Chapter 124: Omake: The Beginning of the French Civil War

AN: Many thanks to @sparkptz for another update.

Once again, if you want to contribute to the TL, feel free to shoot me a DM with your excerpts, POVs, or narratives! Since we're expanding the story to the global stage, I'll gladly put any inputs from the readers into the timeline.

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Spark's Note: Many of these events are referenced in Chapters 94 of the main timeline

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

The Purge of Marseille

News of the astonishing events of the 14th, 15th, and 16th of November spread throughout France over the following weeks, although not as fast as Louis XVI’s entourage as it sped southwards. Amidst the chaos of the Battle of Paris and the subsequent clean-up — the National Guard had deliberately damaged much of the city’s roads and lighting in the effort to turn Paris into an armed labyrinth of barricades and traps — it took over a week for messages to be sent out to the various departments informing them of the astonishing events of the previous weekend. Indeed, many of the southern regions of France did not hear about the Republic at all until royalist armies, reimposing the King’s absolute authority, told them about it, usually in the course of levying troops from said regions.

This delay turned out to be fateful. Whilst Lafayette and the much-depleted National Assembly tried to get control of events in Paris and assert their newfound Republican authority on the provinces, the royal entourage continued towards Marseille. Initially, the King had intended to set up court in Tours, but it soon became clear that they needed to get as far as they could from the clutches of the National Guard whilst still remaining in the metropole. Along the way, the entourage — initially the royal family, the nobles that constituted the remaining court at Versailles, and those who had escaped the disaster in Paris — had grown into a respectable army. Rumors of the King’s flight had spread far quicker than any official messages from either the King’s entourage or from the National Assembly, and those conservative and royalist nobles who had not yet fled the country flocked to the King’s side. Soon the King’s entourage had attached to it a respectable army of near eight thousand; albeit one of the more top-heavy armies in recorded history. At least half of the army was of the officer class, with only a small fraction of enlisted or levied troops.

On the 13th of December, the royal army reached Marseille. What followed can only be considered one of the great tragedies of the entire war. Still infuriated by the humiliation at Paris, Artois — now with experienced military men around to guide him — was determined to do to Marseille what had not been done to Paris, particularly as Marseille had been one of the cities most enthusiastic in support of the Revolution. Whilst the people of Marseille had ample warning of what was headed their way, and the local Dantonist National Guard tried to organize a valiant defense, there was no repeat of the victory the Parisians had achieved on that fateful November Sunday. Artois had learned his lessons well, and the people of Marseille did not have a Lafayette leading them. The Royal Army stayed in a single group, avoided the makeshift defensive structures the National Guard had tried to construct, and over the following days methodically purged the city of its pro-Revolutionary sentiment district by district, street by street, house by house. It is difficult to determine the exact death toll of what was soon described in Republican propaganda as “la purge”, but modern historical estimates of whom were killed during the battle or were executed after the fighting had ended range from five to seven thousand, with some wilder neo-Montagnardin claims of up to twenty thousand (ironically, these dubious claims typically rely on Girondin propaganda after the fact). Louis and Artois had, at last, crushed an unruly mob.

The fallout from the Purge

In the short term, the Purge of Marseille was a badly-needed triumph for the King. Had he been forced out of France entirely, it is quite possible that the French Civil War could have sputtered out before it even reached a chance to get fully going, and the Battle of Paris would have been the final paragraph in the long history of the monarchy in metropolitan France. However, with Marseille under firm royalist control, the King was able to consolidate, establish a new court, and even gain control over much of southern France — often, as mentioned — by dint of controlling the roads and getting the message there first. Over the course of the first half of 1790, the Republic steadily pushed the royalist forces back, but never quickly or decisively enough to truly threaten the King's position in Marseille. All the while, émigrés who had fled France throughout 1789 flocked to the King’s court, bringing with them two full armies under the Prince de Condé and the Marquis de Bouillé, and Austrian mercenaries began to pour into the south of France. By summer 1790, the National Guard’s push south had stalled, and all was ready for a massive counterattack against the Republic.

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In the longer term, however, the Purge was a permanent stain and a catastrophe for the Royalist cause. Amongst those parts of France that did know about the Republic and fall under its authority, the story of the Purge became a black legend, although admittedly a highly embellished one. The new Republican anthem, La Marseillaise, was named in honor of the city by Lafayette; no citizen of the Republic needed any articulation of what was meant by “contre nous, de la tyrannie l’étendard sanglant est levé”. The Girondins, who would dominate the National Assembly until the April Coup and the Second Republic, would enshrine “Remember Marseille!” as their motto. More religiously devout parts of the north that had grown increasingly uneasy with Lafayette’s radical reforms, particularly Britanny and the Vendée, almost immediately snapped back to full-throated support for the Revolution. The people of Marseille had been guilty solely of protecting their own lives and liberty; for that crime they had been massacred by their own King. The French public would never forget, and never truly forgive.

International support slipped too; American Ambassador Laurens immediately denounced the Purge (admittedly, his views on the war were far short of neutral), and Great Britain, which had been gradually moving towards a pro-Louis position, soon declared a policy of neutrality that it would maintain for the rest of the war. Fortunately for Louis, however, the Austrians, Prussians, and Spanish had no such moral quandaries, thinking that Louis had finally done what he should have done all along. The Austrians and, to a lesser extent, the Prussians were soon sending significant but secret military aid to Louis following constant pleas by Queen Marie Antoinette to her brother. Of course, being propped up by the despised Austrians did not do any favors for Louis’ reputation amongst the French people. Official declarations of support would follow next August with the Declaration of Pillnitz. The formation of the First Coalition was underway.

The Republic consolidates

However, it was not until late January until Paris received word of the scale of the tragedy that had unfolded on the Mediterranean Coast, a testament to how effectively the Royal Army was controlling communications in and out of Provence and Aquitaine. In any case, the Assembly had been well and truly occupied during that time with establishing a brand new government. With many of its authors no longer present, the Constitution that had been worked on throughout 1790 was no longer fit for purpose — not least because it assumed a monarchy — and it was thus quickly discarded by the now much more radical Rump Assembly, and a new drafting process began.

This drafting process, however, would largely have to wait until the Assembly was reconstituted. 150 of the original deputies had opted to stand by Lafeyette and declare a Republic when the King had laid down his ultimatum, overwhelmingly out of personal loyalty to Lafayette. Once it was clear that Paris was saved and the Revolution was, for the moment, secured, another six hundred or so emerged from their hiding places to resume their seats in the Assembly. Dantonists and Montagnardins alike [1] railed against Lafayette’s decision to allow these deputies back, warning that they had abandoned the Republic in its hour of greatest need and were not likely to be its friends going forward. Indeed, many of these delegates would form the core of Orleanist agitation in the years to come.

Lafayette held firm, however, pointing out that he had let Robespierre and Barère resume their seats. In any case, the question was moot; even with over 750 deputies in the Assembly, that left almost six hundred seats that needed filling. Elections were arranged for February; a ludicrously optimistic timetable by any standards, given that contact with the provinces was only just re-established — and, in the case of virtually all of France south of Lyon, would not be made at all — and little about the basic constitutional structure of the new Republic was known. Lafayette knew, of course, but he was not yet telling anyone — that would be work for the new Assembly.

Out in the provinces, the situation was no less chaotic. News about Louis’s ultimatum to the Assembly, the Assembly’s declaration of a Republic, the Battle of France and then Louis’s flight to the south had come all at once; news of the Purge of Marseille arrived in most places shortly thereafter. The resultant shock sent the populace of most departments still loyal to the Revolution into what has often been described as a Second Great Fear. Estates, property, legal titles, and anything else associated with the monarchy were smashed, seized, or burned by armed mobs, often led by delegates of local Jacobin Clubs. Anything owned by known conservative absolutists or those who had gone to join the King in Marseille was treated with particular disdain. Eventually, the National Guard was able to restore order, but no attempt was made to restore the property of those now widely viewed as murderous traitors. This was, to say the least, an extraordinary environment in which to hold France’s second ever attempt at a democratic election, and the first with universal manhood suffrage.

Yet somehow, the election of February 1790 went off smoothly in those provinces that were not under Royalist control or seeing active fighting, largely thanks to the enthusiastic participation of the populace — turnout in some communes were in excess of seventy percent — and the watchful eye of the National Guard, now firmly enshrined as the institutional embodiment of the Revolution and the Republic. On March the 7th, the new delegates of the National Assembly — the famous Second Assembly — took their seats for the first time.

The new Assembly of a thousand was a very different body to the old. Largely gone were the swathes of liberal and conservative nobles who had represented the intellectual cream of the pre-Revolutionary French crop. In their place were men — although, as of yet, no women — from all walks of French life: lawyers, doctors, artisans, merchants, and journalists. These were men who had cut their teeth out in the provinces, translating Lafayette’s democratic reforms into tangible, real-world action where it mattered. They knew their country, they knew their people, and, they were committed to making their new Republic work. Amongst them were many of the giants of the Revolution and of French politics for the next two decades: Lafayette, Danton, Desmoulins, Brissot, Robespierre. The great French experiment in democratic republican governance — mirroring that of Kim, Washington, and Jefferson across the Atlantic — had begun in earnest.

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[1] The author is being tricky here; at this stage, there is no discernable difference between Dantonists and Montagnardins, neither term having yet come into use (even “Jacobin” is too specific at this stage). One might wonder why the author is at pains to make this distinction...

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