High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 619
however, merely to “municipalize” and “departmentalize” the Left Bank, and later to
annex it, not to countenance a separate republic there. The effect was the same so far
as destruction of the old order was concerned. The agitation for a Swabian Republic
on the Right Bank flared up at the same time, in mysterious conjunction with Gen-
eral Augereau, who replaced Hoche in October, and had been one of Bonaparte’s
aides in the Cisalpine. Meanwhile the Irish exiles worked for similar liberation, and
Wolfe Tone, who spent a good deal of time in the Batavian Republic on plans for
the Franco- Dutch invasion of Britain, and was present at Bonn in September 1797
at the abortive proclamation of the Cisrhenane, pursued his dream for a Republic of
Ireland. The Swiss cantons fell into turmoil, and from a welter of short- lived “re-
publics,” Lemanic and Rhodanic, a unified Helvetic Republic emerged in March
- After the death of the French General Duphot in a street riot at Rome, the
papal city was occupied by units of the French army, supplemented by troops of the
new Cisalpine army and of the Polish Legion. A Roman Republic followed. At the
end of the year the French occupied Turin, where the end of the Sardinian monar-
chy could be envisaged, and also Naples, where the most insubstantial of the sister-
republics, the Neapolitan or Parthenopean, was proclaimed.^14
The wave of enthusiasm made itself felt beyond the zone of the satellite repub-
lics. At Berlin the Abbé Sieyès made a point of treating the royal court with repub-
lican disdain. Asked, upon his arrival as ambassador, whether “His Excellency was
clothed with a civil or military character, and was a count or a baron,” he replied
haughtily that in France there were only citizens, and all citizens were soldiers.
When he requested to be excused from wearing a sword at his presentation at
court, the king shrugged and the queen laughed, but they let him have his way,
since it was Prussian policy to remain neutral between France and its enemies.^15 At
Vienna, at about the same time, the French envoy, General Bernadotte, provoked a
serious riot by displaying a huge tricolor flag from his balcony. As Fersen remarked
of this future king of Sweden, he was “one of the raging Jacobins” (nor was Fersen
mistaken) who wished to push the Directory into a more aggressively revolution-
ary program toward Europe.^16 Fersen himself, newly installed as chancellor of the
University of Upsala, was combatting the Jacobinism of Swedish students. “As to
14 No less than eight tricolors had been devised by 1798, of which five were then officially in use.
The five were the French; the Cisalpine of green, white, and blue; a gray, white, and red for the Roman
Republic; a Dutch or Batavian red, white, and blue with horizontal stripes authorized in 1795; and a
Swiss or Helvetic tricolor of red, green, and yellow adopted on April 14, 1798. Two others had been
ventured but had disappeared: the Belgian red, yellow, and black of 1789; and a Cisrhenane red, blue,
and green of 1797. A Greek tricolor of red, white, and black had also been proposed in 1797. Of these,
the French, Italian (Cisalpine), Dutch, and Belgian are in use today. The German republican colors of
black, red, and gold, used today in the German Federal Republic, date from the revolutionary move-
ment of 1848.
On the Dutch and Belgian tricolors see the Algemene Winkler Prins Encyclopedie, art. “Vlag”; on the
Helvetic, J. Strickler, Actensammlung aus der Zeit der Helvetischen Republik, 1798–1803, I, 644; on the
Cisalpine, above, p. 387; on the Roman, A. Dufourcq, Le régime jacobin en Italie: étude sur la République
romaine (Paris, 1900), III; on the Cisrhenane, J. Venedey, Die deutschen Republikaner unter der franzö-
sischer Republic (Leipzig, 1870), 269; on the Greek, A. Dascalakis, Oeuvres de Rhigas Velestinlis (Paris,
1937), 123.
15 P. Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris, 1939), 204.
16 Dagbok, III, 223–26, 229.