Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution 1316832244, 9781316832240

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of
Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Popular Sovereignty and International Law on the Periphery of France
2 The Union of Avignon and the Challenges of Self-Determination
3 Revolutionary Power and the Annexation of Belgium
4 Strategic Interests, Survival, and the Left Bank of the Rhine
5 Between Subject and Sovereign States: Sister Republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

“This brilliant book tells the story of how tax law in Mandatory Palestine was transformed from an intimate institution relying on the voluntary cooperation of taxpayers to a formal system enforced by lawyers. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the nature of law and in how to make a legal system that necessarily depends on voluntary cooperation achieve its goals.” Reuven Avi-Yonah, Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law, the University of Michigan

“Once more, Assaf Likhovski has demonstrated his keen understanding of law and its social function in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine as well as the state of Israel. This volume solidifies Assaf Likhovski’s position as one of the most formidable and important scholars of the legal history of Israel.” Michael Stanislawski, Columbia University “In this ambitious and well-written narrative, Assaf Likhovski demonstrates his masterful skills as a legal and cultural historian. By analyzing changing methods of tax assessment and collection, Likhovski tells a compelling historical tale about fundamental transformations in Israeli law and society.” Ajay K. Mehrotra, author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State “Assaf Likhovksi has written an absolutely fascinating book. His exploration of the rise and fall of what he aptly calls the ‘intimate fiscal state’ uses taxation to provide a prism on the history of late Ottoman and British-ruled Palestine, as well as Israel. Everyone interested in the relationship between law and society, the history of taxation, the subject of tax avoidance, and the history of Israel will want to read this brilliant work.” Laura Kalman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jacket image: community tax (kofer ha-yishuv) stamps. Courtesy of Museum of Taxes, Jerusalem J AC K E T DE S IG N E D BY H A RT Mc L E OD LT D

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

“Assaf Likhovski has written a fascinating account of the development of taxation in a region that has long struggled with shifting rulers and divided populations. This book is more than just the definitive history of taxation in Israel. It is a case study on the cultural and sociological underpinnings of tax law itself.” Steven Bank, University of California, Los Angeles

This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine, and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship.

KOLLA

E DWA R D JA M E S KOL L A is a professor of law and legal history at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He is the author of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (2006), which was awarded the Yonathan Shapiro Best Book Award in Israel Studies.

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution E DWA R D J A M E S K O L L A

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

The advent of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution inspired an unintended but momentous change in international law. Edward James Kolla explains that between 1789 and 1799, the idea that peoples ought to determine their fates in international affairs, just as they were taking power domestically in France, inspired a series of new and interconnected claims to territory. Drawing on case studies from Avignon, Belgium, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy, Kolla traces how French revolutionary diplomats and leaders gradually applied principles derived from new domestic political philosophy and law to the international stage. Instead of obtaining land via dynastic inheritance or conquest in war, the will of the people would now determine the title and status of territory. However, the principle of popular sovereignty also opened up new justifications for aggressive conquest, and this history foreshadowed some of the most controversial questions in international relations today. Edward James Kolla is Assistant Professor of History, in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar, at Georgetown University.

See the Studies in Legal History series website at http:// studiesinlegalhistory.org/ Studies in Legal History

editors Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania Holly Brewer, University of Maryland, College Park Michael Lobban, London School of Economics and Political Science Reuel Schiller, University of California, Hastings Cynthia Nicoletti, Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis Edward James Kolla, Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution Robert W. Gordon, Taming the Past: Essays on Law and History and History in Law Assaf Likhovski, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel Paul Garfinkel, Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 Karen M. Tani, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972 Stefan Jurasinski, The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law Felice Batlan, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945 Sophia Z. Lee, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right Michael A. Livingston, The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938–1943

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

EDWARD JAMES KOLLA Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service in Qatar

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107179547 doi: 10.1017/9781316832240 © Edward James Kolla 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-17954-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents

Contents

Lists of Maps

page viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 2 3 4 5

Popular Sovereignty and International Law on the Periphery of France

35

The Union of Avignon and the Challenges of Self-Determination

84

Revolutionary Power and the Annexation of Belgium Strategic Interests, Survival, and the Left Bank of the Rhine

160

Between Subject and Sovereign States: Sister Republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy

206

121

Conclusion

270

Select Bibliography Index

299 316

vii

Maps

I.1 French Claims to Territory, 1789–1799 1.1 France, 1789 3.1 France’s Eastern Boundaries at the Start of the Revolutionary Wars, 1792 5.1 The Batavian Republic and the French Rhineland, 1798 5.2 The Helvetic Republic, 1799 5.3 The Italian Sister Republics, 1799 6.1 The Napoleonic Empire, 1811

viii

page 4 38 123 215 221 234 272

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge all the individuals and institutions whose care, encouragement, and assistance helped me to write this book. For the wherewithal either to conduct research or present my findings, I am grateful to Trinity College in the University of Toronto for a Norah Whitney Scholarship; the Society for French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French History for a John B. and Theta H. Wolf Travel Award; the Frederick Jackson Turner Society; the J. Brien Key Fund; the Finnish Historical Society; the Triangle Institute for Security Studies; and New York University Abu Dhabi. I am especially thankful for a year-long Bourse Chateaubriand from the French Government and for two semester-long fellowships: one from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and the other from the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the context of the institution’s wider “Rethinking Diplomacy” initiative. Finally, and most of all, I benefited from extended support from the History department at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned my PhD, and over the past six years from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, where I work, under the sponsorship of the Qatar Foundation For the opportunity to introduce some of the ideas in this book, in more or (often) less polished form, and for all the feedback received from participants, I thank the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, England; the Australian Society for French Studies; the historians at NYU Abu Dhabi, especially Martin Klimky and Amir Minsky; the American Society for Legal History; Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, on the invitation of Melissa Byrnes; the Western ix

x

Acknowledgments

Society for French History; the Institute for Historical Studies at UTAustin, and especially Kenneth Loiselle of Trinity University; the Society for French Historical Studies, three times; the Camargo Foundation; the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era; the Triangle Institute for Security Studies; the University of Chicago Center in Paris, headed at the time by Jan Goldstein and Bill Sewell; the Hanasaari Swedish-Finnish Cultural Centre and the Prime Minister of Finland’s office; and the French Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche and Embassy in Washington DC. On two occasions, significant portions of or the full manuscript were read and I received feedback in hours-long seminars. I am much obliged to all the participants at both seminars for their time, work, and suggestions. The first, at UT-Austin, included Judith Coffin, Julie Hardwick, Chris Lee, Bob Olwell, Jeremi Suri, James Vaughn, and Laurie Wood. Christine Baker took the notes. The second workshop was hosted by the History department at Georgetown University in Washington: Carol Benedict, Jim Collins, Theo Cristov (from George Washington University), Alison Games, Sandra Horvath-Peterson, John McNeil, and Judith Tucker participated. Tommaso Astarita was also there, and organized it all, and has been my best mentor at Georgetown, along with Jo Ann Moran Cruz, who could not attend the workshop but read and commented on the entire manuscript. Overall, I am grateful to my colleagues in DC for their support, even if a little over 11,000 kilometers away. My editor in the series Studies in Legal History, Michael Lobban, also read the manuscript and provided excellent suggestions, as did the two anonymous reviewers – my true thanks go to all three, and to the American Society for Legal History for sponsoring the series. At Cambridge University Press, my editor Deborah Gershenowitz, as well as Kristina Deusch, Katherine Law, and Puvi Kalieperumal have been a joy to work with. Many mentors, colleagues, and friends read portions of the draft or discussed it, French history, or international law with me. I am tremendously grateful to Noha Aboueldahab, Maxine Berg, Susan Bohandy, Lara Mancini Bond, Alex Bradley, Jeff Brooks, Will Brown, Hannah Callaway, Bobby Chesney, Manuel Covo, Hugo Cugnet, Daniel Deudney, Sarah Easterby-Smith, Alan Forrest, Jimmy Geist, Lige Gould, Siba Grovogui, Jean Guillaume, Amanda Herbert, Patrice Higonnet, Leith Hunter, Annie Jourdan, Richard Kagan, Tom Kaiser, Gillian Kolla, Peter Kolla, Wilson Lam, Josh Lobert, Margaret MacMillan, Mary Ashburn Miller, Andrew Mills, Phil Morgan, Sam

Acknowledgments

xi

Moyn, Jim Reilly, David Rounthwaite, Bill Rowe, Carole Sargent, Gary Savage, Paul Schroeder, Hamish Scott, Azim Shariff, Todd Shepard, David Stewart, Chris Tozzi, Ruth Wedgwood, and Dave Woodworth. I thank Luke Kolla for talking about other things with me, and Arthur Mestrot for distracting me, with squash. For standout help, I especially thank Claire Cage, Dan Edelstein, and John Marshall. Jean-Clément Martin supported this project with the original suggestion to look at Corsica and other insights and enthusiasm along the way, and by hosting me at the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française at the Université de Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne. The idea for this book first came to me when I was a fourthyear undergraduate at the University of Toronto, in a class taught by Robert Bothwell and Arne Kislenko. Thank you both. I would never have imagined where this project, and this career they suggested I follow, would take me – literally . . . to Qatar! I am thankful for my colleagues and friends at Georgetown in Qatar: Brendan Hill, Anatol Lieven, Jimm MacGregor, Josh Mitchell, Julien Moutte, Gerd Nonneman, Maya Primorac, Sohaira Siddiqui, Alex Silberman, Clyde Wilcox, Jacqulyn Williams, and Hana Zabarah; and especially Abdullah Al-Arian and Max Oidtmann for feedback on this book. There is no word to describe Karine Walther, who has been the closest and most supportive of all. David A. Bell was and continues to be an outstanding advisor, historian, and inspiration. More than anyone else who helped with this book, I am indebted to him – for years of dedication, training, and advice, all generously given with his usual good humor, wit, and warmth. Carol Ring, the late Bob Panasiuk, and Anne Bourque nurtured in me interests that would inspire me to be a scholar. Mme. Bourque also chaperoned me on trips to France, twice, at a young age and helped inspire my love for that country. In France, I was welcomed, chaleureusement, by Joëlle and Michel Leberruyer in Bayeux and Anne-Catherine and Jean-Luc Guillaume in Alsace and their respective families. This book is dedicated to my parents, Debra and Edward Kolla. I am grateful to them for too much to list, so will only mention two things. I will never forget the moment they said yes to my request to go on that first voyage to France, and then calling them the night I arrived from the Champs-Élysées.

Introduction

On November 10, 1792, three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the people of the city of Berg in the western Holy Roman Empire made an astonishing request. “Legislators,” they implored the National Convention in Paris, “declare to the universe that all peoples who suffer under the yoke of despotism, and who desire the protection of the French and union with their republic, will be protected and recognized as French.”1 This entreaty is notable, first, because prior to the French Revolution, the free choice of a people hardly mattered for such matters; instead, dynasticism was the fundamental characteristic of international relations. Territory was either transmitted through marriage or succession, or conquered as a result of victory in war between sovereign princes. Then, in 1789, French revolutionaries proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, most notably in article 3 of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” In this historic document, they asserted that now “all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation,” as opposed to in the person of the king. At first, people at the time only understood this groundbreaking proposition as applying to French domestic politics. It underpinned France’s first written constitution, promulgated in 1791. Deputies in 1

Archives nationales de France (AN): AD/XV/42. “Adresse du Grand-Bailliage de BergZabern à la Convention Nationale,” written November 10, 1792, read in Paris November 19, 1792. The Convention was France’s national unicameral assembly from September 20, 1792 until October 26, 1795.

1

2

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

the newly formed French National Assembly had worked tirelessly for more than two years on this charter – their explicit, self-appointed, and most important endeavor. Deputies also often assumed responsibilities related to the everyday administration of the country, and some of those tasks related to France’s external affairs. But, in general, revolutionaries gave little thought to matters of international politics and law, in deference to their constitution-writing mission. They certainly did not aim, proactively, to support or apply the principle of popular sovereignty abroad. This is the second reason why the request from the German-speaking people of Berg, in the Rhineland, is extraordinary. In spite of revolutionaries’ initial intentions, after the French abandoned monarchical government for a political system based on the will of the people, this novel idea inadvertently bled into international affairs, where it inspired a series of unprecedented and interconnected claims to territory. That is the subject of this book. The first places where the principle of popular sovereignty upset the international status quo were on the periphery of France itself. The island of Corsica and borderland province Alsace had complex and anachronistic legal relationships with the rest of France due to the provisions of the treaties by which French kings had originally acquired them. In the summer and fall of 1789, revolutionary officials and everyday people invoked the will of locals in both provinces to be fully part of France and thereby resolve vexing ambiguities deriving from their arcane status. In so doing, advocates contended that the will of the people trumped and indeed nullified the older dynastic entitlements and existing treaty law. As one French official asserted, “The law of nations is not founded on the treaties of princes.”2 These developments took place quite literally on the outer edges of France and were often driven by locals with distinct regional concerns. They therefore left French diplomats and leaders in Paris in a bind. Most officials were wary about applying the principle of popular sovereignty to international questions for fear of dramatically upsetting the international status quo. But they were also deeply committed to respecting the will of the people.

2

Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XX (Du 23 octobre au 26 novembre 1790) (Paris, 1885), 83.

Introduction

3

Also in the first years of the Revolution, a dispute emerged that threatened to be even more contentious, because it was located within French borders even though on a tract of land not formally a part of France. Avignon had been a papal enclave on the Rhône in southern France since medieval times. In the spring of 1790, the city’s inhabitants attempted to enact municipal reforms in emulation of what was happening around them. When His Holiness rejected their demands, the people of Avignon declared themselves “free, sovereign, and independent” in a series of plebiscites and requested annexation by France.3 After considerable hesitation, the National Assembly in Paris accepted and, in September 1791, decreed union with Avignon – the first time in history a transfer of territory occurred on the legal basis of the will of that territory’s people. In Avignon, too, the impetus for this momentous change came mostly from locals and not deputies in Paris, and was achieved only after considerable legal debate and some bloodshed. And like in Corsica and Alsace, the events in Avignon showed the potential for the principle of popular sovereignty to undermine the edifice of ancien régime treaty law and, indeed, call into question all territorial claims since the Dark Ages. But prescient observers, then as now, noted that the most dangerous precedent set by France’s annexation of Avignon was not the way it undercut preceding law, but, rather, how it opened up new justifications for conquest. After the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in April 1792, and in response to the request for annexation this time by the city of Berg in November, the French were much less ambivalent than before, pledging to “accord fraternity and assistance to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty.”4 But soon, that “fraternity and assistance” and that “liberty” started often to take the form of conquest – foregoing whether the people in question actually wished it or not. It was in Habsburg Belgium, the most important early theater of the Revolutionary Wars,

3

4

See Archives départementales de Vaucluse: 5/F/181. “Délibération du Conseil général de la commune de la ville d’Avignon du 12 juin 1790,” or Archives municipales d’Avignon: 4/H/6. Deliberations of the districts, June 9–18, 1790. Deliberations of the district of Saint Symphorien, June 12, 1790. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LIII (Du 27 octobre au 30 novembre 1792) (Paris, 1898), 474.

4

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

that the French first invoked the will of the people and replicated the procedures for consulting them that had developed in Avignon. However, the French were forced to rework their approach when the people’s choice was not to their liking. In such cases, revolutionary armies argued that they were emboldened to “abolish all the social institutions” or “tyranny” against the explicit wishes of locals and, indeed, annex their territory, if a people lacked the intelligence or “courage to want to be free.”5 Not only did the French thus begin to decide what was best for other peoples, but also, they claimed they were required to reform those areas they occupied in the war according to the principle of popular sovereignty, because the French could only legitimately interact with other free peoples. This is precisely what happened with the conquest of Belgium in the north, and Savoy and Nice in the south in late 1792 and early 1793. After early military successes in these areas and in the German Rhineland, French armies suffered a series of setbacks. The specter of

0 0

Amsterdam

400 200

600 km

300 miles

BATAVIAN REPUBLIC

French frontier, 1789

(1795–1806)

French frontier, 1799

BELGIUM AND THE RHINELAND Paris

French territory, 1789 Areas annexed by France

HELVETIC REPUBLIC (1798–1803)

FRANCE

The Sister Republics

CISALPINE REPUBLIC (1797–1802)

Berne SAVOY Avignon NICE

Milan Venice Genoa

LIGURIAN REPUBLIC (1797–1805)

CORSICA

200 100

Rome ROMAN REPUBLIC

Naples

NEAPOLITAN REPUBLIC (1799)

(1798–1800)

Mediterranean Sea

map i.1 French Claims to Territory, 1789–1799

5

AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique), dossier 5. “Observations sur le décret du 15 Xbre 1792.”

Introduction

5

foreign invasion prompted the levée-en-masse in August 1793, when all men in France were summonsed for military service. This period, 1793–1794, also saw the French Revolution at its most radical domestically, with the establishment of the Republic, the execution of King Louis XVI, and the reign of Maximilien Robespierre and the Terror. In response to the foreign threat, and in this charged political atmosphere, revolutionaries again modified the way in which they drew on the principle of popular sovereignty to justify claims to territory. They now argued that because France was the bulwark against despotism, in war it could justifiably bolster its military position and protect its strategic interests, even if this were by acquiring lands against the wishes of a local populace. The first such population in question was that living on the German left bank of the Rhine. This claim of strategic exigency, much like the French position in Belgium that they must impose “freedom” on people who were too stupid or cowardly to know it was best, seems actually to be inconsistent with the principle of popular sovereignty – indeed, the two stances appear explicitly contradictory. And yet, the train of French logic here was counterintuitive. In the face of opposition by locals, the French made territorial claims in the Rhineland by arguing that the necessities of war against dynastic tyrants and in support of free and popular government superseded the particular will of any inconvenienced people. French revolutionaries, therefore, had not necessarily abandoned their respect for the will of the people in the case of western Germany. Rather, they came to view the survival of France in the war – and anything which that required – as essential to the survival of the principle of popular sovereignty itself. As one French official inquired, “have we consulted the will of the people?” Ominously, the official then replied, “The will of peoples, it is their interests” and those interests were bound up with “the fate of the French.”6 After the stabilization of France’s international position and the establishment of a new regime, the Directory, in 1795, the French tried to square the legal circle of staying true to the principle of popular sovereignty while also, in the context of the ongoing war, 6

AN: AD/XV/49 (Imprimé – Affaires étrangère, Hollande 1789–1806). [Louis] Portiez, “Seconde Partie: Vues sur la Hollande,” 6.

6

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

continuing to prioritize France’s national interests – interests which had advanced and expanded immeasurably with the wild success of the revolutionary armies. One army official expressed the quandary well: “Are the inhabitants of conquered territories mature enough for freedom?” Could they, therefore, be trusted to form independent states? If not, would their lands, like Belgium and the Rhineland, need to be appropriated by France? Or would these people be best off in a middle ground, as allies of, but dependent on France?7 Thus, the French innovated once more. In areas it conquered in war, France now established client states, which it called “Sister Republics” – first in the Netherlands, then in Switzerland and across Italy. Rather than face outright annexation, the people of these territories were essentially forced to draft constitutions on the French model, and to agree to alliances that rendered them subservient to France. Because the Sister Republics were technically autonomous and locally self-governing, they represented, and even respected, the will of the local inhabitants – in theory. In reality, the diplomatic, military, and financial relations between them and France made them vassals in everything but name. Napoleon Bonaparte had an important role in France’s military success and the establishment of Sister Republics in Italy. He would go on to even greater power and prominence after the coup of 18 Brumaire, on November 9, 1799.8 This event ended the Directory and launched Bonaparte to political control of France, and onto a path that ultimately led to the Napoleonic or First French Empire.9 The justifications that undergirded his later conquests, until his fall in 1814–1815, were still based at their core on the will of the people, even if hypocritically. These justifications had been established in Corsica, Alsace, Avignon, Belgium, the Rhineland, and the Sister Republics between 1789 and 1799. Those ten years – the focus of this book – show the important, if at times 7 8

9

AN: AF/III/185 (Armée d’Italie). “Quelques observations sur les Pays Conquis.” As Thierry Lentz notes, “A large part of the traditional historiography of the Revolution stops the Revolution at the Brumaire coup.” Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle histoire du Premier Empire, 4 vols. (Paris, 2008–2010), III:31. See also Martin Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (Houndmills, 1994), 2–3, where he argues that every potential end date for the Revolution “implies a particular interpretation of the Revolution and of Napoleon.” The latter term differentiates the empire of Napoleon I from that of his nephew, Napoleon III, the Second French Empire from 1852 to 1870.

Introduction

7

convoluted, impact and effects of the principle of popular sovereignty on international law during the French Revolution. What Is International Law? “International” is a murky and controversial concept, both today and in the past. Opinion varies greatly as to what constitutes international law, not least because there is no analogue in the international arena for the recognized creators of domestic law, such as national legislatures.10 On one side, James Leslie Brierly, one of the classic authorities on the subject, defines international law as “the body of rules and principles of action which are binding upon civilized states in their actions with one another.”11 At the other extreme, some deny the existence of international law altogether.12 In eighteenth-century Europe, which provides the backdrop for this book, international law can be said to have existed as it did in any historical period: in the sense that people thought it existed, and acted accordingly. Diplomats employed legal terminology, French revolutionaries legitimated their actions in legal terms, and opposing powers explicitly described their positions as being in defense of the 10

11

12

“The international lawyer,” one scholar therefore bemoaned, “finds himself in the not too enviable position of having himself to frame his own concept of law.” Maarten Bos, “Will and Order in The Nation-State System: Observations on Positivism and Positive International Law”, in R. St.J. Macdonald and Douglas M. Johnston, eds., The Structure and Process of International Law: Essays in Legal Philosophy, Doctrine, and Theory (Dordrecht, 1986), 68. He goes on, “In the absence of a legislator in the national sense of the word, indeed and there being no obligatory jurisdiction for an international court, nobody will perform the task for him.” The historian of international law finds him- or herself in the same predicament. J. L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th edn. (Oxford, 1963), 1. Randall Lesaffer defines international law as “all systems of law regulating relations between autonomous political entities throughout human history,” in an “Introductory Note” to Raymond Kubben, Regeneration and Hegemony: Franco-Batavian Relations in the Revolutionary Era, 1795–1803 (Leiden, 2011), xi. Another key German thinker from this tradition was lawyer and historian Otto Friedrich von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, 2 vols., trans. Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1934). Martti Koskenniemi adopts a more sophisticated if also critical position when he argues that international law is “vulnerable to the contrasting criticisms of either being an irrelevant moralist Utopia or a manipulable façade for State interests.” Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Cambridge, 2005), i.

8

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

rule of law. Evidence shows that international law has operated in this way, in practice, since at least 3100 BCE, when a treaty was negotiated between Eannatum, the ruler of a Mesopotamian city-state called Lagash, and the people of another city, Umma.13 The treaties between France and the Sister Republics were merely more recent examples of the same. Extensive, formal codification of international law did not take place until the twentieth century.14 For the study of periods before that, a sociological account of international law is especially persuasive. It is a framework whose roots run deep. It revolves around an idea that goes back to the Roman saying ubi societas ibi ius – but which actually has even earlier origins, being attributed to Aristotle: “Where there is society, there will be law.” Much more recently, in the early twentieth century, the Austrian jurist Eugen Ehrlich, widely regarded as the father of the sociology of law, similarly promotes the notion of law as social fact and deriving from social interaction.15 His English contemporary, Brierly, also argues for the existence of international law on a sociological basis, positing that “ever since [people] began to organize their common life in political communities they have felt the need of some system of rules, however rudimentary, to regulate their inter-community relations.”16 E. H. Carr, a prominent member of the “English School” of international relations theory, explains the symbiosis of society and law: “No political society, national or international, can exist unless people submit to certain rules of conduct,” and furthermore, “law is regarded as binding because, if it were not, political societies could not exist and there could be no law.”17 Even Martti Koskenniemi, one of the leading critical theorists of international law, admits that 13 14

15

16

17

Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York, 1950), 8. Generally speaking, codification started in the late nineteenth century with the law of war, but became expressly important since the Second World War especially after the International Law Commission was tasked with this mandate by the United Nations General Assembly. Kubben, 13. See also Eugen Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, trans. Walter Moll (1913; repr., New York, 1962). Brierly, 1. He later goes on to state, “Law can only exist in a society, and there can be no society without a system of law to regulate the relations of members with one another,” 41. Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1962), 41, 177. He believes, further, that international law differs from municipal law only in so far as being “the law of an

Introduction

9

the idea of [the modern states] system is historically as well as conceptually linked with that of an international Rule of Law. In a system whose units are assumed to serve no higher purpose than their own interests and which assumes the perfect equality of those interests, the Rule of Law seems indeed the sole thinkable principle of organization – short of the bellum omnium.18

Coupled with the sociological, another helpful framework is termed “international legal process,” which seeks to examine “the international legal system in operation.”19 It helps elucidate how principles – or, “principles of action,” as Brierly puts it – such as popular sovereignty can acquire international legal legitimacy without being formally codified. On this process, Abram Chayes, Thomas Ehrlich, and Andreas Lowenfeld write: “The real world cannot wait for the articulation of a fully developed normative system. Actual problems must be resolved, or at least contained . . . [T]he elaboration of precept and the response of the system to changing conditions often occur most

18

19

undeveloped and not fully integrated community, ” 170–171 and asserts that international law is “a function of the political community of nations. Its defects are due, not to any technical shortcomings, but to the embryonic character of the community in which it functions,” 178. Some would merely push the question back and to the existence of international society. Martin Wight, another member of the English School, argues that even if international affairs can be characterized as anarchic because of the lack of a formal system of governance, “if anarchy means complete disorder, it is not a true description of international relations,” because any society is “a number of individuals joined in a system of relationships for certain common purposes.” See Wight’s “International Legitimacy,” in Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester, 1977), 105. This view of the relationship between law and society is not unique to the English School. Robert Redslob, a French theorist, has likewise noted that “once states were constituted they formed a system of norms to govern their mutual relations: this is the law of nations”; Robert Redslob, Histoire des grands principes du droit des gens depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à la veille de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Rousseau, 1923), 7. Like Gierke and Carr, Redslob is not concerned about the chicken-and-the-egg question of appearance, but rather emphasizes the existence of the link: “it is a perfectly spontaneous relationship,” 7. Martti Koskenniemi, “The Politics of International Law,” The European Journal of International Law 1:1 (1990): 1. Abram Chayes, Thomas Ehrlich, and Andreas F. Lowenfeld, International Legal Process: Materials for an Introductory Course, 2 vols. (Boston, 1968–1969), vii. Later, based on his experience as Legal Adviser at the State Department during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chayes again argues against seeing law exclusively in terms of specific rules or norms. Instead, he aims to show how international law typically operates, first, as “a constraint on action,” second, as “the basis of justification or legitimation for action,” and last, in “providing organizational structures, procedures, and forums.” See Abram Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law (New York, 1974), 7.

10

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

visibly and effectively in the process of dealing with concrete disputes.”20 One such set of disputes involved French revolutionaries applying the will of the people during the Revolution to resolve problems in Corsica, Avignon, Belgium, and elsewhere. The principle of popular sovereignty steadily gained acceptance, and accordingly became a compelling justification for actions such as French claims to international territory.21 The emphasis on process in this framework not only illustrates the functional relationship between law and society, but also highlights the protean nature and contingency of the law, as scholars analyze the evolving conditions under which certain principles gain legal potency. Study of this process in international law is almost by definition historical. Randall Lesaffer has asserted that through archival research one properly appreciates “how legal arguments were operated and formed” and calls this the study of “international law,” again, “in action.”22 Indeed, this type of historical enquiry helps to produce the very theoretical framework that can shed light on how international law developed at a given historical moment. This book involves just such an examination of international law in action, showing how the will of the people became a candidate claim that 20 21

22

Chayes, Ehrlich, and Lowenfeld, xi–xii. Thomas Franck has tried to measure the extent to which ideological and specifically legal factors come to play a role in international politics; he identifies four indicators of a specific norm’s legitimacy – determinacy, symbolic validation, coherence, and adherence. See his The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations (Oxford, 1990), 49. Determinacy is based on “1. the transparency of the standard established in the rule text; and 2. the extent to which the rule is accessible to legitimate clarifying procedures,” 67; just as “determinacy is the linguistic or literary-structural component of legitimation, so symbolic validation, ritual, and pedigree provide legitimation’s cultural and anthropological dimension,” 91; coherence is the ability of the legal cue to communicate the reality of a given situation, 135; adherence is fairly self-explanatory. Franck’s work on international law’s legitimacy is one of the many offspring of Louis Henkin’s classic How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy, 2nd edn. (New York, 1979), in which Henkin sought to explain why “almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time,” 47, even though the prescriptive elements of a judicial system do not “police” international law as they do in a Hobbesian state. Kubben, xii. Kubben also states that “studying matters of law from diplomatic practice has still been neglected,” but likewise believes history is best suited to determine “how legal order is organized and conceived by practitioners [and] the concepts and rules of conduct that are recognised by relevant actors as legally binding or as sources providing legal claims and arguments,” 7.

Introduction

11

gained a much broader reach across national borders than its authors ever intended, and the conditions that enabled it to do so. Although this cast of thinkers and paradigm are clearly Eurocentric, the idea of an international legal system as a sociological reality ought to be separate from the manifestation of that law in any particular place, at any historical moment. When scholars do turn attention to specific moments, these are best understood through an examination of the process of articulation of arguments, “in action,” such as the territorial claims expressed by revolutionaries based on the principle of popular sovereignty, the defense of the then-status quo by their dynastic opponents, or canonical treatises on the subject such as the 1758 classic, Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations.23 Let us now move to one of those historical moments and look at how the concept of international law was understood prior to the French Revolution. Ancien Régime International Law In 1789, a report was prepared in the French Foreign Ministry bearing the humble title “Commentary on the best form of government.” The author, Joseph Matthias Gérard de Rayneval, was a career diplomat and longtime aide to Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes, minister until his death in 1787. Rayneval argued, “France is a Monarchy, and it can only be a Monarchy.”24 Even on the precipice of Revolution, this treatise reflects the certitude of Europeans about dynasticism – a principle that permeated both domestic and international politics. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, personal tutor to Louis XVI and later official historiographer of France, similarly (and similarly incorrectly, as history would soon prove) posited “no nation without the king” on the eve of the Revolution. He might well have said “no international relations without kings.”25 At that time, international law and dynastic monarchs were closely linked in the European worldview. 23

24

25

The full title in the original French is Droit des gens ; ou, Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains. Archives diplomatiques de France: MD-France-1405. “Mémoire sur la meilleure forme de gouvernement,” 1789. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Exposition et défense de notre constitution monarchique française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1789), 2:105.

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Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

The Roman legacy of western European political and legal unity, carried into the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church and especially the Carolingians, was gone by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 This worldview had been shattered by a number of successive challenges – the “discovery” of America, in 1492, which showed terrestrial reality to differ fundamentally from the teachings of classical antiquity and the Bible; the Reformation, which defied the authority and universality of the Pope and his church; and the Wars of Religion, which wedded religious discord to political antagonism with particularly devastating results. Civility, sociability, common heritage, manners, and commerce provided a new collective order and compensated for Christianity, which had waned as the basic social ethic.27 Although medieval Christendom did not disappear entirely, it fell into the shadow of emerging alternatives such as a societas humana. The new terminology “public law of Europe” – a common synonym at the time for the “law of nations,” which itself was a derivation of the Latin jus gentium – captured this secularizing shift.28 Especially after the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, European international relations and law were understood to operate between theoretically equal sovereign powers that were, for the most part, dynastic princes.29

26

27

28

29

See Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–1800 (Washington DC, 1995). Keith Michael Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays, eds. Willem Melching and Wyger Velema (Amsterdam, 1994), 119. See also J. G. A. Pocock, “What Do We Mean by Europe?” Wilson Quarterly 21:1 (Winter, 1997): 12–30. See Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin, 2000), 287. He writes, “This designation was most appropriate because the intellectual substance of this international legal order embraced a variety of values, convictions, and experiences, all amalgamated in a very specific manner including the solidarity of monarchic rulers; concepts of political order; dynastic and other domestic constitutional institutions,” 292–293. Scholars recognize the indeterminacy of the origins and, indeed, debate the very existence of the “Westphalian” system, as well as the fact that its operation in practice rarely matches perfectly with its theory; nevertheless, it serves as a useful foundation for thinking about international relations. See Teschke Benno, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, 2003); Christopher Harding and C. L. Lim, eds. Renegotiating Westphalia: Essays and Commentary on the European and Conceptual Foundations of Modern International Law (The Hague, 1999); Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty,

Introduction

13

Aside from being equal in their interactions, these sovereign princes also notionally possessed supreme authority in their realms. Jean Bodin, the jurist and political philosopher, originally put forth the notion of the King of France as “Emperor in his kingdom” and defined sovereignty as “the most high, absolute, and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a Commonwealth” in the late sixteenth century.30 In the eighteenth century, Vattel, that century’s most widely read authority on such topics, externalized Bodin’s notion of a prince’s “highest unified power” and popularized the idea of the sovereign dynastic ruler as the sole embodiment of the state, both internally and externally.31 Hersch Lauterpacht invokes another, even more famous thinker in the history of international law, Hugo Grotius, to emphasize the connection between a monarch’s domestic and international roles: In stressing the practical analogy of states and individuals Grotius derived substantial assistance from the fact that in the century in which he wrote the emerging territorial state was a creature of personal rule . . . Marriage settlements and testamentary dispositions continued to be an important medium of territorial changes. The policy of the state was the policy of the ruling prince. The rules of conduct binding upon states were deemed to be rules binding upon their sovereigns. They were rules of law and morality governing the conduct of individual human beings.32

Not only did the “dynastic idiom” infuse notions of sovereignty.33 International society was fundamentally informed by courtly culture,

30

31

32

33

International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55:2 (Spring 2001): 251–287 and The States System of Europe, 1640–1990: Peacemaking and the Conditions of International Stability (Oxford, 1994); Partel Piirimae, “The Westphalian Myth and the Idea of External Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, eds. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2010), 64–80; and Benjamin Straumann, “The Peace of Westphalia as a Secular Constitution,” Constellations 15:2 (June 2008): 173–188. Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, eds. Christiane Frémont et al. (1576; repr., Paris, 1986), 107. Stephane Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden, 2004), 127, 137. Hersch Lauterpacht, “The Grotian Tradition in International Law,” British Yearbook of International Law 23:1 (1946): 28–29. See also Grotius’ De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625). Martin Wight writes: “Alliances were consolidated by dynastic marriages . . . Territorial aggrandizement was justified by dynastic claims. Foreign revolutions

14

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

French in particular, and the related notions of honor, prestige, ceremony, and glory pervaded international relations – sometimes to the detriment of a rational appraisal of state interests.34 Even the balance of power, perhaps the defining model of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century international relations, reflects an obsession with dynastic status.35 Voltaire mocked what he saw as the absurdity of dynasticism, once imagining a prince who goes to war after a “genealogist proves . . . that he descends in a direct line from a count whose kin had made a family pact three or four hundred years before with a house, memory of which no longer subsists . . . [for a] province, which is located some hundreds of leagues away.”36 Farce aside, Voltaire captured here the essence of the legal status quo during this period. Because this system was predicated on the idea of a prince’s exclusive sovereign authority over a discrete territory, claims to territory were among its most important legal questions. On this subject, the people’s will hardly figured. Vattel argued that “just title” to territory derived only from “concessions, purchases, conquests made in the regular war, &c.” and not from the choice of the population concerned.37 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, emphasized war as especially important to the acquisition of territory in The Spirit of the Laws, where he argued,

34

35

36 37

were fomented by cultivating dynastic pretenders,” 154. Guy Rowlands has more recently argued that the “French state under Louis XIV was shaped instead by Bourbon dynasticism, a term which can and should include tensions within the ruling house; by family interests; by personal rivalry; by highly traditional senses of obligation and chivalry; and, at the end of the day, by the need to find money to fight wars.” See The Dynastic State and the Army Under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002), 361. On dynasticism in international relations, there is an upcoming book by Tom Kaiser. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 53. William Doyle, The Old European Order, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1992), 265–266, 268. Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton, 2002), 84. See also Alfred and Detlev F. Vagts, “The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea,” The American Journal of International Law 73 (1979): 555–580. Voltaire, “Guerre” in Dictionnaire Philosophique (Geneva, 1764). Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758), book II, chapter 7, §80. See also book II, chapter 11, §140 and book III, chapter 13, §193, §198, §201, and §202. He did allow that that “succession is established by the express will, or the tacit consent of

Introduction

15

according to a contemporary citation, “the object of war, is victory; that of victory, is conquest; that of conquest, conservation.”38 Inspired by Montesquieu, Louis de Jaucourt, in his article on conquest in the Enlightenment compendium, the Encyclopédie, wrote, “if [a] war is just, so too is the conquest.”39 Voltaire bemoaned that it would “never be examined in any treaty” whether “people have the right to sell other people” just as they traded them and the territory on which they lived in the aftermath of war.40 Here, again, the great philosophe touched on another important element of ancien régime international law, the documents in which such “just titles” were codified – treaties.41 Dynastic sovereignty, territory, and treaties were all essential parts of international law during the early modern period in Europe.42 On the eve of the French Revolution, “just” claims to territory were not based on the decision of a local population itself, but instead on military conquest, purchase, royal marriage, concession, or succession;

38

39

40

41

42

the nation,” which echoed social contract theory going back at least to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, book I, chapter 5, §60, but in reality this had practically no effect. Ian Hunter suggests that the idea of the state as a self-determining nation is present in Vattel: see “Vattel’s Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant Nation,” Grotiana 31 (2010): 108–140. Cited in AN: AD/XV/47. “Pétition de Jean-Henri de Villette, homme-de-loi de la commune de Bruxelles, &c., au Corps Législatif de la République Française, 26 Brumaire 5me année.” See also Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge, 1989), 139. Louis de Joucourt, “Conquête,” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (Paris, 1755). See also Luigi Delia, Droit et philosophie à la lumière de l’Encyclopédie (Oxford, 2015). James Q. Whitman has argued that war was a “kind of acceptable legal procedure” in The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 10. He goes on: “Only sovereigns were permitted to use the deadly trial by combat that was war in order to resolve their disputes” and contends that this way of thinking about war “symbolized the triumph of monarchical legitimacy,” 17. Voltaire, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, in Œuvres historiques (1768; repr., Paris, 1957), 1552. See Jaucourt, “Traité public” in the Encyclopédie. For more on treaties, see Chapter 1. Interestingly, E. Nys has argued that French Enlightenment thinkers took a “minimal role . . . in the development of theories of international law” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See “La Science du droit international en France,” in Les Théories politiques et le droit international en France jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle (Brussels, 1899; repr., Geneva, 1970), 111.

16

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

were set down in sacred treaty law; and the decisions involved were almost always made by a dynastic prince. As Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the late-seventeenth-century French bishop and theologian put it, “The whole state is in the person of the prince.” He could very well have added that the system of international law was based on princes, too.43 The Advent of Popular Sovereignty in France Given the interlinked relationship between dynastic sovereigns and international law during the ancien régime, the appearance of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution is all the more momentous.44 The two important figures who contributed most to this process were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment philosopher, and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a clergyman elected as one of the deputies of the Third Estate from Paris, who would go on to a long and varied career as a revolutionary political figure. Rousseau famously expounded the idea of a social contract based on “the total alienation of each associate, together with all of their rights, to the entire community,” and of that community therefore being guided by a general will.45 In 1762, Rousseau sought to reconcile the seeming inconsistency between the requirements of sovereign unity and indivisibility for governance – firmly rooted in French political thought since Bodin and epitomized in the singular person of the 43

44

45

Jacques-Bénigne Bousset, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Ecriture sainte, ed. Jacques Le Brun (1679, first published 1709; repr., Geneva, 1967), 185. Alfred Cobban has written, “To sum up the French Revolution simply is impossible. It is a great ocean into which many rivers flow. It defies generalization”; In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (New York, 1960), 185. And yet, Keith Baker calls this all-important innovation the shift of indivisible sovereignty “from the natural person of the king to the abstract, collective person of the people”; “Sovereignty,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 848. He goes emphatically on: “That the principle of national sovereignty lay at the very heart of the French Revolution need hardly be insisted upon. That this principle was created – and implemented – by transferring absolute sovereignty from the king to the nation is a truism worth repeating,” 844. See also the essay “Representation redefined,” in his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays of French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 224–251. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (1762; repr., Indianapolis, 1987), 24.

Introduction

17

king – and the will of the multitude. He argued that “since sovereignty is merely the exercise of the general will, it can never be alienated, and . . . the sovereign, which is only a collective being, cannot be represented by anything but itself.”46 It was, however, Sieyès who truly integrated Rousseau’s general will into a theory of representative politics. Sieyès was a deputy in the Estates General that met in 1789, for the first time in more than 150 years, to attempt to resolve the French monarchy’s financial woes. He was one of the chief engineers of the amalgamation of the first two privileged estates – the clergy and the aristocracy – with the Third Estate, which encompassed everyone else in France’s imbalanced ancien régime social order. He based this innovation on the premise that the Third Estate’s numerical superiority should translate into political preponderance. This was a key moment in the early Revolution, when the anachronistic Estates General of France transformed itself into the French National Assembly on June 13, 1789.47 But no mere tactician, Sieyès was also, according to François Furet, the French Revolution’s “most profound political thinker.”48 Sieyès’ most important contribution to the political revolution was the pamphlet “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état?” – “What Is the Third Estate?” – published in January 1789. This treatise began with the assertion that, hitherto, the Third Estate had been “nothing,” with most wealth and 46

47

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Ibid., 29. See also Charles Covell, The Law of Nations in Political Thought: A Critical Survey from Vitoria to Hegel (Houndmills, 2009), 161, where he argues that, for Rousseau, “states stood as sovereign persons or entities, as from the standpoint of law-making capacities of the citizen-bodies comprising them, and that states, as in their ideal form, were to exercise their sovereignty in accordance with the institutional principles of a republican constitutionalism adequate to ensuring government subject to the rule of law.” Rousseau thus believed in the “belligerency of states” and that states were “resistant to subordination to . . . institutions of international government . . . However, there was no sense with Rousseau as to the possibility of these fundamentals being affected by factors concerning the internal domestic political organization of states.” This is important for some revolutionaries’ views of the international system, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. After July 9, 1789, self-tasked with writing a constitution for France, it technically became the National Constituent Assembly, although the shorter form remained in popular usage, and will be used in this book. Starting on October 1, 1791, a Legislative Assembly, according to the terms of the constitution of that year, assumed its functions. François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1992), 45. See also William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, 1994).

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Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

authority concentrated in the hands of the church and nobles. However, using the contemporary idiom of political economy, Sieyès argued that the Third Estate was, in fact, “everything,” by making a critical analytic jump from its economic and social indispensability to its political primacy.49 Sieyès promoted the idea of the Third Estate as truly representing the nation, and of political action as based on the nation and the national will, writing that “the nation exists before all else, it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself,” and “it is the source and master of all positive law.”50 While according to Rousseau, “sovereignty cannot be represented,” Sieyès nevertheless developed a revolutionary vision of representation that drew on Rousseau’s idea of the will of the people and married it to his own polemical vision of contemporary French society.51 The result was, to quote Keith Baker, “the transfer of ultimate authority from the public person of the sovereign to the sovereign person of the public.”52 The new understanding of sovereign authority was crystalized in the Constitution of 1791, having first been elaborated in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” which was appended to the constitution – France’s first – as an introduction.53 Having accepted that constitution, on September 14, 1791, Louis XVI recognized his official and explicit loss of authority, lamenting, “What remains to the king, other than the empty simulacrum of royalty?”54 In that same year, the Minister of Foreign Affairs officially described the transition in France from a regime based on dynastic to popular sovereignty for the rest of Europe:

49

50 52 53

54

Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état?, ed. Roberto Zapperi (1789; repr., Geneva, 1970), 119. Ibid., 180, 183. 51 Rousseau, 74. Baker, Inventing, “Public opinion as political invention,” 172. J. K. Wright, “National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, 1994), 199: articles 3, 6 (law as an expression of the general will), and 13 (separation of powers) had direct and specific constitutional implications. For the Constitution of 1791 itself, see its own definition of sovereignty (title III, article 1) and the representative capacity entrusted to the National Assembly (title III, chapters I and III), and the restriction of the role of the king (title III, chapter II, section 1, articles 2 and 3). Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXVII (Du 6 juin au 5 juillet 1791) (Paris, 1887), 379. The citation is from the “Déclaration du roi adressée à tous les Français à sa sortie de Paris,” and was read on June 21, 1791.

Introduction

19

The Estates General were assembled and took the title of National Assembly: soon a Constitution appropriate to the happiness of France and the Monarch replaced the old order of things . . .The National Assembly adopted the form of representative government, joined to hereditary royalty. The Legislative Corps was declared permanent . . . What some are calling the Revolution was nothing but the annihilation of a mass of abuses accumulated over the centuries . . . They no longer exist: the sovereign Nation now only has citizens equal in rights, no despot other than the law, no organs other than public functionaries, and the King is the first of these functionaries. Thus is the French Revolution.55

Since the French Revolution, according to Francis Harry Hinsley, popular sovereignty “has sooner or later come to be the prevalent doctrine” in almost all “political societies.”56 And yet, it is important to remember that it ought to be treated as historically contingent.57 A further caveat – which applies equally to a sovereign prince, people, or nation – is that all such formulations, according to Edmund Morgan, require a fair degree of “make-believe.”58 For this reason, precise definitions are all the more necessary before setting off on the historical inquiry of this book. And a definition of “popular 55

56 57

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AN: AD-XV-38-105-7. “Copie d’une Lettre du Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, adressée, par ordre du Roi, à tous les Ambassadeurs & Ministres de Sa Majesté dans les Cours étrangères,” Paris, 1791. F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1986), 154. J. G. A. Pocock, “Deconstructing Europe,” London Review of Books 13:24 (December 19, 1991): 6–10. Moreover, Edward Vose Gulick reminds us that states or a state system oriented around the principle of sovereignty, as in Europe, ought not be taken for granted: “It has often been forgotten that the whole apparatus of the Europeans states system, with its carefully contrived concepts of sovereignty, independence, nationalism, and legal equality, all meshed more intricately than the elements of a Swiss watch, is by no means a common historical circumstance,” in Europe’s Classical Balance of Power: A Case History of the Theory and Practice of One of the Great Concepts of European Statecraft (Ithaca, 1955), 5. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), 13. Andreas Osiander makes a similar case in “Le problème de l’ordre européen à la fin du XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle: rupture ou continuité ?” in Acteurs diplomatiques et ordre international, XVIIIe–XIXe siècle, eds. Marc Belissa and Gilles Ferragu (Paris, 2007), 25. Sovereignty, like international law, might also be better understood as a process, elucidated by its operation, rather than as a theory in the abstract. See Stephen D. Krasner, Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on international relations (New York, 2009), 21: “The principles [of sovereignty] have blinded scholars more than they have policy makers. Policy makers have to solve specifics problems. They are concerned about outcomes.” See also his Sovereignty: Organized Anarchy (Princeton, 1999).

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sovereignty” is perhaps the most important of all. Why is not “national sovereignty” the term of choice in these pages, given that the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” averred emphatically, “all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation”? First of all, popular sovereignty should not be interpreted as implying a regime with popular or democratic underpinnings, such that all, or even a majority, of the people were able to express themselves politically. This, of course, was hardly the case in revolutionary France, even counting a brief period of universal manhood suffrage in 1792. Popular sovereignty captures, instead, the abstract belief that government ought to be predicated on the will of the people, as theorized by Rousseau. In this sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “popular” is an adjective – “Of, relating to, deriving from, or consisting of ordinary people or the people as a whole; generated by the general public.” Thus, the principle of popular sovereignty, as a predicate, reflects others such as “will of the people,” “sovereignty of the people,” “popular will,” and “general will,” which were exceptionally common during the Revolution. As the general and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles-François Dumouriez once said, “Will of the people and sovereignty are synonyms.”59 According to Alphonse Aulard, the first chair in the history of the Revolution at the Sorbonne, by the late eighteenth century, the word “nation” had come to denote a sovereign people, and so popular and national sovereignty could also almost be understood as synonymous during that time.60 Nevertheless, popular sovereignty is preferable because, especially during the early Revolution, the will of the people was often invoked in sub-national regions or polities such as Corsica, Alsace, and Avignon to clarify or legitimate relationships with France. Indeed, revolutionaries argued that the will of the people – that is, popular sovereignty – could provide a legal basis for accomplishing certain objectives in areas such as these. However, they maintained,

59 60

AN: AF/II/236/A (Armée du Nord). Proclamation by Dumouriez. Alphonse Aulard, La Paix future, d’après la Révolution française et Kant (Paris, 1915). Aulard recognizes that the word “nation” did have several meanings. See also Peter Sahlins, who has written that “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 1789 empowered citizens individually, as the equal subjects of rights, and collectively as the nation, the source of sovereignty”; Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, 2004), 267.

Introduction

21

precisely because these territories were not nations – and, thus, did not possess national sovereignty – other choices or options were precluded.61 Just as Rousseau’s general will was necessarily nebulous when it came to practical politics, necessitating Sieyès’ pragmatism, historical actors as diverse as Robespierre and Edmund Burke grappled with the idea of popular sovereignty – which was perhaps the most challenging, confusing, and important concept of the times. Few revolutionaries had a clear appreciation of who “the people” were precisely, and there certainly was no consensus on the matter.62 Likewise, “the nation” was, in some cases, a construct just as abstract and difficult-to-define as “the people.”63 And yet, revolutionaries recognized that the principle of popular sovereignty empowered certain people, not least to make choices for themselves. Moreover, they saw that it bolstered changes in law and, ultimately, claims to territory. Thus, many revolutionaries relished a certain deliberate ambiguity surrounding the principle and various related terms, so much the better to serve their own ends. The First Changes to Revolutionary France’s Foreign Policy Once the notion of popular sovereignty took hold, and in spite of revolutionaries’ domestic preoccupations, it began to influence French thinking about international affairs, manifesting itself in various ways in matters of state. Many of these effects were, at first, subtle. For example, the principle complicated issues of diplomatic decorum. During the early Revolution, diplomatic representatives 61

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Aira Kemiläinen has an interesting take on the differentiation between the two in “L’affaire d’Avignon” (1789–1791) from the Viewpoint of Nationalism (Helsinki, 1971), 13. One need not go so far as François Furet, who is famous or, indeed, notorious for his belief that the Revolution’s extremism was present from the start because the opacity of the general will created a power vacuum in France, such that rival factional groups sought to seem to act in its name without much connection to social reality. See his “The French Revolution is over,” in Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), 18, 45–49. Thomas Paine, for example, argued that the Third Estate declared themselves the representatives of the nation based on the idea that “no constitution, worthy of being called by that name, could be established on anything less than a national ground,” but, like Sieyès, without precisely defining the nation in “Rights of Man, Part I (1791)” in Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge, 2000), 119, 129.

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were no longer sent by the king, and in his name. They were instead, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs explained, “chosen by the King of the French and accepted by the representatives of the nation, that is to say, by the nation itself.”64 Foreign envoys to France found themselves in the corresponding predicament of not knowing to whom or what they were accredited. Being mostly noblemen who represented dynastic sovereigns, they tended not to recognize the pretensions to sovereignty of the National Assembly. Their situation became even more precarious after the abolition of the status of nobility in France in June 1790. Thereafter, domestic law precluded these foreigners, like everyone else, from using their titles, displaying either their or their ruler’s coats of arms, or dressing their servants in livery. Not all of the effects were this muted, however. In the late 1780s, in Nootka Sound, on what is now Vancouver Island in western Canada, British traders tried to establish a post in territory that Spain had claimed and had declared closed to foreigners. When the Spanish discovered the British camp, in the summer of 1789, they attacked it, seized some of its ships, and drove it away. Because the incident threatened war between Britain and Spain, the latter requested support from its ally France, citing the Family Compact – a treaty socalled because it was negotiated between the two Bourbon houses in 1761. Louis XVI answered the call, mobilizing the French Navy. But emboldened by growing support for the idea of popular sovereignty, the National Assembly called into question whether the king could take such action without consulting it, the people’s representative body. A debate began about the proper attribution of war powers for France’s new constitution in the spring of 1790. Did these powers belong to the sovereign people, represented in the legislature? Or were they the purview of the monarch, who as executive could better expedite decisions and take actions with the discretion required by military and international affairs?65 Quickly, though, the discussion ballooned beyond 64

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AN: DXXIII-4–12. “Instructions de Dumouriez pour M. de Maulde, allant à Vienne, ambassadeur extraordinaire de France,” Paris, April 14, 1792. In general, see also Linda and Marsha Frey, “‘Courtesans of the King’: Diplomats and the French Revolution,” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 32 (2004): 107–122. The controversy over responsibility for foreign affairs – at this time, as a constitutional question – was also captured across the Atlantic, in the well-known “Pacificus-Helvidius debate.” Alexander Hamilton and James Madison squared off

Introduction

23

constitutional primacy in matters of war and peace to the types of treaties, alliances, and foreign policy a free people ought to pursue. From there it grew to ultimately question the very root of the legality and rectitude of war. The noble deputy Charles de Lameth argued against the legitimacy of the Family Compact as a treaty with Spain, and denounced dynastic politics in general, saying “first of all the family of a king is his people.”66 Other deputies speculated whether kings and sovereign peoples had the same or different interests, and wondered if free peoples should only take other such peoples as allies. At the same time, the philosophe Nicolas de Condorcet criticized not only the Family Compact, but also all the treaties of kings: “A Pact between family is not a Treaty of union between two Peoples . . . [The nation] has the right to annul treaties, like it has the right to become free. These sorts of Treaties by Kings are a veritable conspiracy against the People.”67 Most famously, this debate prompted France’s celebrated, and controversial, declaration of peace to the world and renunciation of aggressive warfare and conquests on May 22, 1790.68 In the Assembly, deputies postulated that only kings ever aspired to offensive war or

66

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over the constitutionality of President George Washington’s proclamation of neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars – with Hamilton, as Pacificus, arguing for executive control over foreign policy and Madison’s Helvidius rebutting in favor of legislative oversight. The debate occurred in print in Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States: Pacificus’ case was made on June 29, 1793 and Helvidius’ rebuttal, consisting of a series of articles, between August 24 and September 18, 1793. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XV (Du 21 avril 1790 au 30 mai 1790) (Paris, 1883), 530. This comment came on May 16, 1790. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Extrait du Pacte de Famille ; donné par la Gazette de France, le 26 décembre 1761 (Paris, 1790), 1, 9. The decree of May 22, 1790, eventually entered the Constitution of 1791, under title VI, “The Relations of the French nation with foreign nations”: “The French nation renounces undertaking any war with the aim of making conquests and will never employ its forces against the liberty of any people.” Similar language appeared in article 2, title XIII of the draft constitution of Condorcet, presented to the National Convention on February 15, 1793, though never implemented: France “solemnly renounces uniting foreign lands to its country, unless after the will freely emitted by the majority of its inhabitants, and only where the lands that seek this union are not incorporated in and united to another nation, by virtue of a social pact, expressed in a previous and voluntary constitution.” See also the current Constitution of 1958, article 53. Alphonse Aulard lauded the renunciation, citing it as the foundation of the modern society of nations: see “La société des nations et la Révolution française,” in Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française, vol. 8 (Paris, 1921), 151 and “L’opinion

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territorial aggrandizement, and that the legislature – as the organ of the free, benevolent, and virtuous people – was incapable of launching a war of aggression. Thus, if the people were given the power to declare war, war would effectively be abolished.69 Thomas Paine, transatlantic conscience of the age, opined on the subject in The Rights of Man: Monarchical sovereignty, the enemy of mankind and the source of misery, is abolished; and sovereignty itself is restored to its natural and original place, the nation. Were this the case throughout Europe, the cause of wars would be taken away . . . Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government.70

But did the principle of popular sovereignty preclude “a false system of government” and, therefore, all future war and conquest? One contemporary was not so sure: France, he or she wrote, was “the first of the European nations that, in forming a purely defensive social pact, entirely renounced offensive war with the perfidious intention of encroaching upon its neighbors by conquests” in an entirely new manner.71 Although this was not French revolutionaries’ initial intention, it would ultimately be an outcome. As ideas like these took hold, the principle of popular sovereignty began to erode the foundations of ancien régime international law.

69

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publique en France et la société des nations,” in L’origine et l’œuvre de la société des nations, ed. P. Munch (Copenhagen, 1923), 212. See Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, “La « guerre juste » dans le droit constitutionnel français (1790–1946),” in Revue générale de droit international public, vol. LIV (Paris, 1950): 229. Paine, 151–152. Honoré Mirabeau also intuited that democracies go to war more readily than despots – a point underscored by Albert Sorel in L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 2, La chute de la royauté (Paris, 1925), 89–90 and T. C. W. Blanning in The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), 76. Jean-Clément Martin highlights a different problem, not unlike Carl Schmidt’s vision of the political: by declaring peace to the world and forswearing war, conquests, secret diplomacy, and the like, “this sets up an organization of the world on the mode of friends/enemies of freedom, thus introducing the makings of a global civil war . . . for ideological reasons”; if offensive war is disavowed, defensive war becomes an imperative against despots. See Martin’s Violence et Révolution : Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe nationale (Paris, 2006), 119, and Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996). Bibliothèque nationale de France : 8-LK2-96. “Réflexions sur les affaires du temps,” Strasbourg, May 16, 1791.

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A Lacuna in the History of the French Revolution: Popular Sovereignty in International Law Daniel Mornet observes, “The directions taken by the Revolution were not necessarily those one imagined when one sought, in 1788–1789, to reform France.”72 And yet, few historians have recognized the unintentional implications of the principle of popular sovereignty for international law. At first, revolutionaries’ preoccupations were chiefly internal – something that only changed when forced by external events like the Nootka Crisis. As the well-traveled orientalist and deputy, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, later made Count de Volney by Napoleon Bonaparte, told the Assembly during the debate about war and peace, the direct outcome of the events in Nootka Sound, “Until this moment, we have deliberated in France and for France; today, you will deliberate for the universe.”73 Only when compelled – especially by imbroglios in Corsica and Avignon, themselves driven not from Paris but rather by locals with parochial concerns – did revolutionaries begin to connect the ideological principles that had developed during the domestic revolution to international questions. Even the famed “decree of fraternity” of November 1792 came in response to the request of the German people of Berg – something almost no historians of the Revolution have remarked on.

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Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française, 1715–1787 (Lyon, 1989), 525. See also Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 131, on unintended consequences: “But, on the other hand, these actions and decisions are often taken because they are earnestly and fully expected to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialize . . . the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions stand in need of being discovered even more than those effects that were unintended but turn out to be all too real.” Emphasis in the original. T. J. Jackson Lears puts it best: “to paraphrase the historian E. P. Thompson, all history is the history of unintended consequences . . .. Cultural historians try to burrow beneath the surface of utterances and claims and arguments, to tell us more about how divided we are as selves and how we all want conflicting things, to show how even the bestintentioned efforts can lead to confused and sometimes self-defeating outcomes.” See “The Confidence Economy: An Interview with T. J. Jackson Lears,” by B. R. Cohen, May 7, 2013, www.publicbooks.org. Archives parlementaires, vol. XV, 576, on May 18, 1790. Volney traveled extensively and lived in the Ottoman Middle East in the early 1780s, and was the author of Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787) and Considérations sur la guerre des Turcs et de la Russie (1788).

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When revolutionaries turned their attention abroad and to responding to these crises, they were also not proactively inspired by Enlightenment critiques of ancien régime diplomacy. This erroneous idea is as old as the Revolution itself and continues to be propagated by specialists.74 Witness Robespierre asking and answering, “What does this mysterious science of politics and legislation amount to? To putting into the laws the moral truths culled from the works of the philosophers.”75 Yes, the fiery language of some revolutionaries echoed, for example, Voltaire’s and others’ critiques. And, yes, the principle of popular sovereignty derived from ideas connected to Enlightenment philosophy, most notably that of Rousseau. But in spite of bombast such as Condorcet’s claim of a “right to annul treaties” or the inflammatory comment of the Jacobin, Camille Desmoulins, that “The public law of Europe ought to be treated as Luther treated the canon law: all of the books about it should be thrown into the fire,” such rhetoric is belied by reality, exposed by sober analysis of diplomatic responses to actual events.76 This kind of methodical scrutiny of diplomatic and military dispatches as well as government reports, parliamentary and civic debates, popular pamphlet literature, and petitions constitute the source base of this book and the story it tells. That same line of inquiry also shows that although exporting 74

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Historians often assume revolutionaries works from Enlightenment first principles. See, for example, Emile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, vol. 2, Les révolutions (1789–1830), 11th edn. (Paris, 1933) and André Fugier, La Révolution française et l’Empire napoléonien, vol. 4 of Histoire des relations internationales, ed. Pierre Renouvin (Paris, 1954). More recently, Marc Belissa emphasizes the direct impact of Enlightenment philosophy on thinking about the international system, and prioritizes Paris both in terms of his narrative and source base, especially the debates in the Parisian assemblies. He explicitly describes his work as the history of “discourses” and not of diplomacy and therefore neglects the practicalities that drove the transformation of international law on the ground. See Fraternité universelle et intérêt national (1713–1795) : Les cosmopolitiques du droit des gens (Paris, 1998), and Repenser l’ordre européen (1795–1802) : De la société des rois aux droits des nations (Paris, 2006), 20, for example, where he says revolutionaries first rejected the international system, “in whole because it is perceived by revolutionaries to be an unjust, oppressive and immoral system”; and 21–22: revolutionaries “are convinced that [the Revolution] must necessarily bring about a complete overhaul in the ways states act in relation to one another.” See also “La Diplomatie et les traités dans la pensée des Lumières: ‘négociation universelle’ ou ‘école du mensonge’,” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 4 (1999): 317. Cited in Walter Alison Phillips’ introduction to Pierre Gaxotte, The French Revolution, trans. Walter Alison Phillips (London, 1932), vii–viii. From Desmoulins’ Révolutions de France et de Brabant, also cited in Gaxotte, 188.

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Rousseauian principles was not the revolutionaries’ main goal, once those principles inadvertently began to gain traction, they provoked complications in international affairs as profound as in French domestic politics – something that surprisingly few historians have detailed.77 This emphasis on inadvertency is not to suggest that the Revolution did not have causes based in foreign affairs or that foreign concerns were totally absent.78 Ancien régime France’s inefficient fiscal apparatus and poor finances at home were exacerbated by the outrageous debt incurred during the Seven Years’ War and in supporting the Thirteen Colonies during the American War of Independence. Insolvency then impinged on France’s freedom of action in international affairs in the crucial years leading up to the Revolution, which itself further discredited the king’s ministry.79 The “Dutch Crisis” of 1787 was particularly humiliating.80 No less than Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern scientific historical practice, once argued, “One of the most important” causes of the Revolution was the unfavorable “change in France’s international situation” in the 1780s “which brought the government into deep discredit.”81 The sense of vulnerability felt by the French in the face of such international disgrace – especially acute in the context of dynasticism – was compounded after the outbreak of the Revolution by massive state breakdown, suspicion of the king and especially the 77

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80 81

See, especially, Chapter 2. Since the bicentenary of the Revolution, political cultural analysis of matters such as Rousseau’s general will have dominated the historiography even if the insights of such analysis are rarely applied outside a domestic setting. Daniel Mornet perceptively remarked, “The origins of the Revolution are one story, the story of the Revolution is another,” 525. See, for example, Orville T. Murphy, The Diplomatic Retreat of France and Public Opinion on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1783–1789 (Washington, DC, 1998). See the discussion at the beginning of Chapter 5. Leopold von Ranke, “The Great Powers,” in The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, ed. and trans. Roger Wines (New York, 1981), 144–145. The essay was originally published in 1833 in the first issue of volume II of the periodical Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift. But, from this tenable assertion, he overreached like so many others to conclude that because of “this changed world situation . . . the popular movement in France, which at first had a reform character but was too soon transformed into a revolutionary one, was directed from the very beginning against the outside world,” 145.

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Austrian queen, and the declining strength of the army. Indeed, France’s widely sensed and much acknowledged weakness among European powers helps account for both its renunciation of aggressive war and its reluctance to apply the theory of popular sovereignty internationally in the early years of the Revolution.82 This impression of weakness from a country that, under Sun King Louis XIV, had made a bid for universal monarchy, was captured by British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger when he mistakenly predicted to the House of Commons in February 1792, “unquestionably there never was a time in this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.”83 Instead, just two months after Pitt’s declaration, and less than two years after it had renounced conquests and aggressive conflicts, France declared war on Austria and Prussia – which triggered a conflagration that lasted a generation, drew in almost every power in Europe, and during which the French occupied nearly the entire continent. These events have divided or flummoxed historians.84 It is too simple to assume France abandoned the heady, benevolent principles of the early Revolution to embark on a campaign of naked expansion and chauvinism in the later years, just as it is too easy to accept the boast and bluster of early revolutionaries such as Desmoulins.85 How France 82 83

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I am indebted to my anonymous reader A for this point. Cited in R. W. Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, 1789–1914: A Survey of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1938), 12. For more on this, see Chapter 3. The best recent work on the war is David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007). See also Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009), 261, who describes how “The struggle for public liberty, moreover, is no longer contained within (or along) the borders of France: The entire earth has become the battlefield on which the fate of the republic will be decided. While this transformation of the revolutionary cause into a world-wide struggle was largely due to a ‘redefinition of war,’ it proceeded according to the same natural right logic that had dictated the ‘extermination’ of the Republic’s internal enemies.” I would only add that it also was heavily influenced by the spread of the principle of popular sovereignty. Scholars therefore try to discern some moment when everything changed. Some point to the obvious, the outbreak of war in 1792, others to the Terror, to explain a supposed transition. See, for example, the volume Occupants occupés, 1792–1815 : Colloque de Bruxelles, 29 et 30 janvier 1968 (Brussels, 1969), 19, 45, 48, 69. The early phase, in this analysis, is supposed to have lasted from April 1792 to March 1793 and the second from June 1794 until the end of Napoleon’s empire. See also David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in

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went from impotence, and timidity in the application of the principle of popular sovereignty abroad, to possessing a continental empire legitimated, even hypocritically, by derivations of that same principle is the story this book tells. Anthony Pagden, writing about a different context, has argued that “transformation in the conception of the law was in large part a response to a radical transformation in . . . political cultures,” not a self-conscious or intended, but rather an iterative and contingent process.86 The same is true of the French Revolution and international law between the years 1789 and 1799.87 The events of these years have remained obscure in the legal scholarship as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Lassa Oppenheim complained, “the history of international law is certainly the most neglected province of” international law.88 Today, that history is a burgeoning subfield but, surprisingly, the influence and effect of the Revolution remains an area of unrealized potential.89

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International Society (Oxford, 1993). He believes that by 1793 international “events had acquired an unstoppable momentum,” 302. Other scholars posit the caesura in 1795, with the advent of the Directory. Marc Belissa physically breaks his analysis between his two books at this point. He also sees the period 1792–1795 as the “defeat” of the “cosmopolitan perspective” of the Enlightenment and the early years of the Revolution: Fraternité, 30. Moreover, he believes the actors themselves perceived this same break in 1795. He describes the Directory as “a period that seems . . . marked by reflection around the passage from one international order to another”: see Marc Belissa, “Révolution française et ordre international” in Acteurs diplomatiques, 38. Anthony Pagden, “Empire and Its Anxieties,” The American Historical Review 117:1 (February 2012): 143. Similarly, Keith Baker, in “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in The French Idea of Freedom, 157, describes the declaration as a “speech act” that derived importance “less from the historical sources of its particular utterances than from the illocutionary force of these utterances in a particularly tense and complex situation.” This view of intellectual history is in line with the depiction of international legal process of Chayes, Ehrlich, and Lowenfeld. In a sense, the aim of this book is to trace the ways in which new revolutionary claims to territory, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, became “thinkable” in international law, to use Keith Baker’s terminology. See, again, Inventing the French Revolution. Lassa Oppenheim, “The Science of International Law: Its Task and Method,” The American Journal of International Law 2:2 (1908): 313–356. Cited in Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge, 2004), 11. The appearance of the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d’histoire du droit international in 1999 was a promising development. Randall Lesaffer has recognized that even if “the history of international law has – until the ‘boom’ of the last two decades – been one of the least developed fields of legal

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For some time, support for or opposition to the Revolution directly determined views of its international legal importance. For example, Aulard believes that, after 1789, “the French people would give laws to the entire universe and all nations would come together with it such that all humans could no longer be anything but friends.”90 In contrast, Leo Tolstoy begins War and Peace with a discussion about how French revolutionaries are unremittingly guilty of breaking international law. Some research has focused on narrow legal topics such as diplomatic immunity or human rights during the Revolution.91 Histories of the specific crises or conquests described in this book, such as they exist, can be parochial. For example, in keeping with the strong autonomous identities that subsist in Corsica and Alsace to this day, historians often scrutinize the experiences of these areas in isolation during the Revolution.92 Only by examining the histories of Corsica and Alsace

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history, the Revolution and, even more, the Napoleonic Ages, are among the most neglected periods.” See “In the Embrace of France: An Introduction,” in In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789–1815), eds. Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer (Baden-Baden, 2008), 1. For example, Grewe, limply observes that a “state of international lawlessness” came to exist between revolutionary France and the rest of Europe, but dismisses the Revolution as merely “a particular, transitory stage” and ignores its innovations almost entirely, 413. The great international lawyer Arthur Nussbaum, for his part, is baffled: “To what extent the general transformation of political ideas wrought by the Revolution has . . . influenced international law, is not easy to say,” 133. Alphonse Aulard, “L’opinion publique,” 213. Linda and Marsha Frey, “Diplomatic Immunity? International Law and the French Revolutionary Legacy,” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 20 (1993): 213–219, and Marsha Frey’s “Question of Privilege: The Revolutionary Attack on ‘Protected Spies’,” in Rebels Against the Old Order, Essays in Honor of Morris Slavin (Youngstown, Oh., 1994). Lynn Hunt has examined the development of human rights during the Revolution; see Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007). For a different view, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). On Corsica, see, for example, Dorothy Carrington et al., eds., Le bicentenaire et ces îles qu’on dit françaises (Paris, 1989), especially Jean-Dominique Gladieu’s chapter, “La Corse et la Révolution française: les cause d’une rupture,” and Jean Defranceschi, La Corse française (30 novembre 1789 – 15 juin 1794) (Paris, 1980). On Alsace, see Jeannine Siat, Histoire du rattachement de l’Alsace à la France (Le Coteau, 1987) or Eric Hartman, La Révolution Française en Alsace et en Lorraine (Paris, 1990). See the many works of René Moulinas, which highlight the novelty of Avignon’s annexation, most notably his Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon (Avignon, 1986).

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31

in comparison with one another, and then tracing the similarity of new legal claims there to Avignon, Belgium, and the Rhineland, do their true impact on international law appear. There was significant ideological continuity from one step to the next, as well as radical conceptual and rhetorical innovations; by putting the early and the later cases together, what may seem like local interests and concerns, or French belligerence, reveal themselves to be part of a larger pattern of interconnected legal logic. Otherwise put, just as a recognition of how the principle of popular sovereignty might be applied outside France’s borders was latent in the early stages of the Revolution, something like respect, manifested convolutedly, for that principle was not absent in its later ones.93 Similarly, the latest histories of the Sister Republics endeavor to show the agency of locals and fail to capture how the formation of these republics was, in aggregate, the culmination of a longer legal trend.94 Overall, no comprehensive examination of French revolutionary annexations and the international law behind them has been undertaken. The greatest flourishing of the history of international law has been in examining colonial contexts.95 What is more, the slave revolts and 93

94 95

Consider this claim in a letter of April 14, 1792, from the political club Amis de la Constitution in Bordeaux to the chapter in Strasbourg, which presages this evolution: “Our Constitution is the most perfect code that human wisdom has ever imagined: it assures the happiness of France and prepares that of the whole world.” Archives de la ville et communauté urbaine de Strasbourg: 205 MW 14. Or see the claim of Desmoulins, ever memorable, who believed that “the philosophy and the spirit of freedom cannot fail to cross the Alps and the seas . . . I do not despair of [one day] seeing the Cockade on the Holy Father, the great Turk, the King of Prussia, the Czarina, and even Joseph II,” the Holy Roman Emperor, in Révolutions de France et de Brabant, vol. I, 27, cited in Albert Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers : Cosmopolitisme et défense nationale (Paris, 1918), 58. See the discussion in Chapter 5. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004); Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002) and A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010). This history has directly focused on claims to territory – outside Europe. See, for example, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2014) and Saliha Belmessous, ed. Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford, 2012). It has also produced fine works in the context of English and Atlantic history, such as David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002): 39–64; Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” William and Mary Quarterly 60:2 (April 2003): 471–510 and Among the Powers

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revolutions in France’s Caribbean colonies in the 1790s, which led to St. Domingue becoming the second independent state in the western hemisphere, have enjoyed rich and rewarding attention of late.96 The birth of Haiti raised some of the same questions as the application of the will of the people to territory in Europe; it was, nonetheless, categorically separate.97 For example, the racial differences in and the existence of slavery set St. Domingue and other colonies apart from France’s European acquisitions during the Revolution.98 More basically, the French never invoked the will of the people to justify their claims to overseas colonies. During the Revolution, there was controversy about the representation of overseas colonies, whereas deputies from Corsica, Alsace, and other areas annexed later sat in revolutionary assemblies.99 These and other exceptions for the colonies, made in contravention to revolutionary principles, in Robespierre’s opinion, prompted his famous outburst,

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98

99

of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2014); and Peter and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, 1993). A recent example of this history in the early modern French imperial context is Laurie Marie Wood, “Îles de France: Law and Empire in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1680–1780,” (PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2013). See, for example, Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010); and Manuel Covo, “Commerce, empire et révolutions dans le monde atlantique: La colonie française de Saint-Domingue entre métropole et États-Unis (ca. 1778–ca. 1804)” (PhD dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, École doctorale de sciences sociales, 2013). See Dubois, 7 and 92: the history of St. Domingue “pushed the meaning of citizenship and national belonging in new directions” and raised questions of such as “[w]hat institutions could legitimately represent the national will? Who would be granted the right to shape these institutions?” For a more modern take on the way the colonies, and the postcolonial era, refract very different understandings of sovereignty, see, for example, Robbie Shilliam, “What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of the Sovereignty Debate,” Review of International Studies 32:3 (2006): 379–400. Jacques Binoche, “Les députés d’outre-mer pendant la Révolution française,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 231 (Jan.–Mar. 1978): 45: “Nothing, on the eve of the Revolution, seemed to indicate colonial representation in Paris.” See also Claude Wanquet, “La Première députation de la Réunion à l’Assemblée Nationale,” in Révolution Française et Océan Indien : Prémices, paroxysmes, héritages et déviances, eds. Clause Wanquet and Benoît Jullien (Paris, 1996), 113, 115, 119. And then, by 1812, one-third of senators in Napoleon’s empire were from non-French, European territories.

Introduction

33

“perish your colonies if you would keep them at this price!”100 Because of these dissimilarities, the histories of the colonies have little light to shed on the international legal history of the French Revolution in a transnational, continental European context. Such a history is long overdue.101 A Story of Unintended Consequences and Complications French revolutionaries did not set out to change the world. Their original, explicit goal was hardly to overturn the contemporary states system, on the basis of some premeditated ideological program, much less to transform international law. Instead, the Revolution began as a domestic enterprise. Its necessary but not sufficient cause was the bankruptcy crisis that had dogged France throughout the eighteenth century; its proximate origin can be located in the various and vigorous attempts to resolve those economic woes toward the end of the 1780s. Then, the urgent need to reform the state’s finances exploded when a succession of bad harvests and civil unrest catalyzed decades of Enlightenment philosophy, and philosophizing, that had progressively, if not always purposefully, undermined the intellectual and cultural foundation of the French monarchy.102 Thereafter, the

100

101

102

Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXVI (Du 12 mai au 5 juin 1791) (Paris, 1887), 60, from the debate of May 13, 1791. Dubois asserts that Robespierre was concerned less about the colonies than about the precedent they might set to justify tyranny in continental France, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 88. Miranda Spieler has argued that revolutionaries “bracket[ed] the colonies from the new legal order” of continental Europe and that in the colonies, “domestic legislators . . . relied on legal and rhetorical devices that aimed to circumvent the rights of man.” Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule During the French Revolution,” in William and Mary Quarterly 66:2 (April 2009): 381–382. This lacuna is all the more surprising since first-rate scholarship exists in early modern French domestic legal history. See, for example, Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in SeventeenthCentury France (Oxford, 2009) or Michael Breen, Law, City and King: Legal Culture, Local Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (Rochester, 2007). On the origins of the French Revolution, there are countless works. For an overview of the causes, see William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 1–85.

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explicit goal of revolutionaries was to provide France with a written constitution.103 After the French were pushed to apply the principle of popular sovereignty in international settings, it had great and unpredictable consequences. This new interpretation of sovereignty and international law introduced myriad difficulties; it opened up far more questions than it answered. It undermined the sanctity of treaty law and the very territorial settlement of Europe. It cast doubt on the legitimacy of claims to some of France’s own provinces, and augured their possible separation. It was particularly contentious along international boundaries, where it provided novel justifications for forceful annexations. Ultimately, it underpinned the creation of a constellation of client states. An anecdote, most likely apocryphal, suggests that upon his return from the wildly successful campaigns in Italy, in 1797, Bonaparte boasted to Sieyès, “I have created the great nation.” Sieyès is held to have replied, “That is because we first created the nation.”104 The creation of the French nation, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, had indeed contributed to Bonaparte’s great nation, and later his empire, in a variety of respects. One, hitherto unexplored, was the way the will of the people was invoked in international law. Let us turn now to the story of how this unfolded, which coincidentally begins in Bonaparte’s own birthplace, on the outer fringes of France, in Corsica.

103

104

In support of this claim, Timothy Tackett has argued, “While deputies arriving in Versailles clearly anticipated significant reforms, only a very few, it will be argued, envisioned changes that could be construed as ‘Revolutionary’”; in Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, 1996), 14. As Desmoulins also recalled later, “In all France there were not ten of us who were republicans prior to 1789.” Cited in Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, 1996), 49, who in turn quoted Henri Peyre, “The Influence of Eighteenth Century Ideas on the French Revolution,” in Historical and Critical Essays (Lincoln, 1968), 72. See the retelling in Sorel, 7.

1 Popular Sovereignty and International Law on the Periphery of France

In Settecento riformatore, Franco Venturi argues that The first links in the long chain of reforms and revolutions, projects and delusions, rebellions and repressions that led in the eighteenth century to the collapse of the old regime, are to be sought not in the great capitals of the West, in Paris and London, or in the heartland of Europe, in Vienna and Berlin, but on the margins of the continent, in unexpected and peripheral places, on the islands and peninsulas of the Mediterranean, among lords and peasants in Poland and Bohemia, and in Denmark and Sweden to the north.1

Venturi’s thesis applies equally to the “collapse” of the dynastic system of international law. Just as the “margins” of Europe are emphasized in his analysis, the territorial fringes of the French kingdom were the first sites where the will of the people was applied to international questions. During the first years of the Revolution, in both Corsica and Alsace, people invoked the principle of popular sovereignty to resolve problems associated with the complicated relationships between these regions and France, legacies of Baroque arrangements and the treaties that had codified them. In both instances, revolutionary leaders in Paris were driven to make new territorial claims that, in turn, led to incendiary accusations from counter-revolutionaries or dynastic powers that they were undermining the notion of treaty adherence, if not all the boundaries in Europe. 1

Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, 1989), vii.

35

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Contested since antiquity, Corsica had been controlled by the Republic of Genoa for much of the Middle Ages. Revolt against Genoese rule, which began in 1729, culminated in an independent Corsican Republic in the 1750s, ultimately under the leadership of the charismatic figure Pasquale Paoli and with a constitution that reflected close study of Montesquieu and the input of Rousseau.2 However, in 1768, a treaty placed the island under a confusing form of French military administration when its titular sovereign, Genoa, ceded control of Corsica in return for France quashing Paoli’s neophyte state. At the start of the French Revolution, in November 1789, there was a bloody altercation in the Corsican city of Bastia between, on the one hand, local revolutionaries who were attempting to form a contingent of the National Guard and, on the other, French regular army grenadiers. In response, many Corsicans implored their deputies in the National Assembly to clarify their status by having the island declared a full and integral part of France, based on their sovereign choice. The Assembly complied and, for the first time in history, the will of a people was cited to trump an existing international legal arrangement. Corsica was, therefore, the site of the earliest expression of the principle of popular sovereignty as a source of international law.3 2

3

For the constitution, see Archives départementales de la Corse-du-Sud: 7/J/1. Rousseau corresponded with Paoli and his comrade Matteo Buttafuoco; the latter invited the Genevan to write a constitution for the island, although the “Projet de Constitution pour la Corse” (1765) never fully materialized. On the suggestion of Rousseau, James Boswell visited the island in 1765 and published his experiences there as part of a campaign to raise public awareness of and material support for Paoli’s cause. See James Boswell, An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to that Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, 2nd edn. (London, 1768). Boswell wrote that tangible expressions of political liberty were rare in modern times, found only in the histories of the Swiss, the Dutch, and of course the British, but that “a most distinguished example of it actually exists on the island of Corsica. There, a proud and resolute nation has now for upwards of six and thirty years, maintained a constant struggle against the oppressive republic of Genoa . . . If ten thousand Greeks have gained immortal honor because they were opposed to the armies of the Persian monarch, shall not the Corsicans be found deserving of glory?” pp. 6–8. The work also starts with an embarrassingly gushing dedication to the Corsican leader, although Boswell put his money where his mouth (or, rather, pen) was: he personally sent Paoli’s forces 30 cannons from the Carron Ironworks at Falkirk. Rousseau recommended Boswell visit the island when they met at Motiers. This important point has been overlooked because the facts of the situation have often been misconstrued. Both William Doyle and Paul Schroeder, for example, write that

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37

Also early in the Revolution, on the night of August 4, 1789, deputies in the National Assembly renounced scores of historic privileges and vowed to eradicate feudal rights and obligations from France forever.4 Not to diminish the consequences of this momentous event for the rest of France, perhaps the greatest controversy the abolition provoked was in the eastern province of Alsace, where it inadvertently sparked a major international crisis.5 Alsace was another fairly recent addition to France, having – for the most part – been annexed from the Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years’ War (1608–1648). After that war’s end, the Peace of Westphalia and subsequent treaties included stipulations that, while recognizing the French king’s sovereignty over the province, upheld the lands, rights, and privileges in Alsace of lords of the Empire who dwelled in Germany. These lords, known as the princes possessionnés, were thus both territorial rulers in and residents of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as vassals of the King of France for their lands located in Alsace. When they, along with all other such title-holders in France, lost their feudal rights in August 1789, they forcefully protested. Again, as in Corsica, the revolutionary government ultimately responded with the novel argument that Alsace had legally and legitimately joined France, not because of the Peace of Westphalia with its caveats for the rights of the princes possessionnés, but rather through the choice of the Alsatian people themselves. A bitter diplomatic and legal confrontation ensued between France and the dispossessed lords, who were backed by their patron, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor. The dramatic events in both Corsica and Alsace illustrate that deputies in Paris did not premeditatedly introduce the principle of popular sovereignty to international law, and that French actions – and the ensuing confrontation – did not develop out of some inherent, revolutionary desire to transform international relations. The pressure to invoke the will of the people as France’s full legal title to Corscia and in

4

5

France “took over” or acquired Corsica in 1768 without highlighting its complex legal status. See The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 2; and The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 35–36, respectively. See Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French Revolution (University Park, Pa., 2003). The classic treatment remains Pierre Muret’s “L’affaire des princes possessionnés d’Alsace et les origines du conflit entre la Révolution et l’Empire,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 1 (1900): 433–456, 566–592.

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38

Lille

Amiens Metz Paris

Strasbourg Troyes

Rennes Orléans

Dijon France before the Revolution

Poitiers

Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin: Papal territory

Geneva Lyon

Corsica: Genoese territory, under French administration since 1768 Alsace: French territory where princes of the Holy Roman Empire retained feudal lands and rights since the Peace of Westphalia, 1648

0

100 50

100

200 km 150

Milan

Genoa

Bordeaux Avignon Toulouse Marseilles

0

Bern

F R A N C E

CORSICA

200 miles

map 1.1 France, 1789

Alsace came principally from officials and ordinary people in these two outlying regions, in response to specific crises. Especially in Corsica, locals were the first to insist that their sovereign choice legally resolved the confusion over the island’s relationship with France, brought to a head by the bloodshed in Bastia. Similarly, the affair of the princes possessionnés was sparked by the idiosyncratic territorial regime in Alsace and aggravated by the priorities of the French, most importantly the commitment to eliminate the scourge of feudalism. In both cases, therefore, the National Assembly in Paris reactively accepted the popular will as the legal determinant of status for these territories to resolve particular conundrums. Revolutionary leaders, and the diplomats who communicated their positions to foreign powers, were constantly hedging and wrestling with these ideas, stuck between the proverbial rock of the contemporary European states system and the hard place of staying true to the revolutionary project underway. Although French revolutionaries had no intention of overturning the bases of international law, once people began to invoke the principle of popular sovereignty in this way, they could hardly oppose this contentious innovation.

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39

And contentious it was. Although the people’s will was used in Corsica for the first time to trump a legal obligation between states, when it was invoked to justify the abolition of feudalism in Alsace the fallout was much more controversial. The sheer mass of treaty law and other legal instruments that had confirmed the rights of the princes possessionnés during the ancient régime – stemming originally from the near-sacrosanct Peace of Westphalia – far outweighed the documentation in the Corsican instance. Moreover, Corsica’s prior overlord, the Genoese Republic, was in no position to press claims against France – a much stronger power even during the turmoil of its Revolution. Thus, the Genoese allowed the issue of Corsica to drop. The princes possessionnés, in contrast, insignificant dukes and bishops though they may have been, mobilized support in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually managed to pit Habsburg Austria, which stood at the head of the Empire, against its long-standing adversary – France. For this reason, many classic accounts of the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792 designate the affair, along with the dispute over the émigrés, as one of the conflict’s main causes.6 Moreover, the princes possessionnés themselves were tenacious antagonists, whose schooling in the jurisdictional mess of German public law afforded them a nimble facility for legal argumentation. They reveled in the minutiae of the treaty and feudal law that, they claimed, France was flouting. In both cases, the Genoese and the princes always came back to one winning argument, one colossal accusation: France, by refusing to comply with its solemnly contracted international obligations, was threatening the very sanctity of treaty law. They argued that no convention between France and another power, historic or contemporary, was safe from the purported will of the people, and that such volatility made international relations untenable. They depicted the revolutionary attack on inviolable treaties as imperiling the territorial settlement of Europe, arguing that if the National Assembly were left to meddle, every covenant going back to the division of Charlemagne’s empire among his three grandsons in the Treaty of Verdun in 843 could be called into question. French action would also undermine 6

Theodor Ludwig, Die deutschen Reichstände im Elsass und der Ausbruch der Revolutionskriege (Strasbourg, 1898), 152–153.

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more recent arrangements, including many that, over the years, had added new territories to the French crown. They therefore emphasized that, just as revolutionaries could invoke the choice of the people to fully claim territories such as Corsica and Alsace, people in other provinces could potentially leverage this argument to secede from the kingdom. Overall, by representing the principle of popular sovereignty as compromising the legal bases of the traditional, dynastic states system, opponents of France elevated conflicts over a negligible island in the Mediterranean and a narrow set of rights possessed by two dozen petty lords along the Rhine into a clash between two divergent visions of the international system and international law. Revolution in and Union with Corsica Corsica’s rebellion against Genoa and its bid for independence were something of a cause célèbre among thinkers disposed to doctrines of freedom in the mid-eighteenth century. Rousseau famously wrote, “In Europe there is still one country capable of receiving legislation. It is the island of Corsica. The valor and constancy with which this brave people has regained and defended its liberty would well merit having some wise man teaching them how to preserve it.”7 The plight of Corsica was also known in the Thirteen Colonies, especially among “Sons of Liberty” clubs, and Paoli had a tavern named after him not far from Philadelphia by the young patriots who met there; it has become a town of more than 5,000 people today. In spite of this support and other impressive endorsements, in retrospect Corsica’s abortive attempt at independence hardly seems to embody the Age of Enlightenment, and Paoli ultimately proved himself to be less a paragon of virtue and freedom than a scheming and self-interested operator. Genoa was, since 1005, an independent city-state; one of the Italian peninsula’s “Maritime Republics”; and a center of shipping, shipbuilding, and banking. Genoese control of Corsica dated from 1358 when Corsicans themselves, exasperated at their own feudal lords, invited the Italians to assume control of the island.8 Over time, 7

8

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (1762; repr., Indianapolis, 1987), 46. Archives diplomatiques de France (AD): MD/France/1537. Cortes, “Points de vue politique sur la Corse,” October, 1776.

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41

Corsican identity hardened in rural areas of the interior of the island, where Genoese influence was thin, and around the historic capital city of Corte. Two successive bad harvests helped precipitate a revolt in 1729, when villagers in Bozio refused to pay their taxes. Soon the island’s entire center was gripped by popular insurgency, at which point Corsican notables joined the nationalist crusade in significant numbers. The Consulta, a representative body in existence since at least 1264, issued a declaration of independence in 1735, imploring the protection of the Virgin Mary.9 However, Corsican nationalists never gained full control of the island. They scored several surprising victories, in 1732 and 1738 in particular, but they could not draw full benefit from an intervention during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) by Great Britain, Austria, and Sardinia. After years of episodic violence and indecisive skirmishing, by 1755, Paoli had firm control of the Corsican rebellion; Genoa requested French aid, which first arrived a year later in 1756. France, for its part, was inclined to get involved before another power would.10 On May 15, 1768, France and Genoa concluded a treaty stipulating that France would pacify the island and keep control of it until Genoa could repay the costs of the expedition.11 The treaty fixed no term for Genoa’s repayment of this debt, thus leaving open almost indefinitely the possibility of the Italians regaining control of the island. The treaty also prohibited France from ceding control of Corsica to a third power or granting Corsica independence. France’s military effort would ultimately involve 25,000 men and last almost exactly one year, from the date the treaty was signed to when it defeated Corsican forces at Ponte Novu on May 8, 1769. Voltaire depicted the battle in particularly heroic terms, with Corsican fighters building fortifications with the bodies of their dead; the injured, to reinforce the barricades, willingly threw themselves on top.12 9

10

11 12

Dorothy Carrington, “La révolution corse, 1729–1769,” Le bicentenaire et ces îles qu’on dit françaises (Paris, 1989), 62. The Spanish were thought to covet Corsica for its central location in the Mediterranean, advantageous to commerce, and the possibility of the island becoming a British naval base was a constant worry. AD: MD/Italie/11. “Gouvernement de Gênes,” 1749. AD: MD/France/536. “Déclaration sur la Corse, Compiègne le 22 juillet 1769.” Voltaire, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, in Œuvres historiques (1768; repr., Paris, 1957), 1553. He affirmed, “One finds courage everywhere, but one only sees such actions among free peoples.” In truth, many Corsicans were somewhat more craven: Paoli did

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After the French victory, Corsica’s status – under military custody but not formally the patrimony of the king – was almost immediately ambiguous. According to the declaration the king sent to various royal houses of Europe communicating the terms of the May 1768 treaty, Genoa had formally transferred “the full and entire sovereignty of the aforementioned Island of Corsica” to the king but it then added, almost as an insignificant codicil, “subject to the conditions laid out in the treaty.”13 French administration on the island mirrored that in other provinces and seemed tantamount to formal conquest. As early as June 1768, the king installed councils of justice and, in September 1769, sent his first intendant, or direct administrative representative.14 Some Corsicans, for their part, also came to regard their island as fully French: Jean Joseph Marie de Guernes, the Bishop of Aléria, in a speech to the king on the occasion of the presentation of the Cahier des États of Corsica on August 25, 1776, said, “swept along by an irresistible charm, [Corsicans] have let out a resounding cry of joy: We are French.”15 A young Corsican from the minor nobility benefited from the French connection: Napoleon Bonaparte (or, as he was christened, Napoleone di Buonaparte) went in 1778 to study in a French military academy on scholarship from the king.16 And yet, this ambitious young man would later claim, “I started life in Corsica and with it a violent love for my unfortunate homeland and for its independence,” and his life, in microcosm, represents something of the complex relationship between France and Corsica. The awkward nature of the French claim to Corsica is also evident, for example, in official documents.17 In a secret memo about the 1768 treaty, the author

13 14

15

16 17

not participate in many battles and was not present for the final defeat at Ponte Novu, and other nationalist leaders had previously joined the French. AD: MD-France-1536. “Déclaration sur la Corse, Compiègne le 22 juillet 1769.” See AD: MD/France/1536. “Ordonnance de Louis XV . . . Portant Création des Sièges de Juridictions Royales dans l’Isle de Corse,” Versailles, September, 1769, which notes a Conseil Supérieur in Bastia, created by edict in June 1768, and Sièges de Maréchaussées in Bastia and Ajaccio. AD: MD/France/1536. “Discours au Roy, prononcé par M. De Guernes Evêque d’Aléria à l’occasion de la présentation du Cahier des Etats du Royaume Corse, le 25 Août 1776.” Emphasis in the original. Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York, 2004), 17. See, for example, AD: MD/France/1536. “Projet de Législation pour l’administration des bureaux de santé dans l’Isle de Corse.” When referencing Corsica, “this Island” was crossed out and replaced with “this Kingdom,” perhaps to emphasize its unique status, even if it had come “under our obedience.”

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conceded that “doubts have arisen, recently, on the nature and scope of the rights France acquired” over Corsica.18 Instructions from Vergennes, the Foreign Minister, written in the name of the king to his new representative in Genoa, the Marquis de Monteil, in September 1777 describe the circumstances of the treaty’s negotiation to prove “the intention of the late King . . . to acquire Corsica irrevocably.”19 The idea that Genoa could ever repay France the costs of putting down Paoli’s rebellion “is, and will always be, illusory,” and therefore Corsica must be seen “as a Domain belonging to France.” Because Genoa did not wish to confront this reality, however, Vergennes expressly instructed Monteil that, when discussing the matter of Corsica with Genoese officials, he should answer them always in a manner analogous to the Treaty . . . and . . . neither to analyze nor to comment on it: the absolute impossibility is and always will be that the Republic could exercise the ability to repay, and this suffices for the king to reassure him against any attempts that the Genoese could make in the future to regain possession of the island.20

This sensitive revelation illustrates how the French confidently played along with Genoa’s charade of maintaining formal sovereignty over Corsica, while exercising full administrative control over the island and doubting to the point of incredulity that this state of affairs would ever change. Corsica, in this regard, was no different from other parts of Europe that existed in a state of ambiguity with regard to their territorial sovereignty – areas that were sometimes holdovers from earlier eras and antiquated polities such as the Holy Roman Empire; or sometimes were, as in the case of the island, the result of complex diplomatic arrangements. These areas existed outside the formal schema of a system that, increasingly, theoretically only allowed for full and formal sovereignty by a power over discrete territories. At the same 18

19

20

AD: MD/France/1537. “Mémoire sur le traité par lequel la Rep. De Gênes a cédé la Corse à la France,” 1778. AD: CP/Gênes/supplément/9. Letters of instruction and credentials from Louis XVI and Vergennes to the new representative of France in Genoa, Monteil, Versailles, September 23, 1777. Another tantalizing detail revealed in this document is that Genoa, during the insurrection, began to fear that Corsican rebels would attack its possessions in Italy proper. Ibid.

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time, France’s campaign to assert control over Corsica made sense during the eighteenth century, when domestic and international conceptions of power and prestige were so closely tied to gains in territory and population. Corsica was also important for French strategy in Italy.21 Perhaps most importantly, the French presence in Corsica precluded a British one, thus preventing what a commentator called a chance for the Royal Navy to “do us an infinite harm in the Mediterranean.”22 In another indication of its peculiar status, Corsica was not granted representation in the February 1787 Assembly of Notables that set off French pre-revolutionary political turmoil, nor in the second Assembly of November 1788. When the king invited them to send deputies to the Estates General, therefore, Corsicans were thrilled. Starting in mid-April 1789 (much later than in the rest of France), electoral assemblies were formed on the island, and on May 18, 1789, the General Assembly of Corsica convened in Bastia. The cahiers de doléances, lists of local concerns deputies brought with them to the Estates General, drawn up by Corsicans, closely resembled those from the mainland; many of their complaints centered on the exploitation of the peasantry.23 However, 28 cahiers insisted on full access and equality for Corsicans seeking royal offices in the rest of the kingdom. Most importantly, the cahiers of the Third Estate and the nobility both tasked their deputies explicitly “to see this island united to the French nation, become an integral part of this monarchy,” and to assure that it never be ceded “without the consent of the Estates General [of France] and the Estates [of Corsica].”24 The ensuing narrative of revolutionary events in Corsica clearly shows that the will of its people was invoked not because of the theoretical convictions of deputies in the assembly halls of Paris, but 21 22 23

24

AD: CP/Rome/912. Letter from Bernis to Montmorin, Rome, March 10, 1790. AD: MD/France/1536. “La Corse vengée,” Rennes, June 27, 1770. French property grants during the military occupation meant that by 1789, large landowners dominated Corsica and this noble caste made life particularly egregious for the lower orders. See Ange Rovère, “Dans le sillage de France, 1769–1796,” in Le Mémorial des Corses, vol. 2, Soumission et résistance, 1553–1796, ed. Francis Pomponi (Ajaccio, 1980), 467–471. René Emmanuelli, “L’intégration à la France,” in Histoire de la Corse, eds. Paul Arrighi and Antoine Olivesi (Toulouse, 1986), 76. The above phrasing is the Third’s; the nobles asked that Corsica “be expressly incorporated in the crown and made an integral part of this monarchy, and that it may be neither separated nor alienated without the consent of the Estates General.”

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by the loud and insistent demands of people on the periphery – in this case, starting on the streets of Bastia. As in the rest of France, agricultural privation was the catalyst for popular uprisings in Corsica in early 1789. The insurrection, which began in earnest in April, reached a head on May 1. Municipal officers were entering the citadel of the Hôtel de Ville, or city hall, in Bastia for an assembly when crowds started to heckle them. Pushed into the street, the mayor and his son fled; in the ensuing melee, two died. The assembly was postponed and guards were posted throughout the city.25 News of unrest and of victories in the fight against absolutism and aristocracy in France – especially the sacking of the Bastille, word of which reached Corsica in the first days of August – only emboldened Corsican efforts. With its cahiers, Corsica sent four deputies to the Estates General in May 1789 – Peretti della Rocca for the clergy; for the nobility, Matteo Buttafuoco, a nationalist leader and aide to Paoli who benefited handsomely when he joined the French cause; and Colonna Cesari and Christophe Salicetti for the Third.26 Salicetti, who would go on to a long career as ally/enemy/associate/henchman to Napoleon Bonaparte, helped turn the French Revolution’s initial upheaval in Corsica into a question of the island’s status in international law. On October 20, 1789, he sent a letter to his acquaintance J.-B. Galeazzini that soon became public. After defending “the zeal and the constancy which we employ to support the interests of our Province,” he proceeded to offer a provocative observation: all the Provinces of France have made themselves masters of their respective administrations; all receive orders only from their provisionally established municipalities, employing no other force than that of the national militia; and Corsica alone trembles under the shadow of the Robe, of the Bayonet and I must say of a vile clerk or of the intendant or of the Customs authorities. This singular idea makes me shudder with horror.27

Salicetti insisted that he was not encouraging strife. Instead, he advocated creating the National Guard, popular militias that were springing up

25 26

27

AD: MD/France/1536. “Bulletin,” May 13, 1789. Coincidentally, the officer who commanded Corsican forces to their ultimate defeat at Ponte Novu was named Carlo Salicetti; it is not clear if there was any relationship between him and the deputy. AD: MD/France/1536. Letter from Salicetti to Galeazzini, Paris, October 20, 1789.

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across mainland France, in Corsica and in Bastia in particular, where the General Assembly met, for protection from both the regular army and the “horrors of anarchy.” When Salicetti’s letter became public, it provided the spark that caused the two hitherto separate gases of Corsica’s legal status and the social grievances that had dominated the French Revolution in Corsica up until that point to converge and combust. On the morning of November 5, 1789, the municipal government in Bastia succumbed to the public pressure unleashed by Salicetti’s avowal that Corsicans ought to form units of the National Guard.28 A delegation of civic officers, including the mayor and town councilors, went to the home of the Viscount de Barrin, governor and commander-in-chief of royal forces in Corsica, to communicate this request. From the beginning, the French military in Corsica had taken an unsympathetic view of the Revolution, in part because the demarcation between ancien régime and the occupying force was blurry indeed. Barrin refused to make a decision immediately, but promised to issue a formal pronouncement the following day. Subsequent events are subject to some dispute. Some sources, which tend to paint the governor unfavorably, relate that Barrin threatened to sound the general alarm if the city’s people went ahead and met without his definitive answer – to which the mayor supposedly responded that if Barrin did so, he would be risking his own and the mayor’s lives.29 Other sources recount that the people believed Barrin was prevaricating, in order to empty the city of all arms and organize 28

29

Some sources cite this day’s events as occurring on November 4, though the majority of commenters, then and now, list November 5. This account is constructed from the following sources: Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. X (Du 12 novembre 1789 au 24 décembre 1789) (Paris, 1878), 335–336: A letter from Bastia, signed Galearini, Guasco, and Morati, “members of the commune of Bastia,” read in the National Assembly on November 30, 1789 by Volney; AD: MD/France/1536. Letter from Dutillet with the bulletin of events in Corsica over the prior four days, Bastia, November 7, 1789; “Procès verbale des Officiers municipaux de la ville de Bastia capitale de l’Isle de Corse,” November 5, 1789; “Réfutation du comité de la ville de Bastia, capitale de l’Isle de Corse, à l’exposé des officiers du Régiment du Maine sur ce qui s’est passé en cette ville le jeudi 5 novembre 1789,” signed by all members of the “Comité de la Ville,” Bastia, November 28, 1789; AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, November 23, 1789. AD: MD/France/1536. “Réfutation.” In keeping with this portrayal of the army’s exaggerated fear of the people, it claims that employees of the intendant went to ask Barrin for arms.

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his troops to resist the people’s gathering in the interval before the formal denial of the request to create National Guard regiments. Still other sources assert that Barrin ultimately authorized a public meeting before it assembled.30 In any case, at three o’clock in the afternoon, people convened at the church of Saint John to begin registering in the National Guard. By one account, while the people were peacefully congregated in the church, two companies from the regiment of Maine – grenadiers with Colonel de Rully at their head, and chasseurs under Captain de Tissonet – entered and tried to disperse the group. Shots were fired as approximately 25 “brave bourgeois” with guns tried to defend the gathering. Another, more common version of the day’s events recounts that those assembled in the church heard the general alarm being sounded, and so sent a deputation to Barrin’s palace to assure him that their meeting was peaceful. The governor then came to the church to inquire of their intentions, at which point the regimental troops arrived, apparently unaware that their commander was inside.31 When some people went outside to announce that Barrin was in the church, they were fired upon.32 The majority of sources concur that Barrin ultimately ordered the regular troops to stand down, and then gave in to all the demands of the people, to the point of ordering that guns be distributed to the new militia. With calm restored, the governor was escorted home by the new National Guard, which took up sentry around the city in place of the royal troops of the line. Most accounts also agree that in the clash two soldiers died and two more were wounded, including Captain de Tissonet. Two civilians, Antoine Rinesi and Barthelemy Denegri, both quite young and both apparently unarmed, were fatally injured 30

31

32

See AD: MD/France/1536. “Procès verbale” which claims he sent word via his secretary, Bourguignon, that the people could meet and that the troops would not interfere. Other sources, such as “Réfutation,” claim Bourguignon went to the mayor and authorized the meeting against Barrin’s wishes. Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 335. Another account, almost certainly the product of second- and third-hand accounts, has the army acting even more malevolently – in which Barrin supposedly gave permission for the meeting in the church but then had it surrounded, whereupon he entered. In the ensuing fracas, patriotic Corsicans allegedly arrived in droves, attacking the troops, disarming them, and arresting Barrin for having given the order to fire on the assembly. See AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte. AD: MD/France/1536. “Procès verbale.” A similar version differs only in the alarm being sounded after Barrin visited the assembly: Letter from M. Dutillet.

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by fire and bayonet strikes.33 All were in agreement on who to blame. The municipal officers “publicly protested that General Barrin and anyone else, who could have given the order to either sound the alarm or mobilize the troops . . . and fire on the people, will be responsible.”34 In a move reminiscent of the mutiny of the French Guards who refused to attack and then joined the crowds of Paris in July 1789, some regimental troops fired into the air, technically obeying their officers’ orders but avoiding greater bloodshed.35 The consequences of these events were immediate and profound. Bastia’s municipal officers boldly asserted that when Barrin ordered the regular troops away and the arming of the militia, “by adopting the sentiments of the National Assembly sanctioned by His Majesty [allowing for the creation of the National Guard], he recognized that Corsicans were subjects of the King restorer of French liberty, French like him and consequently his brothers.”36 They assumed and took for granted that, because Corsicans were fully participating in the National Assembly of their own choice, and because its decrees, like those creating the National Guard, applied to the island, Corsica was therefore an integral part of France. No vote or any other consultation was deemed necessary; full legal union with France was based on Corsicans’ functional participation in the Revolution, in which the people had declared themselves sovereign. Although circuitous, this logic made proactively consulting Corsicans on the question through a plebiscite, as would be required later in new acquisitions, irrelevant. The initiative for formal recognition of this inclusion and legal union came from the island itself. Three new delegates were sent to Paris – J.-B. Galeazzini, J. B. Guasco, and Pierre Paul Murati – with the three-part mission of recounting the troubling events in Bastia of November 5, of assuring that rumors that Corsica would be returned to Genoa were baseless, and of gaining the full application of the Assembly’s laws to Corsica.37 Meanwhile, a letter was sent to the

33

34 36

An interesting aside concerns the artillery during the day’s events. The cannons on the city’s ramparts were pointed toward the interior and prepared for firing, with lighters distributed; however, when the officer in charge of the artillery (Valette) arrived, he was so aghast by what he found he ordered their return to their normal spots. See AD: MD/France/1536. “Réfutation.” AD: MD/France/1536. “Procès verbale.” 35 AD: MD/France/1536. “Réfutation.” Ibid. 37 Rovère, 477.

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National Assembly, in which several citizens of Bastia, after having described the fracas of November 5, addressed their Corsican deputies: You are, Messieurs, charged by your cahiers to demand that the island of Corsica be declared an integral part of the monarchy; and we cannot hide that we are very surprised to see that you still have not presented this demand to the National Assembly. You have already told us that your admission as deputies declares us, by that fact, a province of France; this is not enough. The [Royal] ministry conquered us by force and via a treaty concluded with the Republic of Genoa, and does not have the right to cede us. For our security and so that we will always be French, which is our sole desire, we need a decree from the nation on a request made by you, Messieurs, who are our representatives freely and legally elected.38

The same day that this letter was read aloud (November 30, 1789), an address from a large number of citizens of Ajaccio was also delivered to the National Assembly in Paris. In it, citizens complained that the intermediary commission and military administration on the island, like the royal army in Bastia, had “opposed to this day every patriotic assembly and the formation of a national militia”; the people of Ajaccio therefore conveyed a widespread and general desire “to be united to the French nation.”39 Salicetti immediately demanded a decree of union in the National Assembly, but neglected the key matter of the will of the Corsican people. Louis-Marie, Marquis d’Estourmel, a nobleman from Cambrai, therefore added, “I propose to say that the decree is given based on the request and the free will of the inhabitants of Corsica.” The president, recognizing the Assembly’s desire, issued the following decree: “The island of Corsica is declared part of the French empire; its inhabitants will be governed by the same constitution as other French people.”40 On December 4, 1789, the king gave the union his formal sanction, setting a precedent that would soon find application in another corner of France and, ultimately, across Europe.41

38

39 40 41

Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 336. A letter from Bastia, signed Galearini, Guasco, and Murati, “members of the commune of Bastia,” read in the National Assembly on November 30, 1789, by Volney. Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 336. This address was also read by Volney. Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 336. See Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 364–365. See also Archives nationales de France (AN): AD/XV/41. “Lettres patentes du Roi, Sur le Décret de l’Assemblee Nationale, portant que l’Isle de Corse fait partie de l’Empire Français,” Paris, January 1790.

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The Peace of Westphalia, the Abolition of Feudalism, and the Case of Alsace In 1786, instructions for a French diplomat sent to Regensburg, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire’s Diet, or assembly, stated, “The German polity is perhaps the most complex that has ever existed.”42 The affair of the princes possessionnés was rooted in an ambiguity in the Peace of Westphalia that itself derived from the intricacies of Imperial constitutional law. In the Empire, two separate levels of authority coexisted. The overall sovereignty of the Empire was complemented at the local level by the territorial superiority or supremacy of individual lords, also known as immediality or, in German, Landeshoheit.43 Certain parts of Alsace had been direct fiefs of the Holy Roman Emperor, so when France annexed the province and this higher-level sovereignty passed from the emperor to the French king, the local superiority of these parts transferred as well.44 But in areas where territorial supremacy had been exercised by Imperial princes, prelates, chapters, monasteries, or cities, the Peace of Westphalia guaranteed the continued immediality of those entities. Eight separate articles of the Treaty of Münster (one of two treaties that make up the Peace of Westphalia) recognized French sovereignty, of the higher order, in Alsace. Two other articles, on which future controversy hinged, left most lords free in the local supremacy they had possessed when Alsace had been part of the Empire and affirmed that no power could claim “Regiam

42

43

44

AD: MD/Allemagne/120. “Mémoire pour servir d’instructions au Sieur Bérenger, allant résider à Ratisbonne en qualité de Ministre du Roi près de l’Assemblée des Etats de l’Empire,” 1786. The city was historically known as Ratisbon, or Ratisbonne in French. Jeanne Siat describes “territorial superiority” thusly: “immediality did not correspond to any powers. It gave privileges, guaranteed political independence, the only quid pro quo being the payment of a subsidy and the recognition of the power of the Emperor,” in Histoire du rattachement de l’Alsace à la France (Le Coteau, 1987), 31. Local lords thus had to recognize the authority of certain higher bodies, Herrschaften, over them – like the emperor, the Imperial Court Chamber, and the Diet. After the annexation of Alsace, the French king exercised this higher authority. Had these possessions only passed under the territorial supremacy of the King of France, he would potentially have gained entry to the Imperial Diet and the capacity to meddle directly, from within, in the affairs of the Empire. Habsburg counselors therefore suggested handing these territories over outright. Siat, 29.

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superioritatem,” royal superiority, over them or their lands.45 Over the years, subsequent treaties, agreements, and letters patent granted by the king and the Conseil souverain in Alsace, a court of last resort, confirmed the king in his role as sovereign overlord just as they endorsed and upheld the lords’ immediality. During the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French state sought to homogenize Alsace and assimilate its administration with the rest of the kingdom, although its governance would remain complex, divided among the military commander, the intendant, and the Conseil souverain. The period 1648–1697 saw especially vigorous change, in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. The two main figures in this process were the intendant Jacques de la Grange, whose term lasted from 1673–1698, and the Marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV’s energetic Secretary of State of War. And yet, the French monarchy had to proceed gingerly. “One must certainly not touch the customs of Alsace,” wrote the Controller-General of Finances in 1701 to the Marquis d’Huxelles, a French general and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.46 Many have noted that the integration of Alsace at this time was a success precisely because the monarchy respected local institutions, languages, religions, culture, and the province’s economic ties with the Empire.47 The Conseil, for example, developed an approach to law in Alsace that synthesized Roman, Germanic, and French traditions.48 As Nicolas de Corberon, the first president of the Conseil, wrote in July 1719, “The conformity of hearts and of sentiments is always preferable to a uniformity of customs.”49 45

46

47

48

The eight articles of the Peace of Westphalia, Treaty of Münster, that turned Alsace over the France were 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, and 82; the two that complicated matters were 90 and 92. Most importantly, see article 92, which guaranteed the princes “the Liberty and Possession they have enjoy’d hitherto, to arise as immediately dependent upon the Roman Empire; so that [the King of France] cannot pretend any Royal Superiority over them, but shall rest contented with the Rights which appertain’d to the House of Austria.” This is a favorite and famous quotation, sometimes rendered in English as “Do not touch Alsace’s things” or “ways”, or even “The customs of the country of Alsace must not be interfered with.” Quoted for example in Georges Livret and Nicole Wilsdorf, Le Conseil souverain d’Alsace au XVIIe siècle, Origines, création, activité judiciaire et politique, installation à Colmar (1698) : Les traités de Westphalie et les lieux de mémoire (Strasbourg, 1997), 642. See, for example, Roland Marx, Recherches sur la vie politique de l’Alsace prérévolutionnaire et révolutionnaire (Strasbourg, 1966), 112. Livret and Wilsdorf, 462. 49 Quoted from ibid., 23.

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By the twilight years of the ancien régime, Alsace still exhibited traits reflecting the patchwork quilt that was the Holy Roman Empire. The church held half the province’s land; one-sixth belonged to the princes possessionnés, who ruled over 600,000 people in 71 cities and 1,000 or so villages from across the Rhine.50 The ten cities of the former Décapole, an alliance of Imperial municipalities founded in 1354 to preserve their common rights, were still governed by their medieval constitutions. Although these towns possessed a tradition of urban republicanism due to the participation of local elites in their administration, the lack of regional Estates in Alsace precluded the development of a wider political or representative consciousness.51 According to foreign observers like the Englishman Arthur Young, who traveled the province on the eve of and during the early Revolution, Alsace seemed more culturally attuned to the east than to the west; the people spoke a strange dialect, understood German, but oftentimes knew no French.52 There were substantial and legally distinct Protestant and Jewish populations. Alsace was divided economically from France by a customs barrier at the Vosges, but traded freely with Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. The Rhine was thus a military border with the Empire, but not a customs or cultural frontier, and because of the princes possessionnés, as a political boundary it was ambiguous at best. These obscurities and exceptions left Alsace squeezed between the princes possessionnés and the French crown, not just geographically, so that conflict between the two long predated the abolition of feudalism. In 1720, for example, the Conseil threw a delegation out

50

51

52

“Aperçu des biens du clergé” in Réimpression de l’Ancien Moniteur, seule histoire authentique et inaltérée de la Révolution française depuis la réunion des EtatsGénéraux jusqu’au Consulat (Mai 1789 – Novembre 1799), vol. III (Paris, 1850), 121 (15 janvier 1790); Jean-Joseph Feltz, “Du sujet au citoyen : Naissance d’un homme aspirant à la dignité, la liberté, l’égalité (XVIIIe siècle),” in La Révolution française et l’Alsace, vol. 4, L’Alsace et la République, ed. Charles Kieffer (Cernay, 1992), 10–11. Roland Oberlé and Michel Péronnet, La Révolution en Alsace, 1789–1799 (Le Coteau, 1989), 81. The Décapole was terminated in 1679 with the Treaty of Nijmegen. Arthur Young, Voyages en France, pendant les années 1787–88–89 et 90, Entrepris plus particulièrement pour s’assurer de l’état de l’Agriculture, des Richesses, des Ressources et de la Prospérité de cette Nation . . . Traduit de l’Anglais par F. S., 2nd edn., 3 vols. (Paris, 1794). See, for example, 1:437, where he writes of Saverne, in Alsace, “I found myself, by all appearances, in Germany.”

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of Alsace from the Prince-Bishop of Speyer that had come to make the inhabitants of the bishop’s lands pledge allegiance to him; in 1755, it overturned the decision of the Chamber of Bruchsal, the bishop’s aulic council (an executive-judicial forum in the Empire), which had ordered the confiscation of the lands of the Count of Helmestatt for failing to give homage and fidelity to the bishop.53 Such quarrels heated up when, starting in the late 1780s, the princes resisted practically all civil or constitutional innovations aimed at solving the bankruptcy crisis gripping France. As early as 1787, they contested the authority of the Provincial Assembly that met in November and December of that year, as well as the municipal reforms it suggested.54 Some of the arguments they made to protest this Assembly would reappear later, at the height of the crisis over feudal rights. In a letter in 1787, the Provost of Beinhein, a possession of the Margrave of Baden along the Rhine, complained to the intendant of Alsace that it was “unconstitutional to send a deputy to the assembly, as the deliberations there are absolutely irrelevant to the Margrave.”55 He quoted the Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Ryswick to defend the Margrave’s full sovereignty in his Alsatian lands. Establishing new municipal authorities was, he explained, an “innovation as prejudicial to as it is inconsistent with the recognized rights of the prince.”56 In spring 1789, Alsace was mostly spared the violence that struck other parts of France, but the “Great Fear,” a wave of rural unrest and peasant rebellions, hit southern Alsace in summer and the princes started responding to the Revolution in a variety of ways. The Duke of Zweibrücken basically gave in to the crowds, whereas the Landgrave 53

54

55

56

François Burckard, Le Conseil souverain d’Alsace au XVIIIe siècle : Représentant du roi et défenseur de la province (Strasbourg, 1995), 196–198. For another example of dispute between the two, see AD: MD/Alsace/12. “Précis du grand mémoire de la souveraineté du Roy sur l’Alsace,” in which the ten Imperial cities and various “princes and gentlemen” asserted that they were not required to recognize the sovereignty of Louis XIV. Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin: 19/J/390/39. “Declaration” from Speyer protesting “the election of mayors [and] all innovations contrary to treaties that result in new municipal” governments, Bruchsal, February 26, 1790. Margrave is the English or French version of the German feudal title Markgraf, which tends in noble hierarchies to fall between a count and a marquis. Quoted in Daniel Peter, “L’attitude des Princes possessionnés en Alsace du Nord au début de la Révolution,” L’Outre-forêt : revue d’histoire de l’Alsace du Nord 73 (1991): 25. He cites Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (HSD): D/21A/22, 9.

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of Hesse-Darmstadt reinforced the garrison in his Alsatian capital, Bouxwiller, and even sent troops into Strasbourg to help put down the fighting that led to the sacking of the city hall on July 21.57 The Great Fear influenced, and was only ended by, the flurry of magnanimity and egalitarianism of night of August 4, when the National Assembly abolished feudalism.58 Two months after that night’s historic sitting, deputies received this laudatory message from the General Assembly of the commune of Combourg: “Posterity will have difficulty believing that, without a miracle, in just one day, you liberated twenty three million people by breaking the chains of feudal servitude; that only through history would people know of this oppressive and tyrannical regime.”59 From this point, the princes’ reactions to the Revolution took a strictly legal form. On December 1, 1789, Zweibrücken sent a 16-page complaint decrying the violation of various treaties; the Bishop of Strasbourg, not technically a prince possessionné because a resident in France, also sent a formal complaint on December 12; and the Bishop of Trier did the same for his lands in Lorraine, an adjoining province. In January 1790, the Prince-Bishop of Speyer wrote of how his “territorial rights . . . are going to be sacrificed to a vainglorious whirlwind of populism.”60 A month later he sent a 51-page document to the French king, invoking his treaty rights in rich detail. By the time of the division of France into departments in spring 1790, the princes already had much to oppose, but the restructuring of Alsace into two departments and seven districts only 57

58

59 60

Oberlé and Péronnet, 103. Landgrave is another title used only in the Holy Roman Empire and is roughly equivalent to “count”. In Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, 1996), Timothy Tackett describes the night of August 4 thus: “‘a kind of magic,’ a remarkable and utterly unanticipated spirit of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice seemed to take hold of the Assembly,” 172. And yet, as Georges Lefebvre correctly observes in La Révolution française, 7th edn. (Paris, 1989), although the decrees of August 4 aimed to destroy feudalism “entirely,” the reality of dismantling the regime was terribly more complicated, 126–127. Albert Mathiez agrees, noting that on August 4 the Assembly was basically aiming to “stop the disorder [in the country] with a few opportune sacrifices” and that most feudal rights were suppressed with the condition that they could be bought back, but ultimately the conditions of repurchasing them made this practically impossible: see Les grandes journées de la Constituante, 1789–1791 (Paris, 1913), 39. AN: C94-99. The date of the address is October 18, 1789. Cited in Peter, 27. HSD: D/21A/18, 4.

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frustrated them further. On March 5, the National Assembly reserved the right to determine the scope and nature of any compensation to be offered to the princes for their lost feudal rights. Meanwhile, the king had dispatched a diplomat, the chevalier Jean de Ternan, to gauge the princes’ positions on reparations for their losses. It was the first of a series of fruitless missions; the princes would not negotiate with revolutionaries. The years 1790 and 1791 saw a barrage of letters fly between Paris, Vienna, the various courts of the princes, and the Imperial Diet in Regensburg. Not only did the princes use this last body and other Imperial fora to promote their cause, but also, when Joseph II died on February 20, 1790, they tried to mobilize support at the Electoral College that assembled to determine his successor. By early 1792, each side’s conduct in the affair increasingly antagonized the other. The princes were unanimous in their refusal even to discuss indemnities for their abolished rights; the new emperor, Leopold II, increasingly took up the princes’ cause. Other powers were rallying against France, too – Prussia, most conspicuously and avariciously. The French were equally intransigent, as they embraced and then defended the will of the people as forming the true legal title to Alsace, as it had to Corsica. Consequently, both episodes sparked a contest over the validity of treaties, in which the previous territorial arrangements had been codified. Popular Sovereignty and the Threat to Treaty Law In the same work in which he praised Corsican valor at the Battle of Ponte Novu, Voltaire criticized the treaty of 1768 between Genoa and France that transferred control of the island to the latter with the famous line, cited in the Introduction: “It remains to be determined if men have the right to sell other men,” he wrote, only immediately and pessimistically to discard this proposition, adding, “this is a question that will never be examined.”61 Little could Voltaire have known that revolutionary France would abrogate this very treaty, on the basis of the same principle he had raised. Also, the act of abrogation was almost as controversial as the reason why. That agreements must be 61

Voltaire, 1552.

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observed – often encapsulated in the Latin brocard pacta sunt servanda – is perhaps the most basic norm not simply of international law but of all types of law.62 Eighteenth-century legal theorists, such as Jean Dumont, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Georg von Martens, posited treaties as the fundamental basis of international law – if not something of a constitution for Europe, by virtue of the way they built on one another.63 Even Rousseau believed both that conventions “remain the basis of all legitimate authority among men,” and that “external relations,” in particular, necessarily included “public law” and “treaties.”64 Thus, not only was the will of the people controversial as a legal precept, but also the fact that France violated treaties on the basis of it became a further source of tension. After the National Assembly decreed the formal union of Corsica and France, thus contravening the treaty in which Genoa had only ceded administration of the island, Genoese leaders believed they had a solid legal foundation upon which to claim if not the restoration of the island then at least a return to the pre-revolutionary status quo. Their efforts would ultimately prove futile. As soon as news of the union reached Genoa, “a number of extraordinary councils were held,” reported the French agent there, Flotte: “[the Genoese] see themselves as wronged with respect to their rights.” The Genoese representative in Paris, the Marquis of Spinola, meanwhile was instructed to write a complaint to the French king. The Genoese also took the provocative step of immediately trying to involve other 62

63

64

Shirley V. Scott, International Law in World Politics: An Introduction (Boulder, 2004), 6. As Paul Schroeder has written of the eighteenth century, “The principle pacta sunt servanda . . . though seldom acknowledged, governed most commitments,” 7–8. Jean Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens, contenant un recueil des traités d’alliance, de paix, de toutes les conventions et autres contrats, qui ont été faits en Europe, depuis le règne de l’empereur Charlemagne jusques à présent ; avec les capitulations impériales et royales et en général de tous les titres qui peuvent servir à fonder, établir, ou justifier les droits et les intérêts des princes et États de l’Europe, 8 vols. (Amsterdam, 1726–1731); Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Le droit public de l’Europe fondé sur les traités conclus jusqu’en l’année 1740 (The Hague, 1746); Georg Friedrich von Martens, Précis du droit des gens moderne de l’Europe, fondé sur les traités et l’usage (Göttingen, 1789). Marc Belissa describes how Mably believed treaties were “public instruments of good faith” because they formed legal relationships between states based on mutual trust. See his “La Diplomatie et les traités dans la pensée des Lumières : ‘négociation universelle’ ou ‘école du mensonge’,” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 4 (1999): 309, 312. Rousseau, 20, 103.

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powers. They sent an address to the minister plenipotentiary of the Spanish crown, Cornejo, who responded that Madrid could not involve itself in a dispute over a treaty of which it had not initially been a guarantor, adding that, as Flotte quoted, “if France were acting this way, it was probably because it had the right to do so.” The Genoese also approached the British consul to inquire if he had received orders on the matter from his court. Finally, a letter was dispatched to the Genoese minister in Vienna, to rally the Holy Roman Emperor to the cause. Flotte concluded, “[the Genoese] are, my lord, in a state of agitation they are at pains to conceal.”65 Spinola ultimately delivered his letter to the king, and the Foreign Minister sent it on to the National Assembly, where Bertrand Barère, a future member of the Committee of Public Safety and active participant in the Terror, read it aloud on January 21, 1790. Spinola accused France of having “injured, or rather destroyed the treaty of 1768.”66 Genoa had only ceded “the administration of the sovereignty of the kingdom of Corsica,” not full sovereignty, a point that Genoa felt was protected by “the inviolability of a solemn treaty.” Spinola categorically rejected the union of Corsica with France, even though he accepted the administrative innovations of the French Revolution: It is not contrary to this treaty for His Majesty, and the National Assembly, full of equity and justice, to adopt for the administration of this island the systems, divisions, and Laws that can suit at once France as well as the Corsican Nation. The [Genoese] Republic remains on this topic completely indifferent. But it cannot watch with the same eye Corsica become an integral part of the French Monarchy since the Republic would be injured in the rights that it expressly reserved when it ceded the exercise of the sovereignty of this Kingdom.

Because, as the Spanish had noted, the treaty stipulated no guarantors to uphold its provision, the Genoese envoy revisited his most powerful, but merely philosophical, defense: he appealed to “the good faith of His Majesty who knows how much the inviolability of treaties is necessary for the happiness and security of Nations.”67 Other attempts were made to garner the support of foreign powers. Flotte reported that in Genoa, again, “there occurred many extraordinary councils, and it was decided to prepare an exposé of the Genoese 65 66

AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, December 21, 1789. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Spinola with a report for the king. 67 Ibid.

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claims . . . and to send this exposé to all the Courts [of Europe].”68 Even more extreme was a faction of young members in the Genoese Consiglietto, an advisory council, who “were of the belief that they needed to throw themselves in the arms of England, and even forsake to it all of Genoa’s right to Corsica, if it would only take up the cause on this condition.”69 Willingness to abandon Genoa’s claim to Corsica, as a means to counter France’s having illegally arrogated it, illustrates just how important the imbricated matters of pride, honor, and the probity of conventional legal intercourse were in eighteenth-century international relations. It was thought better to voluntarily relinquish the title to Corsica than to see it illegitimately usurped. The “stormy” session of the Consiglietto in which this proposal was advanced ended with an older and “wiser” bloc suggesting that they wait to see the effect of the forthcoming exposé on European opinion before making offers to the British.70 Still, on March 9, the British consul reportedly had a secret meeting with the Genoese Secretary of State that lasted over an hour, after which the Council remained in deliberation for another two. That Sunday morning, the Genoese government expedited “an extraordinary courier . . . one assumes he is going to England with instructions for the Republic’s agent with respect to Corsica.”71 Meanwhile, rumors abounded – later proven false – that Genoa was trying to raise funds, perhaps with British help, to repay France the costs of its occupation of Corsica and thereby regain full sovereignty over the island, as provided for in the treaty of 1768.72 The French response to these machinations was remarkably calm. Armand Marc, Count de Montmorin, Foreign Minister since Vergennes’ death in 1787, was at first sympathetic to Genoa’s position. Indeed, Genoa had the conventions of the old public law of Europe on its side. In his letter of January 17, 1790, to the Garde des Sceaux – something like a Minister of Justice – with which he transmitted Genoa’s first letter of protest to the National Assembly, Montmorin also sent excerpts from the treaty of 1768, suggesting, tellingly, “this will permit 68 69

70 71 72

AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, February 8, 1790. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, February 22, 1790. Ibid. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, March 9, 1790. Emmanuelli, 378

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you to find all the points on how the state of Corsica can be changed.”73 In a reply of the same day to Spinola’s letter, Montmorin wrote that as soon as he had heard of the National Assembly’s declaration on Corsica, “I hastened to send to the President of this assembly excerpts of the treaty [of 1768],” which was, of course, a bit of diplomatic hyperbole. However, the minister was genuine in hoping the Assembly would observe the treaty, and he expressed, “I have every reason to believe, Sir, that the National Assembly, informed of the conditions of the treaty of which it had not had a precise knowledge, will come back on its first decision.”74 But, when it debated Spinola’s letter on January 21, the National Assembly had no such intention. The famous deputy and celebrated orator Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count de Mirabeau, derisively questioned how the Genoese could have ceded the administration but not the sovereignty of Corsica, as if “a power like France . . . was merely [Genoa’s] minister.”75 Dominique Garat the elder, a Third Estate deputy from Bordeaux, also found the idea that France was merely the agent of Genoa in Corsica preposterous – not for reasons of national conceit, but rather a justification that echoed Voltaire: “one does not cede men; one does not cede nations. There must be no doubt on this principle.” Then, Antoine Barnave, along with Mirabeau, one of the best speechmakers of the early Revolution, struck on the key principle: It is neither treaties, nor our conquests, that ought to establish our right and the destiny of Corsica; it is the will of the inhabitants of this island. This will was presented to us by the Corsican deputies; it is contained in their cahiers; it was recently expressly reiterated, and all these acts led to the formal request for the union of Corsica with France.76

Again, deputies assumed to know the will of Corsicans by the various means of participation in French popular government, but 73

74 75

76

AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Montmorin to the Garde des Sceaux Paris, January 17, 1790. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Montmorin to Spinola, Paris, January 17, 1790. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XI (Du 24 décembre 1789 au 1er mars 1790) (Paris, 1880), 269–270. The following citations all come from this debate, which, again, took place on January 21, 1790. This position was not entirely novel and reflected Estourmel’s proposal that “the decree [be] given based on the request and the free will of the inhabitants of Corsica.” See Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 336.

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without a direct consultation on the question of union. Barnave, therefore, avowed, “given the will expressed by the inhabitants of Corsica, there is no cause to deliberate the complaint of the Republic of Genoa.” Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, a liberal lawyer from Chartres and future Jacobin and Mayor of Paris, immediately picked up on Barnave’s idea, citing the importance of “the most beloved and constant will of the inhabitants [of Corsica] to be French.” The Duke de Châtelet voiced the support for the old system of law: “Nations must follow treaties and the public law of Europe or they will lack good faith.” Mirabeau, always intellectually dexterous, countered this argument, reiterating the terms of the treaty and the fact that Genoa must repay France before it could claim any of its rights. But then, switching to the new logic and espousing the legal rectitude of popular sovereignty, he proclaimed, “we have reason to say that the sacred principle, which regulates this matter, is the will of the people.” Barnave’s motion to ignore Genoa’s protest was passed and decreed.77 Thus, the National Assembly deputies simply and earnestly reconceptualized the terms by which Corsica had been, and territory in general ought to be, legitimately transferred. They enacted what was, in fact, an entirely novel claim in international law – although only with the intention of undermining Genoa’s position. Though couched explicitly in the context of Corsica and serving as a response to the peculiarities of its relationship with France, their logic nevertheless had more general if unintentional implications. They effectively declared dynastic cessions (if not successions), transmissions by treaty not based on consultation with the people, and military conquests immoral and illegal; the will of the people, henceforth, would be the critical determinant for such issues. For the moment, these principles did not find a universal application or even much more extended discussion, because Genoa quietly let the matter drop. The exposé detailing Genoa’s rights to Corsica and their flagrant violation by France seems never to have been finished, and certainly never circulated.78 By April, Flotte, the French envoy, related that “The Genoese Government, which has turned its eyes away from [Corsica], to occupy itself with the troubles that occurred on the border 77 78

Archives parlementaires, vol. XI, 269–270. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, March 1, 1790.

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of the Republic and Piedmont, seems satisfied by this pretext to withdraw.”79 If the border conflict with Piedmont was indeed only a face-saving gesture for Genoa to abandon its claims to Corsica – again highlighting the importance of dignity and appearances in diplomatic intercourse, particularly during the ancien régime – it is hard to imagine in what other ways it could have pressed its position. In the National Assembly, Mirabeau mocked the idea of a Genoese military reprisal, especially because France’s original claim to Corsica derived from Genoa’s martial failure against Paoli’s insurrection: “I do not view as especially dangerous the Republic of Genoa, whose armies were sent into flight by twelve men and twelve women on the seashore of Corsica.”80 On May 17, Flotte communicated the essence of the British response to Genoa’s request for aid to authorities in Paris, as well as its underlying legal logic: as much as the British king expressed a desire to be helpful to the Genoese, Flotte related, “on the subject of the rights of Genoa to Corsica, this island having incorporated itself indivisibly in France and its inhabitants having declared themselves, of their own free will, French citizens, it is no longer in the power of the Republic to claim supreme dominion over this kingdom.”81 The British, surprisingly, endorsed the will of the Corsicans as a legitimate basis for union with France. It would be the last time a foreign, dynastic power willingly adopted this revolutionary position until the second half of the nineteenth century. The affair of the princes possessionnés would not enjoy such an uncomplicated conclusion, nor would other powers back either France’s abolition of the princes’ feudal rights or its legal justification for doing so – which was, just as in Corsica, that the will of the people legitimized non-observance or abrogation of earlier treaty law. The Genoese opposed the change in Corsica’s status primarily for reasons of pride, since they had already ceded effective control of the island; on the contrary, the princes’ position in Alsace was based on the perception that they would incur both a substantial financial and 79 80 81

AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, April 12, 1790. Archives parlementaires, vol. XI, 270. AD: CP/Gênes/164. Letter from Flotte to Montmorin, Genoa, May 17, 1790. Whether the English endorsed not only the French position but also the National Assembly’s radical justification, or whether Flotte added his own revolutionary flourish in conveying this information, is not clear.

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political loss from the abolition of their rights. Because they, like Genoa, lacked military wherewithal, the princes sought to generalize the theoretical threat posed by France’s position to the sanctity of treaty law, thereby garnering wider support. The princes possessionnés therefore repeated their complaints in the various organs of the Holy Roman Empire, often exasperatingly so for other Imperial delegates – but they ultimately managed to turn their particular grievance into a common affront. In response to these increasingly sharp and sophisticated attacks from a variety of opponents, revolutionaries were forced to articulate more fully their positions both on popular sovereignty as a principle of international law and on related matters of treaty adherence and territorial integrity. Earlier, revolutionaries had been wary of too fully deploying this arsenal, either not needing to do so in the quarrel with Genoa or pragmatically not wishing to upset the international legal status quo. However, because of the increasing vehemence of the dispute with the princes possessionnés, and the high stakes of the matters involved, the French eventually rose to the challenge. At first, some revolutionaries ardently defended France’s right to and sovereignty in Alsace through a traditional exposition of treaty law, just as had functionaries during the ancien régime when the crown and the princes had clashed over issues in the province. In April 1790, the deputy Charles de Peyssonnel gave a speech examining the situation in Alsace – not from the point of view of the will of the people, but rather from the standpoint “of the treaties [the princes] hold up [and] of the public law of Germany.”82 Others in French officialdom combined respect for older legal norms with devotion to the principles of popular sovereignty in defending the abolition of feudalism in Alsace. In his instructions to the diplomat Ternan for the mission to persuade the princes possessionnés to accept indemnities for their lost rights, Montmorin suggested that the envoy first advocate France’s rights in Alsace based on treaty law. No doubt, Montmorin wrote, the princes “will invoke the treaties on which their rights are founded” and the synallagmatic, or reciprocal, nature of treaty rights

82

See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XIII (Du 14 avril au 21 avril 1790) (Paris, 1882), 159.

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and obligations in general.83 In a telling revelation, and not unlike his admissions about France’s violations of the treaty with Genoa, Montmorin advised Ternan to tread cautiously on this point because, “essentially, it is correct.” Montmorin’s first instinct, therefore, was to think in terms of the traditional legal system in which treaties were sacrosanct. However, he then instructed Ternan on arguments that reflected something original. France’s new universe of rights held that “men cannot possess property rights over other men,” he advised, which was a simple enough justification of the abolition of feudalism. Montmorin admitted that this new opposition to feudalism needed to be weighed against the synallagmatic conventions between France and the princes, that the princes’ rights could not be abolished outright, and that therefore France was offering indemnities. However, French opposition to feudalism was not the only new basis to abolish the princes’ rights in Alsace – rather, the entire move was legitimized by the popular will: “This very same proprietor [a German prince] does not have the indefinite right to refuse his consent [to the abolition of his rights]. He must submit to the general will of society.”84 Montmorin was contending that “the general will” validated a domestic law (the abolition of feudalism) that otherwise, because of old treaty obligations, would have had no force in Alsace. Thus, however much Louis XIV or Louis XV would have liked to bring Alsace fully into his orbit, a treaty obligation that an absolutist monarch could not have overturned now could be breached precisely because of the people’s collective will.85 83

84 85

See AD: CP/Allemagne/661. “Mémoire pour servir d’instructions au Sr. Cher. de Ternan, Colonel Commandant du Régiment de Royal Liégeois,” May 31, 1790. Ibid. Montmorin’s successor as Minister of Foreign Affairs, as the title became in 1791, Charles-François Dumouriez, made a similar argument two years later, saying that indemnities were offered to German lords because “their seigniorial rights could no longer subsist under our Constitution.” See AN: DXXIII/11/1. Letter from Dumouriez to Custine in Berlin, sent from Paris, March 18, 1792. A similar legal perspective is clear in a declaration by the Société des amis de la Constitution in Strasbourg. In opposition to the claims of the princes possessionnés, of Alsatian clerics who adopted the princes’ arguments to prevent the sequester of their lands, and of other “counter-revolutionary” types, the Strasbourg club argued that the general interest must always win out against particular interests, and, moreover, that since the general interest needed considerably greater resources, this need justified measures such as the un-indemnified seizure of fiefs and the nationalization of church estates. Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg: M/6/852. “Zuschrift an die Landleute im Elsass, uber den Bertaus des National-Guter” (Strasbourg, 1790).

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The single most important and detailed defense of France’s new position was given in a report to the National Assembly on October 28, 1790, by the deputy Philippe Antoine Merlin de Douai – himself from Flanders, in the French borderlands, where these issues were proving most controversial. A farmer’s son, Merlin trained as a lawyer, gaining practical experience in the Flanders Parlement, a court that registered laws.86 Moreover, he honed his theoretical expertise when, in 1784 and 1785, he contributed to the publication of Joseph-Nicolas Guyot’s Répetoire uni et raisonné de jurisprudence en matière civile, criminelle, canonique et bénéficiale. Merlin’s speech, on behalf of the committee on feudalism that he chaired, was pivotal because of its forceful and comprehensive nature. French authorities had, for a time, avoided making a sweeping defense of their new interpretation of their legitimate claim to Alsace for the pragmatic reason of not wanting to exacerbate the situation. Now, however, Merlin illustrated that revolutionaries possessed a powerful theoretical arsenal. Merlin’s speech encapsulated most of the pertinent lines of attack: the use, and subsequent rejection, of extant treaty law to illustrate full French sovereignty over Alsace; the assertion that the principles of national unity and indivisibility of sovereignty required full application of the laws abolishing feudalism to Alsace just like to the rest of the country; and, finally, the declaration of the central contention that the will of the people – as opposed to dynastic right and expressed in treaties – was the truly legitimate basis for claims to or transfers of territory in international law. Merlin summed these threads all up with a shattering conclusion: “The law of nations is not founded on the treaties of princes.”87 Merlin began his case, like Montmorin and many others, by employing the traditional logic of ancien régime international law: he catalogued various treaties, congresses, and rulings that proved, in his opinion, that France possessed full and unfettered sovereignty in Alsace 86

87

See Hervé Leuwers, Un Juriste en Politique: Merlin de Douai (1754–1838) (Arras, 1996). Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XX (Du 23 octobre au 26 novembre 1790) (Paris, 1885), 83. In the original French, Merlin’s climactic line was, “ce n’est point par les traités des princes, que se règlent les droits des nations.” Although this is most commonly, and more forcefully, rendered in English as “the law of nations is not founded on the treaties of princes,” a more direct translation is perhaps “it is not by the treaties of princes that the rights of nations are determined.”

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and, therefore, had the prerogative to abolish unilaterally the princes’ rights. He enumerated other examples of how the lords had submitted to the sovereignty of French kings in the past: never in Alsace had they raised troops, built fortresses, minted currency, or increased taxes without the king’s explicit permission. The lords also went to the king and the Conseil souverain in Colmar to register letters patent, some of which he quoted. Merlin concluded by stating that the German princes had lost the territorial superiority granted them by article 87 of the Treaty of Münster according to the principle “just as territorial superiority can be acquired through mandate, it can be lost through a lapse in use.”88 Merlin recapitulated France’s case for Alsace based on this orthodox reading of the law, as follows: “I have demonstrated the full sovereignty of the French nation over the full totality of Alsace, with a degree of proof that rebuffs all possible objections.”89 However, even as he deigned to argue this case in the old idiom of international law, Merlin implicitly rejected that idiom, apologizing to the Assembly for using “an old . . . language . . . the language one would have used at the beginning of last year; and, as you well know, there is an immense distance between the beginning and the end of last year.”90 He would proceed to disavow the old system entirely. Merlin posited a simple but hugely consequential question before the Assembly, one that set the old dynastic and the new revolutionary visions of law in stark opposition. Was Alsace part of France because of “these treaties, all these conventions, the fruit of the errors of kings and the ruses of their ministers?”91 No, he found it abhorrent to go back to “the time of wars, of desolation, and of tyranny” when monarchs could “sell, exchange, give, cede by force cities, villages, cantons, entire provinces” to search for “the cause of the association of our brothers in Alsace to [our] beautiful and happy Constitution.”92 He emphatically denied that “it is the Treaty of Münster that forms the legitimate title of France to sovereignty in Alsace” and, equally, that “it 88

89

Ibid. Merlin here committed a mistake that is common both in contemporary writings and modern historical texts: he misattributed certain articles of the Treaty of Münster. According to various sources, the article that forbade the king from asserting royal superiority over the German lords with lands in Alsace were 82, 83, 85, or 87 (as Merlin claims). Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 80. 90 Ibid., 76. 91 Ibid., 75. 92 Ibid., 81.

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is due to diplomatic parchment that the Alsatian people are French.”93 On the contrary, he asserted “there is no other legitimate title of union between you and your brothers in Alsace than the social compact formed last year between all French people, old and new, in this very Assembly.”94 In a single passage, Merlin summarized many of the critical themes, noting how the sovereignty of the people rendered the popular will legitimate as a legal instrument and how conflicting treaties were, therefore, nugatory: today since reason, having ripped away the veil of ignorance, has taught all men their true rights; today since the sovereignty of the people, so long forgotten or reviled, has at last been enthusiastically consecrated . . . what do conventions matter to the people of Alsace, to the French people, that in a time of despotism united the former to the latter? It is not due to these conventions that a union was forged between them. The Alsatian people united with the French people because they willed it. It is therefore this will alone that consummated, or legitimized, the union.95

Merlin’s rhetoric recalled the language used to justify the union of Corsica and France. Indeed, Merlin made the connection clear: “Like the Corsican people, the Alsatian people, by a vow legally and freely taken, have purified what was until now unjust and illegal, the exercising by kings of sovereignty over them that had been gained merely through conquests and treaties. Like the Corsican people, the Alsatian people became French because they wished it.”96 Also as in Corsica, this “vow” and wish was deduced from Alsatians’ participation in the Revolution but without an explicit consultation on the matter; the Alsatian people were French, as were Corsicans, because of the “social compact” uniting all of France through active participation in the National Assembly. Merlin reached this conclusion

93 94

95 96

Ibid. Ibid., 75. Although Merlin does not say so directly, Georges Lefebvre reckons that this reference to a social pact alludes to the nights of June 17 and July 9, 1789, when the Third Estate declared itself to be the National Assembly and a constituent one, respectively. Lefebvre, 191. Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 81. Ibid., 82. In a retort, Hypolitus A. Lapidé said that Alsatians blush at these comparisons with Corsicans, because “they were never rebels, and they never want to be.” See AN: AD/XV/46. Lapidé, “Très-humbles et très-respectueuses observations, sur le Rapport fait à l’Assemblée Nationale, le 28 Octobre, relativement aux Prince de l’Empire,” November 1790, 27.

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at the end of his speech: whatever stipulations were included in the Peace of Westphalia, no reservations were made for feudal fiefs when the Alsatian people properly and truly joined France, by their free choice. Thus, there was no legal basis for an indemnity to be paid to the German lords for their lost rights. However, Merlin suggested, and the Assembly agreed, to propose to the princes possessionnés “an indemnity which, if it is not rigorously required by justice, is all the more appropriate so as to show, in all of Europe, the spirit of fairness, peace, and brotherhood that guides [France] in its relations with foreign powers.”97 The princes possessionnés, for their part, mounted a vigorous defense of their rights and, thus, of the legal status quo. The preponderance of arguments formulated by the princes and their advocates aimed at 97

Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 82. Hervé Leuwers argues that the offer of indemnities proves that Merlin’s most important goal was the success of the Revolution: “the interest of the country was a priority” over a “strict application of his principles on international order,” 222. Although the National Assembly approved a budget on May 22, 1792, that allocated 40 million livres in potential payment to the princes (and to the pope for Avignon; see Chapter 2), even after France’s declaration of war in April 1792, attitudes quickly hardened. By June 17, the Assembly suspended the decree’s article that offered awards to the princes. On December 16, after a fiery and mocking speech by the Alsatian deputy Philippe-Jacques Rühl, France’s new legislative assembly and executive government since the abolishment of the monarchy in September, the Convention, adopted a measure revoking all previous decrees that offered remuneration to the princes. See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LV (Du 11 décembre 1792 au 27 décembre 1792) (Paris, 1899), 78. To much applause, Rühl asked why France should pay indemnities to those who sent “barbarian hordes . . . onto French soil [and] who devastate our countryside?” He then related an anecdote that garnered laughter about a French officer who refused at the entrance of Zweibrücken to remove his tricolor cockade. When confronted, he is supposed to have drawn his sword and fought back such a multitude that a “child of seven who should show himself today in the city wearing a national cockade would have the entire citizenry on their knees before him!” On January 29, 1793, the Convention started to organize impounding the princes’ lands, and on February 2, it ordered farmers and other leaseholders to pay their rents to public receivers. Also in February 1793, Rühl proposed seizing all of the princes’ lands, to help inflate the value of the floundering assignats, a new French paper currency. On May 9, the Convention began officially confiscating the domains of princes at war with France; on May 14, sequester was extended to all those who – though not engaged in hostilities – had not openly protested the Conclusum of the Diet of Regensburg which had declared war on France. See Roland Marx, La Révolution et les classes sociales en Basse-Alsace (Paris, 1974), 202–203. On July 17, the Convention unilaterally abolished all of the rights of the princes, without any compensation whatsoever. See ABR: Q/2647, on the sequester of lands of the princes to the national domain.

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confirming their rights in the treaty law. This tactic, while illustrating devotion to the established eighteenth-century form of international law, underscored a more fundamental censure of the way revolutionaries were destabilizing international relations. Rarely did the princes or their polemicists directly address revolutionaries’ claims about the will of the people – although, when they did, they highlighted some of the deficiencies of applying this principle in international affairs. From the princes’ responses to the first French diplomatic overtures, to their own appeals for support to other European courts; from their correspondence with one another, to their official protests in the Holy Roman Empire; from the popular polemical literature written by their supporters in Germany, to the writings published by counterrevolutionaries in Alsace and in the rest of France, the arguments marshaled in opposition to France’s abolition of feudalism almost always took the same form. They enumerated, explicated, and reiterated diatribes of treaty articles and other traditional legal instruments. Indeed, for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, international legal conflict took exactly this form: laundry lists of articles from extant treaties would be hurled by one side at the other, and support would be garnered from un-implicated (but not disinterested) parties, until one side gave in because of intimidation, coercion, or inducement – or the matter was settled in the aftermath of military conflict when the defeated party would accede to a treaty that recognized the rights of the victor, thus establishing a new legal standard. The Elector of Cologne, for example, launched a typical defense of his rights in late 1789, stressing that they could not be abolished by the National Assembly because of the Treaty of Westphalia in the 89th article [and] the Treaty of Nijmegen in the approbation that is given by the general Diet of the Empire [for protecting the rights of the princes]. These rights are even more explicitly protected in the Peace of Risswick [sic] in the 11th and 17th paragraphs. The Peace of Rastatt in no way derogates from the rights, and in the Peace of Baden they are expressly declared in the article twelfth.98 98

AN: DXIV/9/65/29. “Mémoire de l’électeur de Cologne, qui renferme des réclamations au sujet des décrets de août 1789.” Written in Bonn on October 9, 1789; delivered by representatives in Paris on December 27, 1789. Emphasis in the original.

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Hundreds of similar protestations, declarations, memoranda, and notes were written in the same vein. An altogether less sophisticated, though not always less effective, position simply mocked the French, as in a joke comparing Merlin the deputy and Merlin the sorcerer: “It is quite clear that all treaties, which were until now nothing more than an odious conspiracy against the people, need to be reinterpreted today in the sense of this happy Revolution. This is what the report of the great Merlin, [chosen] because of the analogy of his name, has recently shown in an invincible manner.”99 As for the idea that sovereignty could reside in the people, the princes “still insist in this vast continent not to view the consent of the people as a legitimate title.”100 A former fiscal prosecutor in Lauterbourg and aulic counselor of the PrinceBishop of Speyer, Johann Peter Stupfel, was one of the most virulent anti-French polemicists.101 He went so far as to say of Merlin’s report, “One has difficulty indeed restraining oneself when hearing such extremities that the universe has never known.”102 Put simply, the princes possessionnés argued in the Imperial Diet in October 1790 that “the public law of Europe has only recognized, for the last eight centuries, the sovereignty of France in the person of the monarch.”103 The princes were motivated in their opposition to the French by the specter of lost feudal revenues, political privileges, and (albeit meager) international prestige. But, while vociferously defending their rights, they also mobilized arguments about the sanctity of treaty law that at once had a solid basis in political and legal theory and could appeal to other European powers. Thus, in 1790 the Prince-Bishop of Speyer, one of the most belligerent princes possessionnés, sent a report to the 99 100

101

102

103

AN: AD/XV/46. Lapidé, 4. AN: AD/XV/41. “Examen du mémoire que M. de Peysonnel a adressé le 20 avril 1790, à l’Assemblée Nationale, concernant les demandes et prétentions des divers Princes d’Allemagne qui ont des propriétés dans les provinces d’Alsace et de FrancheComté, par M. le Baron de Rathsamhausen, Colonel d’Infanterie et Député d’Alsace à l’Assemblée Nationale,” 2. Although Stupfel dominated the response of the princes possessionnés to France’s abolition of their rights, next to no other information exists about him. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BN): 8/LB39/4324. [Stupfel] “L’Impossibilité,” 56. AD: CP/Allemagne/662. “Précis du mémoire des princes à la Diète générale de l’Empire contre les Décrets de l’Assemblée Nationale de France, qui sont attentatoires à leurs droits & possessions en Alsace, & aux droits de la souveraineté,” October 1790.

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Electoral College, then selecting the next Holy Roman Emperor, alleging that the French Nation does not recognize the inviolability of the peace of Westphalia and other conventions made with the King, and it fancies itself, on the contrary, authorized to violate, at its whim, the obligations the crown of France took upon itself by promises that are sacred according to the law of nations; as a result, the Nation believes itself to be privileged, not [obliged] to maintain and fulfill the aforementioned Treaty and other conventions . . . as long as it finds they are not in keeping with its immediate interests.104

In February 1791, the Diet in Regensburg released an “Imperial Dictature,” which used similar language to protest the National Assembly’s abrogation of conventions to which the Empire and the French king had agreed “according to the ancient form in existence for a great number of centuries . . . and known and respected by all of Europe.”105 The near infinite cataloguing of articles that the French were supposed to have broken had the cumulative effect of indicting French behavior in opposition to the orthodox respect for treaty law. Indeed, the Prince-Bishop of Speyer lauded the minutiae of treaty law in a response to a defense of France’s position by Ambassador Groschlag, the French representative at the Imperial Diet: Germany [and] all Europe, astonished at the attacks the National Assembly has taken upon itself to make, have not yet ceased to dig among the trivial details that are the base of the political order and of the fundamental constitutions of respective Empires, in which all powers are so acutely invested. You consider things according to maxims of convenience . . . whereas me, I only know how to envision them in terms of the principles of the law of nations.106

104 105

106

AD: CP/Allemagne/661. The report is dated August 12, 1790. AN: AD/XV/41. “Avis réquisitorial des Conseillers, Ambassadeurs, & envoyés des Electeurs, Princes et Etats de l’Empire, assemblés en Diète: Dictature de l’Empire,” Regensburg, February 2, 1791, 2. Archives de la ville et communauté urbaine de Strasbourg: 3/MW/39. “Propositions ultérieures de M. le baron de Groschlag, Ministre Plénipotentiaire de Sa Majesté très Chrétienne près le Cercle du haut Rhin, à Son Altesse Monseigneur le Prince-évêque de Speyer, touchant les indemnités que la Cour de France se propose de déterminer au sujet des Droits féodaux & autres Droits de Seigneur & de Supériorité territoriale, dont l’Assemblée nationale a arrêté l’abolition contrairement aux traités de paix, et Réponse à icelles de la part de Son Altesse Monseigneur le Prince-évêque de Speyer Dénoncées à la Diète générale de l’Empire au Mois de Février 1791.” Emphasis in the original.

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Adherence to and observation of treaties were so fundamental a proposition that most agreements contained provisions in the event of noncompliance. The princes argued that France’s “violation or nonexecution” of “the stipulations and dispositions of the treaty of Westphalia . . . which forms a veritable synallagmatic contract . . . render the cessations [from the Empire to France] null.”107 This claim followed logically from the principle that if a power should break its contract, as France had in abolishing the princes’ feudal rights in Alsace, so the princes claimed, it should correspondingly lose that which it had gained from the original convention – a principle known as Res transit cum onere, “one acquires something along with its obligations.” Another common mechanism for treaty compliance was the designation of guarantors, which the 1768 treaty between France and Genoa had lacked, who would enforce a treaty’s provisions. Who precisely guaranteed Westphalia’s many provisions was itself a subject of debate; the princes repeatedly called for the enforcement of the Treaty of Münster or for France to lose possession of Alsace – but to no avail.108 Both the Genoese and the princes argued, essentially, that international law was almost exclusively based on synallagmatic treaty obligations. Those treaties were nearly always negotiated between sovereign princes, and the fact that the French nation had had the insolence to renounce the obligations made by its king did not render these duties void. On the contrary, the Genoese and the princes argued that French action was merely the selfish expression of France’s interests. In response to this description of their supposed attack on adherence to conventions, revolutionaries articulated a position with respect to treaty law that minimized the extremity of their behavior and its potential negative consequences.

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Avis réquisitorial . . . Dictature de l’Empire,” 2. The French argued that the Empire was not a guarantor of Alsace in the Treaty of Münster and so therefore could not interfere in the dispute between France and the princes. See AD: MD/Allemagne/117. “Observations.” The deputy ChristopheGuillaume Koch argued that a close reading of the guarantee of the Treaty of Münster showed its main purpose to be to safeguard the treaty’s internal workings in Germany; the only obligation on France, as on other guarantors, was to work for the maintenance of German freedom and to protect against Imperial overreach. See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXXVIII (Du 29 janvier au 21 fevrier 1792) (Paris, 1892), 71. Koch spoke on February 1, 1792.

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Revolutionaries in this period did not disavow all French treaty obligations simply because they opposed the immoral machinations and secret diplomacy of kings and their ministers, as their antagonists liked to claim (and as some historians are wont to repeat). Whereas Merlin and others occasionally borrowed rhetorical flourishes from Enlightenment critiques of ancien régime diplomacy – Voltaire’s criticism of the “right to sell other men” being especially popular – they hardly advocated a wholesale reform of the international system along these lines. Nor did they repudiate the idea of treaties in the abstract, or the principle that they ought to be respected, though some revolutionaries later would.109 A few years later, Barère intoned from the floor of the Convention, France’s republican assembly after the abolition of the monarchy, “French loyalty, the interest of the republic, and the majesty of the two peoples are safer guarantees than written declarations . . . Our certificate of alliance and mutual defense is written by the hands of nature.”110 This outcome was neither Merlin’s nor most revolutionaries’ intention. For example, despite the growing unpopularity of such commitments as the 1756 Austrian alliance or the Bourbon Family Compact with Spain, on May 20, 1790, Mirabeau asked during the debate on war and peace occasioned by the Nootka Crisis, “if we ought to renounce treaties,” because “The time will come, no doubt, when we will only have friends, not allies, when free relations will be universal, when Europe will be a great family.”111 But, he cautioned, “hope also has its own fanaticism,” and for 109

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A representative distortion, or misunderstanding, of France’s position used by the princes and taken up later by historians like René Hombourger, has Merlin’s “new system of law render[ing] null all the treaties concluded between the French crown and the Empire.” See René Hombourger, “Les vaines démarches des princes électeurs rhénans possessionnés en Alsace et en Lorraine (1790–1792),” Mémoires de l’Académie nationale de Metz CLXIX:VII:I (1988): 90. See also Marc Belissa’s interpretation, “The treaties of the ancien régime are considered contrary to the rights of nations and therefore null de facto”; in Fraternité universelle et intérêt national (1713–1795) : Les cosmopolitiques du droit des gens (Paris, 1998), 219. AN: AD/XV/47. “Adresse des députés du peuple Belge à la Convention nationale, avec la réponse du président,” December 4, 1792. Mirabeau’s full citation is, “I have asked myself if we ought to renounce treaties, and this question becomes one of knowing if, in the current state of our relations and those of Europe, we ought to abandon to chance the influence of other powers on us, and our power in Europe; if, because we are changing overnight our political system . . . we will force other nations to change theirs; if, for a long time to come, our peace and the peace of others can be preserved in any other way than by an equilibrium that prevents the swift union of many peoples against one? The time will

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the moment peace in Europe was maintained “by an equilibrium that prevents the swift union of many peoples against one.” When it came to the status of Corsica or the abolition of feudalism in Alsace, revolutionaries were impelled to take specific positions, and the theoretical question of the validity of agreements was, they stressed, beside the point. Rather than deny the validity of all treaties, Merlin and others argued that the sovereign French sovereign people could resolve specific ambiguities in certain conventions.112 Thus, on August 25, 1790, on the suggestion of Mirabeau, the National Assembly decreed, “all the treaties previously concluded will continue to be respected by the French nation.” Many historians like to seize on the revolutionaries’ next proposition – that these arrangements would be “reviewed and modified” – while neglecting to mention that the entire process was meant to be communicated clearly to all powers; that the intention was to maintain most extant commitments, namely “defensive and commercial stipulations”; and that this assessment never, in fact, took place.113 Deputies pragmatically opted to continue to respect most French treaty obligations because, as Emmanuel-Marie-Michel-Philippe Fréteau, a noble from Melun, put it, to do otherwise would be tantamount to “a declaration of war.”114 But if France were neither declaring an end to, nor

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come, no doubt, when we will only have friends, not allies, when free relations will be universal, when Europe will be a great family; but hope also has its own fanaticism; will we be lucky enough that, in an instant, the miracle to which we owe our liberty repeats itself in a flash in the whole world?” See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XV (Du 21 avril 1790 au 30 mai 1790) (Paris, 1883), 620–621. Edward Hallett Carr provides a thorough and historical treatment of justifications for the non-observance of treaties and conventions in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1962), 181–189. Merlin’s and others’ position with respect to the princes possessionnés comes closest to Carr’s description of non-observance “on the ethical ground that certain treaties, though legally binding, lack moral validity,” although they did not so much advocate that the moral virtue of their position allowed for the breach of extant international law, but that it created new international law. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XVIII (Du 12 août au 15 septembre 1790) (Paris, 1884), 266. This decree followed on an earlier suggestion by Mirabeau on May 24, 1790: see Archives parlementaires, vol. XV, 662. Archives parlementaires, vol. XV, 662–663. Fréteau’s comments came on May 24. He continued, “If there are some treaties that hurt the rights of the nations, and there are certainly some that do, after a debate, probably lively, we will find ourselves brought to the point of demanding their annihilation.”

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even undertaking a review of, all its international agreements, its actions potentially upset the contemporary states system in another incendiary way. The Will of the People and the Destabilization of European Boundaries The princes’ firm insistence on the need to enforce treaty law went beyond an abstract commitment to reciprocal obligations. Still based on a self-serving desire to maintain their specific rights, the princes argued that without respect for past obligations, the territorial and political status quo could break down and potentially compromise the entire map of Europe. Stupfel, the ardent defender of the princes possessionnés, asked whether the National Assembly would invalidate the ninth-century treaties, “which gave and assured to the French successors of the children of Louis the Fair Neustria, Aquitaine, and all the succession of Lothair until our day, [or] would reverse all the rights of the French scepter over the kingdom?”115 Seeming to recognize that his argument was a reductio ad absurdum, Stupfel followed this remark by saying, “These are the exaggerated and even ridiculous extremes where infidelity to treaties would lead.” Exaggerated though it may seem when applied to the distant past, this logic could invalidate many more recent settlements, and indeed the solidity of the French state. The kingdom of France was formed since the Middle Ages of a variety of autonomous political and cultural units; this diversity, always a relatively contentious matter, became especially so in the charged atmosphere of late-eighteenth-century political culture. During the socalled Maupeou Revolution in late 1770, the Chancellor of France, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, and Louis XV exiled the Paris parlement to try to bend it, with its special responsibility for registering laws, to the royal will.116 During this tense confrontation the provincial parlements assumed the mantle of constitutional and representative organs, and in Brittany and Normandy they defended their rights as those of “nations.” In the early years of the Revolution, such claims were again enunciated – not only by Bretons and Normans but also in

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BN: 8/LK2/4978. [Stupfel,] “Questions d’état décisives,” 62. See Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge, 1985).

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Provence – in defense of traditional provincial privileges that were annihilated on the night of August 4 when feudal and all other ancient rights were abolished.117 The will of the people, used to such great effect in formally uniting Corsica and Alsace with France, could likewise be invoked against the central state in regions with autonomous identities and traditional privileges – and so had the potential to dismember the kingdom. Nowhere was this possibility more acute than in France’s most recent acquisitions – surprisingly enough, in Corsica and Alsace. In terms of the latter case, precisely because he intuited a danger that the same will of the people used to legitimize the province’s union with France could alternatively justify secession, Merlin differentiated in his speech between two different types of unions – one permissible, the other not. For the first, in which two independent and sovereign peoples decide to join, the union “only needs the consent of the two peoples.”118 This type of union had occurred between France and Corsica, and France and Alsace. For the second type, however, a region that did “not form [by itself] a people, but rather only a section of one” could not secede or merge with a neighbor, because a section of a sovereign people was different from an integral whole. Merlin’s fears became transparent when he asked if Brittany or Provence could legally detach from France. No, he firmly answered his own question, because “to break a political society, there needs, and I speak here after the author of The Social Contract, there needs for all the citizens to assemble and there needs for them to be of one common accord on this matter.”119 In other words, according to this

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David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 72–73. In 1788–1789, Bretons and Normans claimed that reform by the Estates General would effectively dissolve the agreements that bound the provinces to the kingdom. Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 82. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. Merlin may have been referring to the section of book IV of Rousseau’s classic work in which he asserts that “So long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have but a single will, which is concerned with their common preservation and the general well-being. Then all the energies of the state are vigorous and simple; its maxims are clear and luminous; there are no entangled, contradictory interests; the common good is clearly apparent everywhere, demanding only good sense in order to be perceived. Peace, union, equality are enemies of political subtleties,” and “If, therefore, at the time of social compact, there are opponents to it, their opposition does not invalidate the contract; it merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens.

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interpretation of Rousseau, regions could freely join France so long as they were not presently parts of a cohesive political society: portions of the Holy Roman Empire – because of the diffuse nature of sovereign authority there – fit this category, as well as the dispersed holdings of the pope, such as Avignon. But any French province, as a component of an integral state, could not choose to leave without the entire state’s blessing.120 At the time of union with Corsica, on November 30, 1789, the Marquis de Sillery, a nobleman elected to Estates General who had early on joined the Third, proposed something similar: “We have enough examples of the dismemberment of the monarchy . . . I therefore make the proposition of decreeing that, in no case, can the executive power cede any province or part of a province attached or belonging to the French empire, without consulting the nation.”121 Merlin and Sillery’s vision, based on Rousseau and grounded in ancien régime practice in response to recalcitrant provinces, posited that French regions only possessed sovereignty as parts of the whole; when they had acceded to the whole, as Corsica and Alsace had both done, their original autonomy was lost. Aside from highlighting the role – and potential danger – of the principle of popular sovereignty in leading to secessions, these debates also highlighted a clash between different visions of sovereignty: not popular versus dynastic, but rather a unitary model against a more complex one. Merlin’s vision was a solution to the crisis precipitated when the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire’s division of sovereign authority in Alsace came up against the National Assembly’s claim to legislate for all of France. This duality – or hierarchy – of sovereignty had been maintained in the province by the Peace of Westphalia but was atypical in France, a country where Bodin’s principle of unitary sovereign authority eventually triumphed. Drawing inspiration at once from this revivified tradition of sovereign indivisibility, revolutionaries

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Once the state is instituted, residency implies consent. To inhabit the territory is to submit to sovereignty.” See Rousseau, 79, 81. Merlin’s interpretation of Rousseau here is corroborated by David Bates, who argues, “The logic of the political entailed a sovereign power whose responsibility was not to any particular social goal or interest but simply the demands of maintaining political unity” in “Constitutional Violence,” in Journal of Law and Society 34:1 (March 2007): 29. He elaborates on this interpretation in States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York, 2012). Archives parlementaires, vol. X, 336.

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argued that continued protection of the German princes’ feudal rights in Alsace would constitute a dangerous and harmful exception. As Merlin argued, those rights “were offensive to humanity, were detrimental to natural liberty, were erecting between this province [Alsace] and the other parts of the kingdom a barrier incompatible with the perfect association of interests and emotions that can alone create a truly national whole.”122 The Rousseauian conception of the collective will that underpinned the National Assembly’s authority, when wedded to Bodin’s vision of undivided sovereignty, both required and empowered revolutionaries to end the exception in Alsace – an exception that would “destroy the first basis of the social contract, since no society can exist if each of its members does not submit, upon entry, to the opinion of the majority.”123 The German polity, on the contrary, was an intricate constitutional order rooted in feudal relationships and different levels of authority, all regulated by centuries of custom and treaty law. Take away or invalidate that law, nullify feudal or dynastic relationships, re-conceptualize sovereignty or alter how territorial claims were defined, and the whole house of cards could collapse. This domino effect – to switch game metaphors – helps to explain the fervid opposition in Germany to the revolutionaries’ new understanding of law. Aside from the pecuniary matter of the princes possessionnés’ lost rights in Alsace, this struggle was for the Empire, in many ways, an existential one.124 As Paul Schroeder has written, “The French concept of an exclusive sovereign authority exercised by a single government over a clearly defined territory clashed directly with the life-principle” of the Holy Roman Empire, where the exercise of governmental power at varying levels was the very nature of the constitutional order. As such, “Sweeping away feudalism might be the way to consolidate revolutionary France; it would destroy Germany.”125 France’s new vision of international law might put the Empire in jeopardy, but it was particularly ominous for its

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Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 80. 123 Ibid., 81. No less an historical authority than Leopold von Ranke recognizes the importance of Alsace and the affair of the princes possessionnés to German constitutional law: “the relationship of provinces separated from Germany . . . appears to be [both] domestically and internationally meaningful.” Leopold von Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege, 1791 und 1792 (Leipzig, 1875), 78. Schroeder, 72.

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smallest and weakest polities, such as the princes, and indeed all small states on France’s periphery. Their very “existence,” again according to Schroeder, “rested less on power than on the old traditional legal order”126 The French revolutionary challenge to that legal order was, therefore, multifaceted. The abrogation of treaty law, with its theoretical assault on reciprocity and adherence, or the specter of unitary sovereignty inspired by Bodin threatened weaker states and diffuse polities. But precisely what made the revolutionaries’ challenge so devastating to small border entities and powerful dynastic empires alike was the principle of popular sovereignty, because it potentially undermined and challenged both. For monarchical rulers, French revolutionaries’ new vision of political legitimacy invalidated their dynastic sovereignty at its core, and fundamentally upset the eighteenth-century states system. This shakeup went far beyond a facile worry that France would suddenly renounce all treaty obligations undertaken by the king. In addition to the importance of treaties and of pacta sunt servanda, in the traditional system, sovereigns had legal responsibilities to both fellow rulers and the collective that was the European system. Conversely, in the revolutionary system, responsibility both flowed from and was accountable to the people. Dynastic sovereigns, therefore, increasingly perceived a fundamental threat to (their conception of) European civilization in the principle of popular sovereignty. For this reason, although few of the princes possessionnés or their supporters were willing to countenance the principle or its application in law, they nevertheless liked to dwell on the consequences. In a revealing passage Stupfel, with uncharacteristic humility, asked: 126

Schroeder, 73. T. C. W. Blanning regards the affair of the princes possessionnés as less of a conflict between historical rights and national sovereignty – that is, between a status quo Germanic and a revolutionary French outlook – than between historical rights and state sovereignty. In this estimation, powerful secular princes in the Empire such as Austria and Prussia, and also Bavaria and Saxony, would have liked to do the very same thing as France in asserting full territorial sovereignty and excluding the jurisdiction of other, lesser nobles; these grand princes were therefore unsympathetic when the piddling princes possessionnés came clamoring for support. See T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), 77. Schroeder, while for the most part agreeing with Blanning, has extended the argument to suggest that smaller polities were under threat in the West and East, “by what Austria, Prussia, and Russia had already done and were doing to undermine [the established] legal order.”

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What can one do against the many, what can the many do against the all? What if these principles, I ask, were nothing but the result of the enthusiasm of their announcer, what if they had been either refuted or at least neglected by the National Assembly? We could have consecrated them to oblivion. But the moment they formed the basis for a decree that formally declares, that, considering that there be no other sovereignty in the entirety of France except for that of the nation, Alsace must equally experience the effects [of the abolition of feudalism]; from the moment this declaration publicly consecrates the principles on which it rests, from the moment the declaration of these principles will not become a hollow effigy; in that case, these same principles are a very serious warning for all sovereigns.127

Conclusion The peculiarities of the Corsican revolution of the mid-eighteenth century prompted Genoa to negotiate a treaty with France to pacify and occupy the island, and the contingencies of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century impelled France to abrogate that treaty and declare the formal union of Corsica and France based on the sovereign will of the Corsican people. Similarly, the unique legacy of the Holy Roman Empire and the terms of the Peace of Westphalia created a legal quandary in Alsace when the National Assembly decreed the abolition of feudalism in France. The vagaries of Genoese diplomacy meant that the matter of Corsica was allowed to drop before it could develop, perhaps, into a full-scale international crisis; however, Corsica maintains its importance as the first site at which the will of the people was applied in international law. In Alsace, on the contrary, the invocation of the principle of popular sovereignty to legitimize the province’s union with France was eminently more contentious. The princes and their advocates mobilized arguments to defend both their material and existential interests, which reflected philosophical commitment to dynastic sovereignty, treaty observance, and the territorial status quo. As E. H. Carr describes, “states which violate treaties either deny that they have done so, or else defend the violation by arguments designed to show that it was legally or morally justified,” and France was no exception.128 Revolutionary advocates such 127 128

BN: 8/LB39/4324. [Stupfel] “L’Impossibilité,” 87–88. Emphasis in the original. Carr, 156.

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as Merlin claimed that France not only had a stronger case than the princes based on the treaty and feudal law, and so was not in violation of that law; but also, France could abolish the feudal rights of German princes in Alsace, even in contravention of the Peace of Westphalia, because it was truly the people’s choice to join France. As in Corsica, Alsatians were never directly consulted on their formal union with France; their will to be fully French, revolutionaries maintained, was implicitly manifested by their participation in the National Assembly. Like their opponents, the French recognized that these innovations were provocative, which is one reason they proceeded cautiously. The National Assembly refused to abrogate or even review all the treaties that had been negotiated by the king, and Merlin clearly articulated that French provinces could not invoke their individual, general wills to separate from the integral state. These latter sorts of disputes could be terribly acrimonious and destructive in practice – as later proven, for example, by the United States’ Civil War. France itself would subsequently face quandaries with respect to both provinces described in this chapter. Riding a wave of nationalist euphoria in 1871 after victory in the FrancoPrussian War, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck annexed Alsace (and part of Lorraine) to the newly unified German Empire because of its connections to the east prior to the Thirty Years’ War. Although Alsace is firmly part of France again, in spite of some persisting Germanic culture, intermixed claims to sovereignty, territory, and identity unsettled Corsica during the later Revolution, and continue to this day. Immediately following the National Assembly’s decree of union with Corsica, on November 30, 1789, Mirabeau suggested another decree was necessary to allow exiles who had fought for the island’s liberty to return home – including Paoli himself. The former nationalist leader went on to a second political career, only now under French revolutionary auspices. In September 1790 he was elected president of the Corsican Electoral Assembly, a post to which he was re-elected in both 1791 and 1792. However, he fell from power in 1793, discredited because of complex disputes over the sale of national lands, in which long-standing opponents outmaneuvered him.129 In response,

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Jean-Dominique Gladieu, “La Corse et la Révolution française : les cause d’une rupture,” in Le bicentenaire, 83; Florence Gauthier, Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution : 1789–1795–1802 (Paris, 1992), 161–163.

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in May 1793, Paoli tried to use the traditional Corsican assembly, the Consulta, to appeal directly to the people. The Convention voted him hors-la-loi on July 17, at which point he turned to the British for succor. The Royal Navy arrived in early 1794, and Paoli convoked another Consulta that, on June 15, proclaimed the island’s separation from France and an accord between Corsicans and their new protector and king, George III. The French soon re-conquered the island and Paoli fled, again and finally, to exile in England – but the episode proved that a simple expression of the will of the people, as had happened when the National Assembly decreed Corsica’s union with France, would not cause all of the complexities associated with national identity, the general will, and law to dissolve. Corsica is still home to a robust national-independence movement that resorts to violence to achieve its aims. The Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu, or FLNC, is the main nationalist faction, but it is banned.130 Bombings of French public buildings as symbols of external authority are not uncommon.131 In February 1998, Claude Erignac, the prefect of Corsica and thus the French government’s top official on the island, was shot and killed on the streets of Ajaccio as he was exiting a theater.132 The majority of Corsicans may oppose independence from France, but still clamor for greater autonomy through increased

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In March 2005, the suspected leader of the FLNC, Charles Pieri, went on trial. In one of the trial’s more entertaining twists, “Prosecutors allege[d] that Pieri and his supporters blackmailed Club Med and another tourist company, Nouvelles Frontieres, into paying hundreds of thousands of pounds in sponsorship money to the Sporting Club de Bastia – a first division football team that is close to the nationalist cause.” See Henry Samuel, “Corsican Nationalist in Terrorism Trial,” The Telegraph, March 11, 2005. Thus, Corsican national identity, modern political violence, and a continuing history of vendettas together perpetuate the harsh reputation of Corsica and Corsicans for brigandry and lawlessness. They are ordinary enough, in fact, to have occurred when the author made his first visit to Corsica in spring 2007. A group of nationalists were charged with orchestrating the assassination and Yvan Colonna, the triggerman, was sought in (what some have called) the biggest manhunt in French history. Arrested on June 4, 2003, from a hideout in the rugged and sparsely populated interior of the island – Colonna had been living in a bergerie, a traditional Corsican stone hut used by sheepherders of yore – he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison on December 13, 2007. See Martin Buckley, “Turbulent Corsica spurns autonomy,” BBC News, July 12, 2003.

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power for local government, exemptions from national taxes, and, most importantly, protection of Corsu, the Corsican language.133 The principle of popular sovereignty, therefore, remains incredibly destabilizing for domestic politics as for international relations, not only because of the threat to treaty observance or simple undermining of boundaries, but also huge attendant ambiguities about the “people’s” identity that it opens up in practice. It is important to remember that France’s actions in these two areas, at the time of the Revolution, came in response to specific diplomatic imbroglios. Moreover, the impetus to invoke the will of the people to resolve the complex relationship especially between Corsica and France was initiated by Corsicans themselves. Revolutionary leaders in Paris applied the principle of popular sovereignty to international questions only reluctantly at first and when forced. Although the French position was not meant to rock the European states system, the fact it was unintentional did not prevent it eventually from so doing. Although they aimed only to resolve the specific crises in Corsica and Alsace, revolutionaries’ positions represented an epic challenge to the dynastic iteration of international law. As an anonymous contemporary observer described the genesis of this clash: [The political principles of Genoa and the princes] have been, for a long series of centuries, those of all the States of Europe, and particularly of France: the base of almost all governments has been, and is still, that the People are for the Princes, and not the Princes for the people; that sovereignty is for [princes] a property as real as a fief; and ever since a few scattered voices have ventured to say that that sovereignty belongs to nations, to peoples, they have cried anathema.134 133

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As with many squabbles for autonomy, Corsican demands for less taxation are rejoined by many French peoples’ complaints that the central government allocates too much money, much more than its fair share, to the island. As for Corsu, Corsicans’ feverish devotion to their language can be seen all over the island on defaced road signs on which the non-Corsican names of places are spray painted over, or shot out. In 2000, the Socialist premier Lionel Jospin proposed greater selfrule for Corsica, but Gaullist opposition deputies in the National Assembly, who feared other regions with particularist identities would demand similar concessions, opposed the project. The conservative government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, on the suggestion of then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, held a referendum in July 2003 that similarly offered greater autonomy to Corsica through a variety of measures, including the merger of the island’s two departments. These proposals were rejected, however, by a slim majority of Corsicans. AD: MD/Allemagne/117. The document is merely entitled “Observations” and seems to have been written in 1791.

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Stupfel and others were right, therefore, to recognize a globalized threat to the thrones of Europe. It was not long before war would break out between Austria and France, an explicit cause of which was the affair of the princes possessionnés.135 However, even before war broke out, the French applied the precedent established in Corsica and Alsace of invoking the will of a people to determine a territory’s international status – only this time, to annex the lands of another power. This domain was part of precisely the sort of diffused polity, the Papal States, that Merlin had argued and others feared could be subject to the centrifugal force of the principle of popular sovereignty. Many people, French and foreign alike, embraced the French Revolution because of the appeal of popular government; some foreigners so wished to be governed according to the new political forms inaugurated by the Revolution that they sought union with France. It was not for lack of an abrogated treaty that much of Europe opposed this new way to claim territory, when the people themselves requested and actively voted for it, in Avignon.

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See the “Loi portant Déclaration de Guerre contre le Roi de Hongrie & de Bohême,” April 20, 1792. It can be found at AN: AE/B/I/614, among many other places. In it, Austria is accused of having “formally made an attempt against the sovereignty of the French Nation, in declaring itself willing to support the pretensions of the German Princes with possessions in France, to whom the French Nations never ceased to offer indemnities.”

2 The Union of Avignon and the Challenges of Self-Determination

On September 13, 1791, deputies in the French National Assembly were debating the annexation of the papal enclave of Avignon when a messenger burst in with a letter from the king, Louis XVI, declaring his official acceptance of France’s first written constitution.1 Rapturous applause and discussion of the size and composition of the deputation to be sent to the king, to express the Assembly’s delight, soon overwhelmed talk of the fate of Avignon. A better illustration of the priority of domestic concerns to early revolutionaries could hardly be imagined. Avignon came under the pope’s control in the Middle Ages, and was famously the site of the papal court from 1309 to 1377. From 1378 until 1417, during the Western Schism, Avignon and Rome were home to rival claimants to the papacy. After the official transfer of the Holy See back to Rome, Avignon remained a possession of His Holiness – although France, which completely surrounded the enclave, always had a dominant influence. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, revolutionary changes afoot in France could hardly have been expected not to affect the town. Locals clamored for reform and a constitution on the French model, but when their sovereign, Pope Pius VI, refused in June 1790 the municipal government declared independence and proclaimed its desire An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “The French Revolution, the Union of Avignon, and the Challenges of National Self-Determination,” in Law and History Review 31:4 (November 2013): 717–747. 1 Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXX (Du 28 août au 17 septembre 1791) (Paris, 1888), 619–622.

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to join France. Civil strife between partisans of the pope and those who advocated union with the French ensued in both Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, its adjacent but politically separate neighbor, also under papal rule. After considerable violence and political and legal wrangling, a plebiscite conducted over the summer of 1791 showed that, according to French officials, union was the sovereign choice of the people. The National Assembly in Paris then decreed the annexation of Avignon and the Comtat on September 14, 1791. Scholars of the French and Avignon revolutions imbue the union with an air of triumph – a sense that, from these events, the novel and inspired principle of national self-determination emerged, later to be crystallized in United States’ President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” at the end of the First World War. René Moulinas, the most prominent historian of Avignon, has written at length about its union with France based on “this idea, novel in the field of international law and attribution of sovereignty . . . that we call today the right of selfdetermination.”2 Similarly, the international lawyer Arthur Nussbaum calls Avignon’s introduction of “the idea of the plebiscite . . . into the processes of annexation . . . a great accomplishment,” adding, “One must remember that this was the era in which princes sold their soldiers like so many horses.”3 In spite of these claims to novelty, Avignon was not the first area over which the National Assembly asserted its authority by virtue of the principle of popular sovereignty and in contravention of existing international legal norms.4 Revolutionaries had, as described in Chapter 1, appealed to the will of the people to resolve quandaries associated with the status of Corsica and abolition of feudalism in 2

3

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René Moulinas, “L’élaboration d’un nouveau droit international : Avignon, le Comtat, et le droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes (1789–1791),” in La Réunion d’Avignon et du Comtat à la France : Actes du colloque organisé par l’Association départementale du bicentenaire de la Révolution et par l’Académie de Vaucluse . . . (Avignon, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humains, 21 septembre 1991), ed. René Moulinas (Avignon, 1992), 47, 54. Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York, 1950), 133. See also Michel Vovelle in Martine Lapied’s Le Comtat et la Révolution française : naissance des opinions collectives (Aix-en-Provence, 1996), 9, and more recently, JeanPierre Bois, De la paix des rois à l’ordre des empereurs, 1714–1815 (Paris, 2003), 285. Wilhelm G. Grewe, among others, has wrongly identified what he cites Ernest Renan as calling a “plebiscite of every day” as first developing in Avignon. See The Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin, 2000), 420.

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Alsace, both of which served as precedents for the annexation of Avignon. Envoys sent from Avignon to Paris to lobby for union maintained, for example, that the National Assembly could easily decree union because “This is how [it] acted in the case of Corsica, which [France] accepted based on [Corsicans’] consent.”5 Similarly, an anonymous tract argued for the National Assembly to invoke the same principles as it had “in an analogous situation, and which served as the basis for the Decree relative to Corsica.”6 True, the situation in Avignon was different. In Corsica and Alsace, France already effectively controlled the provinces, and revolutionaries only subsequently argued that the will of the people was the means whereby those lands truly joined France; in Avignon, the process was reversed, with the proclamation of the will of the people preceding French acquisition. More importantly, despite the triumphal historiography, the appearance of national self-determination in Avignon was fraught with violence, antagonism, and much bloodshed, auguring significant ideological and legal difficulties. As one contemporary commenter put it, “It has been said that peoples, just like Aeson, can only regenerate themselves in a bath of their own blood. The revolution in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin sealed with new proof this depressing historical reality.”7 The revolution in Avignon and its implications for international law, therefore, warrant fresh assessment. Specifically, the story of Avignon’s proclamation of independence from the pope, 5

6

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Archives départementales de Vaucluse (ADV): Biblio/65/2. Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon à la France,” Paris, 1790, 39. They further contended that the king, as executive, could work out the “ulterior difficulties.” Bibliothèque municipale Ceccano (BMC): Ms/2496. Documents sur Avignon et le Comtat, particulièrement pendant la Révolution, “Observations sur la réunion d’Avignon et ses dépendances à la France,” 1790, 55. Bertrand Barère also argued, for example, that on May 24, 1791, the Assembly “had declared that Corsicans alone were sovereigns and masters of themselves . . . had accepted their wish and . . . had declared that their island was an integral part of [France]” as justification for doing the same in Avignon: see Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXVI (Du 12 mai au 5 juin 1791) (Paris, 1887), 383. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BN): LB39/4920. Raymond de Verninac-SaintMaur, Des troubles d’Avignon et du Comté Venaissin, depuis le mois d’Août 1789, jusqu’à ce jour (Paris, [1792]), 3. According to Greek mythology, Aeson, the father of Jason of Argonauts fame, was killed by Jason’s wife Medea, who then put the corpse in a pot filled with his blood. Aeson came back to life as a young man.

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its announcing a desire to join France, and, eventually, the formal affirmation of that request by the National Assembly in Paris was not one in which the will of the people was clearly and unambiguously made manifest. This story was also not one in which a sovereign people openly chose freedom over despotism. Finally, the most obvious and immediate outcome was not the internationalism of Wilson that scholars like Moulinas, Nussbaum, and others anachronistically imply. This chapter helps to remedy those three misconceptions. First, Avignon demonstrated many of the formidable challenges, both material and theoretical, associated with the use of a plebiscite to determine the international legal status of a territory. Such trouble had not occurred in Corsica and Alsace, where direct consultation was not undertaken, because those regions were already administered by France and because the people’s will was taken for granted as signaled through participation in the National Assembly. In Avignon, the process would not be so simple. Everything from the mechanics of voting in municipal assemblies to the question of emigration would cloud a veritable determination of the will of the people. The history of the Revolution highlights many difficulties of instituting Rousseauian conceptions of the general will in internal politics, but the story of Avignon reveals these troubles to be active – if not more acute – in the international realm. Second, it soon became apparent that the liberty of the people of Avignon to choose their political destiny and the choice of political liberty were not necessarily connected. A free people could still choose to live under a tyrant. What is more, as in the cases of Corsica and Alsace, revolutionaries who supposedly championed the principle of popular sovereignty nevertheless also had recourse to traditional legal claims based on dynastic treaty law. These inconsistencies illustrate the convoluted nature of legal argumentation at the time and undermine simple celebratory and counter-revolutionary depictions of the union, alike. Finally, the union of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin with France revealed revolutionaries to be operating as they had in Corsica and Alsace – in response to a particular crisis driven by local considerations, without any intention of fundamentally upsetting European international law. Indeed, probably more than in the aforementioned instances, and precisely because in the case of Avignon France seized

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the territory of another power, revolutionaries proceeded cautiously, vigilant in their attempt not to antagonize the pope and other European princes. As with legal change in Corsica and Alsace, opponents of the annexation of Avignon argued vehemently about the potential evils inherent in transfers of territory based on the popular will, for its capacity to call into doubt all territorial claims and international treaties settled over the centuries. However, the gravest concerns were not backward-looking, but prospective, and the most damning criticism of the French acquisition of Avignon was that, even before the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, invoking the will of the people portended a potentially dangerous new kind of annexation. History of the Revolution in Avignon In early medieval times, Avignon had belonged to the Counts of Provence, but it came into the possession of Queen Joan (Jeanne, in French) of Naples who, in turn, sold it to Pope Clement VI in 1348. The Comtat Venaissin had been ceded even earlier. Pope Gregory X acquired the Comtat, part of the old patrimony of the Counts of Toulouse, in 1273 from Philip III.8 The two territories were entirely contiguous, being enclosed by the Rhône and Durance rivers, and the mountains of Dauphiné; however, having acquired them as separate territories historically, the pope never joined them politically, which had important repercussions for their evolution and eighteenth-century revolutions.9 Despite the official separation of Avignon and the Comtat from France, from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century, most contemporaries stressed the French culture of their inhabitants. 8

9

Jean-Jacques Clere, “Le rattachement d’Avignon et du Comtat à la France : approche juridique (1789–1791),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 290 (Octobre–Décembre 1992): 571. Some dispute exists as to the exact date of the pope’s acquisition of the Comtat. On the history of the revolution in Avignon, see, especially, René Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon (Avignon, 1986) and Sylvain Gagnière et al., Histoire d’Avignon (Aix-en-Provence, 1979), the section of which on the revolution, 477–492, was written by Martine Lapied. Older surveys include J-F. André, Histoire de la Révolution avignonnaise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1844); Pierre Charpenne, Histoire de la Révolution dans Avignon et le Comtat et de leur réunion définitive à la France (Paris, 1892); and Charles Soullier, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon et du ComtéVenaissin en 1789 et années suivants, 2 vols. (Paris and Avignon, 1844).

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As one early-nineteenth-century historian describes it, “despite the long Italian domination, [the people of Avignon and the Comtat were] French by instinct, by language, by character, by nature.”10 Whereas the language of the common people was Provençal, the city’s elites adopted French, just like those in the surrounding regions of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Residents of Avignon and the Comtat enjoyed special entitlements and privileges in France: they possessed the right of régnicoles granted by Francis I in 1535 and renewed by Charles IX, which allowed them to own and acquire property in France by contract or succession, exempted them from the droit d’aubaine, special death duties, and all other discriminations against foreigners, and permitted them all the charges and positions normally reserved only for subjects of the crown.11 Avignon was also an important trade and communications hub. French men and women could hardly avoid the city on their way from Paris or Lyons down the Rhône corridor to Marseille, Nîmes, or Aix. There were no formalities or taxes upon entering Avignon, either for goods or for people, and the city maintained a robust commercial relationship with France. The main economic indications of separateness were a thriving trade in contraband books, tobacco, and salt. In many ways, therefore, those living in Avignon and the Comtat enjoyed a best-of-both-worlds situation: despite the benefits accrued from the right of régnicoles and close commercial ties with France, they were exempt from the obligations normally imposed on French subjects and there was next to no tax burden in the pope’s lands and no military service duties. For these and other reasons, for a long time, the residents of Avignon and the Comtat never showed much open discontent with their status as subjects of His Holiness.12 Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, a series of issues converged, intensifying a desire among some for union with France. Currents of thought from the era’s

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André, 1:140. See also Paul Achard, Précis de l’histoire d’Avignon, au point de vue religieux, et dans ses rapports avec les principaux événements de l’histoire générale, 2 vols. (Avignon, 1852): 2:130, and Moulinas, Histoire, 14–15. Among those in royal service who hailed from Avignon, Marie-Antoinette had three: the femme de chambre of her son, the Duke of Normandy; her delivery doctor; and her personal chaplain. Moulinas, Histoire, 15. BN: 8/LK7/659(A). J. Guerin, Discours sur l’histoire d’Avignon (Avignon, 1807), 43.

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Enlightenment thinkers, who advocated the harmonization of knowledge and practical reality, caused Avignon, where state boundaries did not correspond with cultural and linguistic divisions, to be seen as a medieval anachronism in an increasingly rational and well-balanced political order.13 Second, due in part to favorable memories of an occupation by France between 1768 and 1774, during the Seven Years’ War, merchants in Avignon were attentive to the benefits of formal membership in the French national economy.14 More immediately, locals blamed popular deprivations due to poor harvests and the harsh winter in 1788–1789 on dithering papal officials, and large quantities of foodstuffs had to be imported from France.15 Lastly, in the spring and summer of 1789, politics in Avignon were inspired by and emulated the historic occurrences taking place throughout France. According to a poster displayed all over Avignon in early August 1789, and titled “Advice of a patriot to his fellow citizens”, while Avignon and the Comtat were struggling under the combined weight of famine, the internal dissensions of its citizens, and other problems, “harmony and equality starts to exist in France. By what fatal destiny do we not see them reigning here too?”16

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16

See, for example, Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751–1766). See BN: F-5005 (245). “Arrêt de Parlement du 9 Juin 1768,” Aix, 9 June 1768. The occupation developed from a dispute between Pope Clement XIII and Louis XV. After the king’s expulsion of the Jesuits from France, they established themselves in the papal lands and attacked the French monarchy from there. Also, the pope proclaimed his sovereignty over the Duchy of Parma, whereas the pretender was Louis XV’s grandson and a close relative of the Kings of Naples and of Spain, and this was seen as an attack on the whole Bourbon clan. The King of Naples occupied the Duchy of Benevent, and Louis took Avignon. The matter was resolved when the next pope, Clement XIV, suppressed the Jesuits and renounced his claim to Parma. There had also been two earlier occupations, in 1663–1664 and 1688–1689, under Louis XIV. For the union of 1663, see BN: F-47112 (9). “Arrêt de la cour de parlement de Provence. Portant Réunion de la ville d’Avignon, & Comté Venaissin, au Domaine de la Couronne,” Paris, July 26, 1663. It occurred during the papacy of Alexander VII. Louis XIV’s second occupation resulted when he tried to impose his law on the church and Innocent XI sought to revoke the long-established and recognized right of exile of the French legation. ADV: 1/J/39; Archives diplomatiques de France (AD): CP/Rome/910. See also Hyacinthe Chobaut, “Avignon et le Comtat à la veille de la Révolution Française,” in Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse 23 (3e et 4e trimestres 1923): 140–142. The anonymous poster, “Avis d’un patriote à ses concitoyens,” was posted in Avignon on the night of August 1, 1789.

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Thus, desire for a revolution in the municipal government, as had occurred in France in July 1789, was intensified by the demand from the poster’s anonymous author. On March 25, 1790, Philippe Casoni, the vice-legate and papal representative in Avignon, authorized reformed municipal elections on the condition of the pope’s eventual blessing. The vote returned mostly pro-French merchants and lawyers. Protests on April 10 led the vice-legate to accept all demands for reform but then, on April 21, a brief from Pope Pius VI revoked all concessions previously granted by his delegate. This move pushed most Avignon residents to realize that a successful program of change would only happen through union with France. On June 10, pro-papacy aristocratic forces attempted to take over city hall, setting off another round of protesting. Extraordinary intervention by the French mayor of nearby Orange and a detachment of National Guards was all that prevented bloodshed. In this tense climate, the various district assemblies of Avignon met to decide the city’s fate. Following the lead of the district of Saint Symphorien, the city “unanimously deliberated to declare the people of the Avignon nation free, sovereign, and independent, and to unite with the French nation” on June 12, 1790.17 The city also resolved to send four envoys to the National Assembly in Paris to submit the request for union in person.18 Although inspired by political innovations in France, the process leading to union was sparked in the streets of Avignon, confirming that, as in Corsica and Alsace, the first stirrings of transformation to international law at this time occurred on the margins of the French state and not as a program directed from Paris. As Raymond de Verninac-Saint-Maur remarked at the time, “There is no need to search outside [Avignon] for the causes of this event.”19 The city’s solemn decree, however, hardly settled matters and, indeed, helped provoke a conflict between Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin that fed off historic tensions. Casoni fled to Carpentras, 17

18

19

See ADV: 5/F/181. “Délibération du Conseil général de la commune de la ville d’Avignon du 12 juin 1790,” or Archives municipales d’Avignon (AMA): 4/H/6. Deliberations of the districts, June 9–18, 1790. Deliberations of the district of Saint Symphorien, June 12, 1790. They were Jean Duprat the younger, a native of Avignon and a silk-thrower; Nicolas Jean Baptiste Lescuyer, a notary; André Pacifique Peyre, a lawyer originally from Perenas; and Louis Grégoire Tissot, also a lawyer from Joncquières. See ADV: 6/L/128. See BN: LB39/4920, 61.

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traditionally the capital of the Comtat, where he issued a “public and authentic” protestation of the revolution in Avignon.20 A Representative Assembly also convened in Carpentras, on May 24, to institute reforms, all the while proclaiming loyalty to His Holiness. A force of soldiers from Avignon laid siege to Carpentras in January 1791, spelling the doom of the Representative Assembly. The municipal government in Avignon proposed the federation of the city with the rest of the Comtat and invited representatives to an Electoral Assembly; the more conservative and pious regions of the Comtat refused to participate, instead organizing themselves into an avowedly counter-revolutionary group called the Union of St. Cecilia – again triggering fighting and a second siege of Carpentras that May. Until this point, the French had taken an equivocal stand on the events in Avignon and the Comtat. In November 1789, a Third Estate deputy from nearby Aix-en-Provence who hailed from an ancient and illustrious Provençal family, François Charles Bouche, presented a formal request in the National Assembly for the union of Avignon and the Comtat and France.21 At the time, his proposal excited little attention in either Paris or the Midi. Even after Avignon’s initial request for union in June 1790, most deputies in Paris vacillated for fear of either offending European powers or antagonizing the pontiff – who had the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which reorganized the relationship of the clergy in France to the government, under consideration at the time.22 Maximilien Robespierre was one of the few who, early on, embraced the cause of Avignon as one of principle, based on solidarity deriving from respect for the principle of popular sovereignty: “The cause of Avignon,” he famously declared, “is that of the universe, it is that of liberty.”23 On November 20, 1790, the

20

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22

23

BMC: Ms/2522/66. “Protestations de Son Excellence Monseigneur le Vice-légat d’Avignon,” Carpentras, 1790. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. X (Du 12 novembre 1789 au 24 décembre 1789) (Paris, 1878), 4. This proposal came on November 12, 1789. BN: LB39/4920, 70. The classic study remains Albert Mathiez, Rome et le clergé français sous la Constituante: La Constitution civile du Clergé, l’Affaire d’Avignon (Paris, 1911). Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XX (Du 23 octobre au 26 novembre 1790) (Paris, 1885), 525. Debate of November 18, 1790.

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National Assembly prorogued a discussion on union but, to help restore order in Avignon and the Comtat, sent French troops – control over which it controversially gave to the revolutionary municipal government in Avignon.24 Revolutionary Avignonais saw this move as a tacit recognition of their independence – to be followed, it was hoped, by union.25 Those who opposed union, meanwhile, were livid at this violation of papal sovereignty and contemporary international law.26 By spring 1791, Pius VI formally condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and, with the violence in Avignon and the Comtat threatening to spill over into neighboring departments, the National Assembly decided to get involved in earnest. On May 25, it named three mediators to a twofold mission – to make peace between the warring factions in Avignon and the Comtat and to discern the true opinions of the people in both areas with respect to union with France.27 Peace was signed between the revolutionary forces of Avignon and the Union of St. Cecilia on June 19, after which the mediators organized a series of votes and consultations across the region.28 Based on these plebiscites, the mediators concluded that a veritable majority wished to join France. The deputy Jacques-François de Menou, Baron de Boussay, gave the joint report of the diplomatic and Avignon committees to the National Assembly on September 12, 1791. Menou was a nobleman from Tours and military officer who would go on to a long career as a Napoleonic general. He converted to Islam while on campaign in Egypt, where he surrendered the Rosetta Stone to the British after the French defeat at the Battle of Alexandria in March 1801. He became one of a cadre of

24

25

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27

28

See the statute at ADV: 9/J/7/2. “Loi pour la protection des Etablissements Français à Avignon, & pour le maintien de la tranquillité dans cette Ville,” Paris, December 1, 1790. AMA: 4/H/1. Letters of the deputies of Avignon to the National Assembly, June 1790 to October 1791. AD: CP/Rome/913. “Translation of the Note submitted by the Papal Nuncio,” January 15, 1791. Jacques Lescène des Maisons, a justice of the peace; François-Valentin Mulot, a constitutional and Rousseauist priest, formerly a Benedictine and now a municipal officer in Paris; and Raymond de Verninac de Saint-Maur, a former magistrate who would later serve as prefect in the department of the Rhône. See AMA: 4/H/4. The action of the French mediators, June 9 to September 29, 1791. See also Charpenne, 1:155. See, for example, AMA: 4/H/6. Special deliberations of the districts and corporations of Avignon, 1790–1791. Deliberations of the districts, July 14, 1791.

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Napoleonic officials “who were specialists in the process of annexation,” according to Michael Broers.29 In his first step toward this specialization, Menou announced to the National Assembly that, out of 98 communities, 52 had voted for union, with another 17 announcing that they had previously affirmed a desire for union and did not feel the need to do so again; 19 voted against union; and 10 refused to make their views clear. Fifty-two was not only a majority of communities, but also represented a majority of the population – 101,046 out of 152,919 people. Menou proceeded to assert the freedom of these votes, as well as the idea that because it would not seriously injure any foreign countries and because it was probably necessary for avoiding civil war, union ought to be decreed.30 Deputies on the right in the National Assembly immediately attacked these results, and had the mediators summoned for questioning. As noted at the outset of this chapter, however, during continued debate about Avignon the next day, the Assembly was interrupted by news that the king had accepted the constitution.31 On September 14, 1791, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve – at that time one of the stars of the Assembly – argued that the time had come for a vote. A significant majority of deputies concurred with the mediators’ views, and the National Assembly decreed, “In accordance with the wish freely and solemnly proclaimed by the majority of the communities and citizen of the two countries,” the union of Avignon and the Comtat with France.32

29 30

31

32

Michael Broers, Europe Under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London, 1996), 68. Archives parlementaires, vol. XXX, 579–584. See also BMC: Ms/2539/41. “Tableau général de la population & des Citoyens Actifs des Villes & Lieux formant les Etats d’Avignon & Venaissin réunis, & des divers vœux émis pour l’adoption d’un Gouvernement,” and BMC: Ms/2550/9. “Tableau servant à prouver le vœu de la grande majorité du Comtat Venaissin, pour sa réunion à la France.” Finally, more recently, see Lapied, Le Comtat et la Révolution française, 97. Timothy Tackett, among others, has linked the royal family’s attempt to escape France, only to be stopped at Varennes on the night of June 20–21, 1791, to Louis XVI’s acceptance of the constitution but ultimately to the fall of the monarchy. See When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). There does not appear to be a link between the flight and union with Avignon, again underscoring its subordinate importance compared to domestic matters. The decree, “Loi portant réunion des Etats d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin à l’Empire Français,” September 14, 1791, is available at BN: 8/LK2/4650. Recueil de diverses pièces fugitives concernant La Révolution du Comté-Venaissin & de la Ville d’Avignon, 1791, #137.

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The Difficulty of Determining the Sovereign Will Historians have documented the difficulties associated with revolutionaries’ attempts to institute Rousseauian notions of the general will in French politics, with some drawing direct causation from these efforts to the Terror.33 However, this analysis has been limited to the domestic realm, when in fact the process was equally, if not more, fraught in the international arena. Actually determining the people’s will introduced new and underlined existing problems with the use of popular sovereignty as a principle of international law, in both theory and practice. With respect to practice, the mechanics of consulting the people to discern their will was a tremendous challenge, even in the small and relatively self-contained territories of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin.34 Obvious questions arose about whom exactly to consult, who ought to consult them, and how.35 At the time, voting rights – such as they existed – were almost always tied to means and property. But Avignon had no direct taxes and therefore no distinction between what, in France, was beginning to be called active and passive citizenship – the ability to participate directly in politics versus freedom under the law. Thus, basically anyone could and did vote in the June 12, 1790, district polls in which Avignon declared independence and first requested union with France, and in the many subsequent votes, which therefore approached direct democracy. Any man, that is; certainly no women were consulted in any of the plebiscites that took place. Energetic members of the Avignon district assemblies included artisans in the city’s renowned silk industry, merchants, and professionals, but opponents of these votes nonetheless called them the intrigues of “men without fortune and

33

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35

See, most famously, François Furet, “The French Revolution is Over” in Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), especially 48–49, which helped launch a “revisionist” reinterpretation of the political culture of the Revolution. Historians for a long time ignored the practicalities of voting and elections in France during the Revolution. See Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799 (Cambridge, 1996), 1–3. Again, to compare with France, Melvin Edelstein has written that revolutionaries there too “grappled with issues of religion, race and gender as they related to” voting. See The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy (Farnham, 2014), 43.

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without honor.”36 Others dismissed these votes because of their participants’ lack of experience in public affairs. One nobleman opined, “Almost all the deputies will not be used to undertaking diligent work; they will soon grow tired of the repetitiveness of meetings; for the most part they will only have very weak notions of the principles of administration. The true interests of the Province will often be extremely unknown to them.”37 Controversially, violence and coercion hung over the ballots; said one opponent on the votes, “one imprints the sacred character of legality on bloody insurrections . . . on the clamor of a portion of the multitude, deliberating [with] arms in hand.”38 The question of partiality became particularly contentious with respect to the French mediators and soldiers sent to the Midi in the summer of 1791 to end the ongoing civil war and to assess the population’s true desires in a state of calm. Partisans of His Holiness believed either that those favoring France would be privileged or that voters wishing to remain under the pope’s rule would be cowed, or both.39 As one anonymous 36

37

38 39

ADV: 5/F/181/#11. “Mémoire” on the events of June 1790 in Avignon. See also A. Segond, “Les foules révolutionnaires à Avignon” in Provence historique 19:78 (octobre–décembre 1969): 307–328. Even among the “extremists,” the majority were workers from the industrial sector, especially textiles and construction, and peasants: 316. Moreover, the majority of members in the assemblies were mature and with families and so not uncontrollable social elements, such as people in trouble with the law, or young people with nothing to lose or on the margins of society: 328. ADV: 9/J/7/1. “Discours prononcé par M. le Baron de Sainte-Croix à la séance . . . du 25 mars 1790, de l’Assemblée générale des Etats du Comté Venaissin.” This same sort of criticism was leveled by counter-revolutionaries against the National Assembly in Paris as well: “in the past two years, we have seen, as the head of affairs in France, men who should have never dreamed nor expected that they could be admitted to the legislature or a ministry.” See BN: 8-LB39-5808. “Lettre d’un Citoyen Français, à un député de l’Assemblée Nationale, Sur le Discours de M. Maihle, membre du Comité Diplomatique, dans l’affaire des Princes Possessionnés en Alsace, prononcé à la Séance du Samedi 25 Février 1792” (Paris, 1792), 29. Or, they were described not as representatives but rather the organ of a vulgar and self-interested mob: “What is the force of the National Assembly? It is the People, as long as this people does not become disillusioned of the reward it believes will result from the decrees of the Assembly, or it does not become intimidated by the fear of a stronger force.” See BN: 8-LD4-3543. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobet, “Correspondance secrète de M. Gobet, évêque de Lydda,” “Lettre de M. Gobet Evêque de Lydda au chapitre de Basel,” 5. BMC: Ms/2987/29. “La vérité dévoilé,” June 18, 1790. See, for example, the letters to the Archbishop of Avignon, in Villeneuve, June 18, 1791 and September 24, 1791 in Georges Bourgin, ed. La France et Rome de 1788 à 1797 : Régeste des dépêches du cardinal secrétaire d’état, tirées du fonds des ‘Vescovi’ des archives secrètes du Vatican (Paris, 1909), 8–9, 12–13.

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pamphleteer described the scene, “The commissionaires [mediators] were sent; instead of reestablishing peace and tranquility, in accordance with their mission, they favored the scoundrels who terrorized [the province], and they forced the communities of the Comtat to vote in favor of union.”40 The clergyman Jean-Sifrein Maury, leader of the anti-union faction in the National Assembly, called the mediators “missionaries of Revolution.”41 The pope himself accused them and their soldiers of “favoring revolt,” one of the many pretexts on which he dismissed the plebiscites they organized as shenanigans.42 The National Assembly had explicitly ordered the mediators “not to take any ulterior position relative to the rights of France to this region” in their work, and tasked them, moreover, with removing all French people fighting for either side in the civil war.43 When criticized for meeting with pro-France factions by those who opposed union, the mediators responded by asking if it were possible to negotiate peace without talking to combatants on both sides.44 In a report to the National Assembly on September 9, 1791, one of the mediators noted, quite correctly, that the French presence did not prevent many communities from voting in favor of the pope.45 Indeed, during the decisive vote of the summer of 1791, many voters (including some who resisted union) thanked the mediators and French soldiers for the opportunity to express their views in safety.46 For some, that classic revolutionary phenomenon, emigration, cast doubt on the entire process and left the true desire of the majority in Avignon uncertain. Some opponents of union claimed that most propertied citizens “fled their homeland to save their lives” in the time around the crucial vote of June 12, 1790; that poll was, therefore, nothing but “the work of a few seditious types,” such as 40

41 42

43

44 45

46

ADV: 1/F/4. “Réponse à un publiciste concernant les Droits du Saint-Siège sur le comtat Venaissin & sur Avignon.” Achard, 2:145. BN: 8/LK2/4650. Recueil de diverses pièces, #135. “Mémoire officiel communiqué aux Ministres des Cours Etrangères par ordre de Sa Sainteté.” ADV: 5/F/181/#17. “Commission du Roi,” given to Mulot appointing him a mediator, Paris, June 1, 1791. See BN: LB39/4920, 50. Archives parlementaires, vol. XXX, 438–443. See, for example, Archives nationales de France (AN): D/XXIV/1/7/2. Deliberation of Cayranne, August 23, 1791. See, for example, BMC: Ms/2960/92. “Adresse de l’Assemblée Electoral aux Habitants du Département de Vaucluse, arrêté dans la Séance du 13 Août 1791,” Avignon, 1791.

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those without property and foreigners, who had “abandoned themselves to the greatest excesses.”47 On the other hand, a letter to deputies in Paris of July 17, 1791, claimed that votes in Avignon and the Comtat were “perfectly free, in spite of the emigrations that occurred for a variety of reasons; there is still an absolute majority of propertied citizens even counting those absent.”48 France’s annexation of Avignon based on the will of its inhabitants also raised theoretical misgivings. As described in the previous chapter, many people worried about the destabilizing effect the will of the people could have on contemporary boundaries. On November 18, 1790, after Robespierre gave his oft-quoted “The cause of Avignon is the cause of the universe” speech, the Lyonnais cleric Louis Charrier de la Roche warned in the National Assembly that no country, France included, would be free of the impact of the principle of popular sovereignty in relation to its territory, and that France’s overseas colonies could thereby choose to leave.49 One month prior, during his speech on the affair of the princes possessionnés, Merlin de Douai had warned of the potential for a people’s will to be used as justification for secession from France. The specter of peoples choosing to break away from France prompted Merlin to distinguish between unitary sovereign states, from which regional groups could not secede without the agreement of all, and looser amalgams like the Holy Roman Empire or the papal territories, from which they could. The envoys from Avignon to the National Assembly made a similar argument: that polities that did not themselves “form . . . a people, but rather only a section of” an integral people, could not separate from the whole. But such was not the case of Avignon. An anonymous author, again in line with Merlin’s logic, maintained that a people could not willingly leave an association without the permission of the rest, but that this objection did not apply to Avignon because it had never been part of a “free association . . . the only chain that united [Avignon to Rome] 47

48

49

BMC: Ms/2539/30. “Protestation de la majeure partie des Citoyens-propriétaires d’Avignon, contre toute émission de voeu qui tendait à soustraire le pays à la domination du Saint-Siège,” July 12, 1791. AMA: 2/D/32. Active correspondence of the municipality, March 22 to October 5, 1791. Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 531–534. See also ADV: 1/F/4. “Réponse à un publiciste concernant les Droits du Saint-Siège sur le Comtat Venaissin & sur Avignon.”

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was that of slavery.”50 Others argued that having the same ruler did not make a single people out of a diverse group of territories, like the pope’s holdings; this unity could only happen through mutual “help and consent,” as in France.51 Louis-Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, an architect and revolutionary politician, was one of the most perceptive writers on the union of Avignon.52 He similarly argued for the difference between the pope’s holding and France: Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Foix, Provence, etc. are no longer attached to the crown, by virtue of treaties cessions, successions, or other titles of servitude stipulated between Despots, but rather they are integral parts and dissolved in the French Empire by their simple, voluntary cooperation in the new social pact which is today the only title that replaces all those that force or ruses had extorted from the weak.53

Recognition of these different entities, which either formed or did not form an integral whole, introduced another complication – what unit of people ought to be consulted to determine its fate? Pierre Victor Malouet, a former royal colonial official who had served in St. Domingue in the French Caribbean, and who therefore had firsthand knowledge of the way redefining territorial claims based on popular choice could spark unrest, asked, “Sovereignty resides in the people, no doubt; but where does the sovereignty of the people reside? Each of these factions, city, province, market town, can they or can they not detach at will from the union . . . that forms one people?”54 50 51

52

53

54

ADV: 1-J-44. Révolutions de Paris, November 20–27, 1790. ADV: Biblio/65/2. Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon à la France,” Paris, 1790, 11–12. He lived from 1739–1796. Aside from his writings on Avignon, in 1789, during the Estates General, he published “Cahiers du quatrième Ordre, celui des pauvres Journaliers, des Infirmes, des Indigents, etc., l’Ordre sacré des infortunés ; ou Correspondance philanthropique entre les Infortunés, les Hommes sensibles, et les Etats-généraux: pour suppléer au droit de députer directement aux Etats, qui appartient à tout français, mais dont cet Ordre ne jouit pas encore.” This work was republished in 1967. See BN: MFICHE/8/LB39/4874. Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, “Les droits des peuples défendus contre la politique & contre les titres odieux de leurs antiques oppresseurs, ou, la liberté réclamée pour les Avignonois & les Comtadins par-devant l’assemblée nationale,” Paris, April 26, 1791, 8. See also BN: 8/LK2/4650. Recueil de diverses piéces, #87 “Les Comtadins deviendront-ils Français ? Par un Membre de la Société des Amis de la Constitution, séante aux Jacobins à Carpentras,” Carpentras, 1791, 10. BMC: 8/32395. “Motifs d’après lesquels, M. Malouet a demandé l’élargissement des Avignonois détenus à Orange,” July 1790, 1–2.

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This concern intersected with representation: at what level was representation valid – down to each and every individual? Even in Avignon and the Comtat, which were relatively small and discrete areas, one pamphleteer asked, “union can only be the result of the wish issued by the true representatives of the People [but] whose wish can these Representatives proclaim? Their own particular wish?”55 Stupfel, the ardent supporter of the princes possessionnés, asserted that at the level of the province “no Alsatian deputy can alone make claims . . . deputies from the same province contradict and fight one another over rights which emanate from the same common source, that rest on a common title, to which common ancestors owe their common happiness, and from which common posterity, from centuries of experience, knows to expect common prosperity.”56 Other difficulties emerged based on the intersection of popular sovereignty and geography, specific to Avignon and the Comtat because of their historical separation and economic and social differences. Most basically, the Comtat was predominantly rural and its inhabitants peasants whose livelihood derived from agriculture.57 Long-standing tensions between the two areas boiled over into open enmity and war during the Revolution. The French readily viewed Avignon and the Comtat as one unit, rarely contemplating union with one without the other. In the aftermath of declaring their own freedom and requesting union with France, the residents of Avignon at first emphasized their ancient division from the Comtat and asked that their sovereign will be heard, independent of that of the Comtat – a point that the city’s envoys in Paris reiterated.58 Soon, however, people in Avignon recognized that they “must unite all their efforts” with the people of the Comtat “to hasten the moment of union with

55 56

57 58

ADV: 9/J/7/3. “Adresse des Avignonais aux Comtadins,” 1790. BN: 8/LK2/4978. [Stupfel,] “Questions d’état décisives, résultantes pour la province d’Alsace des décrets rendus par l’Assemblée nationale de France depuis le 4 août 1789 jusqu’au 13 février 1790 inclusivement, ou Conciliation des droits particuliers de cette province avec les dits décrets et la Constitution qui en résulte. Suite des Considérations sur la même province” (1790), 27–29. Chobaut, 141. AMA: 4/H/6. Deliberations of the districts, July 14, 1791. See also ADV: Biblio/65/2, Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon à la France,” Paris, 1790, 14–15.

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France.”59 Comtadins, for their part, also emphasized the differences between the two – both in terms of historical claims and contemporary action. They contrasted “the respectful conduct of the people of the Comtat with the manner (seditious, outrageous, and in violation of the law of nations) in which the demagogues of Avignon act against their legitimate Monarch, which gives birth in the hearts [of Comtadins] to feelings of implacable hatred” for the people of Avignon.60 Comtadins constantly accused Avignon of meddling in their affairs.61 All of these competing claims rendered the already tricky matter of actually consulting the people eminently more difficult. Even after the National Assembly decreed union in September 1791, citizens in Carpentras, amid their “cries of joy,” claimed that they had, indeed, wanted union with France but not with Avignon, and asked that in matters civil, juridical, and administrative, their city be separated from Avignon.62 This request serves as but one of many examples of how the supposedly simple matter of the will of the people quickly provoked complications involving factions and dissident groups, territorial integrity and homogeneity, and secession and civil war. The Liberty to Choose Versus the Choice of Liberty The revolution in and annexation of Avignon also showed that no teleological link existed between popular sovereignty and political liberty – as the narrative that champions union with France as the victory of the will of the people over feudalism, dynastic right, or despotism is wont to suggest. Such claims simply echo many of the original advocates of the union. These advocates provocatively 59

60

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62

ADV: 1/L/80. “Procès-verbaux du pacte fédératif entre les Avignonais et le Comtadins,” February, 7 1791. See also BN: NUMM/78749. Louis-Guillaume Tissot, Suite des éclaircissements sur les évènements actuels d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin (Paris, 1791), 2–4. AD: CP/Rome/912. “Manifeste des représentants du Comté Venaissin,” August 5, 1790. See ADV: 6/L/120. Papers of Gabriel-Raymond-Jean-de-Dieu-François d’Olivier (coadjuteur Chancellor of the Rectory and deputy to the Representative Assembly of the Comtat). “Délibérations des députés du Comté Venaissin,” November 1790. See also ADV: 9/J/7/1. “Extrait du procès verbal de l’Assemblée représentative du Comté Venaissin,” December 20, 1790. ADV: 5/F/181/#20 bis. “Délibération des citoyens actifs de la ville de Carpentras,” September 17, 1791.

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questioned whether “kings can sell people like a herd of sheep” or claimed, instead, that “sovereignty cannot be the property of a person.”63 However, the reality was far less simple. Some advocates of union employed arguments that smacked precisely of treating Avignon and its people as feudal property; papal partisans, in turn, made strident claims based on the will of the people. The first calls, both in Avignon and France, for union were predicated upon practically every basis except the choice of those concerned – cultural compatibility between the French and those in Avignon, the need for territorial or economic consolidation or the free circulation of people, the fear that Avignon could become a counterrevolutionary enclave within France, or the strategic need to fully control both the Rhône valley and the east–west overland route to Milan.64 Common at the time, though counterintuitive in retrospect, were assertions of France’s dynastic or treaty rights to the territory, extending all the way back to the age of Charles Martel, or even Roman times.65 Bouche’s first request in the National Assembly in November 1789 was based on medieval treaty law; he argued for union explicitly against the wishes of the local population, writing, “we will annex them without consulting them, without consulting them we can take them.”66 Deputies such as Bouche, Pétion, and Menou sought to invalidate the pope’s claim by nullifying Queen Joan’s original sale based supposedly on, for example, a prohibition in the will of her grandfather, Robert of Naples; her minority status at the time of the transaction; her coercion by the pope; the sale price of 80,000 florins not representing the true value of the territory; or the fact that the sum was possibly never paid.67 The envoys that Avignon sent to Paris after the city’s solemn declaration of independence and request for union 63

64

65

66 67

ADV: Biblio/65/2, Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon a la France,” Paris, 1790, 17–18. See also ADV: 1/J/44. Révolutions de Paris, November 20–27, 1790. See, for example, BN: MFICHE/LB39/3527. Dupart, Lescuier, Peyre, and Tissot’s “Manifeste de la ville et Etat d’Avignon,” Paris, 38 and ADV: 9/J/7/3. Dupart, Lescuier, Peyre, and Tissot’s “Supplément au Manifeste de la ville et état d’Avignon,” 1790. See AD: MD/Rome/32. “Memoire des Droits du Roi sur Avignon et sur le Comté de Venaissin.” Cited in Moulinas, Histoire, 37. ADV: Biblio/75. Charles-François Bouche. “De la restitution du Comtat Venaissin, des ville et état d’Avignon,” Paris, 1789, 15. See also BN: 8/LB48/1027, 29.

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also made such antediluvian claims.68 Similarly, they presented arguments based on other facets of traditional public law, such as the inability of the old Counts of Provence or Toulouse to alienate parts of their patrimony.69 The pope’s advocates – such as Maury and Malouet in the National Assembly and his diplomats in both Paris and Rome – went about rebutting these French claims based on history and treaty law, with examples based in fact and abstract theory. The papacy’s defenders described this violation of law as particularly egregious, committed as it was against His Holiness and the church: for Avignon to accept the French constitution was “to substitute the ancient and legitimate government for the destructive state of anarchy and to subrogate contemporary laws for holy canons, reversing sacred hierarchy, the authority of the church, and even the Catholic faith.”70 Supporters of the pope advanced the argument – surprising given that the papacy was simultaneously making claims to moral supremacy – that even if the original sale by Joan had been wrong or invalid, “these vices would have been covered or rather erased by a constant possession of four or five centuries,” and a sacred one no less.71 Finally, many opponents of the union, and the pope himself, relished the seemingly blatant contradiction between France’s declaration of peace to the world and renunciation of conquests and its annexation of Avignon soon thereafter.72 They sardonically highlighted the resemblance between French claims to Avignon and the type of diplomatic activity in Eastern Europe like the partitioning of Poland, undertaken by powers such as 68

69

70

71

72

ADV: Biblio/65/2. Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon a la France,” Paris, 1790. BN: F/47112 (9) and F/5005 (245). See also ADV: Biblio/75, “De la restitution,” 21–22 and ADV: 9/J/7/3. BMC: Ms/2550/6. Pius VI, “A nos vénérables frères l’archevêque d’Avignon, & les évêques de Carpentras, de Cavaillon, & de Vaison, & à nos chers fils le chapitre, le clergé, & le peuple de la ville d’Avignon, & du Comtat Venaissin, soumis à notre souveraineté temporelle,” Rome, April 23, 1791. BMC: Ms/2536/39. “Question de droit public, concernant la monarchie,” May 1790, 22. See, for example, AD: CP/Rome/914. “Chirographe de notre Saint Père le Pape Pie VI Par le quel Sa Sainteté ratifie, approuve et confirme la Protestation du Commissaire de la Chambre contre toute usurpation de la Ville d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin et annule et déclare comme non avenu le décret du 14 Septembre 1791 de l’Assemblée Nationale qui prononce l’incorporation de ces états à la France,” Rome, 1791. See also AD: CP/Rome/914. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Montmorin, October 5, 1791.

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Russia and Austria, which revolutionaries tended to abhor.73 One writer compared Bouche’s proposal to just such actions, executed “with imprescriptible rights in one hand, and guns in the other.”74 Those in favor of union countered that conquests implied violence, submission, and war.75 The people of Avignon and the Comtat, rather, “wanted to be part of [the French] nation, to be free with it.”76 Notably, many opponents of the union and supporters of the pope made their own claims based on the will of the people. In fact, a unanimous deliberation of the city council in Avignon was the first to employ this tactic, in the immediate aftermath of Bouche’s first call to annex the region, when it affirmed its loyalty to the pope and, similarly, the Representative Assembly of the Comtat rejected union, claiming, “the only legitimate foundation of any acquisition or claim of sovereignty is the free consent of the People.” Astonishingly, the Comtadin assembly defended the pope’s sovereignty, channeling Voltaire, by saying, “people cannot be sold or trafficked like simple mobile or territorial property.”77 The true will of the pious and loyal subjects of His Holiness – unfettered and not coerced, especially in the Comtat – endured as an argument against union even after those subjects began to adopt revolutionary political positions.78 In imitation of the French, cahiers de doléances or lists of grievances prepared in the region in the summer of 1789 often requested radical changes in municipal government or the adoption of the French constitution, sometimes while still avowing loyalty to the pope. Avignon was the first community to make such an appeal, proclaiming, “When the Constitution of France is known, it 73 74

75

76

77

78

Archives parlementaires, vol. XXX, 496. ADV: Biblio/75. “Réponse d’un Comtadin, à la brochure intitulée : Restitution du Comtat Venaissin, des Ville & Etat d’Avignon par M. Bouche,” 5. ADV: Biblio/65/2. Tissot, Peyre, Lescuier, “Précis des moyens de réunion de la ville d’Avignon à la France,” Paris, 1790, 19. ADV: 5/F/181/#22. “Les Comtadins deviendront-ils français ? Par un membre de la Société des Amis de la Constitution, séante aux Jacobins à Carpentras,” Carpentras, 1791. ADV: 9/J/7/1. “Déclaration et protestation de l’Assemblée des Etats du Comté Venaissin, réunis aux membres du Comité des mêmes Etats, contre la Motion faite, au sujet de cette Province, à l’Assemblée Nationale de France,” November 25, 1789. See also ADV: Biblio/75. “Des droits du pape sur le Comté Venaissin et l’état d’Avignon et réfutation de l’écrit de M. Bouche,” Geneva, 1790, 41. Lapied, 17–18.

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will be scrupulously followed [here].”79 After that city unambiguously vocalized its desire for both French-style administration and union with France, the diverse communities of the Comtat were left grappling with these choices, as reflected in their own cahiers that often simultaneously proclaimed their allegiance to the pope and requested reform of the province on the French model.80 In June 1790, the Representative Assembly in the Comtat sent its homage and congratulations to the National Assembly in Paris on its glorious work: “Encircled by France, linked to the French by intimate and daily links, speaking the same language, having the same mores, the same opinions, making up, for all intents and purposes, but one people, it is necessary that we be governed by the same laws”; thus, it “adopted the French Constitution, and all the decrees of the National Assembly of France.” However, the Comtat was only to follow French laws that were “compatible with our locality and with the respect due our Sovereign. Yes, Sires, the adoption of French laws . . . could not bring about the slightest reduction of respect and inviolable loyalty that we maintain until our last breath, for our beneficent monarch.” For Comtadins, then, loyalty to the pope was based on their “free consent” and “unanimous wish.” Part of the motivation for this address is clear in the passage in which the Comtat’s deputies declared themselves thankful that they need not worry about a threat from France, as both polities had embraced liberty as the basis for their respective regimes. Any fears Comtadins had that the French harbored designs on their territory “soon dissipated . . . [and the Representative Assembly] was fully reassured by reading [the National Assembly’s] decrees on Corsica” and the decree renouncing conquests.81 Here, therefore, advocates of the pope openly recognized the principle behind the union of Corsica – that it was based on the will of the 79

80

81

See ADV: 6/L/119. “Essai des doléances de la ville d’Avignon,” 1789. See also BMC: Ms/2820. “Essai des doléances de M. les cordonniers de la ville d’Avignon,” 1790. BMC: Ms/5985. Cahiers de doléances (1789–1790) Avignon, the Comtat-Venaissin, Orange. Aubignan, on May 22, 1790, proclaimed these as its first and second requests, 71; Caderousse, December 29, 1789, asked explicitly for the adoption of the French constitution and the suppression of feudal rights, 238; these trends were followed in Carpentras, 246; La Garde Raréol, 305; Rasteau, 349; Roaix, 353; Thor, May 20, 1790, 360; and Vacqueyras, 366. AD: CP/Rome/912. “Copie de l’adresse de l’Assemblée Representative du Comté Venaissin à l’Assemblée Nationale,” Carpentras, June 11, 1790.

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people concerned – enlisting this logic to justify remaining with the Holy See and to encourage France to respect that principle and Comtadins’ decision. When it became apparent that most of the people in both Avignon and the Comtat were opting for union with France, advocates of the pope shifted their argument, emphasizing a Hobbesian social contract as a necessary corollary of the will of the people. They argued that a synallagmatic agreement existed between rulers and ruled, and that the people could not unilaterally throw off their sovereign. An anonymous pamphleteer asked whether the “integrity of a prince to fulfill his engagements does not impose on the people the obligation to maintain, and to maintain inviolably, their oath of loyalty to him? If peoples do not want their prince to dispose of them without their consent, can the people dispose of themselves without the consent of the prince?”82 Maury, exasperated by so much talk about the rights of the people, argued that the corresponding rights of kings were being ignored.83 Not only are the contradictions in both sides’ positions evident with hindsight, but also they were clear to contemporaries. The insightful writer Dufourny recognized that France, having thrown off the idea that dynastic claims mattered for territory and instead acknowledged the importance of the will of the people, “cannot, without perjuring itself, invoke again any of its ancient property titles.” Indeed, many contemporaries argued that France was doing precisely that in advancing medieval and treaty claims to Avignon and the Comtat.84 In a speech on May 2, 1791, on behalf of the diplomatic committee of the National Assembly, Menou asked, about Avignon, “Is this about dispossessing the pope, by resuscitating the system of feudalism?”85 82 83 84

85

BMC: Ms/2536/39, 34–35. Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 564–580. Debate of November 20, 1790. BN: MFICHE 8/LB39/3532. Louis-Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, “Supplément à la défense des droits des Avignonois, des Comtadins et autres Peuples à la plus entière liberté. Pour répondre aux diverses objections et particulièrement aux Députés, au Rapporteur et a M. de Robespierre,” Paris, 1790, 15. See also BN: MFICHE/LB39/ 3531. Louis-Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, “Des droits des Avignonois à la plus entière liberté. De la nécessité de rédiger une déclaration des droits des Nations avant de statuer à leur demande,” Paris, 1790, 13. See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XXV (Du 13 avril au 11 mai 1791) (Paris, 1886), 452–67, for Menou’s report.

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Moreover, the people of Avignon and some in Paris, such as Robespierre, were increasingly frustrated that the National Assembly seemed to be refusing to honor its self-proclaimed devotion to the will of the people, as it delayed making a final decision about union when the desire of the people of Avignon was so clear. The city government in Avignon lamented, “we see with suffering that committees continually send back a matter so essential, on which depends the tranquility and happiness” of Avignon and the Comtat.86 Similarly, many of the positions taken by those opposing union, in particular the idea that Comtadins could adopt the French constitution and maintain their loyalty and “respect due to the Sovereign Pontiff,” were incongruous and easily ridiculed.87 Many Comtadins wanted to put in place the mechanics of French revolutionary administration, but not to embrace the principle of popular sovereignty that served as their legitimizing basis. Moreover, these self-avowed believers in the National Assembly’s work who remained loyal to the pope may have been less than honest: the envoys of the very same Representative Assembly that lauded the National Assembly and its constitution wrote to Carpentras from Paris to complain that they were consistently being denied the ability to address the National Assembly by pro-union deputies like Bouche, adding, “It does not matter, we have not been upset of being denied the honor . . . of sharing [this forum] with rebels.”88 Finally, many reveled in the biting irony that the Representative Assembly in Carpentras “multiplied to infinity its oaths of loyalty to the pope,” while His Holiness formally prohibited the gathering.89 Thus, in Avignon, as in Alsace and Corsica before, the 86

87

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AMA: 2/D/32. Active correspondence of the municipality, March 22 to October 5, 1791. Letter to Tissot in Paris, March 22, 1791. ADV: 9/J/7/1. “Extrait du procès verbal de l’Assemblée représentative du Comté Venaissin,” May 29, 1790. BMC: Ms/4199. Correspondence of the Representative Assembly and its envoys in Paris, 1790 and 1791. Letter from the envoys in Paris, November 29, 1790. ADV: 6/L/1. Letter from “Membres de la Société des Amis de la Constitution” to “Amis et frères,” Avignon, January 13, 1791. Unlike these contemporaries, historians have missed the inconsistencies or undervalued their importance, instead advancing a clearer though misrepresentative narrative. Albert Sorel merely remarks that sometimes French revolutionaries invoked old treaty law in Avignon and sometimes they did not – all the while aiming to show the similarity between ancien régime and revolutionary foreign policy goals in expanding the state. He therefore neglects what was unique and compelling about the confusion of legal idioms at this time, of old and

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principle of popular sovereignty was clearly neither the exclusive purview of the French nor a harbinger of liberty. Avignon as a Cause of Conflict and a Prototype for Conquest The union of Avignon had important consequences for international politics and law, beyond the immediate context of southern France. Because it allowed French revolutionary principles to transcend into international affairs, despite revolutionaries’ initial efforts to tread gingerly, the union heightened the potential for international conflict with the powers of monarchical Europe, as had been the case with the union of Corsica and especially the affair of the princes possessionnés in Alsace. More importantly, it introduced a new and dangerous pretext for conquest. Although in Avignon revolutionaries sought to exhibit scrupulous concern for the will of the people, such respect was tenuous in any claim to self-determination – and it could prove altogether illusory. At first, most revolutionaries in Paris equivocated over the question of union. Just as they had waited with the princes possessionnés, forcefully arguing the full implications of the principle of popular sovereignty in Alsace only after it became clear that their opponents were intractable, they prevaricated over the union of Avignon. This time, they were vigilant not to antagonize the pope while various disputes over religious matters in France were still unresolved. Many revolutionaries were especially wary, because in Avignon they would be annexing another power’s territory, of undermining the tenets of traditional international law.

new means to achieve those goals. See Sorel’s L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 2, La chute de la royauté (Paris, 1925), 107. Meanwhile, Aira Kemiläinen, admittedly focusing on the question of nationalism, merely finds it odd that both sides of the debate used the same arguments: “It is peculiar that both the defenders of union and their adversaries referred to both [popular will and ancient rights]” without really plumbing why. See his “L’affaire d’Avignon” (1789–1791) from the Viewpoint of Nationalism (Helsinki, 1971), 164. More recently, Marc Belissa uses the episode to chastise revolutionaries when they hewed to older-style legal arguments – for not being more pure in the application of “cosmopolitan liberty.” He thereby reifies the idea of the Revolution as a Manichean struggle. Marc Belissa, Fraternité universelle et intérêt national (1713–1795) : Les cosmopolitiques du droit des gens (Paris, 1998), 233, 241.

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From the start, the pope clearly did not think well of the revolutionary innovations occurring in France. During the summer of 1789, François-Joachim de Pierre, Cardinal de Bernis, France’s ambassador in Rome, reported that Pius VI was concerned that the pretensions of the Third Estate did not bode well for the church or its clergy.90 After the night of August 4, 1789, when feudalism was abolished in France, the papal nuncio wrote to Montmorin, the Foreign Minister, protesting the National Assembly’s decree rescinding the annates, a payment Rome had received since time immemorial; like opponents of change in Corsica and Alsace, Bernis intoned, “One does not destroy by a simple stroke of the pen the most ancient of our treaties.”91 The agreement to which he referred – the Concordat, between the Holy See and the Gallican church concerning the rights and privileges of each, signed in Bologna in 1516 by Pope Leo X and King Francis I – was rivaled only by the Peace of Westphalia in the canon of early modern French international legal commitments. Although the supreme pontiff himself maintained a decorous silence about the Revolution, for a time, French envoys in Rome reported all sorts of rumors of his displeasure, as well as potential avenues of action, such as a letter to be sent to all French bishops.92 The dispute became even more divisive after the National Assembly adopted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, on July 12, 1790. What is more, many aristocratic émigrés, and, indeed, the king’s two pious aunts, Princesses Victoire and Adélaïde, ultimately settled in Rome, contributing to the counter-revolutionary spirit in the city. And still, Pius VI kept quiet, which Bernis described as based on a desire that hasty judgments and impatience not precipitate a schism, even as popular gossip implied that a rupture was imminent.93 Montmorin and other French officials, for their part, wished His Holiness would make a decision or some sort of pronouncement so that they would know where they stood.94 When the National Assembly 90 91

92

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AD: CP/Rome/911. Letter from Bernis in Rome to Montmorin, July 15, 1789. AD: CP/Rome/911. Letter from the papal nuncio in Paris to Montmorin, August 8, 1789; letter from Bernis in Rome to Montmorin, August 19, 1789. AD: CP/Rome/912. Letters from Bernis in Rome to Montmorin in Paris, March 10 and 16, 1790. AD: CP/Rome/913. Letter from Bernis in Rome to Montmorin, November 2, 1790. AD: CP/Rome/913. Letter from Montmorin in Paris to Bernis in Rome, October 5, 1790.

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voted on the question of Avignon on November 20, 1790, most deputies subscribed to the opinion, enunciated by Mirabeau, that union was not in France’s current interest. Although not explicitly declared, the understanding was that the French prudently wished to settle the matter of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy with Rome before deciding on Avignon.95 Montmorin also communicated this position to Philippe de Ségur, who succeeded Bernis as French ambassador in Rome. In his instructions to the new envoy, Montmorin counseled that Avignon was one of many matters of contention between the Holy See and France, adding, “it is very probable that it will be discussed . . . with bitterness.” However, as yet, the Assembly had not decreed anything that substantively affected the rights of the pope in Avignon and, therefore, Ségur should “only respond that the disposition of the King is to maintain the old state of things” until “the Assembly pronounces otherwise.”96 The pope finally and formally condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in two bulls, Quod aliquantum and Charitas, of March 10 and April 13, 1791, respectively. Calm broken, he used most emphatic language, calling the Assembly’s actions “the sounds of war that philosophical innovators . . . excite against the Catholic Religion.”97 The long-expected break between France and Rome had finally occurred, freeing the National Assembly to act in accordance with the will of the people in Avignon. The pope himself would now not tarry in denouncing French activities there, too. He “felt he was indispensably obligated to denounce” the actions of France in sending troops, back in November 1790: Such a duty is all the more pressing today and it is all the less permitted to put off fulfilling it, [now] that there is very evident proof of effrontery, and coordinated efforts to spread the same principles all over. No one can ignore the plots hatched to propagate [these principles] with an incredible rapidity, such that barely can one believe that there is in Europe at this moment a state

95 96

97

Archives parlementaires, vol. XX, 580. AD: CP/Rome/914. “Mémoire pour servir d’Instructions au Sr. Philippe de Ségur . . . allant à Rome en qualité d’Ambassadeur Extraordinaire de Sa Majesté près le Saint Siège,” Paris, 1791. AD: CP/Rome/914. “Bref de notre très Saint Père le Pape Pie VI sur le serment civique prêté par les Ecclésiastiques & sur les élections et les consécrations des faux Evêques dans le Royaume de France,” Rome, April 13, 1791.

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which shelters such atrocities and where our Holy Religion, authority, and public tranquility are all equally compromised.98

Whereas His Holiness had been both patient and reticent over religious matters so as to prevent a schism, in the temporal realm of international law he not only immediately cried anathema at France’s annexation of Avignon and the principles that underlay it, but also emphasized the need swiftly to recognize, oppose, and ultimately stop their spread. In so doing, he greatly contributed to the legal and wider conflict. The union, therefore, added to tension and the imminence of war in Europe – pitting France against not only the papacy but also Catholic states such as Austria, which not surprisingly backed the pope, and even Orthodox Russia. Even before the union was decreed, all sides were aware that events in Avignon were being followed intently across Europe. Comtadins who opposed union felt it worthwhile “to testify to Europe, that [they] persist and will persist in the solemn sentiment” of inviolable loyalty to His Holiness.99 After the union, the pope and those around him tried to adopt a tone of stoic, or perhaps spiritual, resignation, claiming, “In this state of things . . . all that is left . . . is to unite [our] tears . . . in submitting entirely to the decrees of Providence that, in its impenetrable aims, permits such a bitter persecution against its Church.”100 In reality, they did anything but.101 The French envoy in Rome reported that the Curia was preparing an official response to France’s annexation. In mid-November 1791, France’s agent secured a copy of a letter to be sent to the ambassadors and ministers of every Catholic power in Rome, and forwarded it to Paris. The pope complained that after France had “published and reiterated to all the Courts of Europe the most formal and exaggerated protestations of having renounced all aggression and conquests,” the National Assembly “impudently dares . . . to authorize and order the 98

99

100

101

AD: CP/Rome/914. The pope’s letter of protest over the annexation of Avignon, included with a letter from Bernard in Rome to Montmorin on November 16, 1791. ADV: 9/J/7/1. Declaration by the Representative Assembly of the Comtat, June 15, 1790. ADV: 1/J/39. Letters of the Secretary of State of the pope to the Bishops of Avignon and the Comtat from the Vatican Archives, to the Archbishop of Avignon in Villeneuve, October 1, 1791. The projection of papal authority in realms temporal at this time bears the influence of Bellarmine. See Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), especially 261–292.

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most violent and criminal usurpation.” He accused France of not only trying over the previous months “to put into doubt the solidity and validity of titles,” but also supporting the “alleged claim of the people of Avignon and the Comtat . . . to be declared French” – all of which he dismissed as “sophism and imposture” to the end of seizing his province. Interestingly, he did not explicitly reject the idea that the people of Avignon and the Comtat could decide this matter; rather, he charged that “by fraud, by armed force, by imprisoning many loyal subjects, by the most cruel vexations, the majority of Citizens either fled or were not in a state to vote,” and thus that France had “hastened to exploit the will of the inhabitants.” But he asserted that the sovereigns of Europe were too intelligent to be fooled by France’s charade. Thus, he figured that his fellow monarchs’ unvarying sense of right, and their exacting justice, put [him] in the necessary position of not delaying in letting them know of such a serious outrage, and of formally and solemnly requesting their assistance . . . These same sentiments inspire the firmest confidence that, rightly indignant at such an outrage, they will employ all their power, and will equally want to lend their powerful support to have annulled a decree that, by invading a sovereign [territory] belonging to the Holy See, insults the most sacred rights and compromises openly the territorial claims of all the sovereigns of Europe.102

Thus, much like the prince possessionnés, the pope aimed to garner support for his individual loss by casting it as a threat to all of Europe.103 France’s relations with the papacy deteriorated further, and affected diplomacy practically. When the papacy refused to recognize the French chargé d’affaires, Alphonse-Timothée Bernard could only communicate with Francesco Saverio de Zelada, Cardinal Secretary of State, via the intermediary of his son! Then on November 23, 1791, Cardinal Zelada informed the young man that the Holy See was no longer dealing with France at all.104 In February 1792, Bernard reported that most foreign courts had responded in a “satisfactory” manner to the pope’s protest, “but yet 102

103

104

AD: CP/Rome/914. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Montmorin on November 16, 1791. ADV: 1/F/4. “Réponse à un publiciste concernant les Droits du Saint-Siège sur le comtat Venaissin & sur Avignon.” AD: CP/Rome/914. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Montmorin, November 23, 1791.

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without announcing anything specific.”105 The Portuguese responded that they had already taken the issue up with their ambassador. Santini, the Russian agent in Rome, had been circulating a letter he received the week before, in which Catherine the Great’s foreign minister thanked the pope for the report and said the empress was intently following the subject of the annexation, which was “offensive to the law of nations.” He concluded by noting, “although Russia did not have direct political relations with the Court of Rome . . . if possible, her Imperial Majesty will unite very willingly her efforts with those of other Powers to insist on the rights” of the Holy See in Avignon.106 The Austrian emperor, for his part, never responded to the pope’s first missive, leading His Holiness to write to him again about the “great and manifest injustice” of the annexation of Avignon, asking that he, “placed at the head of a great Empire, surpassing in dignity and in Strength all other princes . . . employ all your measures to render us justice in Avignon.”107 A few days later, word arrived in Rome that Leopold II was almost dead – indeed, that he had probably not seen any of the pope’s letters before falling ill – but that no matter what opinion his successor took on the matter, the death and subsequent election of a new Holy Roman Emperor would likely delay any response to the affair.108 Revolutionaries, having abandoned their earlier caution in decreeing annexation, nevertheless did not yet suppose that their differences with Rome were irreconcilable or that hostilities were imminent. The National Assembly offered the pope an indemnity for his lost territory, as they had the princes possessionnés for their abolished feudal rights.109 Advocates of the union also highlighted, as they had before the National Assembly’s decree, the absurdity of other powers going to war with France over Avignon: “If the pope [and] foreign powers seriously would like to undertake a war against 105 106 107

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AD: CP/Rome/915. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Lessart in Paris, February 1, 1792. Ibid. AD: CP/Rome/915. Letter from the pope in Rome to the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, March 3, 1792. AD: CP/Rome/915. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Lessart in Paris, March 14, 1792. AD: CP/Rome/915. Letter from Bernard in Rome to Dumouriez in Paris, April 4, 1792. See also AD: MD/Rome/76. “Mémoire servant d’instructions pour le C.en Cacault allant à Rome en qualité de chargé des affaires de la République Française,” Paris, January 19, 1793.

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France . . . can one imagine that they have grasped the nature of the union of a city situated in the middle of France . . . that, not being able to influence in the current balance of power in Europe . . . [is] no sort of external threat for powers?” Charles-François Dumouriez, who became Minister of Foreign Affairs in March 1792 and would go on to greater renown as a general, similarly noted that Avignon could not possibly be a pretext for war: “This State is an enclave in the middle of our meridional Provinces.”110 The envoys Avignon sent to Paris argued, “If the pope had sought a pretext for open combat, he should have chosen his annates, his tithes,” and that, similarly, if foreign powers were in need of excuses, “they would have found them in the Family Pact [the dynastic alliance between Bourbon France and Spain], in the aristocratic fury of the émigrés, in the prescription of despotism.”111 Revolutionaries were, therefore, not undertaking a premeditated program of aggrandizement in Avignon, as illustrated by the delicate manner in which they approached the union. They were correct to question the provocative nature of the union in terms of European power politics, by highlighting the meager material stakes involved. Nonetheless, France’s annexation of Avignon based on the will of the people was still enormously contentious, most of all because it set the precedent for a new kind of annexation. Although at inception the union was based veritably on the choice of the people concerned, both the ideological precepts and the legal forms set out in Avignon would be used repeatedly in the years to come, when the people’s choice was the least motivation – or, for the most part, nonexistent. Indeed, when figures championed the will of the people in order to annex Avignon and other territories, precisely because they were not proclaiming a clear principle, they ended up opening a Pandora’s Box in which French national interest and the “popular will” became hopelessly muddled. As was the case with Corsica and Alsace, many opponents of the union foresaw the potential evils inherent in transfers of territory based on the popular will. They argued that possession based on historic, dynastic, or feudal titles was the only basis for stability in international 110

111

AN: D-XXIII-4–14. Dispatch from Dumouriez to Noailles, ambassador of France in Vienna, March 27, 1792. ADV: 9/J/7/3. “Supplément au Manifeste de la ville et état d’Avignon,” 1790. See also AN: D/XXIII/4/14. Dispatch from Dumouriez to Noailles, ambassador of France in Vienna, March 27, 1792.

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relations; the revolutionaries’ position, they asserted, called into doubt all territorial claims and, indeed, all international treaties ratified over the centuries that had not taken into account the will of the people, thus auguring the very collapse of diplomatic and legal relations between states. As one opponent of union reminded the French, just as earlier opponents had done, if the logic of popular sovereignty were applied to the entire map of Europe, “you yourselves also [must] return therefore the provinces that you have added to your kingdom by such illegitimate means” as conquest, negotiation, or dynastic inheritance or marriage.112 The author even invoked revolutionaries’ earlier decree of union with Corsica, asking, “was the [1768] conquest of Corsica legitimate? No, of course not, by your proper confession; since you declared that you would not consider yourselves the real possessors until the moment when this people asked for the promulgation of your decrees on the island.” He thereby accused the French of failing to apply this same logic in all of their provinces acquired by the laws of the ancien régime. This accusation of hypocrisy was not, however, the author’s most incendiary accusation. In the case of Avignon, the gravest anxieties were not retrospective but rather forward-looking. The author exclaimed, “What a revelation, this memorable decree, for all proposals of union of foreign provinces with France! Conquest is therefore in your eyes only what it is in the eyes of philosophy.”113 Or, as Malouet warned, “Any annexation is now possible so long as one can prove or simply conjure up a supposed popular will in favor of the takeover.”114 Opponents of the union quickly seized on this point, demanding to know, if this principle “sufficed to strip a sovereign of a part of his state, why stop if on such a happy path? Savoy, Nice, the Low Countries, the Palatinate.”115 These concerns were prescient. France used similar, if increasingly insincere legal claims about the will of the people derived from the precedent of Avignon in justifying its annexation of precisely these four areas, and many others. However, counter-revolutionaries were not the only ones who opposed this logic of territorial change based on the will of the 112 114

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ADV: Biblio/75. “Réponse d’un Comtadin,” 3. 113 Ibid. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XVIII (Du 12 août 1790 au 15 septembre 1790) (Paris, 1884), 370–373. Debate of August 27, 1790. ADV: Biblio/75. “Réponse d’un Comtadin,” 12.

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people. An eccentric thinker, Dufourny argued that, in opposing the union, he was not defending aristocratic rights; he hated the rights of the pope, the Count of Provence, and the King of France equally.116 Instead, he was speaking out against both the French, who insisted France had any claim to Avignon, and the people of Avignon who too quickly asked for union without reflecting on the sacrifice of their hardwon freedom.117 He especially opposed another figure who claimed to support the people of Avignon because their cause was that of the “universe” – Maximilien Robespierre. Dufourny argued against the assertion by Robespierre and others that just because it had renounced aggressive conquests, France could not possibly chauvinistically extend its territory. Although they maintained “the principle that territories and sovereignty only belong to nations,” Dufourny believed that the French were opening avenues for conquest based on “all the passions of the wild man, united to the vices of the social man, temptation of ambition, consumptiveness of greed, or the gangrene of avarice,” and quoted the fable of La Fontaine about a lion king who eats a lamb, and the wily fox who tells him it is permissible.118 Dufourny, therefore, went beyond the argument that dynastic and treaty claims needed to be respected because of the stability they afforded in ordering territorial divisions or the political world. He argued that, by rendering such claims dependent on the people – fickle, contradictory, and difficult to consult, as the revolution in Avignon and the Comtat had proven – these claims were decoupled from any mooring that could prevent the entire system from descending not into anarchy, but something worse: a contest driven by the worst depravities of man. Conclusion The decree of union brought on “outbursts of joy” in Avignon and the Comtat, and three days of celebrations including “salvos of artillery, fireworks, dances, [and] cheers of ‘Vive la Nation! Vive l’Assemblée Nationale et le Roi des Français!’”119 The result was not so celebratory for His Holiness. He would never recover the city. In February 1797, in

116 117 118

BN: MFICHE/8/LB39/4874. Dufourny, “Les droits des peuples défendus,” 4. BN: MFICHE/8/LB39/3532. Dufourny, “Supplément à la défense,” 2. Ibid., 4, 17–19. 119 ADV: 1/J/44. Révolutions de Paris, September 17–24, 1791.

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the midst of war in the Italian peninsula, Pius VI agreed to the Treaty of Tolentino in which, by article VI, he renounced “purely and simply” all his rights to Avignon and the Comtat and gave them over to the French Republic, a decision that was made binding on him and his successors in perpetuity.120 This concession did not prevent Pius VII, in 1817, from publishing the bull Vineam quam plantavit, mapping out the jurisdictions of new dioceses in France. The Supreme Pontiff felt it necessary to add, “In decreeing [a] new district, which includes the duchy of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, we do not intend to give prejudice against the incontestable rights of the Holy See to this country.”121 Indeed, the Holy Father had protested against France being granted Avignon at the Congress of Vienna, under the logic that the victory of 1814–1815 nullified all that had occurred since 1789. The May 1814 Treaty of Paris between France and the powers of the Sixth Coalition reduced France to its 1792 boundaries, and article III, paragraph 13 explicitly “assured France the possession of the principality of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin”; the second Treaty of Paris, after Napoleon’s return and “Hundred Days,” maintained this part of the settlement even as it further reduced France to its 1789 frontiers.122 The pope, therefore, took one of the last contradictory positions on the union of Avignon and France, and was duly accused of challenging “a resolved point” of law established in sacred treaty, “one of the first truths of our public law.”123 René Moulinas, like many others, is correct to observe that by 1789 there was not much difference between Avignon and French Provence: “The delimitation of the two domains, that of the pope and of the king, [was] entirely political: between the subjects of the Holy See and of [Louis XVI] there was no difference . . . in language, custom, interest, or way of thinking.”124 In part because of these similarities, groups in both Avignon and the Comtat pushed for union with France – much like local forces in Corsica, who embraced the principle of popular sovereignty pragmatically, for their own ends. France proceeded 120

121

122 124

“Peace Treaty of Tolentino between the Holy See and the French Republic,” Tolentino, February 19, 1797. See also Chapter 5. Cited in BN: 8/LB48/1027. Moureau, Réflexions sur les protestations du Pape Pie VII, 4–5. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., 39. 123 BN: 8/LK2/614. Hutteau, Analyse de la vente, iv, 70–71. René Moulinas, Journées Révolutionnaires à Avignon (Nîmes, 1988), 7–8.

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cautiously at first, apprehensive as it was to alienate the pope or other European powers – but, ultimately, the National Assembly decreed union, and historians have shown that a majority of people in Avignon and the Comtat did, in fact, wish to join France. Thus, the move almost certainly reflected the true will of the people. And yet, fuller investigation of the history shows that the revolution in Avignon and its legacy for international law was more complicated than described by past historians, for whom focusing on the rhetoric attending the virtue and victory of national self-determination has been enough. Instead, at the time of the French Revolution, devotion to the supposedly clear principle of popular sovereignty created, in Avignon, a theoretical and practical morass in international law in which territorial claims became unmoored from their traditional bases. This problem was due, to a certain extent, to the extraordinary difficulty of consulting the people to determine their will, and, indeed, the complexity of ascertaining what unit of people was appropriate to canvass. This quagmire was also evident in the way that neither advocates of union nor supporters of the pope monopolized any legal argument, neither dynastic treaty law, nor the popular will. Even after the French union with Avignon, the National Assembly also decreed two small areas to be integral parts of France – Dombes, in the southeast and with a complicated history of political independence, and Henrichemont, an autonomous principality in the center of France. Both territories were more like Corsica or Alsace than Avignon; both had, prior to the Revolution, unique and antiquated relationships with the French state. When their full union was decreed, on October 16 and November 4, 1791, respectively, the justification was – surprisingly – treaty law from the 1760s.125 In the end, the union of Avignon provided a pretext upon which later revolutionaries could transform the idea of territorial transfer based on the principle of popular sovereignty, as had developed in Avignon, into a means to justify new and potentially chauvinistic annexations. Rather than triumphantly highlight the birth of a celebrated principle of international law, the union was the culmination of a process during 125

AN: AD/XV/41. “Loi Portant réunion à l’Empire Français, du pays de Dombes & dépendances,” Paris, October 16, 1791; “Loi Portant reunion à la France du pays d’Enrichemont,” Paris, November 4, 1791. The former listed as its basis a contract of March 17, 1762; the latter, a contract of September 24, 1760.

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the early French Revolution whereby the will of the people hastened unanticipated and unprecedented legal change in international affairs. The union also illustrated many attendant dangers that foreshadowed later complexities associated with nationality, sovereignty, and territory – and that continue to this day. Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, believed national self-determination to be “simply loaded with dynamite.” Among other concerns that echo from the time of the union of Avignon with France, he argued that, “Without a definite unit which is practical, application of this principle is dangerous to peace and stability.”126 Modern theorists similarly assert that national self-determination is “not just contested, but notoriously ambiguous,” “misunderstood and misused,” or even “flawed, fatally so.”127 One of these theorists has wondered, “If the pursuit of the ideal of national self-determination has caused such upheaval, surely the belief that it is a panacea must be fallacious.”128 The history of the union of Avignon shows that, at its origin, the principle was already believed by some to be a panacea, while simultaneously seen by others to be the opposite. Faced with this paradox, Dufourny advocated establishing “the bases of the legitimate relations between societies, their moral and noncontractual relations, which would form a declaration of the law of nations”; only then could all nations enter into coalitions or unify in a universal society based on the rights and duties of individuals.129 He was, like all who have tried to develop a uniform code of international law, defeated by the details and could only proffer platitudes: This necessary declaration, the work of the most pure philosophy, cannot be the product of the analysis of conventions or treaties, either ancient or contemporary, by which the leaders of nations have until this day settled

126

127

128

129

Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, 1921), 97. He cites notes he wrote to himself on December 30 and 20, 1918, respectively, just after landing in France for the Paris peace conference. The latter two observations/conclusions are from Omar Dahbour, Illusion of the Peoples: A Critique of National Self-Determination (Lanham, Md., 2003), x, and the first from James Summer, Peoples and International Law: How Nationalism and Self-Determination Shape a Contemporary Law of Nations (Leiden, 2007), xxxiii. Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy (New York, 1994), 209. BN: MFICHE/LB39/3531. Dufourny, “Des droits des Avignonois à la plus entière liberté,” 3–4, 8.

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their own personal interests; but it must be the fruit of the profound mediation of the most learned people, and most of all the most virtuous.130

His failure to articulate a moral vision of international law did not preclude the reality that – in the absence of one – after the precedents set in Corsica, Alsace, and Avignon, territorial claims could easily be justified by the principle of popular sovereignty, but driven by many different motivations once they became unhinged from their traditional berths – which is precisely what happened next.

130

Ibid., 6.

3 Revolutionary Power and the Annexation of Belgium

In early 1793, an official in the French army declared that, “forced to make war on tyrants [and] in chasing them from [Belgium],” France “had to abolish all the social institutions established by force and tyranny.” According to this logic, the French were justified in making sweeping social and political changes in Belgium, and, by extension, other lands – including even annexing them – against the wishes of the local populace. But why were the French driven to take this sort of action in Belgium, as if they had no other choice, and how did they acquire this imagined authority to do so? In the mind of this official, it was because these other peoples “could very well not have the courage to want to be free . . . [I]t is in this spirit that [France] chose to exercise the pouvoir révolutionnaire,” or revolutionary power.1 That a French military bureaucrat should make such a claim is surprising, for both its assertiveness and its novelty. Before the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars, few French officials had been concerned with promoting the will of the people outside their borders. The government in Paris only recognized the international legal implications of the principle of popular sovereignty when it was forced to do so, often grudgingly, by the cases in Corsica and Alsace. However, after France declared war on Austria on April 20, 1792, this reticence diminished.2 As French 1

2

Archives nationales de France (AN): D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique), dossier 5, “Observations sur le décret du 15 Xbre 1792.” Technically, the French declared war on the King of Hungry and Bohemia, the most elevated of the Austrian Habsburg dynastic titles, because Francis II had yet to be

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armies advanced into new territory, they expected that the virtues of popular government would be as apparent to the peoples there as they had been to those within France. Therefore, the French replicated the protocol for consulting the people that had been first employed in Avignon, proactively attempting to determine the people’s will in not only Belgium, but also Savoy, Nice, and a handful of other small areas they occupied in the early course of the war. But sometimes the results surprised them. Because the French worked from legal principles that had developed in Corsica and Alsace and culminated in the union of Avignon with France, there was a fair amount of continuity from before the outbreak of war in terms of their justifications for annexing foreign territory and the process they used to do so. Revolutionaries maintained their commitment to the will of the people as generating the terms for a true title to territory. They organized public assemblies and plebiscites based on earlier precedents, and in many cases copied earlier language used in decrees of union. The entire process by which the French consulted the people of Belgium, Savoy, and Nice, and the rhetoric and logic that underpinned their actions, were uncannily similar to what had transpired in Avignon, although with gradually more cynical intention and increasing manipulation. And yet, there were even more startling departures. The idea of claiming territory based on the will of the people – already controversial by the standards of dynastic international law – soon metamorphosed into the pouvoir révolutionnaire. Unlike before, some revolutionary officials were now suggesting in Belgium that, should a people lack the courage, intelligence, or maturity to be free, the French must assist them. The pouvoir révolutionnaire therefore represented a provocative innovation, by which the French began to decide what they felt was best for the people of other nations and to assert it by force, if necessary. It might, therefore, sound like a hollow pretext, a new iteration of raison d’état – the belief especially of realist analysts of international relations that states always pursue their interests. And yet, the pouvoir révolutionnaire was not a complete formally elected Holy Roman Emperor. See the “Loi portant Déclaration de Guerre contre le Roi de Hongrie & de Bohême,” April 20, 1792. It can be found at AN: AEB-I-614, among many other places.

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deviation from the proposition that the principle of popular sovereignty was important. During these first campaigns of the war, the French were often genuinely baffled when they encountered foreigners who opposed revolutionary social and political changes or,

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as in the Comtat, voluntary opted for a despotic form of government. What is more, some French officials claimed that they must only interact with free peoples and that the pouvoir révolutionnaire was the most effective means for them to establish free institutions in the often chaotic circumstances of war. Thus, contradictory though it may seem to respecting a people’s wishes, the pouvoir révolutionnaire actually developed from a firmly held conviction among the French that they were obliged to promote, discern, and respect the will of the people wherever they went. Historians of the French Revolution have been heavily preoccupied with explaining either the outbreak of hostilities or French war aims. They have mostly ignored these novel, connected, and yet changing legal justifications for territorial expansion, from before to after the start of the Revolutionary Wars. During much of the nineteenth century, the prevailing belief among historians was that international discord during the Revolution sprang organically from the wellspring of ideological opposition.3 To be fair, the events leading up to and just after the declaration of open conflict can give that impression. Figures such as Francis II, the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor and French Queen Marie-Antoinette’s nephew, or Frederick William II, the Prussian king who declared war on France on May 21, 1792, faithful to his alliance with Austria, unwaveringly supported dynastic sovereignty. Dynasts’ positions had hardened in response to the king and his family’s attempt to flee France, before they were stopped on the night of June 20/21, 1791, in Varennes, some 50 kilometers short of the

3

As T. C. W. Blanning has written, Leopold von Ranke and his disciples believed that conflict was “a clash not so much between states as between principles: between the monarchical conservatism of the old regime and the republican liberalism of the Revolution”; The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), 70. In his classic study of the subject, Carl von Clausewitz described the hostilities that broke out between revolutionary France and its enemies as having “broken loose in all [their] elemental fury” and therefore being “untrammeled by any conventional restraints”; On War (Berlin, 1832). The French, meanwhile, “harbored the belief that they were undertaking [the Revolution] for all of humanity, and that like the people of France, all the peoples of the world should form one single family,” according to Alphonse Aulard. For him, other (often French) historians, and the revolutionaries whose views they internalize, France “was not selfish”; rather, they believed, despots were self-interested in opposing the Revolution. See Alphonse Aulard, “La société des nations et la Révolution française,” in Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française, vol. 8 (Paris, 1921), 145.

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frontier. The Padua Circular of July 1791 called for the freedom of the royal family; and the Pillnitz Declaration of that August threatened intervention in France to safeguard the rights of Louis XVI. Gustav III, the Swedish king and a friend of the Count of Provence, Louis XVI’s brother and the future Louis XVIII, was particularly insistent in calling for action against the “Orang Outangs [sic] of Europe.”4 On December 21, 1791, the Austrian Chancellor Wenzel Anton, Count of Kaunitz, warned that France risked opposition from a league of “sovereigns together united to maintain public tranquility and the security and honor of their crowns.”5 After the outbreak of war, the Duke of Brunswick, commander of a combined Prussian–Austrian army, threatened the people of Paris with “an ever memorable vengeance” and “complete destruction” in his famous Manifesto of July 25, 1792, should harm befall the French royal family. This provocation did not prevent a Parisian mob from attacking the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792; Louis XVI, severely discredited after the abortive flight to Varennes, lost official power when the National Assembly suspended his duties that night. Ranke argues that the stark opposition between dynastic sovereigns and French revolutionaries exacerbated conflict because both sides believed that “If we are now attacked by a spiritual power, so we must oppose it with spiritual force.”6 A revisionist challenge to this orthodoxy developed around the twin propositions that dynastic opposition to the Revolution was neither as instantaneous nor as intractable as many had assumed, and that French factional politics were the main catalysts of war.7 But the outbreak of 4

5

6

7

Cited in H. M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (New York, 2006) 255. Cited in Thomas E. Kaiser, “A Tale of Two Narratives: The French Revolution in International Context, 1787–93,” in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Malden, Mass., 2015), 172. Leopold von Ranke, “The Great Powers,” in The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, ed. and trans. Roger Wines (New York, 1981), 154. Paul Schroeder emphasizes that the reaction to the Revolution was hardly blind rage, especially in Vienna, and that eastern “conservative” despotisms were, in the 1790s, themselves concertedly undermining the European system on their own. The various partitions of Poland are the most famous example of this destabilization. For Schroeder, the important point is that the bankrupt eighteenth-century balance of power – based on a brutal, zero-sum conception of political and strategic competition – collapsed in the 1780s and 1790s, but not because of the Revolution, and much more spectacularly in Eastern than in Western Europe. See The Transformation of European

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hostilities was neither an epic “spiritual” struggle nor merely a partisan maneuver to gain power by certain groups in France, notably the Girondins. France’s declaration of war can also be interpreted tactically, as an essentially defensive response to the loss of its allies, including Austria, and the emerging coalition of powers now led by its erstwhile partner. It is unfortunate that the justifications that revolutionaries used when they moved into new territory have been lost in debates over the ideology and origins of the war, because the land claims help elucidate these broader questions.8 France’s new understanding of territorial claims derived from a deep if increasingly convoluted commitment, philosophically as well as practically, to the will of the people. This understanding had already elicited a sharp rebuttal from many quarters because of the inherent challenge it posed to the international system, as described in the preceding two chapters. These facts help to illustrate that “ideology” played a crucial role in unsettling existing precedents for international law and aggravating international tension at the time. Likewise, the fact that most revolutionaries were at first reticent in exporting the principle of popular sovereignty proves they did not start out as ideological missionaries. Their devotion to revolutionary principles, and a desire to seek out others who shared those values, if not impose them by force, only increased as the French viewed the war effort as

8

Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 73–74. Blanning, for his part, squarely locates the origins of the Revolutionary Wars in the machinations of the hawkish Girondin political faction in the French National Assembly; Origins, 98. He argues that Girondins saw war as a way to both secure power in the Assembly, and “drive” the Revolution “to its logical conclusion.” In Blanning’s retelling, Austria’s sole role in the prelude to war was to commit a series of miscalculations as to both the Girondins’ sway in the Assembly and their true desire for conflict. Thus, he focuses on what he calls “the ‘Coppelia effect’ (after the magic spectacles which Dr Coppelius gave to the wretched Hoffmann and which for him turned Spalanzani’s doll Olympia into a beautiful woman),” 73. This analysis reversed the approach of Ranke, whose scholarship emphasized the Primat der Aussenpolitik or primacy of foreign politics. Jean–Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution : Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe nationale (Paris, 2006), 120, argues that it was in the complex “framework of thought” brought about by the events in Alsace and Avignon, in which a “majority of deputies linked positive and natural law in the pragmatic hope of assuring the success of the Revolution” and radicals like Robespierre started to invoke international law’s emancipatory potential, “that the complex maneuvers of the king and deputies, facing an eventual recourse to external war to resolve internal contradictions find their place.”

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a legitimate response to the hostile coalition of powers unleashed against them. These changing territorial legalities not only form an important episode in the history of international law, therefore, but they are also not immaterial to the story of the outbreak of the war. In terms of how the French came to move from their initial reticence about exporting the principle of popular sovereignty to the point they reached in Belgium, it was not a question of a complete and total caesura, as some historians have posited – a victory of cynicism and chauvinism over the Revolution’s early benevolence. Alfred Cobban, for instance, once claimed that revolutionaries’ “idealistic frame of mind did not survive for long” after the outbreak of war and, instead, “revolutionary zeal carried the day over democratic idealism . . . From this point onwards the Revolution rapidly diverged into paths of aggression.”9 But it was not as simple as that. And neither was there no change at all, as historians at the other extreme seem to believe. Alphonse Aulard, remarkably, holds that the idea of “free consent” was “respected by the French Revolution in all the ulterior annexations [after Avignon]: Savoy, Nice, Monaco, the left bank of the Rhine. The populations were consulted.”10 As this chapter will show, there was manipulation by French forces in these “consultations” – and especially in Belgium, which Aulard perhaps tellingly leaves off his list. The establishment of assemblies using pro-France political clubs was just one example. This was in addition to when the pouvoir révolutionnaire bypassed the people entirely and claimed justification for annexation in cases when locals were not as eager for freedom as the French might have liked, or the situation was more confused than it had been in previous cases and the French felt compelled to impose a revolutionary form of government as a prerequisite to discerning the people’s true wishes. The point here is not to apportion blame or to revel in supposed hypocrisy, just as it is not to fall victim to the siren song of easy explanations, such as that the war’s genesis catalyzed a sharp and decisive break with the pure ideals of the early revolution. Any of that would cause one to miss the subtlety of the evolution in French legal justifications for claiming territory

9

10

Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination (New York, 1970), 41–42. Aulard, “La société des nations,” 152.

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based on the principle of popular sovereignty from Corsica to Avignon to Belgium. Even the great philosophe and progenitor of the idea of the all-powerful general will, Rousseau, seemed to endorse the pouvoir révolutionnaire in a famous maxim: “The people always want what is best for themselves, but they do not always see it.”11 Close study of France’s claims to territory during the volatile first years of the Revolutionary Wars helps to unravel the seeming incongruity at the heart of Rousseau’s statement – of both a reverence and a disdain for the will of the people, and the vacillation between the two. The Conquest of Belgium, Savoy, Nice, and Monaco The term “Belgium” is anachronistic but serves nonetheless as useful shorthand for a contested territory with a long and complicated history. Belgium constituted part of the “Seventeen Provinces” of the Burgundian Netherlands during the late Middle Ages. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, inherited the territory and sought to consolidate its administration with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, although this action helped spark the Dutch Revolt and Eighty Years’ War that ultimately split the independent and republican United Provinces in the north from the southern portion, which remained under Habsburg (first Spanish, and then Austrian) control.12 In 1789, emulating the French Revolution, some Belgians launched an insurrection against their Habsburg masters in what is known as the Brabant Revolution. In nearby Liège, an autonomous bishopric only nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, a revolt similarly ousted Prince-Bishop Hoensbroeck. His predecessor, Velbruck, had been a great supporter of Enlightenment ideals, but by 1789 the city had returned to authoritarian absolutism. The Brabant insurrection led to

11

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In French, “On veut toujours son bien, mais on ne le voit pas toujours.” JeanJacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (1762; repr., Indianapolis, 1987), chapter 2, section 3. Rousseau’s point had more to do with nefarious forces misleading the people as to what was truly in their interest; the point of the pouvoir révolutionnaire was the opposite – to benevolently guide a hopelessly misled group. In this book, especially in Chapter 5, “the Netherlands” is used to refer to the independent United Provinces in the north, often also called Holland, just as Belgium here references the entity in the south.

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a short-lived republic, the United States of Belgium, with which revolutionary Liège allied itself after a rebel victory over Austrian forces at the Battle of Turnhout. Emperor Joseph II asked his close friend and Belgian aristocrat, the Prince of Ligne, “why [his] people do not love” him, then pronouncing, “your country has killed me,” before actually dying on February 20, 1790.13 Soon, however, the Empire struck back. Joseph’s brother succeeded him as Leopold II. Whereas Joseph did not take as hardline an approach to the Revolution as some caricatures would have it, Leopold was, in fact, less compromising. In December 1790, an Austrian Imperial force reclaimed Belgium and, in January 1791, reinstalled the PrinceBishop of Liège. Even before the outbreak of violence, the conflict was internationalized, with the Brabant patriot leader, Hendrik Van der Noot, soliciting aid in many European capitals.14 Just as they were initially prudent with respect to Alsace and Avignon, the French proceeded cautiously at first. Montmorin, the French Foreign Minister, did not even open a letter sent to him by a Belgian congress in late 1789 declaring its independence, and he instructed the National Assembly to do the same.15 Montmorin tried to resolve the crisis in Belgium through negotiation between the insurgents and Austria, with which France had been allied since 1756. The “Diplomatic Revolution” of that year saw France and its long-standing Habsburg rival come together in a dynastic pact buttressed by the betrothal of the Dauphin of France, the future Louis XVI, and an Austrian archduchess, Marie-Antoinette.16 However, many were not happy with the king’s ministers’ reluctance to help those in revolt. Camille Desmoullins wrote hopefully in March 1790, in his popular and comparative Révolutions de France et de Brabant, “Until now our 13

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Cited in Walter W. Davis, Joseph II: An Imperial Reformer for the Austrian Netherlands (The Hague, 1974), 272. Fred Stevens, “‘Révolutions de France et de Brabant’ : Heurs et malheurs de la Révolution brabançonne dans le tourbillon de la France,” in In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789–1815), eds. Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer (Baden-Baden, 2008), 56. Jeremy J. Whiteman, Reform, Revolution and French Global Policy, 1787–1791 (Aldershot, 2003), 109–110. See Thomas Kaiser, Marie-Antoinette and the Austrian Plot, 1748–1794 (forthcoming).

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kings have made our treaties; finally peoples can make their alliances themselves.”17 These countervailing opinions reflect the diplomatic quandary in which the French found themselves. Liège, in particular, became a hotbed of émigré and counter-revolutionary activity and a rallying point for Prussian and Austrian armies after the Prince-Bishop was returned to power. Meanwhile, those who had spearheaded the revolution there fled to France, where they vocally advocated for intervention. When Hoensbroeck died on June 3, 1791, a letter reported that he had, during his reign, “imposed the rod of Despotism on the whole nation” and that people in Liège therefore danced in the streets in celebration of his demise, until the police dispersed the revelry.18 After Charles-François Dumouriez, a less traditional figure than Montmorin, became Minister of Foreign Affairs in March 1792, he dispatched to London Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the former bishop and diplomat who would himself one day become foreign minister. Talleyrand’s mission was to try to calm the government there and reassure it of France’s renunciation of conquests, in the Low Countries and elsewhere. Dumouriez also wrote to France’s ambassador in Vienna, Emmanuel Marie Louis Noailles, to pledge, “We renounce for always all conquests, just as we will never make the people of the Low Countries say that they wish to give themselves to France.”19 In spite of these assurances, on April 28, 1792, the French army invaded Belgium. French revolutionaries, however, soon had their own conquest to prevent. On July 30, 1792, Austrian, Prussian, and émigré forces entered France. Given the disarray of the French military – with much of the officer corps having previously emigrated – it seemed entirely possible that the combined, counter-revolutionary army would easily march to Paris and restore the absolute authority of the king. Then, on September 20, 1792, Dumouriez and another general, François Kellermann, in command of a motley revolutionary force, 17

18 19

Cited in Gary Savage, “The French Revolution and the Secret du roi: Diplomatic Tradition, Foreign Policy and Political Culture in Later Eighteenth-Century France” (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2005), 195. Archives diplomatiques de France (AD): CP/Liège/74. AD: CP/Autriche/363. Letter from Dumouriez in Paris to Noailles in Vienna, March 27, 1792.

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stopped their adversaries at the Battle of Valmy. Goethe, who personally witnessed the battle, later claimed to have predicted (rather self-servingly, even if the line is now famous), “From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world.”20 The next day, in place of the disgraced and moribund monarchy, the French First Republic was proclaimed. Dumouriez, who had assumed command of the French Army of the North in August after the defection of the Marquis de Lafayette, of American Revolution fame, was responsible not only for the victory at Valmy but also for France’s advance into Belgium. On October 6, the new government in Paris, the Convention, ordered him to chase the enemies of the Republic wherever they fled and to free oppressed peoples along the way. Clearly, these oppressed peoples were taking notice. That same month, on the 13th, the French chargé d’affaires in Liège wrote to the new French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Lebrun-Tondu: “The news of [various French military victories have inspired] the people of Liège most interested in our cause, good patriots . . . in their hearts, [they have] hope of the appearance very soon of French citizens and the end of their hardships.”21 That same October, a group of Belgians went to Paris to thank the Convention for its help – but also to request that it not annex their country. On November 4, French deputies seemed to comply when they voted that, for a region to join France, it would have to be the explicit desire of an authorized assembly in the area. Two days later, the French won another spectacular victory in Belgium, the Battle of Jemappes. The triumph was so great that Lebrun named his new daughter “Civilis-Victoire-Jemappes-Dumouriez.” Another two days after Jemappes, Dumouriez tried to clarify the nature of the assembly that would decide Belgium’s future, in line with the principle of popular sovereignty, announcing that the new government must reflect the will of all the people of the Belgian nation.22 Meanwhile, in early September 1792, the French invaded Savoy, one of the domains ruled by Victor Amadeus III, King of Sardinia, and indeed the dynasty’s ancestral home. The intention was to pre-empt an

20

21

Cited in William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 193. AD: CP/Liège/74. Letter from Jolivet. 22 Stevens, 67.

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Austrian invasion of France by the southeast, since Victor Amadeus was a close ally of the Habsburgs. Still, some in the National Assembly, such as François Amédée Doppet, a deputy from Isère but born in Savoy in Chambéry, promoted the incorporation of Savoy with France. Sardinian troops quickly retreated to the Alps, “as cowardly as they had been cruel,” according to a local account.23 When French General Anne Pierre de Montesquiou-Fézensac entered Chambéry, he reported that the municipal government organized a ceremony, presented him the keys to the city, and declared “the feelings of connection and attachment of the people of Savoy for the French nation.” In turn, “in the name of this generous nation,” Montesquiou promised “protection, peace, and liberty to the people of Savoy.”24 Immediately, the Jacobins, the radical political club, opened a branch in the city. Albert Sorel remarks that of all France’s neighbors, Savoy possessed a majority most keen to be annexed by France.25 Therefore, in late October, a hastily organized National Assembly of Allobroges, which took its name from an ancient Gallic people who once inhabited the area, after having abolished titles of nobility, feudalism, and the claims of the Sardinian House of Savoy, requested union with France.26 On November 27, 1792, France’s new republican regime accepted the entreaty, “having recognized that the free and universal will of the sovereign people of Savoy, declared in assemblies, is to incorporate itself with the French Republic,” and “considering that their respective nature, relations, and interests render this union advantageous to the two peoples.”27 The territory was christened “the department of Mont-Blanc.” Nearby Nice, another territory of the King of Sardinia and sharing cultural and linguistic connections to France, was also taken with virtually no combat by General Jacques Bernard d’Anselme. 23

24 25

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AD: CP/Sardaigne/271. “Adresse de l’Assemblée Nationale des Alloberges à la Convention Nationale de la France,” October, 1792. AD: CP/Sardaigne/271. Letter of General Montesquiou, 1792. Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 3, La guerre aux rois, 1792–1793 (Paris, 1925), 114–115. These people and the assembly are variously rendered as “Allobroges” and “Alloberges.” See the “Décret de la Convention Nationale” November 27 and 29, 1792 and “Réunion de la Savoie à la République Française du 27 Novembre 1792,” for example, at AD: CP/Sardaigne/271 or AN: AD/XV/41.

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On October 8, 1792, he reported that his army would reorganize the judicial and administrative corps of the county so that locals could “enjoy as soon as possible . . . all the benefits of the Revolution.”28 On November 4, the Convention declined to deliberate on a request for union by two envoys, claiming it could only do so “after having known the express will of the people.” A Representative Assembly of 18 communes therefore convened, and on January 31, 1793, the Convention issued a decree of union in which it “accept[ed] the will freely declared by the sovereign people of the erstwhile County of Nice, in their primary assemblies.”29 The independent principality of Monaco, much like Corsica, had been under French protection since a treaty signed in Péronne in September 1641, which stipulated that France provide a garrison of 500 men, “who will be responsible for keeping [the Principality] in the possession of the Prince and his successors.”30 After the outbreak of war, the prince worried about losing this garrison to more active duty, and so wrote to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. On June 1, the Minister of War, Joseph Servan, replied and confirmed that France would maintain “the most perfect neutrality” with Monaco, and ordered that the garrison be continued.31 Nevertheless, on October 22, 1792, General d’Anselme sent a battalion into Monaco and, treating it as hostile territory, set up a Jacobin club and planted a tree of liberty, an important symbolic act dating to the American Revolution that linked freedom with nature and strength. His forceful actions and disregard for the concerns of locals indicated the developing contradictions between what was heretofore France’s policy with respect to foreign peoples and conquered territory, based on the will of the people, and its wartime behavior. They also foreshadowed the next iteration of France’s revolutionary law of conquest. 28 29

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AN: F/7/4401. Letter to the president and members of the Convention. See “Décret de la Convention Nationale,” November 4, 1792, “Demande en réunion à la France du ci-devant Comté de Nice,” and “Décret de la Convention Nationale, Portant que le ci-devant Comté de Nice fait partie intégrante de la République Française,” January 31, 1793, in both AD: CP/Sardaigne/271 (1792–93) and AN: AD/XV/41. AN: AF/II/64 (Affaires étrangères). Letter from Servan to the Prince of Monaco, Paris, June 1, 1792. Ibid.

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Initially, the French sought to bolster the scrupulousness of their army, their commitment to the renunciation of conquests, and their deference to the will of the people. In October 1792, the diplomatic committee of the Convention issued instructions to guide the army’s conduct in occupied territories; generals were first ordered not to impose new laws but only to “protect [locals] against the efforts of tyrants, and give them the force of arms to conquer their liberty.” The French recognized the exigency of distinguishing what their armies ought to do for peoples who had already manifested their sovereign will, from the case of those who were yet to do so. Thus, generals were instructed not to assume “tyrannical power” before a people decided their destiny, and to ensure three goals: “safety of people, respect for property, independence of opinion.” Such conduct was necessary because the French Revolution itself was based on the “force of wills” of the people and, therefore, the committee advised, “there is only one route to follow: that is to let each individual have the right to express his [or her] opinion as freely as he [or she] conceived it. Wherever there is not freedom of opinion, the most revolting and insufferable despotism reigns.”32 Then, on November 19, deputies seemed to abandon all of France’s earlier caution in applying or defending the principle of popular sovereignty internationally. Building on the October report of the diplomatic committee, the Convention issued the so-called decree of fraternity, which offered help to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty.33 The French, having previously renounced offensive warfare, 32

33

AN: AD/XV/53, “Rapport fait au nom du comité diplomatique sur la conduite à prescrire aux Généraux français en pays ennemi,” by Marc-David-Alba Lasource, October 24, 1792. AD: CP/Suisse/431 (Octobre–Decembre 1792) dates the report as October 14. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LIII (Du 27 octobre au 30 novembre 1792) (Paris, 1898), 474. The decree of fraternity was a response to a request, as mentioned in the Introduction, and this request will be treated in great detail in the next chapter. Historians locate the origins of fraternity at the Festival of the Federation, on July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. On that day, General Lafayette (of American Revolution fame) oversaw half a million soldiers vow “To remain united with all the French by the indissoluble bonds of fraternity.” See Marcel David, Fraternité et révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1987), 17–19; Mona Ozouf, “Fraternité,” in Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, vol. 4, Idées, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (1988; repr., Paris, 1992), 199. Florence Gauthier highlights that Maximilien Robespierre was possibly the first person

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vowed publicly to come to the aid of any people who desired to throw off the yoke of tyranny and to be free. This pledge, which applied far beyond those areas like Belgium and Savoy where French armies happened to enter in the first months of the Revolutionary War, was France’s boldest declaration of support for popular sovereignty as a principle of foreign policy or international law. And yet, for the moment, the French were merely reiterating, even if they were expanding the reach of, the very justifications that had underpinned the annexation of Avignon and would do likewise for the union of France and Savoy or Nice, where assemblies requested and the Convention accepted absorption by the French as the will of the people. The French could still rationalize their pronouncements by maintaining that all they wished to do was extend support to any peoples seeking to determine their own destiny. However, on December 15, the Convention departed markedly from this stance. The deputy Pierre-Joseph Cambon gave a report on behalf of the combined diplomatic, finance, and military committees, indicating its broad relevance. The French army was instructed to promise local peoples assistance, liberty, and peace wherever they arrived – as opposed to the decree of fraternity which held that a request for French succor should precede the actual arrival of assistance.34 Cambon thereby issued the famous declaration of “Peace to the cottages, war to the chateaux.” Generals were ordered to proclaim the sovereignty of the people, wherever they went, and rescind all old constitutions and laws.35 They were immediately to establish French-revolutionary-style administration, in place of the ancien régime, in all territories in which French

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to utter the motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” in his speech “On the organization of the National Guard” of December 5, 1790, in article XVI: “On their souls engraved these words: FRENCH PEOPLE, & below: FREEDOM, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. The same words are inscribed on flags which bear the three colors of the nation.” See Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution : 1789–1795–1802 (Paris, 1992), 129. And yet, unlike liberty and equality, fraternity only entered the French constitution in 1848. See Alphonse Aulard, “La devise ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’,” in Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française, vol. 6. (Paris, 1910), 1. AN: D/§3/35 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Correspondance du Ministre des Affaires étrangères avec les Représentants du Peuple en Mission” and “Instructions générales pour les Commissaires nationaux, nommé par le Conseil exécutif, En conformité de Décret de la Convention Nationale du 15 décembre.” AN: AD/XV/47. “Rapport des citoyens Delacroix, Gossuin, Danton, Merlin (de Douai), Theilhard, Robert, membres de la Convention nationale, et nommés par elle Commissaires près de l’armée et dans les pays de Belgique, de Liège, etc.,” Paris, 1793.

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arms prevailed as opposed to consulting locals as to their preferred form of government, and in the ensuing elections French officials could exclude anyone they wished. The decree of December 15, which T. C. W. Blanning calls an “uneasy mixture of liberation and exploitation, naivety and cynicism,” is what effectively empowered the pouvoir révolutionnaire.36 It and the decree of fraternity seemed at loggerheads. This narrative trajectory serves to situate General d’Anselme’s actions in Monaco in a clearer context. Having renounced conquests, the French initially promised only to annex new territory should a people explicitly request it. Henri Grégoire, a Catholic priest turned revolutionary leader who ardently supported abolitionism and theorized revolutionary international law, could proudly claim, “The former duchy of Savoy, county of Nice, and principality of Monaco, illustrate the touching spectacle of three peoples who, illuminated by our principles and seconded by our arms, have, without bloodshed, recovered their liberty. They have formally asked you for political adoption.”37 However, in Monaco, locals only lobbied the Convention for union after the French began to apply the decree of December 15, to avoid especially article XI by which France vowed to have no relations with, and treat as enemies, those who wished to keep their old systems of government.38 Further, the interference of the French, for example, in the establishment of a chapter of the Jacobin club had already made the exercise of the will by locals in Monaco murky. On February 14, 1793, Lazare Carnot, who would later be known as the “Organizer of Victory” after the war’s darkest moment for France, gave a report for the diplomatic committee recommending the annexation of Monaco. The Convention decreed union based on the principles of the decrees of both fraternity and December 15: “Confirming the resolutions they announced to help and rescue all peoples who wish to conquer their

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T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), 65. AN: AD/XV/53. “Rapport présenté à la Convention au nom des Commissaires envoyés par elle, pour organiser les Départements du Mont-Blanc & des Alpes maritimes,” by Grégoire, 1793. See also Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, 2005). AN: AF/II/64.

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freedom; [and] on the free and formal desire that was addressed [to France] by several foreign communes, neighbors or enclaves, meeting in primary assemblies, making use of their inalienable right of sovereignty, to the effect of being united with France.”39 The tension between these two decrees, between help to those who request it and rescue of those who might not, elucidates the shift from respect for the principle of popular sovereignty to the coercion implicit in the pouvoir révolutionnaire, especially when compared to France’s reaction to what it perceived as meddling in its own affairs. Revolutionary officials had long argued that France ought not be dictated to: in defiance of the Padua Circular, Pillnitz Declaration, and Brunswick Manifesto, which all defended monarchical sovereignty, they affirmed that France had the right to put Louis Capet, formerly Louis XVI, King of France, on trial. These positions were based on the principle of non-interference. The French had vociferously denounced the Padua Circular and Pillnitz Declaration as violations of their sovereignty and the legal prohibition against intrusion in the internal business of an independent state. Indeed, both the sovereign states system, in the abstract, and Vattel, the eighteenth-century’s most popular theorist of international law, in great detail, upheld the idea of non-interference.40 Louis was ultimately found guilty of treason by the French Republic and executed by guillotine in the Place de la Révolution in Paris on January 21, 1793. Similarly, Lebrun supposedly repudiated the idea of “influencing the opinions of a people” – but, only so long as other peoples “want to give themselves a constitution.”41 Lebrun and other French officials maintained these awkward positions of simultaneously demanding non-interference in their affairs while intruding in those of others, such as those who had no desire to see their political and social system changed, with the decree of December 15 and the pouvoir révolutionnaire. Lebrun evaded this contradiction by claiming the righteousness of France’s political views: “Politics and

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See AN: F/7/4395 and AD/XV/41. “Décret de la Convention Nationale,” February 14, 1793 and “Relatif à la réunion à la République Française, de la Principauté de Monaco, & de plusieurs Communes.” See also Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LVIII (Du 29 janvier au 18 février 1793) (Paris, 1900), 549. Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (Amsterdam, 1758), book I, § 37. Cited in Sorel, 160.

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justice are two ideas that have too long been separated, but that the Republic is strongly determined never to disentangle.”42 Earlier Precedents Applied In the areas annexed immediately after Avignon, both the logic of and the mechanics for ascertaining the will of the people adhered uncannily to the precedents established earlier and described in the previous chapters. For example, Belgium and Savoy were viewed as disjointed possessions of the faraway Habsburgs and Victor Amadeus III, respectively. They were precisely the types of territories that did not constitute part of a strong and integral state and that, according to Merlin, could therefore separate without consultation with the central authority. As one commentator wrote of Belgium, “This small country is composed of many parts of provinces that long ago formed many separate sovereignties, although united today under one domination.”43 Furthermore, on November 19, 1792, a popular assembly in Brussels claimed responsibility for not only its affairs but also those of all of Belgium, in a manner reminiscent of Avignon’s often trying to control the destiny of the Comtat. A Belgian deputation traveled to Paris – again, as one had from the city of Avignon – that same month to express gratitude to the Convention and, on December 4, requested that “the French nation engage itself with Belgians and Liègeois not to conclude any treaty, not even to undertake the smallest communication with any power, unless the absolute independence of Belgium and Liège are formally recognized and established.”44 More importantly, immediately after the French victory at Jemappes, people began to gather in primary assemblies in cities, towns, and municipalities all across Belgium to declare their will. The form of these assemblies and the elections to them mirrored what had happened in Avignon.45 The capital took the lead, with the

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Ibid., 164. AD: MD/Pays-Bas/5. “Essai sur un gouvernement pour la Belgique” by Baron de X, submitted by Tilly, May 8, 1792. AN: AD/XV/47. “Adresse des députés du peuple Belge à la Convention nationale, avec la réponse du président,” December 4, 1792. AN: AF/II/236/A. “Instructions sur le mode des Assemblées & les élections populaires dans la Belgique,” and votes for union in Liège, January 1793. AN: D/XLII/6.

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Assembly of Provisional Representatives in Brussels recommending that such convocations and popular elections take place across the whole country, and with urban populations being keener for union than rural ones.46 The French army, again as in Avignon, assumed a formal role in setting up these assemblies.47 Political commissioners were sent by the Convention along with the French army into conquered territories, to assure for the implementation of the decrees of fraternity and December 15, and to consult the people on their destiny, just as the mediators who had gone to Avignon had done. In the province of Hainaut, for instance, they reported that out of 330 communes, 300 voted unanimously for union with France. Of the 30 remaining, some expressed no decision, others “declared they would adhere to the desire of the majority whatever it may be,” and still others did not convoke assemblies for one reason or another. Only a third of the 30 voted against annexation by France. Many locals were motivated to vote for union, the commissioners claimed, because of “the location of the province, its [shared] language, its usages” but “most of all, eagerness to abandon the name of Austrian Hainault.” Tying the choice of the people to French military victory, this region sought instead to be named the new department of Jemappes, a name “forever memorable in the annals of the history of free peoples.”48 The people of Louvain, meanwhile, were so eager to join France that they “request[ed] union or death.”49 Soon, the Convention had to respond formally to all these incoming requests for union, from communities not only in Belgium but also all the way up the Rhine to the Swiss border where French armies were successful. In some cases, French authorities dismissed or disregarded

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“Procès-verbaux de l’Assemblée Nationale des Allobroges,” mostly from October 1792. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). “Extrait du procès-verbal de la séance de l’assemblée des Représentants Provisoires de la Ville libre de Bruxelles,” November 28, 1792. See also Occupants occupés, 1792–1815 : Colloque de Bruxelles, 29 et 30 janvier 1968 (Brussels, 1969), 46. AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). “Procès-verbaux des Séances des Assemblées primaires.” AN: F/7/4401. Letter “Les Commissaires de la Convention Nationale près l’armée et dans les pays de la Belgique, de Liège, etc. A leurs collègues composant la Convention Nationale,” Brussels, February 25, 1793. AN: F/7/4401. Letter from the “Société des amis de la liberté et de l’égalité de Louvain” to the Convention, February 28, 1793.

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expressions of the people’s will they deemed inappropriate or inauthentic, just as they had rejected the first request of the two envoys from Nice.50 However, for the most part, the Convention accepted the “desire freely declared by [a] sovereign people . . . in their primary assembly” and declared the union of France with Brussels on March 1, 1793, and with a variety of other towns in the weeks that followed.51 The overwhelming majority of the official reports of the primary assemblies’ voting and the Convention’s formal decrees of union mirrored the language used in Avignon: assemblies would solemnly declare their independence and the sovereignty of the people, then request union with France, and the Convention would accept recognizing this desire to be the will of the people. However, some subtle variations emerged – perhaps because of the profusion of requests and decrees, although in some cases innovations proved telling. In one instance, in the decree of union with Liège that came several weeks later, the Convention accepted “an address by the citizens of Liège, refugees in Paris, who asked for union in the name of their fellow citizens,” rather than wait for the views of the people of Liège who actually remained there.52 In areas annexed on March 20 and 23, the Convention “accepted” the “freely declared” wish of local peoples on the advice of not only the diplomatic committee, as had happened in the past, but also the committee of general defense, highlighting the new importance of the military.53 Indeed, the central role of the military persisted after union. Whereas before, most areas united with France were made part of existing departments or had their administration otherwise turned over to civilian authorities, in 50

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AN: F/7/4401. As with the assembly for Flandre-Orientale in Gand, on January 30, 1793 AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184 and AN: AF/II/232 and AD/XV/41. Union was declared with Hainaul, Gant, Franchimont, Stavelot, and Logne on March 2; Florennes and 36 villages in its surrounding area on March 4; Tournay on March 6; Louvain and Ypres on March 8; Ostende on March 9; Namur, Ham-surSambre, Charles-sur-Sambre, Fleurus, and Wasseigne on March 11; 32 communities on the Rhine on March 14; Nerel, Aeltre, Thourould, Blakenberg, Ecloc, Damne, and the area around Bruges on March 19; and Biding, Enting, Marquain, Chin, Tragmegines, Porrentruy, and others on March 20 and 23. AN: AD/XV/41. “Décret de la Convention Nationale, Portant réunion du pays de Liège à la France,” May 8, 1793. AN: AD/XV/41. “Décrets de la Convention Nationale, Qui ordonnent différents réunions à la République Française,” March 20 and 23, 1793.

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Florennes, “the commissioners of the Convention to the Army of Belgium [were] charged with undertaking all measures necessary for the execution of the laws of the Republic.”54 In late February 1793, Lebrun wrote to the president of the Convention that, just as the mediators in Avignon had undertaken their work with impartiality and equanimity, “the principles spread by the national commissioners, by general officers, and by other patriots, their good conduct and zeal have had the best effect in Belgium.” He continued, “The will for union with France has been communicated little by little, as soon as the people freely assembled could articulate their opinion on the subject which,” he humbly added, “is infinitely more important for the Belgian people than for the French nation.”55 As a result, according to contemporary estimates, in just a few short weeks, 48 cities and 582 communities united with France or expressed a desire for union; only 47 communities were neutral or had not yet pronounced a position; and a mere 14 requested independence or their previous form of government. The French claimed, “almost everywhere the will for union was unanimous.”56 The president of the Convention, Bertrand Barère, boasted that France had championed “first before all others the immortal dogma of the sovereignty of the people.”57 Clearly, the earlier ambivalence of French officials and assemblies to invoke the will of the people as a claim to territory had vanished, as the procedures gradually extemporized before were now repeated and reproduced. Still, the French went to great lengths to emphasize that these annexations were not traditional conquests and, in another parallel with the past, that events had forced the French to act. They highlighted, first of all, that “The unjust war that the despots were the first to prepare against France, is the only basis for the legitimate, generous, and sacred war that we have pursued against them.”58 In the south, perhaps out of concern that France had not been as directly threatened there as it had 54 55

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Ibid. AN: F/7/4401 (Suisse, Réunion à la France de la Belgique, des Pays-Bas, etc.). Ministerial letter from Lebrun to the president of the Convention, February 28, 1793. AN: D/§3/36 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Tableau des Villes et Communes de la Belgique réunies à la République.” AN: AD/XV/47. “Adresse des députés du peuple Belge à la Convention nationale, avec la réponse du président,” December 4, 1792. AN: AF/II/236/A. 3rd Report on Belgium, April 17, 1793, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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been on its northern boundaries, revolutionary officials constantly reiterated that they had not sought new conquests and defended the idea that a people’s will could be legitimately expressed while a territory was under military occupation. Even the National Assembly of Allobroges reaffirmed that France had not only renounced conquests, but also enshrined this probity in its constitution. The assembly’s motivation was not only to defend the rectitude of French action there, it seems, but also to “to destroy any motive for [France’s] refusal” of Savoy’s request for union. The Savoyard deputies sought to balance their denial of French aggression and the proactive expression of their own will: begging for union “would have shown to the universe [that] we had not found in our hearts the energy and the pride to constitute a free people . . . [W]ould the French, at the height of its glory, want to associate itself with several million slaves?”59 And yet, some peoples could remain slaves, and not just by groveling before the French; and revolutionaries did indeed associate with them in a variety of ways. In keeping with the decree of December 15, but in a departure from real respect for the will of the people, the French sometimes manipulated or coerced a people who might otherwise not adopt political beliefs favorable to revolutionaries. Despite a report from one of their many secret agents operating in Belgium, that “the public spirit [here] is favorable at the moment to the affairs of France,” the French were not content to allow that spirit to develop without some involvement.60 One way the French promoted their interests in foreign territories was through local patriotic clubs. A French officer argued in late 1792 that the most important thing France could do was see to the “establishment of popular societies. It is in the bosom of these societies that public spirit is formed, it is here that the sacred fire of patriotism is lit and maintained . . . it is also here that is taught the horror one must have for arbitrary wills, the respect [and] obedience for the general will, which must fill the people.”61 The primary

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AD: CP/Sardaigne Supplément/9. “L’Assemblée Nationale des Allobroges, au peuple,” October 27, 1792. AD: MD/France/329 (Correspondance des agents secrets a l’intérieur). Note of Milon for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, September 15, 1793. AD: CP/Liège/74. “Discours prononce par le citoyen Lorain, officier dans le douzième régiment de chausseurs à cheval, à la société des Amis de la Liberté & de l’Egalité, le 6 décembre, l’an 1er de la République Française,” Liège.

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assemblies that French soldiers and commissioners helped organize in Belgium after Jemappes, and that ultimately voted for union, were heavily influenced by clubs that were often “fathered by French military men,” according to Michael Kennedy, an authority on the most influential of such societies, the Jacobins.62 In Savoy, the Jacobins “sent out agents to organize the local electoral assemblies” and, in Nice, “the campaign for unity” was “a put-up job.”63 That Jacobin clubs played a prominent role in promoting a French political agenda and, indeed, union in these areas is another pattern reminiscent from Avignon even if there the interference had been less.64 Also as in Avignon, many questioned the true freedom of elections conducted in the presence of French arms: a petition to the Convention from people in Savoy asked whether it was “in keeping with the principles and interests of the French Nation to welcome, in these circumstances” a new territory where coercion may have influenced the request for union?65 In Belgium, the French were similarly accused of scheming behavior: a report by the French army itself concluded that “the odious manner in which the majority of French agents have worked to prepare the will of the Belgian people” was, quite simply, “to scare [Belgians].”66

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Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, 1988), 149. Kennedy goes so far as to argue that, “Abetted by a small minority of foreigners and a few ‘foreign’ clubs, France, by 1793, had annexed all the lands on its periphery up to the ‘natural frontiers’ of the Rhine and Alps,” 141. Ibid., 143, 144. Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, 1982), 224–228. AN: AD/XV/41. “Pétition à la Convention Nationale Touchante à la réunion proposée de la Savoie à la France,” 1792. AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). “Du Résultats des Assemblées Primaires de la ville Libre de Bruxelles, et des moyens de faire former, promptement, dans la Belgique, une Convention Nationale, ou une Administration Provisoire, suffisamment autorisée, avec laquelle la Nation française puisse s’entendre, incessamment, sur l’adoption de ses Principes Politiques, et en matière de Finances,” Brussels, January 25, 1793. The basis on which French agents were being criticized was not, however, out of respect for the will of Belgians; the report argued that these tactics played into the hands of clerics and the aristocracy, to whom locals would turn and then request their old constitutions and religion in assemblies. Such meddling especially in the all-important assemblies that requested union has led Fred Stevens to declare that the destiny of Belgium was “orchestrated from the beginning,” 68.

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French guidance was also clear, for example, in the motherhood metaphors that pervaded requests for union and other pronouncements. One example, from the Jacobin club of Tournay, claimed, “We like to believe that as a good mother, the French Republic will not refuse the adoption of a new child.”67 A letter from patriots in Louvain who sought union with France affirmed that if the “beneficent” Republic should “welcome” their request for union, it would “find in us grateful children, and worthy of our august mother, children who will be true and zealous defenders, and sworn enemies of all despotism and aristocracy.”68 The operative word here is “worthy.” This term was common in letters requesting French support – as, for example, when a Belgian described his country as “a nation worthy of liberty.”69 Similarly, a patriot in Amsterdam argued that the people of Holland had a history of liberty and fighting oppression: “What nation has fought more to shake the yoke of tyrants who controlled it through a hundred years of continual war?” The Dutch, therefore, “only wait for the moment when the generous French will lend them help, to show themselves to be worthy of being free.”70 What, however, should the French do if they found themselves somewhere where a little meddling and manipulation were not enough, where the people were not – or not yet – worthy of liberty? Perhaps, like “children,” a people could not yet be advanced or mature enough to be consulted as to its destiny; perhaps, a people could be too stupid, or blinded by the malevolence of tyranny. In these cases, were the French to abandon or ignore such unworthy peoples, those who had not responded to the offer of help to win freedom in the decree of fraternity with a ringing affirmative? Or should the French disrespect a people’s immediate desire to continue to be subjugated by aristocracy and despotism, implicitly or explicitly expressed? Should the French, as the decree of December 15 suggested, aim to make the unworthy worthy? 67

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AN: F/7/4401. Letter from the “Société des amis de la liberté et de l’égalité de Tournay” to the Convention, arrived in Paris, March 8, 1793. AN: F/7/4401. Letter from Louvain to commissioners of the Convention in Belgium, forwarded to LeBrun, then forwarded on to the president of the Convention, along with requests for union of 5 cantons, March 3, 1793. AN: F/7/4401. Letter from J. Ricayot of Brussels, December 31, 1793. AN: F/7/4401. Letter from “un Batave, citoyen d’Amsterdam” to “Protecteurs des droits de l’homme,” December 22, 1792.

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The Paradox of pouvoir révolutionnaire In the early period of the war, French revolutionaries made territorial claims that went beyond the determinative principle of popular sovereignty and the choice of the people themselves for union. General Dumouriez may have declared in October 1792, “We enter [onto your territory] to help you plant the tree of liberty without involving ourselves at all in the constitution that you may want to adopt,” in line with the instructions given to the French military before the promulgation of the decree of fraternity. However, even at this point, Dumouriez added an ominous condition: “So long as you establish the sovereignty of the people and that you renounce living under despots, we will be your brothers, your friends, and your supporters.”71 This condition recalls the peculiarity, especially in the Comtat, of people actively choosing to continue to live under a “despot.” Stipulations were therefore attached to political liberty – opposition to despotism and aristocracy, and adoption of a constitutional order that markedly resembled the one in France – thus implying that failure to comply with these requirements justified military intervention, political subordination, or even annexation. In instructions for the representatives of the people – the euphemistically named envoys of the Committee of Public Safety, which served as the de facto executive of France during the Convention – who accompanied the army in Belgium, based on the decree of December 15, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs described how “it is not the bold passion to spread our principles and our laws beyond our borders” that motivated France in the war, again reiterating the belief among the French that the export of revolutionary ideology was not their initial motivation.72 Still, it was not good enough simply to push the tyrants back, or to invite peoples of other lands to join in the struggle against tyranny – precisely as France had done with the decree 71

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). “Manifeste du General Dumouriez au Peuple de la Belgique,” October 1792. AN: D/§3/35 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Correspondance du Ministre des Affaires étrangères avec les Représentants du Peuple en Mission” and “Instructions générales pour les Commissaires nationaux, nommé par le Conseil exécutif, En conformité de Décret de la Convention Nationale du 15 décembre.” These instructions also reiterated “It is obvious that we are never guided by the turbulent ambition for conquests . . . More than ever, we respect the independence of nations.”

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of fraternity. By the decree of December 15, the Convention added a brief but important codicil whereby French generals were obliged “to grant assistance to those peoples and to defend those citizens who have been . . . persecuted for their attachment to the cause of liberty” – and, meaningfully, to those who “may be.”73 According to this decree, a “community of liberty” was to be established, but if not by the choice of other peoples, then actively created by France and justified by the pouvoir révolutionnaire.74 To repeat what was described at the outset of this chapter, the pouvoir révolutionnaire was a self-justifying and self-explaining logic, based on the French perception that they had been “forced to make war on tyrants,” which empowered them to “abolish all the social institutions established by force and tyranny,” as elaborated in the decree of December 15, even against the will of a people who might be too foolish, too infantile, or too cowardly “to want to be free.”75 According to this logic, then, the French could legitimately annex the territory of any such people against their will. A people could prove itself unworthy of political independence, thus necessitating the French to institute this sweeping social and political change and even unilaterally decree union, in any number of ways. First, quite simply, they could be daft. Belgians, some French claimed, “have always displayed and display still the most stupid and brutal aversion to the principles of equality and liberty.”76 A French diplomat in Brussels wrote to Paris to ask for “philosophical writings” on the subject of “the rights of man,” because “the country where we now find ourselves has, more than any other, a great need for enlightenment, and enlightenment immediately.”77 According to another report, because the ancien régime in Belgium, with its centuries of accumulated “customs, laws, and privileges,” was “so bizarre, so contradictory,” the French offered a simplification of the political process in comparison with “the dreadful disorder . . . [of] an often corrupt or

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Ibid. 74 Ibid. AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). Dossier 5, “Observations sur le décret du 15 Xbre 1792.” AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). “Extrait du procès-verbal,” January 27, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). Dispatch of Metman to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, December 2, 1792.

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ignorant government.”78 In such cases, the Ministry of the Interior recommended, the French would “clarify” administration; provide benevolent “views on the division of Belgian territory into departments and cantons” to help “end divisions between citizens and clarify their real interests”; promote and “multiply commercial relations between the old and new departments”; and generally “overturn all the barriers that could hinder communication without reservation” between France and Belgium.”79 Meanwhile, many Belgians wondered, and not unintelligently, whether the beneficent lessons of the French had to be so total, or if “our old civil, criminal, and police laws, which have nothing to do with the nobility or the tithe or feudalism,” could be retained.80 Related to the claim that stupidity and poor government justified the pouvoir révolutionnaire, French officials also argued that people could easily be misled – which is poignant, given the way the French often interfered in their own ways. As a member of the Army of the North reported from Brussels, “While the Estates and the monks seek to stop enlightenment and to mislead public opinion with fanatical and seditious writings – spreading around money, beer, and liquor – the House of Austria . . . the Stadholder, and the English government have emissaries [who aim to] make the French hated by slandering their government and their intentions.”81 When they were not bribing, inebriating, or misinforming the people, these same monks were preying on religious sectarianism, claiming that “the French system would destroy the Catholic religion, and introduce Calvinism.” 78

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AD: MD/Pays-Bas/5. “Essai sur un gouvernement pour la Belgique,” by Baron de X, submitted by Tilly, May 8, 1792. AN: D/XLII/7 (Comité du salut public au sujet de Belgique). “Ministère de l’Intérieur: Instructions Pour la Réunion des Commissaires du Gouvernement dans les neuf départements réunis.” Dan Edelstein notes, “There is a long tradition in republican thought, moreover, of waiting for the proper moment to establish republican government. The key criterion, according to republican theorists, was the moral and civic preparedness of the people; fostering this sort of “public virtue” took institutions, which enabled citizens to assimilate republican laws and manners.” See The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009), 220–221. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184 (1793, ans 1 et 2, J. S. Mardi, Rolland, Deshacquets et Desforges-Beaumé). Report of provisional representatives of the people of the city of Brussels to the commissioners, March 1, 1793. AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). “Situation de la Ville de Bruxelles et des Lieux circonvoisins depuis l’entrée des français,” probably January 1793.

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Courage was another important precondition, which some conflated directly with a desire for union with France. One French commissioner mused whether the people of three Belgian districts “would have the courage to unite with France or not.”82 Some French officials in Belgium went even further, claiming that the “universal war” into which France had been forced, drove it “to the point of wanting union” with Belgium, an imperative they justified through reference to the pouvoir révolutionnaire again.83 General Jacques Henri de Moreton wrote to Lebrun in Paris, on January 11, 1793, “I think that we must give the Belgians an effective organization [that is, a government favorable to France] before the fighting season, for the dual interest of the Belgian revolution and the next campaign.”84 Another French official argued, “In the end, the spirit of the decree [of December 15] had no other purpose than to obtain and force the union of those countries occupied by French armies, with the Republic,” to augment military forces, especially the National Guard, for the defense of Belgium.85 Further south, in Savoy and Nice, similar logic was at work. A proclamation aimed at recruiting volunteers for the National Guard asserted that the “war of peoples against kings lasts only for a moment; this crisis is short and decisive; the mass of the Nation will crush its enemies; peace will be perpetual.”86 This assessment, of course, was doubly wrong. France needed to bleed its new territories for troops, something it would do through until 1814. This glib proclamation tried to play the inhabitants of newly annexed territories off one another, asserting in Savoy that many more recruits were volunteering in Nice.87 A different proclamation, in the recently formed department of Alpes-Maritimes around Nice, claimed that all 82

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AN: AF/II/236/B. Rapport of Dufour on Malmedy, Stavelot, and Logne, April 25, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens Supplément/15 (1792–1829). Letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs from Pereyra, Proli, Duscuillon in Douai, May 22, 1793. AN: D/XXIII/2 (31 letters from generals). Letter from Moreton to LeBrun in Paris, January 11, 1793. AN: D/§2/4–5 (Armée du Nord en Belgique). “Observations sur le décret du 15 Xbre 1792.” AD: CP/Sardaigne/271 (1792–93). Proclamation on the National Guards and national volunteers, by the commissioners of the National Convention, to the citizens of the department of Mont-Blanc, Chambéry, February 7, 1793. Ibid.

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departments had contributed troops and so “no doubt you await the moment when [the Republic] calls on you.”88 Another strategy was to more directly embarrass people, arguing that because France had benevolently accepted Savoy’s request for union, its locals must have “shame” for not joining the army.89 These concerns for manpower and other strategic considerations foreshadowed the much more explicit claims that the French were starting to make in the German Rhineland, and as described in the next chapter. Back in the north, Dumoriez fled to the émigrés and Austrians after the spectacular rout of his army at the Battle of Neerwinden on March 18, 1793, reversing French military fortunes in Belgium. Some revolutionaries therefore claimed that France must “give an idea of its strength to those peoples who scorned its benefits. This is the only way to prove to Europe that if the French suffer reverses, it is because they preferred to employ the force of reason with people who did not understand it,” again linking the pouvoir révolutionnaire with French military needs.90 This logic seemed to imply that if the French military should falter, it was in part because of the herculean task it had assumed in engaging in not only conquest but also social and political adaptation. But reverses were only seen to be temporary. The Convention claimed that France would not “harm the rights of countries united to the French Republic” and “never abandon them to the tyrants with which it was at war.”91 Thus, the French vowed they would be back. The pouvoir révolutionnaire was not merely a reaction to the perceived idiocy of benighted peoples or the fluctuations of the war on tyranny. French officials asserted the proactive exigency of preventing anarchy in newly conquered areas. The deputies in the Convention, confronted with the duty of social reorganization, recognized: 88

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AN: AF/II/252. Army of Italy, proclamation of recruitment in Alps-Maritimes, April 22, 1793. AN: AF/II/250. Army of Italy, proclamation of recruitment in Mont-Blanc, April 3, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens Supplément/15 (1792–1829). “Réflexions sur les moyens, espérances, que la France peut concevoir de la part des Belges dans le cas d’une nouvelle invasion,” by Mesemahes, Lille, June 2, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184 (1793, ans 1 et 2, J. S. Mardi, Rolland, Deshacquets et Desforges-Beaumé). Decree of the Convention “Relatif aux Pays réunis à la République française,” April 13, 1793.

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It is necessary in all revolutions for a provisional power, which tempers the excesses of zeal, contains the explosions of vengeance, directs the views of self interest towards the general good, and moderates disruptive movements in the old order of things; a momentary power is necessary that methodically demolishes the ancien régime, that temporarily replaces the eclipsed authorities and stops the devastations of anarchy. It is a sacred trust that our generals will restitute to [conquered peoples] with the fidelity of republicans, as soon as they have organized the exercise of their sovereignty.92

The French arrogated this duty, they claimed, not because their country was necessarily revolutionary, but because it was evenhanded – a place in which “all fanaticism is a horror, even that of philosophy.”93 And they claimed that the pouvoir révolutionnaire was just such a power: “Every revolution needs a provisional power that directs its disruptive movements, that in certain ways methodically demolishes all the parts of the old social constitution . . . Such must be the pouvoir révolutionnaire.”94 This was a moment of increasingly radicalization domestically, in political theory as much as in terms of the guillotine’s body count – Louis XVI included. As Dan Edelstein has argued, “The government no longer needed to derive its authority from the will of the people, but could claim to legislate on the basis of natural right alone.”95 Edelstein even identifies a domestic analogue for the pouvoir révolutionnaire: a claim that the Revolution itself justified some of its most dramatic transformations. In November 1792, in response to accusations of authoritarianism, Robespierre countered by exalting the power of the Revolution: particular actions may themselves be illegal, but only “as illegal as the Revolution, as the fall of the throne and the Bastille, as liberty itself . . . Citizens, did you want a revolution without 92

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AN: AD/XV/49. Decree of the Convention containing a proclamation to Belgians, March 2, 1793. AD: AF/II/236/A. 3rd Report on Belgium, April 17, 1793, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. AN: D/§3/35 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Correspondance du Ministre des Affaires étrangères avec les Représentants du Peuple en Mission” and “Instructions générales pour les Commissaires nationaux, nommés par le Conseil exécutif, En conformité du Décret de la Convention Nationale du 15 décembre.” Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, 186. Mary Ashburn Miller agrees, stating, “by 1793, nature seemed to have overtaken the general will as the legitimation of governance.” See A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca, 2011), 166.

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revolution?”96 Edelstein sums up Robespierre’s positions, much like the pouvoir révolutionnaire: “The end justified the means.”97 Back at the international level, the French also had to manage the practical consequences of military occupation. The French believed they needed to assure that peoples of other lands were enfranchised because, if not, France “would have been forced to treat them as veritable enemies, as voluntary satellites, [or] as accomplices of tyrants.”98 According to one observer, even though France had renounced conquests, it could not “divest itself” of the political control of Belgium that military success had thrust upon it. The French could relinquish political authority exclusively “into the hands of the legitimate representatives of the Belgians,” and only then “validly contract with them and make a treaty of alliance” that the decree of fraternity and other pronouncements implied.99 A French agent in Belgium described this rationale behind the pouvoir révolutionnaire in even more detail, in late November 1792. The French had not wished to conquer Belgium; indeed, they had not wished to conquer any people, and it was “impolitic” to convoke assemblies through “orders and requisitions.” However, the French found themselves in the perplexing situation of having to establish relations with Belgians after having renounced conquest: once rendered independent, it is necessary that people exist in Belgium with whom we can competently carry on communications: these people must necessarily be agents of the Sovereign. Now, France cannot and need not recognize in any country any other sovereign than the people. Therefore France has the right, even with its amicable and fraternal intentions, to require the nomination of agents with which its own can treat and,

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Archives parlementaires, vol. LIII, 160–61. The speech occurred November 5, 1792. Dan Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution Without Revolution? Reflections on Political Authority,” French Historical Studies 35:2 (Spring 2012): 271. Edelstein goes on to argue that the “shift from a popular and constitutionalist to a statist and self-reflexive concept of revolutionary authority was gradual, but it was precipitated by the overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, and reached its full development with the proclamation of a ‘revolutionary government’ in October 1793,” 272. AN: D/§3/35 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Correspondance du Ministre des Affaires étrangères avec les Représentants du Peuple en Mission” and “Instructions générales pour les Commissaires nationaux, nommés par le Conseil exécutif, En conformité du Décret de la Convention Nationale du 15 décembre.” AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens Supplément/14 (1792). “Réflexions,” by Salvo Meliori.

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consequently to establish to this end an assembly of people in a country where it cannot find any agent of the public authority invested with power delegated by the only sovereign [the people] France can recognize.100

In other words, because they refused to interact with governments not based on the will of the people, the French believed themselves authorized to force this new political system on a people, even against their will.101 As Dumouriez explained when he first arrived in Belgium, “To be independent, [a people] must be able to express its will . . . The French people only wish to interact with the Belgian people, sovereign to sovereign . . . [The French people therefore] will only ever recognize the agents that you [the Belgian people] have freely chosen.”102 However, just as the union of Avignon exposed the contradiction of the people of the Comtat, for a time, choosing to retain the pope as their sovereign, one French deputy wondered if the promise to respect the will of the people was not negated by the requirement that “they must exclude from their choice a form of government” such as monarchy.103 The logical conclusion of the French was to interpret a people’s choice for such a regressive form of government as a de facto declaration of themselves as an enemy of the Republic.104 How did revolutionaries try to resolve this incongruity, given the respect for or at least homage paid to the free choice of the people? In part, the answer lies in a belief in the inherent rectitude of France’s new political system and its universal desirability. Jean-Baptiste Gobel, the revolutionary Bishop of Paris who had been the first priest to take 100

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). “Note,” by C. Metman, French agent to the Belgian Republic, November 29, 1792. See also AN: D/§3/35 (Representatives on mission in Belgium). “Correspondance du Ministre des Affaires étrangères avec les Représentants du Peuple en Mission” and “Instructions générales pour les Commissaires nationaux, nommés par le Conseil exécutif, En conformité du Décret de la Convention Nationale du 15 décembre.” AN: AF/II/236/A (Armée du Nord). Proclamation by Dumouriez. AN: AD/XV/53. “Rapport fait au nom du comité diplomatique sur la conduite à prescrire aux Généraux français en pays ennemi,” by Marc-David-Alba Lasource, October 24, 1792. AN: AD/XV/47. “Rapport des citoyens Delacroix, Gossuin, Danton, Merlin (de Douai), Theilhard, Robert, membres de la Convention nationale, et nommés par elle Commissaires près de l’armée et dans les pays de Belgique, de Liège, etc.” Paris, 1793.

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the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, predicted just five days after the outbreak of the war: “The value of the liberty acquired by the French nation, having been felt by our neighboring peoples, it is in our interest, as it is in theirs, to bring into their territory the bases on which this liberty is founded with our protective arms.”105 Barère explained to the deputies of the Belgian people that “it was the folly of conquerors, to give their laws and their customs to all people . . . but France has conquered nothing for itself in Belgium, except your hearts.” When it became clear that France had not convinced the hearts and minds of all people of the value of revolutionary principles, Barère and many other revolutionary leaders did not see it as “folly” to impose revolutionary government through the pouvoir révolutionnaire, because “there is no half-justice, nor half-liberty [and because] the French nation stipulates for the human race.”106 Merlin de Douai, who had argued so forcefully for the application of the principle of popular sovereignty in the case of the princes possessionnés in Alsace, believed there was a manifest morality in the annexation of Belgium and the imposition by force, if necessary, of liberty and equality for all.107 These French officials and others believed so totally in the virtue of their political beliefs that they trumped the will of other peoples. Thus, when the citizens of Mons repudiated the decree of December 15 and the idea that the French were empowered to enact unilateral change in occupied territory, those who supported France claimed incredulously, “This monstrous act is not and cannot be the will of the people.”108 Such was the catch-22 of the pouvoir révolutionnaire. Other contemporaries recognized it as such, with obvious consequences. As one correspondent wrote to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, “I well saw that the decree of 15 December . . . 105 106

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AD: CP/Bâle/9 (1792). Letter from Gobel to Dumouriez, April 25, 1792. AN: AD/XV/47 (Imprimé – Affaires étrangères). “Adresse des députés du peuple Belge à la Convention nationale, avec la réponse du président,” December 4, 1792. Hervé Leuwers, “Révolution et guerre de conquête. Les origines d’une nouvelle raison d’État (1789–1795)” in Revue du Nord LXXV: 299 (janvier–mars 1993): 31. AN: AD/XV/47 (Imprimé – Affaires étrangères). “Adresse des citoyens amis de la liberté et de l’égalité de la ville de Mons à la Convention Nationale.” Meanwhile, the president of the Convention defended French action in Mons by stating “the representatives of the French people believed they needed to exercise the pouvoir révolutionnaire, which would preserve you and us from aristocracy.”

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produced the most unhappy impression on the majority of Belgians; in the place of the trust, the fraternity that was about to be established between the two peoples, this decree substituted mistrust and fear.”109 One unfortunate and practical consequence was that after the December 15 decree rendered all prior elections in Brussels illegal, and prompted its assembly to resign, no functioning government existed in the capital – thus necessitating the French to adopt an even more active role.110 The provisional representatives of the city of Brussels, like their countrymen in Mons, called the December 15 decree “An attack against Belgian sovereignty.” If Belgium were free, they asked, how could France assert a power that is “revolutionary, active, and coercive” there? To do so would be “national aristocracy,” which would “create a new mythology of sovereignty that would distinguish peoples based on their political force as nations and demi-nations.” At the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars, therefore, these Belgian deputies clearly saw how the legal rationale behind the pouvoir révolutionnaire, coupled with France’s “political force,” undermined the nature of a sovereign states system and France’s claims of noninterference, as it “would destroy the sacred base of political equality” between states.111 The Brussels assembly tried to stake its claims in terms that ought to – they hoped – make sense to the French, who purported to so cherish individual equality: although “nations can be, like individuals, unequal in means, they must necessarily be equal in Rights.” In so doing, this assembly actually echoed not only the political logic of the French Revolution, but also the philosophical foundations of the contemporary international system, which Hugo Grotius had theorized was based on the moral analogy between individuals in a theoretical state of nature, and equal and autonomous states in post-Reformation Europe. As the representatives in Brussels concluded, “the Sovereignty of the Belgian people . . . is entire, or it is null.”112 109

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens Supplément/14 (1792). Letter from Proli in Brussels to LeBrun, January 5, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184 (1793, ans 1 et 2, J. S. Mardi, Rolland, Deshacquets et Desforges-Beaumé). Letter from Metman to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brussels, January 22, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). “Adresse des représentants provisoires de la ville de Bruxelles à la Convention Nationale de France,” December 24, 1792. Ibid.

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After the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars and the conquest of Belgium, the French came to believe that the righteousness of free political systems exceeded the need to respect legal norms – traditional ones like the equality of sovereign states, but also the relatively recent innovation of self-determination. The pouvoir révolutionnaire was not, therefore, simply a means to replace older territorial claims based on dynastic or treaty law with ones based on the will of the people, as the French had already done in Corsica, Alsace, and Avignon. Now, as a French agent in Brussels argued, the pouvoir révolutionnaire “constitute[d] the French government legally in the right to take over the Belgian people and in any political measures that they deem[ed] necessary.”113 Thus, it was an undercutting of the European states system, based on the principle of the political independence of the state. As another French agent in Belgium recognized, this new vision of emancipatory politics meant that those who were liberated by the French, were, like “the Belgian people,” simply “a power of an inferior order. [Their state] would naturally be the political satellite of the powerful French republic.”114 Indeed, as will be shown in Chapter 5, satellite states would also soon make an appearance. Conclusion A month before Dumoriez’s defeat and defection, and in keeping with their strategic concerns, French officials in Brussels put the National Guard in France’s northern departments on permanent standby to enter Belgium, if necessary, to “maintain order.”115 A few weeks later, these troops were called up: “considering that . . . the vast majority of the municipalities of Belgium have already manifested the desire for union with the French Republic . . . therefore it is a sacred duty for all French citizens promptly to protect their new brothers against the enterprises of conspirators.”116 Conspirators, however, 113

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). Letter from Metman in Brussels to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, December 30, 1792. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184. “De la réunion de la Belgique à la France,” by C. M. agent of the French Republic. AN: AF/II/240 (Armée du Nord). Decree by Delacroix, Goussin, and Merlin de Douai, Brussels, February 17, 1793. Ibid., March 5, 1793.

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were the least of the French army’s problems in Belgium. The day before Neerwinden, troops were again requisitioned from France to “give, without delay, our brothers of Belgium unequivocal proof of the unshakable determination of France, in adopting them, to defend them against their former despots.”117 Still, despite France’s best efforts, by the fall of 1793, the Flanders campaign ended with the French being pushed entirely out of Belgium. Patriot refugees flooded into France, and not until after June 26, 1794, and the Battle of Fleurus would revolutionary armies win decisive control of Belgium, as well as the German Rhineland and southern Holland. Then, a representative of the people could proudly boast that France and Belgium’s first “union [had] not [been] a chimera,” even if the latter territory had for a time been occupied by “the hordes of the coalition” of monarchs.118 On October 1, 1795, France would decree (again) the formal annexation of Belgium, thus confirming the execution of the earlier decrees of union based on the will of the people.119 As Gaspard Lesage-Senault, a merchant from Lille and deputy from the department of Nord explained, France “merely was recovering [its] property.”120 Another deputy, JeanFrançois Génin, a lawyer from Chambéry and representative from the new Savoyard department of Mont-Blanc, pointed out that France’s enemies often liked to insist that “treaties must be religiously observed,” which was simply what France was doing in reaffirming these earlier unions.121 Overall, the French claimed that they were undertaking conquests not because they wanted to, but because they

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AN: AF/II/240 (Armée du Nord). Decree by Gossuin, Merlin de Douai, Cochon, Bellegarde, and Lequinio, Brussels, February 17, 1793. AN: AD/XV/47. “Discours prononcé au Temple de la Loi, à Bruxelles, le 10 Brumaire, l’an 4e, par Portiez (de l’Oise), représentant du peuple, Commissaire du Gouvernement dans les pays réunis.” AN: AD/XV/41. “Loi sur la réunion de la Belgique et du pays de Liège à la République française,” 9 Vendémiaire IV/ October 1, 1795. AD/XV/41. “Recueil de discours, sur la question de la réunion de la Belgique à la France,” speech by Lesage-Senault, deputy of the department of Nord, Paris, V. Ibid. Speech by Génin, deputy of the department Mont-Blanc. Another deputy, Reynaud from Haut-Loire made the slightly more regressive argument that Belgium was part of the old “domain of our ancestors” and so France had “the right to keep [Belgium] after having re-conquered it by the same means it was taken away, that is, by force of arms.”

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must.122 France’s annexation of Belgium would ultimately be recognized by Austria on October 18, 1797, with the signing of the Treaty of Campo Formio at the end of the War of the First Coalition. And, although the French never lost control of Savoy or Nice, not until peace negotiations with the King of Sardinia were concluded in May 1798 did the latter renounce “purely and simply, in perpetuity, for him, his successors and their issue, in favor of the French Republic, all the rights that he may claim to Savoy and the counties of Nice.”123 As in the early days of the revolution in Avignon, France’s position with respect to these areas was, at first, circumspect and uncertain. During the Brabant revolt, diplomatic requirements vis-à-vis Habsburg Austria – in 1789, still an ally – dictated one course of action, whereas French devotion to the principle of popular sovereignty implied another. By the time war broke out in 1792, revolutionaries had acquired a degree of comfort not only with applying the will of the people in international relations and law, as they had done in Corsica and Alsace, but also ultimately with the mechanics of determining that will to justify annexing territory that – according to the ancien régime status quo – belonged to another sovereign prince. However, in late 1792 and early 1793, the French encountered a new legal quandary: some people did not wholeheartedly embrace revolutionary France’s new understanding of sovereignty, or the reformed political and social order that the French understood to implicitly accompany it. The French had sometimes to influence the outcome of elections to be certain that people in the territories they conquered shared their political views. They did so, for example, through the manipulation of primary assemblies by local Jacobin clubs. Moreover, between Valmy and Jemappes, to paraphrase Albert Sorel, the French went from patriotism in a moment of peril to enthusiasm in moment of deliverance; some French revolutionaries came to believe that, for the good of all people, the triumph of the

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AN: D/XLII/6 (Comité du salut public au sujet de Belgique). “Proclamation au nom du Peuple français; Les Représentants du peuple Près les Armées du Nord et de Sambre et Meuse, Aux Habitants de la Belgique et autres Pays conquis par ces Armées,” Brussels, 17 Nivôse III/ January 6, 1795. AD: CP/Sardaigne/272. Treaty with the King of Sardinia, concluded by Delacroix for France and de Revel et de Tonso for Sardinia, Paris, 26 Floréal IV/ May 15, 1796, ratified 30 Floréal IV/ May 19, 1796.

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Revolution over the old order was necessary.124 Blanning puts it even better: “the National Convention had created a serious misunderstanding over the word ‘liberté,’ with the rest of Europe taking it to mean the right to choose their own form of government, but with the French taking it to mean the right to choose the form of government established in revolutionary France.”125 The legal means by which France did so was the pouvoir révolutionnaire. These international legal innovations occurred in a context of increasing military and strategic confusion, domestic radicalization, consolidation of the Republic at home, and the vehement defense of France abroad against the interference and intervention of monarchical Europe. Conspicuously, the pouvoir révolutionnaire developed at almost the exact same time as the king’s trial and execution – the culmination of a similar process in Parisian politics when, as Edelstein argues, “Robespierre was essentially calling on the state to execute the king on the basis of revolutionary authority.”126 In the same letter in which they transmitted their city’s request for union, the Jacobins of Tournai congratulated France for “cutting off the head of the last King of the French [because] this act of firmness and justice will consolidate the bases of the universal republic.”127 The Tournai club therefore linked this supreme revolutionary act at home with France’s position internationally. French revolutionaries elaborated this “universal republic” not only with the pouvoir révolutionnaire. As a French agent in Belgium put it, “That which enthusiasm has decided, reason must sanction.”128 The pouvoir révolutionnaire represented an evolution from, rather than a break with, revolutionaries’ earlier justifications for absorbing territories; it retained important causal links to earlier innovations and, counterintuitively, the principle of popular sovereignty itself. For example, the French repeatedly stressed that they were forced to these ends. More importantly, they claimed they needed to create polities based on the will of the people since these were the only sorts with 124 126 127

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Sorel, 164. 125 Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, 66. Edelstein, “Do We Want a Revolution Without Revolution?,” 281. AN: F/7/4401. Letter from the “Société des amis de la liberté et de l’égalité de Tournay” to the Convention, arrived Paris, March 8, 1793. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/184. “De la réunion de la Belgique à la France,” by C. M. agent of the French Republic.

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which they could interact, even though this rationale ultimately undermined sovereign equality. The French also viewed themselves as required to establish popular government and undertake political and social reform, such as the abolition of feudalism, wherever people were too cowardly or too stupid to enact these changes themselves. There is something of the mission civilisatrice here of later, overseas French imperialism. Indeed, there is also similarity between the December 15 decree, in terms of the free rein it gave the army in political transformation, and the 1956 law that empowered the French army to use any means necessary in fighting counterinsurgency in Algeria. In addition to chauvinism and naked aggression, history is replete with examples of armies unleashing devastating violence in an attempt, even benevolent, to enact social change. Pascal’s great phrase comes to mind: “He who would act the angel, acts the beast.” At the time of the Revolution, although born of a mutated reverence for and an attempt to institute popular government, the pouvoir révolutionnaire was inherently “the imperious language of a master.”129 Moreover, French conquests led to a dramatic increase in the extraction of men and specie from territories “freed” by revolutionary armies and, as will be described in the next chapter, the explanation the French increasingly gave for their actions was the need to fight against monarchs and tyranny. Although they opposed the tyrants vehemently, they ultimately argued that in a war to defeat them, “If you want to still treat other peoples as friends, you may. If you want to treat them as conquered slaves, you have the right.”130

129

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). “Adresse des représentants provisoires de la ville de Bruxelles à la Convention Nationale de France,” December 24, 1792. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/183 (1792, 9 derniers mois, M. de Lagravière, Ministre plénipotentiaire). Letter from Metman in Brussels to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, December 30, 1792.

4 Strategic Interests, Survival, and the Left Bank of the Rhine

After the Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792, the appearance of the pouvoir révolutionnaire showed how reverence for the principle of popular sovereignty continued to have unintended consequences, and was not always straightforward when applied in international settings. Contemporaneous developments saw French revolutionaries on the German left bank of the Rhine depart, seemingly, from some of their dearest principles and instead engage in the same wanton occupation and extraction as the very despots they professed to loathe. One French commentator in this area evoked the ambition of absolutist monarchs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when he claimed, “in politics, there is no glory but in force.”1 That French armies raided treasuries and levied onerous requisitions of troops and other goods in the Rhineland, as elsewhere, is a fact. The most consistently cited estimate is Jacques Godechot’s: that between 1792 and 1799, the French extracted “at least” 360 million livres worth from all occupied territory.2 This plunder funded both the immediate costs of occupation and the wider French war effort, according to the classic maxim that armies must nourrir la guerre par la guerre, or feed war with war. France’s overall financial hardship at 1

2

Archives nationales de France (AN): AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” ed. Georges-Guillaume Boehmer (Paris, IV), essay by Théremin, 8. Jacques Godechot, La grande nation : l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799, 2 vols. (Paris, 1956), II:565.

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this time is also well known; in 1797, the government declared partial bankruptcy, the only time it had done so since 1770.3 It is not surprising, as Blanning puts it bluntly, that French military activity “can be summed up by a single word: exploit.”4 Less clear to historians is that the French did not simply abandon the idea that legitimate claims to territory are based on the will of the people, going back to the unions of Corsica and Avignon with France. Revolutionaries did not fully reprise the military ethos of the ancien régime. Instead, the French elaborated a new justification for extractions from and even the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine that derived – in a circuitous manner – from veneration of that same will. In this sense, the story of France’s conquest of the Rhineland was not the victory of old-fashioned chauvinism and abuse over more benevolent sentiments. Rather, as in Belgium with the elaboration of the pouvoir révolutionnaire, it was actually the result of a remarkable synthesis. The first step to this new logic was, again, the claim that French republicans had not started the war but were merely defending themselves against a coalition of aggressive tyrants. France, therefore, merited any “just indemnities” it acquired while pursuing its enemies back into the territories from which they had first come. However, these lands that the French came to occupy, and the goods or specie they extracted from them, were more than mere compensation for damages. The French saw themselves as especially justified in their new and increasingly atavistic behavior because, they believed, hostilities had started precisely due to the monarchical powers of Europe seeking to crush the Revolution. So important was France’s struggle to protect and preserve popular government against the forces of tyranny that many believed the Republic was justified in acquiring any lands or other advantages that bolstered it in the war or improved its strategic position. As Henri Grégoire said at the start of the wars, “if my neighbor breeds serpents, I have the right to eliminate them, for fear of becoming their victim.”5 This logic resembled the pouvoir 3 4

5

Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York, 2004), 114. T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), 75–76. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LIII (Du 27 octobre au 30 novembre 1792) (Paris, 1898), 610–614. The speech occurred November 27, 1792.

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révolutionnaire – which held that the French must bring the Revolution to other peoples whether they desired it or not – in justifying actions that outwardly ignored the will of local peoples, which the French so professed to value. Nonetheless, it was precisely in protecting the essence of republican ideology and the principle of popular sovereignty that the French believed themselves authorized to set aside their erstwhile contention that the only basis for annexing foreign territory was the unambiguous choice of peoples themselves. This explanation represents the most important departure from the pouvoir révolutionnaire, the logic behind which, as described in Chapter 3, required that French arms promote, if not establish, free and popular governments because freedom was manifestly, in the French view, in the best interests of all and necessary for proper communication between sovereign peoples. Under a new and modified interpretation, deployed for the most part in western Germany, the French prioritized the accumulation of material and strategic assets in its military struggle – prior even to forcing a people to be free. Indeed, French revolutionaries were intent upon extracting concessions and exacting troop requisitions from even those locals in western Germany who were most sympathetic to the Republic. This process intensified, moreover, when the Revolutionary Wars assumed the force of an existential conflict. The French ultimately viewed the war as “total,” not only from a material perspective, but also, based on Rousseau’s understanding of the state of nature, as a struggle for survival.6 When revolutionary armies first moved into the Holy Roman Empire, they encountered the same patchwork quilt of polities and overlapping sovereignties that had been the genesis for the affair of the princes possessionnés. Following precedents developed in Avignon and deployed also in Belgium, they helped organize elections in local primary assemblies, in many of which delegates met, declared the people they represented free, and requested union with France. Nevertheless, one important difference existed between Avignon, 6

Jean-Yves Guiomar sees total war in a material fashion, as unlimited expansion. See L’invention de la guerre totale : XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris, 2004). David A. Bell takes a broader social, cultural, and intellectual history approach to the phenomenon: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007).

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Savoy, and all the areas France had annexed earlier, on the one hand, and the “Rhineland” on the other. The latter did not constitute a clear, pre-existing polity. All the territories, which heretofore united with France based on the will of their peoples, were established political and geographic entities. The French effectively accepted the old configurations, although at times they tweaked arrangements, as with, for example, the merger of Avignon and the Comtat. Even “Belgium” was for the most part Habsburg patrimony. In these earlier cases, the will of the people was more important, theoretically at least, than the land the people happened to inhabit; people determined a land’s status – essentially the color of a particular, recognized territory on a map that hitherto had been a dynastic possession. But nothing akin to the Rhineland existed politically. The French conceived of it at once in German cultural-linguistic and geographical terms. And increasingly, especially with the rise in strategic thinking, the geography itself mattered. As the will of the people was disaggregated from a specific, previously constituted territory, the potential for confusion, coercion, and manipulation expanded. The land now mattered, prima facie, and subsequently required a delineated people to determine its destiny. The French moved, therefore, from consulting the will of a people to seize an extant, organized territory to conquering territory and then conceiving of it in new terms, before also ultimately annexing it. After early military successes in Germany, like elsewhere, the French suffered a series of destabilizing setbacks. By the summer of 1793, republican armies had lost much of the territory they had first occupied; and, by August, the specter of foreign invasion of France itself prompted a levée-en-masse – the requisition of every able-bodied adult male in the Republic to military service. On October 10, 1793, “the provisional government of France” was declared “revolutionary until the peace.”7 The period between the summers of 1793 and 1794 saw the French Revolution at its most radical, domestically, under the control of Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. This was a time of not only war and Terror, but also counterrevolutionary rebellion across France – most severe, and severely 7

The literature on the Terror is vast. Recently, see Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

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repressed, in the Vendée region of western France.8 Because of extreme measures put in place at this time, like the levée, the French regained the initiative in the war and ultimately retook much of the German Rhineland. As mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, after the Battle of Fleurus in June 1794, France also re-conquered Belgium and occupied southern Holland – arrogating almost unfettered control of the entire left bank of the mighty Rhine. There was, nonetheless, more controversy in France about these new claims to and military extraction from the Rhineland than there had been about earlier annexations and even the pouvoir révolutionnaire. Whereas some French officials advocated pursuit of French interests and glory, others maintained a strict respect for the will of foreign peoples. Robespierre, known as “the Incorruptible” for his supposed moral purity, is often portrayed as consistently opposing chauvinistic annexation – although his position was more nuanced than often thought and reflects generally the muddle of these justifications. Many officials cautioned that expansive territorial ambitions were not rendering the Republic – and the principles it purported to protect – more secure, but rather endangering it by enflaming the states system in which it must exist. Such arguments were reminiscent of what not only early revolutionary diplomats but also France’s adversaries, especially the German lawyers of the princes possessionnés, warned against: the potential of the people’s will to imperil the rule of law and the territorial settlement of Europe. This policy dispute in France, especially after the Thermidor coup against Robespierre in July 1794, which ended the Terror, manifested itself most clearly when Prussia exited hostilities in mid-1795 and the Republic formally set about negotiating a peace treaty, for the first time since the outbreak of the war, and a settlement for the left bank of the Rhine.9 While some historians see the outbreak of war as an important caesura, others depict a discontinuity between France’s first occupations of 1792–1793 and the period after Fleurus, in 1794–1795. By the latter time, these historians contend, French republicans changed their policy from proclaiming and extending the 8 9

See, most importantly, Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris, 1987). Thermidor, long a subject of “disdain,” is of recent interest. See, for example, the forum in French Historical Studies 38:1 (February 2015): 1–82; the citation is from Laura Mason’s “Introduction.”

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values of the Revolution to extracting wantonly all that the Republic needed or wanted.10 Although there is some truth to this caricature, there was no abrupt break; to assume so ignores both what contributed to the shift and the fact that, as with the move from the relatively benevolent plebiscites of Avignon to the pouvoir révolutionnaire in Belgium, there was significant, if subtle, continuity between all these periods. Or, otherwise put, in the Rhineland there was another evolution in the law that despite superficial appearances nonetheless related back to the will of the people.11 What is more, in the historiography, France’s occupation and annexation of the left bank of the Rhine has often been framed in terms of its aim to extend its borders to its “natural frontiers.”12 George Danton, an avowed advocate of this strategy and the first president of the Committee of Public Safety, made a famous speech to this effect in early 1793: “The boundaries of France are marked out by nature. We shall reach them at their four points, the Ocean, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.”13 Albert Sorel classically argued that France’s revolutionary foreign policy sought to achieve precisely what its dynastic predecessor had sought: rivers, oceans, and mountains as

10

11

12

13

Occupants occupés, 1792–1815 : Colloque de Bruxelles, 29 et 30 janvier 1968 (Brussels, 1969), 48, 69. To his credit, Blanning recognizes “French policy during the first year of the war was confused, as the conflicting claims of national interest and international ideology were sorted out”; however, he goes on to conclude that the move ultimately was “to the detriment of the latter” and, moreover, “the military crisis of 1793 [] brought the final and completely victory of nationalism,” 69. The classic historiography includes Sydney Seymour Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France: A Study in French Diplomacy During the War of the First Coalition, 1792–1797, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957); Arthur Chuquet, L’expédition de Custine (Paris, 1892); Jacques Droz, L’Allemagne et la Révolution française (Paris, 1949) and La pensée politique et morale des Cisrhénans (Paris, 1940); Alfred Rambaud, Les Français sur le Rhin (1792–1804) (Paris, 1891); Philippe Sagnac, Le Rhin français pendant la révolution et l’empire (Paris, 1917). For a more recent survey, see Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). Wilhelm Grewe describes the long history of French interest in natural frontiers, including such diverse figures as Bodin and Richelieu, in The Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin, 2000), 322–324. See also Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France : De l’espace au territoire, XVIe – XIXe siècle (Paris, 1998), especially 115–122. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LVIII (Du 29 janvier au 18 février 1793) (Paris, 1900), 102. The speech occurred January 31, 1793.

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natural bulwarks against France’s enemies.14 The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees was the first European treaty not only to delineate specifically the territory to be ceded, but also to fix the French southern boundary as the eponymous mountain chain.15 The annexation of Savoy and Nice brought with it the Alps as protection in the southeast. Afterward, all that remained was the Rhine.16 However, the proposition that France sought its natural frontiers as a strategic objective, and the connected historiographical debate about whether this move represented a break with the ancien régime or a violation of the renunciation of conquests, ignores the how – that is, the important ways in which the Revolution introduced new means by which France justified this extension.17 Natural limits may have been the ends, but what were the legitimate means of claiming them? The answer to this question ties back to the principle of popular sovereignty.18 The Conquest, Loss, and Re-conquest of the Rhineland Between the Belgian theater in the north and Savoy and Nice in the south, a Prussian and émigré force amassed in Coblenz, located at the 14

15

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17

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Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 3, La guerre aux rois, 1792–1793 (Paris, 1925), 250. See also volume 1, Les mœurs politiques et les traditions, in which he argues that revolutionaries tapped into much older strategic thinking. See Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989). Enlightenment thinkers are often described as looking to nature as having created boundaries: Sahlins, Boundaries, 97. Sahlins cites Grégoire on Savoy: “one must consult the archives of nature, to see what rights are permitted, what duties are prescribed” (Moniteur, 14:333; November 28, 1792), Boundaries, 187. Sorel, meanwhile, depicts Danton and others as believing, simplistically, that natural limits were set out by nature and in nature’s inherent goodness, 3:278–279. The arguments in this chapter are agnostic on these older historiographical questions, of the extent to which officials offered natural boundaries as a strategic objective or indeed the main goal in this period, or the novelty or widespread acceptance of the proposition. For the rebuttal to Sorel, see Gaston Zeller, “La Monarchie d’Ancien Régime et les frontières naturelle,” Revue d’histoire moderne 8 (1933): 305–333 and “Histoire d’une idée fausse,” Revue de synthèse 11 (1936): 115–131. For a recent take, see Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries Since the Seventeenth Century,” The American Historical Review 95:5 (Dec. 1990): 1423–1451. Chimène I. Keitner perceptively recognizes this combination and, in a different context, calls revolutionary foreign policy “balance of power politics with a twist, namely, a new international legitimating discourse based on national sovereignty.” See The Paradoxes of Nationalism: The French Revolution and Its Meaning For Contemporary Nation Building (Albany, 2007), 118.

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strategic confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, after the Revolutionary War broke out in April 1792. Led by Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, of manifesto fame, this force invaded France in July and occupied the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. After initial losses, the French were able to halt this incursion, just as they had farther to the north and more famously at Valmy. Indeed, the French soon reversed their fortunes and entered into the territory of their recent assailants, in the Rhineland, as they had also done elsewhere. French armies – under the leadership of General Adam Philippe Custine, known also as général moustache to his devoted soldiers – soon occupied much of western Germany. At first, the French had hardly any need to rationalize their incursion, as towns across the Rhineland implored them for union. Thus, the “Great-Bailick” of Berg-Zabern requested incorporation in November 1792, “ashamed still to be slaves to a prince.” In an indication of how widely the protocol for election of assemblies and requests for union was disseminating, the citizens of Berg informed the French that they had received information from the city of Landau, three leagues away, on how to elect officials properly, and that they were animated by the same sentiments as the people of Savoy, who had, of course, requested union in October: “Penetrated by the same sentiments as Savoy, we manifest to you the same desires and we undertake the same responsibilities.” In rousing and formidable language, cited at the very beginning of this book, which recalled Robespierre’s claim that “the cause of Avignon is that of the universe,” the people of Berg entreated the National Convention, “Legislators, declare to the universe that all peoples who suffer under the yoke of despotism, and who desire the protection of the French and union with their republic, will be protected and recognized as French.” They proceeded to predict that French protection was all that the rest of the inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire were waiting for, “to break their chains.”19 The request from Berg is compelling for a number of reasons. Composed on November 10, 1792, it was read in the Convention on November 19, and clearly inspired the decree of fraternity of that 19

AN: AD/XV/42. “Adresse du Grand-Bailliage de Berg-Zabern à la Convention Nationale,” written November 10, 1792, read in Paris November 19, 1792.

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same date – discussed in the previous chapter for its relationship to the pouvoir révolutionnaire. It is completely unmentioned in the historiography that the noteworthy decree of fraternity was not a proactive measure aimed at exporting the French Revolution, but was inspired instead by an appeal from abroad. In spite of changes to French policy in occupied territories that came soon thereafter, especially because of the decree of December 15, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lebrun clarified to diplomats that the declaration of fraternity aimed to help only those people wanting liberty from sovereigns with whom France was at war; it did not apply to “a neutral people” or those who “had freely given themselves the constitution under which they were governed.” What is more, in keeping with Merlin de Douai’s understanding of integral sovereigns – and perhaps reflecting France’s own, no-longer-theoretical concern about domestic insurrection – Lebrun clarified that if a people “wished to break the pact which united them to the social body of which they are part, it would be inappropriate for them to count on our assistance” and the French would view these actions as “sedition in which we would take no part.” Lebrun called this circumstance wherein a portion of a people were in revolt “a partial will in opposition to the general will.”20 Much like the revolutionaries’ application of the principle of popular sovereignty to the relationship between France and Corsica or Alsace, deputies in Paris were compelled by events outside their control – and in this case, as in Avignon, by people outside their boundaries – and initially (albeit briefly) they trod gingerly. Before the contradictions between the decrees of fraternity and December 15 outlined in Chapter 3 became acute, deputies asserted that when French armies entered territory in the Rhineland, this entry would not constitute conquest. To quote Berg’s appeal, on which the decree was based, the implicit understanding was that “something that offers itself cannot be conquered.”21 Almost immediately, France’s ability to honor the promises of the decree of fraternity in Germany – to provide the support it guaranteed – was outpaced by requests for help and for union. In Bergzaberu, in midDecember, the mayor and the municipality complained that the general from whom they had requested help had deferred, for lack of precise 20

21

Archives diplomatiques de France (AD): CP/Suisse/431 (Oct.–Dec. 1792). Letter from Lebrun to Barthélemy, Paris, December 10, 1792. AN: AD/XV/42. “Adresse du Grand-Bailliage de Berg-Zabern à la Convention Nationale,” written November 10, 1792, read in Paris November 19, 1792.

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instructions from the Convention.22 The people of Schambourg requested union to reverse an exchange brokered under the old public law of Europe that had seen France trade them to the Duke of Zweibrücken in 1786: they claimed to be “children whom tyranny had ripped from the arms of their mother.”23 In late December 1792 the Convention sent two representatives to “reestablish order, revivify public spirit, and regenerate both the civil and military constituted corps” in the Rhineland. They were Jean Pierre Couturier and Georges Frédéric Dentzel – originally a soldier for the Duke of Zweibrücken from the Palatinate; later, a Lutheran pastor in Landau who supported the French Revolution and founded the National Guard and Society of Friends of the Constitution in that city; and, eventually, a deputy in the Convention.24 In February 1793, primary assemblies of a now-familiar model met in cities across the Rhineland under French aegis to elect deputies to a wider assembly, the “Rhenogerman National Convention,” which convened in Mainz on March 17. As elsewhere, Jacobin clubs were active in this whole process.25 These elections were “free,” to quote the president of the Rhenogerman Convention, Joseph Hofmann, also

22

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24

25

AN: F/7/4401. Letter from mayor and municipal offiers of Bergzaberu and other villages, around December 14, 1792. See also the request for union from the commune of Enstzheim-Empire, February 27, 1793. AN: F/7/4390/2. “Adresse des habitants du Bailliage de Schambourg, qui demandent d’être réunis à la France, 1793,” and letter from Minister of the Interior to president of the Convention, January 6, 1793. AN: AD/XV/41. “Rapport et projet de décret, sur la réunion au territoire de la République Française, de trente communes enclavées sur les bords du Rhin, entre Landau & Wissembourg,” 1793. Sagnac, 72. See also Oliver Benjamin Hemmerle, “From ‘Schwesterrepublik’ to ‘Revolverrepublik’: French Embrace and German Acceptance/Repulse” in In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789–1815), eds. Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer (Baden-Baden, 2008), 72. See also Amir Minsky, “In a Sentimental Mood: German Radicals and the French Revolution in the Rhineland, 1792–1814” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2008), although Minsky also describes the problematic relationship between the Mainz and Paris Jacobin clubs in 1793. Finally, see Leighton S. James, Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe (Houndmills, 2013), 29, who argues the elections “produced a paltry turnout” and “the French occupying authorities (and the ‘Clubbists’ themselves) were ultimately disappointed at the weak influence the small number of radicals had over their countrymen.”

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a general administrator in the city government of Mainz.26 The first order of business for the 130 deputies, again following precedent, was to declare the people free and sovereign. On March 21, three French representatives and Custine, as General of the Army of the Rhine, visited the Rhenogerman Convention to recognize the people it represented as, indeed, free, and to “assure [them] protection and the maintenance of their sovereignty.” It is a matter of some ambiguity whether this delegation then suggested that the deputies vote to join France, or if locals proposed the union. In any case, the idea was accepted – some claim unanimously – by the assembly and, on March 23, a mission was sent to Paris to submit the appeal in person.27 The French National Convention “accepted” this request, “freely declared” by the people of the Rhineland in a decree of March 30, 1793.28 However, France’s military position was anything but secure. Prussian and Austrian forces entered Mainz, now a French city, on July 22, 1793, and republicans were not able to retake it until 1795. The capitulated French garrison was sent from western Germany, where it had failed to protect the Republic’s newest citizens, to the Vendée, where it would help quell counter-revolutionary ones.29 Indeed, concern for maintaining social order in both newly annexed territories and the old heartland of the French monarchy, at a time of insurgency against the Republican government in many parts of the country, like the Vendée, is clear when the representatives of the people, Emmanuel Pérès from Haute-Garonne and Louis Portiez from Oise, made allusion to the St. Bartholomew Day massacre in a report to the Convention from Belgium.30 Back to Mainz, in his terms of surrender, the French 26

27

28

29 30

AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795). “Des Nouvelles Limites de la Republique Francaise,” by Hofmann, Paris, III, 4–5. Ibid. Hofmann claimed that the French proposed the union, though he also claimed it was accepted unanimously. The French documents obviously imply the idea was the Germans’ own. AN: AD/XV/41. “Décret de la Convention Nationale, Portant que les villes de Mayence, Worms, etc. font partie intégrante de la République Française,” March 30, 1793. See also AD: CP/Mayence/70 (1791–1794). Report of the commissioners sent August 13, 1792. Bell, 169. AN: AD/XV/41. “Avantages de la réunion a la France de la ci-devant Belgique et pays de Liège et Maestricht et Compte de la seconde mission des représentants Pérès (de la Haute-Garonne) et Portiez (de l’Oise) dans ces pays réunis,” IV, 70.

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commandant tried also to negotiate the evacuation of members of the political clubs, like the Jacobins – a clear indication, yet again, of the importance of these individuals and groups to the French in the newly annexed borderlands.31 The Prussian king refused “peremptorily.”32 Indeed, negotiations over the exchange of German prisoners in France and the patriot “hostages” in Mainz, many of whom were club members, continued to be one of the few subjects of diplomatic exchange between France and its adversaries into 1794.33 This breakdown in diplomatic relations reflected France’s increasing isolation. Back in January 1793, Spain and Portugal had joined the Prussians and Austrians in hostilities against France, and on February 1, Great Britain and the Netherlands did so as well. In early March, in a self-induced measure that reflected some radical demands from the early Revolution, France annulled all treaties of alliance and commerce with states with which it was at war. Republican envoys to the few states where they were still welcome would, according to instruction from Lebrun in June 1793, henceforth be simple in their dress and speech. They were required to address their colleagues and counterparts as “citizen” rather than with a title – including Monsieur – and the familiar French second-person participle, tu, proliferated in place of the more formal vous.34 Meanwhile, France’s military position continued to deteriorate and some of its eastern territory again came under occupation. In August, the representatives of the people of the combined Armies of the Moselle and Rhine warned, “our enemies stain once again the land of liberty; Condé, Mainz, and Valenciennes are under their control,” mixing recent and more long-standing French possessions.35 That same 31

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33 34

35

Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, 1988), 146. AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795). Conditions of capitulation of Mainz, July 23, 1793. French soldiers were allowed to leave freely, and take their arms, except cannons, and colors. AN: AD/XV/42. Hostages in Mainz, 1793. Generally, see Linda and Marsha Frey, “‘The Reign of the Charlatans Is Over’: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” The Journal of Modern History 65:4 (Dec., 1993): 730–733, and Frédéric Masson, Le Département des affaires étrangères pendant la Révolution, 1787–1804 (Geneva, 1977). AF/II/248 (Armée du Rhin). Proclamation by the representatives of the people of the Armies of Moselle and the Rhine, J. B. Lacoste and Guyardin, Metz, August 6, 1793.

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month, on August 21, the French founded their first republican spy service, forerunner of the famous Deuxième bureau, in Metz.36 Two days later, France declared its infamous levée-en-masse. Although already at war with most of their neighbors, in September 1793 the French severed diplomatic ties with all regimes save republics: the trio of the Dutch, Swiss, and American peoples were the only ones with whom the French maintained relations. The French, momentarily, committed themselves to open diplomacy and foreswore secret correspondence. Also in September 1793, Terror was proclaimed “the order of the day.”37 Radicalization of French domestic politics during this period was, therefore, inextricably linked to the republic’s international situation, as it intensified both militarily and ideologically. The Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, raged against “The furious and destructive passion of the French people who wish to subject all the nations to an insane system of liberty and equality.”38 A British diplomat, meanwhile, alleged that the French, not content solely to ruin their own government, were trying to wreck all of Europe, in his words, by inciting principles that invite peoples to rise up against any legitimate authority, and to break all moral and civil links. Their intentions in this respect are contained in their formal decrees to grant fraternity and help to peoples who want to revolt and recover what they are not ashamed to call liberty, a liberty that was started and that supports itself by crimes and cruelties, that make humanity shudder. A liberty a thousand times more unbearable than the hardest and the most bloodthirsty despotism that the history of the world can offer as an example. Liberty, finally, without law, without order, without personal security, but characterized by terror, by the distrust, by the upheaval of individual properties and the more brazen presumption.39

For their part, French revolutionaries became even more adamant about Cambon’s memorable offer in the decree of December 15 of 36 37

38

39

AN: AF/II/246 (Armée du Rhin). Copy of decree, August 21, 1793. Among others, Jean-Clément Martin shows how this slogan, famous though it may be, was never officially decreed by the Convention: Violence et Révolution : Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris, 2006), 189. AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795). “Ratification de l’Empereur des Conclusuma des 18 février et 22 mars 1793.” AN: AF/II/63. “Manifeste par M. Drake, Ministre Plénipotentiaire de Sa Majesté Britannique auprès de la Serme. République de Gênes,” most likely fall II.

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“Peace to the cottages, war to the chateaux!”40 All the while, tension remained between this decree and the decree of fraternity or, indeed, at the heart of the pouvoir révolutionnaire as described in the previous chapter, with both its respect for and forceful imposition of the principle of popular sovereignty. Another seeming contradiction developed with respect to the will of the people in foreign lands, and requisitions and military strategy generally; was prevalent in many occupied and annexed territories but most conspicuous in the Rhineland; and is the subject of this chapter. Republican military exigency could trump all, including the principle of non-interference explicit in the decree of fraternity and the will of the people still implicitly valued in the decree of December 15 and the pouvoir révolutionnaire. Already at the time of union of Monaco, on February 14, 1793, Lazare Carnot, a key military organizer, had said, “Every political act is legitimate, so long as it is required by the welfare of the state.”41 Before the fall of Mainz, when the city was still under siege and in an attempt to relieve pressure, General Alexandre de Beauharnais invaded the Palatinate and sought to take nearby Mannheim; Beauharnais was the first husband of Josephine, who as Napoleon’s wife would later become Empress of France. Envoys sent to the Elector Palatinate affirmed that the French army was not undertaking conquests, because “this is not an enemy of which we take possession.” They explained that the Republic would “never interfere in the internal government of our neighbors” and its intention was “not to infringe on [the] rights” of others. Nonetheless, “the motives of security and defense force us to enter territory that for many reasons we wanted to consider as neutral.”42 Soon, military imperative and the “welfare of the state” would “force” the French to do more than simply “enter” the territory of others.

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AN: AF/II/63. “Paix aux Chaumières, guerre aux Châteaux,” Metz, June 2, 1793. In this broadside, which reversed the order but retained the language of Cambon, the Convention’s representatives of the people ordered the arrest of the Prince of NassauSarrebruck and his family because, although France strenuously desired peace, “despotism searches everywhere to oppose the triumph of philosophy.” Archives parlementaires, vol. LVIII, 547. AD: MD/Allemagne/123. “Mémoire pour servir d’instructions aux Citoyens chargés de faire connaître à l’Electeur Palatine les intentions de la République Française à l’égard de l’invasion fait dans le Palatinat par l’armée du General Beauharnais,” 1793. They were even instructed to invoke France’s role as guarantor of Peace of Westphalia to justify their invasion!

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Exploitation and Strategic Interests General Custine, although hailing from an aristocratic background, took the initiative to promote popular government in Germany from the onset of his army’s occupation there. But his actions also show that the French sometimes had more self-interested and avaricious intentions. In November 1792, the people of Frankfurt claimed not to be worried about the approaching French army, because they had “manifested the most peaceful intentions towards the French Nation.”43 A petition written by a Frenchman related how happy the population of Frankfurt was with the status quo, such that General Custine could not, according to one observer, have been aiming to liberate it because the inhabitants already considered themselves free.44 In spite of this professed neutrality, and in an ominous precedent, Custine not only entered the city but also imposed a burdensome military indemnity on the municipal authorities. The general claimed that Frankfurt housed émigrés and asked for a contribution of two million florins.45 The city’s representatives later complained to the National Convention in Paris that the general, “after having entered Frankfurt in a hostile manner, after having treated this city as conquered territory, occupied it as an enemy land.”46 Thus, even before the decree of December 15 was promulgated, Custine not only enthusiastically propagandized French revolutionary values, to a people who asserted their own freedom, but also immediately imposed harsh levies. People in other areas also complained about being treated like an occupied enemy. In late February 1793, deputies from the cantons of Hardtkirche, Wolfskirchen, Trouling, and Dimmering inquired why 43

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AN: AD/XV/42. “Mémoire sur la Contribution militaire de deux millions de florins, imposée à ladite Ville, au nom de la République Française, par les Députés de la Ville libre d’Empire de Frankfurt,” November 1792. AN: AD/XV/42. Petition for the people of Frankfurt, November 6, 1792; “Relations exacte,” January 10, 1793. AN: AD/XV/42. “Mémoire sur la Contribution militaire de deux millions de florins, imposée à ladite Ville, au nom de la République Française, par les Députés de la Ville libre d’Empire de Frankfurt,” November 1792. AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795). “Mémoire des députés de Francfort près la Convention nationale au sujet de la prise de cette ville par les troupes allemandes,” Paris, January 6, 1793. This source alleges Custine only requested a contribution of one million florins from the city. Part of what may have motivated Custine’s conduct toward Frankfurt was advice from municipal authorities in Mainz, a rival city and center of pro-French sentiment.

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their lands were being subjected to requisitions as if they were foreigners and foes, when they had been united with France by a decree on the 14th of that month. They insisted on being treated as French citizens.47 Even French officials were sometimes bewildered by their orders. Writing to the Convention president, a commissioner delegated to the army by that body articulated his surprise upon learning from a colleague commissioner to the Armies of the Rhine, Vosges, and Moselle that they were expected to make requisitions in Zweibrücken under the auspices of the decree of December 15, but after its union with France, and to send envoys “to preach the sacred love of liberty, and preside over the formation of municipal governments.”48 Overall, there was often a disjuncture between the actions of civilian authorities more interested in inculcating the principles of the Revolution and brusque military personnel who aimed to extract as much benefit as they could for their armies.49 Extractive and exploitative practices took a number of forms. The representatives of the people imposed the assignat – revolutionary France’s problematic paper currency, the value of which was supposed to derive from confiscated church lands – in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere, to improve the Republic’s balance of payments.50 Commercial policy overall was oriented to France’s advantage. For example, representatives of the people claimed in 1794, “For a long time [Belgians] have demanded that the barrier established between [their] country and the territory of the Republic be lifted,” but nevertheless they maintained many exceptions to the free flow of commerce between France and Belgium, in ways that, of course, benefited France.51 That commercial regulations or monetary policy 47

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AN: AF/II/246 (Armée du Rhin). Decree of the representative of the people of the Army of Moselle, Sarrebruck, August 31, 1793. AN: AF/II/247 (Armée du Rhin). Letter to the president of the Convention, by Boutay, commissioner delegated to the armies, Zweibrücken, April 2, 1793. Occupants occupés, 313. AN: AF/II/239 (Armée du Nord). “Proclamation des représentants du peuple près les Armées du Nord et de Sambre et Meuse, aux Bataves,” signed H. Bellegarde, Portiez (de l’Oize) and Briez, Brussels, 10 Brumaire III/ October 31, 1794. AN: AF/II/239 (Armée du Nord). Proclamation of the representative of the people of the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, along with the envoys to the departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, signed Berlier, Briez, J. B. Lacoste, Portiez (de l’Oise), Roger-Ducos, and N. Haussmann, Brussels, 26 Brumaire III/ November 16, 1794.

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should favor the French is perhaps understandable – and these deeds were by no means the worst of the pecuniary impositions on conquered and annexed lands. French military officials complained that “since the entry of the French” in Namur, for example, extractions had been organized “in a manner as damaging to the prosperity of the people of Namur as to the interests of the Republic; seeing as most of the requisitions made were done without authorization, they rendered useless those that were done legitimately . . . The result of these requisitions is a debacle.”52 Overall, in the Rhineland, the French sought “contributions, subsistence . . . in general all that one has or could requisition from the enemy territory occupied by the armies of the Republic.”53 Indeed, concern arose that France was not exploiting the great resources of this area as much as it could be. In August 1795, the representatives of the people of the Armies of the Rhine and Moselle urged the authorities in Paris to act fast “to see in an efficient manner to the conservation of national income in this vast and valuable part of our conquests.”54 To this end, the representatives sent two citizens – Bella, who had worked as a customs official in the department of Bas-Rhin, and Kolb, who was the chief inspector of forests – to organize preliminarily the conquered lands between the Rhine and Moselle rivers. The representatives suggested creating an agency of customs and contributions, with better oversight by a central commission and a streamlined judicial system. Most importantly, as they put it, “We thought it necessary to avoid the establishment of the mass of administration that has been adopted in Belgium, firstly because of the difficulty of finding administrators zealous for the new order of things and secondly because . . . far from accelerating the pace of business, they would hinder it by their lack of fitness for this kind of work.”55 52

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AN: AF/II/241 (Armée du Nord). Decree of J. B. Lacoste, representative of the people of the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, Namur, 8 Nivôse III/ December 28, 1795. AN: AF/II/244 (Armée du Nord). “Pouvoirs & Instructions pour les Citoyens Dumoulin et Colonge, agents, envoyés près des Armées du Rhin et de la Moselle,” from the Committee of Public Safety, 26 Nivôse II/ March 16, 1794. AN: AF/II/244 (Armée du Nord). Letter from the representatives of the people of the armies of the Rhine and Moselle, Rivaud et Merlin (de Thionville), to the Committee of Public Safety, Strasbourg, 22 Thermidor III/ August 9, 1795. Ibid.

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The administration of and requisitions in lands occupied earlier, therefore, affected those taken later. When new territories were conquered – as, for example, in Flandre-Orientale, West-Flandre, Tournesis, and the old duchy of Luxembourg – responsibility was given to more established areas, like the central administration of Belgium, in this case.56 Thus, patterns of administration and exploitation replicated themselves. When Koblenz and Trier were conquered, control was subordinated to the central administration at Aix-la-Chapelle. French diplomats emphasized that in the area between the Meuse and Rhine rivers, with a population of 1.5 million, “It would be impossible . . . that a single superior administration would suffice for a population as spread out [as this one].” The plan, again, was to follow the system established in Belgium, in which Brussels had a central administration and a governing council to run the vast lands for which it was given jurisdiction.57 The administration of these various territories was complicated by the fact that, because of military reversals on both sides, an area could go from being an annexed part of the Republic, to controlled by the enemy, to re-conquered by the French, all in a few months. The ambiguity of the status of Belgium between its first union with France, its recapture by monarchical forces, and then its re-conquest can be summed up by the query of one Belgian citizen, J. D. Moreu: “If we were French, could we be conquered in the name of France?”58 The issue was not merely semantic: occupied territories often, though not always, suffered harsher requisitions than areas annexed to France. How to justify this plunder? According to a report drawn up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Directory – France’s new government after the Terror, established on November 2, 1795 – “All the towns of this country,” between the Meuse and Rhine rivers were 56

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AN: AF/II/243 (Armée du Nord). Decree of the representatives of the people of the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, Briez, Portiez (de l’Oise) and Haussmann, Brussels, 3 Frimaire III/ November 23, 1794. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/185 (1794 et 1795, ans 2, 3 et 4). “Motifs qui ont déterminé le projet de Règlement pour les Pays conquis, appelés d’entre Meuse et Rhin,” 6 Nivôse IV/ December 27, 1795. AN: AD/XV/41. “Réflexions soumises au Comité de salut public par un citoyen Belge, Sur le rapport de Merlin de Douai,” by J. D. Moreu, Paris, 8 Vendémiaire IV/ September 30, 1795.

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to be “subordinated to the beneficent law of the victor.”59 This “beneficent law” permitted all lands to be assessed for “heavy military and extraordinary contributions.” However, the result of this behavior, in addition to hostage-taking and summary executions, was that “public spirit in this area is destroyed. The name French there is, in general, almost as loathed as that of their old masters.” This damning report blamed the activities of French agents: “The conquered countries were viewed as an enormous prey that was abandoned to the rapaciousness of some men who were there to enrich themselves in the fastest and the most scandalous manner.”60 Another proclamation mentioned the “beneficent law” that “unites your territory to the Republic” and “calls you to enjoy the benefits of a revolution that has amazed the universe.” Here, a forceful “law” rather than the will of the people is described as having united this territory with France – a point underscored by the text “You are French” that headed the proclamation, on one page in French (“Vous êtes Français”), facing on the other the German literal translation, without any hint of irony, “Ihr sind Franken.”61 Similarly, according to one report, the French believed themselves “authorized by the law of war, and even more so by the reasons that put their weapons in their arms, to see to their various needs by contributions from” conquered territory – even if, by their own admission, this only alienated the local population further.62 The wide prerogative assumed by the French is evident, for example, when on October 15, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety ordered that a new group of representatives of the people be sent to Belgium, and that these representatives were “authorized to bring . . . to the administration of Belgium any amendments and modifications that circumstances or localities may require and to take all the measures

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AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/185 (1794 et 1795, ans 2, 3 et 4). “Rapport du Ministre des Relations Extérieurs au Directoire Exécutif, Sur la situation administrative et politique des pays conquis,” 9 Frimaire IV/ November 30, 1795 Ibid. AD: CP/Pays-Bas Espagnols et Autrichiens/185 (1794 et 1795, ans 2, 3 et 4). “Proclamation de l’Administration Centrale du Département des Forets Aux Administrés de ce Département, sur la réunion prononcée par la Loi du 9 Vendémiaire, an 4e.” AD: MD/Pays-Bas/5. “Mémoire sur l’Etat actuel de la Belgique,” Paris, 4 Ventôse III/ February 26, 1795.

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that the salvation of the Republic will require.”63 One of these representatives, Philippe Constant Joseph Briez, also from the borderlands of Douai – and who clearly had megalomaniacal tendencies, based on the way he signed his name into his official letterhead – argued in a dispatch to one of his colleagues that the order of October 15 gave them “the greatest latitude of power”: “thus, it is up to us now to procure for the Republic all the goods and advantages that it has the right to expect from these conquests.” Briez suggested that every French representative “confer and determine together all the great measures of administration” so that collectively they could plunder an even greater territory, more efficiently.64 This talk of the “law” of the victor might seem like a return to ancien régime legal forms, when military conquest constituted one of the most common and clearest justifications for territorial annexation. Indeed, it was unpopular for that as well as the obvious reasons. The difference, however, is in the idea of “salvation” in the Committee of Public Safety’s order. In 1795–1796, a merchant from the Rhineland who supported its absorption by France, Georges-Guillaume Boehmer, financed an essay competition asking whether it was in the interest of France to make the Rhine its eastern frontier.65 He offered a 4,000-franc prize. So many more people than expected submitted entries – 56 in all – that it was ultimately necessary to increase the prize money to be distributed to a greater number of worthy finalists. A majority of the essays supported the idea that keeping the left bank was in France’s interest, and indeed supported the proposition that France could plunder and pillage its new windfall as it pleased. But a subtle yet significant justification pervades even this otherwise bellicose collection. The winner was a man named Charles-Guillaume Théremin, a Prussian of Huguenot ancestry who became French in 1795, worked in various capacities for the Republic, and was called by the Prussian ambassador in Paris “the great expert who is consulted” 63

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AN: AF/II/235/A (Armée du Nord). Register of order of the Committee of Public Safety, 24 Vendémiaire III/ October 15, 1794. AN: AF/II/235/A (Armée du Nord). Letter from Briez, representative of the people in Brussels, to Lacoste, in Valenciennes, 27 Vendémiaire III/ October 18, 1794. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil.”

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about Germany.66 Théremin argued, “It was only after conquering its own liberty, that France could be master of deciding its own frontiers,” thus implying that a free people could justifiably make such determinations.67 Jean Joseph Derché of Vosges, an employee of the Committee of Public Safety specializing in external relations and who came in second, used both a classical reference and a parental metaphor in a popular pamphlet to bolster his point that, “If the union of Belgium and these countries below the Rhine provide a common benefit, France may force them to form this union”: [I]t is thus, according to Polybius and Mably, that the Achaeans, who were the freest people ever known, forced several cities to enter their League against tyranny. One could well compare the inhabitants of the left bank of the Rhine to people in their infancy who do not have, by themselves, a clear will, and who need a guide to put them on the road to Happiness: what must France do in their respect? Fulfill the duties of a good father who wants good for his children and often does it without consulting them.68

Derché’s account echoes the logic of the pouvoir révolutionnaire, whereby a people in their “infancy” must be put on “the road to Happiness” by a parental figure who might do so even “without consulting them.” He also tempered his claim that France, like the Achaeans, could “force” other peoples to its will so long as it provided “a common benefit,” by referring perhaps to the decree of fraternity. He stated, “France will never forget the solemn obligations that it contracted to help weak peoples,” but a more important and, indeed, “The most sacred duty for France is to prevent these countries from falling back into the control of their former masters.”69 The strategy and success of the French against despots trumped its earlier pledge of assistance to free other peoples or, indeed, respect for their wishes.

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Andrew Jainchill discusses him in detail in Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, 2008), 115–116. The citation is from 144. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Théremin, 2. AN: AD/XV/41. “Discours de J. J. Derché des Vosges, sur la rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française,” Paris, IV, 12. Ibid., 45–46, 16. As if to anticipate his adversaries’ counter-argument, he pointed out that France was not annexing territory for the simple sake thereof, because, for example, France had not kept any of the land it conquered during the war from Spain.

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In a Ministry of Foreign Affairs memo from October 1794, toward the end of the Terror, the author illustrated the difference between expansion based on strategic interests versus the will of the people, asserting, “An empire can expand in two ways: by conquest, or by free union.” France had clearly renounced the former option in its famous declaration of peace to the world, the author claimed, and because of the republican respect for justice and the rights of man. Therefore, the author continued, France “had employed the second method in principle and in practice.” And yet, the author claimed that France most definitely had the right to conquer as it liked, not unlike the officials who invoked the old law of war; he merely counseled reflection on whether and when this approach was the wisest. It was necessary to inquire whether a particular union advanced “the aim of society,” being either the “common happiness” or “the advancement of the perfectibility of man.” The author concluded, “[No] nation has yet been in so fortunate a situation as is France at this moment. The fate of other nations depends on it. To make them happy, it only has to make itself happy.”70 Most remarkably here – in terms of otherwise onerous and unpopular strategic annexations and requisitions – is the belief that to help others, France had first “to make itself happy.” Just as advocates of the pouvoir révolutionnaire argued that the need to promote popular government was such that it trumped even the independent choice of a people, erroneous or craven as it might be, some republicans in France identified a new justification that also served a seemingly higher purpose. Many French republicans considered the various acquisitions, requisitions, and other extractive, avaricious, and chauvinistic behaviors grievously necessary. They asserted that France could do anything to protect the Republic, even pilfer and conquer lands against the desire of locals, because the Republic was engaged in an existential struggle against the forces of tyranny. In much the same way that Terror was linked to virtue in domestic politics, acquisitions and this new justification for conquest became linked to the preservation and perpetuation of virtue, instantiated in the Republic itself, in international affairs.71 70

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AD: MD/Allemagne/117* (1778–1796). “Examen de la question à l’égard du pays conquis,” October 14, 1794. Robespierre’s famous line on the subject is “Terror without virtue is fatal; virtue without terror is impotent. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe,

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The first step in defending this logic required underscoring, as always, that the war was not France’s fault, but had been thrust upon it by perfidious enemies. The vast majority of commentators emphasized and re-emphasized this point. For example, in his prizewinning essay, Théremin wrote that France’s enemies, “believed that our generosity [in declaring peace to the world and renouncing conquests] was weakness,” and so attacked. Now that French armies were victorious, “they want to remind us of this generosity” and the renunciation “that they began by mocking.”72 He argued that because France had not started the war with the intention of conquest, “since fortune expanded us in a defensive war, we can only enrich ourselves by those who, in an offensive war, could not defend themselves.”73 Similarly, the political figure François-Antoine de Boissy-d’Anglas argued, “According to established diplomatic practice conquests are only recognized as consolidated by treaties, up until which point they are simply occupations.” But he clarified that this older law applied only in wartime, and that France was not really at war, under the tenets of dynastic international law, because “it repulsed attacks aimed against it to overthrow liberty.” Therefore, he concluded, “The fate of war favored France . . . fortune most definitely did not abandon justice. Its conquests belong to France, therefore, because they are the price of its courage, the compensation for its losses, the punishment of its enemies.”74 The last part of this sentence indicates the second important point. Because it was not responsible for the war, France could acquire whatever spoils it liked as a just indemnity for having been made, unfairly, to fight. In a report to the National Convention about his mission as a representative of the people in the lands conquered by the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, Claude Roberjot, an

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inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue,” from a speech to the National Convention on February 5, 1794. Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. X (Paris, 1967), 357. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Théremin, 9. Ibid. AN: AD/XV/41. “Recueil de discours, sur la question de la réunion de la Belgique à la France,” speech by Boissy-d’Anglas, representative of the people, Paris, V.

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abjuring priest who held a number of posts after the fall of Robespierre, argued that it was appropriate to take an indemnity, because the war was so vicious: “when the French Nation drains itself to fight a war in which it was subjected to injustice, dishonesty, hatred for freedom, jealousy of its future prosperity, [with] all the powers united to beat it and destroy it; how could it be politic, appropriate, to require no compensation from our enemies?”75 Charles Delacroix, another representative of the people, similarly believed that because Austria had provoked war with France, “it is necessary that it pay the price of the blood of our brothers [and] the treasures it has forced us to spend.”76 Derché was emphatic in asserting that annexing territory to the Republic was just such compensation: “It is still necessary to assign to the defenders of the homeland a reward worthy of their glorious work; this reward, it is union with the countries from which they have removed our enemies.”77 Moreover, according to Charles Tainturier, a judge from Liège, France “could not renounce the compensation that it has the right to expect from the defeated enemy who had sworn its annihilation.”78 But France was not simply owed recompense for the wrongs done to it in the past by the despots who started the war. This point is indicated by the key word: “annihilation.” As Delacroix made clear, the benefits France now claimed, in land and specie, were also insurance for the future: “If the peace that our conquests will ensure us, does not guarantee us an augmentation of forces . . . we will remain in a state of languor and stagnation that will not allow us to oppose the ambitious designs” of Austria, Prussia, Russia, or any of those who sought the Republic’s eradication.79 This last point is the third, and most important, step in this reasoning. The issue was not only that France was owed territory and 75

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AD: CP/Allemagne/669. Report made to the Convention by Roberjot, representative of the people, Thermidor III. AN: AD/XV/41. “Opinions sur la réunion de la Belgique et du pays de Liège,” by Charles Delacroix, representative of the people, Vendémiaire IV, 2. AN: AD/XV/41. “Discours de J. J. Derché des Vosges, sur la rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française,” Paris, IV, 45. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Tainturier, 23. AN: AD/XV/41. “Opinions sur la réunion de la Belgique et du pays de Liège,” by Charles Delacroix, representative of the people, Vendémiaire IV, 2–3.

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war booty for the cost of having been forced, illegally in republicans’ minds, to arms. These claims, and the increase in French power they implied, were also the means of saving the Republic by preventing future wars. According to Jean-Philippe Garran, a lawyer and member of Paris’ revolutionary municipal government, “Political corps, like individuals, have the right to do anything that is necessary for their preservation.”80 He went on to argue that if France’s enemies were successful in war, they would destroy the Republic. He summed up these various points well when he argued that the territory France annexed because of the war was legitimately annexed, because of “the indemnity owing to us for the most just war that any nation has ever undertaken; the need to decrease the power of our most formidable enemies by increasing ours [and] to end this dreadful scourge and prevent it from returning in the future.”81 Indeed, he characterized these principles as “the justice of reprisals and reciprocity that must reign between belligerent powers, following the Law of Nations.” But France was not just any “political corps,” and most revolutionaries no longer followed the old “Law of Nations.” As Théremin put the new reality, simply and succinctly, in his essay, “Before all, it is necessary to preserve in France the fruits of this revolution, and to maintain the republic.”82 He was hardly alone in this view. The representatives of the people, Pérès and Portiez, made the same argument: by pushing forward its boundaries, France was multiplying “our means to defend against the common enemy” – despotism.83 Roux, an administrator in the Jura mountains of eastern France, argued, “The virtues of a people and the justness of their government are the best guarantee of their freedom; but if they must fear for the proximity of many Kings, enemies of their principles, jealous of their power, and occupied tirelessly with their

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Considérations de droit publique sur la réunion de la Belgique,” by J. Ph. Garran, Vendémiaire IV, 4. Ibid., 6, 11. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Théremin, 19. AN: AD/XV/41. “Avantages de la réunion à la France de la ci-devant Belgique et pays de Liège et Maestricht et Compte de la seconde mission des représentants Pérès (de la Haute-Garonne) et Portiez (de l’Oise) dans ces pays réunis,” IV, 46.

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own expansion, [a free people] must for their security create barriers to this foreign ambition.”84 Derché even went so far as to argue that it was “not only in the interest, but also the responsibility” of the Republic to annex all the territory on the left bank of the Rhine.85 Alluding to the need to extend France to its natural boundaries, and providing the justification thereto, he asserted that the French must adopt the “frontiers that nature has traced for it,” because of “the necessity of augmenting our resources and means.”86 This zero-sum game interpretation of European politics recalls the eighteenth-century competition between absolutist dynasties, as Derché argued that any increase in French power would mean a diminution thereof for France’s enemies.87 France had lost important territories, such as its most lucrative colony, St. Domingue, during the war, and he believed “the conquered countries [in Europe] could offset” this loss.88 Echoing the philosophy not only of Vattel but also of Thomas Hobbes, his central point was that “the power of a people increases as it depends less on others for, first, its subsistence and for its own preservation.”89 This emphasis on survival had roots in political philosophy even more nuanced than Hobbes’ state of nature, in which people famously compete in a “war of all against all” as they acquire what is necessary for survival and fight for self-preservation. Grotius, though less famous than Hobbes, was actually the first to imagine a system of natural law from this struggle and analogize it with the international system.90 Now, during the Revolution, many groups made appeals to natural law to 84

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AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Roux, 93. AN: AD/XV/41. “Discours de J. J. Derché des Vosges, sur la rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française,” Paris, IV, 2. Ibid., 2–4. Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 8. AN: AD/XV/41. “Discours de J. J. Derché des Vosges, sur la rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française,” Paris, IV, 30–31. He emphasized that the Rhineland possessed “metals, oak, beech, fir, elm, ash” and that conquest of the left bank would promote commerce with the rest of Germany and around the North Sea. Ibid., 32. Richard Tuck traces the intellectual genealogy of these ideas from Grotius, through Hobbes and Vattel to Rousseau. See The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999). He argues that Rousseau gave the same twist to Hobbes as Hobbes had done to Grotius: if there

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justify exceptional behavior, often in the context of a purported existential struggle.91 Philosopher David Bates argues that the theoretical state of nature of Rousseau, so loved by the Jacobins, rather than that of Grotius or Hobbes, most inspired revolutionaries.92 Bates’ analysis is the most appropriate philosophical context for this discussion of territorial conquest. In Rousseau’s telling, the state of nature is not one of hostility; instead, “crimes, wars, and murders . . . horrors and misfortunes,” come after people found civil society; as they compete over resources, inequality develops.93 Politics develop as the power to provide unity, necessary for protecting the well-being of nascent society. According to Bates, “The unity formed at the origin of the political was existential: the group must be defended.”94 The general will, Rousseau believed, also derived from the individual desire for self-preservation, and was linked to the defense and survival of the community because, according to Bates, “the will of the unified community can never itself deviate from the independent will to survive.”95 Bates believes that this was why Rousseau “seems to justify radical expressions of the sovereign will beyond the law . . . His concept of the political identified a pure logic of preservation that had no predetermined limit.”96

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could not be international peace, as Hobbes’ “war of all against all” suggested, then the Hobbesian state could not protect its citizens from war as, according to Hobbes himself, his state is an agent in a state of nature. But Rousseau saw the Hobbesian state as the best option available. There is a similar relationship in Kant’s work: he agreed with Hobbes about the state of nature, and that it was the duty of people to enter civil society, 207. Arthur Nussbaum links Spinoza to this story, who also believed states existed in a condition of natural hostility, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York, 1950), 144–147. See Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009). See, especially, David William Bates, States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York, 2012). See, especially, Rousseau’s Second Discourse, or, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (in French, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes) (Dijon, 1754). David Bates, “Constitutional Violence,” Journal of Law and Society 34:1 (March 2007): 28. In States of War he argues that Rousseau imagined a political community with an ahistorical character; and that Rousseau did not believe that war created state necessarily, as had Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, but that states made war possible for the first time, 172. Bates, States of War, 188. Also, “Sovereignty is indivisible and without any ‘rule’ – it is ‘absolute power,’” Bates, “Constitutional Violence,” 28. In States of War he similarly argues, “In unprecedented emergency conditions, the state must often act to defend the

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This interpretation of Rousseau helps to elucidate the way republican France could ignore its earlier renunciation of conquest and, seemingly, reverence for the will of the people.97 The republican understanding of popular sovereignty placed a huge emphasis on “maintaining political unity” and on survival. Sorel also seems to subscribe to this reading of Rousseau: he argues that Carnot believed that the Republic was indivisible precisely because being so was in the country’s interests; Europe was divisible for the same reason.98 This interpretation returns to Merlin’s belief that territories such as Alsace, when it had formed part of the Empire, and the left bank of the Rhine that France came to occupy could be admitted into the nation easily and readily because they were not parts of an integral sovereign – but, once part of France, their separation was precluded.99 More importantly, this mindset permitted any action deemed necessary to the survival of the community, including the need to plunder, pillage, occupy, and annex – even against the will of the inhabitants – territories such as the Rhineland. It is not totally without base, therefore, that many revolutionaries believed Rousseau said, “if philosophers become the masters, they would be a thousand times more intolerant than any others.”100 Whether or not he ever uttered those words, Rousseau’s philosophy corresponds with the belief of many republicans: when the war was at its most treacherous and their society most in danger, any action was permissible to assure the Republic’s survival. As General Lazare Hoche, in charge of the Army of Moselle, said in January 1794, “all our morality is concentrated in the prosperity of the Republic.”101

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political community, even at the expense of the law.” This action can be justified because all law, even constitutional law, requires a stable body politic and peace to function, although this very existential legitimation of the political undermines constitutional order, 215. Sorel, 3:200. Ibid., 3:310. Only here Sorel quotes Hobbes and his law of the state of nature, rather than Rousseau, whose interpretation is more appropriate. See also Keitner, 74. She writes that the French state was “ill-suited to accommodating diversity both within and among nation-states” and had the potential to undermine the very freedom it was meant to protect “by making national cohesion a political imperative.” Cited in, AD: MD/Pays-Bas/5, “Mémoire pour les ci-devant Belges, adressé aux consuls de la République Française,” Dufaur, 20. Cited in Blanning, 73.

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War and Peace Laudable and moral though the survival of the Republic may be, in the eyes of some, the French quest for strategic interests in the Rhineland was enormously controversial – in Germany, of course, and internationally, but also within France itself. Debate centered less on whether protection for the Republic was a paramount good, but rather, how best that protection ought to be accomplished. Some policy makers harbored concerns inspired by classical republicanism.102 Still others believed that while conquests were not necessarily problematic, the French had to be less ideological and more pragmatic in their approach. Jean Bon Saint-André suggested in the Convention that French officers needed to be more “Prussian,” which referenced that country’s elite and uncompromising but also sensible military ethos, made famous in the eighteenth century under Frederick the Great. The Convention, in turn, had encouraged generals in September 1793 to “exercise with regard to the countries and individuals conquered by their armies the customary rights of war.”103 Some observers of France’s international situation framed pragmatism, therefore, in terms of a traditional if not precisely ancienrégime consideration of the European system. In the essay competition asking if France ought to annex the left bank of the Rhine, mentioned previously, one entrant, Lembert of Strasbourg, argued that an increase in France’s territory and resources was necessary both for preserving the Republic and for maintaining stability in Europe: “The equilibrium of Europe itself imperiously prescribes that France take the Rhine as its boundary.”104 This logic recalled not only a zero-sum conception of politics, but also the balance of power so important to international affairs since the time of Machiavelli, if not Thucydides. Pérès and Portiez alleged that “Europe has its eyes fixed on the annexed countries,” with 102

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As Jainchill describes, “Republics, it was thought, could not survive expansion,” 146. He explores the puzzle that whereas monarchies conquered, not since the Roman Republic had one acquired a land-based empire: “And the Roman Republic, as anyone educated in the eighteenth century knew, perished as Rome became an empire,” 142. See also 147–148. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LXXIV (Du 12 septembre au 22 septembre 1793) (Paris, 1909), 231. AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Lembert, 112, 116.

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the balance of power foremost in peoples’ minds. They contended that England and Russia, in an effort to counterbalance France, guaranteed Belgium to Austria.105 Meanwhile, for France, control of the Low Countries was paramount to “divest the English of several branches of trade,” in the words of Roberjot.106 Only then could France offset England on the seas – and Austria and Russia on the continent – and, according to Garran, “put an end to this dreadful scourge and prevent its return in the future.”107 Hardliners, meanwhile, held that no matter how many of its conquests France might offer to return for the sake of a settlement, Britain indubitably would never allow for peace: if the Republic started to return some of its conquered territory, perfidious Albion would ask for it all.108 In spite of such positions – which married French interest to a pragmatic if not Prussian and traditional appraisal of the balance of power – increasingly, there was widespread recognition of the need to temper the Republic’s approach to conquest, whether it occurred in the name of the people or the pursuit of strategic advantage. Joseph Eschassériaux, a member of the Convention, opposed annexations based on the decree of fraternity and requests from foreign peoples. In 1794–1795, he issued warnings similar to those that had earlier opposed applying the will of the people to questions of international territory because of the destabilizing effect: “It is chance, incorporation, or conquest that has set every people on their territory: these titles must be sacred, inviolable; to ignore them, there would only be confusion, anarchy and destruction” – although artfully he left out feudal or dynastic titles. History, he warned, would judge equally badly the conquistadors in America, those who partitioned Poland, and the French. He maintained that a desire to make people happier, so central to the pouvoir révolutionnaire, even if it aimed to do so against people’s wishes, was no justification for invasion: 105

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Avantages de la réunion à la France de la ci-devant Belgique et pays de Liège et Maestricht et Compte de la seconde mission des représentants Pérès (de la Haute-Garonne) et Portiez (de l’Oise) dans ces pays réunis,” IV, 47. AD: CP/Allemagne/669. Report made to the Convention by Roberjot, representative of the people, Thermidor III. AN: AD/XV/41. “Considérations de droit publique sur la réunion de la Belgique,” by J. Ph. Garran, Vendémiaire IV, 4, 11. AN: AD/XV/41. “Discours de J. J. Derché des Vosges, sur la rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française,” Paris, IV, 34, 39.

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“The blood of people should no longer be spilled for the cause of freedom.” And yet, in keeping with a concern for France’s strategic position, he did allow one caveat: “The right of conquest, when not legitimated by defense, is an unjust law.” Overall, he believed, “To reject this principle, would plunge the world into a state of continual war.”109 Indeed, the Convention revoked the decree of fraternity, on April 13, 1793, and pledged instead that France would not involve itself in the government of others, but it insisted that it likewise would not tolerate interference by other powers in its own internal affairs.110 This assertion merely restated the principle of early modern international law – non-interference – and indeed something that revolutionaries had been claiming since 1789: that other powers should not concern themselves in France’s domestic business. In his speech in support of the measure, Danton asserted: We have reached a stage where it is necessary to disengage liberty, in order to protect it better against all these enthusiasms. Let me explain: in a moment of enthusiasm you passed a decree the motive of which was doubtless fine, in that you took on the obligation to give protection to peoples who sought to resist the oppression of their tyrants. This decree appeared to commit you to support a few patriots who might wish to start a revolution in China.111

Just a few months earlier, Danton had advocated that France push its boundaries to its natural frontiers. Here, Danton’s message is that to best “protect” liberty, France must protect itself. Much of the historiography depicts the policy shift from the decree of fraternity to the strategic imperative of natural frontiers and exploitation of conquered territory as relating to France’s vulnerability to both foreign invasion and internal rebellion in early 1793. Also important 109

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AN: AD/XV/39. “Des droits des peuples; des principes qui doivent diriger un peuple républicain dans ses relations étrangères,” Eschassériaux the elder, III, 11–12. There was no need to force liberty – with, for example, le pouvoir révolutionnaire. Instead republicans had to be patient. Eschassériaux foresaw “A day will come no doubt, when peoples, one after another, will awake from the long torpor of slavery, and will reclaim their rights, break all the instruments invented by tyranny to keep them in irons.” Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. LXII (Du 13 avril au 19 avril 1793) (Paris, 1902), 102. Archives parlementaires, vol. LXII, 3.

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was the political ascendancy of Robespierre and the “Mountain,” the radical political group in the Convention who supported him, including, for example, Eschassériaux. Robespierre had a famously pusillanimous attitude toward emancipatory foreign policy, especially the imposition of freedom on others, such as with the pouvoir révolutionnaire. This was the Robespierre who railed against “armed missionaries.”112 It was the same strict devotion to the will of the people that impelled Robespierre to believe it ought to be respected in Avignon, which he had called the cause “of the universe,” even though union went against France’s interests at the time. There is much truth to this depiction of Robespierre’s foreign policy convictions, although the reality is more complex.113 On the one hand, it is said, he opposed wars of liberation against a people’s will. And yet, he was capable of boastful chauvinism: “The French people seem to have preceded by two thousand years the rest of the human race . . . Europe is on its knees before the shadow of the tyrants whom we are punishing.”114 On April 24, 1793, not long after the National Convention had rescinded the decree of fraternity, Robespierre proposed in that venue expanding the fight against tyranny to the whole world – although the matter never came to a vote. He threatened all those who endeavored to hinder the march of liberty, saying they must be attacked “not like ordinary enemies, but like rebel and brigand enemies” and that kings and the aristocracy be declared enemies of the human race.115 Such a proposal would extend well 112

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From his speech “On War” in the Jacobin Club, January 2, 1792. Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. VIII (Paris, 1954), 81. Keith Baker has argued that “Warfare – not the virtue-enhancing kind once fought by a civic-minded citizen militia, but the modern, professionalized, deficit-financed, tax-generating, and despotism-fostering war fought by standing armies – this became Robespierre’s great bugbear in late 1791 and early 1792”; in “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 73:1 (March 2001): 32–53. Robespierre’s position may have started as such, but it changed over time. Meanwhile, Blanning believes “Robespierre could have claimed complete consistency,” 71. Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 : recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. XC (Du 14 floréal au 6 prairial an II/3 mai au 25 mai 1794) (Paris, 1972). The citation comes from his May 7, 1794, report to the Convention, “On Religious and Moral Ideals and Republican Values.” Cited in Alphonse Aulard, “La société des nations et la Révolution française,” Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution Française, vol. 8 (Paris, 1921), 152–153. See also Edelstein.

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beyond the scope of the decree of December 15, or even the pouvoir révolutionnaire. “The Incorruptible” backtracked from this position, like his noble one with respect to Avignon, by fall 1793 when he said, “The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free despite itself.”116 Robespierre came to the conclusion, like many of his peers, that the cause of France could trump the cause of other people – that is, “the universe.” Or, had the cause of France become the cause of the universe? Precisely when Robespierre’s power was at its height, the acquisition of territory for strategic purposes was most pronounced, leading one scholar to characterize his approach not as pure ideological commitment, but rather “hardheaded Realpolitik.”117 This deliberate focus on France itself was nevertheless protection of the font of popular government, exemplified by the brutal requisitions in the Rhineland, and so can be said to derive from the same reverence for the will of the people that justified the earlier annexations of Avignon and Savoy and the decree of fraternity, and also motivated the pouvoir révolutionnaire. These varied and ostensibly contradictory measures were in reality connected. The subtle evolution from one to the other disproves the apparent jumble, which is well reflected in the supposedly consistent views of that most revolutionary character, Robespierre himself. With Robespierre’s arrest and execution, in the coup of 9/10 Thermidor, year II, according to the new republican calendar, or July 27–28, 1794, there was no reversal of his policy against conquests, since no such clear and consistent policy had existed. The subsequent Thermidoran reaction and establishment of the Directory with the Constitution of Year III did nevertheless offer an opportunity to think about the relationship between the will of the people, emancipatory measures like the pouvoir révolutionnaire, and the accumulation of strategic resources and territory by France.118 116 117

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Quoted in Biro, 1:188–189. Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, 1996), 93. Other historians go so far as to claim that this moment was a reinstitution of ancien régime occupation practices. See Occupants occupés, 24, for example. However, this analysis ignores the way French expansion was linked to spreading and supporting popular movements, at least in theory, and not absolutist glory. See Marc Belissa, Repenser l’ordre européen (1795–1802) : De la société des rois aux droits des nations (Paris, 2006), 29, where he argues that the aim of his work is “to try to understand how actors thought this ‘moment of transition’ and which conceptions of European order underpinned” the period around 1795, although his treatment ignores the important continuities from before. For the classic treatment

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Pro-annexation figures such as the director Jean-François Reubell from Alsace, and therefore with a bias in favor of eastern expansion, squared off against those who opposed more acquisitions. Despite their differences, the ensuing debate reflected a widespread interest in stabilizing the international system and France’s position in it after the radicalization of the war’s most dangerous phase. These considerations were crystalized in the negotiation of the peace treaties with Spain and Prussia at this same time.119 What was not up for negotiation – in keeping with the principles of both non-interference and popular sovereignty – was recognition of France’s republican government. As a diplomatic briefing asserted, “The existence of the French Republic is a fact the recognition of which can neither be discussed nor be made into an article of the treaty.”120 In the instructions sent from Paris, the French plenipotentiary, François-Marie Barthélemy, was warned that Prussia would offer to recognize the Republic, but that this offer must be rejected as needing neither acknowledgment nor recompense: “The Republic that they could not prevent from existing, is recognized as soon as they treat with it, and recognition amounts to certifying a fact which has no more need to be attested.”121 With respect to the border with Germany, Barthélemy was to stipulate, “The Republic views the Rhine as its natural limit, which it is resolved to maintain.”122 The Committee of Public Safety in Paris also advised Barthélemy to reject the Prussian proposal that France hold some areas of the left bank “in civil possession” only, until a general peace were negotiated between France and the Holy Roman Empire. The Committee even insisted on the language used to characterize the occupation, until the final treaty was concluded, to

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see also Raymond Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de l’Europe : Des traités de Bâle à la deuxième coalition (1795–99) (Paris, 1911). The first overtures for peace developed because they exchanged plenipotentiaries to deal with prisoners: CP/Prusse/215 (Vendémiaire–Floréal III). AD: MD/Prusse/8 (1758–1804). “Précis historique of the négociation,” 1796. AD: CP/Prusse Supplément/10 (1793–1795). “Instructions pour le Citoyen Barthélemy, Ambassadeur de la République Française auprès des Cantons Suisses, relatives à la négociation de paix avec le Roi de Prusse,” Paris, 26 Nivôse III/ January 15, 1795. Ibid. The instructions continued, “The reasons of law and even reciprocal convenience, which dictated this resolution, will be easily understood by the Citizen Barthélemy and the Committee does not need to list them.”

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assert a stronger claim – “the French Republic will continue to occupy” instead of “the troops of the French Republic.”123 However, the French would consent – in perhaps the grossest violation of the will of the people, and a return to the horse-trading of ancien régime diplomacy – to an exchange of territory. Internal documents show the French understood that if “[t]he Rhine will be the new boundary of France,” lost Prussian territory on the left bank could be the main source of contention during peace negotiations: “France requires the cession (of the left bank): but it will not oppose that H[is] M[ajesty] the King of Prussia obtain a portion of territory beyond the Rhine in equivalency. [France] may even help him to procure it.”124 From the talks, Barthélemy reported that the Prussian king seemed ready to concede the left bank of the Rhine and that Prussian “indemnification should take place on the right.”125 This compromise by France, while clearly an abandonment of principle, was nevertheless another strategic consideration made in defense of the Republic. Notably, the Prussians were much more worried in case this provision became public – given the uproar it would cause in the rest of Germany – than were the French, for whom this was a betrayal of their revolutionary values.126 The Treaty of Basle, April 5, 1795, formally ended the war between France and Prussia, and was the first legal instrument negotiated

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AD: CP/Prusse/214. Letter of the Committee of Public Safety to Barthélemy, 2 Germinal III / March 22, 1795. Hardenburg, the Prussian envoy and future foreign minister, proposed that instead of France gaining control of the left bank, it should “enjoy the same assurances and advantages of the estates of the King,” along with a secret article saying France could have them after a general peace so long as the Prussian king was indemnified. See AD: CP/Prusse/214. Letter from Barthélemy to the Committee of Public Safety, Basle, 3 Germinal III/ March 22, 1795. AD: CP/Prusse Supplément/10 (1793–1795). “Résultats des explications du Comité de Salut Public sur les ouvertures pacifiques préparatoires faites de la part de Sa Majesté le Roi de Prusse et de son Ministère,” Paris, January 8, 1795. AN: AF/III/76 (Prusse). Letters of Barthélemy, ambassador in Swizlerland and negotiating with Prussia, Basle, 29 Pluviôse III/ February 17, 1795 and 18 Germinal III/ April 7, 1795. Ibid. As one anonymous pamphleteer wrote, just as France was justified in exploiting the territory it conquered, now during the negotiations France ought to “claim all the expenses that [it had] the right to require by the law of conquest.” See AN: AF/II/64. Anonymous “Response” to the treaty.

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between France and another power since the start of the Revolution. According to article V, France would continue to occupy all Prussian possessions on the left bank of the Rhine, until a definitive arrangement between France and the Empire. However, according to article II of the secret annex to the treaty, as discussed, Prussia essentially ceded the left bank to France and, in return, France promised that, at the general peace, it would help Prussia obtain compensation on the other side.127 Other secret stipulations included that Prussia would make no hostile moves against the Low Countries (article I) and France would move hostilities away from Prussia (article III).128 Of course, Prussia was only one of 97 states with lands occupied by France on the left bank of the Rhine, and the general peace was therefore no small matter.129 To shore up its diplomatic position in the months after its settlement with Prussia, the French negotiated a number of similar such arrangements with the larger west German landholders: with the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, on August 28, 1795; with the Duke of Wurttemberg, on August 7, 1796; and with the Margrave of Baden, on August 22, 1796.130 These treaties all shared many terms – and, indeed, language – with the Prussian one. France would keep the left bank of the Rhine until a formal and definitive settlement with the Empire. There was no talk of the will of the people on the left bank in these documents. Instead, in the secret provisions, the princes agreed to use their position as members of the Imperial Diet to push for a general peace with France, at which time “all the dependent territory of the Empire on the left bank of the Rhine, the islands, and the course of the river will be united with the French

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AD: CP/Prusse/214. Treaty of Peace, Basle, 16 Germinal III/ April 5, 1795. AN: AF/II/64. Secret provision of the treaty. 129 Rambaud, 162. AN: AD/XV/42. See the peace treaty with the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, Basle, 11 Fructidor III/ August 28, 1795, by article 5 of which France kept all possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. See also “Loi Contenant ratification du traité de paix conclu le 20 Thermidor, an IV, entre la République française et le duc de Würtemberg et Teck,” 28 Thermidor IV/ August 15, 1796, and the secret articles of the treaty in which the duke also agreed to push so that Italy lose all feudal links to the Empire. See also “Loi Portant ratification du traité de paix entre la République française et le margrave de Bade, 5 Fructidor,” 14 Fructidor IV/ August 21, 1796, and the secret articles of the treaty.

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Republic.”131 The cession was to be legitimized in treaty law, not according to the principle of popular sovereignty. Because of the nature of German Imperial law, and as these secret provisions showed, the settlements with individual princes on one or the other side of the Rhine mattered less than the general peace. The individual territorial concessions needed the formal agreement of the full Diet and thus, as Barthélemy knew well, Austria could meddle.132 Much hinged on the emperor himself. Barthélemy reported that when Francis II received news of the peace between France and Prussia, he was overjoyed, and the empress clapped and said “bravo.”133 Officially, however, the response was more somber. The Emperor’s public position vis-à-vis France was fairly intransigent and maintained an ideological opposition to diplomacy with the Republic: “To know if France is equally disposed and has the same desire to work to end the war,” he asserted, one need only look at the actions of France, before returning to a favorite point of contention: “for example, the contrasting variation in French diplomacy between the declarations it made on the renunciation of all conquests,” back in May 1790, and all its subsequent acquisitions.134 A decree of the Imperial Commission about the possibility of negotiations with France asserted the need for German unity: The preponderance of Germany is founded on the happy accord of the generality of the wills of the States united legally with their leader . . . H[is] I[imperial] M[ajesty]. . . hopes that the Electors, Princes, and Estates, in the important matter of the peace of the Empire, will not do anything against the content of . . . the Peace of Westphalia.135

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Ibid. AN: AF/III/76 (Prusse). Letter of Barthélemy, ambassador in Switzerland and negotiating with Prussia, Basle, 16 Ventôse III/ March 6, 1795. AN: AF/III/76 (Prusse). Letters of Barthélemy, ambassador in Switzerland and negotiating with Prussia, Basle, 10 Floréal III/ April 29, 1795. AD: CP/Allemagne/668 (1795). “Traduction du décret de Ratification de la cour Impériale, Royale, addresé à la Diète générale de l’empire à Ratisbonne, de Vienne, le 19 novembre 1795, touchant la manière d’entamer une paix convenable pour l’Empire et les instructions, plein pouvoirs, et à donner à la Députation de l’Empire.” AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795). “Décret de la Commission Impériale relatif aux voies préparatoires pour une pacification avec la France,” Vienna, May 19, 1795. This call did not quite reflect the extremity of the threat from France to the existence of the Empire, as Schroeder and others argued and as described in Chapter 2.

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Prussia, in anticipation of this rebuke, sought to bolster its position for having come to terms with France by, first, claiming it was merely looking out for German interests; second, blaming England for prolonging the war; and, last, accusing the emperor of poor leadership and responsibility for the losses Germany had suffered, especially the left bank of the Rhine. Meanwhile, the French, in establishing the conditions under which they would negotiate with the emperor, insisted that France keep Belgium and Luxembourg and that Francis II potentially compensate himself, again in a return to territorial swaps, with lands in Germany. Italy was, at this point at least, up for negotiation except for any parts of the departments of Mont-Blanc and Alpes-Maritimes, formerly Savoy and Nice, which were “declared constitutionally an integral part of” France.136 The French ultimately achieved these demands, and more, with the Treaty of Campo Formio, by which Francis II in his dynastic capacity as Archduke of Austria but not as emperor also recognized the extension of France’s boundary to the Rhine.137 This time it was Francis, not the King of Prussia, who had to contend with wider German acquiescence to the new reality in the Rhineland.138 Also, like the Prussian ruler, in secret provisions Francis tried to secure new lands in exchange for his own losses; as before, the compensation for everyone else was to be a major point of contention.139 It was not until the

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AD: CP/Autriche/363 (Vienne, 1792, M de Noailles, ambassadeur, M Maison, Chargé de mission). “Instructions sur la Conduite que Doit tenir le C. Potterat Par rapport aux deux Déclarations du Ministre de l’Empereur,” by the Directory, signed Reubell, Paris, 7 Frimaire IV/ November 28, 1795. See also AD: CP/Allemagne/667 (1793, 1794, 1795), “Projet de Paix,” 1795, with similar provisions including France’s annexation of the left bank, and the proposal that Austria take Bavaria for its loss of Belgium. Much more will be said about the Italian dimension to this treaty in Chapter 5. AN: AD/XV/39. “Observations” on article 3 of the note of the French plenipotentiaries to the Congress of Rastatt, 28 Fructidor VI/ September 14, 1798. The author argued that secessions from the Empire had to be recognized by that whole entity: “It cannot suffer any kind of separation from the Germanic body without the consent and approval of His Imperial Majesty and the Empire”; all powers recognized this reality, as did “all existing treaties”; and overall the Holy Roman Empire was just “as one and indivisible” as the French liked to claim of the Republic. AD: CP/Autriche/368 (1797–98). Letter from the envoy to the Diet of the German Empire, to Bernadotte, ambassador in Vienna, Regensburg, 6 Ventose VI/ February 24, 1798. Many stakeholders believed the secession of the left bank had been decided at Campo Formio, so they were “more and more worried about their

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Congress of Rastatt, which opened in December 1797 and which was the first diplomatic assignment of Klemens von Metternich, the future Austrian Chancellor and chairperson of the Congress of Vienna, that a settlement with the full Empire begun – although the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition in 1799 and the assassination of the French plenipotentiaries to Rastatt thereafter left the Rhineland, technically, in international legal limbo until the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in February 1801.140 No matter: France had been administering the left bank of the Rhine as annexed territory for some time by then, having in January 1798 formally divided it into four departments and decreed the full application of French law. The Rhineland was formally annexed on March 9, 1801.141 In July 1795, another major power made peace with France and exited the war – Bourbon France’s erstwhile Family Compact ally, Spain. That treaty, also negotiated at Basle and signed on July 22, 1795, demarcated the boundary geographically at the Pyrenees, like its 1659 predecessor, stipulating, “commissioners should take as the basis of this treaty, as far as possible, the summits of the mountains which form the watershed between France and Spain.”142 Aside from matters of strategic consideration and even natural frontiers, this

140

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future settlement” and regretted not dealing directly with, and getting an indemnity from, France. See also a letter from and to the same, 25 Ventôse VI/ March 15, 1798, in which the envoy recounted how secession was finally consented to by a deputation of the Empire; ecclesiastic princes “are in consternation since they see that certainly their reign is no longer of this world, while the princes who had hereditary states on the left bank of the Rhine find means of consolation in having been deposed in the expectation of being amply compensated on the right bank,” especially with church lands. See article VI of the treaty. The murder of the French envoys, a serious contravention of international law in any era, shows the contempt in which most Austrians still held revolutionaries. Metternich, in his letters from Rastatt, called the French “illconditioned animals” and said, “You would die of fright if you met the best dressed of them in a wood.” Later, the French would have a similar disdain for diplomatic immunity. Linda and Marsha Frey describe how as emperor, Napoleon told Prince Eugène de Beauharnais to arrest ambassadors if necessary in Italy, in “Diplomatic Immunity? International Law and the French Revolutionary Legacy” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 20 (1993): 213. AN: AD/XV/41. “Loi portant que les départements de la Roer, de la Sarre, de Rhinet-Moselle et du Mont-Tonnerre sont partie intégrante du territoire française,” 18 Ventôse IX/ March 9, 1801. AD: CP/Allemagne/669 (Correspendance of Barthélemy). Peace treaty with Spain, 4 Thermidor III/July 22, 1795, article VII.

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border delineated an increasingly important difference – nationality. According to an anonymous pamphleteer, such separations had an inherent morality: “There are moral limits . . . that time has assigned to each people and that history respects more than others. Language, uses, customs, morals, character constitute these limits and create, of every political body that is contained therein, a Nation apart.”143 Going forward, colors on a map would no longer denote dynastic possession, and instead national allegiance, predicated in theory if not always explicitly in practice on the will of locals. The German author of this missive quoted from a piece allegedly written by the disgraced General Dumouriez, in which the conqueror of Belgium is supposed to have observed that at least the French and Belgians spoke “the same language.” However, the author warned, “They are not the same people” on the left bank of the Rhine, and so France’s eastern border did not conform to this nascent national principle.144 Aside from underlining cultural and linguistic differences, this German national, who clearly opposed France’s annexation of the Rhineland, also had a strategic point to make: “Observe the splendors of history, and you will see that national states have rarely experienced total annihilation, while political bodies composed of several portions of different nations, have suffered endless vicissitudes.”145 This warning about the durability of France’s increasingly heterogeneous empire echoed Merlin de Douai’s own logic about integral states and composite political entities, although here nationality replaced a consideration of the general versus a particular will.146 As usual, the author cited one of the eighteenth century’s greatest crimes as an important point of reference: “It was reserved for our century to show us the destruction of a national state; but the fate of Poland is certainly 143

144

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Lettre d’un allemand à un de ses amis en France, sur la question: S’il est de l’intérêt de la République Française de conserver ses conquêtes à la rive gauche du Rhin?” Frankfurt, September 2, 1795. Emphasis in the original. Ibid. The Dumouriez piece is “Extrait de l’écrit intitulé : coup-d’œil politique sur l’avenir de la France.” Aside from cultural similarity there are other reasons to annex Belgium, including its enormous wealth and important geostrategic location. Ibid. Again, emphasis in the original. Jainchill highlights the threat perceived by classical republicans to a polity too diverse in its mores. He explains that some pro-annexation figures tried to allay these concerns by envisaging “natural frontiers” as “the limit to which the Republic could expand without jeopardizing its republican liberty,” 149. Still others tried to advance (historically dubious) arguments about a common Gallic ancestry, 155.

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not irrevocably fixed.”147 The author was correct, and the reappearance of Poland as a national state coincided with the explicit elocution of a principle in Paris – not popular sovereignty exactly, but rather national self-determination – in 1919.148 To return to the 1790s, what to do with the areas France controlled where the people spoke a different language or, indeed, constituted a separate nation? Tainturier, the judge from Liège, argued that, as opposed to annexation, France could encourage the creation of independent republics in areas that manifested major cultural and other differences.149 With strategic protection for the Republic still forefront in his mind, he suggested that small, independent, neutral republics, like Switzerland, would constitute a better buffer than annexed territory between France and its monarchical foes. Generally speaking, the commercial advantages would be the same.150 Some brochures recommended that France renounce union with the Rhineland and set up an independent republic there too.151 General Hoche, under his own initiative, campaigned for the establishment of a Cisrhenan Republic, created on August 28, 1797, but the enterprise was short-lived.152 Then, the coup of 18 Fructidor, year V, on September 4, 1797, to avert a possible Royalist takeover of the Directory, saw the removal of directors who generally opposed 147

148

149

150

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Lettre d’un allemand à un de ses amis en France, sur la question: S’il est de l’intérêt de la République Française de conserver ses conquêtes à la rive gauche du Rhin?” Frankfurt, September 2, 1795. Emphasis in the original. Meanwhile, Pérès and Portiez wondered whether Poland would get the same advantages from its union with Austria as Belgium would with France. See AN: AD/XV/41. “Avantages de la réunion à la France de la ci-devant Belgique et pays de Liège et Maestricht et Compte de la seconde mission des représentants Pérès (de la HauteGaronne) et Portiez (de l’Oise) dans ces pays réunis,” IV, 45. See Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York, 2001). AN: AD/XV/41. “La rive gauche du Rhin, Limite de la République française, ou Recueil,” essay by Tainturier, 24. AN: AD/XV/41. “Mémoire sur le projet de réunion de la Belgique à la France,” by Adrein-Philippe Raoux, sent to the Committee of Public Safety, 4 Vendémiaire IV/ September 26, 1795, 19–20. An independent Belgium would be prone to interference by other great powers, especially Great Britian: see AD: MD/Pays-Bas/5. “Mémoire sur l’Etat actuel de la Belgique,” Paris, 4 Ventôse III/ February 26, 1795. For example, “Coup-d’œil sur le Rhin, relativement aux négociations de paix” cited in AN: AD/XV/42. See also “Quelques reflétions sur l’établissement de la république Cis-rhénane,” by Dorsch, “an employee in foreign relations,” Paris, VI, who disagreed. Rowe, 58–59.

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annexations: Carnot, the military mastermind, and Barthélemy, who had negotiated peace with Prussia and Spain and was exiled to French Guiana.153 Those who preferred direct control of the Rhineland were politically on the ascendant. Hoche’s death on September 19 also did not help the stillborn independent republic; neither did a dearth of local, public support.154 Perhaps the most important factor that doomed the Cisrhenan Republic was that, with strategic considerations and indeed exploitation in mind, most French officials wished to retain direct access to the Rhineland’s prodigious resources. Although a failure in western Germany, the project of allied and autonomous republics would be taken up elsewhere. Conclusion If republican, like monarchical, France sought glory on the battlefield – then likewise, according to Reubell, in a report on the peace with Prussia, “If the wishes of the French people were for peace, they could only be for a glorious peace.”155 In keeping with the war aims of France in this crucial period, this peace “could neither compromise the dignity, nor harm the interests of the Republic.” Nonetheless, there were tensions between France’s pursuit of strategic interests and its “dignity,” if that is taken to mean is ideological commitment to the will of the people. France’s interests in the Rhineland, whether that be exploitation of conquered territory or annexation to the natural frontiers, seemed at times to contradict its commitment to the principle of popular sovereignty, but closer examination reveals that state interests and republican values were inextricably linked. Many French saw themselves as justified in claiming any advantage in men, specie, or land that would allow them to prevail in the struggle against tyranny. The Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse proclaimed this noble cause to the inhabitants of conquered territory from January 1795: “By breaking their chains, by vanquishing the tyranny that had oppressed 153

154 155

For the context see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820 (New York, 1994), 102. Godechot, I:262. AN: AF/II/64. “Rapport fait à la Convention Nationale au nom du Comité du salut public Sur le Traité de Paix entre la République Française & le Roi de Prusse,” by Reubell, 21 Germinal III/ April 10, 1795.

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them, by pursuing their enemies beyond their borders and in remote areas, the French people also break the irons of their neighbors, and push back, strike, and at the same time destroy all forms of despotism and all support for tyranny.”156 As described in this chapter, that fight and the resulting freedom were costly. Those peoples who were beneficently “united to the great family of French Republicans” would “be associated to their great destiny, to their glory, their triumphs” – but they also were expected to “imitate [the French] in sacrifices and in deprivations.”157 Scholars have described French “sacrifices,” “deprivations,” and occupations during roughly the period of the Terror as categorically different from – if not contradictory to – the policies France had espoused earlier. Some argue that the Terror witnessed an effervescence of Realpolitik based on the acquisition of as much territory and war booty as possible. Some go so far as to say that even Robespierre abandoned a foreign policy based upon republican values and emancipation, while others maintain his ideological purity. Mirroring this historiographical debate, there was certainly more debate about the Republic’s conquests during and just after the Terror than ever before, which itself shows a departure from the early Revolution when foreign affairs, and the role of revolutionary principles therein, were secondary. French diplomacy was always, in this period, driven by a number of potentially conflicting ideas and imperatives, some reflecting longstanding geopolitical ambitions, some inherited from revolutionary ideology, and with the exact combination determined by contingent factors. And yet, whether French policymakers supported exploitation, annexation, both, or neither – the one thing all directors as well as generals and other officials could agree on was, to quote Steven Englund, “an unquestioned belief that the fate of the Revolution hung on maintaining French supremacy in a Europe of hostile regimes.”158 This belief represents an important but subtle continuity from the early Revolution, through all the various claims to territory 156

157

AN: AF/II/235/B (Armée du Nord). “Proclamation au Nom du Peuple Français, Les Représentants du Peuple près les Armées du Nord et de Sambre et Meuse, Aux Habitants de la Belgique et autres Pays conquis par ces Armées,” Brussels, 17 Nivôse III/ January 6, 1795. Ibid. 158 Englund, 112.

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that had developed, and been debated, based on the will of the people. In this new manifestation, France, as the self-described victim of an unjust war and to assure its survival as the lone bastion of republican government, was empowered if not to spread the principle of popular sovereignty, then to acquire through conquest and requisition the means and strategic position necessary to defend that principle. The debate in France at this time also implicated the country’s natural frontiers. Historians have tended to focus on the originality or true nature of this geostrategic goal, but they ignore the fact that natural frontiers were not in and of themselves a legal rationale for their own acquisition. Instead, the justification for them, just like for exploitation, tied back to the defense of the Republic and ultimately of free and popular government. The French, and historians since, also grappled with how the Republic’s conquests, especially the extension of its borders to the Rhine, contributed to an increasingly heterogeneous empire. Whereas the populations of Avignon and Belgium were, for the most part, French-speakers who shared cultural and other similarities with people in France, the same was not true of western Germany. What is more, the rising importance of nationality underlines the reality that in the Rhineland, the French moved from annexing discreet, pre-existing territories based on the will of their peoples, to conceiving of land based on the identity of its inhabitants – or, potentially, any other factor – prior to annexing it. As Peter Sahlins has described, starting at this time, “National territory would be defined by the nationality of its inhabitants – or so it would seem . . . In truth, this was a passive acceptance based on the spatial dimensions of national territory: their territory defined them as Frenchmen, while as Frenchmen they defined their territory as French. This self-fulfilling logic was to have far-reaching consequences.”159 Especially after Thermidor and when they negotiated peace with Prussia and Spain in 1795, the French debated the Republic’s position in the international system and how it might coexist with other states. From the decree of non-interference, in April 1793, to the two Treaties of Basle, the French may have officially moved away from the decree of December 15 and especially the pouvoir révolutionnaire to embrace 159

Sahlins, Boundaries, 188.

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a more orthodox approach to a sovereign states system, with its bedrock principles of independence and equality. The French also accepted the need to enter into diplomatic relations with other powers, even monarchies, and came to appreciate the stability afforded to the wider territorial order from treaties. Still, counterintuitive though it may seem, formal annexation of the left bank of the Rhine under these terms, along with the territorial swaps that made the peace settlements possible, linked back to the glory of popular government, through the protection of republican France Reverence for the will of the people, which initially set off the revolutionary reformulation of legal claims to territory, would manifest itself in one final new formulation. This last iteration theoretically resolved some of the seeming contradictions in this history from the beginning and was made possible by the war, which did not end in 1795. Peace with Prussia, by which France insisted that Germans stay out of the Low Countries, freed republican armies to turn fuller attention to Italy; similarly, after they made peace with Spain, the French could move across the southeast, toward Piedmont. This strategic relief also allowed French officials to focus anew on the Dutch, with whom they also negotiated peace in 1795, but whose territory republican armies occupied. The result of that occupation and those negotiations would not be annexation, as had happened in Belgium, Savoy, or the Rhineland. The establishment of a Sister Republic, the Batavian Republic, in Holland built on earlier proposals, such as the Cisrhenan Republic on the left bank of the Rhine, and reflected many tensions inherent in France’s various claims to territory based originally on the will of the people. For example, the French, “faithful friends of the Batavian Republic,” claimed only to want “to conquer it to respect its independence and consolidate its freedom.”160 And yet, an echo of the exploitation of the German Rhineland and a concern for strategic considerations is also clear as the representatives of the people to the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse wrote of Holland, “It is necessary to find means to channel the riches and resources of Holland

160

AN: AD/XV/41. “Recueil de discours, sur la question de la réunion de la Belgique à la France,” speech by Boissy-d’Anglas, representative of the people, Paris, V.

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into” France.161 Clearly, therefore, emphasis in the Sister Republics would remain on “the capacity to take advantage of victory,” even if they like the Batavian Republic were not annexed territory and, technically speaking, France “respect[ed their] independence.” Overall, the French aim was “to make [the Batavian Republic] a friendly nation, allied, which will combine its power and its resources with ours, as the price of the independence that we obtained for it.” By now, this claim of both autonomy and exploitation was not necessarily contradictory in French minds, and it had far-reaching consequences. As the representatives of the people to the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse observed about the dawn of the modern client state, “The conquest of Holland must not only strengthen and consolidate the destiny of the French Republic, but it will also determine the destiny of the whole of Europe.”162

161

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AN: AF/II/235/B (Armée du Nord). Letter from the representatives of the people of the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, by Briez, to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, Brussels, 4 Pluviôse III/ January 23, 1795. Or, about taking fortresses there, “You will certainly approve of this measure, considering that it is at the first moment that one must score the greatest blows and take all determinations that must ensure the fortunes of the Republic in the conquered territories.” Ibid.

5 Between Subject and Sovereign States: Sister Republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy

In the instructions given to France’s top diplomat in the Batavian Republic in 1797, the Directory claimed, “After the memorable campaign that put the French Republic in complete possession of Holland, [we] gave liberty to a nation that had proven itself worthy.”1 Back at the time of the union of Avignon, the French had not given liberty to anyone, but rather recognized the will of the people to effect a change in the status of a territory, when it accepted the desire of locals to join France. After the decree of fraternity offered assistance to any people who wished to recover their liberty, the French became more proactively involved in these struggles – so much so that via the pouvoir révolutionnaire they gave freedom even to those who had not requested it. Now, the Directory asserted, “It was not sufficient that the United Provinces recover [their] liberty, as that they might maintain it.” As described in the previous chapter, the French believed themselves justified in exacting requisitions and even annexing territory if it served their strategic interests in maintaining freedom against tyranny. However, this position, and indeed the radicalization of France’s entire war effort, provoked something of a backlash. In the aftermath of the Thermidor coup that ended the Terror and around the time of the establishment of the Directory, direct incorporation in the Republic 1

Archives diplomatiques de France (AD): MD/Hollande/71. “Mémoire pour servir d’instructions au Citoyen Charles de la Croix, Ministre Plénipotentiaire de la République Française près la république Batave,” signed Reubell, Barras, RévellièreLépeaux, Merlin, and Talleyrand, 12 Frimaire VI/ December 2, 1797.

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was seen, in some cases, as a bridge too far. In this particular instance, for example, the French believed that “it was necessary for the French Republic to tie [the Dutch] to its own destiny,” not through annexation, but rather with “an alliance, the fairest that ever existed between nations.” The new relationship was both a “sufficient guarantee” of security for the French and Batavian Republics, and proof of France’s continued respect for the will of the people.2 This history represents revolutionary France’s last major innovation with respect to international law and territory. Because of the unique history of the Netherlands and France’s own revolutionary ideals, the French formalized a certain measure of independence and sovereignty for the new Batavian Republic, which took its name from the Roman appellation for people who lived in the Low Countries in antiquity. In addition to the Batavian Republic, founded in 1795, other Sister Republics included the Helvetic Republic, established in 1798 in Switzerland, and a number of similar entities in Italy, starting in 1796. Many locals, especially professional and mercantile elites and the members of political clubs, in these areas were sympathetic to the Revolution and agitated for the establishment of French-style constitutional regimes. But they also had help. Like the votes for union with France in Avignon, Savoy, and Belgium, these new regimes were established in the presence of, or indeed were facilitated by, French arms. This history is best known in the case of Italy, where Napoleon Bonaparte was France’s commanderin-chief and won a series of spectacular victories that helped establish his renown. After their establishment, these regimes maintained close and explicit political, financial, diplomatic, and cultural ties with France – just as the French had tied the Batavian Republic to their “destiny.” The line between military and civilian authority, local and French, remained blurry indeed. Many of the attributes, then and now, of political independence in these states were in fact the prerogative of the French. The Sister Republics were, therefore, entities that existed in an ambiguous middle ground. By maintaining a pretense of local rule, in keeping with the revolutionary devotion to the will of the people, but also by assuring for French military and diplomatic primacy in these relationships, the 2

Ibid.

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Sister Republics represented a synthesis of earlier law that aimed both to champion popular sovereignty and to protect French strategic interests. The Sister Republics were not formally annexed to France the way other territories, such as Belgium or the left bank of the Rhine, were during the Revolutionary Wars – although there were many similarities between French treatment of both. Instead, the Sister Republics were the culmination of a process that began in the earliest years of the Revolution. France’s first claims to territory based on the will of the people in Corsica and Alsace; the evolution from France’s annexations of Avignon, Savoy, and Nice based on assembly votes and plebiscites, to the pouvoir révolutionnaire in Belgium; and the assertions of strategic exigency in the Rhineland were critical for the emergence of this sort of client state. Older historiography of the Sister Republics does not emphasize this trajectory. Albert Sorel, representative of the nineteenth-century consensus, describes their existence as not being in contravention of the old public law of Europe – a fairly un-nuanced appraisal.3 The liberal defender of the Revolution, Alphonse Aulard, sees the origins of international organization in this “attempt or a beginning of a society of nations in these Sister Republics that formed a ring around France.”4 More recent work, often by specialists from the former sister states themselves, emphasizes how local inhabitants played key roles in the assemblies that led to their creation and in their subsequent histories. These scholars’ goal has been to show connection, rather than coercion, between the French and indigenous revolutionary groups and to highlight local agency.5 3

4

5

Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 3, La guerre aux rois, 1792–1793 (Paris, 1925), 225. Alphonse Aulard, “La société des nations et la Révolution française,” in Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française, vol. 8 (Paris, 1921), 152. On the subject of the Batavian Republic, Raymond Kubben highlights how the Dutch had their own republican tradition; thus “France’s first sister was rather adopted instead of given birth to”: Regeneration and Hegemony: Franco-Batavian Relations in the Revolutionary Era, 1795–1803 (Leiden, 2011), 141. Similarly, Annie Jourdan boasts that “other countries in revolution, particularly Holland, preceded the Revolution par excellence that was that of the French,” in “République française, Revolution batave : le moment constitutionelle,” in Républiques sœurs : Le Directoire et la Révolution atlantique, ed. Pierre Serna (Rennes, 2009), 301. See also her La Révolution batave : Entre la France et l’Amérique (1795–1806) (Rennes, 2008). Antoine Broussy rejects the historiography that interprets the Swiss as subject to

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This analysis can be traced to legal historian and former Mayor of Haarlem, Leonard de Gou, who asserted that the various Batavian constitutions were, both in form and content, based on Dutch traditions.6 A focus on the localities, valuable as it may be, neglects important causal factors that were military and diplomatic and, for the most part, instigated by the French. Some scholars interpret the Sister Republics more in this line, as undermining the principles of state autonomy and independence.7 As such, recently, the Sister Republics are one of the few aspects of the Revolution to have undergone serious analysis by legal historians – although much of this work still tends to focus narrowly on individual polities.8 In contrast, this chapter puts the Sister Republics, as

6

7

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French whims and the Helvetic Republic a failure, in “Regards sur la Constitution helvétique : influences croisées entre la France du Directoire et les patriotes suisses” in Républiques sœurs, 333–334. Similarly, Marc H. Lerner argues that “The experiment of the Helvetic Republic collapsed because of the failure to balance the different versions of liberty that existed within Switzerland; the state was not simply imposed by the French as a crime against tradition,” in A Laboratory of Liberty: The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750–1848 (Leiden, 2012), 131. He also notes that the Swiss are “reluctant to acknowledge any foreign source or inspiration for their [modern] democratic society,” and although the French Revolution is often seen as the birth of democracy and modernity, the Helvetic Republic is not remembered or is seen badly by the Swiss as a “foreign imposition,” 321–322. Joost Rosendaal, “La genèse de la Constitution batave de 1798, un produit français ?” in In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789–1815), eds. Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer (Baden-Baden, 2008), 10. See also Leonard de Gou, Het plan van constitutie van 1796. Chronologische bewerking van het archief van de eerste constitutiecommissie ingesteld bij decreet van de Nationale Vergadering van 15 maart 1796 (The Hague, 1975) and Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797. De behandeling van het Plan van Constitutie in de Nationale Vergadering, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1983–1985). Mikulas Fabry, Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of States Since 1776 (Oxford, 2010), notes how the constellation of French satellite states and its legacy, the Napoleonic Empire, “posed a fundamental challenge to the rules of membership in the family of nations,” 36. The volume edited by Jacobs, Kubben, and Lesaffer, In the Embrace of France, and the excellent work of its many contributors is notable in this respect. This work emphasizes that ideological commitment to liberty as well as Realpolitik, or the quest for natural frontiers and the establishment of the Sister Republics, did not form a simple or straightforward contradiction; see the essay by Oliver Benjamin Hemmerle, “From ‘Schwesterrepublik’ to ‘Revolverrepublik’: French Embrace and German Acceptance/ Repulse”, 71; that the period of the Directory, far from being a dull or conservative retrenchment, was a time of development in international thought, when one could

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a phenomenon, in a wider context. It provides a systemic explanation for the birth of the Batavian, Helvetic, and Italian Sister Republics, each in turn, crucially highlighting connections to the earlier history of territorial claims based on the will of the people as they had developed since the beginning of the Revolution. Then, focus shifts to the many ways in which the Sister Republics proved to be, truly, between subject and sovereign states. Another important context that informed the genesis of the Sister Republics was the proposals of various seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thinkers, from Charles Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre to Immanuel Kant, for unions or federations of like-minded states.9 Oliver Hemmerle also sees the concept of the Sister Republic developing from the “Cosmopolitanism/Internationalism of the Enlightenment.”10 Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, who had been critical in transforming the Third Estate into the National Assembly, proposed in 1794 a federative system, which of course France would control, as an “Outline of the French Republic’s relations with the powers of Europe.”11 Henri Grégoire, meanwhile, suggested a Déclaration du droit des gens, or, “Declaration of the Law of Nations,” on June 18, 1793, as part of the constitution the Convention was supposed to

9

10 11

conceive of the appropriate diplomacy of a free people even in the face of increasing authoritarianism in France; see Anna Maria Rao, “Les Républiques-soeurs et la France : Droit international et tentatives d’émancipation dans les écrits de Matteo Galdi,” 99; and that equality and hierarchy were then, just as they had been in the ancien régime and as they continue to be today, a source of great tension in international law; see Raymond Kubben, “A Tale of Dwarfs and Giants: The Batavian Republic and the Franco-Anglo Peace,” 152. On the subject of “legalized hegemony,” see Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge, 2004). Saint-Pierre proposed that the union should not mix in the internal administration of individual states except to maintain a shared, fundamental form of government. See Charles Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713; repr., Paris, 1986), 164. His ideas built on William Penn’s “Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe” (1693). Meanwhile, Immanuel Kant assumed that the existence of separate states presupposed either perpetual war or some sort of legal order, in his opinion something analogous to a federal union: see “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans H. B. Nisbet, 2nd edn. (1795; repr., Cambridge, 1991), 113. Hemmerle, 70. Andrew Jainchill Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, 2008), 187. He notes that this “Outline” was written by an unidentified official who was most “probably” Sieyès.

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prepare, but was never officially adopted.12 Grégoire re-presented his project on April 23, 1795, at the time of the writing of another constitution, the Constitution of Year III that established the Directory. Although he asserted the sovereign equality of all nations, he also promoted universal republican values and hinted at something like a federation in a call for despotism to disappear.13 Both Sieyès and Grégoire were former clerics, and perhaps the universalism of the Catholic Church inspired their visions of international law so distinct from state-centric particularism. What is more, proposals similar to what ultimately became Sister Republics abounded in many areas earlier annexed to France, and with comparable rationale.14 In addition to the abortive Cisrhenan Republic, in Savoy one anonymous commentator suggested that France should “renounce . . . all incorporation and consolidation; but nothing prevents that it contract associations with other peoples, intended to maintain their independence and cement peace.” These associations, the author went on, “would be even more in keeping with the views and principles of the French nation, that diverse peoples, notwithstanding differences of climates, mores, character, could all be aggregated without differences of government being a motive for exclusion, as long as the governments were legally and freely established.”15 Moreover, the Sister Republics that were actually established later in the Revolution were not, strictly speaking, the first examples of this sort of state to exist. In 1792, in the area around Basel, the Rauracian Republic was briefly declared as a “daughter republic” of revolutionary France. Its appellation indicates an explicit subservience, which history ultimately confirmed. Its proper name derived from the Latin moniker of an ancient Celtic tribe, the Rauraci, which inhabited the southern part of the upper Rhine. 12

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Although his “Declaration” was never included in the ill-fated charter, its articles 118–121 declared France to be the friend of all free peoples, an echo of the decree of fraternity. On Grégoire’s “Declaration,” see Aulard, 153–154. Jean-Louis Harouel argues that the idea came originally from Girondins, who in turn got it from foreign “patriots” who came to France, especially from Holland, and starting in 1792; see Les republiques soeurs (Paris, 1997), 3. Archives nationales de France (AN): AD/XV/41. “Pétition à la Convention Nationale Touchante à la réunion proposée de la Savoie à la France,” 1792.

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The Prince-Bishop of Basel, Franz Joseph Sigismund von Roggenbach, exhibited great animus against the French Revolution, especially due to the affair of the princes possessionnés and the agitation of the émigrés. As part of Switzerland, Basel was neutral in the war that broke out in April 1792, but the bishop’s seat at Porrentruy was part of the Empire, and therefore party to hostilities. French troops entered Porrentruy less than a week after the start of the conflict. Armand Louis de Gontaut, General Biron, accused the bishop of having conspired with the princes possessionnés against France, thereby having “broken the peace and the alliance” that had existed between Basel and France since 1780 and thus of being an “enemy of the Republic.”16 In line with a respect for the will of the people and the decree of fraternity that would be passed only days later, Biron qualified France’s position: Because the French Republic only makes war against despots, and not against peoples, and then in entering their territory it intends to make no infringement on their sovereignty or independence . . . We, on behalf of the French Republic, proclaim the citizens of the aforementioned countries free to remove their old masters, and to give themselves any government they want.17

In keeping with the precedents established in Avignon, Biron called on the communes to name one deputy each, “not allegiant to the Prince,” and for those selected to convene in a National Assembly, to decide “definitively on their organization and on the choice of the new government.”18 On November 27, 1792, this assembly met and immediately voiced its pleasure with the decree of fraternity that had been promulgated in the interim. The deputies asserted that they were “meeting in a national assembly under the protection of the French Republic,” and Considering that the constitution and laws of the German Empire are not the result of the will of the people . . . the deputies and representatives of the communes of Basel, meeting in a constitutional assembly, declare before the sky and the earth, that all the links that attached [them] to the Emperor and the Empire of Germany, as well as to the Bishops of Basel and their chapter, are broken.

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Furthermore, they declared the communes a “free and independent republic.”19 Also as in Avignon, the reality of these consultations was more complicated than official pronouncements indicated. Another vote was held on December 19, after the flight of the bishop, but French soldiers were accused of overly active involvement – by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, no less – with the result that some of the “wrong” people were introduced in the assembly as deputies.20 In February, the Convention sent commissioners to Porrentruy, officially, to “establish full liberty.”21 Their mission was, in fact, after the irregularities experienced and the successive collapse of the two earlier assemblies, to convene a new one.22 The third body ended the ill-fated attempt at independent governance and voted for incorporation in France on March 7, 1793.23 The Convention in Paris was happy to oblige, and on March 23, 1793, Porrentruy became the department of Mont-Terrible.24 The people of the nearby town of Bienne recognized a stark binary that the Sister Republics were later able to avoid: “whether to unite [with France] or to be treated as conquered territory.” This choice recalls the pouvoir révolutionnaire, by which people either chose freedom and union with France, or had it imposed on them, or suggests that no third option existed to union or the sort of exploitation and logic of conquest that underpinned French behavior on the left bank of the Rhine.25 Nevertheless, and as described in the previous chapter, some French officials were starting to believe that annexation to the Republic was not a practicable option in all areas and

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AD: CP/Suisse/431 (Oct.–Dec. 1792). “Proclamation des Députés des Etats-libres du ci-devant évêché de Bâle, réunis en assemblée constituante au château de Porrentruy,” November 27, 1792. AD: CP/Suisse/433 (Jan.–March 1793). Letter from Lebrun to the Bishop of Paris, December 29, 1792. See also AD: CP/Bâle/9 (1792). Letter of December 29, 1792, accusing the general of admitting people who should not have been. And AD: CP/ Suisse/434 (1793 – March, April, May). AN: F/7/4400 (Suisse). “Proclamation Des Commissaires de la Convention national de France, envoyés dans le Porrentruy,” February 23, 1793. Ibid. See also AD: CP/Suisse/433 (Jan.–March 1793). AN: F/7/4400 (Suisse). “Procès-verbal” of the General Assembly of Rauracie, for union with France, March 7, II/ 1793. AN: CP/Suisse/434 (1793 – March, April, May). Decrees of union of March 20 and 23, 1793. AN: F/7/4400 (Suisse). Copy of a letter of Bienne, March 16, 1793.

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for all peoples. In a letter to France’s ambassador in Basel, the Bernese diplomat and treasurer Karl Albrecht von Frisching noted about Porrentruy, “The Swiss person is not as patient as the Savoyard. One must hope . . . that the Convention will lose, little by bit, its taste for unions.”26 In 1795, when an assembly in Amsterdam proclaimed the establishment of the Batavian Republic, a new possibility was truly born, soon to be mimicked in Switzerland and Italy as well. The Batavian Revolution and Republic Even in the late eighteenth century, the Low Countries had a long history of insurrection, going back at least to the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), when the Dutch Republic won independence from Spanish rule. Even before Belgium similarly rose in agitation against its own Habsburg masters in 1789, through much of the 1780s, a patriotic reform movement had been in rebellion against the Dutch Stadholder, the Prince of Orange, which clamored for a more democratic form of government on the American model – especially after the disastrous Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784). France’s support for the Dutch patriots, based mostly on the latter’s desire for a French alliance, was passive until the French minister in The Hague convinced Vergennes, the Foreign Minister, that they would certainly emerge victorious. In September 1787, however, Prussian troops intervened to overthrow the patriots and to restore the Stadholder – and, with it, an Anglo-Prussian ascendancy. Many leaders of the rebellion went into exile in France, where they later supported both the French Revolution and its export to their homeland. France, meanwhile, was humiliated and could do nothing for fear of provoking a war, against either Prussia or Britain, that it could ill afford. The Low Countries were an area of such strategic importance to Britain that Edmund Burke once remarked, “Holland might justly be considered as necessary a part of this country as Kent.”27 26

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AD: CP/Suisse/435 (Jan.–March 1793). Letter from Frisching to Barthélemy, Bern, April 2, 1793. Quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), 47. See also Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 40–41 and Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge, 1995), 187–193.

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Early in the Revolutionary Wars, having heard news of French military success in Belgium, Dutch patriots again clamored for France to take the fight into their republic. In a speech before the Société des amis de la liberté et de l’égalité, the old Jacobin Club in Paris, in December 1792, a group of “oppressed Batavians” asked, “We see the chains of our neighbors, the Belgian people, broken . . . The admirable conduct by your many and valiant battalions in the countries conquered by them . . . makes even the rich capitalists of this

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country, desire that they next arrive in our provinces.” They concluded by asserting, “The only question that we ask ourselves, every day, with more confidence than concern, comes down to these [three] words: will they come” – to pay the debt owed since 1787?28 That same December, the Provisional Executive Council of the Convention in Paris deliberated over sending an expedition to the Netherlands based on a request from General Dumouriez, before his defection, “to promote the disposition that the Batavian people have already shown to recover freedom.”29 Without rejecting the idea of “assisting, by the entrance of French troops in Holland, a revolution that is in keeping with freedom,” the Council decided “that, for the moment, it is enough to use all the forces of the Republic against the enemies who first attacked it, and to continue to pursue the Austrians [and] drive them out beyond the Rhine.”30 However, highlighting the way that these sorts of strategic considerations conflicted with French ideological propositions, again, the Batavian Revolutionary and Dutch Patriot Committee wrote the Council in early January, 1793, proclaiming, “Batavians wait with confidence for the rescue and the fraternity, promised by the decree of the National Convention of November 19 to all people, who wanted to become free.”31 On February 16, 1793, Dumouriez indeed invaded the Netherlands, only to be repulsed and pushed out. It was not until the following winter that there had ever been a better time to undertake the campaign, according to a letter sent to Antoine Bernard Caillard, the French secret agent turned ambassador in Amsterdam.32 Then was the moment when France could wage “war on the great and ambitious,” and make peace “with the weak.”33

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AN: AD/XV/49. Letter from “Les Bataves opprimés aux Français libérateurs,” Holland, December 1792, read in the Société des Amis de la liberté et de l’égalité, Paris. Emphasis in the original. AN: AF/II/244 (Armée du Nord). Debate of December 5, 1792. 30 Ibid. AN: AF/III/69 (Hollande). Letter from the “Comité Révolutionnaire Batave & des patriotes Hollandais,” to the Provisional Executive Council, Paris, January 7, 1793. AD: CP/Hollande Supplément/22 (1792–1799). Letter to Caillard, secret agent in Amsterdam and sometimes England, from Paris, 7 Nivôse II/ December 27, 1793. What made the moment so auspicious was the retaking of Toulon, the destruction of the rebels in the Vendée, and the defeat of the Austrians in Alsace. Ibid.

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As always, when it came to the “weak,” the French needed to be seen “not as conquerors but as liberators,” in the words of a former diplomat. This official reckoned that “a purely hostile invasion of Holland would bring together almost all forces against us.” Instead, France must “affirm Holland as a voluntary and independent ally,” in which case the Netherlands “would be more useful than if it must submit to our laws” and adopt a French-imposed government – in short, than if it were subjected to the pouvoir révolutionnaire and annexed.34 Another insightful memo underlined French machinations and mobilization of sympathetic locals in occupied territory, and recalled the French use of political clubs in Savoy and Belgium to populate assemblies. The author of this new piece, a different diplomat, advised that the possibility of union between the two republics needed to be “an immediate point of discussion,” because patriot leaders in the Netherlands needed time to “bring in the real sans-culottes,” the most radical supporters of the French.35 The fall and winter of 1794 proved to be decisive. The British, Austrians, and their allies lost the southern Netherlands and were forced to retreat into Germany. Just as Burke had hyperbolically described the importance of Low Countries to Britain, the French, after their victory at the Battle of Fleurus, boasted that by taking them, they had “struck at the heart of the coalition of kings, because they removed from England its most magnificent dependent.”36 In early 1795, the Stadtholder fled to Britain, which would henceforth turn its military attention to the seas while the Austrians

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AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). “Aperçu sur les relations extérieurs de la République Française” by a former diplomatic agent, 26 Vendémiaire III/ March 16, 1795. AD: CP/Hollande Supplément/22 (1792–1799). “Aperçu de quelques considérations utiles à observer lors d’une invasion effective dans la République d’Hollande.” In keeping with earlier policy in Belgium, the most immediate tasks were convincing people France would follow rules, encourage troops to switch sides, and deal with the clergy. AN: AD/XV/49. [Louis] Portiez from Oise, “Vues sur la Belgique et la Hollande,” III; “Seconde Partie: Vues sur la Hollande,” 12. Then, to achieve peace in Europe, “one must destroy the colossal power of England . . . Thus must be the result of the conquest of Holland,” 12–13. Similarly, AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). “Aperçu sur les relations extérieurs de la République Française” by a former diplomatic agent, 26 Vendémiaire III/ March 16, 1795, states that the work in Holland is key to “hit at the heart of the odious league that aims to subjugate us.”

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focused on Italy. A French envoy in the Hanseatic port of Bremen proclaimed, “The Revolution [in the Netherlands] is totally complete.”37 But who had “completed” this Revolution? There was, indeed, popular unrest that complemented French military action, and that culminated in the proclamation by an assembly in Amsterdam on January 19, 1795, of the Batavian Republic. Caillard relayed that people in the Low Countries were sympathetic to the revolution, but also inquired about “the role he must play.”38 The French clearly had experience with mobilizing their supporters in foreign territory, and in situations less ideal than when a clique had lived in Paris, as had many Dutch patriot leaders since their failed uprising in 1787. The connections between the establishment of the Batavian Republic and French annexations since the beginning of the Revolution do not end there. Much of the logic behind earlier conquests was contained in a 1795 report penned by Pierre-JeanBaptiste, also known as Publicola, Chaussard, a man of letters, former commissioner of the French government in occupied Belgium, and, after Thermidor, the chief of the Commission of Public Instruction. He wrote that any political system in Holland must “without doubt conserve the candor and majesty of our principles,” in a nod to the will of the people, and be based on “the dignity of a free nation.”39 These principles were sacred because, “republican politics must be the opposite of those of despots.” However, just as the pouvoir révolutionnaire was elaborated because some insisted that France could only legitimately undertake diplomatic relations with other free governments, Chaussard argued that France would interact with the 37

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AD: CP/Allemagne/668 (1795). “Quatrième Rapport d’un émissaire envoyé en Allemagne de Brême le 12 Pluviôse III,” January 31, 1795. It also notes “we know that the Stadtholder embarked at Schwessingen for England.” AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Letter from committee of external relations to the Committee of Public Safety, 29 Prairial II/ June 17, 1794. In his reply of 7 Ventose II/ February 25, 1794, Caillard agreed that “a popular revolution is founded on the sacred base of the rights of man,” and again insisted that France had promised “Peace and fraternity to free nations, war to tyrant and oppressors.” AD: MD/Hollande/48. “Mémoire sur Hollande, ou Considérations Philosophiques sur les avantages que la politique, le commerce et les arts peuvent retirer de la conquête des Provinces-Unies, sans porter atteinte aux droits et à la propriété du peuple Batave.” The aim, of course, was “to reach rival England on all the seas, and hit it in India.”

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Batavian Republic “people to people through the intermediary of the government that [the Dutch] will give themselves,” but only if it conformed to French revolutionary values. Furthermore, just as the French claimed strategic assets in western Germany to enable them better to fight despotism, in the Low Countries, “restituting to France its own advantages, sharing the foreign benefits between it and Holland, such must be the goal of our policy.”40 It was in this context, therefore, that representatives of the Batavian people wrote to the French on March 3, 1795. They affirmed that their first act after their successful revolution was to commit themselves to the rights of people; secondly, “with all eagerness and zeal,” they recognized “the acquisition of our independence and freedom.”41 But instead of next requesting union with France, they sent deputies to negotiate a treaty of alliance, the result of which was the May 16, 1795, Treaty of The Hague. The Batavian revolution may have preceded the French, and some Dutch leaders may have actively sought the Treaty of The Hague; however, by that accord, if there were still any doubt, the Batavian Republic proved itself a French vassal. With unequal offensive and defensive alliances that favored a great over a lesser power, territorial concessions of North Brabant and Maastricht to France that directly served its strategic interests, an indemnity, and the imposition of an army of occupation 25,000 strong, this arrangement hardly seems a peace between free peoples. After the conclusion of the Treaty of The Hague, there was still the matter of a Batavian constitution.42 As a report on relations between the French and Batavian Republics later described it, “One did not hesitate in feeling the need to replace [the earlier Dutch Republic] with a Government which, more analogous to the [French] Republic, will harmonize in some way the interests of the two peoples.”43 The French minister in The Hague, François-Joseph-Michel Noël, was instructed to convoke a constitutional assembly, which came together on May 1, 1796, to draft the document.44 The work 40 42 43

44

Ibid. 41 AN: AF/II/64. AN: AF/III/70 (Hollande). “Projet de constitution pour la Republique Batave.” AD: MD/Hollande/71. “Précis historique des rapports de la République française et de la Rep. Batave jusqu’au 18 Brumaire an VIII,” approved by Talleyrand, November 9, 1799. Ibid. See also AN: AF/III/69 (Hollande). Dispatch of Noel, The Hague, 16 Ventose IV/ March 6, 1796.

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proved difficult and there were many conflicts, so the French ended up essentially writing the charter themselves. Notably, the Directory only took this liberty “after having reclaimed the full use of rights of conquest.”45 On January 22, 1798, a coup d’état cleansed the Dutch assembly of many whom the French believed to be British stooges, after which that body rubberstamped a new text based on the French Constitution of Year III, which subsequently entered into force in April 1798. A Unitary Republic in Switzerland A similar story unfolded in Switzerland, which, like the Low Countries, had been independent prior to the French Revolution. Switzerland was a loose confederacy of highly autonomous cantons; in origin, it was a defense league, in the fourteenth century. Its earliest assemblies were hardly legislatures, but rather conferences of diplomatic emissaries.46 Like the Empire and other Baroque political conglomerates of the time, Switzerland was therefore diffuse in both its governance and its territory. For example, the independent city of Mulhouse, formerly of the Décapole, the medieval alliance of free towns, had joined the Swiss confederation in 1515 and remained an enclave in Alsace even during the political rationalization there during the early Revolution, which sparked the affair of the princes possessionnés. The French government wrote to its commissioner in that city, in 1793, “If France were only consulting its conveniences, it would have long ago effected the incorporation [of Mulhouse], but it respects the rights of peoples.”47 Still, Charles-Ignace-Pons Bouder de Catus, the French envoy there, was encouraged to work to “bring them to request their union . . . [to] show that the loss of their political independence is only a chimera,” and that they would enjoy great benefits as part of France, not only in 45

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commercial terms but also because “they will be strong with all the force of the Republic.”48 Clearly, like the papal city of Avignon and Habsburg Belgium, the bonds of association that tied together the old 48

Ibid.

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Swiss confederacy were weak in comparison to the unitary sovereignty of the French. Indeed, the Swiss were concerned about the precedent set by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, given both their geographic proximity and the legal justification proffered.49 As the Secretary of State in Bern, Morlot, noted, “It appears to me not worthy of the generosity of a great and powerful Nation to want to expand at the expense of a nearby power.”50 By late 1797, France still “gave [assurances] that it will maintain the integrity of the Helvetic corps,” but authorities in Bern had reason to be nervous.51 Peter Ochs, a magistrate from Basel, visited Paris in November 1797, but instead of working on the negotiations for which Basel had sent him, “the real object” of his voyage, according to one report, “was to work on revolutionizing Switzerland.”52 Ochs had long advocated a new Swiss constitution, along with FrédéricCésar de La Harpe, formerly tutor to the children of Russian Tsar Paul I and from the French-speaking Vaud canton to the north of Lake Geneva.53 Vaud was known as subject lands, a canton governed from a different location – in this case, Bern, since 1536. In December 1797, Ochs had dinner with General Bonaparte and the expansionist director Jean-François Reubell: when Ochs described the forces of repression as truly powerful in Switzerland, Reubell responded, “Well then, we’ll have to kill the executioner.”54 France capitalized on this political dissatisfaction, exacerbated by tension between the Swiss-German majority and a French-language minority. The government in Bern accused the French high commissioner of trying to “establish and prepare the opinions” of the Swiss “in favor of the sovereignty” of the people, especially the Vaudois.55 Violence broke out there and in Basel in January 1798, 49

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AN: AF/III/79 (Sardaigne). Letter from Barthélemy, French Ambassador in Switzerland, to the Committee of Public Safety, Basel, 21 Pluviôse III/ February 9, 1795. AN: AF/III/79 (Sardaigne). Letter of Morlot, no date, but likely III. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Bulletin of 2 Nivôse VI/ December 22, 1797. Lerner argues that the French went from being indirectly to directly involved in Swiss affairs in October 1797, 100. AD: MD/Suisse/90 (1579–1814). Note on the constitution, 1798. 53 Broussy, 338. Recounted in Michel Vovelle, Les républiques-sœurs sous le regard de la Grande Nation (1795–1803) : de l’Italie aux portes de l’Empire ottoman, l’impact du modèle républicain français (Paris, 2000), 25. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Bulletin of 2 Nivôse VI/ December 22, 1797.

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which led to border skirmishes between the Swiss and the French. In mid-February 1798, Félix Desportes, the French commissioner in Geneva, wrote about the dissatisfaction in the communes in Vaud and how they were meeting to vote on a new constitution; he predicted it would pass.56 On March 1, Joseph Mengaud, another French envoy, reiterated that the “Directory of the French Republic does not want to invade your territory . . . The French Republic does not expand at the expense of a people it wants to enfranchise. If the Swiss be free, if they be happy, the Executive Directory will be satisfied.”57 Nevertheless, on March 4, Desportes quoted General Guillaume Brune as essentially declaring an ultimatum to the Swiss authorities: “That you leave to the peoples of these regions the choice, either to found a single Republic with the inhabitants of the Italian bailiwicks, or, what would be perhaps preferable, to form three republics, confederal between themselves, and allies of the French Republic.”58 The basis for a Sister Republic, of some sort, in Switzerland was therefore set. The next day, March 5, France invaded Switzerland and the old confederation collapsed.59 The new nature of political organization in Switzerland was immediately a foremost concern. Before intervention, Mengaud reported that some Swiss people feared that France would force “the establishment of a single government for all of Switzerland” in place of the older, more diffuse cantonal model.60 The deputies of the new National Assembly who met in Basel in early March wrote to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs that they would work for “the union of all Swiss people [to] establish

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AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter of Félix Desportes, commissioner of the French government in Geneva, 28 Pluviôse VI/ February 16, 1798. In terms of other options, he proclaimed that “no one will be satisfied if we leave open the possibility of union to the people of Vaud.” He then reported, in a letter of 12 Ventôse VI/ March 2, 1798, that the French-leaning patriots had indeed won the vote in Vaud. AN: AF/III/85 (Suisse). “Encore un mot au peuple Suisse,” J. Mengaud, Basel, 11 Ventôse VI/ March 1, 1798. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter of Desportes, commissioner of the French government in Geneva, to the Directory, 14 Ventôse VI/ March 4, 1798. Emphasis in the original. AN: AF/III/86 (Suisse). Letter from the provisional government of Bern to Mengaud, March 5, 1798. They claimed that the night before, the former government “formally abdicated its powers and put them in our hands”; they would move to create a national government based on liberty and equality. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from Mengaud, chargé d’affaires, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, 12 Ventôse VI/ March 2, 1798.

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among themselves a perfectly representative constitution,” in addition to assuring that “it will never deviate from the route traced by the experience of the French Republic.”61 Ochs was a leading figure in drafting that document.62 On March 15, the Basel assembly again wrote to announce that a draft constitution had been “unanimously” accepted based on “the principles of the unity and the indivisibility of all of Helvetia.”63 The constitution’s first article created a unitary republic, as in France, “one and indivisible”; its second, in respect for the will of the people, asserted, “The universality of citizens is the sovereign.”64 As in Belgium and other locations, despite a professed attachment to the will of the local people, the French had actively helped achieve their preferred result. In late March, Marie Jean François Philibert Lecarlier d’Ardon, a wealthy landowner from Picardy turned revolutionary politician and commissioner of the French army in Switzerland, tried to underscore French reluctant determination, with antecedents going back to the pouvoir révolutionnaire: “The stubbornness or rather the delirium of your tyrants forced the great nation to enter your territory, its phalanx accustomed to victory.” But France “never” made war against “peoples,” only against “oppressive governments”; and “the conquests of the friends of liberty must turn to the benefit of liberty itself.”65 That same day, he also insisted on a quick decision by the Swiss citizenry on the new, French-inspired constitution.66 The French meddled in this all-important choice in many ways that were reminiscent of their behavior elsewhere, not least the presence of the army and interference by French diplomats.67 Lecarlier described

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AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from the National Assembly of the Republic of Basel, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, March 12, 1798. Broussy, 341, claims Daunou and Merlin helped Ochs. According to Mengaud, he was not the principle author, but rather intervened with suggestions to make it more likely to pass in the assembly. See AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from Mengaud, chargé d’affaires, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, 20 Ventôse VI/ March 10, 1798. See also AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from Pierre Ochs, to Frey in Paris, Basel, 24 Ventôse VI/ March 14, 1798, in which Ochs called it “the Constitution of Paris.” AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from the National Assembly of the Republic of Basel, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, March 15, 1798. AD: MD/Suisse/39 (1785–1813). Draft constitution, 1798. AN: AF/III/86 (Suisse). Address of 8 Germinal VI/ March 28, 1798. 66 Ibid. AN: AF/III/86 (Suisse). Letter from the provisional government of Bern to Mengaud, March 8, 1798. They wrote, unbelievably, “despite the entry of the French troops in our capital we continue nevertheless to manage the affairs of the Government.”

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his mission as having “as its main goal to accelerate the organization of the Swiss constitution.”68 The secretary of the French legation in Basel, Louis Pierre Édouard Bignon, wrote to Talleyrand, by then Minister of Foreign Affairs, to advise that Mengaud, the diplomat, had gone to various places “where his presence could be useful to the acceleration of the Helvetic organization in line with the views of the French Government.”69 The nature of this persuasion is evident in a letter Mengaud sent to the provisional government in Lucerne, chastising them for bad faith and threatening that “the French government will distinguish with pleasure [between] those cantons that will adopt first the constructional act proposed for Switzerland.”70 Slowly, therefore, different regions accepted the draft constitution – or had it imposed upon them.71 Lucerne had learned its lesson: “struck by the progress of French troops,” Mengaud reported, it sent a delegation that “asked General Schauenbourg for five days to get to the level of the regenerated cantons.”72 On April 12, 1798, 121 cantonal deputies proclaimed the Helvetic Republic.73 Three days later, Bignon wrote to Paris to confirm that the older, loose confederation was a thing of the past, and that Brune’s vision of a Switzerland divided into several allied republics had also not materialized. In its place, the Directory’s desire for a “system of indivisibility” had been imposed, although opposition, and outright military revolt, continued in many parts of the country for months to come.74 This insurgency was ironic, because the Bernese authorities 68

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AN: AF/III/86 (Suisse). Letter from Lecarlier, commissioner of the government with the army of the French Republic in Switzerland, to the Directory, 20 Floréal VI/ May 9, 1798. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from the secretary of the French legation, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, 4 Germinal VI/ March 24, 1798. AN: AF/III/85 (Suisse). Letter of Mengaud, minister of the French Republic in Switzerland, to the provisional government of Lucerne, Basel, 30 Ventôse VI/ March 20, 1798. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from the secretary of the French legation, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Basel, 8 Germinal VI/ March 28, 1798, saying that six cantons had already accepted the centralizing constitution. AN: AF/III/85 (Suisse). Letter from Mengaud, to the Directory, Bern, 7 Germinal VI/ March 27, 1798. AD: MD/Suisse/90 (1579–1814). Note on the constitution, 1798. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from the secretary of the French legation, to Talleyrand, Basel, 6 Germinal VI/ March 26, 1798; see also the letter 14 Floréal VI/ May 3, 1798, with talk of insurgency by the “anti-constitutional cantons.”

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were originally worried, before the French intervention, that “One has reason to believe that the main towns of Vaud will refuse to take up arms in the case they would be directed against France.”75 The concern over arms became acute when the War of the Second Coalition broke out between France and an alliance of Great Britain, Austria, and Russia in late 1798, with Switzerland an important theater. The French government maintained, afterward, that even if the Swiss claimed to be neutral, “Switzerland had become the refuge of our enemies.”76 Although some French-speakers in Vaud were denied the full union with France that they sought, around this time France directly annexed two areas associated with Switzerland.77 On January 28, 1798, Mulhouse opted to join France, a decision that the treaty of union attributed, in keeping with the principle of popular sovereignty, to the “wishes of the magistrates, councils, citizens, and inhabitants.”78 Of this move, Jean Derby, a deputy in the French Council of Five Hundred, the lower house of the Directory’s legislature, commented, “There is no more solemn act between nations than that by which a people consents to become an integral part of another people.”79 Then, on April 26, 1798, Rousseau’s hometown, the independent cityrepublic of Geneva, was annexed by France based on the now wellworn premise that “the will of the Republic of Geneva for this union was solemnly declared.”80 Derby, again, intoned triumphantly, “The author of Emile and The Social Contract had adopted France: free France constituted as a republic adopts the homeland of

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AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Bulletin of 2 Nivôse VI/ December 22, 1797. AD: MD/Suisse/39 (1785–1813). “Mémoire pour servir d’Instructions au Citoyen Perrochel, Ministre Plénipotentiaire de la République Française près la République Helvétique,” 1799. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter of Félix Desportes, commissioner of the French government in Geneva, to the Directory, 20 Ventôse VI/ March 10, 1798. See also AN: AF/III/85 (Suisse). Letter from Mengaud, to the Directory, Bern, 18 Germinal VI/ April 7, 1798, which claims some in Basel were asking for union with France. AN: AD/XV/41. “Rapport fait par Jean Derby . . . Sur le traité de réunion de l’Etat de Mulhausen à la République française,” from the Council of the Five Hundred, 4 Ventôse VI/ February 22, 1798. Ibid. Negotiation of the union took place 9–10 Pluviôse, January 28–29, and was decreed by Directory 22 Pluviôse VI/ February 10, 1798. AN: AD/XV/54 (Suisse 1789–1841). Treaty of union with Geneva, 7 Floréal VI/ April 26, 1798.

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Rousseau.”81 In both Mulhouse and Geneva, as in Avignon, many believed that the meager geostrategic stakes, shared French language and culture, and geographic proximity if not full encirclement by France, were all robust justification for union.82 Desportes, the French commissioner, reported to Paris some of the special provisions of the treaty of union he drew up for Geneva, because “you had ordered me to make it as similar as possible to that of Mulhouse.”83 That these two treaties were essentially duplicates, and that the unions shared so many characteristics with earlier annexations again underscores the fact that they all were indeed closely connected, if not directly modeled on one another. Bonaparte and Italy Since at least the time of Charles VIII, for France, Italy was an area of both strategic interest and dynastic competition with its great Habsburg rivals. Moreover, as with Corsica, its strategic position in the Mediterranean rendered Italy a site of tactical consideration vis-à-vis the British – especially after the brief British seizure of France’s important port town of Toulon in 1793. A report by Charles Reinard for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that, in the early years of the Revolutionary Wars, “respect for the laws of neutrality has contained [France] within the wall of mountains” north of Italy.84 He further noted, more ominously and in keeping with French concern for requisitions and strategic advantage, that Italy was the breadbasket of south-central Europe and thus critical to the supply of the French army. 81

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AN: AD/XV/41. “Rapport fait par Jean Derby . . . Sur le traité de réunion de la République de Genève à la République française,” from the Council of the Five Hundred, Floréal VI/ April–May 1798. See, for example, AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter of Desportes, commissioner of the French government in Geneva, to the Directory, 28 Pluviôse VI/ February 16, 1798. He quotes a report made by three officials in Geneva two days prior, saying, “it is in the interest of Geneva, geographically speaking, to be united with France.” See also AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). “Coup d’œil sur l’importance des fabriques de Genève,” VI: “The Republic of Geneva offers France a population of only 35,000–36,000 souls and an almost imperceptible augmentation of territory.” AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter of Desportes, commissioner of the French government in Geneva, to the Directory, 10 Floreal VI/ April 29, 1798. AD: MD/Italie/11 (1494–1793). “Mémoire sur les motifs et les moyens de faire une invasion d’Italie,” by Charles Reinard, 24 Brumaire II/ November 14, 1793.

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By 1796, with Prussia out of the war and France’s continental northern flank secured by annexed Belgium and the Batavian Republic, French armies advanced on three fronts: in the north, the Army of Sambre and Meuse under General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, formerly a private who had risen through the ranks of the revolutionary army and drafted France’s 1798 conscription law; in the center, the Army of the Rhine commanded by Jean Victor Marie Moreau, an ally turned rival of Bonaparte who was ultimately exiled to the United States. And in the south, the Directory made the ambitious Corsican Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy, on March 26, 1796, after a series of exploits including the recapture of Toulon and help in securing the artillery in Paris to disperse a royalist uprising on 13 Vendémiaire, year IV, or October 5, 1795, with – according to the nineteenth-century historian and satirist, Thomas Carlyle – “a whiff of grapeshot.”85 The Italian campaign was part of a concerted effort developed by Lazare Carnot, now a member of the five-person executive Directory, which sought to bring the war to the heart of France’s enemy, Austria, via both Germany and Italy.86 In the latter theater, Bonaparte proved to be incredibly successful, with a delegation from Bologna and Ferrara later recounting, “The invincible armies of the Republic came down out of the Alps like a torrent, which breaks and overturns everything that opposes its passage, [and] has covered the surface of Italy. And like the beneficent Nile, [it] has deposed in the most beautiful of [Italy’s] provinces the precious seed of liberty.”87 Bonaparte’s victories launched a phase of French control and political transformation, between 1796 and 1799, known as the “Revolutionary Triennium.” The policies and practices of French armies in Italy, as in Holland and Switzerland, drew on the experience of conquest elsewhere. As in the Rhineland, and described in Chapter 4, French officials asserted their unfettered rights as victors to exploit and extract. As a French military policy document claimed, “The conquest of Italy makes us masters of all 85

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Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols. (London, 1837), vol. III, book 7, chapter 7. François Auguste Marie Mignet, Histoire de la Révolution française depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1814 (1824; repr., Paris [n.d.]), II:212–213. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter from the deputies of Bologna and Ferrera to the Directory, Paris, 11 Germinal V/ March 31, 1797.

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the rights and powers of the Emperor” in his former possessions, such as raising men and taxes, even if “We should only take modest advantage of them and aim for their abolition.”88 Indeed, just as in Belgium, and as described in Chapter 3, the French also reformed the country based on their vision of the proper political order, with justification harkening back to the decree of December 15, which instructed the army peremptorily to institute revolutionary change wherever it arrived. “If we are a little pressed by necessity, we could put public and ecclesiastical lands up for sale,” went one suggestion, “but for this it would be necessary to revolutionize the country, to overthrow the current governments and found republics.”89 The model of the Sister Republic was a perfect vehicle to respect “the wish of all Italian patriots,” who hoped “that France will divide Italy in republics,” while France also “could require from the various states of Italy, like the Republic in Holland, obligations of payment.”90 Proposals for the scope and variety of Sister Republics in Italy reflected its ancien régime political diversity, although most considerations, including the will of the people, were subordinate to French strategic interests. The Directory may have aimed for “all [France’s] frontiers [to] be encircled by friendly peoples, linked to the Republic by the need, interest, maintenance even of their safety,” but it settled on the need for multiple republics in Italy to expel Austria from the peninsula.91 François René Jean de Pommereul, a military man who served as French ambassador in Florence, proposed five republics in northern and central Italy – Milan; Modena; Ferrara and Bologna; La Marche, Ancona, and Umbria; and Rome. He argued that Italy’s “becom[ing] our natural ally, like the Batavian Republic, would assure us political and commercial preponderance,” not only on the peninsula but also in the Levant.92 Control of the north, especially of 88 89 90

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AD: MD/Italie/12. “Observations générales sur la guerre d’Italie,” probably IV. Ibid. Ibid. Indeed, France would, therefore, “divest himself of all land taxes and annuities that France owes in Italy, to Genoa, etc.” AD: CP/Autriche/366 (1796–97). Instructions for peace negotiations, 7 Thermidor IV/ July 25, 1796. They also envisaged at this point, and ultimately achieved, that the pope would maintain only token power, and that all feudal ties of Italy to the Holy Roman Empire would be abolished. AD: AF/III/71 (Italie). “Vues generales sur l’Italie,” by Pommereul, Florence, 25 Floréal IV/ May 14, 1796. In this proposed union, the Italian federation would have

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the fertile heartland of Lombardy, had been strategically crucial since before the time of Charlemagne. D’Anneville, the French second secretary at the legation in Genoa, believed that in setting up a republic in Lombardy, “France would establish invariably its political preponderance in all of Italy.”93 Another French agent in the region not only agreed that “The interest of France requires that Lombardy become independent,” but also suggested that the undertaking would in fact be quite easy: “The Directory can form for this country any constitution that it would like, it is sure to have general approval, because everyone hates the Austrian government.”94 In reality, military victory facilitated the process. Sympathetic, revolutionary governments were declared in a number of towns subsequent to French triumphs. Bonaparte asked the Directory, “if this people asks to organize themselves into a republic, must we grant it?” with an inescapability and innocent arrogance that recalls Robespierre on Avignon’s request for union.95 Bonaparte later claimed that after the Battle of Lodi, in May 1796, “I believed myself a superior man, and that the ambition came to me of executing the great things which so far had been occupying my thoughts only as a fantastic dream.”96 Among these “great things,” the “French government,” but more precisely Bonaparte himself, formally and “finally resolved to erect a republic in the conquered territory in Italy,” and he proclaimed the Transpadane Republic on October 15, 1796, in the old Duchy of Milan, north of the Po river; the next day, to the south, he declared Modena and the Papal

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had a senate with one deputy and two supplementaries from each canton, and one deputy from France, and France would be declared the “only perpetual ally.” Thus, even in theory, the French would always have a central role in the new polities, no matter the details. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract of an essay on Lombardy, by D’Anneville, second secretary of the legation, Genoa, 29 Brumaire V/ November 19, 1796. He also suggested a “third power,” in Germany based in Bavaria or around Mainz, not unlike the Cisrhenan Republic. It is unclear if he was related to the more famous diplomat, Pierre Rossignol D’Anneville, French envoy to Genoa between 1703–1723. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract of a letter from Milan, 29 Messidor IV/ July 17, 1796. Cited in Vovelle, Les républiques-sœurs, 22. Cited in T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996), 145. Blanning goes on to show, as have many commentators starting with Clausewitz, how Lodi was, in fact, indecisive at best or “unnecessary, a mistake and a failure” (146) at worst.

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Legation of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna together the Cispadane Republic.97 The votes by local peoples that technically legitimated these republics followed earlier examples going back as far as the consultations in and French union with, again, Avignon.98 Given the clear precedents on which he drew, especially from the Netherlands, Bonaparte certainly “did not invent the concept of ‘sister republic,’” as Steven Englund perceptively notes in his biography of the Corsican, “but he experimented with it.”99 Unlike in the Low Countries and Switzerland, where Sister Republics were established in existing political entities, in Italy Bonaparte consolidated polities but created the greater republics ex nihilo.100 These new creations were based, like the French conceptualization of the Rhineland, on both a sense of cultural homogeneity and strategic interests. After Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Rivoli, on January 14–15, 1797 – truly his greatest up until that point – France gained even more new territory as well as the critical fortress town of Mantua, opening up the route to the east. Austria was finally forced to enter into negotiations for peace. The territorial settlement of much of western Europe, already de facto established, was codified in these negotiations. Henri-Jacques-Guillaume Clarke, the charismatic IrishFrench general and envoy to Vienna, was instructed that the “first and most essential” issue was, as described in the previous chapter, the formal “cession and abandonment” by Austria to France of “the Austrian Low Countries [Belgium], the duchy of Luxembourg, and all that it possessed on the left bank of the Rhine.”101 A key requirement underscores how the French continued to depart from the old system of merely recognizing territories won in war, by treaty instruments signed in their aftermath: Francis II would need to recognize French “sovereignty” in the abovementioned territories,

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AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Extract of a letter from Genoa, October 15, 1796. Previously, in June 1796, the Bolognese Republic had been proclaimed, with the first Jacobin constitution in Italy. See, for example, the language used in AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract from the deputies of Ferrera, November 17, 1796. Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York, 2004), 113. Vovelle, Les républiques-sœurs, 21. AD: CP/Autriche/367 (1796–97). Instructions to Clarke, envoy to Vienna, Paris, 29 Nivôse V/ January 18, 1797.

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not because of military victory, but rather because they were “united [to France] by [its] laws and constitution.”102 There was concern in France’s more recent acquisitions.103 A Milanese deputation asked not to be returned to Austrian domination, but instead, in what was by now an established if corrupt practice, that the French “direct the formation of primary assemblies to the end of uniting the will of the people.”104 The French staunchly insisted on the independence of the Italian states they had wrested from the control of Austria, if only to confirm them under their own tutelage.105 An armistice was signed at Leobon on April 18, 1797, and included Austrian acquiescence to the aforementioned cessions as well as, in a secret annex, the renunciation of its claims in Italy.106 Now was the moment, according to Guillaume-Charles Faipoult, French Minister of Finance before he was sent to Italy as a diplomat, when France “must make one republic of all the countries available today” in Italy.107 Bonaparte too recognized the benefits of a strong client, particularly because the forts of Lombardy would help France challenge Venetia.108 He consolidated the Cispadane and 102

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Ibid. Also as described in the previous chapter, for territories that had joined France that were formerly parts of the Holy Roman Empire but not Habsburg fiefdoms, such as Porrentruy, “It is . . . necessary, to facilitate a peace to be concluded with the German empire, that the Emperor in this quality consent to their union” with France. Some directors, such as Reubell and Carnot, initially thought Italian conquests could be used as bargaining leverage with Austria vis-à-vis the left bank of the Rhine. Others, like Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, supported the nascent Sister Republics in Italy – although it was the initiative of Bonaparte that proved decisive. Georges Lefebvre describes the competing interests well in The Directory, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1967), 79–82. Part of what motivated Hoche to establish the Cisrhenan Republic was to counterbalance his conquests against Bonaparte’s when the latter gained the upper hand. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract of a petition from the deputies of Milan, to the Directory, Paris, 20 Ventôse V/ March 10, 1797. AD: CP/Autriche/367 (1796–97). Supplement to instructions, 6 Pluviôse V/ January 25, 1797. AN: AF/III/59 (Allemagne, Villes Hanséatiques, Autriche). Preliminary articles of peace and secret ones, Leoben, 29 Germinal V/ April 18, 1797. In secret article 1, the emperor renounced all claims to Italy. See also AD: MD/Autriche/8 (1737–1805). Report of Talleyrand to the Directory, 16 Thermidor V/ August 3, 1797. AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Letter from Faipoult, the extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary of France to the Republic of Genoa, to the Directory, 12 Floréal V/ May 1, 1797. AD: CP/Autriche/366 (1796–97). Letter from Bonaparte, 30 Germinal V/ April 19, 1797.

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Transapadane Republics and a handful of other territories, and on June 28, 1797, proclaimed the Cisalpine Republic.109 A joint statement of General Clarke and the Austrian envoy to Leobon, Marzio Mastrilli, Marquis of Gallo, acknowledged that the emperor must renounce Lombardy, which is “indispensable, according to all the principles of the law of nations, to give legitimate substance to the new government” of the Cisalpine Republic.110 (In a highly unusual move, even by ancien régime standards when aristocrats often served leaders irrespective of background or subjecthood, Gallo was asked to negotiate for Austria even though he was the Neapolitan ambassador to that court.) The Treaty of Campo Formio, signed on October 18, 1797, codified the Preliminaries of Leobon, saw Francis II recognize the Cisalpine Republic, and ended the War of the First Coalition.111 Controversially, compensation to the emperor came at the expense of the Venetian Republic. As a captain in the French army wrote, using familiar imagery and language, Italians were happy “when Bonaparte came down from the Alps, shouting his proclamation of peace to peoples, war against tyrants.” However, the sacrifice of Venice at Campo Formio “sunk all friends of liberty in the greatest

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The Directory preferred the moniker “Trans,” indicating the republic was on the far side of the Alps from Paris. Bonaparte, however, adopted the perspective of Rome, hence “Cis.” As Englund remarks, “It certainly flattered the Italians,” 113. AD: CP/Autriche/367 (1796–1797). Joint statement of Gallo and Clarke, July 18, 1797. AD: CP/Autriche/368 (1797–1798). Law ratifying the peace of Campo Formio, 13 Brumaire VI/ November 3, 1797. Not only did the Republic deign to negotiate with a regime, as with the Prussians in 1795, that had previously vowed its destruction, but they also abandoned or set aside many of their republican scruples and recognized Imperial diplomatic pre-eminence. See the supplement to the instructions given to Bernadotte, the French ambassador to Vienna after the peace, by the Directory, Paris, 28 Nivôse VI/ January 17, 1798. He was told, on the subject of etiquette and pre-eminence, the treaty stipulated the Republic would enjoy the same prerogatives as monarchical France; thus, the French ambassador came behind the Papal nuncio: “The official desire of the French government is that all that which is purely ceremonial and etiquette be destroyed and that there be no preeminence among independent states. But so long as the old ways prevail in Europe,” in an attempt to have their cake and eat it too, “the Directory intends to retain all rights which belonged to [ancien régime] France.”

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desolation.”112 Bonaparte’s action, and it was very much his own, emphatically departed from France’s professed commitment to the will of the people and seemed to imply a return to the diplomacy of the ancien régime, much like the secret provisions of the 1795 peace with Prussia, but was all the more galling since Venetia was a fellow republic. The directors and the public in Paris were shocked. When compared with French activity in western Germany and the other Sister Republics, however, it is not quite so outlandish. In its initial instructions to Clarke, the Directory suggested that France circumvent the issue of how those rulers who lost territory be compensated; “you can declare, if required, that the Republic will not oppose arrangements that this House [of Habsburg] might make with the princes of the Empire.”113 Talleyrand even suggested that Austria and others partition Bavaria to make up for their losses.114 Thus, the sacrifice of Venice was not simply aberrant or imperious treachery by Bonaparte, as critics have charged. Swapping territory in the old “despotic” style, when it suited the strategic interests of France, was also an established practice of revolutionary diplomacy at this time.115

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AN: AD/XV/50. “Le cri d’Italie” by Forel, captain and commissioner to the war council. This point was not only the most notorious at the time, but also in much of the historiography since. Raymond Guyot viewed Bonaparte as betraying the principles of the Revolution in Le Directoire et la paix de l’Europe : Des traités de Bâle à la deuxième coalition (1795–99) (Paris, 1911). However, more recently, Vovelle calls this depiction “reductionist and moralizing,” Les républiques-sœurs, 27, and highlights that there was a strong desire for peace across almost all groups in France at the time, 153. Likewise, Englund calls Venice “poisoned fruit,” for both sides, but argues Campo Formio is the best peace France could have hoped to achieve, 117. AD: CP/Autriche/367 (1796–1797). Instructions to Clarke, envoy to Vienna, Paris, 29 Nivôse V/ January 18, 1797. And, as described in the previous chapter, France regularly proposed that it would help indemnify powers for losses on the left bank of the Rhine with new territory on the right bank. See also AD: CP/Autriche/367 (1796–1797). Supplement to instructions, 6 Pluviôse V/ January 25, 1797. Because the French lacked territory on the right, it had to be creative. France, for example, proposed seizing land from the ecclesiastical estates of Swabia and the Circles of Upper- and Lower-Rhine to achieve a final settlement in Germany. See AD: CP/ Autriche/365 (1796–1797). Treaty with Austria and the Empire, IV. AN: AF/III/59 (Allemagne, Villes Hanséatiques, Autriche). Letter from Talleyrand, 3 Germinal VI/ March 23, 1798. See also AD: CP/Autriche/365 (1796–1797). Additional instructions for negotiation, from the Directory, Paris, 12 Germinal IV/ 1 April 1797, where, again, article 1 was about swapping territory.

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Another Sister Republic in Italy was the Ligurian Republic, in Genoa, also proclaimed by Bonaparte on June 14, 1797. The Most Serene Republic of Genoa, erstwhile proprietor of Corsica, had been in independent existence for almost 800 years. As elsewhere, establishment of this French client state followed popular tumult that some blamed France for instigating. The French minister in Genoa, Faipoult, later reported that he had expected an uprising, attributing it to popular enthusiasm for French revolutionary principles and, indeed, their successful implant in Lombardy. He even claimed that he warned the Genoese senate of this prospect.116 Nevertheless, pamphlets abounded in the city asserting that Faipoult “had been the principal instrument of the Directory and General Bonaparte to overthrow the Genoese constitution.”117 The French insisted that their intervention was benevolent and “all that prevented anarchy in Genoa,” and that political change had been the choice of the people: “the propagation of democratic principles . . . was determined by the example of neighboring peoples . . . it is the work of the enlightened class of the Genoese nation.”118 The new republic’s first constitution was drafted, voted on, and ultimately adopted on December 22, 1797.119 Early the next year, Genoese citizen Dominique Moscheni had the honor of going to Paris to “affirm [to the French government] the gratitude of the Ligurian people for the benefits of liberty,” which he tellingly admitted “the invincible armies of the French Republic have gained for them.”120 The next of two relatively short-lived Sister Republics was in Rome. Both the French monarchical and revolutionary states had long had tortured relationships with the papacy, most recently due to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the annexation of Avignon. The power of the principle of popular sovereignty in the Papal States was professed 116

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AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Report to the Directory on the revolution in Genoa, 22 Messidor V/ July 10, 1797. Ibid. Another source, AD: CP/Gênes/171 (1796–1797). “Relation de la Révolution à Gênes” argued it was inspired by a revolution in Venice, 9. AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Report to the Directory on the revolution in Genoa, 22 Messidor V/ July 10, 1797. AD: CP/Gênes/172 (1797). Constitution project, 26 Brumaire VI/ November 16, 1797. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter to the Directory from the provisional government of the Ligurian Republic, Lucca, 20 Ventôse VII/ March 10, 1799.

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in an anonymous letter sent to the Directory back in 1796, that should General Bonaparte reach the gates of Rome, he should declare, “He will only deal with the Roman people. This word alone destroys papal authority.”121 The French diplomat Alphonse-Timothée Bernard reported the “universal unhappiness of the subjects of the pope,” in addition to the Papal States’ enormous deficit, complicated diplomatic situation, and weak and incompetent government.122 These factors came together to spark a revolt in December 1797. In most recountings, Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother and the senior French envoy to the city, was central to organizing the insurrection. And yet, he later wrote to the Directory that, on December 26, three people came to inform him that there would be an uprising the next day, and asked if France would support it.123 Bonaparte reported, incredulously, that he answered thus: his position as ambassador made him an “impartial spectator of events,” but that he “would report to my government whatever happened.”124 He also supposedly insisted that they never come back to him with such a request. Once the rebellion occurred, the elder Bonaparte retold, a crowd gathered outside the French embassy where cocardes françaises, symbols of the French Republic, were passed out and the people chanted “Long live the Republic! Long live the Roman people!” To cap off this fanciful diplomatic report, Bonaparte described one celebrant, who presented himself to me [Bonaparte] as a madman, saying “we are free, but we come to ask for the support of France.” This insane speech was of a revolting temerity in the mouth of an artist . . . I ordered him to withdraw immediately from the jurisdiction of France . . . He retired, confused, [and] the troops who were with me made him feel the madness of his business.125

More seriously, in the ensuing unrest, papal forces broke into the French embassy and killed the French General Léonard Mathurin

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AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Letter to the Directory, 1 Messidor IV/ June 19, 1796. AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). “Extrait d’un mémoire sur les causes qui doivent conduire le Gouvernement Papale à une fin très prochaine” by Bernard, secretary of Cacault, Rome, Vendémiaire V/ September–October 1796. AN: AD/XV/39. Letter from the ambassador in Rome, Bonaparte, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Florence, 11 Nivôse VI/ December 31, 1797. Or see AD: CP/Rome/ 926. Letter of 8 Nivôse VI /December 28, 1797. See also AD: MD/Italie/9 (964–1830). Ibid. 125 Ibid.

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Duphot, also a popular poet.126 Ambassador Bonaparte fled town and France declared war.127 The Directory accused the Papal States, “always unfaithful to the law of nations,” not only of Duphot’s murder but also of contravening the Treaty of Tolentino, agreed to that February by Pius VI after the occupation of some of his Italian holdings and meant to prevent the seizure of Rome.128 The Directory ordered “the Army of Italy to march on Rome and to exact vengeance for all these outrages,” calling “the Cabinet of St. James and the theocracy of Rome” the greatest enemies of France.129 On February 15, 1798, huge crowds assembled at Campo Vaccino, the old Roman Forum, where, according to General LouisAlexandre Berthier, who had taken the city for France, “The people constituted as sovereign reassumed their rights, declared the former government nullified . . . and organized themselves as the Roman Republic.”130 Berthier acknowledged the idea “that the people are sovereign, and recognized the independence of the Roman Republic,” and, because he let them keep their religion, the College of Cardinals supposedly sang a Te Deum, a hymn of thanksgiving for an extraordinary blessing, to the recovery of Roman liberty.131 A few days later, Berthier proclaimed in classical analogy, “Rome is free . . . a republican government is organized and will make happy, I hope, the descendants of Brutus” and reported to the Directory that His Holiness had quit Rome for Florence: “It was not without difficulty that he decided to leave.”132 The pontiff had intended to go to Malta, but ultimately was deported to France, where he died in exile. Hyacinthe Bernard, an employee of the French legation in Florence, crossed paths with Pius VI on the road from Rome. Cardinal Maury, an early advocate of his rights in Avignon, accompanied the Holy Father.

126 127 128

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Suitably, his best-known piece was “Ode aux mânes des héros morts pour la liberté.” AD: CP/Rome/926. “Précis des évènements,” 26 Pluviôse VI/ February 14, 1798. AN: AD/XV/51. Extract of the register of deliberations of the Directory, 1 Ventôse VI/ February 19, 1798. Tolentino was also the treaty mentioned in Chapter 2 by which the pope recognized his loss of Avignon and the Comtat. AN: AD/XV/51. Extract of the register of deliberations of the Directory, 13 Ventôse VI/ March 3, 1798. AD: CP/Rome/926. Letter from Berthier, Rome, 27 Pluviôse VI/ February 15, 1798. AN: AD/XV/51. Extract of the register of deliberations of the Directory, 13 Ventôse VI/ March 3, 1798. AD: CP/Rome/926. Letter from Berthier, 2 Ventôse VI/ February 20, 1798.

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Bernard reported, of Maury, “although a fugitive, he still uses the same language. Wherever he speaks, he rants in his way against atheism, the piracy of the French, etc. In the end, he has forgotten nothing about exciting the arms of fanaticism against the heroes of freedom.”133 By April 29, 1798, France accepted an envoy from the new republic, Prince Giustiniani, scion of one of the most ancient houses in Europe, said to descend from Theodora, sister of Emperor Justinian. In a speech presenting him, Talleyrand announced “France, which has always respected the independence of other States, is forced not to look upon the Roman revolution as foreign,” hailing that the Roman Republic, “this beautiful name, lost in history, could, after 1800 years, become our contemporary.”134 Naples was the site of another fleeting Sister Republic.135 In November 1798, the commissioner of the Directory in Rome wrote to Paris about the need to conquer Naples or force the total submission of its government under King Ferdinand IV, a Bourbon descended from the Spanish line. The commissioner asserted that Naples, which had rapturously welcomed Admiral Horatio Nelson that September, was in thrall to the English, which not only allowed Albion to control the middle Mediterranean and important islands such as Corfu and Malta, but also meant that “The Italian Republics are not safe!”136 That December, Generals Barthélemy Catherine Joubert and Jean Étienne Vachier, known as Championnet, reported to Paris that a force under the Austrian General Karl von Mack, serving in Naples, was threatening Rome.137 General Jacques MacDonald, like Clarke a Frenchman of Jacobite origin and commander of the Army of Rome, accused Naples of perfidy, asking, “Do these idiots think that the armies of the Great Nation will not triumph over all its 133

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AD: CP/Rome/926. Letter from Hyacinthe Bernard, of the French legation in Florence, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, 10 Ventôse VI/ February 28, 1798. AN: AD/XV/39. Speech 10 Floréal VI/April 29, 1798. It is sometimes erroneously identified as the Parthenopaean Republic, which derives from Parthenope, an ancient Greek colony in the vicinity of Naples. Harouel calls the Neapolitan Republic a sister “repudiated by the Directory,” imposed on it by a victorious general, Championnet, like Bonaparte had imposed others on them further north – “but,” unfortunately for the southern one, “without the same success,” 63. AN: AF/III/78 (Rome). Letter from the commissioner of the Directory to the Directory, Rome, 3 Frimaire VII/ November 23, 1798. AD: CP/Naples/126. Letter from generals Championnet and Joubert to the Directory, Rome, 5 Frimaire VII/ November 25, 1798.

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enemies?”138 In response to a direct query by Championnet, Mack wrote that his troops had crossed into Roman territory “to take possession of the Roman state, revolutionized and usurped since the peace of Campo Formio, and never recognized or affirmed by His Sicilian Majesty, nor by his august ally the Emperor and King.”139 He insisted that French troops retreat to the Cisalpine Republic; they did not, and war was declared on December 6, 1798.140 Hostilities were brief – like the existence, ultimately, of the Neapolitan Republic. After Mack invaded, the French counterattacked, pushing deep into Neapolitan territory.141 A satirist mocked Ferdinand’s campaign to the Eternal City: “He came, he saw, he fled.”142 The Bourbons further absconded to Sicily aboard Nelson’s Vanguard. The French were successful because, according to Faipoult, now civil commissioner of the Army of Rome, the Neapolitan army was weak and there was a general insurrection “in all the country situated between [Naples] and Roman territory.”143 Neapolitan forces fleetingly engaged the Army of Rome, but after several days of continued fighting, the French were victorious. The Neapolitan Republic was proclaimed on January 21, 1799 – although it only lasted until the summer.144 Similarly, the latter-day Roman Republic only survived until combined British and Neapolitan forces quashed it in September 1799. By then, the War of the Second Coalition was raging.145 138

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AN: AF/III/78 (Rome). Address of the Army of Rome, signed by General MacDonald, Terni, 15 Frimaire VII/ December 5, 1798. AD: CP/Naples/126. Also on 5 Frimaire VII/ November 25, 1798, Championnet wrote to Mack and Mack replied the next day. AN: AD/XV/39. Law declaring war on Naples and Sardinia, 16 Frimaire VII/ December 6, 1798. For a contemporary account see AN: AF/III/78 (Rome). Letter from Perouse, commissioner of the Roman Republic, to the Directory, 28 Frimaire VII/ December 18, 1798. Cited in Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (New York, 2005), 250. AN: AF/III/78 (Rome). Letter from Faipoult, commissioner of the Army of Rome, to the Directory, Capoue, 23 Nivôse VII/ January 12, 1799. AD: CP/Naples/126. Declaration of the Directory, 19 Pluviôse VII/ February 7, 1799. As for the rest of Italy, Lucca was only invaded in 1799, during the War of the Second Coalition; it had a brief government modeled on the Directory, which did not last, as the territory went back and forth between occupying armies before falling under definitive French control. In Tuscany, Grand Duke Ferdinand III was the first monarch to recognize the French First Republic and only briefly joined the First

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The Contradictions Inherent in the Sister Republics The histories of the Batavian, Helvetic, and Italian Sister Republics illustrate significant continuity with the development of new claims to territory based on the will of the people since the start of the French Revolution. They also represent a further innovation and were a novel legal relationship between polities. They were neither annexed conquests nor wholly independent states. The reasons why France did not formally annex these areas are varied. Annexation had, of course, been controversial since before the union of Avignon – but after Thermidor it was increasingly tied to new anxieties about the place of France in Europe and, also, French domestic politics. Classical republican ideology had an inherent concern about the noxious and corrupting effects that expansion could have on a polity; Andrew Jainchill argues that the creation of the Sister Republics was “fundamentally informed by [these] anxieties.”146 As Jean-BaptisteEtienne Poussielgue, the first secretary of the French legation in Genoa, explained: “We remembered the project of Louis XIV to establish a universal monarchy. We fear much more that the most illuminated and strong nation might attempt, with even more success, to establish a universal Republic.”147 He suggested instead that the Republic “maintain France’s strategic position through alliances with secondand third-rank powers that depended on France for a guarantee of their existence”; moreover, by respecting the will of the people, France would “re-win the affection of foreign nations and their governments.”148 Direct acquisition, and the overstretch that went along with it, became more complicated over time as increasingly diverse peoples were

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Coalition against it, under pressure. He was eventually forced out in 1799. After Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Mondovì, Piedmont was occupied briefly before the Armistice of Chesasco, of April 28, 1796, took King of Victor Amadeus III out of the war. Subsequently, by the Treaty of Paris that May and as described in Chapter 3, he formally ceded Savoy and Nice to France. Jainchill, 166, continues: Sister Republics “would allow the French republic to build a ‘federative system’ beyond [its] frontiers without exposing itself to the expansionist danger.” AN: AF/III/79 (Sardaigne). Letter from Poussielgue, first secretary of the French legation in Genoa, Turin, 5 Brumaire V/ October 26, 1796, with “Mémoire pour servir de projet de traité d’alliance.” Ibid. He also suggested France needed to send agents who listened to and dealt with the concerns of other governments, not people to preach revolutionary values, which simply made enemies.

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conquered by French armies, in an era in which incipient national identities, as described in the previous chapter, were emerging. Louis Portiez from Oise, the representative of the people in Belgium, described, “The inhabitants of conquered countries differ among themselves in mores, customs, idioms, and political and religious opinion.”149 Consolidating them in a single republic would, indeed, be difficult. An important consideration was whether other peoples were yet ready for liberty – an important departure from the forced guidance of benighted masses central to the pouvoir révolutionnaire.150 There were geographic and economic considerations as well. The long, flat, open frontier had made Belgium a target for centuries, and Savoy and Nice, though mountainous, were still contiguous with France. The left bank of the Rhine, like many areas annexed, was on France’s side of what it considered a natural barrier. In spite of calls to unite Holland, like Belgium, with France, Portiez warned of potential trade imbalances because Holland was generally a producer and France a consumer of goods.151 Economic considerations could have a strategic dimension: Commandant Thiellay of the fort at Lichtenberg wrote to the Committee of Public Safety that “it is in the commercial interest of the French people to deprive the imperious Albion of the majority of trade in Europe” through their control of the Low Countries. Nevertheless, France had “reasons of general interest not to treat the provinces of Holland as conquered territory.” Thiellay noted another more important justification, which harkened back the decree of fraternity: “that of generously helping a people who desire shaking off the yoke of despotism.”152 Here, Thiellay highlighted a central justification that dated from the formal union of Corsica with France: wishing to respect the will of the people. Now, that respect was manifested not in direct incorporation, but rather in French support for the creation of new republics. French 149

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AN: AD/XV/49. Portiez, “Vues sur la Belgique et la Hollande,” III; “Seconde Partie: Vues sur la Belgique et autre pays conquis,” 2. Even a people like the Belgians needed to decide if they would form unitary republics, federal republics, or be united with France. Jainchill, 174 AN: AD/XV/49. Portiez, “Vues sur la Hollande.” By staying separate, Holland also would see its political and economic structure maintained while benefiting from access to German, Swiss, and Belgian markets – which is fairly benevolent. AD: MD/Hollande/71. Letter from Thiellay, the commandant at Lichtemberg to the Committee of Public Safety, 8 Ventôse III/ February 26, 1795.

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rhetoric returned to the renunciation of conquests and an earlier, more direct respect for the principle of popular sovereignty than was evident in the pouvoir révolutionnaire, for example, connected circuitously to that principle though it may also have been. Again, the French emphasized their benevolent intentions, lack of interest in conquests, and support for the choice of others. In a declaration to the people of the Low Countries, the French government’s representatives to the army affirmed, “The blood of the founders of the Republic of the United Provinces still flows in your veins,” and therefore the Dutch were ready for freedom. Moreover, France had never ceased thinking of the Dutch as friends and allies; as such, “There are few armies that in haughtily conquering you would preserve your laws. We give you freedom. We have not come to you, to impose a yoke; the French nation respects your independence.”153 In private, too, in a letter to the Committee of Public Safety, two French representatives again claimed that France “had no intention of affecting the sovereignty and independence of the Dutch nation.”154 In Switzerland, a pamphlet similarly claimed, “The great nation wants to protect you in your development, but never conquer you.”155 Mengaud, the French diplomat in Basel, reiterated the point, “Your magistrates deceive you when they have the audacity to proclaim that the French Republic wants to invade your territory. The French Republic [is] too large to seek out unjust usurpations, at the expense of an allied state, [or] an increase of territory that it does not need.”156 Instead, the French army was fighting “the eternal enemies of your usurped rights.”157 Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, 153

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AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). “Déclaration des représentants du Peuple Français, aux armées du Nord, de Sambre et Meuse,” January 20, 1795; proclamation “République Française aux habitants des Provinces Unies,” Pluviôse III/ January–February 1795. France had not come with the intention of subjugation; France “comes to give you liberty . . . that is the goal of the invasion.” AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Letter from Blauw and van Dam to the Committee of Public Safety, 1 Pluviôse III/ January 20, 1795. AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). “Cri de la Justice” was a rebuttal to the pamphlet “Aux habitants des campagnes du Pays de Vaud,” which claimed France was aiming to annex all of Switzerland. AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). Proclamation from Mengaud, minister of the French Republic to the inhabitants of Switzerland and especially Bern. The mention here of “need” hints at the strategic exigencies described in the previous chapter. AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Report of the Directory on the revolution in Genoa, 22 Messidor V/ July 10, 1797 and letter from Mengaud, minister of the French

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a director and formerly president of the Council of Five Hundred, proclaimed in a public meeting in Paris, when the Minister of Foreign Affairs presented the plenipotentiaries of the Helvetic Republic, “No, the French Republic never disregards the independence of peoples” – although it is curious that he constructed the sentence in the negative instead of using a more positive affirmation, “never disregards” as opposed to “always respects.”158 In Italy, according to a report by the Directory, during the revolution in Genoa “the French agent [claimed that France] kept, as much as possible, the strictest composure and that it acted only when the dignity of the Republic, the interest of its compatriots, or the wellbeing of our army made it a duty.”159 Championnet, as General-in-Chief of the Army of Naples, warned and ordered other generals: Treat the inhabitants of the lands that you are crossing with kindness and moderation, to ensure our power by making the revolution loved and nationalized, and bless our victorious and liberating arms . . . do not forget that the campaign that you make is less military than political, it is less about fighting enemies than making friends and supporters.160

And yet, the role of French political operatives, diplomatic envoys, and indeed the military was not always so “friendly.” Although the French might claim that their policies vis-à-vis Holland, Switzerland, and Italy reflected relations with “independent” peoples and respected those peoples’ wills, the reality was far more complicated. The Sister Republics’ histories reveal a number of legal contradictions that situate them between fully sovereign entities and territory seized in war, which belie the claims of their leaders and French benefactors that these were autonomous states. The first set of such incongruities surrounds the establishment of the Sister Republics themselves, both the promulgation and the terms of their constitutions

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Republic in Switzerland, to the electoral body of Bern, 7 Germinal VI/ March 27, 1798. AN: AD/XV/39. Speech of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a public meeting of the Directory where the plenipotentaries of the Helvetic Republic, 10 Fructidor VI/ August 27, 1798. AN: AF/III/66 (Gênes). Report of the Directory on the revolution in Genoa, 22 Messidor V/ July 10, 1797. AN: AF/III/73. Address by Championnet, General-in-Chief of the Army of Naples, to other generals, 5 Ventôse VII/ February 23, 1799.

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and the treaties of alliance immediately negotiated with France. Of the 13 constitutions in Sister Republics over their history, fully 11 were modeled on the French Constitution of Year III.161 Just as French agents had been active in plebiscites and public consultations since the union with Avignon, in Holland they eagerly partook in the creation of the new regime. The Committee of Public Safety promised “loyalty and protection to the popular party” of proFrance partisans; in return, Batavian “sans-culottes” were “secretly armed” to facilitate “the project of abolishing the political and military ancient régime,” and the “revolutionary committee of the Dutch nation” affirmed itself to be “united until death to the French people.”162 The Dutch were indeed to be united with France, in fact if not in name. After the French invasion, the interim organization of a French-style administration was effected “under the authority of the representatives of the French people, provisionally, for and in the name of the French Republic” and not, tellingly, the Dutch people.163 Local pro-French activists and key figures in the founding of the Batavian Republic, Jacobus Blauw and Willem van Irhoven van Dam, might modestly claim their hope was “that the French government not compromise the energy of the Batavian nation; and, on the contrary, allow the greatest latitude be given to it to declare its will and to form itself into a republican government.”164 However, these same two men admitted that, in reality, the French wanted “the two Republics founded . . . in a common society, under the protection of the same principles and a guarantee of the same interests.”165 When the Estates General of the Batavian Republic named and sent envoys to negotiate its treaty of alliance and commerce with France, the mission was “based on the reciprocal interests of the two nations detached from any diplomatic deception and concluded with the 161 162

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Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London, 1991), 11. AN: AD/XV/49. “Exposé historique de la Conduite de la Nation Batave dans la Guerre actuelle,” from the French Republic to the Stadholder, Paris, February 1, 1793, 17, 18; letter of the “revolutionary committee of the Batavian nation” to the representatives of the people of the French army, Amsterdam, 29 Vendémiaire III/ October 20, 1794, 21. AN: D/§3/117 (Armées du Nord en Hollande). “Idée ou plan d’administration.” AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Letter from Blauw and van Dam to the Committee of Public Safety, 7 Pluviôse III/ January 26, 1795. AN: AD/XV/49. Letter of Blauw and van Irhoven van Dam, Paris, 15 Nivôse III/ March 5, 1795, appended to “Exposé historique de la Conduite de la Nation Batave dans la Guerre actuelle.” Also available in AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795).

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loyalty and disinterestedness which suits two nations who truly have the same interests.”166 The negotiations themselves tell a different story, and the treaty bears out the falsity of depicting this arrangement as a fair exchange between autonomous and mutually respectful states. The Batavian envoys proposed, “[t]hat the Republic of the United Provinces recognize the sovereignty and independence of the French Nation,” that the two countries not mix in the affairs of others, that France return all occupied territory, and that Holland be neutral, open its ports to French vessels, and allow France to help it clear its territory of foreign troops.167 As opposed to Dutch neutrality, France countered that Batavian forces, on land and at sea, should come under French command – to which their counterparts conceded, adding hopefully that, in case of war, the military be used “according to a campaign concerted between the two governments.”168 With respect to territory, and the French insistence that it retain all Dutch possessions on the left bank of the Rhine and Whaal rivers, the Batavian delegation responded in forceful terms that highlighted French hypocrisy (although with confusing double and triple negatives): This article is of the highest importance; one cannot pretend that the French Republic did not declared that it did not want to grow via conquests, and it did not declare war against the Batavian people, but against the Anglo-Prussian faction that was oppressing them. No matter the rights of victors, or indemnities in war, they cannot be extended to the point of conquering entire peoples against their will. This contention is especially contrary to the principle of the sovereignty of the people, proclaimed so solemnly on behalf of the French nation.169

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AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Letter to the Convention, The Hague, March 3, 1795. AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Articles for peace that the representative of the United Provinces proposed to the Committee of Public Safety, 19 Nivôse III/ January 8, 1795, with other documents and new stipulations, 20 Nivôse III/ January 9, 1795. AN: AF/II/64 (Affaires étrangères). “Eclaircissement sur le projet de traité, remis au nom du Gouvernement Batave,” Blauss and Meyer, Batavian plenipotentiaries, April 26, 1795. Ibid. They went on, “In any case, such conduct would not give any real advantage to the French Republic; it would [instead] certainly give very unfortunate results. It is for these reasons that the Batavian Government is convinced that the honor of the French Republic requires this solemn declaration, so that all subsequent transaction

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In a letter the Dutch plenipotentiaries to the Committee of Public Safety, again, candidly called the French out, this time with a subtle warning: “We know neither how to hide, nor how to remain silent about the clatter that malice is spreading in the Netherlands during the course of these important negotiations.” France, they accused, “has the audacity to advertise that the Batavians will be abandoned to their own fate, if they do not fully accede to the conditions that the French government prescribed.”170 The unequal terms of the Treaty of The Hague show that the Batavian Republic, legally recognized as a “free and independent power” that France “guaranteed [in] its liberty and independence,” ultimately lost out.171 By this accord, the Dutch gave 12 ships of the line to France; France returned the territory it occupied except, “as a just indemnity,” Dutch Flanders, land on the left bank of the Hondt river and south of Venloo, so that France effectively annexed everything on the left bank of the Rhine; France kept an occupation force in the Low Countries, ostensibly for their protection; and the Batavian Republic paid “as indemnity and compensation for the costs of the war, the sum of a hundred millions florins,” the hard currency of the Netherlands all the while France forced others to use its own floundering paper currency.172 This treatment is more reflective of a vanquished foe, if not the usual treatment by the French of occupied territory, rather than that of a stalwart friend.173 A similar narrative unfolded in Switzerland. General Brune effused that “in spite of all the rights of victory, I would still like to have leniency on you.”174 Leniency was rare and, when it occurred, was

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between the two peoples about borders will enjoy a spirit of justice and legitimacy, worthy of two free nations.” AN: AF/II/64 (Affaires étrangères). “Articles Préliminaires et Bases sur lesquelles on propose un Traité d’Alliance entre la République Française et la République Batave.” AD: CP/Hollande/587 (1795). Views of the Committee of Public Safety on the treaty of alliance with the Batavian Republic, 14 Germinal III/ April 3, 1795, and order the Committee of Public Safety 15 Floréal III/ May 4, 1795. AD: CP/Hollande/587 (1795). Law of 8 Prairial III/ May 27, 1795, that ratified two peace treaties, of France with Holland and Prussia, respectively. France also insisted on keeping key fortresses and a loan of another hundred million livres at the paltry rate of 3 percent: see AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795), “Articles fondamentaux,” 10 Germinal III/ March 30, 1795. AD: CP/Hollande/587 (1795). An order of 27 Floréal III/ April 27, 1795, shows the administrative organization of a territory after conquest and the reorganization after a country is declared a Sister Republic to be uncannily similar. AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). Ultimatum given to the delegates of the canton of Bern by General Brune, 10 Ventôse VI/ February 28, 1798.

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predicated on French security. As Mengaud explained to the Swiss, France’s goal was not invasion for the sake of conquest, but rather “to overthrow a vicious and corrupt government, to substitute in its place one more similar to that of the French and Cisalpine Republics, whose existence, safety, and tranquility will always be compromised as long as the Swiss remain under a despotism.”175 Further, to the people of Lucerne, he explained that the French wished that a “constitution of the sovereignty of the people replace these oligarchic governments so favorable to the intrigues of our enemies.” The French, he claimed, wished “to partner more strictly still with the people of Switzerland,” which of course meant, in language that evokes the pouvoir révolutionnaire, the adoption of a French political system: “it would be satisfactory to see the form of the government of these lands become closer to that of the French Republic.”176 Brune went on to require the replication of French political forms, in a military ultimatum issued at Bern, insisting that the Swiss “establish immediately a provisional government to take action for the creation of a Helvetic constitution, that guarantees the equality of political rights.”177 Thus, the nature of Switzerland’s new administration, and ultimately its unitary constitution based on France’s, was a foregone conclusion.178 The treaty that was ultimately negotiated between the Helvetic and French Republics again saw the former renounce or abandon many of the hallmarks of statehood. France overrode the principle of noninterference, but couched in language of autonomy and aid: it “guarantees to the Helvetic Republic its independence and the unity of its government; and in the case that [an] oligarchy attempts to overthrow the current Helvetic constitution, the French Republic commits to give to the Helvetic Republic, at its request, the relief that it would need.” The military connection was stronger still: “The general effect of this alliance is that each of the two republics may, in case of war, require the cooperation of its ally.” Any future 175

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AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). Mengaud, minister of the French Republic, to the Swiss, 30 Pluviôse VI/ February 18, 1798. AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). Letter from Mengaud, minister of the French Republic, to the state of Lucerne, Basel, 22 Pluviôse VI/ February 10, 1798. AN: AF/III/83 (Suisse). Ultimatum given to the delegates of the canton of Bern by General Brune, 10 Ventôse VI/ February 28, 1798. Lerner tries to gloss positive by claiming that the “structure and constitution” of the state was “shaped” by the French Revolution but “created” by the Swiss, 132.

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territorial settlement, in a reference to France’s earlier annexations, should “not contradict in any way the unions already definitively made with French territory.” Finally, to facilitate communication and trade with Italy, commercial and military routes through Switzerland were fully opened to the French.179 Not surprisingly, the experience of the Sister Republics in Italy was similar. At the birth of the Cisalpine Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte haughtily claimed, “The French Republic was empowered by right of conquest; it renounces this right today, and the Cisalpine Republic is free and independent.” But even the pretense of organizing elections or manipulating plebiscites was now gone, and, “to make this passage occur without hindrance, without anarchy, the [French] Directory judged it necessary to appoint, for this time only, the members of the government and the legislative body.”180 The alliance between the Cisalpine and French Republics again codified subservience, and in many ways placed the Italians in an even more dependent relationship than the Dutch or Swiss vis-à-vis the French. Although France recognized it, again and as usual, as a “free and independent power,” the Cisalpine Republic agreed to “take part in all wars the French Republic may have” and, should the Directory ask, “put all its forces to march and all its resources at the ready.”181 The Cisalpine Republic “requested” that France leave a permanent occupation corps to maintain its liberty, independence, and tranquility and, for these troops, the Italians would pay France annually; these troops and all others would be under the command of French generals; and, finally, as

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AD: MD/Suisse/37 (Capitulations militaires). Treaty, 2 Fructidor VI/ August 19, 1798. AD: CP/Autriche/366 (1796–1797). Declaration of Bonaparte, Montebello, 11 Messidor V/ June 29, 1797. In Bologna, where there was a short-lived administration before incorporation in the Cispadane Republic, deputies recognized that “General Buonaparte and the commissioners of the Army of Italy, in constituting the Senate of Bologna as temporarily vested with public authority, order it to organize a permanent constitution according to the will of the people”; however, this new constitution had to be modeled on “the bases of the French constitution” and, upon completion, sent to the Directory in Paris for approval. See AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Report of deputies of Bologna, Paris, 5 Fructidor IV/ August 22, 1796. They used, of course, the Italian spelling of the general’s name. AN: AD/XV/53. Treaty of Alliance and Treaty of Commerce with the Cisalpine Republic, Paris, 3 Ventôse VI/ February 21, 1798.

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part of a treaty of commerce, neither side could exclude entry or consumption of merchandise from the other.182 In Rome, in a now extremely common if still hypocritical formulation, Berthier recognized the Roman Republic and the provisional government that “[wa]s proposed to him by the sovereign people,” but that was also “under the special protection of the French army.”183 The proposed Roman alliance stipulated that 8,000 French troops remain stationed in Rome, and that Roman authorities help pay for their upkeep, in addition to an indemnity.184 In a secret codicil, the Roman government also agreed to pay a general contribution to the Army of Italy for six months.185 In response to Talleyrand’s introduction of the envoy of the Roman Republic, the chairperson of the Directory responded honestly: “It is under the auspices of the French Republic that this prodigy was born.”186 In Naples, all of these strands came together and the process reached its (il)logical conclusion. Championnet organized a provisional government but with no mention of the will of the people. Because “the regeneration of a people cannot be effected under the influence and the direction of the institutions of despotism,” again recalling the pouvoir révolutionnaire, Championnet pledged “the solemn engagement that [France] takes to die for your cause and not to take up arms except for the maintenance of your independence and the conservation of your rights that [France] won.”187 After elaborating this subservience, he enthused, “You are finally free,” before concluding with an echo from the decree of fraternity: “your freedom is the only prize that France wants to take from its conquest.”

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Ibid. AN: AD/XV/51. Speech of General Berthier, 27 Pluviôse VI/ February 15, 1798. AD: CP/Rome/927. Draft treaty of friendship and alliance between the French and Roman Republics. The alliance never had time to go into force. AN: AF/III/77 (Rome) Letter from the commissioners of the Directory, Rome, 22 Germinal VI/ April 11, 1798. AN: AD/XV/39. Speech 10 Floréal VI/ April 29, 1798. AN: AF/III/73. Law concerning the provisional government of the Neapolitan Republic, by General Championnet, 4 Pluviôse VII/ January 23, 1799. Articles 1 and 2 named the 25 citizens who would form the provisional government and who would have legislative and executive power until a new constitution came into force (article 3), although nothing would have the “force of law” without the sanction of Championnet (article 4).

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Even after the problematic establishment of the Sister Republics, French meddling in their affairs became entrenched. Oftentimes the constitutions and treaties of alliance had established an official means for this intrusion; other times, the French did it extra-legally, even outside the formal bounds of the imbalanced relationships between France and the Sister Republics created at their inception. All this behavior continued to undermine the notion of these states as legitimately autonomous. On territorial demarcations and other matters of geography, the French were intimately involved, for example, in a dispute between the Cisalpine Republic and the Duke of Parma, who had managed to remain independent.188 In Zurich, Jean-Jacques Rapinat, Reubell’s brother-in-law and commissioner of the government for the French army in Switzerland, went to Schaffhausen with the general-in-chief of the army to assure the people that the canton would not be given to Austria.189 Mengaud and Talleyrand, at one point, debated the finer points of which city would make the best host for the National Assembly of the Cisalpine Republic.190 Autonomous diplomatic activity was certainly not a hallmark of the Sister Republics.191 François Rivaud, the French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, was frequently an intermediary between that administration and its own diplomats in Vienna. For example, when the Cisalpine diplomat assigned to Austria was named to his republic’s Directory, that body asked Rivaud for suggestions for his successor, because “it hastens to follow” French advice.192 In Rome, the French

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AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter from Rivaud, French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Milan, 6 Ventôse VII/ February 24, 1799. AN: AF/III/84 (Suisse). Letter of Rapinat, commissioner to the French in the Helvetic Republic, Zurich, 28 Prairial VI/ June 16, 1798. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Mengaud, chargé d’affaires, Paris, 4 Floréal VI/ April 23, 1798. Kubben has claimed, of the negotiation of the Peace of Amiens between the French and Dutch, and the English, that there were no signs of clear inequality in the treaty: “At least in public, appearances were being kept up.” See “A Tale of Dwarfs and Giants,” 172. AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter from Rivaud, French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Milan, 18 Pluviôse VII/ February 6, 1799. See also the letter from the Directory of the Cisalpine Republic to Rivaud, Milan, 14 Pluviôse VII/ February 2, 1799, and of 10 Frimaire VII/

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commissioner had a hand in assigning diplomats, as well as in managing ecclesiastical matters.193 French agents were also involved in military assignment, movements, and nominations – a critical realm that is normally the exclusive purview of a sovereign state. Rivaud regularly weighed in on the incorporation of “French military personal among Cisalpine troops.”194 The Directory of the Helvetic Republic complained about the passage of French troops going to Italy via its territory and demanded, according to the Treaty of Alliance but ultimately in vain, that French soldiers stay along prescribed routes.195 General Marc Beaumont wrote of how Bonaparte “pressed Brigadier General Vignolle to accept the function of Minister of War of the Cisalpine Republic.”196 The French appointed officials, both military and civil, across all the Sister Republics, and to the highest offices. In Switzerland, in late March 1798, Mengaud reported on the all-important choice of the directors of the Helvetic Republic, and testified that he was happy with the selections, as “I have the satisfaction of having indirectly designated them to the National Assembly.”197 Three months later, Rapinat reported the resignations of two directors, Ludwig Bay and Alphons Pfyffer, the Secretary-General and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, respectively – which he had requested. He claimed, “The public desired this for a long time.” Certainly more important than that, the head of the Directory had admonished the two fired directors for the “cunning and treacherous conduct that they had undertaken against France.”198 Even some French officials balked at

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November 30, 1798, between the Cisalpine ministers in Vienna and Paris, which shows France had access to their diplomatic correspondence. AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Letter from the commissioners to the Roman Republic, to the Directory, Rome, 26 Germinal VI/ April 15, 1798. AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter from Rivaud, French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Milan, 10 Ventôse VII/ February 28, 1799. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter from the Directory of Helvetic Republic to the Directory of the French Republic, Lucerne, October 13, 1798. AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter from General Beaumont, Lodi, 3 Ventôse VII/ February 21, 1799. AD: CP/Suisse/466. Letter from Mengaud, chargé d’affaires, to Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arau, 30 Germinal VI/ April 19, 1798. AN: AF/III/84 (Suisse). Letter of Rapinat, commissioner to the French in the Helvetic Republic, Zurich, 2 Messidor VI/ June 20, 1798.

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so significant an intrusion. Antoine-Léon-Anne Amelot, formerly the intendant for Burgundy under the ancient régime and now administrator in chief of contributions, revenues, and finances for France in Italy, complained to the Cisalpine Directory about what he deemed to be arbitrary actions by General Brune in changing directors in Italy, worrying the moves were “illegal.”199 Then there is the very fact of political independence. The consuls of the Roman Republic practically begged France not to remove its commissioners, claiming their presence was necessary for “the very existence of the Republic”: “The role you assumed by sending a commission to Rome invested with all your powers and your confidence saved everything.”200 Clearly, the regime could not subsist in Rome without active French participation. The commissioners themselves submitted a list of Roman matters that still needed their attention to Paris: “We must complete legislation, enable and regularize the operation of public authorities, watch over the discontented and suppress them, stop or prevent ruin, meet the needs of the army, monitor finances, contributions, the sale of national assets, [and] make right an infinite number of applications.”201 That French political agents were essentially running the country was not unique to Rome. In Switzerland, they “were empowered with all superior public authority in matters civil, political, and financial in the territory of the Helvetic Republic, with regard to the interests” of France, which basically could mean anything.202 When Austrian military forces 199

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AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter of Amelot, administrator in chief of contributions, revenues, and finances of the French Republic in Italy, to the French Directory, Milan, 27 Brumaire VII/ November 17, 1798. See also AD/XV/50. “Observations sur les calomnies dont j’ai été objet,” by Rivaud, Paris, VII. He highlights his orders of 4 and 17 Brumaire VII/ October 25 and November 7, 1798, which ended the attempt by Brune to change a number of members of the Legislative Council and Directory of the Republic. The Amelot family had long been committed to public service in France, including in diplomacy, and included most famously Michel-Jean Amelot, Baron de Brunelles, Marquis de Gournay (1655–1724), who was French ambassador to Venice, Portugal, Switzerland, and Spain. He was a lead negotiator of the Peace of Utrecht after War of the Spanish Succession. AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Letter from the consuls of the Roman Republic to the Directory, Rome, 26 Prairial VI/ June 14, 1798. AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Letter from the commissioners to the Roman Republic, to the Directory, Rome, 26 Prairial VI/ June 14, 1798. AN: AF/III/84 (Suisse). Proclamation about the powers of the commissioner in Switzerland, 24 Floréal VI/ May 13, 1798.

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threatened the Cisalpine Republic at the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition, its directors and legislators asked the French for evacuation.203 In a letter of April 14, 1799, Rivaud wrote that it was the intention “of my government [to] maintain the moral and political existence of a republic” in northern Italy.204 Without that support, the republic could not survive. One last way in which the status of the Sister Republics as only quasi-autonomous client states was confirmed was that France continued to exact requisitions of all sorts, much as in conquered territory. As described in the previous chapter, the French sometimes justified these extractions on the premise that they had been compelled to fight an unjust war. Similarly, just after the proclamation of the Batavian Republic, the representatives of the people to the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse wrote that “the Dutch people” had been forced into a war “against their interests and will,” by their erstwhile leaders.205 Therefore it was necessary for the French to promote good feeling and to work against pillage; however, the representatives added, “We believe we must reserve for ourselves the ability to make requisitions necessary for the subsistence and maintenance of the army.” Indeed, they boasted, “The benefits of this brilliant conquest [of the Netherlands] are immense for the Republic,” and enumerated, “it gives [France] its treasures, stores, building sites, vessels, and especially in the political and commercial affairs of Europe, a preponderance that is impossible to calculate.” In Italy, Bonaparte’s armies were known for pillaging extensively.206 According to a “good

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AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter from the Directory of the Cisalpine Republic, to Rivaud, French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, Milan, 24 Germinal VII/ April 13, 1799. AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). Letter of Rivaud, French ambassador to Cisalpine Republic, 25 Germinal VII/ April 14, 1799. AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). Letter from the representatives of the people to the Armies of the North and Sambre and Meuse, to the Committee of Public Safety, Amsterdam, 20 Pluviôse III/ February 8, 1795. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter from the Directory of the Cisalpine Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Milan, 28 Ventôse VI/ February 16, 1798. The French troops who entered the Cisalpine Republic just after it was established were owed “at least three months of back pay.” See also AN: AF/III/65 (Gênes). Dispatch from Faipoult, French minister in Genoa, 29 Frimaire VI/ December 19, 1797, saying the Genoese government accepted that French troops be housed, fed, and clothed at their cost. Jacques Godechot is the best authority here: see La grande

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citizen,” the French could “exact hefty contributions in cash,” “products meant for revivifying our manufacturing, or provisioning our Navy,” foodstuffs to “provide for abundance throughout the country,” and gold and silver “to fill the coffers of the nation.”207 As every visitor to the Louvre has witnessed, perhaps unknowingly, the French also plundered artistic masterpieces, which it appropriated from supposedly free states like the Sister Republics in a manner perfectly analogous to what happened in occupied and annexed territory.208 For example, in Belgium, Pierre-Jacques Tinet, the artist and an agent of the commission of commerce and appropriations, had the task of “choosing and sending to the Republic all scientific objects and arts useful to instruction.”209 The French swapped the masterpieces they claimed with their own art, and cloaked their actions in fraternal generosity: “After the second entry of the army in the territory formerly known as Belgium, the French sent many works of art to Paris . . . Now that the inhabitants of these lands are truly French, you will find it undoubtedly fair . . . to send our new brothers,” not the works that had been taken, but rather “works by the best masters of the French School.”210 Even before the French created the Roman Republic, they pilfered art from the Catholic Church’s rich collection, and a variety of miscellaneous objects from the Vatican Library. Charles-François Delacroix – the Minister of Foreign Affairs and officially the father of the Romantic artist, though there is much speculation that his successor as minister, Talleyrand, actually sired the painter of the famous Liberty Leading the People – described how the

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nation: l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799, 2 vols. (Paris, 1956), II:565. AN: AF/III/185 (Armée d’Italie). “Réflexions d’un Bon Citoyen sur les Avantages que la République Française peut Tirer de la Conquête d’Italie.” AN: AF/III/72 (Italie Cisalpine). “Etat d’objets d’arts et sciences choisis pour être envoyés à Paris par les commissaires du Gouvernement,” by Salicetti, commissioner of the Army of Italy, 25 Messidor IV/ July 13, 1796. See also AN: AF/III/185 (Armée d’Italie). Order of Salicetti and the general-in-chief for the removal of “monuments of sciences and arts,” 30 Floréal IV/ May 19, 1796; AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Extract from the dispatch of the commissioners of the government in search of scientific and artistic objects in Italy, Rome, 8 Fructidor IV/ August 25, 1796. AN: AF/II/244 (Armée du Nord). Extract of the register of the Committee of Public Safety, 16 Vendémiaire III/ October 7, 1794. AN: AD/XV/41. “Motion d’ordre prononcée par Portiez (de l’Oise) Sur les départements réunis par la loi du 9 vendémiaire an IV,” Council of the Five Hundred, 19 Brumaire V/ November 9, 1796

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plethora of statues and paintings “that made up the first convoy” alone was so large it overwhelmed the logistics of transport.211 The French were keen on classical art from Italy because, as David Jordan explains, it “would present the Revolution as the legitimate inheritor of the European past, the apotheosis of the universal yearning for liberty”; they had a particularly strong appetite for busts and statues of republican Rome regicides.212 Financial appropriations were also imposed, especially in banking centers such as Amsterdam, Zurich, and Genoa. Christophe Salicetti, the Corsican who had been key to the union of his island with France, described the French view well: “The resources produced by the conquered countries not only consist in objects of provision and in funds. Public deposits, which became national properties by the conquests, [contained treasures] of jewelry, gold, and silver.”213 In Switzerland, authorities in a variety of cities complained about how General André Masséna “continued to require, without our consent, more or less heavy sums as loans from diverse communes.”214 Deputies in Bologna hoped that in accepting to pay a contribution of 4 million livres in silver fixed by Bonaparte and the Directory in July 1796, they made themselves “safe from any later claims by the French and that private property would be respected.” They were wrong; another confiscation was soon made of both urban and rural funds.215

211

212 213

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AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). List of statues and paintings taken from Rome and the Vatican library, with a letter from Delacroix, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the Directory, Paris, 23 Floréal V/ May 12, 1797. See also AF/III/77 (Rome). Letter of the commissioners of the French government for the seizure of scientific objects and arts Rome, 15 Prairial V/ June 3, 1797. The pope also paid the French army a formidable financial contribution before the creation of the Roman Republic, 10 million livres in gold and silver, and 5 million in diamonds. See AN: AF/III/77 (Rome). Dispatch from Cacault, Rome, 8 Germinal V/ March 28, 1797 David P. Jordan, Napoleon and the Revolution (Houndmills, 2012), 39–40. AN: AF/III/185 (Armée d’Italie), Letter of Salicetti, commissioner of the Army of Italy and the Alps, Milan, 4 Germinal IV/ March 24, 1796. AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter from the Directory of the Helvetic Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Bern, October 15, 1799. Ultimately, they refused to be party to such action, “to conserve intact the national dignity that was entrusted” to them. See also the letter from the Directory of the Helvetic Republic, to the Directory of the French Republic, Bern, October 11, 1799, about 800,000 livres that Massena tried to take from Zurich. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract of a report of the deputies of the commune of Bologna, Paris, 12 Thermidor IV/ July 30, 1796.

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French financial chicanery went beyond simple extraction. They required the Batavian Republic, from which France was a net importer of many goods, to accept and, indeed, transact in the undervalued assignat – again, as they had done in many conquered and annexed territories.216 As one Dutch critic complained, “The law of the maximum and robbery, which is the necessary consequence of it, and the forced use of the assignat are, in particular, an obvious and palpable infringement of the law of property, the independence of other nations, and a usurpation of the right of sovereignty – and hurts the friendship and fraternity that the French people offer to other nations.”217 Complaints abounded in these supposedly autonomous states, just as in annexed territories, about not only French requisitions and imperious behavior but also the disorganization of it all. As in most wars, those who personally enriched themselves were attacked. A report described how the “wealth acquired by the French Republic by the blood of its brave soldiers, has run largely in favor of a crowd of voracious men without prudery” and concluded despairingly that, for the Sister Republics, “liberty was given to them only to be followed by theft.”218 Joseph Fouché, the French ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic and later chief of police in Napoleon’s empire, blamed the anarchic affairs with respect to requisitions on all the different French agents who each made their own demands of the government – demands that were “divergent and often contradictory.”219 Amelot wrote to the chair person of the French Directory from Milan that abuse of the administration of finances of the Army of Italy “has exhausted immense resources and left debts,” and he worried about its efficacy in a new war, which was on the horizon.220 216

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AD: CP/Hollande/586 (1794 and 1795). “Publication of the provisional representatives of the people of Holland, concerning the circulation of assignats,” signed by P. Paulus, The Hague, February 2, 1795. AN: AD/XV/49. “Des vrais intérêts de la France relativement à la Hollande,” Paris. Various laws from mid-1793 created price controls, or maximums, on a variety of items but especially foodstuffs. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). “Mémoire sur l’aliénation des biens nationaux, en pays conquis.” AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter of Fouché, ambassador of the French Republic to the Cisapline Republic, to the Directory, Milan, 8 Brumaire VII/ October 29, 1798. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter of Amelot, administrator in chief of contributions, revenues, and finances of the French Republic in Italy, to the Directory, Milan, 26 Brumaire VII/ November 16, 1798.

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Not only do the injurious troop levies, the financial indemnifications, and the like described in Chapter 4 resound in this history of the Sister Republics, but also the renunciation of conquests and the decree of fraternity, which vaunted the people’s will and France’s benevolence. In a letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the secretary of the French legation to the Cisalpine Republic, David, bravely pointed out something of this inconsistency to his superiors, along with the consequences: There is no doubt that the love of liberty [in Italy] seems to weaken at this time, and is becoming a more durable sentiment . . . The military regime and the state of uncertainty caused by the often contradictory acts by the constitutional authorities and the staff of the army, make the people feel the deprivation or the frequent violation of their civil and political rights very strongly.221

He also referenced a second problem, linked to policies of securing strategic advantages and the extraction of resources from conquered territory for the benefit of France: “The heads of the French army and especially the employees of the military administrations seek to extend the tutelage under which they hold a country, which the former still regard as a conquest, and in which the latter, in their current position, find great opportunities to perform heinous pillage.”222 He cited as an example the story of artillery being sold to the Cisalpine Republic: the French took it back because of the worries of the general-in-chief, but nonetheless demanded payment! The effect of all this behavior on local peoples was obvious. Rapinat wrote to Paris about how the Grisons of the eastern Alps might wish to join the Helvetic Republic, except that army requisitions were alienating people.223 Faipoult claimed hopefully that the Italian people were truly attached to France, but would be even more so if the abuses ended.224 These are among the more positive prognostications. A local critic, Marco Ferri, wrote a number of pieces denouncing French kleptocracy 221

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AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Extract of a letter from David, secretary of the French legation to the Cisalpine Republic, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Milan, 6 Floréal VI/ April 25, 1798. Ibid. AN: AF/III/84 (Suisse). Rapinat, commissioner of the government to the army of the French Republic in Helvetia, Zurich, 13 Prairial VI/ June 1, 1798. Also known as Graubünden, Grisons is now the largest and easternmost canton of Switzerland and borders Italy, Austria, and Liechtenstein. AN: AF/III/71 (Italie). Letter of Faipoult, commissioner of the French government to the Cisapline Republic, to the Directory, Paris, 9 Brumaire VII/ October 30, 1798.

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and hypocrisy. In an open letter to the French ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic, he asserted that Bonaparte, “to legally promulgate the [constitution], publically convened ad hoc committees, composed in the majority of Cisalpine patriots,” but that underhand tactics were necessary to “quietly organize his government and to get it – without convulsions, anarchic debate, or counter-revolutionary twitches – on the republican trajectory.”225 He predicted that soon “the people will realize that their sovereignty exists not only in hollow pronouncements, that their independence is neither an illusion nor a dream,” and if the people did not react, “it is because no one believes you to be reasonable enough, republican enough, to listen calmly to the language of the truth.”226 Toward Napoleon’s Empire Ferri was one of Bonaparte’s many critics, although he can lay claim to being among the first. Since then, and until very recently, commentary of the general turned emperor has been mostly “the preserve of military historians, hagiographers and demonizers,” according to Michael Broers.227 A leading scholar of the Corsican, Broers has called for a “new Napoleonic history” that examines the legacy more than the life of Bonaparte and goes beyond the lens of conquest because “the politics and ideology of his regime must be confronted.”228 With respect to international law, Bonaparte’s legacy is, remarkably, quite limited. As a general, he had been an important but by no means solitary figure in the development of the Sister Republics, which owed more to the longer history of claims to territory derived from the will of the people, as described in this book. Later, the “ideology of his 225

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AN: AD/XV/51. Marco Ferri, citizen of the Cisalpine Republic, to Ambassador Trouvé, Saint Lô, 4 Thermidor VI/ July 22, 1798. Ibid. Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, eds. Michael Broers, Peter Hicks, and Agustín Guimerá (Houndmills, 2012), 3. Two representative titles include Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against, trans. Olive Renier (New Haven, 1964) and Desmond Seward, Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (New York, 1988). Ibid., 1. Broers argues, “There is, arguably, the need to push the man if not away, then at least a little aside” and to focus “less in what actually happened, than in what was attempted, outline and projected.” For the second quotation see Michael Broers, Europe Under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (London, 1996), 5.

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regime,” and indeed the legal foundations for his empire, continued to derive from the principle of popular sovereignty and were merely adjustments of rather than further innovations to that which occurred during the earlier Revolution. There was significant continuity in both the foreign policy and vision of the international system between the Directory and Bonaparte’s later regimes.229 The over-measured shadow of Napoleon’s empire accounts for some of the ignorance of what it inherited from preceding administrations, but obfuscation also has a contemporary origin because the Directory’s “legacy,” as Martin Lyons has shown, was one “which Bonapartistes were reluctant to acknowledge.”230 There were important continuities in personnel. Figures such as Salicetti, Faipoult, and Menou have been called “professionals of annexation”; they had long careers spanning not just the Directory and Napoleon’s empire, but in many cases had cut their teeth during the earliest unions with France.231 This continuity meant that, according to Stuart Woolf, by 1805 “annexation became a skilled art.”232 Moreover, the two forms of control of foreign territory that were used during the Napoleonic empire – direct annexation followed by departmentalization or client statehood – were clearly based on precedents from the Directory and earlier.233 More importantly, so too were the legal justifications for this control. Duplicitous though it may have been, the various regimes of Bonaparte were based, at least in theory, on the will of the people.234 The term “citizen” rather than “subject” was still used at the height of

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Woolf, 2: “In his relations with Europe . . . Napoleon was to develop many of the policies already initiated under the Directory”; Jainchill, 193: he transformed the Directory’s “federative system into a continental empire.” Martin Lyons, France under the Directory (Cambridge, 1975), 237. Woolf, 69. Broers has also used similar language about the cadre of annexation professionals: see note 29 in Chapter 2. Woolf, 50. See both Michel Vovelle in L’administration napoléonienne en Europe : adhésions et résistances, eds. Christine Peyrard, Francis Pomponi, and Michel Vovelle (Aix-enProvence, 2008), 75 and Woolf, 49–50. They also both add that Napoleon’s empire exercised “domination” over properly independent states like the Bourbon holdings in Italy but also, at times, Prussia and Austria. Thierry Lentz, “Imperial France in 1808 and Beyond,” in The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, 31: the “fundamental law of the First Empire was the evolutionary series of reforms begun in 1789.”

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his empire of 44 million people and 130 departments that stretched from the English Channel to the Ionian Sea. Article 3 of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” which affirmed “all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation,” also required that “No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” Bonaparte, although the constitutions of his regimes never included a declaration of rights until 1815, was never in technical violation of this condition from the earliest days of the Revolution. As both a consul and emperor, he simply insisted that the people were still the font of sovereignty, while their will was manifested through him.235 The continuing if insincere invocations of the principle of popular sovereignty were just as important as the enduring commitment to constitutions. Autocratic though his behavior may have been – increasingly so, toward the end – he always held office by statute.236 It was the Senate that elevated him to imperial rule, on May 18, 1804, with the words: “The government of the French Republic is entrusted to an emperor, who takes the title of EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH.” The title itself, like Louis XVI’s that shifted from King of France to King of the French under the 1791 Constitution, emphasized the community of French people, of which Napoleon was leader, as opposed to feudal possession of the territory of France. During his coronation on December 2, he famously crowned himself rather than let the pope, who was present under impressment, do so. At the climactic moment he turned and faced the congregation, and thus symbolically the people, rather than the altar in Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Supreme Pontiff. Puis VII is depicted as displeased, to say the least, in Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Coronation of Napoleon when, moments later, the emperor himself also crowned his consort Josephine. The ceremony ended with now-Emperor Napoleon taking his oath “by the grace of God and the Constitution.”

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Annie Jourdan goes so far as to say he was not unlike the constitutional monarch that the early revolutionaries of 1789–1791 sought. See the “Conclusion,” in The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, 313–315. Englund actually shows that as First Consul, Bonaparte enjoyed powers “more extensive than Louis XVI’s when he was demoted to constitutional monarch in 1791, and more extensive than the powers that Rousseau conferred on a dictator of emergency,” 221. Englund, 243.

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During his rule, Bonaparte certainly sidelined legislative institutions, which had been volatile since before the Terror. He and like-minded conspirators who brought down the Directory valued a responsible political order over a representative one.237 It is not surprising the people hardly protested the transition, given how corrupt elections had become. He once said, “my policy is to govern people as the great number wish to be governed. That, I think, is the way to recognize the sovereignty of the people.”238 Still, Bonaparte sought to mold and control public opinion.239 He also made direct appeals to the people to determine their will – again, in theory, if in reality the results were always foreordained – in plebiscites on important matters in 1800, 1802, 1804, and 1815.240 Over time, revolutionary political culture may have changed, as it certainly had prior to Bonaparte’s accession, but the basic premise and importance of the principle of popular sovereignty, even if only in pretense, remained consistent.241 This same premise, manifested in the various, connected claims to territory described in this book, underpinned the Napoleonic territorial order too.242 If not pronounced directly in name of the people, as had happened with Avignon and Savoy, unions were declared with the language of consultation, for example by the “orators of the government”; new territories were granted representation in the legislative corps of the Republic; and the law was proclaimed “in the name of the French people,” as in the annexation of Elba – ironic, since he was first exiled there – in August 1802.243 The notion that the will of the people was respected by virtue of participation in the French 237

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Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820 (New York, 1994), 46. Cited in Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, 1981), xii. Jordan highlights this as particularly true in Italy, where Bonaparte “mastered the culture of the democratic politics of the Revolution: public opinion not only ruled, but it could be shaped,” 38. Lyons, 296. As Broers notes, plebiscites could be seen as “actually re-enforcing the concept of a social contract with the nation” in The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, 14. Woloch, 21. See also Hemmerle, 76, who argues that “the replacement of the Republic by the Empire in 1804 is overestimated.” Similarly, Alexander Grab argues that “Napoleon’s imperial rule over Europe possessed a Janus face, combining reform and innovation with subordination and exploitation,” in Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (Houndmills, 2003), 19. AN: AD/XV/41. “Sénatus-Consulte organique portant réunion de l’ile d’Elbe au territoire de la République,” 8 Fructidor X/ August 26, 1802.

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polity, even if not discerned directly in a plebiscite, went back to the justifications for the full incorporation of Corsica and Alsace in France described in Chapter 1. A combination of reverence for popular government and a sense of primacy over lesser peoples who had yet to embrace its virtues, reminiscent of the pouvoir révolutionnaire outlined in Chapter 3, pervades the empire of Napoleon, who David Jordan asserts “embraced the revolutionary Messianism first preached in the spring of 1792,” which remained “until [his final] defeat.”244 The goal of “revolutionizing” other lands, so explicit in the decree of December 15, continued to be policy across the Napoleonic empire, especially in Italy where, as Broers has extensively documented, imperial administrators aimed euphemistically for “regeneration.”245 He cites Napoleon on St. Helena saying his aim was the “national education of Italians.”246 The contempt of the French for the unenlightened people of their empire is also clear is such claims as Pommereul’s that “The morality of Italians is all in Machiavelli” or Masséna’s when, on the brink of military defeat in May 1799, he asserted, “Only the efforts of France impede Europe from falling into the barbarism into which her enemies are hurling her.”247 Stuart Woolf summarizes how the “French political model . . . was perceived by its representatives as not only superior to, but also to be emulated by, existing states and societies,” and that this truth applied to both “its successive Revolutionary and Napoleonic incarnations.”248 244

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Jordan, 286, 294. The idea of “messianism” is problematic, not least because it implies a consistent vision whereas in reality this history involved both continuity and change. However, if one substitutes veneration for government based at least in theory on the will of the people, the characterization is apt. Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Houndmills, 2005), 26. This all, of course, bred intense resentment among Italians. See also his The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War Against God, 1801–1814 (London, 2002), 3. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1. AD: AF/III/71 (Italie). “Vues générales sur l’Italie,” by Pommereul, Florence, 25 Floréal IV/ May 14, 1796. Masséna is cited in Woolf, 9. Woolf, 10. He also highlights that the French deeply believed in their cultural preeminence and the license this gave them, 8–9. Lyons, 232: under the Empire, the French continued to believe that the Revolution “had given them the secrets of enlightened government” and, moreover, had empowered them to spread it throughout Europe. Grab, xi, too shows how the French viewed their role in Europe as a model society to emulate, and that Europe ought to recognize French supremacy and supply resources to aggrandize its position.

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The connection between the Sister Republics and the First Empire’s satellite kingdoms is even more obvious. Talleyrand may have quipped, about the thrones in the emperor’s client states, “You cannot sit on bayonets.”249 Nonetheless, Napoleon made his brothers Louis, Joseph, and Jérôme, Kings of Holland, Naples and then Spain, and Westphalia, respectively; his sister Elisa, the only female sibling he elevated to political power, Princess of Lucca and Piombino and then Grand Duchess of Tuscany; his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais Viceroy of Italy; and his brother-in-arms Joachim Murat Grand Duke of Berg and later King of Naples, among others appointed to lesser seats. The extent to which these contrived titles and appointments undermined the old principle of dynastic legitimacy is conspicuous in the response of Francis II, the 54th Holy Roman Emperor since Charlemagne was crowned by the pope on Christmas Day, 800, when he was forced to abdicate and abolish the 1,006-year-old institution – older still, if one considers its connection to the Roman Empire of antiquity.250 The head of the House of Habsburg, itself one of Europe’s oldest and arch-legitimist dynasties, followed the Corsican upstart’s example and fabricated an entirely new imperial designation for himself – Emperor of Austria. The Habsburgs would only enjoy this new title until the end of the First World War, but other Napoleonic parvenus persist. The heirs of Jean Bernadotte, a revolutionary military officer and later Marshall of France under Napoleon, are today still the Swedish royal family. Like the Sister Republics of the Directory, the “Brother Kingdoms” of Napoleon’s empire were awkward hybrids. On the one hand, they were autonomous entities, with constitutions of their own.251 On the other, the rulers were truly Napoleon’s vassals, members of the House of Bonaparte reigning, if not truly ruling, at the Emperor’s whim, and implementing his plans and policies.252 249

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Cited in Broers, The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, 3. The line recalls Robespierre’s “armed missionaries” bon mot. These figures with respect to the Holy Roman Empire are from from Grab, 90. Broers claims that the “undeniably authoritarian, militaristic character of the Napoleonic regime and its satellite states has often blinded historians to the central importance of their constitutions,” in The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture, 5. Hemmerle, 78. He cites Jean Tulard, Napoléon, ou, Le mythe du sauveur (Paris, 1987): “Become kings, the brothers of Napoleon should be nothing more, in the thinking of the leader, than auxiliaries of his policies.”

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Overall, Napoleon’s empire reflected pragmatism and improvisation, entirely in keeping with the history of the inadvertent spread of the principle of popular sovereignty to international law and the iterative development of different claims to territory based on the will of the people from 1789 until Bonaparte’s takeover. As Englund aptly puts it, “The Empire was not a planned or even desired accomplishment but a contingent, ad hoc, congeries of conquered lands, satellites, allies, which turned up over the course of a twelve-year journey.”253 It makes eminent sense that Napoleon should employ the innovations in international law that arose in much the same fashion, as they continued to serve his purposes well. The emperor himself said to Karl von Dalberg, Prince Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, in 1806: “You ideologues act according to systems worked out in advance. As for myself, I am a practical man, I seize events and push them as far as they will go.”254 That said, one ideological commitment he always maintained, if only in dissimulation, in his government domestically as in his empire internationally, was to the will of the people. As he once told Charles Tristan, Marquis de Montholon, an ex-general and one of the few to join Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena after his second abdication, “I did not usurp the crown, I found it in the gutter. The people put it on my head.”255 Conclusion To return to the Sister Republics, the same Dutch critic of the forced use of assignats summed up the relationship between France and its client states well: “A people who give their laws to another people, without being required, and even against the wish of the other, undoubtedly exercise the right of sovereignty in the greatest latitude.”256 Given that France effectively “exercised the right of sovereignty” over them, the Sister Republics were not truly independent states. They were constituted in the aftermath of French military victories, and 253

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Englund, 333. See also Woolf, 20, who says today few would argue Napoleon had a master plan from the outset. Much of the expansion of the empire was also driven by the (futile) pursuit of the Europe-wide trade blockade of England, the Continental System. Woolf, 21. 255 Cited in Jordan, 196. AN: AD/XV/49. “Des vrais intérêts de la France relativement à la Hollande,” Paris.

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thereafter their governments remained intertwined with, if not explicitly subservient to, that of the French Republic. However, they were also not formally incorporated in France and they enjoyed a veneer of autonomy and self-government. The same is true of the first such republic, the Batavian, proclaimed in 1795 but inheriting a revolutionary tradition going back to 1581; the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland; and the several Sister Republics established in Italy during the triennio between 1796 and 1799. The year 1799 saw a brief reversal in French military fortunes. The War of the Second Coalition broke out in earnest and famed Russian General Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, who reputedly never lost a large battle, took command against the French in Italy on April 19. The deputy Pierre-Joseph Briot of Doubs exclaimed in the Council of Five Hundred that summer, “One day, no one will believe that three months have seen the fruit of three years of [previous French] victories and work destroyed.”257 At the time, Bonaparte was stranded in Egypt, having undertaken a new gambit against the British in faraway India.258 On Albion’s other flank, an Irish Sister Republic was briefly proclaimed when French forces under General Jean Humbert set ashore in County Mayo to lend assistance to a rebellion in late August 1798. The Republic of Connaught proved shorter-lived than the Roman, the Neapolitan, and even the Cisrhenan, and ended in defeat at the Battle of Ballinamuck on September 8. It was just this sort of imperial overstretch that the Sister Republics, at least in theory, aimed to mitigate.259 Given the increasing diversity of the areas under French control, and given classical republican anxieties, administrative feasibility was a consideration in their genesis. More importantly, the histories of the Sister Republics show an overwhelming concern for the will of the people – or, more precisely, keeping up a charade of it. The French endeavored to be true to their principles, especially after their relatively more chauvinistic behavior in Belgium and the Rhineland. However, they could not follow through fully on the rhetoric of self-determination, and so set up friendly 257 258

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AN: AD/XV/50. Speech of 14 Thermidor VII/ August 1, 1799. Edward James Kolla, “Not So Criminal: New Understandings of Napoléon’s Foreign Policy in the East,” French Historical Studies 30:2 (2007): 175–201. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000 (New York, 1988).

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satraps who were neither too beastly to their own people nor too independently minded. All the while, French military strategy dictated the need to maintain these territories as buffers, even if they were beyond the Rhine or the Alps and therefore France’s natural frontiers, and to exact as much wealth and manpower from them as possible, as French armies had done elsewhere. The Sister Republics therefore reflected a synthesis of the earlier history of French unions and conquest, going back to the beginning of the Revolution. The Sister Republics were also the last innovation in international law with respect to territory during the French Revolution. Raymond Guyot claimed that by March 1799 “the diplomatic history of the Directory was finished.”260 The regime may have been over, but its diplomatic history and, more specifically, its system of client states would have a much longer legacy, during Napoleon’s empire and beyond. Before becoming emperor, the Corsican had first to secure his erstwhile conquests in the Italian peninsula. He returned to France from Egypt, having absconded in the night, abandoning his army and without even informing his second-in-command.261 On 18 Brumaire, year VIII, or November 9, 1799, in what Lyons pithily remarks was “the first republic’s last coup d’état,” Bonaparte and a number of allies overthrew the Directory.262 He and former directors Roger Ducos and Emmanuel Sieyès become consuls in the new regime’s three-person executive, with Bonaparte later consolidating his authority as First Consul and then First Consul for Life. What truly allowed Bonaparte to solidify his pre-eminence was, characteristically, military victory.263 In a feat thought impossible, he crossed the Alps in May 1800. The painter David, ever the effective propagandist, also immortalized this moment of Napoleonic lore with 260 261

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Guyot, 880. This action prompted the best quotation in French history, as always perhaps apocryphal. When Jean-Baptiste Kléber, whom Bonaparte left in command, met with his officers the morning after his superior’s secret departure, he reportedly said Bonaparte “has left us here his pants full of shit . . . We will return to Europe to put them back on him.” Another version has Kléber complain, less hopefully, “and now he expects me to wear them.” See Général Jean-Baptiste Kléber, Kléber en Egypte, 1798–1800, ed. Henry Laurens (Cairo, 1988–1995): I:63–64. He never got the chance to return Bonaparte’s pants, as a student assassinated Kléber in Cairo in June 1800. Lyons, 230. Lyons also argues that, at first, it was not clear this coup would be any different from the many others that had fiddled with elections during the Directory. Jordan, 76.

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the most famous image of the general, his steed rearing, at the top of Great Saint Bernard Pass, where the name “BONAPARTE” is engraved along with fellow conquerors’ “HANNIBAL” and “KAROLVS MAGNVS IMP.” After the Battle of Marengo, on June 14, the French were again dominant in Italy. Austria left the coalition and, as already described, by the Treaty of Lunéville of February 9, 1801, formally accepted the terms of the previous agreement of Campo Formio and much of the territorial settlement described in this book. The basis of French legal claims had not changed in the interim, nor would they for the duration of Napoleon’s imperial rule. For all that was novel and spectacular about Bonaparte, therefore, as he rose to paramountcy and after he assumed control of France with the coup of 18 Brumaire, the law of conquest that he applied across much of Europe, even under an imperial guise, had been established beforehand. That law culminated in the system of Sister Republics, which Bonaparte had a hand in creating in Italy, and was a synthesis of earlier justifications for conquest based on the will of the people. These polities paradoxically exercised local authority but were in fact French dependent-states and reflected a revolutionary devotion to the principle of popular sovereignty, if only in principle, and simultaneously a desire by France to exercise the ambitions of a great power. Not only were the international legal foundations set for the Napoleonic empire during this earlier period, but also the seeds of its ultimate collapse. If annexations based on the will of the people, in theory, and a cultural and political superiority reminiscent of the pouvoir révolutionnaire continued under Napoleon’s empire, so too did the sequesters, requisitions, and general quest for strategic assets begun in earnest in the Rhineland, continued in the Sister Republics, and so important to France’s great power status. In 1799, at the start of the War of the Second Coalition, it was Swiss authorities who were most vocal in their complaints to France about onerous requisitions that have “become more diverse and imperious.”264 In a dramatic letter from the directors of the Helvetic Republic to their French counterparts, in April 1799, the former described the situation as so bad in the eastern cantons – which, for months, had been provisioning 264

AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter from the Directory of the Helvetic Republic to the Directory of the French Republic, Bern, October 6, 1799.

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the French army, fighting the Russians under Suvorov – that “famine is at our doors.” With an allusion to past insurrection in France itself, and an ominous lesson for Napoleon’s later empire, they warned: “The results that this will bring can be described by one word, Vendée” – the site of the bloody rebellion in northwestern France. The Swiss directors advised, “Yes, if you do not want to have in Switzerland the most terrible of Vendées, if you do not want forty thousand men, who if regularly maintained would protect the border, [instead] join the Austrians to have bread, then something must be done.”265

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AN: AF/III/68 (Genève). Letter from the Directory of the Helvetic Republic to the Directory of the French Republic, Lucerne, April 15, 1799.

Conclusion

Vendée, where a counter-revolutionary insurrection raged between 1793 and 1796 and up to 200,000 people were killed, quickly became a synonym in the revolutionary lexicon for vicious, unbridled violence.1 French as well as foreign officials, like the directors of the Helvetic Republic, used “Vendée” to draw attention to particularly difficult regions or situations. Although the dissatisfaction and privations due to French military requisitions in Switzerland, which led the Helvetic directors to use this term in 1799, did not, in the end, spark a Vendée, it was an apt warning. Because of similar appropriations by the French and general frustration with imperial rule, Vendées would indeed break out later, starting in 1807, across Napoleon’s empire.2 Local displeasure with the French precipitated the Peninsular War in Spain, in which the term guerrilla war, Spanish for “little war,” first gained widespread use. Similar upheavals rocked Italy, Germany, and elsewhere – and ultimately contributed to Napoleon’s downfall. Neither the principle of popular sovereignty, which was by then discredited and bankrupt, nor force could ultimately hold the Napoleonic empire together. However, the importance of the will of the people for the history of international law did not end there; it was to be much more enduring. At the beginning of the French Revolution, Jacobin writer Camille Desmoulins contemplated hopefully, “We have broken down the barriers 1 2

Jean-Clément Martin, ed. Dictionnaire de la Contre-Revolution (Perrin, 2011), 504. See Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York, 1965), I:169.

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of division that separated the French from one another; let us hope that soon the division between kingdoms will no longer exist; there will only be one people, that we will call humanity.”3 A world ideologically united by the “armed missionaries” that Robespierre attacked, the Directory’s federative system, or Napoleon’s empire were all concrete expressions of this desire to do away with the divisions between countries. They were all, also, supposedly predicated on the will of the people, even if this proposition increasingly strained credulity. Napoleon pushed things furthest, both the hypocritical invocation of the principle of popular sovereignty and the geographical scale on which he applied it, annexing faraway territories such as on the Dalmatian Coast to his empire based on the dubious, yet still powerful claim that its inhabitants wished to be French.4 The contradiction between local government and French control at the heart of the Sister Republics was granted a thin veneer of dynastic legitimacy when they became Brother Kingdoms, literally ruled by Napoleon’s family and friends. If Talleyrand is to be believed, even the French people became fed up with the charade of uniting the continent under one banner on the basis, supposedly, of the general will. He confided to Tsar Alexander I at negotiations at Erfurt, in 1808, before the Franco-Russian alliance broke down and Napoleon set off on his disastrous march on Moscow: “It is up to you to save Europe and you can do it only by standing up to Napoleon. The French people are civilized; their sovereign is not . . . The Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees are the conquests of France; the remainder is the Emperor’s, France does not approve.”5

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Camille Desmoulins, La Révolution de France et de Brabant, vol. XXXI (Paris, June 1790), 318. This point is repeatedly made in the historiography. See, for example, Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin, 2000), 420–421, who in turn cites François Laurent, Histoire du droit des gens et des relations internationale, 18 vols. (Brussels, 1850–1870); Sir Geoffrey Butler and Simon Maccoby, The Development of International Law (London, 1928); and Robert Redslob, Histoire des grands principes du droit des gens depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à la veille de la Grande Guerre (Paris, 1923). But Sam Moyn puts it best: “If rights had any internationalist pedigree flowing from the French Revolution, it was, alas, mainly to be found in Napoleon Bonaparte’s claim to be spreading the flame of the rights of man as he engulfed the world in the conflagration of his imperial designs.” Samual Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London, 2014), 14. Quoted in Jean Tulard, Napoleon: The Myth of the Saviour, trans. Teresa Waugh (London, 1984), 227.

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Yet if the legacy of the Revolution for the history of international law was not to be Desmoulins’ fraternity of all humankind, it was nevertheless more than what many historians have supposed. They have lavished attention on the most famous and flagrant infractions of that law during Napoleon’s reign. Even one of the greatest historical novels of the era, and by many accounts the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace, opens with a reception of the highest St. Petersburg society, in July 1805, and a conversation about the arrest and execution of the young Bourbon prince of the blood, Louis Antoine, Duke d’Enghien, for plotting against the French emperor.6 French dragoons had secretly crossed the Rhine, seized the duke at his residence in the sovereign state of Baden, and brought him back to France. He was ultimately spirited to the Château de Vincennes outside Paris, where he was shot in the castle’s moat – an example of the unlawful and highly 6

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (1869; repr., New York, 1942) book 1, chapters 1 and 5.

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controversial practice referred to today as “extraordinary rendition.” Such illegalities were not limited to the French. Both sides committed egregious violations of international law. The British, for example, seized the neutral Danish fleet and bombarded Copenhagen harbor in 1807. Nonmilitary transgressions are also well known, such as France’s opening of the river Scheldt to navigation in contravention of the Peace of Westphalia.7 But such exclusive focus on these offenses is misguided; remarkable and renowned though they may be, they had little significance for the long-term history of international law.8 Precisely the opposite was true for the principle of popular 7

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See Carl J. Kulsrud, “The Seizure of the Danish Fleet, 1807: The Background,” The American Journal of International Law 32 (April 1938): 308, in which he describes that Britain, fearful of a combined Franco-Russian force turning against it after Napoleon and Alexander I’s accord at Tilsit, took the initiative in July 1807. Worried the French would seize the Danish Navy first, Britain dispatched a fleet to Copenhagen, which arrived on August 2. They started to shell the city on August 16 and it capitulated on September 7; on October 21, the British departed with the 76 ships of the Danish Navy that remained, 280. Some, such as George Canning, the Danish Countess Charlotte Schimmelmann, and the Prussian minister in London, Jacobi, felt that because the Revolution and Napoleon had obliterated the old public law of Europe, Britain’s expedition was justified; others have called it an unprovoked attack on a neutral nation. Another interesting if not very impactful side story – the question of what to do with the deposed emperor – foreshadowed modern debates about the sovereign immunity of world leaders. When Napoleon was overthrown the first time, in 1814, the allies’ own sense of legitimacy impelled them to allow him to keep his titles, and he was made sovereign ruler of Elba. After his 100-day return, he was exiled to the South Atlantic. How and why he arrived there is fascinating. After the Battle of Waterloo, some of his advisors urged him to escape to the United States, but ultimately he surrendered himself to the British, to Captain Frederick Maitland of the HMS Bellerophon, in July 1815. The Admiralty issued Maitland strict orders not to land in Britain, or even to enter British territorial waters, for fear that some zealous justice of the peace might issue a writ of arrest. Habeas corpus requires captives to be either tried or freed, but the British did not like either option – the latter, for obvious reasons, and the former because, under the law of nations, Napoleon was merely a sovereign who had waged and lost a war, and according to most commentators, the worst he could suffer would be to lose his empire and to become a prisoner of war. But writers like Blackstone and Vattel affirmed that once the war was over, all prisoners must be set free. He was therefore sent to an island owned by the East India Company, St. Helena, without trial, hearing, or even accusation. Napoleon once complained to an English officer, one Captain Hamilton of the frigate Havana, “I was never your prisoner: savages would have had greater regard for my position. Your ministers indignantly violated in my case the sacred right of hospitality, they have sullied your nation for always.” Hamilton responded that Napoleon was the prisoner of all the allies, to which Napoleon retorted that Russia and Austria would have treated him better, but that he had freely surrendered to the British “Because I believed in their laws, in their public

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sovereignty. The unanticipated impact it had on international law during the period of the French Revolution was only the start, as the application of the principle spawned ripple effects that spread over the next two centuries to locales far beyond France and even Europe. Much of this legacy was indirect and may indeed seem speculative, but this story possibly constitutes the true and enduring importance of the French Revolution for the history of international law. The Significance of the French Revolution for International Law in Comparison to What Came Before Before looking ahead, however, it is worth looking back, as some may argue that the introduction of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution was not particularly novel, and therefore not groundbreaking for international law. Historians might point to earlier instances when the people’s choice was cited as a basis for a transfer of territory.9 Free cities maintained a republican tradition throughout the Middle Ages and certain regions in kingdoms like France resisted the idea of central authority, as Merlin de Douai well knew when he argued they could not secede.10 When France annexed Verdun in 1552 it purported to do so only according to the people’s wish. Participants in various uprisings against Spanish Habsburg authority – such as in the Dutch Revolt starting in 1568 and the Catalan and Portuguese rebellions of 1640 – sometimes justified their actions with reference to something akin to the will of the people.11

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morality. I was cruelly mistaken.” See Emmanuel, Count de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, ed. Joël Schmidt (1822–1823; repr., Paris, 1968), 217. Pope Honorius III objected to an alienation of territory by Hungarian monarchs in 1220, based on the idea that they did not own, but rather were the stewards of the kingdom. See Stephen C. Neff, Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 130–131. For the transmission of republican ideology from the late Middle Ages to the American Revolution, see J. G. A. Pocock The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). However, according to John Elliott, Catalans more often invoked “conventional contractual agreements based on historical precedent,” and so their revolt was, like so many others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “a ‘medieval’ revolt against the new-style [absolutist] monarchy.” See J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge, 1963), 549.

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Britain had an explicitly republican government during the periods of the Commonwealth (1649–1653) and the Protectorate (1653–1659). The existence of these regimes represented a threat to the idea of monarchical government in Europe and to the then-dynastic international system, much as the French revolutionary ones later would.12 Poet and polemicist John Milton was one of the Commonwealth’s principal theorists and chief diplomats as Secretary of Foreign Languages. He made brash assertions that prefigure the oftquoted contentions made by French revolutionaries and, moreover, portended some of the later effects of French revolutionary ideology on international law.13 Similarly, his contemporary Marchamont Nedham wrote in 1650, that “[t]his is an age for kings to run the wildgoose-chase.” Poet Andrew Marvell’s Horatian Ode of that same year foresaw the liberation of “all states not free[d]” by Oliver Cromwell.14 Milton himself self-assuredly declared, “Believe me, the right of kings seems to be tottering.”15 12

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The Levellers of the English Civil War were, according to David Wootton, the first to argue for the ultimate sovereignty of the people in their anonymous tract “England’s Miserie and Remedie” of 1645. See David Wootton, ed. Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (Harmondsworth, 1986), 273. In spite of its short-lived popularity, the movement fizzled out after Parliament deemed it seditious and after the main leaders were arrested in March 1649. Milton articulated a forceful defense of the regicide of Charles I in his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. First published in February 1651, this piece asserted that a trust, not a contract, between ruler and ruled constituted the basis of monarchical government – such that the ruler forever retained obligations to use authority for the public good and could be dismissed if he betrayed this trust. See Martin Dzelzainis’ “Introduction” in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge, 1991), xvii–xviii. Milton’s work was a rebuttal to French classical scholar Claudius Salmasius’s Defensio Regia, published anonymously in November 1649, which was intended by Royalists to mobilize opinion on the continent against Oliver Cromwell’s new regime. Salmasius was, after Grotius’ death, the leading Protestant scholar in Europe of his day. Salmasius argued that God, not the people, were the origin of royal power and that the king was legibus solutus (above positive law) and answerable only to God: see Dzelzainis, xix. Blair Worden, “Milton and Marchamont Nedham,” in Milton and Republicanism, eds. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1995), 172. Similar ideas can be adduced from James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (London, 1656). Milton, Political Writings, 86. The similarities were not lost on French revolutionaries: in 1792, a group of Jacobins from the Drôme department printed a translation of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and with it a call for the king’s head and the establishment of a republic, by an “analogy between the conduct of Charles Stuart

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But the political and diplomatic history of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, of course, proved nothing of the sort. Instead, this handful of cases notwithstanding, the dynastic idiom continued to pervade both domestic politics and culture, and international law, until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. The only major exception to that was the American Revolution. However, these two revolutions had fundamentally different relationships to international law. R. R. Palmer locates the first “developed theory of the people as constituent power . . . in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, whence it passed into the preamble of the United States constitution of 1787.”16 American revolutionaries marshaled arguments related to popular sovereignty to make the provocative assertion of liberty from the British Empire.17 However, the ultimate legacy of the American Revolution, in terms of international law, is negligible. After their military success against Britain, if not immediately with the “Declaration of Independence,” Americans sought to prove they

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and Louis Capet.” They went on to aver that Milton’s work “grounds and elaborates the inalienable rights of sovereignty of all peoples with as much clarity as solidity; that the genius which produced it inflames all hearts with the scared fire of liberty . . . [and] demonstrates to all adherents of the inviolability of kings that in all times among all nations their crimes have been expiated on the scaffold.” See Défense du peuple anglais, sur le jugement et condamnation de Charles premier roi d’Angleterre, Par Milton, Ouvrage propre à éclairer sur la circonstance actuelle où se trouve la France (Valence, 1792), 5. Palmer’s work is still a classic and especially useful for its comparative methodology. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, vol. 1, The Challenge (Princeton, 1959), 224. More than 30 years before the French Revolution, and 25 before these events in Massachusetts, Pasquale Paoli’s 1755 abortive constitution for the Mediterranean island of Corsica described its people as “sovereign.” See Chapter 1. Whether this was an international legal claim is debatable. Jack Greene has argued that Jefferson’s logic in the “Declaration of Independence” rested more on “English jurisprudential conceptions of government as limited government and of the British constitution as a constitution in which law confined the discretion or will of monarchs, judges and legislators.” See Jack P. Greene, “Law and the Origins of the American Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. I, Early America (1580–1815), eds. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge, 2008), 481. John Pocock makes slightly different argument in “1776: The Revolution Against Parliament” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985): he emphasizes the influence of commonwealth principles in shaping American constitutional views and growth. See also Pocock’s edited volume, Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980).

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were status quo members of the existing international order.18 On the contrary, French revolutionaries posited their activity, first domestic but eventually international as well, as a fundamental break with the past. Coupled with the relative isolation of the newly formed United States from the European states system, the conservatism on the part of American revolutionaries explains why, although the young nation witnessed domestic political innovations similar to those in France, the American Revolution did not go on to have corresponding effects on the international legal system.19 In contrast, the trajectory of the impact of the French Revolution was almost the inverse. Whereas the United States was born through a radical challenge to European empire, but hardly went on to challenge the states system further, French revolutionaries initially had no explicit goal to reform or transform dynastic international law. But the unintended consequences of the principle of popular sovereignty, once unleashed by the French, would reverberate for centuries to come. The Importance of the Revolution for What Came Next The revolutionaries who first advocated Rousseau’s general will as the basis for France’s new political system neither planned that the concept should be applied outside their borders, nor foresaw the ultimate effects when it was. This book has described those effects – both the novel and interconnected claims to territory that revolutionaries ultimately deployed, and the complications, confusion, and conflict 18

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As David Armstrong puts it, the goal of American revolutionaries was “to win the right for their state to enter the society of states as a respectable member, not to overturn it,” Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International Society (Oxford, 1993), 42. David Armitage makes a similar point in his international legal explication of the “Declaration of Independence” when he argues that Americans aimed to bring the United States into the society of nations by transforming their rebellion into a legal war between states and by facilitating alliances with other powers. See his “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002): 5–6 and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). In terms of those domestic developments, Gordon S. Wood reminds us that despite any hesitancy or slow change, the American Revolution unleashed forces that made politics more democratic and chaotic than the nation’s founders intended. See The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).

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that arose when the will of the people was applied in international law in this way. Subsequent generations may not have articulated or recognized claims to territory based on direct revolutionary precedents. Nonetheless, they have invoked the will of the people in very similar, if not many of the same ways that the French did between 1789 and 1799. Likewise, when succeeding generations of diplomats and international lawyers have faced challenging repercussions with respect to applying the principle of popular sovereignty to international law, they, too, have been unaware that their situations were not new. When French revolutionaries started to make claims to territory on the basis of the principle of popular sovereignty, it proved to be deeply problematic, opening a Pandora’s Box of sorts. Revolutionaries were left grappling with a litany of questions. How is a people to be defined for the purpose of making claims in the international arena? When and how are the people to be consulted, so as to divine their true will? What if that will is judged to be misguided or manipulated, and who can arrogate that judgment? What is legitimate action in defense of the greater good of popular government, but which might go against some people’s individual wishes? These questions have proved far more enduring than the brief ten years in which they were passionately debated during the French Revolution. Some of the consequences or parallels of the revolutionary experience for the subsequent history of international law were explored in the individual chapters of this book. The union of Corsica with France and the affair of the princes possessionnés in Alsace highlighted the vulnerability of extant treaty law to new principles or realities that inadvertently undermine its foundations. Theorists have long sought to understand why, as Louis Henkin famously put it, “Almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.”20 The events described in this book are among the best examples in modern history of how and why a state can choose, or feel

20

Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy, 2nd edn. (New York, 1979), 47. See also Harold Hongju Koh, “Review Essay: Why Do Nations Obey International Law?” Yale Law Journal 106 (June, 1997): 2599–2659.

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ideologically compelled, not to adhere to international law, and some of the ramifications of such a decision. The Revolution also illustrated the difficulties of imposing values by law if not by force.21 The belief of the French that they knew best for other peoples – even if, charitably, one interprets their goal as instituting laudable political or social innovations – presages the mission civilisatrice of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism. This hubris was not limited to the French at the time, nor has it been relegated to the relatively distant past. More than 200 years later, in surprisingly similar language to that used by French revolutionaries, President George W. Bush argued in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that the United States was justified in spreading its values – by force if necessary – in an epic “struggle between freedom and terror.”22 Certainly unknowingly, Bush parroted the belief of the president of the Convention that in Belgium, “the French people . . . needed to exercise the pouvoir révolutionnaire,” a self-justifying mechanism for legitimizing superior – in the opinion of the French – values, to “preserve you and us from aristocracy.”23 There is a striking similarity here, if one interchanges the word “terror” with “aristocracy,” “tyranny,” or any of the other synonyms for the evil revolutionaries believed they were battling.24 And eventually, both Americans and the French before

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The qualifier “secular” might best be added to “values” here. Carl Schmitt discusses the secularization of theological concepts, and conflict, in both The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996) and The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, 2003). Reinhart Koselleck for his part describes a critique whereby the political realm was subverted by social, cultural, and moral ones. See Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). George W. Bush, Address to American Legion National Convention, Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 31, 2006. See also Jordan J. Paust, Beyond the Law: The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the “War” on Terror (Cambridge, 2007) and Phillippe Sands, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR’s Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush’s Illegal Wars (New York, 2005). Archives nationales de France (AN): AD/XV/47 (Imprimé – Affaires étrangères). “Adresse des citoyens amis de la liberté et de l’égalité de la ville de Mons à la Convention Nationale.” Ironically, for a time, “terror” was on the side of freedom – at least in the view of Robespierre. See Chapter 3.

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them experienced the truth of Robespierre’s famous aphorism that “no one likes armed missionaries.”25 The story of the Sister Republics described the birth of the modern client state – again based ostensibly on values, supposedly shared between peoples, but actually imposed by a more powerful, occupying force. In the twentieth century, Nazi Germany, with its various dependencies; Imperial Japan, with the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere; and the Soviet Union, with the Warsaw Pact, used a similar situation to great effect.26 All three provide examples of attempts similar to the French revolutionary and Napoleonic history, of trying to overturn a system of discrete and independent states, through both annexation and clientage, based on ideological preconditions. The three regimes cited were much more deliberate and programmatic in their desire to transform international law than French revolutionaries had been, even if they were ultimately futile.27 The writer Louis-Pierre Dufourny de Villiers trenchantly discerned the ambiguities inherent in France’s revolutionary legal innovations better than most – including the sense of superiority intrinsic to revolutionaries’ vision of the international system, just like Nazi or communist predominance imbued theirs. At the time of the union of Avignon with France, he underscored the notion – still at the heart of international relations today – that great and small nations alike ought to be equal in rights. He observed that just because Avignon had adopted the French constitution, France did not have the right to 25 26

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Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the Jacobins Club, Paris, January 2, 1792. Jean-Louis Harouel, Les republiques soeurs (Paris, 1997), 124, makes the analogy between France and the USSR and its client states: “In both cases, it is an empire that does not admit to the name, and suffocating political tutelage is enforced in the guise of ideological unity.” For Nazi views of international law, see Alfred M. de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945 (Lincoln, 1989). For Marxist ones, see See V. Kubálková and A. A. Cruickshank, Marxism and International Relations (Oxford, 1985), especially chapter 8 on “International Law and International Organizations,” 158–192; T. A. Taracouzio, The Soviet Union and International Law: A Study Based on the Legislation, Treaties and Foreign Relations of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (New York, 1935); and Richard J. Erickson, International Law and the Revolutionary State: A Case Study of the Soviet Union and Customary International Law (Leiden, 1972). These visions tended to reject the contemporary system much more forcefully than the French Revolutionary one did, at least at first. This is because Marxists tended to see the law, along with the state, as part of a social superstructure determined by an economic substructure.

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annex the enclave. He illustrated this disparity by asking: if the reverse were true – if France had adopted the constitution of Avignon – would anyone consider the annexation of France by Avignon?28 However, the French Revolution’s most profound legacy in international law was ultimately not the eclipse of equality between states, but rather relates again to the principle of popular sovereignty. The Revolution altered not the idea of a system of sovereign states, but rather the nature of that sovereignty, by catalyzing a transition from dynastic to popular and then national. The amalgamation of the notion of the will of the people and the European territorial state system presaged, as historians of the union of Avignon with France like to spotlight, the birth of national selfdetermination. Just as triumphantly as many of these historians, Alfred Cobban remarks, “The effect of revolutionary ideology was to transfer the initiative in state-making from the government to the people.”29 Even if the triumphalism is misplaced, Cobban and the Avignon specialists are correct in pushing back the origins of national self-determination to more than a hundred years before where most people locate them: at the First World War and President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of his “Fourteen Points.”30 Perhaps the fact of these much earlier origins has been neglected because, again, no one – Wilson least of all – pointed directly to the French Revolution as inspiration, and, of course, the terminology itself also changed with the early twentieth-century neologism still in use today.31 28

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Bibliothèque nationale de France: MFICHE 8-LB39-3532. Louis-Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, “Supplément à la défense des droits des Avignonois, des Comtadins et autres Peuples à la plus entière liberté. Pour répondre aux diverses objections et particulièrement aux Députés, au Rapporteur et à M. de Robespierre,” Paris, 1790, 3. Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination (New York, 1970), 41. They first came in a speech on “War Aims and Peace Terms,” January 8, 1918; points 6–13 dealt with the right to national self-determination of Russia, Belgium, AlsaceLorraine, Italy, former territories of Austo-Hungry, the Balkans, Turkey, and Poland, respectively. For a representative view that Wilson inaugurated and popularized this idea, see Mortimer Sellers, ed., The New World Order: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and the Self-Determination of Peoples (Oxford, 1996), 1: “Self-determination acquired primary significance only after World War I and the interventions of President Woodrow Wilson.” Wilson was, rather, motivated by the belief that the world ought to “be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its

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What is more, in its origin the principle of popular sovereignty was less about, and indeed predated the widespread rise of, nationalism. Instead, it was about self-determination of peoples, or variously defined and debatable “units” – from existing territories like Corsica or Avignon, to newly contrived regions in the Rhineland and northern Italy.32 Finally, at the time of the Revolution, the will of the people was invoked to connect populations to larger states such as France, rather than to sever them off in the form of secessions or independence movements, as later became the norm.33 No matter the reason, aside from the Avignon crowd, most historians’ interpretations of the roots of national self-determination completely miss the French origins of the principle. To better understand how the principle of popular sovereignty as developed during the Revolution gradually metamorphosed into the later concept of national selfdetermination, a brief sketch of the diplomatic history of Europe between the fall of Napoleon and the twentieth century is in order. This history shows the persistence of the idea of the will of the people, how it was applied to international law in ways that recall the French revolutionary experience, and, lastly, that over time, the “people” in the “will of the people” became increasingly a “national” people.34

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own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.” Speech on “War Aims and Peace Terms.” David Miller notes that it is not feasible to fit nationality within borders; thus, “serious attempts to apply the principle [of national self-determination] inevitably lead to chaos.” See On Nationality (Oxford, 1995), 108. Another trend has been to interpret the “origins [of] self-determination [as] an Enlightenment concept relating to individuals, not to nations,” according to Eric Weitz; see “Self-Determination: How a German Enlightenment Idea Became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right,” The American Historical Review 120:2 (April 2015): 463. He argues that “For [the concept’s] early progenitors amid the German Enlightenment and Romantic Age – Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and others – the defining events were the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests.” But he sees these thinkers as merely responding to occupation and not at all engaging with the principles that underpinned it. Thus, he claims, “In its first century and a quarter, from the French Revolution to World War I, the history of self-determination was very much a German story,” 464. Wentworth Ofuatry-Kodjoe likewise highlights that the term in English is based on the German selbstbestimmun, which he argues first made an appearance in the writings of radical German philosophers in the 1840s. W. Ofuatry-Kodjoe, The Principle of SelfDetermination in International Law (New York, 1977), 21. For a critical take on the classic claim the French Revolution gave birth to modern nationalism, see William Sewell, “The French Revolution and the Emergence of the

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A Brief History of the Persistence of the Will of the People After its appearance during the Revolution, the principle of popular sovereignty then contributed to the downfall of Napoleon. Although the reach of Napoleon’s empire and its many satellites was based, in theory at least, on the free choice of local populaces, frustration and cynicism was widespread due to the hypocrisy of the reality. It was especially pronounced with regard to imperial levies of soldiers as well as specie – irritations that dated back to the French annexation of the Rhineland and the time of the Sister Republics. The period after Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812 proved the lie behind the empire’s claim to represent the will of its entire people. Spain, for example, was in open revolt. To motivate tangible opposition to his empire, the various kings and emperors fighting against Napoleon appropriated the new phenomenon of rising nationalism, promising to expel the French, while preserving the Revolution’s most popular legacies, such as constitutional rule of law. A battle fought near Leipzig in Saxony in October 1813 proved the efficacy of this strategy. Dubbed “The Battle of the Nations,” 191,000 Frenchmen were defeated by more than 300,000 coalition allies. However, after harnessing the power of these people to help bring down Napoleon, the leading allies at the Congress of Vienna abruptly reversed their position and set out to eradicate the idea of the people’s choice from the European continent. Traditional depictions of Napoleon’s defeat and exile, Vienna, and the Concert of Europe have leaders trying to “turn the clock back” to before 1789 and expunge the twin scourges of nationalism and liberal constitutionalism. And yet, just as restoration of the Bourbons faltered in French domestic politics, so too did it fail utterly in international law, in spite of its codification in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna. Precisely because Napoleon’s armies had spread the ideals of the Revolution so widely and proclaimed them so lengthily during the occupation, even if their actions belied the rhetoric, those ideals stuck.35 Robespierre was

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Nation Form,” in Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, ed. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook (Lantham, Md., 2004), 91–125. I had the honor to debate this point with Lionel Jospin, the former Prime Minister of France, at a roundtable about his book Le mal napoléonien (Paris, 2014) in Melbourne, Australia, at the 22nd annual conference of the Australian Society for French Studies. See, for example, Oliver Benjamin Hemmerle, “From ‘Schwesterrepublik’ to

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ultimately vindicated in his claim: “I am far from asserting that our revolution will not influence in due course the destiny of the world . . . but I say that it will not be today.”36 The first challenges to the Vienna settlement, which showed the persistence of the principle of popular sovereignty, came from areas where national constitutions on the French model had been promised to the peoples who had helped bring down Napoleon’s empire – such as in Spain, where intervention by the Concert proved necessary in 1820.37 Greece was another example. During the Greek Revolt of the 1820s, the Vienna settlement’s two main aims came into opposition. On the one hand, the restoration powers countenanced no popular action against legitimate sovereigns; on the other, the Greeks were a Christian people in rebellion against the Ottoman Sultan and Europeans were sympathetic to their plight. Both the Russians, who shared an Orthodox culture with the Greeks, and the British, whose elite were schooled in the classics and thus extolled Pan-Hellenism, became unlikely allies. In 1832, Greece achieved independence. The powers of the Concert could overlook this violation of the letter of the law of Vienna, even if it meant affirming the national principle, since the Sublime Porte had always existed on the fringes of the system of European international legality. Then, during the 1830 Revolution, Belgium gained independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with which it had been united at Vienna to provide a bulwark against France. Belgian independence was based, in part, on its autonomous nationality and then guaranteed in treaty law by a number of powers, including Britain, which technically entered the First World War

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‘Revolverrepublik’: French Embrace and German Acceptance/Repulse,” in In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789–1815), eds. Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer (Baden-Baden, 2008), 77: “The Napoleonic system was more successful in spreading the revolution’s achievements than the Revolution itself.” AN: AD-XV-38–186-15. “Société des Amis de la Constitution, Séante aux Jacobins, à Paris : Discours de Maximilien Robespierre sur la guerre, prononcé . . . le 2 janvier 1792,” 20. Carl L. Becker similarly argues that in the hundred years after the fall of the Bastille, revolutionaries gradually accomplished many of their aims: see The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 2003), 159. One of the best treatments of the early years of the restoration, which highlights many of its own paradoxes, is still Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston, 1973).

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against Germany for infringing this agreement.38 However, the best examples of the legal force of the will of the people, increasingly mobilized and recognized in terms of national units, came during the 1860s and 1870s, when Italian and German unification occurred explicitly in contravention of contemporary international law. Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, once dismissively called Italy a mere “geographical expression,” and Italian unification was for the most part directed against Austria, which, according to the Vienna settlement, had a legal claim not only to specific territories in that region but also to overall influence on the peninsula.39 Frustration with mismanagement and foreign occupation – Austria being the offender this time, rather than France – grew in Italy in the early nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the Risorgimento, or resurgence of Italy, represented a robust nationalist sentiment. Piedmont, the most powerful Italian polity, and France met in July 1858 at Plombières in secret negotiations, and together they provoked a war against Austria in Lombardy. Giuseppe Garibaldi then brought the conflict to the south, starting in the spring of 1860. In October of that year, plebiscites, which of course had been inaugurated in international law when Avignon voted for independence from the pope and union with France, now confirmed the desire of the people of Naples, Sicily, and the Papal States – but not yet the city of Rome – to join a unified Italian kingdom. Support for the unification movement was strong in Britain, and was couched in legal terms that had fascinating parallels to the core principles underpinning the French Revolution. Lord John Russell, at the time British Foreign Secretary, approved of Italian unification and thought it was legally valid because it reflected, as he described in a dispatch of October 27, 1860, the will of the people – another clear echo of revolutionary precedent.40 In an example of how the appropriate unit for the recognition and application of the people’s will was by then national, that same year, British philosopher John 38

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German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg called the 1839 Treaty of London a “scrap of paper” at the outbreak of hostilities; this infamous line is the title for Isabel V. Hull’s, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca, 2014). The line appeared in a letter to British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, August 6, 1847. Cited in A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954), 124.

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Stuart Mill wrote, “it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”41 A. J. P. Taylor notes that posterity has almost universally endorsed these views, though they lacked formal justification in international treaty law at the time.42 Full unification of the Italian peninsula followed the Prussian defeat of Austria in 1866, by which Italy gained Venetia, and then the defeat of France in 1870, which caused French troops to leave Rome. The use of plebiscites to determine, in theory, a population’s true desire continued, just as it had after its first appearance during the Revolution and into the time of Napoleon’s empire. Manipulation or coercion also continued, as evidenced by the lopsided final tally in the Roman vote to join Italy – 40,000 to 46! The use of the principle of national sovereignty to enact territorial change, especially in contravention of treaty law, was even starker in the case of German unification. The catalyst was the Schleswig-Holstein question. Lord Palmerston, then the Foreign Secretary and British later Prime Minister, purportedly said that only three people had ever understood this matter – one, Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert, was dead; another, a Danish politician, mad; and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten. In an arrangement reminiscent of the Baroque territorial order of the ancien régime, the duchies were ruled by the Danish king, but not as integral parts of Denmark; Holstein, almost entirely German speaking, was part of the German Confederation. Prussia had intervened in the duchies in 1848, during a revolt against the Danes. At that time, to resolve the crisis, the future Napoleon III had suggested that the borders be drawn according to nationality.43 But Russell, at this time Prime Minister, opposed the move – arguing that self-determination was “too new in Europe,” and that “the Great Powers had not the habit of consulting populations when questions affecting the Balance of Power had to be settled.”44 Clearly his view

41

42 43

44

John Stuart Mill, Considerations of Representative Government (London, 1861), chapter XVI, “Of Nationality, as connected with Representative Government.” Taylor, 112. See, for example, Charles Owen Richardson, “The Ideas of Napoleon III on the Principle of Self-Determination of Nationalities and Their Influence on His Foreign Policy” (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1963). Cited in Taylor, 151.

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would change between then – the Revolutions of 1848, also known as the “Springtime of the Peoples,” but overall a failure for aspiring national movements – and the time of Italian unification in the 1860s. The international agreement in response to the revolt of 1848 and the ensuing hostilities, the London Protocol of 1852, forbade the formal incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein with either Prussia or Denmark. However, German nationalists vehemently opposed creeping Danish control. Prussian Minister President and future German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, never one to miss an opportunity, capitalized. In 1863, seizing on a succession crisis and Danish irredentism, both Prussia and Austria launched a series of rapid attacks by which they took possession of the duchies. Although Prussians and Austrians fought together in this easy war against Denmark, the settlement produced a cumbersome arrangement whereby one duchy went to each of the victors. Meanwhile, leaders across Europe condemned the seizure as an obvious contravention of the London Protocol. Taylor writes that Prussia and Austria’s settlement – between themselves, in Vienna, on October 30, 1864 – represented “the first time an international conference broke away from treaty rights and decided to apply the doctrine of self-determination.”45 However, in negotiations at the time of the French Revolution, such as those that led to the 1795 Treaty of Basel or the Treaty of Campo Formio, 1797, Prussia and Austria, respectively, were forced to recognize claims to territory by the French Republic based on the will of the people. After Prussia and Austria awkwardly divided Schleswig-Holstein between them, a showdown between the erstwhile allies was inevitable. In 1866, Prussia defeated Austria in a war in just seven weeks, after which Prussia dissolved the German Confederation, established in law by the Vienna peace. In its stead, Bismarck created an alliance of north German polities, and a military agreement with Bavaria in case of attack by France. Then, riding a wave of anti-French hysteria, Bismarck manipulated his neighbor to the west into declaring the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, thereby completing the unification of Germany. Bolstered by nationalist fervor, in the peace dictated and signed at Versailles, Bismarck claimed Alsace-Lorraine on 45

Taylor, 152. See also Erich Eych, Bismarck and the German Empire (London, 1960), 106.

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the basis of its many German-speaking inhabitants. The long history of the French assimilation of Alsace, beginning with annexation at the Peace of Westphalia and ending with the affair of the princes possessionnés, was undone in moment. Many officials, such as liberal icon and British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, considered this act a crime because Alsatians themselves were never consulted.46 Whereas the various territorial changes involved in Italian unification had been legitimized by not only the national principle but also some sort of plebiscite, fraudulent though the latter may have been, direct consultation of the people was forgone in the creation of the unified German Empire. As in Corsica and Alsace, during the early years of the Revolution, the people’s will was simply assumed – although in the new German Empire, in another indication of the power of nationalism, that assumption was not based on political participation so much as on national comradeship. It is an important, if indirect, legacy of the French Revolution that the will of a people – now a national people – was invoked to legitimize Italian and German unification. In both cases, the process of legitimation occurred in contravention of treaty law, just as had happened during the Revolution when the people’s will trumped existing treaties, for the first time ever with the formal union of Corsica with France. What is more, in Italy, the desire of the people for unification, along with the flouting of extant treaty law, was further justified by way of plebiscites, as had first happened with the union of Avignon and France. And yet, in one of the few surveys of the history of international law, Wilhelm Grewe asserts that these precedents and ideas “lay dormant” after the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna until “they experienced an astonishing rebirth” a full century later at another peace conference, following the calamity of the First World War.47 Grewe might have considered that “rebirth” much less “astonishing” if he had paid closer attention to the events of the Revolution, better to perceive their echoes in the nineteenth century. What is more, the peacemakers in Paris in 1919 – and many of those since who have tried to apply the principle of national self46

47

Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge, 2013), 15. Although Gladstone was aghast, other stalwart liberals like John Stuart Mill merely evinced lukewarm disapproval. Grewe, 414.

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determination – encountered numerous, similar difficulties as French revolutionaries had when applying the will of the people in international affairs in the late eighteenth century. This point, too, is almost entirely neglected in the study of the national selfdetermination. More Recent Complications Redrawing the map of Eastern Europe proved much trickier than most attendees at the Paris Peace Conference expected – because of overlapping or multiple identities, complicated geography, and poor consultation.48 What is more, applying the principle of national selfdetermination ever since has been much more complicated than the triumphalist historians of the annexation of Avignon suggested. Cobban is an exception. Although he hails from that historiographical camp, he perceptively notes a difficulty that derives from the will of the people opening up two distinct possibilities with respect to territorial status, which Merlin and others had originally intuited at the time of the affair of the princes possessionnés. First, a people could “claim that it had a right to decide whether to attach itself to one state or another,” as many peoples chose, or were forced to do, as France began to expand during the 1790s. Or, second, a people could declare that they “constitute an independent state by” themselves.49 This latter option would prove the more popular choice during the twentieth century, with all the attendant instability for established states and the wider territorial order that both revolutionaries such as Merlin and especially France’s opponents underscored during the Revolution. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” reflected something akin to Cobban’s second option, which justified the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires in Eastern Europe – although had he known the history of the Revolution better, he may have had reason to be nervous. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State, sensed complications involved in taking 48

49

My family offers a poignant example of this difficulty in the twentieth century: ethnically Hungarian, and German-speaking, my great-grandfather emigrated to Canada from a town that was predominately Orthodox though he was Catholic, and after the Paris Peace Conference it was located in Serbia. Cobban, 41.

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this route, in the aftermath of the First World War.50 He wrote in 1921, “Self-determination should be forgotten. It has no place in the practical scheme of world affairs. It has already caused enough despair, enough suffering and enough anarchy.”51 Lansing’s pronouncement at the same time recalled some of the troubles associated with the first applications of the will of the people in international affairs during the Revolution, and was eerily prescient. Eventually, the centrifugal power of national self-determination drove the decolonization of European empire in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, as Vladimir Lenin had promoted and Lansing had worried about back in the early twentieth century.52 Here again, one can see a knock-on legacy of the principle of popular sovereignty at play, more than 150 years after its true first appearance. Even today, after the International Court of Justice has recognized national self-determination as a “principle” if not a right, tensions still abound in international law between state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the will of the people, just as in the time of the French Revolution.53 The potential for separatist campaigns, referendums, and plebiscites – in some of the very same areas as in the 1790s – to

50

51

52

53

As preciously cited in Chapter 2, he recognized that “Without a definite unit which is practical, application of this principle is dangerous to peace and stability.” Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, 1921), 97. Robert Lansing, “Self-Determination: A Discussion of a Phrase,” Saturday Evening Post, May 1921, 16. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” were actually a response to Vladimir Lenin’s “Decree of Peace” of November 8, 1917, which promoted colonial emancipation. OfuatryKodjoe, vii: “First exploding onto the international scene as the plea of European ‘oppressed nationalities,’ [national self-determination] later became the battle cry of colonial peoples struggling to free themselves from imperial domination.” See also Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007), in which he examines the unintended consequences of national self-determination in other places than Europe, where Wilson and others only intended to apply it. My work shows the earlier origins of this history. Manela fails to recognize the long term genealogy of the principle when he claims that it was only after the First World War that “the right to self-determination vault[ed] from the musings of obscure theorists into the center of the international discourse of legitimacy,” 225. Neff cites an International Court of Justice decision of 1995 saying national selfdetermination is “one of the essential principles of contemporary international law,” 436–437.

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destabilize domestic politics and international relations remains manifestly acute. Not only does Corsica still possess an active independence movement, but also both France and Spain must contend with the autonomously minded Basques. The Québécois in Canada and the Scottish in the United Kingdom have held plebiscites on independence in established, democratic states, and the Catalans in Spain have sought to hold one.54 Unrecognized, breakaway entities proliferate in relatively lawless areas of multi-ethnic and multireligious confusion like the Caucasus, where they include South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan, and Transnistria from Moldova. The Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Tibetans and Uighurs in China yearn for greater autonomy, if not independence, but are forcefully kept in check. The plight of Palestinians and their relationship to the state of Israel is one of the most contentious international legal issues in the world today. Unsuccessful attempts at independence have caused enormous bloodshed, whether in the recent past, as when Biafra tried to secede from Nigeria, or further back, for example when the Confederate States of America tried to leave the Union. Successful and acknowledged breakaways since the heyday of decolonization are few, but include the Bangladeshis, Eritreans, East Timorese, and South Sudanese, though not without their own complications and carnage. The breakup of and war in the former Yugoslavia is notable, first because it occurred in precisely the area in which national self-determination was originally intended by Wilson to be a panacea. Second, those events are most notorious for the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, which highlights the sad truth that the existence of minority groups in a given state or region – even absent the possibility of their separation – has promoted homogenization by majorities in some of the twentieth century’s most horrific tragedies. And, in a return to Cobban’s first option of a people choosing not independence but rather to “attach itself to” an existing state, Russia annexed Crimea in the spring of 2014 after a hastily organized plebiscite. Many commentators described the union and Russia’s

54

The Canadian Supreme Court opinion Reference Re Secession of Quebec, 2 S.C.R. 217, 1998, surveyed the international legality of declarations of independence and secession based on national self-determination and is often cited as authoritative.

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subsequent involvement in an insurgency in eastern Ukraine as the gravest threat yet to the post–Second World War territorial order and security apparatus in Europe. What few noticed was how closely this episode recalls the French revolutionary precedent of a great power annexing the territory of a less mighty neighbor where there are cultural or national connections, important strategic considerations, and after, by most accounts, a heavily manipulated referendum – all on the basis of the claim that the local people wished it. The Impact of the French Revolution on Doctrinal Writers Aside from reverberations in diplomatic history, the advent of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution had implications for how doctrinal writers thought about international law. In 1795, Kant’s second article in “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” forbids states to acquire others “through inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift” – although it is unclear if, in doing so, he was repeating the Enlightenment commonplace, for example from Voltaire, or if he had been more directly impacted by the development of French revolutionary claims based on the will of the people.55 But the effect of the Revolution on the thinking of another German, George Frederic Martens, who had written a great deal about international law by the time of the Revolution, is more certain. Prior to the Revolution, Martens viewed Europe as a common society without a legal overlord or hegemon; in spite of the anxiety and uncertainty of a system of autonomous states, he was unsure whether what he perceived to be France’s bid to create a universal republic, based around the principle of popular sovereignty, would actually create peace.56 Moreover, he found many of the explicit pronouncements by revolutionaries about international law – such as Grégoire’s “Declaration of the Law of Nations” – vague and unworkable, just as Dufourny’s and others’ were. This observation corroborates the idea of the inadvertency of the Revolution’s impact in international law: that it came about through diplomatic behavior in 55

56

Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. by H. B. Nisbet. 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1991), 94. Karlijn van Blom, “A Very Uncertain Perspective… The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age and International Relations in Europe, in the Views of Georg Friedrich von Martens (1756–1821)” in In the Embrace of France, 135–136.

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response to specific crises rather than explicit but abstract declarations. Moreover, the lack of an official, doctrinal pronouncement on international law that revolutionaries attempted to institute helps account perhaps for the fact that the repercussions of the Revolution in the subsequent history of international law were mostly indirect legacies that have, for the most part, gone unremarked. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who coined the term “international law” in the same year as the outbreak of the Revolution, vehemently opposed the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” which he derided as “simple nonsense,” and famously dubbed all natural law “nonsense upon stilts.”57 John Austin, Bentham’s student and the great theorist of nineteenthcentury legal positivism, described the difference between positive and natural law as between what “is” and what “ought to be”: “The existence of a law is one thing: its merits or demerits are another thing. Whether a law be, is one inquiry . . . whether it agree with a given or assumed test, is another and a distinct inquiry.”58 A more recent commentator, John Gardner, says, “In any legal system, whether a given norm is legally valid, and hence whether it forms part of the law of that system, depends on its sources, not its merits.”59 The triumph of Italian and German unification, perhaps the two greatest events of nineteenth-century European diplomatic history, happened in contravention of the “sources” of international law, if they can be called as much, such as then-prevailing treaty law – most notably the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna.60 In positivists’

57

58

59

60

Jeremy Bentham, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (1789; repr., Oxford, 2005), xxxv. This oft-quoted line comes from the 1843 essay “Anarchical Fallacies, being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution.” John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London, 1832), 278. Emphasis in the original. John Gardner, “Legal Positivism: 5 ½ Myths,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 46:1 (2001): 199. Austin went so far as to deny that international law counts as law at all, since law had to be commanded and enforced by a sovereign body. No such body existed in international affairs in the nineteenth century, of course, and so “positivism” in international law in this sense is meant to mean the rules by which sovereign states willing agree to be bound, either by the practice of states in customary law or explicit agreements in treaty law. Many historians use this definition, among others

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terminology, asserting the will of a national people to effect territorial changes might, at best, have been an idea of “great merit” or “merits” to the Italians and Germans concerned, or even British leaders such as Russell and Gladstone – except, in the last case, where their own imperial possessions were concerned. Of course, the first time the merits of the will of the people were recognized and widely applied was during the French Revolution. There was a legal doctrine in the nineteenth century that was influenced by the Revolution in this way – one that is not well remembered today, either by historians or the wider public – the historical school of international law. It emphasized the nation and therefore the nation-state, the origins of which were imagined to be in some romantic, misty past. Peoples, therefore, were the primary international legal actors, to borrow the modern terminology; the German “Volk,” for example, had a moral and legal right to organize themselves as a state. Pasquale Mancini, a professor at the University of Turin in the 1850s who went on to be Minister of Justice in the 1870s and of Foreign Affairs in the 1880s in unified Italy, was a great advocate of the national/historical vision of international law.61 Giuseppe Mazzini, among the greatest figures of the Risorgimento in Italy, also subscribed to this theory. Mazzini might at first seem to harbor a contradictory view: he was a great advocate of both nationalism and internationalism, claiming, in the Grotian tradition, that “Nations are the individuals of Humanity.”62 He viewed the ideal political world as an association of nation-states, the parts as important as the whole. His vision recalled the federal union of republics imagined by some French revolutionaries.

61

62

Antony Anghie in Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004). See, for example, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Della nazionalità come fondamento del diritto delle genti: prelezione al corso di diritto internazionale e marittimo pronunciata nella R. Università di Torino dal professore Pasquale Stanislao Mancini nel dì 22 gennaio 1851 (Turin, 1851) and La vita de’ popoli nell’umanità: prelezione al corso di diritto internazionale pubblico, privato e marittimo pronunziata nell’Università di Roma nel dì 23 gennajo 1872 dal professore ordinario Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (Rome, 1872). Giuseppe Mazzini, “To the Italians” (1871), in The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London, 1907), 241.

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Indeed, Mazzini explicitly identified the legacy of the 1790s: “All the acts of the great French Revolution . . . were consequences of a Declaration of the Rights of Man,” with its central message of popular sovereignty.63 He believed that “The lessons of the past can be summed up in a single word: union.” These unions were, “at the domestic level,” of people “who share the same democratic faith,” and, internationally, “a single union of all the European peoples who are striving towards the same goal.”64 He had rejected the empire of Napoleon because it was predicated on the idea but not the reality of the people’s choice, and he also opposed the Congress of Vienna and Concert system thereafter, which attempted to ignore or repress the freedom of national peoples.65 Mazzini was hopeful, again using language reminiscent of French revolutionaries, that “The Countries of the People will rise, defined by the voice of the free,” and overturn the Vienna settlement – which he viewed as not only immoral but also illegal because it contravened the national principle. In its place, the union they would create would be typified by peace: “Between these Countries there will be harmony and brotherhood.”66 One cannot fail to see how distinct this view is from the positivist one, which rejected the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” and anything derived from it – such as territorial claims made on the basis of the will of the people – as legally unfounded. Mazzini, on the contrary, believed like many revolutionaries that “The end of politics is the application of the moral Law to the civil constitution.”67 Bentham argued that emphasis in law must not be placed on sentimental or moral criteria, and scorned natural law, which he perceived the “Declaration” to be: “A great multitude of people are continually talking of the Law of 63 64

65

66

67

Mazzini, “The Duties of Man” (1860), in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, 8. Mazzini, “Towards a Holy Alliance of the Peoples” (1849), in A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton, 2009), 121. He believed that God “divided Humanity into distinct groups upon the face of our globe, and thus planted the seeds of nations. Bad governments have disfigured the design of God.” See “The Duties of Man,” 52. Mazzini, “The Duties of Man,” 52. See also, “Towards a Holy Alliance of the Peoples,” 121, where he postulated that people would “rise up simultaneously in every country where our movement is currently active” and that “foreign intervention” by the despots, a hallmark of restoration politics, “will then become impossible.” Mazzini, “To the Italians,” 241. Emphasis in the original.

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Nature: and then they go on giving you their sentiments about what is right and what is wrong.”68 Austin picked up here where his mentor left off, emphasizing how people ought not confuse law and morality: a realist view of the world that exists, and a moral view of how it ought to exist, respectively.69 It is indisputable that Bentham, Austin, and their positivist legacy are better remembered today than Mancini and Mazzini, or at least Mazzini as a legal theorist. Steven Neff has noted that “the nationality thesis did not attract significant support amongst international lawyers generally at the time.”70 And yet, there is a disjuncture between the dominance of positivism as a legal philosophy, and the power of the will of the people if not the nationalist thesis in animating major territorial change in Europe since the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, positivism was truly meaningful in actual diplomatic practice outside Europe – just as the French legally bracketed St. Domingue and other overseas colonies during the Revolution.71 Back at the time of the “discovery” of the Americas, the jurists and theologians of the School of Salamanca, starting with Francisco de Vitoria, articulated a series of means by which the Spanish could acquire just title to territory based on Thomist natural law.72 By the

68 69

70

71

72

Bentham, xlv, 27. Bentham and Austin’s philosophy shares many attributes with the thinking of Edmund Burke, who penned the best-known contemporary critique of the Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Nonetheless, Burke and other conservative, counter-revolutionary thinkers like Joseph De Maistre also had mystical views on nationalism; Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais saw the popular will and God’s will as one. Stephen C. Neff, “A Short History of International Law” in International Law, ed. Malcolm D. Evans, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 2010), 17–18. Mark Mazower has recently argued that “Mazzini was among the first and most important figures to think seriously about international cooperation in terms of the politics of nationalism,” and that Mazzini’s ideas more accurately reflect the “club of nation states” model that was ultimately manifested in the League of Nations and United Nations. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York, 2012), 48. See the Introduction, its footnote 100, and Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule During the French Revolution,” in William and Mary Quarterly 66:2 (April 2009): 381–382. Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis (1538) in Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge, 1992). See also Pagden’s Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, 1995). In the scholarly literature, Vitoria contends with Grotius for the appellation “father of international law.”

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nineteenth century, natural law was no longer invoked and hardly anything akin to the will of the people, which underpinned so much territorial change in Europe, was applied overseas. Instead, in colonial acquisitions, positivism was the most important tool.73 Articles 34 and 35 of the General Act of the Berlin Conference of February 26, 1885, codified the rights of European powers and the United States of America to claim African land as if no one lived there, under terra nullius, the ancient Roman term for unclaimed and unoccupied territory, as if it had appeared up out of the ocean.74 Oppenheim’s International Law in 1937 stated that the only exception to this doctrine was if the people in a territory were already recognized as a state, although because “civilized” states could only confer recognition, the positivist bind was set – not to be undone, in one of the many unintended and indirect effects of this history, until the principle of national self-determination was recognized in any widespread manner outside Europe, in the aftermath of the Second World War.75 The Will of the People and Legal Conscience The dominance of positivism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal philosophy, and rejection or ignorance of the impact of the principle of popular sovereignty, has clouded understanding of the impact and effect of the French Revolution on international law in another way. Writing in the 1920s, Hugo Krabbe, a Dutch jurist, argued that before the French Revolution, “authority” – as vested in traditional power structures and codified in public instruments and treaties – was the source of law. Afterward, authority was supplanted by what Krabbe termed “legal conscience,” which derived its force from the emancipatory power of the will of the people and the institutions of popular government.76 Krabbe specifically credited Rousseau, the 73 74

75

76

See, again, Anghie. From article 35: “The Signatory Powers of the present Act recognize the obligation to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them.” Alfred Verdoss and Heribert Franz Koeck, “Natural Law: The Tradition of Universal Reason and Authority” in The Structure and Process of International Law: Essays in Legal Philosophy, Doctrine, and Theory, eds. R. St.J. Macdonald and Douglas M. Johnston (Dordrecht, 1986), 21. Hugo Krabbe, “L’idée modern de l’état,” in Recueil de l’Académie de droit international III (1926): 559.

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Revolution’s great apostle of the general will, as inspiring this change.77 What is this conscience, if not social consensus on the legal validity of certain propositions and based on their merits, as opposed to the sources so beloved by positivists? In a bit of circular reasoning, at the inception of the transition Krabbe identifies, the sovereignty of the people was the first proposition that gained force through Krabbe’s idea of legal conscience itself. No one explicitly justified the unifications of Italy and Germany, even accounting for Mazzini’s obvious sympathy for French revolutionary principles, on the basis of legal precedents such as the annexations of Avignon or Belgium – although they all were legitimized by the will of the people, first dating back to 1789. True, the political reality of the rise of nationalism and the primacy of the nation-state, not to mention Realpolitik, contributed to the success of these unification movements. The same is true of the assertion and application of the principle of national self-determination after the First World War, when American power impelled the “Fourteen Points” and no one explicitly spoke of the French Revolution – neither Wilson to support his principle, nor Lansing to warn of its chaotic potential. And yet the kinship between the French revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty and the principle of national self-determination, one of the twentieth century’s most important, is obvious even if mostly unspoken. Krabbe’s analysis helps explain both the persistence and the strength of the will of the people absent any official codification. Legal conscience was its foundation. Thus, the French Revolution’s legal legacy has not been widely recognized. The Revolution unexpectedly led to the birth of new claims in international law predicated on the principle of popular sovereignty – which have endured until the present day. The history of the Revolution and the centuries ever since also signals how such claims, on the basis of their merits and the conscience of the people, as opposed to more formal sources, achieved legal force.

77

Ibid.

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Index

In this index, “annexed” refers to territories annexed by France and “Conquest” refers to French military conquest. active and passive citizens, 95 Adélaïde, Princess, 109–110 Alexander I (tsar), 271, 273n7 Algeria, 159 Alpes-Maritimes department, 148–149, 197 Alsace. See also princes possessionnés annexed, 2, 50–55, 75–76 autonomous identities in, 30, 75–76 Conseil souverain of, 51, 52–53, 65 Corsica as precedent for, 155 departments of France established in, 54–55 feudalism abolished in, 37, 38–39 French respect for customs of, 51, 51n46 French sovereignty in, 50, 50n44 German unification and, 287–288 Germany’s annexation of, 80 governmental complexities in, 51–53 Holy Roman Empire fiefs in, 50 international law and, 30–31 Landeshoheit (territorial sovereignty) in, 50n43, 50–51 under Louis XIV, 51, 53n53 Merlin on, 64–67 popular sovereignty in, 2, 20–21, 35, 37–38, 39, 55, 79, 82, 121–122, 157, 208, 262–263 as precedent for Avignon, 85–86, 87–88, 122

316

as precedent for Belgium, 153, 155 as precedent for conquest, 6–7 as precedent for Sister Republics, 208 as separate from France, 52–53, 53n53, 53n54 treaty law in, 39, 61–74 Alsace-Lorraine, 281n30, 287–288 Amelot, Antoine-Léon-Anne, 252–253, 253n199, 257 American Civil War (1861–1865), 80, 291 American Colonies, 27–28, 40, 171–172 American Revolution, 276–277, 276n17, 277n18, 277n19 ancien régime Bonaparte’s Italian diplomacy and, 235 Enlightenment critiques of diplomacy in, 26–27, 72 financial crises of, 26–27, 33–34, 53–54 France’s natural boundaries/frontiers and, 165–166 international crises of, 27–28 international law in, 11–16 Merlin on treaty laws of, 64–67 Republican reversions to diplomacy of, 194–195 revolutionary administration replacing, 135–136 rights of, retained by French Republic, 233n111

Index treaties made by, 11–16, 22–23, 64n87, 71–72, 72n109, 78, 80, 102–103 war waged by, 24, 27–28 Anghie, Antony, 293–294n60 Anselme, Jacques Bernard d’, 132–133, 136 Aristotle, 8 Armstrong, David, 28–29n85 army/armies of France. See also pouvoir révolutionnaire; war; specific battles; specific places coercion accusations against, 143 decree of December 15 and, 135–138, 145–148, 159, 228–229 decree of fraternity and, 135–138 mission civilisatrice and, 159 National Convention on the conduct of, 134–135 non-interference in occupied territories and, 145, 154 plunder by, 148–149, 160–162, 164–165, 177–179, 182–184, 254, 257 political clubs influenced by, 142–143 requisitions imposed by, 159, 174–175, 178–179, 254–259, 256n214, 268–269, 283 Revolution resisted in territories occupied by, 46n29, 102, 104, 137, 146–148, 152–153, 253, 278–280 1796 advances of, 228 territorial governments reorganized by, 132–133, 135–136, 162, 163 voting overseen by, 96–97, 139, 143 war on tyrants and, 121, 243 Assembly of Notables, 44 assignats (French paper currency), 67n97, 175, 257 Aulard, Alphonse, 20, 20n60, 23–24n68, 30, 30n90, 124n3, 127, 208–209 Austin, John, 293–294, 293n60, 296, 296n69 Austria Bavaria and, 197n136, 235 Belgium and, 197n136 compensations proposed for, 197n136 compensations sought by, 197 defeat of, in Alsace, 216n32 France at war with, 28, 111, 121–122n2, 130–131, 225–226, 228

317 Frances’s objectives and, 125–126n7 French alliance with, 129 French annexation of Belgium recognized by, 157 Italy and, 217–218, 230, 232, 232n103, 232n106, 251, 285–286 peace negotiated with, 196–198, 231–232, 233n111, 268 Pope Pius VI and, 111, 113 princes possessionnés supported by, 39–40 Prussian defeat of (1866), 285–286 Roman Sister Republic not recognized by, 239–240 in the Schleswig-Holstein question, 286–287 War of the Austrian Succession and, 41 War of the Second Coalition and, 225–226 Austrian alliance (1756), 72, 129 Avignon overview, 84–120 Alsace as precedent for, 85–86, 87–88, 122 annexation opposed, 87–88, 97–98, 102–103, 104–105 annexation requested, 91, 91n18, 104, 206 annexed, 3, 30n92, 84–85, 86–87, 95, 107–108n89, 111, 114–120, 236, 280–281 Comtat Venaissin in conflict with, 91–93, 100–101 Comtat Venaissin united with, 87–88, 93–94, 94n31, 163 Corsica as precedent for, 66–67, 66n96, 85–86, 87–88, 122, 155 Enlightenment in, 89–90 envoys sent to Paris from, 85–86, 91, 91n18, 98, 102–103 famine in, 90 French characteristics of, 88–89, 89n11, 203 French mediators sent to, 93–94, 93n27, 96–97 French national unity and, 75–76 French neutrality toward, 92–93 French occupations of, 90, 90n14 French troops sent to, 92–93, 110 independence of, declared, 95

318 Avignon (cont.) international law and, 30–31, 86–88, 91, 92–93, 113, 118–120 international status of, 87 papacy and, 84–85, 88, 89–90, 91, 96–97, 104–105, 116–117, 221, 285 popular sovereignty in, 3, 10, 20–21, 25, 83, 87, 92–93, 101–108, 114–116, 117–118, 127–128, 206, 262–263 as precedent for Belgium, 155 as precedent for conquest, 3–4, 6–7, 108–116 as precedent for Nice, 135 as precedent for Rauracian Republic, 212 as precedent for the Rhineland, 162 as precedent for Savoy, 135 as precedent for Italy, 208, 230–231 Robespierre on, 92–93 secession and, 98–99 self-determination in, 85, 108, 118, 119, 281, 282 in the Seven Years’ War, 90 Treaty of Tolentino and, 238n128 unification of, 93–94 violence in, 84–85, 86, 93 voting in, 93–94, 95–98, 112, 121–122, 138, 208 Azerbaijan, 290–291 Baker, Keith, 16n44, 29n87, 191n113 Bangladesh, 290–291 Barère, Bertrand, 57, 72, 86n6, 141, 152–153 Barnave, Antoine, 59–60 Barrin, Viscount de, 46–48, 46n29, 47n30, 47n31, 47n32 Barthélemy, François-Marie, 193–194, 193n122, 196, 200–201 Basel, 211–212, 222–224, 226n77, 287 Batavian Republic. See also the Netherlands assignats as required currency in, 257 constitution of, drafted by France, 219–220 establishment of, 204, 207, 218, 254 exploitation of, 204–205

Index French alliance with, 229–230 French domination of, 245–247, 249–250 French hypocrisy addressed by, 246–247n169 French military occupation of, 218n39, 219 indemnities and requisitions imposed on, 219, 254 Map 5.1, 215 negotiating with France, 245–247 pouvoir révolutionnaire and, 218–219 price controls imposed on, 257n217 as Sister Republic, 208–209n5 state status of, 241, 265–266 Bates, David, 76n120, 186n94, 186–187n96 Battle of Fleurus, 156–157, 163–165, 217–218 Battle of Jemappes, 131, 138, 157–158 Battle of Neerwinden, 149, 156–157 Battle of Rivoli, 231 Battle of the Nations, 283 Battle of Valmy, 130–131, 157–158 Battle of Waterloo, 273–274n8 Bavaria, 197n136, 230n93, 235 Beauharnais, Alexandre de, 173, 198n140 Beauharnais, Eugène de, 264 Beaulac, Stephane, 13n31 Becker, Carl L., 284n36 Belgium Alsace as precedent for, 153 ambivalence of, toward annexation, 3–4 annexation rejected by citizens of, 139 annexation requested by citizens of, 139–141 annexed, 121, 140, 141, 156, 157, 159, 227 assignats as required currency in, 175 Austria and, 197n136 Avignon as precedent for, 138–141, 143, 152 Corsica as precedent for, 155 dynastic rulers of, 128–130, 221 envoys sent from Paris to, 145 envoys sent to Paris from, 138, 139–140

Index France’s national/cultural boundaries and, 199, 203 French adherence to principles and, 266–267 French agents in, 139, 142, 143, 143n66 French commercial policies imposed in, 175–176 French conquest of, 4 French loss and reconquering of, 156–157, 177 French military control of, 151–152 French view of, as inferior, 155 independence from the Netherlands, 284–285 international law and, 30–31 popular sovereignty in, 5, 10, 122, 145, 152–153 pouvoir révolutionnaire in, 145–148, 149–155, 208, 241n148, 242n149 as precedent for conquest, 6–7 as precedent for Italy, 228–229 as precedent for Sister Republics, 208 as precedent for the Netherlands, 217 rebellions and revolutions in, 128–130 requisitions administration in, 177 secession and, 138 state status of, 5–6 voting in, 121–122, 138–140, 142–143 war in, 121 Belissa, Marc, 26n74, 28–29n85, 56n63, 72n109, 107–108n89, 192n118 Bentham, Jeremy, 293, 293n57 Berg (Holy Roman Empire duchy), 1–3, 25, 167–169, 264 Berlin Conference (1885), 297, 297n74 Bernadotte, Jean, 264 Bernard, Alphonse-Timothée, 112–113, 237 Bernard, Hyacinthe, 238–239 Bernis, Pierre, François-Joachim de Pierre, 109–110 Berthier, Louis-Alexandre, 238, 250 Biafra, 290–291 Bignon, Louis Pierre Édouard, 225–226 Biron, Armand Louis de Gontaut, 212 Bismarck, Otto von, 80, 286–287

319 Blanning, T. C. W., 78n126, 124n3, 125–126n7, 135–136, 157–158, 160–161, 165n10, 191n113, 230n96 Blauw, Jacobus, 245 Bodin, Jean, 13, 16, 77, 78 Boissy-d’Anglas, François-Antoine de, 182 Bologna, 109, 229, 230–231, 231n97, 249n180 Bonaparte, Elisa, 264 Bonaparte, Jérome, 264 Bonaparte, Joseph, 237–238, 264 Bonaparte, Louis, 264 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon Bonaparte Bos, Maarten, 7n10 Bosnia, 291 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 16 Boswell, James, 36n2 Bouche, François Charles, 92, 102–103, 104 boundaries of France. See natural boundaries/frontiers of France Bourbon dynasty, 13–14n33, 22, 90n14, 239, 240, 260n233, 272, 283–284. See also Family Compact Brabant Revolution, 128–130, 157 Brierly, James Leslie, 7, 8, 8n16, 9 Briez, Philippe Constant Joseph, 179 Broers, Michael, 94, 259, 259n228, 262n240, 263 Broussy, Antoine, 208–209n5 Brumaire coup. See Coup of 18 Brumaire Brune, Guillaume, 223, 225–226, 247–248, 252–253, 253n199 Brunswick Manifesto (1792), 124–125, 137 Burke, Edmund, 21, 214, 217–218, 296n69 Bush, George W., 279 Buttafuoco, Matteo, 45 cahiers de doléances (Estates General lists of grievances), 44, 49, 104–105, 105n80 Caillard, Antoine Bernard, 216, 218, 218n38 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph, 135–136, 172–173, 173n40 Carnot, Lazare, 136–137, 173, 187, 200–201, 228, 232n103

320 Carpentras (Comtat Venaissin capital), 91–92, 101, 107 Carr, Edward Hallett, 8, 73n112, 79 Casoni, Philippe, 91–92 Catalan Rebellion, 274 Catherine the Great (empress), 113 Catus, Charles-Ignace-Pons Bouder de, 220 Cesari, Colonna, 45 Championnet (Jean Étienne Vachier), 239, 239n135, 244, 250, 250n187 Charitas (papal bull of Pius VI), 110 Charlemagne (Frankish ruler), 39, 264 Charles I (king), 275n13 Charles IX (king), 89 Charles Martel (Frankish ruler), 102 Chaussard, Jean-Pierre-Baptiste (Publicola), 218–219 Châtelet, Duke de, 60 Chayes, Abram, 9–10, 9n19, 29n86 China, 290–291 Cisalpine Republic Austrian military threats to, 253–254 Bonaparte’s manipulations in, 258–259 French artillery sold to, 258–259 French commissioners in, 253–254, 253n199 French system of government instituted in, 247–248 French troops housed in, 254n206 ministers of, chosen by Bonaparte, 252 nomenclature of, 233n109 proclaimed, 249–250 republics consolidated into, 232–233 territorial demarcations of, 251–253 Cispadane Republic, 230–231, 232–233, 249n180 Cisrhenan Republic, 200–201, 204, 211, 232n103, 233n109, 266. See also the Rhineland. Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 92–93, 109–110, 152–153, 236 Clarke, Henri-Jacques-Guillaume, 231, 232–233, 235, 239–240 Clausewitz, Carl von, 124n3, 230n96 Cobban, Alfred, 16n44, 127, 281, 289–290, 291–292 Colonna, Yvan, 81n132 Committee of Public Safety, 145, 163–164, 178–179, 193–194, 245 communism, 280–281

Index Comtat Venaissin annexed, 84–85, 104–106, 105n80, 107 Avignon in conflict with, 91–93, 100–101 Avignon united with, 87–88, 93–94, 94n31, 163 Corsica as precedent for, 105–106 counter-revolution in, 91–92 envoys sent to Paris from, 107 famine in, 90 French culture of, 88–89 French neutrality toward, 92–93 papal loyalties in, 91–92, 96–97, 105–106, 107–108n89, 152 as papal territory, 88, 88n8, 89–90 Pope Pius VI’s loss of, 116–117 popular sovereignty in, 100–101, 107, 123–124, 152 Representative Assembly of, 91–92, 104–106, 107 Treaty of Tolentino and, 238n128 violence in, 84–85, 86, 93 Concordat (1516), 109 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 23–24n68, 26–27 Congress of Rastatt (1797–1799), 197–198 Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), 116–117, 283–285, 288–289, 293–294, 295 Connaught, Republic of (Irish Sister Republic), 266 Constituent Assembly (1789–1791), 17n47, 66n94 Constitution of 1791 declaration of peace in, 23–24n68 Louis XVI’s acceptance of, 84, 94 popular sovereignty and, 1–2, 18, 18n53 wars of conquest rejected in, 23–24n68, 103–104, 105–106 Constitution of Year III, 210–211, 219–220, 245 constitutions of Napoleon’s Brother Kingdoms, 264, 264n251 Corberon, Nicolas de, 51 Corsica Alsace compared with, 66–67, 66n96 ancien régime influence in, 45 annexed, 2, 30n92, 36–37n3, 42–49, 44n24, 57, 75–76, 79, 278–279 Assembly of Notables and, 44 autonomy of, 75–76

Index Comtat Venaissin and, 105–106 constitution of, 36n2 Consulta of, 41, 81 Corsu language of, 82, 82n133 in the Estates General, 44, 45 feudalism abolished in, 38–39 French military administration of, 36, 46 Genoa as overlord of, 36, 39, 40–41, 61 Great Britain, 41, 41n10, 44, 61, 81 identities within, 30, 80–82, 81n130, 81n132, 82n133 intendants in, 43n19, 45, 46n29 international law and popular sovereignty, 30–31 Merlin on, 66–67 National Guard of, 36, 45–48 peasantry exploited in, 44, 44n23 popular sovereignty in, 2, 10, 20–21, 25, 35, 36, 37–40, 44–45, 48–49, 59–60, 59n76, 79, 82, 121–122, 127–128, 157, 208, 262–263 as precedent for Avignon, 85–86, 86n6, 87–88, 122 as precedent for Belgium, 155 as precedent for conquest, 6–7 as precedent for Sister Republics, 208 in rebellion against Genoa, 36, 40–41 as a republic, 36 self-determination in, 282 Spain and, 41n10 uprisings in, 36, 38–39, 45, 46n28, 47–48, 47n31, 48n33, 61, 79, 290–291 counter-revolution Alsace and, 63n85 Avignon and, 102 in the Comtat Venaissin, 91–92 Liège and, 130 popular vs. dynastic sovereignty and, 115–116 and Rome, 109–110 in the Vendée, 170–171, 216n32, 270 writers advocating, 296n69 Coup of 18 Brumaire (1799), 6, 6n8, 267–268, 267n262 Coup of 18 Fructidor (1797), 200–201 Covell, Charles, 17n46 Crimea, 291–292

321 Cromwell, Oliver, 275 Custine, Adam-Philippe, 168–170, 174, 174n46 Dahbour, Omar, 119n127 Danton, Georges, 165–166, 190 David, Jacques-Louis, 267–268 Declaration of Independence (U.S.) (1776), 41, 276–277, 276n17, 277n18 declaration of peace to the world (1790), 23, 23–24n68, 103–104, 111–112, 181 declarations of the law of nations, 210–211, 211n12, 292 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), 1–2, 18, 29n86, 260–261, 260n229, 293, 295 decree of December 15 (1792) abandonment of, 203–204 Brussels’s rejection of, 153–155 vs. the decree of fraternity, 135–138, 168, 172–173, 206 definitions and characteristics of, 135–138, 148, 172–173, 173n40, 228–229 enforcement of, 139, 142 French army and, 135–138, 159 levies imposed in advance of, 174–175 military requisitions prevailing over, 173 Mons’s rejection of, 153–154 Napoleonic empire and, 263 vs. pouvoir révolutionnaire, 135–136, 172–173 vs. unworthy citizens, 144 decree of fraternity (November 19, 1792) and Berg, 3–4, 167–169 conquest vs., 3–4 vs. the decree of December 15, 135–136, 168, 172–173, 206 definitions and characteristics of, 134–136 enforcement of, 139 French military control of Belgium and, 151–152 international affairs and, 25 limited to territories at war with France, 168 military requisitions prevailing over, 173 Neapolitan Republic and, 250

322 decree of fraternity (cont.) origins of, 134–135n33 renounced in Sister Republics, 258 retreat from, 135–136 revoked, 190 in Switzerland, 212–213 decree of non-interference (1793), 190, 203–204 Delacroix, Charles-François, 183, 255 Delacroix, Eugène, 255 Denmark, 286–287 Derby, Jean, 226–227 Derché, Jean Joseph, 180n69, 183, 185, 185n88 Desmoulins, Camille, 26–27, 28, 31n93, 34n103, 129–130, 270–271 Desportes, Felix, 223, 223n56, 227 destabilization of European boundaries, 74–79 Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. See Holy Roman Empire diplomacy in Alsace, 37, 65–66 with Austria, 129–130, 197–198 author’s scrutiny of, 26 Avignon and, 103–104, 106, 114–115 with the Batavian Republic, 245–247 of Bonaparte in Campo Formio treaty, 235 breakdown in, 171–172 conflicting imperatives in, 1–2, 157, 202–203 conquest and, 182–184 Corsica and, 43–44, 82 crises dictating behavior of, 292 of the Directory, 267 dynastic control and operations of, 276 Enlightenment critiques of, in ancien régime, 26–27, 72 of France in the Cisalpine Republic, 251–252, 251–252n192 of France vs. the Holy Roman Empire, 37 with free governments only, 218 with Genoa, 60–61, 79 national unification and, 293–294 as a necessity for the Republic, 204 in the Netherlands, 217 with the papacy, 110–112, 237 popular sovereignty and, 292–297

Index positivism in, 296 with the princes possessionnés, 68 with Prussia, 195–196 re-opening of, 204 the Republic’s existence not negotiable in, 193–194 with the Sister Republics, 207–208, 251–252 of Switzerland, 220–222 Diplomatic Revolution (1756), 129 diplomats on the army’s conduct in occupied territories, 135 chosen by National Assembly vs. the king, 21–22 decree of fraternity and, 168 immunity of, 30, 30n91, 198n140 National Assembly and, 106 National Convention and, 134–137, 140–141 pouvoir révolutionnaire pursued by, 224–225 Directory (1795–1799) Barthélemy removed from, 200–201 Batavian Republic charter drafted by, 219–220 Bonaparte promoted by, 228 Bonaparte’s regimes and, 260, 260n229 Carnot removed from, 200–201 on compensation for First Coalition sovereigns, 235 conquered territories under, 5–6 conquest reconsidered by, 192–193, 192n118 corruption in, 262 end of, 5–6, 6n8, 267 Faipoult as agent of, in Genoa, 236 Neapolitan Republic and, 239n135 popular sovereignty and, 271 the Republic’s survival and, 202–203 the Revolution’s wars and, 28–29n85 Sister Republic requisitions required by, 256 Swiss unification imposed by, 225–226 unification aims of, 270–271 war on Rome declared by, 238 doctrinal writers on international law, 292–297

Index Dombes (territory in France), 118 Doppet, François Amédée, 132 Doyle, William, 36–37n3 Dubois, Laurent, 32n97, 33n100 Ducos, Roger, 267 Dufourny de Villiers, Louis-Pierre, 99, 99n52, 106, 116, 119–120, 280–281, 292 Dumont, Jean, 55–56 Dumouriez, Charles-François on Avignon and war, 114 battles won by, 130–131 in Belgium, 130, 145 defection of, 149, 155 feudal rights and obligations, 63n85 on French-Belgian national differences, 199 in the Netherlands, 216 on popular sovereignty, 20 Duphot, Léonard Mathurin, 237–238 Dutch Crisis, 27–28 Dutch Republic, 214–216 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 128, 274 Edelstein, Dan, 28n84, 147n79, 150–151, 151n97 Edelstein, Melvin, 95n35 Ehrlich, Eugen, 8 Ehrlich, Thomas, 9–10, 29n86 Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), 128, 214 Elba, 262–263, 273–274n8 elections. See voting electoral assemblies. See also voting in Avignon, 87, 91 in Belgium, 138, 139–140, 142–143 in Corsica, 44 discredited, 232 in Italy, 232 Jacobin manipulation of, 157 in Monaco, 136–137 in Nice, 142–143 popular sovereignty and, 232 in the Rhineland, 162, 168–170 in Savoy, 142–143 Elliot, John, 274n11 Enghien, Louis Antoine, Duke d’, 272–273

323 England. See Great Britain Englund, Steven, 230–231, 233n109, 235n112, 261n235 Enlightenment, 26, 26n74, 28–29n85, 33, 72, 89–90, 166n16, 282n33 Erignac, Claude, 81 Eritrea, 290–291 Eschassériaux, Joseph, 189–191, 190n109 Estates General, 44, 45, 75n117, 76 European boundaries’ destabilization, 74–79 exploitation. See military indemnities and requisitions Faipoult, Guillaume-Charles, 232, 236, 240, 258, 260 Family Compact, 22–24, 72, 114 Ferdinand III (grand duke), 240–241n145 Ferdinand IV (king), 239, 240 Ferri, Marco, 258–259 Festival of the Federation, 134–135n33 feudal rights and obligations abolished in Alsace, 37, 38–39, 61, 71, 73, 74–75, 78–80 in Corsica, 74–75 Dumouriez on, 63n85 in France, 37, 53–54, 54n58, 61, 74–75, 109 in Germany, 77 Merlin’s rationales for, 64–77 Montmorin on, 63 popular sovereignty and, 74–75 princes possessionnés and, 37–38, 55, 63n85, 67–71 Roman Catholic Church and, 109 feudal territorial holdings, 76–77, 101–102, 106, 114–115 First World War (1914–1918), 85, 264, 281, 284–285, 288–289, 290n52, 298 Flotte (French agent in Genoa), 56–58, 60–61, 61n81 Foreign Ministry of France (ancien régime), 11 Fouché, Joseph, 257 France in 1789, Map 1.1, 38 France’s Eastern Boundaries in 1792, Map 3.1, 123 Francis I (king), 89, 109

324 Francis II (archduke and emperor), 121–122n2, 124, 172, 196–197, 231, 233–235, 264 Franck, Thomas, 10n21 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 287–288 Frankfurt, 174 Frederick William II (king), 124 Fredrick the Great (king), 188 French Republic ancien régime rights retained by, 233n111 Avignon and Comtat Venaissin ceded to, 116–117 Belgian unity with, 155 dignity of, in peace, 201 establishment of, 5, 131 holdings of, on the left bank of the Rhine, 195–196, 195n130 independent republics’ formation encouraged by, 200–201 King of Sardinia’s concessions to, 157 made universal, 241 monarchs recognizing, 240–241n145 motherhood metaphors applied to, 144 natural boundaries/frontiers of, negotiated, 193n122, 194–195 Netherlands incorporated into, 207 Pope Pius VI’s concessions to, 116–117 recognition of, as absolutely requisite, 193–194 Savoy’s incorporation into, 132 survival of, 202–203 Fréteau, Emmanuel-Marie-MichelPhilippe, 73, 73n114 Frey, Linda and Marsha, 198n140 Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu (FLNC), 81, 81n130 frontiers of France. See natural boundaries/frontiers of France Furet, François, 17, 21n62 Galeazzini, J.-B., 45, 48 Gallo, Marzio Mastrilli, Marquis of, 233 Garat, Dominique, 59–60 Gardener, John, 293 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 285–286 Garran, Jean-Philippe, 184, 188–189 Gauthier, Florence, 134–135n33

Index general will, 63, 80, 142, 150n95, 167–168, 271. See also Rousseau, Jean Jacques Geneva, 226–227, 227n82 Génin, Jean-François, 156–157 Genoa Consiglietto of, 57 Corsica controlled by, 40–41, 236 Corsica’s rebellion against, 36, 40–41 French intervention in, 236, 244 Great Britain and, 57, 58, 61 Holy Roman Empire and, 57 as an independent city-state, 40 Ligurian Republic in, 236 requisitions imposed on, 256 Spain and, 56–57 Genoa-France treaty (1768), 36, 42–49, 55–61, 73, 79 George III (king), 81 Georgia, 290–291 German Confederation, 286, 287 Germany Great Britain vs., 285–286, 285n38 feudal relationships within, 76–77 as Francis II’s compensation, 196 French occupation in, 174 national unification of, 284–285, 286–289, 293–294 Nazi Germany, 280 peace negotiated with, 232n102 in the Schleswig-Holstein question, 286–287 Switzerland and, 222–223 treaty law in, 77–78 war against Napoleon in, 270 Girondins (political faction), 125–126n7, 211n14 Gladstone, William Ewart, 288, 288n46, 293–294 Gobel, Jean-Baptiste, 152 Godechot, Jacques, 160–161, 254n206 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 130–131 Gou, Leonard de, 208–209 Great Britain American Revolution and, 276–277, 276n17 Congress of Vienna and, 284 Corsica and, 41, 41n10, 44, 61, 81

Index deprived of trade in Europe, 242 France’s conquered territories and, 188–189 Genoa and, 57, 58, 61 vs. Germany, 285–286, 285n38 international law violations of, 273 Italian national unification supported by, 285–286 Italy and, 227, 239 Napoleon’s blockade of, 265n253 the Netherlands and, 214, 217–218, 217n36 in the Nootka Sound crisis, 22 popular sovereignty and, 61, 61n81 Prussian accusations against, 197 republican governments of, 275, 275n12 on the Revolution’s conception of liberty, 172 Russia and, 188–189 at war with France, 171 Great Fear, 53–54 Greece, 284 Grégoire, Henri, 136, 161–162, 166n16, 210–211, 211n12, 211n13, 292 Grewe, Wilhelm G., 12n28, 29–30n89, 85n4, 165n12, 288–289 Grisons (Swiss canton), 258, 258n223 Grotius, Hugo, 13–14, 154, 185–186, 185–186n90, 275n13, 294, 296n72 Guasco, J. B., 48 Guernes, Jean Joseph Marie de, 42 Gulick, Edward Vose, 19n57 Gustav III (king), 124–125 Guyot, Joseph-Nicolas, 64 Guyot, Raymond, 235n112, 267 Haiti, 32. See also St. Domingue Hamilton, Alexander, 22–23n65 Habsburg empire Alsace and, 37 Austria as head of, 39 Belgium in, 128, 138, 163 end of, 264, 289 French alliance with, 129, 157 indemnities proposed for, 235n113 Italy and, 227 princes possessionnés and, 39

325 Sardinia and, 131–132 Savoy in, 138 Harouel, Jean-Louis, 211n14, 280n26 Helvetic Republic. See also Switzerland cantons reluctant to join, 258, 258n223 establishment of, 207, 225 failure of, 208–209n5 French appointment of directors in, 252 French commissioners in, 253 French constitutional basis of, 248 French domination of, 247–249 French troops crossing territory of, 252 Map 5.2, 221 state status of, 241, 265–266 the Vendée and, 268–269, 270 Hemmerle, Oliver, 210, 262n241 Henkin, Louis, 10n21, 278–279 Henrichemont (principality in France), 118 Hinsley, Francis Harry, 19 Hirschman, Albert O., 25n72 Hobbes, Thomas, 14–15n37, 106, 185–186, 185n90, 186n94, 187n98 Hoche, Lazare, 187, 200–201, 232n103 Hoensbroeck, Prince-Bishop, 130 Hofmann, Joseph, 169–170, 170n27 Holland. See the Netherlands Holy Roman Empire abolition of, 229n91, 264 Alsace annexed from, 37 Alsatian fiefs of, 37, 50, 52–55 Avignon annexation rejected by, 3 Belgium within, 128 Diet of, 55, 67n97, 68–71 France as threat to, 196n135 French invasion of, 162 French national unity and, 75–76 Genoa and, 57 as multi-state empire, 162 princes possessionnés and, 39–40, 62, 68 sovereignty and, 43–44, 50–51 at war with France, 67n97 Holy See. See popes; Rome (as Holy See) Hombourger, René, 72n109 Horatian Ode (Marvel), 275 human rights, 30, 30n91 Hunter, Ian, 14–15n37 Huxelles, Marquis d’, 51, 69–70

326 intendants (French royal representatives), 43n19, 45, 46n29, 51, 53, 252–253 International Court of Justice, 290 international law American Revolution and, 276–277, 276n17 ancien régime and, 11–16 Avignon and, 86–88, 91, 92–93, 113, 118–120 British violations of, 273, 273n7 codification of, 8–10, 8n14, 15 in colonial contexts, 31–33, 32n96, 32n98, 32n99 definitions and characteristics of, 7–11 doctrinal writers on, 292–297 Dufourny on, 119–120 Duke d’Enghien affair and, 272–273 dynastic control and operations of, 11–16, 15n39, 35, 122–124, 276 equality among nations and, 280–281 French claims to superiority and, 280–281 French Revolution’s legacy in, 293–294 the general will and, 95 Genoese citations of, 71 German unification in violation of, 284–285, 286–289, 293–294 historical school of, 294–297 historiography of, 29–33, 30n89 Italian unification in violation of, 284–286, 293–294 legitimacy indicators of, 10n21 Napoleonic empire and, 265, 268–269, 271n4, 273n7 non-interference as basis of, 190 observance vs. non-observance of, 278–279 Oppenheim’s International Law, 297 Peace of Westphalia and, 12–13n29, 273 Pope Pius VI’s citation of, 111 positivism in, 293–298, 294n60 princes possessionnés’s citations of, 67–71 as public law of Europe, 12, 12n28 revolutionaries’ rejection of, 26n74 the Revolution’s significance for (overview), 270–298 Robespierre and, 126n8 self-determination in, 85

Index Sister Republics and, 207 treaties as basis of, 15–16, 55–56 wars of conquest and, 4, 6–7, 15–16, 15n39, 23–24 international law and popular sovereignty client states created by, 34 decree of fraternity and, 134–135 historiography of, 25–33 ignored in the Revolution’s history, 25–33, 297–298 legacies of, 270–274, 278, 290–292, 297–298 Napoleonic empire and, 6–7 National Assembly and, 85–86, 92–93 and national sovereignty, 281 persistence of, 283–289 princes possessionnés and, 39–40, 62 revolutionary ideology and, 126–127 unintended consequences of, 34, 82, 273–274, 277–278 Irhoven van Dam, Willem van, 245 Israel, 290–291 Italian Sister Republics Bonaparte’s armies’ pillaging in, 254–255 constitutions of, 249n180 French army in, 228–229 French domination of, 229–230n92, 249–250 French interference in, 251–259 indemnities imposed on, 249–250 and the Holy Roman Empire, 229n91 Map 5.3, 234 popular sovereignty and, 229–230, 250 requisitions imposed on, 254–255 self-determination in, 282 state status of, 241, 249–250, 265–266 Italy Austria and, 217–218, 230, 232, 232n103, 232n106, 251, 285–286 Avignon as precedent for, 230–231 Belgium as precedent for, 228–229 Bonaparte in, 227–240, 262n239 Eugène de Beauharnais as Viceroy of, 264 France’s strategic interests in, 227, 229–230 French claims to superiority in, 263 French conquests in, 197, 232n103

Index French-Prussian peace treaty and, 204 French revolutionizing resented in, 263n245 homogeneity with France, 231 indemnities imposed on, 229 national unification of, 285–286, 293–294 neutrality of, 227 requisitions imposed on, 256 the Rhineland as precedent for, 228–229, 231 self-determination for, 281n30 war against Napoleon in, 270 Jacobins (political club), 142–143 in Chambery, 132 Dutch patriots’ appeals to, 214–216 in Italy, 231n97 in Mainz, 169n25 Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and, 275–276n15 in Monaco, 133 motherland metaphors expressed in, 144 in the Rhineland, 168–170 of Tournai, 158 voting influenced by, 157 Jacobs, Beatrix, 209–210n8, 283–284n35 Jainchill, Andrew, 180n66, 188n102, 199n146, 210n11, 241, 241n146 Japan, 280 Jaucourt, Louis de, 15 Joan (queen), 88, 102–103 Jordan, David, 255, 262n239, 263, 263n244 Joseph II (emperor), 55, 129 Jospin, Lionel, 283–284n35 Joubert, Barthélemy Catherine, 239 Jourdan, Annie, 208–209n5, 261n235 Jourdan, Jean-Baptiste, 228 Kant, Immanuel, 210, 210n9, 292 Kaunitz, Wenzel Anton, 124–125 Keitner, Chimène, 166n18, 187n99 Kellermann, François, 130–131 Kemiläinen, Aira, 21n61, 107–108n89 Kennedy, Michael, 142–143 Kléber, Jean-Baptiste, 267n261 Koch, Christophe-Guillaume, 71n108 Koselleck, Reinhart, 279n21

327 Koskenniemi, Martti, 7n12, 8–9 Krabbe, Hugo, 297–298 Kubben, Raymond, 10n22, 208–209n5, 209–210n8, 251n191 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 131, 134–135n33 La Grange, Jacques de, 51 La Harpe, Frédéric-César de, 222 Lamennais, Hugues-Félicité Robert de, 296n69 Lameth, Charles de, 23 Lansing, Robert, 119, 289–290, 290n50, 298 Lapidé, Hypolitus A., 66n96 La Révellière-Lépeaux, Louis Marie de, 232n103 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 13–14 The Law of Nations (Vattel), 11 League of Nations, 296n70 Lebrun-Tondu, Pierre, 131, 137–138, 141, 167–168, 171 Lecarlier d’Ardon, Marie Jean François Philibert, 224–225 Lefebvre, Georges, 54n58, 66n94, 232n103 legal conscience, 297–298 Lenin, Vladimir, 289–290, 290n52 Lentz, Thierry, 6n8, 260n234 Leopold II (emperor), 55, 113, 129 Lerner, Marc H., 208–209n5, 248n178 Lesaffer, Randall, 9–10, 29–30n89, 209–210n8, 283–284n35 Lesage-Senault, Gaspard, 156–157 Leuwers, Hervé, 67n97 levée-en-masse (French military conscription), 5, 163–172 Leviathan (Hobbes), 14–15n37 Liège, 128–129, 130, 138, 140–141, 183, 200–201 Liège, Prince-Bishop of, 129, 130 Ligurian Republic, 236. See also Genoa Locke, John, 186n94 Lombardy, 229–230, 232–235, 236, 285 London Protocol (1852), 287 Louis XIV (king), 13–14n33, 28, 51, 53n53, 90n14, 241 Louis XV (king), 74, 90n14 Louis XVI (king) authority of, challenged, 22–24

328 Louis XVI (king) (cont.) Charles I and, 275–276n15 as constitutional monarch, 261n235 Constitution of 1791 and, 18, 84, 94 Corsica and, 45–48, 49, 86n5 discredited, 27–28, 124–125 execution of, 5, 137, 157–158 flight to Varennes, 94n31, 124–125 as King of the French, 261 Louis XVIII (king), 125 Louvois, Marquis de, 51 Lowenfeld, Andreas, 9–10, 29n86 Lyons, Martin, 260 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 55–56, 56n63, 180 MacDonald, Jacques, 239–240 Mack, Karl von, 239–240 Madison, James, 22–23n65 Mainz, 169–171, 169n25, 171n32, 174n46 Maistre, Joseph de, 296n69 Malouet, Pierre Victor, 99, 103–104, 115 Mancini, Pasquale, 294, 296 Manela, Erez, 290n52 Marie-Antoinette (queen), 27–28, 89n11, 124–125, 129 Martens, Georg von, 55–56, 292–293 Martin, Jean-Clément, 24n70, 172n37 Marvell, Andrew, 275 Marxism, 280n27 Masséna, André, 256 Mathiez, Albert, 54n58 Maupeou, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de, 74 Maury, Jean-Sifrein, 97, 103–104, 238–239 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 295n66, 296n70, 298 Mengaud, Joseph, 223–224, 224n62, 224n67, 225, 226n77, 243, 247–248, 251, 252 Menou, Jacques-François de, 93–94, 102–103, 106–107, 260 Merlin de Douai, Philippe Antoine on the abolition of feudal rights, 64–77 on Belgium’s annexation, 156–157 on Corsica, 66–67 French national unity and, 75–76, 75–76n119, 76n120, 83, 187, 187n99

Index jokes at the expense of, 69 legal training of, 64 on national unity, 199 on popular sovereignty vs. treaty law, 64, 66, 79–80, 83 pouvoir révolutionnaire justified by, 152–153 princes possessionnés indemnities proposed by, 67, 67n97, 83n135, 153 Rousseau invoked by, 75–76n119, 76n120 on secession, 75–76, 98–99, 138, 274, 289 treaties respected by, 72–74, 73n112, 80 Metternich, Klemens von, 197–198, 198n140, 284n37, 285–286 Milan, 229, 230–231 military indemnities and requisitions. See also army/armies of France; war; indemnities or requisitions in specific places as absolute in the Rhineland, 173 administration of, 176–177 backlash against, 206–207 as a French imperative, 181 French laws requiring, 177–179 French officials’ complaints regarding, 175–176, 257 imposed in friendly states, 174–175 justifications for, 174–175, 179–181 Mill, John Stuart, 285–286, 288n46 Miller, Mary Ashburn, 150n95 Milton, John, 275–276, 275n13, 275n15 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count de, 24n70, 59–60, 61, 72–74, 73n111, 80, 109–110 Moldova, 290–291 Monaco, 30n90, 133, 136–137, 173 Mons, 153–154, 153n108 Mont-Blanc department, 132, 156, 197 Monteil, Marquis de, 43, 43n19 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 14–15 Montesquieu-Fézensac, Anne Pierre de, 132, 186n94 Montmorin, Armand Marc, Count de, 58–59, 62–63, 64, 109–110, 129–130 Mont-Terrible department, 213 Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas, 11

Index Moreau, Jean Victor Marie, 228 Moreton, Jacques Henri de, 148 Morgan, Edmund, 19 Mornet, Daniel, 25, 27n78 motherhood metaphors, 144 Moulinas, René, 85, 87, 117–118 Mulhouse (Alsatian/Swiss city), 220, 226–227 Murat, Joachim, 264 Murati, Pierre Paul, 48–49 Naples, 88, 90n14, 102, 264, 285. See also Neapolitan Republic Napoleon Bonaparte administrative vs. representative government preferred by, 262 Campo Formio treaty and, 235, 235n112 Cisalpine Republic proclaimed by, 249 Cisalpine ministers chosen by, 252 Commander of the Army of Italy, 228 Corsica’s annexation and, 42 coup of 18 Brumaire of, 6, 6n8, 267–268, 267n262 David’s painting of, 267–268 defeated, 283 diplomatic immunity and, 198n140 the Directory and, 260, 260n229 in Egypt, 266, 267, 267n261 as Emperor of the French, 261 exile(s) of, 273–274n8 as First Consul, 261n235, 267 historiography of, 259–260 Italian Sister States created by, 6–7 in Italy, 227–240 popular sovereignty and, 6–7, 260–263, 260n229, 260n234, 283 as pragmatic improviser, 265 as public authority in Bologna, 249n180 public opinion molded by, 262, 262n239 revolutionary messianism of, 263, 263n244 royalist uprising defeated by, 228 Russia and, 271, 273n7, 283 Salicetti and, 45 self-assessment of, 230 Sister Republic requisitions imposed by, 256

329 Sister Republics proclaimed by, 230–231, 232n103, 236 in Switzerland, 222 Napoleonic empire overview, 259–277 Brother Kingdoms of, 264, 264n252, 270–271 conflicting aspects of, 262n242 decree of December 15 and, 263 French claims to superiority and, 263, 263n248, 268–269 Great Britain to be blockaded by, 265n253 independent states dominated by, 260n233 international law and, 265, 268–269, 271n4, 273n7 Map 6.1, 272 Napoleon III and, 6n9 popular sovereignty in, 259, 265, 268, 271 pouvoir révolutionnaire in, 263, 271n4 the Republic replaced by, 262n241 requisitions required from satellites of, 283 Revolution’s ideals spread by, 283–284, 283–284n35 state autonomy challenged by, 209n7 unification aims of, 270–271 National Assembly (1789–1791) Alsatian compensations decided by, 54–55 ancien régime treaties and, 73–74 Avignon-Comtat unification decreed by, 94 Avignon’s annexation and, 3, 106–107, 109–112 Avignon’s envoys to, 85–86, 91, 91n18, 98, 102–103 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and, 109–110 Corsica and, 36, 48–49, 86, 86n5 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and, 1–2 deputies elected to, 96n37 foreign ambassadors’ refusal to acknowledge, 22 formation of, 66n94 Genoa-France treaty contravened by, 56

330 National Assembly (1789–1791) (cont.) Genoa’s demands rejected by, 59–60 indemnities proposed for Rome by, 113–114 vs. international law, 85–86, 92–93 Louis XVI’s authority challenged by, 22–24 mediators sent to Avignon by, 93–94, 93n27 popular sovereignty made legal determinant by, 37–38 vs. the princes possessionnés, 64–77 National Convention (1792–1795) on the army’s conduct in occupied territories, 134–135 Berg’s appeal for annexation and, 1–3 Committee of Public Safety and, 145 decree of fraternity revoked by, 190 envoys sent to Belgium by, 139, 145 envoys sent to Berg by, 167–169 formation of, 66n94 Nice’s annexation and, 132–133, 135 vs. the princes possessionnés, 67n97 Rhineland sovereignty accepted by, 170 Savoy’s annexation and, 135 national self-determination. See popular sovereignty; self-determination nationalism, 165n10, 282–283, 282n34, 288, 288n46, 294, 296n69, 296n70, 298 national sovereignty evolving from dynastic sovereignty, 16n44, 281 German unification and, 286 international law and, 281 origins of, 281 popular sovereignty and, 16n44, 20–21, 21n61, 281 princes possessionnés and, 78n126 revolutionary foreign policy and, 166n18 natural boundaries/frontiers of France annexed territories at, 143n62 buffer territories and, 266–267 Danton on, 190–191 governance legitimated by, 150n95 historiography of, 165–166, 165n12, 166n17

Index national identity and, 198–199, 203 Nice/Savoy and, 166 proper extent of, 199n146 the Pyrenees and, 198–199 the Rhineland and, 201 Sister Republics and, 209–210n8 as strategic imperative, 184–185, 190–192 natural law, 126n8, 185–186n90, 293, 296 Neapolitan Republic, 239–240, 239n135, 244, 250n187, 266. See also Naples Nedham, Marchamont, 275 Neff, Steven, 290n53, 296 Nelson, Horatio, 239, 240 the Netherlands. See also Batavian Republic Austrian losses in, 217–218 British losses in, 217–218 Great Britain vs. France in, 188–189 French alliance with, 171–172, 214–216 French army in, 156–157, 163–164 Great Britain and, 214 indemnities imposed on, 229, 247 indemnities proposed for, 247n172 invasion of, considered, 216–217 Kingdom of, 284–285 Louis Bonaparte as king of, 264 popular sovereignty and, 205, 242–243 provinces uniting with France, 140n51 pouvoir révolutionnaire in, 242n149, 242n151 requisitions imposed on, 256 revolutions in, 208–209n5, 214–216, 217n35, 218 the Rhineland as precedent for, 228–229 as a Sister Republics, 6, 247n173 southern regions of, 156–157, 163–164 Talleyrand in, 130 at war with France, 171 Nice as the Alpes-Maritimes department, 148–149, 197 annexed, 4, 132–133, 148–149, 166 Avignon as precedent for, 135 envoys sent to Paris from, 132–133, 139–140

Index France’s natural boundaries/frontiers and, 166 French characteristics of, 132–133 French invasion of, 132–133 French recruitment in, 148–149 played against Savoy, 148–149 popular sovereignty in, 115, 122, 135 as precedent for Sister Republics, 208 as precedent for Switzerland, 222 Treaty of Paris and, 240–241n145 voting in, 208 Nigeria, 290–291 Noël, François-Joseph-Michel, 219–220 non-interference policy, 137–138, 145, 154, 190, 203–204, 248 Nootka Sound crisis, 22–23, 25, 72 Nussbaum, Arthur, 29–30n89, 85, 185–186n90, 87 Nys, E., 15n42 Ochs, Peter, 222, 223–224, 224n62 Ofuatry-Kodjoe, Wentworth, 282n33, 290n52 Oppenheim, Lassa, 29 Oppenheim’s International Law, 297 Pacificus-Helvidius debate, 22–23n65 pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be observed), 55–56, 56n62, 78 Padua Circular (1791), 124–125, 137 Pagden, Anthony, 29 Paine, Thomas, 21n63, 24 Palatinate, 173, 173n42 Palestinians, 290–291 Palmer, R. R., 276–277, 276n16 Paoli, Pasquale, 36, 36n2, 40–41, 41n12, 43, 61, 80–81, 276n16 Papal States, 83, 236–237, 238, 285 parlements (French regional law courts), 74 Parma, Duke of, 251 Pascal, Blaise, 159 Peace of Amiens (1802), 251n191 Peace of Baden (1714), 68 Peace of Rastatt (1714), 68 Peace of Westphalia (1648). See also Treaty of Münster Alsace and, 37, 39, 67, 79, 287–288 ambiguities in, 50–51

331 in the French-Austrian peace negotiations, 196–197 international law and, 12–13n29, 273 Palatinate invasion justified by, 173n42 the princes possessionnés’s citations of, 68–70 significance of, 109 territorial sovereigns’ holdings protected under, 50n44, 51n45, 53 as treaty law, 68 Treaty of Münster in, 50, 51n45 Pérès, Emmanuel, 170–171, 184, 188–189, 200n147 “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (Kant), 292 Pétion de Villeneuve, Jérôme, 59–60, 94, 102–103 Piedmont, 60–61, 204, 240–241n145, 285–286 Pieri, Charles, 81n130 Pillnitz Declaration (1791), 124–125, 137 Pitt, William, 28 plebiscites. See voting Poland, 35, 103–104, 125–126n7, 189, 199–200, 200n147, 281n30 political liberty vs. popular sovereignty, 101–108 Pommereul, François René Jean de, 229–230 Pope Leo X, 109 Pope Pius VI Avignon and, 86–87, 91 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and, 92–93, 110 Comtat Venaissin and, 91–92, 107 constitutions rejected by, 84–85 Corsica’s precedent invoked by, 105–106 exile and death of, 238 France and, 103–104, 110–112 National Assembly’s deference toward, 92 popular sovereignty invoked by, 105–106 Revolution and, 109 Treaty of Tolentino and, 116–117, 238 Pope Pius VII, 117, 261 popes. See also Rome (as Holy See) authority of, challenged, 12

332 popes (cont.) Avignon holdings of, 75–76, 88, 89–90, 90n14 Comtat Venaissin holdings of, 88, 89–90 French annexation of Avignon and, 87–88 in Italian Sister Republics, 229n91 sovereignty of, violated, 92–93 temporal authority of, 111–112, 111n101 popular sovereignty. See also international law and popular sovereignty; selfdetermination; territorial claims; voting advent of, in France, 16–21 ancien régime diplomacy and, 194–195 in Belgium, 145 competing claims of, 102, 104–105, 107 as conquest justification, 3–4, 5–6, 10, 60 Constitution of 1791 and, 18n53 vs. the decree of fraternity, 135–136 definitions and characteristics of, 19–21, 19n57, 19n58, 20n60, 282 difficulties in determining, 95–101 discredited, 270 doctrinal writers on, 292–297 Dufourny vs., 116 vs. dynastic sovereignty, 78, 135–136 European boundaries destabilized by, 74–79 evolution in policies of, 28–29, 164–165, 165n10, 281 vs. feudal rights and obligations, 63, 74–75 foreign affairs and, 21–24 foreign invasion and, 5–6 French national unity and, 76–77 Great Britain and, 61 imposition of, 5, 172–173 instructions to the army regarding, 134–135 international law and (overview), 35–83 international vs. domestic applications of, 1–2, 25, 31, 31n93, 121–122, 127, 134–135 invoked by post-revolutionary generations, 278

Index legal conscience as foundation of, 297–298 manipulation of, 127, 142–143 Merlin on, 64, 66 in the Middle Ages, 274, 274n9 Napoleon’s conception of, 6–7 Napoleon’s downfall and, 283 as national self-determination, 281–282n31, 282, 282n32 national sovereignty and, 20–21, 20n60, 166n18 vs. royal authority, 22–23 persistence of, 283–289 vs. political liberty, 101–108 prerequisites for, 123–124, 145, 146–148, 152 Republican indivisibility and, 187, 193–194 Republican supremacy and, 202–203 revolutionary political virtue superior to, 153 Rousseau and, 16–18, 127–128 royal sovereignty and, 1–2, 16, 18–19, 106, 157 secession and, 76–77, 98–99 significance of, 16, 16n44 subordinated to French interests, 229–230 and the Terror, 95 as uncodified, 298 unintended consequences of, 25–27, 160, 277 Porrentruy (Swiss municipality), 211–213, 214, 232n102. See also Rauracian Republic Portiez, Louis, 170–171, 184, 188–189, 200n147, 241n148, 242, 242n149, 242n151 Portugal, 113, 171 Portuguese Rebellion, 274 Poussielgue, Jean-Baptiste-Etienne, 241 pouvoir révolutionnaire (revolutionary power) Barère’s justification of, 152–153 vs. Belgian national sovereignty, 153–155 vs. choice of government, 157–158 contradiction of, 145–155 crises leading to, 4–5, 158, 163–164 vs. the decree of December 15, 172–173

Index definitions and characteristics of, 146, 161–162, 213 evolution of, 150–151, 151n97 imposed on the unwilling, 121, 123–124, 137, 144, 146–148, 152–153, 278–280 justifications for, 121–124, 146, 151–153, 180 on the left bank of the Rhine (overview), 160–205 military requisitions prevailing over, 173 the Mountain vs., 190–192, 190n109 as natural right, 150–151, 150n95 in occupied territories, 149–150 popular sovereignty and, 122–124, 127–128, 137, 145–155, 158–159, 161–162, 172–173, 242–243 rationales for, 153n108 relaxation of, 241n148, 242, 242n149, 242n151 Robespierre vs., 150–151, 190–192 Rousseau and, 127–128, 128n11 Pragmatic Sanction (1549), 128 primary assemblies. See electoral assemblies princes possessionnés (Alsatian propertied nobles) allies of, vs. France, 39–40 Alsatian fiefs of, 52–55 ancien régime and, 39 counter-revolution and, 68 feudal rights abolition rejected by, 37–38, 55, 63n85, 67–71, 73n112 French-Austrian war and, 83, 83n135 as French vassals, 37–38 Germany and, 77n124 indemnities for, 55, 62–63, 67, 67n97, 113 lands of, impounded, 67n97 Peace of Westphalia and, 50 vs. popular sovereignty, 39, 68, 69 Revolution’s impact on, 53–55 treaty law and, 61–74, 67n97, 278–279 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (Milton), 275n13, 275–276n15 Provence, 74–75, 88, 99, 102–103, 117–118 Provence, Count of, 124–125

333 Prussia Austria defeated by (1866), 285–286 France defeated by (1870–1871), 285–286, 287–288 France invaded by (1793), 130–131 indemnities proposed for, 194–195, 194n123 peace negotiated with, 164, 192–193, 194–195, 196–197, 197n136, 203–204, 233n111 in the Schleswig-Holstein question, 286–287 war declared on, 28 public law of Europe, 12 Quebec, 290–291 Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? (Sieyès), 17–18 Quod aliquandum (papal bull of Pius VI), 110 Ranke, Leopold von, 27, 27n81, 77n124, 124n3, 125, 125–126n7 Rapinat, Jean-Jacques, 251, 252, 258–259 Rauracian Republic, 211–212. See also Porrentruy Rayneval, Joseph Matthias Gérard de, 11 Realpolitik, 202, 209–210n8, 298 Redslob, Robert, 9n17 Reformation, 12 Renan, Ernest, 85n4 Reubell, Jean-François, 192–193, 201, 222, 232n103 revolutionary power. See pouvoir révolutionnaire Revolutionary Triennium, 228 Révolutions de France et de Brabant (Desmoulins), 129–130 Revolutions of 1848, 287 Rhenogerman National Convention, 168–170 the Rhineland. See also Cisrhenan Republic annexations in, 198 assignats as required currency in, 175 Aulard on, 30n90 Avignon as precedent for, 162 Custine’s occupation of, 174 electoral assemblies in, 162, 168–170 envoys sent to Paris from, 170

334 the Rhineland (cont.) essay competition on, 179–181, 182, 188 exploitation of, 174–187, 190–191, 201, 204–205 France regaining control in, 5, 156–157 French adherence to principles and, 266–267 French nationalism and, 203 French plundering of (overview), 160–205 French sovereignty in, 168–170 geography of, 163 ideological vs. pragmatic views of, 188–189 international law and, 30–31 Jacobin clubs in, 168–170 as precedent for conquest, 6–7 as precedent for Holland, 228–229 as precedent for Italy, 228–229, 231 as precedent for Switzerland, 228–229 requisitions imposed on, 283 Rhenogerman National Convention in, 168–170 Savoy as precedent for, 162 self-determination in, 266–267, 282 union with France, 168–170, 170n27 voting in, 168–170, 169n25 Rhine River (left bank of) annexed, 165–166, 198 Berg and, 1–3, 25, 167–169, 264 departments of France established in, 198 Dutch possessions on, retained by France, 246 France’s natural boundaries/frontiers and, 165–166 French control of, 163–164 French indemnities proposed for conquests on, 235n113 French Republic holdings on, 195–196 historiography of, 165, 165n11, 165–166n17 Italian conquests and, 232n103 Map 5.1, 215 negotiations regarding, 164, 194–195, 194n123 pouvoir révolutionnaire and (overview), 160–205 treaties with German landholders on, 195–196, 195n130

Index The Rights of Man (Paine), 24 Rivaud, François, 251–252, 253–254 Roberjot, Claude, 182–183, 188–189 Robespierre, Maximilien annexations opposed by, 164 on armed missionaries, 191, 264n249, 271, 279–280 Avignon annexation supported by, 98, 106–107, 167, 190–192 on colonial France, 32–33, 33n100 decree of fraternity and, 134–135n33 Dufourny vs., 116 on Enlightenment philosophes, 26 foreign policy shifts of, 190–192, 202 on the global spread of the Revolution’s ideals, 283–284, 284n36 international law and, 126n8 on Louis XVI’s execution, 158 overthrown, 164, 192–193 popular sovereignty and, 21, 92–93 vs. pouvoir révolutionnaire, 190–192 Realpolitik of, 192n117 reign of, 5 on the Terror, 181–182n71, 279n24 war opposed by, 270–271 war policy shifts of, 191n113 Rocca, Peretti della, 45 Roche, Louis Charrier de la, 98 Roggenbach, Joseph Sigismund von, 211–212, 236–239 Roman Republic (as Sister Republic), 240, 250n184, 253–254, 255 Rome (ancient), 12, 102, 188n102, 239 Rome (as Holy See). See also popes Adélaïde and Victoire’s emigration to, 109–110 artworks appropriated from, 255–256 Austria and, 113 vs. Avignon as Holy See location, 84 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and, 109–110, 236 vs. France, 110, 112–113 French Avignon territorial claims rejected by, 103–104 French military presence in, 250 indemnities imposed on, 250, 256n211 Joseph Bonaparte as ambassador to, 236–239 Mack advancing on, 239–240 uprising in, 237–238 war declared on, 237–238

Index Rousseau, Jean Jacques Avignon and, 87 Corsica and, 36n2, 40 on dictators, 261n235 the general will and, 16–17, 20, 21, 21n62, 27n77, 27n78, 87, 95, 95n33, 127–128, 186, 277, 297–298 legal conscience and, 297–298 Merlin’s invocation of, 75–76, 75–76n119, 76n120 on popular sovereignty, 16–18, 127–128 pouvoir révolutionnaire and, 127–128, 128n11 renunciation of conquest and, 187 on respect for treaties, 55–56 social contract and, 16–18, 75–76 on state sovereignty, 17n46, 186–187n96 on state unity, 75–76n119 as Swiss native, 226–227 on war and states, 186n94 on war for survival, 162, 185–187, 186n90, 187n98 Rowlands, Guy, 13–14n33 Rühl, Philippe-Jacques, 67n97 Russell, John, 285–287, 293–294 Russia. See also Soviet Union Congress of Vienna and, 284 Crimea annexed by, 291–292 dissolution of empire of, 289 vs. France, 111 French diplomacy and, 103–104 French presence in the Netherlands and, 188–189 Great Britain and, 188–189 indemnities and requisitions as defense against, 183 Napoleon defeated in, 283 Napoleon’s accord with, 271, 273n7, 283 Pan-Hellenism and, 284 Pius VI and, 113 polities threatened by, 78n126 self-determination in, 281n30 territories annexed by, 291–292 in the War of the Second Coalition, 225–226, 266 at war with France, 111, 266, 268–269, 271, 283

335 Saint-André, Jean Bon, 188 Saint-Pierre, Charles Irénée Castel de, 210, 210n9 Salicetti, Christophe, 45–46, 256, 260 Salmasius, Claudius, 275n13 sans-culottes (radical revolutionary faction), 217, 245 Sardinia, 41, 131–132, 157 Savoy annexation requested by citizens of, 132 annexed, 4, 131–132, 141–142, 148–149, 166 Avignon as precedent for, 135 Berg and, 167 France’s natural boundaries/frontiers and, 166 French invasion of, 132 French promises of peace to, 132 French recruitment in, 148–149 Grégoire on, 136 Jacobin influence in, 142–143 as the Mont-Blanc department, 132, 156, 197 played against Nice, 148–149 popular sovereignty in, 115, 122, 135, 262–263 as precedent for Sister Republics, 208 as precedent for Switzerland, 222 as precedent for the Netherlands, 217 as precedent for the Rhineland, 162 secession and, 138 Treaty of Paris and, 240–241n145 voting in, 143, 208 Schleswig-Holstein question, 286–287 Schmidt, Carl, 24n70, 279n21 School of Salamanca, 296 Schroeder, Paul, 36–37n3, 56n62, 77, 78n126, 125–126n7, 196n135 secession, 40, 75–76, 98–99, 197–198n139, 274, 282, 291 secularization, 12–13n29, 78n126, 279n21 Ségur, Philippe de, 110 self-determination. See also popular sovereignty arguments against, 286 by attachment to a state, 289, 291–292 in Avignon, 86, 108, 118, 119, 282 in Belgium, 155 Cobban’s views of, 289

336 self-determination (cont.) by constituting an independent state, 289–290 in Corsica, 282 decolonization and, 289–290 in Germany, 282n33 International Court of Justice and, 290 international law and, 290n53, 291n54 Lansing vs., 289–290, 298 legal conscience as foundation of, 298 modern manifestations of, 119, 289–292 of multiple or overlapping territorial identities, 289, 289n48 vs. national borders, 282n32 in Poland, 199–200 popular sovereignty and, 283–289 in the Rhineland, 266–267, 282 in Russia, 281n30 in Yugoslavia, 291 Serbia, 289n48, 290–291 Servan, Joseph, 133 Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), 27–28, 90n14 Sewell, William, 282–283n34 Sicily, 285 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 16–18, 21n63, 34, 210–211, 210n11, 267 Sillery, Marquis de, 76 Sister Republics. See also specific republics artwork transfers and, 255–256 Aulard on, 208–209 Constitution of Year III and, 245 establishment of, 30–31, 207, 244–251 French appointment of officials in, 252 French designs on, 205, 205n161 French domination of, 6, 6n8, 268, 270–271 French federative system building in, 241n146 French objections to the Republic’s interventions in, 252–253 French requisitions alienating the citizens of, 258–259 French unification procedures and, 208 functions of, 207–208, 266–267 historiography of, 208–210, 208n5, 210n8 the Japanese empire and, 280 local agency in, 208–209

Index modern client states and, 280 Napoleon and, 6, 264 Nazi Germany and, 280 paradox of, 241–259 political independence of, 253–254 popular sovereignty and, 207–208, 241, 268 proposals regarding, 210–211 requisitions imposed on, 254–259, 268–269, 283 revolutions in, 208–209n5 state autonomy challenged by, 209n7 state status of (overview), 244–259 state status of, 241, 251, 265–266 in sympathy with the Revolution, 207 as unannexed territories, 208 slavery, 32 social contract (Hobbesian), 14–15n37, 106 The Social Contract (Rousseau), 75–76 Sorel, Albert, 24n70, 107–108n89, 132, 157–158, 165–166, 166n14, 187n98, 187, 208–209 South Sudan, 291 Soviet Union, 280, 280n26 Spain Basque separatism in, 290–291 Congress of Vienna and, 284 Corsica and, 41n10 Dutch Republic’s independence from, 214 Family Compact with France, 22–24, 72, 198 France’s national/cultural boundaries, 198 Genoa and, 56–57 Joseph Bonaparte as King of, 264 peace negotiated with, 192–193, 198, 203–204 separatist movements in, 290–291 at war with France, 171, 270, 283 Speyer, Prince-Bishop of, 52–53, 54, 69–71 Spieler, Miranda, 33n100 Spinola, Marquis of, 56–57, 59 Spinoza, Baruch, 185–186n90 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 14–15 St. Domingue (French Caribbean colony; the future Haiti), 32, 32n96, 32n97, 99, 185, 296

Index Stupfel, Johann Peter, 69, 74, 78–79, 83, 100 Suvorov, Alexander Vasilyevich, 266, 268–269 Sweden, 264 Switzerland. See also Helvetic Republic; Porrentruy as buffer territory, 200 as a confederation, 220–222, 220n46, 223, 225–226 constitution of, 222, 224n62, 223–224, 225n71, 248n178 divided into allied republics, 225–226 France’s direct involvement in, 222, 222n51 French alliance with, 171–172 French army in, 212–213 French commissioners in, 253 French domination of, 247–250, 248n178 French invasion of, 223, 243n155 Geneva annexed, 226–227 German majority sentiment in, 222–223 Mulhouse and, 227 neutrality of, 211–212 Nice as precedent for, 222 popular sovereignty in, 223–224, 226–227 pouvoir révolutionnaire in, 224–225 princes possessionnés and, 220 Republican assurances regarding independence of, 243–244 requisitions imposed on, 256, 256n214, 268–269 revolt against France in, 225–226 the Rhineland as precedent for, 228–229 Savoy as precedent for, 222 as a Sister Republic, 6, 223, 247–249 unitary republic in, 220–227 in the War of the Second Coalition, 225–226 Tackett, Timothy, 34n103, 54n58, 94n31 Tainturier, Charles, 183, 200–201 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de Cisalpine Republic’s Assembly site and, 251 on compensation for First Coalition sovereigns, 235 on the Napoleonic empire’s client states, 264

337 Eugène Delacroix and, 255–256 on France’s discontent with Napoleon’s wars, 271 Mengaud and, 225 as Minister of Foreign Affairs, 225 in the Netherlands, 130 Roman Sister Republic, 239, 250 Tsar Alexander I and, 271 Taylor, A. J. P., 285–286, 287 Ternan, Jean de, 55, 62–63 territorial claims (in Alsace), 2, 3–4, 30–31, 50–55, 65–66, 80, 114–115 territorial claims (in Avignon), 30–31, 87–88, 100, 102–103, 108, 112–113, 116–117, 118 territorial claims (in Belgium), 5–6, 30–31, 141–142, 155, 156n121 territorial claims (in the Comtat Venaissin), 105–106, 112–113, 116–117 territorial claims (in Corsica), 2, 3–4, 30–31, 42, 43–44, 56, 58, 60, 61, 105–106, 114–115 territorial claims (dynastic) in Alsace, 2, 155 Austria renouncing, 232 in Avignon, 87–88, 101–102, 104–105, 106–107, 110–112, 116–117, 155 consolidation methods of, 13–14n33 in Corsica, 155 international relations and, 1–2, 114–115 in Italy, 90n14 National Assembly’s debates on, 102–103 popular sovereignty and, 3–4, 163 territorial claims (general). See also wars of conquest boundaries of Europe and, 35, 74 conquest and, 42, 59–60 destabilizing effects of, 74–79, 164 dynasts’ vs. revolutionaries’ principles of, 11 French recruitment efforts and, 148–149 imposed on dissenters, 102, 104 indeterminacy of, 118 Map I.1, 4 military threats as rationale for, 5–6 outside France and Europe, 31–32n95

338 territorial claims (cont.) pouvoir révolutionnaire and, 126–128, 145–155 rationales for, 141–142 representatives opposing, 23–24n68, 164 Sister Republics and, 6 territorial claims (and popular sovereignty) in Alsace, 35, 54, 64, 114–115, 118–120 in Avignon, 3–4, 30–31, 83, 101–102, 103–105, 106–107 Constitution of 1791 and, 1–2 in Corsica, 35, 40, 114–115, 119–120 France’s objectives in, 5–6, 28n84, 126–127 the general will and, 21, 95–101 international law and, 29n87, 95–101 princes possessionnés and, 38–39 problems emanating from, 278 treaties emanating from, 287 Vattel on, 14 territorial claims (in the Rhineland), 4–5, 30–31, 127, 160–205 territorial claims (in Sister Republics), 208–210, 241–259 Terror Barère as agent of, 57 deprivations in occupied territories during, 202 end of, 164 foreign invasion and, 5 justifications for, 181–182n71 as the order of the day, 171–172, 172n37 popular sovereignty and, 95 Realpolitik in conquest during, 202 the Revolution’s wars and, 28–29n85 Théremin, Charles-Guillaume, 180n66, 184 Thermidor (1794) (coup and reaction against Robespierre), 164, 164n9, 192–193, 206–207, 241–242 Thiellay, Commandant, 242 Third Estate, 16, 17–18, 21n63, 44, 66n94, 109–111 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 12, 37, 80 Tibet, 290–291 Tinet, Pierre-Jacques, 255 Tolstoy, Leo, 30, 272–273

Index Toulon, 228 Transapadane Republic, 230–231, 232–235, 233n109 treaty law. See also specific treaties in Alsace, 39, 61–74 of the ancien régime, 64–67, 64n87 Avignon and, 103–104, 288 Corsica and, 39, 55–61, 278–279, 288 Genoa-France treaty and, 39–40, 55–61 German dependence on, 77–78 German unification in violation of, 288 inviolability of, 56–58 ironies in, 107–108n89 Italian unification in violation of, 288 medieval, 102–103, 106 Merlin’s rejection of, 64 Montmorin’s respect for, 62–63 National Assembly’s regard for, 72–74, 72n109 pacta sunt servanda as the basis of, 55–56, 56n62 Pius VI’s appeal to, 103–104 plebiscites in violation of, 288 popular sovereignty vs., 3–4, 39–40, 72, 55–74, 78 princes possessionnés and, 61–74, 67n97, 278–279 rationales for violation of, 79 territorial claims and, 15–16, 35 yielding to military conquest, 67–71 Treaty of Basel (1795), 194–195, 198, 287 Treaty of Campo Formio (1797), 157, 197, 232–235, 235n112, 239–240, 268, 287 Treaty of Lunéville (1801), 197–198, 268 Treaty of Münster (1648), 50, 51n45, 65–66, 65n88, 68–69, 71, 71n108. See also Peace of Westphalia Treaty of Nijmegen (1678–1679), 52n51, 68 Treaty of Paris (1814), 117, 240–241n145 Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 53, 68 Treaty of the Hague (1795), 219, 247 Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), 166, 198 Treaty of Tolentino (1797), 116–117, 238, 238n128 Treaty of Verdun (843), 39 Treilhard, Jean-Baptiste, 243–244 Tuck, Richard, 185–186n90 Tuileries Palace, 124–125 Tuscany, 264

Index Ukraine, 291–292 unintended consequences of international law and popular sovereignty, 34, 82, 273–274, 277–278 of popular sovereignty, 25–27, 160, 277 of the Revolution, 25n72, 33–34, 34n103, 82 Union of St. Cecilia (Comtat counterrevolutionary group), 91–92, 93 United Nations, 296n70 United States, 22–23n65, 80, 85, 228, 273n8, 276–277, 277n18, 279, 291, 297 Vattel, Emmerich de, 11, 13, 14–15n37, 137, 185, 185–186n90, 273–274n8 Vaud (Swiss canton), 222–223, 223n56, 225–226 Vendée (French counter-revolutionary region), 170–171, 216n32, 270 Vendémiaire uprising (1795), 228 Venice, 233–235, 235n112 Venturi, Franco, 35 Verdun, 39, 274 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Count de, 11, 18–19, 43, 58, 214 Victoire, Princess, 109–110 Victor Amadeus III (king), 132, 138, 240–241n145 Vineam quam plantavit (papal bull of Pius VII), 117 Vitoria, Francisco de, 296, 296n72 Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, Count de, 25 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 14–15, 26, 41, 55, 59, 72, 104, 292 voting. See also electoral assemblies in Berg, 167 in the Cisapline Republic, 249 demographics of, in Avignon, 95–96, 96n36 for deputies, 96n37 destabilizing effects of, 290–291 difficulties with the mechanics of, 95–98, 95n34, 157 emigration and, 97–98 French agents active in, 142–143, 245 French army and, 96–97, 139, 143 gender and, 95, 95n35

339 in Italy’s Sister Republics, 230–231 manipulation of, 157 in Napoleon’s regimes, 262, 262n240 popular sovereignty determined by, 95–101 in Rome, for Italian national unification, 285–286 treaty law violation justified in, 288 universal manhood suffrage, 20 violence and coercion in, 96–97 Vovelle, Michael, 235n112, 260n233 Walt, Stephen, 192n117 war. See also army/armies of France; declaration of peace to the world; decree of fraternity; decree of December 15; military indemnities and requisitions; wars of conquest; specific battles; specific places and the ancien régime, 24, 27–28 between Avignon and the Comtat, 93–94, 100–101, 103–104 civil war, 24n70, 80, 96–97, 101, 275n12 constitutional primacy in matters of, 22–23 defensive vs. offensive, 23–24, 24n70, 134–135, 182 against despots vs. populations, 141–142, 160, 181, 183, 212, 224 dynastic regimes and, 15n39 financed by warfare itself, 160–161 Girondins and, 125–126n7 ideological explanations for, 124–128, 145, 191n113, 201–202 in Italy, 116–117, 227–240 natural law as justification for, 185–186, 185–186n90 Nootka Sound crisis and, 22–23, 25, 72 popular sovereignty and, 4–6, 28n84, 122, 127–128 pouvoir révolutionnaire and, 123–124, 148, 149–150 Realpolitik and, 202 requisitions justified by, 159, 182–185 of revolutionaries vs. the ancien régime, 124n3 the Revolution’s transition to, 28–29, 28–29n85 Sister Republics and, 6, 244–259 territories conquered in, 1–2, 14–15

Index

340 war (cont.) Terror and, 202 as total war, 162, 162n6 as unlimited expansion, 162n6 in the Vendée, 163–164, 170–171, 216n32, 270 war (on Austria), 28, 83, 111, 121–122, 121–122n2 war (on France). See also army/armies of France France initiative regained in, 163–164, 228 justifying defensive retaliation, 125–126, 141–142, 146–148, 161–162, 182, 202–203, 254 justifying plunder, 148–149, 160–162, 164–165, 177–179, 182–185, 254, 257 Prussia in, 124–125 radicalization in France, 172, 192–193, 206–207 Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, the Netherlands in, 171 Terror and, 202 war (in Holland), 144 war (on Prussia), 27–28 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 30, 272–273 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), 41 War of the First Coalition (1792–1797), 157, 232–235 War of the Second Coalition (1799–1802), 197–198, 225–226, 240–241n145, 266 wars of conquest. See also declaration of peace to the world; territorial claims (general) Batavian Republic and, 218–219 Belgium and, 3–4, 128–138, 151–152, 177 Comtat Venaissin and, 105–106 as defense against invasion, 266–267 the Directory and, 219–220 Dufourny on, 116 France’s natural boundaries/frontiers and, 166 French declarations against, 23–24, 23–24n68, 28, 103–104, 105–106,

111–112, 129–130, 134–135, 136, 141–142, 145n72, 196 French imperatives in, 156–157 French justifications for, 141–142, 156–157, 181, 182, 201–202 French reevaluations of, 202, 231–233, 246 French shifts in attitude toward, 188 Monaco and, 128–138 national self-identification vs., 242 Nice and, 128–138 pouvoir révolutionnaire and, 213 precedents for, 3–4, 6–7, 108–116 reconsiderations of, 192–193, 241–242, 258 the Rhineland and, 166–173, 176–177, 178–179, 203, 213 Robespierre and, 192–193 royal sovereignty exercised through, 66–67 Savoy and, 128–138 Sister Republics arising from, 268 as wars for survival, 185–187 Wars of Religion, 12 Washington, George, 22–23n65 Weltz, Eric, 282n33 Westphalia. See Peace of Westphalia “What is the Third Estate?” (Sieyès), 17–18 Whitman, James Q., 15n39 Wight, Martin, 9n17, 13–14n33 Wilson, Woodrow Fourteen Points of, 85, 281, 281n30, 289, 290n52, 298 Lansing and, 119, 289–290, 298 national self-determination and, 85, 281n30, 281–282n31, 290n52, 291, 298 Wood, Gordon S., 277n19 Woolf, Stuart, 260, 260n229, 263, 263n248, 265n253 Wootton, David, 275n12 Wright, Martin, 8–9n17 Young, Arthur, 52 Zelada, Francesco Saverio de, 110–112