Liberation and Annexation 431
it is that he should not have the management of finances, but be subjected to strict
rules; I propose therefore that the army supply commissioners should be under the
surveillance of the Minister of War, and the control of metallic currency under the
surveillance of the national Treasury.”^7 And the Convention, which had so re-
cently offered “aid and fraternity to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty,”
took the matter- of- fact line that France should not pay for this aid. The Bourbons
in former times had given away millions in louis d ’ors to subsidize their interna-
tional ventures. The British government, between 1793 and 1815, gave away
£57,000,000 to keep Continental armies in the field against the Revolution and
Napoleon. The governments issuing from the French Revolution were not so gen-
erous. For one thing, they lacked the money. In any case, it is doubtful whether any
government, bourgeois or democratic, claiming responsibility to the people, could
in the eighteenth century have given away such sums for foreign aid.
Cambon estimated that the war was costing some hundred million livres a
month, of which the large portion expended beyond the French frontiers had to be
paid in gold or silver on ruinously unfavorable terms. “There is everlasting talk that
we are carrying liberty to our neighbors. What we are carrying to them is our hard
currency and our food supplies; they don’t want our assignats.”^8
Clearly Belgium could not be abandoned in wartime to the enemies of France—
to Austria, or the Statists. Just as clearly France would not pay for its liberation.
The solution was obvious, and painless both to France and to the Belgian friends
of France. The enemy governments and privileged classes should pay. Crown do-
mains, public revenues, church lands, the property of other old- regime corporate
bodies, tithes, seigneurial dues—all of which had been appropriated in France by
the Revolution—should now be appropriated by pouvoir révolutionnaire in Bel-
gium also. Guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chaumières!
The decree of December 15 began as follows:^9
I. In countries which are or will be occupied by the armies of the
French Republic, the generals will immediately proclaim, in the name of the
French nation, the abolition of existing taxes and revenues, of the tithe, of
feudal dues both fixed and occasional, of servitude both real and personal, of
exclusive hunting rights, nobility and all privileges in general. They will de-
clare to the people that they bring peace, aid, fraternity, liberty and equality.
II. They will proclaim the sovereignty of the people and suppression
of all existing authorities; they will immediately convoke the people in pri-
mary or communal assemblies, to create and organize a provisional adminis-
tration.The following articles specified that officers of the old government should be
excluded from the first election, and that property of the “prince” (meaning in Bel-
gium the Hapsburgs, but the decree applied to all occupied countries), the local
7 Ta s sier, 155.
8 Cambon on December 9, Moniteur, réimpression, XIV, 703.
9 Moniieur, réimpression, XIV, 755. On international law at the time as it pertained to conquest
and annexation see J. Basdevant, La Rév. fr. et le droit de guerre continentale (Paris, 1901), 185–97.