and thus French dominion over the Dutch banks was universally regarded as intolerable in London.
Historians are divided as to whether President Danton knew this or not. He vociferously denied any involvement and historical documents do not disprove his assertion (though they don’t prove it either). In any case, however, French involvement was not directly responsible for the events of July 1796, although the ultimate cause does indeed lead back to France. As the world’s great banking capital, Dutch banking interests were heavily invested in the French economy as bankers, tripping over themselves in the rush to extend credit to French enterprises. When the good times ended in 1801, however, the close ties to France came back to bite the Dutch banks and, by extension, the Dutch economy. Fortunately, the underlying soundness – and size – of the Dutch banking system (and its critical importance to Britain as well) ensured that no true financial crisis emerged, but it meant that by 1806, the Dutch economy had been encountering heavy weather for several years, and the Dutch government was in severe financial difficulty.
Unsurprisingly, William V turned to the most obvious solution to solve these financial problems: he raised taxes on just about everything. Unfortunately, as in ancien regime France, these taxes fell disproportionately on the common people rather than the nobility, and especially on the rising middle classes, who were the bedrock of the Patriots’ support. To William, this was a feature, not a bug, as he believed that breaking the middle classes financially would dampen their political enthusiasm too as they turned away from political demands to more self-centered economic pursuits instead. In this, he was very wrong.
Officially, the Dutch Revolution starts on February the 15th 1806, with the dissemination of anonymous pro-Patriot pamphlets circulated in Utrecht declaring that the new taxes were unjust and that people should refuse to pay them. Over March and April, this quiet anti-tax rebellion spread throughout the city, despite the attempts of the authorities to spread it out until the whole province was effectively in legal revolt. However, this was not really a true Revolution; the Patriot cause was not yet truly reignited and for the most part, it was merely a generalized practice of tax evasion. However, in May, two near-simultaneous events set the Netherlands aflame.
Firstly, the news that Louis XVI had been forced from Versailles, that the Second Republic had been established in France and that Georges Danton was French President percolated through the Netherlands. Second, on the 20th, William V had finally had enough and ordered the Army to re-establish order in Utrecht and called on the Prussians to lend support, as they were marching through the area anyway on the way to Belgium. With this, he thought, he was heading off any threat of renewed Patriot insurrection. He was very, very wrong.
Unbeknownst to all – at least officially – a large contingent of Patriots had snuck back across the Franco-Dutch border with a healthy assortment of weapons and into Amsterdam. On the 24th they arrived in the city and found it teeming with anger and resentment; William had abused them, overtaxed them, and now was calling upon foreign armies to crush their largely non-violent resistance. They were, to put it mildly, fed up, and waiting for a spark.
That spark arrived two weeks later, on the 6th of May. A company of Prussian soldiers who were in the city to “restore order” were somewhat overzealous with their orders with regards to an obstinate shopkeeper who had refused entry to the Stadtholder’s tax collectors. An argument escalated to a standoff, which somehow led to shots being fired… and returned. This was not the first such incident involving the Prussian company, but it was the first that saw the general shooting on both sides. Soon the firefight was spreading, as armed Dutch civilians converged to avenge the shopkeeper, who had been killed, and before anyone knew part of Amsterdam had risen up in armed insurrection. Despite the desperate attempts of loyal troops to contain the situation, by nightfall, a militia ten thousand strong was marching on the Town Hall, where the Stadtholder himself was located.
Stunned by the sudden spiral of events out of control and aware that the mob would not leave him in one piece if they captured him, William V fled. The Patriot militia found the palace abandoned with official documents, gold and directives strewn around, left behind in the rush to flee. From there, the Patriot leader Rutger Van Schimmelpenninck declared that the office of Stadtholder was abolished, and a Staatsbewind, or State Council, established to rule the Netherlands until elections were held to elect a new, democratic Assembly. Officially, he claimed that this was not a revolution, merely a reforming of the existing governmental apparatus, but given that the Dutch “Republic” had long been a hereditary monarchy in all but name, no one was fooled by this claim. They were even less fooled when they noticed the final part of his declaration: a request for French support to cast out the Prussian “invaders”.
The French Autumn Offensives
This had not been missed in London. Henry Addington had succeeded the ailing William Pitt (the Younger) several months previously as Prime Minister, and immediately he was faced with a grave national crisis. With the British press being fed lurid stories about mob violence in Amsterdam by Orangists and the arrival of both Louis XVI and the exiled Stadtholder William V in London, Addington had no choice but to declare war on France and join the Second Coalition on August 12th.
By this time, the massive task of mobilizing the great but unwieldy French armies was finally near-completion. Conscription had been in place for well over a decade now and anti-draft resentment had died down to more generalized grumbling and annoyance, but it still proved difficult at times to enforce the draft requirements and bring the French armies up to nominal strength. A mixture of carrots – in the form of appeals to patriotic honor and the defense of France, especially as the Coalition armies laid siege to the great fortresses of the northeast, was mixed with the liberal use of the stick. Danton was not Lafayette, and he encouraged Corday to be tough-minded and somewhat inflexible in dealing with draft-dodging, which was a persistent problem in the still deeply Catholic northwest of the country.
However, the draft was by then not a novelty and the appeal to French honor was a powerful one, especially when it came from Corday who was now seen as nothing short of Joan d’Arc reincarnated after her central role in the Second Revolution. As the war aged and the apparent threat to la patrie grew, so did compliance. Of note, the fraction of women in the National Guard rose substantially compared to the first war; one because the draft applied equally to all, at least nominally, but also because it was more obvious than ever that military service was the one great exception in French society was equality in the sexes existed in deed and not just in word.
An equally large headache, however, emerged with the equipment and weaponry that these men and women would be using. Since the early 1700s, the French armies of both the ancien régime and the First Republic had used the time-old Charleville musket, which was largely in line with the capabilities of similar weaponry used by their European competitors. However, by 1795, the view of the French general staff, let by the ever-insightful Joachim Murat and Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, was that the great limiting factor on the capacity of the French armies to break the stalemate that had developed by that late stage of the First Coalition War was not manpower or tactical sophistication, but firepower. The French soldier of 1795 would manage, on average, one shot per minute in combat, two if circumstances were extremely favorable or the troops in question were Revolutionary Guards. And those shots would not be especially accurate; claimed accuracy levels of fifty percent at 150 meters fell apart entirely in combat with misfires, lack of training, battlefield stress, and thick smoke (especially at Villeyrac) making target identification and accurate fire near-impossible. Most of these factors could not be helped, but increasing the rate of fire of the French soldier could compensate for many of these shortcomings.
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Thus, when the war ended in 1796, Lafayette sent the Revolutionary Guard commander Michael Ney to the city of Bern in Switzerland, ostensibly to establish relations with the Swiss Confederation (which had stayed resolutely neutral during the war). In truth, however, Ney had secret orders from Lafayette to meet, of all people, a mechanic and inventor named Samuel Johannes Pauli, and lure him to Paris. These orders must have seemed baffling to Ney – why was Lafayette telling him to meet a Swiss tinkerer with no military background, of all people – but from all accounts, it did not take long for Ney to change his mind. For upon their meeting, Ney showed Pauly a standard-issue Charleville musket to inspect and within two hours, Pauly had suggested half a dozen different potential improvements that were worth exploring, some of which had taken the French generals years of bloody experience to grasp themselves. Evidently convinced he was in the presence of genius, Ney promised Pauly a generous state salary and personal sponsorship if he were to help design new weapons for France. Within the week, Pauly had packed up his things and followed Ney back to Paris.
Ney’s enthusiasm for the man was not misplaced. Taking the Gallicised name Jean Samuel Pauly, he established a gunsmith workshop in Paris under the nominal auspices of the great weapons manufactory in Saint-Étienne, but in truth working under the strict and secret supervision of Lafayette himself. It did not take long for this partnership to bear fruit, for in 1798 Pauly filed a secret patent for a breechloading shotgun with a brand new and truly revolutionary feature: the needle-firing integrated cartridge.
As part of his personal sponsorship, Ney had taken Pauly to watch battlefield exercises of the French Revolutionary Guard in late 1796. While there, Pauly realized that the great inhibitor of the individual soldier’s firepower was the sheer difficulty of reloading, a highly involved process with multiple steps that only became more challenging in actual combat. Moreover, to ease this process, musket balls had to be slightly smaller than the barrel they were supposed to fit in, which had the unfortunate side-effect of making the already-poor accuracy of these weapons even worse. Thus, Pauly’s focus immediately turned to ways to simplify this reloading process. His solution was to incorporate all the ingredients – including mercury fulminate primer powder at the base, which was Pauly’s major insight – needed to fire the shot in a single brass or paper casing that could be loaded through the breech of the weapon, a process far simpler and quicker than the long, convoluted reloading of the traditional musket. The cartridge would then be activated by a needle, a major innovation, though not the first of its type as the Americans had already hit upon the same idea several years before. [1]
The Pauly gun was not without its drawbacks. Extracting the used cartridge was not always easy, and it took several iterations before Pauly fixed early reliability issues. It required two separate powders to make each cartridge, which presented huge new logistical headaches for the French war machine. The major problem, however, was cost: the Pauly gun and its ammunition were far, far more expensive than the Charleville it was endeavoring to replace in large numbers. In every other way, however, it was a vast improvement. It was easier to aim and shoot than the Charleville, it was far easier to clean (as all breechloaders are), it was far more weather-resistant and easier to aim to boot (as you would not have the smoke from the burning powder being blown back at your face). Most of all, though, a Pauly-armed soldier could shoot up to ten times per minute, a massive increase on the previous one or two. Lafayette and Murat, seeing the demonstrations, needed only one look before recommending their universal adoption in the French armies. Pauly and his apprentices at the Paris gunsmith would go on to produce some of the most famous and innovative firearm designs of the 19th century.
However, this was not at all cheap, and not at all straightforward, and the expense associated with jumping the French armies from flintlocks to cartridge-firing breechloaders has been partially blamed for the slowness of the economic recovery following the crash of 1802. Indeed it had still not been completed by 1806, and only a sixth of the French soldiery could be equipped and armed with the new guns.
In September 1806, however, the French armies decisively proved their worth. The Coalition armies, whose every movement was tracked (and, from time to time, actively harassed) by the American 707th special forces battalion that was secretly sent to aid the French, were still by and large attempting to employ variants of the old trench tactics associated with the first war and were expecting the French to do the same. But the French had changed tactics again: over and over on the northwest front, where the French armies met their Coalition counterparts, the French would concentrate their best Pauly gun-armed battalions and still-superior artillery in the center. Rather than engaging in the slow, elongated battles of attrition that characterized the first war, they concentrated their firepower in the center of the Coalition position at often point-blank range. With still-superior artillery and now a vast disparity in small arms firepower, the Coalition position typically crumbled and the Coalition army was forced to retreat lest the entire army be swallowed up.
This pattern characterized the remainder of 1806. Strasbourg was liberated on September 28th, the siege of Liége lifted two weeks later, and on October 20th Maréchal Murat linked up with the Dutch patriot Army near Antwerp. By year’s end, he had swept into the Rhineland and was threatening to cross the Rhine itself. French fortunes were similarly positive in the southwest in the Pyrenees and in the southeast in Savoy, although the mountains slowed progress in both places.
The Scheveningen Debacle
With the war going increasingly badly on the continent, the pressure on the British government from her erstwhile Coalition allies to relieve their situation was immense. The British were the one power that was doing well in the war; by 1807 they had seized most of the remaining French overseas possessions in India and the Pacific, and they had smashed the Dutch Navy as it attempted to sortie from Amsterdam. The Danish Navy, which had been sent in support of the Dutch, met a similar fate several months later. With the French reluctant to seriously engage the British at sea beyond the practice of blockade-running, British mastery of the seas was at its absolute zenith in the beginning of 1807.
It was thus understandable that there would be pressure on Britain to leverage this naval dominance into actual results on the continent. This pressure was internal too; with both the Stadtholder and King Louis in London and themselves amassing forces for a potential invasion, Prime Minister Addington thus felt he had no choice but to endorse an invasion of the Netherlands – France itself seen as being far too hard a nut to crack due to the “Great Wall” myth – in February 1807. An invasion force of no less than fifty thousand men, including twenty thousand British regulars, twenty thousand Orangists who had evacuated the Netherlands after the fall of the Stadtholder and ten thousand French Royalists were assembled in a hundred and fifty ships. From there, however, things began to go very, very wrong.
From the start, the invasion force was plagued with internal difficulties and infighting over seniority and goals. The Orangists did not trust the French Royalists, who in turn still resented the British for staying out of the first war, who in turn thought the Orangists and French Royalists absurd and were beginning to question the worthiness of their cause. Unsurprisingly, there was thus great disagreement about where the invasion force should go: the British government had by then virtually written off the Coalition cause as a whole, and wanted to land on the lightly defended and easily defensible North Holland peninsula which could be easily protected by the Royal Navy. From there, they could use the threat of a large Army in the Franco-Dutch rear to obtain a separate, favorable peace. The Orangists, on the other hand, wanted to land near Noordwijk to restore the Stadtholder. The British, who by then was thoroughly sick of William V’s overbearing attitude and rather more sympathetic to the Patriot complaints about his rule than before, were not so enthusiastic about this plan as it meant running straight at the Patriot armies near Amsterdam. The French, meanwhile, wanted to land near the Rhine-Meuse Delta, cut off the Republican armies to the north and west, and march on Paris.
It was this final option, in the end, that the British commander, the Duke of York, agreed to, if for no other reason than it would be easy to supply. However, he did so with great reluctance, as the sea in that area is riddled with dangerous shoals, and decided to compromise by landing a little north, near the town of Scheveningen. His reluctance was soon proved well-founded, as these shoals played havoc with the Coalition fleet as it approached the coastline, only adding to the confusion within the ranks as several ships ran aground. It was an ill omen for what was to follow.
This confusion did have one positive side-effect: it meant that the French, who of course knew all about the invasion, were themselves in the dark about where it would land. The Republicans had thus dispersed their forces throughout the French coastline, and only had fifteen thousand men defending the area around the delta when the British began landing on March 7th. It was thus possible, as the British finally began unloading onto the beach near Vlissingen at the mouth of the Meuse, that the British invasion could still work and could push inland to Antwerp, which would have seriously threatened the French rear. However, it was then that the arguments over the invasion goals re-emerged in earnest, as the process of unloading was slowed to a crawl by squabbles over command structure, sulking from the Orangists who were angry that the fleet had landed so far south, and even complaints from the French – who had picked this area as an invasion site – that the fleet had landed so far north in the Netherlands, rather than southeast in French Belgium.
It was enough to give the Duke of York, who also had intermittent foul weather to deal with, a headache, which presumably only got worse when he was given a shocking piece of news by a messenger who had been sent out ahead to scout the local area: the French Army that was marching on the invasion site was not five thousand strong, as first thought, but fifty thousand. In short, the French were not dispersed as first thought, but concentrated, and coming. The result was instant pandemonium in the ranks. The Royalists panicked – no doubt in a somewhat exaggerated way, to force the fleet to land further south – whilst the Orangists wanted to immediately march north, away from the beach and towards Amsterdam. The British regulars, meanwhile, could see that trying to meet an army that large in the process of unloading was an extremely bad idea, and immediately began preparations to get back aboard the ships.
But the message was a lie. No one knows if the messenger was a turncoat in the employ of the French Ministry of Information or not or if he was simply fed bad information, but the truth was that the original estimation had been correct: the French really had been dispersed, and could not have stopped the invasion army from moving inland and the beachhead being secured. By the time this was realized on the evening of the 8th, however, and the re-embarking process stopped, it was much too late. The French had realized the invasion was at hand, and the small force of five thousand near Den Haag was beefed up to twenty thousand, with more on the way.
Without waiting, the French commander decided to exploit the confusion he was well-informed was present in the Coalition ranks and march on the beach immediately. With half the invasion force still on the ships when the French army arrived as well as most of its supplies, York knew they could not possibly stand up to an actual army and had no choice but to surrender without so much as a shot being fired in anger. The local French commander was generous, allowing the entire invasion fleet to sail away without taking prisoners – the French Royalists had wisely gotten off the beach as soon as word of the incoming Republicans spread – although they had to leave all their heavy guns behind.
The “Debacle at Scheveningen”, as the events of the 8th and 9th of March 1807 became known, instantly caused an uproar back in Britain. The unfortunate Duke of York was court-martialled, but even that scapegoat could not save Prime Minister Addington, who resigned in May. For the war, the embarrassing failure hardened the British opinion that the cause of the Coalition was more folly than wise, and it would be the British, not the French, who would begin secret negotiations with the French in mid-1807 to bring the war to a conclusion favorable to both nations. The Stadtholder had been the driving force behind the invasion – Louis had signed on with far more reservation – and it was then that the British wrote the House of Orange off once and for all. Their only condition was that British interests in the Netherlands be restored and protected, a condition that the somewhat anglophile Danton was happy to agree to.
Longer-term, however, it has been argued that the debacle was a net positive for Britain. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, with only rich embarrassment as a cost, and the British would study the failures at Scheveningen carefully in the decades to come. The importance of a clear and unified plan, good relations between the services and between Britain and her allies, good intelligence of the situation on the coast, bad intelligence to throw off Britain’s enemies, and speed in getting off the beach before enemies could reinforce: these were lessons that would be well-learned and heavily emphasized in the British armed services in the following years. Much thought would go into the best way to conduct large naval invasions, and Britain would get many opportunities to fine-tune its practices in the colonial sphere through the early 19th century.
It would be these lessons that would be applied to great effect a quarter of a century later, when Britain and her allies would attempt another large naval invasion of a hostile continent. Unlike Scheveningen, however, this invasion would be wildly successful…
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[1] The Pauly gun is literally just the OTL Pauly gun, invented about a decade early here as Pauly is brought to Paris much earlier than OTL and is given basically unlimited remit to do what he wants. It is amazing to me that Pauly presented an honest-to-god cartridge firing, needle-activated breechloader to Napoleon in 1812 and he... rejected it, because it would have required two powders. The Pauly gun has its problems (and was really complex and expensive relative to other firearms of its time) but it really is massively superior to traditional 18th-century muskets in basically every way otherwise; from all reports, everyone who fired it came away with rave reviews. The big change from OTL, really, is that Lafayette knows that this is where arms manufacturing is going, and so says "give me as many of those as you can". Pauly's apprentices, incidentally, would be responsible for a great many firearms innovations in OTL, most notably Dreyse who invented the first rifled needle gun.