In 1791, Easter finally arrived. Louis XVI and his Queen awaited the holiday with genuine eagerness: they longed for a change of air, to escape the dreary, oppressive, and utterly unprivate Tuileries, and to enjoy the brilliant springtime and a few moments of calm at the Chateau de Saint-Culot in the western outskirts of Paris. It was a very beautiful chateau, surrounded by twelve hectares of gardens, fields, and broad stretches of forest. From the old fortress, one could look out over the Seine without having to face the ever-present sight of those ugly, trouser-clad louts and the madwomen of Paris.

  Ever since he had signed the Decree on the Clerical Oath, Louis XVI had been plagued by migraine. The recent public condemnation of that law by the Sacred College in Rome and by the Pope himself had only deepened the distress of the pious King of France and robbed him of sleep and appetite. Here and now, Louis XVI was already regretting having approved both the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Decree on the Clerical Oath.

  When large numbers of Parisians gathered on the lawns before the Tuileries to protest against the interference of the Roman Curia and publicly burned portraits and effigies of Pope Pius VI, the King and Queen thought of the Chateau de Saint-Culot as a refuge. By retreating there, they hoped to avoid political disturbance, calm their nerves, and celebrate Easter in the traditional way.

  However, the wishes of the King and Queen were quickly dashed.

  At dawn, the iron gates of the Tuileries opened. Eight jet-black horses were harnessed to the massive royal coach. Escorted by eight thousand National Guardsmen, the royal party was to drive westward to the Chateau de Saint-Culot for a holiday.

  When the royal convoy reached the Place du Carrousel opposite the Louvre (on the present site of the Arc de Triomphe), the bells began to clang in the tower of the nearby Church of Saint-Roch. Very soon, shouts rang out: “The King is trying to escape!” “The King has been kidnapped by the English!” “The King has turned traitor!”

  Within a short time, the gathering crowd surrounded the entire convoy, packing the Place du Carrousel so tightly that not a step could be taken. Accompanied by his aides-de-camp, Lafayette once again came to rescue the royal couple. The General stood on the stone steps of a raised platform and declared frankly to the crowd, “I ask you to trust me. The King is not leaving Paris, and he is certainly not being kidnapped. He is merely going to a chateau in the western suburbs for a holiday!”

  No one was willing to believe the explanation of the commander of the National Guard. The crowd drowned Lafayette in boos and jeers: “Shut up! The King cannot leave. He cannot go anywhere! He must stay in the Tuileries!”

  After nearly an hour of deadlock, the furious coachman raised his whip and prepared to force a passage through the crowd. More than twenty citizens seized the reins and held them fast, making the horses rear and shriek while the coach could not move at all. Lafayette struggled to fight his way to the front of the royal coach, continuing to argue and plead, but to no effect.

  New rumours spread through the crowd. “There is an English spy hidden in the King’s coach—he is holding the King and Queen hostage!” As a result, the enraged patriots became even more agitated and began shoving the carriage back and forth at random, paying no attention whatsoever to the desperate pleas of the Queen, who had leaned out of the carriage window.

  When all attempts at persuasion failed, Lafayette finally lost his temper.

  He ordered his aide-de-camp to instruct the National Guardsmen on the outer cordon to lower bayonets and force the crowd away from the royal coach. Yet the guardsmen from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine battalion flatly refused to obey General Lafayette’s orders. The mutinous officers even threatened the royal escort: if they dared to harm any citizen, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine battalion would open fire on the coach of the King and Queen without hesitation.

  Even if he was almost spitting blood with rage, Lafayette still carried out his duty. He kept scrambling into the saddle and dismounting again, rushing back and forth, shouting himself hoarse and running until he was gasping for breath, almost in utter despair. Three hours after leaving the Tuileries, the disheartened King and Queen abandoned their destination and announced that they would turn back. Amid the cheers of the crowd, they returned to the Tuileries.

  While this farce was taking place, André and Danton were standing quietly on the roof of the Louvre, watching.

  André asked Danton, “Was it you, or Marat, who incited the crowd?”

  Danton said nothing and merely shook his head.

  Unconvinced, André pressed him: “Duc d’Orléans? Barnave? Or perhaps Duport, or the Lameth brothers?”

  Danton kept shaking his head. “None of them,” he replied.

  Robespierre was lying in bed, gravely ill. Prieur had gone on a trip to Brussels in Belgium and Rotterdam in the Dutch Republic and had not yet returned to Paris, so they were both out of the question. The only man capable of stirring up trouble in the wealthy districts of Paris was…

  “Marquis de Bouillé!” André and Danton said in unison. The two conservative leaders in the Assembly, Cazalès and Father Maury, both possessed a kind of political and moral fastidiousness and were unlikely to participate in such a conspiracy. Marquis de Bouillé was the sole exception.

  From their vantage point on the roof of the Louvre, the two conspirators had little difficulty discerning what the Royalist general intended. His aim was to force the King and Queen to abandon the illusion that the people of Paris still supported the Bourbon dynasty, and thus to drive them to flee at all costs to one of the frontier provinces, rally the German mercenary regiments and make a comeback with the help of intervention by powers such as Prussia and the Austrian Empire.

  From Paris to Metz was a distance of more than some three hundred kilometres, and the route necessarily passed through the département of the Marne, especially either Reims or Chalons-en-Champagne. That was why Danton, in a grave tone, warned André, “We must choke off the King’s line of escape in the Marne!”

  The National Constituent Assembly and the Paris City Hall (the Commune) were currently playing a game of power not unlike the Eastern stratagem of “holding the Son of Heaven to command the lords.” Once Louis XVI succeeded in fleeing to the frontier, two-thirds of the nobility and half of the field army would rally again under the lilies of the Bourbons, and France would inevitably face an unprecedentedly brutal civil war. If they lost the power to interpret and issue orders in the King’s name, both the National Assembly and the Paris National Guard would become utterly vulnerable.

  If the absolutist rule of the Bourbon monarchy were restored in Paris and in Reims, rebellious nobles such as Lafayette and Talleyrand might be pardoned. But men like Danton, Prieur, Robespierre, and Marat—members of the lower and middle ranks who had now become “beneficiaries of the new order”—would certainly be called to account. As for the “demon” André Franck, who had slain more than a hundred nobles and clergy and countless loyalists of the Crown, his fate needed no elaboration.

  For that reason, André said, with a solemn expression, “I have already ordered the gendarmerie to intensify patrols at the frontier posts. Once I return to Reims, I will also propose that the provincial National Guard redeploy its forces around Chalons-en-Champagne. But I have one more question, Georges. Are you preparing to support the republican system that Marat is preaching?”

  Danton shrugged and replied in all seriousness, “It makes no difference to me. I simply enjoy watching that fool Lafayette suffer. As for a monarchy with a republican constitution and a republic with a monarch, there is no real difference between the two. Today’s France is both a monarchy and a republic…”

  “Shut up, Georges.” André cursed at him with a smile. “I received a double A in the General Principles of Law course, remember?”

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  …

  Compared to the harmonious brilliance of 1790, 1791 had indeed been rather unlucky for Lafayette. The incident at the Place du Carrousel, where the royal couple were blocked by the crowd, had made the General of the White Horse lose face, and the betrayal of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine battalion had left him badly shaken. Although that unit was forcibly disbanded afterwards by the Paris City Hall and the National Guard headquarters, the other district battalions of the National Guard showed plenty of sympathy for those mutineers.

  A short time later, a sudden incident left the torn-and-conflicted Lafayette even more disheartened.

  After the Parisians had forced the holiday-making King and Queen to return to the palace, the nobles who still clung to their strong royalist convictions began to fear for Louis XVI’s safety in the Tuileries. They therefore contacted one another and decided to dress in identical black coats and trousers, concealing daggers and other weapons in their clothing, in the hope of slipping into the palace one evening to protect their King and Queen.

  These muddle-headed Royalists were promptly stopped at the gates of the Tuileries by the National Guardsmen on palace duty. A search of the black-clad men turned up all manner of weapons: daggers, pistols, three-fold swords, and even awls. Heated words were exchanged, and the quarrel quickly degenerated into physical combat. It was obvious that the men in black were no match for professional soldiers.

  Fifteen minutes later, the victorious Guardsmen carried dozens of black-clad men and tossed them one by one into the shrubbery and lawns. The sans-culottes who had rushed in upon hearing the commotion also joined the fray. They drove, shoved, punched, and kicked these “knights of the dagger.” Some particularly vile sans-culottes smeared horse manure and urine over the faces of the fallen and wounded and loudly mocked them for having become brave “knights of excrement.”

  Louis XVI and Queen Marie, who were hiding in the palace, were trembling so badly that they did not dare step out onto the grand terrace to see what was happening. Only when the “firefighting general” Lafayette arrived, ordering his soldiers to disperse the rampaging sans-culottes and rescuing the black-clad men lying on the grass, did the scene come to an end. Among those who had been badly beaten was a cousin of the Marquis de Lafayette from one branch of his family.

  Two days later, completely despondent, General Lafayette longed to withdraw from trouble. He submitted his resignation as commander-in-chief of the National Guard to the National Constituent Assembly and the Paris City Hall, only to be informed that this did not comply with procedure. Almost everyone insisted that the “Grand Marshal” must remain in his post—not least the very Parisians who had publicly humiliated Lafayette and the men in black that day.

  Lafayette was not the only one in low spirits. The King and Queen were equally furious. The two of them began to regret having rejected the seemingly reckless but well-intentioned rescue plan of Marquis de Bouillé and Colonel Campan. By that time, Mirabeau’s dying plea that “the King must flee as soon as possible” had also reached the Tuileries through Talleyrand and others.

  In May, Louis XVI asked his brother, Comte de Provence, to contact Marquis de Bouillé and Colonel Campan in secret. Since the original plan had already been ruined, a new escape scheme had to be drawn up. Before long, a Swedish nobleman by the name of Fersen, a Comte, arrived at the Tuileries and declared himself willing to help the French royal family.

  Comte Fersen’s other identity, of course, was that of Queen Marie’s secret lover.

  …

  In late eighteenth-century England, being the wealthy son of a bourgeois family was not as easy and carefree as one might imagine.

  Unlike the traditional noble and bureaucratic heirs such as the Fosters, young James Watt, as heir to old Watt, had from the age of eight, in his spare time, been required to remain at his father’s factory as an apprentice. He started by picking up scrap and hauling iron blocks. Watching his father’s ceaseless labour, young James gained his first rudimentary understanding of the steam engine.

  After the age of fourteen, James succeeded in shedding his status as an apprentice and became a skilled repairman. From the sound of the piston and the cylinder of a steam engine, he could immediately diagnose the problem and repair it in time. Several years later, James Watt graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and re-entered the Watt steam-engine company.

  From that point on, James formally became a mechanical engineer and worked alongside his father, old Watt, on the development of new steam engines. Over the past five years, father and son had worked in close cooperation, inventing the double-acting cylinder, the steam valve, and the three-link mechanism. The first allowed steam to enter and leave from both ends of the cylinder and thus to drive the piston in both directions; the latter two greatly improved the stability of the engine and made it possible, in principle, to employ high-pressure steam engines safely in practical production (the steam locomotive).

  Originally, as deputy chief engineer, James did not need to travel all the way to Chalons-en-Champagne. However, when the Frenchman Say proposed an order to purchase no fewer than twelve Watt-type steam engines every year for the next ten years, even old Watt could no longer sit still. The Watt company had previously sold fewer than ten engines a year. The contract with the French Joint Steam Engine Company alone would therefore bring the Watt firm between fifty thousand and sixty thousand pounds in annual sales revenue.

  In Chalons-en-Champagne, James’s initial task was to work together with Edmund Cartwright, the patent-holder for the water-powered loom. With the cooperation of numerous French engineers, the two Englishmen transformed the water-powered loom into a steam-driven loom. In fact this work was not especially complicated: there had already been a similar success in Manchester in England; and the French were sparing no expense in supporting the project. In February 1791, the steam loom was successfully developed and promptly put into practical use.

  In a textile factory the size of a tennis court, rows of looms stood neatly in place. Their driving power was no longer the unstable muscle power of men and animals, nor water power subject to environment, season, and weather, but three of the latest Watt steam engines driving the looms.

  A week of production trials proved that, compared with existing French hand-loom weaving, the steam looms increased efficiency a hundredfold and were more than thirty per cent more efficient than Cartwright’s own water-powered looms. The crucial point was that thanks to steam power, such factories could in theory operate around the clock.

  By early April, the raw yarn requirements of the joint weaving mill alone already accounted for forty per cent of the total output of more than a hundred hand-spinning workshops across the entire Lorraine region. At the same time, the cost of producing cotton cloth in the joint factory (including all machinery depreciation) was only half that of traditional cotton cloth.

  After the successful development of the steam loom, Edmund Cartwright left France with his one-third share of the patent rights and began travelling throughout Europe to promote this type of loom. Meanwhile, the team of British and French engineers led by James began work on converting Crompton’s spinning mule to steam power (the patent for the mule having already been licensed).

  Compared to the exceptionally smooth conversion of the steam loom, the spinning-mule project encountered one mishap after another. Between February and March this year, three further steam engines arrived at the joint factory in Chalons-en-Champagne for installation; two of them broke down during trial runs, both due to damage to critical components.

  This drove James Watt almost mad with anxiety. He feared that it would undermine the Joint Steam Engine Company’s confidence in and future purchases of Watt engines. Fortunately, as the client’s representative, General Manager Say did not press the issue. Once replacement parts from the Watt factory reached Chalons-en-Champagne, everything returned to normal.

  By late March, the steam-powered spinning mule had also been successfully developed and passed field testing. The three converted steam mules could continuously drive 3,000 humming spindles, greatly increasing the efficiency of the spinning machines—fifty times higher than that of the spinning jenny and more than a hundred times greater than that of traditional local spinning.

  James would probably never know that the two engines which had failed were damaged “by accident” on the secret instructions of the real boss behind the scenes, André. While the British were helping the United Investment company build steam looms and steam-powered spinning mules, the chief engineer, Périer (the older one), was leading a group of French mechanical engineers in the heavily guarded building next door, working day and night to copy the Watt-type steam engine. Among the engines they were “careless enough to break” were precisely those two original machines, handled by Périer (the older one) (Charles Périer) and others.

  According to the supreme directive of the big boss, Périer (the older one) had to replicate—“pirate”—the core components of the Watt steam engine by the end of the year, whatever the cost. It did not matter if two engines were ruined in the process; even if all twelve of the Watt engines imported this year or due to be imported were “ruined,” it would still be acceptable. No one understood better than André the unparalleled driving force which the Watt-type steam engine exerted on the Industrial Revolution.

  For all that the British were now enthusiastically singing the praises of the French Revolution, most politicians in London still viewed the ancient kingdom across the Channel with suspicion, apart from a few idle and ignorant young rakes like Fox. They sincerely hoped that the French anarchists would drag into the depths of hell the Kingdom of France, founded by the Duc of Paris (Hugh Capet), defended by Henri IV, and glorified by Louis XIV.

  Yet once the revolutionary storm across the water threatened British political and economic interests, these immaculately dressed British gentlemen would, without the slightest hesitation, overturn the table. They would not only intervene by force and provide financial aid to the anti-French coalition powers, but would also restrict exports to France of all machinery with strategic value, including the Watt-type steam engine.

  5 chapters in advance of the Royal Road schedule. You can find it here:

  https://www.patreon.com/cw/wentaj

  free to read on Royal Road as always, so there’s absolutely no pressure — this is just for readers who want to be a little ahead and help me spend more time writing and researching this series.