In September 1792, there were two dates of the highest importance for France.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon on September twentieth, in the National Convention’s final preparatory session, the deputies unanimously agreed that the monarchy would be abolished completely in law, and that a new French Republic would be born. The year 1792 would also be designated Year One of the Republic.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon on September twenty-ninth, Duc de Brunswick, having finished signing the Secret Treaty of Valmy, ordered the more than forty thousand troops of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition garrisoning the Moon Bay fortress to march out in formation and lay down their arms before the French army under André’s command. Valmy ended in victory.

  It must be emphasized that although on September twentieth the deputies of the National Convention could hardly wait to proclaim the Republic, France at that moment was still in the midst of a massive invasion by one hundred and forty thousand foreign intervention troops, including ten thousand insurgents of the émigré detachment. At the Brissot faction’s proposal, the republican parliamentary government—note that it was no longer “an assembly and a government,” for the National Convention had been vested with supreme legislative and executive authority—kept a deliberately low profile in its external messaging. As a result, most Parisians were left in ignorance, while many newspapers in the city continued to conduct a grand debate over the merits of monarchy versus republic; and even some diplomatic documents sent to foreign legations still, half consciously and half unconsciously, retained language that referred to the Kingdom of France.

  Time now returns to the morning of September twenty-first, when the National Convention formally opened. More than seven hundred newly elected deputies from across France gathered as before in the debating chamber of the Manège Hall. In the morning session, the deputy Prieur of the Marne—who had also served as a representative in the Estates-General and the Constituent Assembly—proposed that the Palais des Tuileries, though plundered bare, should be restored and made the Convention’s seat. This, he argued, would demonstrate that the new democratic republic had replaced the old despotic monarchy. The proposal was greeted with enthusiasm and passed with almost unanimous support.

  Because the Manège Hall stood only a little more than one hundred meters from the abandoned Bourbon palace, Pétion, newly elected as the first rotating president of the National Convention, organized a visit during the midday recess. The deputies toured the Tuileries and offered their own proposals for renovating the future seat of government; the entire reconstruction was expected to last until the summer of 1793.

  Yet as these more than seven hundred deputies—representing twenty-five million French citizens, wearing tricolor sashes, and preparing to grasp both legislative and executive power—strode through the great Tuileries garden with heads held high, there was no celebratory mass, no ceremonial robe, not even a decent slogan.

  On the way back from the old palace to the debating hall, Robespierre walked with Danton, Desmoulins, Marat, Augustin, and the painter Davy, but deliberately avoided standing shoulder to shoulder in the same row as Pétion. Moreover, the Robespierre–Danton faction, the Mountain, was displeased that Pétion, who had lost in the Paris electoral district, could nonetheless become the Convention’s first rotating president. But with the situation so harsh, it was still unwise to expose Jacobin internal contradictions to the open air.

  In fact, weeks earlier, at the three-man meeting on Rue du Paon, Robespierre had proposed expelling Brissot, Vergniaud, and Pétion from the Jacobin Club. Danton, however, voiced his concern, because André had written to him—Danton was Minister of Justice and also a leading figure in the cabinet—declaring that until the war of national defense had ended, any person or organization that attempted to split the Jacobins would suffer André’s most merciless and most lethal blow.

  Robespierre understood that André’s warning was not meant to shield the Brissot faction. André simply did not want Paris to tear itself apart, cut off the front’s supplies, and damage morale. Even so, the man from Arras, behind his green lenses, brooded over the matter. One could guess that in the little notebook where he drafted lists of future revenge, André’s name climbed several places higher.

  Although the Convention opened on September twenty-first and the faces of the seven hundred deputies were full of confident smiles, in most hearts there was still a weight of shadow. The reason was simple: the Northern Command Headquarters had not, on the expected timetable, delivered a decisive, annihilating blow against the German coalition. When Pétion, for the third time in his capacity as rotating president, sent a letter to André, he did not know that the Commander-in-Chief, under even greater pressure, directly “invited” him to come to the front for an inspection—an invitation that frightened the timid Pétion into writing no further letters.

  Though Pétion was on excellent personal terms with him, André most detested Paris meddling in major operations without understanding the battlefield. Since the Command Headquarters had been formally authorized by two successive legislatures, it followed that within the theater, all military, economic, administrative, and diplomatic affairs were decided by Commander-in-Chief André. The former seven-man committee of the Command Headquarters had been completely hollowed out by André during the September reshuffle that accompanied the general re-election of deputies.

  When Valmy ended in victory, André did not comply with the Convention’s request to send a dispatch at once. Instead he waited until ten o’clock at night, after more than forty thousand prisoners had been marched into the Suippes prisoner camp twenty kilometers away. Only then did the Northern Command Headquarters send its “good news” to the Convention—one line of text:

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Long live the Republic!”

  By André’s prior arrangement with Paris, the phrase “Long live the Republic!” would be used only when the French army had won a great victory. Thus, when those words left the Command Headquarters base at Suippes and, over more than four hours, crossed multiple provinces and more than two hundred kilometers to arrive above the Louvre, where the Paris telegraph office was located, even wet, leaden Paris was lit at once by the flame of victory.

  Two hours later, when the second and more detailed battle report reached the National Convention, it was already seven o’clock in the morning on September thirtieth. The chamber became a sea of joy. Deputies of every faction set aside their old resentments and divisions for the moment. With tears in their eyes they leapt from their benches, ran back and forth across the hall, and embraced and kissed the cheeks of everyone they met. Then hundreds of deputies, hand in hand, sang in chorus again and again the “Marseillaise” and the “Chant du Départ.”

  One hour later, when the deputy Fouché of the Loire proposed that André Franck, Lieutenant General, who had rendered outstanding service, be granted the title of Marshal of the Republic, the hall erupted in applause. The deputies rose once more as a body and shouted, arms raised, the ringing slogans, “Long live Marshal André!” and “Long live the Republic!”

  At that moment even Robespierre, seething inwardly, had to do the same. He saw his allies of the Mountain—Danton, Desmoulins, Marat, Couthon, and Davy—each of them wearing an ecstatic expression, almost dancing with excitement. Robespierre therefore decided to tear up the draft speech he had been carrying, the one that accused André of dictatorial rule over the Northern Command Headquarters. No—he should burn it. No one else must ever see it.

  For André’s victory was the victory of the French, and it also belonged to the Jacobins. As for the royalists hiding in Paris, they could only cower under their quilts, terrified out of their wits by the thunder of triumphant slogans.

  Outside the Manège Hall, more than thirty thousand Parisians, drawn by the news, stood in the unbroken autumn rain, holding their breath and listening with rapt attention to the front-line dispatches that poured out from the Convention chamber:

  In this battle, the main body of Brunswick’s Prusso-Austrian Coalition has been encircled and annihilated. The Prussian corps of more than forty thousand has laid down its arms before the French army under Commander-in-Chief André. As of eight o’clock in the morning on September twenty-second, the number of coalition troops marched into the prisoner camps has already reached seventy thousand. In addition, those killed on the battlefield, those who died of severe wounds, and non-combat losses from disease and the like amount to roughly twenty thousand. At present, two hundred thousand brave and invincible French troops are, across every front, fully blocking and pursuing the remaining fifty thousand foreign intervention forces, expanding the fruits of victory...

  “Long live André!”

  “Long live the Republic!”

  “Long live Marshal André!”

  ...

  Once the news of victory arrived, the Parisians’ long-suppressed love of exuberance finally poured out without restraint. Shouting slogans, singing war songs, passionate embraces, and kisses were merely the traditional items. When they heard that the Prussian corps had surrendered in full, tens of thousands of overexcited sans-culottes surged into the Convention chamber. Without so much as a word, they hoisted the hundreds of deputies out one by one, set them on their shoulders, and then paraded through the great Tuileries garden again and again, cheering all the while.

  The Paris police and the National Guard responsible for the Convention’s security could do nothing about it. Fortunately, the crowds’ spontaneous actions were all well intentioned, and there was no real danger.

  Women ran back to their homes, took out their finest dresses and hair ornaments, and returned to the Revolutionary Square and the Tuileries garden to sing and dance in celebration of Victory Day. Whenever they saw a French soldier in a blue uniform pass by, these frenzied women rushed forward like wolves, threw the unfortunate man to the ground, and then—five or six sturdy women working together—dragged the poor fellow beneath a nearby bridge pier or into the garden shrubbery and feasted on him.

  A sergeant of the Army of the North, a man named Nelson who was in Paris on duty, described the scene frankly. He said:

  “...It was madness. I was walking along the Rue des Tuileries when more than twenty Parisian women—some pretty, some ugly—surrounded me, and then, before I knew what was happening, they led me into the grass in a nearby garden... (use your imagination here) I did not crawl out until night. When I was lucky enough to find my trousers and put them on, I discovered my backside was exposed, cold and drafty. In the midst of misfortune, I was still not the worst. Of the dozens of blue-uniformed soldiers who crawled naked out of the garden that night, at least seven or eight ended up impotent.”

  This scandalous affair, though impossible to prosecute afterward, was nonetheless placed under a public gag order by the Paris City Hall. It forbade discussion in public places and did not permit newspapers to report or circulate the story. Yet in July and August of the following year, 1793, among the many newborns in Paris, a great number of boys were given “André” as a middle name. In the Bible, André means “strong,” “manly,” and “brave.”

  ...

  The songs of celebration in the Revolutionary Square, the Manège Hall, and the Tuileries garden also reached the king’s prison at the Temple. The clear bugle calls and urgent drumbeats that proclaimed the end of monarchy passed through the thick walls of medieval rooms and pressed in through the cracks around the windowsill.

  Louis XVI was then reading in his cramped chamber in the tower. Since mid-August, the former King of France had finished nearly three hundred volumes in various languages, and had even translated German or Latin passages into French. A jailer sympathetic to the royal family secretly told him that the force sent to rescue him under Duc de Brunswick had failed and had surrendered in full to the French. Louis XVI, however, showed no reaction. He did not even lift his eyes.

  Queen Marie Antoinette, on hearing the bad news, clutched the Dauphin and burst into tears. Then, as though something came back to her, she found a small box beside her pillow. Inside was the gift André had given to Princess Marie-Thérèse—or rather, a special one-way ticket: a plain brooch carved from stones of the Bastille.