Of peasant birth, Pichegru was nevertheless appointed by ecclesiastical influence as a scholar at Brienne. In the dearth of generals he was selected for promotion by Saint-Just as was Hoche at the time when Carnot discovered Jourdan. Having assisted Hoche in the conquest of Alsace when a division general and only thirty-two years old, he began the next year, in 1794, to deploy his extraordinary powers, and with Moreau as second in command he swept the English and Austrians out of the Netherlands. Both these generals were sensitive and jealous men; after brilliant careers under the republic they turned royalists and came to unhappy ends. Moreau was two years the junior. He was the son of a Breton lawyer and rose to notice both as a local politician, and as a volunteer captain in the Breton struggles for independence with which he had no sympathy. As a great soldier he ranks with Hoche after Napoleon in the revolutionary time. Hoche was younger still, having been born in 1768. In 1784 he enlisted as a common soldier and rose from the ranks by sheer ability. He died at the age of thirty, but as a politician and strategist he was already famous. Kléber was an Alsatian who had been educated in the military school at Munich and was already forty-one years old. Having enlisted under the Revolution as a volunteer, he so distinguished himself on the Rhine that he was swiftly promoted; but, thwarted in his ambition to have an independent command, he lost his ardor and did not again distinguish himself until he secured service under Napoleon in Egypt. There he exhibited such capacity that he was regarded as one of Bonaparte's rivals. He was assassinated by an Oriental in Cairo. Bernadotte was four years the senior of Bonaparte, the son of a lawyer in Paris. He too enlisted in the ranks, as a royal marine, and rose by his own merits. He was a rude radical whose military ability was paralleled by his skill in diplomacy. His swift promotion was obtained in the Rhenish campaigns. Gouvion Saint-Cyr was also born in 1764 at Toul. He was a marquis but an ardent reformer, and a born soldier. He began as a volunteer captain on the staff of Custine, and rising like the others mentioned became an excellent general, though his chances for distinction were few. Jourdan was likewise a nobleman, born at Limoges to the rank of count in 1762. His long career was solid rather than brilliant, though he gained great distinction in the northern campaigns and ended as a marshal, the military adviser of Joseph Bonaparte in Naples and Madrid.
The record of military energy put forth by the liberated nation under Jacobin rule stands, as Fox declared in the House of Commons, absolutely unique. Twenty-seven victories, eight in pitched battle; one hundred and twenty fights; ninety thousand prisoners; one hundred and sixteen towns and important places captured; two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts taken; three thousand eight hundred pieces of ordnance, seventy thousand muskets, one thousand tons of powder, and ninety standards fallen into French hands—such is the incredible tale. Moreover, the army had been purged with as little mercy as a mercantile corporation shows to incompetent employees. It is often claimed that the armies of republican France and of Napoleon were, after all, the armies of the Bourbons. Not so. The conscription law, though very imperfect in itself, was supplemented by the general enthusiasm; a nation was now in the ranks instead of hirelings; the reorganization had remodeled the whole structure, and between January first, 1792, and January twentieth, 1795, one hundred and ten division commanders, two hundred and sixty-three generals of brigade, and one hundred and thirty-eight adjutant-generals either resigned, were suspended from duty, or dismissed from the service. The republic had new leaders and new men in its armies.
The nation had apparently determined that the natural boundary of France and of its own revolutionary system was the Rhine. Nice and Savoy would round out their territory to the south. This much the new government, it was understood, would conquer, administer, and keep; the Revolution in other lands, impelled but not guided by French influence, must manage its own affairs. This was, of course, an entirely new diplomatic situation. Under its pressure Holland, by the aid of Pichegru's army, became the Batavian Republic, and ceded Dutch Flanders to France; while Prussia abandoned the coalition, and in the treaty of Basel, signed on April fifth, 1795, agreed to the neutrality of all north Germany. In return for the possessions of the ecclesiastical princes in central Germany, which were eventually to be secularized, she yielded to France undisputed possession of the left bank of the Rhine. Spain, Portugal, and the little states both of south Germany and of Italy were all alike weary of the contest, the more so as they were honeycombed with liberal ideas. They were already preparing to desert England and Austria, the great powers which still stood firm. With the exception of Portugal, they acceded within a few weeks to the terms made at Basel. Rome, as the instigator of the unyielding ecclesiastics of Vendée, was, of course, on the side of Great Britain and the Empire.
At home the military success of the republic was for a little while equally marked. Before the close of 1794 the Breton peasants who, under the name of Chouans, had become lawless highwaymen were entirely crushed; and the English expedition sent to Quiberon in the following year to revive the disorders was a complete, almost ridiculous failure. The insurrection of Vendée had dragged stubbornly on, but it was stamped out in June, 1795, by the execution of over seven hundred of the emigrants who had returned on English vessels to fan the royalist blaze which was kindling again.
In the collection of Mr. Edmond Taigny.
Marie-Josephine-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie,
Called Josephine, Empress of the French.
From the design by Jean-Baptiste Isabey
(pencil drawing retouched in water-color) made in 1798.
The royalists, having created the panic of five years previous, were not to be outdone even by the Terror. Charette, the Vendean leader, retaliated by a holocaust of two thousand republican prisoners whom he had taken. After the events of Thermidor the Convention had thrown open the prison doors, put an end to bloodshed, and proclaimed an amnesty. The evident power of the Parisian burghers, the form given by the Girondists to the new constitution, the longing of all for peace and for a return of comfort and prosperity, still further emboldened the royalists, and enabled them to produce a wide-spread revulsion of feeling. They rose in many parts of the south, instituting what is known from the colors they wore as the "White Terror," and pitilessly murdering, in the desperation of timid revenge, their unsuspecting and unready neighbors of republican opinions. The scenes enacted were more terrible, the human butchery was more bloody, than any known during the darkest days of the revolutionary movement in Paris. This might well be considered the preliminary trial to the Great White Terror of 1815, in which the frenzy and fanaticism of royalists and Roman Catholics surpassed the most frantic efforts of radicals in lawless bloodshed. Imperialists, free-thinkers, and Protestants were the victims.