The Radiant Republic 112. First Commissioner

As the central city of northeastern France and the capital of the Moselle Departnt, tz lay at the confluence of the Moselle and the Seille on the Lorraine Plateau, less than fifty kilotres from the northern border of the Duchy of Luxembourg (present-day Luxembourg). tz had nearly 50,000 inhabitants, and the main part of the city stretched along the Moselle.

tz had first been fortified in the days of the ancient Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages it was a Free City under the Holy Roman Empire, and it prospered economically. In 1552, during his annexations, King Henry II of France beca the ruler of the Three Bishoprics; from then on, tz broke away from the Holy Roman Empire. Thereafter, tz beca a key French military stronghold. After the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Polish Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, the city instead developed still further.

Like his cousin, the Marquis de Bouillé, one important reason Lafayette chose tz as the base of the Army of the Moselle (central army group) was that tz possessed the largest and most important arms manufactory in the north of France. More than 3,000 people worked in it, including many skilled craftsn and experts in armants.

The tz arsenal produced everything from bayonets, sabres, muskets, cannon, and all kinds of ammunition, to officers’ and soldiers’ uniforms, weapon belts, marching packs, cavalry sets, engineer tools, and transport wagons. In short, the tz works could provide an almost complete set of equipnt for any branch of the army (though most non-ordnance items were outsourced).

Last year, when the German Corps of the Marquis de Bouillé was forced to dissolve, André sent emissaries to the tz works and, with the lure of high benefits and high pay, enticed away several hundred skilled craftsn and more than ten armants specialists to serve at the Reims works. What enraged the people of tz even more was that he packed up the venerable tz artillery school—rich in talent and tradition—taking everyone from cadets and instructors to the commandant and headmaster, and carried them off to Reims in one sweep.

This, too, was the origin of the tense relations between Marne and Moselle. Last May, the two departnts even brought a lawsuit in Paris’s High Court over the “loss of talent.” At that ti, André—then Deputy Prosecutor of the Marne—appeared again in court under the guise of a barrister, representing Marne in the case.

At a preparatory session before the hearing, the domineering barrister André unceremoniously threw a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen at the opposing counsel. He openly declared, and threatened, that any troublemakers or hostile groups who violated the “principles of 1789” ought to be sent to prison and made to serve three years of hard labour. This frightened Moselle’s lawyers and officials; not long afterward they chose to withdraw the suit of their own accord.

From that point on, Moselle still suffered defeat after defeat in its contests with André (and with Marne). By the grain crisis of the spring of 1792, Moselle’s governor and its chief provincial prosecutors—both principal and deputy—were collectively removed by the departnt’s General Council of the Commune, and the responsible parties would also be subjected to an official-cri investigation by the Legislative Assembly’s review committee.

For this reason, to avoid unnecessary trouble, André did not enter the city of tz. He detoured around it and went straight to the Army of the Moselle (central army group)’s camp in the northern suburbs. With the exalted status of a deputy-commissioner, André’s carriage and escort passed without hindrance into the core of the encampnt.

The Army of the Moselle (central army group)’s headquarters lay in the northern outskirts of tz, in an ancient monastery that had stood abandoned for many years and had now been restored anew. Judging only from the complex of buildings and the extent of its grounds, the monastery was large; it was not hard to imagine the grandeur of its heyday. As for its na and the date of its construction, few people cared to learn. A year earlier, this abandoned monastery had belonged to the Marquis de Bouillé, commander of the German Corps; now it had passed to Bouillé’s cousin, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Through the clean glass windows on either side of the carriage, André saw the scene in the Army of the Moselle (central army group)’s camp: groups of three or five sergeants sat lazily around fires; behind them were white tents thrown up in disorder, and muskets left lying about. It was already the hour of lunch. By almost every fire, each soldier held a small bowl of sticky food like mashed potatoes, swallowing with pained expressions. From ti to ti they muttered curses under their breath at passing officers, and pulled faces—plainly because of the wretched rations.

When they saw André’s carriage, a few junior officers with so sense of honour ran over and shouted at their n, ordering the soldiers to put down their food at once, stand up, and render a proper salute to the senior commander whose carriage was about to pass. Unfortunately, very few soldiers were willing to obey. They continued, stubbornly, to grapple with the potato paste.

“Heh. The current Minister of War, General Grav, thought flour was too expensive, so two weeks ago he ordered 50,000 tonnes of potatoes from the Reims grain exchange for each of the three army groups.” In the carriage, Ouvrard felt uncomfortable all over at the thought of the nauseating mash, as if sothing were lodged in his throat. “Heh—50,000 tonnes. Enough for Lafayette’s troops, and the camp followers with them, to eat for years.”

Before this, André’s forr broker had been staying in Bar-le-Duc, the capital of the use Departnt, as the resident trade representative of Marne. After receiving André’s urgent notice, Ouvrard drove to the checkpoint at Étain, on the border between Moselle and use, and joined the old chief’s convoy.

Hearing the joke, André frowned but said nothing. Indeed, apart from the Irish—whose land was barren and strewn with stones, and could grow almost nothing but potatoes and maize—continental Europeans rarely chose potatoes as a daily staple unless forced by war and famine.

So the current Minister of War was another bastard who did not live on ordinary food, who ate only white bread. If he wished to save money, he still could not replace soldiers’ black bread with nothing but potatoes; at the very least, the rations ought to include a pot of at-and-vegetable soup. Yet, unfortunately, there was soup simring on the fires—but it was thin and watery, with only the faintest sheen of grease. There was no at to be seen, unless at an officer’s table, where one might occasionally find a slice or two.

In Marne, by contrast, potatoes were mostly used as ingredients in dishes. The potatoes stored up—besides those sold outward to nearby famine-stricken departnts—were largely processed into whole potato flour. Whole potato flour was a dehydrated potato product: made from fresh potatoes, it went through washing, peeling, sorting, slicing, rinsing, parboiling, cooling, steaming, mashing, and then dehydration and drying, yielding a granular, flaked, or powdered product collectively called whole potato flour.

Under ordinary conditions, when made by hand, 5 tonnes of potatoes could be converted into 1 tonne of whole potato flour. Because this flour not only kept for a very long ti—ten to fifteen years—but could also replace most functions of wheat flour and be made into many tasty foods, such as porridge, at rolls, biscuits, milk potato powder, and patties, André required Marne and the Ardennes to treat whole potato flour as a strategic material and to stockpile it.

…

Lafayette’s command centre was located in the nave of the monastery’s church. At least from the outside, it was a spacious, bright, well-built structure. Yet once André stepped inside, the atmosphere turned sour.

Chairs and tables in the church hall were placed at random, and military maps with every kind of scale were spread over them in layers. Officers moved to and fro in a clamour, talking all at once. Field officers sat around the altar where the tabernacle had once stood, chatting at ease; staff officers stood below them, seemingly arguing without end over markings and figures on the maps; a quartermaster brusquely rejected a young officer’s pestering and ran off to complain to a senior commander that the piled-up potatoes were beginning to sprout…

Captain Suchet, who had been following behind, leaned in and said in a low voice, “If this were our camp, these n would all be put in confinent.” Indeed, from the first checkpoint onward, no ssenger had reported to headquarters that the commissioner had arrived. André stood at the entrance for two full minutes, and still no one ca forward to ask who he was.

André gave a wry shake of the head. With such low quality and such lack of vigilance among the officers, what war did they intend to fight? Perhaps the enemy would need only a group of fanatics to wipe out more than forty mid- and senior-ranking officers here in one net.

As André was thinking, a young officer with an unhappy face rushed out between the scattered chairs and benches. He seed absent-minded and paid little attention to what lay ahead. Tall and strongly built, he slamd into André’s shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground. Captain Suchet, close at the commissioner’s back and acting as an aide, flushed with indignation; he strode forward angrily and seized the reckless man by the collar.

“Lieutenant Colonel, you should apologise to your superior for your rash behaviour!” Suchet’s loud rebuke made many officers in the hall turn to look toward the noisy entrance.

“Superior?” The lieutenant colonel lifted his chin with contempt. He glanced at the unfamiliar civilian in a black broad-brimd hat and black coat, and sneered. “Superior? Whose superior would that be?”

Suchet released the collar, lifted his head high, looked around at the crowd, and shouted, “This is Major General André Franck, representative of the Legislative Assembly, and the first commissioner attached to the Army of the Moselle (central army group)!”

As soon as the words fell, the already disorderly tables and chairs clattered again, and then toppled into further disarray. More than forty officers stood where they were; they had no ti to straighten their uniforms or put on their hats, when the captain shouted again: “All of you—attention! Salute Major General André!”

The brief display of authority done, André removed his tricolour cockaded hat and spoke, signalling that the officers should continue their work. “Gentlen, I am not in uniform today. There is no need for ceremony.”

At once, he turned back to the young officer—whose right hand was still raised in salute—and asked with a smile, “And you, sir—the honourable lieutenant colonel—may I ask your na?”

“Reporting to General André: I am Jean-Victor Moreau, Lieutenant Colonel of the 1st Volunteer Battalion of Ille-et-Vilaine (in Brittany)!” The officer straightened his chest without flinching, yet the slight tremor in his voice betrayed the fear inside him; he even forgot, at the outset, to apologise.

There was no helping it. On the march of more than 500 kilotres from Ille-et-Vilaine to Moselle, Lieutenant Colonel Moreau and his 1st Volunteer Battalion had heard far too many legends of André along the way: the all-powerful “The God-Favoured,” the terrifying Lucifer-king of devils, the overwhelmingly powerful deputy who controlled the fifteen northern departnts like a dictator…

On the very day the 1st Volunteer Battalion reached the tz camp, Moselle’s senior officials were arrested and thrown into prison; rumours said it was because they had offended Deputy André. As the son of a Breton lawyer (a prosecutor), Moreau had refused to inherit his father’s trade and had gone into the army instead (after spending so ti mixed up with gangs), but he still knew how much political power it took to topple a governor and a chief provincial prosecutor—and not in one departnt, but in three.

At first, Moreau believed that as long as he stayed in the Army of the Moselle (central army group), that detested General André could not touch him. Yet a few days earlier, all officers of regintal rank and above received a notice from headquarters: Deputy André (Major General) would soon arrive at the tz camp as the commissioner-inspector attached to the Army of the Moselle (central army group), and would accompany the army group to examine all aspects of war preparations; Marshal Lafayette required all officers to take the matter seriously, and so forth.

And now, at the first eting with the commissioner, a conflict had already erupted. Moreau felt he was about to be thoroughly ruined. Yet the root cause was still the damned quartermaster’s business: if the quartermaster had not issued potatoes as bread to the 1st Volunteer Battalion, Moreau would not have clashed with him so violently, and still less would he have crashed—by sheer carelessness—into General André.

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In truth, André was not as vicious as Moreau imagined. He asked the man’s na only as a casual question, with no thought of “bullying the small with the great.” But when he heard the na Jean-Victor Moreau, his eyes lit up; an idea ca to him, and he felt a bellyful of mischief rising. During the Revolution there were two generals nad Moreau; the other was Jean-René Moreau, from Rocroi in the Ardennes—and the other…

Just as Moreau ca to his senses and prepared to apologise, André cut him off roughly. “You—Lieutenant Colonel Moreau. You may go. We have plenty of ti to settle our account.”

Watching Moreau’s dejected, solitary back as he withdrew, André could not help laughing with pleasure.

“Sir—Marshal Lafayette and the others are here,” Captain Suchet reminded him softly from behind.

André turned and saw Marshal Lafayette leading more than ten senior field officers toward him. Wherever they passed, chairs and benches clattered again in a scattered chorus.

It had been a long ti. Lafayette was still that paladin of the spotless sword, accustod to wearing a cold face. Only upon seeing his “old friend” André did his dull, expressionless features manage to squeeze out the faintest smile—rare indeed. It seed that more than three months of pastoral life had taught the General of the White Horse sothing of life’s helplessness.

Yet in Lafayette’s eyes, André remained that arrogant, domineering bastard of a lawyer whom everyone feared. No sooner had he arrived at the Army of the Moselle (central army group)’s camp than he had the place in chaos. And that unlucky lieutenant colonel who had just left—Lafayette hoped he would not spend the night drowning in nightmares.

The two old friends, cordial in appearance and estranged in spirit, t and naturally clasped arms, laughing and talking as if delighted. While they traded idle banter, the aides in the hall had already tidied the scattered tables and papers; a military band that had hurried over ford up on the church square and began to play a gentle, elegant minuet. Besides its use at court balls, a minuet was often employed as an informal welcoming tune.

When everything was ready, an ugly smile surfaced on Lafayette’s face. As commander of the Army of the Moselle (central army group), he began to introduce the senior officers at his side to the commissioner who had co from afar.

In André’s mind, apart from three generals whom he knew fairly well or at least recognised, he had little impression of the others and no intention of deepening it. In the sifting flood of the Revolution, they would quickly beco naless passers-by—or headless corpses beneath the guillotine.

Handso in face and elegant in manner, General Narbonne was an old acquaintance of André’s. As the forr Minister of War, the two had once joined forces to set up the unfortunate Dumouriez. When the last cabinet fell, the reputed bastard of Louis XV simply went over to his Constitutionalist friend Lafayette and took a post in the Army of the Moselle (central army group).

The next was General Kellermann, stern of face and rigid of character. André’s familiarity with him ca from the key battle recorded in textbooks before André’s own crossing: a battle that rewrote France’s fate—monarchy before that day, republic after it. On a hill of that battlefield stood even a statue of Kellermann directing with composure.

The third was General Custine: an old general with a well-trimd heavy beard, grey hair but a sturdy body, nearly fifty. André’s knowledge of him, a general of distinguished service and loyal heart, ca from the last words he spoke before mounting the scaffold.

When several senior officers shook André’s hand, their expressions were not only perfunctory but their tone openly disdainful; they were rely going through the motions for this absurdly young commissioner from Paris. Lafayette frowned when he saw it, but as commander he could not easily intervene; he instead fixed them with an angry stare, and things improved sowhat.

Seeing this, Narbonne shook his head inwardly. Had these fools taken the wrong dicine, deliberately handing the man chances to explode, in public and in private? As forr Minister of War, Narbonne had seen too much in Paris of the commissioner’s imnse power. Fortunately, André’s expression remained flat: he neither t cold faces with a lofty contempt, nor offered smiles to greet their chill. In his mind, he kept a small ledger for grudges.

“What is the point of being angry with a pack of dead n and walking corpses?” This was André’s true thought.

When the band’s trumpets struck up the brisk “Hussars’ March,” the commander of the Army of the Moselle (central army group) sincerely invited the commissioner of the National Assembly to review the troops together. The unit to be inspected had co from the northern outskirts of Paris: the Montmartre Heights infantry regint under General Narbonne.

In the centre of the church square, 2,000 soldiers, dressed in blue review uniforms, ford a neat square. They looked clean and orderly; their shirts were spotless, their spirits full; even the buttons on their coats and every strap of their belts glead.

Accompanied by a great number of senior officers, Commander Lafayette and Commissioner André walked down the church steps, talking and laughing.

Before long the music stopped abruptly. The regintal commander roared an order: “All—attention!” The soldiers held their breath and instinctively adjusted their formation to its best, lifting their chests and raising their heads.

As the two commanders approached the regintal colonel at the head of the line, the colonel flourished his shining sabre in a brief flourish, then rendered the sabre salutes in sequence, ending with the blade held before the chest. The colonel shouted again: “Salute the commanders!”

“Salute the commanders!” With a sharp collective snap, the entire regint raised their muskets in salute.

After the shout that seed to split the sky, the square fell into silence. When the two commanders resud their steps, the band played, again and again, an impassioned war march, “Victory Will Surely Be Ours.” (This march existed in different versions, from the ti of Louis XV to the era of Napoleon.)

With a broad smile, André walked slowly along the ranks. Now and then he stopped to exchange a few words with officers and n he knew, speaking of the situation in Paris, and of curiosities of army life. This Montmartre Heights regint had once rested for a few days at the Bacourt camp; André had also invited most of its officers to dine with him. For Lafayette to produce this unit for review today was, in its way, a careful effort.

After the review, Lafayette led the commissioner to a reception room on the second floor behind the nave for a brief rest, while the senior officers remained together in the adjacent eting room to await orders.

The quartermaster, still grumbling to his colleagues, complained that he was too busy to waste ti accompanying the commissioner. He was thickset, with a fat head and heavy ears; on his sunken face lay two dense eyebrows. Each ti he grew excited, those brows quivered up and down with his intonation.

“Shut up, Grand Colonel!” Narbonne could not help barking at him. “André is in the commander’s office next door. If you have objections, go and raise them to his face—don’t bawl here like an idiot!”

The grand quartermaster muttered one or two resentful words under his breath, but did not dare to speak loudly again. Comte de Narbonne was a close friend of Marshal Lafayette’s; the quartermaster had patrons of his own, but he had no need to clash with Narbonne outright.

General Kellermann, who seed to enjoy seeing the quartermaster suffer, asked Narbonne, “I hear you used to be close with Commissioner André. Tell us what he is like.”

As he spoke, the general shot the short, fat quartermaster a scornful look; the bastard had once shorted his division of supplies as well. Yet Grand Colonel had no small backing: he was a mber of the local Jacobins’ club and kept close ties with Brissot. In a sense, before André arrived, this grand quartermaster was the Jacobins’ man placed inside the army group, to watch the words and deeds of senior officers.

Narbonne understood Kellermann’s intent and smiled faintly. “Yes—very close. Three years ago, André had only just co to Paris, a small lawyer who delivered docunts for the Palais de Justice. In the Babeuf case of 1790, as defence counsel he virtually challenged the entire Criminal Court of the Châtelet by himself. When no one thought he could win, he overturned the case and won a complete victory. Afterward, he was appointed the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court, recovering customs duties in Bordeaux and Paris and punishing the tax farrs who profited from the nation’s calamity; in that single year he brought 30,000,000 livres into the treasury. In a sense, the deputies’ living stipends over two legislatures, and the pay of the 150,000 troops involved in this northern war, were all funds he raised when he served as the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court.

“But that is not even the most formidable part. Back then, several cabinet mbers—Comte de Saint-Priest as Minister of the Interior, Comte de La Tour du Pin as Minister of War, and Vicomte de Champien as Minister of Justice—were all struck by André’s impeachnt accusations and had to submit resignations to the king. And last year, my friend, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lésart suffered the sa: within three days he not only lost several able assistants, but also had to yield the power to appoint four important envoys. And not long ago, the governors and chief provincial prosecutors of Pas-de-Calais and Moselle resigned of their own accord, again because of Commissioner André’s impeachnt. In short, this young man of Champagne is extraordinarily capable. They say what he likes best is to pick fights with the thorns—and he almost never misses.”

Narbonne deliberately raised his voice on the word “thorns,” and the eting room erupted in laughter, with old General Custine laughing loudest of all. The fat quartermaster burned with hatred; he swore that from tomorrow he would halve the supply allotnts of Narbonne’s division, Kellermann’s division, and Custine’s brigade.

The officers’ scheming next door did not affect the pleasant conversation between the two commanders in the adjoining room. André refused Lafayette’s Champagne. He asked the duty officer outside for a pot of hot coffee, and instructed him to add extra sugar and fresh milk. In March, tz was dark and damp, and André was used to drinking sothing hot.

“Coffee and cane sugar have gone up again—and they’re often out of stock,” Lafayette muttered, ill-humoured.

André smiled unconcernedly. “It doesn’t matter, my friend. They’ll fall soon. Coffee, cocoa, cane sugar—even indigo—everything will be available.”

The war in the colony of Saint-Domingue was far better than André’s worst expectations. The “cold owl,” Colonel Saint-Cyr, did not disappoint him: with only 8,000 National Guard militia, he held off the rolling assaults of 150,000 enslaved insurgents for five months and held the line at Cap-Français. In late January, he even led a series of counterattacks and destroyed more than 20,000 rioters.

To the southeast, Port-au-Prince—previously hanging by a thread—finally received ergency aid ferried across from Cap-Français: 3,000 colonial troops personally led by the Marquis de Bouillé. Together with the local National Guard, they likewise held the crucial port city and spared it from the ravages of more than 100,000 rioters.

If nothing unexpected occurred, then by the ti Dumouriez’s expeditionary army reached Saint-Domingue, the colonial authorities would shift from defence to offence and strike at the 400,000 rebels hiding in the mountains, striving to end all fighting before the end of this year and drive the remaining hundreds of thousands of slaves back to the plantations—or sell them into North Arica.

A week after the formation of the “cabinet of Brissot’s friends,” on March 17—after a half-year interval—five rchant ships from the port of Cap-Français, laden with coffee, cane sugar, and cocoa, put in at Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine to await customs inspection and clearance.

The very next day, in Paris’s commodities futures market, coffee and cane sugar—long stubbornly high—crashed by nearly half. The Parisian bourgeois, already tortured half to death by sky-high coffee prices, even poured into the streets, celebrating and shouting the absurd slogans “Long live coffee!” and “Long live cane sugar!” As for the 500,000 enslaved blacks suffering in Saint-Domingue, no one rembered them—perhaps no one wished to rember them.

Le Figaro published an editorial at precisely the right mont, praising the great, glorious, and righteous Deputy André for his far-sighted judgnt: he was the first to perceive the grave crisis in Saint-Domingue, and the first to call for—and to act upon—sending various military aids there. Those ships, besides being full of military supplies, also carried more than a hundred military instructors, among them the hero who had defended Cap-Français, Colonel Saint-Cyr.

This report in Le Figaro won André an incomparable prestige among the citizens of Paris, especially the bourgeois. A heartfelt cry of “Long live André” soon rang out again and again in the cafés crowded with intellectuals. Afterward, Brissot had to admit that, despite all his efforts, he still could not surpass André’s influence in Paris.

Beginning in July 1790, André’s labour and effort of twenty-one months at last yielded rich returns. This was not rely a matter of comrcial profits of many tens of millions—indeed hundreds of millions—of livres per year; more importantly, it was the mastery of hearts, especially the lofty prestige and powerful appeal among Paris’s intellectuals, which money alone could seldom buy. It must be said: “hearts” seem intangible, and often submit to force and tyranny; yet once they reach a certain stage, they beco a vast and unstoppable driving power.

…

Returning to the reception room of the Army of the Moselle (central army group) commander, André carefully set down an English bone-china coffee cup with a gilt rim upon the table, because it was one piece of the exquisite table service that the first Arican ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, had given to General Lafayette. In the twenty-first century, the entire set would be worth a fortune. Even if Trump were to offer a luxury apartnt on Manhattan Island in New York in exchange, this bone-china enthusiast would gladly accept.

“Speak, André,” Lafayette asked bluntly, with no patience at all. “How exactly do you intend to conduct your inspection? I will send people to cooperate fully with you and your n.”

André smiled. “It’s not as complicated as you imagine. I need only finish one thing—and I’ll be doing you a great favour. Then I will leave your camp and return to Paris to report. And don’t imagine as so dictator and despot. The Legislative Assembly has 745 representatives; I am only one of them. Even if I were forming factions, it would be impossible to make 744 fellows wearing tricolour sashes follow at my heels at all tis.”

“But you can tempt them!” Lafayette retorted—and the next sentence, “You are Satan,” never made it out.

“Tempt?” André burst into laughter.

Then the laughter stopped abruptly. He stared hard into Lafayette’s eyes and spoke word by word:

“Commander, whether the temptation is money or power, both are beautiful things that people long for and pursue.

“We are not the sa.

“You are noble by birth; you can live in fine clothes and eat rich food every day, and enjoy life.

“I must strive for everything I need with my own effort; hell is often at my side.

“You need only raise your arm and cry out, and countless n will follow you to fight in North Arica.

“I must first fill my belly. To obtain a single piece of black bread, I must set many desires aside.

“For you, there are opportunities without end. Lose this one, and you can choose the next.

“For , there is usually only one chance in life. Miss it, and I have nothing. So, Monsieur le Marquis, you have no right to accuse . Everything I have was earned by my own two hands—not by alms, not by titles, and not by so-called noble blood.”