The French Offensive and Bloody Saturday

Once again, praise be @sparkptz!

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

The Devil's Balls

As winter began in 1792, the Republican cause seemed distinctly on the back foot. The success at Valence was virtually the only offensive victory France gained, and even that was caused principally by the foolishness of the Royalists in an ill-advised attempt to retake Lyon. Strasbourg had secured the north, and thoughts began to turn in Paris towards how to exploit the opening that Murat's victory over the arrogant Brunswick had given them, but that was still some time off. The south, particularly the passes through the Massif Central and the area around Bordeaux, became of utmost priority for the Republic by late 1792, and in those campaigns, the Republic was very much on the defensive.

This, however, was a situation to which the French armies of 1792 were extremely well suited. The best way to describe the French army at the end of 1792 would be "determined, innovative, but unsophisticated". Its great weakness was tactical maneuver; its infantry units were generally simply not capable of the sophisticated tactics or fluidity of formation that their well-drilled opponents could muster, which greatly reduced both their offensive potential if not well-supported by Revolutionary Guard cavalry and rendered them highly vulnerable when caught out in unsuitable terrain. Two brigades of largely National Guard, for example, that had been sent to Bordeaux to reinforce Jourdan, were caught unawares in mid-September by the Spanish. Virtually the entire force was annihilated or captured, with their Spanish opponents suffering only light casualties despite numerical inferiority. This was emblematic of the state of French infantry in late-1792: greatly improved, but still tactically limited. However, when entrenched and given the opportunity to defend a fixed position, the French Republican infantry was a fierce proposition, proving near-impossible to dislodge or break. The one great exception to this rule in mid-1792 was Jourdan, but even he was well aware that he could not ask his National Guard battalions to perform complex maneuvers or maintain rigid formations. His great gift was his ability to work around the limitations of his army, not remove them.

There were two departments, however, in which the French Army was not at all deficient, and indeed was in fact far ahead of its opponents. The first was its widespread intelligence network, second only to the American NIS in its sophistication and reach. The Republic was, above all, an ideological project, and one that had a great many followers amongst the reformers, the Enlightenment liberals, and the urban poor all across the invisible masses of Europe. In a project spearheaded personally by Georges Danton before the failed Jacobin coup of 1792, a vast network of spies and informers was assembled throughout Royalist France and the rest of Continental Europe; those sympathetic to the Republican cause were encouraged to contribute by simply collecting information on anything relevant to the war: troop movements, levies, war plans, financial information, tidbits relevant to morale, anything. This more than anything else was what gave French commanders their uncanny ability to ensure that battles largely happened only at a time and place of their choosing; the French armies may not have been able to outmatch the Coalition armies in an even fight, but most of the time they knew where the Coalition armies were. There is no doubt that Jourdan's brilliant fighting retreat to Bordeaux would have not been possible without constant detailed information being fed to him on Spanish and Royalist army movements by the Ministry of Information.

The second factor, and unquestionably the most terrifying for the Coalition armies, was the French artillery. Lafayette had ensured that no French commander would, after Lyon, ever have cause to complain about a lack of artillery support; raising and training new artillery companies and giving them finest cannons and howitzers France could produce was a high priority from the very beginning of his Presidency. As with the strides made in battlefield medicine, there is no question that the Republic benefited greatly from its close ties to the United States, even if official recognition was not yet forthcoming. A new system, called the Republican system, was introduced and called for streamlining the existing Gribeauval system into just four calibers, of which the 6-pounder and 12-pounder would predominate, and the designs were near-copies of the new American cannons being produced by Kim's factories in New York. The new French artillery was lighter, cheaper to make and of higher quality — and hence longer-ranged — than the Coalition's artillery. A French 12-pounder Gribeauval made before 1789 would struggle to be effective at ranges beyond 900 meters, by 1792 Republican 12-pounders were able to push this to a full kilometer. [1]

The men manning the artillery too were of high quality. Although technically part of the National Guard, the artillery companies of the French Army had a quite different character and quality to their citizen-soldier comrades, as standards of both recruitment and training in the artillery were the highest in the entire army. Noble or commoner, man or woman, blanc or noir, any were welcome to try and join the artillery companies, but a serious of rigorous examinations ensured that only the best and brightest were admitted. Once there, they were constantly drilled and trained; French artillery companies and platoons competed between themselves to record the highest rate of fire and the greatest accuracy during their training, and the standards they achieved were high indeed. Even so, between 1791 and 1793 the artillery companies doubled in both size and number.

None of that, however, was known to the ordinary Spanish, Austrian or French Royalist soldier standing in line formation on the battlefield. What they knew about was what the French artillery was firing at them, and they did not much like it.

For many a decade, the main ordnance fired by cannons or howitzers in the course of battle — as opposed to the siege — had been either roundshot or grapeshot. Roundshot (little more than a large metal ball) was accurate and somewhat effective against dense infantry formations at ranges of up to a kilometer, but grapeshot, nothing more than a sack full of small iron balls, was orders of magnitude more devastating. Canister shot had been invented in 1753 and solved many of the problems of grapeshot, in particular the great damage done to the cannons themselves, but suffered from extremely poor accuracy compared to roundshot — and thus the effective range was generally well under three hundred meters — and often created friendly fire problems to boot. There was thus a great desire for a shell that combined both the range and accuracy and roundshot with the devastating anti-personnel properties of the canister shot.

As it so happened, the solution was already in place before the Revolution even began. In this country [Great Britain], then-Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel is credited with the discovery of the spherical caseshot [2] in 1782. Conceptually a reinforced canister shot with a time fuse, this superficially resembled a large roundshot but instead was filled with small iron balls and a small explosive charge that would detonate after a specified time, expelling the iron balls forward of the now-empty casing with great velocity. The results of a caseshot detonating in front of a dense infantry formation and showering any poor unfortunates in the cone of fire with the lethal contents of the caseshot were gruesome, to put it mildly. However, this first version of Shrapnel's caseshot, whilst obviously promising, was highly unreliable, prone to premature detonations. The British Government in 1789, whilst very excited by the prospects of this new ordnance and encouraging Shrapnel and others to continue working on the design, did not yet consider it ready for widespread use.

Across the Atlantic, however, in secret the military researchers and engineers of ARPA disagreed. They too had invented the caseshot — of course keeping it very much secret from the public and the world — and their variants did not suffer the premature detonation and reliability issues that doomed Shrapnel's initial versions as weapons of war. Reports from ARPA archives of the results of their testing are filled with a mixture of both unrestrained excitement but deep trepidation; the Americans knew they had a truly devastating weapon in their hands that would make a bloody, gory mess of those on the wrong end of its gift.

It is not known when the decision was made by the famously Francophile President Jefferson to share the secret of the caseshot with the French Republic, but likely it came after the Declaration of Pillnitz, which convinced the American government that the First Coalition War was inevitable and that the French Republic would need more active support to survive. In great secrecy a shipment of the first model ARPA-designed caseshot was sent to France — the Americans of course keeping the most advanced versions for themselves — as well as detailed instructions as to its manufacture and use in battle. Soon the French were making their own caseshot — nicknamed the les couilles du diable ("the devil's balls") by the French artillery companies — and coming to very similar conclusions to ARPA, albeit with more enthusiasm as they had a real war to win.

However, it was approximately a year until the caseshot was ready for battlefield use. The main bottleneck was not production but rather training; the effectiveness of the caseshot depended greatly on exquisite timing of the time fuse on the part of those manning the artillery. A too-early detonation would scatter the contents too widely to be truly effective against line infantry, too late and the caseshot was little more than a small bomb with a highly localized effect. It took months and months of intense training before the new artillery companies raised through late 1791 and early 1792 were ready to use the new weapon, and their first test would be at Strasbourg. There was in fact great nervousness in the French Army about debuting such unproven ordnance at such an important juncture. Failure would likely mean the end of the Republic; a great deal of faith was being placed in the promises of their American friends.

However, they needed not have worried, for the caseshot proved entirely in line with ARPA's claims and far more effective than even the most optimistic expectations of the French artillery officers. Sat well behind the French trenches, the French artillery waited in silence whilst Massena's brigade engaged, were rebuffed, and returned. Once Brunswick's army moved to within a kilometer of the French trenches, the signal was given and the howitzers and cannons opened fire. At this range, the Coalition soldiers assumed they were being fired upon by roundshot and reacted accordingly… until some of the "roundshots" started bursting mid-air less than a hundred metres in front of them and cut entire infantry platoons to quite-literal pieces.

In some analyses, the French artillery, more than the trench tactics used by Murat, was what turned Strasbourg decisively in the Republicans' favor. Everyone was familiar with grapeshot and canister shot, but canister shot was short-ranged and liable to hit your own men as much as the enemy; whatever the French had concocted was sailing harmlessly over their heads over their own shoulders before shotgun-blasting the unfortunate Coalition infantry with bullets the size of grapefruits. It was likely this, more than anything else, that triggered the wave of desperate and uncoordinated charges through the pre-designed French killing zones by the otherwise-disciplined Prussians and Austrians, attacks which were only partially effective in dislodging the first line of entrenched defenders and wholly ineffective against the second. After the battle, Austrian soldiers would not whisper amongst themselves about the effectiveness of Murat's entrenchments, or the fanaticism of the French soldier, or even the obvious presence of women on the battlefield. They would speak about "the devil's balls", and the great mess they made of their army. Brunswick, of course, watching from well back in safety, simply thought that his men had gone mad for some reason or that the battlefield had been booby-trapped somehow.

From the New Year's Offensive to the Day of Defeats

Emboldened by this enormous success, the caseshot would become the standard anti-personnel ordnance of the French army. Further refinements would follow in the years to come, but the basic ARPA design would remain largely unchanged through the remainder of the war. By December, every army serving under the tricolor was well-stocked with caseshot and had companies trained in its particular usage. With it, the French were able to do what they had barely been able to do since the beginning of the year: conduct real offensives. Now with the knowledge that France could substitute the lack of tactical capacity of their National Guard formations with sheer firepower, Lafayette replaced Dumouriez with Masséna at the head of a greatly-reinforced Army of the Centre and began the New Year's Offensive on January the 1st, 1793.

In contrast to the set-piece masterpieces of Jourdan and Murat, the New Year's Offensive did not win any prizes for subtlety in its tactical execution. However that made it no less effective; being the very first the Republic had attempted in winter and across the most difficult terrain in France no less, it did have the great benefit of being a complete surprise. With little warning or preamble, Masséna took his new army encamped near Issoire and marched to Saint-Flour, where Republican intelligence had suggested a Royalist-Italian army was building. The results were as predictable as they were one-sided: the Royalists were largely levied peasants from Provence who had no real enthusiasm to fight their own countrymen, and the Italians were even less enthusiastic about fighting an Austrian war.

Completely taken aback by the sudden appearance of a large French army on their doorstep on January 3rd, the Coalition army essentially disintegrated; many ran once the "devil's balls" began raining down on them, and quite a few of the "Royalists" out-and-out defected straight over to the cheering Republican lines. Those who did stay and valiantly tried to put up a stand were promptly dissuaded of those ideas by the massed Republican infantry and howitzers. Saint-Flour was probably the most one-sided Republican victory of the entire war; Coalition Army of thirty thousand had suffered five thousand casualties and been scattered to the four winds, Massena had suffered no more than three hundred casualties, far fewer than those inflicted by Generals Winter and Mountains upon the Republican army. There was now very little standing between Massena and the city of Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast. With limited opposition Massena promptly took the city on January 14th, effectively slicing the Royalist-held territory in half.

This sent the Coalition commanders into a frenzied panic. No one had been expecting an attack through the Massif Central, especially not during winter. The news that the Coalition army holding the central front had been blasted away reached Marseille only a few days before the even more shocking news of the capture of Montpellier. It is at this point that Louis made serious preparations to evacuate the metropole and flee to Corsica. In the meantime, however, the Spanish attack on Bordeaux, which had begun several weeks before, was put on the backburner and three armies gathered and prepared to retake Montpellier. A truly enormous battle was looming. On the 10th of March, the combined Coalition armies — two Spanish, one mercenary Austrian and one Royalist, totaling close to a hundred and fifty thousand men — marched from Toulouse and towards Montpellier.

Lafayette, for his part, was well aware of the significance of what had taken place. If Montpellier held, then Louis's position in the metropole would be entirely indefensible and he would have to flee, either to Austria or to Corsica, and the greater part of France would have been liberated. Offensives could then begin earnest to the north and east to force the Austrians and Prussians to the negotiating table and end the war. If, however, Masséna was defeated, then the passes through the Massif Central would be vulnerable, Bordeaux would come under renewed assault and even Valence would be at risk. It was therefore paramount that every free man and woman France could spare was sent to Montpellier at once.

At the same time, the Republican intelligence had heard from liberal sympathizers within Spain that the Spanish King Charles IV had approved an extraordinarily bold undertaking: a secret invasion of the Vendee. This invasion would be small and, in itself, not a serious threat, but the true goal was obvious: for years, the Vendée had been by far the greatest source of disquiet and unrest within the Republican-held part of France. An isolated, poor, rural and deeply Catholic department largely untouched by the social and economic forces that had led France to revolution, the peasants of the Vendée — whilst supportive of Lafayette's 1789 early reforms as much-necessary correctives to unjust taxation — had been much put out by the later social reforms, particularly with regards to the status of women, believing them an intrusion of temporal authorities into the sacred domain of the Church. The province provided few recruits for the National Guard and virtually none of those were women — the tiny handful that did were by and large looking for a way to get out of the province — and the general mood of the province had dampened yet further by the announcement of conscription. There is no doubt that Lafayette's decision to include a wide array of religious exemptions to conscription and refusal to confiscate any of the Church's vast landholdings was aimed at minimizing the possibility of unrest in the Vendée. Nevertheless, he feared that a single spark could light the region on fire — a spark that a Royalist-Spanish army could easily provide. On the same day that the Coalition combined army left Toulouse, the Spanish fleet set sail for the Vendéan coast.

Extraordinarily, however, and to the great surprise of all, both schemes would completely fail. On paper, the greater shock of the two came at sea. The French Navy had been greatly reduced by defections to the Royalist side — particularly as the bulk of the French Navy was based at Toulon, less than a day's ride from Marseille — and so the Republic had been hard at work rebuilding its navy since 1790 with modern ships. As with the early Republican Army, it lacked experience and know-how, but while its officer corps needed to be totally reconstituted, many of the ordinary sailors of the Navy had found their way to Republican territory. A small fleet, cobbled together between some of the few the Republic still had and a handful of newly-constructed vessels was able to sail from La Rochelle under the command of Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, one of the few pre-Revolutionary French naval officers to remain loyal to the Republic.

On paper, this small fleet was well outmatched by the Coalition invasion fleet, as it was less than half the size and with less experienced commanders and crew. However, communication and language issues as well as infighting over who should assume ultimate command over the invasion plagued the Coalition fleet, and it largely split into a Royalist squadron under the Comte de Puisaye and a Spanish under Frederico Gravina. Nevertheless, either squadron was still able to easily outmatch the small French force waiting near Île d'Yeu. However, fate, as it often does in naval combat, intervened, in the form of thick dawn fog on March the 16th that sometimes occurs in the Bay of Biscay during spring.

Even on its own would not be enough. However, once again the superb military intelligence capabilities of the French state came into play: Villeneuve knew well that the Coalition fleet had internal problems, and more importantly had split into two. A miscommunication meant that Royalist squadron had elected to sail around the west end of the Île d'Yeu, the Spanish the east, and this allowed Villeneuve to set a trap. Hiding behind the north side of the island and shrouded by the fog, Villeneuve waited for the Royalist fleet to pass by just after dawn and then, less than fifteen miles off the mainland coast, pounced. The Royalist fleet, in the midst of preparing to unload their troops, were shocked to find the Republican fleet emerging from the fog behind them. They attempted to turn to engage, but amongst the French ships were three brand-new ships-of-the-line which could hit harder and from further away than any the Coalition navies had, and the Royalist squadron was soon scattered and four transports sunk.

The French ships then turned to meet the Spanish, who had aborted their own landing preparations to help their Royalist colleagues. The fighting in this engagement was more even than it had been against the Royalists, but when a Spanish brig being used as a troop transport had its gunpowder store abruptly explode, obliterating the ship — as well the six hundred men aboard — and seriously damaging the transport next to it, Gravina decided that enough was enough. Twenty of his ships had either been sunk or forced to disengage with severe damage and in return, he had only sunk seven Republican vessels. With the majority of the transports gone and the expedition a total failure regardless of how the battle went, he signaled to his remaining vessels to depart to the south, despite still arguably having the upper hand. The attempted invasion of the Vendée had failed.

The Battle of Villeyrac

The truly momentous event this day, however, happened hundreds of kilometers to the south. On the morning of the 16th, the Coalition combined armies assembled and prepared to meet the Republican army west of Montpellier. Meeting the four Coalition armies were three "divisions" of the French Republican Army just south of Villeyrac: the left under Marceau, the right under Masséna and the central Revolutionary Guard division under the recently-promoted Michel Ney, numbering a hundred and thirty thousand strong. With Like at Strasbourg, the Republican armies were largely entrenched or defiladed and built a wide array of defensive dugouts, trenches, berms and other earthworks. The first line of trenches and field fortifications was only lightly manned, mostly by Revolutionary Guard skirmishers and sharpshooters armed with new model rifles, and their orders were to pick off as many Coalition officers as they could. The second line was more heavily defended and manned, a mixture of Revolutionary Guard and the best National Guard, all of whom were explicitly instructed to hold fire until the "the whites of the enemies' eyes were visible". The subsequent three lines held the remainder of the National Guard, and at the rear, a reserve force of Revolutionary Guard was available to plug dangerous holes in the line when required.

The Republican strategy, agreed between the three French generals in advance, did not rely on "holding every inch of ground and never yielding" as dramatizations often present. Masséna, Marceau and Ney did not expect to hold the first defensive line or indeed even the second. Their hope was, however, that in taking the first two defensive lines the Coalition would be disorganized and cut off from easy communications and thus counterattack; the idea was not to hold ground for no reason but rather inflict massive casualties on the Coalition armies. Critical to this was a policy of rapid counterattack at any position the Coalition managed to take within the main French defensive lines — the first would not be seriously contested once the skirmishers withdrew — and for this, a new battlefield communications system was implemented for the first time. For each of the ninety battalions, one of the lieutenants of that battalion was explicitly charged with keeping three flags raised at their position at any one time: two identifying their unit and one outlining their basic situation — whether a position was counterattacking, withdrawing, or needed reinforcement. Any given signal would then be relayed by further flag stations a hundred yards apart all the way back to the command position in the rear, and orders returned by flag colors back down the line. This system was very crude, consisting little more of basic colors assigned by a table, but it was far faster than the traditional practice of runners. It would need to work if the Republican strategy were to end in success.

The battle began at nine in the morning with skirmishes between the Republican and Coalition cavalry near Loupian. These were cursory at best; neither side needed much by way of scouting to know where the enemy was and how they were disposed. With the steep foothills of the Massif Central protecting the Republicans' right flank and the Mediterranean on the left, the Coalition knew they would have to break through the Republican position directly to continue their advance on Montpellier. The battle proper, therefore, really started two hours later, when the Spanish advanced their two armies and began engaging the Republican skirmishers.

In truth these initial engagements drew very few casualties save for a few Coalition officers being wounded or killed, and very little by way of meaningful fighting. However, it did change the battlefield: before long the entire scene was shrouded in thick smoke. With the Coalition army now in the range of the Republican howitzers which were showering the Coalition soldiers with disconcerting — if largely unaimed — caseshot, the Comte de Provence and the Spanish commander Antonio Ricardos ordered their men to assault the Republican lines.

What followed was a desperate, bloody mess for the entire rest of the day and well into the evening as thousands upon thousands of Coalition and French men and women engaged each other at a virtual knife-fighting range for hours on end. A confusing, smoke-filled and body-strewn back and forth played itself over and hours and hours, as generals largely ceded effective control over the battlefield to captains, lieutenants and sergeants. The battle, such as it was, ceased to be a single coherent action as opposed to a hundred desperate individual struggles between the mostly Spanish Coalition soldiers and the Republican men and women, mostly over trenches, defensive embankments and other strongpoints in the French position. However, several things are clear from detailed analyses of the battle.

First, while the Republican communication did not work anywhere near as efficiently as advertised — the dense smoke, the confusion of battle, overworked signal officers in the chain and the death or wounding of many of the key signal lieutenants ensured the system was constantly overwhelmed — it intermittently allowed the French commanders a measure of understanding and control over the course of the battle that the Coalition generals simply could not manage. There are many accounts from both sides of the Coalition overwhelming a French defensive position, only to be beset within minutes by reinforcements from Revolutionary Guard infantry held in reserve, forcing the Coalition infantry to withdraw or suffer heavy casualties. By and large, the Republican commanders had a much better idea of what was actually going on in the smoke-filled melee surrounding them and local tactical opportunities were exploited far more effectively on the Republican side.

Second, the superiority of the French artillery was now completely obvious to all, and a major shock to the Spanish commanders who had not fully believed the tales coming out of the north after Strasbourg. French artillery was simply superior in every single way, with Republicans inflicting thousands upon thousands of casualties on the often-exposed Coalition soldiers. While the French howitzers raining caseshot were mostly inaccurate and caused fewer casualties in themselves, the morale effect they had on the Spanish troops was enormous, and this caused major problems for the Coalition commanders in keeping their units in formation and in position. There is no doubt that the desperation of the Spanish soldiers to take French defensive positions, just like the Prussians and Austrians at Strasbourg, was driven by their desire to gain protection from the French artillery.

Third, while the second line did indeed fall just as Massena had expected, it had taken until three o'clock, and at a staggering cost to the Coalition by the standards of the time. Several elite infantry regiments of the Spanish Army were simply shattered by early afternoon, and every defensive position the Coalition soldiers took off the French cost lives at a level the Coalition army simply could not sustain. This, in the end, is the critical factor upon which the battle and indeed the entire war: the French armies, despite being drawn from the great unwashed masses of the country who had barely even held a gun before, were fighting for liberty, equality, and in defense of their homes and their country. The Coalition forces simply were not. It is thus no surprise at all that the French fought harder, more desperately, without fear and with utter tenacity that the Coalition forces could not overcome. In one typical scene a 20-year-old French sergeant of Revolutionary Guard chasseurs, Henri de la Rochejaquelin, upon learning that his platoon had run out of ammunition and become isolated, ordered the soldiers to remove the bayonet for their weapons, drop everything else and sounded a charge on a Spanish battalion that was blocking their way. For this action, Rochejaquelin would receive the legion d'honneur, second class.

By nightfall, it had become abundantly clear that the Coalition simply could not breakthrough, and much more of this would render Ricardos without an army. The men were exhausted, morale was low, ammunition was scarce and they had only just taken the third line, and were experiencing constant counterattacks on their positions in the fourth. Units were starting to break, and one entire regiment of Spanish infantry, having pushed too far and been immediately surrounded, had even surrendered en masse. In the dead of night, therefore, Ricardos submitted to the obvious and ordered a general withdrawal. Provence was furious, knowing that the Spanish were effectively abandoning the attempt to retake Montpellier and, by extension, ceding all of southeast France including Marseille, but there was nothing he could do. By midnight, the ragged remnants of the Coalition army retreated back to their encampment at Béziers. Within a week they had fallen back to Narbonne, where they would remain. There would be planning for a renewed assault on Montpellier beginning in July, but it would never materialize.

Bloody Saturday

The morning of the 17th dawned on a smoke-free battlefield covered in corpses in quantities unknown to European warfare since the days of the Mongols. The victorious Republic had suffered thirty thousand casualties, over ten thousand of whom had died on the field. The Coalition armies had suffered far worse, with double the casualties and well over double the deaths, but nonetheless the scene was utterly shocking to all who surveyed the remnants of the battlefield. Unlike the great Republican victories at Paris, Macon, Lyon, and Strasbourg, there was no great fanfare or outpouring of celebration following the victory at Villeyrac. There was a great sigh of relief, yes, and no small amount of joy at the knowledge that Louis would soon be forced from the metropole, but the sacrifice had been too great and the battle too bloody for anything but somber recognition and hundreds of more recipients of the legion d'honneur, many of which were posthumous. Indeed, although 15th of March was soon memorialized by the Girondin government as "The Day of Defeats", acknowledging the twin victories at Villeyrac and Île d'Yeu, within the institutional memory of the National Guard 16 March has a different name: "Le Jour des Larmes", the Day of Tears.

Indeed for the first time there started to be public murmurings that perhaps the cost of the war was too high, particularly with conscription in effect and the imposition of war taxes to finance National Guard salaries back in March. No one wanted a return to the ancien régime of course and few publicly countenanced any rollback of the social, political and economic forms the Assembly had decreed since 1790. But Villeyrac, far from marking the ultimate affirming of the Revolution, instead led some to wonder if enough was enough. If liberty, equality and fraternity were the priority, they wondered, then would it maybe be best to ultimately come to some agreement, some arrangement that secured democratic government by the people of France in perpetuity, even if nominally under the reign — but not the rule — of a King? Britain, they argued, was doing something like that with some success, why not France?

So began the political rise of the Orléanists, named as such because they coalesced around the self-styled Girondin deputy Phillipe Égalité. However, he is better known to both history and the French public as the Duc d'Orléans, head of the Orléans cadet branch of the Bourbon royal family, and indeed in the line of succession to the French throne. Orléans was a member of the Society of 1789, of course, and a genuine advocate of the Revolution — indeed Marie Antoinette fervently believed him the puppet master of the entire thing — but with the Montagnards discredited, Orléans now found himself the center of both war-skeptical and conservative political organization within the Republic. Some even wondered if Orléans himself, a respected deputy of the Assembly in reasonable standing within the chamber, should be crowned as a figurehead King of the French in a final compromise between the royalist sympathies everyone knew still existed and the maintenance of French democracy. As of yet, this was little more than whispers and salon conversations, but as the war dragged on and on, their voice would become more organized and louder, and become highly influential in crafting the peace that would finally conclude the First Coalition War. Of course, in the eyes of many, in doing so their main achievement was to make a second Revolution, and a second war, entirely inevitable.

In the short term, however, the return of conservative political organization to the Republic instead triggered one of the grimmer, sadder episodes of the First Republic: Bloody Saturday and the two weeks of destruction that followed. Totally convinced that Orléans' rise meant the presage of a royalist coup they had long feared, the extreme-left rump of the Jacobin Club, led by the journalist Jacques Hebert and the ultraradical priest Jacques Roux organized a mob of twenty thousand strong on April 6th 1793 to storm the prison in which Robespierre, Marat and the other Jacobin leaders imprisoned after the failed coup of the previous September. With many of the Parisian National Guard battalions called to the front to reinforce Massena — and, Lafayette had mistakenly thought, to drain Paris of its most radical energies — and with Danton no longer in a position to feed information on the Paris radicals to the President, the insurrection took all completely by surprise. It likely did not help that, several months earlier, the Spanish had invaded Saint-Domingue and sugar imports from the colony had ceased completely, leading to a severe shortage within Paris. Thus while Bloody Saturday is generally pinned as a reaction to the rise of the Orléanists, in truth it was more likely an inevitable reaction to broader, deeper-set patterns within Paris. Coupled with rising taxes to fund the war, the poor and increasingly hungry districts of Paris needed only a spark to be set aflame, and Orléans' rise provided it.

As in September, not all of the radicals in Paris agreed. The Cordeliers Club still held some sway, especially within the National Guard, and the same deep belief that a revolution against the Republic would be disastrous still held sway. Lafayette did not even wait to hear a word — he could well hear what was happening from his office — to declare martial law in the city, and an attempt to storm the Palais de la République and take the National Assembly by force was blocked by ten thousand National Guard, many of whom had been part of Robespierre's escort to jail months before. With the vital centers of government-protected, the mob turned their ire on anything and everything else that smacked of "counterrevolution", and over the next two weeks, much of the city burned — tragically including many of the old slums that housed the poor and hungry of east Paris — as the National Guard desperately tried to reassert control. Thousands died, mostly in the fires that raged through the city largely uncontrolled in the fortnight after the 6th. In the chaos, most of the freed Jacobin leaders escaped and fled to the border — whereupon they were promptly captured by the Austrians — and much of the city was in ruins.

Lafayette, for his part, was horrified by the events of early April. There was enormous pressure upon him from both the Girondins, who had always been afraid of an insurrectionary mob rising out of Paris, and the rapidly-rising Orleanists to forcefully crush any semblance of radicalism within France and within Paris. The Jacobin Club was of course designated a terrorist organization and disbanded, but many in the Assembly wanted far more than this. They wanted all the remaining radical deputies of the Assembly purged, the Cordeliers Club banned (even though it had come out against both the September coup and the Bloody Saturday insurrection), the radical programme rendered unconstitutional to even advocate, mass arrests of those who had led the insurrection, the Paris Commune broken up and some even wanted a rollback of social reforms.

Lafayette did none of these things, indeed he did the opposite. Instead of cracking down more broadly, he made the following pronouncement on May the 3rd, at the height of the anti-radical push in the Assembly:

"The responsibility for the terrible events of April rests with me, and me alone. Those who had committed violence and insurrection will be prosecuted according to the laws of the Republic. However, the deeper responsibility lies with those who allowed the people of this city to live in poverty and hunger while other citizens did not. As President of France, the ultimate responsibility for the violence thus lies with me, and I tender my immediate resignation."

The Assembly descended into a shocked uproar, and Lafayette was convinced by unanimous pleading — even the leftover radicals now felt Lafayette was their only protection against the tender mercies of the Girondins — to remain President, but by all accounts, his brief resignation was quite genuine. He had actually met with some of the ordinary men and women who had participated in the insurrection and had been profoundly affected by the tales of years of crushing poverty and desperate hunger that he had heard. Afterward, as a token of solidarity, he refused to wear the traditional culotte that signaled him a member of the nobility, and increasingly disdained his own noble title. The latter years of his Presidency would be preoccupied with schemes to try and improve the lot of the citizens of the poorest districts of Paris, but with little support in the Assembly, these rarely came to much.

In the aftermath, the mood in France was dark and one of mourning. Even the increasingly positive news from the front was not enough to lighten the demeanor of the French citizenry. However, despite the elated delusions that abounded in Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, this was not the presage to a collapse of French morale. The French populace was grim, yes, but a determined grimness to see this fight, for which all in the Republic blamed King Louis and the Austrians for starting, through to its just and proper conclusion. When Lafayette began a war bond drive in May to help finance the war, the response he received was overwhelming, and together with ever-growing American aid largely secured French finances for the rest of 1793. Whilst arguments were rising over the proper terms of the peace, and whether compromise was a better route to long-term security than all-or-nothing victory, all agreed on this: there would be no peace whilst foreign soldiers held a single square meter of French soil.

The war, therefore, ground on...

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[1] Some of you may be reading this and thinking "isn't this all just Napoleon's OTL reforms and advances being applied 10 years early?", and you are entirely correct in thinking so.

[2] This is, of course, a shrapnel shell, which was only officially named as such in the 1850s. Greater pressure to come up with military innovations after the humiliation of the Revolutionary War means it's invented by Shrapnel two years before OTL, but obviously, ARPA, which is cheating, got there first and also is using more of a late-19th century design which fixes the reliability problems that plagued the pre-1850s versions. The American-French connection ensures that Maj-Gen. Shrapnel does not get the credit here outside of Britain.