The French Revolution (PART ONE)
The Ancien Regime was the backbone of the French nation-state. It was also the backbone of the end of the Kingdom of France and its eight hundred years of existence.
It began, as it would, with the matter of finance. The matter was not fuelled by a lack of revenue, but by the lack of centralised planning in how the revenue was collected and who paid for it. While British affairs were dealt with annually by looking at revenue and spending, the French matters were dealt with spending but not collection. Collection, what would drive expenditure, was a matter of regional authorities whose powers had grown over the course of two centuries. The Estates-General, the only authority that could approve national taxes for France, had not convened since 1614 with the revenue being dealt with by the regional Parlements. These authorities, with their jurisdictions split over France, applied one-time taxes while giving private individuals the power to collect the taxes. This calamity was more noticeable once you realised that France was wealthier and more populous than Britain. Following a declaration of default in 1770, then Financial Minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot made his way by reforming. The defeats of the Continental Army in the American Rebellion by the hands of the British and Loyalist forces had killed off any chance that the Kingdom of France could intervene in the fighting.
Despite being thankful for France not going against the British in North America, Turgot was fired from the position in 1778 (1) on a mix of court intrigue and failure to combat the regional Parlements and their resistance to the centralisation of tax collection. He was replaced by Jacques Necker, a Swiss Protestant, who attempted reform with much the same enthusiasm and the same resistance. The War of the Bavarian Succession breaking out did not help matters, with Necker being fired from the job in 1782, failing to prevent French intervention in the Western Hemisphere and failing to fight against the pro-Austrian faction of the French court. He stood back as he heard the news regarding the Treaty of Nantes and his successor, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the then-Archbishop of Paris. This man was the simultaneous Chief Minister of France and the Finance Minister, having little experience with either matter but propelled to such positions by Maria Antoinette and the pro-Austrian camp in the wake of the Austrian victory in the War of the Bavarian Succession.
He started by forcing the regional parlements to publish records of internal free trade within the country in early 1784, close to two years after he was thrust into the position. He escaped an attempt on his life in March 1784, by a group of French veterans who lost fellow men against the Incans in South America. The assailants were repelled by a group of loyalist Garde Nationale. The news of the conspiracy had begun to raise tensions between the loyalist officers and their soldiers. The terms of the Treaty of Nantes had struck at the French, in particular the intellectuals of the middle class, who felt that the monarchy and the nobility had wasted the nation's energies for nothing. Over 20,000 French soldiers and sailors had died during the fighting, with sailors on half-pay wondering what the King was thinking, knowing that Spain was abandoned to the ravages of the treaty and France was left with no compensation or territory gained. The alliance between King Louis XVI and Austrian Emperor Joseph II meant nothing to the French middle, working and lower classes. A growing national debt, rising economic social inequality and an inability to pay it off due to legal quandaries mattered more to the French. A plan for provincial assemblies was made up in 1785, which was ignored by the parlements after they had ignored Turgot and Necker's reforms. In that year, King Louis XVI suspended them and replaced them with justices who would enforce tax collection, measures that were ignored once again. Riots over food prices began in 1786, starting in Paris, which were quelled by loyalist soldiers. 23 Loyalist soldiers died compared to over 627 protestors. Moderates within the anti-Ancien Regime crowd were pushed out or radicalised by already pessimistic individuals who saw no reform as too much and no effort as too wasteful. They looked to the American Republic established by First Citizen Aaron Burr and promoted by Thomas Jefferson, Hugh Williamson and Benjamin Franklin. Paris had thousands of people who were unemployed and in poverty, persons that would fit the bill for the radical message of equality, fraternity, republicanism and liberty. The Enlightement had triggered the necessity of understanding human rights in a nation-state, and that meant ideas such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, taxation with representation and reforms to government. Things which were not present in an absolutist monarchy like France. These ideas stuck with the intellectuals and the middle class of France, who were seeing the consequences of a static, unreformed system that failed to uphold itself.
The King, however, expelled the parlements and forced them to move Nantes in June 1786 following the Paris Riots. As a part of a measure to enforce tax collection for longer than a year, they were recalled to Paris by March 1787. The conflict ended at last with the King convening the Estates-General in November 1788. Necker was restored to his position as Finance Minister and Chief Minister of France, as the French Crown's debt was 4.9 billion livre at the end of that year.
Not convening since 1614, the Estates-General convened after the 1788 elections in August. The First Estate was for the clergy, numbering 303 deputies, who represented the Catholic clergy who owned close to 1/10th of all French land. Two-thirds of the clergy lived on money that was a similar number to the urban and rural poor. 291 deputies would be elected to the Second Estate, for the nobles who owned a quarter of the land and collected rents. The nobles were divided by those within the aristocracy and those that were traditionalist conservative professionals within judicial and administrative ranks as well as dominators of the regional parlements. As for the 610 deputies of the Third Estate, half were lawyers or local officials with 1/3rd of the deputies being businessmen and 51 were wealthy landowners. What made the process unfair was the fact that the First and Second Estates were, by and large, exempt from the taxes that had not being passed to the Crown. That and how the Second and First Estates were in seperate chambers and could therefore could outvote the Third.
The Estates each wrote down a list of complaints, which was supportive of the monarchy, relaxing press censorship and willing to reform the national finances once it was made public in February 1789. Abbé Sieyès, a priest and political thinker within the Third Estate, argued for a single assembly for all three Estates instead of three seperate facilities. After a period of argument between two sides, the Third Estate verified its own deputies as of the 18th March 1789. The First Estate began to do the same on the 23rd March 1789. On the 2nd April 1789, 610 delegates for the Third Estate and 215 from the First Estate sat as the National Assembly, as one group. It was made clear to the First and Second Estates that the Assembly would proceed with or without them. On the 12th April 1789, a majority of the First Estate and 200 Second Estate deputies arrived, thereby convening as one body.
The Estates-General started with the regional Parlements, which were abolished on the 7th May 1789 after much argument. This was followed by plans made by the National Assembly to control revenue, not the Crown. The response was the King dismissing Necker on the 10th May 1789, with Necker fleeing Paris after overhearing news of a lynching of loyalist ministers. The lynching never took place as it was quelled by loyalist soldiers, but the fear spared Necker's life from the radicals who would ensnare others as he reached Spain in late 1789. The debt had increased, as the debt ratio to gross national income now reached 56.7% (compared to Britain's 173.8%). The debt was greater in Britain, but due to the regressive tax system of France, the revenue towards repaying the interest was the same in both nations. The privileges of the Church were to be reformed also, but they were shot down by the First Estate and a large section of the Second. Curtailing the powers of the King was the next mission in July 1789, with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Hugh Williamson speaking on the matter. The three men were part of the Third Estate since emigrating from North America. While the rhetoric was on their side, the debate was being torn by the Third Estate radicals under Jean-Paul Marat (who formed under the name Jacobin and took to the American Republic for inspiration) and the Third Estate moderates under Jacques Pierre Brissot. Brissot had his friends in Franklin, Jefferson and Williamson. The moderates would come under the name of "Brissotists, Jeffersonians or Franklinists" by late 1789.
The Spring time of 1789 for the Kingdom of France gave way to a poor harvest. The rural farmers had next to nothing to sell and the urbanites had their purchasing power corrupted due to inflation. The trigger began in Paris, with 100,000 people marching in the streets in the morning of the 26th July 1789. The Swiss Guards and the Garde Nationale under General Lafayette began to disperse the crowds at 10am, but the crowds fought back. The reports at the time suggest that Jean-Paul Marat, the leader of the sans-culottes, pointed to The Bastille at 11:12am. The Bastille was stormed at 2pm, after several hundred men gathered arms to besiege the fortress. Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay, the governor of The Bastille, was given an order to hold out. With 315 Swiss Guards, Garde Nationale and Royalists, de Launay held out for several hours. The Bastille was surrounded on all sides by revolutionaries and protestors. The defenders would try to pray for a Royalist counterattack, which came in the early hours of the 27th. However, at 4:13am, the walls of The Bastille were breached. A total of 4,750 protestors stormed the fortress, taking all of the available weapons and munitions. In the darkness, there was much confusion over who was who. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner who was treated well under de Launay, was killed in the chaos, having been mistaken for one of the defenders (2). The defenders were lynched, with de Launay beheaded and having his head placed on a spike.
As this occurred, the Royal Family fled Versailles. Having seized literature by the Jacobins and the Brissotists made mention of republicanism, the Garde Nationale declared the necessity of emigrating to Austria. After news arrived of a mob marching to Versailles, the Royal Family made for Austria on the night of the 1st August 1789, escorted by 1500 dragoons that had to fight their way through a mob of 3,000. Across the country, the news of Paris falling to the revolutionaries spread like a bushfire. The royalist areas of Brittany, Normandy and the Vendee rose in declaration of the King and the Bourbon Royal Family on the 15th August 1789. The National Assembly was welcomed in Versailles on the 28th August 1789, where it stood for a new meeting. However, much of the Second Estate had fled for the countryside, to their own properties to defend, or left for the Vendee or for Britain.
The National Assembly could not contain the growing violence, which was now developing into anarchy in the surrounding region and small-scale skirmishes the further away from Paris one looked. The Assembly abolished feudalism in the country, established trial by jury, an independent courts system and abolished the tax exemptions the aristocracy had over the course of October and November. At the same time, the army was being divided, with the officers being loyal to the Crown and the soldiers of the line being drawn to the revolutionary fervour. The beginning of December had sans-culottes coming out and lynching farmers that refused to surrender their crops without compensation in time for winter. When news came of the Bourbon Royal Family arriving in Austria under pomp and circumstance, the National Assembly was confronted in the Palace of Versailles by 12,000 Jacobins on the 11th December 1789, who announced their declaration of a new order. The Brissotists began to split over the declaration, only for the opposition to be arrested en-masse by Marat and the Jacobins and denounced by Jacques Pierre Brissot and his more devoted followers for "counter-revolutionary actions against the state". Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Williamson were arrested on the 25th April 1789 along with 37 others from the First and Third Estate and imprisoned in near starving-conditions in Paris. Somehow separated, Thomas Jefferson and six others escaped their cells six days later during a loyalist attempt to free prisoners across Paris. Failing to rescue his fellows during the chaos Jefferson would escape the city, arriving in Spain in on the 14th February 1790.
Jean-Paul Marat essentially became the face of the revolution, where he was sworn into power as the First Citizen in the front of Notre Dame on the 7th January 1790. Notre Dame, one of the great Catholic cathedrals in Europe, was turned into a church dedicated to the Cult of the Supreme Being. While Marat orchestrated the popular sentiment, intellectual fuel was developed by Maximilian Robespierre, who believed that a deistic cult was necessary for the de-Christianisation of France and of Europe. A cult where the being was not God, but Reason and salvation was not by faith alone or by faith and works (as the Catholic Church supports) but by pushing on virtue. Reason replaced God in moral thought as of the 8th January, where the first session was held. At the same time, the 1790 Constitution was declared to the people. Marat's position as First Citizen was unlimited five-year terms, where he would be the supreme executive power in a republican system of government. The House of Bourbon were not to be recognised.
The National Assembly was dissolved on the 16th January 1790, with the National Congress replacing it. The Congress was Marat and Robespierre's idea in the 1790 Constitution. While the Constitution upheld human rights such as freedom of speech and of the press and manhood suffrage, it also included ideals such as republican government and the abolition of the Catholic Church in France, instead acknowledging the Cult of the Supreme Being. The National Congress, 315 strong, voted to pass the constitution and to recognise Marat pro forma on the 21st January. Marat's first orders were to declare King Louis XVI and the House of Bourbon traitors and that they were to be executed on sight should they return to France. The French Army was reorganised, as sans-culottes took over town after town. Republican forces under Louis Desaix pushed out loyalists in the west, leaving the Vendee, Normandy and Brittany as the only clear unoccupied regions as of the 25th March 1790.
The United Kingdom, caught off-guard by the sweeping moves by the republican forces, assisted with loyalist refugees. On the 10th April 1790, Prime Minister Edmund Burke made a speech denouncing the revolution, which was followed by a twelve minute standing ovation. Burke would be regarded as one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers due to this speech as well as the effort he made in taking in refugees from France as well as declaring war on the First Republic of France on the 11th April. Britain was followed by the Kingdom of Sweden on the 27th April and the Electorate of Saxony and the Austrian Empire on the 22nd May. Austria raised a total of 150,000 men in May, while Joseph II wrote a letter ordering Marat to stand aside and reinstate King Louis XVI as King of France. Marat declined on the 15th June 1790, leaving France no option but to face Britain, French Loyalists, Austria, Sweden and Saxony in war. With rumours of 200,000 soldiers amassed by Austria, Marat in turn ordered levee en masse on the 28th June 1790, with 400,000 men called to arms.
Louis Marie Turreau was one of many officers who had been swept in by the revolution, with his zeal coming from ruthless battlefield combat rather than a high-minded virtue of how the world ought to be governed. Turreau, having served in the New Spain Revolution (3), became a colonel in charge of putting down the loyalists in the Vendee who refused to enlist. In May, he gathered to himself 6,000 sans-culottes before pushing through the region. The enforced closure of churches and the expulsion of priests that refused to obey the 1790 Constitution had triggered Vendee resistance, with battles at Savenay and Nantes being republican victories in late May. Turreau was promoted, with 20,000 men under his disposal as he continued through the rebel areas. He would get a few more recruits from the peasants who were given lands from the monasteries, but a few was all he could get. The British landed near Machecoul on the 23rd September 1790, 5,000 under General Henry Clinton who would assist the Vendee resistance. The hope was for the Bretons, Normans and Vendee to be organised as a counter-revolutionary force.
Machecoul was occupied by the Vendee-British force, numbering 11,000, on the 27th September 1790. Jacques Cathelineau, a peddler of contraband products, was a devout Catholic and royalist as well as a physically strong man. Cathelineau was made the leader of the Vendee contingent. Turreau gathered 26,000 men, who invested the city on the 28th September 1789. The battle would start to show signs of what was to come. The sans-culottes, although poorly equipped, were strong in their courage and in their numbers. The men would assault Machecoul, even under heavy fire. This was an argument played out with bullets and cannon fire instead of ink and quill. Turreau gave in and moved away in the early hours of the 29th September, preying instead on the rural towns and monasteries that still held out for the King (and extension, God). The victory allowed for the formation of the Catholic and Royal Army of the Vendee, which would be the official counter-revolutionary army as of 15th October 1790.
The Coalition Army, numbering 120,000 under the command of Saxon General Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, marched into France on the 26th July 1790. It consisted of Austrian, Saxon, Hanoverian, Hessian and Prussians, soldiers that were once enemies but now allies under a single commander. In August, the Duke of Brunswick defeated the sans-culotte forces under General François Christophe de Kellermann at Strasbourg on the 19th August 1790 before capturing Mulhouse on the 28th and Nancy on the 9th September. September had been a time of drawing in new recruits from the French loyalists that still remained in the country. The Duke of Brunswick's numbers shot up to over 150,000 men. Facing against Kellermann again, they fought at Metz on the 18th September 1790. Taking 65,000 men, he faced against 40,000 under Kellermann. The fighting lasted for five hours, with the sans-culottes engaging in wave attacks to compensate for the lack of weapons. The fight was inconclusive. Kellermann's report was published as a victory and the Duke of Brunswick's report was published as a victory as well. Kellermann had managed to halt the Duke of Brunswick's advance, which would have taken Verdun and the lands east of the Forest of Argonne. The Duke of Brunswick, however, escaped with the tactical victory, losing only 4,000 men to Kellermann's 12,000.
The Revolution in Belgium, which had started in September 1789, was receiving support from the French Republic. The hope was for Charles Theodore to give up on trying to hold his lands. Charles Theodore was Duke of Berg-Jülich and Elector of the Palatine, Duke of Luxembourg, of Limburg and the Count of Hainaut. His territories had 50,000 men set out to crush the revolutionary force, which numbered 37,000. The first battle was at Mons on the 6th September 1790. The integration of the forces of Charles Theodore had been haphazard at best. The French and Belgian soldiers assaulted the lines several times throughout the day, often repeating the formations that King Charles XII had once committed eighty years before. The gunfire was secondary to the rush of the poorly armed French and Belgian forces, which battered Charles Theodore's forces into a rout. The French and Belgians, led by Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, suffered 11,000 casualties. The Imperial forces, suffered 23,700 casualties before falling into a rout, leaving the city to be taken by Lafayette's forces. The year of training and recruitment had benefitted the Belgians in their fight for independence as a republican state alongside the French.
October and November were lull months, as autumn hit hard and winter was upon both sides. The Coalition forces had been roused and the French were in turn.
The Kingdom of France was over. The Austrians, Saxons and Swedish begin to assemble their armies to storm France, while the British are preparing also. The malice of the infernal columns under Turreau against the Vendee was about to begin.
Meanwhile, the speed of everything had not allowed for any concerns about past grudges. Such was the case of Pasquale Paoli, who forgave one man's son. On the 5th August 1790, he took in several Corsican nationalists that were a part of the army. On the 10th August 1790, Pasquale Paoli was acclaimed as the President of the Second Corsican Republic. In the room where it happened would be his apprentice, Napoleone di Buonaparte (5).
*****************************
1. Two years later than OTL
2. His work, 120 Days of Sodom, was lost in the carnage of the fighting.
3. He never had any OTL military experience before the French revolution. Now, he is promoted earlier.
4. Paoli never forgave Bonaparte for his father's betrayal of Corsica in 1769. Here, he was forgive for his father's trechery and Bonaparte retains his Corsican nationalism as well as his republicanism.
I don't know how long this will go for, but I hope it is worth it.
Likes, thoughts and comments below. I don't know how far the ATL French Revolution should go for. Hope you enjoyed this post.
EDIT: Have increased the time to make the revolution more plausible, as well as added a few more elements.
It began, as it would, with the matter of finance. The matter was not fuelled by a lack of revenue, but by the lack of centralised planning in how the revenue was collected and who paid for it. While British affairs were dealt with annually by looking at revenue and spending, the French matters were dealt with spending but not collection. Collection, what would drive expenditure, was a matter of regional authorities whose powers had grown over the course of two centuries. The Estates-General, the only authority that could approve national taxes for France, had not convened since 1614 with the revenue being dealt with by the regional Parlements. These authorities, with their jurisdictions split over France, applied one-time taxes while giving private individuals the power to collect the taxes. This calamity was more noticeable once you realised that France was wealthier and more populous than Britain. Following a declaration of default in 1770, then Financial Minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot made his way by reforming. The defeats of the Continental Army in the American Rebellion by the hands of the British and Loyalist forces had killed off any chance that the Kingdom of France could intervene in the fighting.
Despite being thankful for France not going against the British in North America, Turgot was fired from the position in 1778 (1) on a mix of court intrigue and failure to combat the regional Parlements and their resistance to the centralisation of tax collection. He was replaced by Jacques Necker, a Swiss Protestant, who attempted reform with much the same enthusiasm and the same resistance. The War of the Bavarian Succession breaking out did not help matters, with Necker being fired from the job in 1782, failing to prevent French intervention in the Western Hemisphere and failing to fight against the pro-Austrian faction of the French court. He stood back as he heard the news regarding the Treaty of Nantes and his successor, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the then-Archbishop of Paris. This man was the simultaneous Chief Minister of France and the Finance Minister, having little experience with either matter but propelled to such positions by Maria Antoinette and the pro-Austrian camp in the wake of the Austrian victory in the War of the Bavarian Succession.
He started by forcing the regional parlements to publish records of internal free trade within the country in early 1784, close to two years after he was thrust into the position. He escaped an attempt on his life in March 1784, by a group of French veterans who lost fellow men against the Incans in South America. The assailants were repelled by a group of loyalist Garde Nationale. The news of the conspiracy had begun to raise tensions between the loyalist officers and their soldiers. The terms of the Treaty of Nantes had struck at the French, in particular the intellectuals of the middle class, who felt that the monarchy and the nobility had wasted the nation's energies for nothing. Over 20,000 French soldiers and sailors had died during the fighting, with sailors on half-pay wondering what the King was thinking, knowing that Spain was abandoned to the ravages of the treaty and France was left with no compensation or territory gained. The alliance between King Louis XVI and Austrian Emperor Joseph II meant nothing to the French middle, working and lower classes. A growing national debt, rising economic social inequality and an inability to pay it off due to legal quandaries mattered more to the French. A plan for provincial assemblies was made up in 1785, which was ignored by the parlements after they had ignored Turgot and Necker's reforms. In that year, King Louis XVI suspended them and replaced them with justices who would enforce tax collection, measures that were ignored once again. Riots over food prices began in 1786, starting in Paris, which were quelled by loyalist soldiers. 23 Loyalist soldiers died compared to over 627 protestors. Moderates within the anti-Ancien Regime crowd were pushed out or radicalised by already pessimistic individuals who saw no reform as too much and no effort as too wasteful. They looked to the American Republic established by First Citizen Aaron Burr and promoted by Thomas Jefferson, Hugh Williamson and Benjamin Franklin. Paris had thousands of people who were unemployed and in poverty, persons that would fit the bill for the radical message of equality, fraternity, republicanism and liberty. The Enlightement had triggered the necessity of understanding human rights in a nation-state, and that meant ideas such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, taxation with representation and reforms to government. Things which were not present in an absolutist monarchy like France. These ideas stuck with the intellectuals and the middle class of France, who were seeing the consequences of a static, unreformed system that failed to uphold itself.
The King, however, expelled the parlements and forced them to move Nantes in June 1786 following the Paris Riots. As a part of a measure to enforce tax collection for longer than a year, they were recalled to Paris by March 1787. The conflict ended at last with the King convening the Estates-General in November 1788. Necker was restored to his position as Finance Minister and Chief Minister of France, as the French Crown's debt was 4.9 billion livre at the end of that year.
Not convening since 1614, the Estates-General convened after the 1788 elections in August. The First Estate was for the clergy, numbering 303 deputies, who represented the Catholic clergy who owned close to 1/10th of all French land. Two-thirds of the clergy lived on money that was a similar number to the urban and rural poor. 291 deputies would be elected to the Second Estate, for the nobles who owned a quarter of the land and collected rents. The nobles were divided by those within the aristocracy and those that were traditionalist conservative professionals within judicial and administrative ranks as well as dominators of the regional parlements. As for the 610 deputies of the Third Estate, half were lawyers or local officials with 1/3rd of the deputies being businessmen and 51 were wealthy landowners. What made the process unfair was the fact that the First and Second Estates were, by and large, exempt from the taxes that had not being passed to the Crown. That and how the Second and First Estates were in seperate chambers and could therefore could outvote the Third.
The Estates each wrote down a list of complaints, which was supportive of the monarchy, relaxing press censorship and willing to reform the national finances once it was made public in February 1789. Abbé Sieyès, a priest and political thinker within the Third Estate, argued for a single assembly for all three Estates instead of three seperate facilities. After a period of argument between two sides, the Third Estate verified its own deputies as of the 18th March 1789. The First Estate began to do the same on the 23rd March 1789. On the 2nd April 1789, 610 delegates for the Third Estate and 215 from the First Estate sat as the National Assembly, as one group. It was made clear to the First and Second Estates that the Assembly would proceed with or without them. On the 12th April 1789, a majority of the First Estate and 200 Second Estate deputies arrived, thereby convening as one body.
The Estates-General started with the regional Parlements, which were abolished on the 7th May 1789 after much argument. This was followed by plans made by the National Assembly to control revenue, not the Crown. The response was the King dismissing Necker on the 10th May 1789, with Necker fleeing Paris after overhearing news of a lynching of loyalist ministers. The lynching never took place as it was quelled by loyalist soldiers, but the fear spared Necker's life from the radicals who would ensnare others as he reached Spain in late 1789. The debt had increased, as the debt ratio to gross national income now reached 56.7% (compared to Britain's 173.8%). The debt was greater in Britain, but due to the regressive tax system of France, the revenue towards repaying the interest was the same in both nations. The privileges of the Church were to be reformed also, but they were shot down by the First Estate and a large section of the Second. Curtailing the powers of the King was the next mission in July 1789, with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Hugh Williamson speaking on the matter. The three men were part of the Third Estate since emigrating from North America. While the rhetoric was on their side, the debate was being torn by the Third Estate radicals under Jean-Paul Marat (who formed under the name Jacobin and took to the American Republic for inspiration) and the Third Estate moderates under Jacques Pierre Brissot. Brissot had his friends in Franklin, Jefferson and Williamson. The moderates would come under the name of "Brissotists, Jeffersonians or Franklinists" by late 1789.
The Spring time of 1789 for the Kingdom of France gave way to a poor harvest. The rural farmers had next to nothing to sell and the urbanites had their purchasing power corrupted due to inflation. The trigger began in Paris, with 100,000 people marching in the streets in the morning of the 26th July 1789. The Swiss Guards and the Garde Nationale under General Lafayette began to disperse the crowds at 10am, but the crowds fought back. The reports at the time suggest that Jean-Paul Marat, the leader of the sans-culottes, pointed to The Bastille at 11:12am. The Bastille was stormed at 2pm, after several hundred men gathered arms to besiege the fortress. Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay, the governor of The Bastille, was given an order to hold out. With 315 Swiss Guards, Garde Nationale and Royalists, de Launay held out for several hours. The Bastille was surrounded on all sides by revolutionaries and protestors. The defenders would try to pray for a Royalist counterattack, which came in the early hours of the 27th. However, at 4:13am, the walls of The Bastille were breached. A total of 4,750 protestors stormed the fortress, taking all of the available weapons and munitions. In the darkness, there was much confusion over who was who. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner who was treated well under de Launay, was killed in the chaos, having been mistaken for one of the defenders (2). The defenders were lynched, with de Launay beheaded and having his head placed on a spike.
As this occurred, the Royal Family fled Versailles. Having seized literature by the Jacobins and the Brissotists made mention of republicanism, the Garde Nationale declared the necessity of emigrating to Austria. After news arrived of a mob marching to Versailles, the Royal Family made for Austria on the night of the 1st August 1789, escorted by 1500 dragoons that had to fight their way through a mob of 3,000. Across the country, the news of Paris falling to the revolutionaries spread like a bushfire. The royalist areas of Brittany, Normandy and the Vendee rose in declaration of the King and the Bourbon Royal Family on the 15th August 1789. The National Assembly was welcomed in Versailles on the 28th August 1789, where it stood for a new meeting. However, much of the Second Estate had fled for the countryside, to their own properties to defend, or left for the Vendee or for Britain.
The National Assembly could not contain the growing violence, which was now developing into anarchy in the surrounding region and small-scale skirmishes the further away from Paris one looked. The Assembly abolished feudalism in the country, established trial by jury, an independent courts system and abolished the tax exemptions the aristocracy had over the course of October and November. At the same time, the army was being divided, with the officers being loyal to the Crown and the soldiers of the line being drawn to the revolutionary fervour. The beginning of December had sans-culottes coming out and lynching farmers that refused to surrender their crops without compensation in time for winter. When news came of the Bourbon Royal Family arriving in Austria under pomp and circumstance, the National Assembly was confronted in the Palace of Versailles by 12,000 Jacobins on the 11th December 1789, who announced their declaration of a new order. The Brissotists began to split over the declaration, only for the opposition to be arrested en-masse by Marat and the Jacobins and denounced by Jacques Pierre Brissot and his more devoted followers for "counter-revolutionary actions against the state". Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Williamson were arrested on the 25th April 1789 along with 37 others from the First and Third Estate and imprisoned in near starving-conditions in Paris. Somehow separated, Thomas Jefferson and six others escaped their cells six days later during a loyalist attempt to free prisoners across Paris. Failing to rescue his fellows during the chaos Jefferson would escape the city, arriving in Spain in on the 14th February 1790.
Jean-Paul Marat essentially became the face of the revolution, where he was sworn into power as the First Citizen in the front of Notre Dame on the 7th January 1790. Notre Dame, one of the great Catholic cathedrals in Europe, was turned into a church dedicated to the Cult of the Supreme Being. While Marat orchestrated the popular sentiment, intellectual fuel was developed by Maximilian Robespierre, who believed that a deistic cult was necessary for the de-Christianisation of France and of Europe. A cult where the being was not God, but Reason and salvation was not by faith alone or by faith and works (as the Catholic Church supports) but by pushing on virtue. Reason replaced God in moral thought as of the 8th January, where the first session was held. At the same time, the 1790 Constitution was declared to the people. Marat's position as First Citizen was unlimited five-year terms, where he would be the supreme executive power in a republican system of government. The House of Bourbon were not to be recognised.
The National Assembly was dissolved on the 16th January 1790, with the National Congress replacing it. The Congress was Marat and Robespierre's idea in the 1790 Constitution. While the Constitution upheld human rights such as freedom of speech and of the press and manhood suffrage, it also included ideals such as republican government and the abolition of the Catholic Church in France, instead acknowledging the Cult of the Supreme Being. The National Congress, 315 strong, voted to pass the constitution and to recognise Marat pro forma on the 21st January. Marat's first orders were to declare King Louis XVI and the House of Bourbon traitors and that they were to be executed on sight should they return to France. The French Army was reorganised, as sans-culottes took over town after town. Republican forces under Louis Desaix pushed out loyalists in the west, leaving the Vendee, Normandy and Brittany as the only clear unoccupied regions as of the 25th March 1790.
The United Kingdom, caught off-guard by the sweeping moves by the republican forces, assisted with loyalist refugees. On the 10th April 1790, Prime Minister Edmund Burke made a speech denouncing the revolution, which was followed by a twelve minute standing ovation. Burke would be regarded as one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers due to this speech as well as the effort he made in taking in refugees from France as well as declaring war on the First Republic of France on the 11th April. Britain was followed by the Kingdom of Sweden on the 27th April and the Electorate of Saxony and the Austrian Empire on the 22nd May. Austria raised a total of 150,000 men in May, while Joseph II wrote a letter ordering Marat to stand aside and reinstate King Louis XVI as King of France. Marat declined on the 15th June 1790, leaving France no option but to face Britain, French Loyalists, Austria, Sweden and Saxony in war. With rumours of 200,000 soldiers amassed by Austria, Marat in turn ordered levee en masse on the 28th June 1790, with 400,000 men called to arms.
Louis Marie Turreau was one of many officers who had been swept in by the revolution, with his zeal coming from ruthless battlefield combat rather than a high-minded virtue of how the world ought to be governed. Turreau, having served in the New Spain Revolution (3), became a colonel in charge of putting down the loyalists in the Vendee who refused to enlist. In May, he gathered to himself 6,000 sans-culottes before pushing through the region. The enforced closure of churches and the expulsion of priests that refused to obey the 1790 Constitution had triggered Vendee resistance, with battles at Savenay and Nantes being republican victories in late May. Turreau was promoted, with 20,000 men under his disposal as he continued through the rebel areas. He would get a few more recruits from the peasants who were given lands from the monasteries, but a few was all he could get. The British landed near Machecoul on the 23rd September 1790, 5,000 under General Henry Clinton who would assist the Vendee resistance. The hope was for the Bretons, Normans and Vendee to be organised as a counter-revolutionary force.
Machecoul was occupied by the Vendee-British force, numbering 11,000, on the 27th September 1790. Jacques Cathelineau, a peddler of contraband products, was a devout Catholic and royalist as well as a physically strong man. Cathelineau was made the leader of the Vendee contingent. Turreau gathered 26,000 men, who invested the city on the 28th September 1789. The battle would start to show signs of what was to come. The sans-culottes, although poorly equipped, were strong in their courage and in their numbers. The men would assault Machecoul, even under heavy fire. This was an argument played out with bullets and cannon fire instead of ink and quill. Turreau gave in and moved away in the early hours of the 29th September, preying instead on the rural towns and monasteries that still held out for the King (and extension, God). The victory allowed for the formation of the Catholic and Royal Army of the Vendee, which would be the official counter-revolutionary army as of 15th October 1790.
The Coalition Army, numbering 120,000 under the command of Saxon General Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, marched into France on the 26th July 1790. It consisted of Austrian, Saxon, Hanoverian, Hessian and Prussians, soldiers that were once enemies but now allies under a single commander. In August, the Duke of Brunswick defeated the sans-culotte forces under General François Christophe de Kellermann at Strasbourg on the 19th August 1790 before capturing Mulhouse on the 28th and Nancy on the 9th September. September had been a time of drawing in new recruits from the French loyalists that still remained in the country. The Duke of Brunswick's numbers shot up to over 150,000 men. Facing against Kellermann again, they fought at Metz on the 18th September 1790. Taking 65,000 men, he faced against 40,000 under Kellermann. The fighting lasted for five hours, with the sans-culottes engaging in wave attacks to compensate for the lack of weapons. The fight was inconclusive. Kellermann's report was published as a victory and the Duke of Brunswick's report was published as a victory as well. Kellermann had managed to halt the Duke of Brunswick's advance, which would have taken Verdun and the lands east of the Forest of Argonne. The Duke of Brunswick, however, escaped with the tactical victory, losing only 4,000 men to Kellermann's 12,000.
The Revolution in Belgium, which had started in September 1789, was receiving support from the French Republic. The hope was for Charles Theodore to give up on trying to hold his lands. Charles Theodore was Duke of Berg-Jülich and Elector of the Palatine, Duke of Luxembourg, of Limburg and the Count of Hainaut. His territories had 50,000 men set out to crush the revolutionary force, which numbered 37,000. The first battle was at Mons on the 6th September 1790. The integration of the forces of Charles Theodore had been haphazard at best. The French and Belgian soldiers assaulted the lines several times throughout the day, often repeating the formations that King Charles XII had once committed eighty years before. The gunfire was secondary to the rush of the poorly armed French and Belgian forces, which battered Charles Theodore's forces into a rout. The French and Belgians, led by Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, suffered 11,000 casualties. The Imperial forces, suffered 23,700 casualties before falling into a rout, leaving the city to be taken by Lafayette's forces. The year of training and recruitment had benefitted the Belgians in their fight for independence as a republican state alongside the French.
October and November were lull months, as autumn hit hard and winter was upon both sides. The Coalition forces had been roused and the French were in turn.
The Kingdom of France was over. The Austrians, Saxons and Swedish begin to assemble their armies to storm France, while the British are preparing also. The malice of the infernal columns under Turreau against the Vendee was about to begin.
Meanwhile, the speed of everything had not allowed for any concerns about past grudges. Such was the case of Pasquale Paoli, who forgave one man's son. On the 5th August 1790, he took in several Corsican nationalists that were a part of the army. On the 10th August 1790, Pasquale Paoli was acclaimed as the President of the Second Corsican Republic. In the room where it happened would be his apprentice, Napoleone di Buonaparte (5).
*****************************
1. Two years later than OTL
2. His work, 120 Days of Sodom, was lost in the carnage of the fighting.
3. He never had any OTL military experience before the French revolution. Now, he is promoted earlier.
4. Paoli never forgave Bonaparte for his father's betrayal of Corsica in 1769. Here, he was forgive for his father's trechery and Bonaparte retains his Corsican nationalism as well as his republicanism.
I don't know how long this will go for, but I hope it is worth it.
Likes, thoughts and comments below. I don't know how far the ATL French Revolution should go for. Hope you enjoyed this post.
EDIT: Have increased the time to make the revolution more plausible, as well as added a few more elements.
Last edited:
