EIGHT

Decrees “in the Name of the French Republic”: Armed Cosmopolitans

The ever-changing French revolutionary governments dispatched a steady stream of ambassadors, commissioners, residents, and representatives to serve as the “eyes and arms” of Paris. Always on the move, shuffled, rearranged, and recalled, this array of civil and military agents transmitted the French Revolution to the Swiss, the Genevans, the Belgians, the Italians, the Dutch, and the Irish from 1793 until the end of the eighteenth century. Cannons and bayonets had become the order of the day, a dramatic departure from the idealistic, peace-promoting universalism of the revolution’s earliest days.

The first deputies elected to the new French National Assembly announced to widespread applause that in this revolutionary era all men would live as brothers. Schooled in the cosmopolitanism of enlightened philosophers, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1770s and 1780s proclaimed their intentions abroad to be peaceful. Old Regime despots backed by their legions of mercenaries had waged wars of imperial conquest. Republicans would instead dispatch diplomats such as Benjamin Franklin and Louis Otto in the service of liberty. They saw the dawning of an era of “universal peace.”¹

Shunning the diplomatic institutions of the Old Regime, the French in 1789, like the Americans in 1786, rejected war as hostile to their revolutionary aims. “Each nation has the right to decide its own laws,” the marquis de Condorcet proclaimed, warning potential aggressors that to resort to force was “to make yourself the enemy of the human race.”² Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre stated what by then seemed obvious, that no government should “assume that by invading a foreign people they could be convinced to adopt your laws and constitution.” In an often-quoted addendum, he explained, “No one likes armed missionaries.”³ The new nation expected its neighbors to respect its sovereignty. France, however, did not have, as the Americans did, an ocean to shield it from either its friends or its enemies. By its continued existence, then, the revolutionary nation threatened its neighbors.

MAP 8.1
Europe, 1789. Map by Bill Nelson

In celebration of its first anniversary, French revolutionaries gathered in the pouring rain on the Champ de Mars and declared the French Revolution a universal revolution. The French National Assembly welcomed processions of revolutionary refugees from Geneva, Italy, Poland, the United Provinces, Ireland, England, and Prussia. At the center of the parade grounds, on the Altar of the Federation, stood a woman symbolizing the constitution and warriors representing the patrie, their arms outstretched to receive the assembled celebrants of universal law. Lafayette, the hero of the hour, approached the altar on a white charger. Visitors from across Europe agreed that at that moment, “all national differences vanished, all prejudices disappeared.”⁴

One of the foreigners chosen in 1792 to represent French departments in the National Convention, Anacharsis Cloots, loudly proclaimed the Universal Republic of Humankind. According to the Prussian-born Dutchmen, henceforth there would be no national boundaries; no foreigners would inhabit his new world. With greater reserve but no less enthusiasm, the marquis de Condorcet called on the revolutionary French to grant citizenship to all who took up residence in the cosmopolitan republic.

Propelled by this buoyant optimism in 1792, the French declared war on tyrants, on the king of Bohemia and Hungary in particular.⁵ This war would be different, they clarified. The revolutionaries would not fight for territorial gain, as the king’s armies did under the Old Regime. They would bring liberty to peoples oppressed by despots and aristocrats. By August 1792, French soldiers were fighting on five fronts: in the southeast against the Piedmontese, in the southwest against the Spanish, in the east against the Prussians, in the north against the Austrians, the British, and the Dutch, and at home against the federalists and counterrevolutionaries. For the remainder of the decade, French armies were fully engaged invading neighboring kingdoms, republics, and empires, venturing as far afield as Egypt and the Caribbean.

French revolutionaries elaborated this armed mission in revolutionary decrees. Printed in Paris, the decrees were dispatched to the Genevans, the Belgians, the Germans, the Italians, and the Irish—to anyone whose territory lay within the ever-expanding range of their armies levied en masse. The promise of French military aid was as audacious as the universal revolution was bold. The decree of 19 November 1792 extended fraternity to all peoples who desired their freedom. Decrees issued on 15 and 17 December went farther, compelling rather than inviting peoples liberated by revolutionary armies to be free like the French. Armies and their agents plastered decrees on doorways and proclaimed them in town squares.

Diplomatic correspondence, including policy-changing decrees, did not flow any more smoothly over land than it had across the sea to the colonies in the Caribbean. Politics, more often than storms, disrupted the spread of decrees over the mountains and plains of Europe. French foreign agents sent to Italy, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland frequently introduced their reports to Paris with what became almost a stock phrase: “For several months we have received no letters.”⁶ An executive commissioner to the army complained: “Nothing is more disagreeable for the principal agent of the government to receive not a single dispatch, not a single response, and to learn government measures only through intermediaries or subordinates.”⁷ By the time diplomatic communiqués arrived in Cologne or Milan, orders dispatched with urgency from Paris were often irrelevant.

So much changed so precipitously, in committees in Paris and abroad, that French diplomats, many of them holdovers from the monarchy, struggled to implement revolutionary foreign policy on the ground.⁸ Foreign minister Charles-François Dumouriez instructed foreign powers to dispense with the formality of the Old World and to address Louis XVI simply as “His Majesty, The King of the French.”⁹ A few months later, with their king out of the way, French officials asked foreign governments to strike all honorary titles from their correspondence.

On assignment as minister plenipotentiary in Switzerland, a seasoned diplomat, François Barthélemy, informed Paris that he had been barred by the Swiss from entering his official residence in Soleure. He received an official response from Paris in March 1792 informing him that the foreign minister to whom he had addressed his correspondence had been denounced in the National Assembly and arrested. The new minister of foreign affairs wrote two weeks later describing the “revolution” in the ministry in Paris. He assured Barthélemy, then wandering homeless through the Swiss cantons, that he would read Barthélemy’s letters with the same interest as his ill-fated predecessor and share them with the king. A few months later, when Parisians stormed the Tuileries, massacring the king’s Swiss guards, Barthélemy’s Swiss informers urged him to hole up out of sight. The third foreign minister to whom he reported was unconcerned and unsympathetic. Pierre Lebrun simply ordered Barthélemy to stand his ground, reminding him that he was stationed in the Swiss cantons to carry out French revolutionary policy and to disseminate its decrees.¹⁰ Theirs was a bellicose universalism anchored in patriotic nationalism.

Contradictions proliferated, catching French diplomats and Belgians, Genevans, Italians, Germans, and the Swiss and Irish unprepared. The clash in revolutionary assumptions is evident in correspondence linking Paris with its agents. The lines dividing friends from allies, like every other dichotomy in this turbulent era, were ever shifting, further confused, not clarified, by war.

Ending “the reign of error” in the Belgian Provinces and Geneva

In August 1792, within months of the French declaration of war, Prussian forces, flanked by Austrian contingents, invaded France. They captured the French fortress at Longwy in four days. Only Verdun stood between the duke of Brunswick’s armies and Paris. It seemed that the French Revolution would perish, as had all of the other European revolutions, crushed by neighboring empires.

One month later, revolutionary France was on the offensive, spurred by the patriotism of the Brissotins in the Legislative Assembly. Singing “Ça Ira” and “La Marseillaise,” and proclaiming “Vive la Nation,” the Army of the North, under the command of General Charles Dumouriez, and the Army of the Center, under General François-Christophe Kellermann, stopped the Prussians in the deep mud and icy rain at Valmy. “From this place and this time forth, a new era in world history opens,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote.¹¹ The German writer expected imperial mercenaries across Europe to fall to the French revolutionary volunteers inspired by liberty.

French armies under Dumouriez’s command invaded the Austrian-ruled Belgian provinces in November 1792. Their goal was not only to remove the Austrians but also to release an oppressed people from the grip of the nobles and the church. French soldiers posted decrees and handed out proclamations inviting the Belgians to join them in planting trees of liberty. “As long as you establish the sovereignty of the people and renounce the rule of all despots, we will be your brothers, your friends, your supporters,” the French general promised his neighbors.¹²

Peasants and artisans alike helped the French chase Austrian carriages fleeing through the countryside and back toward Vienna. Enthusiastically welcomed by former Brabant revolutionaries as liberators in village after village, Dumouriez and his armies saw themselves as true Belgian heroes. In that spirit, Dumouriez refused to accept the keys to the city of Brussels, advising citizens not to “allow any foreigner to dominate you. You were made to be independent.”¹³ He did not ask himself what would happen if the liberated peoples chose to go their own way, following a path that diverged from that of the French Revolution. Such hostility to the revolution seemed inconceivable, at least initially.

It was the exuberance, not the reluctance, of the Belgian welcome that worried Dumouriez. Belgian crowds burned the Austrian coat of arms and invited the French general to the first meeting of the Société des amis de liberté et d’égalité (Society of the friends of liberty and equality) popularly known as Jacobins, at the Church of the Jesuits. Thousands of Bruxellois gathered to toast the end of “the reign of error” and to proclaim the dawn of a new era illuminated by the light of liberty.¹⁴ Seasoned by his experience as foreign minister, Dumouriez counseled moderation and called for the election of a Belgian provisional government.

Within days, all that changed. Former Brabant revolutionaries from 1789 accused the French revolutionaries in 1792 of imposing their democracy on the Belgians. The worried general informed the minister of war in Paris that victory celebrations might have been premature. “The cabal of priests and the old Estates still rule three-quarters of the country,” he despaired.¹⁵ Delegates from the newly elected provisional government in Brussels traveled to Paris to remind the French “that before the 16th Century, in Europe it was only the Belgians and the Swiss who knew true liberty.”¹⁶ The Belgians had no need for French tutors or a military occupation. The French Convention thought otherwise.

FIGURE 8.1
Decree from the French National Convention, 19 November 1792, extending fraternity to all peoples who desire to be free

The National Convention issued a decree on 19 November 1792 in direct response to resistance encountered by the French army and its agents in the Belgian provinces. Foreign minister Pierre Lebrun dispatched three diplomats to the Belgian provinces to monitor the enforcement of the decrees, and the Convention sent four of its own agents to assure the provisioning of the occupying army. Dismayed, Dumouriez appealed to the Convention, recalling the cosmopolitan proclamations of 1789 and 1790. Now the French were forcing the Belgians into Jacobin clubs and pillaging property, he complained, “leaving their new brothers without physical or moral liberty.”¹⁷

In December 1792, from his post on the French finance committee, Pierre-Joseph Cambon called for a declaration of war not only against despots but against anyone defending the Old Regime. Neighboring peoples who harbored priests and nobles were to be treated as enemies of France. Cambon criticized Dumouriez, in particular, “for announcing grand philosophical principles” but not enforcing the decrees. Cambon’s plan to “declare revolutionary power in any country that we enter” prevailed over Dumouriez’s objections.¹⁸ It took several weeks for December decrees that threatened French intervention to reach the Belgian provinces. The National Convention had delayed the printing of the threatening decrees because of significant opposition in Paris. Influential deputies, including Jacques-Pierre Brissot, argued that the Belgians themselves should ratify the decrees. Belgian mail carriers refused to deliver post from France.

“When you entered the Low Countries to pull us out of slavery, we all followed you, but you have reversed our rights, laws, Religion, Estates, courts & privileges,” a Belgian anonymously chastised the French occupying forces. “You have revolted an entire Nation by your despicable sacrilege.”¹⁹ The Provisional Representatives sent another delegation to Paris, this time to condemn the December 15 decree as destructive of Belgian sovereignty. As a free and sovereign people, they expected to choose their own path, elect their own representatives, and act according to their general will, without French interference. However, there is no evidence that the three men arrived in Paris to deliver their message. They seem to have decided their mission was futile and disappeared into villages en route.

While Dumouriez was fighting in the Low Countries, another wave of French troops marched south toward Savoy. Their route took them through the Swiss cantons, a strategically important gateway to southern Europe. The French monarchy had a history of meddling in the affairs of its mountainous neighbors, Geneva in particular. With French soldiers camped just outside their gates, Genevans appealed to the cantons of Bern and Zurich to lend military protection “against this unjust aggression.”²⁰ The Genevan General Council posted placards on walls throughout the city calling residents to arms. As a last resort, the Council empowered an emissary, François Ivernois, to meet French general Anne-Pierre Montesquiou, stationed outside the city. Ivernois did not hesitate. He accosted General Montesquiou as he arrived back in camp at four in the morning. The exhausted general was more diplomatic than Ivernois had any right to expect, sending a courier to Paris to request written confirmation of French intentions to march around, not through, Geneva.

Troops from Bern and Zurich arrived in Geneva before the written assurances came from Paris. That worried the French representative in Geneva, who hastily withdrew to the safety of the French encampment. The Genevan council assured General Montesquiou of its peaceful intentions. He forwarded the Genevan assurances to the minister of foreign affairs in Paris, but cautioned the Genevans not to expect too much of his diplomatic intervention. He was, after all, “as a citizen of a free country, no more than an intermediary.” The general warned, prophetically, that in the end Geneva would be no “freer or happier than France wanted it to be.”²¹ It turned out that he was Geneva’s strongest advocate. Worse would follow.

In November 1792, Montesquiou received orders from Paris to invade Geneva with his army of four thousand men. Montesquiou refused, protesting that he would not “act like Louis XIV.”²² Diplomacy should have changed with the revolution, he argued. No more willing to accept direction from Paris than Dumouriez, in accord with his own ideas of the foreign policy befitting a revolutionary republic, Montesquiou personally negotiated a treaty with the Genevans. Stunned, the National Convention in Paris denounced the independent general’s “shameful transaction.” They sent General François Kellermann, himself accused of cowardice for not attacking the German city of Trier, to replace the insolent general.²³

Exiles from the Genevan revolutions of 1782 and 1789 joined the fray as the Brabant revolutionaries had in the Belgian provinces. Some urged the French to invade and free their compatriots from aristocratic rule, while others protested against violations of Genevan sovereignty. Étienne Dumont, the Genevan revolutionary who had worked with Mirabeau, wrote from London to remind Kellermann of the long Genevan tradition of independence and republican governance. Brissot, who had witnessed the defeat of the first Genevan revolution, joined those exiles clamoring for French intervention. The Genevan Council also sent delegates to Paris, not trusting the power of a written memorandum. Was national sovereignty not a French revolutionary principle, they asked. Relying on Montesquiou and Ivernois as diplomatic conduits, the delegates relayed increasingly desperate news from their meetings with French deputies and ministers back to Geneva. Pro-French Genevan exiles had promised the French access to the sizable Genevan treasury as a reward for intervention. Lebrun, who had repeatedly denounced “the miserable politics” of the equivocating, aristocratic Genevans as a threat to “French liberty,” was tempted.²⁴

As a last resort, to preempt French intervention, the Genevan Council staged its own revolution in December 1792. After granting citizenship to 5,423 people, a decades-old demand, and declaring all residents of Geneva equal, the sitting council turned over power to provisional revolutionary committees. Placards posted in the streets proclaimed a pointed variation on the French “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” reading “Liberty, Equality, and Independence.” The Genevans left the French little reason to invade the revolutionary republic as they celebrated their third revolution in a decade. This time, in a marked departure from Old World diplomacy, the French congratulated them on the “happy changes.”²⁵ A Genevan National Assembly of 120 members elected by universal male suffrage took their seats in an amphitheater with raised banks of seating constructed to resemble the Paris Convention. A bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau sat on the president’s table, and trees of liberty were planted around the city.

In 1793, the newly named Genevan ambassador to France assured his fellow citizens that their independence had never been more secure than in the hands of the French revolutionaries. The adjutant general of the French army of the Alps also conveyed a decree from the French resident, expressing his affection for the small republic. Over lunch in Geneva, General Kellermann told the newly elected Genevan assembly that the French harbored no feelings other than those of friendship and fraternity toward the Genevans who had proved themselves worthy revolutionary allies. They need not be alarmed by perfunctory French troop movements in the vicinity. He did not inform them that he had written the French Convention, requesting permission to invade the city-state.

At stake in Paris was more than the defense of revolutionary France. The French were committed to coming to the aid of all peoples who “wished to recover their liberty.” Against the backdrop of the Terror in France, boldly independent generals defined the revolutionary mission of the French abroad. By the end of 1793, the French were fighting not only the Austrians and the Prussians but Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands. The Committee of Public Safety in Paris proceeded to direct the wars by decrees, dispatching its representatives on mission south to Italy and east to Germany.

The Rhineland and the Italian Peninsula: “A true milk cow” and “the most fertile plains”

The French armies that invaded Germany in 1792 had been forced to retreat in 1793. Assessing blame, Merlin de Thionville, the new French commissioner serving with the Armies of the Rhine, scoffed that in 1792, generals had been seduced by “the promises of cosmopolitan universalism” and had naïvely assumed Germans would welcome them as liberators. Merlin took pride as a French revolutionary in being “a free republican, always free.” He added in a significant proviso, “before extending liberty to others, I want to derive the benefits of the French constitution myself.”²⁶ The next time, the French would use Prussian tactics against the Germans, seizing everything in the path of the armies and living off conquered territory. That strategy would not be limited to German territories.

Merlin was not alone in dividing his world into the revolutionary French and the “others.” This assessment was a long way from the idealistic vision of a universal republic voiced in the National Assembly in 1789 or celebrated at the Festival of the Federation in 1790. German and then Italian resistance to the armed extension of the French Revolution over the next five years would widen that gap. Foreign intransigence would also bring other foreign agents around to Merlin’s view of the French revolutionary mission. A determined Committee of Public Safety took over the direction of foreign policy in general and the wars in particular in the spring of 1793. It had been decided. Dissension did not work in wartime.

French armies invaded Germany again in August 1794, advancing through Trier and routing all of “the émigrés, monks, priests, nuns and all the other eminences” in their path. The French were welcomed, at least initially. In Koblenz, municipal authorities, bedecked “in full regalia” and led by the mayor, handed the French the keys to the city. The French accepted them. From the heights above the Moselle and Rhine rivers, the revolutionary army surveyed “the rich and abundant country.” Below them the generals beheld “a true milk cow for the French Republic.”²⁷ The mission to liberate the Germans would more than pay for itself. French soldiers inventoried goods left behind by aristocrats while their officers announced “the dawning of the beautiful day for which mankind has longed.” They invited the Germans “to become our brothers and free men!”²⁸

French armies advanced north along the Rhine to Cologne, where the city council met them. The council offered lodging and rations to the troops, asking the French in turn to respect their republican constitution, religion, and property. In a series of formal letters sent to Paris, they reminded their guests that the city of Cologne, free before the French arrived, expected to remain free after the French left. The French representative promised in his reply to respect Cologne’s traditions and laws, but he also asked for an inventory of all public revenues and assets. He assured the city fathers, “Our most fervent wish is always to spare the people the calamities of war that tyrants inflict.”²⁹

The goodwill did not last the week. French soldiers plundered the rich collections of the municipal library of Cologne, and the council protested in outrage that the books and engravings belonged to the people of Cologne. The French representative reassured them that they had simply relocated their treasures to Paris, where revolutionary allies could enjoy them. Indirect diplomatic channels to Paris produced no response, so municipal officials from Cologne wrote the National Convention directly. “Who should a free man address,” they asked “if not the representatives of the people who established the foundation of the reign of liberty?”³⁰ As a last resort, Cologne sent a deputation to present its protests in person to the Provisional Government established by the French military in Bonn, a government Cologne had not previously deigned to recognize. The French would not hear their protests.

French diplomats and generals alike professed surprise that the liberated German people had not risen up to join them in overthrowing “the monarchical oppressors and tyrants of the universe.”³¹ Instead, agents reported, Rhinelanders, like Belgians, had obstinately clung to their old ways. They even refused to accept their responsibility for feeding the French army, forcing the French to extract requisitions. Germans who could not appreciate liberty would be treated as a conquered enemy.

In December 1794, ignoring pessimistic reports from military and political agents, the French Committee of Public Safety opened treaty negotiations with Prussian King Frederick William II. In the Treaty of Basel, Prussia ceded the left bank of the Rhine to France, giving the republic, in the words of the Abbé Sieyès, “a virtually insurmountable barrier” to the east.³² At last, observers predicted, revolutionary France, its boundaries set, would be able to rest. The secretary of the Prussian Royal Academy, André Riem, called on German princes to surrender to the inevitability of French rule. That was supposed to bring peace.³³

After the fall of Jacobins Robespierre and Saint-Just, between July 1794 and October 1795, forty-eight members of the Convention rotated through the Committee of Public Safety. Representatives to the Army of the Pyrenees lobbied “to secure the limits of the Republic with our military triumphs” by taking possession of new territories “in the name of the people.”³⁴ Pragmatic expansionists prevailed in the Committee, setting additional French armies in motion. A rebalanced Europe would be stable and peaceful, they promised, looking to the future to justify their strategy in the present.

The Directory, established in the fall of 1795 by moderate revolutionaries, inherited the war aims of the Thermidorian Committee of Public Safety. The directors pledged again to secure France’s “natural frontiers.” The Directory, though, had to contend just with the British at sea and the Austrians and Sardinians on land. The other enemies of the revolution had all been defeated. In the spring of 1796, the Directory sent another young general, Napoléon Bonaparte, into the field, this time to northern Italy. As before, the directors expected his army to live off aristocratic riches, church treasures, and the agricultural bounty of the land as it advanced down the Italian peninsula. “Yours will be an admirable operation from a financial point of view that in the end will upset just a few monks,” the Directory promised.³⁵ Bonaparte needed few words of encouragement. He predicted the Italian campaign not only would pay for itself but would be the decisive battleground of the French Revolution.

After hard-won victories in the Piedmont in April 1796, Bonaparte led his forces onto the plains of Lombardy, forcing the Austrians to retreat before them. In his famous address to the “naked and starving” Army of Italy, he directed his army’s attention “to the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces, the spectacular cities, all will be in your power. There you will find honor, glory, and riches.”³⁶ Positioning two cannon at the bridge at Lodi, Bonaparte cut off the enemy, allowing French troops led by General Masséna to march into Milan in May. “Today, I see myself for the first time, not as a simple general, but as a man called to influence the fate of the people,” Bonaparte declared.³⁷ Henceforth, he vowed, he would set his own course. When the Directory ordered him to share command with General Kellermann, Bonaparte adamantly refused. He sent wagonloads of loot from his Italian campaign to placate and silence the directors in Paris. Kellermann bowed before Bonaparte’s bravado and lent him ten thousand soldiers to reinforce his army.

Bonaparte’s rapid march through the Piedmont and Lombardy more than paid for itself. Bonaparte’s soldiers collected Petrarch’s manuscripts and paintings by Leonardo, Correggio, and Michelangelo to ship back to Paris. French civilian authorities in Italy complained to Bonaparte that sacking municipal treasures and imposing levies on the bourgeoisie would alienate their only supporters and drive rural landowners into the counterrevolution. Bonaparte ignored their concerns. When a small coterie of French soldiers who had remained behind to maintain order were found murdered and hanged from the newly planted trees of liberty, Bonaparte marched back and burned the closest village.

French troops marched out of Milan without the traditional army convoys of provisions. As long as the army kept moving, it could live off the land. Along their route, soldiers pillaged farms for sustenance, and military agents confiscated goods. Two deputies from the Piedmont traveled to Paris to appeal for leniency, but the Directory was too busy celebrating Bonaparte’s victories to receive them. “It is not up to you to open a discussion of peace terms,” Charles Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, sneered.³⁸ The French would dictate terms to the Italians, including provisioning the invading French army. As the Directory speculated about the treasures that could be removed from churches and the contributions that could be exacted, it instructed Bonaparte to confiscate English ships in the port of Livorno and to make Parma pay for its resistance. In Rome the pope was instructed to pray for the success and prosperity of the French Republic.

French civilian agents who arrived in the newly conquered territories in the wake of Bonaparte’s military campaign received little specific guidance from Paris on handling disgruntled residents, and what they received was too late to be relevant. The Directory acknowledged that it had “not yet arrived at any plan for regulating certain questions.”³⁹ General Christophe Salicetti, a Corsican Jacobin, installed himself and his wife at the luxurious Palace Greppi in Milan. He proceeded to secure loans, print proclamations, and disseminate decrees to “revolutionize Italy.” Many of the Italian revolutionaries who supported Salicetti, however, were unrepentant Jacobins, a political position decidedly out of favor with the French directors, who distrusted foreign revolutionaries and their allies.

The rhetoric of 1789 that had peaceful peoples coexisting in a revolutionary world must have seemed far away to Italians, especially those who counted themselves supporters of the revolution. Seven years into the revolution, they would have wondered what had happened to the principles of liberty and sovereignty. Had the war to extend the French Revolution by defeating despots and displacing aristocrats and clerics so depleted the resources of the republic that national survival of the republic competed as a revolutionary objective with liberation of oppressed peoples beyond French borders? Could these goals be reconciled? These were the questions yet to be answered in the increasingly problematic politics of Italy.

Victories on the battlefields of Italy allowed the Directory to declare an end to papal rule over Bologna and to establish the Cispadane Republic One and Indivisible. A constitution for the republic, ratified by a popular vote in April 1797, vested sovereignty in “the citizens as a whole” and guaranteed property rights. The republic lasted only three months before Bonaparte incorporated its territories into his Cisalpine Republic, merging six Italian regions. Bonaparte himself appointed a directory for the new republic. Legislators who refused to ratify his constitution were replaced. Revolutionaries from clubs in Milan and refugees from Venice and Sardinia abolished the nobility and guilds, confiscated lands from the church, published a constitution, and organized an army.

Foreign minister Delacroix cautioned the Directory that republics established by revolutionaries and supported by an invading army would command little serious support in Italy. As he balanced the conflicting objectives of winning Italians over to the revolutionary cause and exploiting the wealth of Italy, Delacroix bluntly asserted, as Merlin had before him: “The interests of the [French] should be the deciding factor.”⁴⁰ Under such conditions, the Directory’s agents who had written off “the mass of the people” as “totally deprived of enlightenment and energy” wondered whether “it was possible or even advantageous for the French republic to republicanize Italy as the generals were trying to do.”⁴¹

The French elections in March 1797 produced a moderate-royalist majority advocating negotiations with the two remaining adversaries, Austria and Britain, but Bonaparte was not ready to make peace. What was needed, he decided, was a coup. With the assistance of his emissary, three directors ousted their peace-seeking opponents from the Directory and the legislative chambers, leaving in place a government favorable to republican expansion. Bonaparte understood that it was the state of war that allowed the Directory to survive. Peace was not possible in that political context.

A series of coups followed in the Cisalpine Republic. When General Louis-Alexandre Berthier, a veteran of Rochambeau’s army in America and Bonaparte’s chief of staff, challenged the French Directory’s strategy, he was replaced by General Guillaume Brune, a veteran of Dumouriez’s army and a proponent of revolutionary imperialism. Brune refused to cooperate with the Directory’s diplomats and openly allied with Italian Jacobins. The Directory responded by replacing the French commissioner to Italy, then recalled his replacement, and finally ordered Brune back to Paris.

In the Rhineland, General Lazare Hoche, another young upstart like Brune, pursued his own independent, but very different, policy. He refused to allow French agents, few of whom spoke German or understood local traditions, to impose a regime on the Germans who had proven themselves ill-fitted for a republic. On his own initiative, General Hoche slowed down the revolutionary march of the French, reinstating the old municipal governments throughout the Rhineland in March 1797. He won the support of the recalcitrant Germans by reducing their tax burdens and restoring property to the clergy. In September 1797, the Directory ordered Hoche to change course and ally not with German moderates but with the more radical revolutionaries in Rheinbach, Koblenz, Cologne, and Bonn to establish the Cisrhenian Republic.

“The intention of the French is clearly to turn all Europe into republics,” Axel von Fersen, the Swedish noble who had fought with Rochambeau in America but betrayed Dumouriez’s plans for Belgium to the Austrians, predicted.⁴² The Cisrhenian Republic lasted less than a month and died in a flurry of decrees. The Directory recalled General Hoche. Before leaving, Hoche called the attention of his successor, General Augereau, to what he saw as the ultimate revolutionary goal: “founding a republic on the left bank of the Rhine to be a friend and ally of France.”⁴³ That was, however, no longer the Directory’s intention. Republics had proved to be poor military provisioners.

By 1797, The French army had exhausted the resources and political patience of the Rhineland. The left bank of the Rhine had been occupied and marched over for so long that it yielded little, despite continued pressure from agents dispatched to provision the army. These agents complained that they could not overcome the superstitions and prejudices of the German people mired in their “Gothic routines.”⁴⁴ Annexation was the only option left to wring more resources out of the Germans.

Renouncing any expectation of self-government, François Rudler, an Alsatian sent by the Directory to the Rhineland, simply eliminated the Old Regime by administrative fiat. He issued 625 decrees in one day. In November 1797, to prepare Germany for annexation to France, he abolished the nobility, guaranteed freedom of religion, reorganized the schools, and proclaimed equality as the foundation of a new system of justice. Rudler ordered the French commissioners stationed in Aachen, Coblenz, Trier, and Mainz to produce German petitions in support of annexation. Although they gathered the requisite signatures, all of the “spontaneous” petitions bore the same phrases: gratitude for the abolition of feudalism and celebration of the French flag that flew from the towers of the former German empire. The commissioners hoped that Rudler would not notice that only fifteen percent of the eligible males had signed. He did. In his report to Minister of Justice Lambrechts in Paris, Rudler protested the recalcitrance of Prussian regions where Hoche had allowed old ways to persist.

German revolutionaries who dreamed of a Cisrhenian republic told a different story. “The ambition of a conquering Republic knows no limits,” the German journalist A. G. F. Rebmann complained.⁴⁵ He had supported the first French military incursions into Germany, but he did not understand the French claim to natural borders. The Germans, more moral and philosophical than the French, needed to be allowed to make revolution on their own terms, these Cisrhenian revolutionaries argued. Why not “follow the lofty example” of the Cisalpine republic, municipal officials in Bonn asked.⁴⁶ What had happened, they asked, to the French revolutionary ideal of a Europe of sister republics? Had the universal republic been completely eclipsed as a goal? The answer ultimately was yes, but France would try one last time to win over its neighbors.

Ireland: “A capital opportunity”?

In October 1797, Bonaparte signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. The treaty did more than secure the natural border of the Rhine to protect the French Republic and procure the Rhineland to feed its armies; it altered the relationship of French civil and military authorities in the field. The Directory gave more authority to the military and took tighter control of its political agents abroad.

Britain loomed large across the Channel, with England as the yet unchallenged enemy and Ireland the unfulfilled republican hope. The French had been betting on an Irish revolution since 1791. That year, against great odds, under the leadership of thirty-year-old Theobald Wolfe Tone, Catholics and Protestants had come together as United Irishmen to fight at the very least against unfair taxation and the concentration of power in the hands of an elite, or even for Irish independence from England. Revolutionary pamphlets flooded Ireland over the next few years, some indigenous, others borrowed. It seemed to one Irish barrister that Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was “in every one’s hands and in every one’s mouth.”⁴⁷ Calls to imitate the French were everywhere. The French watched as revolutionary momentum ebbed and flowed.

In 1794, the French Marine Ministry sent Anglican clergyman William Jackson as its agent to explore the revolutionary potential of Ireland. John Hurford Stone, English businessman, French revolutionary, and partner of Helen Maria Williams, introduced Jackson to radicals throughout England, including John Horne Tooke of the Society for Constitutional Information. On his own, Jackson befriended John Cockagne, a spy who had infiltrated the porous British radical network. Cockagne kept William Pitt informed of all of Jackson’s activities. Among the Irish rebels, only the widely traveled Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, took Jackson’s proposals seriously. Rowan, however, was locked away in prison. But he was not out of contact with the revolution, it turned out. Rowan took full advantage of the generous terms of aristocratic imprisonment that provided for food to be sent from his home and for visitors and pamphlets from the United Irishmen to be received in his cell. It was there that Jackson and Cockagne met with Tone to discuss the overthrow of English rule in Ireland.

Tone reluctantly agreed to draft their declaration, a denunciation of the English and plea for Irish independence. Rowan took Tone’s carefully phrased entreaty and embellished it with incendiary calls to arms, all under Tone’s signature. Without Tone’s knowledge or permission, Rowan passed Jackson a copy to send to an agent in Hamburg, who forwarded it to the French minister in the United Provinces, who in turn dispatched it to France. The packet was intercepted, as Tone could have predicted it would be, and Jackson was arrested and convicted. Jackson committed suicide in prison. Implicated in the treasonous scheme, Rowan convinced his jailor to allow him to visit his wife one last time before his probable hanging. She had prepared an escape. From their house, he slid down knotted bed sheets to the back garden, mounted a horse that was saddled and waiting, and rode to the Channel. There he found a boat and sailed to France. Intercepted by the French and imprisoned as a British spy, Rowan was freed by Robespierre.

The calamitous misadventures scared Tone but did little to set back French planning for an Irish revolution. Rowan, soon a regular at White’s Hotel and a close friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, joined the chorus of exiles lobbying the Committee of Public Safety to attack Britain. Robespierre’s death at the guillotine convinced Rowan to seek safety in a more tranquil republic. He arrived in Philadelphia on 4 July 1795; he survived the rough crossing, but his bear, raccoon, and opossum did not.⁴⁸ Tone was already there. The two Irish radicals kept their distance from American politics, which struck them as, if less bloody, at least as fractious as the French. American politics seemed excessively subject to the unsavory influence of money.

In 1796, Tone returned to Europe to join the committee of Irish expatriates in Paris, his voyage financed in part by James Monroe, the American minister in Paris. By December, decked out in a splendid French adjutant general’s uniform, Tone sailed with fifteen thousand French troops aboard the eighty-gun flagship Indomitable. It was one of the largest naval expeditions of the French revolutionary wars. Had it not been for the weather, it might have succeeded. The French ships slipped past the British fleet into Bantry Bay on the southwest coast of Ireland, but there, in becalmed seas, the flagship was separated from the rest of the fleet. Once the winds finally picked up, they swirled to hurricane strength, chasing the French ships, commanded by indecisive and inexperienced naval officers, back to France. Eleven vessels and five thousand men had been lost without ever engaging the British, sinking any immediate hopes for a second invasion. The Directory might send some arms across the Channel, but it looked to the Irish themselves to beat back the English and “to proclaim the Independence of their island.”⁴⁹

Tone sat for two months on board the Dutch flagship Vryheid (Freedom), waiting for the wind to change and launch a Dutch invasion. Finally, Bonaparte himself summoned Tone to discuss invasion plans. “Our Government must destroy the English monarchy, or expect itself to be destroyed by those intriguing and enterprising islanders,” Bonaparte wrote the French foreign minister in October 1797. “The present moment offers a capital opportunity,” he added.⁵⁰ Bonaparte put General Kilmaine, an Irishman who had come to Paris as a student and then fought in the American Revolution, in charge of preparations. Irish émigrés in Paris relayed the excitement rocking Parisian theaters and cafés to the United Irish at home. Thomas Paine contributed funds and drew up plans for an amphibious assault by small gunboats. The United Irishmen waited intently for news of the embarkation. It never came. Before the invasion was launched, the Directory turned its attention to Egypt. The directors had decided that Bonaparte would confront the English in the Middle East, not Britain.

In May 1798, news reached Paris that the Irish revolution had begun on its own. Tone hurried to Paris from Le Havre. Lady Pamela Fitzgerald, a French exile married to the leader of the United Irishmen, sent reports through her sister about the best places for debarkation along the Irish coast. The United Irishmen boasted that half a million people had sworn an oath of allegiance to the revolutionary cause, most having taken up arms. The Earl Camden, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, warned London that “even a small body of French will set the country ablaze.”⁵¹ The French, though, had neither the ships nor sailors ready to launch another cross-Channel invasion in response to the insurrection breaking out in Wexford. They had to resort to cutting down trees lining the avenues to the port to build the flat-bottom boats required to supplement the two vessels lent by the Dutch. Most disastrous of all, General Jean-Joseph Humbert impatiently sailed ahead of the other ships. His still unpaid, inexperienced sailors commanded few supplies. Humbert’s soldiers did have pamphlets in hand as they marched ashore. “The moment of breaking your chains is arrived. Our triumphant troops are now flying to the extremities of the earth, to tear up the roots of the wealth and tyranny of our enemies,” they announced to their fellow “citizens of the world.”⁵² Townspeople who saw French frigates sail into the harbor assumed they were British until they saw the blue and green uniforms. The Directory had ordered the ragged band to wait for the second fleet to arrive before engaging the English. Humbert, like so many other French generals before him, ignored his orders. Humbert’s Army of Ireland met the English at Castlebar. The eight hundred French soldiers, supported by about six hundred Irish recruits, were vastly outnumbered. Defeat seemed certain until one wing of the English army inexplicably broke ranks and fled. Other English divisions followed, surprising Humbert with victory. The French established the Provisional Government of Connaught. At a victory ball, according to now well-established French custom, the general assessed the local citizens two thousand guineas to support his war. Ignoring the chorus of Irish complaints, Humbert marched on to the next battle. At Ballinamuck, Humbert confronted twenty thousand English troops commanded by General Cornwallis. Luck was not on their side this time. In the rout, the English captured and executed the Irish leaders.

Encouraged by the news of Humbert’s first battle, French reinforcements, three thousand strong, once again with Tone in tow, sailed in September 1798 for Ireland. The British anticipated their arrival. Beset by a severe storm as they approached Ireland, few of the French ships made it past the British blockade and into the harbor. The French ships that broke through met news of Humbert’s defeat at Ballinamuck conveyed by the local postmaster. Their pamphlets proclaimed in less exuberant tones: “Let not your friends be butchered unassisted; if they are doomed to fall in this glorious struggle, let their deaths be useful to your cause, and their bodies serve as footsteps to the temple of Irish Liberty.”⁵³ The French sailed home, defeated for a third time. Revolutionary wars, it seemed, could not be won by decrees and proclamations alone.

Each side blamed the other. The Irish were disappointed that the French, who had long promised them aid, were unable to deliver it. The French military complained that they had been misled by the Irish exiles in Paris to expect revolutionary support from Protestants and Catholics alike. That had not materialized, either. After the failure of the third Irish invasion, French generals concluded that the Irish were not only oppressed by the English but engaged in their own civil war, Protestants vs. Catholics. The dispirited leaders of the United Irishmen countered that the French knew only how to subjugate revolutionaries, not to liberate them. French generals had proven that throughout Europe, they charged.

The evolving contradictions had consequences. The Irish were not the only revolutionary neighbors to ask whether the cosmopolitan French Revolution of 1789, embraced and energized by revolutionaries from every corner of the Atlantic for a decade, had finally been overwhelmed by calculations of French national interest. Others also wondered what had happened to the Enlightenment conviction that reason transcended national borders. Did the Irish experience prove that revolutionary France was just one more pragmatic European power calculating territorial gain?⁵⁴

“Switzerland is fulli revolutionated” “in the Name of the French Republic”

The answer to the Irish question was not clear-cut. French revolutionary strategy guided a foreign policy in transition under duress. Increasingly, decrees and dispatches were posted by French diplomats abroad critical of generals who disagreed with agents on the ground who disregarded committees and directors based in Paris. For the last five years of the eighteenth century, ever-changing revolutionary politics dictated the course of the war, while the levée en masse redirected the revolution in Paris. The military campaigns built one on another, pulling not only France but most of Europe into an unending war that ricocheted from one front to another, seemingly out of control.

Under the Directory, the French revolutionary armies had overreached themselves, marching beyond the territory the French could reasonably govern. Historian Albert Sorel bluntly summed up the Directory’s problematic strategy for revolutionary war: “Incapable of understanding the sentiments of a people who were not French, or a party that was not their own, a liberty they did not arbitrate, a justice they did not distribute, an independence that was not that of their own government, the Directory treated the emancipated republics as a conquered land.”⁵⁵ That set off a downward spiral. The French commissioners in Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and the Swiss cantons engendered distrust of their fundamental revolutionary principles as they established republics and then annexed territory to the French republic.

In January 1799, General Jean Championnet, still a confirmed Jacobin, took Naples. Overstepping the Directory’s orders and defying its civil commissioner, he created the Parthenopean Republic. The Directory recalled Championnet to Paris, where they arrested him. The Parthenopean Republic survived longer than its creator, until June 1799.

New European republics bore little resemblance to the vision of earlier revolutionaries. To propagate liberty, the French revolutionary armies lived off the land; the exploitation of scarce resources mobilized widespread resistance against France. The expense of provisioning the army alienated residents, even the most ardent revolutionaries. Escalating resistance to French rule in turn created an ever more pressing need for the French army to maintain order, and that led to more substantial requisitions. The directors changed governments, constitutions, generals, and agents abroad, but did not find a way out of this spiraling escalation of the revolutionary war. Nowhere was that more obvious than in the Swiss cantons.

In 1793, François Barthélemy had worried about the fate of the Swiss cantons. He reminded French foreign minister François Deforgues, who had replaced Lebrun (arrested and accused of treason by the Jacobins), of the agreements negotiated by “your predecessor.”⁵⁶ He also warned the diplomatic newcomer of the consequences of an independent diplomacy waged by overzealous and powerful French generals. French diplomats had credited Barthélemy’s “attention and his conciliatory spirit” with keeping the peace in the independent-minded republic.⁵⁷ He had weathered the shifts in French foreign policy by interpreting orders from Paris loosely in the light of his experience and his own relations with the Swiss. He had also encouraged the Swiss to “speak honestly and tell me everything in their hearts,” noting: “I responded with the same abandon.”⁵⁸ That seemed to work as long as there was minimal interference from the military and few decrees or agents wended their way across the mountains from Paris.

Deforgues promised Barthélemy that France would respect the neutrality of Switzerland just as it did that of the United States. That guarantee held for almost five years, a relatively long time amid the chaos of the militarized revolutionary foreign policy. During that same period, the Belgian provinces would be taken back by Austria, reconquered and occupied by France, and finally annexed to the French Republic.

In 1797, revolutionaries in Basel renounced their traditional oath of loyalty to Bern, established a national assembly, proclaimed their independence, and planted a tree of liberty. Revolutionary crowds set fire to chateaux in the surrounding countryside, inspiring popular uprisings in the Valais, Fribourg, Solothurn, Schaffhouse, Zurich, Toggenbourg, Thurgovie, Gossau, Lucerne, Basel, Rheinthal, Sargans, Gaster, and Uznach. The sound of gunfire drew French troops commanded by General Ménard into the village of Thierrens in the Vaud. “You know that Switzerland is fulli revolutionated (new things, new terms),” Brillat Savarin, the French writer just returned to Europe in 1797 from three years in America, informed a friend in his less than perfect English.⁵⁹ The Directory recalled General Ménard, sending General Brune to the Vaud with instructions to rely on decrees rather than arms. No sooner had Brune issued his first proclamations and opened negotiations with Bern than he received orders from Paris to attack the city in retaliation for the incident at Thierrens. The confused general wrote Paris requesting more precise instructions. The Directory replied in March, sharply cautioning Brune against negotiations with oligarchs and ordering him to march on Bern without delay, to occupy the city, unseat the government, and raid its treasury. Brune, on his own initiative, assured the Swiss that they were all republican brothers. Frédéric-César de La Harpe, a Lausanne lawyer who had taken up residence in Paris, advised the French directors to be more explicit in their directions to the confused diplomats in the Swiss cantons.⁶⁰

The Directory united the cantons on 22 March 1798, proclaiming the Helvetic Republic, One and Indivisible. Peter Ochs, the mayor of Basel and a leader of the “French party,” drafted a unitary Swiss constitution that decreed the equality of all the residents of the republic and abolished the remaining legal distinctions between citizens. Directors in Paris revised Ochs’s constitution and offered it to the newest republic. La Harpe, echoing earlier cautions from Germany and Italy, warned the French foreign minister, Charles Talleyrand, of the unrest brewing in the new Swiss republic. He blamed the generals and their soldiers who were not only taxing the Swiss to provision the Army of the Rhine “in the Name of the French Republic” but raping women and defiling the countryside.⁶¹Named the new Swiss president by the French, Ochs counseled his countryman against open defiance. A few weeks later, Ochs complained to La Harpe that despite his attempts to find common ground between the French and the Swiss, the cantons were rife with distrust and he felt personally threatened. The Directory, unsympathetic to his plight, forced Ochs to step down, replacing him with Philippe Secrétan, the onetime Brabant revolutionary who had returned to the Vaud.

The civil commissioner to the French army, Director Reubell’s brother-in-law Rapinat, waded into the disorderly republic, declaring null and void any Swiss decrees that contradicted French orders. He closed Swiss clubs, imprisoned journalists, and replaced reluctant officials with men known to be French allies. Before long, the Directory recalled Rapinat and overruled his draconian decrees. To the French request that La Harpe preside over his country, he warned them privately, “it is not in my character to be the creature of any foreign government.”⁶² At the same time, he cautioned Swiss revolutionaries that “without the assistance of the Grand Nation, the rights of the people and the name Helvetic would be obliterated.”⁶³ After consultations in Paris, the Directory sent Rapinat back to Switzerland more determined than ever to establish his authority over the Swiss. More troubling to the Swiss than the implications of Rapinat’s return was the French expectation that the Swiss field an army. Swiss delegations traveled to Paris reminding the French that Switzerland had been neutral for centuries. Talleyrand did not listen, ordering more than twenty thousand Swiss troops into battle against the Austrians in Italy.

MAP 8.2
Europe, 1799. Map by Bill Nelson

In Geneva, the independent republic did not last, either. In January 1798, to put an end to the continual disputes between the French agents and the government of the city-state, the Directory pulled the offending French deputation out of the city, but also closed off routes to foreign trade. French soldiers remained behind to patrol the streets.

One morning, the troops awoke to find that the French flag flying above the empty French resident’s house had been stained black. The Genevan city council immediately promised to hoist a new flag and offered a reward for the apprehension of the perpetrator. Five thousand contrite Genevan citizens processed to the French residence to apologize, hoping to stave off French retaliation. It came anyway. Two months later, on behalf of the Directory, the French resident presented the Genevan council with a Treaty to Reunite the Republic of Geneva to the French Republic. The Genevan council appointed an extraordinary commission of 130 members to respond to the French treaty, and the stalling began. The commission read the decree aloud at its first meeting. Discussion spilled over to a second and third meeting before the exasperated French resident ordered them to meet with him. With a stern face and “an extreme coldness,” he informed the Genevans that “it was time to finish this affair.”⁶⁴ They were to have their response to the French treaty to him by noon. Such an important decision could not be rushed, they replied, listing all the Genevan committees and councils that still had to be consulted. The French resident angrily and unilaterally announced the unification of Geneva to France. He called the councilors into his office to reflect on their options, under the surveillance of French troops. Four meetings later, the Geneva commission complained in a letter to Paris that the resident had acted without appropriate powers. The resident replied that his instructions from Paris were in the mail. At a tenth meeting, he ordered them to address him directly and to stop sending complaints to Paris. As the Genevan council met to consider whether to extend the term of the extraordinary commission, sixteen hundred French troops entered the city by three different gates and occupied the city hall atop the hill. While soldiers milled outside the door, the commission declared the end of Genevan independence. Geneva would be a French department, the Léman. No one was happy.

Swiss deputations wrote the French Directory of the suffering of the common people in their cantons as the French continued to wage war, but the Directory was in no position to lend material or moral assistance to anyone. Local officials complained of “the numerous troops of unclothed and starving people who line the roads of Switzerland. … Whole families are emigrating, but where to go? Misery reigns everywhere. Like a contagious illness, the troubles grow every day.”⁶⁵ Who would have thought a decade earlier, in 1789, when the Genevans and the French each revolted and threw off the tyrants of the Old Regime, or even a few years later in 1793, when Robespierre paid homage to the Americans and the Swiss as the two freest republics, that it would have come to this, revolution at the point of a bayonet. Chosen to represent Basel to the French Consulat, the author of the constitution of the ill-fated Helvetic Republic listened as Bonaparte announced in Paris, “Mr. Ochs, the Revolution is done.”⁶⁶

“Two thousand leaders that must be removed”: The Caribbean Epilogue to an Armed Revolution

But it was not done. In 1798, the Directory sent General Gabriel-Marie-Théodore-Joseph Hédouville to promulgate French legislation across the Atlantic in the colony of Saint-Domingue. Vested with civilian authority, Hédouville arrived to find a Caribbean ravaged by war. The British, who had deplored the French strategy of freeing the enslaved as “unprecedented … unjustifiable and barbarous,” ultimately followed the French practice of recruiting slaves to reinforce their dwindling forces in the Caribbean.⁶⁷Death from disease, especially yellow fever, had taken three out of every five British soldiers. Six thousand black soldiers who had been promised their freedom joined the British.

Hédouville’s mission went terribly wrong. To pacify the colony in anticipation of the arrival of fresh French troops, he tried to neutralize two military leaders—Toussaint Louverture, commander of the freed slaves, and André Rigaud, at the head of legions of free people of color—by setting them against each other. That strategy failed. While Hédouville won over Rigaud, Louverture, on his own, negotiated the terms of a British surrender and retreat from Saint-Domingue. Like the British, Louverture knew the limits of the power of Paris in the Caribbean in 1798.

Hédouville was no more successful in reestablishing order on the plantations of Saint-Domingue. His orders to the former slaves to sign three-to five-year contracts with their masters reverberated with echoes of slavery. Black soldiers returning from years of military service, some as officers with experience commanding their former masters, resisted the return to plantation labor. Hédouville tried to make an example of a high-ranking black officer. The officer, Moïse, called on Louverture for assistance. Together, Moïse and Louverture’s troops surrounded Le Cap, driving the agent of the French Directory and his accomplices onto ships to sail back to France. Julien Raimond, the one remaining commissioner from the time of Sonthonax and a longtime proponent of rights for free people of color, and Jean-Baptiste Belley, a member of the tricolor delegation that had secured emancipation in 1794, left for France with Hédouville.

The civil war between Louverture and Rigaud that Hédouville hoped to instigate broke out after he left. The unrest in the French colony suited France’s enemies, who exploited it to gain trading rights. Louverture, afraid that the return of French forces to support Rigaud would doom emancipation for the slaves, initiated negotiations with the British and the Americans to normalize their formerly clandestine commercial trade. The British and the Americans also agreed secretly to aid Louverture’s military efforts. An independent Saint-Domingue, they assumed, would weaken France by cutting it off from the profits of its colonial plantations, and would reduce the possibility of the rumored French attack on Jamaica.

Louverture wrote to the Directory to secure official support of his command, sending his letter with a white officer, Colonel Vincent. Before Vincent arrived in Paris, Bonaparte had felled the Directory. He had no intention of responding directly to the black leader. Instead, Bonaparte sent a commission of three, including Vincent and Julien Raimond, carrying proclamations that exempted the colony from French legislation and that established a new set of “special laws.” They arrived in May 1800 bearing assurances from Bonaparte that he would not violate their freedom, and army flags on which had been sewn an acknowledgment that liberty came from France.

Louverture had not waited for approval from Paris to solidify his authority over the island. He ordered Moïse into battle against the Spanish to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Basel and called for electoral assemblies to form a new assembly to write a constitution for the island. In their minds, “the Revolution had violently reversed all that constituted the old administration of the island of Saint-Domingue.”⁶⁸ Vincent returned to France again, this time with the new constitution confirming the abolition of slavery and naming Louverture governor for life.⁶⁹

Bonaparte responded with military force. He negotiated for British and American support to reimpose slavery in the colony and to restore the slave trade. They obliged, thus freeing the French to turn their military might on the colony. Bonaparte mobilized twenty thousand troops under his brother-in-law, General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, a veteran of battles on the Rhine, in Italy, and in Ireland, to take possession of the ports, fight against the black generals, and disarm the black population of the once prosperous colony. The naval fleet carried the largest army yet to cross the Atlantic. Peace in Europe, Bonaparte informed Louverture, had allowed him to direct his full attention to Saint-Domingue.⁷⁰

Leclerc arrived in Le Cap in February 1802. Refused permission to land, he seized it “with indignation,” only to discover that the port had been evacuated and burned to the ground.⁷¹ His proclamation to the residents of Saint-Domingue, printed in two columns, one French, one Creole, promised that the French would guarantee liberty for the blacks. Bonaparte urged the citizens of Saint-Domingue to join their “friends and their brothers in Europe,” all of whom had “embraced the French and promised them peace and friendship.”⁷²

Louverture tried to warn military leaders in the west and the south that the French had come to reimpose slavery, but all of his dispatches were intercepted by forces in league with the French. The defection of key black leaders finally forced Louverture to negotiate. When he arrived to discuss terms with the French, they arrested him. Even without Louverture, word of the French decree reinstituting slavery in Guadeloupe rallied resistance in Saint-Domingue. One of Louverture’s allies who had defected to the French told a general that the insurrections were spreading like fire throughout the colony. They were not, as the French wanted to believe, just the work of brigands; instead, he warned, “the danger is in the general opinion of the blacks” aroused by the decrees.⁷³ General Donatien-Marie-Joseph Rochambeau, experienced in American combat as an aide to his father, complained to Paris that despite executing all blacks he suspected of organizing the insurrections, he could not quell the incessant talk of killing whites and burning their cities. Leclerc realized that even though they had deported Louverture, the French still confronted “two thousand leaders that must be removed.”⁷⁴ Leclerc appealed to Bonaparte not to do anything that even hinted of the reintroduction of the slave trade in Saint-Domingue, because “under those conditions, Citoyen Consul, the moral force that I have established here will be destroyed, and I will be able to do nothing by persuasion, and I do not have sufficient force at my command.”⁷⁵ Leclerc sent an officer back to Paris to describe in person the appalling conditions in the colony.

French officers in the Caribbean continued to report back to Paris, as they had from Koblenz and Milan, in letters bemoaning the difficulty of their mission. The resistance in Saint-Domingue was unlike anything the French generals had met before. Even as French soldiers proclaimed to the blacks that they were all friends and brothers, the blacks kept firing at them. In Europe or America, their enemies were the troops raised by the British, Austrians, and Prussians. But for the black soldiers, defeat of the revolution in Saint-Domingue meant slavery or death. Bonaparte’s expeditionary force was overwhelmed by the combined forces of the mulattoes and blacks united under Jean Jacques Dessalines. Rochambeau capitulated in November 1803. Dessalines promulgated a Declaration of Independence of Haiti from France on 1 January 1804.

At the end of a chapter that began with the revolutionary French Republic declaring war on emperors, Haitian revolutionaries secured their independence by defeating the armies of the soon to be crowned emperor of the French. Led by Jefferson, the Americans established a total quarantine of Haiti.⁷⁶ They were intent on limiting the revolution that threatened to return to their shores. The American leaders, like the French, were ready to declare an end to the revolutionary era.