Journals of Auguste de Chateauneuf— Part 3

15th April, 1800

It has been some time since I last made an entry. Rather unlike me.

You see, I was occupied with my training under Captain Gaston. I must admit, I’m not entirely satisfied with my progress. I have been rather slow to pick this up. The major challenge I believe, is in coming back to the guard position quickly after delivering a hit — which is absolutely crucial unless you want to open yourself to attacks. It takes no more than a second to lose an arm in combat situations. I am finding it to be rather difficult, especially since we have to do the followthrough with the attack. Still, I am quite optimistic that I’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

But I do wonder…

How effective would swords be in a gunfight?

Perhaps not a lot. At least not until one runs out of bullets. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a skill worth learning. I should hate to be entirely dependent on my gun and be completely useless without it.

Oh, and you will be glad to know that I have friends now. Or at least colleagues that I do not entirely disapprove of. One of them is the son of the late Monsieur Dupont, Pierre Dupont.

He is a rather interesting character. He is a lawyer as well, following his father’s footsteps it seems. Monsieur Dupont was a rather formidable lawyer and had worked with my family in the past. Sadly, he was sent to the guillotine for protesting against the lawless execution of one of his clients. Horrible affair, really.

The reign of terror was quite possibly the darkest era of French history, and perhaps the French future. Even thinking about it makes my blood boil. The theological reasoning would be that it was God’s punishment to the French upper-class for the oppression of the French people. But I know better. Sometimes, humans do inhuman things.

Our family was spared because the Robespierres decided that father was still a useful asset in the army. But we were one of the lucky ones.

It seems Gaston’s family has not been so fortunate as mine. He has lost his father and his uncle, both of whom held important positions in the court of Louis XVI, to the guillotine on charges entirely fabricated (there was not an ounce of truth in them, in his own words) by the Robespierres and their associates, leaving Gaston as the 6th Comte de Montmorency. Gaston himself was spared owing to his position in the army, it seems. It is a terrible situation.

With their anarchist, ungodly actions, the revolutionaries have plunged our great country into a sea of darkness. In the last decade we have gone through three governments. The aristocracy, which is the soul of our nation, has fled en masse.. Our economy is in ruins, the whole of Europe is against us and we are left with no allies.

This is the price of going against age-old traditions.

We shouldn’t have let this happen. We should have crushed the revolution in its early stages, but we were too soft. The king was too soft. The king of France, one of the most powerful men in the world, let these anarchists enter his palace, take his country, and imprison and kill him, all without so much as a counterattack.

What a joke.

Even the First Consul, who was then an associate of the Robespierres, was taken aback at the sheer incompetence of the king at handling the revolution. “They will go through anarchy”, he said, and how right he was.

The way to handle rebellions is to employ severity and crush them in their entirety, like the First Consul crushed the royalist rebellion in Paris. It was undoubtedly brutal and led to a lot of casualties, but it prevented any future uprisings and thus saved a great many lives in the long run.

I have no doubt that had General Bonaparte been a senior officer in the French army during the early days of the revolution, we would still be a monarchy.

The revolution has hollowed our nation from inside out and has brought us to our knees, and god knows how long it will take us to get back on our feet. With any luck, the Consulate will be stable, and the First Consul will set us on the right path. He seems, by every means a competent and learned man, and his policies till now seem directed towards rebuilding the nation.

Time will tell.