It was a hot day early in August and the heat lay across the tiled roofs of Paris like a blanket, smothering the still air with the odours of the city: sewage, smoke and sweat. In his office at the corner of the Tuileries Palace, Lazare Carnot sat at a large desk piled with paperwork arranged in labelled trays. Each tray’s contents had been prioritised by his staff, so that Citizen Carnot - as he styled himself - could expedite the most pressing documents concerning the French armies struggling to defend the infant Republic. Ever since the execution of King Louis the enemies of France had regarded her as a monstrous aberration. Monarchs and aristocrats across Europe would not rest easy until the revolution had been mercilessly crushed and the Bourbons returned to the throne. So war raged across the continent as great armies clashed beneath the standards of Austria and the tricolour flags of France. And it was Carnot’s duty to see that his countrymen were organised and supplied to achieve the victories that would guarantee the survival of the ideals of the revolution.

The armies were ever hungry for more recruits, more uniforms, boots, gunpowder, muskets, cannon, remounts for the cavalry and the minutiae of military equipment that was necessary for an army to march and fight. Every day Carnot had to cope with the urgent demands of the generals, meeting their needs as best he could from the finite resources available. There were shortages of everything the armies needed, most of all money. The treasury was all but empty and the National Assembly had been forced to issue paper currency - assignats - that were openly traded at a fraction of their face value. Carnot smiled grimly at the thought as he initialled a requisition for artillery uniforms from a textile mill at Lyons. At least it cost the government nothing to print yet more assignats to pay for the uniforms. If the mill-owner made a loss trading them on that was his own affair. Carnot reached for his pen, dipped it in the inkwell and signed his name with a flourish: Citizen Carnot, on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety.

An ironic name for a committee, he reflected, given that its members had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of their fellow citizens in order to safeguard the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.The Committee ruthlessly suppressed any symptom of dissent inside France even as it directed the war against external enemies. Yet membership of the Committee carried its own danger, as Robespierre and his hardcore Jacobin followers had discovered, and paid for it with their heads. Carnot sighed as he slipped the signed requisition into the out tray.