An 18th-Century French Nativity

Since we've been on the subject of Baroque Christmas art and depictions of the Nativity, I'll share this little piece from my collection.

It's a French eighteenth-century pencil sketch with sepia wash, on laid paper (c. 40 x 25 cm, with no apparent watermark).

The geometry suggests to me that it was a sketch for a wall painting, but that's just my best guess.

Oddly enough, the depiction of the central figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ child seems somewhat awkward in comparison with that of the flanking shepherds, who observe the miracle in quiet dignity.

In any case, the piece just radiates the spirit of the period.

18 December 1916: Battle of Verdun Ends

The Battle of Verdun, which had begun on 21 February 1916, at last came to an end on 18 December. The meat-grinder, as it came to be known, occasioned some 700,000 to 900,000 French and German casualties--among them at least 300,000 dead.

The medal below was issued by the city to the defenders. As historian and security expert John Schindler notes in a piece written on this week's centennial: because of the French system of rotating units in and out of Verdun, "virtually every division in the French army fought at Verdun at some point in 1916."

Details in the post from the February anniversary.

* * *

Resources

"The Butcher’s Bill of 1916: Europe’s Blood-Drenched Year of Horror:
A century ago, Europe was busy killing itself—a nightmare we still live with today," Observer, 17 Dec. 2016

John Schindler (@20committee) places the Battle of Verdun in the context of other bloody operations of 1916, including the Somme (intended to relieve the pressure on France arising from Verdun), and the lesser known battles in other theaters: Isonzo, on the Italian Alpine front, and Russia's Brusilov offensive against Austria-Hungary.

8 June 1794: Robespierre Presides Over the Festival of the Supreme Being

On 8 June 1794, Maximilien Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being, the inauguration of a new civil religion that was to be a high point of the remaking of France in accordance with the principles of revolutionary reason. Instead, it proved to be a foreshadowing of his downfall.


a belief in some divine presence was essential to the philosophical and social order

Contrary to the popular stereotype, Robespierre was not some bloodthirsty monster: in fact, he tried to rein in the "enragés" and "terrorists" who, oblivious to political reality, insisted on implementing ultra-radical policies and carried out murderous and indiscriminate retribution against any presumed "counterrevolutionary" elements of the population. For Robespierre, the so-called "Terror" was just "prompt, severe, inflexible” justice unique to revolutionary situations.

Part of his opposition to the "enragés" also derived from their radical atheism, which struck out against religion, the religious, and monuments of religious cultural heritage alike and did not scruple at the casual murder of priests and nuns. Although Robespierre had no use for the traditional church, he condemned  the radical "de-Christianizers" and upheld freedom of worship. For him, as a disciple of Rousseau, a belief in some divine presence was essential to the philosophical and social order, which, he believed, rested on the moral and spiritual certainty of reward and punishment.

"The day forever fortunate has arrived, which the French people have consecrated to the Supreme Being"

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen appended to the radical French Constitution of April 1793 acknowledged the existence of Supreme Being. Attempting to address the twin crises of the Revolutionary war and the internal divisions of the Revolutionary camp the following spring, Robespierre sought to institutionalize this belief. He delivered a Report to the National Convention on the Connections of Religious and Moral Ideas with Republican Principles, & on National Festivals on 18 Floréal, Year II (7 May 1794).

The day forever fortunate has arrived, which the French people have consecrated to the Supreme Being. Never has the world which He created offered to Him a spectacle so worthy of His notice. He has seen reigning on the earth tyranny, crime, and imposture. He sees at this moment a whole nation, grappling with all the oppressions of the human race, suspend the course of its heroic labors to elevate its thoughts and vows toward the great Being who has given it the mission it has undertaken and the strength to accomplish it.

Is it not He whose immortal hand, engraving on the heart of man the code of justice and equality, has written there the death sentence of tyrants? Is it not He who, from the beginning of time, decreed for all the ages and for all peoples liberty, good faith, and justice?
He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery, and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power. He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue.
It is He who implanted in the breast of the triumphant oppressor remorse and terror, and in the heart of the oppressed and innocent calmness and fortitude. It is He who impels the just man to hate the evil one, and the evil man to respect the just one. It is He who adorns with modesty the brow of beauty, to make it yet more beautiful. It is He who makes the mother's heart beat with tenderness and joy. It is He who bathes with delicious tears the eyes of the son pressed to the bosom of his mother. It is He who silences the most imperious and tender passions before the sublime love of the fatherland. It is He who has covered nature with charms, riches, and majesty. All that is good is His work, or is Himself. Evil belongs to the depraved man who oppresses his fellow man or suffers him to be oppressed.
The Author of Nature has bound all mortals by a boundless chain of love and happiness. Perish the tyrants who have dared to break it!
Republican Frenchmen, it is yours to purify the earth which they have soiled, and to recall to it the justice that they have banished! Liberty and virtue together came from the breast of Divinity. Neither can abide with mankind without the other.
O generous People, would you triumph over all your enemies? Practice justice, and render the Divinity the only worship worthy of Him. O People, let us deliver ourselves today, under His auspices, to the just transports of a pure festivity. Tomorrow we shall return to the combat with vice and tyrants. We shall give to the world the example of republican virtues. And that will be to honor Him still.
[source]

Following the political and philosophical exposition, the Report set forth a 15-point decree on the cult and its festivals.

    First Article.

      The French people recognizes the existence of the Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul.

    II.

      It recognizes that the manner of worship worthy of the Supreme Being is the practice of the duties of man.

    III.

      It places chief among these duties: to detest bad faith and tyranny, to punish tyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do all the good that one can to others, and to be unjust toward no one.

    IV.

      Festivals shall be instituted to remind men of the Deity and of the dignity of their state....

It concluded with the outline of a Festival of the Supreme Being, proposed by the artist Jacques-Louis David, to be held on 20 Prairial Year II (June 8, 1794)

On 4 June 1794, Robespierre was elected President of the Convention (=legislature), and on 8 June, he presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being, according to the aforementioned mise-en-scène.

Festival of the Supreme Being, from Charles François Gabriel Levachez, and Son, and
Jean Duplessi-Bertaux, Tableaux historiques de la Révolution Française, 1798-1804
(folio engraving; image size: c. 190 x 250 mm)

Unlike the more shallow, who felt the need to prove their revolutionary bona fides through ostentatiously "populist" dress and demeanor, Robespierre saw no contradiction in combining the most radical principles with traditional sartorial propriety: he was a fastidious dresser who still wore a powdered wig and silk stockings. A contemporary account described him as presiding over the festival "dressed in a sky-blue coat, with exquisite ruffles of lace, and holding a bunch of flowers, fruit, and ripe wheat in his hand."

The hostile image below, from a nineteenth-century history, conveys the stereotypical view of him: murderous monster as fastidious prig.

from the first French edition of Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins (History of the Girondists--the moderate left-center faction in the Revolution). The work ran to 61 "books" divided among 8 volumes, whose publication (Paris: Furne et Cie.,1847-50) coincided with the outbreak of a new revolution, in which the Romantic poet and liberal politician himself briefly played a key part. It was accompanied by 39 steel engravings of Revolutionary figures, along with a portrait of the author. The plates, drawn by Denis August Marie Raffet (1804-60), engraved by various artists, and printed by Plon, were issued separately in 13 installments costing 1 franc each, from 1848 to 1850 (sheet size: c. 19.5 x. 25.7 cm). This engraving is by one Bosselman, active in the first half of the nineteenth century.


All did not go as planned, either. When he symbolically set fire to the statue of Atheism to reveal the statue of Wisdom rising form its ashes, the latter emerged rather scorched. Whereas Robespierre viewed the Festival as a crucial last attempt to reinvigorate the Revolution, both contemporaries and modern scholars have seen it as one of the factors that contributed to his downfall. It alienated both de-Christianizers and more traditional deists; critics accused him of megalomania and seeking to set himself up as  a new "pope" or "Mahomet" (Muhammad).

When despite the new military victory of Fleurus (26 June), which seemed to secure the Republic's fate, Robespierre insisted on ratcheting up the Terror against internal enemies, both left and right, he found that he longer had a base of support and fell victim to his foes on both extremes a month later. The radical Revolution died with him.

Liberty, Government, and the Press in One Sentence

In the course of working on a revised version of an older essay on the history of periodicals, I had occasion to consider what sorts of documents or objects might illustrate it, so I'll share a few here.

* * *

“Where liberty does not reign, it is fear that governs”

autograph sentiment, 1878, from journalist and publisher Émile de Girardin (1802-81), whose conservative La Presse (1836) introduced the penny newspaper to France. He later moved toward the center of the political spectrum, turning against Napoleon III and opposing the forces of reaction under the Third Republic.

21 February 1916: The Battle of Verdun Begins

This month's artifact of the moment:

A century ago began one of the fiercest battles of a war that has come to stand for unprecedented slaughter. When the fighting on the western front during the Great War changed from the anticipated war of movement to the unexpected war of position, military leaders on both sides in vain sought a way out of the stalemate.


Operation Judgment

As 1915 drew to a close, German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn presented a plan to the Kaiser:

The strain on France has reached breaking point--though it is certainly borne with the most remarkable devotion. If we succeed in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, that breaking point would be reached and England's best sword knocked out of her hand.

A massive assault against the right target would "compel the French to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death."

That target was the fortified area around the Verdun, a city with great symbolic resonance in French history. An ancient Roman fortress, it also lent its name to the treaty that in 843 divided the empire of Charlemagne among his successors. The fall of the fortress during the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 had exposed Paris to the threat of capture. By contrast, in 1870, it was the last fort to fall to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War. Despite the presence of new outlying fortifications built in the wake of that defeat, it was weakly defended in 1916: the garrison was small, and its guns had been removed for use on other fronts.

The Germans assembled overwhelming force and began "Operation Gericht" (Judgment) on 21 February with a massive assault. In the words of John Keegan:

Among the 542 heavy guns were thirteen of the 420mm and seventeen of the 305mm howitzers that had devastated the Belgian forts eighteen months earlier, and to supply them and the medium artillery a stock of two and a half million shells had been accumulated. The whole of the French defensive zone on a front of eight miles--one German division and 150 guns to each mile--was to be deluged with preparatory fire, so that 'no line is to remain unbombarded, no possibilities of supply unmolested, nowhere should the enemy feel himself safe.' Falkenhayn's plan was brutally simple. The French, forced to fight in a crucial but narrowly constricted corner of the Western Front, would be compelled to feed reinforcements into a battle of attrition where the material circumstances so favored the Germans that defeat was inevitable. If the French gave up the struggle, they would lose Verdun; if they persisted, they would lose their army.

After early German gains, the French rallied to the defense, desperately resupplying the city via what became known as the "sacred road" (Voie sacrée) and subjecting the German attackers to devastating artillery fire. The fight thus ground on for nearly a year, bleeding both armies rather than merely the defenders. Combined casualty estimates for the two sides range from around 714,000 to 936,000. Finally, in late October, the French recaptured the key fortress of Douaumount, and by mid-December, they completed the counter-offensive.


To "The heroes, known and unknown, both dead and living"

In November, the municipal council of Verdun (meeting in Paris) ordered a medal struck to honor the heroic defenders. Each 37-mm bronze medal came in a small leather pouch stamped with the name of the city and holding a certificate.

The certificate, which depicted the medal and bore the hand-stamped seal of the city, read:

TO THE HIGH CHIEFS,
OFFICERS, SOLDIERS,
TO ALL,
    
     The heroes, known and
unknown, both dead and living,
who have triumphed over the
barbarians' onslaught and im-
mortalised her nam[e] throughout
the world and for ages to come,
the Town of Verdun, inviolate
and standing on her ruins, dedi-
cates this medal in token of her
gratitude.

The obverse of 37-millimeter bronze medal designed by Émile Vernier (1852-1927) depicts a defiant Marianne (symbol of the Republic) wearing a military uniform and the new army helmet, one fist clenched in defiance, the other holding a sword, poised for the offensive. Around the rim is the watchword of the defenders, "They shall not pass."

The obverse depicts the Porte Chaussée of Verdun between palms, with the word "Verdun" above and the starting date of the battle, 21 February 1916, below.
 

This unofficial medal was eventually issued in a variety of forms and sizes for all who had fought in the Verdun sector, broadly defined, at any point during the war.


"sacrifices . . . made in a most promising cause"?

Falkenhayn summarized his achievements:

The enemy nowhere secured any permanent advantages; nowhere could he free himself from the German pressure.  On the other hand, the losses he sustained were very severe.  They were carefully noted and compared with our own which, unhappily, were not light.

The result was that the comparison worked out at something like two and a half to one: that is to say, for two Germans put out of action five Frenchmen had to shed their blood. But deplorable as were the German sacrifices, they were certainly made in a most promising cause.

History has begged to differ. Falkenhayn had to relinquish his position as Chief of Staff, replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, the hero of Tannenberg who would go on to become President of Germany under the Weimar Republic and reluctantly appoint Hitler as Chancellor. And that is not the end of the ironies. Among the French soldiers captured in the battle was a young Charles de Gaulle. His commander was Philippe Pétain, who achieved fame for his defense of Verdun. In 1940, following the fall of Dunkirk, they briefly served together in the war cabinet before becoming archenemies, as Pétain took the reins of the collaborationist Vichy regime, while de Gaulle led the Free French from London.

* * *

Source of quotations:  John Keegan, The First World War (NY: Vintage Books, 1998), 277-86

A Merry Christmas from Maximilien Robespierre (with a side-note on that Newton business)

From the vaults via last year's Tumblr post:


Understandably enough, we tend to think of December 25 primarily as Christmas, thereby ignoring or forgetting other events that occurred on that date. Among the latter is the birthday of Isaac Newton (1642).

Neil deGrasse Tyson caused a stink this year when he made what he thought was a witty tweet about this coincidence and aroused the ire of some who thought he was anti-Christian. In fact, he was doing nothing new or particularly clever: advocates of science have for some years promoted celebration of the 25th as Newton’s birthday as a light-hearted way of increasing awareness of scientific knowledge.

I always honor the birthday of the scientific revolutionary Newton, but also the occasion of a major address by the political revolutionary Robespierre.

read the rest

Marat, modestly medallically commemorated

Of course, having noted the assassination of Jean Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday and her subsequent execution (1, 2) it would be unseemly not to devote at least a small amount of space to her victim, the radical revolutionary journalist.

For some reason (well, I guess it's not that hard to figure out), I seem to have a respectable stock of Marat memorabilia. Here is one of the most modest items: a small (dia.: 22-3 mm.) uniface copper medal depicting a bust of Marat (with characteristic kerchief on head because of his skin disease) facing left.

The legend reads, "To Marat, The Friend of the People [both the appellation by which he was known and the title of his journal], 1793." There are remains of an attachment loop (bélière). The Stanford University/Bibliothèque Nationale de France collaboration describes this item as from 1793, though other sources suggest that there was also a recast during the Revolution of 1848, when this iconography became fashionable again. (The uniface form and toning of this piece might indeed suggest the latter.)

In any case, pause for a moment to recall one radical journalist who was murdered by an extremist at the opposite end of the political spectrum. You need not share his views in order to condemn her act. And perhaps the case speaks to our situation today.

23 July 1793: Fall of the Mainz Republic (you haven't heard of it?)

You haven't heard of this? Neither had I, at first.

When I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, I was a history major, but I had the de facto equivalent of minors in French and German literature, with undergraduate and later graduate course work in both.

I was--although I considered myself reasonably well-educated for a midwestern yokel--struck by the title of a book by one of my German professors, Jost Hermand:  Von Mainz nach Weimar (1793-1919) Studien zur deutschen Literatur (From Mainz to Weimar (1793-1919) Studies on German Literature). I of course understood the reference to the founding of the Weimar Republic. But Mainz? What was it doing in a history of German literature and democracy? As far as I knew it: the site of some great medieval edifices and home to Gutenberg. What was it doing here?

As I soon learned, it was the "first republic on German soil," proclaimed by local revolutionaries (under the auspices of French forces) on March 18, 1793, and extinguished in the summer of 1793. (And I don't think I would have learned that even if I had taken a formal course on the French Revolution rather than just "read around" in that literature on my own.) The fall of Mainz, along with the assassination of Marat and other setbacks, was one of the factors that prompted the introduction of the so-called "Terror."

Here, a depiction of the Liberty Tree erected by German revolutionaries:

Hand-colored engraving:
"Depiction of the Liberty Tree and the pikes, planted
at Mainz on 13 January 1793.
[at left:] Scale: 1 inch to 6 feet." Actual size of image: 3 x 5 inches)

Rituals and symbols were important, and the new iconography of the Revolution appeared even in the more mundane domain of the economy. Prussian Coalition forces besieged the city beginning on 31 March, and in early May, when it became clear that the crisis was going to continue, the French created special siege money:

Some examples of coins and currency over on the tumblr.


More on the Mainz Republic and its significance.

Charlotte Corday Medal: Well Deserved?

In contrast to the portrait prints in the previous post, numismatic commemorations of Charlotte Corday, assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, are fairly rare.

Here is one of the more refined of those exceptions:

Attributed (1, 2) to the Swedish medallist Carl Carlsson Enhörning (1745-1821), it is made of gilded bronze, with a diameter of 29 mm.

obverse

I don't know the source of the likeness, but it certainly seems to be an idealized generic representation. (I myself do not know of a single depiction in profile--so it is likely that Enhörning would not have, either--though it is possible that this one is based on the artist's interpretation of one of the full-face portraits.)

In any case, the inscription on the reverse suggests closeness to the event, at which time, presumably, few accurate representations of Corday would have been available.

The words, "bien méritée,"--well earned, or well deserved--make Enhörning's political sympathies clear, lest there was any doubt. In choosing this form, the artist also implicitly echoes the standard type of medal that governments, schools, academies, and other institutions issued for commendable achievement. For example, this small silver medal of the eighteenth-century Kingdom of Poland under Stanisław II August given to cadets:

Whether her act was justified is a matter that we can continue to debate. I keep the medal in my collection because I feel her fate rather than the act was "well deserved." Marat was a radical revolutionary leader--not unproblematic in his politics and personal views, yet also hardly the demon that his enemies claimed he was.

Bien méritée? As I said in the previous post, the verdict of "the Raging Reporter" Egon Erwin Kisch seems the most congenial.  Introducing a piece by Marat in his anthology, Klassischer Journalismus (Berlin, 1923), he explains, "the agitated hysteric, Charlotte Corday, a stupid person, stabbed him to death."

Portraits of Charlotte Corday: From Counter-revolutionary Soft Porn to the Picture that Churchill Used to Chide DeGaulle

On 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday stabbed the French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat to death in his bathtub. On July 17, she went to the guillotine.

For counterrevolutionaries, she was a great heroine and tyrannicide. Even many French and foreign supporters of a moderate Revolution viewed her with some sympathy, though the issue of assassination remained a moral and political dilemma that they did their best to finesse. Personally, I've always favored the terse characterization of the episode by the great radical journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1923):  "the agitated hysteric, Charlotte Corday, a stupid person, stabbed him to death."

counter-revolutionary soft porn

Portraits of Corday issued soon after the event, and especially in the nineteenth century, tended to romanticize or infantilize her, as this selection from an earlier post will show.




I described one of them as "Victorian counter-revolutionary soft porn: a little bondage, a little rain and wind—Joan of Arc in a wet t-shirt."

By contrast, this engraving, based on a sketch that the artist Jean-Jacques Hauer made while she was in prison, is the most distinctive if not most attractive. Both she and her contemporaries regarded as the most accurate.

And the best thing about it is that it had a strange second life. Winston Churchill had this engraving on display in his home in order, when dealing with de Gaulle, to remind him of the fate of arrogant Frenchmen.

A Toast to the Fall of the Bastille in the Manner of G. W. F. Hegel

"This glass is for the 14th of July, 1789 -- to the storming of the Bastille"

 

 

I often like to celebrate holidays with an eye to old historical practices.

One of my favorite traditions was that of the great German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). As a student at the famed Stift in Tübingen, he was a passionate admirer of the French Revolution, more interested in political philosophy than epistemology (or the theology that he was supposed to be studying). According to a well-established but less well-proven tradition, Hegel, along with the likewise soon to be famous poet Friedrich Hölderlin and philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, erected and danced around a liberty tree on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in the early 1790s.

But it is absolutely established that, every year, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution, the older Hegel--even though he had seemingly become more conservative--celebrated with a bottle of fine wine. I've known the story for years, but if I stop to think about it, I must have encountered it as a college or grad student, probably via the memoirs of the Prussian diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, while I was doing research on his friend, the poet and journalist Heinrich Heine.

In 1820, as Terry Pinkard's recent biography of Hegel tells it:

At the inn called the Blue Star (where Hegel thereafter always stayed when going to Dresden), various friends and compatriots from other universities gathered for dinner  . . . when the usual local Meißner wine was offered to Hegel, he rejected it, ordering instead some bottles of Champagne Sillery, the most distinguished champagne of its day. Having sent the expensive bottles of Sillery around the table, he then entreated his companions to empty their glasses in the memory of the day on which they were drinking. Everyone happily downed the Sillery, but when it became clear that nobody at the table knew exactly why they should be drinking to that particular day, Hegel turned in mock astonishment and with raised voice declared, 'This is for the 14th of July, 1789 -- to the storming of the Bastille.' Needless to say, those around Hegel were astonished; the old man had not only bought them the finest champagne available, he was drinking to the Revolution at the height of the reaction and at a time when he himself might have been in danger. (But maybe this was not so odd; in 1826, Hegel, once again in the company of young people, again drank at toast to the storming of the Bastille, telling Varnhagen von Ense at the time that he in fact always drank a toast to the storming of the Bastille on July 14.)

Hegel at that time wasn't really an "old man": only 50 (!); admittedly, he died at the age of 61. But I hope that, when I am a truly "old" scholar, I will continue to associate with "young people" and exhort them to remember the Revolution even as I listen to the particular reforming or revolutionary concerns of their own generation.


Print ephemera

Depicted above, two very rare pamphlets from the outbreak of the Revolution:

Paris Sauvé . . .  recounts the events from 12 to 15 July. The anonymous author notes that it is impossible to produce a definitive history at this early point, but offers a preliminary sketch, dedicated to "you courageous Parisians, brave fellow citizens, liberators of all France."

The Récit of the statement by the King on 15 July, by contrast, is an official document on the monarch's report to the Estates General following the storming of the Bastille. He here assures them that, having come before them to consult on the "horrible disorders taking place in the capital," he is one with the nation. He guarantees the personal security of the representatives of the nation and asks them to join him in working for the common welfare.


The wine

Unlike the famous Hegel, I wasn't about to spring for top-of-the-line French champagne (even for myself, much less for a bunch of students) so I chose a much more modest beverage closer to what the typical Frenchman might have drunk back then: in this case, a Pied-de-Perdrix ("partridge foot"). It's one of the old "black wines," a recently rediscovered relative of the Malbec--what one critic calls an "earthy, rustic wine."

I did, however, use a fine hand-blown and -cut eighteenth-century glass appropriate to the occasion. (It's English rather than French, but you have to make do with what you have lying around the house.)

Vive la révolution. Cheers.

#JeSuisCharlie #JeSuisAhmed #JeSuisJuif

Watching the nonstop news coverage of the jihadi terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher market as well as the extraordinary demonstrations of French crosscultural solidarity and international support for free speech and secular democracy, I was reminded of a few images from French history, which I posted on the tumblr.


France: All Are Equal Before The Law

France: An Example to the Peoples of the World

France: Over Two Centuries of Jewish Emancipation

23 July 1793 Fall of Mainz to Coalition Forces

The conquest and then loss of the fortified city of Mainz by French troops in a span of some nine months constituted two turning points in the history of the Revolution and moreover came to symbolize stillborn prospects for German democracy.

Ironically, it was the moderate faction of the Girondins rather than the radicals who had recklessly led the French into war in April, 1792 (Robespierre famously warned that people tend not to be fond of missionaries with bayonets). Initially, the conflict went badly. As the situation deteriorated in August, the people of Paris overthrew the monarchy. The fall of two key frontier fortresses left the country open to invasion, and led to the “September Massacres” of suspected counterrevolutionaries.

The situation changed dramatically when the revolutionary army held its ground and scored a stunning symbolic victory over the seasoned Prussian troops at Valmy on 20 September. The National Convention declared France a republic two days later. Thereafter, the French went over to the offensive. General Custine’s Army of the Vosges captured Speyer, Worms, Mainz (21 October), and Frankfurt in barely a month, mainly because the easily panicked French troops faced little opposition.

The Mainz episode came to epitomize, for contemporaries and later generations alike, the perils and promise of revolution, not least the political engagement of “intellectuals.” Then as now, internal developments commanded the most attention, and the political significance outweighed the military. Debates over the past have a way of becoming arguments about the present and future.

Local radicals founded their own Jacobin Clubs and, in collaboration with the French troops now promising liberation to all peoples seeking assistance (19 Nov.), set about overthrowing the old social order on the left bank of the Rhine. The results were mixed: a bold experiment in democracy that drew support from a wide social spectrum but never became truly populist or practically successful. The conditions were not auspicious. As the idealism of the revolutionary leaders, many of them intellectuals or former officials, collided with the reality of public skepticism or hostility, frustration and French power-political needs led to ever more coercive measures, recapitulating the transition of the Revolution itself from liberalism to authoritarianism. Finally, the new “Rhenish-German National Convention” declared an independent republic (18 March) and then humiliatingly and almost immediately (21 March) sought union with France, which had discovered a belief in “natural” frontiers.

Emergency coinage from the siege of Mainz,  issued by decree of May 1793

coins of similar design were struck in three denominations—1, 2, and 5 sols—in copper, bronze, and bell metal

left: obverse, derived from a coin of the constitutional monarchy, adapted with republican language

right:  reverse, denoting the denomination, and bearing the legend, coinage of the siege of Mainz

Within a fortnight, the high hopes seemed a cruel illusion. Threatened by Coalition forces, Custine had been forced to withdraw the bulk of his troops. The Allies encircled Mainz on March 30, invested it on April 14 and began shelling it on June 18. The bombardment became a sort of horrible spectacle for the population of the surrounding region.

 The city finally fell on July 23. Physical damage was tremendous.  The author Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who accompanied the Coalition troops in 1792 and 1793 observed:

Here we found the most lamentable state of things.  Ashes and ruins were all that was left of what it had taken centuries to build. . . . The mind became distracted at the sight—a much more melancholy scene than that of a town burnt down by accident."

The departing French pledged not to engage the Allies for one year, and many joined the revolutionary armies of the west, where their skill contributed greatly to the crushing of the Vendéan revolt. The fate of their German collaborators was less gentle, ranging from harassment to prison terms, exile, and lynching. The most celebrated primary source is the account by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who accompanied the besiegers but displayed great empathy for all participants (especially civilians) and a spirit of reconciliation all too rare among the victors.  He several times intervened to protect local revolutionaries from attack.  Confronting a man who "swore deadly vengeance against the Clubbists,"

I advised him to use milder language, and represented to him that the return to a peaceful and domestic state of things should not be destroyed by a new war between fellow-citizens, and by feelings of hatred and revenge, as otherwise our misfortunes would never end;

The fall of Mainz, combined with other blows that summer, from the assassination of Marat to the spread of bloody rebellion in both the west and south of France, precipitated the levée en masse and escalation of the incipient Terror. The siege of the city marked the beginning of a series of foreign military setbacks that would stretch from April 1793 to June 1794. Not coincidentally, the turn in the tides of military fortune eventually brought about a softening of support for the Terror and the overthrow of Robespierre and his faction in July. Mainz changed hands several times in 1794-1795, but under the Treaties of Campo Formio (1797) and Lunéville (1801) returned to France and became the Prefecture of the Department of Mont-Tonnerre. In 1814, Mainz was restored to German sovereignty.


Although one should beware of exaggerating the importance of the Mainz revolution, it was the first modern German democratic movement. The problems it posed—the strengths and limitations of both force and idealism, the challenge of implanting democracy under occupation, and the dilemma arising when the majority will rejects democracy—remain topics that we continue to debate in both the military and political realms.

(adapted from a piece I published earlier in another setting)