'Aussie Rick'’s Comments (group member since Jun 13, 2009)

'Aussie Rick'’s comments from the THE NAPOLEONIC WARS group.

All very interesting posts Scott, MR9 and Betsy and I actually didn't consider that fact you highlighted by Palmer in your book MR9 when I read about the introduction of assignats in my book on the French Revolution:

"it is significant that the Revolutionary leaders, though they denounced the Bourbons as tyrants, had no desire to repudiate their debts. The Jacobins of the Terror, despite certain refunding operations, in effect staggered under a burden swollen by the wastefulness of the monarchy which they abhorred."

Scott wrote: "Sure is heavy reading due to the archaic style, but enjoyable and informative just the same. Not sure I will get through the whole book by the end of the month but I will keep ploughing on..."

That's what we all like to see, dedication :)

Great post Scott, some heavy reading there though!

Manray9 wrote: "In Isser Woloch's foreword to R. R. Palmer's Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution, he made an interesting point: Palmer's book was first published in 1941. ..."

That is quite interesting MR9, hopefully its still a compelling read.

"A New World Begins" - Two stories concerning the Concordat of 1801, the agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII regarding the Catholic Church in France:

"When Bonaparte tried to persuade the writer Constantin Volney that the country wanted him to reestablish the Church, he was so irritated by Volney's response - 'If France asked you to bring back the Bourbons, would you do it?' - that he kicked him in the stomach, knocking him to the floor."

And;

"Many army officers were especially disgruntled about the restoration of Catholicism. One group of generals, forced to attend the Mass at Notre Dame, ousted some of the priests from their seats, 'insulting them, making them flee, and taking their places.' After the ceremony, when Bonaparte asked one of the officers what he thought of it, he responded, 'Its a shame that the million or so men who got themselves killed destroying what you have reestablished were not here'."

A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin

"A New World Begins" - The Martyrs of Prairial:

"A military commission was set up to try the leading insurgents as speedily as possible. Of the thirty-six death sentences it pronounced, the most important were those imposed on six Montagnard Convention deputies, including Goujon, Romme, and Ernest Duquesnoy, who had taken sides with the demonstrators on the evening of 1 prairial. Friends had managed to smuggle a knife and a pair of scissors into the prison; rather than submitting to execution, the condemned men each stabbed themselves and then passed the blades on. 'I want my blood to be the last that flows,' Duquesnoy said as he lay dying. 'May it consolidate the Republic.' Their gesture, which evoked the stoic courage of ancient Roman republicans, immortalized them as the 'martyrs of prairial'."

The Martyrs of Prairial:
https://rbzpr.tumblr.com/post/1460556...

Manray9 wrote: "This evening I'll start R. R. Palmer's --

[book:Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution|319..."

It sounds like it should be a pretty interesting account MR9, I hope you enjoy it.

"A New World Begins" - And just when you thought the worst was behind you:

"Robespierre's mood of exaltation did not last. Just two days later, on 22 prairial Year II (June 10, 1794), his close ally Couthon presented the Convention not with a proposal for an amnesty, but with a decree intensifying the Terror. The law of 22 prairial drastically curtailed the rights of defendants tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal: they no longer had any right to counsel, death became the only penalty for all offenses, and the 'conscience of the jurors, enlightened by the love of the patrie [homeland],' was sufficient to determine a verdict. Up to this point, the Revolutionary Tribunal had often acquitted as many as half of the suspects brought before it; in the two months of its operation after the passage of the law of 22 prairial, the conviction rate rose to 80 percent. In the weeks that came to be known as la Grande Terreur (the Great Terror), the Paris tribunal sent over 1,300 people to the guillotine."

The Reign of Terror:
https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolu...

"A New World Begins" - Various uprisings, including the war in the Vendee, led to serious repercussions against the rebels:

"The high-profile trials and executions in Paris were paralleled by merciless measures against the thousands of more ordinary individuals who had participated in revolts against the Montagnard government. On October 12, 1793, three days after the rebel city of Lyon surrendered, the Convention issued a bloodcurdling decree announcing that a monument was to be erected on its site with an inscription reading, 'Lyon made war against liberty; Lyon no longer exists'; what remained of the settlement would be called Ville-Affranchie (Liberated City). Determined to make the punishment of the defeated rebels an object lesson for the enemies of the Revolution, two deputies on mission, Collott d'Herbois and Fouche, planned a spectacular mass execution in Lyon at the beginning of December, when they had several hundred victims chained together and mowed down by cannon. The idea was to strike the enemies of the republic with the force of a thunderbolt, but the result was too gruesome even for the executioners. Soldiers had to wade into a mass of bleeding bodies to finish off dozens of wounded victims with sabers and bayonets. The Montagnards reverted to less theatrical methods of execution, the guillotine and the firing squad, but some 1,900 Lyonnais were put to death for their role in the uprising. In accordance with the Convention's decree, the facades of the houses of the city's wealthier inhabitants were demolished, creating a visible reminder of its punishment."

Revolutionary justice in Lyon, 1793:
http://rodama1789.blogspot.com/2017/0...

"A New World Begins" - Life is getting hard in France for ordinary people:

"The surveillance committees created in March 1793 were charged with carrying out the law. In Paris, the Commune issued a list of 'characteristics that render people suspect,' including 'those who speak cryptically of the misfortunes of the Republic, show pity for the people and are always ready to spread bad news with apparent sorrow, ... those who affect, in order to appear republican, an excessive austerity and severity.' and 'those who not having done anything against liberty, also haven't done anything for it,' criteria elastic enough to take in anyone."

And;

"A former military officer caught up in the dragnet remembered his captors looking him over and deciding, 'He's tall, he looks self-confidant, he's a suspect.' Recounting the incident further, he added: 'I object, I invoke the law, justice, no one listens; outbreaks of laughter echo through the vaults'. The guards strip-searched him, took his clothes and valuables, and threw him into a cell with eighty other prisoners."

The tug-of-war about religion's place in France during the Revolution and after is a continual theme throughout the book I'm reading.

The author of "A New World Begins" mentioned the 'Condorcet paradox' which I have not heard of before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorc...

"A New World Begins" - 1793 and the Revolutionary War spreads across Europe:

" ... More pragmatically, Danton focused on the war's consequences in Europe. France, he told the deputies at the end of January, could no longer hope to reach any peaceful compromise with the other rulers of Europe. 'You have thrown down a challenge to the. This challenge is the head of a king'."

A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin

"A New World Begins" - The Battle of Valmy:

"As Kellermann reported to the Convention, he had held the Prussians off for fourteen hours with continuous gunfire. Then, sticking his hat with its tricolor cockade aloft on the point of his sword and crying 'Viva la nation!' he had urged his men forward as the army band blared out the revolutionary song 'Ça ira' whose lyrics assured the soldiers that 'despotism will die, liberty will triumph.' The celebrated German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was with the Prussian forces, witnessed the demoralization of his own side as they realized that they would not be able to 'skewer the whole French army and roast and eat it.' Goethe later recalled that as the Prussian soldiers sat around a campfire, someone asked hi what he thought the unexpected defeat meant, and he replied, 'from here and now a new epoch of world history begins.' Privately, as he contemplated 'a great nation torn out of its frame,' he anticipated that 'after our unfortunate campaign, the world would also obviously be torn out of its frame'."

Ça ira:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxB-q...

Battle of Valmy:
https://www.thoughtco.com/french-revo...

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/...

Certainly sounds like it Mike!

"A New World Begins":

"Whereas Robespierre kept his emotions under tight control, Danton was unrestrained, both in his oratory and in his private acts. In early 1793, following a mission that had taken him away from the city, he returned to Paris to discover that his first wife had died in childbirth; she had already been buried, but he insisted on having her coffin dug up so that he could embrace her one last time."

Georges Danton:
https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolu...

https://www.heritage-history.com/inde...

Some very interesting information from the book; "A New World Begins" - Paris, August 1792 - May 1793:

"With foreign armies invading the country and sans-culotte militants defying the established authorities in the capital, no one could have any assurance that the Revolution would survive ... It was symbolically appropriate that, on the last day of its session, September 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly turned its attention from war and factional politics to the passage of two laws applying the Revolution's individualistic principles to citizens' private lives. One of them established a secular, state-run system for the registration of identity, the état civil; the other legalized divorce. Despite the crisis surrounding them, the deputies were under pressure to deal with these issues because their restructuring of the Church has ended that institution's jurisdiction over personal status and marriage without putting anything in its place.

Although there was little debate about the law on état civil, everyone recognised its importance. By establishing procedures for municipal officials to register births, marriages, and deaths, it marked a watershed in the shift from a society in which religion pervaded every aspect of life to one in which the individual's relationship with the state became primary. Having proof of being born in France was crucial to determining who qualified for citizenship. By linking children to their parents, birth certificates established parents' obligations to support their offspring and heirs' rights to inherit property. In later life, they were crucial in determining who was liable for military service, eligible for state-provided benefits, old enough to marry, or qualified to hold political office. Marriage licenses authorized the establishment of new families and defined spouses' claims to shared property, whereas death certificates ensured an orderly disposition of that property, whereas under the old regime, Catholic priests had kept the documents that established the legal identity of royal subjects. The 1787 law granting civil status to non-Catholics had created awkward alternative procedures for Protestants and Jews, but, as one deputy said in the September 1792 debate, if all citizens were now to be completely equal, 'there cannot be different ways to recognize births, marriages and deaths'."

A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin

That's a very good point Scott. One recent biography on Napoleon made a point to show the possible impact that Corsica's 'law of blood' may have had on Napoleon's character. I can't remember which author it was that provide that angle, it may have been Patrice Gueniffey in his first volume on Napoleon Bonaparte:

Bonaparte: 1769-1802 by Patrice Gueniffey

"A New World Begins" - Paris 1792, the September massacres:

François Jourgniac de Saint-Méard, an army officer and contributor to royalist newspapers, recorded the prisoners' experience in My Agony of Thirty-Eight Hours, the most widely distributed contemporary account of the September massacres, which continued over the next three days. Saint-Méard had been arrested ten days before the star of the killing and was being held in the abbey of Saint-Germain, one of several confiscated religious buildings that had been turned into prisons. On the afternoon of September 2, killers arrived at the abbey and began taking victims down to the courtyard. From the window in his cell, Saint-Méard could hear what happened to those who were convicted. "It is completely impossible to express the horror of the profound and somber silence that prevailed during these executions,' he wrote. 'It was interrupted only by the cries of those who were sacrificed, and by the saber blows aimed at their heads. As soon as they were laid out on the ground, murmurs arose, intensified by cries of 'long live the nations' that were a thousand times more terrifying to us than the terrible silence."

Saint-Méard was among the lucky prisoners who survived their ordeal. A friendly guard let him watch the interrogations of other prisoners, so he could see what tactics offered the best chance of winning an acquittal.

The September massacres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemb...

https://revolution.chnm.org/exhibits/...

"A New World Begins" - The birth of the song La Marseillaise:

"When news of the declaration of war reached the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, a fortified city on the Rhine that was bound to play a major part in the struggle, the local mayor called on a young military officer with musical talents, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, to compose a patriotic song to mark the occasion. In one night, Roget de Lisle jotted down six stanzas, beginning with the words, 'Allons enfants de la patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé' (Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived). Meant to rouse nationalist fervor, the lyrics called upon citizens to 'form you battalions' and 'let an impure blood water our fields.' The words were fitted to a stirring melody and titled 'War Song for the Army of the Rhine.' Within two months, as soldiers circulated around the country, the new song had reached the other end of France. It was performed at a patriotic ceremony in Marseille on June 22, 1792, and a local newspaper provided the first printed version the next day, allowing the local volunteers to take copies with them as they headed north."

La Marseillaise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mars...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKtCV...