Stop and Look – Charles Mozin’s French cavalry charge
When Madame Guillotine chopped off the head of the French body politic in Paris, the enraged royal houses of Europe descended on France with lethal intent. The Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, the Kingdoms of Prussia and Spain were shocked by the storm of radical reform raging through France and so the First Coalition was formed to combat this new and irate ideology which threatened the legitimacy of every monarch.
At the battle of Valmy, a professional Prussian army was repelled by a force consisting of farmers, haberdashers, labourers, geriatrics, children and a small company of regular troops. This propaganda triumph spurred the new Republic on to take out its opponents with an efficiency and zealousness most traditional commanders did not anticipate. Oddly, for an “enlightened” nation, the French people took their victories as a sign of fate that their system of government, of justice and distribution, was destined to supplant the dusty and regressive dynasties that surrounded them.
Political messaging became a paramount concern for the French state. Morale had to be constantly managed to engender the confidence needed to resist their powerful adversaries. The news of a small French force seizing a large Dutch fleet by charging over a frozen sea encompassed all the desirable themes for a good piece of propaganda. It exemplified the unprecedented success of an underestimated people and could not fail to paint a particularly bright and potent image in the minds of nervous patriots.
The Low Countries had an extraordinarily cold winter in 1794/1795. Even the inland seas encircling the island of Texel were frozen over. In January 1795, the French army under General Jean-Charels Pichegru occupied Amsterdam. General Pichegru was informed that a mighty Dutch battle fleet was anchored at Dan Helder not five miles north of his bivouac. He sent a regiment of Hussars and a regiment of infantry to envelope the hoar frosted armada. At this point in the Dutch conquest, the government was negotiating its surrender to the French Republic but no news of an agreement between the two governments had reached their armies in the field and a state of war was still at play.
According to French accounts, the aptly named General De Winter camped his troops on the banks of the Zuiderzee. Across the cold and tenebrous terrain of the winter-hardened waters, 14 Dutch ships lay anchored. The French could see the little fires of the beleaguered fleet flickering in the night. De Winter commanded Lieutenant-Colonel Lahure to commence an assault over the solid Dutch surf. Each Hussar padded his horse’s fetlocks with a light fabric to muffle the thunderous clap of their approaching hooves and shared their mounts with an infantryman to ensure they outnumbered the poor oblivious deckhands they were about to ambush. They rode over the sea and captured the fleet, making this event, in all likelihood, the only naval military engagement won by the use of cavalry. This action brought the Conquest of the Netherlands to an end and added 850 canons, 14 warships and several merchant vessels to the French military arsenal.
The veracity of this event has been repeatedly questioned by modern historians and accounts from contemporary sources but it supplied a beguiling metaphor for the unprecedented opportunities and accomplishments of the French Republic. Whether entirely true or not, the image of dashing Hussars elegantly cantering through the chill of a caliginous night to heroically capture one of the most formidable assemblies of nautical power in Europe, scintillates like a dream in the eye of the imagination.