The Wars of The French Revolution 1792-1801

The Wars of the French Revolution
The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792–1801 offers a comprehensive and jargon-free
coverage of this turbulent period and unites political, social, military and international
history in one volume.
Carefully designed for undergraduate students, through twelve chapters this book offers
an introduction to the origins and international context of the French Revolution as well
as an in-depth examination of the reasons why war began. Aspects unpicked within the
book include how France acquired a de facto empire stretching from Holland to Naples;
the impact of French conquest on the areas concerned; the spread of French ideas beyond
the frontiers of the French imperium; the response of the powers of Europe to the sud-
den expansion in French military power; the experience of the conflicts unleashed by the
French Revolution in such areas as the West Indies, Egypt and India; and the impact of war
on the Revolution itself.
Offering extensive geographical coverage and challenging many preconceived ideas, The
Wars of the French Revolution, 1792–1801 is the perfect resource for students of the French
Revolution and international military history more broadly.
Charles J. Esdaile has been a member of staff in the Department of History at the University
of Liverpool, UK, since 1989. He was awarded a personal chair in 2004. His previous publica-
tions include Napoleon, France and Waterloo: The Eagle Rejected (2016); Burgos: Occupation,
Siege, Aftermath, 1808–1814 (2014); Women in the Peninsular War (2014); Outpost of Empire:
The French Occupation of Andalucía, 1810–1812 (2012); Napoleon’s Wars: An International
History of Napoleonic Europe (2007); and The Wars of Napoleon (1995).
The Wars of the French Revolution
1792–1801
Charles J. Esdaile
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2019 Charles J. Esdaile
The right of Charles J. Esdaile to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Esdaile, Charles J., author.
Title: The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792-1801 / Charles J.
Esdaile.
Description: First edition. | London ; New York, NY : Routledge/
Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009754| ISBN 9780815386872 (hardback
: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815386889 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781351174541 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799. | First
Coalition, War of the, 1792-1797. | Second Coalition, War of the,
1798-1801.
Classification: LCC DC220 .E84 2018 | DDC 944.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009754
ISBN: 978-0-8153-8687-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-8153-8688-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-17454-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Goudy
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Praise for the author’s previous works
The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War

‘An excellent book which unites depth with brevity.’ (Comptes Rendus)
‘A scholarly and frequently illuminating analysis.’ (Times Higher Educational Supplement)
The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, 1812–1814
‘No student of the Peninsular War can fail to profit from reading Dr Esdaile’s new book,
not least for the harsh light it throws upon the insouciance and brutality shown by British
soldiers towards their unfortunate allies who, rather than being the butt of endless coarse
humour, should now be seen as as much sinned against as sinning.’ (Journal of the Society for
Army Historical Research)
The Wars of Napoleon
‘The depth of Esdaile’s knowledge is strikingly evident . . . The text provides the student
and teacher alike with what is probably the most solid synthesis of the period around. It is
bound to become set reading on any course on Napoleon and Europe.’ (European History
Quarterly)
Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939
‘A masterly work of synthesis, full of judicious assessment, outspoken at times and author-
itative in tone . . . Esdaile strikes a fine balance between narrative and thematic analysis,
blending the two in a complex logical argument, creating coherence out of apparent
confusion.’ (Times Literary Supplement)
The French Wars
‘Esdaile’s work is not simply a chronological cataloguing of European conflicts, but a reas-
sessment of popular conceptions of French nationalism and the Napoleonic myth . . . The
scope . . . provokes the reader to re-examine his or her own perceptions of the French cam-
paigns and their impact on the transformation of Europe.’ (The French Review)
Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815
‘Esdaile assesses the latest scholarship with expertise and insight while keeping his schol-
arly apparatus to a commendable fifty pages. The book is written in a lucid and engaging
style that keeps the pages turning. Napoleon’s Wars will be a standard text for students and
general readers for years to come.’ (Times Higher)
Peninsular Eyewitnesses: The Human Experience of War in Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814
‘An impressive introduction to the wider reality of the war in the Peninsula, this work
weaves together eyewitness accounts from both sides of the conflict . . . It is Esdaile’s use
of both the military and civilian sources which makes this book such a thought-provoking
read. Highly recommended.’ (The Waterloo Journal)
Outpost of Empire
‘Outpost of Empire is a thought-provoking study of French policy in a conquered land and
how the Spanish dealt with it on the local level. In many ways it shatters accepted beliefs on
French arrogance in their rule and Spanish resistance to it. It a must-read for all interested
in the Peninsular War.’ (The Napoleon Series)
Women in the Peninsular War
‘This is a fine book, well-informed and thoroughly documented – 80 pages of notes and
bibliography testify to substantial archival research as well as a thorough review of the
secondary literature. It is also more imaginatively conceived than other works on the sub-
ject . . . It should remain the last word . . . for a long time to come.’ (Journal of Military
History)
Napoleon, France and Waterloo: The Eagle Rejected
‘In the years after Waterloo, France forgot the mess that existed in 1814 and 1815, and
embraced the Napoleonic legend. It was a legend which remembered the years 1805 to
1813, with Ligny tacked on the end, and one which was purely nationalist, and military in
sentiment. The Eagle Rejected is the most revealing work on the French ‘home front’ in the
last years of the Empire and highly recommended.’ (The Napoleon Series)
For Alan Forrest, friend, mentor and inspiration
Contents
List of maps x
Preface xi
1 The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars 1

2 The armies of the ancien régime 35
3 From the Bastille to Valmy 63
4 Saving the Revolution 92
5 Exporting the Revolution 120
6 Sympathy, admiration and collaboration 148
7 Resistance and revolt (1): France 180
8 Resistance and revolt (2): the French imperium 201
9 The reaction of the ancien régime 228
10 The wider world 249
11 The road to 18 Brumaire 276
12 The end of the French Revolutionary Wars 295
Bibliographical note 324

Index 327
List of maps
1 Europe in 1789 xiv

2 Europe in 1799 xv
Preface
It is not going too far to say that the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1801 constitute one
of the poor relations of history. Despite the fact that they were a titanic struggle that has
often been portrayed as the first total war and, if not that, then at least the first ideological
war, they have been doubly over shadowed. Thus, on the one hand, political, social and cul-
tural historians have primarily wanted to write about the events of the French Revolution
and their echoes in other countries, while, on the other, military ones have tended to be
mesmerised by the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte and have in consequence all too often
looked only at those battles in which the then General Bonaparte was personally involved.
The Wars of the French Revolution, however, will take a very different form in that it will
place war at the centre of its coverage while at the same time seeking to ensure that it does
not degenerate into mere narrative: the Italian Campaign of 1796–97, the Egyptian cam-
paign of 1798–1801 and the battle of Marengo will all be included, certainly, but so, among
other episodes, will the fighting in Belgium in 1793–94, the Russo-Polish War of 1794,
the struggle for the ‘sugar islands’ of the Caribbean, the Irish rebellion of 1798, the Anglo-
Russian invasion of Holland in 1799 and, finally, the great Austro-Russian counter-offensive
that temporarily drove the French from their conquests in Italy and thereby helped pave
the way for the coup of 18 Brumaire. Yet, not least because in Tim Blanning’s excellent
The French Revolutionary Wars such a work already exists, The Wars of the French Revolution
will not just be a military history: international relations will also necessarily be present,
together with extensive discussions of the social and political impact of war and of France’s
attempts to make use of new ideologies in pursuit of traditional geo-political aspirations
(or, as some would say, share the benefits of the Revolution with the peoples of Europe). In
short, what is envisaged is a global history that will cater to a wide range of interests in a
way that has never yet been attempted.
That said, there are a number of issues that have been omitted from this work. Of these,
the first is anything more than the barest details of the French Revolution itself. It is the
hope of the author that enough has been said to convey a nodding acquaintance with its
chronology and dramatis personae, but to engage with the subject in all its complexity
would result in a book perhaps twice the length even of the current rather bulky volume.
Nor, meanwhile, would the result be very good: the author is not a French specialist and
would not dream of competing with names as revered as those of Richard Cobb, Alan
Forrest and William Doyle: if something more is required in this respect, then the reader
will find plenty of options available elsewhere. Less understandable, perhaps, is the other
obvious gap in its coverage, namely the absence of any significant treatment of women.
This is most certainly not because of want of interest in the subject on the part of the
author – his Women in the Peninsular War (Norman, Oklahoma, 2014) is surely evidence of
xii Preface
at the very least his good intentions in this respect – but of the simple fact that the French
Revolutionary Wars affected the general position of women in European society very little
and were in turn participated in by them in a very traditional fashion.
Such a comment will doubtless not be popular in certain quarters, and therefore
requires elaboration. In the first place, there is the issue of political participation. In the
Europe of 1789, if one discounts such figures as Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine
the Great of Russia, women were just beginning to take their first steps in the world of
political debate while there was also a growing tradition of female authorship, and all
the more so given that the institution of the salon provided a forum in which they could
learn to express ideas and immerse themselves in the discussions of the day. Yet such
opportunities were almost entirely restricted to the élite while the number of women
who actually secured a voice was tinier still. In the France of the Revolution, things
were a little better, perhaps, but even then, for every Olympe de Gouges and Madame
Roland, there were a hundred or more such women whose role remained wholly pri-
vate. A few more names can be found being drawn to political action by circumstance
or conviction – one thinks here of Madame de la Rochejacquelin, Charlotte Corday or
Marie-Anne Paulze, the wife of the chemist, Lavoisier – but in the end the list is very
small, while elsewhere it is all but non-existent, being constituted by little more than
Elizabeth Wollstonecroft and Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel.
At a lower level, things were slightly different. For a variety of reasons, not the least of
which because the authorities were generally inclined to take a more lenient line in dealing
with female malefactors than they were with male ones, women had always taken a leading
role in such events as bread riots. It is therefore no surprise to find women playing a promi-
nent role in those disturbances that regularly rocked France in the Revolutionary epoch
nor, still less, that a tiny handful, of whom the most important were Pauline Léon, Claire
Lacombe and Théroigne de Méricourt, emerged from obscurity to become, if not major
figures in the milieu of Parisian radicalism, then at least recognisable political personalities
and, what is more, early champions of the cause of feminism, something in which they were
joined by Olympe de Gouges.
Women, then, were certainly active participants in the French Revolution, but that
does not mean that they secured acceptance in its ranks. On the contrary, once the
Montagnards had come to power, Charlotte’s assassination of Marat was used as a pre-
text to move against them: thus, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined, Léon, Lacombe and
Méricourt thrown into prison and such all-female political clubs as had emerged in the
course of the Revolution swept away. As for the legal gains made by women since 1789,
these were lost in the wake of 18 Brumaire, the later Civil Code putting them back in their
traditional place with a vengeance.
What, though, of the war effort? In so far as this was concerned, Olympe de Gouges
and others certainly floated the idea of forming women’s battalions, but no such units ever
appeared, and, apart from a number, almost certainly very small indeed, of women who
hid their identity and became ‘cross-dressers’ – whether on the side of the French or their
opponents – the only way in which women marched to war in the campaigns of 1792–1802
was as camp-followers. As in Spain and Portugal in the years after 1808 – a subject to which
the current author has given much attention – the universal presence of the camp-follower
very probably created opportunities of which individual women were able to make use as a
means of effecting a change in their personal circumstances. But this remains a hidden his-
tory as, for that matter, does the experience of women who never moved beyond their home
environments: we meet them as victims and, very occasionally, spies, but otherwise we can
Preface xiii
do little more than guess. Yet of one thing we can be certain and that is that the French
Revolutionary Wars neither attracted wholesale female participation of a non-traditional
kind nor created a new world for the women of Europe, and in a book of this nature it is
therefore difficult to justify more than the most minimal treatment of the subject.
To write thus is to denigrate neither women nor the cause of women’s history: indeed,
it is rather the author’s most earnest hope that his words will serve as an encouragement
to others to pick up the torch, even if they are inspired to do so by nothing more than
anger. Meanwhile, it is not just in this area that more work is needed. Even now, there are
many parts of Europe whose experience of the French Revolutionary Wars has not yet been
explored or, at least, not in the English language. Above all, what is needed here is a study
of the Habsburg monarchy in the Revolutionary and, indeed, Napoleonic epoch. In the
whole range of the historiography, there is no greater want than this, and, until such a work
is written, historians like the current author whose languages come to a grinding halt at the
Rhine will never be able to do more than scrape the surface of a part of Europe which expe-
rienced the French Revolutionary Wars at a level of intensity second only to that of Britain
and, of course, France herself. With other areas clearly in need of attention in the English-
language historiography, including Belgium, Switzerland and Poland, there is clearly plenty
of scope for young scholars who can raise their sights beyond the French Revolution per se
and at the same time ignore the siren voice of ‘memory’, a genre of historiography for whose
absence from these pages no apology is made whatsoever.
At length, then, I come to the words that really are the most important in any book.
In this respect, the people I need to mention are numerous: first of all, Laura Pilsworth, for
believing in this project when few other people appeared to do so; second, the staff at all the
libraries whose doors I have so repeatedly darkened, including, most especially, Marc Brans
at the Royal Army Museum in Brussels and Catherine McManamon of the Sydney Jones
Library at the University of Liverpool; third, Rory Muir, Zack White, Mark Lawrence, Rick
Schneid, Rafe Blaufarb, Alan Forrest and Philip Dwyer, friends and colleagues who have
advised, encouraged and, in the nicest possible way, criticised; fourth, my family, especially
my poor and most long-suffering Alison; and, fifth, last but by no means least, my wonderful
students – should anyone who took ‘War, Nationalism and Society in Europe, 1792–1801’
chance to pick up this work, know that you are each and every one of you remembered with
gratitude and affection.
Charles Esdaile, 18 January 2018

Boundary of the N St. Petersburg
Holy Roman Empire
EDE
Christiania SW
F
Hapsburg Dominions O
M
KINGDOM Stockholm
Prussian territory RUSSIAN
DO
OF DENMARK Moscow
EMPIRE
Glasgow AND NORWAY
KING
Edinburgh
IRELAND Copenhagen
GREAT
Dublin
BRITAIN IA
SS KINGDOM
RU
UNITED OF P
NETHERLANDS Hamburg OM OF POLAND
KINGD
Warsaw
Amsterdam
London Kiev
AUSTRIAN Brussels
NETHERLANDS Cologne
THE Prague
Paris EMPIRE HASPSBURG
AUSTRIA
Munich
KINGDOM Vienna
Budapest
0 400 miles OF FRANCE
KINGDOM
SWITZERLAND
OF HUNGARY
Geneva
Bordeaux DOMINIONS
RE
WALLACHIA
P
PIEDMONT
UB
Turin BOSNIA
LI
Belgrade
C
Marseille O BULGARIA
F SERBIA
KINGDOM GR. D. VE
KINGDOM OF NI Sofia
PAPAI CE
OF OF SPAIN TUSCANY STATES
CORSICA OTTOMAN Constantinople
PORTUGAL Madrid Barcelona Rome
Lisbon
EMPIRE
KINGDOM
SARDINIA
OF THE
TWO SICILIES
Athens
Gibraltar
AFRICA
MOROCCO ALGERIA TUNIS
Map 1 Europe in 1789

1. Batavian Republic
2. Belgium France (frontiers of 1792)
3. Left bank of the Rhine France (annexations
K
4. Savoy 1792–99)
R
5. Helvetic Republic French satellites/allies
6. Nice French occupation/
M A
7. Piedmont administration
8. Cisalpine Republic Second Coalition
E N
N
9. Ligurian Republic RUSSIA Neutral
10. Parma
E D
D E
11. Modena Frontier of Holy
12. Lucca Roman Empire
W
13. Tuscany
S
14. Roman Republic GREAT
15. Parthenopean Republic PRUSSIA
BRITAIN
16. Piombino
17. Montenegro 1
18. Ionian Islands (to France)

19. Ragusa 2
20. Trentino 3
GERMAN
A U S T R I A
TERRITORIES
20
5
FRANCE
4 8
7 11
8
12 OTTOMAN
10 17
9 13 EMPIRE
6 14
L
16 19
UGA
15
S PA I N
SARDINIA
PORT
18
SICILY
Map 2 Europe in 1799

1 The origins of the French Revolutionary
Wars
Let us begin by making one thing very clear. The French Revolutionary Wars were not a
struggle between liberty on the one hand and tyranny on the other. They were not, indeed,
wholly about the French Revolution at all: with considerable justice, indeed, Tim Blanning
has gone so far as to argue that they did not break out in 1792, but rather two years before
the fall of the Bastille, the cause being the great crisis that erupted in 1787 in eastern
Europe. According to this scenario, war preceded the revolution and not the other way
about (indeed, one could almost even go so far as to argue – though the current author would
not do so – that the most important event in the international history of Europe in the last
fifteen years of the eighteenth century was not the French Revolution of 1789, but rather the
Polish Revolution of 1791). This, of, course, does not mean that ideology played no role in
the spread of conflict: on various occasions, in fact, it intensified tension. But the chief cause
of trouble it was not, whilst the diplomatic history of the 1790s (and, indeed, the 1800s) sug-
gests that few of the great powers of Europe had any problems with the concept of peace with
France, nor even an alliance with her. Nor did the 1790s bring any real change in the aims of
the great powers, who in each case pursued goals that would have comprehensible to rulers
of fifty or even one hundred years before. This should not be taken to mean that these goals
were fixed. Every state at one time or another had choices to make in terms of their priorities
and partners, or felt that it had no option but to sacrifice one goal in favour of another. Much
the same was true of the structures within which they operated: the dynamic of international
relations in Europe altered very considerably over the course of the eighteenth century and
continued to change after 1789. But until 1800, at least, and possibly even a decade later,
the general range of those choices remained substantially the same, the implication being, of
course, that the French Revolution did not suddenly engage the exclusive attention of every
ancien-régime chancellory and ministry of war. To quote George Rudé, then, the struggle of
1792–1801 ‘was not, and . . . never became, a straightforward crusade of the crowned heads
of Europe against Revolutionary France’.1
One might with some justice go well beyond this. Not, in fact, till 1814 did the powers
finally set aside their differences and concentrate all their forces and energies in a fight to
the finish with Napoleon.2 But to discuss this issue would clearly be to go far beyond the
remit of the current volume. For the time being, our priority must rather be to examine
the eighteenth-century context. In brief, this was very much that of an age of conflict. For
over a hundred years before 1789, indeed, there had hardly been a year when the whole of
Europe had been at peace. Why this was so is again a question that need not detain us here
for too long. However, in brief, for all the monarchies of Europe, the battlefield was at one
and the same time a gauge of their power and a theatre for their glorification, and, by exten-
sion, an important means of legitimising their power at home, where they were frequently
2 The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
challenged by feudal aristocracies and powerful religious hierarchies. Meanwhile, war bred
more war. To some extent, the ever-greater demands which it imposed – for the eighteenth
century was an age when armies and navies grew steadily bigger and more demanding in
terms of their equipment – could be financed by internal reform. Hence the ‘enlightened
absolutism’ which was so characteristic of the period from 1750 to 1789 and beyond, not
to mention the efforts of both Britain and Spain to exploit their American colonies more
effectively. But a variety of problems, including not least the resistance of traditional élites –
a factor that could in itself generate armed conflict – meant that there were only limited
advantages to be derived from such solutions, and thus it was that most rulers looked at one
time or another to territorial gains on their frontiers or the acquisition of fresh colonies.
This, of course, implied war in Europe (which given its cost in turn implied territorial
gain or at the very least financial compensation). No major state would ever have agreed
to relinquish even the smallest province voluntarily, and, whilst the weaker ones could
sometimes be overawed into doing so, a unilateral gain for one monarch was not acceptable
to any of the others: for, say, Sweden to have been allowed to take over Norway, Russia
would have expected to take over a slice of Poland or the Ottoman Empire. Nor was this an
end to the problem. To go to war successfully, it was necessary to possess allies, and allies
in turn expected to be paid for their services, either in money or in land. As this, of course,
set off a fresh chain of demands for compensation, so the problem could rarely be confined
to one part of Europe or another, many of the conflicts of the eighteenth century turning
into truly continental affairs that drew in states from Portugal to Russia and from Sweden
to Sicily. Nor, by the same token, could any peace settlement ever be definitive. Thus, no
war was ever fought with the aim of obtaining total victory: aside from the question of cost,
no dynastic monarch would ever have sought to beggar another altogether, if only because
the ruler concerned might prove a useful ally in the next crisis. Yet this in turn meant that
the loser of any conflict was almost always in a position to seek to overturn the result of one
war by seeking victory in another, and thus a game that was essentially pointless continued
to fascinate and mesmerise.3
Many factors, then, conspired to make war endemic in eighteenth-century Europe.
However, still worse was the fact that the pressures that led to conflict were increasing.
Not the least of these was a change that was beginning to take place in the structure of
international relations. Thus, very, very gradually, foreign policy was moving from being an
affair of dynasties to being an affair of nations. This development must not be exaggerated:
indeed, it affected only a few states and made limited progress even in them. Yet, for all
that, it cannot be completely ignored. In a very vague and general sense it was everywhere
understood that there ought to be a connection between foreign policy and the well-being
of the subject, but in most cases little more than lip-service was paid to the idea, whilst there
was no sense that the populace had a right either to be consulted on the issue of war or peace
or to expect concrete benefits in the event of victory. In short, the peoples of Europe were
mere pawns who were to be mobilised or called to endure suffering exactly as their rulers
thought fit. Starting in England in the seventeenth century, however, a new pattern started
to emerge in that we see the first stirrings of political awakening, if not emancipation: as
early as the 1620s, for example, Charles I caused outrage amongst his subjects by failing to
intervene effectively in favour of the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War. This process
having everywhere come on by leaps and bounds by 1789, as Black says, ‘In all states public
opinion had to be taken into account by government and political figures.’4
However, whilst by no means unimportant, these issues were outweighed by other more
pressing matters. Particularly for the eastern powers, there was the rising cost of their
The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars 3
military establishments. As the eighteenth century advanced, so their armies increased
in size: Russia and Prussia both more than doubled the size of their armies between 1700
and 1789, whilst Austria was not far behind. Whereas what had mattered in the early part
of the century had been dynastic prestige and, in particular, the question of which of the
reigning families should rule the many states that were bedevilled by succession crises,
beginning with Frederick II of Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740, what mattered now
was rather territory. Conquest, indeed, was essential, and because this was the case all
considerations of legality and morality began to go by the board, all that mattered being
increasingly raison d’état. But so long as all the major states in Europe were playing the
same game, it was held (at least by many of their rulers and statesmen) that universal
conquest brought with it universal good. The weaker states of the Continent would suffer,
certainly, but as none of the great powers would lose out in relation to one another, the
net result would be a balance of power that made for general security. To put it another
way, conquest was a moral duty from which all would benefit, and war, by extension, an
act of benevolence. Meanwhile, it was also less threatening than before. In 1789 the stand-
ing armies of Europe may have been much bigger than they had been in 1700, but new
crops, better transport, improved bureaucracies, more productive fiscal systems, harsher
discipline and tighter procedures in the field all ensured that the horrors of the Thirty
Years War, in which masses of unpaid men had simply surged from one side of Germany
to the other, living off the country and denying the authority of political masters that had
lost all ability to pay and supply them, would not be repeated. At the same time, it would
also be less costly in another sense. Thanks to developments in the art of generalship, it
was assumed that battle would be less frequent. Enemy armies would be manoeuvred out
of their positions, and, their commanders, as products of an age of reason, would tamely
accept the logic of their position and march away, leaving their opponents to march in
unopposed. If battles could largely be avoided, sieges, too, would become less of an endur-
ance test, for it was widely accepted that once a fortress had had its walls breached, its
governor would capitulate without further resistance so as to save the lives of both the
townsfolk and his men.5
Or so it seemed. In reality, much of this, of course, was so much nonsense. Given that
every possible territorial solution that could be worked out for the continent of Europe was
bound to upset one or other of the great powers, continual conquest would lead not to per-
petual peace but rather perpetual war and therefore produce not security but insecurity. As
the Seven Years War had shown, as the stakes grew ever higher, so rulers with their backs
against the wall would habitually resort to battle rather than simply accepting the logic of
superior numbers or generalship, just as they would be inclined to put fortress governors
under great pressure to resist the enemy to the utmost: it was, after all, this very conflict that
gave rise to the phrase pour encourager les autres. As the War of the Bavarian Succession of
1778–9 had shown, late eighteenth-century regular armies were much less likely than those,
say, of the War of the Spanish Succession to be able to pull off the sort of feats of manoeuvre
that would have been required to decide the issue of wars without a battle. And there was
certainly no diminution in the sufferings which war meant for the civilian population nor
in the damage which an army’s passage could inflict on a district. On the wilder fringes of
warfare – the Balkans, the frontiers of the American colonies – torture and massacre were very
much the order of the day, whilst large parts of Germany had been devastated by the Seven
Years War. The overall picture, indeed, is a grim one: war may not have been the monster
of the seventeenth century, but it was still a savage beast.6 Of this many rulers and states-
men were well aware, and a few even tried to back away from the traditional power game.
But in the end, they were helpless, for the only weapons they could fall back on were the
same mixture of alliance and armed force that had caused the problem in the first place.7
Indeed, the situation was even worse than this suggested. By the mid-1780s, a major
conflagration was in the making. As Jeremy Black has written, ‘In the 1780s, Europe’s rulers
were not planning for the French Revolutionary War, but they were preparing for major
conflicts, such as that which nearly broke out in 1790–91 between the Prussian alliance sys-
tem and Austria and Russia’.8 Let us begin by considering France. Thus, once mighty, since
1763 she had suffered a series of major catastrophes and humiliations. In the east, the first
partition of Poland of 1772 gravely weakened an old friend without providing any compen-
sation in the form of the boost that was thereby given to Austria. Stripped of her enormous
American territories in the Seven Years War, she had gained a certain degree of revenge by
assisting the nascent United States of America in the American War of Independence, only
to find that this action had shattered her financial position beyond repair and brought her
little or nothing in the way of material gain: Tobago, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and a few
forts on the coast of what is today Senegal were hardly an impressive haul in this respect.9
In this position she was repeatedly humbled, being forced both to accept a profoundly unfa-
vourable commercial treaty by the British and to stand by helplessly whilst Prussian forces
crushed the pro-French régime established by the Dutch revolution of 1785–7. Still worse,
perhaps (in going to war with Britain, the French foreign minister, Vergennes, had hoped
that humbling Britain on the global stage would force the latter to secure her place in
Europe by forging an alliance with France), the damage inflicted on Britain turned out to be
minimal in economic terms as well as military ones, for the American colonies – a region
of the world that was diverse, populous and affluent enough to constitute a more valuable
market for the Old World than any number of sugar islands – were led by factors of cost, sen-
timent and long-standing business and family links to go on buying British.10 To say that on
the eve of the Revolution France was bent on a war that could reverse these disasters would
be a wild overstatement – her statesmen were actually pursuing a variety of courses, some of
them quite contradictory; Vergennes himself remained a friend of peace right up until his
death in 1787; and the financial position was so desperate that 1788 saw the military budget
reach an all-time low – but nevertheless this was certainly an option that was being kept
open and prepared for: whilst a massive programme of military reform transformed the army
and prepared it for offensive operations, French diplomats sought to bolster the position of
Austria – France’s chief ally – by seeking an alliance with Persia that might make Russia
think twice about going on the offensive in the west (that said, desperate to avoid conflict,
Vergennes had refused to back Joseph II of Austria’s schemes for a deal that would see
Bavaria added to Austria and the ruling Wittelsbach family given the Austrian Netherlands
in exchange). At the same time, efforts were made both to dissuade Vienna from embark-
ing on military adventures in the Balkans and to build up the Turks against Russia whilst
also securing a trade agreement with the latter. As for Britain, she, too, was threatened by
continued naval construction, alliances with the rulers of Egypt – in theory, a province of
the Ottoman Empire but, in practice, a quasi-independent dominion – the dispatch of naval
expeditions to India and Cochin China, and the construction from 1783 onwards of a mas-
sive naval base at Cherbourg.11
It was not just France that, if only implicitly, was threatening to overthrow the status quo,
however. In the eastern powers, too, there were factors making for war. In Austria, for exam-
ple, Joseph II had been engaged on an aggressive attempt to build a powerful, centralised
state, but he had run into increasing opposition and was inclined to seek redress not only in
plans that would have involved swapping the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria but also in
launching an attack on the Ottoman Empire in company with Russia. Also contemplated,
meanwhile, was a renewed war with Prussia, the death of Frederick II in 1786 suggesting
that she would now be a much easier target. All the more was this the case, meanwhile, as
Prussia had in recent years frustrated a series of Austrian attempts to reinforce its position
in the Holy Roman Empire.12 What, meanwhile, about Prussia? For Frederick William II,
too, aggression was essential. Thus, the gains made in the first partition of Poland had been
much smaller than those obtained by either Russia or Austria, whilst Russia had gone on to
make further gains in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. Still worse, some of the territo-
ries left to Poland were particularly sensitive in so far as Prussia was concerned, the failure
to obtain them having left the Prussian army with some difficult strategic problems. Nor
had any significant compensation been obtained in the War of the Bavarian Succession
of 1778: although Frederick II had frustrated a major improvement in Austria’s position in
Germany, he had turned down the opportunity for territorial gains. For his successor, then,
more land was essential. In the first place, the means used were to be peaceful ones – like
Vienna, Potsdam was quite capable of working out fanciful plans for territorial exchanges,
whilst Frederick William II was no warlord – but it is clear that there was to be no draw-
ing back.13 In Sweden there was a situation parallel to that of Austria in that a reformist
monarch – in this case Gustavus III – had run into serious opposition at home and wished to
reinforce the power of the throne by a flight to the front vis à vis Russia.14 And, last but not
least, there was the Russia of Catherine the Great, which, thanks in part to the influence of
the empress’ lover, Grigory Potemkin, a hero of the struggle of 1768–74 who was bent on
driving the Turks from Europe, liberating Constantinople and, at the very least, setting up
a Greek satellite state if not restoring the Byzantine empire, was proving so aggressive in its
attitude with respect to its interpretation of the treaty of 1774 that the Sultan’s government
was being pushed ever closer towards a counter-stroke.15
This is not the place to retail the long and complicated story of the events that followed.
In brief, the inevitable crisis exploded in August 1787 when Turkey attacked Russia in
an attempt to claw back the serious losses she had suffered in the war she had waged with
Russia in the period 1768–74 (the result had been the treaty of Kutchuk Kainarjae, by which
Constantinople had to surrender its overlordship of the Khanate of the Crimea, pay Russia
substantial reparation and cede Bukovina to Austria, as well as granting Saint Petersburg
the right to protect the substantial Christian populations contained within the Ottomans’
domains). This conflict in turn provoked a general war in eastern Europe in that, bound
by the terms of the treaty of alliance she had negotiated with Russia in 1781, Austria was
forced to enter the war against Turkey, whereupon Sweden declared war against Russia and
Denmark declared war against Sweden.16 Meanwhile, in 1789 large parts of the Habsburg
Empire were gripped by a great wave of protest at the centralising policies of Joseph II, the
disturbances in the Austrian Netherlands – i.e. the western half of present-day Belgium –
eventually culminating, as we shall see, in an armed revolt that drove out the Austrians
altogether. By 1790, except in the Balkans, the fighting had died down, not least because,
in a clear instance of the growing importance of public opinion, Gustavus III had been
forced by growing internal opposition to make peace with Russia, but, in the midst of the
general confusion, revolution had broken out in Poland where a reformist faction amongst
the nobility was anxious to restore her fortunes and build a modern state: in the middle
of the eighteenth century Poland had been the largest state in Europe next to Russia and
Austria, but a series of complicated events in the first half of the century had reduced her
to the status of a Russian protectorate, while the deeply entrenched rights of the nobility –
the most notorious was the so-called liberum veto, a provision that meant that it took the
vote of just one deputy for new laws to be thrown out by the diet – had had the result of
hamstringing the state in military terms and leaving her wide open to a partition that saw
Austria, Russia and Prussia seize substantial border territories from her in 1772.17
Until now, events in France had for the most part been ignored, but in the course of 1791
she too was dragged into the crisis on account of Leopold II of Austria’s desperate attempts
to stave off a further round of hostilities and, in particular, a further partition of Poland
(see below). For the self-same reason, it is now time for us to turn to those events. What
happened in France in 1789 and the years the followed has, of course, been subjected to
endless debate, and it is not the intention of the author to recapitulate the full canon of that
debate in the current work. In essence, however, the story begins with the bankruptcy –
financial, certainly, but also personal, political, diplomatic and military – of the French
monarchy. To begin with the figure of Louis XVI is, perhaps, to risk accusations of somehow
imagining that if only France had been ruled by a Louis XIV the French Revolution would
never have happened, but it is not necessary to take this line to accept that Louis XVI was
scarcely either a dynamic or a reassuring figure: whilst he may have allowed himself to be
painted wearing a suit of seventeenth-century style armour in the same style as that affected
by so many of his contemporaries, such dreams as he entertained of foreign-policy success
revolved around the exercise of what today would be called soft power. Thus, if France
would reign supreme, it would be on account of her cultural supremacy and the reputation
of her monarch for wisdom and beneficence. To quote William Doyle, indeed, ‘All Louis
XVI had was good intentions.’18 Having inherited the throne at the age of just twenty, fol-
lowing the sudden death of Louis XV, a monarch who had done little or nothing to prepare
him for his future role, he was conscientious, hard-working and by no means unintelligent,
but, with all, he was shy, awkward and uncommunicative; very much inclined to take refuge
behind a mask of hauteur; obstinate to a fault; and determined to defend his every preroga-
tive. As if all this was not enough, meanwhile, he was also extremely obese, and this added
still further to the general air of lackadaisicalness, an air that was contributed to by the fact
that, desperate to show that he was no tyrant, he had rescinded the reforms imposed on
the regional councils of administration and justice known as the parlements by his prede-
cessor’s chief minister, Maupeou, virtually as soon as he had come to the throne and ever
afterwards fought shy of repeating the experiment: when a new Comptroller-General of
Finance, Anne-Robert Turgot, attempted a further bout of reform from 1774 onwards, he
was very quickly dismissed.19 And, if obesity was one chink in the king’s armour, his queen,
Marie-Antoinette, was another. Much demonised both before and after 1789 on account of
a wide range of wholly invented social and sexual misdeeds, the sometime Maria Antonia
of Austria did not deserve much of the calumny that was heaped upon her, but she cannot
be defended from charges of ignorance, frivolity, extravagance, indifference to the plight of
the poor and meddling in court politics, whilst the fact that she was Austrian was little short
of disastrous (as we shall see, the alliance with Austria of which she was the personification
offered France very little, whilst at the same time risking dragging her into conflicts in east-
ern Europe in which she had little interest, the result being that the queen was perceived
as nothing short of a de facto enemy agent, and not so much l’autrichienne – the Austrian
woman – as la chienne autriche – the Austrian bitch).20
Had the circumstances been different, it is possible that the king and queen’s personal
failings would not have mattered. However, the circumstances were not different. On the
contrary, as detailed above, in the wake of American Revolution, France found she had
gained little benefit from Britain’s humiliation. Thus, her diplomatic situation seemed as
weak as ever, while the Austrians repeatedly failed to give her the support she needed.
As the 1780s rolled on, meanwhile, so the diplomatic eclipse seemed to darken by the
year. Establishing a friendly government in Amsterdam would have been a triumph in
the constant struggle with Britain – setting aside the valuable strategic situation occupied
by the United Provinces themselves, the Dutch held footholds in the wider world that
would be of obvious value in the form of the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon – and yet
the opportunity had been lost, matters being rendered still worse by the fact that the chief
result of the crisis had been the emergence of an alliance between Britain, Holland and
Prussia that effectively blocked all hope of serious advances in the Low Countries. As for
efforts to mediate a peace in the Balkans that would have allowed the Turks – a traditional
ally of France – to emerge from the war with Austria and Russia – a war in which Austria’s
involvement was one more sign of the contempt in which Vienna seemed to hold French
interests – with minimal losses, these were rebuffed. Nor was it just such matters of detail,
important as these were. Even more frightening were the structural changes that had taken
place in European geopolitics. Thus, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Louis XIV
had in part been able to dominate Europe because the support of Spain in the west, and
Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire in the east, sufficed to balance the British and
Austrians. However, the situation had now changed in that the British were far more pow-
erful than they had been a century earlier, while the rise of Prussia and Russia – powers
that had been negligible in 1700 – ensured that France’s eastern allies were now far less
effective. As Stone has said, ‘The entire strategic calculus of Versailles . . . was rendered
obsolete by developments at Saint Petersburg and Berlin.’21
Clearly, then, if France was to defend her interests in the cut-throat world of interna-
tional relations, she would, needs must, have to depend on her own resources, but these, it
was clear, were simply not fit for purpose. The navy, certainly, was both large and of con-
siderable quality, but the very special circumstances of 1781 – a moment that saw France,
Holland and Spain united in alliance against Britain – were unlikely to be repeated: able to
build ships at a far greater rate than the French, by 1789 the British had an advantage of well
over two to one in terms of ships of the line.22 Even fighting in such a context, meanwhile,
the Bourbon fleet was far from invincible in tactical terms – the very squadron that had
triumphed at Chesapeake Bay had, after all, shortly afterwards suffered a crushing defeat
at the Battle of the Saints, a fact that was doubly worrying given the fact that the same
West-Indian waters contained the vital colonies of Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe –
while it was not ships that were going to make a difference in facing up to opponents such
as Prussia or, for that matter, convincing Austria to take more notice of France’s interests.
Yet the French army looked even less fit for purpose than the navy. Populous though
France was, her army was comparatively small, while the earnest attempts that had been
made to improve its performance since the disastrous defeats of the Seven Years War – the
most important are the formation of specialist light-infantry battalions, the introduction
of the superlative Gribeauval artillery system and the opening of a network of military
academies – had yet to be tested in combat and, in some instances – above all, the tactics
that the infantry should employ on the battlefield – were still the subject of intense debate.
But even had the army been stronger, there was simply not the money to allow France to
go to war: indeed, such a course of action was explicitly rejected by the current Minister
of Finance, Loménie de Brienne, on the grounds of cost. To quote Jeremy Black, then, ‘In
foreign-policy terms, 1787 marked the beginning of the Revolution.’23
To make this point more explicitly, it is necessary to examine the gulf that had opened
between France’s governance and the requirements of her prosperity and, to the extent
that one can speak about such a thing, national interest. Thus, over the past fifty years or
more, the wealth of France’s West-Indian colonies had come to form the bedrock of her
wealth. Whilst French merchants and financiers made fortunes from the slave trade, other
merchants, not to mention the planters of Saint Domingue and the other French colonies,
made equal fortunes from the consignments of sugar, coffee, indigo and other products
that they sent back to France both for domestic consumption and re-export. Finally, in
the hinterlands of Atlantic ports such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes, cultivation
of the commercial crops necessitated by maritime expansion was booming, just as in their
shipyards a host of craftsmen were labouring to construct the new vessels that were just
as essential.24 Members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie alike thrived off the immense
profits which all this economic activity generated, and the latter group in particular were
able to use their growing wealth to buy their way into the ancien régime, whether by acquir-
ing land or patents of nobility.25 With France clearly a nullity in international relations,
the question could not but arise as to how the substantial economic interests that had
thus been generated could be defended against British predation. Seemingly there was no
money with which to lend muscle to French foreign policy, and yet the fabulous ostenta-
tion of Versailles – a spectacle to which even those who were no more than moderately
prosperous could gain access and which was therefore in effect on show for all to see –
suggested that money existed in plenty, the problem being rather that the monarchy could
not be trusted to spend it on the men and ships that were so obviously required: it was after
all only in 1768 that a new royal palace – the so-called Petit Trianon – had been erected at
Versailles, whilst in 1783 this had been followed by the Hameau de la Reine, on the surface
a fantastical rural idyll constructed for no better reason than to allow Marie-Antoinette to
play at being a shepherdess.26 And, if the Hameau de la Reine was completed, the naval
base at Cherbourg was not.27
Dissatisfaction with the régime’s conduct of foreign policy, then, was rife, but this was but
the beginning.28 For the French élites, the 1780s was an extremely frightening period. At the
heart of this was a combination of economic instability, agrarian and industrial backwardness
and population growth. To begin with economic instability, with France an overwhelmingly
rural country, the harvest was everything, and that meant in turn that the whole country was
at the mercy of the weather. Should the latter ruin the harvest, then the amount of grain
available for release to the urban market would fall by a disproportionate amount. And this in
turn would force up the price of the bread that was the staple of the artisans and the labour-
ing poor, thereby undermining the market for such mundane items as stools, benches, cups,
plates and cutlery, not to mention the second-hand clothes that were a prominent feature of
every street market, the result being that the income of the humble was also hit very badly.
With the peasantry’s always limited disposable income also being sent into sharp decline,
the resultant crisis would spread ever more widely until its tentacles had enfolded even the
humblest pedlar. To break out of this situation, of course, what was needed was industriali-
sation, but this last was in the aggregate limited in the extreme, not least because France’s
colonies were not extensive enough to generate the sort of demand for cotton products and
other goods emanating from Britain’s much more impressive collection of overseas territories
and continued control of the vital American market (also important here was, first, an over-
whelming tendency for surplus capital to be invested in land and status rather than industry,
and, second, the backwardness and low productivity of much of French agriculture).29 And,
finally, due to a variety of factors, including the disappearance of the plague and, particularly
in the middle years of the century, an unwonted number of good harvests, the population had
been increasing ever more sharply: in 1789 there were perhaps 7,000,000 more Frenchmen
than there had been in 1700, at least half of whom had been born in the years since 1750.
With the economy (and, yet again, the colonies: in this respect the loss of Canada in the
Seven Years War was crucial) unable to sustain such increases, the result was grim indeed.
As McPhee writes:
Twenty-two of the years between 1765 and 1789 were marked by food riots, either in
popular urban neighbourhoods where women in particular sought . . . to hold prices at
customary levels, or in rural areas where peasants banded together to prevent scarce
supplies from being sent away to market.30
Nor was it just that disturbances were frequent: on the contrary, from the 1760s onwards, the
number of such events rose steadily until the events of the great subsistence crisis of 1775 –
an event that produced a popular response so dramatic that it became known as the ‘Flour
War’ – fell back for a few years under the influence of a series of good harvests and then shot
ever upwards until they blended with the disturbances that formed the backdrop to 1789.31
Finally, also all too observable were brigandage and vagrancy: from the 1760s onwards, the
plains of La Beauce – an area that was by no means the most propitious in France as a theatre
of operations for bandit chieftains – were for many years terrorised by a series of gangs known
as the chauffeurs d’Orgères, while the roads of many parts of France were constantly thronged
by aimless groups of wandering poor who, even if their prime objective was to find work,
food and shelter, were nonetheless regarded as a serious social menace.32
Against this internal threat, the régime could offer little protection – though surpris-
ingly well organised, not to mention the best force of its kind in the whole of Europe, the
semi-military constabulary known as the maréchaussée numbered under 4,000 men and, like
the army and the navy, was simply not strong enough to do its job, whilst the beginnings
of a national system of poor relief that were laid down in the form of the workhouses set up
in most main towns from the 1760s onwards were but gestures given the swarms of beggars
and prostitutes who thronged the streets33 – and thus it was that failure on the home front
joined failure abroad as a source of complaint amongst the propertied classes.34 However,
these same propertied classes were a force that was far better educated and politically aware
than had ever been the case in the past. With the coming of the so-called polite society
and, more specifically, the salon, it became de rigueur for anyone desirous of being regarded
as a person of culture to have at least a nodding acquaintance with the literature of the day,
included in which was not just a growing range of novels – themselves by no means necessar-
ily calculated to uphold the moral norms of the ancien régime35 – but also the extraordinary
outpouring of social, political, economic and scientific thought that we collectively refer
to as the Enlightenment. That this was anything but a coherent doctrine, let alone a blue-
print for revolution, goes without saying. However, nor was it a blueprint for stasis. Driven,
above all, by the concept of reason, the philosophes – such figures as Montesquieu, Voltaire,
D’Holbach, D’Alembert and Diderot – directly or indirectly subjected almost every aspect
of the ancien régime to a biting critique that was reinforced by the writings of the many other
scholars and men of letters scattered across Europe, such as David Gibbon, David Hume,
Adam Smith, Cesare Beccaria and Immanuel Kant. As for their collective message, it could
not be mistaken: through the application of human reason and intellect and the pursuit of
knowledge, society could be remodelled, reconstructed, even remade altogether. And, if
that was so, it followed that even France’s problems could be resolved: she could alike be
better governed, more efficient, more educated, more secure, more successful, more prosper-
ous and more respected. Already under attack for its ownership of so much of the land and
opposition to progress, the Church – itself by no means a monolithic block, but rather an
institution deeply divided between died-in-the-wool defenders of the supremacy of Rome
and reformers known as Jansenists who wanted much greater power for the bishops, an
end to the religious orders and much greater support of the parish clergy – was also being
undermined by the great strides that were being made in the understanding of the natural
world, great strides in which Frenchmen – most notably, the chemist, Lavoisier – were once
again playing an important part. To quote William Doyle, then, ‘The Enlightenment was
a critical movement, and its advocates spent much of their time pouring scorn on pillars of
the established order of things such as the Church and the legal system.’36
‘Critical’, however, is not a word that should be taken too far. In the words of Norman
Hampson, ‘The Enlightenment . . . was not primarily a political movement except in the
sense that anti-clericalism was a political programme of a kind.’37 And, if it was not politi-
cal, still less was it democratic. With a few notable exceptions, the men who ‘made’ the
Enlightenment in France were anything but enemies of the ancien régime: if anything, indeed,
they were enemies of the people, a group who in their eyes were devoid of reason and sen-
sibility, not to mention irredeemably violent and brutish.38 Yet almost every word that the
philosophes wrote in one way or another undermined Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, just
as hapless servants of the monarchy such as Turgot and Necker inadvertently highlighted
the failings of the Bourbon state through their desperate efforts to restore its fortunes. That
these failings were enormous, meanwhile, was all too clear. It was not just that the court
was wildly extravagant. Wherever the sharp-eyed observer looked, there was chaos. To do
justice to this subject in so short a compass is near impossible, but there were nine major
factors that held back the French state from realising its not inconsiderable potential. In
no particular order, these were as follows: first, the survival of the thirteen parlements, these
being regional high courts of appeal staffed by a corps of judges entirely independent of
the monarchy on account of the fact that they had either bought or inherited their seats
that effectively had a right of veto over all royal legislation; second, the fact that, like the
judges of the parlements, the vast majority of officials held their posts either because they
themselves had bought them or because this had been done by earlier generations; third,
the fact that the collection of most sources of revenue was in the hands of tax farmers who
paid over comparatively little of their income to the royal treasury; fourth, the inadequacy
of a tax system that touched the resources of the propertied classes (whether noble or bour-
geois) hardly at all and exempted the Church altogether; fifth, a legal system that inflicted
on France a multiplicity of local courts and legal codes; sixth, web upon web of internal
customs duties that at one and the same time acted as a break on industry, undermined the
domestic market and rendered it very difficult to transfer grain and other food stuffs from
one part of the country to another in times of dearth; seventh, the survival in many parts
of France of mediaeval estates that were jealous in their defence of provincial privilege;
eighth, a widespread degree of municipal self-government that more than anything else
served to defend such privileges as freedom from taxation; and ninth the failure to provide
the intendants (hand-picked royal officials with the unenviable task of enforcing the will of
the throne and in general heading the administration in their areas) with adequate support
in terms of men and authority alike.39
All this, of course, served to give the writings of the philosophes an impact of a sort that
the latter had never intended. Meanwhile, for every D’Alembert or Diderot, there were
ten, twenty, thirty or more writers of a very different genre whose work had an effect that
was still more corrosive. As yet, France was anything but a literate society en tout, but
she was nonetheless a society in which reading was becoming ever more common, and
one which was therefore beginning to generate an ever-greater demand for reading matter.
Meanwhile, as education increased (as indeed it did), so there began to appear figures who
could find no niche in the structures of power and authority and therefore came to hate
it for the manner in which it excluded them from power. Thus was born the figure of the
pamphleteer, the man who made his living by hanging on the fringes of educated society
and not just reflecting its concerns but popularising them and at the same time increasing
the number of his own readers. As witness both the catalogues of illicit booksellers and the
consignments of illicit works periodically seized by the authorities, what this boiled down
to was a move in the direction of sensationalism and not just that but pornography. The
court, then, was not only extravagant but corrupt, a place where masked balls were covers
for orgies in which everybody from the queen down engaged in bouts of multiple coupling
with numerous partners, including on occasion members of the same sex (everybody, that
is, bar the unfortunate Louis XVI whose unfortunate deficiencies in the bedchamber were
notorious and who therefore became an even greater subject of derision, particularly when
compared with the notoriously uxorious Louis XIV and Louis XV). And, if this was what
went on at Versailles, so it went on in many other areas of First and Second Estate society:
a particular target here was the Church, and thus it was, for example, that pornographic
prints circulated, showing such scenes as voluptuous nuns languidly choosing between rival
ecclesiastical erections.40
Developments on the home front therefore combined with developments abroad to
bring the question of reform ever closer to the fore. In the end, however, it was the régime
that precipitated the crisis. In the wake of the American War of Independence, Louis XVI
acquired a new Minister of Finance in the person of Charles de Calonne. An erstwhile
intendant, Calonne was all too aware of the monarchy’s many difficulties and he immedi-
ately threw himself into a last-ditch effort to produce a plan of reform that would somehow
bring in the money that was required to render France a credible great power once again.
The chief result of his work was a series of proposals in many respects harking back to the
work of Turgot that would have ended the fiscal immunity of the propertied classes, cut gov-
ernment expenditure, rendered the collection of the taxes on salt and tobacco much more
equitable, introduced moves towards free trade and, perhaps most importantly, opened the
way for the expropriation and sale of the lands of the Church. As both Calonne and the
king were well aware, however, simply to announce these measures by decree would have
been to incur the wrath of the parlements and see them at the very least gravely delayed,
if not blocked altogether. To get round this situation, an appeal to some higher authority
was required, and thus it was that he summoned an ‘assembly of notables’ consisting of 144
senior officials, churchmen and aristocrats whose task it was to ratify the reform programme
on behalf of the whole nation.41
In itself, the convocation of an assembly of notables was not revolutionary: on the
contrary, similar bodies had appeared on three earlier occasions in French history. That,
however, was by the by: the net result was to precipitate revolution. For reasons that are
not entirely clear – the traditional explanation is that the delegates to the assembly had too
strong a vested financial interest in the existing system to tolerate reform, but later histori-
ans have in some instances claimed rather that the problem was above all one of detail and
even that there was some feeling that Calonne should have gone further – Calonne’s ideas
were thrown out and their author dismissed and sent into internal exile. With Calonne
gone, the position of Minister of Finance passed to the Archbishop of Toulouse and erst-
while president of the assembly, Etienne Loménnie de Brienne. A much less abrasive figure
than Calonne, the new minister succeeded in getting some of the less radical parts of his
predecessor’s plan accepted by the parlements, but their opposition to such matters as a new
land tax was unyielding and, after a prolonged battle with the powerful Parlement de Paris
in particular, in August 1788 Loménnie resigned when it became clear that, while the parle-
ments could be silenced (albeit to the accompaniment of enormous public agitation, they
were in fact all shut down by decree in May of the same year), France was now quite literally
bankrupt: whereas Calonne and his predecessors had hitherto kept the ship of state afloat
by borrowing vast sums of money at even vaster rates of interest, the financiers on which
they had relied would no longer listen to their demands, still more damage to the royal cause
being done when an assembly of the clergy that had been summoned to vote through the
Church’s regular financial don to the state limited this to less than one-quarter of the con-
siderable sum that had been asked for and, still worse, decreed that even the miserly amount
concerned should be spread over two years; hence the decision to summon the mediaeval
parliament, known as the Estates General, recognised though it was that this body had the
right to demand the redress of grievances prior to granting fresh taxes.42
The decision to convoke the Estates General had implications that were beyond mas-
sive. Literally overnight, France was plunged into a new world. In the first place, there
was the question of the conditions under which the new assembly should meet and, in the
second, the only slightly less pressing question of the issues which it should debate, this
being an explosive mixture. Given that the régime addressed the second issue by issuing an
appeal for the elaboration of cahiers des doléances (literally, ‘notebooks of grievances’), the
upshot could not but be a vigorous period of debate, but fuel was added to the flames by an
announcement that, as had been the case when it last met in 1614, the new body would
meet by estates (i.e. by its separate houses, each of which were 300 strong), thereby ensuring
that the clergy and the nobility would always outvote the Third Estate – the representatives,
at least in theory, of the people – despite the fact that the strength of this last’s contingent
was increased from 300 to 600. Over the past few years, debate on the future of France had
already been vociferous, but now the release by Loménnie de Brienne’s successor, Necker,
of many journalists and pamphleteers who had been imprisoned for engaging in criticism of
the régime, the suspension of censorship – a logical consequence of the convocation of the
Estates General – and the relaxation of rules banning seditious assemblies meant that the
floodgates were well and truly open. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the enormous
number of pamphlets that now saw the light of day, some 4,158 being published in the year
preceding the opening of the Estates General; much the same was true of newspapers, in
respect of which the four titles in publication at the beginning of 1788 had risen to 184 by
the end of 1789. And with the pamphlets came political clubs and societies that in many
instances were merely extensions of pre-existing salons but, unlike such earlier gatherings,
ranged themselves behind particular issues or points of view. In the pithy words of François
Furet, then, ‘The monarchy . . . by renouncing its nature, was making way for society.’43
The cahiers des doléances, therefore, emerged on the crest of a wave of public debate that
was completely unprecedented and drew its impetus from a much wider segment of French
society than just the salons. As for the demands that they made of Louis XVI and his minis-
ters, these were many, varied and occasionally contradictory, including, as they did, regular
meetings of the Estates General; the gallicanisation of the Church; the abolition of the
tithe and the religious orders; the strengthening of the system of provincial estates; the end
of noble and ecclesiastical privilege; the institution of both cheaper systems of justice and
more uniform codes of justice; the reduction of public expenditure; the regulation of every
profession from prostitution to surgery; the reform of every form of taxation; the closure of
theatres and gaming houses; the moral regeneration of society; the abolition of slavery in
France’s colonies; the provision of better public services in such areas as highways, street
lighting, sanitation and access to medical care; and the establishment of basic freedoms of
property, occupation and the individual. Not all the demands had equal support behind
them, and not all the cahiers voiced the same list of demands or interpreted similar demands
in the same way, but the general inference was clear: at every level of society, there was a
clear recognition that the ancien régime was no longer fit for purpose.44
Thus far, whilst not ignoring the question of popular involvement and interest in the
march of events, we have discussed the Revolution very much as a political phenomenon,
as, indeed, a movement that above all reflected the interests of the élites. From the start,
however, it was clear that it was much more than just this, that France, in fact, was in the
grip of a movement that was at least as much social as it was political. Mention has already
been made of the problem of poverty, but it has up until now only been discussed in terms of
the extent to which it impinged upon the concerns of the propertied classes. What we need
to do now is to consider the problem as it was experienced by the less favoured members
of society. That the concerns of these groups were very different from those of the élites is
suggested very clearly by close analysis of such views as they were able to inject into the
political process. Nowhere is this clearer than in the many thousands of cahiers des doléances
that were elaborated by humble parish assemblies in rural areas. Thus, whilst assemblies
representing the various élites placed most emphasis on demands calculated to satisfy politi-
cal agenda – in the case of the nobility, the restriction of royal power and, in that of the
more prosperous elements of the Third Estate, the abolition of noble privilege and the set-
ting aside of hindrances to economic development – those that echoed the concerns of the
peasantry were rather filled with demands for a fairer system of taxation, the abolition of
conscription to the militia and a massive assault on the perquisites of feudalism.45
We come here to a very different revolution. In so far as the propertied élites were con-
cerned, what was required was essentially a series of political reforms that would ultimately
bring greater prosperity and with it a reform of the social problem. However, beyond the
charmed circle of polite society was a world whose priorities were very different. We speak
here, of course, of the rural populace, this being composed of an admixture of peasants –
small tenant farmers and owner occupiers who farmed no more land than they could man-
age by themselves or with the aid of their immediate families and, in a minority of wealthier
instances, a few hired hands brought in for the harvest or the spring sowing – and the mass
of landless labourers and men who owned or rented a little land but had to supplement their
income by hiring out their labour to their richer neighbours or joining the hordes of migrant
workers who tramped the country in search of work on the harvest every summer. For these
groups, as has already been suggested, life was very hard in that they were inherently vul-
nerable to the vagaries of the weather and also under the cosh of a combination of steady
population growth (amongst other things, this had the effect of, first, driving up rents by
as much as 50 per cent and, second, progressively subdividing peasant holdings to such an
extent that in the end very few families were left with enough land to live on), mid-century
agrarian reforms aimed at enclosing the commons implemented under the influence of the
group known as the Physiocrats, and systems of crop rotation that kept as much as half the
arable land out of production at any given moment, but many features of the ancien régime
conspired to make life even more difficult for them. First and foremost there were the twin
pressures exercised by the feudal system and the state (a third element here could conceiv-
ably be the Church, but it is generally agreed that, whilst all those who owned or rented
land had to pay the tithe, the amount that this represented – usually much less than a tenth,
when, that is, it was paid at all, was fairly inconsequential).46 Taking feudalism, first of all,
vileins were not tied to the land, did not have to perform forced labour on their seigneurs’
estates and, money permitting, could even own or rent plots of their own: what survived,
then, was a wide range of financial payments (the seigneurs, for example, monopolised such
facilities as ovens, windmills and olive presses and charged more or less heavy fees for their
use), restrictive game laws which prohibited poaching even in times of the utmost dearth
and prevented villagers from dealing with such pests as rabbits and pigeons, the subjection
of the populace to the manorial courts and certain restrictions on property rights (in brief,
smallholdings whose owner died without a direct heir reverted to the ownership of the
appropriate seigneur).47 Meanwhile, although conditions varied from place to place – in
parts of Brittany, for example, feudal dues had not been revised for 150 years48 – on the
whole the rule of the seigneurs was becoming ever more oppressive as arriviste members of
the bourgeoisie sought to do all they could to maximise their investments and needy nobles
struggled to keep up appearances in the face of a tide of social change.49
Yet it was not just feudalism. Also to be considered were the demands of the state. To
the latter went the land tax and the poll tax, both of them discriminatory levies that fell
almost entirely on the rural populace, as well as a variety of levies on basic commodities
such as salt, all of which gave rise to much bitterness, not least because the inhabitants of
one province very often found themselves paying much higher rates than neighbours living
just across the border in another. ‘The indirect taxes are detestable’, railed one cahier des
doléances. ‘The exciseman has no respect for the privacy of our homes; he comes poking
and prying, laying his hands on everything, and nothing is sacred in his eyes . . . The col-
lector of the taille is a rapacious harpy whose one idea is to squeeze the poor in every way
he can. The villagers charged with the collection of the taxes are compelled to ruin their
neighbours so as not to be victimised themselves by the exorbitant demands of these petty
tyrants.’50 Still worse, the situation was getting worse almost by the year. To quote Georges
Lefebvre, ‘The royal demands had steadily risen during the eighteenth century . . . In
Walloon Flanders . . . the increase in direct taxes in the reign of Louis XVI alone has been
estimated at twenty-eight per cent.’51
If things were bad in the countryside, they were no better in the towns. As the popula-
tion had risen in the course of the eighteenth century, so it had increasingly outstripped
the capacity of the countryside to sustain it, and thus it was that large numbers of destitute
villagers and their families began to migrate to the towns and cities in search of work.
Unfortunately, however, the latter were no more able to sustain them than their places
of origin. Indeed, in urban environments they may even have been worse off, for they had
access to neither the kitchen gardens usual in even the most impoverished villages nor
the chestnuts, mushrooms and wild berries of the commons, and instead found themselves
exposed to a situation in which the price of food they now had no option but to purchase
was rising far more quickly than any wages they might hope to earn. Paris, Rouen, Lyon and
most other large towns were therefore crammed with thousands of families living on the
edge of destitution with little in the way of skills that they could offer. When times were not
too hard, some of the men might find work as porters or labourers and some of the women in
sweat shops, while there were also generally at least some opportunities in domestic service,
but the existence of these classes was, at best, a precarious one, and their physical condi-
tions never other than dreadful. Little better off, meanwhile, were the majority of artisans:
not only, albeit indirectly so, were they as much at the mercy of the weather as any peasant
or landless labourer, but they were no more immune than the very poor to the ravages of
the diseases that stalked town and countryside alike and could in a matter of hours deprive a
family of its main breadwinner. As noted before, then, begging, petty crime and prostitution
were rife, while the very high incidence of, if not infanticide, then, condemnation to the
near certainty of the death sentence represented by the numerous foundling hospitals stands
as a constant reminder of the miseries endured by the lowest echelons of Bourbon society.52
The poor were a constant and ineradicable feature of life in France, but, as 1788 headed
towards 1789, there were even more of them than normal. Why this should have been so is
not hard to establish. The commercial treaty signed with Britain in 1786 had certainly had
some impact on France’s various textile industries, but it would be misleading to place too
much weight upon this factor, not least because the treaty had taken so little time to have
the dramatic effects which are sometimes alleged: Blanning, for example, speaks of ‘a reces-
sion which affected all sectors of the economy except the colonial trade’ from the 1770s
onwards, as well as ‘a collapse of wine prices [from 1778] due to over-production and over-
abundant harvests’.53 Things were already difficult, then, but on 13 July 1788 there came
complete disaster in that a freak hailstorm swept across a broad swathe of northern France
and devastated a harvest that was already promising to be mediocre thanks to a serious lack
of rain earlier in the year. The consequence was all too predictable in that the country was
immediately plunged into a subsistence crisis. As usual, the price of bread began to rise ever
more steeply, thereby undermining the ability of artisans to sell their products, while the
mayhem was increased still further by an exceptionally severe winter which brought trade
and industry to a standstill that was all but total. By the beginning of 1789, then, in town
and countryside alike, the countryside was in the grip of conditions that almost certainly
outstripped anything that had been seen in France for most of the previous century. Not
surprisingly, if the situation was dramatic, so was the response. Bread riots broke out on all
sides, the countryside began to mobilise against the seigneurs, and, in April, Paris witnessed
serious disturbances when the premises of a wealthy manufacturer named Réveillon were
ransacked by an angry mob. Thus far, in one sense, thus normal, but the situation in the
spring of 1789 was anything but normal: with Versailles so close to Paris, news of events
there was readily available, and all the more so, as the number of newspapers was almost
literally growing by the day, no fewer than 180 new publications appearing in the course of
1789, publications, moreover, which were by all accounts being read or otherwise accessed
by the denizens of not just the salons but the slums.54
The backdrop to the elections that took place from the autumn of 1788 to the spring of
1789 could, therefore, scarcely have been more threatening. Yet this did nothing whatso-
ever to affect the composition of the Estates General when it finally assembled in Versailles
in 1789. The Third Estate were elected on a very wide franchise consisting of every male
taxpayer aged twenty-five or above, but, thanks to the system of indirect election that was
adopted, not to mention the fact that deputies were unpaid and had to meet all their own
costs, this did nothing to produce a body that was in any way representative of its constitu-
ents. ‘What is the Third Estate?’, famously demanded the pamphleteer, Emanuel Sièyes.
The answer, of course, was everyone who was not either a noble or an ecclesiastic: in other
words, roughly 25,000,000 out of a total population of 26,000,000, of whom the vast major-
ity were the peasants. However, this was not reflected by the composition of the men who
came to Versailles. Thus, of 610 deputies, some 400 were lawyers or officials, eighty-five
financiers, merchants and manufacturers and about fifty ‘men of letters’, each and every
one of them men of property. These, then, were the men who, at least initially, ‘made’ the
Revolution, and it was largely to the needs and perceptions of the groups that they repre-
sented that that it was initially addressed, needs and perceptions, be it said, that did not
even begin to address those of the humble peasants and artisans who had suddenly found
themselves given a voice. To paraphrase Gwynne Lewis, if the Third Estate on display at
Versailles was intellectually radical, it was also socially conservative.55
Yet the men of Versailles were not alone. Operating alongside them was another group
entirely, namely the swarms of radical pamphleteers and radicals who had been unleashed
by the collapse of press censorship. Typical of these figures of the so-called ‘Fourth Estate’
were Jacques Brissot, a clerk from Chartres who had twice been imprisoned in the Bastille for
writing seditious pamphlets and spent some time in exile in London; Camille Desmoulins,
a failed lawyer living in poverty in Paris who had turned to criticising the régime as a way
of making his way in the world; Jacques Hébert, a clerk ruined by a law-suit; Jean Marat,
a highly successful doctor who had put aside his medical practice in favour of becoming a
full-time journalist in 1788; and François Babeuf, a sometime bailiff who had fallen on hard
times. No one should doubt the genuine passion and idealism of such men, whilst, as the
example of Marat suggests, it is very far from the truth to imagine that they were all penni-
less drifters who had failed to make their way in French society. That said, for their ideas to
be heeded they all needed a radicalisation of the revolution, just as to maintain their influ-
ence (and, for the most part, support themselves), they needed readers, and lots of them.
Logic, then, dictated an appeal to the streets, and they therefore were inclined increasingly
to outbid one another in their rhetoric, to give their newspapers such titles as the Ami du
Peuple and the Tribun du Peuple, and in the more extreme cases to make use of a language
that was ever more crude and bloodthirsty. As such, meanwhile, they were to play a key part
in events, it in large part being through their influence that the Revolution acquired a mass
following. In Lewis’ pithy phrase, henceforth ‘the Parisian crowd, les petits . . . were always
standing at the elbows of les gros’.56
The events that followed have been retold so many times that it is scarcely neces-
sary to do so again now. As matters currently stood, the three houses – nobility, clergy and
commonalty – that made up the Estates General were set to meet and vote separately from
one another, and, as everyone was well aware, this meant that there was a very real danger
that any proposals emanating from the Third Estate that challenged the established order in
too aggressive or fundamental a fashion would be immediately voted down. For this reason,
throughout the preceding six months or more, pressure had been growing in the press and
the pamphlet literature for a move to joint meetings of the three houses and, with it, voting
in common ‘by head’ rather than ‘by order’. Against this demand, now backed by the parle-
ments, whose determination to defend corporate privilege at all costs was thereby starkly
revealed (in the conflicts with the throne of the previous year they had consistently argued
that they were defending the rights of the nation against tyranny), Louis XVI stood firm,
but, hardly had the deputies assembled at Versailles, than his resistance began to crumble.
In brief, the logic of the situation was unanswerable, especially as it soon became very clear
that many of the deputies even of the First and Second Estates were not in sympathy with
the demands of their more hardline fellows (amongst the nobles, there were plenty who
regarded root-and-branch reform as being more important than the defence of a system
that had long since outlived its usefulness, while the representatives of the Church were
dominated by members of the parish clergy, a group whose depressed situation rendered
them eager for change).57 When the increasingly angry Third Estate openly challenged
the system by declaring itself to be a national assembly and, in the famous ‘Tennis-Court
Oath’ of 20 June 1789, swearing that it would remain sitting until France had been given
a constitution, the ancien régime collapsed: with more and more of the deputies of the First
and Second Estates voting with their feet and voluntarily joining the representatives of the
people, at the end of the month Louis gave way and ordered the remaining hold-outs to join
their fellows. In the words of Georges Lefebvre, ‘Hence was effected . . . what may be called
a juridical revolution, realised without recourse to violence, by methods taken over from
the parlements by men trained in the law.’58
France, then, was now set on a course from which there was no return, but amongst
the minority who refused to accept that this was the case was seemingly Louis XVI. Under
pressure from his two brothers and Marie-Antoinette, the king decided that enough was
enough. Confronted by yet another challenge by the Estates General, which on 9 July
proclaimed themselves to be not just a national assembly but also a constituent assembly,
on 11 July Louis dismissed his entire government and replaced it with a team of what he
believed to be reliable aristocrats. In itself, this was an act of folly, for Necker, in particular,
was well known to be genuinely committed to the cause of reform and, still more impor-
tantly, cheap bread, and was therefore immensely popular. Still worse, however, the king
was also rumoured, correctly enough, to be massing large numbers of troops around Paris in
preparation for a bid to restore order by force, the anger whipped up by this development
being fanned still further by the fact that many of the troops concerned were known to be
composed of Swiss and other foreigners.59
The results were impressive. Within a matter of hours, enormous crowds of Parisians,
many of them members of the artisanate and the labouring poor, had flocked to impromptu
political meetings held at the Palais Royale and other venues, where the impassioned rhet-
oric of self-appointed champions of reform such as Camille Desmoulins stirred them into
marching through the streets and embarking on a desperate search for arms. The capital
then was out of control, but Louis now discovered that the army was no longer willing to
play the part assigned to it. For this, there were many reasons, including, not least, the fact
that the officer corps was in many instances gripped by precisely the same desire for reform
as so much of the rest of the propertied classes, just as the rank and file – billeted as they
were on the inhabitants of Paris and the towns and villages roundabout, and drawn in large
part from the same groups as they were now being expected to turn their arms upon and
themselves frequently unable to buy sufficient food – were being pulled into the axis of the
crowd. However, it was not just that. Also very important in the situation were a number
of issues that were specifically military. Particularly important here was the fact that, given
the situation that reigned with regard to gaining access to the officer corps and securing
promotion with its ranks, much of the army’s leadership cadre was deeply disaffected on
professional grounds. Louis XVI having never shown much interest in the army – having
on the whole favoured the navy – even the grandest of grandee officers could feel mildly
aggrieved.60 This, however, was the least of the king’s problems. Thus, disadvantaged by
the aristocracy’s links with the court, the petty nobles who made up the bulk of the officer
corps – let alone the handful of non-noble officers, the so-called officiers de fortune – were
in most cases condemned to never rising above the rank of captain; the senior representa-
tives of the corps of non-commissioned officers had just seen their already-slender hopes of
gaining commissions dashed by an ordinance that laid down that henceforth all candidates
for admission to the officer corps should be able to prove that not just they themselves
but also their parents and even their grandparents were members of the nobility; and,
finally, the rank and file endured poor conditions even when the situation was not nearly
as dire as it was in 1789 and were subject to the sort of ruthless discipline typical of many
eighteenth-century armies.61
Given this situation, the reality was that Louis XVI’s cause was in tatters. As violence
and disorder mounted on the streets of Paris, many units simply went over to the demon-
strators en masse, including, most notably, the whole of the regiment of French Guards.
Here and there, there were some clashes between the crowd and units that as yet remained
loyal, but the king’s commanders soon bowed to the inevitable and pulled back their men
rather risk further mutinies. In Versailles, however, there was still a great fear that hordes of
Swiss and German mercenaries were about to wreak havoc, and 13 July therefore witnessed
the National Assembly decree the formation of a citizens’ militia tasked with the defence of
the revolution against the forces of reaction (at least, that was the public image: alongside
it was the equally important goal of maintaining order and, if necessary, facing down the
populace).62 In the future, this force, now denominated the National Guard, was to be
overtly regularised as a propertied militia, but in Paris the authorities were in no position
to enforce such niceties even if they wanted to, and the early hours of 14 July saw a large
crowd simply constitute themselves as a revolutionary army and seize the substantial num-
bers of muskets stored in the great military complex of Les Invalides. Gunpowder, however,
was lacking, and it was soon discovered that the city’s entire stock had been transferred
to the mediaeval castle known as the Bastille. Royal prison as this also was – it was where
those imprisoned by the executive orders known as the lettres de cachets were traditionally
imprisoned – military necessity dovetailed neatly with political expedience, and a hastily
organised force of around one thousand men therefore closed in on the fortress. The events
that followed – a mélange of sporadic negotiations for a peaceful settlement interspersed
with outbursts of fighting – need not be recounted in detail. Suffice to say that, by late after-
noon, unprepared for a siege as he was and completely unsupported by the substantial force
of troops still in the city, many of whom, indeed, mingled with the rioters or even joined
them outright, the governor was persuaded that further resistance was pointless and there-
fore laid down his arms, not that this saved him, along with a number of his men, from being
lynched by the crowd. As for the attackers, promptly labelled the vainqueurs de la Bastille,
they became the Revolution’s first heroes and their dead its first martyrs.63
Revealed in the fall of the Bastille was one of the chief pillars of the Revolution at the
popular level, namely the rage and despair of the urban poor (it was no coincidence that
14 July 1789 saw bread prices in Paris reach their highest level ever, whilst it is also worth
pointing out that Necker was seen by the crowd not so much as the harbinger of a new
political order as the harbinger of price controls). However, it was not just on the streets
of Paris that the weight of popular ire was felt. In the countryside, the spectacle of a Third
Estate dominated by bourgeois proprietors of the sort who were associated with some of the
very worst efforts to maximise the profits to be made from the feudal system had not gone
unnoticed, and rumours now began to spread of a counter-revolution in the countryside
aimed at thwarting the demands of the peasantry. With the harvest approaching, the usual
bands of desperate migrant labourers were on the move, and these were now transformed
in the popular imagination into mercenary gangs called in to engage in intimidation and
murder at the behest of the seigneurs (an alternative and less political explanation is that,
given the general dearth, the populace were simply terrified of what the arrival of desper-
ate bands of migrant labourers might mean for their communities, and still another that
rural France was in the grip of a collective attack of paranoia brought about via the mass
consumption of grain contaminated by ergot, but, even if these ideas have weight, the
effect was much the same).64 The result was the grande peur. Starting in Franche-Comté
and Gascony – areas that were very different from one another geographically and several
hundred miles apart – the countryside was gripped by an extraordinary wave of panic and
hysteria that had soon spread virtually from one end of the country to another. Terrified
and angry alike, village after village turned on the seigneurs. Stewards and bailiffs, then,
were frequently assaulted and many chateaux pillaged and burned to the ground, the trou-
ble going on for many weeks. Weather vanes made in the image of coats of arms were a
particular target, along with court houses and the manorial rolls that recorded the precise
status of the vileins. Grain supplies, too, were requisitioned and, very occasionally, lands that
had once belonged to the commons reclaimed. Finally, here and there, a few unfortunate or
particularly provocative seigneurs were even murdered. In one sense, there was nothing new
here – peasant revolts, after all, had a long history in France – but never had anything been
seen that was quite so widespread or quite so prolonged, nor had there ever been a threat to
an entire harvest (in the past, trouble had come at moments in the agricultural years when
little work was needed in the fields). Dominated by the representatives of rural property
as it was, the National Assembly could not but be quickly drawn into the crisis, and, after
much debate, on 4 August it took the only step open to it to save the harvest and defend
its collective self-interest, namely the promulgation of the famous declaration announcing
the abolition of feudalism.65 Meanwhile, just as in Paris the need to defend the Revolution
from the monarchy had led to the formation of a propertied militia, so many villages saw the
recruitment of what were in effect peasant equivalents, this being a development in which
some observers later professed to see great significance. To quote Jean-Pierre Bial, the son
of a prosperous tenant farmer from a small town in the province of Limousin who went on
to become a colonel in the grande armée:
A company of twenty-five to thirty men was organised under the command of Monsieur
Boutang . . . The sudden transformation of these peasants into disciplined soldiers made
for a strange sight. From that moment can be dated the birth among the mass of the
nation of the warrior and patriotic spirit that went on to achieve such great things.66
At a stroke, then, the way had been opened to France’s transformation, but was this really
the case? As has been pointed out, the vote of 4 August had only been enacted in a
desperate bid to put an end to the grande peur and was immediately followed by the estab-
lishment of an aptly named ‘Feudal Committee’ whose members appear to have been
chosen according to their likely moderation.67 Be that as it may, the French Revolution
now stood revealed in all its diversity. At Versailles the Third Estate – an essentially élite
property-owning group – and its allies among the clergy and the nobility was pushing for
a far-reaching political reform that would open the way to an increase in domestic secu-
rity, an improvement in the economic situation and a restoration of France’s power in
Europe and the wider world. In Paris, especially, a vociferous coven of pamphleteers and
propagandists were competing for influence and calling on the power of the street. In the
larger towns and cities, including not just Paris but also such provincial centres as Lyons,
Marseilles and Strasbourg, the artisans and their still less fortunate fellows wanted cheap
bread. And in the countryside, the peasants and the landless labourers wanted an end to
feudalism and, with it, access to the land. Over the next few years, events in France were
to be dominated by the interplay between these four elements. Mercifully enough, the
precise details of much of the next two years or so need not concern us here: suffice to
say that, under the influence of such relatively moderate figures as Count Mirabeau and
Antoine Barnave, France was transformed into a constitutional monarchy in which politi-
cal liberty was married to the defence of property, the great charters of the new age being
constituted by the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ of 26 August 1789
and the Constitution of 3 September 1791, and, with it, a state in which the Church lost
much of its influence through the dissolution of the religious orders, the expropriation of
its property and, last but not least, the elaboration of the notorious Civil Constitution
of the Clergy.68
Even as the new order was being elaborated, however, it was being undermined.
Trouble began early on. Horrified by the overthrow of feudalism, the king delayed sanc-
tioning the vote of 4 August for as long as he possibly could and in the meantime insisted
on maintaining court ceremonial and generally carrying on as if nothing had happened.
This last, however, was scarcely the wisest of moves, for, as Caiani has written:
A monarch with a strong attachment to the forms, symbols and procedures of the old
order made an unconvincing constitutional head of a regenerated revolutionary state.
The pageantry of the royal household contrasted starkly with the emergent political
culture of France.69
With suspicion growing of counter-revolution – in this respect, it had not helped that the
king’s youngest brother, the Count of Artois, had fled the country in the wake of the fall of
the Bastille – it only took a single spark to ignite the powder-keg, that spark being an incident
in which a group of army drunken officers insulted the tricolour, which had become the sym-
bol of the Revolution, and loudly toasted the monarchy. The response was swift in coming:
on 5 October a large crowd of market-women – ever a particularly combative group – driven
primarily by an innate belief that somehow Louis’ recalcitrance was connected with the
continued bread shortages, marched on Versailles and, having sequestered the king and his
family by force – a process accompanied by the murder of two palace guards – forced them to
return to Paris, Louis also having to accede to the abolition of feudalism for good measure.70
Back in Paris, the royal family were installed in the palace of the Tuileries to the accom-
paniment of a certain outward show of respect and much jovial good humour, but nothing
could hide the fact that Louis was to all intents and purposes a prisoner nor wash away the
memory of the terror to which Marie-Antoinette had been subjected as the crowds had burst
into the palace: there had certainly been a moment when she was in danger of her very life.
As yet, there was no open breach between King and Revolution, but ever more figures asso-
ciated with the ancien régime began to head for the safety of the lands beyond the Rhine, the
Alps and the Pyrenees. First to go were a number of court aristocrats, but, as the atmosphere
in the army and navy became ever more unruly (see Chapter 3) and the anti-clerical tone
of public life ever more pronounced, they were followed by ever greater numbers of offic-
ers and churchmen. With Artois and his chief ally, the erstwhile chief minister, Calonne,
metaphorically knocking at the gates of every palace in Europe and begging for military aid,
whilst at the same time beginning to build an army of mercenaries and deserters on the fron-
tier, it was not long before cries were being raised that the king and queen were to all intents
and purposes ‘enemies within’.71 From this there emerged a republicanism that had not been
on view in 1789 but now to many observers seemed the only way to save the Revolution. As
might have been expected, prominent here were the radicals who had been so prominent
in 1789: coalescing in a large number of political clubs of which the most important were
those of the Cordeliers and the Jacobins (the names come from the erstwhile convents in
which they held their sessions), they preached the need to destroy counter-revolution and
strove by every means to keep the power of the street lined up behind the Revolution. More
and more frightened, in April 1791, Louis and Marie-Antoinette faced a further crisis when
an attempt to spend Easter at the suburban palace of Saint Cloud ended in their enforced
return to the city, whilst they were also confronted with the – from their point of view –
thoroughly objectionable Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In the circumstances, the only
way out seemed to be flight, and so, on 20 June, the royal family slipped away from Paris and
made what should have been a dash for the frontier. However, dash of any sort it was not:
the party’s progress rather being extremely slow, after barely twenty-four hours of freedom,
the fugitives were rounded up at Varennes and brought back to Paris to be met by a hostile
crowd. It was a key moment. To quote François Furet:
Between 1790 and 1791 . . . the deputy from Aix [i.e. Mirabeau] argued that the
Revolution . . . was not by any means incompatible with a renewed monarchy . . .
The monarchy, on the contrary, chose to offer the spectacle of its separation from
the nation.72
With the flight to Varennes, the French Revolution connects once more with the interna-
tional history of Europe. Thus far, it has to be said that its influence in this respect had been
remarkably limited. A few monarchs, certainly, had responded to the news of the fall of the
Bastille with alarm and hostility – good examples include Catherine the Great of Russia,
Gustavus III of Sweden and Charles IV of Spain – but none had made any real attempt to
intervene against the Revolution, whilst Joseph II of Austria’s successor, Leopold II, had
been positively gushing in his praise. Thus:
The regeneration of France will be an example which all sovereigns and govern-
ments will be forced, willy-nilly, to copy. Infinite happiness will result from this
everywhere . . . and it will be one of the most useful fashions introduced by France
into Europe.73
More cynically, meanwhile, Frederick William II of Prussia, a state which had for some
years been showing its contempt for the notion of monarchical solidarity by quietly foment-
ing dissent in the Austrian Netherlands and Hungary, welcomed the Revolution on the
grounds that it would weaken France as an ally of Austria, whilst in Britain, too, vague
notions that France was somehow but following the glorious precedent set by the events
of 1688 were coupled with the hope that the Royal Navy’s greatest competitor would be
crippled.74 Monarchs might disapprove of what was happening in principle or lament this
or that event in particular, but the conclusion is unmistakeable: France was either not a
matter of much concern or, alternatively, something that they could not do anything about:
thus, in Austria, Joseph II’s renunciation in the last weeks of his life of the reformist policies
of the 1780s had done little to restore order to his troubled domains; in Prussia Frederick
William II prided himself on being a benevolent ruler who had lessened the burden of taxa-
tion on the poor and at the same time pleased the propertied classes by pushing on with
the legal reforms initiated by Frederick the Great; and, in Russia, Catherine II was fully
occupied with Russia’s wars against Sweden and Turkey. In the words of Paul Schroeder,
then, ‘The revolutionary events which shook France from May to August 1789 . . . had lit-
tle impact on international politics.’75 Here and there, we see a period of domestic reaction,
but the use of armed force was never even contemplated. With the general complacency
reinforced by the National Assembly’s formal renunciation of war as an instrument of for-
eign policy on 22 May 1790, Artois and his acolytes were therefore offered only the most
nominal succour, whilst little response was forthcoming even when the Revolution openly
challenged the whole basis of the international order by unilaterally annexing the papal
enclaves of Avignon and the Venaissin and failing to exempt the estates held by assorted
German princes in Alsace from the abolition of feudalism, the only reason that France came
to the forefront being the march of affairs in eastern Europe.76
In so far as these last were concerned, at the moment that we set them aside to discuss the
Revolution, the situation was that, whilst peace had been signed in the Baltic, Catherine
was still fighting the Turks in the Balkans to the highly complicating accompaniment of a
revolution in Poland. In large part thanks to Prussia, meanwhile, stability was a long way
away. For all the first-class military reputation she had acquired in the Seven Years War,
Prussia was the weakest of the Great Powers in that her territories, a large part of which
were devoid of agricultural and mineral wealth alike, sprawled from one side of Germany to
the other and were unprotected by anything in the way of natural defences. Securing fresh
territory and, in particular key fortresses, was therefore something of a fixation and all the
more so as the reigning monarch, Frederick William II, was still very much in the shadow
of his illustrious predecessor, Frederick the Great, and therefore desperate to prove himself
by securing fresh glories. Moreover, Prussia’s position was currently one of great frustra-
tion. With Austria bogged down in the war with the Turks, as the latter eagerly pointed
out, the obvious move was an attack on her, and early in 1790 the Porte duly succeeded in
inveigling the Prussians into signing an offensive alliance that committed the latter to war
with Vienna. However, with mobilisation of the army actually in train, Britain – at this
point Prussia’s ally – made it very clear that she would on no account tolerate aggression
against Austria, while Leopold II in any case shut the door in Prussia’s face by opening peace
negotiations with Turkey on the basis of the status quo ante.77 This, however, just produced
fresh complications. Much enraged, the Prussian government suggested, first, that France
should join Prussia in an alliance against Austria and ,second, albeit all but simultane-
ously, that Austria should join Prussia in an alliance against France, the ostensible aim of
which would be to restore the ancien régime but whose goal was actually to secure Prussia a
number of territories belonging to Bavaria, in compensation for which Bavaria and Austria
would be offered compensation in France. Neither France nor Austria being prepared to
join Prussia, Potsdam now turned its attentions to the Russians, who were currently seeming
set fair to mop up in the Balkans without difficulty. The prospect of Catherine the Great
settling eastern Europe as she wished being as alarming to Britain as it was to Prussia, the
way opened to yet another scheme, this one envisaging the empress being faced by a choice
of making peace with Turkey or being attacked by George III and Frederick William II. On
the surface, the goal was to ensure that the Russians could not put a stranglehold on Polish
trade by denying the Poles access to the Black Sea via the Rivers Bug and Dniestr (in brief,
Pitt and the Prussian chief minister, Ewald von Hertzberg, were currently hoping to get
Poland to join the alliance of Britain, Holland and Prussia that had been forged in 1787 and
therefore wanted to forestall any attempt at blackmail on the part of Russia). Beyond this,
meanwhile, the Prussians were also hoping for gains in Poland: included in the package of
measures was the demand that Russia should also be made to give up her rights in Poland,
this being something, it was argued, that would make the Poles amenable to surrendering
the important fortress cities of Danzig (Gdansk) and Thorn (Torun).78
For a fourth time, however, the Prussians were frustrated as domestic political difficulties
forced the British prime minister, William Pitt, to back out of the projected démarché.79 This
business over, Catherine’s forces were able to press on to victory, July 1791 seeing the Turks
forced to make peace at the cost of a large expanse of territory on the north coast of the
Black Sea. According to all the canons of eighteenth-century diplomacy, territorial gains
for one power ought to mean territorial gains for its neighbours and, particularly, rivals, and
so the Prussians once again went on the offensive. In combination with Britain, they had
just weeks before been courting Warsaw, but they now reversed their policy, and began to
press Austria for an alliance that would open the way to a second partition of Poland. At
this there followed yet more scheming. Despite having taken part in the first partition of
Poland in 1772, Austria was now very well disposed towards that country, for, if allowed to
flourish, the revolution of 1791 bid fair to rescue her from Russian tutelage and establish her
as a strong buffer state (as a result of the new constitution, the power of the Polish govern-
ment was greatly increased and the privileges of the nobility much curtailed). However, all
too clearly, this arrangement had little chance of being acceptable to Catherine the Great,
whilst Prussia was only too likely to come in with Russia if the latter went to war to restore
the situation prior to 1791. In other circumstances, Leopold might have fought to defend
the Polish revolution, but, as his decision to pull Austria out of the war with Turkey had
already suggested, he was deeply averse to conflict: on the one hand, of all the rulers of
eighteenth-century Europe, the one who saw most clearly that the endless cycle of warfare
had somehow to be ended, he was also well aware that Austria’s finances were simply not
capable of sustaining the demands of yet another war. That being the case, Leopold in this
instance went along with Prussia: in brief, better to give Frederick William II the territory
he wanted and save what was left of Poland rather than see Poland swallowed up by two
powers that wanted nothing other than her destruction.80
Yet this was not the end of Leopold’s manoeuvring. By this time, events in France were
causing genuine concern in the royal palaces of Europe and, for the first time, calls for an attack
on France began to be heard, most notably from Catherine the Great, Frederick William II
and Gustavus III. It is fairly clear that, at least in the sense of being motivated by ideological
concerns, these should not be taken at face value – Catherine the Great wanted to get Austria
and Prussia embroiled in a war with France, Frederick William to obtain more territory and
Gustavus III to restore the military power of a traditional ally – but they nonetheless provided
Leopold with a heaven-sent opportunity. Whilst genuinely concerned for the safety of the
French royal family – Marie-Antoinette was, after all, his sister – he was yet deeply opposed
to military action in France and, indeed, anywhere else and wanted nothing more than peace
and stability. Still faced by the conundrum of how to attain his preferred cause in Poland –
i.e. the survival of the Polish state as it had existed in 1791 without the loss of territory to
Prussia or anyone else – he now came up with what in his eyes appeared a winning formula:
in brief, why not unite the whole of Europe against France and in the process impose an arm
lock on the whole gamut of international relations, thereby at one and the same time saving
Poland and ensuring that Austria would not have to engage in any further wars? The result
was the circular of Padua, a diplomatic note issued on 6 July 1791 calling for the formation
of a concert of Europe aimed at forcing the French government to guarantee the safety of the
French royal family on pain of military intervention.81
As diplomatic initiatives go, few can have been more well meaning than the circular of
Padua: aimed at guaranteeing peace and protecting the cause of political reform in Poland,
it was only in the realms of theory a threat to the French Revolution: with memories of the
Dutch debacle of 1787 very recent and all the evidence pointing to the fact that France
was in a far worse state militarily speaking than she had been then, Leopold was sincerely
convinced that there would be no war – that the Revolution would in effect settle down
and allow France to become a stable constitutional monarchy that was no more incompat-
ible with the international order than Britain was. Indeed, when, joined by a Prussia still
engrossed in her endless search for territory, Leopold issued the subsequent Declaration
of Pillnitz of 27 August 1791, the fact that he wanted to avoid war was made very clear:
if France did not moderate her behaviour, she would be attacked, yes, but only if absolute
unanimity was attained by the international community.82 Sadly, however, Leopold had
miscalculated. In the first place, his apparent belief that fear of the Revolution was now so
widespread that it could be mobilised in the service of Austria’s interests in eastern Europe
proved to be a disastrous error: the only state that came forward to support him was ever
land-hungry Prussia, whilst the very prince whose palace had given its name to the declara-
tion of Pillnitz, namely the Elector of Saxony, pointedly withheld his support.83 And, in
the second place, Leopold misjudged the situation in France as well. In Paris, power had
hitherto been held by constitutional monarchists who were deeply concerned for the social
order and therefore desperately anxious to cooperate with Louis and Marie-Antoinette.
Opposing them, however, was the faction of the highly influential Jacobin Club – a body
which did not just meet in Paris but was establishing a network of branches all over the
country – known by virtue of the fact that their chief leader was Jacques Brissot as the
Brissotins. Drawn from a mixture of the more radical elements of the National Assembly
and the journalists and pamphleteers who had been playing such a major role in French
politics since 1789, prominent names amongst them included the Marquis of Condorcet,
Jean-Marie Roland and Pierre Vergniaud.84 In brief, as we have seen, their position was
quite simple: so long as a monarch was on the throne, the Revolution could not but be in
danger, and so logic dictated that France must become a republic, a republic, moreover, in
which they would take charge of France’s political destinies (genuinely attractive though
the ideas of the Brissotins often were, they cannot be acquitted of personal ambition). And,
with a seemingly hostile Europe combining against France, what better way to get rid of
Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette than by engineering a war that would, in effect, put them
in the position of being traitors?85
At the very time that Leopold was moving towards the circular of Padua and the declara-
tion of Pillnitz, events in Paris were moving in a direction that was completely antithetical
to his plans. In this respect, matters began with the so-called massacre du Champ de Mars.
Determined to show that he and his fellows had the support of the people, on 17 July Brissot
organised a great meeting on the parade ground known as the Champs de Mars, this being
attended by as many as 50,000 people; the mass support that it received was in part the result
of the fact that it was backed by the still more radical elements concentrated in the parallel
Cordeliers club led by such figures as Desmoulins. There was no intention of, for example,
storming the Tuileries – rather the aim was to collect signatures for a great petition calling
for Louis to be deposed – but the authorities called in the National Guard, and, commanded
though this was by one of the erstwhile darlings of the first period of the Revolution, the
Marquis of Lafayette, the troops opened fire with catastrophic consequences: nobody is
entirely certain of the number of casualties, but there may have been as many as fifty dead
and wounded, most of them men and women of humble origins.86
In itself, 17 July 1791 was a shattering blow to the cause of moderation: simply by organ-
ising the demonstration, Brissot had succeeded in purging the original Jacobin Club of its
more conservative members, 264 of whom withdrew and established a rival political club
known as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution in the convent of Notre Dame des
Feuillants in the Rue Saint Honoré, while Lafayette was immediately forced to step down
from the command of the National Guard.87 Already, then, the Brissotins possessed some-
thing of a winning hand, the very winning hand, of course, into which Leopold was now
proceeding inadvertently to play. No sooner had news of the emperor’s efforts broken than
France was gripped by a war-scare that the Jacobins and their adherents strove to whip up
by every means possible. With the country swept by rumours of hostile fleets on the seas
and hostile armies on the frontiers, the local branches of the Jacobin Club threw themselves
into such activities as convening mass meetings and street demonstrations, organising secu-
rity patrols, locking up suspected spies and counter-revolutionaries, opening the mails,
recruiting companies of volunteers and building beacons to warn of invasion. Faced by such
pressure, the new provincial authorities, themselves often penetrated by men who shared
the ideas of the Brissotins, could not but mobilise the National Guard, whilst from Paris a
call went out for 100,000 men to come forward from the ranks of the National Guard to
form an auxiliary army that could help defend the Revolution.88
Even before the new legislative assembly set up by the elections convoked in accordance
with the Constitution of 1791 met on 1 October, radicalism was, most literally, on the
march. With their cause already favoured by the fact that the original national assembly
had decreed that the new body should be drawn entirely from men who had not sat in its
ranks – a move that automatically cleared away many moderates and opened the way for
many radicals to secure election, including, not least Brissot89 – not to mention the coinci-
dence of the elections to the new body with the great war-scare produced by the circular of
Padua and the declaration of Pillnitz, Brissot and his followers were quickly able to secure
a dominant position from which they cheerfully defied the strictures of Leopold II and
drove the Revolution ever forward: in November, for example the assembly was persuaded
to introduce a series of punitive measures against the large numbers of priests who were
refusing to take the oath of loyalty specified by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.90
Such measures were in part designed to force Louis’ hostility to the Revolution into the
open by, for example, provoking him into making use of his suspensive veto, but from the
beginning the Brissotins’ chief thrust lay in ensuring that the war-scare of 1791 became a
self-fulfilling prophecy. At heart, what was planned was no more than a war against Austria,
a cause that they knew would enjoy much popularity amongst their supporters (Prussia,
it was fondly believed, could be persuaded to stay neutral or even secured as an ally), but
from the moment that Brissot opened the campaign with a speech denouncing what he
pretended was a gigantic pan-European conspiracy to overthrow the Revolution, he and his
followers were swept away by their own rhetoric: France, it was claimed, had needs must
to reclaim the position of international dominance of which she had been deprived by the
incompetence and pusillanimity of Louis XVI, and this could not but sound like a chal-
lenge to the whole edifice of international relations, a cause attractive to many even of the
Feuillants, not to mention the hundreds of radicals who had sought safety in Paris in the
wake of revolutionary turmoil elsewhere or simply flocked there, as they would doubtless
have put it, to partake of the breath of liberty. As for war itself, meanwhile, should it come,
it could not but be victorious: on the one hand, now granted her liberty, France would
fight all the harder, while, on the other, the oppressed peoples of Europe would burst their
chains asunder and rush to support their benefactors, and the soldiers of the ancien régime –
according to Brissotin rhetoric, mere slaves who had no interest in what they were fighting
for – would turn and run for their lives.91
In so far as Leopold II was concerned, this was not what he had expected at all. However,
turning back was not an option: not only did the only way of helping Poland remain using
France as a diversion, but Marie-Antoinette was becoming ever more pressing in her pleas
for intervention. On 17 January 1792, then, a de facto ultimatum was issued calling on
France to desist from all threat of military action against the rest of Europe, restore the rights
of the German princes in Alsace, return Avignon and the Venaissin to the Pope and respect
the rights of the monarchy; the same document also renewed the calls originally made in the
circular of Padua for the formation of a veritable concert of Europe that could enforce these
demands. On 7 February, meanwhile, Austrian resolve was further stiffened by the signature
of an alliance with Prussia, whilst on 1 March one of the last remaining factors standing in
the way of war was removed when Leopold II died suddenly, his young successor, Francis II,
being much less inclined to take a permissive view of events in France.92
As can be imagined, the Brissotins regarded the stiffening of the Austrian position with
the utmost glee, whilst they had also now received additional support from a number of
somewhat surprising sources. First and foremost here was the Marquis of Lafayette: moderate
constitutional monarchist though he was, Lafayette had been much piqued by his fall from
grace in the wake of the massacre of the Champ de Mars and had come to see championing
a war against Austria as a means of restoring his position and not just that but of setting
himself up as a dictator who could restore the Revolution to safer channels. Still more impor-
tant, not least because he was someone who was completely untainted by the events of 17
July 1790, was Charles Dumouriez, an ambitious general of the Bourbon army of Brissotin
sympathies, who had built strong links with the many Belgian exiles in Paris and harboured
dreams of becoming the first president of the free Belgium that he was sure would emerge
from a clash with Austria. Finally, also all too happy to support a war was a Louis XVI con-
vinced that France’s armies would fall apart at the first shots, leaving the way open to the
destruction of the Revolution: on 15 March, indeed, the king made use of his constitutional
powers to get rid of the existing moderate ministry and to replace it with one headed by the
Brissotins and their allies in which Dumouriez became Minister of War. What all this meant,
of course, was that the Feuillants split in twain, Brissot therefore experiencing no difficulty at
all when he put a motion for war before the assembly on 20 April 1792. Significantly enough,
however, the declaration of war was in the first place limited to Austria alone and, in the
second directed at Francis II, not as Holy Roman Emperor but rather as King of Bohemia
and Hungary: as clearly as the Brissotins could say it, then, they were not going to war with
Europe as a whole and did not want any such conflict.93
Thus were inaugurated the French Revolutionary Wars. There was no desire for war
with the French Revolution per se on the part of the ancien régime – indeed, in Leopold
II’s case there was no desire for war of any sort – but in April 1792 clumsy Austrian tactics
combined with political manoeuvrings in France herself had produced a crisis. Initially,
the belligerents were limited to France on the one hand and Austria and Prussia on the
other, but within a year events had drawn most of the states of Europe into a great coalition
against France. That said, however, there was no counter-revolutionary crusade: none of
the powers that fought France had any desire to restore the ancien régime as it had existed
in 1789, and many either limited their commitment to the struggle or dropped out of it
altogether: within a short time of Napoleon taking over the Army of Italy in 1796, indeed,
Spain was actually fighting on France’s side. For most powers, in fact, the war against
the Revolution was either subordinated to long-standing foreign-policy aims or waged in
accordance with those aims. Thus, Russia and Prussia always put the acquisition of terri-
tory in Poland before the struggle against France, whilst in Prussia’s case she only entered
the conflict at all because she thought that it would bring her territorial gains in Germany.
Austria was still thinking in terms of the ‘Bavarian exchange’. And, as for Britain, she went
to war to prevent France from taking over the Low Countries, did so all the more willingly
because war with Paris offered her a way out of the diplomatic isolation that had made her
so vulnerable in the American War of Independence, and for much of the time prosecuted
the struggle by means of tactics that gave a further boost to her colonial and maritime supe-
riority. None of this was to say that ideology was not present. No ruler wanted revolution
at home – there was, indeed, genuine horror at the events of 1792–4 – and many govern-
ments therefore clamped down hard on freedom of debate. At the same time, meanwhile,
the defence of the ancien régime or the international order was made use of as a handy means
of legitimising the war effort, just as counter-revolution was employed – most notably, by
the British – as a means of stirring up revolt inside France. Some financial support, too,
was given to the many émigrés who fled her borders – a serious issue given the fact that a
counter-revolutionary army was being established in the Rhineland composed of a mixture
of foreign drifters and deserters, men (mostly Swiss or German) who had fled France with
their officers and Alsatian peasants driven from their homes by want of food94 – whilst in
1791–2 a sub-text in Austrian policy had always been an amelioration of the position of
Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. And, last but not least, a host of eager men of letters put
pen to paper to denounce the Revolution, and in some cases actually believed what they
wrote. Yet, even after France became a republic, engaging in a total war to restore Louis
XVIII was quite another matter: a Bourbon on the throne might be a good thing in many
respects, but in the end it was something that could be sacrificed to expediency.95
What, meanwhile, of France? Here the concept of an ideological war was certainly much
stronger than elsewhere. In 1791–2 there had been real fears of a counter-revolutionary
crusade, whilst the Brissotins had accompanied their demands with much talk of sweep-
ing the tyrants from their thrones. But appearances are deceptive. In large part the fears of
foreign intervention were a deliberate creation of the Brissotins, for whom war was primar-
ily a political tool designed both to consolidate the Revolution and further their personal
ambition. And, despite their rhetoric, when France went to war in April 1792, as we have
seen, she did so only against Austria: every effort was made to avoid conflict with Prussia,
and for some months secret contacts were kept up with Potsdam in the hope of getting the
Prussians to turn on their old enemies. Like others conducted with London, these secret
negotiations failed, with the result that the Brissotins found themselves faced by a war
which they never really wanted. With France hopelessly unprepared for such a struggle –
her army was in disarray and the famous Volunteers of 1791 and 1792 a distinctly unreli-
able weapon – revolutionising the Continent now gained real importance, whilst to some
extent Brissot and his own followers simply became carried away with their own speech-
making and drunk with vainglory: hence the glorious abandon with which they declared
war on country after country in early 1793. But in the end their crusade amounted to very
little. Whilst 1792 saw France offer to give help to any people who wished to recover their
liberty, denounce the principles that lay behind such acts as the partition of Poland and set
up a variety of foreign legions whose task it was to raise the peoples of their home countries
in revolt, there were plenty of clear-sighted realists in Paris who realised that all this was
both hopelessly impractical and unlikely to achieve anything in the way of results. From
as early as the autumn of 1793, then, the rhetoric of liberation was increasingly disavowed,
whilst the Committee of Public Safety made it quite clear that its watchword was France
and France alone: amongst those executed in the summer of 1793 were a number of over-
enthusiastic foreign revolutionaries. Under the Thermidorian régime and the Directory,
the pendulum swung back in the direction of aggression, but liberation was now but a word,
albeit a useful one, that allowed France’s rulers to prove their revolutionary credentials. In
Belgium and the Rhineland, it was code for annexation, and in Holland, where the first of
a series of satellite republics were established, a euphemism for political, military and eco-
nomic exploitation. And, if revolution was supported elsewhere, most notably in Ireland, it
was clearly as little more than a device to weaken and disrupt the enemy. As for the specific
goals of French policy, it was clear that many of them fitted in very closely with goals that
had been enunciated at one time or another under the ancien régime: the establishment
of the Rhine as one of France’s ‘natural’ frontiers had, for example, been vigorously pur-
sued by Louis XIV. Also visible, meanwhile, was an intellectual structure that had nothing
revolutionary about it at all: at least one member of the Directory – Reubell – for instance,
saw Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine simply as France’s compensation for the gains
made by the eastern powers in Poland. Ideological commitment to expansion was not com-
pletely dead – on the contrary, the balance-of-power concepts advocated by Reubell were
challenged by the fiery Revellière-Lépeaux, who was not only an erstwhile Brissotin, but
the deputy who on 19 November 1792 had introduced the decree promising assistance to
any people that wished to recover their liberty – but it was now balanced by calculation:
indeed, it is Schroeder’s contention that, under the influence of the prime realist, Carnot,
the Directory was at the beginning desirous not of a continuation of the war but rather of a
general peace settlement: so anxious was the ‘architect of victory’ for this outcome, indeed,
that he was even ready to forsake the Rhine frontier. All this, however, can be left for
further discussion in later chapters. Suffice it to say now that what was playing out was not
so much a great crisis in France in which the rest of Europe became embroiled but rather
a great crisis in eastern Europe in which France became embroiled. Not for nothing, then
did Tim Blanning call his work on the subject The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1801.
Notes
1 G. Rude, Revolutionary Europe (London, 1967), p. 64.
2 For a detailed exposé of the author’s views in this respect, see C.J. Esdaile, Napoleon’s Wars: An
International History (London, 2007).
3 For an excellent introduction to the international relations of mid- to late eighteenth-century
Europe, see H.M. Scott, The Birth of a Great-Power System, 1740–1815 (London, 2006), pp. 137–42.
4 J. Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1700–1789 (Houndmills, 1990), pp. 410–11.
5 M.S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Régime, 1618–1789 (London, 1988),
pp. 188–92.
6 As many recent authors have stressed, the idea that there was a major gulf between the supposedly
‘limited’ warfare of the eighteenth century and the supposedly ‘total’ warfare of the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic period has been greatly exaggerated. ‘There is a widely held but largely misleading
view that warfare before the French Revolution was inconsequential in its results and limited in
its methods . . . Such a thesis is mistaken . . . Warfare was far from limited.’ J. Black, Warfare in the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1999), pp. 173–5. For those directly caught up in it, meanwhile, it is
difficult to see how their experiences of war differed that much from those of their seventeenth-
century predecessors: much of Germany, in particular, was laid waste, whilst Prussia may have
lost as much as 10 per cent of her population. C. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of
Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), pp. 209–10. See also J. Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe,
1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982), pp. 158–69.
7 For an interesting discussion of these issues, see P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European
Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 47–52.
8 Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century, p. 198.
9 Meanwhile, support for the American cause was not without its political effects. To quote Alfred
Cobban, ‘Alliance with the Americans not only exposed French society to democratic and repub-
lican ideas, but made them fashionable and respectable. Many of the young French nobles who
left their wives or mistresses to fight for American independence returned with a new mistress,
liberty.’ A.B.C Cobban, A History of Modern France, I: 1715–1799 (London, 1957), p. 122. See
also J. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (Abingdon, 2006), p. 16.
10 B. Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2002),
p. 24. This situation was not just wounding to French pride. As the same author points out, ‘There
was no demand in the French Caribbean islands for textiles and iron goods comparable to the desire
for such mass-produced wares in the British-dominated markets of the United States. As a result,
there was no colonial spur to industrialisation in France (even assuming – counter-factually –
a conjuncture of domestic forces favourable to the process there) comparable to the American
stimulus to industrialization in England.’ Ibid., p. 25.
11 J. Black, From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (London, 1999), pp. 274–80,
287–9. For the reform of the army, see S.F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French
Revolution: The Role and Development of the Line Army (Oxford, 1978), pp. 26–32. F. Fox, ‘Negotiating
with the Russians: Ambassador Ségur’s mission to Saint Petersburg, 1784–1789’, French Historical
Studies, 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 47–71, is a case study in both the futility of much of France’s
diplomacy at this time and the difficulties the regime of Louis XVI faced in remedying the situation.
12 D. Beales, Joseph II, II: Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 373–402; Scott,
Birth of a Great-Power System, pp. 181–5; Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 47–8.
For a recent article that is inclined to exonerate Joseph and argue that he was driven into an
aggressive policy in the Balkans – a policy that was not in fact his so much as Catherine the
Great’s – for fear of losing Russian support against Prussia, see M.Z. Mayer, ‘The price for Austria’s
security, Part 1: Joseph II, the Russian alliance and the Ottoman war, 1787–1789’, International
History Review, 26, No. 2 (April, 2004), pp. 257–9.
13 Scott, Birth of a Great-Power System, pp. 201–2.
14 Ibid., p. 194.
15 Ibid., pp. 188–91; J.T. Alexander, Catherine the Great (London, 1989), pp. 238–57.
16 For the crisis of 1787 and the fighting that followed, see Schroeder, Transformation of European
Politics, pp. 56–61; K.A. Roider, Austria’s Eastern Question, 1700–1790 (Princeton, New Jersey,
1982), pp. 169–88. Not the least of the results of the new conflict was that, with Austria now
embroiled in the Balkans, it cleared the way for Frederick William II to send his troops into Holland.
17 For the revolution of 1788 and the background thereto, see N. Davies, God’s Playground: A History
of Poland (Oxford, 1981), I, pp. 509–29; J. Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795
(London, 1999), pp. 52–127.
18 W. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 43.
19 The most recent biography is J. Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI (London, 2016) although this
has been criticised for taking too favourable a view. Just as unsuccessful as Turgot in respect of
financial reform was his successor, Jacques Necker, who sought by a variety of means both to
find ways of raising extra fiscal revenue and of encouraging financiers to loan the regime more
capital only for himself to be dismissed in turn in 1781. For a brief introduction to Necker, see
H. Rosenblatt, ‘The banker who brought down the ancien régime: rediscovering Jacques Necker’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39, No. 4 (Summer, 2006), pp. 546–8.
20 For Marie-Antoinette, see J. Haslip, Marie-Antoinette (London, 1987). Meanwhile, for the cam-
paign of abuse to which she was subjected, see C. Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the
Myth of Marie-Antoinette (New York, 1990).
21 Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution, pp. 28–9.
22 The precise figures of ships of the line in commission in 1790 was 145 for Britain and seventy-
three for France. That said, the Spaniards possessed seventy-two such vessels, whilst French ships
were much more heavily gunned than their British counter-parts, so much so, indeed, that the
British advantage in guns was a mere one-sixth. See N.A.M. Roger, The Command of the Ocean:
A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), p. 361; N. Miller, Broadsides: The Age of
Fighting Sail, 1775–1815 (London, 2000), p. 108.
23 J. Black, European International Relations, 1648–1815 (Houndmills, 2002), p. 208. For a discus-
sion of the double foreign-policy disaster of 1787, see Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution,
pp. 49–52.
24 For an interesting case study of Nantes and its hinterland, see J.C. Martin, La Loire-Atlantique dans
la tourmente révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Nantes, 1989), pp. 12–19. Too much concentration on
the Atlantic trade, important as it was, can be misleading. In other areas of the world, France was
doing far less well. To quote Gwynne Lewis, ‘By the 1780s only a few French ships were to be seen
moored along the quays of Canton, their former berths seized by the English in search of Chinese
tea, silk and porcelain. The same collapse . . . was apparent in India where France now had just
five trading posts.’ G. Lewis, France, 1715–1804: Power and the People (Harlow, 2004), p. 215.
25 For a brief analysis of Bourbon France, see W. Doyle, The Ancien Régime (Houndmills, 1986),
pp. 14–33.
26 In fairness, the Hameau de la Reine was about much more than the fantasies of Marie-Antoinette
in that it was set up as a model farm designed to encourage the aristocracy to improve both their
estates and the lot of their tenants, but such was the scorn with which the monarchy was regarded
that the latter’s good intentions did not receive the slightest credit.
27 Blanning sums up the situation perfectly: ‘Victory over the British in America . . . was spoilt by
the failures of the last year of the war which obliged French negotiators to accept much less than
had been expected. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, Frederick the Great’s formation of the
League of Princes in 1785 and, above all, the failure to prevent the Prussians invading the Dutch
Republic in 1787 all helped to confirm that France had ceased to be a great power. In an age when
the state did relatively little at home and so much more importance was attached to foreign policy,
the failures cut very deep.’ T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?
(Houndmills, 1998), p. 42.
28 For an interesting discussion of the debates called forth respecting French foreign policy in the
twenty years prior to the Revolution, see G. Savage, ‘Foreign policy and political culture in later
eighteenth-century France’, in B. Simms (ed.) Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 304–24. With France caught between an increasingly powerful
and aggressive Britain on the one hand and the growing threat to her traditional alliance system
posed by Prussia and Russia on the other, furious arguments raged between those who wanted the
chief emphasis of French foreign and defence policy to be the reinforcement of French seapower
and those who rather wanted it to be building a powerful army that could back up Austria. In real-
ity, this was not a debate about principle – the ‘easterners’ were just as concerned about Britain
as the ‘westerners’ – but, as the tone of political debate became ever more violent, so those who
placed the Austrian commitment first were more and more labelled as ‘traitors’.
29 This is not to say that France was a state devoid of economic growth or even of industrial growth.
On the contrary, there is now general agreement the French industry was far from stagnant. In
the words of Gwynne Lewis, ‘The production of woollen goods increased by almost 150 per cent
between the beginning and the end of the eighteenth century; the number of looms . . . in the
silk capital of the world, Lyon, doubled in the same period . . . In and around Rouen . . . produc-
tion of cotton goods trebled between 1730 and 1750.’ G. Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking
the Debate (London, 1993), p. 9. All this is taken as read, but the significant rises listed here are
undermined by the fact that the base from which they proceeded as very low, while there was no
way that the advances were significant enough to be able to absorb sufficient hands to counter
the growing problem of surplus population. At the same time, as Lewis goes on to show, from the
1770’s onwards the industrial expansion that characterised the eighteenth century as a whole,
began to slow down and even to go into reverse. Ibid., p. 11.
30 P. McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Oxford, 2002), p. 6. On the problem of poverty in
general, see Lewis, France, 1715–1804, pp. 117–37.
31 Lewis, France, 1715–1804, p. 217. For the ‘Flour War’, see G. Rudé, ‘The crisis of 1775 and tradi-
tions of popular protest’ in I. Woloch (ed.), The Peasantry in the Old Régime: Conditions and Protests
(New York, 1970), pp. 82–7.
32 For a general survey, see B. Garnot, Crimes et justice au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2000). The
term chauffeur had a very different meaning from the one it does today, referring to the widespread
tendency of the brigands to employ ‘warming up’ the feet of their victims as a handy means of
torture. Meanwhile, brigands were only slightly less detested by the commonalty than they were
by the propertied classes: the preferred prey of the gangs was anyone with money in their pocket
and, therefore, by extension, members of the élite, but in times of dearth they frequently turned
on the humble just as much. See R. Mandrou, ‘Scarcity and insecurity in agrarian life’, in Woloch,
Peasantry in the Old Régime, pp. 19–20.
33 For the maréchaussée, see C. Emsley, ‘The most useful corps for the state: the maréchaussée’, in
C. Emsley (ed.), Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1999), pp. 13–36.
34 It will have been noted by now that the term ‘bourgeoisie’ is being studiously avoided in this
chapter. That there was a rising bourgeoisie in France is perfectly true in that many families that
were not noble had been able to make their way under the ancien régime and not just that but on
occasion make considerable fortunes. What is not true, however, is, first, that the bourgeoisie
were separate from the privileged orders. In theory, there were a variety of barriers that excluded
commoners from such institutions as the officer corps, but for those with money it was perfectly
possible to purchase patents of nobility, many feudal seigneurs in fact being recently ennobled
members of the bourgeoisie; so much land had passed into the hands of representatives of the
Third Estate, meanwhile, that they owned something like 25 per cent of the superficie of France.
At the same time, if bourgeois were becoming noble, many nobles were becoming bourgeois in
that they were increasingly engaging in activities on which, by tradition, they used to be seen as
turning their collective backs: as an example, the de Charette family which fought so ferociously
against the Revolution in the Vendée had, prior to the revolution, been heavily involved in
ship-building. With regard to the problem of begging, prostitution and petty crime, meanwhile,
see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 15–16; O. Hufton, ‘Begging, vagrancy, vaga-
bondage and the law: an aspect of the problem of poverty in eighteenth-century France’, European
Studies Review, 2, No. 2 (April, 1972), pp. 978–123.
35 The classic example here is the novels of the Marquis de Sade. See S. Spruell, ‘The Marquis de
Sade: pornography or political protest?’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 9,
(1981), pp. 238–49.
36 W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980), p. 22. So numerous are introductions
to the Enlightenment that trying to select a few key texts is an invidious task, but brief works
suited to undergraduate readers include R. Porter, The Enlightenment (Houndmills, 1990) and
H. Dunthorne, The Enlightenment (London, 1991).
37 N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968), p. 252.
38 To quote Blanning, ‘The Enlightenment was a movement of the educated élites for the educated
élites.’ Blanning, French Revolution, p. 22.
39 For a useful general survey, see Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, pp. 53–65; J.H. Shennan,
France Before the Revolution (London, 1983), pp. 2–20.
40 For two important discussions of the growth of political libel and pornography in pre-
Revolutionary France, see R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (London,
1991), pp. 67–91, and R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
(London, 1996). For a more critical view inclined to play down the effects of the attacks on the
royal family, see V.R. Gruder, ‘The question of Marie-Antoinette: the queen and public opinion
before the French Revolution’, French History, 16, No. 3 (September, 2002), pp. 269–98.
41 J. Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old
Régime (Oxford, 2010) is a recent monograph. For a biography of Calonne, see R. Lacour-Gayet,
Calonne: Financier, reformateur, contre-révolutionnaire (Paris, 1963).
42 For a particularly concise discussion of what has been deemed ‘the revolt of the aristocracy’, see
N. Hampson, A Social History of French Revolution (London, 1963), pp. 34–59. See also Lewis,
Rethinking the Revolution, pp. 21–2.
43 F. Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Oxford, 1988), p. 42; Lewis, Rethinking the Revolution,
p. 23; J. Hunt, The French Revolution (London, 1998), p. 15.
44 The dangers of too narrow an interpretation of the cahiers have been pointed out by John Markoff.
Thus: ‘The demands expressed in cahiers are those that groups constituted in specific ways could
agree upon at a specific moment and with a complex audience in mind: at an assembly one had
not only to come to terms with the nobles, urban notables or villagers with whom one was trying
to agree on a text, but one also had to bear in mind . . . one’s sense – possibly shared with one’s fel-
lows at the assembly, possibly not – of what it was shrewd and prudent to demand.’ J. Markoff, The
Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the Abolition of Feudalism (University Park,
Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 26. Useful discussions, meanwhile, include M. Patterson, ‘Rethinking
the French Revolution: political culture and the cahiers des doléances of 1789’, Proceedings of the
Western Society for French History, 20, (1993), pp. 155–66; G.V. Taylor, ‘Revolutionary and non-
revolutionary content in the cahiers of 1789: an interim report’, French Historical Studies, 7, No. 4
(Fall, 1972), pp. 480–502; G. Shapiro and J. Markoff, ‘Officially solicited petitions: the cahiers de
doléances as a historical source’, International Review of Social History, 46 (2001), pp. 79–106.
45 J. Markoff, ‘Peasants protest: the claims of lords, Church and state [sic] in the cahiers des doléances
of 1789’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 , No. 3 (July, 1990), pp. 413–54.
46 With regard to the tithe, as Doyle says, this was ‘patchily levied, and seldom took as much as a
tenth even from those who failed to avoid it’. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 33.
47 For a general discussion of the position of the peasantry under the feudal system, see G. Lefebvre,
The Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, New Jersey, 1947), pp. 131–9; C.B.A. Behrens,
‘The peasant problem in the eighteenth century’, in Woloch, Peasantry in the Old Régime,
pp. 74–81; Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, pp. 192–7.
48 D.M.G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford, 2003),
p. 63.
49 Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, p. 140; F. Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic
Interpretation (Cambridge, 1990), p. 33; J.Q.C. Mackrell, The Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-
Century France (London, 1973), pp. 150–6.
50 Cit. A. de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, ed. H. Brogan (London,
1966), pp. 205–6.
51 Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, p. 136.
52 For an introduction to the subject of poverty in eighteenth-century France, see O. Hufton, The
Poor of Revolutionary France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974); Lewis, France, 1715–1804, pp. 116–44.
A further point to note is that such poor relief as was on offer was cold comfort indeed: the state
workhouses known as dépôts de mendicité were little better than prisons and ones that were particu-
larly unpleasant at that. See Lewis, France, 1715–1804, p. 217.
53 Blanning, French Revolution, p. 49.
54 Hampson, Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 69–70; Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution,
pp. 161–6.
55 Lewis, Rethinking the Revolution, p. 24. Whilst Lewis’ aphorism is perfectly correct in principle, it
should be noted that the Third Estate did contain a number of radical figures, including Jerôme
Pétion de Villeneuve, a lawyer much exercised by the poverty of the populace and the plight of
the slaves in France’s Caribbean colonies, and the Comte de Mirabeau, an impoverished noble-
man who had been involved in a seemingly endless series of scandals on account of his dissolute
life-style, written numerous pamphlets critical of the ancien régime and several times been impris-
oned for sedition.
56 Ibid., pp. 27–8.
57 For the erosion of the defence of corporate privilege amongst the First and Second Estates, see
J. Markoff, ‘Allies and opponents: nobility and Third Estate in the spring of 1789’, American
Sociological Review, LIII, No. 4 (August, 1988), pp. 477–96; M. Hutt, ‘The curés and the Third
Estate: the ideas of reform in the pamphlets of the French lower clergy in the period 1787–1789’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, VII, No. 1 (January, 1957), pp. 74–92.
58 Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution, p. 89.
59 In common with a number of other contemporary armies, in 1789 the French army included many
foreign regiments. Of these the Swiss, especially, were easily distinguishable because of their red
uniforms, whilst some of the other regiments wore blue. Even the least discerning eye, then, had
no difficulty spotting a build-up of foreign troops.
60 A. Corvisier, ‘La place de l’armée dans la Révolution Française’, Revue du Nord: Histoire et
Archéologie – Nord de la France, Belgique, Pays Bas, 75, No. 299 (January, 1993), p. 7.
61 Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, pp. 4–37.
62 The ‘downward-facing’ aspect of the National Guard cannot be stressed too strongly. ‘On the day
of its formation’, writes John Ellis, ‘only householders – a singularly select group in eighteenth-
century Paris – were summoned to the meetings in the sixty electoral districts. About 13,000 citizens
subsequently enlisted, but all vagrants and homeless persons were excluded from its ranks, as were
even a large part of the settled wage earners. In the words of . . . Pierre Barnave, the National
Guard was going to be bonne bourgeoise.’ J. Ellis, Armies in Revolution (London, 1973), p. 79.
63 A detailed account of the events of 14 July may be found in J. Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille,
14 July 1789 (London, 1970). For the role of the army, in particular, see Scott, Response of the
Royal Army to the French Revolution, pp. 54–60. Given the tendency of the French Revolution to
mythologise itself, it is worth pointing out that 14 July 1789 was not much of a jour de gloire. Even
had the self-proclaimed vainqueurs de la Bastille actually stormed the walls, it would not have been
much of an achievement: not only were the defenders outnumbered ten to one, but the central
keep which was the only part of the fortress that the governor tried to defend was not the loom-
ing tower that forms the centrepiece of so many prints and paintings. That, however, is by the by:
the key point is that the fortress was not stormed at all, the attackers, rather, simply being let in
through the main gate.
64 Still another explanation for what occurred is that the disturbances were the work of provin-
cial agitators who had found themselves excluded from the Estates General and now wanted to
drive the Revolution forward and secure themselves some sort of political platform. Given the
appearance in eye-witness accounts of figures who were clearly not members of the peasantry in
leadership roles of one sort or another, this idea does not seem wholly far-fetched. However, how
such agitators could possibly have co-ordinated their activities over such vast distances remains
unclear. In the end, then, one is led to believe that all the various explanations could well have
played some part in events – that there was in fact not one grande peur but several or even many.
65 A classic study of the grande peur is afforded by G. Lefebvre, La grande peur de 1789 (Paris, 1970).
More accessible, perhaps, is the account in S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
(New York, 1989), pp. 428–41. One aspect of the affair that should, perhaps, be mentioned more
often is that, in eastern areas where Jews were a visible element amongst the population, they were
made the subject of considerable violence.
66 G. Soulié (ed.), Les carnets du Colonel Bial: mémoires ou souvenirs militaires des guerres de la Révolution
et de l’Empire (Brive, 1926), p. 29. What Bial was blind to here, of course, is that the arming of the
peasantry was a double-edged sword that ended up being as much used against the Revolution as
it was for it.
67 Mackrell, Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France, pp. 173–4.
68 Accounts of the period from July 1789 till September 1791 are manifold. See, for example, Doyle,
Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 112–58.
69 A. Caiani, Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789–1792 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 8.
70 For a detailed description of the march on Versailles, see Schama, Citizens, pp. 456–70.
71 This charge, alas, was perfectly true: from late 1790 Louis had been in close touch with Louis de
Breteuil, a prominent diplomat with particularly strong links with Gustavus III of Sweden who
had replaced Necker as chief minister in the crisis of July 1789 and fled into exile in the wake of
the fall of the Bastille, and through him had been endeavouring to whip up support for his cause,
whilst the presumed lover of Marie-Antoinette, a Swedish officer serving in the French army
named Axel von Fersen, was also very active in this respect. M. Price, ‘Louis XVI and Gustavus
III: secret diplomacy and counter-revolution, 1790–1792’, Historical Journal, 42, No. 2 (June,
1999), pp. 435–66.
72 Furet, Revolutionary France, p. 95.
73 Cit. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 163.
74 B. Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (Houndmills, 1998), p. 55; M. Duffy,
‘British diplomacy and the French Wars, 1789–1815’, in H.T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the
French Revolution, 1789–1815(Houndmills, 1989), pp. 127–8.
75 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 61. For the response of Russia in particular,
see Alexander, Catherine the Great, pp. 276–9; H. Troyat, Catherine the Great (London, 1978),
pp. 288–9.
76 For all this, see T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Harlow, 1986),
pp. 74–5.
77 For the background to this decision, see M.Z. Mayer, ‘The price for Austria’s security, Part II:
Leopold II, the Prussian threat and the Treaty of Sistova, 1790–1791’, International History Review,
26, No. 3 (September, 2004), pp. 473–514.
78 Pithily described as ‘the foreign-policy equivalent of multiple personality disorder’, Prussia’s
activities are analysed in detail in P.G. Dwyer (ed.), ‘Prussia during the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars, 1786–1815’ in P.G. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (Harlow,
2000), pp. 240–4. See also Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 81–4; Clark, Iron
Kingdom, pp. 284–6.
79 For Pitt’s difficulties, see J. Ehrman, ‘The younger Pitt and the Ochakov affair’, History Today, 9,
No. 7 (July, 1959), pp. 462–72. One casualty of the affair was Hertzberg who was promptly dis-
missed from office by a furious Frederick William II.
80 For all this, see Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 83–8.
81 Ibid., pp. 89–90; Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 85–6.
82 Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 86–8. There are still many admirers of the
French Revolution and, more especially, Napoleon, who imagine that that every move against
France was the product of ‘Pitt’s gold’. It is therefore worth stating here that Britain played no part
whatsoever in the decisions that led to the circular of Padua and the declaration of Pillnitz. See
J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (London, 1969–96), II, pp. 47–9.
83 Simms, Struggle for Mastery in Germany, p. 58.
84 An older tradition labels the group led by Brissot as the Girondins on the grounds that some of their
leaders were associated with Bordeaux, which, of course, stands at the mouth of the River Gironde.
85 Hampson, Social History of the French Revolution, pp. 135–6. It is conventional to portray the
Brissotins’ determination to foment a war as being something that was wholly political, a mere
device that would at one and the same time rid France of the king and enable them to humble
their political opponents. However, it is at least possible argue that war was always going to be a
very likely outcome of the Revolution. At root, the events of 1789 had stemmed from the deter-
mination of the political élite to further their interests by, amongst other things, restoring France
to greatness, this being a project that in the end could scarcely mean anything else than embark-
ing on a crusade to right France’s many wrongs. See Schama, Citizens, pp. 591–2.
86 Schama, Citizens, pp. 566–7; Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire, pp. 118–20.
87 The convent taken over by the breakaway group for their headquarters was an unfortunate choice:
in the same way as the club from which they had just broken away had become known as the
Club de Jacobins, so the new organisation became known as the Club des Feuillants. However,
in French une feuille de papier means ‘a sheet of paper’, and so the name ‘Feuillant’ could not but
contain an instant hint of mere ‘paper-pushing’.
88 Stone, Reinterpreting the Revolution, pp. 152–4. The decision to make the National Guard the
centre-piece of France’s response to Austria and Prussia reveals much about the Revolutionaries’
attitude towards the army. Thus, as witness the many debates on the subject that had taken place
in the National Assembly, one of the few things on which moderates and radicals could unite
was fear of caesarism. As Ellis says, then, ‘Here was a clear attempt to create at least a part of the
regular army that would be motivated by the same political commitment as the National Guard.’
Ellis, Armies in Revolution, pp. 84–5.
89 Whereas the moderate deputies were thus excluded, many of the radicals were able to continue
to serve the Revolution in other guises, Jérôme Pétion, for example, being elected Paris’ second
mayor in November.
90 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 174–9.
91 Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution, pp. 163–6; Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary
Wars, pp. 99–101.
92 Stone, Reinterpreting the Revolution, pp. 166–8. For a discussion of events that is inclined very
much to speak to the issue of Austrian responsibility for the crisis, see T. Kaiser, ‘La fin du ren-
versement des alliances: la France, l’Autriche et la declaration de guerre du 20 avril de 1792’,
Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 351, No. 1 (January, 2008), pp. 77–98.
93 For the role played by Dumouriez in particular, see P.C Howe, ‘Charles-Francois Dumouriez
and the revolutionising of French foreign affairs in 1792’, French Historical Studies, 14, No. 3
(September, 1986), pp. 367–90.
94 S. Comeau de Charry, Souvenirs de la Guerre d’Allemagne pendant la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris,
1900), p. 71.
95 A particularly interesting case to note here is that of the United Provinces. Of all the administra-
tions of the ancien régime, that of William V had the most immediate reason to fear Revolutionary
France: after all, it was but five years since it had had to face a French-backed revolt that had only
been put down by foreign intervention, whilst the partisans of that revolution were once again
making their presence felt. Yet, to the fury of émigré agents sent to persuade the Dutch to join
the coalition, no such agreement was forthcoming even when the French invaded Belgium in the
wake of the battle of Valmy. As the Baron du Crossard snarled, ‘Those men who . . . remained
attached to the stathouder maintained that Dumouriez would not attack Holland because they did
not want Holland to be attacked.’ Baron de Crossard, Mémoires militaires et historiques pour servir à
l’histoire de la guerre depuis 1792 jusqu’en 1815 inclusivement (Paris, 1829), I, p. 17.
2 The armies of the ancien régime
With Europe on the brink of what was to become ten years of general warfare, it is as well
that we should devote a chapter to the armies whose task it was going to be to confront the
Revolution. In so far as these were concerned, the mere mention of them is prone to conjure
up an image of common soldiers recruited from the proverbial ‘scum of the earth’ who were
relatively few in number, subjected to a savage code of discipline and utterly disengaged
from the causes for which they were supposed to fight; of officers who came from the nobil-
ity alone, knew little other than how to cut a dashing figure at court and from start to finish
bought their way up the ranks; of tactics that were rigid in the extreme; of superannuated
generals who could barely ride a horse; and, in sum, of a military system that did but play at
war. Already belonging in the dustbin of history, meanwhile, they were from 1792 onwards
consigned to it once and for all by the armies of Revolutionary France, these last sweeping
from victory to victory on account of the manifold advantages brought by the Revolution of
1789. In brief, with nothing to believe in and nothing to fight for, the slave-soldier was con-
fronted by the citizen-soldier and in the process found to be utterly wanting. In all this there
are, of course, elements of truth, but at the same time there are also elements of stereotype,
and these last, alas, far outweigh the former. In this chapter, then, we shall examine the
armies of Europe as they stood in 1789 and in the process show, first, that they represented
a foe that was worthy of considerable respect and, second, that many of the innovations the
French Revolution supposedly brought to the art of war were not in fact innovations at all.1
Let us begin with the simplest question of all, namely whether the armies of eighteenth-
century Europe were as small as they have been portrayed. In assessing this matter, a degree
of caution is obviously necessary. As the English author, William Coxe, noted, although
the Russian army in theory numbered some 370,000 men in 1785, the actual situation was
very different:
The real number of effectives always falls far short of this nominal list . . . Although,
considering the number of distant garrisons, the extent of the empire and the difficulty
of obtaining intelligence, it is impossible for a traveller to ascertain the exact state of
the army, yet it is probable that the effective troops . . . scarcely exceed 200,000.2
Yet, whilst this is fair comment, with the exception of Britain – a state whose army was
limited in size by a combination of long-standing political mistrust and the very different
needs of a world power – there was still nothing paltry about armies that, even if only on
paper, in 1789 numbered 426,000 in the case of Russia, 359,000 in the case of Austria and
200,000 in the case of Prussia.3 As for what could be achieved in time of war, at least in
terms of percentage of the population, the figures easily rivalled those of later conflicts, the
number of men called up by the French in the War of the Spanish Succession amounting to
some 455,000. Even in Britain, the figures were impressive: at the turn of the seventeenth
century, the army inherited by Queen Anne numbered no more than about 30,000 men,
and yet by 1709 Britain had at least 150,000 men available for service.4
With this question settled, we should next ask of what did the armies of the ancien régime
consist and how were they organised. If one excludes the Ottoman Empire, from one end
of Europe to the other, the land forces of states large and small conformed to a common
pattern. As in all eras, for the simple reason that he was the cheapest to equip and the most
versatile, the most common soldier in every country was the infantryman, in most cases a
man who fought shoulder to shoulder with his fellows in close order and was armed with
a muzzle-loading, smoothbore, flintlock musket together with a bayonet and, sometimes
at least, a short sword known as a hanger. In terms of their organisation, meanwhile, they
were organised into regiments, named in some instances after their colonels and in others
after specific areas from which they might or might not be raised, each of which usually
had two or three battalions of perhaps 1,000 men apiece at full strength, the battalions in
turn being broken down into a varying number of companies, of which one was invariably
composed of élite troops known as grenadiers (in many armies such as the Austrian, these
companies were withdrawn from their parent units and formed into separate battalions
that could be used to spearhead attacks or shore up sectors of the line that were particularly
threatened, though there was much debate as to the impact this had on the efficacy of units
as a whole).5 Whilst there were exceptions – the Russians, for example, had recently issued
their foot-soldiers with an extremely practical uniform characterised by baggy red overalls
reinforced with leather, a short apple-green coatee of a generous cut and a leather helmet6 –
it was not just the weapons and units that were similar. On the contrary, infantrymen also
dressed the same, favouring leather gaiters, white or buff breaches and waistcoats, a long
tailed coat in the national colour (dull red for the British; white for the French, Spaniards
and Austrians; light blue for the Bavarians; dark blue for the Prussians and the Swedes)
and, depending on the practice of the army concerned and the type of company to which
the man belonged, either a tricorne hat, a leather helmet or a cap made of fur or cloth,
whilst at the same time being slung about with a cartridge box, a bayonet scabbard, a water-
bottle, a haversack and a knapsack. Meanwhile, because their arms were the same, their
tactics were the same too. Thus, the musket was only effective when used en masse and
this in turn dictated both the use of the three-deep line as the usual fighting formation and
reliance on sheer weight of fire rather than accuracy: what mattered was not taking aim
but rather learning to load and fire at a rate of three or four times a minute and that in the
horrific conditions encountered on the battlefield.7
What actually happened on the battlefield is a subject that will be discussed at a later
point. For the moment, let us rather continue with our survey of weapons and troop types.
We here come to the first of the many qualifications that show just how stereotypical our
view of eighteenth-century warfare is. In brief, whilst the bulk of the foot-soldiers fought
very much in the style described here – hence the term by which they were known, i.e.
‘line infantry’ – from early in the eighteenth century, propelled by the need to operate in
broken terrain or fight unconventional enemies such as the Turks or the Barbary corsairs,
and in many instances possessed of elements in their population that offered themselves for
this purpose, a number of armies had developed corps of what were known as light infantry,
men who operated spread out in what was known as open order and could therefore move
much more swiftly than men deployed in line, as well as being far more able to cope with
woods or forests or rocky slopes. The remote origins of this development lay in the need of
Austria and Russia to confront the irregular opponents constituted by the Turkish empire
The armies of the ancien régime 37
and the Tartars of the steppes. Faced by this problems, the Habsburgs and Romanovs alike
had had recourse to the notion of ‘military frontiers’ – in brief, areas whose inhabitants (in
the Austrian case, the indigenous Slavic population, who were one and all deemed Croats,
but in the Russian one, settlers known – from a Turkic word meaning ‘adventurer’ – as
Cossacks) were given land and a range of privileges, including, not least, freedom from
serfdom, in exchange for the obligation to provide military service. Little by little, however,
the threat from the Turks and the Tartars diminished, and the result was that these peasant
territorials increasingly began to appear in Austrian and Russian forces fighting the troops
of other European powers.8 Both states, then, were able to field large numbers of irregulars,
and these posed their opponents such problems that they had to put together special units
that could counter them in the form of gangs of free-booters known as freikorps who were
recruited in time of war and then hastily got rid of as soon as hostilities came to a close.9
So much for the remote origins of light infantry, at least in eastern Europe. Gradually,
however, a series of factors including both a search for greater efficiency and the need to
impose better discipline (Croats and Cossacks alike were notorious plunderers) led to a
series of reforms which saw the Croats given proper uniforms and organised into regular
units, and the many Cossacks who were too poor to own horses replaced by battalions
of specially trained troops armed with rifles instead of the usual musket.10 In the German
states, meanwhile, the freikorps had acquired so evil a name that they too disappeared, being
replaced by permanent units of riflemen, who were generally recruited by voluntary enlist-
ment from amongst such groups as foresters and gamekeepers and given special dark green
uniforms, interest in the new way of fighting which they represented being manifested in
dramatic style by the Prussian creation in 1787 of twenty battalions of fusiliers, these being
troops trained to fight in open order who were armed with a version of the ordinary musket
that was both lighter and easier to aim.11
The emergence of such troops was not just a phenomenon limited to Austria, Russia
and Prussia, however. In Spain the demands of fighting in the mountains of Portugal and
need to fight off the constant raids of the Barbary corsairs had led to the formation of three
regiments of light infantry.12 Across the seas, meanwhile, Europe’s two great colonial pow-
ers had found themselves both fighting irregular opponents, whether white frontiersmen,
native Americans or the armies of assorted Indian potentates, in terrain that was often
far worse than anything Europe had to offer, the result being that in America and India
alike they organised substantial auxiliary forces trained to fight in open or closed order
as required. Not content with this, meanwhile, they also began to include light infantry
in the orders of battle of their regular armies: in 1739 the need to police the Scottish
mountains gave the British army the famous ‘Black Watch’, the first of a long and distin-
guished series of kilted Highland regiments. These last units, true, quickly lost all trace of
their origins as light infantry, but the experience of the American War of Independence
showed that light troops were indispensable, and the decision was therefore taken to train
one company of each infantry battalion to fight as skirmishers. Finally, in France a similar
process led to the formation of twelve battalions of green-coated light infantry known as
chasseurs (literally ‘hunters’).13
The same ability to adapt to circumstances and display both flexibility and imagination
was also on view in respect of the cavalry. At the beginning of the military revolution of
the seventeenth century, the mounted forces of conventional European armies consisted of
cuirassiers and harquebusiers – more-or-less heavily armoured horsemen whose task it was
physically to break and ride down enemy formations – and dragoons – mounted infantrymen
who could rush to secure key positions, provide a mobile reserve on the battlefield and serve
as scouts and foragers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a steady process
of evolution had taken place which saw the fully armoured cuirassiers of old disappear alto-
gether; the more lightly armoured harquebusiers discard their helmets and be reclassified
as line cavalry or heavy dragoons, or (if they retained their armour) cuirassiers; and the
dragoons lose their infantry function and become maids-of-all work who could function as
slightly less effective shock troops on the battlefield whilst taking charge of reconnaissance
and patrol duties off it.14 Thus emerged two of the three generic categories of mounted
troops that characterised eighteenth-century horse in the form of heavy and medium cav-
alry, and, setting aside the issue of armour, these looked much like infantrymen with the
exception, of course, that they wore heavy riding boots. As for their function, by the time
of the French Revolution, the days when cavalry had relied primarily on firearms were long
gone: instead, in part through the influence of changes introduced in the Prussian army by
Frederick the Great, horsemen now relied on their swords and aimed to charge home at full
speed in the hope of breaking the enemy by sheer momentum.15
If the heavy and medium cavalry remained the predominant branches of the mounted
arm, from the middle of the seventeenth century, however, there also emerged a third type
of cavalryman. As with the light infantry, these originated in the need to fight the forces
of the Turks and Tartars, a large part of which consisted of fast-moving irregular cavalry
armed with bows and lances.16 In Russia the result was the emergence of the Cossacks and,
more especially, the irregular horsemen that are the quintessential troop-type associated
with them, but states such as Hungary and Poland rather relied on their extensive nobilities
to turn out in time of war as mounted horsemen, and the resultant troops had collectively
become known as hussars (so named from a combination for the Magyar words for twenty
and a unit of land of approximately one acre, the idea being that for every twenty such
units a landowner possessed, he had to provide the state with a fully equipped horseman).
Initially such men had ridden to war in armour, but by the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury the need for speed and stamina had led them to abandon such protection, the riders
therefore rather appearing in the colourful dress typical of their class and region, namely
soft leather boots, tight pantaloons, jackets heavily decorated with embroidered lace and
cylindrical caps of wool or fur.17 However, turn out as they did in mere war-bands, in much
the same way as with the light infantry, moves were soon underway to find a better way
of meeting the needs which they had addressed, the result being the emergence of large
numbers of new cavalry units that in some cases – above all, those regiments denominated
hussars or lancers – maintained stylised, not to mention highly exaggerated, versions of the
original eastern European look, and in others – those denominated chasseurs à cheval (liter-
ally ‘mounted hunters’), light horse or light dragoons – favoured a more conventional style.
Whichever was the case, however, they were armed with lances (occasionally only), curved
swords used for slashing known as sabres, carbines and pistols; mounted on much lighter
horses than their fellows; and, in theory, principally employed for raiding and reconnais-
sance though – not least because, for all cavalrymen, the charge was the very high point of
their aspirations – they often also came in useful on the battlefield.18
So much for the cavalry. In all the armies of the larger states, meanwhile, the third pil-
lar upon which they rested was the artillery. Prior to 1700 the numbers of guns employed
had been steadily on the increase, and the coming of the new century did nothing to check
this development. On the contrary, whereas the largest number of guns ever seen on a
single battlefield in the Thirty Years War was eighty-four, the average in Marlborough’s
victories at Blenheim, Oudenarde, Ramillies and Malplaquet was 185. With the rise in the
number of guns came greater professionalisation: in the Thirty Years War gunners had been
independent operators chartered by the campaign, but army after army saw the organisation
of specialist regiments of artillery recruited in much the same way as the rest of the army, not
to mention the establishment of training schools that sought to ensure the presence of com-
petence and doctrinal unity alike. As for the guns, themselves, if they continued to consist
for the most part of muzzle-loading cannon cast in bronze, firing solid iron shot at long range
and anti-personnel rounds known as canister at short, together with an admixture of short-
barrelled howitzers firing explosive shells, there was at least a move towards standardisation
with most Continental armies settling for campaign purposes on a combination of four,
eight and twelve-pounders (there were also, sixteen, eighteen and even twenty-four pound-
ers, but these were too heavy to be used on the battlefield and reserved for siege warfare).
At the same time, there were also considerable advances in casting, elevating mechanisms
and the design of gun carriages, the general effect of which was to improve range, accuracy,
manoeuvrability and hitting power alike. The highest expression of the art in this respect
was the Gribeauval system, which was introduced into the French army from 1776 onwards –
not the least of its innovations was the introduction of back-sights – but the Austrians
already had something rather similar as early as 1753, whilst the guns they used were copied
by Frederick the Great in the latter years of the Seven Years War. In the wars of the sev-
enteenth century, still little more than expensive investments in sound and fury, a century
later cannon and howitzers were well on their way to becoming the queens of the battlefield:
thus conscious both of the improvement in the technology and their ever more enhanced
professional status, artillerymen began to put forward ideas about how they might intervene
in combat that were increasingly ambitious and commanders such as Frederick the Great
to listen to them more and more. In consequence, standard features of the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars such as grand batteries and oblique fire were also a common phenom-
enon in the battles of the war of 1756–63, whilst the Seven Years War also saw Frederick
experiment with horse artillery (i.e. batteries in which all the gunners were mounted on
horseback so as to allow their guns to move very rapidly from place to place). On the other
hand, one issue that remained to be resolved was the question of the artillery’s drivers and
teams of draught animals: in no army were the drivers militarised, although they were often
the owners of the horses and oxen hired to pull the guns, the result being that, while army
commanders could usually rely on their guns being pulled on to the battlefield, they could
not necessarily rely on there being any way of moving them thereafter. At the same time,
the growing understanding that artillery fire was at its best when concentrated was vitiated
by the perpetuation of an innovation initially pioneered by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden
in the Thirty Years War in the form of the attachment of a pair of light artillery pieces to
each infantry battalion (though it has to be said that the guns concerned were generally so
small that they would have been useless as a part of most grand batteries).19
Last of the four branches into which all armies were divided was the engineers. In every
state without exception a force composed of nothing more than a corps of more-or-less
highly trained officers at best only a few hundred strong – in 1717 Britain’s Royal Engineers
had just twenty-eight such officers on its books while even in 1782 the number was still
only seventy-five20 – this had in most cases to rely on the services of labour drawn from
the rest of the army (one of the few exceptions was Austria, which possessed one battalion
of sappers, one battalion of miners and one battalion of pontooneers). In consequence,
its efforts on campaign were frequently hindered by the habitual sullenness with which
infantrymen and, especially, cavalrymen responded to being expected to perform physical
labour: in most cases the work got done, but it was frequently not done very well. That
said, the engineers were not without considerable importance: it was they who were in
charge of map-making, they who maintained a state’s existing fortifications and erected
new ones, and, very, often, they too who conducted the major programmes of public works
and civil engineering beloved of the enlightened absolutisms of the eighteenth century:
roads, bridges, quays and new towns or suburbs could one and all fall within the purview
of engineer officers, and to this extent the academies which were established to keep their
ranks up to strength and ensure that their standard of education was sufficiently rigorous
may be regarded as the polytechnics of their age.21
So far, so good, but analysis of eighteenth-century armies is complicated by the fact
that they did not just break down by arms of service. Thus, on the one hand there were
the powerful royal guards maintained by many sovereigns: often very strong and generally
composed of long-serving veterans – the Spanish example numbered some 10,000 men
including a guard of halberdiers, two six-battalion infantry regiments and two regiments
of cavalry – these forces were highly privileged, enjoying better conditions of service and
more resplendent uniforms than the rest of the army, and could in theory be expected to
turn in a better performance on the battlefield.22 On the other, meanwhile, there were the
far lowlier bodies represented by the provincial and urban militias: a militarised version of
the trained bands and town guards of the seventeenth century, these forces could in some
instances run to a hundred or more battalions in large states and were recruited by conscrip-
tion, specifically linked to particular geographical areas and commanded either by officers
on secondment from the regular army or local worthies who had retired from front-line
service, but, other than periodic training sessions of a fairly brief variety, they only served
in time of war and could not necessarily be relied upon in battle (that said, drafted into the
regular army, as was certainly the practice in France, 20 per cent of whose infantry came
from this source in the Seven Years War, they could be a useful means of fleshing out regi-
ments reduced to a mere cadre by combat losses).23
Of course, some infantries were better than others, some cavalries better than others,
some artilleries better than others and some corps of engineers better than others. Indeed,
armies as a whole were inclined to vary dramatically in quality with those of the smaller
and poorer states trailing far behind those of their wealthier neighbours. Amongst the worst
was probably that of Portugal. Having performed extremely creditably in the face of the
Franco-Spanish invasion that formed one of the last campaigns of the Seven Years War, the
army was thereafter allowed to dwindle away for want of finance, the result being, as one
anonymous pamphlet complained, that the nobility lost interest in a military career to such
a degree that the officer corps had to be filled from nominees among their dependants such
as or coachmen and other flunkies.24 For a more detailed analysis we can turn to the future
victor of the battle of Valmy, Charles Dumouriez, who penned a long report on Portugal for
the French government some years after the abortive campaign of 1762:
The Portuguese army is in a tolerable state of discipline: it marches and manoeuvres

well, but it ought more frequently to be drawn out into encampments [so] that the lit-
tle manoeuvres of exercise might be applied to the great operations of war . . . Neither
are the troops accustomed to remove earth, to practice the manoeuvres of attack and
defence as well as the art of fortification, and all this is essential in a country like
Portugal where war must be on the defensive and carried on in detail [i.e. en détaille,
meaning by small independent units] . . . Portugal maintains twelve squadrons of cui-
rassiers in pretty good condition and discipline though I doubt whether they possess
sufficient solidity to resist the impetuous shock of the Spanish cavalry . . . There is
but one regiment of light dragoons, very ill-exercised, and, of course, incapable of
engaging in that kind of war for which they are designed . . . The artillery is composed
of three battalions, but in a very bad state of discipline; the cannon are ill-made and
clumsy . . . There are no field-pieces . . . to accompany the infantry . . . The corps of
engineers is ill-formed and extremely ignorant: they can do little more than rule paper
and page a register.25
If the Portuguese army was a second-rate force, across the frontier in Spain, things were not
much better albeit not so much because of desperate poverty pure and simple as because of
the fact that in the reign of Charles III the army very much took second place to the navy,
a force that was currently being massively increased in strength. Whatever the reason, how-
ever, it was all too obvious that things were not well, not the least of the problem being that
the Spanish army was desperately understrength. As the German observer Joseph Texier
wrote, for example:
The Spanish troops are ill clothed and worse shod . . . Their bravery, docility, loyalty
and steadiness are well known – have been demonstrated many times over even –
but they require better discipline, better support and better officers if they are ever to
become excellent soldiers.26
Another army bedevilled by an unfavourable strategic context was that of Britain. Hit by
massive cuts in the defence budget in the wake of American independence, the redcoats
were stripped of many hardened veterans and very quickly lost touch with the lessons
that had been learned across the Atlantic, the efforts at reform associated with Sir David
Dundas culminating in the imposition in 1788 of a tactical system based wholly on the
Frederician model. In fairness to many regimental officers, this was from the start perceived
as an anachronism, but the general picture was not encouraging. ‘Our army’, complained
one well-placed officer in 1793, ‘was lax in its discipline, entirely without a system and very
weak in numbers. Each colonel of a regiment managed it according to his own notions or
neglected it altogether. There was no uniformity of drill or movements; professional pride
was rare; professional knowledge still more so. Never was a kingdom less prepared for a stern
and arduous conflict.’27
As one German writer observed, indeed:
The English . . . are only soldiers when they are in action and do not trouble them-
selves much about the business at other times. They are as brave as anything you can
call brave, but at this time of day [i.e. at this hour] bravery alone is not sufficient.28
If we turn our attention to the so-called military monarchies of central and eastern Europe,
however, the picture is very different. Despite the grievous human losses of the Seven Years
War, the Prussian army, for example, continued to dazzle. To quote a frequent visitor to
Prussia who wrote an admiring biography of Frederick the Great, for example:
The Prussian infantry march wonderfully well, the soldier exhibiting nothing of a stiff or
straightened air, and almost constantly preserving silence, without standing in need of
the cadence of musical instruments, yet are his steps not less in time, or less exactly meas-
ured than if the drum was beating . . . The Prussian cavalry always perform their manoeu-
vres with the greatest dexterity, sword in hand and on the full gallop . . . They observe
their distances [i.e. the distances between each sub-unit] . . . with the most scrupulous
exactness. If the difficulties occasioned by the nature of the ground sometimes produce
irregularities, this inconvenience is soon remedied by the attention of the officers and
there is scarcely time to perceive them . . . On beholding all these manoeuvres, we are
lost in . . . admiration and can scarcely believe it possible for human art to carry activity,
order and precision to a higher point of perfection.29
If this was so, meanwhile, it was because of rigorous training. Thus:
The garrison towns are real camps where the troops are constantly exercising, and the
field exercises form so many fields of battle in which the Prussian armies, divided into
enemy parties, place themselves in all possible situations and study, arms in hand, every
resource of art to conquer or at least not be defeated.30
In the historiography, it is a common-place to maintain that somehow the Prussian army

was in decline by the time of the French Revolution, and it may be that it did indeed
suffer from the loss of the extraordinarily energetic guiding hand represented by der alte
Fritz. That the king’s personal influence was very strong is undeniable. In the words of
the same observer:
Frederick was the soul of all these exercises and his indefatigable activity caused him to
be present in every part of the army . . . As soon as the roads became passable in spring,
he flew from province to province, reviewing his whole army . . . punishing neglect,
redressing grievances and, by reproaches and commendations opportunely distributed,
inflaming or awakening the military zeal.31
At the same time, such was the hold of the Frederician system that in the years after
Frederick’s death, a certain conservatism or reluctance to change infected many officers:
after all, with the scourge of combat all but lifted from their shoulders, there were plenty who
were growing old in the service, and such men were not much disposed to be receptive to
criticism from the outside, and particularly not from a France utterly discredited by the bat-
tle of Rossbach: thus it was that one visitor to Berlin could write that the Count of Guibert,
the progenitor of the tactical system that from 1792 onwards was to pose the Prussian way of
fighting battles with its greatest challenge, ‘is looked upon here as the most miserable drivel-
ler in the whole world’.32 Yet the forces of Prussia remained formidable. As their most recent
historian has written:
The Prussian king’s decision [to go to war] was substantially validated by an army that
between 1792 and 1795 performed up to and beyond reasonable expectations: Prussia’s
senior officers were no worse than their British and Austrian counterparts or, on the
whole, their French enemies . . . The line battalions combined well-regulated volleys
and well-controlled local counter-attacks to match, if not always to master, the élan of
their opponents. Prussian light infantry proved formidable opponents against French
foragers and raiding parties. In large actions as well, the fusiliers taught some sharp
lessons . . . in marksmanship and skirmishing.33
Moving on, we come to the Austrian army. Prussia’s most inveterate opponent, this force
has been much underrated: in the same work as the one just cited, for example, we find it
being stigmatised as ‘a small professional army’ hampered by ‘out-dated notions of training
and deployment’, wedded to ‘the tradition of the previous century’ and commanded by an
officer corps ‘well-known for its lack of interest in intellectual development’ whose members
were ‘rarely, if ever . . . encouraged to think for themselves’.34 Only slightly less derisive was
the leading specialist in the Austrian army of the Napoleonic Wars, Gunther Rothenberg,
who saw it as being ‘overly defensive minded . . . pedantic and schematic’.35 This is, how-
ever, at best a caricature. Whilst it was true that the habitual use of linear formations in
battles against conventional adversaries made attacking difficult, this was just as true for
every other army on the continent. In so far as quality was concerned, then, Joseph II and
his successors could actually feel very confident. Austria’s cavalry was generally regarded as
being the best in Europe; the artillery was excellent, outmatched though its weapons now
were by the more-up-to-date pieces fielded by France and Prussia; and its infantry was pos-
sessed of excellent skirmishers. Under Joseph II, meanwhile, the military estate had been
subjected to a series of reforms aimed at improving efficiency and cutting costs, and there is
therefore little reason to believe that the army fell far short of the extraordinary standard it
had achieved in the Seven Years War.36
Also very impressive, meanwhile, was the Russian army. In the Seven Years War the
forces of Peter III had repeatedly fought Prussian generals to a standstill whilst at Kunersdorf
they had even inflicted a catastrophic defeat on Frederick himself. There having followed
many more victories against, first, the Poles and then the Turks, this was not an army to be
trifled with, and all the more so as Catherine the Great had no sooner acceded to the throne
than she had embarked on a major programme of reform that brought the changes in the
cavalry and introduction of light infantry already noted, as well as new tactical regulations
and widespread improvements in training.37 This is not to say that the Russian army was
perfect, however. On the contrary, there was a general feeling that, while still more than
capable of dealing with the Turks, it had not kept up with its European counterparts, relying
instead on the innate qualities of the Russian peasant soldier. To quote Roger de Damas, a
young French nobleman who secured a commission in its ranks in 1788:
At the time of which I am speaking, the Russian army was greatly inferior in tactics to
the armies of the other first-rate powers. This was especially true of the cavalry which
was positively ignorant, but the steadiness of the men in the ranks, their handling of
arms, their deportment and discipline, were perfect to the last degree . . . The inferior-
ity of the Russian army in the matter of training is counterbalanced by its discipline
and steadiness.38
Finally, we should, perhaps spare a word for the armies of the minor German and Italian
states. Generally much too small to constitute much of a significant fighting force in
themselves, they essentially existed on the one hand to promote the prestige of the ruling
dynasties or, in the case of the German ecclesiastical territories, prince-bishops, and on
the other to promote law and order and strengthen the social fabric. As Riesbeck wrote of
the army of the Elector of Mainz, for example, ‘The military establishment of the country
appears to be more calculated for the purpose of feeding a hungry nobility than for real
use.’39 Rather more efficient, it seems, were the forces of Hesse-Darmstädt, but, even so, at
least to keen observers, their domestic function was still very apparent. Thus:
Better or more active troops than the three Darmstädt regiments of infantry are not
to be seen in Germany, the Prussians not excepted. They consist of about 6,000
men. The regiments . . . quartered at Pirmasens [are] . . . a pattern of discipline,
economy and good behaviour . . . It is incredible how little they cost, and, as they have
frequent furloughs granted, agriculture suffers nothing from them: they are, in fact,
only a well-disciplined and well-regulated militia. Nor is the military education with-
out its advantages in other respects: one immediately sees upon looking at [the] peas-
ants that they have seen service, for the natural consequences of it, a peculiar degree of
order, cleanliness and activity, distinguish them from their neighbours.40
Yet, if they were small, at least some of these miniature armies yet had a considerable mili-
tary reputation. The troops of Hesse-Kassel were very much the first choice whenever the
British had occasion to hire entire regiments of Germans as was, most famously, the case of
the American War of Independence, whilst the Prussian commentator, Von Helldorff, was
glowing in his praise of the Saxons. As he wrote:
With regard to the discipline introduced in this army, it may be truly said that it is infe-
rior to none in Europe, and their dexterity in manoeuvring and in military evolutions
does equal credit to them . . . As to the corps of artillery and engineers, it may, without
prejudice, be portrayed as the most perfect of its kind . . . Commissions in this army are
never sold but are given as a reward for merit.41
Taking ancien-régime Europe as a whole, then, what emerges is a picture of armies that,
given an adequate degree of financial support, were in most cases highly effective fight-
ing machines, and military estates that were far more flexible than they have usually been
given credit for. However, one area in which all armies were universally deficient was in
their staff-work. The commanders of field armies, of course, could only be appointed at the
start of a war, but this would have been of little import had France, Prussia and the rest
possessed general staffs of an adequate size. To say that there were no permanent general
staffs whatsoever is an exaggeration – most armies, indeed, had a body known as the quarter-
master-general staff which was responsible for planning and over-seeing the movement
and encampment of field armies, and another known as the adjutant-general staff which
attended to matters of internal administration such as discipline and recommendations for
decorations or promotion42 – and in 1765 Prussia even saw Frederick the Great effectively
unite the two departments by making the same general the head of both. Yet at best these
bodies were far too small – as late as 1783 the Prussian examples only employed around fifty
such officers – whilst their technical resources were extremely limited: in the archives of the
Ministries of War and other organisations responsible for the administration of the armed
forces, there might exist reports on fortresses that were going to have to be besieged or prov-
inces that were going to have to be invaded, but, then again, there might not. Put these two
problems together and the result was that campaigns frequently had to be planned in the
most ad hoc of manners and conducted by groups of officers brought together by little more
than patronage, and, what is more, groups of officers whose only mode of communication
was a man on horseback. Yet another problem was that in no field army was there ever any
higher formation than the brigade of from three to five infantry battalions or cavalry regi-
ments, this meaning that far more copies of any given order would have to be prepared and
sent out than would normally be the case (meanwhile, it should also be noted that brigades
had no existence in peacetime, rather having to be improvised in time of war). Some help
was derived from the fact that over the years certain forms and processes had evolved that
were more or less well understood, whilst in some instances important posts in the staffs
of the quarter-master-general or adjutant-general were occupied by officers who had a real
talent for staff-work, but this last was rarely more than the result of pure happenstance.
Incredibly enough, some impressive feats of planning and execution were still achieved, but
all too clearly what was needed was permanent bodies that could wrestle with the problems
involved in marching on Paris or Potsdam or anywhere else in peace as well as in war, not
to mention staff academies that could provide experienced officers with training in the
multifarious skills that were so necessary, but, except in France, where a general staff was
established in 1783, such few steps as were taken towards this goal were either undermined
or thrown out altogether by vested interests who feared that a general staff could not but
become too powerful.43
It was not just operational efficiency that suffered as a result of poor staff-work. Thus,
amongst its other effects were endless logistical problems that ensured that armies often suf-
fered terrible privations in the field. Here, for example, is Roger de Damas on his experiences
before the Turkish fortress of Ozu Kusamatsi (Ochakiv):
I should find it hard to give any idea of the sufferings of the army and of every indi-
vidual in it, at this period. There was snow on the ground to a depth of two feet,
accompanied by twelve or fifteen degrees of frost, which often upset the tents . . . In
these immense deserts there were no woods or resources of any kind, and the inferior
ranks were deprived of wine, brandy and even meat since they could not pay the price
that was demanded. The generals and colonels could only ameliorate their lots with a
few comforts by paying their weight in gold . . . It is impossible to give any idea of the
misery of our condition.44
To lambast the armies of the ancien régime for such deficiencies is to miss the point, how-
ever. That there were numerous deficiencies is true enough, but this does not mean that the
military world was hidebound. On the contrary, there were plenty of highly cerebral offic-
ers whose writings show a strong desire to explore the innermost workings of warfare and
to reach a higher state of efficiency, men like Prince Wilhelm of Schaumburg-Lippe, the
Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado, the Count of Guibert, the Prince of Ligne, Maurice
de Saxe, the Count of Saint-Priest, the Marquis of Puységur and Jean de Folard. Nor were
these writers operating in a vacuum or in a climate that was unreceptive of their efforts:
by 1789 in Germany, in particular, there existed a vigorous periodical press specialising in
military affairs, the thoughts of the ‘greats’ were echoed and re-echoed in the many books
published by figures who were much humbler in stature but no less thoughtful, and we find
the conqueror of Quebec, James Wolfe, urging young officers to immerse themselves in the
works of Schaumburg-Lippe and the rest.45
Nowhere were the debates engaged in by these writers more fiercely waged than in the
field of tactics. Here commanders faced a real problem. Battle in the eighteenth century
was a bloody and protracted affair, and there was therefore much interest in finding a way of
securing a result more rapidly and thereby saving lives: soldiers being a valuable investment,
battles which regularly led to 30, 40 or even 50 per cent casualties were not to be contem-
plated with equanimity, if indeed they were to be contemplated at all (if Frederick the
Great fought far more battles than most other commanders, it was not because he wished to
do so, but rather because he was usually in so beleaguered a situation that there was no way
he could do anything else). In brief, the issue was the line: inherently a slow and unwieldy
formation, this was hard even for a single battalion to manoeuvre in, let alone a force of
half a dozen or more. Particularly if the enemy had a plentiful supply of artillery, there were
likely to be heavy casualties before the attackers could fire a single shot, and, when they did
get within range, matters very rapidly deteriorated still further. According to the received
wisdom of the period, the attackers would then open fire themselves, but at the same time
keep moving forward, thereby so shaking the defenders that they would eventually break
and run. Yet the reality of what occurred was invariably very different. As soon as the troops
opened fire, the sheer noise, let alone the other pressures of the moment, was enough very
quickly to disrupt the ordered sequence of platoon volleys that were supposed to ripple
up and down the line from one end to the other. Very soon, then, men were simply firing
individually as fast as they were able whilst all suggestion of an advance was soon lost: while
the men were shooting at the enemy, they could legitimately persuade themselves that they
were satisfying their obligations and thereby escape the need to undertake the psychologi-
cally very difficult step of pressing home the advance (another factor to consider here was
the immense quantities of smoke produced by prolonged musketry: growing ever thicker,
this came to serve almost as an artificial wall which, at one and the same time, offered at
least the illusion of cover whilst at the same time hiding dangers that were all the more
terrible for being invisible). With the officers and sergeants being cut down just as fast as
the rank and file, they were incapable of getting their men to advance, and thus it was that
whole attacks would become bogged down and battles degenerate into prolonged exchanges
of fire that would involve terrible casualties.46
Finding a remedy to this situation was by no means straightforward. For a while the
response of Frederick the Great was to order his men to advance without firing, but the net
result of this was simply to see them shot down by the hundred without being able to kill a
single man in return. Far more promising in this respect were the theories put forward by the
French thinker Folard. Rooting his ideas in a study of ancient warfare, Folard argued that
best way of securing a quick resolution to a battle, and, indeed, the only way of doing so in
a decisive fashion, was to have the infantry advance upon the enemy without firing and to
rely entirely upon the bayonet. To do this effectively, however, reliance on the line would
have to be abandoned and the troops formed in dense masses that could rush the enemy and
not have to pay constant attention to aligning themselves on neighbouring units. In princi-
ple, such an idea had many advantages, including, not least, the fact that it meant that far
more soldiers could be concentrated on any given point than would otherwise be the case,
but at the same time there were also serious problems with the idea in that such masses were
extremely vulnerable to artillery fire, being both easier to hit than lines and susceptible to
heavier casualties (a cannon ball striking a line would kill or disable three men whereas one
striking a column could bring down three or even four times that figure). On top of that,
the column was very much an all-or-nothing weapon: were it to be brought to a halt, under
the tactical regulations of the early and mid-eighteenth century, there was no way that it
could be redeployed in line. Hardly surprisingly, then, it was only in the Russian army – a
force that spent most of its time fighting opponents with only limited firepower47 – that the
column became a normal feature of battlefield tactics and then not until the years after the
Seven Years War. Particularly important here was the influence of Alexander Suvorov. A
veteran of all the wars in which Russia engaged in the period from 1756 onwards, Suvorov
was a charismatic, even wildly eccentric, figure adored by his soldiers and possessed of a
positive lust to take the war to the enemy. Very much an ‘easterner’ who believed in a
specifically Russian way of making war, he therefore rejected Frederician-style linear tactics
in favour of bayonet attacks. Many years before the French made the column a standard
feature of their tactics in the period from 1793 onwards, the Russians were therefore well
used to fighting in this formation, and all the more so as it was more or less impervious to the
attacks of the irregular cavalry which they so often found themselves fighting (it is worth
pointing out, however, that even Suvorov admitted that against western-style armies, the
line was very much a necessary technique, and not just that, but, in some instances, the only
possible technique).48
All this said, the column was not solely a Russian phenomenon. Confronted by very
similar conditions in the Balkans, the Austrians employed formations known as ‘battal-
ion masses’ that were based very much on the same principle. Meanwhile, it was not just
eastern Europe that saw armies responding to local conditions: in the American War of
Independence, for example, the British army reduced the depth of the line from three ranks
to two, whilst many commanders authorised their men to cut short the tails of their coats,
replace their breeches and gaiters with canvas leggings and transform their stiff tricorne
hats into the shapeless affairs typical of the American frontier.49 More formally, meanwhile,
further encouraged by increasingly fashionable notions of national characteristics that held
that Frenchmen were too excitable and volatile to be suited to the rigid discipline of the
battle-line, French proponents of the offensive continued to mull over the problems raised
by Folard’s theories until at length a later thinker, the Count of Guibert, came up with a
system that allowed battalions advancing in column to extend into line more or less at
will whilst advancing on the enemy and then to switch back into column just as easily,
the manoeuvres concerned being formally sanctioned with the publication of new drill
regulations in 1791 (no thanks, be it said, to the Revolution, the new regulations having
been adopted some years prior to 1789). Over and over again, then, one sees not hidebound
traditionalism but a willingness to experiment and adapt to new circumstances.50
At the operational level, too, there is much to ponder. According to tradition, eighteenth-
century armies were ponderous affairs which were weighed down by immense baggage trains
carrying, on the one hand, the complicated paraphernalia which a pampered officer corps
needed to maintain its lifestyle in the field and, on the other, the enormous weight of can-
vas required to keep the common soldiers – valuable investments, after all – safe from the
ravages of rain and cold, and, what is more, ponderous affairs that were weighed down still
further by the need to set up fortress camps designed not so much to keep out the enemy
but to keep in the soldiery. All this, of course, made for a very slow rate of march, while the
pace of operations was slowed still further by the need to stay in touch with the magazines
that fed the troops – ever prone to desertion, the men could not be allowed to forage for
themselves – and the absence of any mechanisms that allowed armies to march divided
whilst yet coming together to fight. In all this there is some justification, but the picture has
again been exaggerated. Thus, prescient commanders might well establish magazines, but
the reality was that, the vast majority of the time, armies depended on the resources of the
areas in which they found themselves, the only proviso being that the process was carried
out by an orderly process of requisitioning rather than the rank and file being turned loose
to ravage the countryside on their own account. Meanwhile, wagon trains or no wagon
trains, rates of march were respectable enough even by the standards of later times, whilst
eighteenth-century generals were also well aware of the advantages of splitting their forces
during the manoeuvre phases of campaigns and in fact frequently did so.51
If it is necessary to revisit how armies fought (and, indeed, thought), it is also necessary
to do so with respect to how they were recruited. Here again the stereotype is one that is
highly compelling: officers were gentlemen – nobles even – and the rank and file the lowest
of the low. In respect of all this, let us begin with the former. The first thing to say, of course,
is that, historically, there was a very strong link between the concept of nobility and mili-
tary service. If the Church prayed for society, the nobility fought for society, and, should the
one cease to pray and the other to fight, their claims to predominance were clearly forfeit.
Under the feudal system, this made sense: knights were required to turn out at the call of
their lords, whilst it was only through their economic power that large numbers of common
soldiers could be raised with any ease. Gradually, however, the situation began to change.
The monarchs of Europe no longer needed to make use of feudalism as a mechanism for
mobilisation, but rather began to hire bands of soldiers who could offer much more in the
way of armed support. By means of the so-called ‘military revolution’ of the seventeenth
century, there emerged the modern standing army, and on one level this undermined the
nobility’s ability to legitimate itself still further: no longer needed to fight for the monarchs
of Europe in their capacity as seigneurs, they could now not even defend their interests by
force, the state having acquired a de facto monopoly of force. That said, however, the new
armies did not just operate in this fashion. Rather, they also offered nobilities a means of
reasserting their military identity and monarchs a means of sweetening the pill of political
emasculation. In brief, the new armies needed officers, while offering the resultant commis-
sions to the nobility gave the latter a new position in the state, albeit a position in which
their subordination to the throne was rendered very clear, and, not just that, but one that
served to reinforce the existing social order. As for the nobility, meanwhile, they were
happy to accept the bounty on offer: aside from the issue of the need to assert their social
superiority and maintain family traditions of chivalry and heroism, many nobles were far
from rich and were therefore delighted to enjoy the perquisites offered them by membership
of the officer corps. These last, meanwhile, were numerous: a commission brought a variety
of fiscal and legal privileges, whilst there were also the huge sums to be derived from the so-
called inhaber system whereby colonels were considered proprietors of their regiments and
captains proprietors of their companies, this opening the way to a wide range of more or less
fraudulent practices which offered huge profits. Hence, in part at least, the very common
phenomenon one comes across of commissions as ensigns being secured for boys as young as
five or six: the earlier feet were placed on the ladder, the quicker access would be obtained
to a captaincy.52
In the beginning, then, the vast majority of officers came from the nobility, and it was in
fact generally expected that young noblemen would do their duty by the state whether they
liked it or not, the point being driven home, in Russia, by a decree of Peter the Great that
actually forced the sons of the nobility to enter either the army or the bureaucracy and, in
Prussia, the forcible enrolment of young junker in cadet schools by Frederick William I.53
Yet, setting aside countries like Britain where the nobility was simply too small a group
for commissions to be limited to their ranks, nobility was an elastic term, whilst it was by
no means an indispensable prerequisite to obtaining a commission. In most armies there
were at the very least instances of men being promoted from the ranks for acts of heroism
or years of meritorious service, whilst the technical arms always tended to be more open
to recruits from outside the nobility, if only because there was a tendency among young
nobles to disdain the idea of grubbing around in trenches and batteries when they could
be carrying a regiment’s colours or heading some gallant cavalry charge. Also of some
importance was the extensive influence which remained in the hands of commanding
officers: a word from them was enough to secure many young men their first commissions,
and, if they chose to turn a blind eye to some aspirants’ social origins, there was little that
could be said to them: hence the fact that Frederick the Great’s generals included a Jew
and men whose fathers were a drummer, a sergeant and a Lutheran pastor, and that despite
the king’s well-known hostility to anything that smacked of the bourgeoisification of the
officer corps (indeed, so numerous did such men become in the ever-growing Russian
army that Peter the Great eventually decreed that all men who reached the eighth level
of the ‘table of ranks’ he established for all officials and army officers would automatically
be admitted to the hereditary nobility). As the Enlightenment took hold, meanwhile, so
there was a tendency noted in at least some countries for the scions of particularly wealthy
families to scorn the notion of a military career, the criticism of writers such as Voltaire
having tended to call its prestige into question, a further issue here being reforms that,
particularly in Austria, got rid of many of the perquisites of the inhaber system. So great
was the problem in Austria, indeed, that Catherine the Great was left with no option but
to throw open the doors of the various military schools she had established in Vienna to
anybody who could satisfy certain basic educational qualifications and, more than that,
offer free tuition, from which point onwards the Habsburg officer corps emerged as the
most meritocratic in Europe – famously, Karl von Mack, the commander of the Austrian
army destroyed by Napoleon at Ulm in 1805, had begun his military career as a common
soldier. By 1789, then, many armies had considerable numbers of non-noble officers: even
in Prussia, the figure may have been as high as 10 per cent. As we have seen with regard to
the French example, however, the officer without money or connections, and particularly
those men elevated from the ranks, could generally expect only a very slow rate of promo-
tion: there were, then, plenty of officer corps possessed of an embittered sub-stratum of
ageing lieutenants (for such men to rise even as far as captain was very hard).54
Also worthy of question is the common view that career progression was a simple matter
of officers simply buying their way up the ranks, a very good example here being the Duke
of Wellington who rocketed from ensign to lieutenant colonel in just six years. Yet, even
in the British army, purchase was never the only route for advancement: many first com-
missions were acquired by preferment, whilst promotion could be obtained by seniority or
even merit.55 In other armies, meanwhile, the norm was usually a mixture of preferment
or seniority, the former being predominant in the infantry and cavalry and the latter in
the artillery and engineers. Yet the fact that purchase was not widespread did not neces-
sarily mean that armies were meritocracies. On the contrary, money talked: in France and
Austria, all promotions carried with them a fee payable to the officer whose place was being
taken; in France and Spain, preferment came to titled aristocrats who possessed sufficient
wealth to maintain themselves at court much more easily than it did to penniless nobles
confined to provincial garrison towns; and in Britain, officers who could not afford to live as
gentlemen – essentially anyone without substantial private means – found it hard to attract
the favour of their superiors.56
What of the education of the officer corps? Here, too, caricature has ruled the day with
officers frequently being depicted either as effeminate fops more familiar with courts than with
cannon or roistering figures given over to gambling, drinking and hunting who had no interest
in their men and little knowledge of the art of war. Yet again, however, we need to be careful.
It is certainly true that, by contrast to the artillery and engineers, who invariably attended
such colleges as the one at Segovia dedicated to turning out Spain’s gunners, only a minority
of infantry and cavalry officers could boast of having attended the various military academies
that sprang up around Europe in the course of the eighteenth century, the vast majority rather
beginning their careers as cadets or ensigns in some regiment or other. For obvious reasons,
this was less than ideal: not only was the quality of training that they received very mixed, but
the young boys concerned, some of whom were as young as twelve or thirteen, could easily
be corrupted by the wilder spirits in the officers’ messes. For men denied advancement by the
prevailing norms, meanwhile, there was little incentive to engage in such activities as study.
Inevitably, then, drinking, gambling and other vices were indeed rife, while garrison towns
were also the scene of endless horseplay, not to mention downright bullying of the civilian
population and endless duelling amongst the officers themselves. However, as the eighteenth
century wore on, so a number of influences began to counteract the negative ones outlined
here; in the first place, monarchs such as Maria Theresa strove to encourage greater learning
among the officer corps; in the second place, the penalties for overstepping the bounds of what
was acceptable were often considerable; and, in the third, the gradual spread of the notion of
the ‘polite society’ also tended to impose at least a veneer of refinement. In 1789, then, whilst
there were plenty of officers who were indeed, if not outright reprobates, then creatures of
routine whose ignorance was all too obvious, there were others who exhibited a high level of
professionalism (in this respect, of course, much depended on circumstance: in the Prussian
army the manoeuvres conducted every year ensured that officers were at least basically com-
petent whilst, in countries such as France and Spain, the absence of such manoeuvres meant
that anything other than battalion drill was a real challenge; equally in the French army
leave was very generous – in the five years following gaining his commission in the artillery,
Napoleon spent barely six months with his regiment – whereas in the Austrian one it was
extremely limited ).57
Over-generalisation about the officer corps is therefore unwise, it only being with regard
to the rank and file that one can be more certain of the stereotype. In the vast majority,
then, the common soldiers came very largely from the urban and rural poor. At the sim-
plest level, enlistment could either be voluntary or the result of some form of conscription.
Beginning with voluntary enlistment, this consisted of regiments sending out recruiting
parties to tour particular areas of country and persuade young men to enlist in exchange for
a bounty. This was, however, a procedure which was notorious for being attended with a
wide range of fraudulent practices: men were frequently tricked into enlisting and cheated
out of much of their fee.58 If fraud was so prevalent, meanwhile, it was a reflection of the
obvious fact that military service was extremely unattractive. In every locality, true, there
were always a few young men who were bored or alienated enough to take the king’s shilling
or its equivalent, but, for anyone who had a reasonable chance of making a go of civilian
society, the sight of dirty, half-fed soldiers being bullied by foul-mouthed corporals and
sergeants, and, still more so the legions of maimed, blinded or simply cast-off ex-soldiers
eking out a miserable existence as beggars, was scarcely an encouragement. Added to this,
meanwhile, was, first, the fact that service was often either for life or, at the very least, some
lengthy term such as twenty-five years and, second, simple fear of travel: the vast majority
of the free elements of the populace – and it should be noted that across much of central
and eastern Europe the population were serfs who could not enlist voluntarily even if they
wanted to – were peasants or landless labourers who had never travelled more than a few
miles from their homes and were most unhappy at the prospect of having to do so. Hardly
surprisingly, then, recruiting parties for the most part only obtained recruits from amongst
the poorest and most desperate elements of society, men who were, of course, themselves
the worst possible advertisements for military life. As the Frenchman Laborde observed of
Spain, for example, fresh blood was only to be found in spots that abounded in ‘dupes and
libertines’.59 For a stark comment on the situation, we need only cite the words of an officer
in the Austrian army named Cognazzo who defected to the Prussians and published a series
of biting critiques of the Austrian war machine. Thus:
We should not allow ourselves to be blinded by ‘love of country’ or ‘inclination towards

military service’. If we take the trouble to investigate the most important impulses
which bring the lads to the . . . recruiting table, we shall find that they are things like
drunkenness, a frenzy of passion, love of idleness, a horror of any useful trade, a wish
to escape from parental discipline, inclination towards debauchery, an imaginary hope
of untrammelled freedom, sheer desperation [or] the fear of punishment after some
sordid crime.60
The difficulties of relying on the populace for volunteers had been demonstrated all too
graphically in Austria in the wake of the War of the Austrian Succession.61 In brief, driven
in part by notions of benevolence and in part by the dictates of expedience, Maria Theresa
renounced conscription and announced that henceforward all recruitment to the army
would be voluntary.62 The result, however, was a failure of dramatic proportions, it therefore
being all too clear that it would be necessary to resort to other means. In Austria, France
and Prussia, not to mention many lesser states, an important way forward here was the
recruitment of foreign deserters. With discipline harsh and conditions poor, many soldiers
fled their regiments only in many instances to find themselves hundreds of miles from their
homes and possessed of no means of survival except banditry: in the Seven Years War alone,
no fewer than 212,000 soldiers disappeared from the armies of Austria, Russia and Prussia,
while even in peacetime many men took the first opportunity of escaping that was offered.63
Such fugitives were in many instances ripe for recruitment, and thus it was that many armies
contained large numbers of foreigners, such men either simply being incorporated into ordi-
nary units, as in Prussia and Austria, or used, as in France and Spain, to maintain units that
were specifically foreign: in 1789, for example, the latter had three line-infantry regiments
that were notionally Irish and one that was equally notionally Italian.64 With large bounties
on offer on all sides, there were even men who made a living by becoming serial deserters,
who fled from one army to the next with gay abandon, one such being the future Marshal
Augereau who, by 1789, is supposed to have been a veteran of service in no fewer than
four different states.65 Finally, the French, the Spaniards and the Papal States all recruited
units of red-coated mercenaries from Switzerland, then a poverty-stricken backwater whose
population could only find relief from their misery by selling themselves as soldiers, while in
the mid-eighteenth century the Austrians were able to persuade a number of minor German
states to provide them with contingents of recruits. Again, however, such men were a double-
edged sword: if, on the one hand, they were a useful source of manpower, on the other, they
were, like the indigenous volunteers, very poor material, ‘a most wretched crew’ or, indeed,
‘a mass of unfortunates’.66 Though there were problems even there, only in Switzerland was
the situation much different: here service in foreign armies had been such an important part
of the Swiss economy for so long that in many families it had become a tradition. To quote
Corvisier, ‘Special consideration must be given to recruiting in Switzerland. The factor of
poverty . . . gave way to a sense of vocation.’67
If one type of recruit was the volunteer, the other was the conscript. The press had been
in existence in one form or another since at least the seventeenth century, if not before,
but, in the course of the eighteenth century, it was gradually codified and given clearer legal
form. In Spain, for example, a tradition established itself known as the sorteo whereby the
state periodically issued a call for so many recruits, who were then apportioned amongst the
country’s provinces and municipalities on as proportionate a basis as possible and actually
obtained by means of a ballot, this system being given definitive form by means of new regula-
tions issued in 1770. The intention was that the call-up should take place annually, but this
caused uproar, and in 1777 a major riot in Barcelona convinced the authorities that the sys-
tem should only be used in time of war, and preferably not then either. Alongside voluntary
enlistment, however, there continued to exist the so-called leva or levy, this essentially being
periodic round-ups of anyone whom the authorities deemed to be a threat to public order.
In theory, of course, the target was such groups as pimps, footpads and the idle, but, in the
context of a country in which large parts of the rural population depended on seasonal day
labour, the net result was that the measure became a bludgeon that descended on the heads
of the deserving poor and undeserving poor alike. Not all those who were picked up were
sent into the army – proven criminals were instead consigned to chain gangs, and a few lucky
individuals were even released – but over the years the leva nevertheless provided thousands
of men for the rank and file, and it is in fact quite clear that the vast majority of recruits came
from this source.68
The most well-known system of conscription in the Europe of the late eighteenth cen-
tury was, of course, that of Prussia. Dating from 1733, this had not replaced the voluntary
enlistment on which the Prussians had previously relied but had rather been introduced
alongside it. In brief, every infantry regiment (the cavalry and the artillery, by contrast,
continued to rely on volunteers alone) was assigned a district from which to draw the men
it needed, and the able-bodied male population of each district aged between the ages of
eighteen and forty declared liable for military service (uniquely, in the Prussian service the
conditions for being declared as being ‘able-bodied’ included possessing a height of at least
five foot seven inches whereas elsewhere a mere five feet nothing was usually quite suf-
ficient); each district, meanwhile, was further broken down into a number of sub-districts,
known as cantons, at a rate of one for each company of the regiment. This done, the stage
was set for annual levies, which were set at whatever level was needed to keep each regi-
ment up to strength, but, in peacetime at least, the number taken was generally very few,
often a mere two or three men from a canton that could easily include 500 families. This,
however, was just as well, for the pool from which recruits were selected was rendered much
smaller than it might have been by the establishment of numerous exemptions, some of
them humanitarian (married men, only sons), some occupational (bakers, millers, pastors)
and some social (nobles). As to who was taken, this rested on the local lord of the manor,
but, whereas in other countries, the men picked out by the local authorities tended to be
known trouble-makers or the physically or mentally handicapped, in Prussia, the fact that
the lords of the manor were invariably serving or retired officers meant that the recruits
tended to be fine physical specimens possessed of excellent characters. As to why such men
could be spared, this was simple: after an initial two years in which they received their
basic training, the men were sent home to live with their families and sustain themselves
by labour on the land, only normally having to return to the army for the manoeuvres
conducted each year for two weeks in the wake of the harvest. So manifold were the advan-
tages of this system – it was extremely cheap, productive of excellent recruits, reasonably
acceptable to the populace and helpful in respect of unit cohesion – that it remained in use
in Prussia right up till the catastrophe of 1806, whilst, starting in 1781, Joseph II imposed
it province by province in his domains as well, even if the Tyrol and Hungary had to be
allowed to resume their highly preferential traditional arrangements in the wake of the
protests of 1789–90.69
The demands of the state being everywhere limited by a wide range of exemptions of
the same sort to be found in Prussia, one certainly cannot speak of universal conscription.
That said, taking the eighteenth century as a whole, enormous numbers of men were still
called up, while, under pressure, states were quite capable of overthrowing convention.
With Prussian manpower seriously depleted in the wake of the Seven Years War, Frederick
the Great, for example, took a step that shook contemporary opinion to its foundations, in
which respect we can here turn to comments made by Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, a sometime
functionary of the East India Company who visited Potsdam in 1779:
The Jews, who have, ever since the time of Hadrian, manifested the most decided
inaptitude and antipathy to war, have nevertheless attracted the attention of Frederick
as capable of being made subservient to the general protection or defence. After the
partition of Poland . . . finding that there was a very considerable proportion of them
resident in the territory which fell to his share, he determined to embody them and
instruct them in the science of arms. They vainly remonstrated to His Majesty that
war was neither analogous to their national genius, nor agreeable to their private feel-
ings. A corps of several thousand was formed, compelled to learn the manual exercise
and passed in review. But such was found to be, on trial, their insurmountable disin-
clination to bear arms that, after many fruitless endeavours, they were finally broken
and disbanded.70
If Jews had initially been excluded from service in the armies of Austria, Russia and Prussia,
in Britain, much the same applied to Catholics, and, by extension, a large majority of the
population of Ireland: thanks to the penal laws of the seventeenth century, the British army
was prohibited from enlisting Irishmen. In theory, this remained the case until 1793, when
the law concerned was repealed by the Militia Act, this being a measure which, as we shall
see, extended the county militia to Ireland. However, driven by the need for recruits, by
the late eighteenth century, many regiments appear to have been turning a blind eye to the
practice, particularly if the men concerned could immediately be whisked off to foreign ser-
vice. In the west as much as in the east, then, should the circumstances require it of them,
military establishments were prepared to set aside religious or political prejudice if that was
the price of obtaining sufficient recruits.71
Whatever social groups they came from and however they were recruited, the soldiers of
eighteenth-century Europe were subject to the most ferocious discipline. Both at the time
and in later years, attempts were made to downplay this aspect of military life. Christopher
Duffy, for example, has been keen to stress the moves made in the Austrian army to human-
ise discipline, regulate the treatment of common soldiers by officers and sergeants and, in
general, appeal to the soldiers’ better nature rather than simply relying on terror, while
Johann Riesbeck insisted that the Prussian army, a force notorious for its brutality, was not
nearly as bad as was generally painted. Thus:
The hardships of the situation have been much exaggerated . . . Even blows, about
which so much has been said, are only used when the man shows incorrigible stupidity,
awkwardness, negligence or wickedness. In no armies are recruits treated with more
gentleness than they are in the Prussian.72
Let us concede that Riesbeck has a point here and that the Prussian service was indeed less
onerous than has been claimed. Yet, even if this was so, it was not just Prussia: across Europe
soldiers were every day subjected to casual kicks and blows by their superiors or, still worse,
sentenced to hundreds of lashes; to long periods sitting astride the wooden horse (a very instru-
ment of torture consisting of two planks placed edge to edge and set too high off the ground
for the malefactor to take any weight on his feet); to run the gauntlet (a particularly barbaric
punishment whereby men were repeatedly made to march the length of two files of men armed
with hazel switches with which they were compelled to whip him each time he passed by);
and, for particularly serious crimes, the noose or even the firing squad. As for the reasons for
this savagery, they were obvious enough: in the eyes of the military and, indeed, civil estab-
lishment, soldiers were dangerous brutes who had to be kept in their place in times of peace
and driven to fight in times of war, on top of this there was the need to be able to conform to
complicated manoeuvres and, above all, fire a musket three times a minute or even more.73
All this begs an obvious question. Soldiers were not just subjected to great brutality, but
unfairly recruited; paid little; poorly fed; housed in many instances in stinking, overcrowded
barrack rooms; dressed in uniforms that tended to grow ever more tight and uncomfortable
as the eighteenth century wore on; forced to dress their hair with a disgusting mixture of
grease and flour that regularly attracted the attention of rats while they were trying to sleep
at night; and seemingly offered little in the way of reward: if they were mutilated, they
might get a licence to beg or a small pension, or, if they were really lucky, a place in one
of the great hospitals-cum-care homes established for the purpose, but that was about all.
Why, then, should they have fought, and, what is more, in general fought so well (Prussian
casualties in Frederick the Great’s battles were generally proportionately much higher than
they were in those of Napoleon)? That fear mattered cannot be denied: when battalions
were deployed in line, their natural line of retreat was blocked by a line of officers and non-
commissioned officers armed with pole-arms – spontoons, halberds and half-pikes – whose
sheer length ensured that men who turned and ran would receive short shrift. Yet there
were a number of different factors at work here, some of them obvious and some of them less
so. Let us begin here with small-group loyalty, the focus of this being the tent-party of eight
to ten men. Unless soldiers chose to desert, the regiment was the only home they had, and
they therefore had no option but to fight, for a soldier who left himself open to the scorn
of his immediate messmates by running away risked being cast out into, quite literally, the
outer darkness: gone would be the communal campfire, not to mention the comradeship
and pooling of resources that was the chief factor in making life bearable for the common
soldier: not for nothing, then, do we find Prussian soldiers swearing oaths to one another
before the battle of Leuthen to stand by one another come what may.74 At the same time,
too, there was also the issue of professional pride. Generally men who had little or nothing
in civilian society, by enlisting in an army, they obtained a tiny degree of status that was
worth hanging on to at all costs. The life of a soldier was not much, but it was better than
that of a beggar, and across Europe there were many men who must have responded to that
simple fact, whilst the very contempt with which soldiers were regarded by many civilians
doubtless acted as a spur in the direction of greater commitment to the military estate.75
For cantonalists of the sort that filled the Prussian army and, later, its Austrian coun-
terpart, the situation was rather different: unlike the volunteers, such men had homes to
go to and other lives in which they could take refuge. Yet, here, too, there were social
bonds whose ties were hard to throw off. Given the fact that regiments were assigned spe-
cific recruiting districts, men served alongside neighbours, the result being, of course, that
flight could lead to social disgrace and even reprisals. In short, whilst the pressures facing
cantonalists were rather different from those facing volunteers, they were still very real.
And, yet, it was not just a question of social pressure. Thus, for cantonalists, as much as
volunteers, military service brought with it certain benefits – the right in all cases to trial
in military courts rather than the normal manorial ones, the right to petition the throne –
that marked out the men concerned from their fellow villagers and can be assumed to have
been something felt worth living up to.76
For all troops, meanwhile, there was also the possibility of identifying with particular
military commanders who either projected an image of genuinely caring for their troops
or were associated with military success. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, one
such had been the Duke of Marlborough, or, as his men called him, ‘Corporal John’, whilst
another was Frederick the Great. Here, for example, is Riesbeck:
In all the countries belonging to the bishops and in many of the free states, I met with
soldiers who had served the King of Prussia and who had most of them deserted from
him . . . I talked with about twenty of these deserters and did not meet one of them who
did wish himself back again . . . I sometimes . . . endeavoured to show them what far
more pleasant days they endured under their bishops or magistrates, and how impossi-
ble I thought it, from all the accounts I had heard of the Prussian army, that they should
be displeased with their change of situation. They all speak of the king’s great achieve-
ments with a degree of enthusiasm which often struck me not a little, and the conclu-
sion of what they said was always . . . [that] in other places men are only half-soldiers
and derive no credit from it. Notwithstanding they have the utmost liberty under these
petty princes . . . many of them . . . desert back again to the King of Prussia.77
Pride in a warrior-king, of course, could very easily be translated into identification with
the state he ruled, and it is at least possible to argue that, under Frederick the Great, at
least some of his soldiers began to see themselves as Prussians and, conceivably, even as
Germans: was not a constant feature of Prussian propaganda the idea that Frederick was
fighting to protect the interests of all Germans from the over-weening ambition of the
emperor? In Britain, meanwhile, it is clear that by the middle of the eighteenth century a
powerful proto-nationalist discourse with which the soldier – until the 1750s almost invari-
ably an Englishman and, until the 1790s, usually a Protestant to boot78 – could clearly
identify. At the heart of this was religion: if Britain was a green and pleasant land by com-
parison with much of Europe, it was because she was Protestant, whilst, if British soldiers
and British sailors regularly triumphed over their opponents, it was because these last were
Catholic. To quote Linda Colley:
It was Protestantism that helped to make Britain’s successive wars against France
after 1689 so significant in terms of national formation. A powerful and persistently
threatening France became the haunting embodiment of that Catholic Other which
Britons had been taught to fear since the Reformation . . . Imagining the French as
their vile opposites . . . became a means – particularly for the poor and less privileged –
to contrive for themselves a converse and flattering identity.79
Whether under Marlborough, Wolfe, Burgoyne, Cornwallis or, ultimately, the Duke of
York, British soldiers had a proud record to live up to, and there were in truth few occasions
when they did not do so.80
To conclude, then, the military world of the late eighteenth century was very far from
being as rickety as is commonly presented. In the first place, armies were for the most
part far from being the tiny forces of legend, whilst, even if they were, they were rapidly
expanded in time of war. Meanwhile, although recruited from the lowliest sectors of society
and led predominantly, though not exclusively, by the nobility, their soldiers usually fought
extremely well, just as their officers were in many cases clearly competent professionals
and, what is more, competent professionals who were anything but averse to new ideas: the
characteristic that comes over above all, indeed, is not a slavish devotion to tradition, but
rather an adaptability that allowed for both the incorporation of new ideas and technolo-
gies, and the modification of existing doctrine in accordance with changing opponents and
tactical realities. In so far as this chapter is concerned, there is much more that could be
said about the armies of the eighteenth century – for reasons of space, for example, it has
been impossible to say very much about the manner in which they fitted into their parent
societies – but there are other works to which the reader can easily refer here such as those
by Childs, Anderson and Corvisier. In the context of the current work, the important point
is simply this: that the armies of Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia were scarcely walk-
overs, and that their eclipse – an eclipse that was in any case but partial – therefore cannot
be attributed solely to the simplicities that have so often been advanced in respect of the
military impact of the French Revolution.
Notes
1 For a detailed critique of the notion that eighteenth-century warfare was limited, indecisive and
generally lacking in verisimilitude, see J. Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (London, 1994),
pp. 67–86.
2 W. Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark, (London, 1791), V, pp. 346–7.
According to Gunther Rothenberg, the effective strength of the Austrian army in 1789 was but
230,000 men. G. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian
Army, 1792–1814 (London, 1982), p. 24.
3 C. Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London, 1987), p. 17.
4 For all this, see C. Barnett, Britain and Her Army (London, 1970), pp. 126–213 passim, and
J. Black, Britain as a Military Power, 1688–1815 (London, 1999), pp. 45–78.
5 When they first appeared in the latter half of the seventeenth century, grenadiers were shock
troops whose task, as the name suggests, was to clear the way for assaults by going ahead of the
main body and hurling hand grenades – then small spheres of iron filled with gunpowder ignited
by a piece of slow-match – it being in recognition of this role that they were issued with upright
fabric or sometimes bearskin caps, the broad-brimmed hats worn by most soldiers being regarded
as an impediment to their throwing arms. By the time of the French Revolution, the use of
hand grenades had fallen into abeyance, but grenadiers had survived as élite units, access to
whose ranks acted as a useful means of rewarding deserving soldiers with greater pay and status.
Uniquely, in the Prussian army the grenadiers were organised as separate battalions within each
three-battalion regiment.
6 The Russian army had Catherine the Great’s favourite and lover, Grigorii Potemkin, to thank for
this development. A highly experienced soldier who had made his name in the war against the
Turks of 1768–74, Potemkin was a great exponent of mobility and the need to develop specifically
Russian ways of waging war. B.W. Menning, ‘The Russian imperial army, 1725–96’ in F.W. Kagan
and R. Higham (eds.), The Military History of Tsarist Russia (Houndmills, 2002), p. 68.
7 For a general introduction to eighteenth-century infantry, see C. Jorgensen et al., Fighting
Techniques of the Early-Modern World, AD1500–AD1763: Equipment, Combat Skills and Tactics
(London, 2005), pp. 56–60.
8 M. Fussell, ‘“Feroces et barbares”: Cossacks, Kalmucks and Russian irregular warfare during the
Seven Years’ War’, in M.H. Danley and P.J. Speelman (eds.), The Seven Years’ War; Global Views
(Leiden, 2012), pp. 243–62; R. Bassett, For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army from 1619
to 1918 (London, 2015), pp. 60–1; K. Wesseley, ‘The development of the Hungarian military fron-
tier until the middle of the eighteenth century’, Austrian History Yearbook, 9 (1973), pp. 45–110;
C. Duffy, Instrument of War: The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War (Rosemont, IL, 2000),
pp. 301–15. Cossacks are normally envisaged as irregular cavalry, but, lacking horses, the poorer
elements of the population had no option but to serve on foot.
9 Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 271–3; Jorgensen et al., Fighting Techniques of the
Early-Modern World, pp. 53–6.
10 Menning, ‘Russian Imperial Army’, pp. 64–5; Bassett, For God and Kaiser, pp. 173–4. Like muskets,
rifles were muzzle-loading while they were ignited by the same flintlock mechanism. However,
unlike muskets, they were not smoothbores: rather, spiral groves known as rifling were engraved
along the length of the inside of the barrel, and the ball made to grip its sides by being forced down
it wrapped in a leather pouch. At least in theory, accuracy and range were thereby dramatically
increased albeit at the cost of rate of fire, many armies therefore coming to the conclusion that
they were more trouble than they were worth. In the various German states – Austria and Prussia
included – and Russia, men equipped with such weapons were known as jäger (literally ‘hunters’).
11 P. Hofschroer, Prussian Light Infantry, 1792–1815 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 3–4.
12 C.J. Esdaile, ‘The Spanish army’ in F.C. Schneid (ed.), European Armies of the French Revolution
(Norman, Oklahoma, 2002), p. 153.
13 For the origins of light infantry in the British army, see D. Gates, The British Light-Infantry Arm,
c.1790–1815: Its Creation, Training and Operational Role (London, 1987), pp. 10–26. As in Austria,
meanwhile, there were experiments with rifles, but it was decided that these weapons were not
suited to battles in Europe.
14 These changes were not achieved without controversy. Not only did some conservative thinkers
lament the disappearance of the old-style cuirassier, but in Russia there was much debate between
those who wished to maintain the traditional function of dragoons and, indeed, convert the whole
of the regular cavalry into such troops – on the grounds that men who fight on foot as well as on
horseback were far better suited for the campaigns against the Turks, which they believed should
be Russia’s chief strategic focus, than western-style heavy cavalry – and those who rather wanted
to increase the number of heavy cavalry regiments so as to improve Russia’s chances in wars
against Austria and Prussia. Menning, ‘Russian imperial army’, pp. 65, 67–8.
15 There being clear signs that there were limits to the efficacy of mounted action in the face of
resolute and well-trained infantry, the continued fascination with heavy cavalry can be seen as
one area in which the military estate demonstrated its conservatism. Yet it is possible to go too
far here: delivered in the correct circumstances, cavalry charges could be absolutely devastating
and were in fact one of the only ways in which in the achievement of tactical superiority could
be translated into a decisive victory, whilst the fact that the proportion of field armies that the
cavalry represented steadily diminished as the eighteenth century wore on is clearly evidence of a
readiness to acknowledge battlefield realities.
16 In the course of the eighteenth century, the Russians acquired the services of some of their old
enemies, the bands concerned swelling the size of their irregulars still further. Herewith the
description of the English traveller, Andrew Swinton, who observed a force of such troops in the
course of a visit to Saint Petersburg in 1789: ‘Several thousand Tartars, Bachkirs and Kirghizes
are arrived and encamped near the city. They are all horsemen, poor, miserable looking crea-
tures, especially the Kirghizes. They resemble a band of gypsies and their camp keeps up the
resemblance . . . Their arms are bows and arrows and a kind of spear, a piece of stick with an iron
spike . . . at the end of it . . . The officers have pistols and sabres, richly ornamented with silver
and gold . . . They are not fond of fighting . . . against musketry . . . I am at a loss to guess what
service they can be of in Finland, whose rocks and mountains, so unlike the plains of Tartary, will
be another world to those tribes. They may, indeed, butcher the defenceless peasants, but I hope
this disgrace will not happen to the Russian arms.’ A. Swinton, Travels into Norway, Denmark and
Russia in the Years 1788, 1789, 1790 and 1791 (London, 1792), pp. 244–7.
17 Initially the Russians had also fielded large numbers of noble cavalry of the sort described here,
but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, this element of their forces had disappeared thanks
to the reforms of Peter the Great. For some details on early light cavalry, see G. Gush, Renaissance
Armies, 1480–1650 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 61–91 passim.
18 By the time of the French Revolution all the major armies had units of regular light cavalry, the
only state which continued to make use of the original noble levies being Poland. As for Russia, she,
too, employed such units – by 1774 her order of battle included no fewer than twenty-three regi-
ments of hussars, lancers and light horse – but with them she continued to deploy many regiments
of mounted Cossacks, and that despite the fact that it was all too clear that they were hopelessly
undisciplined, a terror to the civilian population of all the areas through which they passed and
all but useless on the battlefield. Menning, ‘Imperial Russian army’, pp. 66–7. Meanwhile, writ-
ing in the early 1780s, the German author, Johann Riesbeck, has interesting things to say on the
militarisation of the original hussars. Thus: ‘It is remarkable enough that, whilst in imitation of
the Hungarian soldier, the hussar has become an essential part of the Prussian army . . . . . . the
true original is lost in his own country. Not one of the . . . regiments of hussars in the emperor’s
service is made up entirely of Hungarians . . . The Hungarian has entirely lost his spirit by [the
imposition of military] discipline . . . This [last] was not enough to make the Hungarian a match
for the Prussian hussars in the Silesian War: on the contrary, they always proved inferior to them.’
J.K. Riesbeck, Travels through Germany in a Series of Letters (London, 1787), II, pp. 47–8.
19 Duffy, Military Experience of the Age of Reason, pp. 230–3; B.P. Hughes, Open Fire! Artillery Tactics
from Marlborough to Wellington (Chichester, 1983), pp. 36–51. Russian infantry regiments had no
fewer than four pieces of artillery attached to them (two howitzers and two cannon), and this
may explain the disproportionately heavy losses which they were able to inflict on the Prussians
in battles such as Zorndorf and Kunersdorf. With regard to Frederick the Great’s use of horse
artillery, a treatise on the Prussian army in the 1780s waxed enthusiastic. Thus: ‘I was myself
an eyewitness to the use and effect of mounted artillery in the year 1761 when . . . General
von Zeithen . . . marched into Poland to oppose the Russian army . . . An advanced post of the
Russians, 6,000 men, infantry and cavalry . . . was attacked near Costin . . . by sixteen squadrons of
horse commanded by Colonel von Lossow . . . who, having six three-pounders with him, attacked
in column . . . masking his six cannon . . . and, having come up close with the enemy . . . fell off
to the right and left. Meanwhile, the six cannon . . . kept up such a well-directed, brisk and unex-
pected cartridge fire . . . that the enemy in a minute’s time were absolutely thrown into disorder.’
J.M. Helldorff, An Historical Account of the Prussian Army and its Present Strength to which is added
a Succinct Account of the Army of the Elector of Saxony, (London, 1783), pp. 20–1.
20 M.S. Thompson, Wellington’s Engineers: Military Engineering in the Peninsular War, 1808–1814
(Barnsley, 2015), p. 5.
21 J. Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004); H. Capel et al., De Palas a Minerva: la formación científica y la
estructura institucional de los ingenieros militares en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1988). Duffy, Instrument of
War, pp. 291–300.
22 For an introduction to the various royal guards of the eighteenth century, see P. Mansel, Pillars
of Monarchy: An Outline of the Political and Social History of Royal Guards, 1400–1981 (London,
1984), pp. 23–32.
23 For some general coverage of the militias, see J. Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789
(Manchester, 1982), pp. 59–60, and A. Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789
(Bloomington, IN, 1979), pp. 54–7, 131–2, whilst discussions of a particularly bad example can
be found in C. Corona Marzol, ‘Las milicias urbanas de la baja Andalucía en el siglo XVII’, in
I. Marín Marina (ed.), Milicia y sociedad en la baja Andalucía, siglos XVIII y XIX: VIII Jornadas
Nacionales de Historia Militar (Sevilla, 1999), pp. 377–89. For obvious reasons, England is par-
ticularly well documented as witness M. McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England
(Oxford, 2015) and J.R. Western, The English County Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of
a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London, 1965).
24 Anon., Letters from Portugal on the Late and Present State of the Kingdom (London, 1777), p. 36.
25 C.F. Dumouriez, An Account of Portugal as it appeared in 1766 to Dumouriez, since a Celebrated
General in the French Army (London, 1797), pp. 109–14.
26 Cit. H. Friedrich-Stegmann, La imagen de España en los libros de los viajeros alemanes del siglo XVIII
(Alicante, 2014), p. 132.
27 H. Bunbury, Some Passages of the Great War with France from 1799 to 1810 (London, 1854), p. vii.
28 Riesbeck, Travels in Germany, II, p. 171; for a general survey, see H.C.B. Rogers, The British Army
of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1977).
29 J.C. Lavaux, The Life of Frederick II, King of Prussia, to Which Are Added Observations, Documents
and a Variety of Anecdotes (London, 1794), II, pp. 121–30. Of the Prussian cavalry, Riesbeck wrote,
‘As wonderful as the Prussian infantry is, it is . . . infinitely surpassed by the cavalry . . . Even
English travellers, who are not apt to give favourable accounts of what they meet with in other
countries, and who are so proud of their own cavalry, confess that this part of the Prussian army
goes beyond all that can be conceived of it.’ Riesbeck, Travels in Germany, III, pp. 20–1.
30 Lavaux, Life of Frederick, II, pp. 118–19.
31 Ibid., p. 119.
32 Riesbeck, Travels through Germany, III, p. 18.
33 D. Showalter, ‘The Prussian army’ in Schneid, European Armies of the French Revolution, pp. 45–6.
34 L. Eysturlid, ‘The Austrian army’ in ibid., pp. 64–85.
35 Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, pp. 28–9. In fairness, Rothenberg’s opinion can be
sustained by reference to contemporary authors. Here, for example, are the thoughts of a con-
temporary French observer: ‘The inequality between the Turkish army and the armies of all the
European powers is immeasurable . . . Thence arises a problem difficult to resolve: why do the
Russians invariably defeat the Turks, while the Austrians’ success against them is very uncertain?
There is no lack of honour or courage in the Austrian army: there are good generals, excellent sol-
diers and better cavalry of all kinds than the Russians possess. Yet the Austrians often have losses,
the Russians never . . . The Russian despises the Turk, while the Austrian officer thinks he counts
for something and the Austrian private fears him . . . I think the Austrian generals must fight in
much the same spirit as a gambler shows when he is discouraged by losing twice in succession The
man who loses his head because he has been beaten in his first rubber of whist will assuredly be
beaten in the second . . . The Austrian army, while it has more knowledge, hesitates and vacil-
lates at the moment of attack, and for this reason receives the charge oftener than it makes it.’
J. Rambaud (ed.), Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, 1787–1806 (London, 1913), pp. 46–8.
Another Frenchman who had occasion to observe the Austrians was Sébastien Comean de Charry,
a twenty-two-year-old émigré serving in the army of the Prince of Condé who fought alongside an
Austrian force at the battle of Bienwald on 20 August 1793: ‘Sitting on one of my cannon with
my arms crossed, I reflected on the battle, the first I had ever taken part in . . . In so far as I could
see, the army of Condé was the only force that had done well: the Prince had formed his men into
a single mass, and with that mass had outflanked the enemy line and forced it to retreat . . . As
for the rest of our superb army, it had manoeuvred with great regularity, kept up a methodical and
well-nourished fire and made a splendid display of its cavalry, but it had obtained only the feeblest
of results. I could see the problem: the Austrians were slow and saw a battle-line in terms of a
parade-ground manoeuvre, whereas I saw it rather as a means of attacking and pursuing the enemy.
I realised afterwards that, as a good Frenchman, I instinctively grasped how to wage war, whereas
the Austrian army possessed nothing more than the slowest and most ponderous routine.’ Comeau
de Charry, Souvenirs de la guerre d’Allemagne pendant la Révolution et l’Empire, p. 84.
36 For Joseph’s reforms, see Bassett, For God and Kaiser, pp. 167–74. Duffy, Army of Maria Theresa,
pp. 208–9. Particularly in respect of the changes these brought to the inhaber system, these aroused
immense opposition within the military estate. As Riesbeck remarked, the figure most associated
with the reform next to Joseph II, Field Marshal Lacy, was ‘universally hated’. Thus: ‘The reason
is a very evident one. Before his time every captain had an opportunity of cheating his sovereign
by furnishing the soldiers of his company with every article of clothing [while] those of a higher
rank . . . divided the contents of the military chest between them. That is now all at an end: the
soldier is supplied out of the emperor’s warehouses with every possible article for which he can
have occasion . . . receives his pay the moment it is due . . . is better clothed than any soldier
in Europe and . . . accustomed to a thrift which cannot but contribute to the increase . . . of his
health and strength.’ Riesbeck, Travels through Germany, I, p. 273.
37 G. Soleyveytchik, Potemkin: A Picture of Catherine the Great’s Russia (London, 1949), pp. 117–18;
Menning, ‘Imperial Russian army’, pp. 63–9.
38 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, pp. 47–8.
39 Riesbeck, Travels in Germany, III, p. 240.
40 Ibid., II, pp. 147–8.
41 Helldorff, Historical Account of the Prussian Army, pp. 125–6.
42 An exception here was Austria: although regulations issued in 1769 laid down that each field army
should have such bodies, these were only actually assembled on the outbreak of war. Rothenberg,
Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, p. 19.
43 Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 176–82. For a detailed discussion of the Prussian
example, see C. Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbott, 1974), pp. 143–4.
44 Rambaud, Memoirs of Comte Roger de Damas, pp. 61–2. The influence which good staff-work and
an effective plan could have here is graphically illustrated by Marlborough’s march to the Danube
in 1704: admittedly this took place in a far more favoured area of Europe, but at the end of each
day’s march the troops found ample supply depots waiting for them, losses due to ‘wastage’ being
kept to a minimum.
45 W. Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms, 1786–1813 (New York, 1945), pp. 61–3; Childs, Armies
and Warfare in Europe, pp. 91–2.
46 Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 212–14. Also extremely useful here is R. Muir,
Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (London, 1998): although this is centred
on the Napoleonic era, much of what Muir has to say is equally applicable to fighting in the late
eighteenth century.
47 Some commentators have seen the fact that Russia had to devote much time and energy to fight-
ing in ‘alternative’ environments as being key to a particularly flexible approach to warfare. To
quote Brian Davies, ‘In the later Turkish Wars . . . we see the Russians achieving crushing victo-
ries through new variable-formation tactics, especially through the chequerboard deployment of
mutually supporting hollow squares . . . Once again the more significant military innovations of
the period had developed out of the struggle on the Turco-Tartar frontier rather than from opera-
tions against the European powers,’ B.L. Davies, ‘The development of Russian military power,
1453–1815’, in J. Black (ed.), European Warfare, 1453–1815 (1999), pp. 174–5.
48 To deal with the enemy cavalry, the Russians also introduced squares made up of a number of
different battalions of a sort that would be recognisable to the French army sent to Egypt in 1798
and successive British armies in the colonial wars of the nineteenth century. For the reforms of
Potemkin and Suvorov, meanwhile, see Menning, ‘Russian imperial army’, pp. 69–74. Also use-
ful is P. Longworth, The Art of Victory: The Life and Achievements of General Suvorov, 1729–1800
(London, 1965).
49 For an interesting case study, see M. Urban, Fusiliers: How the British Army Lost America but
Learned to Fight (London, 2007).
50 For the process of thought that led to the regulations of 1791, see H. Strachan, European Armies
and the Conduct of War (London, 1983), pp. 25–7; meanwhile, for a recent discussion of Guibert,
who is associated not just with the introduction of a practical system of columnar tactics, but also
the conceptualisation of the nation-in-arms, see B. Heuser, ‘Guibert: prophet of total war?’, in
R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds.), War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (Cambridge, 2010),
pp. 49–68.
51 For an interesting discussion of the logistics of eighteenth-century warfare, see M. van Creveld,
Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 17–39. For the nature
of campaigning, meanwhile, see C. Telp, The Evolution of Operational Art, 1740–1813: From
Frederick the Great to Napoleon (Abingdon, 2013), pp. 12–25, and Strachan, European Armies and
the Conduct of War, pp. 34–5.
52 Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789, pp. 77–9; Corvisier, Armies and Societies in
Europe, pp. 87–105.
53 M.S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Régime, 1618–1789 (London, 1988),
pp. 115–16.
54 For a detailed discussion of the situation of the officer corps in the Prussian army, see Duffy, Army
of Frederick the Great, pp. 25–7. As for Austria, the situation there is discussed in C. Duffy, The
Army of Maria Theresa (Newton Abbot, 1977), pp. 24–5, and M. Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of
Emergence, 1683–1797 (Harlow, 2003), pp. 305–8. It should be noted, meanwhile, that promotion
from the ranks was not necessarily a positive development: with the best will in the world, erst-
while sergeants were unlikely to be men of much education, and they and their wives were often
snubbed by officers of a higher social class; deprived of any hope of advancement, they therefore
tended to slide into alcoholism (not for nothing did the Duke of Wellington later state that he
did not approve of promoting men from the ranks as they invariably turned to drink). See Duffy,
Instrument of War, pp. 140–1.
55 For a discussion of the purchase system in the British army, see E. Robson, ‘Purchase and promo-
tion in the British army in the eighteenth century’, History, 36, Nos. 126–7 (February, 1951),
pp. 57–72.
56 For the Austrian example, see Duffy, Army of Maria Theresa, pp. 34–5; M. Hochedlinger, ‘Mars
ennobles: the ascent of the military and the creation of a military nobility in mid-eighteenth
century Austria’, German History, 17, No. 2 (April, 1999), pp. 141–76; and T.M. Barker, Army,
Aristocracy, Monarchy: Essays on War, Society and Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (New York,
1982), pp. 128–46. For France, meanwhile, see Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, pp. 101–2.
57 Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, pp. 105–9. For two case studies, see Duffy, Army of Frederick
the Great, pp. 42–52; Duffy, Army of Maria Theresa, pp. 38–46. The Austrian officer corps has often
been singled out for its ignorance, but Riesbeck paints a picture which is entirely different. Thus:
‘Amongst all the imperial officers I was acquainted with, I did not meet one, of a certain age, who
did not possess a certain fund of philosophy. During my stay here [i.e. Vienna], I found them by
far the best company in the place, and, with the permission of the professors, doctors and other
literati, must think them by far the most enlightened people in the Austrian dominions . . . There
has long been a freedom of thinking and reasoning in the army, which . . . does the emperor the
utmost honour. Every regiment has a library to itself, and the officers find means to procure every
good book, however prohibited it may be.’ Riesbeck, Travels in Germany, II, pp. 103–4.
58 For an excellent survey of the practice of recruiting in Britain, see R. Holmes, Redcoat: The British
Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London, 2001), pp. 135–50.
59 A. de Laborde, A View of Spain (London, 1809), IV, p. 505; see also Childs, Armies and Warfare
in Europe, pp. 61–2. In so far as recruitment was concerned, the cavalry regiments tended to do
better than infantry regiments, perhaps because the opportunity to ride a horse carried with it a
subconscious suggestion of assimilation into the gentry. At the same time, productive, perhaps, of
a greater spirit of risk taking, towns and cities tended to produce more recruits than villages: hence
the disproportionately urban nature of the French army in 1789.
60 Cit. Duffy, Army of Maria Theresa, pp. 48–9. For an interesting discussion of one particular aspect
of recruitment in England, see J. Hurl-Eamon, ‘Did soldiers really enlist to desert their wives?
Revisiting the martial character of marital desertion in eighteenth-century London’, Journal of
British Studies, 53, No. 2 (April, 2014), pp. 356–77. A rather more positive gloss is put on all
this by André Corvisier: ‘There is no question that the army appeared to be a refuge for any who
wished to avoid all kinds of bondage: sons rebelling against parental authority . . . young men
made impatient by social constraints [or] the bonds of the rural community . . . Protestants who
found relative tolerance for their beliefs among the troops, who were generally unconcerned about
religion. Psychological misery [also] became an increasingly important factor. Widowers, orphans,
uprooted foreign vagrants . . . men from the countryside who had not succeeded in finding posi-
tions in the cities, looked to the army for human contact and support.’ Corvisier, Armies and
Societies in Europe, pp. 132–3.
61 It should be noted, however, that both the British and the French armies continued to rely on
voluntary enlistment. That said, in Britain, at least, in the Scottish Highlands, it is clear that
there was a considerable degree of unofficial conscription. In brief, in the wake of the unsuccess-
ful Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745–6, the lairds were anxious to demonstrate their loyalty
to the Crown, and the net result was that when the American War of Independence led to a
great expansion of the army, they rushed to form new regiments for either home defence – the
so-called fencibles – or service overseas (in addition to acting as tangible proofs of their devotion
to the house of Hanover, these units also provided the men who formed them with a wonderful
opportunity for patronage). In all these units, service was theoretically voluntary, but, in practice,
compulsion was widespread, the impoverished tenant farmers who made up the bulk of population
being threatened with the loss of their holdings – something that was in any case highly beneficial
to the lairds – unless they gave up one or more sons as recruits.
62 Duffy, Instrument of War, p. 195.
63 For a useful case study, see A.N. Gilbert, ‘Why men deserted from the eighteenth-century British
army’, Armed Forces and Society, 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1980), pp. 553–67.
64 The presence of Irish troops is explained by the flight to France and Spain of many of the Irish
troops who had been raised to fight for the cause of James II in the aftermath of the Glorious
Revolution. For many years, the ranks of these units had been kept up to strength by Irish boys des-
perate to escape the poverty of their home villages who made their way to France with the help of
Jacobite agents, but by the middle of the eighteenth century the flow of recruits had been reduced
to a trickle, while the Catholic gentry had also started to abandon what was generally perceived as
a lost cause. Though the defeat of the revolt of 1745–6 had brought over some few Scots, including
the father of the future Marshal Macdonald, by 1789, all that all that was left was different coloured
uniforms – red in France and sky-blue in Spain – a tiny handful of officers who had actually been
born in Ireland and a large number of second- or third-generation immigrants with Irish names
such as, to name but a few, Lacy, O’Donnell, Blake and O’Donoghue. See M.G. McLaughlin, The
Wild Geese: The Irish Brigades of France and Spain (Oxford, 1980).
65 J.R. Elting, ‘“The proud bandit”; Augereau’, in D.G. Chandler (ed.), Napoleon’s Marshals (London,
2003), pp. 2–3.
66 W. Dalrymple, Travels through Spain and Portugal in 1774 (London, 1777), p. 65; cit. Friedrich-
Stegmann, Imagen de España, p. 131. In the case of some of the contingents sent by the minor
German states, it is probable that at least some of them were victims of some form of impressment.
67 Corvisier, Armies and Warfare, p. 135.
68 For the leva, see R.M. Pérez Estévez, El problema de los vagos en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid,
1976), pp. 55–248 passim. Meanwhile, pieces of legislation known as Press Acts had authorised
the use of similar measures in Britain in no fewer than four different times of crisis in the course
of the eighteenth century (1704–12, 1745–6, 1755–7, 1778–9). Anderson, War and Society in
Europe of the Old Régime, p. 121. As in Spain, so in Austria and Russia. Desperate for troops, Maria
Theresa was forced to institute a quota system whereby each province was expected either to
contribute so many recruits to the army or to pay a substantial sum of money that could be used
to hire more foreigners, whilst in Russia, too, from the time of Peter the Great, each province was
subjected to a periodic draft that generally looked to take two or three men in every hundred. In
both cases, the task of who was actually to be sent was left to the local authorities, and thus it was
that the men sent were invariably petty criminals, migrant labourers (a group who could easily
be represented as vagrants), the physically and mentally handicapped and serfs who had shown
themselves to be poor workers or otherwise of little value to the community.
69 On Prussia, see D. Showalter, ‘The Prussian military state’ in G. Mortimer (ed.), Early-Modern
Military History, 1450–1815 (London, 2004), pp. 118–34; Duffy, Army of Frederick the Great,
pp. 54–6; O. Büsch, Military System and Social Life in Old-Régime Prussia, 1713–1807: The
Beginnings of the Social Militarization of Prusso-German Society (Atlantic Highlands, New
Jersey, 1997), pp. 2–48. The extension of the system to Austria, meanwhile, is discussed in
Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, pp. 292–5.
70 N. Wraxall, Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw and Vienna I, pp. 218–19. The
Russian army also experimented with formations of Jewish troops. Thus, acting on the rather
unlikely pretext that a Jewish state could one day be created from the ruins of an overthrown
Ottoman Empire, and that this state would need an army, in his capacity as governor of the
territories acquired from Turkey in 1774, Potemkin formed a regiment of Jewish light cavalry.
Soloveytchyk, Potemkin, p. 118. In the Austrian army, meanwhile, conscription was extended
to the Jews as a result of the demands of the war against Turkey of 1788–90. Beales, Joseph II, II,
pp. 577–8.
71 For recruitment amongst Irish Catholics prior to 1793, see C. McDonnell, ‘Irishmen in the British
service during the French Revolutionary Wars, 1793–1802’, National University of Ireland
(Maynooth) PhD thesis, 2013, pp. 9–10. An earlier example, and in some respects one that was
no less astonishing, was the way in which in the course of a few short years, the Scottish Highlands
were transformed from the most savage of savage peripheries that had had to be suppressed at the
cost of three major wars to a repository of recruits popularly seen as some of Britain’s most devoted
and heroic common soldiers. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nations, 1707–1837 (London, 1992),
p. 103.
72 Riesbeck, Travels in Germany, III, p. 15. For the amelioration of discipline in the Austrian army,
see Duffy, Army of Maria Theresa, p. 56.
73 Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, pp. 67–73; Duffy, Army of Frederick the Great, pp. 62–4.
74 Duffy, Army of Frederick the Great, p. 176.
75 Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 129–31. In the Russian army, the tent-party was
given institutional reality through the so-called artel, this essentially being a friendly society to
which all of its members surrendered their pay and, if they ever acquired any, plunder so that it
could be disbursed for the good of the whole. For a case study in the operation of small-group loy-
alty as a focus for motivation in combat, see E.J. Coss, All for the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier
under Wellington, 1808–1814 (Norman, OK, 2010), pp. 191–210.
76 Büsch, Military System and Social Life in Old-Régime Prussia, pp. 31–3.
77 Riesbeck, Travels through Germany, III, pp. 16–17.
78 Until the 1750s the British army was overwhelmingly both English and Protestant. At that point,
significant numbers of Scots began to appear in the ranks, some few of whom were Catholic.
However, it was not until the French Revolutionary Wars, when sheer necessity forced the state to
turn to the resources of largely Catholic Ireland – something hitherto impossible due to penal laws
not abolished till 1792 – that the bounds of ethnicity and confessionalism were finally broken.
79 Colley, Britons, p. 368.
80 For a survey of the mixture of crude xenophobia and popular patriotism that motivated the
English soldier of the eighteenth century, see L. James, Warrior Race: A History of the British at War
(London, 2001), pp. 275–80.
3 From the Bastille to Valmy
On 20 September 1792 there occurred perhaps the greatest non-battle in all history. In
brief, after a somewhat confused campaign, 30,000 Prussian troops under the Duke of
Brunswick confronted some 54,000 men under General Dumouriez in an excellent defen-
sive position near the small village of Valmy (in theory, Brunswick had also had 7,000
Austrian troops at his disposal under Clerfayt, but they were delayed in their approach
to the battlefield and did not arrive until after the fighting was over; also present with his
army was King Frederick William II). Both the contestants being plentifully supplied with
artillery, a massive cannonade broke out and for the full length of the morning the rival
guns fired salvo after salvo at the opposing ranks, though seemingly with little effect (the
weather having been exceptionally wet, it is probable that many cannon-balls simply bur-
ied themselves in the mud). About an hour after midday, Brunswick ordered an advance,
and his infantry battalions dutifully marched forward across the undulating plain beneath
the hills on which Dumouriez had arrayed his forces. What might have happened then is
one of the great ‘what ifs’ of military history, but, as we shall see, it is entirely possible that,
had Brunswick pushed home his advance, the defenders would have turned and run; even
as it was, two particularly raw battalions disintegrated when a lucky enemy shot caused
a massive explosion by setting fire to a number of ammunition wagons. However, in the
event, Dumouriez’s forces were not put to the test: halting his men when they were only
half-way to the French positions, Brunswick retreated tamely off the field. Some great day
of glory, then, it most certainly was not. All one future Napoleonic marshal could find to
write about it in his memoirs were two laconic lines: ‘General Dumouriez . . . took up his
quarters . . . at Sainte Menehould . . . The Prussians attacked him there: he resisted; the
enemy retired.’1
Setting aside later ridiculous ‘picture-book’ style depictions of the battle, featuring
French troops marching heroically on the enemy in column, there is little dispute as to the
nature of these events.2 This is not the case with their significance, however. Famously, the
German poet, Johann von Goethe, who was present with Brunswick’s forces as a member
of the personal suite of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, claimed that the triumph of the French
represented the birth of a new era of world history and at the very least implied that, in
military terms, it represented the triumph of the old order over the new, while Friedrich
Laukhard, a man of considerable education who had enlisted as a common soldier in the
Prussian army after running away from the seminary in which he had been studying for the
priesthood and eventually deserted to the Republican forces, like Goethe, wrote an account
of the campaign in which he was scathingly critical of the military arrangements of the
ancien régime and portrayed his comrades as dupes who had been tricked into enlisting and
in consequence had absolutely no chance of taking on the thoroughly enthused French
on equal terms.3 One of the Frenchmen concerned, meanwhile, was Charles François, a
seventeen-year-old volunteer from Picardy who had enlisted in a Parisian battalion scarcely
a month before the battle, and, for him, too, the patriotic verve of the French soldiers was
in the end what won the day:
General Kellermann galloped up, and ordered us to extend in line. ‘Comrades!’ he

cried. ‘Victory is ours . . . Long live the Nation!’ These words electrified us: we raised
our hats on our bayonets . . . The enemy advanced nearer and nearer as steadily as
though on parade. At this moment, the mist cleared and we gave them a terrible volley
which knocked over the front ranks . . . The others crushed one another in their anxi-
ety to bolt, and their officers had immense trouble to rally them . . . This first success
redoubled our ardour.4
Composed many years after the events in question, François’ tale had grown in the tell-
ing: in fact, very few French troops came within musket range of the Prussians at Valmy
(what is interesting, however, is that he mentions the use of traditional line formations,
rather than the columns that are more traditionally associated with the armies of the French
Revolution). Rather more revealing, then, are the words of Philippe Girault, a musician in
the regular infantry regiment of La Perche who had joined the regular army in 1791:
At the moment when the fire was at its most intense, the son of the Duke of Orléans,
the man nicknamed General Equality . . . rode over to us musicians, and said, ‘It is a
while since we have heard the “Ça ira”: play that for us.’ We jumped to it at once, and
all the other musicians roundabout followed suit. However, we didn’t keep it up for very
long: we had hardly begun the refrain when two of us were wounded and another killed,
and this put an end to the music at a stroke, the same discharge of artillery . . . sweeping
away twenty-one men of the front rank of our fifth company. Meanwhile, I was feeling
anything but good as it was the first time I had been under fire. Luckily, I was soon out
of it as my coat got completely plastered with the brains of an officer who was killed a
few paces in front of me.5
Here, one suspects, speaks the voice of the authentic front-line soldier, and it is one from
which the influence of enthusiasm for the Revolution is entirely absent: Girault tells us
that he had only joined the army in the first place because spending his life working in a
quarry alongside his father held little appeal to him, whilst in the wake of Valmy he col-
laborated with the other eight members of the regimental band in obtaining a completely
fraudulent collective sick note that saved them from the horrors of a winter encampment
for several weeks.6 Such evidence, however, has not prevented a variety of historians from
insisting that what triumphed at Valmy was the entirely new concept of the people-in-
arms, namely the mobilisation of an entire people in defence of political principles to
which they were bound by self-interest. Amongst the more recent examples is David A.
Bell’s The First Total War:
The French held. The troops cheered every French shot and every Prussian miss with
the cry ‘Vive la Nation!’ They sang Revolutionary songs, particularly the bloodthirsty
Ça ira . . . and the new favorite called the Marseillaise. The French could not compare
with the Prussians for discipline, but their very indiscipline could give them a degree
of bravura.7
From the Bastille to Valmy 65
Less bold, but only slightly so, is William Doyle:
Kellermann and Dumouriez had more men than the Prussians. They had fewer guns,
but those that they had were superior and handled by graduates of the outstanding
pre-Revolutionary gunnery schools. So they outgunned the enemy, and, when they
followed up their advantage, the French charged to cries of ‘Vive la Nation!’ and the
singing of the Ça ira. They fought with an enthusiasm and determination not seen on
European battlefields for generations, and they stopped the invaders in their tracks.8
Although accounts can be found from men fighting with the invaders that suggest that at
the very least the sheer numbers that Dumouriez had been able to bring to the field were
an issue – for example: ‘The Duke, when his lines were formed, galloped to the crest of the
hill, and, suddenly coming within view of the enemy’s lines, cried, “The devil! What a lot of
them there are!”’9 – such writing, however, is at best incautious: indeed, Doyle’s version of
Valmy is not one known to history, whilst his words betray an extraordinary lack of knowl-
edge of such stricken fields as Kolin (18 June 1757) and Kunersdorf (25 August 1758).10
Fortunately, other historians have been more judicious. Here, for example, is Geoffrey Best:
‘Although the French infantry stood its ground stoutly . . . it was the French artillery, of
purest ancien-régime construction and training, whose “cannonade” did most to win the
day.’11 Still more explicit is John Lynn. Thus:
The numerous and obvious assertions of intense nationalism in the army tempt histori-
ans to conclude that French troops were driven by something approaching fanaticism.
That conclusion is too extreme . . . Patriotism mattered, but it did not alone transform
men into superb fighters.12
Next, we have Paddy Griffith:
In the battle of Valmy . . . there is plenty of reason to believe that the French infantry
would have run away . . . if only the enemy had persisted with his . . . massed attacks.
In the event French artillery fire and Prussian . . . indecision conspired to save them
from any serious test, but it was always a pretty near-run thing.13
And, finally, Tim Blanning has pointed to issues beyond the confines of the battlefield,
namely the errors in strategy and other issues that led to Brunswick failing to concentrate
his entire army at Valmy, and the terrible epidemic of dysentery that beset his troops as
they advanced into France.14 These points are very strong, entirely defensible even, but
their influence has tended to swing the pendulum of debate too far in the opposite direc-
tion. Traditional historians of war are inclined to be conservative in their prejudices, and,
confronted by the forces of the Revolution, they have rarely liked what they have seen,
this trend being exemplified by the sharp words of Edward Creasy. To quote his account
of Valmy:
The carmagnoles, as the Revolutionary volunteers were called . . . were utterly undisci-
plined and turbulently impatient of superior authority or systematical control. Many
ruffians, also, who were sullied with participation in the most sanguinary horrors of
Paris, joined the camps and were pre-eminent alike for misconduct before the enemy
and for savage misconduct against their own officers.15
From this point, it was but a step to the obvious conclusion: victory had been obtained, not
by the new order but the old.16
Clearly there is room for much debate here, and, by contrast, no room for facile expla-
nations. That said, to discuss Valmy at this stage is to put the cart before the horse: what
we must rather do being to examine the impact of the Revolution on the army. Here we
must begin with the issue of manpower. Prior to the Revolution, whilst there had always
been a steady trickle of deserters, in many units the annual average was very low, so much
so, indeed, that it was almost never more than two or three dozen and often less. With the
coming of the Revolution, however, the situation changed dramatically in that desertion
rates shot up dramatically.17 With recruitment badly down as well, by the end of 1790, the
strength of the army had fallen to around 130,000 rank and file from a total at the begin-
ning of the Revolution of 156,000. What, however, did this development represent? In the
first place, as the administrative situation became more and more confused, so the living
conditions of soldiers deteriorated dramatically, many men leaving for no better reason
than that they were hungry and unpaid. Also likely to abscond, meanwhile, were men who
had never been happy with their lot but had hitherto decided that desertion was too risky.
That said, there were also strong political imperatives. Initially there was a willingness,
perhaps, to give the National Assembly a chance, but, as the counter-revolutionary attitude
of large parts of the court and aristocracy became ever more apparent, so the rank and file,
the long-serving corporals and sergeants with hopes of gaining access to the ranks of the
officer corps, and the officiers de fortune began to lose faith in the liberal aristocrats and
petty nobles who were the de facto spokesmen of the military, and all the more so as there
seems to have been little or no attempt on the part of the latter to reach out to the men
below them and seek to win their trust and loyalty (it was symbolic here that many officers –
amongst them a certain Napoleon Bonaparte – seem to have been completely oblivious to
the increasingly serious nature of the situation and, as was usual over the autumn and win-
ter, disappeared for long periods of leave, leaving their men to cope with the deteriorating
conditions on their own). The net result was a growing number of outbreaks of indiscipline
and mutiny as the lowlier elements of the armed forces began to kick against their fate and
imbibe the excitement in tavern and street. Bored and angry, the rank and file protested
against having to do drill and fatigues and accused officers trying to get them to do their
duty of being ‘counter-revolutionary’ – it did not help in this respect that many regiments
responded to the growing turmoil by purging men who were judged to be agitators – whilst
any form of disciplinary procedure was likely to produce angry denunciations of injustice.
All this, meanwhile, was stirred up from beyond the ranks of the army in that soldiers were
constantly being harangued by supporters of the Revolution keen to get them to join politi-
cal clubs, set up links between their regiments and local units of the National Guard, and
participate in fêtes révolutionnaires of every sort.18
By the summer of 1790, the growing tension had reached crisis point, the result being a
series of mutinies and disturbances so severe that the army began to slip into what looked
suspiciously like a state of complete and total dissolution. The details of what happened
varied: in some places, the issue was rival units falling out with one another over more or
less fabricated differences of political allegiance; in others, it was suspicion of the man-
ner in which officers were managing the regimental funds on which the common soldiers
depended for much of their well-being; in still others, it was anger at disciplinary decisions
that were perceived as unjust, attempts to check the spread of political propaganda or the
antics of particularly unpopular officers; and in others again, it was the receipt of orders
aimed at transferring particularly suspect units to other towns and cities. However, the
differences between each instance and the next scarcely matter: everywhere the pattern
was much the same in that the regiments involved rioted, barricaded themselves in their
barracks, took over the towns in which they were stationed, detained officers whom they
suspected of counter-revolutionary feeling and fraternised with the local radicals egging
them on from without. Disturbances took place in many places, amongst them Saint-
Servan, Epinal, Stenay, Longwy, Metz, Saarlouis, Compiègne, Hesdin, Perpignan, Lille and
Nancy, whilst as much as one-third of the army’s units appear to have been affected at one
time or another. In most cases, peace was restored by means of mediation, but in the last
two instances there was bloodshed. Fairly minor in Lille, which merely saw several days of
brawling, in Nancy the disturbances escalated into the worst violence France had seen since
the storming of the Bastille. Thus, provoked on a number of different fronts, in the middle
of August 1790 the three regiments that formed the garrison rose in revolt, only for the
National Assembly to order the arrest of the delegates they sent to Paris to state their case
and, still more dramatically, dispatch loyal troops to restore order, the result being a pitched
battle that saw over a hundred casualties.19
In the wake of the fighting at Nancy, twenty-three of the ring-leaders were executed,
but such extremes of punishment were distinctly unwise, for they could not but drive the
lower ranks of the army into the arms of the emerging forces of political radicalism, this
process soon being intensified still further by the influence of emigration. In brief, then,
from the first months of 1791, a steady trickle of officers began to abandon their posts and
travel to the frontiers where in many instances they enlisted in an army that was being put
together in the Rhineland by a connection of the royal family styled the Prince of Condé.
By the summer, meanwhile, augmented by a resumption of the unrest in the barracks, the
ever growing demands that were being voiced amongst more radical elements for the officer
corps to be restructured, democratised or even purged, the flight to Varennes and, last but
not least, the imposition of a new oath of loyalty which placed support for the constitution
before support for the king, the trickle had become a flood.20 One eyewitness was Henriette
de la Tour du Pin, the twenty-year-old wife of the Count of Gouvernet:
The greater part of the officers, instead of opposing the efforts of Revolutionists with
consistent firmness, sent in their resignations and left France. Emigration became
a point of honour. The officers who remained with their regiments received letters
from those who had emigrated, reproaching them for cowardice and lack of attach-
ment to the royal family. They endeavoured to make them see it was their duty to
abandon their sovereign. They promised them the intervention of enormous armies
of foreigners. The king . . . hesitated to arrest this torrent. It thus happened that
every day saw the departure of some members of his party or even of his household.21
Though by no means every arm of service was affected equally – cavalry officers were far
more likely to emigrate than infantry officers, and infantry officers in turn far more likely
to emigrate than artillery officers – by the end of the year some 6,000 officers had gone,
most of them voluntarily, but a few of them after having been forced to leave by pres-
sure or, on occasion, direct action by the rank and file, the latter being unwilling to trust
men whom they suspected of being implicated in counter-revolution.22 Still worse, if only
because they did not have families to worry about, the men who went tended to be drawn
from the younger age groups.23 In the meantime, the departure of so many officers initiated
a further process of change in the army. With 60 per cent of the leadership cadres the other
side of the frontiers, new men had to be found to head the troops, and these, obviously
enough, could not but be found among the ranks of the officiers de fortune and the senior
non-commissioned officers. Fortunately, the whole issue of privilege in the officer corps
being a major item on the National Assembly’s agenda, the mechanisms were already
being put in place to effect a change: as early as September 1790 it had been agreed that an
examination system would replace birth as qualification for obtaining a first commission
in the officer corps and that one-quarter of the positions would be reserved for men who
had made their way up the ranks, whilst a revised pay scale introduced two months earlier
had eased the need for officers to have substantial private incomes.24 By the end of 1791
no fewer than 800 erstwhile sergeants and warrant-officers had been commissioned as lieu-
tenants and captains, whilst their good fortune was shared by numerous non-noble officers
who were hastily promoted to higher ranks.25 The development can be studied in detail
by reference to the future marshals of Napoleon. Thus, a sergeant in the Royal Maritime
Regiment in 1789, in November 1791, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was gazetted as a lieuten-
ant, while, another man who made the same leap was Michel Ney, in 1791 a sergeant in
the Colonel-General cavalry regiment. Equally, a lieutenant in the Dillon regiment at the
start of the Revolution and with it a classic officier de fortune, Etienne Macdonald went to
war in April 1792 as a captain, the same being true of Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey,
a light-infantry officer who had taken eleven years to advance from his first commission
as a sub-lieutenant to the heady heights of full lieutenant before finally being given com-
mand of a company in 1791. Finally, a battalion commander in the Regiment of Médoc
and member of the petty nobility who had taken thirty-four years to advance to the rank
of captain, Philibert Sérurier served at Valmy as a lieutenant-colonel.26
Tough and uncompromising, it was above all such figures who restored at least a modicum
of order in the armed forces prior to the outbreak of hostilities, yet at the same time it has
to be recognised that, whilst much talent was unleashed by the method fixed upon by the
National Assembly, there were many negative effects that have rarely been recognised. If we
know about them at all, it is largely due to the American historian, Rafe Blaufarb, who has
shown that in practice ‘deputies, local politicians, courtiers and revolutionary celebrities’
were able to insert themselves into the process, and by one means or another ensure that
candidates who they had adopted were granted commissions by the Minister of War. Some of
the men concerned were, to be sure, erstwhile officers and non-commissioned officers of the
old army, but plenty were not. Thus, in a sample based on the records of fourteen different
regiments, Blaufarb has shown that no fewer than 332 men who had hitherto been civilians,
each and every one of them sons of ‘active citizens’, were granted commissions between 1790
and 1792, of which at least twenty-four were related to deputies to the National Assembly,
and most of the others members of families with considerable social influence; as many as
20 per cent, indeed, were even nobles. His conclusions, then, are exceptionally stark:
The replacement operations definitively ended the traditional equivalence between the
terms ‘officer’ and ‘noble’, but did not result in social levelling . . . The system was una-
bashedly nepotistic . . . Deputies used patronage to spread the spoils of the Revolution
to family, friends and neighbours at home.27
The presence of so many interlopers did nothing to restore the stability of the officer corps,
whilst at the same time often having unfortunate results. As Bial wrote of his experiences
immediately prior to the battle of Valmy, ‘Only a few of the officers knew any of the theory,
whilst plenty of them did not even see the necessity for learning it.’28 Yet at no time had
good officers ever been more necessary. As we have seen, the period 1789–90 was marked by
a considerable amount of desertion, but 1791 saw the situation completely turned around.
As ever, economic misery – now even more severe than it had been in 1789 – began to
propel large numbers of men into the army who would probably never have enlisted had
the situation been more favourable. In all, then, perhaps 50,000 new recruits had joined the
army by the end of 1791: on average 900 men strong in the summer of 1790, at the end of
the period, infantry regiments had reached a strength of around 1,300.29 Given the context –
growing fears of counter-revolution and foreign aggression – it is possible to argue that
this surge of recruitment was the result of heightened patriotism and enthusiasm for the
Revolution, but, whilst idealism may have played a role in some individual cases – we know
that future corps commander, Dominique Vandamme, had been a member of the Society of
the Friends of the Constitution before he joined the Regiment of Brie in June 179130 – such
claims do not ring especially true, and all the more so as the three testimonies that we have
from men that joined the regular army at this time make no reference to political factors
playing a part in their decision to enlist: Phillippe Girault and Nicolas Duvernois both tell
of being bored and frustrated, while the future Marshal Marmont, who volunteered for the
artillery in 1790, afterwards said of his decision only that he had had designs on becoming
a soldier from a very early age.31 Many historians, then, are doubtful of the idea. To quote
Corvisier, ‘More than revolutionary fervour, these enlistments were due to poverty.’32 In
this respect, the fact that volunteers continued to be paid substantial bounties cannot be
disregarded; all that can really be said is that the National Assembly introduced a number
of reforms that made joining the regular army less unattractive as an option: corporal pun-
ishment, for example, was abolished and men who served out their full enlistments and
maintained a good record were guaranteed political emancipation as active citizens.33
The expansion, and with it, political transformation, of the regular army seen in 1791 not
only continued but picked up speed in 1792. New recruits continued to arrive in droves –
by the end of the year, over half the army had been recruited since 1789 – and, with France
at war from April onwards, it is even more tempting to argue that the populace was in the
grip of a wave of ideologically driven bellicosity. Once again, however, it does not feel
inappropriate to question such assumptions. That some men were driven to volunteer by
political imperatives cannot be denied, but nor can the facts, first, that the problem of hun-
ger remained as strong as ever and, second, that enlistment continued to be rewarded by
the payment of sums of up to 120 livres. Meanwhile, prepared though he is to recognise the
importance of the political, the leading specialist in the area, Samuel Scott, is firm in his
contention that other factors should be prioritised. Thus;
Two laws in January and July 1792, which have been generally disregarded by histori-
ans, were responsible for the great increase in the strength of the regular army in that
year. The law of 25 January 1792 . . . [reduced] the term of enlistment . . . from eight
years to three years . . . A decree sanctioned July 22 . . . maintained the same length
of enlistment . . . However, the minimum age was lowered from eighteen to sixteen.34
Nor is Scott wrong to take such a line. Thus, the geographical origins of the new recruits are
highly instructive: prior to 1789, common soldiers had come very disproportionately from
Paris and, in addition, eastern parts of France that were exposed to invasion. In the wake of
the Revolution, it might have been expected that this pattern would change – that recruits
would now be found in a much broader swathe of the country. Not a bit of it, however:
until the introduction of conscription in 1793, there was but little difference, areas such as
Brittany, Guyenne, Gascony and the Auvergne providing as few men as ever.35
In so far as enlisting in the army is concerned, then, the fact that Revolution was at war
had little impact on popular attitudes to military service. What cannot be denied, however,
is that, for whatever reason men enlisted, once in the ranks they were subjected to a bar-
rage of politicisation that outweighed everything seen in 1790 and 1791. Possibly seeing all
too clearly that the crowds of men flocking to enter the barracks were in the end in large
part a mixture of street urchins and failed artisans moved above all by the need to feed
their bellies, in some instances wary of the very notion of a regular army, and fearful of the
retribution with which they were increasingly threatened, around the country, town coun-
cils and Jacobin clubs engaged in a ferocious battle for hearts and minds: on the one hand,
France’s soldiers had to be instilled with suitable notions of heroism and self-sacrifice, while,
on the other, their political allegiance had to be assured against counter-revolutionary brib-
ery and seduction. Harangue, then, followed harangue, article followed article, pamphlet
followed pamphlet, and banquet followed banquet, while soldiers were everywhere encour-
aged to join political clubs and befriended by civilians who ten years before would have
regarded a man in uniform as little better than a diseased and dangerous outcast.36 Still
more strikingly, the army was issued with songbooks full of such stirring and bloodthirsty
anthems as the Chant du départ and, above all, the Marseillaise.37 How far this campaign suc-
ceeded is a moot point – throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars one suspects,
for example, that the song that was heard most often around French campfires was the
resoundingly apolitical Chanson de l’oignon38 – but what is clear is that, to the extent that
it survived at all, the rigid discipline of the old army continued to be eroded: henceforward
men were far more prone to stand on their rights, to challenge the authority of their officers
and even to question their orders, the consequence being that leadership had to take on a
new ethos based on something other than social status.39 Whilst they might have fought at
Valmy wearing the white uniforms of the Bourbon monarchy, even the regular soldiers of
Dumouriez therefore cannot be regarded as being coterminus with the troops of 1789. Nor,
meanwhile, was this just a case with their spirit: what with the decline in their training,
on the one hand, and the influx of new recruits, on the other, the regular army of 1793 was
simply incapable of functioning on the battlefield with anything like the same precision as,
say, the men who had fought at such places as Yorktown in the closing years of the War of
American Independence. As Blanning notes, then, ‘By the time the war broke out in April
1792, what had once been the royal army had been transformed.’40
From all this, it follows that to give the old regular army credit for saving the Revolution
at Valmy is so much romantic nonsense. That said, this scarcely means that the palm can
go to the new forces generated by the Revolution. Let us begin here with the National
Guard. As we have seen, the origins of this force can be found in the events surrounding
the attempted coup of July 1789, in that the National Assembly had responded to the
threat of counter-revolution by decreeing the formation of a civic militia in Paris.41 Thanks
in large part to the grande peur, this development was copied in towns and villages across
the country, and by the late summer it had all but become a national institution, although
in organisational terms it was to retain its purely local character until 14 July 1790 saw the
National Assembly order the unification of all the local detachments into a single force.
Placed at the head of the whole was the popular hero, the Marquis of Lafayette, while a
further law of 14 October 1791 obliged all active citizens and those of their sons who had
attained adulthood to enlist in the Guard, and what is more, fund the cost of their uniforms,
weapons and equipment (a sum that came to a figure that it would take a middling artisan
several months to put together); established an order of battle based on the new system of
local government that had been brought in in the wake of the Revolution; and laid down
that the whole force should now adopt the blue coats, red facings and white breeches or
trousers which the original Parisian force had inherited from the mutinous French Guards,
many of its first recruits having come from the ranks of this regiment, one such being the
future Marshal Lefebvre. As for the role of the men concerned, they had since the days of
their first creation essentially acted as the police arm of the Revolution, hunting down ban-
dits, suppressing riots and providing guards of honour for this or that civic ceremony. Very
soon, however, it became clear that all was not well. One of the force’s earliest members was
Paul Thiébault, the twenty-one-year-old son of a Frenchman who had become a professor at
Prussia’s leading military academy: having enlisted as a private in 1789, he later described
how the zeal of the early days quickly died away to such an extent that ‘to get twenty, you
had to order out sixty’.42
Despite such issues, the National Guard played a key role in the political history of the
French Revolution, whilst many of its members were anything but mere time servers. Given
permission by his parents to join the National Guard in exchange for surrendering his ambi-
tion to join the regular army, Bial later claimed to have become influenced by a mixture of
Revolutionary principles and dreams of heroism:
The fall of the Bastille had not failed to have a certain influence on my spirit. Resounding
as it was on all sides, the word ‘liberty’ flattered my ears, while my head and heart alike
were filled with visions of the marvellous heroism of the Greeks and Romans.43
Eventually transferring to the regular army, Bial went on to become a general, but the pre-
eminent example of political fanaticism in the National Guard is surely Louis de Saint Just,
a failed law student, would-be poet and bitter critic of the ancien régime who, though he
lacked the property qualifications necessary for enlistment, secured a place in the National
Guard of his home village of Blérancourt through the good offices of a brother-in-law who
had a seat on the council.44 Finally, amongst the excited boys and Revolutionary fanatics
were plenty of erstwhile officers in the Bourbon army including, not least, the redoubtable
Nicholas Davout, a fervent supporter of the Revolution who had championed the military
rebellion at Nancy, a further element of military expertise being lent by the secondment to
the force for training purposes of such figures as Alexandre Berthier, hitherto a lieutenant-
colonel in the Soissonais infantry regiment.45
As a bastion of the Revolution in terms of armed conflict, however, the National Guard
was a nullity, for its members could not be required to serve outside their home depart-
ments. More than that, many of the men who joined its ranks did not see themselves as
soldiers at all. To quote Alan Forrest once more:
Urban merchants’ and country lawyers’ sons who flocked to join were participating in
a public demonstration of their patriotic principles, generally in the company of their
friends and social peers. For the great majority of them, their sense of obligation ended
there. They did not for a moment imagine that they were signing up for service in a
real army, or that their service might involve a sustained period of absence from their
local community.46
That said, as the internal and external dangers to the Revolution seemed to multiply, so it was
not long before a variety of politicians were eyeing the Guard as a means of supplementing
the army. Essentially, the problem was a political one. If the army had been revolutionised
through the emigration of as many as two-thirds of its officers and, more symbolically, the
abolition of the old regimental titles – almost all of which were either provincial or referent
in one way or another to the ancien régime – in favour of numbers, the generals were to a man
not just men who had spent their lives in the service of the old order but also nobles, much
the same applying to the colonels and lieutenant colonels. Expanding the army might be
viewed as a necessity – indeed, in order after order, it was pushed very hard – but, in political
terms, it was also a threat, and thus it was that the idea emerged of the creation of a field force
drawn from the National Guard. In this, of course, political considerations were well to the
fore, but, however naïvely, there was also a sincere conviction that ideological drive would
be a far better preparation for soldiering than arms drill. To quote Alan Forrest, ‘The political
leaders in the assembly were convinced that . . . passion for the nation and its Revolution
would compensate for any lack of traditional tactical training.’47
Established in a somewhat piecemeal fashion by a series of decrees promulgated between
21 June and 17 August 1791, the new force was eventually set at a total of 101,000 men
formed into 169 independent battalions, it being further agreed that the men would elect
their own officers, enlist for a single year only, receive twice the pay of a soldier of equiva-
lent rank in the regular army and be recruited, organised and equipped by the departmental
authorities. As for the response, there has been a tendency in the historiography both to
take it as read that 100,000 men actually came forward, and to claim that the rank and file
were solidly bourgeois (in the propertied sense) and therefore probably the most politically
enthusiastic recruits the French cause ever obtained. The reality, however, was rather dif-
ferent. In the end no more than 50,000 men appeared – just sixty battalions – while service
in the new force appears to have had limited appeal amongst those elements of the popula-
tion who had little track record of providing France with her soldiers. Thus, setting aside
the sizeable number of deserters from the regular army – the proportion of 12 per cent that
marked one battalion whose social composition we have a good grasp of may not be out of
line – the social and geographical base of recruitment was almost exactly the same as it had
been in the old army. Thus, the rank and file was largely young, urban and overwhelmingly
artisan in character, while the regions that contributed most troops were traditional recruit-
ing grounds – Paris and the swathe of departments stretching across Champagne and into
Burgundy – that had always sent large numbers of recruits to the regulars, just as the areas
of the country that were least well represented were areas that had always been averse even
to voluntary military service such as Brittany, Poitou, Aquitaine and Gascony.48 In social
terms, this looks very odd – the fact that the National Guard was recruited only from active
citizens should have guaranteed the new battalions a much more bourgeois appearance –
but the fact was that few men of property had the slightest wish to serve as private soldiers,
whilst there was still the issue of law and order: if solid citizens were away fighting foreign
enemies, who would be left to fight the canaille? As Ellis points out, implicit in the very
terms of the decree creating the new force was an acceptance that ‘passive’ citizens would
have to be recruited – did not said decree lay down that the cost of the recruits’ weapons and
equipment would be met by the authorities? – while, as Forrest admits, particularly in those
areas where recruitment to the army had always presented problems, getting the requisite
men together was a dirty business:
Mayors . . . used sleight of hand to fulfil their military obligations, filling their quotas
with . . . men who had physical disabilities or who did not fulfil the basic height
qualifications, vagrants and petty criminals and those living on the margins of
village society.49
Only in the case of the officers is there really a case for arguing that the Volunteers of
1791 were a bourgeois army, and, even then, this is open to qualification. In principle,
the necessary leadership cadres were to be elected by the men of each unit from their
own number, but this concession was limited by the principle that men could only
stand for election to the higher ranks if they met certain basic tests of military experi-
ence: to become a lieutenant-colonel, for example, a candidate had to have previously
exercised the rank of captain or above). In practice, then, the number of posts which
even the wealthiest military neophytes could occupy was limited, the bedrock of the
officer corps being, first, captains and lieutenants of the regular army who had refused
to emigrate; second, retired officers; and, third, long-serving sergeants and corporals, no
more than one-third of the men concerned coming from civilian society.50
The impression that the conventional view of the Volunteers of 1791 is difficult
to sustain is confirmed by a quick review of a few individual cases. Here and there, it
is possible to come across figures who do seem to conform to the stereotype. Pyrenean
volunteer Guillaume Latrille de Lorencez, was a student in a Capuchin college in Pau,
who ran away to join the Volunteers of Basses-Pyrenées.51 Also from the Pyrenees was
Antoine Noguès, the youngest son of a prosperous farmer who enlisted in the Second
Battalion of Volunteers of Hautes-Pyrénées along with his elder brother at the tender age
of thirteen.52 And, finally, we have Louis Suchet, the son of a Lyons silk-manufacturer,
who switched from the National Guard to the Fourth Battalion of Volunteers of
the Ardèche in April 1792.53 However, alongside such figures we have François-
Xavier Joliclerc, the only son of the widow of a freehold peasant from the village of
Froidefontaine near Belfort, who enlisted in the Seventh Battalion of Volunteers of the
Jura; Denis Belot, a peasant or, possibly, day labourer, from the region known as Brie,
the only son of a widower, who enlisted in one of the battalions raised in Seine-et-
Marne; Jean Lannes, an apprentice dyer who joined the Second Battalion of Volunteers
of the Gers in April 1792; Jean de Dieu Soult, a sergeant in the Royal Regiment who
became a drill-instructor in the First Battalion of Volunteers of Haut-Rhin; Claude
Perrin, an ex-soldier who had briefly turned shopkeeper in the garrison town of Valence
after coming out of the army in 1781 before re-enlisting in the Third Battalion of the
Volunteers of Drôme in the same year; André Masséna, a time-served veteran of the
Royal Italian Regiment who joined the Second Battalion of the Volunteers of the Var;
and Nicolas Oudinot of the Third Battalion of Volunteers of the Meuse, who had run
away from home to join the army in 1784, only to be forcibly bought out by his father
and set to work as a clerk.54 Finally, though on what grounds is far from clear, the first
British historian of the Revolutionary armies, Ramsey Phipps, claims that at least a part
of the rank and file were constituted by the mass of men turned adrift when the old pro-
vincial militia had been dissolved in 1789, this at least guaranteeing that the number
of men with military service was reasonably high.55
If the identity of the Volunteers of 1791 refuses to conform to stereotype, their motiva-
tion is even more problematic. Only a very few of such personal accounts as we have address
the matter clearly, and, when they do, we can rarely be certain that their comments can be
taken at face value, whilst there is also the danger of making unwarranted assumption: for
example, if Jolicerc became a rabid Jacobin, there is no way of knowing that he possessed
those views before he enlisted and, indeed, some hint that he joined up for reasons that were
not political at all (in brief, unhappiness at his domestic situation). With regard to the ex-
soldiers, meanwhile, one wonders whether the issue was not so much political conviction as
the loneliness and alienation often felt by such men. One historian honest enough to tackle
the problem despite a generally sympathetic view of the Revolution is Alan Forrest. Thus:
In 1791 the lot of the volunteer still seemed glorious and faintly exotic, the once-in
a-lifetime chance . . . to escape from humdrum reality for a few carefree months in the
service of the patrie. If many of the new volunteers did care deeply about the cause in
which they had enlisted . . . there were others for whom the volunteer battalions repre-
sented an opportunity to get away or a means of satisfying a thirst for adventure. There
were so many possible reasons for enlistment. Some were rebellious spirits seeking a
means of escape from parental authority; others were impoverished and hungry and
were attracted by the relatively high level of income; others again were bored or were
lured into volunteering by the bravado of their friends.56
Given these doubts, it follows that the Volunteers of 1791 were not much of a reinforcement
to France’s military strength, a military strength that, as the powers of Europe rightly judged,
the years from 1789 to 1792 had left sorely denuded. On the contrary, scarcely had the fight-
ing begun than the Revolution experienced a series of humiliating reverses. Having assembled
a considerable force around Lille, late in the evening of 28 April, the newly appointed com-
mander of the Army of the North and erstwhile hero of the American War of Independence
(in this latter conflict, he had commanded the French expeditionary force), the Count of
Rochambeau dispatched a substantial force of French troops commanded by Theobald Dillon
across the frontier in what appears to have been intended as a surprise attack that would strike
the defenders in the first light of dawn. On the same day, meanwhile, a second force under the
Duke of Biron (a commander who, under his original title of the Duke of Lauzun, had won
much fame in the American War of Independence at the head of an independent ‘legion’ of
light troops recruited from foreign deserters) marched on Mons. Having advanced only a few
miles, the invaders ran into the Austrian outposts, and proceeded at a stroke to disprove the
complacent theorising that had led France to war. The Austrians were badly outnumbered,
but, in both the actions that followed, a handful of cannon shots were sufficient to cause
panic in the French ranks and, not just that, but have the whole assembly running for the
French frontier in a matter of minutes.57 For a good account of the events that befell the col-
umn commanded by General Dillon, an officer of Irish birth who had, as was common enough
among the surviving Catholic gentry, fled his native land to take service in the French army
in the 1760s, we can turn to the account provided by the then captain of engineers and future
general, Armand Marescot. To quote a letter that he wrote to a friend on 14 May 1792:
I have really been in very great danger. Thus, I was at the action that took place on
the road to Tournai. This has been somewhat distorted in the newspapers, but in the
last analysis the result cannot be seen as anything other than a complete rout and an
utterly shameful one at that . . . It was about four o’clock in the morning. For the past
few hours there had been a series of skirmishes in which our chasseurs had been badly
shot up, but all of a sudden . . . an enemy column appeared . . . and marched upon us in
the best order . . . Although the enemy was still 800 toises away, the first shots of their
cannon were sufficient to cause the whole of our cavalry to flee in disorder. The rapid-
ity with which this happened was astonishing, whilst it was very distressing to see the
road covered with carbines, pistols and cuirasses, not to mention men who had fallen
from their steeds and horses who had stumbled in their flight. I am very surprised that,
abandoned as they were in the middle of a plain, the whole of our infantry were not
enveloped and taken prisoner.58
What had happened in this unfortunate affair is clear enough: tired and in all probability
marching in a state of complete disorder, the French forces were simply taken by surprise.
In the febrile atmosphere conjured up by Brissot and his allies, however, there was but one
explanation for failure, and that was treason. What happened next is described by a friend
of Dillon’s who had happened to be Lille at the time the advance began. Thus:
At a place near the town I met four dragoons . . . crying that all was lost, that the army
had been betrayed, and cut to pieces . . . I returned into town with . . . an officer of
the National Guards, [mounted] on a horse belonging to one of the artillery carriages,
who also cried that all was lost, betrayed, and cut to pieces, but . . . could not give any
detail of particulars . . . The street was full of . . . the cry of ‘Treason, aristocrate, and
à la lanterne!’ The . . . infantry now presented themselves . . . Not one wounded . . . I
asked many officers and soldiers news of the general; not one could give me any account
of him. An officer of the cuirassiers said that he was surprised to hear me ask news of
a general who had led them to butchery . . . A hundred steps from the gate, they had
hung an officer of engineers, M. Berthois, by his feet: I saw more than twenty shots
through his body . . . At length I heard cries of ‘He’s coming! He’s coming! To the lan-
terne!’ I asked, with a trembling voice, ‘Who?’ ‘Dillon’, they answered. ‘The traitor, the
aristocrate! We are going to tear him to pieces, he and all that belong to him . . . Dillon
is coming in a cabriole . . . Let’s go and finish him!’ The cabriole soon appeared; the
general was in it, without a hat, with a calm and firm look . . . He had hardly passed
through the gate, when more than a hundred bayonets were thrust into the cabriole,
amidst the most horrible shouts . . . and I think this killed M. Dillon, for I never saw
him move afterwards.59
Somewhat sententiously, John Lynn remarks that ‘those observers who wish to portray vol-
unteer battalions as unreliable and line troops as steady and loyal should note that Dillon’s
entire column of 2,300 men included only one company of volunteers’.60 As it happens, this
statement is quite correct, but it does tend to miss the point, this being, of course, that, thus
far, the French Revolution had added but little to France’s military capacity. So obvious was
this that the ‘battle’ of Tournai shook the new political establishment to the core, but, to
its credit, it did not crumble but rather redoubled its efforts. With the term of service of the
Volunteers of 1791 rapidly coming to an end, yet more troops were needed, and so, along
with decreeing the mobilisation of the whole of the National Guard, in July 1792, it issued
a further call for volunteers, whilst yet continuing to build up the regular army.61 This time,
however, there were enormous differences. Thus, service was to be for the duration of the
war, whilst the de facto limitation of enlistment to the propertied classes was ended: hence-
forward all Frenchmen could be soldiers. The trouble was that not all Frenchmen wanted
to be soldiers, indeed that comparatively few wanted to be soldiers. Thus, the appeal netted
not the 200,000 men hoped for but, at best, 120,000, and that despite a variety of meas-
ures designed to substitute other benefits for the previous limitation of service to a single
year, not to mention a reduction of the minimum height which volunteers had to demon-
strate before they could be accepted into the ranks. Nor should the lacklustre nature of the
response have come as a surprise: such as it was, the carnival atmosphere of the previous
year had been replaced by a much darker picture marked by the real possibility of military
defeat, whilst the new call to arms coincided with a moment in the agricultural year when
labour was at a premium and rural households desperate to retain all the labour they could.62
At the same time, the ‘Volunteers of 1792’ were very much an army of the poor.
Amongst their ranks, we may discern a few recruits who would not have been out of place
amongst their predecessors of the previous year: the Paul Thiébault we have already met;
Jean-Pierre Dellard, the eighteen-year-old son of a prosperous fermier from Cahors, who
enlisted in one of the three battalions raised in the Department of Lot in August 1792
after first having had to hide his failure to attain the requisite height by inserting packs of
cards in his shoes, and was immediately elected to the rank of quartermaster-sergeant by
his fellows; and, finally, Jean Vivien, the sixteen-year-old son of an Orléans wine merchant
who, having already attempted to join the regular army at the age of fourteen, now enlisted
in the Second Volunteers of Loiret and was almost immediately elected as a company
sergeant-major.63 However, if Dellard’s account is replete with patriotic ardour, it also con-
tains a hint of something else besides. Thus:
Every department furnished a contingent for the task of saving the Fatherland from the
ills which threatened it. My own – that of the Lot – was by no means the slowest to rush
to its help. In fifteen days at the most, three fine battalions were on the march for the
frontiers . . . Already inclined towards a career of arms, I seized the opportunity with
the greatest enthusiasm and threw myself into becoming a soldier.64
Once again, then, there is a very strong hint of recruits being motivated by factors other
than patriotism. More importantly, however, such scions of the propertied classes as Dellard
were very much in a minority (again, something that should be no surprise, for there was
little reason to believe that men who had been unwilling to avail themselves of the very
favourable conditions of 1791 would come forward of their own volition in 1792). Thus, to
return to Bertaud, his research makes it very clear that the Volunteers of 1792 were, if not a
much more plebeian body than their predecessors, then certainly one which was much more
representative of the country as a whole. Thus, whereas only 15 per cent of the Volunteers
of 1791 came from rural backgrounds rather than urban ones, in 1792 the percentage had
risen to 69 per cent (these totals, however, should not be equated just with peasants: rather
they also include such groups as servants and artisans). Everywhere, meanwhile, it was, so
he says, ‘the most humble social groups that furnished the contingents’, amongst the many
factors that suggest that this was the case being the fact that the new recruits were on the
whole much shorter than their predecessors: whereas only one-third of the Volunteers of
1791 had been shorter than five feet and four inches, this figure had now doubled.65 As for
how the increase in numbers was achieved, an obvious answer would be a heightened use
of propaganda on the part of the régime, and this was certainly on view. Meanwhile, too,
the foreign menace was now very real. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 7, if large parts of
the urban population were enthused by the Revolution, in the countryside, disillusion and
resentment were spreading rapidly, and it is difficult to see how the massive expansion of
recruitment in the countryside can possibly have been achieved without heavy administra-
tive pressure: in brief, six months before the move that plunged large parts of France into
revolt over the self-same issue, the rural populace was already being bullied into giving up
its sons. In the slightly enigmatic words of John Lynn, ‘Since the legislation demanded quo-
tas and stipulated that men were to be “chosen by their brothers in arms”, some compulsion
might be used.’66
What we have, then, is a picture that is again rather different from the norm. Some
of the Volunteers, perhaps, were genuinely enthusiastic. Already a sergeant-major in
the Calvados National Guard, for example, Charles Decaen says that he joined up
because he believed that ‘every citizen had to contribute to the utmost of his capacity
to the repulse of the enemies who had dared to ignore our borders and advance into the
interior of the country with a view to imposing their will upon us’.67 Meanwhile, to quote a
letter which the peasant, Denis Belot, wrote to his father to explain his decision to enlist:
I am a soldier, then . . . Animated by the same zeal as you, I could not see the Fatherland
menaced by a gang of criminals . . . without my soul being stirred by that holy love
which is always ready to champion the rights that are threatened with being cast aside
with impunity in favour of the atrocious despotism under which we used to languish.68
And, finally, like Belot a volunteer in the same department of Seine-et-Marne, a gardener
named Fricassé said that he enlisted because, ‘having heard over and over again . . . that the
French army was being thrown back and beaten everywhere, I was burning to see for myself
these things which I found impossible to believe’.69 But even ardour for the cause was not
entirely helpful: made up of representatives of the most violent and determined elements of
the crowd, the Parisian units were certainly keen on fighting the enemy, but unfortunately
they coupled this with an aversion to military training, not to mention a tendency to see
treason in the slightest actions of their ancien-régime generals. And, of course, plenty were
not moved by political feeling at all, this being something that, at the very least, did not
make for good behaviour. Thus, one of the comparatively few Volunteers of 1791 who
re-enlisted for a further turn of service rather than returning home, Noguès paints a very
negative picture of life in his battalion, suggesting that drunkenness was rife and that there
were frequent fights with regular soldiers stationed in the area, not to mention numerous
desertions or attempts to feign illness.70
If doubts can be raised about the Volunteers of 1792, this is even more the case with
respect to the still more exotic units represented by the various and often spectacularly
uniformed ‘legions’ that had emerged under the aegis of the Brissotins.71 Conceived of as
independent forces of all arms that could range deep behind enemy lines and encourage
the populace of enemy territories to rise in revolt against their masters, in the end fifteen
such legions were formed, eight of them French and seven of them foreign, but, whether
formed by political exiles such as François Doppet, a Savoyard disgruntled at his failure
to ingratiate himself with his home province’s Piedmontese rulers, ambitious Republican
politicians or simply generals out to recreate the freikorps of the Seven Years War, these
forces were in general worse than useless.72 Typical enough, alas, was the German Legion.
Created on 4 September 1792 at the petition of a committee of German émigrés headed
by the so-called Anarchasis Clootz, this was supposed to be composed of two regiments of
light cavalry, three battalions of infantry and one battery of artillery, whilst its command
was given to a sometime colonel of a Seven-Year-War Prussian freikorps named Dembach.
Like many such men, however, Dembach quickly proved to be a mere adventurer. Nor was
this an end to the problems suffered by the unit: the officers, of which there were far too
many for the number of men who were actually raised, were utterly incompetent and bent
solely on advancing themselves by any means available; and the rank and file were mostly
erstwhile Swiss Guards who had somehow escaped the massacre of 10 August 1792 (see
below). Deployed against the Vendéen rebellion in the summer of 1793, then, the legion
disintegrated in its very first action, a large part of the rank and file not just running away
but actually joining the insurgents.73 Just as bad, meanwhile, was the Belgian unit known as
the Legion of Montesquiou, one officer who was persuaded to join its ranks, being shocked
to discover that in reality it consisted of nothing more than ‘four or five hundred unfortu-
nate men all in tatters whose officers alone were wearing the smart uniform of which so
much had been made’.74
Let us say, however, that, in whatever units they happened to be serving, at least some
of the new recruits were enthused by the Revolution and eager to pit themselves against the
foe. Very soon, alas, such men, found themselves confronted by the miseries of campaign-
ing in the very wet summer of 1792. Here, for example, is Jean Sibelet, a soldier of the old
army who had enlisted in 1781 and was now serving in the Eleventh Regiment of Chasseurs
à Cheval:
The rain that fell on us all the time . . . was a great trial to men and horses alike.
Every move that our mounts made plunged them up to their knees in mud, while
they could never eat their fill as grain was no sooner spread before them than it was
turned to sludge.75
Equally cold and wet, meanwhile, was the Parisian National Guard, Paul Thiébault:
On the very first night we got a pretty exact idea of the delights of camp life in a
rainy autumn. It came down in torrents all night long and the wretched canvas which
was our only defence from the clouds was soon penetrated. The water at first strained
through, but soon began to form big drips which, following in quick succession, were
for each of us as good as any number of spouts. Falling asleep . . . we were woken by cold
water trickling all over us and wetting us through and through.76
And, finally, there is Denis Belot. To quote a letter that he wrote to his father on 25 May:
On the 20th day of this month great masses of cloud piled up before our eyes to the
accompaniment of terrible rumbles of thunder. Almost immediately hail fell in great
quantities, whilst the stones were so big that they pierced our tents and [the canvas
coverings of our] supply wagons . . . As for the straw in which we slept, it was turned to
so much slurry, and what made this worse was the fact that we had nothing with which
to replace it . . . The first night that we slept in our tents, I complained of the hardness
of the ground, whilst the straw scratched my face and hands . . . That night, however,
was completely the other way about: straw and ground alike were so wet that I sank into
them as if they were an eiderdown.77
Faced by these privations, large numbers of men deserted, and, if Dumouriez got any of the
Volunteers to stand at all at Valmy, it was by dint of a programme of intensive training
that each and every one of them was subjected to as soon as they reached the base camps in
which the French generals were trying to re-organise their forces. As Bial wrote:
Our equipment having soon been completed, from the most senior officers down to
the lowliest private now had to occupy ourselves with the task of instruction . . . From
morning to night, then, we wholeheartedly gave ourselves over to drill without a
moment’s repose.78
Thus far, this chapter has been very much a military narrative, and it is therefore entirely
proper that we should return to a discussion of the history of the French Revolution. Even
if this had had only a limited practical effect on the efficiency of the French forces, the
general tendency had been one of an increasing radicalisation that was soon to exercise
a dramatic influence on the international situation. Though Brissot and his fellows had
not anticipated a French defeat, the war that they had embarked on was soon working its
magic. Thus, in Paris there were all too many observers who responded to the murder of
the unfortunate Dillon by applauding what the troops had done and calling for more of
the same: conspiracy was all around, it was shouted, and the traitors must needs be rooted
out, whilst Robespierre was not alone in claiming that, as men who had been appointed to
command under Louis XVI, France’s generals could not be trusted. Over the course of May,
then, surveillance of foreigners and the regulations against non-juring priests were tight-
ened up, while on 29 May the small bodyguard that Louis XVI had been allowed to retain
(the so-called Constitutional Guard) was disbanded. If the king lost his guard, meanwhile,
the new régime acquired one in that every detachment of National Guard in the country
was directed to send a party of officers and men to a great encampment outside Paris that
was eventually to consist of 20,000 men, the idea being that this force (always known as
the fédérés on account of the fact that it was ordered to assemble on 14 July – the so-called
Feast of the Federation of the National Guard) should take the place of the city’s garrison
of regular troops. Finally, last but not least, the restriction of membership of the National
Guard to the propertied classes was swept aside, its ranks, in Paris at least, now being filled
with large numbers of angry sans culottes.79
Under ever greater pressure, Louis chose this moment to make a stand. Hoping, perhaps,
to capitalise on the concerns raised by the concentration of such a large force of men –
men, moreover, who were rightly judged to be likely to represent the most extreme wing
of the Revolutionary movement – in the vicinity of the capital, the king announced that
he intended to veto the decree summoning the fédérés to Paris. This action eliciting angry
protests from a group of government ministers, he promptly sacked them, only thereby
to play straight into the hands of his enemies. On the one hand, the Parisian population
was continuing to suffer severe hardship: if wheat was available in reasonable quantities
due to careful stockpiling on the part of the authorities, the outbreak of rebellion in Saint
Domingue the previous year had driven up the price of sugar and coffee, whilst growing
problems with the assignats – essentially, the paper money issued from 1790 onwards to
finance the Revolution80 – meant that inflation had become a very serious issue. And, on
the other, the populace was increasingly well organised through the establishment of revo-
lutionary clubs in most of the wards, or ‘sections’, into which the city was divided for the
purposes of local government. In consequence, it proved relatively easy to organise a mas-
sive demonstration in the Place du Carrousel on 20 June to demand the reinstatement
of the ministers, a considerable number of the crowd actually forcing their way into the
adjacent Tuileries palace in an effort to terrorise Louis into surrender in person, only with-
drawing when the mayor of Paris, Brissot’s ally, Jérôme Pétion, came in person to beg them
to go home. By then, however, it was too late. To quote Simon Schama, ‘With the humili-
ation of 20 June, the last vestiges of the royal aura had been stripped away.’81
With matters in this situation, events at the frontiers now once more conspired to
intensify the crisis. Such as they were, the forces of the Duke of Brunswick were now
clearly preparing to invade France, and the result was the first of the series of calls that
led to the formation of the Volunteers of 1792. On the very eve of the long-awaited
invasion, Brunswick blundered by issuing a proclamation that had been written for
him by the Prince of Condé in which he threatened dire retribution if either Louis or
Marie-Antoinette suffered the slightest injury and, in addition, announced his determi-
nation to restore order in France.82 According to the traditional version of events, this
manifesto stiffened the determination of the French people to resist and, at the same time,
sealed the fate of the monarchy by generating the blood-soaked rising of 10 August, but
more up-to-date scholarship has suggested that this argument cannot be substantiated, the
rising having actually been in preparation since the time of the demonstration of 20 June.83
At all events, the story now moved to a bloody and horrific conclusion. On 9 August, Paris
rose in revolt. Much to the dismay of the Brissotins, who at this point wanted only to have
themselves restored to power and had been making increasingly forlorn efforts to get Louis
to back down, the radicals who controlled the sections sent their followers on to the streets
and took over the city, which they declared to be under the rule of a revolutionary com-
mune. Instantly supported by much of the National Guard, the rebellion was also able to
call on the fédérés, the latter immediately setting off to march on the Tuileries and embark
upon what was perceived as a re-run of the storm of the Bastille. Trying to make his way
to join the defenders, the Count of La Vallette, at this point a young assistant in the royal
library, found the atmosphere dark indeed. Thus:
Numerous groups of men of the people armed with sabres, pikes or pistols, were passing
along the Rue Saint-Antoine . . . and glanced at us with threatening looks . . . The
women were at the windows, or were weeping and kissing their husbands and sons in
the street. Sombre energy was depicted in the faces of these men, and in every move-
ment they made.84
There followed scenes of horror of a sort that dwarfed anything that happened on 14 July
1789. In the early morning of 10 August, up to 20,000 National Guards and sans culottes
converged on the Tuileries, only to find that the Revolution at last faced a real fight. Lining
every window of the palace’s long façade were 900 Swiss Guards, while they had been
joined by several hundred civilians. Also in the palace was Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette
and their children, but in this final crisis the king proved less than equal to the situation:
‘His coldness and apathy in so terrible a situation were unpleasant to see’, wrote La Vallette.
‘He spoke a few words to us as he passed, which we did not hear, and he soon went back
to the palace. This inadequate appearance made a very sad appearance.’85 Eventually, the
king’s courage failing him altogether, he retired from the palace and escaped to the nearby
National Assembly, taking with him his family. In the circumstances, this decision was
understandable enough, but, already discouraged, the defenders were left uncertain as to
whether they were still supposed to fight. Sensing their hesitation, the crowd rushed for-
ward, and, the hail of fire with which they were greeted notwithstanding, within a matter of
minutes, they were flooding into the palace. To quote La Vallette once again:
The unhappy Swiss were no long capable of defending themselves. Soon the most hor-
rible massacre began, and [this] only ended with the death of the last of them. They
were pursued from room to room: the darkest corners . . . even the chimneys in which
some had hidden themselves did not avail to save them from massacre. They were
thrown out of the windows and their naked bodies were exposed to the savage jeers of
the women of the people.86
La Vallette notwithstanding, some members of the Guard did survive, but even so their
dead numbered at least 600, while the losses of their assailants came to around half that
figure. For the monarchy, however, it was the end, the royal family being that same even-
ing imprisoned in the prison known as the Temple. Under the direction of the Paris
Commune, moreover, the National Assembly, many of whose members had understanda-
bly fled in their turn, dutifully signed its own death warrant by announcing the convocation
of a national convention whose task it would be to decide how France should now be
governed, the various ministers who had been dismissed in June at the same time being
brought back with the addition of Georges Danton, the president of the radical Cordeliers’
Club, who was appointed Minister of Justice.87 Horrified at what had occurred and well
aware that the radicals had been out for his blood for some time, Lafayette attempted, to
use the later Spanish phrase, to ‘pronounce’ against what had occurred, but the troops at
his command – the Army of the North, at whose head he had replaced the unfortunate
Rochambeau – refused to follow his lead, and he was left with no option but to flee to the
safety of the enemy lines. As for his replacement, it was the ever bellicose Dumouriez, the
latter having voluntarily quit the government at the time of the purge of its ranks that had
precipitated the crisis of 20 June and taken refuge at Lafayette’s headquarters.88
If Brunswick had hoped to cow the Revolution into surrender, he could therefore not
have got the situation more wrong. All that was left was force, and, in the middle of
August, his army crossed the frontier, taking first Longwy and then Verdun and at the
same time devastating the country through which he passed. As one inhabitant of Sainte
Menehould complained:
Short of wood for fuel, having cut down and thrown on the fire all the trees along
the high road . . . the soldiers were obliged to strip the empty farms which they passed
of their floors, their shutters and their very beams . . . In every place occupied by the
enemy the picture was one and the same . . . The site of every Prussian encampment
was strewn with the remains of chests, cupboards and other items of furniture that had
been seized to augment the bivouac fires . . . What was astonishing in the extreme,
meanwhile, is that the chateaux, the farms and the houses of the émigrés were not
spared in the slightest.89
Meanwhile, the fall of Longwy and Verdun caused much alarm. ‘We do not understand’,
wrote Denis Bellot, ‘how free men could have abandoned fortifications capable of sustaining
a siege of several months without dying of shame.’90 Not surprisingly, the ramifications were
considerable. At the front, if Lafayette was replaced by Dumouriez, the much smaller Army
of the Centre was handed to the highly experienced François de Kellermann. Meanwhile,
in Paris, the streets reverberated with a mixture of fear and panic, while Danton ordered
every house in the city to be searched for suspects and caches of arms, the net result being
the arrest of 3,000 people deemed, for whatever reason, to be hostile to the Revolution.
Yet this produced another problem. In brief, Paris’ gaols were now crammed with prison-
ers, and the fear began to grow that they might break out and take over the city. With the
situation further inflamed by wild rhetoric on the part of Danton and his associate, the
still more demagogic Jean-Pierre Marat, groups of sans culottes and other elements began
to take the law into their own hands, the result being the infamous ‘September Massacres’.
Breaking into the city’s many jails, then, crowds set up makeshift tribunals and proceeded
to try the unfortunate men and women they found within the walls. In fairness, perhaps
half of the cases resulted in acquittal, but, for anything up to 1,400, most of them common
criminals who had no connection with sedition of any sort, the result was execution, often
in the most brutal of circumstances. ‘Those days’, wrote Paul Thiébault, ‘were the most
hideous in the Revolution, and made an indescribable impression on me, exceeding my
utmost fears. I was disgusted, humiliated, annihilated.’91
Thiébault was anything but alone in this reaction, but the slaughter did nothing to
check progress towards the establishment of the new assembly, the National Convention.
Thus, based on a much wider suffrage than had been the case under the Constitution of
1791 (though still nothing even approaching universal manhood suffrage) but, at the same
time, an indirect voting system that, as before, protected the interests of property, the polls
went ahead over the period 27 August–2 September. At but 20 per cent, turnout was low,
but the 749 deputies had no sooner met on 21 September than they proclaimed Louis XVI
to be overthrown and, by extension, France to be a Republic.92 To quote La Vallette:
The shedding of so much blood did not appease the men of September. They well
understood that the murder of 1200 persons would spread panic and anger through-
out . . . the whole of Europe, [and that] therefore it was necessary to win at any
price . . . In less than fifteen days nearly 60,000 men left Paris for the army.93
However, whether these men constituted much of a reinforcement is another matter,

their arrival at such bases as Chalons and Valenciennes being accompanied by serious
disturbances as well as a number of panics in which hundreds of men scattered into the
countryside screaming that they had been betrayed.94 Nor is it even clear that the sans
culottes were wholly enthusiastic. For an interesting description of the departure of one
contingent, we can turn to the memoirs of a gunner named Louis Bricard:
Having received our orders, we set off via the Rue Saint Martin accompanied by a
large crowd of women in floods of tears at the departure of their husbands or lovers.
However, once we reached the Barrière Neuve de Saint Martin, everyone had to go
their separate ways: whilst the women made their way back into the city with tears
in their eyes, we gunners whipped up our horses. Some of the most foolish of us even
began to strike up patriotic songs.95
Meanwhile, notwithstanding secret efforts on the part of Dumouriez to negotiate a conven-

tion that would take the Prussians out of the war – not the least of the Brissotins’ many
miscalculations when they went to war against Austria was that Frederick William II would
actually join them in this endeavour rather than fighting on the other side – the war went
on, though both sides were having to battle appalling weather conditions as much as they
were each other.96 To quote Paul Thiébault:
Say what anyone will about the mud of Champagne, it is hard to form an idea of what
it was that autumn. The open country was quite impracticable; the roads, washed up by
continual rain and broken up by the movement of so many armies, were covered by five
or six inches of chalky slush in which I marched whole hours without seeing my feet.97
Yet, thanks to Valmy, the more politically conscious of the Volunteers remained in good
heart, the feelings of such men probably being summed up by one Soulbaut, the son of a
peasant from the village of Pionsat near Riom; as he wrote to his father in a letter dated 29
October 1792:
I have joined the volunteers in Paris and am ready to leave to fight the enemies of the
Fatherland. I was born French, and with all the other French, I want to share in the
danger and glory alike . . . We are all, my comrades and I, of one and the same senti-
ment. In a word, I am voluntarily consecrating myself in good faith and with all my
heart to the defence of the Fatherland. ‘Live free or die!’ That is my motto.98
On the home front, too, youthful enthusiasm was blooming. A good example of this, perhaps,
is constituted by that of Boulart. In 1791 a fourteen-year-old schoolboy studying in a Church-
run college at Reims, his studies were abruptly terminated when the college was shut in the
autumn of that year. With war looming, the obvious thing to do seemed to be to consider
a military career, but Boulart’s parents were fearful for his safety and therefore decided to
have him study medicine preparatory to taking up the relatively safe position of surgeon.
This plan, however, was frustrated, and, to his evident delight, Boulart ended up as a second-
lieutenant in the artillery instead, albeit not until the following year. Thus:
By the end of 1792 the defeat of the Prussians at Valmy . . . [and] the decision of the
foreign powers to take up arms in favour of the émigrés . . . had inflamed the enthu-
siasm of the nation to the point of delirium. There was but one cry: ‘To arms!’ Such
enthusiasm being easily communicated, my father realised that I shared in it, and
decided that it was time to fix on a course of action. I was already well enough educated
to present myself for the artillery entrance examinations that were due to be held in five
months’ time . . . but my father did not hesitate for a moment: although it must have
been very difficult for him to fund, very soon he had found a place for me at a school
that specialised in candidates for the artillery examinations, the first days of December
therefore seeing me installed in the Desmarets Institute at Chalons. Having till just 1
May 1793 to complete my instruction . . . for the next five months I threw myself into
my studies with such ardour that I was putting in fifteen hours a day.99
In short, all looked set fair for an offensive, and on 6 November Dumouriez duly attacked the
army of Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen-Gotha just west of Mons at the village of Jemappes.
With scarcely 14,000 men to their name, the Austrians were badly strung out, while they
were also heavily outnumbered, Dumouriez having some 36,000 men and 100 guns. Yet the
battle was not the foregone conclusion that the raw data suggests, and that despite the fact
that for the first time the French were making use of the columnar tactics associated with
Guibert that have always been seen as a key part of their success. For one thing, the defend-
ers were heavily entrenched, the result being that the French artillery could not do its job
effectively. To quote Augustin Belliard, an officer of the old army who was serving as an aide
de camp: ‘Our cannon – indeed, even the two sixteen-pounder guns stationed on the right of
the advanced guard – did not have the slightest effect, whereas the enemy shot caused many
casualties.’100 For a brief account, we can do no better than turn to Etienne Macdonald:
The army advanced upon the enemy and opened the attack with plenty of determina-
tion . . . However, our lines began to reel and even to fall back . . . General d’Harville,
who was to support our right and turn the enemy’s left, did not advance, notwithstand-
ing repeated orders to him to hasten his march. Our left did not advance: the general
[i.e. Dumouriez] went to discover the reason, and recognised the difficulty of forcing the
Austrians right. Our advanced guard . . . had just been repulsed; a second charge produced
no better result . . . Dumouriez left me with the Duke of Chartres [i.e. the future Louis-
Phillippe], who desired me to bring him a regiment of dragoons left in reserve. Whilst this
regiment was coming up, we saw Dumouriez . . . rush forward at the head of the advanced
guard . . . This rapid and decisive attack . . . appeared to decide the enemy to retreat.101
For many observers, the key lesson of Jemappes was not the fact that Dumouriez’s troops
had had to fight desperately hard to vanquish an army less than half their size, but rather
that victory had been obtained through the use of the column. That such a conclusion was
seized upon was rather unfortunate. In reality, the massed ranks of French infantry had suf-
fered grievously at the hands of Austrian artillery, and it is very doubtful that Dumouriez
would have won the day had he not outnumbered the unfortunate Saxe-Teschen by over
two to one. In the minds of the ideologues of the Revolution, however, the picture that
presented itself was very different. The French, they agreed, were not British, Germans,
Dutchmen or Spaniards and, as such, when employed in the old way, had never been
able to compete with the armies of the other powers on equal terms (a fiction useful not
least because it explained away the repeated defeats of the War of the Spanish Succession
and the Seven Years War). What the French did have, however, was élan, a word that is
impossible to translate, but combines concepts such as dash, daring and bravura. It had,
of course, been precisely this quality that had rendered useless every attempt to make
them fight their enemies in the same style as said enemies, but this problem was now
exacerbated as Frenchmen were free citizens, men who thought for themselves and were
less amenable than ever to the bullying of their superiors, men, indeed, who did not even
recognise the concept of superiors. From this, of course, it followed that the proponents
of l’ordre profonde were more right than ever and, not just that, but that the bayonet was
the logical weapon of choice for all French soldiers – that the essence of tactics, indeed,
was for them simply to hurl themselves upon the enemy with the utmost ferocity. This
was, of course, but to make necessity a virtue – even by the time of Valmy, large parts of
the French forces could barely load and fire their muskets, let alone manoeuvre in line –
but such an article of faith did the idea become that many commentators, including, not
least, the current Minister of War, Joseph Servan, began to argue that the troops should be
issued with pikes rather than muskets, thereby obviating any chance that they would stop
to open fire (an action that was generally – and, indeed, correctly – agreed as being likely
to put an end to all forward movement).102
So convinced were Servan and his followers of this logic that, in October 1792, 500,000
pikes were ordered for the use of the French forces, and, particularly on less well-provided
fronts such as the frontier with Spain, in the campaigns of 1793–4 there were even cases
were entire battalions went into action carrying such weapons.103 In the use of the column,
at least, there was some sense in military terms: forgetting the issue of training, for example,
it made the simple cheer a far more effective weapon than might otherwise have been the
case, and also allowed each battalion’s drummers to be concentrated in the middle of the
unit, thereby greatly multiplying the sound which they produced and making it easier to
beat out the frightening rhythm know as the pas de charge Nor, meanwhile, could anyone
argue with the fact that battalions deployed in column could move much faster than troops
deployed in line: not only was it much easier for them to keep their formation, but they no
longer had to be obsessed with the need to keep their alignment with the units on either
side. And, last but not least, even a single infantry battalion was an imposing sight when
advancing in column, whilst this effect was reinforced by the fact that the use of columns
allowed far more troops to be concentrated in a small area than had been the case before.
All this being the case it seemed that the French had discovered the key to invincibility
on the battlefield, and this in turn contributed to the mood of recklessness that very soon
had expanded the conflict beyond all reckoning. Yet if the renewed advance into Belgium
proved anything, it was that the cult of the column, let alone the cult of the arme blanche,
was dangerously flawed. To quote Lynn, indeed, ‘There is a great deal of truth to the asser-
tion that, to be effective, tactics must correspond to the value and temperament of the
soldiers who employ them, but the cult of the bayonet erred in its extremes.’104
Jemappes was not much of a victory, but it was enough.105 Their defensive cordon
penetrated, the Austrians fell back to the east, leaving Dumouriez free to overrun the whole
of Belgium, while Montesquieu marched into the Piedmontese possessions of Savoy and
Nice, and the Count of Custine not only occupied the left bank of the Rhine but struck
east as far as Frankfurt.106 Back in Paris, meanwhile, the Brissotins, and, indeed, public
opinion in general, applauded wildly and began to dream of the idea of attaining France’s
‘natural frontiers’ – specifically, the Rhine, the Alps and the long-since attained Pyrenees –
this being something made all the more attractive given that control of Belgium, in
particular, had been a goal of French foreign policy since the days of Louis XIV. Naked
annexationism was not in tune with the ostensible spirit of events in France since the
Revolution, however, and thus it was that pamphleteers, journalists, deputies and political
leaders alike began to cast about for the fig leaf that was eventually given concrete form in
the so-called ‘Edict of Fraternity’ of 19 November 1792 whereby, despite a variety of dis-
senting voices, including, not least, that of Maximilian Robespierre, the infant Republic
promised to give aid and assistance to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty, whilst the
Brissotin régime’s determination to defend the Revolution was reinforced by the trial and,
at length, execution of the hapless Louis XVI. For good measure, navigation of the River
Scheldt – a right hitherto reserved to the United Provinces – was declared open to all com-
ers, thereby greatly jeopardising Britain’s security by raising the possibility that a French
fleet might base itself at Antwerp (a frightening possibility as Antwerp was for meteore-
ological reasons a much better base from which to operate against Britain than, say, Brest or
La Rochelle). From these decisions, as we shall see, further wars could not but come, but for
those wars the Republic was but ill-prepared: the forces available to the French generals had
been much increased in number certainly, but it is all too clear that there were serious issues
with their military value; that the enthusiasm on which the mobilisation of 1791–2 was
supposedly based in reality took a very poor second place to poverty, chicanery and admin-
istrative pressure; and, finally, that the new tactics on which the Brissotins, in particular,
were relying for victory were at best seriously flawed. In short, 1793 promised to be a tur-
bulent year and one from which Brissot and his fellows were unlikely to emerge unscathed.
Notes
1 C. Rousset (ed.), Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, Duke of Tarentum (London, 1892), I, p. 137.
Someone else who, though at the battle, clearly did not think the story worth telling was Paul
Thiébault, all that he says being that it ‘taught the coalition what sort of men they had to deal
with’. A. Butler (ed.), The Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, late Lieutenant-General in the French Army
(London, 1896), I, p. 135.
2 By far the best account of the battle of Valmy in English is A. Coox, ‘Valmy’, Military Affairs, 12,
No. 4 (Winter, 1948), pp. 193–205. See also T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars,
1787–1802 (London, 1996), pp. 73–80.
3 For an analysis of these accounts, see E. Krimmer, ‘A portrait of war, a grammar of peace:
Goethe, Laukhard and the campaign of 1792’, German Life and Letters, 61, No. 1 (January, 2008),
pp. 46–60.
4 Cit. J. Clarette (ed.), From Valmy to Waterloo: Extracts from the Diary of Captain Charles François,
a Soldier of the Revolution and the Empire (London, 1906), pp. 29–30. Commander of the Army of
the Centre (a subsidiary force which had just been attached to Dumouriez’s Army of the North),
Kellermann was far more the victor of Valmy than Dumouriez was.
5 P.R. Girault, Mes campagnes sous la Révolution et l’Empire, ed. C. Girault (Paris, 1983), p. 17. The
‘General Equality’ mentioned by Girault was the future King Louis Philippe of France, or, as he
styled himself at this point, ‘Philippe Egalité’: at Valmy he commanded a brigade of cavalry.
6 Ibid., pp. 20–1.
7 D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston,
2007), p. 134.
9 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Count Roger de Damas, p. 178.
10 At Kolin, Frederick the Great lost 10,000 dead and wounded out of the 32,000 he had on the
field, while, at Zorndorf, around 45 per cent of the 88,000 combatants became casualties. Duffy,
Army of Frederick the Great, pp. 171–3, 182–3.
11 G. Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe (London, 1982), p. 81.
12 J. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France,
1791–94 (Urbana, IL, 1984), p. 179.
13 P.G. Griffith, The Art of Warfare of Revolutionary France, 1789–1802 (London, 1998), p. 183. The
problem faced by the French was not just related to the quality of their troops. In addition, there
was also the question of their position. Thus, Dumouriez’s forces were deployed in depth with one
portion of the army holding the hill known as Mont Yron, and and the other held much further
back on a second area of high ground. In effect, this meant that the French had only 36,000
troops to face Brunswick’s 30,000 Prussians, these being odds that were obviously much less
favourable to the Revolutionary cause than those which are usually quoted. In theory, of course,
Dumouriez could have sent reinforcements to Mont Yron, but this would have required his raw
troops to carry out complicated manoeuvres under fire and, still worse, in the face of an enemy
that possessed a considerable superiority in cavalry. In short, Dumouriez had exposed himself to
defeat in detail, and was extremely fortunate that Brunswick did not make better use of the situ-
ation. However, all this said, it is worth pointing out that a much more serious attack conducted
by some of the Austrian troops attached to Brunswick’s army near the village of Mauffrecourt in
an attempt to turn Dumouriez’s right flank was beaten back without too much difficulty. M. Vinet
(ed.), Mémoires du Comte Belliard, lieutenant-général, pair de France, écrits par lui-même (Paris,
1842), I, pp. 75–6.
14 For all this, see Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, p. 80.
15 E. Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World from Marathon to Waterloo (London, 1883),
p. 316.
16 E.g. G. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (London, 1977), p. 114.
17 S. Scott, ‘The regeneration of the line army in the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History,
42, No. 3 (September, 1970), pp. 311–19.
19 Ibid., pp. 84–94. R. Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester,
2002), pp. 75–81. The panic displayed by the National Assembly on this occasion was closely
linked with the damning images that characterised the soldiers of the eighteenth century. To
quote Alan Forrest, ‘Soldiers were depicted as gratuitously violent and permanently drunk, a
source of danger to such decent people as they might meet and of nuisance to the local communi-
ties on which they were imposed . . . like beggars and vagabonds, a section of society that needed
to be closely supervised and strictly policed.’ A. Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham,
NC, 1990), p. 31.
20 Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, pp. 105–6. For the assault on the officer
corps on the part of the radicals, see Blaufarb, French Army, pp. 85–91.
21 H.L. Dillon, Recollections of the Revolution and Empire, ed. W. Geer (London, 1921), pp. 122–3.
22 Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, p. 106.
23 Corvisier, ‘La place de l’armée dans la Révolution Française’, p. 12.
24 Scott, ‘Regeneration of the line army in the French Revolution’, p. 320; Blaufarb, French Army,
pp. 91–3.
26 Brief biographies of Bernadotte, Macdonald, Moncey, Ney and Sérurier, may be found in
Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, pp. 18–40, 236–53, 296–310, 358–80 and 441–54. Only slightly
behind these men was Napoleon’s future brother-in-law, Joachim Murat: still a corporal in April
1792, he did not become an officer until October. Ibid., p. 336. It is worth pointing out, perhaps,
that the decision to stay was by no means necessarily dictated by loyalty to the Revolution as
such. According to Macdonald, for example, if he stayed it was for reasons that were entirely
personal. Thus: ‘There had been considerable emigration among the officers of the army, and
particularly among those of my regiment. Efforts were made to induce me to go, too, but I was
married, and very much attached to my wife, who was near her confinement . . . Besides I care
nothing about politics.’ Rousset, Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, I, p. 136. Writing in the
France of Charles X as he was, the ageing commander could be argued to have had good reason
to write as he did, yet one suspects that there were plenty of other officers who found themselves
in a similar situation.
27 Blaufarb, French Army, pp. 93–6.
28 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 44.
29 Scott, ‘The regeneration of the line army in the French Revolution’, pp. 322–3.
30 J. Gallagher, Napoleon’s Enfant Terrible: General Dominique Vandamme (Norman, Oklahoma,
2008), pp. 7–8.
31 Girault, Mes campagnes, pp. 13–14; A. Dufourcq (ed.), Mémoires du Général Desvernois, 1789–1815
(Paris, n.d.), pp. 33–4; Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, p. 256. Still another man who enlisted in
the army at this time, namely Claude Guyot, a cavalryman who ended up commanding the heavy
cavalry division of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, does not offer even so much of an explanation
as this. See J.H. de Font-Réaulx (ed.), Général Comte Guyot: carnets de campagnes, 1792–1815
(Paris, 1999), p. 17.
32 Corvisier, ‘La place de l’armée dans la Révolution Française’, p. 12. A further point to note here
is that there was no decline in the rate of desertion and that in some instances, notably that of
the cavalry, it actually increased. However, this point must needs be qualified by pointing out
that desertion amongst the rank and file was particularly strong among the many Swiss and
German soldiers in the French army. Viewed by political activists and, increasingly, their fellow
soldiers, as potential enemies of the Revolution, even confirmed enemies of the Revolution, for
their own safety as much as anything they began to head for the frontiers, in some cases marching
away as entire units. Scott, ‘The regeneration of the line army in the French Revolution’, p. 319;
Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, pp. 111–14.
33 Scott, ‘The regeneration of the line army in the French Revolution’, p. 322.
34 Ibid, pp. 324–5.
35 Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 59. See also Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the
French Revolution, p. 184.
37 For an introduction to the Revolution’s use of song as a means of political education, see
F. Moureau, ‘Stratégie chansonnière de la Révolution Française’, The French Review, 62, No. 6
(May, 1989), pp. 967–74. According to Moureau, 325 battle hymns of various sorts were published
in 1792 alone.
38 Other traditional marching songs that remained popular with the army included Au pres de ma
blonde and Marlbruck s’en va-t-en guerre. As for the Chanson de l’oignon, it may be described as
a hymn to the realities of soldiering and is completely apolitical in its sentiments. Thus: ‘I like
onions fried in oil; I like onions fried in oil; I like onions fried in oil; I like onions because they
are good! Let’s march, comrade! Let’s march, comrade! Let’s march, let’s march, let’s march! Let’s
march, comrade! Let’s march, comrade! Let’s march, let’s march, let’s march!’ Lyrics accessed at
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_l%27oignon> 10 June 2017.
39 With regard to overt fervour for the Revolution, Scott gives numerous examples of regular units
engaging in such actions as petitioning against suggestions that their pay should be increased,
denoting part of their pay to a variety of patriotic causes and marching into one town or another
singing specifically Revolutionary anthems. Scott, Response of the Royal Army to the French
Revolution, pp. 111–14. However, how far such statements of political loyalty and commitment
to the cause can be taken at face value must be open to challenge: we simply do not know how
they were got up or how far they were accepted with anything other than grudging acquiescence.
40 Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, p. 85.
41 For the Parisian origins of the National Guard, see M. Alpaugh, ‘A self-defining “bourgeoisie” in
the early days of the French Revolution; the milice bourgeoise, the Bastille days of 1789 and their
aftermath’, Journal of Social History, 47, No. 3 (Spring, 2014), pp. 696–720; D.L. Clifford, ‘The
National Guard and the Parisian community, 1789–1790’, French Historical Studies, 16, No. 4
(Fall, 1990), pp. 849–78.
42 Butler, Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, p. 75. For the general development of the National Guard,
meanwhile, see F. Devenne, ‘La Garde Nationale: création et évolution, 1789–aout 1792’ in
Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, No. 283 (January 1991), pp. 49–66.
43 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 31
44 Setting aside Saint-Just, other future leaders who enlisted in the National Guard directly from
the civilian world included Jean-Baptiste Bessières, who had initially studied medicine in Cahors
before being forced by economic difficulties to return home without any qualification, the dissolute
Parisian typesetter Guillaume Brune, and Edouard Mortier, the son of a wealthy Cateau-Cambrésis
cloth merchant who had sat in the Estates General. Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, pp. 62, 80, 312.
45 Ibid., pp. 44, 94. To men serving in the army can be added a number of others who had served
in the army in the past as either officers or members of the rank and file, including Jean-Baptiste
Jourdan and the far less well-known Dominique de Pérignon. Ibid., p. 158.
46 Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 60.
47 Ibid., p. 60.
48 Ibid., pp. 66–7. Politically highly charged, the subject of the Volunteers of 1791 is a minefield, to
say the least. For an interesting discussion of the historiography, see T. Hippler, ‘Volunteers of the
French Revolutionary Wars: myths and interpretations’ in S. Levsen and C.G. Krüger (eds.), War
Volunteering in Modern Times: From the French Revolution to the Second World War (Houndmills,
2010), pp. 23–39.
49 Ellis, Armies in Revolution, p. 85; Forrest, Soldiers of the Revolution, p. 64.
50 J.P. Bertaud, La révolution armée: les soldats-citoyens et la Révolution Française (Paris, 1979), p. 68;
Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, p. 73.
51 P. de Bourgoing (ed.), Souvenirs militaires du Général Comte de Lorencez (Paris, 1902), p. 2. The
Bernadotte referred to is the future marshal and king of Sweden.
52 A. de Maricourt (ed.), Mémoires du Général Noguès (1777–1853) sur les guerres de l’Empire (Paris,
1922), p. 45; Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, p. 192.
53 Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, p. 480.
54 For Joliclerc, see E. Jolicler (ed.), Joliclerc, volontaire aux armées de la Révolution: ses lettres,
1793–1796 (Paris, 1905), whilst Belot may be investigated via the collection of letters pub-
lished in L. Bonneville de Marsangy, Journal d’un voluntaire de 1791 (Paris, 1888). As for,
Lannes, Soult, Perrin (better known as Victor), Masséna and Oudinot, they are all discussed in
the appropriate chapters of Chandler, Marshals of Napoleon. Meanwhile, Soult’s account of his
enlistment is as follows: ‘At the time that the battalions of the National Guard designated for
service in the field were formed, my regiment was in garrison at Schelestad in Alsace. The first
such units to be formed in the area was the First Haut-Rhin. This unit was strong in number
and animated by an excellent spirit, but it possessed very few officers who were capable of doing
their jobs: like the rank and file, none of them had seen any service, and they in consequence
knew nothing of military affairs. The colonel . . . had been a captain in the Swiss Diesbach
regiment and very much wanted to put his soldiers on the same footing as those of the line, but
he had no-one who could second him. At length someone told him of me, and he asked . . . to
have me transferred to his battalion . . . with the rank of sub-lieutenant. This was something of
an irregularity as the volunteers had the right to appoint their own officers, but the grenadier
company saved the day by asking for me to be placed at their head.’ S.A. Soult (ed.), Mémoires
du Maréchal-Général Soult, Duc de Dalmatie (Paris, 1854), I, pp. 4–5.
55 R.W. Phipps, The Armies of the First French Republic and the Rise of the Marshals of Napoleon I
(Oxford, 1926), I, p. 16.
56 Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 63.
57 Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, I, pp. 77–8.
58 Cit. M.G. Cottreau, ‘Lettre de Marescot, 1792’ in Carnets de la Sabretache, 21 (1913), pp. 308–9.
59 Anon., ‘Relation of the assassination of M. Theobald Dillon, maréchal de camp, at Lille on the
29th of April 1792’, in Anon. (ed.), A Political State of Europe for the Year MDCCXCII containing
an Authentic and Impartial Narrative of Every Military Operation of the Present Belligerent Powers and
a Correct Copy of Every State Paper, Declaration, Manifesto, etc., That Has Been and May Be Issued
during the Current War upon the Continent (London, 1792), I, pp. 51–3.
60 Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, p. 221.
61 Though hit hard by the better conditions available in the Volunteers, recruitment to the regular
army continued throughout: in April 1793, for example, Jean Curély, the 18-year-old illiterate
son of a poor peasant from Lorraine was found a place in a cavalry regiment in which a connec-
tion of the family had become an officer. See C. Thoumas (ed.), Le Général Curély: itineraire d’un
cavalier léger de la Grande Armée, 1793–1815 (Paris, 1887), pp. 97–8
62 Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 65; J.P. Bertaud, ‘The Volunteers of 1792’, in A. Forrest
and P. Jones (eds.), Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution
(Manchester, 1991), pp. 168–78.
63 J. Vivien, Souvenirs de ma vie militaire, ed. E. Martin (Paris, 1907), pp. 6–7.
64 J.P. Dellard, Mémoires militaires du Général Baron Dellard sur les guerres de la République et de
l’Empire (Paris, n.d.), p. 3.
65 Bertaud, La révolution armée, pp. 82–3.
66 Cit. Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, p. 52. One young man who was certainly recruited by force
was the future general, Etienne Hulot: in 1792 a student at Reims, he says that he was dispatched
to the army as a part of a requisition. J.L. Hulot, Souvenirs militaires du Baron Hulot (Jacques-
Louis), général d’artilleries, 1773–1843 (Paris, 1886), p. 8.
67 E. Picard and V. Paulier (eds.), Mémoires et journaux du Général Decaen (Paris, 1910), I, p. 4.
68 Bonneville de Marsangy, Journal d’un voluntaire de 1791, p. 10.
69 L. Larchey, Journal du marche du Sergent Fricassé, 1792–1802 (Paris, 1882), p. 5.
70 Maricourt, Mémoires du Général Noguès, pp. 52–60.
71 At least in theory, the Légion des Allobroges mentioned below, for example, were arrayed in
distinctive dark-green uniform that bore no resemblance to anything worn by any other unit
of the French army. P. Haythornthwaite, Uniforms of the French Revolutionary Wars (Poole,
1981), p. 99.
72 Bertaud, Révolution armée, pp. 85–8.The formation of the Allobrogian Legion – the name
commemorated the tribe that lived in the Savoy area at the time of Caesar’s conquest of
Gaul – can be dated to 31 July 1792 when Doppet’s proposal to form such a unit was brought
before the National Assembly. Having obtained the latter body’s sanction, Doppet then par-
ticipated in the storm of the Tuileries at the head of the handful of men he had managed to
get together thus far and saved the lives of a number of Swiss Guards who he proceeded to
incorporate into his command. See F. Doppet, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Doppet
(Carouge, 1797), pp. 50–2. According to the Legion’s commander, in the course of the autumn
‘whole platoons of volunteers arrived from Geneva every day’, but this is so much braggadoc-
chio. ‘In the event’, writes Blanning, ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Doppet, as he had now become, was
able to muster just one company to help Montesquiou’s army invade Savoy’. Blanning, French
Revolutionary Wars, p. 89.
73 H. de la Bassetierre, ‘La Légion Germanique, 1792–93’, Carnets de la Sabretache, II (1894),
pp. 367–81. It is somehow no surprise to find that amongst the recruits gleaned by this force
was the serial deserter, Pierre Augereau. Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, p. 4.
74 A.M. Chamans, The Adventurous Life of Count Lavallette by Himself, ed. L. Aldersey White
(London, 1936), I, pp. 67–8.
75 Cit. Anon. (ed), ‘Le journal du Capitaine Sibelet’, Carnets de la Sabretache, II, (1894), pp. 463–4.
The term chasseur à cheval is often mistranslated as ‘mounted rifleman’. It rather means ‘light
cavalryman’.
76 Butler, Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, I, p. 134.
77 Bonneville de Marsangy, Journal d’un voluntaire de 1791, p. 23
78 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 44; Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 221–2. It was not, of course,
just the Volunteers who were put through this programme but also the troops of the regular army.
79 Schama, Citizens, pp. 602–4. The fédérés came to acquire a particularly evil reputation. Admittedly
a hostile witness, Thiébault describes them as ‘scoundrels who distinguished themselves only by
want of discipline, pillaging and cowardice’. Butler, Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, I, p. 132.
80 So important were the assignats to the history of the Revolution that some explanation is needed
of their origins and function. In brief, the story is as follows. In 1789 the National Assembly had
taken two decisions which can only be described as being absurdly contradictory. Thus, on the
one hand, it effectively imposed a moratorium on the levying of taxation, and, on the other,
it committed itself to honouring the debts of the Bourbon state. To deal with this situation, it
was proposed that creditors should be satisfied with bonds – the self-same assignats – redeemable
against the expropriated lands of the Catholic Church. In itself, this was not a bad scheme, but,
still Minister of Finance at this point, Necker badly underestimated the size of the deficit it would
need to cover, and the National Assembly responded, not by cutting expenditure, as he wanted,
but issuing more bonds whilst at the same time ordering that they should be allowed to circulate
as legal tender. The result was catastrophe. Virtually from the moment of their first issue, the
value of the assignats collapsed – by August 1790 they had lost 20 per cent of their value – while,
for reasons that need not concern us here, coin disappeared from circulation, this in turn having
a serious impact on the job market and also fuelling inflation in that shopkeepers forced to accept
payment in assignats raised their prices in a desperate attempt to recoup the money they were
otherwise certain to lose. Still worse, unwilling to be paid in depreciating paper money, peasants
put less of their produce on the market, thereby at one and the same time giving an added twist
to the inflationary spiral and depressing the domestic consumption of manufactures. To none of
this, however, did the National Assembly have any answer other than saturating the market for
land with the sale of more and more of the biens nationaux and issuing still more paper money.
In part motivated by a desire for financial stability, then, in the short term, the Revolution had
precisely the opposite effect. For all this, see Aftalion, French Revolution, pp. 68–101 passim.
81 Schama, Citizens, p. 609.
82 See, for example, H.A. Barton, ‘The origins of the Brunswick manifesto’, French Historical Studies,
5, No. 2 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 146–69.
83 See E. Cross, ‘The myth of the foreign enemy: the Brunswick manifesto and the radicalization of
the French Revolution’, French History, 25, No. 2 (June, 2011), pp. 188–213.
84 Chamans, Adventurous Life of Count Lavallette, I, p. 47.
85 Ibid., p. 48.
86 Ibid., p. 52. For an alternative account, see H. Morse Stephens, ‘M. de Durler’s account of
the defence of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792’, English Historical Review, 2, No. 6 (April,
1882), pp. 350–7. Amongst the eye-witnesses to the fighting was none other than Napoleon
Bonaparte: in Paris by chance, he was deeply horrified by what he saw and carried the image
with him right up till his downfall in 1814. For a graphic account by a modern historian,
meanwhile, see Schama, Citizens, pp. 612–18.
87 For the aftermath of the journée of 10 August, see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution,
pp. 189–91.
89 Cit. Anon., ‘La première invasion prussienne (1792)’, Carnets de la Sabretache, 4 (1896),
pp. 618–19. Given the miseries endured by the Prussian army in its advance, the general want of
discipline is all too understandable. ‘September arrived’, wrote Tercier, ‘and, with it, torrential
rain that lasted for six full weeks. The roads became completely impracticable and foodstuffs
extremely scarce. Dysentery seized hold of the army on account of the quantity of unripe grapes
eaten by the soldiers, and the Prussians in consequence lost a great many men.’ C. de la Chanonie
(ed.), Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Tercier (Paris, 1891), p. 59.
90 Bonneville de Marsangy, Journal d’un voluntaire de 1791, p. 36.
91 Butler, Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, I, p. 128. For a detailed (and highly critical) discussion of the
September massacres, see Schama, Citizens, pp. 627–39.
93 Chamans, Adventurous Life of Count Lavallette, I, p. 61.
94 E.g. Hulot, Souvenirs militaires, p. 11; Vinet, Mémoires du Comte Belliard, I, p. 68.
95 A. Bricard and E. Bricard (eds.), Journal du cannonier Bricard, 1792–1802 (Paris, 1891), p. 3.
96 Dumouriez’s attempts to negotiate with Brunswick are discussed in Blanning, French Revolutionary
Wars, p. 82.
97 Butler, Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, I, pp. 136–7.
98 Cit. E. Picard (ed.), Au service de la nation: lettres des voluntaires, 1792–1798 (Paris, 1914), pp. 1–2.
99 J.F. Boulart, Mémoires militaires du Général Boulart sur les guerres de la République et l’Empire (Paris,
n.d.), pp. 1–4.
100 Vinet, Mémoires du Comte Belliard, I, p. 86.
101 Rousset, Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, pp. 140–1.
102 Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 187–91.
103 J. Lynn, ‘French opinion and the military resurrection of the pike, 1792–1794’, Military Affairs,
41, No. 1 (February, 1977), pp. 1–7.
104 Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, p. 193.
105 Amongst Dumouriez’s troops, certainly, there was much excitement. As a soldier named Huret of
the First Battalion of Volunteers of Loiret wrote to his cousin on 16 October 1792, ‘However long
I make it, this letter would never be sufficient to detail all the heroic feats that took place in the
battle. The enemy ended up by abandoning Mons by means of a retreat, or rather flight, that was
disorderly in the extreme. The number of their slain is so considerable that we still don’t know
how many it amounts to: although . . . the inhabitants have been occupied in burying them ever
since the battle ended, the fields . . . are still absolutely covered. As for us, we lost between 700
and 800 men.’ Cit. Picard, Au service de la nation, pp. 127–8.
106 The son of a general who had been killed at the battle of Rossbach, Custine was an engaging
figure who was nicknamed by his men ‘Moustaches’ on account of his luxuriant facial hair. Later
one of Napoleon’s greatest marshals, Gouvion Saint-Cyr was one of his aides de camp: ‘General
Custine [was] . . . the first commander to give the French a taste of victory. At the beginning
of the campaign, he had saved the fortress of Landau from a surprise attack by the Prince of
Condé . . . and later there had come, first, the affair at Spire in which he had netted 3,000 pris-
oners, and then the capture of a . . . town as strong and important as that of Mainz . . . All this
had brought him the entire confidence of his troops, whilst his manner of haranguing them, his
friendliness, and his enormous moustaches all contributed not a little to exciting enthusiasm for
his person. I have never seen a general who was so loved. Brave and energetic, on a day of battle
he was to be seen everywhere.’ G. Saint-Cyr, Mémoires sur les campagnes des Armées du Rhin et du
Rhin-et-Moselle de 1792 jusqu’a la paix de Campo Formio (Paris, 1829), I, p. 80.
4 Saving the Revolution
If there is one thing on which all histories of the Revolution are agreed, it is that the year
1793 marked the most dramatic moment in its trajectory. On 21 January, the hapless Louis
XVI was sent to the guillotine, and, within a matter of months, France found herself fight-
ing not just Austria and Prussia, but Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Piedmont, Naples
and, at least in theory, Russia, together with many minor states, whilst at home she was
gripped by both civil war and counter-revolutionary revolt. Far from triumphing over the
soldiers of the ancien régime, her soldiers were tumbled from their conquests in Belgium and
the Rhineland, and her territory once again invaded by foreign armies. With the forces
inherited from the developments of 1791–2 in tatters, it seemed that the Revolution was
doomed, but then the situation was turned around in dramatic fashion. A new set of politi-
cians seized power in Paris and, throwing aside the bounds of doctrine, availed themselves
of the full weight of France’s human and material resources, whilst at the same time proving
utterly merciless in their determination to root out anyone who threatened the stability
of the Republic. To all this, the people responded with good will and enthusiasm, and the
result was that new armies emerged that carried all before them, in part because they were
commanded by new generals freed from the conventions of the eighteenth century, whose
careers owed everything to the Revolution. In the process, meanwhile, France invented
the concept of total war, thereby initiating an entirely new period in military history. It is a
beguiling picture and one which has duly had a long history of beguiling. Yet, whilst it can-
not be said to be entirely without foundation, it is shot through with problems of all sorts,
the object of this chapter being to engage with its various tenets in a rather more sceptical
fashion than has tended to be on view hitherto.
Flawed though the heroic version of the events of 1793 may be, its starting point is sensible
enough. Thus, the new year found France in a situation that was at the very least very frighten-
ing. Here, for example, is the assessment of one of the finest military minds of his generation:
All things considered, given the lack of training of our troops, the inexperience of
our generals and the weakness of our government, the results that had been obtained
from the campaign of 1792 were quite satisfactory, but it was not difficult to see that,
in the campaign that was certain to follow, the coalition would make greater efforts
and, further, that it would be supported by other powers . . . Even the least clairvoyant
of men could easily see the dangers that threatened the Republic, whilst nobody could
understand the folly with which the Convention, far from trying to diminish the num-
ber of its enemies, was seemingly bent on augmenting said number by its successive
provocations. An irrational pride and self-confidence had taken it in its grip, and it had
come to believe that it could topple each and every throne with mere decrees. As for
Saving the Revolution 93
its armies, these were completely ignored, indeed, left in a state of the utmost nudity,
and the precious time afforded by the rigours of the season squandered in horrible
discussions that served only to alienate opinion in France and the outside world alike.1
That the situation in the army was very serious was certainly all too clear. In the first place,
the flood of volunteers having quickly dried up, it could at best hope to maintain its strength,
but even this modest objective was undermined by the conditions being experienced in its
freezing encampments. Let us here cite a letter of Pierre Riel, then commander of a de facto
division of the Army of the Moselle, to his superior, Custine, dated 13 January 1793:
My cavalry are not in a fit state to move: to repeat what I have already told you, their
harness and saddles are in a dreadful condition; the soldiers have no breeches; and I
doubt whether the horses are up to taking the field . . . on account of having spent the
last month out in the snow with their backs covered in ice . . . The rest of the army set
off to attack Triers bare-footed and bare-arsed alike, and it has come back in the same
condition, while I receive nothing from the Minister except promises which do nothing
to clothe them or put shoes on their feet. To order troops who are all but naked to take
the field once again in so rigorous a season would be to run clean counter to humanity
and justice alike . . . Your orders are given with all the weight of the sovereign author-
ity and my response is that of an obedient soldier, but one cannot engage in operations
without the means to do so. Give me those means and I will be ready for anything, but,
if you ask the impossible of me, I will simply tell you that undertaking what you want is
beyond my power . . . and consent to seeing myself replaced by someone who you judge
to be more capable.2
Hardly surprisingly, then, discipline and morale alike were very low. At Ath, for example,
Roch Godart, a sometime corporal in the Orléans infantry regiment who had enlisted in a
Pas-de-Calais volunteer battalion in September 1792 and had immediately been elected to
the position of battalion commander, found himself facing a major mutiny occasioned by
a variety of grievances, including not least his men’s insistence that ‘at the end of the day
they were volunteers and should therefore be treated as such’, not to mention their belief
that ‘as the officers owed their election to their good offices, they should treat them as their
benefactors’.3 Having re-enlisted when his term of service expired, Antoine Noguès was now
a sergeant in garrison in Roussillon, and his memoirs paint a very negative picture of life in
his battalion at this time. Thus, drunkenness was rife and there were frequent fights with
regular soldiers stationed in the area, while Noguès himself confessed to have spent most of
his time out hunting; still worse, when news broke that the Spaniards had declared war, there
were numerous desertions, whilst plenty of other men feigned illness.4 With regard to the
volunteers, in particular, meanwhile, Riel was scathing: ‘I am well aware that there are 240
battalions of volunteers in existence, but I am also aware that there [is] . . . a great amount of
desertion.’5 The consequence was dire: with sickness also rife, by February 1793 the number
of men under arms had fallen to 228,000 men, and even such troops as remained with the
colours were in an appalling state. Philippe Girault, for example, was stationed near Landau:
Constantly exposed to snow and ice . . . for five days, we were left without any food.
I had . . . a few assignats and took the risk of heading off to a nearby village, but the
inhabitants had nothing left: absolutely everything had been pillaged. The only thing
available was a few potatoes, but nobody would take my paper . . . For a little while
we got some provisions from the inhabitants of Bitsche: it so happened that we had
a number of young men from that place, and when their families found out about the
desperate state that we were in, they hastened to bring us some food . . . But eventually
it was all gone, while we still had to eat. That being the case, the battalion commander
took the decision to bring things out into the open. Half the battalion was sent across
the frontier . . . Coming across a village, they put it under contribution. All the food in
the place was loaded into carts and brought back to camp.6
France’s armies, then, were shrinking, but those of her enemies were growing: on 31 January
the Convention had declared war on Britain and Holland in response to their moves to
secure Antwerp from French aggression, whilst, in part thanks to the general horror at
the fate of Louis XVI, relations with most of the other states of Europe began to worsen
very rapidly. In the face of this situation, the state of the army could not be neglected for
any longer. On 24 February, then, the Convention voted for a levy of 300,000 men. In
the first instance, it was agreed, the departments could raise the quotas that were for the
first time assigned to them by obtaining more volunteers, but, if these proved not to be
forthcoming, then they were authorised to make use of compulsion. Volunteers, however,
were few and far between, and the upshot was that France faced the possibility of conscrip-
tion. Understandable as the introduction of this measure was, however, the Brissotins had
continued to display a tendency to place rhetoric ahead of detail in that, other than stat-
ing that those liable for service would include all unmarried men and childless widowers
between the ages of eighteen and forty, they failed to stipulate exactly how the principle of
compulsion should be enforced. This, however, was a disaster. Conscription of any sort had
always been hated, but what happened next was an outrage: left to their own devices, in
many instances – most instances perhaps – the local authorities did everything they could
to ensure that they and their associates were not affected by the new measure, and in some
instances did not even trouble to institute a ballot, but rather simply co-opted those mem-
bers of the community who were particularly vulnerable – ‘village idiots’, for example – or
had in some way or other incurred their wrath. As if this was not enough, meanwhile, the
few men chosen who had money and connections were often able to escape by other means:
currently employed in the household of a local noble as a tutor, for example, a sometime-
seminarian named Antoine Pion de Loche persuaded his master to send one of his servants
in his place.7 The result was uproar. In the area of France to the south of the lower reaches
of the River Loire that was to become known as the Vendée and also much of Brittany,
large parts of the populace, as we shall see, sprang to arms in opposition to the decree,
but there were very few areas of the country where the measure was not greeted with the
utmost resentment. To take just one example, Haute Vienne saw disturbances of one sort
or another take place in Poitiers, Chasseneuil, Dissais, Mezeau, Ligugé, Beruge, Smarves
and Villedieu, and appears only to have met its quote of 990 men by the offer of generous
bounties to anyone who would join up.8
Thus was unleashed a theme that was going to be a recurrent issue in Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France, namely the need of the French state to wage war on much of its own
people. At times – 1794–8 and 1815 – it was to walk away from that struggle; at times –
1806–13 – it was to secure so strong a position that the population were quiescent; and,
finally, at still other times – 1793–4, 1798–1806 and 1814 – it was to be locked in bitter
battles in which it either secured a pyrrhic victory or was actually defeated outright. Waged
in the spring of 1793, the first battles in this long struggle very much went to the people.
Resistance, then, was massive: men faked illness; contracted hasty marriages, sometimes of
the most improbable kind (there were numerous cases of young men marrying widows in
their eighties and even nineties); faked physical handicap or disease; rendered themselves
incapable of firing a musket by amputating their trigger fingers or having their two front
teeth extracted; went into hiding; or simply ran away. Meanwhile, as if these acts of indi-
vidual resistance were not enough, there were also numerous acts of collective resistance in
the form of riots, petitions and protest meetings, the result being that by the summer barely
half the number of recruits required had actually been obtained.9
With desertion continuing at a very high rate, the Republic’s military position was now
desperate. To quote Jean-de-Dieu Soult,
Several months would have to go by before the . . . levy could produce the least result,
and in the meantime the ranks continued to melt away . . . it therefore being neces-
sary to use such few new recruits as reached the army to replace its losses. As for the
enemy, they were not only better trained, better clothed and better organised, but also
far stronger in number.10
In so far as the war against the rapidly growing First Coalition was concerned, on several
fronts the French were in full retreat. Let us begin in the south where the Republic had
declared war on Spain on 7 March. As we have seen, many years of the government of
Charles III pouring the bulk of the defence budget into the navy had produced an army that
was badly understrength, and it was only with considerable difficulty that the Spaniards
mustered an army in Catalonia and pushed across the frontier into Rousillon (for example,
it took them a month just to capture the isolated border fort of Bellegarde). Fortunately
for them, however, the Republican forces in the area were amongst the worst trained and
equipped in the whole of France, and they therefore buckled before the Spanish onslaught,
ponderous though this was: when Antoine Noguès’ volunteer battalion first encountered
the enemy, for example, it discovered that it had been issued with musket balls of the
wrong calibre, immediately fleeing in panic to the accompaniment of cries to the effect that
they had been betrayed.11 Pushing on northwards, then, the Spanish commander, Antonio
Ricardos, vanquished a French force at Mas Deu on 17 May and then moved to blockade
Perpignan. Nor was this surprising, for the French forces in the region were little better than
they were before. To take just one issue, between 1 May and 1 September, no fewer than
9,000 men fled the ranks.12 Here, for example, is the future General Lorençez:
The nucleus of the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees was composed of two or three bat-
talions of the monarchy, together with a number of volunteer battalions that were but
barely organised . . . Indiscipline was at its height . . . Cast down by constant defeat
and undermined by constant licence, the troops had become almost as cowardly as they
were insubordinate, it being by no means rare to come across men breaking their arms
in order to have an excuse not to go into battle . . . If anything, the officers were even
worse than their men, having given up not just any attempt to watch over the latter,
but even the pretence of sleeping in the camp . . . As a result, the most disgusting filth
was the norm on all sides. Exposed both to the excessive heat and the extremes of their
own intemperance, the unfortunate soldiers therefore fell sick by the hundred, only to
die in the hospitals for want of care.13
The Pyrenees, however, were very much a sideshow. Far more important were Belgium
and the Rhineland. Here, moreover, the campaign did not even end in the stalemate that
prevailed in Roussillon. Belgium, as we have seen, had been occupied by Dumouriez, but
his army was far from ready for battle. As Jean Dellard admitted, for example, ‘Still a novice
when it came to the art of victory, our army could offer no other barrier to the forces of
the coalition than its love of liberty and devotion to the Fatherland.’14 This, however, was
not enough, and all the more so as there were plenty of French soldiers who actually were
full of gloom at the idea of the new campaign. Pierre Girardon, for example, was the son of
a landowner from the town of Bar-sur-Aube who was currently serving as an aide de camp
of General François Drouot de Lamarche. Hitherto an ardent Jacobin, 1793 found him a
worried man. As he wrote to his brother on 11 January:
If we have a change of clothes . . . to put on, we consider ourselves to be very happy:

at this moment there are plenty of people in the army who are going about entirely
naked . . . As for making war, we need bread, corn and hay, all of which are lacking.15
A few days later, meanwhile, he had become downright despondent, if at the same time a
little whimsical. To quote a further letter written to his brother on 30 January:
We are facing a terrible war . . . Rivers of blood are certain to flow on both sides . . . The
women, then, are certain to suffer: there won’t be enough young men for all of them to get
married. If they had any wit, they would share each of the ones that are left with a group of
two or three others: perhaps they could have the fellow a week at a time in rotation . . . For
some days I have been very pensive, in a world of my own even, and I am not afraid to say
my head is full of the darkest thoughts . . . I have taken up the cause of the nation and will
continue to sustain it to the end. That said, saying such things is all well and good when
one is knocking back the best of wines in some bar: one has to be able to say it in the face
of the enemy. Without that we are done for: what we did in the last campaign was but the
beginning – we must be prepared for episodes of far greater violence.16
Such doubts, perhaps, come as a surprise, but the fact was that on the ground the reality of
the Republican war effort was all too clear. To make matters worse, the whole basis of the
campaign was open to question. To quote Paul Thiébault:
On 1 February the Convention had declared war against England and Holland and had
ordered the conquest of the latter country. Such an operation . . . could only be carried
out after crossing three great rivers . . . [and] would bring our left to Amsterdam while
our centre and right were . . . seriously threatened and . . . an Anglo-Dutch army of
40,000 men on the march against our left. I have never been able to understand how
the Convention . . . could have dreamt of such an enterprise.17
Himself blinded by ambition nearly as overweening as the overconfidence of the

Convention, Dumouriez duly pushed north into Holland where he quickly took a number
of fortresses such as Breda, whilst another French force, commanded by a Spanish exile
named Francisco de Miranda who eighteen years later was to become the leader of the
revolt of Venezuela against Spanish rule, besieged Maastricht.18 However, left to their
own devices, some 40,000 Austrian troops were soon marching into Belgium under Prince
Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Attacked by overwhelming numbers outside Maastricht on
27 February, Miranda was completely routed. Amongst the men caught up in the desperate
scramble to escape the disaster was Louis Bricard:
We set off in the dead of night to the accompaniment of a howling wind. So bad was
the noise and so intense the darkness that we could neither hear nor see even the men
who marched on either side . . . In the end we managed to get across the Meuse . . . by
means of a bridge of boats . . . From there we marched to Tirlemont amidst scenes of the
utmost disorder: everyone regarded himself as being his own master, and it was a matter
of devil take the hindmost, and the soldiers would no longer obey. As for the countryside
through which we passed, it was pillaged – nay, ravaged – by the army’s many stragglers.19
Dumouriez in consequence had no option but to retreat. There being plenty of French
troops in Belgium, the victor of Valmy could easily have assembled an army big enough
to turn the tide, but instead he compounded his errors by attacking the Austrian army
straight away with such men as he had ready to hand. Fought at Neerwinden on 18 March,
the battle that followed was a disaster. Possessed of a numerical advantage of only perhaps
5,000 men, Dumouriez was thrown back with heavy losses and forced to withdraw in great
disorder in the face of vigorous Austrian counter-attacks, perhaps half his surviving troops
deserting over the next few days. For the French army it was a traumatic experience:
The cannonade did terrible damage: each shot would strike down an entire file in the
first line of units, and then do the same in the one behind; already the ground was
covered with dead and wounded . . . We now saw a large force of cavalry advancing
towards us supported by a large number of pieces of light artillery. At once disorder
took hold of our ranks, and this allowed the horsemen to force their way in amongst the
infantry and set about putting them to the sword. Luckily a number of twelve-pounder
guns had just come up together with some howitzers . . . and these directed such a fire
on the enemy that they were forced to fall back, leaving the battlefield strewn with
a large number of men and horses . . . Never had we seen so murderous a fight: the
houses, the streets and the gardens were all full of dead bodies.20
Beaten again on 23 March at Pellenberg, the French commander negotiated a convention

with the Austrians whereby Belgium would be evacuated without a fight in exchange for a
withdrawal to the French frontier. As if this was not shocking enough for opinion in Paris,
meanwhile, a few days later, a Dumouriez increasingly disillusioned with the political situ-
ation in France, and rightly convinced that his personal ambitions lay in ruins, defected to
the Allies, though not before he had sought to persuade his army to launch a coup.21
Meanwhile, things got no better, for to the west the Austrians were now reinforced by
a large force of English, Hanoverian and Hessian troops commanded by the Duke of York
(he of the famous ‘10,000 men’). Coming into action at Famars on 23 May, these troops
immediately gained a dramatic victory. Amongst the beaten Frenchmen was Jean Dellard:
Very early in the morning we set off . . . With us was a train of artillery consisting
of thirty field guns . . . A quarter of a league from the point of attack, we . . . formed
our eight infantry battalions, each and every one of which had a large number of raw
recruits lacking in experience and enthusiasm alike, into a single mass . . . Dragging the
artillery along with us, we then advanced on the enemy entrenchments with our cav-
alry on our left. The English and the Austrians appeared to have been warned of what
we were up to, and had therefore made ready to receive us. As soon as we were within
range, then, their artillery opened a heavy fire . . . whilst thirty squadrons of cavalry
sallied out and deployed in battle formation. General Chapuis had ridden ahead to
reconnoitre the terrain, but, evidently coming to the conclusion that he had made a
serious error and that the day was lost, he promptly gave himself up to the enemy. At
the sight of what Chapuis was about, meanwhile, General Proteau, a man who was as
imprudent as his superior was cowardly, galloped back towards the column shouting
in the most discouraging manner imaginable, ‘Fall back! About turn!’ These words
producing general uproar, the columns immediately turned about . . . Profiting from
our situation, the enemy’s numerous cavalry immediately attacked us in force. Beset
in front, flank and rear alike, the mere crowds to which we were reduced were soon
suffering the most dreadful damage. As for our troops, they put up not the slightest
resistance . . . In short, confusion and terror reigned supreme.22
Finally, in the Rhineland the French had also been defeated. Isolated deep in the heart of
Germany, Custine had quickly had no option but to give up Frankfurt, but it might have
been expected that he would have stood firm on the Rhine. This, however, proved not to
be the case. Led by Friedrich von Kalckreuth and the Duke of Brunswick, a mixed force of
Austrians, Prussians, Saxons and Hessians crossed the river and besieged Mainz, shutting
up no fewer than 19,000 French troops inside the city.23 The events that followed were dra-
matic in the extreme. As we shall see, in the wake of the city’s occupation by the French,
elections had been held for a national assembly, and, meeting little more than days before
the siege begun, this had voted to seek union with France. The response was chilling: the
city having been surrounded by heavy guns, these last opened fire, not on sectors of the ram-
parts that had been selected as likely spots for a breach, but rather the city itself. As Goethe
(again a witness to events) noted in his journal:
The twenty-eighth of June, in the night: continuance of the bombardment, the fire
being directed against the cathedral; the tower and roof and a number of houses near
it are in flames; after midnight the church of the Jesuits catches fire. We surveyed this
fearful spectacle from the trenches in front of Marienborn: it was . . . a new sight for us,
the rising and falling of the fireballs: we saw them ascending in the form of an arch as
if they would strike the firmament, and when they . . . cracked asunder . . . the flames
that burst forth soon announced that they had done their work.24
Direct attacks on the civilian population as a way of stoking tensions between said civilian
population and the garrisons defending the towns in which they lived were not new –
exactly the same tactic had been employed at Royalist-held Chester in the English Civil
War – but the heightened ideological climate of the moment made it appear that the object
was above all punishment, and for this reason the episode is sometimes portrayed as one
more harbinger of the coming age of total war.25 Be that as it may, despite the most appall-
ing privations, the garrison held out until 23 July, whereupon, in graphic testimony to the
continuing influence and, indeed, prevalence, of older patterns of warfare, the garrison was
allowed to march out with full honours of war and depart to France with the stipulation
that the men concerned should not serve against the Allies for at least a full year (what
interpretation the authorities in Paris employed in respect of this clause in the articles of
surrender will become clear in Chapter 7).26 However, the lengthy resistance put up by the
garrison mattered not a whit, for, long before the city fell, the last French forces were back
on the frontier. Lamentably, however, their retreat had not been precipitate enough for the
countryside to be spared one last experience of French liberation. Amongst the retreating
troops was Pierre Girault:
There was nothing for it but to beat a retreat as quickly as possible . . . That said, as
we did so, we were ordered to strip the countryside of all the livestock we could find.
Horses, cows, sheep, they were one and all driven ahead of the army. At length we
arrived in a village whose inhabitants . . . had rendered us many services. However,
that did not save the whole place from being pillaged. Disliking such proceedings as I
did, I betook myself to a house whose inhabitants had treated me very kindly . . . my
hope being that I might be able to protect them a little. More than that, I tried to keep
back one of their cows . . . but in the end I had to give up and it was taken away . . . the
unfortunate people concerned being left in a state of the greatest affliction.27
With the Vendée now completely out of control, the French Revolution was seemingly fac-
ing the worst crisis in its brief history. Nor was it just a question of military defeat. On the
contrary, a variety of difficulties that had been simmering in the Revolutionary camp for some
time now suddenly boiled over. At the root of the problem was a major split that had devel-
oped between the Brissotins on the one hand and another faction that had emerged in the
Jacobin Club known as the Montagnards (literally ‘men of the mountain’, so-called because
the deputies associated with them sit on the top-most tiers of seating in the Convention).
As has been rightly pointed out, these two groups were not parties in the modern sense and,
apart from a relatively small hard core on each side, the men associated with them were fairly
loose in their allegiance and quite capable of differing from one another. At the same time
Marxist attempts to identify the Brissotins and the Montagnards as being representative of
rival sections of the bourgeoisie have long since been discredited: in practice, the two camps
were almost impossible to differentiate in terms of social class or the sort of society to which
they aspired.28 Yet, for all that, on show were clear differences in outlook. In brief, purism
confronted pragmatism. In the first instance, the issue was the origins of political power in
Revolutionary France. The monarchy had been overthrown by the Paris crowd: having seized
control of both a large number of the forty-eight ‘sections’ into which Paris was divided for the
purposes of local government and a considerable part of the National Guard, the sans culottes
and their political leaders – men like the sometime priest, Jacques Roux; the postal official,
Jean Varlet; and the wealthy brewer, Antoine Santerre – had played the leading role in the
storming of the Tuileries, while the new commune that had been established in the course of
the uprising was also very much under their thumb. Pleased though they were by the coming
of the Republic, the Brissotins could not but look askance at this development: in most cases
at least, men of some means, they could not but fear the radicalism of the crowd, whilst they
saw, too, that the Revolution was not just a Parisian movement but rather a national one –
that the people of Paris, indeed, were not co-terminus with the people of France. Very soon,
then, cracks had begun to appear in the Republican camp in that the Brissotins succeeded in
placing the task of deciding what sort of régime France should have in the hands of a national
convention elected by a complicated system of indirect suffrage that favoured the propertied
classes, and, still worse, exploited this success by setting up a constitutional committee forged
in their own image that proceeded to elaborate a document of a very moderate sort. Having
thus compromised themselves with the sans culottes, within a very short time the Brissotins
had done so again, the issue on this second occasion being the trial of the hapless Louis
XVI. Still secretly hoping to limit the war to Austria, the Brissotins would in many instances
gladly have spared the life of the erstwhile king, and, faced by the implacable determination
of the radicals to put him to death, they tried once again to turn to the country as a whole,
first demanding that the whole issue of a trial should be submitted to a referendum, and then
trying more or less the same tactic with regard to the eventual death sentence.29
In all this, there was much in the way of prudence and humanity alike, but little in the
way of practical politics, in proof of which all those deputies who had voted for the acquittal
of the king now found themselves expelled from the Jacobin Club. Just as stark, meanwhile,
was the lack of vision that accompanied the Brissotins’ conduct of the war. Already the
events of 1791–2 had shown all too clearly that war must necessarily involve an appeal to
the people, and now that France was seemingly on the brink of war with all the powers of
Europe, the case for such an appeal was all the more compelling. Yet all too clearly, neither
commitment to the Revolution nor economic desperation were infinite in their capacity
to produce volunteers, logic therefore suggesting that something more was needed. And, as
to what that something was, this was clear enough: town and city dwellers would have to
be offered cheap bread and the rural populace more land. Yet the Brissotins were slow to
bend before this wind: not only would doing so fly in the face of the right of the freedom
of property – the corollary of cheap bread was the introduction of price controls and the
prohibition of grain speculation – but the victories of Dumouriez and Custime seemed to
obviate any need to do so.30 At the same time, victory would see them freed from another
tangle: with the Revolution constantly threatened by counter-revolution and the power of
the state in sore need of augmentation, legality – indeed, the very notion of constitutional
guarantees – appeared a luxury that France could ill afford, and yet the Brissotins shied away
from even considering such sacrifices. For most of the Montagnards, by contrast, the situ-
ation looked very different. It was not that they disagreed with the Brissotins exactly, but
they realised that the conflict with Austria and Prussia had changed everything. In 1792,
fear that this would be the case had led a few of them to speak out against war in the weeks
leading up to its outbreak, the most notable example being Maximilien Robespierre. But,
what was done was done: all too clearly, or so their analysis continued, a deal would now
have to be struck with the sans culottes, and that in short order. As Doyle says, ‘To Girondin
[i.e. Brissotin] intransigence, they opposed prudence and practicality.’31
In other circumstances, the Brissotins might have been able to hold their ground, but
even before the arrival of the dire news from Belgium and the Rhineland, let alone the
Vendée, they were in a very difficult position. Thus, Paris was on the move again. Since
1789 the economic situation had continued to deteriorate in the capital, not least because
the flight of so many nobles had undercut the market for the luxury goods which were the
staple products of many Parisian artisans, whilst the assignats had become ever more worth-
less and the price of bread ever higher (in this respect, it did not help that the harvest of
1791 was extremely poor). Also at issue was the cost of sugar and coffee: in 1791, as we
shall see, revolt had broken out in the vital colony of Saint Domingue, thereby greatly
reducing the quantity of such commodities that reached France. By early 1792, then, Paris
was experiencing a rash of bread riots, what the population wanted above all being price
controls and with it a voice in the deliberations of those who they no longer saw as their
betters: hence, of course, the political ferment that had produced the events of 10 August.
Driven in part by the war and in part by the issue of ever greater numbers of assignats, prices
had continued to rise, and, with them, popular discontent in the streets of Paris, whilst fuel
was added to the flames by the oratory of the so-called enragés, essentially a group of ‘outs’
who, whether through sincere conviction or cynical self-promotion, took to the sections,
the popular societies and even the streets to preach a message of social radicalism whose
chief tenets were demands for price controls, public assistance, the payment of pensions
to the families of men killed in the war, the sequestration of hoarded supplies of grain and
the punishment or even execution of speculators. For all the novelty of their tactics, how-
ever, the enragés found themselves repelled by the new political establishment represented
by the National Convention (a body that in terms of its social composition was no more
representative than any of its predecessors): on 12 February and then again on 22 February,
deputations that appeared before the deputies calling for the introduction of a ceiling on
bread prices were sent away empty handed. Underpinning all this, meanwhile, was a push
for the democratisation of the Revolution: with the Brissotins now being represented as, at
the very least, friends of speculation, if not closet royalists, the enragés secured the support
of the more radical elements of the sections and the popular societies for a move designed
to remove them from the political scene altogether.32
On 12 March these latest intrigues bore fruition in the form of a rising that saw bands of
National Guards and sans culottes assault the premises of a number of Brissotin newspapers.
In the event, the general revolt this action was supposed to precipitate did not materialise,
but, had the enragés acted but a few days later, they might have achieved more success. Thus,
it was over the course of the next two weeks that Dumouriez and Custine were ejected from
their conquests and revolt broke out in the Vendée. Their hand having already been forced
over conscription – yet another measure that conflicted with their fundamental political
principles – the Brissotins were forced to cede still more ground to the Montagnards. Thus,
for the duration of the war at least, due legal process was set aside, the second half of March
seeing the establishment of a revolutionary tribunal in Paris; the creation of local police
committees with powers of summary arrest; and the promulgation of a decree subjecting
priests, nobles, public officials and army officers caught leading or stirring up rebellion to
trial by court-martial. Meanwhile, in an effort to revivify the war effort, eighty members of
the Convention were sent out to the provinces and field armies as all-powerful commissars
charged with the task of enthusing the populace, urging on the civil and military authorities
and rooting out treason and incompetence alike.33
The extent to which the répresentatives en mission did any good has always been open
to debate, but in the short term it was clear enough that they were a failure: not only did
the military situation continue to deteriorate, but early April saw the defection of General
Dumouriez. Faced by this situation, the Montagnards now at last moved fully into the camp
of the enragés: as late as February, figures as radical as Marat had been refusing to back price
controls, but now Robespierre, Danton and other spokesmen began to call not just for a ‘law
of the maximum’, as the idea was apostrophised, but a wide range of other measures designed
to force the rich to accept their social responsibilities. Desperate resistance on the part of the
Brissotins proving unavailing and, indeed, counter-productive – an attempt to arraign Marat
for sedition, for example, was thrown out by the Revolutionary Tribunal amidst scenes of
wild excitement – the beginning of May therefore saw the introduction of a system of price
controls, though even then it is noticeable that it took threats of another popular insurrec-
tion to get the Montagnards to act on their rhetoric: some exceptions aside, they clearly
remained men driven to social radicalism rather willing soldiers in the cause. That said,
confronted with what they now genuinely believed was a life-or-death situation, Robespierre
and his fellows did not hesitate. With the Brissotins seemingly on the brink of recover-
ing some ground, they now swung into action. Thus, on 31 May a large force of National
Guards and sans culottes surrounded the Convention in what looked set to be a replay of the
events of 10 August. Astonishingly, however, the assembled deputies, the majority of them
either Brissotins or members of the uncommitted sector of the chamber known as la plaine,
refused to be intimidated into authorising the demands of the rebels – above all, the arrest
of twenty-two of the Montagnards’ leading opponents – and the revolt collapsed. To the
conspirators, however, failure was unacceptable, and 2 June therefore saw the Convention
besieged once again. This time there was no mistake, the rebels having not only mustered in
far greater strength than before but taken the precaution of accompanying their foot-soldiers
with a large number of cannon. In the event, perhaps, surprisingly, there was no killing, but
the purge was nonetheless extremely thorough: in defiance of their immunity from pros-
ecution, twenty-nine deputies were arrested including most of the leading Brissotins. Also
taken, meanwhile, were two Ministers, namely Clavière and Lebrun. It was a sad moment:
as Schama laments, 2 June 1793 saw the disappearance of ‘the last scrap of pretence that the
republic was founded on legality or even on representation’.34
There is, of course, a case for arguing here that the end justified the means, that what
mattered was the fact that power had been placed in the hands of a faction that was not
afraid to wield it and that the way had thereby been opened to the restoration of France’s
position on the battlefield. In the short term, however, it actually made things worse rather
than better. We come here to the so-called ‘revolt of the provinces’ or ‘federalist revolt’.35
Though sometimes lumped together with the armed resistance to the Revolution that was
currently wreaking such havoc in western France, this actually represented something very
different, namely not a clash between revolution and counter-revolution, but a civil war in
the Revolutionary camp. In this respect, trouble had been brewing for some time in that
many towns and cities had been experiencing bitter strife between different elements of
the Jacobin movement or, alternatively, the Jacobins and more moderate forces aligned
with the Feuillants. Thus far, thus good – one can see what looks very much like a clash
between radicalism and social conservatism – but matters were not in fact so simple as in
many places particular circumstances (usually particularly difficult economic problems)
meant that, far from following the lead of the Montagnards or their local equivalents, the
local sans culottes were rather inclined to reject them. In at least three cities – Bordeaux,
Marseilles and Lyons – meanwhile, so great were the tensions involved that they had come
to a head, days or sometimes even weeks, before news arrived of the coup of 31 May–2 June,
though it is clear that successive reports from Paris of the ever worsening situation in the
capital, and, in at least some instances, the passionate appeals for assistance issued by such
figures as Vergniaud, did nothing to assuage the outrage and intransigence which came to
characterise the various factions. Everywhere, meanwhile, the common factor was, first,
a local Jacobin leadership that was, by turns, arbitrary, threatening and extremely aggres-
sive, and, second, a general desire for an end to the constant turmoil or, to put it another
way, a return to normality. In these circumstances, the arrest of the Brissotins constituted
the last straw, and there therefore followed a series of revolts against the authority of Paris:
on 7 June the scene was Bordeaux; on 9 June Caen; on 11 June Montpellier; on 15 July
Toulon. Yet it cannot be stressed too much that sympathy with the Brissotins was not the
root of all evil: Lyons had not waited on the news from Paris, exploding into revolt on the
very day the Montagnards moved on the Convention, while trouble in Marseilles began
as early as 27 April.36
The extent of the military challenge which all this posed to the government in Paris was
not very great, whilst claims that over sixty of France’s eighty-three departments were in a
state of open revolt are wildly exaggerated: in fact only something over forty departments
even protested verbally at the purge of the Convention, whilst, in most of the few areas
that took up arms, the insurgents melted away as virtually as soon as loyal troops hove into
sight. Only in Lyons and Toulon were things any different, in the former, because the city’s
isolation deep in the heart of France meant that the news of the collapse of almost all the
revolts elsewhere reached it so late that the time had long passed when there was a seri-
ous chance of negotiating a settlement with the vengeful Montagnards and, in the latter,
because the city’s massive fortifications gave the insurgents a false sense of security. In both
places, meanwhile, there were substantial supplies of arms, whilst the initial leadership was
joined by a number of serving and retired officers who were in reality closet royalists who
had everything to gain by stiffening the cause of resistance. Finally, reduced to the utmost
penury by the collapse of the silk industry, on the one hand, and naval construction, on
the other (Toulon, of course, was one of France’s principal naval bases), much of the
crowd remained solidly behind the insurrection. However, unable to carry the war to the
Montagnards, the rebel leaders could only wait for the axe to fall, and fall it did, military
operations starting against Lyons on 9 August and Toulon on 8 September.37 By then,
however, there was an added twist to the situation: in the latter city, the revolt had origi-
nally been as solidly republican as it was everywhere else, but on 25 August Marseilles had
been retaken by the forces of the government. What followed was not as bad as the scenes
that were later to occur in Lyons, but it was still bad enough, the city being subjected to
a brutal purge that cost the lives of 405 individuals, most of them wealthy merchants or
other leading citizens.38 First port of call for those lucky enough to escape was Toulon, and
the tale that they told was so terrible that the rebel leadership was shocked into accept-
ing an offer of protection from the commander of the British squadron blockading the
port, Admiral Hood, the net result being the arrival in the nick of time of 13,000 British,
Spanish, Neapolitan and Piedmontese troops.39
No fewer than one-third of the French navy being moored in its port, the Allied occupa-
tion of Toulon was a major disaster. Yet, for the rest, the federalist revolt had in the end
amounted to very little: only a few of the rebel leaders had much appetite for a fight, whilst
the populace were but little engaged in the fate of a handful of politicians in Paris. To speak
thus, however, is to speak with the benefit of hindsight. In the dark days of June 1793, mat-
ters were by no means so clear: the enemy were not just at the gates but within the walls
as well. In so far as the Montagnards were concerned, then, the Revolution was in danger,
and it was time to proceed to desperate measures. In the first instance, what this meant was
the establishment of a revolutionary dictatorship, and Robespierre, by now the undisputed
leader of the Montagnards, made this reality by seizing control of the special executive com-
mittee of the Convention created in the wake of the outbreak of the revolt in the Vendée
and packing it with his supporters, whilst at the same time giving it extensive powers includ-
ing, not least, the right to emit decrees on its own account, control of the memberships of
all the other committees set up by the Convention and, to all intents and purposes, the abil-
ity to direct the operations of the government and army commanders alike. Known as the
Committee of Public Safety, the twelve members of which this body came to exist remained
subject to re-election every month at the hands of the Convention as a whole, but in prac-
tice such was its power to round on anyone who challenged its authority that this was a dead
letter. As to its membership, as gradually restructured in the course of the summer, eight of
the so-called ‘twelve who ruled’ – Robespierre, Couthon, Saint Just, Prieur, Saint André,
Billaud-Varenne, Collot-d’Herbois and Hérault de Séchelles – were either Montagnards
or men who were in some respects still more hard-line, whilst the others – Barère, Carnot,
Lindet and Prieur-Duvernois – were centrists inclined to technocratic solutions and, at the
least, open to persuasion when it came to agreeing with Montagnard policies.40
As Robespierre was now to emerge as the first modern war leader, it is perhaps a good idea
to spend a few lines on his character. A small-time lawyer from Arras who was deeply read
in the writings of the philosophes and dabbled in publication himself, he had been elected to
the legislature in the elections of 1791 and won notoriety as a man of advanced democratic
views, and had then served in the Paris commune of 1792 before going on to stand for
election to the Convention. Here he had orchestrated the moves that led to the trial and
execution of the king and, as we have seen, played a key role in the coup of 31 May–2 June.
So much for the bare facts, but evaluating the man is far harder, about the only thing that is
absolutely clear here being that, unlike many of the Revolution’s other politicians, he was
utterly incorruptible and lived in the simplest of fashions. Beyond that, however, there is
much agreement that he was an extremely cold individual who had few personal friends,
was suspicious of all around him and, though not personally cruel, was ruthless in his pur-
suit of his vision of the Revolution, a vision, moreover, which brooked no alternatives.41
That all this does not make for a flattering picture scarcely needs to be said: if Robespierre
had talent in abundance, he lacked warmth, charisma and humanity alike. Nor, of course,
was he a military man, much the same being true of the rest of the committee: whilst a few
members, like the youthful fanatic, Saint Just, had served in the National Guard, only two –
Carnot and Prieur – were army officers, and neither of them anything more than captains
in the engineers. In this respect, then, it was probably just as well that, by the time that
Robespierre and his fellows had entrenched themselves in power, the military situation
had eased more than somewhat. Thus, federalism had been successfully contained, whilst
much the same was true of the rebellion in the Vendée: as we shall see, win battle after
battle though the Vendéens might, it had become clear that they could not break out of
their tangled heartlands, let alone take on the forces of the Republic in open country. Also
much easier was the situation at the front. In the north-east, Saxe-Coburg and the Duke
of York had taken Condé and Valenciennes, but they had not pressed their advance any
further thanks to the insistence of the British government that, before doing anything else,
York should take heavily fortified Dunkirk, the Austrians in the meantime settling down
to besiege Le Quesnoy and Maubeuge. In the Rhineland, while Mainz had surrendered, its
prolonged resistance had ensured that no enemy troops had succeeded in getting across the
frontier. In the Alps, the Piedmontese had reoccupied Savoy when the bulk of the French
forces there had been withdrawn to deal with the revolt at Lyons, and also established a
foothold in Nice, but were otherwise quiescent. And, finally, in Roussillon, undermanned
and poorly supplied, the Spaniards had been unable to advance any further than the vicin-
ity of Perpignan. The French armies, certainly, were still in disarray, but, for the time being,
the Convention had been afforded a breathing space, one result of this being the undoing
of Danton, who had responded to the crisis by proposing negotiations with the Prussians,
on the one hand, and the provinces, on the other, and was therefore badly discredited.42
With the military threat in temporary abeyance, the initial focus was once again the
domestic situation. Here the priority was very simple: in brief, the people (as defined by the
sans culottes of Paris) had to be given what they wanted, there being a very strong chance that
otherwise the enragés would seize control and push the Revolution still further to the left.
Hardly had the Brissotins been ejected from the Convention, then, than work was under-
way on a new constitution which offered universal manhood suffrage, guarantees of public
education, health care and social assistance, and, finally, the right to rise in revolt against
the government should it betray the principles of the Revolution, all this being buttressed
by a new declaration of the rights of man which went far beyond the document of the same
name promulgated in 1789.43 Still more important than satisfying the political demands of
the Paris crowd, meanwhile, was that of filling its bellies, and here, too, the Convention was
not remiss: on 26 July hoarding was made a capital offence, though such was the reluctance
of much of the Montagnard leadership to jettison the principles of free trade that it took a
massive show of strength on the part of the sections on 5 September to persuade the deputies
to impose the famous ‘law of the maximum’. Meanwhile, no longer was the supply of food to
be left to chance: in an example eventually copied in over fifty departments, Paris was given
a so-called armée révolutionnaire, the task of this force – essentially a volunteer sans-culotte
militia some 7,000 strong – being to sally out into the countryside to seize hoarded grain and
force the peasants to dispatch their produce to the capital.44
Important as the new constitution, the law of the maximum and the armées révolution-
naires were, they were not the only means of stealing the clothes of the enragés. Indeed,
there were others that promised to be not only easier to effect but less challenging to the
sensibilities of the Brissotin power base. We come here to the eradication of counter-
revolution and the defeat of the armies that had invaded France. To begin with the
former, one obvious way forward was a vigorous offensive against the Vendée and the
federalists: hence the decision to employ the garrison of Mainz against the one and to
dispatch troops against the other. However, the enemies of the Republic were not just
restricted to a minority who had taken up arms: on the contrary, also to be considered
were the legions of spies and enemy agents who were deemed to be lurking in every nook
and cranny, not mention the numerous representatives of the ancien régime who were
still at liberty. Amongst the many goals espoused by the enragés was the root-and-branch
elimination of these elements, and this, too, was something in which the Montagnards
were variously either happy to oblige, willing to go along with or simply unable to stop.
Already the mechanisms necessary for such a purge existed in the various tribunals and
police committees created in response to the revolt in the Vendée, not to mention the
increasingly draconian legislation which had been enacted in respect of the émigrés and
the non-juring priests, and on 17 September the way was opened for these to go into
action by means of the so-called ‘Law of Suspects’, a measure which in brief threatened
almost anyone with arrest and prosecution on the flimsiest of pretexts. The result was
the famous ‘Great Terror’, though in Paris this began slowly enough, only 177 execu-
tions (amongst them those of Marie-Antoinette and the leading Brissotins) being carried
out in the capital between the start of the purge in October and the close of the year
(arrests, however, were numerous, amongst those picked up being most of the leading
enragés, Roux, Varlet and the rest having long since outlived their usefulness as far as the
Montagnards were concerned).45 Two places which did feel the full weight of the Terror
in 1793, though, were Lyons and Toulon. Having been subjected to a long siege marked,
like that of Mainz, by prolonged bombardment not so much of the walls but rather of the
city’s crowded streets, Lyons surrendered on 9 October and was immediately subjected
to a savage wave of repression in which some 1,900 people were put to death.46 As for
Toulon, the death toll when the port was finally taken in December appears to have come
to around 1,000.47 In the case of Lyons and Toulon, of course, such killings were only
to be expected, whilst the dispatch of the queen and the Brissotins was also a foregone
conclusion. However, what was not quite so predictable was the manner in which the
concept of counter-revolution was now stretched to cover not just armed rebellion or
political hostility but also honest failure: thus, an attempt by Custine to relieve Condé
having been beaten off, he was summoned to Paris, put on trial and sentenced to death.48
If war was to be waged against counter-revolution at home, it was also to be waged
against counter-revolution abroad. With the French armies haemorrhaging deserters and
the enemy quite literally at the gates, the result was the levée en masse of 23 August 1793.
Probably the most famous single measure of popular mobilisation of all time, this effectively
gave the state the right to requisition whatever resources it deemed necessary, whether
human or material, for the war effort and ordered the immediate conscription of all sin-
gle men and childless widowers between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.49 As before,
however, this measure was accompanied by great injustice – not only did the 200,000 men
serving in the National Guard and the armées révolutionnaires enjoy de facto exemption on
the grounds that they were already doing their duty, but the propertied classes escaped the
universal character of the draft without the slightest difficulty, and that despite the fact that
the practice of buying substitutes that had spared many prosperous families in February was
expressly forbidden (in the wealthy Place-Royale section of Paris, for example, artisans and
labourers constituted just one-third of the population, and yet they contributed two-thirds
of the conscripts). In consequence, resistance flared up once again, whilst the enormous rate
of desertion – at least 25 per cent – told its own tale of popular discontent. Instead of the
500,000 men hoped for by Committee of Public Safety, then, in reality only three-fifths of
that amount were ever raised though this was still sufficient to increase the number of men
under arms to 750,000.50
Amidst the new recruits, there were doubtless some men who were happy to march to
war. One such may well have been Joseph Rousseau, a private in the Thirty-Seventh Line.
As he wrote to his father on 22 December 1793:
You tell me to have courage. Know, then, that I . . . am burning with the most ardent
love for the Republic; and that . . . I have sworn not to leave the colours until every
last one of the satellites of the despot rulers who are ranged against us have been driven
from the soil of France.51
Yet, given the evident reluctance of many of the Revolution’s most committed supporters to
risk their lives – an attempt to raise an élite cavalry brigade by eliciting volunteers from the
membership of the Jacobin clubs, for example, produced barely a quarter of the 2,000 men
hoped for52 – one cannot but feel that such men were exceptions. For most of those con-
cerned, indeed, the moment of departure was one of complete despair. Here, for example,
are Pion de Loches’ recollections of how he took his leave from Lons-le Saulnier:
The day of our departure was 8 October. The rapidity with which events had suc-
ceeded one another over the past month had left me too stunned to take in my new
destiny, and I all but forgot to send my farewells to my family. The letter that I sent
them was filled with a resignation that was very far from what I was actually feeling . . .
We marched without order amidst the most profound silence, each one of us lost in
his thoughts.53
The most that could be expected was therefore probably the sentiment voiced by a young
recruit named Cognet:
When we said goodbye to our parents and our friends, our hearts were heavy indeed,
but, little by little, marching along to the noise of the drums diverted us from our
regrets and stiffened the resolve even of the most timid . . . By the time that we arrived
at [our first halt], then, we had begun to assume a warrior-like aspect . . . After two
more days of marching, we arrived at Guise, if not hardened soldiers . . . then at least
resigned to our fate.54
In reality, of course, boosted though it was by a frenetic campaign of propaganda, such

socialisation took much longer than a few days. On 22 October, indeed, Cognet’s battalion
was gripped by an outbreak of panic that spoke volumes about the combat readiness of such
troops. As he wrote, then:
Just as night was falling, convinced that they had spotted an enemy column that had
slipped through our pickets and penetrated to the heart of our position, some raw recruits
from my regiment started shouting that we should stand to arms. The result was a panic
among the new battalions . . . As to the cause of all this, it seems that the authors of the
alarm had mistaken some pollarded willow trees for a force of Austrian troops march-
ing to surprise our camp. I was deeply embarrassed that a hullaballoo of this sort could
have started in my battalion and, still more so, that nothing could be done to bring it
under control. However, the only one of the officers who had seen any previous service
was the battalion commander . . . while the others were young men . . . who owed their
posts to elections and had neither experience nor real authority.55
Even before this unfortunate incident, the limitations of the new recruits had been cruelly
revealed. In Roussillon, lack of numbers and supplies alike meant that the Spanish forces
had become increasingly vulnerable to a counter-attack, and on 17 September a somewhat
foolhardy attempt on the part of the Spanish commander, Antonio Ricardos, finally to cut
Perpignan off resulted in a small French victory at Peyrestortes. Badly shaken, the Spaniards
fell back from the environs of the fortress and retired a few miles southwards. Determined
to eject the Spaniards from French territory, the commander of the Army of the Eastern
Pyrenees, General Dagobert, followed and on 22 September made a determined attempt
to drive them from their new positions at Trouillas. This, however, was easily ordered, but
much less easily achieved. Despite being outnumbered by 5,000 men, the 17,000 defenders
put up a spirited fight and repelled every French attack without difficulty: not only were
several French infantry battalions armed only with pikes and composed of men who had
only been in the army for a matter of days, but Dagobert was also badly outgunned by the
Spanish artillery, the coup de grâce being delivered by a spectacular cavalry charge that flung
the attackers back across the river in a state of complete rout.56
If Trouillas was a disappointment, the growing pressure on the Spaniards was not with-
out effect, Ricardos now resolving to retreat still further to the line of the River Tech.57
Elsewhere, meanwhile, the situation was gradually getting better. In Flanders, as we have
seen, the Allied invasion had been slowed down by the insistence of the British government
that York should make his primary objective the capture of Dunkirk, and that commander
had duly concentrated his British infantry and artillery before the walls, leaving the remain-
der of his troops – his British cavalry together with some 14,500 Hessians and Hanoverians
commanded by Wilhelm von Freytag – to cover the approaches to his positions from the
south and west. To do this, Von Freytag pushed forward some miles into the Flemish coun-
tryside, but his attempts to cover every possible approach led his troops to become spread out
over a front of many miles. As can be imagined, this was a recipe for disaster. Not only were
the outposts of the Army of the North only a few miles away, but it had recently received
large numbers of reinforcements. Custine’s replacement, Jean Houchard, an erstwhile offi-
cier de fortune, was therefore in an excellent position to take the war to the enemy. On 6
September, then, the French commander led his men to the attack. There followed a day of
confused fighting in countryside that was a maze of drainage ditches, hedged fields and small
villages, but, by the end of the day, Von Freytag and his men were in full retreat. Had he
renewed his attack the following day, Houchard might have won a great victory, but he held
back in order to rest and regroup, and then badly mishandled matters when he did attack
again on 8 September, not the least of the problems being that many of his troops appear
to have lost their formation and fought entirely as skirmishers. In the end, however, bitter
fighting centred on the village of Hondschoote saw the Republican forces gain a marginal
victory, the result being that York was left with no option but to evacuate his positions
before Dunkirk and, not just that, but also abandon his entire siege train. Five days later,
there followed a second success at Menin in which Houchard overcame a Dutch division of
5,000 men, but on 11 September the beleaguered fortress of Le Quesnoy surrendered to the
Austrians. Still worse, on 15 September an Austrian counter-attack secured a minor success
at Courtrai and drove Houchard into headlong retreat, the unfortunate French commander
promptly being recalled to Paris and, like Custine before him, sent to the scaffold.58
In Flanders, then, the campaign of 1793 ended in a draw, but, in the condition in which
France found herself at this point, anything better than a defeat rated as a victory. Meanwhile,
further east, the situation was better still. On 30 September the Austrians of Saxe-Coburg had
sat down to besiege Maubeuge, and Houchard’s replacement as commander of the Army of
the North, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, was ordered to march to the town’s relief. We come here
to the first example of a phenomenon which has always been highlighted as one of the ways
in which the Revolution transformed France’s fortunes.59 Thus, in brief, in 1789 Jourdan had
been a haberdasher in Limoges. Enlisting in a local volunteer battalion in 1792, he was imme-
diately elected to the rank of battalion commander for no better reason than the fact that he
had fought as a private in the American War of Independence. Having distinguished himself
in the battle of Jemappes, he was rapidly raised to the rank of general of division. To put it
mildly, then, Jourdan’s rise had been meteoric, but he showed no signs of being overawed by
the fact that he now had 100,000 men under his command. With the defenders of Maubeuge
almost reduced to the point of surrender, on 15 October, he attacked the Austrian forces
covering the siege. Named after the village of Wattignies, the battle that followed raged for
two days. In the first day’s fighting, the Austrian commander, Clerfayt, had much the better of
the engagement despite being heavily outnumbered by the French, but the next day Jourdan
concentrated the bulk of his troops against the Austrian left and broke through, Saxe-Coburg
being left with no option but to abandon the siege and retire across the River Sambre.60 At
some 5,000 men, French losses had been very heavy. In the words of one infantryman:
Our battalion suffered very badly . . . Hugon, who comes from Nozeroy, has a ball
through his thigh; Carrez, from Communailles, one in his neck; and little Chauvin one
which struck him just below the ear and came out through his mouth, breaking his jaw.
Venier, from Mignovillard, has a badly bruised thigh . . . Ducret, from Arsurette, was
shot in the foot; our drummer, one Tinnot, was hit in the knee; and the brother of a
man called Magnien who lives in Nozeroy . . . got a ball in his shoulder. Plenty of men
who were not from our district were left lying on the field, stone-dead, while various
others were carried away, only to die some hours later.61
Yet after the mediocre results that had been achieved in Roussillon and Flanders, Jourdan
could feel well pleased, and that despite the fact that much of the credit for his victory was
stolen by Lazare Carnot: attached to his headquarters as répresentant en mission, the latter
returned to Paris and regaled all and sundry with tales of how he had won the battle single
handed that put Jourdan in such a poor light that they almost cost him his life.62 As for his
soldiers, their faltering morale was much restored. To quote Pierre Girardon, who was now
serving in the Fourth Hussars:
The great blows have been struck: the enemy is scattered and we are in pursuit. We
hit them at every point . . . everywhere got the better of them . . . [and] did not show
them the slightest mercy: some of them received more than fifty blows from our sabres.
Victory is complete: we have overthrown their cannon and burned all their caissons.63
Next, we must consider the situation on the frontiers of the Rhineland. Here the fall of
Mainz had placed the Republican forces in an extremely difficult position in that, split into
two armies – those of the Moselle and the Rhine – 80,000 Frenchmen, few of whom were
in much of a state to fight, faced over 100,000 Austrians and Prussians.64 Yet the Allied
commanders completely failed to press home their advantage: thanks to growing differences
between the Duke of Brunswick and the Austrian commander, Wurmser, for weeks nothing
happened at all, and, when at last operations did resume, they almost immediately found-
ered in a welter of mutual recriminations. Eventually resolving to move forward on his own,
Wurmser was checked at Bergzabern on 27 August, but on 14 September a French attack
on a Prussian division at Pirmasens was repelled with heavy losses. Still worse, meanwhile,
on 13 October Wurmser tore a hole in the so-called Wissembourg Lines, a formidable line
of entrenchments guarding the frontier dating from the War of the Spanish Succession.
Yet the Allies once again failed to advance, rather contenting themselves with besieging
the minor frontier fortresses of Bitsche and Landau. At Biesingen on 17 November and
Kaiserslautern on 28–9 November, French counter-offensives were again defeated, and that
despite the fact that the attackers had a considerable numerical advantage and were led by
Lazare Hoche and Jean Pichegru, both of them generals made by the Revolution (in 1789
the former had been a corporal in the French Guards and the latter a sub-lieutenant in
the artillery). Not until 26 December was the situation finally remedied with the defeat of
Wurmser at the second battle of Wissembourg, but long before then it was clear that the
Allies had abandoned all thoughts of further aggression: the Austrians could not mount
a successful advance without the Prussians, but, believing that Vienna was out to annexe
Alsace and Lorraine, the latter would not lift a finger to help them. To quote the later
military theorist, Jomini, then, ‘Once again the Allies . . . were treading the territory of the
Republic. Yet a situation which should have redoubled their energy served only to wreck all
accord between them.’65
Finally, there is the particularly difficult theatre of war represented by the Alps. In the
northern sector, as we have seen, the Piedmontese had taken advantage of the revolt in
Lyons to march back into Savoy, but they had not attempted to advance any further, whilst
the number of troops they had been able to deploy in the territory had not been very great.
In consequence, having retaken Lyons, the commander of the Army of the Alps, François
Kellermann, had not had the slightest difficulty in throwing them back across the frontier
(not that this did him any good: deeply suspect as a general of the old army, he was promptly
recalled to Paris and thrown into prison). In the southern sector – essentially, the erstwhile
Piedmontese territory of Nice – by contrast, the French had been lucky rather than suc-
cessful in that an Austro-Piedmontese offensive launched in an attempt to take advantage
of the siege of Toulon that might have caused them real problems had been abandoned on
account of heavy snow storms, but at least the gains made by the Piedmontese had in effect
been kept to a minimum.66
In the interior of France, meanwhile, the situation had also improved. As we have
seen, Lyons had surrendered on 9 October, whilst, although it held out until December,
Toulon was now under siege by an army whose artillery had just gained a new commander
in the person of a hitherto unknown artillery officer of Corsican origin named Napoleon
Bonaparte (it should be noted, however, that, fall though the city eventually did, even the
future ruler of France could not prevent the British from either destroying or sequester-
ing eighteen warships as the Republican forces closed in, not to mention torching all the
naval base’s magazines and other facilities).67 In the Vendée, too, on 18 October, months
of savage fighting had culminated in a major victory at Cholet, which ended in the main
rebel army being driven north across the River Loire and forced to embark on a desperate
two-month odyssey which ended in its complete destruction. Meanwhile, the imposition
of a radical agenda continued, one way in which this was apparent being the emergence of
dechristianisation. Officially, the religious policy of the Convention remained unchanged
from the early days of the Revolution – the Church was to be subordinated to the state, but
otherwise allowed to function – but various elements of the Convention and Paris sections
alike sensed that the moment was ripe to satisfy their deeply held prejudices, the autumn
and winter therefore seeing a savage attack on even collaborationist sectors of the religious
establishment: services were regularly disrupted, hundreds of churches closed or vandal-
ised, the constitutional clergy subjected to intense harassment and many ordinary believers
bullied or abused. Meanwhile, it was at this time that the Republic adopted its notorious
secular calendar, that many towns and villages were stripped of the prefix ‘Saint’ and that
the fashion emerged of giving babies classical names rather than Christian ones. Capping all
this, meanwhile, was the emergence of the so-called Cult of Reason, the inaugural service
of which was held in Notre Dame on 10 November.68
Implicit in the campaign of dechristianisation was very definitely a military purpose in
that it was a way of inspiring hatred of the enemy and promoting solidarity with the war
effort. Also central to this last, meanwhile, was the republicanisation of the army. For many
radicals – indeed, for many liberals too – armies were instruments of oppression, and it
was essential that the free citizens who now filled the ranks should remain just that – free
citizens. Despite the bombast of politicians and journalists alike, meanwhile, it was clear
that the Republican armies remained at best an uncertain quantity: even on battlefields
which saw French victories, there were plenty of soldiers who had done more fleeing than
fighting. The net result, then, was a sharp intensification of the propaganda campaign that
had been under way since 1791. New conscripts were sent off to war to the accompani-
ment of banners, banquets and cheering crowds; radical newspapers flooded the army’s
encampments; the représentants en mission harangued the troops at every opportunity and
published pamphlets and newspapers of their own; beautifully engraved weapons began to
be presented to men who had distinguished themselves; measure after measure was taken
to increase the common soldiers’ sense of dignity and self-worth and soften the impact of
traditional hierarchical distinctions; and Jacobin clubs tried hard to provide the troops with
extra comforts and support their families (a task that was also assumed by the state, a new
law passed in November promising the payment of pensions to the families of all those who
died in battle). To quote Rafe Blaufarb, indeed, ‘The Republic virtually made a cult out of
the common soldier.’69
Whether any of this had any effect is another matter. One of the men drafted by the levée
en masse was Charles de Pelleport. As he wrote of the unit in which he was enlisted in his
home town of Toulouse:
Hard to manage though they were, the battalion was armed with pikes. As for uni-
forms and equipment, it was pointless even to dream of them. Something needed to be
done, then, in respect of our courage . . . Drawn up in the Place du Capitole, we were
inspected by the representative of the people on mission in the Department of Haute
Garonne. I can still see this individual, and a right ham actor he was too, sporting, as
he did, a hideous hat designed to make him look important. As for his sword, it was
there for no other purpose than to give him the air of a soldier who had just come
back on leave. Nothing was spared, in short, to create the impression of courage, but
all he achieved as far as I was concerned was to irritate me enormously. After having
walked up and down amongst us for a little while, he told us that the one, indivisible
and immortal Republic counted on our patriotism, that the pike was the only weapon
for the sans culotte, that the tricolour cockade would rule the world. Aside from some
words of scorn for Pitt and Coburg, this nonsense was brought to an end by a rendition
of the Marseillaise, whereupon we took the road for Perpignan.70
Such cynicism was beyond doubt widespread, but, as Palmer has pointed out, it is difficult to
believe that some of this acculturalisation did not rub off on the conscripts, and all the more
so once they found themselves in combat with the enemy, the army therefore becoming a
veritable ‘nursery of patriotism’.71 What also helped here was a sense that the Committee of
Public Safety and its representatives were labouring long and hard to make good the army’s
deficiencies. Scarcely had he arrived at the headquarters of the Army of the North, then,
than Carnot succeeded in obtaining 15,000 bayonets and 8,000 pairs of shoes, whilst, in
Paris, Robert Lindet, another member of the Committee of Public Safety, headed a General
Subsistence Committee whose task it was to keep the armies supplied with food. Conscious
of the need for more arms, meanwhile, the authorities set workshops all over the country
the task of producing uniforms, equipment and weaponry and, in Paris, at least, established
numerous state manufactories: small-scale though many of these were, by the end of the
year, they were employing a workforce of around 2,000 men. Production, meanwhile, was
kept up by the imposition of a draconian code of labour laws, while dozens of France’s lead-
ing scientists were employed to advise on new techniques and pursue innovations of every
sort. As for private property, the concept scarcely existed: in line with various provisions
of the decree of the levée en masse, stocks of timber, coal and iron were requisitioned or, at
least, subjected to compulsory purchase at rates set by the authorities, whilst a forced loan
was imposed on the wealthier sections of society (payable, as it was, in assignats, this last
measure brought in little in the way of finance, but it took so much paper out of the market
that it did lead to a considerable recovery in the value of the currency).72
Clearly, then, France was being organised for total war. Along with this process,
meanwhile, went the consolidation of political authority. If Robespierre and his closest
collaborators had been prepared to go along with much of what was happening in Paris
and the rest of the country, this did not mean that they were comfortable about it. On the
contrary, they were but waiting for the moment when it was possible to reverse the march
towards what they increasingly saw as anarchy, and, with the steady restoration of France’s
military situation, that moment was now at hand. Almost from the very time of the rising
of 5 September, moves had therefore been afoot to curb the more radical elements of the
Revolution. With regard to the issue of feminism, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined on
trumped-up charges, the various clubs that such figures as Pauline Léon had helped form
shut down and the few women serving openly in the army as soldiers rooted out and sent
home; with regard to the Church, dechristianisation was denounced by Robespierre and the
Convention bullied into passing a law confirming the principle of freedom of worship; with
regard to the Jacobin clubs, hundreds of members were denounced and expelled; with regard
to the many foreign enthusiasts for the Revolution, these were frequently arrested and in
some cases executed; with regard to the central committee that had been formed by the
Paris sections to coordinate their activities, this was shut down; with regard to the armées
révolutionnaires, these were dissolved; and, finally, with regard to the Committee of Public
Safety, this was effectively given dictatorial power.73
It should not be thought that all this brought much change to the character of
Revolutionary rule. Certainly, there were no more examples of the sort of slaughter seen in
Lyons or Toulon, let alone the even greater atrocities witnessed, as we shall see, in the course
of the repression in the Vendée: though the majority of the victims of the guillotine had
yet to perish, hereafter, those who died were for the most part members of either dissident
Revolutionary factions or representatives of institutional counter-revolution (essentially
the Church and the nobility). Moreover, the instigators of some of the worst excesses were
recalled to Paris and in some cases even arrested. But there was no backing away from ruth-
lessness, no abandonment of the instruments of Terror and no retreat from the policy of
giving the populace something to fight for. Thus, in the army, représentants en mission such
as the utterly fanatical Louis Saint Just adopted the most ruthless measures against men who
they decided were cowards, defeatists, incompetents or counter-revolutionaries, whilst also
clamping down hard on not just mutineers and deserters but also, in at least some cases,
men guilty of pillage.74 In the Convention, at the instigation of the same Saint Just, now
back in Paris as president of that body, laws were introduced which opened the way for the
confiscation of the property of all those guilty of any form of sedition or counter-revolutionary
activity and its redistribution among the politically-deserving poor.75 In Paris, a variety
of factors determined Robespierre on a savage purge which, along with many priests and
nobles, wiped out, on the one hand, the radical faction headed by Hébert and, on the other,
the more moderate group headed by Danton and Desmoulins who were calling for what
amounted to moves in the direction of social conciliation.76 And, in France as a whole, most
churches remained shut until Robespierre reopened them for the purpose of a new religion –
the so-called ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ – devised by himself which he brought in as a
replacement for Catholicism in May 1794.77
In short, it was very much a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose, the only dif-
ference being that policies that had hitherto been driven from below were now being driven
from above. What, though, of the French Revolutionary Wars? By this point, of course, all
chance that the Revolution could have been overcome by military means in short order was
long since dead. Before concluding this chapter, however, we have to consider what saved the
Convention from the dreadful dangers that appeared to be on the point of overwhelming it in
the summer of 1793. The Revolution had been saved and at the same time given a completely
different direction, and it would be very tempting to argue that these two processes were firmly
linked. At almost every point, however, the traditional thesis does not really work. To pretend
that the triumph of the Montagnards made no difference whatsoever would be ridiculous: for
example, if the levée en masse did not immediately provide the Republicans with large numbers
of fresh troops – Dellard is probably not atypical when he says that he saw none of the new
levies until well after the campaign of 1793 had come to an end78 – it undoubtedly brought
new hope to the politically committed, just as the copious employment of propaganda, not to
mention the radical policies first espoused by the enragés and then taken on board, however
reluctantly, by the Convention, may have encouraged some soldiers to accept their lot and
possibly even to fight harder than would otherwise have been the case. Yet, setting aside the
fact that large areas of France had to be dragooned into giving up their young men, to the end,
morale on the battlefield was uncertain. As one conscript wrote of his first action, for example,
At the first whistle of a ball, the battalion disintegrated. I myself stuck to my post as
rigidly as any Russian, which I suppose was better than nothing. The battalion com-
mander, a man who went about sounding like a talking tactical manual, disappeared
and did not return till the next day.79
Then, too, we have the représentants en mission: whilst some of these men did well in 1793 –
at their best they stiffened the backbone of those around them, there being no doubt, for
example, that Saint Just succeeded in rallying the Army of the Rhine – the bullying and
high-handed methods to which too many of them resorted played a major role in the ori-
gins of federalism.80 And finally, there are the generals. In this respect, 1793 was certainly
marked by a definite move in a direction which ultimately gave the French armies a con-
siderable advantage over their opponents, namely the employment of ‘new’ men who owed
much, if not all, to the Revolution. Out had gone Dumouriez and Custine, and in had come
figures like Houchard and Dagobert, both of them ageing subaltern officers in 1789, and
Carteaux (the general who had commanded the siege of Toulon), Hoche and Jourdan, of
whom the first had been a painter, the second a corporal and the third a shopkeeper. And
yet, of these five, only Jourdan had been an unqualified success, and even then, if his use
of columnar attacks had eventually triumphed at Wattignies, the use of the very same tac-
tics by Dagobert at Trouillas had proved a failure: refusing to be overawed by the charging
French columns, the despised slaves of Spanish despotism had calmly shot them to pieces
and then swept them away with sword and bayonet.
In short, then, it is hard to make a ‘political’ case for the survival of the Revolution
in 1793, what really mattered rather being the mistakes and limitations of its opponents.
Beginning with the home front, we find a Vendeén insurrection that was able to raise sub-
stantial armies but could never muster the training or equipment necessary to take the port
that might just have been its salvation; a Breton guerrilla insurgency that never came close
to equalling the achievements even of the Vendéens; and a few scattered foci of political
opposition that eventually took up arms but could not obtain the popular participation that
would have been necessary to allow them to gain a measure of success. As for the Republic’s
external opponents, the émigrés were never more than a negligible force that was incapable
of independent action; the Spaniards lacked the strength even to besiege Perpignan, let
alone advance beyond it; whilst the Prussians had kept most of their forces in the east a year
previously so as to ensure that they did not lose control of the substantial gains that they
made in the second partition of Poland in 1792, and were suspicious that a good Austrian
showing in the campaign against France could lead to unfavourable territorial changes in
Germany, including, most specifically, the much-dreaded Bavarian exchange. At least,
the Spaniards and the Prussians had joined the fighting, however: by contrast, for all that
Catherine the Great was amongst the loudest of the European monarchs when it came to
denouncing the Revolution and had been at war with France since March 1793, she had
not sent a single man to help France’s enemies. To all intents and purposes, this left the
British and the Austrians. Neither were especially well commanded (though Saxe-Coburg
had a distinguished record in the recent war against the Ottoman Empire and was certainly
not a mere nonentity), and yet Famars and Neerwinden showed that they were more than
capable of defeating armies of the sort that the French could field in 1793. Invading France
was harder than driving the French from Belgium, for, ever since the days of Louis XIV,
the frontiers of Flanders, Artois and Picardy had been studded with formidable frontier for-
tresses that barred every avenue of invasion. To advance into the heart of France, it was not
necessary for them all to be taken, however, and, at the cost of considerable time and effort,
Saxe-Coburg succeeded in creating the gap he needed by taking Condé, Valenciennes and
Le Quesnoy. However, just at the moment of success, the Duke of York was pulled aside
by the British government and forced into moving on Dunkirk, and so the opportunity
was lost. Equally, and in many ways still worse, in the Rhineland and Alsace, victory had
been thrown aside by a combination of the personal quarrels of Brunswick and Wurmser,
and Prussian suspicions of Austrian aggrandisement. In short, if the Revolution was indeed
saved in 1793, it was saved by its enemies. ‘How many times has it been repeated’, wrote
Thiébault, ‘viva voce as well as in writing, [that] “without generals, without officers, without
soldiers, we beat all the armies of the world”? Nothing can be more ridiculous or untrue. But
for the systematic slowness of the Austrians, we should have been beaten ninety-nine times
out of a hundred. They alone saved us by giving us time to make soldiers, officers, generals.’81
Notes
1 Saint-Cyr, Mémoires sur les campagnes des Armées du Rhin et de Rhin et Moselle, I, pp. 19–21.
2 Cit. G. Bompard (ed.), ‘Lettres du Général [Riel de] Beurnonville (Armée de la Moselle, 1793)’,
in Carnets de la Sabretache, 21 (1913), pp. 687–8. A lieutenant in the Bourbon army, Riel had
rallied to the Revolution and become the commander of the detachment of the National Guard
raised by his home municipality. Appointed to the command of a division in the autumn of 1792,
he was invited by the tiny village where he had grown up – one Beurnonville – to take its name
as a mark of its esteem. Meanwhile, not the least of the problems faced by Riel and other com-
manders was that the uniforms and equipment issued to many of the Volunteer battalions had
been shoddy in the extreme, having been manufactured on the cheap by contractors out to maxi-
mise their products. E.g. N. Alzas, La liberté ou la mort: l’effort de guerre dans I’Hérault pendant la
Révolution (Aix-en-Provence, 2006), pp. 34–5.
3 J.B. Antoine (ed.), Mémoires de Général Baron Roch Godart, 1792–1815 (Paris, n.d.), p. 9.
5 Cit. Bompard, ‘Lettres du Général Beurnonville’, p. 696.
6 Girault, Mes campagnes sous la Révolution et l’Empire, pp. 25–6.
7 A. Pion de Loches, Mes campagnes, 1792–1815, ed. M. Chipon and L. Pingaud (Paris, 1889), pp. 2–3.
8 Bertaud, Révolution armée, pp. 99–102; J. Gallaher, ‘Recruitment in the district of Poitiers, 1793’,
French Historical Studies, 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1963), pp. 246–67.
9 For a wide-ranging discussion of resistance to conscription in France that looks not just at 1793
but the whole gamut of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, see A. Forrest, Conscripts and
Deserters: The Army and French Society during the French Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 43–73. Meanwhile, C. Munford, ‘Conscription and the peasants of the Morvan district of
Chateau Chinon, 1792–1794’, Canadian Journal of History, 3, No. 2 (September, 1968), pp. 1–18,
is a useful case study.
10 Soult, Mémoires du Maréchal-Général Soult, I, pp. 18–19.
12 Alzas, Liberté ou mort, p. 66.
13 Bourgoing, Souvenirs militaires du Général Comte de Lorencez, pp. 4–6. For a general account of the
Spanish invasión, see Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, III, pp. 133
14 Dellard, Mémoires militaires, p. 12. Reading between the lines, we may infer from this that
Dumouriez’s troops were low on arms and training alike. However, the Army of the North had
probably been the most politically fervent force the Republic possessed in 1792, and it is therefore
possible that that at least a measure of ideological commitment had survived the winter. To quote
a letter written by Joliclerc to his mother on 23 July 1793, ‘Hearing that you are worried about me
gives me greater distress than all the privations to which I am exposed put together . . . However,
you should rather rejoice: either you will see me return covered in glory, or you will have a
son . . . who knew how to die in the defence of the Fatherland.’ Cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, volontaire
aux armées de la Révolution, p. 103.
15 Cit. L. Morin (ed.), Lettres de Pierre Girardon, officier barsuraubois pendant les guerres de la Révolution,
1791–1799 (Bar-sur-Aube, 1898), p. 28.
16 Cit. ibid., p. 30.
18 A figure as vainglorious as that of Dumouiriez, Miranda was not the most competent of com-
manders. However, the failure to overcome Maastricht was not just the result of his many failings.
To quote one eyewitness, ‘There were not enough guns, powder was lacking and many of the
cannon-balls were found to be of the wrong size. As for the enemy, the émigrés who formed the
garrison fought extremely hard and aimed their pieces with deadly accuracy . . . I saw men who
had climbed up onto the parapets of the trenches cut in two, while the liberty trees the soldiers
had erected were all beaten to the ground.’ Vinet, Mémoires du Comte Belliard, I, p. 101.
19 Bricard and Bricard, Journal de Cannonier Bricard, pp. 31–3.
20 Ibid., pp. 402. In view of the many claims we have noted to the effect that the Austrian army was
lacking in offensive spirit, the ferocious counter-attacks faced by the French at Neerwinden are
particularly worthy of note.
21 In fairness, in the wake of Neerwinden, Dumouriez had some reason to fear for his safety. To quote
the future marshal, Etienne Macdonald, then a regimental commander in the Army of the North,
‘We soon had news of . . . Dumouriez’s retreat. His enemies declared that treason had been at
work: from that moment he was lost and the important services he had rendered in Champagne,
Belgium and Fanders were forgotten. Such is the fate of men who serve revolutions!’ Rousset,
Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, p. 143. A side effect of his defection, meanwhile, was growing
pressure to purge the officer corps of every member of the nobility still to be found in its ranks.
Pursued with considerable vigour as it was, by the end of 1793, this policy had led to the suspen-
sion of some 296 generals alone, of whom some fifty-three appear to have been executed. It was
not just the generals who suffered – many more junior officers were also investigated – but at the
lower levels of the officer corps the purge was much less thorough. Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic,
pp. 79–83. As to the effect on the quality of officer corps, this is unclear: whilst there was clearly
some loss of talent, to assume that it led to a massive improvement is to assume that the noble
element of the officer corps was disproportionately incompetent, this being something for which
there is not the slightest evidence.
22 Dellard. Mémoires militaires, pp. 19–20.
23 Custine scarcely distinguished himself in this campaign, but in his defence, Soult, whose regiment
formed part of his army, points out that he was outnumbered by more than two to one, and at the
same time badly hampered by the activities of the three représentants en mission who had been sent
to his headquarters. Soult, Mémoires du Maréchal-Général Soult, I, pp. 23–4.
24 Goethe, Campaign in France, pp. 318–19. Inside Mainz conditions were horrific. Herewith the
account of a Volunteer of 1792 named Vaxalaire: ‘Bombs, shells and cannon-balls fell on the town
like so much hail. We soldiers had enough to complain about, but for the townsfolk things were far
worse, for it was their houses that were being flattened, their possessions which were going up in
flames. At the same time, they were in far more danger of losing their lives than we were, for when
the enemy’s fire reached a level which it was impossible for us to bear, we were allowed to take
shelter in the casemates beneath the ramparts . . . though the smoke from the explosions got in
through the various openings and created such a fug that many of us fell sick.’ H. Gauthier-Villars
(ed.), Mémoires d’un vétéran de l’ancienne armée, 1791–1800 (Paris, n.d.), p. 23.
25 The deliberate bombardment of the civilian population was not the only example of hard-line
behaviour on the part of the Allied commanders, as witness, for example, their refusal to accede to
the governor’s request that all non-combatants should be granted safe passage from the city. Picard
and Paulier, Mémoires et journaux du Général Decaen, I, pp. 18–19.
26 The situation to which Mainz was reduced is described at length by Decaen: ‘Every magazine of
supplies that was not situated underground . . . had fallen prey to the flames, while the cathedral
and a great number of other buildings had suffered the same fate. The building which had been
used to prepare various devices needed by the defenders had been blown up. The flour mills along
the Rhine had all been burned by mortar bombs fired from a number of gunboats that had sailed
down the river from Holland, and the workshop that had been taken over for the handmills had
been rendered so dangerous that it was only sabre in hand that we could induce the workers
employed there to carry out their duties . . . All those horses that were not judged to be absolutely
indispensable to the needs of the garrison having long since been slaughtered, for the past two
months the only ones the troops were allowed to eat were those killed by the enemy. All the tal-
low and lamp-oil had been consumed, and not just them but the very dogs, cats and rats . . . There
were more than 2,000 sick or wounded, and the number was growing, on top of which the garrison
had lost another 2,000 men killed in action or dead of disease. As for the inhabitants, not only
were they in desperate straits when it came to food, but a great number of both sexes and every
age been killed or wounded, the majority of the survivors having therefore taken to the cellars to
avoid a similar fate.’ Ibid., pp. 44–5.
27 Girault, Mes campagnes sous la Révolution et l’Empire, p. 31. In the course of this retreat, Girault
and his fellows came across a rather small soldier bent under the weight of the dead body of
someone they presumed to be that of a comrade, but were astonished to discover that the soldier
was actually a woman and the corpse that of her husband. Ibid., p. 28. Such cross-dressing is a
common theme in writing on the role played by women in the French Revolutionary Wars, and
there has been some attempt to argue that significant numbers of women took up arms to fight
for the Republic. That a handful of women did enlist in this fashion, there is no doubt, whilst in
1792 an even smaller number openly joined up as women, but, as here, many of the cross-dressers
had a male ally of some kind; by the early months of 1793, the Republican government was bent
on eliminating women from the military sphere, and it is noticeable that in the case unmasked by
Girault’s battalion no-one seems even to have considered the possibility of allowing the woman
concerned to go on serving in the army. As a result, it seems safe to say that the experience of
the French Revolution brought not the slightest change in the position women occupied in the
military world: at best, they were tolerated in the most limited of numbers and restricted to the
tasks that had always fallen to camp-followers, whether it was preparing food for their husbands or
lovers or acting as sutlers or washer-women. See T. Cardoza, ‘“Habits appropriate to her sex”: the
female military experience in France during the Age of Revolution’, in K. Hagemann et al. (eds.),
Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830 (Houndmills, 2010), pp. 108–206.
This is not, however, to dismiss the issue of female activism: in Paris and elsewhere, hundreds of
women were caught up in the mood of the moment, whilst there were persistent demands both for
women to be allowed to enlist in volunteer battalions or to be allowed to form special battalions
of their own. See, for example, McPhee, French Revolution, 1789–1799, p. 19; Alzas, La liberté ou
la mort, pp. 109–14.
28 Lewis, French Revolution, pp. 38–40.
29 For the manoeuvrings of the Brissotins in the wake of the fall of the monarchy, see Schama,
Citizens, pp. 644–62; M.J. Sydenham, The First French Republic (London, 1974), pp. 10–14.
30 These charges of immobilism can, perhaps, be taken too far: on 25 August the old legislative
assembly had voted through a series of measures remedying some of the more socially unjust
features of the original Revolutionary settlement (it was, for example decreed that ‘national
properties’ should henceforth be sold in much smaller lots) and finally putting an end to the per-
petuation of the payment of feudal dues under other names. McPhee, French Revolution, p. 23.
31 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 236. Needless to say, the ever deepening splits
in the Jacobin camp were fuelled by divisions that were personal as well as political. Roland, for
example, hated Danton, just as Camille Desmoulins hated Brissot.
32 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 223; Schama, Citizens, pp. 710–14. The enragés
are of particular interest because of the manner in which they made a specific effort to mobilise
women. Indeed, two of them, Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe, even were women.
33 Schama, Citizens, p. 706.
34 Schama, Citizens, p. 724. There are many accounts of the events of 31 May–2 June, including
not least that offered by Schama (see ibid., pp. 721–4). However, for one of particular clarity and
wealth of detail, see C. Hibbert, The French Revolution (London, 1980), pp. 198–201.
35 Neither of these terms is especially helpful. Certainly, the revolt was provincial in character,
but the provincial opinion was by no means unified in its opposition to the Montagnards just as
the Montagnards were by no means wholly Parisian: at least some of the National Guards who
stormed the Tuileries had been fédérés from the provinces. As for the idea that the revolt was
federalist, this is simply nonsense: the rebels may have objected to Parisian domination of the
Revolution, but they at no point envisaged anything other than a unitary state. For a discussion
of this issue, see Sydenham, First French Republic, p. 16. Also subject to challenge, meanwhile, is
the notion that the rebellion was a conservative reaction to the rise of radicalism: according to
Antonio de Francesco, the local administrations from which the revolt sprang were as democratic
as anything to be seen in Paris, the confrontation between the capital and the provinces rather
arising ‘from the collapse of the existing administrative order, and from the quest at local level
for an alternative power structure which was more closely reconciled with the development of
popular rule.’ A. de Francesco, ‘Popular sovereignty and executive power in the federalist revolt of
1793, French History, 5, No. 1 (March, 1991), p. 99
36 Works on the revolts of May–July 1793 are numerous, but useful introductions are to be found
in B. Edmonds, ‘“Federalism” and urban revolt in France, 1793’, Journal of Modern History,
55, No. 1 (March, 1983), pp. 22–53; P.R. Hanson, ‘The federalist revolt: an affirmation or
denial of popular sovereignty?’, French History, 6, No. 3 (September, 1993), pp. 335–55; and
P.R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution
(University Park, PA, 2003). Meanwhile, see also A. Forrest, Paris, the Provinces and the French
Revolution (London, 2004), pp. 151–6; H.C. Johnston, The Midi in Revolution: A Study of
Regional Political Diversity, 1789–1793 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 222–49; A. Forrest, Society
and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (Oxford, 1975), pp. 109–80; A. Forrest, The Revolution
in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 181–212; W. Scott, Terror and
Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (London, 1973), pp. 40–126.
37 For events in Lyons prior to the outbreak of the siege, see B. Edmonds, Jacobinism and Revolt of Lyon,
1789–93 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 223–46. Toulon, meanwhile, is covered by Crook, Toulon, pp. 126–32.
38 Scott, Terror and Repression, pp. 127–63.
39 Crook, Toulon, pp. 139–41.
40 The clearest outline of the Committee of Public Safety is that afforded in C. Jones, The Longman
Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988), pp. 88–91. Though it owed its final form
to the changes pushed through by Robespierre, it had its origins in an earlier body entitled the
Committee of General Defence which had been set up in January and was remodelled with the
new title of Committee of Public Safety in April. Though possessed of much less power – in
theory, its role was simply to facilitate the work of the government ministers – even then, in one
more example of the Brissotins’ growing weakness, it was essentially a Montagnard concern.
41 Pen portraits are numerous, e.g. Hibbert, French Revolution, p. 203; J.M. Thompson, Leaders of the
French Revolution (London, 1929), pp. 215–21; R.R. Palmer, Twelve who Ruled: The Year of Terror
in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1941), p. 39; Furet, Revolutionary France, pp. 143–5.
42 For the expulsion of Danton, see N. Hampson, Danton (London, 1978), pp. 120–4.
43 For the Constitution of 1793, see Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution, pp. 70–1.
One point that is worth noting is that, although suffrage was now universal, it was also indirect.
44 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 249–51; Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 44–51.
For the armées révolutionnaires, see R. Cobb, The People’s Armies: the Armées Révolutionnaires,
Instrument of Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II (Yale, 1987), pp. 25–43. The
principle of a Parisian armée révolutionnaire had in fact been conceded by the Convention in the
course of the uprising of 2 June, but nothing had been done to put this agreement into practice.
Meanwhile, it is notable that this force was restricted to a size of less than one-tenth of the
100,000 men demanded by the sections.
45 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 253.
46 Edmonds, Jacobinism and Revolt of Lyon, pp. 282–91.
47 Crook, Toulon, pp. 150–1.
49 For a detailed discussion to the background of this measure, see S. Lyttle, ‘Robespierre, Danton
and the levée en masse’, Journal of Modern History, 30, No. 4 (December, 1958), pp. 325–37.
50 Bertaud, Révolution armée, pp. 123–39; Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, pp. 32–4. For an interest-
ing case study of the department of Puy-de-Dôme, see Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 134–9.
51 Cit. Picard, Au service de la nation, p. 32.
52 M. Kennedy, ‘Jacobin cavalrymen’, French Historical Studies, 17, No. 3 (Spring, 1992), p. 673.
53 Pion de Loches, Mes campagnes, p. 8.
54 A.A. Ernouf (ed.), Souvenirs militaires d’un jeune abbé (Paris, 1881), pp. 2–3. One question that is
worth looking into here is the role played by Terror in the implementation of the levée en masse.
If the matter is considered solely in terms of executions, the answer might appear to be very little,
for the 17,000 executions estimated to have taken place in France in 1793–4 bore most heavily on
‘class enemies’ (the clergy and the nobility), rebels taken in arms, or supporters of political groups
opposed to the Montagnards: many areas of the country, indeed, witnessed very few executions
or even none at all. A man whom one conscript saw being guillotined at Toulouse for preaching
against the levée en masse therefore seems to have been rather unlucky. That said, however, death
was not the only punishment meted out by the Revolutionary tribunals, whilst the number of
those arrested was enormous – possibly as many as 500,000. Opposition to conscription does not
figure strongly in such analyses as we have of the indictments, but ‘sedition’ – the crime involved
in almost three-quarters of those cases which have been documented – could as easily cover this
as it could, say, expressing pro-royalist sentiment. To imagine, then, that fear was not a factor in
the success of the levée en masse would therefore be naïve in the extreme. For a detailed discus-
sion of the Terror in general, meanwhile, see D. Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French
Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Gloucester, MA, 1966).
55 Ernouf, Souvenirs militaires, pp. 4–5.
56 Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, III, pp. 151–9. Although the defeat had in large part
been the result of the failure of his subordinate generals to give him adequate support – at least
one of them, indeed, had not advanced at all – Dagobert was recalled to Paris and replaced by,
first Turreau and then Doppet, but he was eventually exonerated and allowed to the Pyrenees,
only to perish from illness within a few days of his arrival. Doppet, Mémoires politiques et militaires,
pp. 206, 258.
57 That said, the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees was in no fit state to take the field. To quote a let-
ter written by Doppet when he was appointed to its command in December 1793, ‘As I travelled
from one formation to the next, I saw an infinity of horses and mules who had died of starva-
tion. As for our brothers in arms, they were for the most part huddling in tents without the
benefit of even a wisp of straw, and there were actually some battalions which did not even have
tents . . . Meanwhile, the rain is coming down all the time, and this has not only caused some of
our men to lose all spirit, but also led to many of them falling sick.’ Cit. Doppet, Mémoires politiques
et militaires, pp. 211–12. By the close of the year, meanwhile, it was not just a matter of men falling
prey to exposure: on the contrary, Doppet’s troops were struck by an epidemic which may have
claimed as many as 10,000 victims. Ibid., p. 239.
59 In fairness, a mere captain in 1789, Houchard could also be regarded as a case in point, but at fifty-
five he lacked the drive typical of most of his counterparts. For a portrait, see Palmer, Twelve who
Ruled, pp. 84–5.
61 Cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, volontaire aux armées de la Révolution, p. 129.
62 Chandler, Napoleon’s Marshals, pp. 160–1. Thanks to the intervention of another of the représent-
ants en mission posted to the Army of the North, Jourdan escaped with his life, but he was stripped
of his command and ordered to retire to his home town of Limoges.
63 Cit. Morin, Lettres de Pierre Girardon, p. 38. Whilst Girardon’s regiment may indeed have been as
effective as is portrayed here, in general the French cavalry were in an extremely parlous condi-
tion: hit very badly by emigration, most regiments were short of horses and badly under strength,
whilst the levée en masse had not added even one new unit of mounted troops to the army’s order
of battle. Kennedy, ‘Jacobin cavalrymen’, pp. 274–6.
64 The parlous state of the Army of the Rhine was later described in graphic terms by Soult. Thus:
‘Never had the army been in a worse state of disorganisation: the successive commanders who had
been placed at their head had not inspired the slightest confidence, whilst the general staff was in
chaos. As for the troops, they were too few in numbers to defend the positions to which they had
been assigned.’ Soult, Mémoires du Maréchal-Général Soult, I, p. 63.
65 A. de Jomini, Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la Révolution (Brussels, 1840), I, 401–2.
What makes matters worse is the fact that in the period July–October the Army of the Rhine had
no fewer than five different commanders. One factor in the revival of the fortunes of the Army
of the Rhine that should be noted is the contribution of Louis Saint-Just as représentant en mis-
sion: having arrived at Strasbourg in late October, he spent the next two months engaged in an
unrelenting campaign to improve discipline and morale and root out incompetents and defeatists.
Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 182–5.
66 Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, III, pp. 98–102.
67 For the siege of Toulon, see D.G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon: The Mind and Method
of History’s Greatest Soldier (London, 1966), pp. 22–8; B. Ireland, The Fall of Toulon, the Last
Opportunity to Defeat the French Revolution (London, 2005).
68 McManners, French Revolution and the Church, pp. 86–97. For a regional case study, see Forrest,
Revolution in Provincial France, pp. 223–30.
69 Blaufarb, French Army, p. 111. See also Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, pp. 89–124. For
a case study in one particular aspect of the attempt to use propaganda to whip up commitment
to the war amongst the rank and file, see J. Lynn, ‘An aspect of the political education of the
French army: the distribution of political journals, 1793–94’, Consortium of Revolutionary Europe
Proceedings, 12 (1982), pp. 75–90. The role of the Jacobin clubs was twofold: on the one hand,
they worked to raise morale and encourage recruitment, and, on the other, they assumed a police
function, hunting down deserters and draft evaders and rooting out disaffection. Forrest, Revolution
in Provincial France, pp. 292–3.
70 V. de Pelleport, Souvenirs militaires et intimes du Victor Comte de Pelleport de 1793 à 1853 (Paris,
1857), I, pp. 8–9.
71 Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 80–1. Whilst one cannot argue with Palmer’s logic, it is not dif-
ficult to find examples which at the very least call it into question. Amongst the new recruits, for
example, was a sixteen year-old-boy from Saint Quentin named Toussaint Trefcon who had grown
up in a background of what is probably best described as genteel poverty. Already a member of the
local National Guard, there was no need for him to have gone, and his decision to join a volunteer
battalion could therefore be seen as a sign of enthusiasm for the Revolution. However, according
to his own account, he claims only to have volunteered out of curiosity, while the winter of 1793
saw him turn deserter and go home with what appears to have been a sigh of relief. As for the idea
of resuming a military career, nothing of the sort entered his head until he was called up under the
terms of the Loi Jourdan, and even then he was a most reluctant soldier. A. Lévi (ed.), Carnet de
campagne de Toussaint Trefcon (Paris, 1914), pp. 1–5.
72 Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 225–38.
73 Ibid., pp. 113–22; 119–28; Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 262–3.
74 I. Germani, ‘Terror in the army: representatives on mission and military discipline in the armies
of the French Revolution’, Journal of Military History, 75, No. 3 (July, 2011), pp. 733–68.
75 Palmer, Twelve who Ruled, pp. 284–7.
76 Jones, French Revolution, pp. 76–7; Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 269–75.
77 For an excellent discussion of Robespierre’s views on religion, see F. Tallett, ‘Robespierre and
religion’, in C. Haydon and W. Doyle (eds.), Robespierre (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 92–108.
78 Dellard, Mémoires militaires, p. 25.
79 Pelleport, Souvenirs intimes et militaires, p. 10.
80 For a helpful discussion, see Griffith, Art of War of Revolutionary France, pp. 82–106.
5 Exporting the Revolution
Grandiloquent rhetoric and more or less abortive offensives notwithstanding, the period
1792–3 had essentially been one in which France stood on the defensive. From early in 1794
onwards, however, the situation was very different. In 1794 the French armies drove the last
foreign invaders from the soil of France and recovered Belgium and the Rhineland; in 1795
they conquered Holland; and in 1796, if repelled in Germany, they overran northern Italy.
Beyond doubt, this was a bravura performance, and, in consequence, it has given further
ammunition to those who would argue that the French Revolution had transformed warfare
and turned its army into an irresistible force. Again, however, this must be counted as an
exaggeration. In a variety of ways, the army of the Republic was a powerful weapon, but it
was never invincible, and in any case took some time to eradicate the problems on view
in 1792–3, whilst conquering western Europe was an achievement of a scale very different
from that of simply staving off defeat. As for the idea that political factors played a major
role in these events, this cannot but be called into question: while their beliefs encouraged
some French soldiers to fight harder, there is little evidence that propaganda weakened the
resistance with which they were faced. To explain the sudden expansion in French military
power, we therefore need to look elsewhere, in which respect the most important factor was
beyond doubt the weakness of the First Coalition: in the words of Paddy Griffith, ‘It was not
so much a case of the French winning a victory, but of the Allies losing one.’1
Of all this more in due course. In the short term, we need first to review the situation
in France. Here, as we have seen, the tide had turned against the radicals, and that this
was so was as clear in the military world as it was anywhere else. Nor was this surprising,
for the guiding hand behind the implementation of the levée en masse was not some enragé
but rather the erstwhile captain of engineers, Lazare Carnot. In some general histories, he
is remembered as a brilliant soldier and, further, a moderate opposed to the more extreme
policies of the Convention, but in fact neither of these ideas has much basis in fact: in the
Wattignies campaign, the failure of the French attacks on the first day had in large part
been the result of his insistence on attacking the Austrians on a wide front, whilst his many
interventions as a deputy in the national assembly suggest that he was as single-minded in
his determination to build a new France as any of his peers.2 That said, what he did possess
was an excellent grasp of the measures needed to realise the massive potential represented
by the levée en masse. Having secured election to the Committee of Public Safety in August
1793, for the next eleven months he threw himself into remedying the many faults in the
forces of the Revolution, perhaps his greatest achievement being to realise the plan agreed
by the Convention as early as February to meld the old regular army and the medley of
volunteer battalions and independent legions into a coherent whole, the basic idea being
that each battalion of line and light infantry would be put together with two of volunteers
Exporting the Revolution 121
to form a new unit called a demi-brigade.3 Known as the amalgame, this arrangement made
for a great advance in administrative efficiency. However, still more importantly, perhaps,
Carnot also put an end to the practice of forming more and more new battalions, which,
as independent units, all required costly headquarters that were far too elaborate for the
numbers of men concerned, and were in addition both composed entirely of raw recruits
and very difficult to keep up to strength: henceforward all new conscripts were to be fed
into existing battalions. In this fashion, Carnot paved the way for one of the French army’s
enduring sources of strength over the next twenty-five years, namely the manner in which
conscripts were inducted into life in uniform by distributing them among soldiers who, if
not hardened veterans, at least had more experience than they did.4
To pretend that Carnot solved all the army’s problems would be unwise, but he did at
least put it on a firmer footing than it had been in the first half of 1793. Meanwhile, equally
important was his contribution to the issue of command and control. With regard to the
officer corps, for example, a problematic issue ever since its introduction – many of the men
elected had had no military knowledge whatsoever, whilst some had even been unable to
read and write – the practice whereby units were allowed to elect their officers had already
been limited, but in the course of 1794 it was abolished altogether and replaced by the prin-
ciple of promotion on merit.5 As for the issue of control or, to put it another way, strategy,
the campaigns of 1793 had been marred by problems of all sorts with generals constantly
clashing with both one another and the représentants en mission attached to their headquar-
ters as to how their troops should be deployed and what they should actually do: the defeat
of Wurmser, for example, had arguably been badly retarded by the determination of Hoche
and Pichegru to go their own way.6 To deal with this issue, Carnot effectively launched a
coup against the generals by getting the Committee of Public Safety to proclaim its control
of all strategy, whilst at the same time issuing a general plan of operations and attaching a
special topographical bureau to the Committee of Public Safety.7
Last but not least, even in the campaigns of 1793, there had been significant improve-
ments in the combat capabilities of the French armies. Over the winter, however, the pause
in operations allowed these foundations to be built upon still further. To quote a letter written
by Cognet on 15 January 1794, for example:
I have to admit that up until now, whilst we have certainly been living a commu-
nal life, we have not been living a military one. All that has now changed, however.
Exercises, reviews and fatigues, one and all they have to be carried out with the most
strict attention to detail.8
On 11 March, meanwhile, the same observer reported a further improvement:
In terms of appearance and military habits alike, we are making rapid progress: there
are drill sessions twice a day, whilst we also go out on patrols that often take us close to
the enemy . . . As we are constantly on the alert, our performance has been sharpened
up a great deal.9
With better training and experience, of course, came better performance on the battlefield.
We arrive here at the question of the tactics used by the French army. These have often
been seen as having been crucial in the victories which it obtained from 1792 onwards:
on the one hand, there are accounts which claim that entire battalions, divisions or even
armies of French troops dispersed in open order and fought as skirmishers, overcoming their
opponents by a constant hail of fire to which the latter, who were for the most part trained
only to fight in close order, had no response; and, on the other, we hear of column attacks
in which great blocks of men hurled themselves upon the enemy and drove them from the
field by moral force alone. Yet the record of such innovatory, or, at least, semi-innovatory,
methods was not good. At Jemappes, column attacks very nearly failed, not least because
Dumouriez made the mistake of having his men deploy into line as soon as they came within
musket range of the enemy line (a manoeuvre that was certainly specified by the regulations
of 1791 as being the correct thing to do but in practice risked disaster) and at Trouillas they
did fail; and the swarms of skirmishers seen at Hondschoote almost certainly reflected not
a conscious choice but rather indiscipline and lack of training, the inability of Houchard’s
men to cope with the difficult terrain in any other manner in fact being the chief reason
why the battle proved so difficult to win. That said, there was clearly much interest in the
Revolutionary army in the employment of skirmishers, and, if only because many volunteer
battalions had chosen to designate themselves as chasseurs or tirailleurs in order to appropri-
ate a degree of panache, the number of light-infantry battalions had more than doubled.
However, whilst there appears to have been a continued tendency to employ light-infantry
battalions whenever circumstances rendered the use of conventional tactics difficult – good
examples are the defence or occupation of woods and villages – the real innovation here
was the idea that all infantry, no matter what their designation, should be able at the very
least to send out their own skirmishers if not to fight in open order in their entirety, the key
development in this respect being a steady move towards the British practice of designating
one company in each battalion as light infantry. Much thought about, too, meanwhile, was
the need to coordinate the employment of infantry and artillery (a development that led
to the emergence of horse artillery as an important element of the French order of battle),
and the consequence was the emergence of a new system of tactics based neither solely on
the use of columns nor the use of large numbers of skirmishers, but rather a sophisticated
doctrine of combined arms that had few equals elsewhere.10
However, important though this was, France’s generals did not just benefit from infantry
tactics that were more flexible than those of the opposition. Thus, the growing need for a
combined-arms approach was matched by the adoption of a new form of organisation. For
a long time, generals had been aware of the logistical advantages of breaking armies down
into smaller parts – in the parlance of the time ‘divisions’ – that could march by different
routes and only come together for battle. However, in the first place, these were purely
manoeuvre formations in that, having rejoined the main army, they were then absorbed
back into the mass, a further issue being that they were usually composed solely of either
infantry or cavalry. What the Revolution now did, however, was to take the idea several
steps further. Prior to 1789 one important step forward had already been taken in that the
division had become a permanent feature of the French army, this last being split up in
peacetime into eighteen regional all-arms garrisons under the command of a single general.
Confronted by very difficult challenges inherent in the French Revolutionary Wars, it was
but natural that French generals should have turned to it as a model: if French armies were
unlikely to be successful unless they resorted to a combined-arms approach, it followed that
they should be given an organisation that guaranteed the possibility of such an approach.
Increasingly, then, every French field army was divided up into permanent divisions, each
of which was composed of infantry, cavalry and artillery alike.11
Exactly as had been the case in earlier conflicts, these were expected to manoeuvre
independently of one another, but, in contrast to the previous norm, once battle had been
joined, they stayed together and continued to operate as a separate entity. As yet there was
little attempt at standardisation – a division might have as few as 3,000 men or as many as
10,000, whilst the number of units it contained was also likely to vary enormously – but
within a short time the principle had become a fundamental feature of French armies, and
not just that but an important part of their hitting power: in brief, a force organised in divi-
sions was both much easier to manage and much more flexible than one organised in the
traditional manner.12
What rendered the greater autonomy conveyed by the divisional system all the more
important was that its introduction coincided exactly with the moment when the French
Revolution’s impact on the officer corps came to the fore: as we have seen, not the least
of the changes seen since 1794 was the rapid promotion of many men who would never
previously have been able to attain high rank. Amongst the figures suddenly pitchforked
into positions of command, there was certainly a degree of dross – a good example is
Antoine Santerre, the Parisian beer magnate who secured a colonelcy in the National
Guard and featured very briefly in war in the Vendée13 – but the reality was that, whilst
such disasters were prominent, there were not as many as might have been expected.
Thus, the new generals were for the most part not men plucked from the ranks of civilian
society. Whilst these did exist – Jourdan was the first to become prominent – the lower-
ranking officers and rank and file of the Bourbon army were far more important, with the
former very much in the majority (of eleven army commanders in June 1794, only one –
Jourdan – came from civilian society, while, of the other ten, no more than three had
started life in the rank and file). In so far as their advancement was concerned, political
connections of one sort or another certainly helped, but neophytes they were not.14 One
and all, such men were hungry for fame and advancement, and perhaps all the more so
because, contrary to the usual image, many of them were far from young, while the shadow
of the guillotine was always there to remind them of the consequences of failure. At the
same time, the changing nature of the army meant that they could not rely on deference,
but rather had to obtain the respect of their men. Not for nothing, then, did Rothenberg
write of the marshals of Napoleon that they ‘all . . . had one common quality, conspicuous
physical bravery’.15
Following the second battle of Wissembourg, the guns had temporarily fallen silent.
However, with the coming of spring, fighting began again on 6 April with a massive offen-
sive against the Austrian and Piedmontese troops occupying the Maritime Alps. Now
known as the Army of Italy, in a plan believed to have been drawn up by Napoleon, the
troops concerned split into two, one element demonstrating against the defensive positions
held by the main Austro-Piedmontese army under Micheleangelo Colli around Saorgio,
and the other pushing along the coast to Oneglia before swinging inland to take Colli in the
rear. The results were spectacular: taken completely by surprise, within a matter of days the
defenders were in full retreat for the Piedmontese frontier fortress of Cuneo.16
As this offensive came to an end, so a second started. Next to suffer were the Spaniards,
who had now been reinforced by a division of Portuguese and were headed not by Ricardos,
who had just fallen victim to pneumonia, but the Count of La Unión. Commanded by
Jacques Dugommier, the officer who had finally secured the surrender of Toulon, on 30 April
the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees fell upon the Spaniards at Boulou in what became a bit-
ter two-day struggle. Unusually, the French outnumbered their opponents by only a few
hundred, but the invaders were spread out over far too wide an area, and the result was that
Dugommier was able to achieve local superiority and break through. By dusk on 1 May, then,
the Spanish forces were fleeing in panic. That said, it is not clear that the French victory had
anything very much to do with new tactics. To quote Lorençez:
In truth, I declare that I have never known men who were more patient, more sober,
better disciplined or braver in battle than the Spanish soldiers I encountered . . . Their
misfortunes . . . came from their absolute confidence in their cannons, their ramparts,
their endless fortifications . . . To think that an army spread out in small groups along
the whole length of its line of battle, and at the same time penned up in defensive posi-
tions and possessed of only the most limited capacity of movement can fight a general
with even a minimal idea of manoeuvre with any hope of success is but an illusion! Is
it not evident that, however strong the line is, there will always be somewhere where
it can be penetrated, and that, once this is achieved, there is nothing for it but flight?17
Having driven the Spaniards from their winter quarters, Dugommier pushed on south-
wards and reoccupied most of the territory that remained in their hands but, having at
last reached the Pyrenees, he was checked by the same frontier fort at Bellegarde that
had posed Ricardos such problems a year before: though two attempts to relieve the place
were beaten off in the battles of La Junquera and San Lorenzo de la Muga, it was not
until 17 September that it was finally forced to surrender, thereby opening the way for
the invasion of Catalonia.18
At the other end of the front, the French had also been successful: in late July the
future Marshal Moncey had launched an offensive on the frontier of Navarre, outflanked
the defenders and taken the fortress of San Sebastián.19 In discussing events in the Pyrenees,
we have been outstripping the narrative of events elsewhere. On the crucial northern front,
17 April had seen the forces of the Duke of York and the Prince of Saxe-Coburg advance
to besiege the fortress of Landrecies, and, within a few days, the Army of the North, now
commanded by Pichegru, was on the march to relieve the garrison. Fighting began on 26
April with three separate attacks on the covering forces commanded by Clerfayt, but these
proved a disaster, the French being everywhere repulsed with heavy losses. This fiasco was
avenged by a victory at Mouscron three days later, but, badly demoralised, the defenders
of Landrecies surrendered on 30 April. Undeterred, Pichegru maintained his position and
on 17 May his subordinate, Joseph Souham, defeated a counter-offensive on the part of
Clerfayt at Tourcoing.20 Further east, meanwhile, furious fighting had now broken out in
the area of Charleroi, where Jourdan’s Army of the Moselle (shortly afterwards renamed the
Army of Sambre-and-Meuse) had embarked on attempt to drive back the Austrian forces
holding the left bank of the River Sambre. In three separate actions, however, the French
were thrown back. Amongst the men caught up in these fruitless attacks was the same
Cognet we first met marching to war in the wake of his conscription:
Sheltered by a terrible downpour that had been coming down since the previous even-
ing, the enemy launched a vigorous attack on us . . . yesterday afternoon and broke our
centre . . . We stood to arms immediately, but our flank was in the air . . . and the result
was that we could not hold our positions for very long. Most of our skirmishers were
quickly cut down and . . . had it not been for the order to retreat, we would have been
gravely compromised by an enemy cavalry charge. At first the withdrawal was carried
out in good order, but then we saw our cavalry heading for the bridges at top speed to
get clear of the enemy. At this the retreat became a rout, and our brigade arrived at
the bridge of Jeumont in the most complete disorder . . . Here took place the saddest
episode of the defeat. To die in combat, is but to do one’s duty, but to die without hon-
our, miserably crushed to death against the parapet of some bridge or drowning in an
attempt to escape by swimming for it, is the height of misfortune. Yet such was the fate
of too many of my comrades . . . How many men were missing when it came to taking
a roll-call! All the units in the brigade had suffered to some extent or other, while my
own battalion had lost almost a quarter of its strength.21
Even when the French got across the river on 30 May and settled down to besiege Charleroi,
the Austrians were still not finished: on 16 June a massive counter-attack at Lambusart
broke part of the force covering the siege and forced Jourdan to pull back south of the
Sambre. Undeterred, and perhaps spurred on by the presence of Louis Saint Just, who was
once again acting as a répresentant en mission, within a few days Jourdan was on the move
again, this time striking east in the direction of Namur. Taken by surprise, the Austrians
were slow to react, and the French commander was therefore able to close in on Charleroi
once more, the garrison of which laid down its arms after only the briefest of resistance.
Unbeknownst to them, however, a large relief force was nearby under Saxe-Coburg, and
on 26 June there followed the battle of Fleurus. One of the biggest clashes of the conflict
to date, this saw some 80,000 French troops pitched against only 60,000 Austrians, whilst
Jourdan’s advantage was reinforced by the facts, first, that he was fighting on the defensive
and, second, that he was operating on interior lines, Saxe-Coburg’s assault being launched
from no fewer than five different directions. In the circumstances, then, it was a credit to
the Austrians that they performed as well as they did. Thus, both the French wings were
driven in, and it is possible that the Austrian commander might have won a great victory
had he possessed the strength to press home his attack, but, in the end, he had to pull back
to Waterloo, a small town south of Brussels that twenty-one years later was to give its name
to an even bigger battle. Amongst the troops who survived was émigré Claude Tercier, who
was fighting in the ranks of the army of the Prince of Condé:
Count Haddick was the general in command of our division; he was a great friend of
my unit. On 25 June the entire Allied army got underway in preparation for a general
attack . . . The French army’s centre and right wing were overcome. Even from some
distance away we could see units of infantry and cavalry effecting their retreat. As for
us, we kept advancing from one position to the next, and congratulated ourselves on
the success of a battle that bid fair to put an end to so horrible a revolution . . . Finally,
the French fell back across the Sambre, and we therefore ended the day feeling very
pleased with ourselves . . . The next morning, however, General Haddick received
an order directing him to take the Brussels road. At this news our astonishment was
extreme, and we embarked on our retreat without in the least understanding what
was going on.22
Dramatic though the effect of the battle of Fleurus was – utterly disheartened, Saxe-Coburg
fell back to the Rhine, thereby abandoning the whole of Belgium to the French, whilst to the
west the Duke of York had no option but to retire northwards to the frontiers of Holland23 –
it is chiefly remembered for the fact that it witnessed the first ever attempt to use air-power
in warfare, the Army of the North having been joined by a unit equipped with hot-air bal-
loons of the type pioneered a few years before by the Montgolfier brothers. However, given,
first, that the amount of information that reached Jourdan from the balloons’ crews does
not seem to have been very great and, second, that the devices proved so difficult to oper-
ate in the context of a campaign that they were immediately withdrawn from service, this
is but a footnote: what mattered was not the readiness of the French to dabble with new
technology but the ability of the French to triumph in conventional operations. But, for the
Montagnards, this last was a double-edged sword. As spring ran into summer, so the pace of
the Terror had stepped up alarmingly: with Robespierre and his allies determined to safe-
guard national unity at all costs, in June their ability to proceed exactly as they wished was
reinforced by a new law which virtually abolished judicial process altogether. With more and
more victims heading for the guillotine and rumours rife to the effect that, having achieved
his goals, Robespierre intended to distance himself from the slaughter by turning on the very
functionaries with most blood on their hands on the grounds that they had gone too far, the
result was inevitable: if France, as Fleurus suggested, was in a position to defend herself, the
need for the emergency measures of the past year was clearly at an end. On 27 July, then,
Robespierre was denounced in a stormy session of the Convention. Hearing of what was
afoot, the Commune tried to organise a coup, but its forces melted away, and the small hours
of 28 July saw the leading Montagnards arrested at the Commune’s headquarters in the Hôtel
de Ville, Robespierre, Saint Just and eleven of their confederates being executed without
trial the next day.24
Though many of its leading members had died with Robespierre, the Committee of
Public Safety survived, but its powers were greatly restricted while moves were put in train
for the elaboration of a new constitution. Thus was born the new period of the Revolution’s
history, known – from the month of the Revolutionary calendar in which it was initiated –
as the Thermidorian reaction, and with it a steady retreat from the democratic ideals voiced
by Robespierre. That said, any thought that Thermidor might produce a more conciliatory
foreign policy proved stillborn, not least because, having shifted the Revolution to the
right, the men behind the coup were in desperate need of legitimacy.25 To make matters
worse, meanwhile, the revival of France’s fortunes continued apace: in Belgium, now com-
manded by Pichegru, the French advanced to the frontiers of Holland, driving York’s army
before them as they went; in the Rhineland Jourdan had taken command of the Army of the
Rhine and moved forward to besiege Mannheim and Mainz; and in Catalonia, albeit at the
cost of the life of Dugommier, 17–20 November had seen the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees
defeat the Spaniards at Figueras and seize the great citadel of San Fernando that blocked
the main road south, and that despite the fact that the Spanish commander, La Unión, had
strengthened his positions with a chain of no fewer than ninety-seven forts which between
them mounted 250 guns. The French forces having been much harassed by irregular resist-
ance in the mountains to their rear (see Chapter 7), the unfortunate Spaniards were treated
with great savagery, large numbers of prisoners being summarily put to death: ‘Coming
across a number of Spanish casualties lying on the ground, I saw one of our cavalrymen
repeatedly try to drive his horse to and fro across them’, wrote one participant. ‘The animal,
however, was most unwilling . . . and it therefore seemed to me that it had much more
humanity than his master.’26
In more conventional times, this battle would have marked the end of the campaign
of 1794, but these were not conventional times, and the victorious forces of the Republic
therefore continued to take the war to the enemy. In Holland a bitter winter had set in
and, pressed by the remodelled Committee of Public Safety, Pichegru used the fact that the
Rhine and Waal had completely frozen over to invade. In the face of this assault, the Dutch
collapsed and the entire country was overrun almost without a shot being fired.27 Holland,
then, was out of the war, and in the period March–July 1795 the First Coalition was fur-
ther undermined by the defection of several of its other members, namely Tuscany, Prussia
and Spain: in brief, Ferdinand III of Tuscany had never wanted to fight the French in the
first place; Frederick William II of Prussia wanted to extract his troops to concentrate on
events in Poland (see Chapter Six); and Charles IV of Spain knew that he was facing both
bankruptcy and growing internal unrest. Henceforth, the Tuscans and the Prussians alike
were to seek refuge in neutrality whilst yet cultivating friendly relations with France, but,
deeply suspicious of Britain, the Spaniards took the process a step further by signing a treaty
of alliance with the Republic in an attempt to reconstruct the Franco-Spanish partnership
that had reigned for most of the eighteenth century.28
Meanwhile, the odds faced by France were also being reduced in another sense. Amongst
the troops caught up in the rout in Holland had been the Anglo-Hanoverian army. York
having been recalled, this was now commanded by a relatively obscure general named
William Harcourt, and the latter deserves some credit for the manner in which he now suc-
ceeded in extricating his forces from the disaster and retreating with them to Bremen from
where they were rescued by the Royal Navy in an early demonstration of the importance of
Britain’s control of the sea. Yet, conducted in bitter cold, the retreat was a terrible experi-
ence which had witnessed the complete collapse of discipline in many units, and the heavy
losses involved, together with the persistent difficulties which had been experienced in
cooperating with the Austrians, led the government of William Pitt to abandon any idea of
fighting in Europe in favour of a colonial strategy centred on the capture of French colonies
in the West Indies. The way in which this change in policy worked out being discussed at
length in Chapter 10, there is no need to go into it any further at the current moment, all
that needs to be said here being that it was clear that a substantial British presence on the
Continent had been rendered unlikely for years to come.29
If France’s diplomatic situation was much improved, meanwhile, by the end of the sum-
mer, the situation on the home front had also been consolidated by, first, the dissolution of
the Commune of Paris and the sans-culotte dominated sections; second, the promulgation
of a new constitution which abolished universal suffrage, established a bicameral legisla-
ture and created a five-man collective presidency known as the Directory; and, third, the
abandonment of both conscription and dechristianisation. Also important was the fact
that on 1 April an insurrection by the sans culottes of Paris in protest at rising food prices
and the complete collapse of the assignats over the winter – the result of the abolition
of the ‘law of the maximum’ and the rest of the Montagnard war economy – had been
crushed, several leading Montagnards then being arrested and either imprisoned in Paris
or deported to the French colony of Guyana.30 Meanwhile, the armies of the Republic
were soon on the march again, the object of their attentions being the only two thea-
tres of war in which they still face armed opposition on the Continent, namely Germany
and Italy. In Germany progress was minimal – thanks to bitter rivalry between Pichegru
(now in command of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle) and Jourdan, the Austrians and
their remaining allies among the minor German states were able to maintain a substantial
bridgehead in the Rhineland and, in an episode that has often been put down to treason on
the part of Pichegru, not just that but retake Mannheim and inflict a heavy defeat on the
French troops blockading Mainz31 – but in Italy an offensive that was launched against the
Austrians and Piedmontese in the Maritime Alps by Barthélemy Scherer in late November
brought a further victory at the battle of Loano.32
As 1795 moved into 1796, so the Directory continued to pursue its aggressive policies.
In brief, a three-pronged strategy was adopted. Whilst the bulk of the French armies struck
eastwards in Germany, recently promoted to the command of the Army of Italy, Napoleon
Bonaparte would march on Milan and then invade Austria by way of the Tyrol; meanwhile,
the troops in the west of France having been in large part freed up by the end of resist-
ance in the Vendée (see Chapter 7), they would be sent to attack Britain by sea. Finally,
with many units desperately short of strength due to the collapse in recruitment since the
abandonment of conscription, the army was reorganised in preparation for the new wave
of hostilities, the 211 demi-brigades of line infantry that had resulted from the amalgame of
1794 being reduced to just 110 (interestingly, however, in testimony to the importance
of skirmish tactics in the French armoury, and, possibly at least, the greater ability of élite
units to hang on to their men, the thirty-two demi-brigades of light infantry only suffered
two losses).33
It was not, however, a reshuffling of the army’s manpower that was to make the difference
to the campaign of 1796, but rather the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte as an army com-
mander. Though we have met the young Corsican once or twice before, it is now time to
introduce the figure who was to dominate the latter part of the French Revolutionary Wars.
So often has the story of Napoleon been recounted, not least by the current author, that it
is wearisome to have to do so yet again. However, in brief, the salient points are as follows.
The scion of a prominent family of the Corsican nobility, Napoleon was born in Ajaccio
in 1769, a few months after the collapse of Corsica’s long struggle for independence in the
face of French invasion. Though a close ally of the Corsican leader, Paoli, Napoleon’s father
chose the path of collaboration, and this secured the young boy an entrée to the system of
military academies established in the latter years of the ancien régime. Though he was duly
commissioned into the artillery in 1786, Napoleon emerged from this process an embittered
and unhappy young man: often homesick during his years of schooling in France, he appears
to have deeply resented the more aristocratic elements among his fellow cadets and to have
been something of a lone wolf who sought refuge in reading the histories of the great com-
manders of the past. From an early age, then, Napoleon aspired to finding fame and fortune
on the battlefield, but initially the context of these dreams was solidly Corsican: sickened by
his father’s collaboration with the French, Napoleon’s desires were centred on liberating his
homeland and becoming a new Paoli (a figure who had combined military prowess with the
reputation of a great law-giver and administrator). Determined, as he was to free Corsica,
it is hardly surprising to find the young artillery officer sympathising with the Revolution,
but it was not France with which he was concerned, and in fact he spent most on the period
from 1789 to 1793 on leave in Ajaccio, where he devoted himself to securing the leader-
ship of the reborn liberation movement. However, these efforts not only did not bear fruit
but eventually attracted so much ire that in June 1793 he was forced to flee into exile in
France along with his entire family. Almost immediately caught up in the federalist revolt,
through sheer good fortune Napoleon then secured the command of the artillery deployed
before Toulon and played the key role that we have already noted, and then for some while
remained on the staff of what now became the Army of Italy. Various vicissitudes notwith-
standing, by the autumn of 1795, he was serving in Carnot’s new topographical bureau
in Paris and was, in consequence, once again fortunate enough to be in the right place in
that October saw a rising in Paris in protest against the various measures that had been
taken to ensure that the new assembly would include a large number of men who had sat
in the Convention, Napoleon immediately offering his services with regard to assisting in
its suppression, a job in which he played a key role. Having thus secured the favour of the
Directory, and, in particular, its most influential member, Paul de Barras, though still only
twenty-four, he was given command of the Army of the Interior. This, however, was not to
his taste – it offered, after all, little in the way of glory – and by dint of a constant criticism
of Schérer’s failure fully to exploit the victory of Loano, in March 1796, he was appointed
to the command of the Army of Italy.34
At first sight it is difficult not to wonder whether this was something of a poisoned
chalice. In the first place, the French were badly outnumbered: whereas the Austrians and
Piedmontese together numbered 52,000 men, the Army of Italy had fewer than 38,000.
Still worse, meanwhile, the latter was short of artillery and cavalry, largely unshod, dressed
in little more than rags, badly underfed and all but unpaid. As a result, discipline was very
poor: pillage was rife and mutiny a frequent occurrence. Also at least potentially a problem
was the attitude of its three divisional commanders, Pierre Augereau, Philibert Sérurier and
André Masséna, all of whom were considerably older than Napoleon and possessed of much
more combat experience. To get as much out of his army as he did, then, was something of a
feat, and there is no doubt that the new commander’s achievement in the days following his
arrival was considerable. Thus, by dint of a mixture of charm, braggadocchio and personal
charisma, Napoleon appears to have won over officers and men alike and, perhaps above
all, to have restored a sense of hope, even if, as may well be the case, the famous proclama-
tion in which he implied that the wants of the army would be made good by the systematic
plunder of northern Italy is a later fabrication. Here, for example, is the impression that he
made upon the future General Roguet, ‘The height of General Bonaparte was below aver-
age, but his lively . . . demeanour, gracious . . . manners, imposing features . . . indefinable
expression and, above all, air of brilliance, set him apart from other men.’35
Operations on the Italian front began on 11 April, a mere twelve days after Napoleon
had arrived at his headquarters. According to his instructions, the main target was to be
the Austrians, the Directory’s hope being that, if left to their own devices, the Piedmontese
might make peace of their own accord. To the French commander, however, this was
anathema for a negotiated settlement with Turin could not but reduce his opportuni-
ties for winning resounding victories. Striking northwards from the coast, the Army of
Italy broke through the enemy cordon facing them at the town of Dego and defeated an
Austrian force at Montenotte and then a Piedmontese one at Ceva. Falling back to the
north, the Piedmontese were defeated a second time at Mondovi, the government of King
Victor Amadeus then immediately suing for peace. It should be noted, however, that there
was nothing remotely feeble about the resistance offered by the Austrian commander,
Beaulieu. Herewith, once again, François Roguet on a counter-attack that took place the
night after Dego:
Assembling a corps of 8,000 picked troops, Beaulieu set out to attack us. By dint of
marching all night, by the time dawn broke he was ready to advance, his efforts being
favoured still further by a thick fog mixed with heavy drizzle. Scarcely had it got light,
then, than the presence of the enemy was announced by the sound of gunfire . . . Taken
completely by surprise and unable to put up the slightest resistance, our pickets fell
back in disorder and spread alarm throughout the camp . . . A ball broke the arm
of our intrepid colonel, whilst the brigade commander, General Rondeau, was also
wounded. As for us, we were swept away by a jumbled mob of men of every regiment
and every rank . . . every one of whom was rushing for the rear . . . the enemy then
establishing themselves in the village and retaking all the artillery captured the previ-
ous day . . . Emboldened by their previous success, the enemy sallied forth from amidst
the houses . . . only to be met with a heavy fire that turned back anyone who was not
killed or wounded. The battlefield became a scene of carnage, but, in the end, French
valour carried all before it, and Dego was carried at the point of the bayonet.36
The defeat of Piedmont, however, was but the beginning. Whilst much of Napoleon’s record
is open to question, nobody can possibly question his mastery of many elements of the art of
generalship. A great strategist he never was – if anything, the reverse is true – but he was a
master of the operational art – the science of conducting a campaign in specific theatres of
war – and grand tactics – the assessment and management of individual battlefields – alike;
had a command of facts and figures that is best described as phenomenal; and was, quite sim-
ply, one of the greatest leaders of men of all time, his capacity to inspire the devotion of his
soldiers being all but unrivalled. At the same time, he was also fortunate in his subordinates:
Masséna is invariably reckoned as one of the greatest of his marshals, whilst his chief of staff
was Alexandre Berthier, an officer of the old army of noble origins of whom even Thiébault,
often a waspish and unpleasant observer, is warm in his praise:
No sooner was Bonaparte appointed than he looked out for a suitable chief of staff.
His choice fell on General Berthier, who was then at Paris, and it was a lucky one.
Berthier had served from his youth; he had been through the American war under
Washington and in all our campaigns. Besides his special business of mapping engineer,
he had knowledge and experience of staff duty, and a wonderful understanding of all
that pertained to war. More than anyone else, he had the gift of remembering orders as
a whole and conveying them rapidly and clearly . . . Nobody, therefore, could have bet-
ter suited Bonaparte, who wanted nothing but a man capable of relieving him of detail,
[and] of understanding at a word what he meant, or, at a pinch, divining it.37
With the confidence of his army growing by the day, after a short lull Napoleon struck
east to deal with the Austrian army that he had first defeated at the battle of Montenotte.
Commanded by General Beaulieu, this had taken shelter behind the River Po to the south
and south-west of Milan, but even so great a waterway represented little in the way of secu-
rity. In the Montenotte campaign, the French commander had already displayed a technique
that was to be one of his hallmarks in the years to come, namely, the strategy of the central
position, whereby, if faced with two enemy armies which together outnumbered his own,
but which he outnumbered if he could deal with them separately, he would drive a wedge
between them and pin one down while crushing the other. On view, now, however, was the
so-called ‘manoeuvre upon the rear’, whereby Napoleon’s hapless opponents were fooled
into thinking that the attack was coming from one direction when in fact the French com-
mander was working his way around one flank or the other to take them in the rear. Thus,
whilst Sérurier demonstrated against the line of the Po in the vicinity of Valenza, the rest
of the Army of Italy marched eastwards along the south bank of the river to the unguarded
town of Piacenza where it swung north and made to cut Beaulieu’s line of communications.
Utterly discomforted, the Austrian commander retreated in great haste, abandoning Milan,
which promptly fell to the French without a shot being fired, and fleeing across the face of
the oncoming French columns to reach the temporary safety of the River Adda. Frantic to
catch Beaulieu before he could escape the trap, Napoleon pushed his men to the utmost, but
he was just too late, though he did secure the consolation prize of a dramatic victory at Lodi
that prevented Beaulieu from making the Adda his next line of defence (famously, it was
during the night that followed this battle that the French commander afterwards claimed
that he first conceived the idea that he could become ruler of France).38 In the Austrian
camp, meanwhile, all was confusion. A future hero of the Peninsular War, Sir Thomas
Graham was serving at Beaulieu’s headquarters as a liaison officer:
The general from personal intrepidity seems to expect too much from troops in the
state his are in, and his language . . . is not conciliatory or encouraging either to officers
or soldiers. His temper, naturally warm, seems irritated by disappointment, and he is
anxious to vindicate his own plans by throwing the whole blame on the execution. On
the other hand, if I may judge from the very improper language held unreservedly by
the officers I have conversed with, his army has no confidence in him.39
Given the various administrative matters that accompanied the fall of Milan, including, not
least, the imposition of a massive financial levy, Lodi saw a brief pause in operations, whilst
the resumption of the offensive was further delayed by a shortlived insurrection that broke
out at Pavia (see Chapter 8).40 On 30 May, however, the position to which Beaulieu had
withdrawn on the River Mincio was pierced at Borghetto, the French going on to occupy
Verona, advance to the shores of Lake Garda and initiate the siege of the key fortress of
Mantua, Napoleon’s forces having now been reinforced by the 20,000 troops who had been
guarding the frontiers of Savoy.41 Meanwhile, thanks to his assiduous self-promotion (pos-
sessed from the beginning of a genius for propaganda, he founded two newspapers, the sole
purpose of which was to augment his glory), the French commander, still only twenty-six,
had become the hero of the hour. Louis Bro, for example, was a schoolboy in Paris:
Amongst we youths Bonaparte became a demi-God to whom one raised veritable altars.
All sorts of stories were told about him. In the office of my father . . . the clerks amused
themselves by sketching his portrait and composing epic poems which compared him
with the famous Alexander. Only one, a fellow by the name of Garponnet, had the
nerve to denigrate our hero: the discussion took a very lively turn, and Garponnet
received a good beating.42
With Napoleon besieging Mantua, we must now deal with the fighting in Germany. As
we have seen, it was here that the main weight of the French offensive in continental
Europe was to fall. Involved in the operations were two field armies, the 78,000 men of
the Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse under Jourdan and the 65,000 men of the Army of
the Rhine-and-Moselle under General Moreau (vice Pichegru, who had, as we have seen,
recently resigned in consequence of criticism of his conduct of operations in the Rhineland
in the previous year). Facing them, meanwhile, were two Austrian armies, Moreau being
faced with the 83,000 men of General Wurmser and Jourdan with the 92,000 men of the
Archduke Charles. In short, the French were badly outnumbered, while their difficulties
were further increased by the fact that the Austrians held a considerable amount of territory
on the left bank of the Rhine between Kaiserslautern and Mainz, the result of this being to
make cooperation between Sambre-and-Meuse and Rhine-and-Moselle extremely difficult.
At the same time, the French forces were barely in a position to take the field. To quote
Jean-de-Dieu Soult, who had now reached the rank of divisional commander:
Although our troops were excellent and in the best of spirits, they were short of many
things in the way of matériel and transport . . . Our artillery, for example, had insuf-
ficient draught animals while our cavalry barely numbered half that of the enemy.43
Nevertheless, pressed by orders from Paris, in June the two generals launched their offen-
sive. Much aided by the fact that Napoleon’s victories in Italy had led to Wurmser being
ordered to march for northern Italy with 25,000 of his men, Jourdan was able to advance
south-eastwards from the bridgehead he controlled at Düsseldorf and Moreau to get across
the Rhine by means of a daring amphibious assault at Kehl. Amongst the first men to land
on the right bank was Charles Decaen:
My boat was coxed by . . . a man by the name of Braun who throughout gave proofs
of the utmost sang-froid . . . I should have been followed by five other boats carrying
160 men, but, thanks to the strength of the current, these failed to follow the line
they had been instructed to take . . . with the result that I found myself facing the
fire of the enemy redoubt all alone . . . the only men I had with me being one officer,
one sergeant, fourteen grenadiers . . . and two pontooneers. Nevertheless, the boat was
brought alongside the bank so skilfully that we were all able to leap ashore at once and
charge the enemy. At this . . . the defenders of the redoubt took to their heels, leaving
behind their two pieces of artillery.44
Fortunately for them, having seized their initial bridgehead, Moreau’s troops were left alone
to consolidate their position. In the north, by contrast, Jourdan had found himself fighting
off a series of Austrian counter-attacks which gave yet one more proof of the fighting quali-
ties of the Habsburg armies. Typical enough was the struggle that took place at the village
of Dill on 16 June, in which the future Marshal Lefebvre, at this point a divisional com-
mander, found himself fighting off 15,000 Austrians at the head of a mere 6,000 of his own
troops. As one participant later wrote:
A lively attack on the part of five battalions of Hungarian grenadiers drove back our
infantry, while the enemy cavalry . . . charged our guns, paying no heed to musketry
and canister alike. Seeking to save the guns, General Richepanse charged the enemy
horse with just four squadrons of cavalry, and succeeded in cutting his way through
them and throwing them into disorder. Forced to retreat in his turn, he nevertheless
managed to rally his men, and . . . bought sufficient time for the infantry to escape to
the edge of the forest in their rear . . . Nevertheless, two cannon and a howitzer were
left in the power of the enemy. Encouraged by this success, the latter resumed their
attack, but they paid dearly for their temerity: a battalion of the 38th demi-brigade and
another of the 9th demi-brigade . . . met them with a general volley of musketry that
brought down almost an entire squadron of enemy cuirassiers . . . the Austrians being
so disconcerted by this unexpected resistance that they fell back across the Dill.45
Temporarily checked by this resistance, Jourdan ordered a retreat, but news that Moreau
had crossed the river persuaded him to resume the offensive, and he was soon back on the
line to which he had advanced prior to being driven back. Nor did he halt there: on 16
July, indeed, Frankfurt was reoccupied after a brief bombardment. Further south, mean-
while, the Army of the Rhine-and-Moselle had been equally successful and was poised
to invade Württemberg and Bavaria. As for the Archduke Charles, he had fallen back
south-eastwards towards the shelter of the River Danube. With the way thereby opened
for the unification of the Sambre-and-Meuse and Rhine-and-Moselle, all seemed set for
a great French triumph, but at this point things started to go badly wrong. In the first
place, the Austrian commander had left large garrisons in Mainz and Mannheim, and this
persuaded Jourdan to leave over a third of his troops behind to keep them under observa-
tion. Still worse, meanwhile, an order arrived from Paris directing Jourdan and Moreau to
mount two entirely separate operations against the Austrians, the one on the frontiers of
Bohemia and the other in the Danube valley. This last, however, was a serious mistake
as it in effect restored the advantage of the central position to the Archduke Charles,
and the latter now took full advantage of the situation. Having previously passed through
the towns of Wurzburg, Bamberg and Nuremberg, on 20 August Jourdan had reached the
river Naab. Spread out to ease the problems of supply, his divisions were widely separated,
and, believing that the Archduke Charles was fully occupied with Moreau, he had few
troops watching his right flank. Seizing the moment with gusto, Charles struck north
from the Danube with 28,000 men and on 22 August attacked the 6,000-strong division
of Bernadotte – yet another officer destined to become a marshal under Napoleon – at
Neumarkt and forced it to retreat. Fearing for his line of communications, the French com-
mander immediately fell back on Amberg, only to be attacked by Charles on 24 August.
Mishandled by the Austrians, this action was not as successful as it might have been, but
even so Jourdan certainly had much the worst of the day. Amongst the troops engaged was
the future Marshal Ney, who was the commander of an infantry brigade. To quote an early
biography put together from his private papers:
Every point that was occupied was attacked, indeed enveloped. The battle was nothing
more than a blood-soaked scrimmage in which a handful of gallant men held out in the
midst of the masses of enemy troops that incessantly hurled themselves upon them.46
Another future marshal caught up in the chaos was Jean-de-Dieu Soult:
I had been detached with my brigade . . . to observe the movements of an Austrian col-
umn that had advanced on our left and appeared to be trying to outflank us. However,
whilst I was engaged with this force in the vicinity of Mockendorff, the units on my
right suddenly fell back . . . At once I made to follow them, but on every side danger
loomed. In front of me were ranged troops that I had been hard put to contain, while
I discovered that an enemy force much larger than my own had come up behind me
and was completely blocking my retreat. A decision was vital, for any hesitation would
have increased the gravity of the situation and demoralised my men by giving them
time to appreciate just how bad things had become. That being the case, I resolved
to clear the obstacle blocking my retreat . . . In order to achieve this, I made it look
as if I was going to try to break through along the road to Bamberg, which was on my
right . . . in response to which the enemy immediately rushed as many men as they
could to resist such a move. Of course, this was exactly what I wanted them to do, and,
no sooner had they committed themselves, than I swung left and burst through their
right wing . . . They thought that they had got me, but with a single manoeuvre I had
freed myself and opened the way to the safety of the River Main.47
Had the Archduke Charles pressed home his offensive, he could probably have secured an
even greater success, but just at this point he was distracted by the arrival of bad news from
the southern front. Here the period July–August had seen Moreau push slowly eastwards
in the direction of Augsberg, but on 11 August he had been attacked by the Archduke
Charles at Neresheim in an attempt to discourage him from acting too aggressively while
the Austrians marched north to surprise Jourdan. Once again, the French found themselves
having to fight very hard:
At five o’clock in the morning, I mounted my horse with a view to conducting a recon-
naissance. Just at that moment a heavy cannonade broke out and I was astonished to
learn that the enemy had launched a vigorous attack. As the firing had first broken
out and seemed to be strongest towards the left of my position, the very sector of my
front about which I was most worried, I first rode in that direction . . . In the event,
however, as the course of the battle revealed, the attack on my left was but a feint.
Not so the attack on my right . . . Having ridden over there in haste, I discovered the
enemy had already forced the brigade of General Lambert, the unit on which my right
flank rested, to retire and driven in my pickets . . . My troops were putting up a good
fight, but the attacks of the enemy were no less vigorous, their canister causing me a
great many casualties.48
In the end, Moreau escaped with a draw, but Charles had nonetheless achieved his object,
for the former was so shaken that he stayed at Neresheim for several days, thereby enabling
the Archduke to march on Jourdan with the bulk of his forces. At length, however, even
Moreau (a commander who was distinctly timorous by French standards) could delay no
more, and, seemingly unaware of his fellow general’s misfortunes, he therefore pushed north-
east to take, first, Augsberg and then Ingoldstädt, it being this advance that led the Archduke
to ease the pressure on Jourdan. Determined to rescue something from the campaign, the
commander of the Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse now resumed the offensive in the appar-
ent hope of catching Charles between two fires. Unfortunately for him, however, he had
once again underestimated his opponent. Thus, far from waiting to be attacked, the Austrian
commander struck west across the River Main and attacked Jourdan’s left flank at Wurzburg.
The result was a further defeat. Badly outnumbered, the Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse was
exhausted by weeks of incessant marching and counter-marching, whilst it was also running
short of food and under constant attack from angry bands of peasants.49 As Soult recalled,
then, ‘The troops fought heroically, but the game was too unequal, and the army was lucky to
be able to get away . . . during the night with the loss of only moderate casualties.’50
With the defeat at Würzburg, Jourdan was out of the fight, and he now fell back on his
starting point, the only territory that was retained east of the Rhine by the Sambre-and-
Meuse being a pocket of territory a few miles deep stretching from Düsseldorf to Coblenz.
As for the Rhine-and-Moselle, for a little while, Moreau hung on in eastern Bavaria, but
it became more and more apparent that his position was untenable. On 19 September,
then, his army evacuated its base at Augsberg. The direct road west being too vulnerable to
attack, Moreau chose rather to take a long detour that almost took him to the Swiss fron-
tier, and it was not till 26 October that the last of his men crossed the Rhine via a pontoon
bridge at Huningue. The army may not have been beaten, but it had yet been hit very hard.
To quote Roch Godart, ‘When the army had crossed the Rhine, my demi-brigade had had
a strength of 2,350 men. Of these, 700 had been killed or wounded and another 700 taken
prisoner, while a further 300 were sick.’51 All that was left to the French here was now the
fortress at Kehl, and even this was duly besieged by the Austrians, though it did not surren-
der till 9 January 1797. Prolonged though the defence was, it was still an inglorious end to
the campaign. As a newly commissioned gunner who experienced the siege recalled, ‘The
infantry . . . more than once refused to do their duty; and . . . the senior officers . . . stayed
snug in their guard room . . . and made no attempt to visit the batteries guarding the walls.’52
In 1796 as much as in any other year, however, it was an ill wind that bore nobody any
good. Failure in Germany meant that the secondary front initially represented by Italy
was suddenly catapulted to the forefront of affairs, while Amberg and Neresheim could
not but magnify the importance of Montenotte and Mondovi, not to mention the figure
of Napoleon. Already, indeed, the young general was in a position to defy the Directory,
an attempt on the part of the latter to curb his prominence by splitting his army into two
and giving him the relatively menial task of marching on Rome to force the Papal States
to make peace while the rest of the French forces continued to fight the Austrians being
scornfully rejected. That said, the principle of securing the southern flank of the Army
of Italy made sufficient sense for Napoleon to adopt it on his own, the Austrians being
granted a brief respite by a quick thrust southwards that led to the occupation of neu-
tral Tuscany and the surrender of Pope Pius VI, the armistice that his administration was
forced to sign on 23 June bringing in a massive indemnity and giving the French the right
to install garrisons in the border fortresses of Bologna and Ferrara.53
Whilst Napoleon had been absent in the south, Wurmser had arrived from Germany
at the head of 20,000 reinforcements, and these troops were now thrown into a counter-
offensive designed to secure the relief of Mantua. Unfortunately for the new arrivals, how-
ever, the Corsican general had returned to the northern front before the Austrian attack
got underway in late July, and, whilst Wurmser himself managed to reach the beleaguered
fortress, another Austrian column led by Quasdanovic was defeated in the first and second
battles of Lonato.54 A gallant attempt on the part of Wurmser to rescue Quasdanovic lead-
ing to a defeat at Castiglione on 5 August, the Austrian commander fell back to the east,
Napoleon then resuming the siege of Mantua. Traditionally, these operations have been
seen as a further success for the French, but the various Austrian battlefield defeats masked
an important fact, and that is that Wurmser had actually secured a considerable strategic
triumph. To quote the military analyst, E.W. Sheppard, ‘Mantua had been relieved and
reprovisioned; the French had lost their siege train, and their siegeworks had been levelled;
and the fortress garrison had been placed in a position to resist for many months to come.’55
It should be noted, moreover, that Castiglione in particular was a hard fight, the Austrians
repelling attack after attack and eventually retiring from the field in good order. ‘Never
can there have been fatigue equal to that which I experienced in the course of that week
of campaigning’, complained Auguste Viesse de Marmont, a young artillery officer who
had become a protégé of Napoleon and particularly distinguished himself at Castiglione.
‘Constantly on horseback, riding from place to place, reconnoitring the enemy or in battle,
I went, I believe, five days without sleep.’56
Following the battle of Castiglione, it briefly appeared that Napoleon might be pre-
vented from obtaining further glories in Italy, for orders arrived from the Directory ordering
him to march north through the Tyrol to succour Moreau. Very unwillingly, the French
commander duly marched on Trent (Trento) and defeated an Austrian force at Rovereto,
but at this point news arrived that Wurmser was marching on Mantua once again, thereby
giving Napoleon the perfect pretext to abandon the invasion of the Tyrol. Rushing his
forces south-east, indeed, he caught Wurmser at Bassano on 8 September and forced him
to take shelter inside Mantua. Again, however, the Austrians could scarcely be accused of
feebleness. As one infantryman remembered:
The Austrians were waiting for us on a low hill, and we advanced to the attack in col-
umn. No sooner had we got in range, than they opened a most intense fire . . . We were
shot to pieces: blasted from the trees, branches came flying through the air and struck us
in the face, while balls cut muskets in two or struck men’s arms and legs. On seeing us
lashed by fire in this manner, the general ordered the drummers to beat the charge, and
we threw ourselves upon them. Their cavalry being unable to reach us on account of a
sunken road that blocked the way, we took their cannon and captured many prisoners
as well. Yet 230 of our men were reported as having been . . . killed or wounded.57
With Wurmser trapped inside Mantua, the command of the Austrian forces passed to a new
commander in the person of Josef Alvinczy. With nearly 50,000 men at his disposal and
Napoleon down to a mere 28,000, in November Alvinczy took the offensive, one Austrian
column heading southwards under Davidovic down the Adige valley while Alvinczy himself
advanced along the northern bank of the same river from the east. Over the next few days,
no fewer than four attempts on the part of Masséna and Augereau to check the Austrian
advance were thrown back – at Caldiero, indeed, the French suffered a heavy defeat – and
in the end order was only restored by a decision on the part of Napoleon to take the risk of
temporarily leaving Davidovic to his own devices while he threw every man he possessed
against Alvinczy. The result was the three-day battle of Arcola (15–17 November). Crossing
the Adige at various points to the east of Alvinczy’s positions, Napoleon attempted to cut
his communications, but the Austrian forces in the area put up a heroic resistance and
thereby bought the time needed for their commander to extricate himself from the French
trap. Having held their own on the first day of the battle, the Austrians did equally well on
the second, beating off every French attack, and it was not until Alvinczy was lured into
launching a foolhardy counter-attack on the third day that Austrian resistance was broken.
François Roguet was with the Thirty-Second Line:
A strong column of Hungarian grenadiers . . . advanced from the bridgehead and made
to attack us. For a moment we were thrown into confusion . . . At that moment General
Gardanne appeared on the road, sword in hand. All on his own though he was, he raised
his hat in the air and shouted, ‘En avant!’, only to fall gravely wounded. Nevertheless,
the charge was beaten, and . . . we rushed the canons facing us . . . The head of the
enemy column recoiled on the ranks behind in great disorder and we crossed the bridge
mixed up with them pell-mell. At long last, meanwhile, Arcola fell into our hands.58
Dramatic though the French victory at Arcola may have been, the bulk of the Austrian
forces had got away, and so the campaign of 1796 may be said to have ended in stalemate.
Meanwhile, before the year had closed, French arms had received another check. We come
here to the great expedition to Ireland that was the third prong of France’s strategy in 1796,
and, with it, for the first time, the opportunity to discuss the war at sea. In 1789 France had
possessed seventy-one ships of the line and sixty-four frigates and had therefore been second
only to Britain in terms of naval power, but the Revolution had wrought havoc with her
ability to mount a sustained challenge to the Royal Navy. Over the period 1789–92, then,
such was the disruption in the dockyards and the want of finance that most naval construc-
tion and routine maintenance came to an end, while hundreds of the navy’s best officers
emigrated in disgust. Even had this not been the case, meanwhile, there would still have
been the issue of geography: France’s ships had of necessity to be split between two theatres
of operations – the Atlantic and the Mediterranean – that could not reinforce one another
without the greatest difficulty, while the simple fact that the prevailing winds blew from the
west meant that the naval bases on the Atlantic and Channel coasts (Brest, La Rochelle
and Cherbourg) were all extremely problematic as stations from which to conduct opera-
tions. When war came with Britain in 1793, then, the situation of the French navy was
anything but ideal, whilst matters were immediately rendered still worse by the fact that the
British government’s immediate imposition of a naval blockade meant that opportunities
for sail-training became limited in the extreme.59
The consequences of all this are scarcely hard to foresee. In an action fought so far out
in the Atlantic that it was labelled the Glorious First of June, the French admiral, Louis
Villaret de Joyeuse, succeeded in frustrating an attempt on the part of Lord Howe to
capture a vital grain convoy en route to France from the United States, but the cost had
been extremely heavy and the fighting little better than one-sided with no fewer than
seven French ships lost as opposed to none at all for the British.60 Elsewhere, meanwhile,
the British had been allowed effectively to rule the waves unchecked, sending large expe-
ditions to the West Indies to capture the various islands that France possessed in that
region and ferrying troops across the Channel without let or hindrance. Meanwhile, so
great was the chaos that even minor offensive operations – the invasion of the Channel
Islands, for example – had to be abandoned as being completely impracticable. And, of
course, the terrible losses inflicted on the Mediterranean fleet in consequence of British
intervention at Toulon were all but impossible to replace, yet more ships being lost (all
of them to the elements rather than enemy action) in a desperate midwinter sortie from
Brest designed to reinforce the naval forces in the Mediterranean and the West Indies.
However, as sorry as this state of affairs was, it did not deter many politicians and even
some generals – the most notable example is Lazare Hoche – from dreaming of invading
England. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Jean-Bon Saint André, the Committee of
Public Safety made strenuous efforts to get the French navy into some sort of order: it
was, indeed, largely thanks to its efforts that Villaret de Joyeuse was able to put to sea
to fight the battle of the Glorious First of June. Yet, despite grandiloquent proposals on
the part of Carnot and others to get 100,000 men across the Channel, no such expedi-
tion was put together, and by the beginning of 1796 the idea had been replaced by more
practical schemes of small-scale raids on the remote coasts of Cornwall. Just at this point,
however, the idea of making use of naval power was given a fresh boost by the arrival
of emissaries from Ireland promising that the island would rise in revolt if the French
would but send an army to support the rebels. As what was going on in Ireland at this
time will be examined elsewhere, all that is necessary to say here is that the Directory
agreed to this plan and gave its execution to Hoche as commander of the French forces
in western France. With immense difficulty, an expedition was eventually put together,
but such was the delay that this involved that the invasion force did not put to sea until
15 December, by which time the Atlantic was in the grip of a particularly stormy winter.
The result was catastrophe: no troops got ashore from the few vessels that made landfall,
while thousands of lives were lost in the many ships that were shipwrecked. Whether
success was ever a possibility is a moot point, but, as it was, the Republic had suffered a
terrible defeat.61
With the collapse of Hoche’s expedition to Ireland, the focus on Italy could not but
be redoubled. Here Alvinczy was proving himself to be just as willing to defy convention
as any French commander, for on 10 January 1797 he launched yet another attempt to
relieve Mantua, advancing on the city from the north with 28,000 men while a general of
Italian origin named Provera menaced Napoleon’s troops from the east. Again the French
were hard pushed, but they had the advantage of internal lines and by dint of hard march-
ing were able to concentrate the bulk of their forces against Alvinczy before Provera had
made enough progress to be a real threat. The Austrian commander having compounded
his danger by separating his troops into five separate columns that could not support one
another, on 14 January he was crushed at the battle of Rivoli, no fewer than 15,000 of
his 28,000 men being killed or taken prisoner. Nor was this the end of the Austrians’
misfortunes, for the forces which had defeated Alvinczy now rushed back southwards and
descended on Provera, the latter ending up being surrounded and forced to surrender.
With all hope of rescue gone, meanwhile, on 2 February Wurmser surrendered Mantua
to Sérurier. As Sheppard points out, however, the heroic efforts of the garrison had not
been in vain:
[Mantua] had effectively filled the true strategic role of a fortress, to economize time
and forces for the benefit of the field armies operating elsewhere. It had detained
Napoleon and his army in Italy and gained time for the Archduke Charles to win a
decisive victory in Germany.62
In theory, the way was now open for Napoleon to invade Austria in line with the instruc-
tions he had received from the Directory the previous year, but, before doing so, he insisted
on settling accounts with the Papal States, the latter having been engaging in a long series
of delaying tactics aimed at putting off the signature of a definitive peace treaty. In acting
in this fashion, the government of Pius VI had been hoping that Alvinczy would turn the
tide of battle in the Po valley, and for this mistake it now paid a heavy price, a division
of French troops invading its territory and inflicting such havoc that Pius’ representatives
immediately sued for peace, the result being the exceptionally harsh treaty of Tolentino.
In addition to agreeing to an increase in the indemnity agreed in the previous year from
21,000,000 livres to 36,000,000 livres, then, Pius had to ratify the French occupation of
the papal enclaves of Avignon and the Venaissin (both of which had had been seized in
1790), surrender the northern province of the Romagna and, perhaps most humiliatingly
of all, allow French commissioners to raid churches and papal palaces alike to strip them of
whatever works of art they deemed suitable for display in the national gallery that had been
established in the Louvre in 1793 as a means of throwing the collections of Louis XVI and
his predecessors open to the public.63 By means of this last clause, official sanction was given
to a policy that had already begun to be put in place elsewhere (in 1794, for example, the
University of Louvain had been stripped of 5,000 precious manuscripts and numerous works
belonging to the Flemish school removed from Brussels and other cities, whilst Napoleon
had been ruthless in his treatment of Milan). In brief, France having in effect placed her-
self at the very forefront of human civilization by dint of the Revolution, it followed that
she should become the custodian of the treasures of the past, whilst it was hoped, too, that
exposing the populace to the works of Raphael, Titian and the rest would help to create the
new France of culture and progress of which the more ardent Revolutionaries dreamed. It is,
of course, just possible that some of the more idealistic figures in the political world believed
such claims, but the reality, of course, was very different: in brief, occupied Europe was to be
stripped of its glory to augment that of France in general, and, in the case of this particular
instance, Napoleon Bonaparte.64
Rome humiliated, Napoleon at last turned north. Facing him was now the Archduke
Charles, but, excellent as this commander was, he had too few troops, while he was pre-
vented from adopting the only plan which made any sense in the circumstances – in brief,
concentrating every man he could muster in the Tyrol with a view to either blocking a
direct march on Vienna or striking south against Napoleon’s communications should the
latter go for the longer but rather easier route via Venice and present-day Slovenia – by
interference from Vienna, the emperor’s advisers rather favouring a cordon defence that
sought to cover both angles of attack. As a result, Charles was left weak everywhere, the
consequence being that Napoleon, who had now been heavily reinforced as well as relieved
of the need to keep a large force of troops at Mantua, was able to mass superior numbers on
both fronts. Whilst the French commander attacked Charles on the River Piave, then, in
the Tyrol Barthélemy Joubert, yet another Volunteer of 1791 who had risen to high rank,
pushed the Austrians back in a series of minor actions that quickly saw him occupy most of
the southern part of the province. By the end of March, the Austrians were in full retreat
and Napoleon himself across the Alps and pushing into the Austrian heartland. As for
the hapless Republic of Venice, meanwhile, it was occupied by French troops, subjected
to heavy requisitioning and threatened with the loss of much of its territory, if not its very
existence, most of the towns and cities of its mainland possessions being persuaded either to
declare their independence or petition for liberation from the rule of the Doge.65
Anxious to bring the campaign to a close for fear that otherwise the Armies of the
Sambre-and-Meuse and Rhine-and-Moselle, which had taken advantage of the absence
of the Archduke Charles to cross the Rhine once more, would steal some of his glory, and
aware, too, that he could only ask so much more of his men, Napoleon now offered terms.
Bankrupt, exhausted and demoralised, the Austrians were only too willing to agree to this
approach, the result being the so-called Preliminaries of Leoben, these being signed on 18
April 1797 (in testimony to the difficulties of his position, the terms offered the Austrians by
Napoleon were remarkably lenient: in brief, the Austrians gave up Belgium and Lombardy
and had to surrender their territories in the Rhineland, but were compensated by being
allowed to take over the archbishopric of Salzburg and all the Italian territories of the
Republic of Venice east of the River Adige, including the city of Venice itself, together
with Istria and Dalmatia, all the rest of Venice’s territory being taken by France).66 Badly
shaken at the collapse of Austrian resolve and in serious difficulties in the Mediterranean,
from which they had been forced to withdraw their fleet at the end of 1796 on account of
the occupation by the French of so many of the ports from which they drew their supplies,
the British might well have followed the Austrian example, and all the more so, as some
sort of compromise peace currently seemed a real possibility. Thus, the first elections to
the new legislative established in accordance with the constitution of 1795 had produced
a strong showing on the part of French royalism, whilst Carnot, especially, was eager for
peace.67 However, acting with the support of Napoleon and a number of other generals,
on 4 September 1797 in the so-called coup of 18 Fructidor, the intransigent faction in the
Directory removed Carnot and his fellow moderate François Barthélemy from its ranks,
purged the legislative of all those it considered suspect and shut down many newspapers
with royalist sympathies, fifty-three of the men arrested being transported to the French
colony of Guyana.68 Amongst those subjected to this last fate was General Pichegru, who
had secured election to the lower chamber of the new assembly and then been chosen as its
president, his rival Moreau having seized the opportunity provided by the coup to release
documents that suggested that he had at least been in contact with the Royalists, if not
actually in league with them.69 The sequel to the coup of Fructidor being a reversion to
many aspects of Jacobinism, particularly persecution of the non-juring clergy and the impo-
sition of new civic cults in place of Catholicism, the Pitt government lost all interest in a
deal and withdrew from the secret talks which it had initiated with Paris.70
Signed on 18 October 1797 at the Italian village of Campo Formio, the peace with
Austria that followed from the negotiations at Leoben did not mark the end of French
expansion: still to come was the invasion of Rome, mainland Naples and Switzerland. As
brief as they were one-sided, however, there is no need to discuss the military campaigns
that produced these events, and all the more so as they shed no new light on the themes
discussed in this chapter. In so far as these last are concerned, there is one simple question
that must be answered. In brief, how was it that, almost entirely unaided by foreign allies or
foreign revolutions, France was able to overcome the powerful coalition with which she was
still faced at the end of 1793? In so far as this issue is concerned, of course, the first thing to
say is that the First Coalition continued to be dogged by massive diplomatic problems. One
thinks here, above all, of the Prussian obsession with eastern Europe, but also problematic
was long-term Spanish rivalry with Britain, British reluctance to commit major forces to the
European war when there were more attractive opportunities to be had in the West Indies
and Russian ambitions in eastern Europe. To quote Paul Schroeder, then, ‘The Allied
coalition . . . was wrecked more by internal divisions than French victories.’71
In exactly the same way as had been the case in 1793, then, the failure of the First
Coalition between 1794 and 1797 was the product of disunity, muddled thinking and self-
interest at the strategic level. However, as even a cursory study of the campaigns suggests,
what the French triumph did not rest on was the result of structural deficiencies in the
armies of the ancien régime. That these were far from perfect cannot be denied, and yet
they inflicted terrible damage on their French opponents and were quite capable of defeat-
ing them in battle. Nor, meanwhile, can their commanders all be tarred with the brush
of age, incompetence or an inability to grasp the changes wrought by the new age: some
of the generals who fought the French were of poor quality, certainly, but others, particu-
larly the Archduke Charles, Wurmser and Alvinczy, showed an excellent grasp of strategy
and at times put even Napoleon under enormous pressure. Does the answer, then, lie in
advantages supposedly derived from the French Revolution? Here, too, however, we must
be cautious. Let us begin with the issue of numbers. The French Revolution, we are con-
stantly told, gave France mass armies that fought with tactics that were entirely new, but
in fact it is clear that neither claim has much basis in reality. The levée en masse may have
enabled the Republican forces to make head on many different fronts simultaneously (not
that any of those fronts were much tested), but the size of field armies did not in fact grow
very much. On the contrary, indeed, it actually seems to have fallen: in the Seven Years
War the average number of combatants in the twelve battles fought by Frederick the Great
was 92,000 men, whereas an analysis of twenty-six Revolutionary-War battles ranging from
Valmy to Rivoli has suggested that the same figure was but 65,000. Meanwhile, if these
same twenty-six battles are examined further, we discover that the French armies only had a
small advantage in terms of numbers, averaging 35,000 men to their opponents’ 31,000, and
that in ten of them they were actually outnumbered. If it is true that they won twelve of the
sixteen battles in which they outnumbered the enemy, numbers, then were not everything,
whilst it is striking, too, that their overall rate of success – sixteen battles out of twenty-six –
is once again not what might have been expected. Greater numbers allowed the French to
sustain war for longer, and, indeed, fight on more fronts, than their opponents could – if
Spain and Austria made peace, it was in large part because their capacity to put men into
the field was utterly exhausted, whilst Britain found herself in a situation in which she could
either fight in Europe or the West Indies but not both – but they neither changed the face
of battle nor guaranteed victory. Indeed, with the abandonment of conscription, numerical
superiority quickly ceased to be an issue. As Bertaud remarks:
By 1797 the army of the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory had lost its mass.
Working on a hypothesis that it had 732,474 men present in August 1794, as Minister
of War, Petiet presented a report to the Directory in which he claimed that in August
1795 the army had no more than 484,363 men . . . in August 1796 [it had] 396,019 and
in August 1797 [only] 381,909.72
If the French did not overwhelm their opponents by force of numbers, there yet remain
many other factors that are often connected with the Revolution to which their victo-
ries can be attributed. Yet here, too, it is necessary to make a number of qualifications.
Amongst these factors, then, are new tactics (especially the introduction of columnar for-
mations and the greater use of skirmishers), the divisional system and a reduction in the
supposedly traditional reliance on supplies transported with the armies in favour of living
off the country, and yet the new tactics and the divisional system had both been inherited
from the ancien régime, whilst, as we have already seen, for the simple fact that they could
not hope to survive otherwise, armies had always lived off the country: always desirable
in and of itself when the country concerned was that of the enemy, poor roads and a lack
of anything other than animal traction meant that there was simply no other way they
could survive. And if the British, the Spaniards, the Austrians and the Prussians lived off
the country, at both the tactical and the operational level they showed themselves to be
capable of making use of methods of war that were very similar: in their successive attempts
to relieve Mantua, for example, Wurmser and Alvinczy repeatedly split their forces into
commands of a divisional character so as to envelop the French.73
Was the advantage political, then? In the French armies, extravagant use was made of
propaganda, whilst in the period 1793–4, in particular, the Revolution was given a social
content designed to give the French populace, urban and rural alike, something to fight
for, and much practical support and encouragement were offered to the rank and file. To
quote Paul Schroeder, ‘France found its key to salvation and victory in revolutionary élan.’74
To a degree this worked – amongst the hundreds of thousands of men who fought for the
Republic, there were beyond doubt large numbers of men who were genuinely engaged
with the ideas of the Revolution, whilst the rule of the Montagnards saw a considerable
fall in the rate of desertion from the levels seen in response to the levy of February 179375 –
but enthusiasm for the Revolution was not sufficient to obviate the need for conscription,
let alone to make every soldier a hero: on battlefield after battlefield, attacks in column
that were poorly coordinated or denied adequate support collapsed in the face of the over-
whelming fire to which they were subjected, whilst there were plenty of occasions when
French troops on the defensive simply broke and ran. At the same time, the very fact
that the army proved so ready to bend before the Thermidorian wind does not encourage
excessive faith in the impact of propaganda on its ranks. To quote Alan Forrest, indeed,
‘If discipline won – and there is little doubt that it did – doubts must surely be cast on the
effectiveness of the Jacobin campaign to raise the political consciousness of the soldiers.’76
Finally, even enthusiastic soldiers were by no means necessarily ideological crusaders. As
one young cavalryman remembered, there were always other stimuli:
I loved my job, I loved my men . . . and, constantly changing and full of improvisation
as it was, I loved the life of a soldier on campaign. At the same time, as I galloped from
one end of Europe to the other, I enjoyed observing the different peoples and their
habits, costumes and cultures, not to mention all the different aspects of the regions
which I traversed. It really was a thing of the utmost pleasure.77
Only in one area, then, can the Revolution truly be said to have made a difference. We
come here to the issue of leadership. In 1792 the French armies had gone to war com-
manded by figures like Dumouriez and Custine, in other words generals of the Bourbon
army who had rallied to the Revolution. However, within a year, such men had started
to be replaced by men like Houchard – career officers who had been denied advancement
under the Bourbons – or, alternatively, men like Hoche, Pichegru and Jourdan – men who
had either been serving in the ranks in 1789 or not been in the army at all. Such men were
often very far from being military geniuses, but they were also capable of engaging with the
troops under their command in a manner in which their predecessors would rarely even
have attempted. Meanwhile, driven by a lust for glory and advancement, they were ever
willing to take risks, to lead from the front and to push their men to extremes. Nor was this
advantage confined to the ranks of the generals alone. With promotion in the army now
genuinely open to all men of talent, behind them came a wave of subordinate commanders
imbued with precisely the same ideas – men like Soult, Ney, Masséna and Augereau who
would go on to provide Napoleon with some of the greatest of his marshals – and behind
them again a wave of captains intent on stepping into the shoes of the men ahead of them
on the ladder. In all this, of course, there was much self-interest – denied the elevation they
craved or otherwise snubbed by the regime, such men were entirely capable of turning their
coats in the same fashion as Pichegru – but that self-interest created a powerful identifica-
tion with the Revolution that lent wings to its soldiers’ feet and ensured that Republican
instincts – anti-clericalism, for example – remained strong in the army throughout the
1790s and beyond. In the words of Bertaud, ‘Propounded by the more radical sans culottes,
the cult of Reason took over the army.’78
Of course, the most obvious example of an officer plucked by the Revolution from
obscurity who rose to the command of an army is Napoleon. Here we come to the factor in
the Republic’s military success that is arguably the most important whilst yet being the one
that is most commonly overlooked, namely sheer good fortune. In brief, whilst anything
but the greatest commander of all time, the young Corsican general was not yet in a posi-
tion in which his faults in this respect – above all, a grasp of strategy that was little short of
appalling, a tendency always to overplay his hand and a failure to remember that general-
ship, like politics, is the art of the possible – had had much chance to reveal themselves,
whilst, as commander of the Army of Italy, he was ideally placed to take advantage of his
many gifts, whether these were his ability win the hearts of his soldiers or his mastery of the
art of in-theatre manoeuvre. Thanks to these two skills, he took the Army of Italy to great
things, no fewer than seven of the sixteen French victories included in the list of battles
mentioned above being fought under his direct command. In short, take Napoleon out of
the equation, and we suddenly discover a situation in which the honours of war are not
unequal, a situation, perhaps, in which France would have gained the natural frontiers and,
very probably, Holland, but would have been unable to advance very far into Germany and
Italy. As Richard Bassett writes of the campaign in Italy:
Napoleon’s generals, Masséna and Augereau, both experienced the tenacity of the
Austrians and it is not clear that, had the French forces been left entirely to the command
of these men, they would have won any of the battles that were fought.79
The Revolution, true, produced Napoleon, but it did not beget Napoleon, or save him from
being killed at, say, the siege of Toulon, where he was, in fact, slightly wounded leading
an assault on one of the city’s many forts. As a note on which to end this chapter, it is an
arresting thought.
Notes
1 Griffith, Art of War in Revolutionary France, p. 283.
2 S.J. Watson, Carnot (London, 1954), pp 46–8, 58–9.
4 The key institution in the military socialisation of the army was the squad or ordinaire; see Lynn,
Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 164–9. Meanwhile, for Carnot’s labours with respect to the army, see
M. Reinhard, Le grand Carnot (Paris, 1952), II, pp. 91–101; Watson, Carnot, pp. 85–90.
6 E.g. Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, II, pp. 73–85.
7 Griffith, Art of War in the Age of Napoleon, pp. 80–2; Watson, Carnot, pp. 85–90; Reinhard,
Le grand Carnot, II, pp. 102–17.
8 Cit. Ernouf, Souvenirs militaires, p. 10.
9 Cit. ibid., p. 12.
10 Griffith, Art of War of Revolutionary France, pp. 207–25; Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic, pp. 241–77;
Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, pp. 115–16.
11 S.T. Ross, ‘The development of the combat division in eighteenth-century French armies’, French
Historical Studies, 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 84–94. Mention of the French cavalry requires a few
words on the subject. In brief, the mounted arm was by far the weakest component of the armies of
the Revolution: the cavalry officers had suffered more from emigration than any other branch of
the armed forces; the rank and file had followed their officers in considerable numbers; and it had
proved all but impossible to raise new regiments. Griffith, Art of Warfare of Revolutionary France,
pp. 225–8.
12 B. Nosworthy, With Musket, Cannon and Sword: Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies (New
York, 1996), pp. 97–8.
13 For a recent biography, see R. Monnier, Un bourgeois sans-culotte: le general Santerre (Paris, 1989).
14 Griffith, Art of War of Revolutionary France, pp. 109–20.
15 Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, p. 131.
16 Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, III, pp. 217–37. For Napoleon’s role in these opera-
tions, see Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 30–2. The French successes on the Italian frontier
were slightly soured by the fact that in February a British expeditionary force had disembarked in
Corsica. Extremely determined though they proved, by May the last of the defenders had been
overcome, whereupon Corsica became a British satellite state whose head of state, like that of
Hanover, was George III. For all this, see D. Gregory, The Ungovernable Rock: A History of the Anglo-
Corsican Kingdom and its Role in the Revolutionary War, 1793–97 (Rutherford, New Jersey, 1985).
17 Bourgoing, Souvenirs militaires du Général Comte de Lorencez, pp. 16–20.
19 Ibid., pp. 186–92.
20 Amongst the troops involved in this defeat was the Duke of York’s Anglo-Hanoverian contingent,
and it is sometimes claimed that it was their indecisive manoeuvring that gave rise to the famous
nursery rhyme. E.g. D. Winterbottom, The Grand Old Duke of York: A Life of Prince Frederick, Duke
of York and Albany, 1763–1827 (Barnsley, 2017), pp. 67–8.
21 Cit. Ernouf, Souvenirs militaires, pp. 34–7.
22 Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Tercier, pp. 77–8. By this time, although they
were still some 12,000 strong, Condé’s forces had lost all claim to be an independent army and
were, in effect, functioning as an Austrian division.
23 For the experiences of the British forces in these operations, see R.N.W. Thomas, ‘Wellington in
the Low Countries, 1794–5’, International History Review, 11, No. 1 (February, 1989), pp. 14–30.
24 Sydenham, First French Republic, pp. 23–8.
25 E.g. Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution, pp. 212–13, 218–20.
26 M.G. Lacour-Gayet (ed.), Mémoires du Vice-Amiral Baron Grivel: Révolution-Empire (Paris, 1914),
p. 19. Phipps, Armies of the Third French Republic, III, pp. 195–9.
27 The decision to invade Holland in the depths of winter was as much the result of necessity as it
was of abstract notions of total war. As one French soldier wrote of the pause in operations that
preceded the new offensive, ‘The moment to go into cantonments had arrived . . . That said, such
was the overcrowding produced by the huge numbers of men that had to be billeted in every town
that none of the quarters in which the troops were placed were either comfortable or agreeable,
whilst every article of first necessity was soon exhausted . . . and from all this it followed that the
pause in operations could not last for very long. P.C. Duthilt, Mes campagnes et mes souvenirs, ed.
A. Lévy (Paris, n.d.), p. 68.
28 Extremely complicated, the diplomatic situation at this point is best approached via Schroeder,
Transformation of European Politics, pp. 138–50; in this respect, the behaviour of the Prussians was
particularly self-centred, whilst their hand was strengthened still further by blundering British
attempts to buy their loyalty by a particularly generous treaty of subsidy. For a detailed discussion
of Godoy’s foreign policy with regard to France, see E. La Parra López, La alianza de Godoy con los
revolucionarios: España y Francia a finales del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1992), pp. 13–42. Meanwhile,
it should be noted that the Spanish army performed remarkably well in the last few months of
the war: if the very last weeks of hostilities saw the Army of the Western Pyrenees sweep aside
the outnumbered Spanish defenders and advance as far as the River Ebro, two separate attempts
to break through the defensive position that had been established on the River Fluvia south of
Figueras were defeated, while a flying column commanded by Gregorio García de la Cuesta, an
officer later to be much reviled by the British in the course of the Peninsular War, managed to
outflank the invaders and retake the town of Puigcerda. Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic,
III, pp. 201–8.
29 For a useful discussion of the strategic dilemma posed by the issue of the colonies, see P. Mackesy,
‘Strategic problems of the British war effort’, in H.T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French
Revolution (London, 1989), pp. 147–64. With the decision of Spain to change sides, meanwhile,
it was also deemed necessary to evacuate Portugal.
31 Whether Pichegru was actually guilty of treason at this point is unclear, though it is true, perhaps,
that the general’s devotion to the Revolution was a lot less deep than his ambition. As one émi-
gré officer later remarked, for example, ‘There is room to believe that [Pichegru] . . . would have
attached himself to the good cause had not the other presented a vaster field of action.’ Anon.,
Life and Anecdotes of General Pichegru, Commander in Chief of the French Republican Army by
M. de V., a French Emigrant Officer (London, n.d.), p. 11. Be that as it may, various agents of the
émigrés had for some time been trying to win him over to the Royalist cause though it is dif-
ficult to establish whether he actually committed himself to anything. What is clear is that he
was furious at the criticism to which he was subjected in the wake of the campaign, the conse-
quence being that he eventually offered his resignation. Seemingly, he never expected this to be
accepted, but the Directory had either become suspicious of his behaviour or were simply glad to
rid themselves of a figure whom they regarded as being as temperamental as he was ambitious. For
all this, see Phipps, Armies of the First French Republic, II, pp. 261–9; E. Daudet, La conjuration de
Pichegru et les complots royalistes du midi et de l’est, 1795–97 (Paris, 1901); G. Caudriller, La trahison
de Pichegru et les intrigues des royalistes dans l’est avant Fructidor (Paris, 1908).
33 For the amalgame of 1796, see Bertaud, Révolution armée, p. 277.
34 For the author’s own take on Napoleon’s early life, see Esdaile, Napoleon’s Wars, pp. 15–37. For
two more detailed treatments, meanwhile, see P. Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799
(London, 2007), pp. 11–191, and M. Broers, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (London, 2014), pp. 15–112.
35 F. Roguet, Mémoires militaires du Général Roguet, 1789–1812 (Paris, n.d.), p. 76.
36 Ibid., pp. 80–1; Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 64–76.
38 Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 77–84.
39 Cit. F. Drake and J.H. Rose (eds.), ‘The dispatches of Sir Thomas Graham on the Italian campaign
of 1796–97’, English Historical Review, 14, No. 53, p. 117.
40 The importance of Napoleon’s conquests to the finances of the Directory cannot be overstated. To
quote Phillip Dwyer, ‘’Wherever Napoleon went in Italy, he imposed enormous levies . . . 2,000,000
francs from the Duchy of Parma, 10,000,000 francs from the Duke of Modena, 20,000,000 from
Milan (five times the burden of the annual tax burden of the old regime.’ Dwyer, Napoleon, p. 225.
41 The fact that Napoleon decided to besiege Mantua rather than somehow bypassing it and moving
on is highly significant: even the greatest of commanders, it seems, could not entirely break with
the patterns of eighteenth-century warfare.
42 C. Bourachot (ed.), Général Louis Bro: mémoires d’un hussard, 1796–1844 (Paris, 2002), p. 2.
44 Picard and Paulier, Mémoires et journaux du Général Decaen, I, p. 90.
45 L. Buquet, ‘Journal historique de la cinquieme campagne commencé le 9 prairial l’an IV de la
République Française’, Journal de la Sabretache, 17 (1908), pp. 351–2.
46 Anon., Mémoires du Maréchal Ney, Duc d’Elchingen, Prince de la Moskowa (London, 1833), I,
p. 170. In the midst of the fighting, two battalions of Ney’s troops were cut off and forced to make a
fighting retreat in square. Cut to pieces by Austrian artillery after prolonged resistance, they were
eventually ridden down by enemy cavalry, but the very fact that they were able to attempt such
a manoeuvre is proof positive of the extent to which the French armies had come on in terms of
their tactical prowess since the beginning of the war.
48 Picard and Paulier, Mémoires et journaux du Général Decaen, I, pp. 131–2.
49 A further problem, of course, was pillage. Whilst some officers attempted to maintain order, the
troops greatly resented such efforts, Godart, for example, describing how an attempt on his part
to deal with one group of marauders led to a mutiny amongst his men and further claiming that
on several occasions he narrowly escaped death when soldiers tired to shoot him in the back.
Antoine, Mémoires du Général Baron Roch Godart, pp. 37–9.
50 Soult, Mémoires du Maréchal-Général Soult, I, p. 317.
51 Antoine, Mémoires du Général Baron Roch Godart, p. 48.
52 Pion de Loches, Mes campagnes, p. 61.
53 Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 89–92.
54 According to the British liaison officer Sir Thomas Graham, Wurmser inspired little confidence
amongst his troops. As he wrote at the onset of the campaign, ‘Had the confidence of the army
been gained by the choice of an able and efficient commander (the only means left to recover the
broken spirit of the soldiers and the disgust of the officers), there would be more probability of
great things being done. The zeal of this good old man is not enough, and there is nothing else.
He is undecided, either from being perplexed by the contradictory opinions of those around him
or from no-one choosing to take the lead and the responsibility attached to it. I believe the latter
to be the case . . . Many of the officers comfort themselves with thinking that defeat must force
peace.’ Cit. Drake and Rose, ‘Dispatches of Sir Thomas Graham’, p. 118.
55 E.W. Sheppard, ‘The Italian campaign of 1796 from the Austrian standpoint’, Journal of the Royal
United Services Institution, 101, No. 602 (April, 1956), p. 260.
56 A. Viesse de Marmont, Mémoires du Maréchale Marmont, Duc de Raguse de 1792 à 1841 (Paris,
1857), I, p. 212. Given command of all the army’s horse batteries, in an action typical of the
aggressive manner in which the French made use of their artillery, Marmont had rushed up his
nineteen guns at the gallop at a critical moment in the fighting and wrought terrible damage
on the Austrian forces facing him, thereby paving the way for a successful attack on the part of
Sérurier’s division.
57 Gauthier-Villars, Mémoires d’un vétéran, pp. 44–5. If the Austrians were still capable of putting
up a good fight, it is clear that their morale suffered terribly from the constant battering that they
received at the hands of Napoleon. ‘It is not only an able and efficient head of the army that is
wanted’, wrote Sir Thomas Graham, ‘but a stricter discipline. The generals don’t think it neces-
sary to stay by their columns . . . in many regiments the officers are inattentive, and on every
march, pursuit or retreat the men are scattered about in a most unsoldierlike manner.’ Cit. Drake
and Rose, ‘Dispatches of Sir Thomas Graham’, pp. 121–2.
58 Roguet, Mémoires militaires, p. 101.For a good account of the battle, see Chandler, Campaigns of
Napoleon, pp. 105–13.
59 By far the best source on the French navy in the early part of the Revolutionary period is
W.S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794 (Cambridge, 1994).
See also J.R. Dull, ‘Why did the French Revolutionary navy fail?’, Consortium on Revolutionary
Europe Proceedings, 19 (1989), ii, pp. 121–37, and Griffith, Art of War of Revolutionary France,
pp. 263–75.
60 For the Glorious First of June, see S. Willis, The Glorious First of June: Fleet Battle in the Reign
of Terror (London, 2012). Whilst the battle might have been a strategic success for the French,
it was the first of an unbroken run of tactical victories for the Royal Navy, the others being
Cape Saint Vincent, Camperdown and, finally, Abukir. Why the British should have been so
unbeatable at sea is not hard to divine. Thus, despite the legend of the press gang, service in
the navy was popular among sailors as it offered conditions that were much better than in the
merchant marine. Add to this a strong conviction of British superiority based on a long tradi-
tion of victory over the French and, with it, the near certainty of good prize money, and it can
be seen that morale was invariably very high. British sailors, then, were not scared of fighting,
while they were generally well led and commanded and also possessed of far more sea experi-
ence than their counterparts, most of whom stayed shut up in their ports for months on end
due to the British blockade. Finally, better training also ensured that British broadsides were far
more rapidly delivered than those of their opponents, while the fact that it was the habit of the
British to fire at the hulls of enemy ships rather than the rigging (the French practice) meant
that their broadsides were far more deadly. For all this, see P.M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of
British Naval Mastery (London, 1976), pp. 126–8; D. Brunsman, ‘Men of war: British sailors and
the impressment paradox’, Journal of Early Modern History, 14, No. 1 (March, 2010), pp. 9–44.
61 For all this, see D.R. Come, ‘French threat to British shores, 1793–98’, Military Affairs, 16, No. 3
(Fall, 1952), pp. 174–88; J.A. Murphy (ed.), The French Are in the Bay! The Expedition to Bantry
Bay, 1796 (Dublin, 1997). There was an ignominious quell to this affair. In brief, on 22 February
1797, the force that had been assembled to raid the British coast, a unit of foreign deserters
known as the Légion Noire commanded by an American of Irish origin landed on the coast of
Wales near Fishguard only to surrender without firing a shot at the first sign that it might meet
serious resistance.
62 Sheppard, ‘Italian campaign of 1796 from the Austrian standpoint’, p. 261.
63 Dwyer, Napoleon, pp. 273–4.
64 For an excellent discussion of the confiscations, see D. Quynn, ‘The art confiscations of the
Napoleonic Wars’, American Historical Review, 50, No. 1 (October, 1944), pp. 437–60. See also,
Dwyer, Napoleon, pp. 234–7.
65 D. Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 37–40.
66 For Napoleon’s decision to offer peace, see Dwyer, Napoleon, pp. 283–5. Meanwhile, the plight
in which Vienna found itself, is summarised by Michael Hochedlinger with brutal clarity: ‘The
Habsburg monarchy was on its last legs. In 1794 seventy-five per cent of public revenue was
consumed by military costs. Between 1793 and 1798 Vienna spent more than 500,000,000 flo-
rins on war against France. Even the issuing of paper money could no longer solve Austria’s
financial problems, and Britain, though known as the paymaster of the First Coalition, showed
unusual parsimony as far as subsidies for Vienna were concerned.’ Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of
Emergence, p. 425.
67 For the travails of the Royal Navy’s Mediterrean squadron, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of
the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004), p. 436.
69 With this move, if he was not there already, Pichegru was finally pushed into the opposition camp:
having managed to escape from captivity the following year, he fled into exile in Britain and from
then on gave himself over to involvement in a series of royalist conspiracies.
70 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 163–4. For the coup of Fructidor and the so-
called ‘Directorial Terror’ to which it gave rise, see G. Lefebvre, The Directory (London, 1965),
pp. 87–109; D. Woronoff, The Thermidorian Régime and the Directory, 1794–1799 (Cambridge,
1984), pp. 168–74.
71 Ibid., p. 138.
72 Bertaud, Révolution armée, p. 271.
73 This last is not the opinion of specialists such as David Chandler. For example, ‘In each of the
four attempts to relieve Mantua, the Austrian high command divided their forces into uncon-
nected parts routed along divergent lines of advance . . . hoping thereby to divert Bonaparte’s
attention and cause the fragmentation of his forces. In the event, however, they only laid their
own forces open to defeat in detail, throwing away the chance of commanding a decisive numeri-
cal superiority on the critical battlefield.’ Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, p. 129. Perhaps, but,
had the Austrians won, as they very nearly did, the matter would have to be looked at in a rather
different light.
74 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 136.
75 For example: ‘We celebrated the feast of 14 July by means of a massed artillery salvo and a
programme of noble and soldierlike music. Free and fiercesome alike, our brows inclined before
the Supreme Being, whilst we offered Him our sincere homage and swore . . . to uphold the
rights of man till our last breath.’ Anon., ‘Journal du Capitaine Sibelet’, p. 460. When writ-
ten in private journals, as is the case here, such words cannot but suggest real devotion to the
cause, while Bertaud points out that, having declined sharply over the second half of 1793, the
rate of desertion had been halved by the time of the Robespierre’s downfall. Bertaud, Révolution
armée, pp. 254–5. However, as Forrest points out, one should be cautious here: whilst greater
politicisation certainly played its part, it is quite clear that its reach was limited and that there
were many conscripts who remained very hostile, In his view, then, what counted was rather
the better policing and administration that came with the advent of Montagnard rule. Forrest,
Soldiers of the French Revolution, pp. 77–8.
76 Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution, p. 124. In a later discussion of this issue based on his read-
ing of unpublished letters sent by soldiers to their families, the same author points out that the
response of the French troops probably differed over time, and in any case was by no means always
based on political conviction. Thus, ‘[In 1794] many of the young soldiers desperately wanted to
believe this propaganda, for, if true, it suggested that the war would soon be over and they would
once again be able to return to their homes and their families. With the passage of time, of course,
this desire for peace would become one of the dominant themes of their letters, a desire for peace
that was often more urgently expressed than any desire for glory. By Year V, for instance, the sign-
ing of the peace was so ardently desired precisely because it was seen as leading to demobilisation.’
A. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the French Revolution and Empire (London, 2002), p. 77.
77 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, pp. 101–2.
78 Bertaud, Révolution armée, p. 151. As late as 1804, for example, erstwhile Republican commanders
such as Augereau are reputed to have been disgusted with Napoleon’s decision to become emperor
of France.
79 Bassett, For God and Kaiser, p. 203.
6 Sympathy, admiration and collaboration
In 1793 the Brissotins had led France into a much wider war than the one which had broken
out in 1792 in the apparent belief that the peoples of Europe would throw off their chains
and rally to the support of the French armies. This did not occur, but, by dint of the force of
arms, by the time the Preliminaries of Leoben produced a definitive peace settlement with
Austria at Campo Formio in October 1798, the Directory nonetheless controlled broad
swathes of territory in both northern and southern Europe: amongst the territories held by
her armies were Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Savoy, Nice, Piedmont, Genoa, Lombardy
and parts of the Rhineland, the Papal States and Venetia. To all intents and purposes,
France had acquired the makings of an empire, and this chapter will therefore examine
how that empire came about, worked and was governed. At the same time, meanwhile,
the moment has come to examine one of the basic truths about Revolutionary Europe,
namely the fact that, for all the power of the ideas of 1789, their ability to produce politi-
cal change in and of themselves was extremely limited: in almost every case it took the
arrival of French bayonets to put them into practice. ‘Bliss was it in that morn to be alive’,
wrote William Wordsworth, but neither he nor the vast majority of the nobles, bourgeois
and literati who welcomed the coming of the Revolution achieved anything approaching a
revolution of their own or even, in many instances, made any real attempt to do so.1
To take such a line may seem odd given the fact that the period from 1789 to 1799 wit-
nessed several political upheavals that at first sight seem to be closely linked to the French
Revolution, indeed, even inspired by the Revolution. Of these the most important were the
Belgian revolution of 1789, the Polish revolution of 1791–4 and the Irish revolt of 1798,
and, in view of what has just been said, the first task of this chapter must be to show that
their links with events in France were weaker than might have been expected. Let us begin
with the Belgian revolution. At the time of the French Revolution, modern-day Belgium
was split into two separate territories, namely the Austrian Netherlands and the Bishopric
of Liège. In brief, trouble began in the former. Thus, the reforms of Joseph II had much the
same impact on Belgian society as they did in the rest of the Habsburg Empire in that the
nobility and the Catholic Church were outraged. Still worse, in the Austrian Netherlands
the nine provinces into which the territory was divided still had much of their traditional
power, the result being that the one side had more to defend and the other more to attack.
By the late 1780s, then, the whole region was in turmoil whilst discontent had spread
to the lower classes, the latter being much angered by Joseph’s attempts to purge popular
Catholicism of many traditional practices, the result being a series of disturbances known
as the ‘little revolution’ that were serious enough to force Joseph temporarily to back away
from some of his more radical measures. However, this change of heart proved short-lived,
and Vienna was soon once again seeking to impose its full programme on the province, the
Sympathy, admiration and collaboration 149
result being that a number of figures particularly identified with the resistance, including,
most notably, the leading advocate, Hendrik van der Noot, fled to the United Provinces
and began to organise a resistance movement.2
A Belgian revolt was therefore becoming a distinct possibility well before revolution
got under way in France, but there is no doubt that events in Paris accelerated events in
Belgium, the spring of 1789 seeing the formation of a secret society called Pro Aris et Focis
under the leadership of another lawyer named Jan-Frans Vonck. In August, meanwhile,
spirits were raised still further when Liège rose in revolt and chased out its Prince-Bishop,
César de Hoensbroeck, a particularly reactionary figure who had reversed a number of
reforms associated with his more enlightened predecessor, François de Velbruck.3 Early
autumn, then, saw the formation of a revolutionary committee, and on 24 October the tiny
army that Van der Noot had managed to raise in Holland crossed the frontier and raised
the flag of rebellion (to be precise, the same red, yellow and black tricolour that is used by
Belgium to this day). Taken completely by surprise, the Austrians tried to fight back, but
many of their men were either Flemings or Walloons and therefore promptly deserted, and
by the end of the year they had been forced to withdraw to Luxembourg.4
With the collapse of Austrian resistance, the way was open for the construction of a
new state. Liège had already set up its own republic, and in January 1790 the Austrian
Netherlands emulated France by convoking its own long defunct estates general and pro-
ducing a constitution modelled in part on mediaeval precedent and in part on that of the
infant United States of America. The result was the proclamation of a new state in the
form of the so-called United States of Belgium. Unfortunately, however, there were bitter
differences in that one faction amongst the rebels – the so-called Statists – saw the aim of
the revolution as having been no more than to restore the pre-Josephinian order, whilst
another – known from their association with Vonck as the Vonckists – wanted a more
representative system, a unitary state and even the adoption of certain elements of Joseph’s
reforms. Able to whip up a crowd thanks to their economic power and ability to tap into
popular resentments, the former triumphed, and the Vonckists were subjected to a fierce
purge that saw many of them imprisoned or, as in the case of Vonck himself, forced to
flee into exile in France.5 In acting in so exclusive a fashion, however, Van der Noot and
his followers were tempting fate, for support for the rebellion had never been universal,
while morale in what remained of the revolutionary camp had been badly undermined by
the rapid suppression of the revolt in Liège by Prussian troops acting at the behest of the
diet of the Holy Roman Empire. In short, the Statists were riding for a fall, and it is there-
fore hardly surprising that, when the Austrians launched the inevitable counter-attack in
September, they encountered only the most minimal resistance.6
Within less than a year, then, the Belgian revolution was at an end, its only result having
been to give Dumouriez and others the impression that Belgium was France’s for the taking.
As for connections with the French Revolution, the fact that they existed is undeniable,
but, quite clearly, it was not the fall of the Bastille that sparked off revolt. As in Belgium,
meanwhile, so in Poland. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Poland had been one of
the largest states in Europe. That said, however, she was also one of the weakest. Thus, the
monarchy was elective rather than hereditary, whilst each new monarch had both to swear
to observe a fundamental charter of rights known as Henrician articles and to agree to a
set of specific demands negotiated at the time of his election, their freedom of action being
further constricted by a stipulation that any piece of legislation submitted to the national
parliament could be blocked by the opposition of a single deputy. As for the result of all this,
it was, of course, to entrench the power to the nobility (the only group to whom political
rights were extended) and leave the monarch little more than a cipher. To make matters
worse, these arrangements were very much to the benefit of Russia, whilst a complicated
series of events in the reign of Peter the Great had allowed Saint Petersburg in effect to turn
Poland into de facto protectorate. Meanwhile, with the monarchy denied adequate funds
and the nobility deeply hostile to the notion of a professional army (they instead preferred
to trust to the old traditions of the feudal levy), Poland became ever weaker in relation to its
fellows, and this in turn made it ever more unlikely that it would be able to defend its posi-
tion in the constantly warring Europe of the mid-eighteenth century. Desperate to redress
the balance, in 1768 a confederation of reformist nobles rose in revolt against Russia, but
after a four-year struggle the rebels were defeated, and the result was that in 1772 Poland
lost substantial territories to Russia, Austria and Prussia (in brief, having defeated the Poles,
Catherine the Great decided that she wanted territorial compensation, the result of this
being that Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great demanded gains for themselves as well).7
By the 1780s, then, a strong feeling was growing among the bourgeoisie, small though it
was, and even some sections of the nobility that something needed to be done, whilst the
current monarch, Stanislas Augustus, was tired of acting as Russian puppet.8 The resultant
reform movement being given its chance by Russia’s decision to go war with Turkey 1787,
the so-called ‘Great Sejm’ of 1788–92 forced through a modern constitution on 3 May
1791.9 Europe’s first modern constitution, this document was seminal indeed. Thus, it pro-
claimed the sovereignty of the nation; granted legal equality and voting rights to burghers;
disenfranchised the large numbers of landless nobility (hitherto pawns of great magnates);
abolished the veto power of individual deputies; increased the size of the army to 100,000
men; created a strong central government and a hereditary monarchy; and placed the serfs –
the vast majority of the populace – under the protection of the national government, this
last being a phrase that seemed to open the way for their eventual emancipation. In all this,
meanwhile, the influence of the French Revolution was at best limited. As in Belgium, the
leaders of the reform movement were well versed in the literature of the Enlightenment,
but, particularly with regard to the abolition of feudalism, the French model was consciously
rejected, the most that can be said being that a small group of lawyers and men of letters
led by Hugo Kollontaj began to style themselves Jacobins and press for a greater degree of
social reform.10
As we have seen, it was fear for the future of the Constitution of 1791 that prompted
Leopold II to develop the strategy that eventually plunged Austria into war with France.
Nor was he wrong to be worried, for the crowning achievement of the ‘Great Sejm’ had
represented a massive blow to the great magnates who had in effect controlled eighteenth-
century Poland. Thus, having first obtained Russian support, a number of them therefore
banded together in the so-called Confederation of Targowica and rose in revolt in April
1792 under Stanislaw Potocki. Soon faced not just with the noble horse raised by the rebels
but with large numbers of Russian troops, the loyalist forces fought bravely but were forced
back on Warsaw, Stanislas Augustus eventually deciding to surrender in the hope of obtain-
ing a compromise peace . However, Catherine proved unbending: the constitution was
revoked, the army greatly reduced in size and Poland stripped of yet more territory, this
last being the result of a particularly cynical intervention on the part of Prussia (in theory,
an ally of Poland since 1790, Prussia had first refused to lift a finger to defend her against
the Russians and then announced to Catherine that in exchange for her forbearance, she
expected territorial gains). Still worse, meanwhile, the indefensible rump state that was all
that was left of Poland was subjected to a treaty of alliance whose terms in effect rendered
it one more province of the Russian empire.11
This, however, was not the end of the story. The capitulation of Stanislas Augustus had
caused great dissatisfaction in the Polish military, the latter believing that it could have
carried on the war and even ultimately forced the Russians to retreat. The savage terms of
peace settlement therefore led to dramatic consequences. Having either fled into exile in
Saxony or gone into hiding, the leaders of the constitutional movement set about planning
a revolt and dispatched Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a hero of the war of 1792 who had served in the
American War of Independence and was much lionised in France, to try to get help from
the Convention.12 This was not forthcoming, but the rebels decided to go ahead anyway.
Initially, it was hoped to confine the struggle that resulted to Russia only, but the efforts
of the rebel leadership to conciliate the Prussians failed, and the Poles therefore found
themselves fighting a two-front war. Meanwhile, the revolt of 1794 was considerably more
radical than that of 1791, being accompanied by much violence against those associated
with the Confederation of Targowica and also, particularly in Warsaw, a certain amount of
political mobilisation, of which a particularly interesting feature was the fact that, despite
high levels of anti-Semitism, considerable numbers of Jews came forward to enlist in the
Patriot militias.13 Meanwhile, though Kosciuszko had been unimpressed with what he had
observed of the French Revolution, he was quite prepared to draw upon its models, embark-
ing on mass conscription and in April 1794 issuing the so-called Proclamation of Polaniec,
this being a document that promised many improvements in the condition of the serfs.
How far the appeal to the peasantry was effective is a moot point, however: whilst massed
ranks of men in peasant costume armed with scythes became one of the most characteristic
visual images of the revolt in after years, most scholars are now far more sceptical, not least
because the proclamation was at best rarely implemented, if not widely ignored.14
Whatever the truth of all this, what certainly cannot be gainsaid is that Kosciuszko’s
appeal to the populace did not save Poland. Following the uprising, the Russians counter-
attacked and were soon joined in this by Prussia. Ferocious fighting raged for six months,
but Kosciuszko was defeated in battle and taken prisoner and the Poles eventually forced to
surrender, though not before the eastern suburb of Warsaw known as Praga had been taken
by storm and subjected to a massacre that may have cost as many as 20,000 lives. Reprisals
were not as grim as might have been expected – though many of them were imprisoned in
the short term, most of the rebel leaders were pardoned following the death of Catherine
the Great in 1796 – but, even so, large numbers of nobles were dispossessed and their
estates distributed either to Russian army officers or Polish magnates who had stayed loyal
to the Russian connection, the remaining Polish territory meanwhile being shared between
Austria, Russia and Prussia.15 As for the cause of resistance, if it was not quite dead – in
all three of the zones into which Poland was now divided, there were conspiracies in the
period 1797–8, some of which were far more influenced by French models than anything
seen even in the revolt of 1794 – but these came to nothing, Poland not seeing a revival of
its independence until the arrival of Napoleon’s forces in 1807.16
Last and most significant of the three revolts that we need to look at before moving on
to other matters is the great insurrection that gripped various parts of Ireland in 1798. Here
the influence of the French Revolution was at its strongest, but here, too, it is important
to note that the events of 1789 did not call forth a rebel army in and of themselves, and,
further, that the French Revolution cannot be said to have given birth to Irish national-
ism. Thus, quasi-national feeling had been growing in Ireland throughout the eighteenth
century: the Catholic majority obviously resented the penal laws and the manner in which
they had been deprived of most of their land, but many Protestants were also unhappy,
for the development of trade and industry was hit very hard by discrimination against
Irish shipping, whilst the Irish parliament’s powers were very limited, another issue for the
substantial Presbyterian community being the fact that dissenters were subjected to almost
as many restrictions as the Catholics. Many of the Protestant elements in this chorus of
discontent being well-educated and articulate, the result was a growing reform movement
led by Henry Grattan.17
By 1789, then, Ireland was already seething with political unrest of a strongly national-
ist character. However, the French Revolution gave this a fresh boost, not least because it
seemed to show that anything was possible, political debate being further stimulated by the
publication of the first part of Tom Paine’s highly influential Rights of Man in March 1791.
Under influence of this general political fervour, in September 1791 a young Church-of-
Ireland lawyer named Theobald Wolfe Tone published an immensely influential pamphlet
calling for the emancipation of Catholics and Dissenters alike as a necessary precursor to a
general programme of political reform.18 Tone being seized upon as a figurehead by a number
of leading Ulster Presbyterians, the result was the formation of an overtly non-sectarian
political club entitled the Society of United Irishmen, this going on to formulate a political
programme featuring universal manhood suffrage, paid representatives and equal electoral
districts. A key issue here, of course, is the extent to which Tone and his colleagues were
influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution. To pretend that they were not aware of
these last would be ridiculous, whilst they certainly followed events in France with great
interest and sympathy. Yet, for all that the programme of the National Assembly offered a
model that was infinitely preferable to the solidly Protestant Glorious Revolution, incorpo-
rating, as it did, all Frenchmen rather than just a privileged minority, far more important
in their minds was the thinking of John Locke and, more immediately, the example of
the American Revolution. In brief, 1789 excited them and encouraged them, but was not
necessary to them. To quote Nancy Curtin, ‘The dominant ideological influence on the
United-Irish leaders was the British radical Whig tradition.’19
In its origins, then, Irish nationalism was intended to bring together all Irishmen not-
withstanding their religion. From the very beginning, however, this vision came under
threat, the basic problem being that the visions of harmony indulged in by the movement’s
founding fathers bore no relation to situation on the ground, especially in the countryside.
Thus, the Catholic peasants, in particular, lived in desperate conditions marked by terrible
rack-renting, a tradition having therefore grown up of terror attacks on local landlords that
were undertaken by secret societies known by the generic name of ‘white boys’. In Ulster,
meanwhile, the violence endemic in the countryside had spilled over into sectarian conflict
thanks to the manner in which a number of legal and demographic changes had enabled
Catholics to penetrate areas of the province that had hitherto been solidly Protestant as
well as to establish themselves as a presence in the textile industry. Furious at what was
going on, Presbyterian elements set up a secret society called the Peep O’Day Boys to keep
the Catholics in their place, the response of the latter being to establish a rival secret society
called the Defenders, not that they were able to prevent thousands of Ulster Catholics from
being driven from their homes.20
The social backdrop to the formation of the United Irishmen was therefore very dark
and all the more so given the manner in which the sectarian strife in Ulster was much
inflamed by a number of economic problems resulting from the war, including, not least,
a slump in the textile industry. Nevertheless, the movement mushroomed rapidly, mak-
ing skilful use of propaganda, quickly establishing branches in most towns and cities and
forging a loose alliance with the Defenders. Initially, the government responded with con-
cessions, but the coming of war could not but change its position: the United Irishmen were
declared a prohibited organisation and many of its leaders prosecuted for sedition, whilst
the Defenders were subjected to savage repression, the situation being polarised still further
by a decision on the part of the government to extend conscription to the county militia
to Ireland.21
In response to this switch in government policy, the United Irishmen became overtly repub-
lican and began to plan for a mass insurrection and, more than that, to seek help from France.
Having previously sought refuge in the United States, then, Wolfe Tone travelled to Paris in
1796 and engaged in the negotiations with the Directory that led to the dispatch at the close
of the year of the expedition of General Hoche.22 Had the French landed, all might have been
very different, but, as it was, this episode could not have been more counter-productive. Thus,
well aware of what was coming, the British authorities responded with an unprecedented
programme of raids and arrests that wrought havoc with the United Irishmen’s organisational
structures and ability to wage war, whilst at the same time strengthening their forces by the
establishment of a purely Protestant part-time cavalry force known as the Yeomanry. All this,
meanwhile, was accompanied by much brutality: martial law was imposed, many houses were
burned down, imprisonment was common, and there were plenty of instances in which sus-
pects were dragged from their homes by squadrons of the Yeomanry and subjected to dreadful
tortures or even lynched. If the language of veterans of the uprising was bitter and frequently
exaggerated, it nonetheless rested on solid foundations. For example:
The army, now distributed through the country in free quarters, gave loose to all the
excesses of which a licentious soldiery are capable . . . No property, no person, was
secure. Numbers perished under the lash; many were strangled in the fruitless attempt of
extorting confessions; and hundreds were shot at their peaceful avocations in the very
bosoms of their families . . . Torture was resorted to, not only on the most trivial, but on
groundless occasions: it was inflicted without mercy on every age and every condition.23
With the bulk of the violence directed against Catholics, the latter hit back in traditional
style via the good offices of the Defenders. Yet the reprisals undertaken by the Defenders
further alienated the Protestants, and the result was that the largely Protestant leadership of
the United Irishmen became ever more isolated. Whilst the United Irishmen never entirely
lost the support of the Presbyterian community – in the eastern parts of Ulster, in particular,
the Catholics had not had the same success in penetrating the Protestant districts as they
had in areas further north and west – or indeed lower- and middle-class Episcopalians, the
reality was that the cause of insurrection was becoming ever more Catholic (something that
was extremely ironic given the fact that Wolfe Tone was a freethinker who despised the
Catholic Church). Meanwhile, the original rebel plan had been to organise a secret army
and rise in revolt in event of a French invasion. However, in the autumn of 1797 the Dutch
navy – in the wake of the damage wrought to Hoche’s ships the previous year, the only
hope left to the French of convoying a substantial invasion force to Ireland – was defeated
at the Battle of Camperdown (Kemperduin). With all chance of foreign support gone, the
conspirators now had to go it alone. Such a course posed many risks, but eventually a series
of British raids that picked up many of the chief United-Irish leaders forced the rebels’
hands: in effect, it was either revolt now or see the United Irishmen broken up completely.
To quote the same observer as before, ‘Delay appeared pregnant with danger . . . and it was
resolved at every hazard to try the fortunes of the field.’24
Hardly surprisingly in view of the arrest of so many leading militants, when the revolt
came, it was extremely uncoordinated. Thus, separate risings took place between 23 May and
7 June in Wexford, Meath and Down, but the rebels had nothing more than pikes, scythes
and fowling pieces, while their forces were utterly deficient in training and discipline alike.
In reality, then, their only hope was that the largely Catholic county militia would mutiny
and join the rebellion. Given the riots that had accompanied the imposition of the militia
system in 1793, this did not seem impossible, and yet the militia in most instances stood
firm. In consequence, thanks in large part to the enclosed nature of the countryside, the
only area where the revolt lasted more than a few days was Wexford. However, even here it
did not last long: with the government forces soon closing in from all sides, the rebels gath-
ered together at the prominent landmark of Vinegar Hill, only to be overwhelmed within a
matter of minutes when they were attacked on 21 June. With revolt everywhere at an end,
on 22 August a small French force commanded by Jean Humbert at last arrived on the west
coast and gained considerable local support, but this was very much in the nature of a last
hurrah: after defeating a British force at Castlebar, Humbert tried to march on Dublin, but
was forced to surrender at Ballinamuck. Here and there, insurgent bands continued to wage
war in the wilder parts of the areas affected by rebellion until well into the autumn, but the
‘Year of Liberty’, as it became known, was over, the cost being as many as 25,000 Irish dead,
as well as Wolfe Tone, the latter being captured off the Irish coast on 12 October when yet
another French expedition was intercepted by the Royal Navy.25
From all this, it is clear that none of these insurrections were directly precipitated by the
French Revolution. To an extent they were encouraged by it, certainly, but in Belgium,
Poland and Ireland alike the revolutionary movements emerged from situations that were
particular to those societies and fed off discontents that would have existed even had the
French Revolution never taken place. What is still more clear, meanwhile, is that even
when they were backed by regular armies, as was the case in Poland, or were able to impro-
vise more or less militarised volunteer forces, as was the case in Belgium and Ireland, their
ability to withstand the forces that deployed against them was limited, superior as these were
in numbers and, usually at least, quality. As for those groups who were genuinely enthused
by French principles, these were even more helpless. In this respect, the revolt in Liège was
very much an exception, the generality of the situation being that, if French ideas spread,
they in no case produced revolution. Nor is this surprising. Across Continental Europe
there had certainly been plenty of individuals who were enthused by the events of 1789,
but it was not long before disillusionment had started to set in. Thus, widely reported, the
September massacres and the uprising of 10 August 1792 caused widespread shock, while
eager visitors to Paris were frequently shocked by the ambience, at least as they perceived it,
of licence and corruption. To quote Georg Rebmann, for example, ‘I had thought that I was
approaching the temple of liberty, but in fact I had entered a brothel.’26 As if this was not
enough, meanwhile, the propertied classes only had to look around them to envisage the
possibility of similar levels of popular violence in their own countries. Thus, such was the
desperate nature of the economic situation that there was a massive wave of agrarian unrest
that may or may not have been influenced by rumours of what was going on in France:
in Italy alone, peasant uprisings took place in Venetia, Piedmont, Sardinia, Tuscany and
Naples.27 In Continental Europe, at least, political organisation in favour of the Revolution
was therefore limited, the one exception being Italy where, in part thanks to the encour-
agement of the so-called ‘first professional revolutionist’, Filippo Buonarroti – a Tuscan
exile of strongly reformist views who had been sent by the Committee of Public Safety to
administer a small enclave of Italian territory that had been occupied by French forces on
the Ligurian coast centred on Oneglia – self-styled Jacobin secret societies emerged in many
towns and cities.28 Meanwhile, a minority of reformist writers and officials, many of them
disillusioned by the collapse of Josephinianism, such as Pietro Verri, continued, if only
privately, to express views sympathetic to the Revolution.29 In Spain, meanwhile, enthused
by what little they could glean of what was going on in France (as we shall see, the Spanish
government had introduced a variety of measures designed to keep Spain free of any knowl-
edge of the Revolution whatsoever), many university students immersed themselves in a
number of more or less subversive pamphlets satirising Bourbon Spain that appear to have
emanated from the pen of a professor of the University of Salamanca named Ramón Salas,
and to have even organised discussion groups for the interchange of information and ideas.30
However, talk was one thing and action quite another: in those few instances where there
were attempts at revolt – the most well-known examples are the Vitaliani conspiracy in
Naples, the Martinovic conspiracy in Austria and the Picornell conspiracy in Spain – these
were either uncovered before they could be launched, or abject failures involving tiny hand-
fuls of individuals who were often seriously at odds with one another (for example, while
Martinovic favoured an independent Hungary, he envisaged a state in which the different
ethnic groups would be accorded autonomy, whereas those involved in the conspiracy who
were of Magyar origin rather wanted a unitary republic in which the Slovaks and the rest
would be subjected to thorough-going Magyarisation).31
So much for the ability of French ideology to effect change on its own account in
Continental Europe, but what about Britain and, specifically, England?32 Superficially, at
least, this was the one country where sufficient interest in the Revolution emerged for there
to be a real chance of overthrowing the old order. At the time of the French Revolution,
thanks in part to political traditions dating back to the seventeenth century and in part to
defeat in the American War of Independence, Britain was already in the grip of vigorous
debates on the need for reform. Under the leadership of such figures as Edmund Burke and
John Cartwright, a wealthy Lincolnshire landowner who founded a political club entitled
the Society for Constitutional Information, demands surfaced for Catholic emancipation, a
revision of the franchise, a greater control of the executive by Parliament, cleaner elections
and a fairer distribution of seats in the House of Commons, this pressure being seconded
by a parallel movement in Scotland headed by such groups as the Edinburgh Society of
Friends of the People and the Dundee-based Friends of Liberty. As could hardly be the
case otherwise, the outbreak of the Revolution had greatly intensified this debate. From
the beginning, 1789 deepened divisions in Parliament in that the Whigs for the most part
were inclined to look kindly on the Revolution, whereas the Tories were just as inclined
to look upon it with suspicion.33 So much was to be expected, but the élites began to lose
their grip on events. On the one hand, a pamphlet in praise of events in France written by
one Richard Price attracted the ire of Edmund Burke who, alarmed by the move towards
democracy – a concept which he regarded with a mixture of fear and loathing – abandoned
his reformism in favour of producing his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, this
last then receiving a sharp reply in the form of counterblasts from both Tom Paine and
the proto-feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft.34 And, on the other, the cause of reform began
to reach out in the direction of a broader clientele, the result being the formation in 1792
of the so-called London Corresponding Society, an organisation headed by comparatively
humble figures which agitated for universal manhood suffrage and at the same time tried
hard to win mass support through the publication of a series of cheap pamphlets in which
the case for reform was laid out in the most accessible of language, the facts that public
meetings organised by the Society in London attracted enormous crowds, that branches of
the Society appeared in a number of provincial cities, and, further, that many independent
radical groups sprang up in small country towns that might have been thought to be far
removed from areas of political ferment, all suggesting that the tactic had much success.35
All this, meanwhile, was accompanied and, indeed, encouraged by vigorous attacks on
the war against France in the radical and even not-so-radical press.36 The government of
William Pitt responding with repression, as in Ireland the result was radicalisation and,
with it, the formation of two secret societies known as the United Englishmen and the
United Scotsmen dedicated to planning insurrection.37
In reality, however, what did all this amount to? A powerful tradition in the histori-
ography of Britain in the Revolutionary period insists that this last either gave birth to
British radicalism in the form that it took from 1800 onwards or that it both sharpened and
gave fresh purpose and context to an existing discourse with roots going back to the sev-
enteenth century. Meanwhile, whilst contributing to that debate, the Marxist historian,
E.P. Thompson, went even further and claimed that the struggle with Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France was ‘the making of the English working class’.38 All this is unexcep-
tionable enough, but is it possible to go on from here to argue, as Thompson at least was
inclined to do, that from these roots there emerged a genuine revolutionary movement
that was prepared to use force to achieve its ends? Whilst there were certainly individual
revolutionaries – the most well-known is Edward Despard, an erstwhile army officer and
sometime member of the London Corresponding Society who was executed in February
1803 after being arrested in connection with a plot to assassinate George III39 – it cannot
but be felt that this is a much more dubious proposition. Thanks to adverse weather –
above all, the extremely harsh winter of 1794–5 – economic disruption, long-term struc-
tural changes in the economy, the enclosure movement and two successive substance
crises, there was frequently terrible suffering in this period, and the result is that it is easy
to produce a list of bread riots and other such expressions of economic distress, not to
mention much evidence of an ever-growing war-weariness and desire for peace.40 Visible,
too, are several attempts to assassinate George III, a growth in acts of intimidation and
violence directed against clergymen and magistrates, a rise in trade unionism, a move away
from the Anglican Church in favour of Methodism, the widespread penetration of English
and Scottish radicalism by elements of the Irish revolutionary movement, and a variety
of disturbances that had their roots not in traditional issues that had always played a role
in sparking off violence, but rather in others that were directly linked to the war effort,
the best example here, perhaps, being the Scottish militia riots of 1798 (like their earlier
counterparts in Ireland, these were motivated by opposition to the extension of the militia
ballot to areas hitherto exempt from it).41 As for fears of revolution, one has only to glance
at the various repressive measures engaged in by the Pitt administration, not to mention
the humiliating peace terms accepted by its successor at Amiens in 1802, to come to the
conclusion that these were very real indeed.42
Thus is the case stated, but it cannot but be felt that there are many weaknesses in
such arguments. For example, let us accept, as was undoubtedly the case, that many of
those who enlisted in the many volunteer battalions that were formed for the purposes of
home defence joined up for reasons that were pragmatic rather than ideological, but does
this mean that they would not have fought had the French actually appeared or that they
would not have stood firm against indigenous revolutionaries? Equally, patriotic demon-
strations are tarred with suggestions that they had been manufactured by local élites, and
yet it is accepted without question that radical ones were wholly genuine, just as shots fired
at George III are always assumed to have been fired by men with a cause rather than men
suffering from one of any number of mental illnesses. As for the presence of Irish emissar-
ies, whilst their presence cannot be doubted, there is little recognition of their constant
complaints of the lack of appetite for serious action that they everywhere encountered
amongst the radical circles in which they moved, just as no thought is given to the impact
of the horrors that took place in Ireland on the radical movement: it is the opinion of at
least one historian that the ‘Year of Liberty’ killed off all chance of such an event tak-
ing place in mainland Britain.43 Problematic, too, is the nature of the evidence that is
presented, for, as Clive Emsley has pointed out, much of it consists of ‘the reports of govern-
ment spies whose own loyalties to the Crown, to their personal financial situation or malice
towards those they spied on, may have coloured what they reported’.44 And finally, we see
the application of double standards, such as when it is on the one hand argued that, because
there is no documentary evidence of the poor buying the penny tracts produced in large
numbers to encourage ‘Church-and-King’ loyalism, it can be assumed that such campaigns
were a failure, and, on the other, that invisibility is no reason for believing that hundreds
of villages and hamlets housed, if not organised groups of radicals, then, at the very least,
plenty of individuals committed to the cause of revolution. As for actual instances of revo-
lutionary plots, these tend in many cases to be mentioned with a certain studied vagueness,
it being clear that the only case where there is concrete evidence of any such phenomenon
is the mutiny that broke out in the ships of the Channel Fleet at the naval anchorage of the
Nore in 1797. This, certainly, was a serious affair, but even here the rank-and-file mutineers
seem to have been moved to take action by the same bread-and-butter issues that moti-
vated their counterparts in the much less radical affair that took place at the same time at
Spithead rather than a British revolution.45 If some of those who have argued that there was
no revolutionary threat have been too complacent, those who have opposed such views are
therefore open to accusations of, at the very least, romanticism.46
Aside from the rather obvious fact that there was no British revolution, as inferred in
the previous paragraph, one of the chief problems faced by those who wish to emphasise
the extent to which the cause of radicalism enjoyed popular support is the issue of popular
counter-revolution. Scarcely had the French Revolution begun to acquire serious populist
tendencies than members of the élites began to attempt to mobilise both the middle classes
and the crowd in support of the government. What is more, despite all the passionate argu-
ment to the contrary, they appear to have done at least as effectively as those who hoped
to emulate events in France: at their disposal, after all, was not just a century of constant
warfare with France but a tradition of fear of invasion, national exceptionalism and popular
xenophobia dating as far back as the sixteenth century.47 Still more remarkable, mean-
while, is the wholesale mobilisation which met the growing threat of French invasion after
1794, and all the more so as the enormous numbers involved were raised entirely through
voluntary enlistment, albeit in ways that were not entirely helpful to the war effort.48 Thus,
service in the regular army being a miserable business with a reputation in the community
that was extremely poor, alternative structures had to be created that went at least some
way towards assuaging popular hostility.49 In addition to the army and the navy, both of
which continued to be raised by voluntary enlistment encouraged by the payment of sub-
stantial bounties, and the militia, which adhered to the traditional ballot whilst yet being
extended to cover Ireland and Scotland, there were three main types of unit, namely the
Yeomanry – locally raised cavalry units dominated by the gentry and its numerous retainers
that, like the Volunteers, served on a part-time basis in their own localities – the Fencibles –
volunteer units of infantry and cavalry that could usually (there were a few exceptions)
only be sent abroad with the consent of their officers and men and were not expected to
serve for any longer than the duration of hostilities – and the Volunteers – units which,
as the name suggests, had enlisted of their own free will, but could not be forced to serve
beyond the borders of their home counties.50 The numbers of such units were very great –
Scotland alone produced fourteen regiments of Fencible cavalry, forty-four regiments of
Fencible infantry and 228 units of Volunteers51 – but, despite the competition for recruits
and the better terms of service offered by the home defence units (including, incidentally,
the militia, whose rank and file were guaranteed a pension), this did not prevent a con-
siderable increase in the size of the regular army, the years from 1793 to 1801 witnessing
the organisation of at least fifteen new infantry regiments, even if some of them appear
originally to have been Volunteer formations.52
In all this, of course, there is much that can be qualified, even much that can be chal-
lenged. Acquiring men for the regular army remained extremely difficult, so much so,
indeed, that it had to continue employing foreign troops, including, two Swiss regiments
inherited from the army of Condé; another Swiss regiment that had originally been raised
for the forces of the East India Company; two small German units that had again served
under Condé and were combined in the British service to form a new light-infantry bat-
talion (the Fifth Battalion of the Sixtieth Foot); a regiment of erstwhile Austrian prisoners
of war who had accepted an offer to enlist in the Spanish army only to fall into the hands of
the British when the latter occupied Menorca in 1797 and who were taken into their service
as the ‘Queen’s Germans’; a regiment of Corsicans; and a regiment of French deserters (one
might also mention Irish Catholics here: as we have seen, officially admitted to the army in
1792, large numbers of them were soon abandoning the ‘wearing of the green’ in favour of a
coat of a different colour, whilst there even appeared regiments such as the famous Eighty-
Eighth Foot, or Connaught Rangers, that were wholly composed of Catholics). Service in
the militia remained so unpopular that almost anyone who could took advantage of the
provision that allowed men who were unlucky in the ballot to purchase the services of a
substitute. The impressive record of the Highlands in providing men for the Regulars and
Fencibles alike can in part be explained by the fact that the lairds possessed massive incen-
tives for forming regiments of their own, not least because such acts carried with them the
rights to appoint the entire officer corps, and therefore had absolutely no hesitation in
exploiting their absolute control of their tenants to force every family to send at least one
son into the ranks. And, finally, the act of joining a Volunteer unit did not necessarily imply
that the men concerned were fervent opponents of the Revolution: among the many other
motives involved were the need to conciliate social superiors, the added éclat afforded by a
colourful uniform, the need to supplement the family income by the small allowances paid
to recruits and, finally the chance of securing a break from the tedium and back-breaking
labour of daily routine, whilst there can also be no doubt that some recruits were obtained
through various forms of intimidation or social pressure. Across most forms of enlistment
other than the Volunteers, meanwhile, one sees a strong tendency for the vast majority of
recruits to come from poor tenant farmers, the labouring poor and sections of the artisanate
badly hit by wartime economic dislocation or longer-term structural change. Mere numbers
of redcoats, then, do not constitute evidence of support for Church and King, but the fact
that so many men were needed for the armed forces provided poverty with a safety-valve.53
Wherever one looks, then, the picture is the same. Notwithstanding the bloody scenes
witnessed in Paris and elsewhere, numbers of men across Europe continued to regard
the Revolution with sympathy and even to organise in its favour, but they could rarely
mount a serious challenge to their rulers, and the translation of French ideas into con-
crete results therefore had to wait till the arrival of French bayonets. Needless to say, this
event brought the friends of liberty rushing to greet the forces of liberation, but what then
happened was that, all too often, they were shown to be as weak as they were irrelevant.
Let us begin with the numerous petty territories that made up the Rhineland. In so far as
this area was concerned, the inhabitants ostensibly had much to complain of at the time
of the French Revolution. Here, for example, is the writer Johann Riesbeck on the situa-
tion that he encountered in Mainz:
The administration of this country is such that it is really disgusting to me to pick out
specimens of it to lay before you. Everything that you have ever heard of the separate
government of priests, mistresses, bastards, parvenus, projectors, eunuchs, bankrupts
and the like exists in the Palatinate at one and the same time. I have spoken with
several Ministers who made no secret of having bought their places. Indeed, there are
more instances than one of places having been put up at public auction in the ante-
chambers of the mistresses. One natural consequence of this is the flagrant oppressions
of the customs-house officers who are so many Turkish pashas and are feared in their
respective districts as the executioners of the vengeance of heaven . . . Almost every
place on the high road has some particular custom payable in it, and all the goods
which pass through it are likewise taxable . . . There is, indeed, no part of Germany in
which adventurers of all sorts are so sure to make their fortunes.54
Even in respect of Mainz, however, this picture is exaggerated: if all was not well, it most
certainly was not all ill either. In fact, the Rhenish rulers were for the most part extremely
enlightened figures whose administrations, within their limits, were honest and competent
as well as much given to inaugurating projects that were designed to improve the security,
living standards and educational attainments of the populace. Also contributing to the rela-
tive prosperity that marked the area was the decline of feudalism to the level of an irritant
only, a flourishing commercial agriculture that profited enormously from the possibilities
offered by the Rhine and its tributaries and thereby enabled many peasants to escape the
pressures generated by population growth by emigrating to America, and the beginnings of
industrialisation in such towns as Creveld. In consequence of all this, of course, levels of lit-
eracy were very high while the propertied classes had access to some of the best universities
in Germany as well as a lively cultural life. Particularly given the prevalence of Catholicism
in the region, so high a level of educational and cultural activity might have been thought
to make it a hotbed of advanced political views, but in practice the pressure was defused by a
combination of paternalistic government, strong representative institutions, reforms to the
structure of the Church designed to favour the parish clergy at the expense of the religious
orders and, last but not least, a relaxed attitude on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities
in respect of the circulation of works of critical thought.55
All this, of course, made the Rhineland a very poor prospect for the ideas of the French
Revolution. Certainly, there were long-running issues among the peasantry that led to
friction and even occasional disturbances, but all the evidence suggests that the sans
culottes of Mainz and other cities were relatively content and that the propertied classes
for the most part could see nothing of any relevance in the French example. Some alarm
was caused by the decision of some of the rulers to welcome the émigrés and allow them to
embark on the formation of military forces such as that of Condé, but what was operative
here was far less sympathy for the Revolution than fear of retribution, whilst petitions of
protest or other attempts to secure the redress of grievances were generally limited in their
aims, couched in the most respectful of terms and tied not to the principles enunciated,
say, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but traditional rights and
privileges. At most, then, what one finds is a sense that a good opportunity was at hand
to demand the redress of long-standing grievances. If the period from 1789 to 1792 was
marked by a wave of protest, then, it should not be thought that this reflected the spread
of revolutionary ideology.56
None of this is to say that there was nobody in the region who was enthused by events
across the French frontier. Chief amongst these figures was Georg Forster, a professor at
the University of Mainz who can be regarded as a founding father of the study of natural
history. Extremely well-travelled, he perhaps had a broader view of the ancien régime than
most of his compatriots and was therefore more open to the ideas of the Revolution. When
the French took Mainz in October 1792, then, he immediately joined a number of other
like-minded observers – the most prominent were his fellow professors, Josef Hoffmann
and Anton Dorsch; the journalist Friedrich Cotta; and the reformist clerics Felix Blau and
Friedrich Pape – in the formation of a political club called the Society of the Friends of
Liberty and Equality. Yet the number of men concerned was relatively small – even at its
greatest extent the Jacobin Club, as it was more usually known, had no more than 500
members, at least some of whom were French officers or administrators – whilst, Forster
excepted, few of those involved had much in the way of reputation or intellectual stand-
ing, the fact being that it cannot but be suspected that many of those concerned were
motivated by nothing more than opportunism. Conscious of their isolation, the more com-
mitted members of the club sought frantically to convert propertied classes and populace
alike to their cause, but it is all too clear that their best efforts fell far short of their goal, not
least because the behaviour of the occupying forces cut the ground from under their feet.
Still worse, they themselves fell prone to bitter divisions between those who were die-hard
in their support of the French and others who resented their arrogance and rapacity, the
disputes becoming so ferocious that in early March 1793 the French subjected the Club to
a massive purge. In consequence, elections to a new city council on the basis of universal
manhood suffrage attracted the participation of just 400 voters. As for those that were held
to establish a Rhenish–German National Convention, these were just as poorly supported,
many communities failing to send a single delegate. When the new assembly met on 17
March 1793 Forster and his remaining allies – by this time the vast majority of the Jacobin
Club’s membership had fallen by the wayside – therefore gave up the unequal struggle: if on
the one hand, they proclaimed a so-called ‘Cisrhenan Republic’, on the other they agreed
to seek union with France.57
The collapse of the Republican movement in Mainz was not, of course, the end of the
story of collaboration in the Rhineland, just as the fall of Mainz was not the end of French
domination. After years of fighting which surged first in the favour of the one side and then
in the favour of the other, the peace of Campo Formio enabled the French at last to occupy
the whole of the region and move steadily in the direction of the French model though it
was not, in fact, till 1802 that full annexation finally occurred.58 Meanwhile, even during
the war years, there was a sustained attempt to win over the inhabitants. As Girault wrote
of Mainz, for example:
It was in that city that I first attended the civic festivals that had been established
by the Republic. The first was that of Agriculture. On a cart drawn by eight mag-
nificent oxen, there rode four of the oldest peasants to be found in the surrounding
district . . . Following them there came a band of young girls dressed all in white and
carrying baskets full of fruit of every sort garnished with flowers, and, behind these last,
a number of young men carrying forks and hoes . . . In the evening there was a grand
ball and the band of my regiment was brought in to provide the music.59
As everywhere else, the French looked to the local élites for co-operation in this process
of acculturalisation, but, so long as the future of the region remained uncertain, the latter
were for most part extremely unwilling to oblige. The corollary, of course, was that the
French had to rely on officials sent in by Paris, but such men were all too often incompe-
tents who had failed to make the grade or mere adventurers, while many of them had no
German. Poorly paid, if, indeed, they were paid at all, they engaged in wholesale corruption
whose general effect was in one way or another to increase the pressure on the inhab-
itants. In consequence, the public-spirited began to see that involvement in the régime
might make sense, whilst in some cases the rulers themselves urged erstwhile officials to
do what they could to ameliorate the burdens of occupation. So far as can be established,
ideological sympathy remained non-existent, but, for all that, such were the dictates of
pragmatism that the seeds were sown for the widespread collaboration seen in the region in
the Napoleonic period.60
If ideological collaboration failed in the Rhineland, in Belgium it scarcely even existed.
That this was so need not have been the case, for the Austrians had scarcely behaved
towards the populace with much generosity in the wake of the suppression of the revolution
of 1790. As Charles Este wrote of the reoccupation of Liège, for example, ‘That the towns-
people might know when they were well . . . the Prince of Coburg made a levy on the town:
the amount of the imposition was half a million!’61 Amongst their troops, meanwhile, were
plenty of men who were at least as rapacious as any French soldier. ‘On the way to Brussels,
we made camp in the forest of Soignies near Waterloo’, wrote Claude Tercier. ‘Nearby
were some Transylvanian irregulars belonging to the legion of Michaellowitz. They were
bad troops, mere pillagers . . . That very night I witnessed the execution of two of them.’62
When the French returned, then, they were initially welcomed as liberators. To quote
Pierre Girardon’s account of events in Namur:
The morning after the town was taken, our advanced guard marched in and passed
through the streets in triumph to the accompaniment of cries of joy on the part of the
people . . . The women threw their bonnets in the air and kissed our hands.63
In one or two places, meanwhile, expressions of popular support went even further.
According to Bial, then, as the last Austrian troops fell back through the streets of Liège,
so the populace pelted them with stones and poured pots of boiling water on them from
the windows.64
Belgium, then, was not a lost cause: setting aside the brutality with which Vienna’s
rule had been re-imposed, the peasants had obtained little from the revolt against Austria.
However, all chance of obtaining a popular constituency in Belgium was soon squandered.
In the wake of the battle of Fleurus, then, the troops behaved very badly and were but rarely
exposed to the sting of military discipline: now a sous-lieutenant, Jean Vivien remembered
the execution of twelve grenadiers as an event that was quite exceptional.65 For a particu-
larly graphic account of the depredations that went on, we can cite a letter written by a
corporal named Demonchy from the recently re-occupied town of Rousbrugge on 4 October
1793: ‘We are presently cantoned in enemy country . . . The town in which are camped out
is completely ruined: as a result of the pillage to which it has been subjected, half of it has
been reduced to ashes . . . Meanwhile, we keep making all sorts of discoveries in the area
roundabout . . . Horses, chickens, cows, sheep, pigs, in short, animals of every sort. Having
rounded the lot up, we then go into the houses of the peasants, knock them about a fair
bit, and then have a good drink of their wine.’66 Nor was it just a matter of pillage, Duthilt,
for example, describing how he came across two French soldiers raping a teenage girl in the
village of Moorsele.67
Rapine, looting and living off the country were common features of eighteenth-century
warfare. Yet few past occupations had been quite so ferocious in the way in which they set
about exploiting Belgium’s resources. In July 1794, then, the French formalised the ruthless
behaviour that had already been the hallmark of many of their generals and représenta-
tives en mission through the establishment in Belgium of a so-called ‘Agency of Trade and
Extraction’. This policy was not confined to Belgium – similar bodies were set up in the
Rhineland, Savoy and Catalonia – and there is no suggestion that she was treated any more
harshly than her companions in misfortune, but the results were still grim enough, it being
the task of these bodies to supervise the sequestration of a long list of items or products that
were deemed to be essential to the French war effort, as well the collection of the enormous
war contributions that had already been imposed on Belgium’s towns and cities by the
French army, contributions, moreover, that had to be paid in coin, whereas all payments
made by the invaders had rather to be accepted in assignats that were never worth more
than a third of their face value and often much less. For the population as a whole, then,
French rule represented at best impoverishment and, at worst, death by cold or starvation.68
As for the Belgian élites, that part of them that might have been won over to the French
cause – essentially, the more radical elements of the Vonckists, some of whom had turned
Jacobin or even enlisted in the Army of the North, which by the end of 1792 could therefore
boast of at least six battalions of Belgian volunteers – found that they had been betrayed.
At first, the arrival of the French had been greeted with much excitement that spanned
the political spectrum – indeed, even Van der Noot sent a message of congratulations to
Dumouriez. However, the resultant ‘honeymoon period’ proved short-lived. In the first place,
the political initiative was seized by the tiny handful of erstwhile Vonckists who had turned
Jacobin. Returning to Brussels in the wake of the arrival of Dumouriez, then, they immediately
established a Jacobin club – the so-called ‘Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality’ –
and seized control of the elections the general had called to produce a provisional national
assembly. Needless to say, the eighty-four men elected were either Jacobins or Vonckists
whom the former hoped could be won over to their cause, and the result was that very soon
Belgium was on its way to acquiring a political settlement that seemed likely to be a republi-
can version of the one achieved in France in 1789, the Jacobin Club in the meantime acting
as a species of ginger-group which, on the one hand, strove to do all it could to win over pub-
lic opinion and, on the other, kept the provisional assembly under constant pressure to move
in the direction of radical change. However, apart from the continued insistence on the part
of all concerned that Belgium should become an independent state, little of this was to the
liking of the Statists, and Van der Noot and his confederates therefore began to protest about
what was going on and, in particular, to seek the aid of an increasingly worried Dumouriez. If
this had been the extent of the problem, the Jacobins and their allies would have had little
to worry about, but across the border in France there was also growing concern. Although 19
November had seen the passage of the decree offering all peoples who wanted their liberty,
underlying this was the assumption that this meant liberty on France’s terms, terms which
in this instance were doubly challenged: not only was there strong support in Paris for the
annexation of Belgium, but it was by no means clear that the new state would remain under
the control of forces friendly to the Revolution – on 27–28 November, indeed, Brussels
witnessed serious disturbances that were clearly the work of Statist agitators.69
Alarmed at the growing clamour, the Brussels Jacobins responded by demanding an all-
out offensive against the Church and the nobility. With the substantial forces in Belgium
beginning to experience serious supply difficulties – supply difficulties that were, of course,
blamed on local resistance rather than simple shortage of food and transport – and many
observers in Paris convinced that Catholic Belgium was simply too backward to embrace
the new order, on 15 December the Convention therefore took drastic action, its repre-
sentatives in Belgium being ordered to move to the election of a new assembly that would,
or so it could be inferred, do France’s will without question and embark on a programme of
reform that took as its model not 1789–90 but 1792.70
The result was chaos. Not only did the provisional assembly protest fiercely to the
Convention, but the local assemblies that were held to choose the delegates to the planned
Belgian Convention over and over again returned men associated with the Statists and
passed resolutions swearing their loyalty to the traditional (i.e. pre-Josephinian) order.
Hardly surprisingly, the elections were promptly annulled, and the provisional assembly
sidelined, the resulting vacuum being filled by the Society of the Friends of Liberty and
Equality, tiny rump though this had now become. Yet the French had no intention of trust-
ing this body, not least because most of the handful of men who continued to attend its
sessions were lacking in both reputation and experience.71 Lacking in reliable local partners,
they therefore had little option but to proceed to direct rule: not only did a series of decrees
promise that Paris would step in to undertake the role that might have been played by a
Convention, but the country was flooded with a horde of commissioners charged with the
task of issuing proclamations extolling political reform with one hand while they stripped
the country of everything they could get with the other. In the meantime, the way was
paved for annexation by the organisation of a referendum which duly produced an over-
whelming majority of favour of ‘reunification’, as the project was termed. This, of course,
was not much justification, but it was all the justification that the French needed. In the
event, changes in the military situation on the ground and the vicissitudes of political life in
Paris delayed implementation for two years, but annexation was now inevitable.72
Jacobinism, then, did not spread to Belgium in any meaningful way. Yet the absence of
ideological collaboration did not mean that there was no collaboration whatsoever. On
the contrary, such were the horrors that the French occupation unleashed that, by the first
months of 1793, the number of those who had taken to brigandage to survive had become
so great that all normal trade and communications were breaking down. In consequence,
the feeling grew that the only hope was annexation by France, not least because only then
would the propertied classes be enabled to protect their interests through the organisation
of National-Guard units, and thus it was that, when the Convention gave the Austrian
Netherlands and Liège a new administrative structure based on a central executive council
and six de facto departments, sufficient local support was obtained to ensure that at both
levels of government Belgians outnumbered French appointees, significant minority though
the latter remained. At the municipal level there was far less in the way of success, the local
notables to whom the French turned when they set about setting up new town councils
understandably feeling particularly vulnerable to popular retribution, but, even so, to say
that there was no collaboration is therefore untrue: more than that, indeed, when annexa-
tion was finally formally announced on 1 October 1795, Belgium’s new status even received
a guarded welcome.73
Even if it was not settled straight away, such was the significance of the natural frontiers
in the French political mind that the fate of Belgium and the Rhineland was never hard
to divine. Yet, thanks to Georg Forster and his confederates, an alternative model had
been revealed to which the French could turn. We come here to the concept of the satel-
lite republic, a state that, while ostensibly free and self-governing, was in practice firmly
subject to France’s control and responsive to her every need, as well as being much cheaper
to administer. As Blanning has observed, so far as the French were concerned, this was a
wonderful invention. However, it was not until the French occupied the United Provinces
in the winter of 1795–6, that the policy was put into effect. Even then, meanwhile, it was
not so much an act of policy as a result of events developing a momentum of their own.
Thus, for some years, considerable elements among the Dutch had been seething with dis-
content: as we have seen, indeed, in 1787 there had even been a short-lived revolution in
consequence of the desire of the current hereditary head of state or stadtholder (always the
head of the House of Orange), William V, to become the king he was in everything but
name in the face of the determination of the seven provinces which constituted the state
over which he ruled to defend their traditional prerogatives and resist what they saw as
the onset of absolutism. Restored by Prussian troops, William had in fact refrained from
imposing major changes, but even so progressive opinion was left furious and embittered,
large numbers of refugees therefore fleeing into exile, particularly in France. Rallying to the
Revolution almost to a man, they looked forward to the day when they could return to their
homeland with great anticipation, and in 1792 organised a so-called ‘Batavian legion’ under
the command of a general named Hermann Daendels who had played a major role in the
fighting in 1787.74
However, it was not the Dutch exiles that took the lead in the United Provinces. Far
from it: French victory in Belgium having encouraged the many supporters of the revolution
left in the country to prepare for a fresh revolt, as the French armies marched ever further
northwards, in town after town power was seized by local élites anxious at one and the same
time to maintain order and advance the reformist agendas that had been overwhelmed in
1787.75 Nor was there the slightest resistance: setting aside the fact that no Dutch city was
more than a few days’ march from thousands of French troops, the behaviour of the increas-
ingly desperate Allied soldiery had become so terrible that there was little love lost for the
First Coalition: on the contrary, indeed, the arrival of Pichegru’s forces was greeted with
celebrations and festivities of every kind. Thus far, thus good, but it was not long before
the Dutch revolution ran into serious problems. In the first place, there was the question of
the peace treaty that was immediately imposed upon it. Much though the new authorities
trumpeted their friendship with France, the Convention was not disposed to show much
in the way of mercy, not least because of the failure of the Patriots to seize power until
the French armies had crossed the Rhine. Nor did it help that there was a strong belief
that the United Provinces were a species of Aladdin’s cave possessed of unlimited wealth.
Notwithstanding desperate Dutch attempts to soften the blow, then, the terms put forward
by the Convention can only be described as crushing: although a few concessions were
obtained by the Dutch negotiators, the resultant Treaty of the Hague stripped the country
of various territories on its southern frontiers, imposed both a levy of 100,000,000 florins
and a forced loan of the same amount, and committed the United Provinces (now renamed
the Batavian Republic) to not only a defensive alliance with France but the upkeep of a
French garrison of 25,000 men.76
These terms came as a bitter blow, for the Dutch had been hoping that their revolution
would at the very least have earned the good will of France, and, with it, the right to remain
neutral. As it was, the new state was from the very beginning saddled with burdens which
it could barely sustain. To quote Pfeil, ‘At a stroke the Batavian Republic was saddled with
a poisoned legacy: a debt whose interest amounted to more than half the annual revenues
of the state.’77 War, meanwhile, also meant economic disaster: the British imposed a naval
blockade, seized many Dutch merchant ships and set about eliminating the Dutch presence
in the wider world. However, serious as the effects of the treaty were, they were not the
most immediate of the problems faced by the Dutch. Delighted though they were with the
fall of the House of Orange, the future was marred by the fact that there was no agreement
whatsoever as to the form that the new state should take. On the one hand, one group – the
Federalists – wanted to restore the traditional political arrangements based on a loose asso-
ciation of self-governing provinces, whilst, on the other, a second – the Democrats – looked
rather to the establishment of a unitary republic, the old constitution having in their eyes
made for an administration that was cumbersome and inefficient, an economy that was held
back on many fronts and a country which was clearly dangerously susceptible to foreign
invasion. Logical though this position was, however, the smaller provinces rightly feared
that a unitary state would be dominated by Holland, and, more particularly, that consolidat-
ing the national debt and introducing a unified system of taxation would greatly increase
the financial burdens laid upon them.78
Extremely deeply seated, the confrontation between these two tendencies immediately
dominated the political situation. Not until March 1796 did a new constituent assembly
meet, and, when it did, there followed two years of chaos. The Directory not yet being at
the point it reached a year later of having to justify its legitimacy by support for revolution
abroad, the French were initially happy to leave the Dutch to their own devices in so far as
domestic politics were concerned, but it soon became apparent that resolving the dispute
was completely beyond the reach of the two sides: after much argument and debate, the
deputies succeeded in producing a compromise, but, when this was put to the electorate
in a referendum in August 1797, it was thrown out, seemingly because supporters of the
Federalists and supporters of the Democrats both believed that too much had been given
away to their opponents. In the wake of this disaster, fresh elections were convened, but
the stalemate continued, whilst matters were rendered still more complex by the fact that
radical elements in the Democrats’ ranks began to agitate for a greater degree of provincial
and municipal autonomy than the initial advocates of a unitary state had been prepared to
concede. The result was the French government lost patience and ordered its ambassador,
Charles Delacroix, to settle matters once and for all. September 1797 had, of course, seen
the coup of Fructidor with its attendant shift to the left, and it would be tempting to argue
that the new Directory wanted to see the establishment of a régime of a similarly radical
complexion in the Batavian Republic, but the reality was rather different: whilst a unitary
solution was ideologically preferable, it was felt that it would be much better for the Dutch
to resolve their own problems; if 22 January 1798 saw a coup in which Delacroix plumped
for the unitary option, it was essentially because he genuinely believed that the Democrats
were in the ascendant.79
Bloodless though the coup was, it nevertheless produced decisive change in that more
than twenty of the most vocal Federalists were expelled from the assembly and a new con-
stitution introduced that satisfied most of the Democrats’ aspirations and established a
Directory on the French model. Moreover, this was approved of by a plebiscite which deliv-
ered a vote of more than 90 per cent in its favour.80 Yet this was not the end of the story.
Whilst there was little desire to quarrel with the constitution as such, the radicals who had
been behind the coup proceeded to overplay their hand, insisting that two-thirds of the
members of the new assembly should come from the one that had passed the constitution,
whilst at the same time arresting numbers of individuals who were not Federalists in the
slightest, packing the administration with their friends and attempting to purge the elector-
ate. Faced by this behaviour, men of property and education who distrusted the artisans and
petty entrepreneurs who formed the backbone of the Democrat movement, the moderates
sidelined by the coup hit back. Still in control of the Directory in spite of the strength
of the radicals, they therefore began to take steps to curb the influence of the clubs and
at the same time set about planning a comeback that would in their eyes strengthen the
social order and put their opponents in their place. With the Directory in Paris now hav-
ing switched direction yet again in the wake of the so-called coup of Floréal (an operation
designed to curb the excessive influence which the Jacobins had secured through the coup
of Fructidor), these plans were by no means unwelcome to the French authorities, whilst
the need to take action was further reinforced by the fact that the cavalier actions of the
radicals were pushing many elements that had previously supported a unitary constitution
into the arms of Federalism or even Orangism. On 12 June 1798, then, Amsterdam woke up
to a second coup headed by Daendels which produced the dissolution of the assembly and
the arrest of the leading radicals, government thereafter being in the hands of men such as
the successful banker Isaac Gogel, none of whom had any interest in pursuing a genuinely
democratic agenda.81
Only now, then, did the Batavian Republic at last secure a degree of stability though
in fact there was to be yet one more coup in 1801 that saw the French garrison overthrow
the constitution of 1798 in favour of one that mirrored the arrangements that had been
put in place in France following the events of 18 Brumaire: no more than anywhere else
in the French sphere of influence, then, can it be said that the Dutch were allowed to go
their own way. That said, alone of the satellite states of which it was the first example,
the Batavian Republic did at least survive to enjoy a flourishing political life throughout,
involvement in the régime being widespread amongst the educated classes, just as sup-
port for it was common amongst many sections of the populace. Political strife there was
aplenty, certainly, but this at no time touched the issue of the state itself: if the Dutch
disagreed as to the form which their republic should take, hardly any of them wished to live
in a monarchy. To quote Kossmann:
Public opinion in the monarchy had certainly not become anti-French. The landing
of British [and Russian] troops in North Holland in August 1799 . . . was, to the great
disappointment of the coalition and the House of Orange, not greeted by a rising of the
Dutch people.82
Elsewhere, however, the picture was very different. We come here, first of all, to Italy. In so
far as this is concerned, the story begins with the campaign of 1796. As we have seen, this
was launched with little in the way of either sense of mission or hope of aggrandisement:
commander of the smallest of the French field armies, all that Napoleon was expected to
do was to tie down the Austrian troops in Italy and, if possible, cause Vienna to weaken its
forces in Germany. Within the Directory, meanwhile, general agreement that Belgium and
the Rhineland should be annexed to France was not matched in the case of Italy. Thus,
whilst Carnot wanted any territorial acquisitions that might result simply to be held (and,
of course, ruthlessly exploited) until such time as they could be used as bargaining counters
in peace negotiations, his colleagues, Reubell and Révellière-Lepeaux, were eager to see
Italy revolutionised, not least because they had been led to believe by Buonarroti and oth-
ers that there was solid support for the Revolution beyond the Alps.83 How this difference
might have been resolved had it been left to itself is unclear, but in the event factors on
the ground took over and handed victory to the revolutionists. We come here, of course, to
Napoleon. Suddenly precipitated by his victories to heights of eminence all but unimagi-
nable a few months before, he quickly found himself in a position in which he was able to
defy the Directory more or less at will, so much money being remitted to Paris in the course
of the campaign that by the end of 1796 he was to all intents and purposes untouchable. To
quote Alan Forrest:
There were few indications of defeats or set-backs with the result that it was difficult . . .
not to associate the Italian campaign with an unbroken series of French advances or
to identify its young general with victory and military glory . . . He was being recre-
ated as a providential figure, the image at the heart of the myth of the saviour of
later years.84
If Napoleon had become a power in the land – indeed, in some respects the only power in
the land – there remained the question of what he should do with his newfound authority.
By all accounts, from early in the campaign he was thinking of seizing power in France,
but, more immediately, there was the issue of the territories that had been occupied by the
French armies. In so far as these were concerned, it was not long before he was thinking
of adopting an idea that stemmed directly from the position of Reubell and La Révellière,
namely the transformation of at least some of France’s Italian gains into a satellite republic.85
In this, of course, there was considerable vanity – when Napoleon had made his entrance
into Milan on 15 May, he had been greeted by a cheering crowd that, in large part anything
but spontaneous though it was (it appears to have been recruited by local Jacobin sympa-
thisers bent on impressing the French with the strength of the population’s enthusiasm for
the Revolution), completely turned his head. In short, Napoleon was entertaining dreams
of playing the liberator. Yet it was not just vainglory that pushed him in this direction: with
much of the countryside in a state of revolt (see Chapter 8) and the Army of Italy commit-
ted in the long-run to invading Austria, it made sense to win over the local Jacobins. And,
last but not least, Napoleon should not be denied a certain sincerity: whilst he was certainly
deeply ambitious, in Italy he found a real cause, namely the overthrow and complete remod-
elling of a society he loathed for its deep-seated Catholicism.86
The first steps in the new policy came in the last months of 1796 with the creation on
the basis of the Duchy of Modena and the Papal territories of Bologna and Ferrara of a state-
let entitled the Cispadane Republic.87 This, however, was but the beginning: in June 1797
Napoleon suddenly announced the creation of a much bigger state based on the Duchy of
Milan (i.e. Lombardy), the lands of the Republic of Venice west of the river Adige and the
Cispadane Republic, this last simply being incorporated into the new territorial units by fiat
without the slightest attempt at consultation (in brief, distrusting the radicalism displayed
by many of its adherents, Napoleon appears to have judged that the best way of keeping
this in check was to submerge the Cispadane Republic in a larger political unit).88 Known
as the Cisalpine Republic and divided into eleven French-style departments, the new state,
whose capital, naturally enough, was Milan, was presented with a constitution based on the
current French model (i.e. that of 1795) and we therefore see universal suffrage, a bicameral
assembly with very limited power and a Directory, though in the first instance the trappings
of democracy were not accompanied by the reality, all the members of the assembly and the
Directory alike being selected by Napoleon himself.89
In so far as collaborators were concerned, Napoleon certainly had plenty to choose from.
There were erstwhile officials of the ancien régime eager to return to the policies of enlight-
ened absolutism; men of letters influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment – one thinks
here of the professor of surgery Pietro Moscati, the mathematician Giovanni Paradisi and the
scientist Alessandro Volta – ardent giacobini eager to unleash a revolution that would sweep
aside the Church and the nobility like the ex-priest Melchiorre Gioia; proto-nationalists
motivated by dreams that the Cisalpine Republic would be the cradle of a united Italy;
opportunists who saw the new régime as a chance to make their fortunes or, at the very least,
better their position, and even a handful of clergy convinced, as Alan Reinemann has put
it, that ‘the new ideals were in their nature Christian’ and, further that, if only the Church
would foster them, ‘freed from the golden chains of wealth and political influence, strong
only in its moral authority and popular devotion, [it] would revive the simplicity, equality,
and fervour of its first centuries’.90 Amongst the substantial Jewish community, too, there
was a certain degree of enthusiasm. To quote Vivien’s experiences of Ferrara, for example:
While the Jews were tolerated in Italy . . . they had to inhabit particular districts . . .
known as ghettos from which they could only emerge at sunrise . . . Having freed them
from this species of confinement and put them in possession of precisely the same civil
rights as Roman Catholics, during the occupation the French therefore found numer-
ous partisans among the Israelites of Italy and that, excepting in matters of interest,
they were keen to do us all sorts of little favours.91
Milan, then, soon became a place of pilgrimage and gathering for Italians of many differ-
ent origins just as the pseudo-court which Napoleon established at the palace of Mombello
was soon thronged by enthusiasts anxious to meet the young general and press their views
upon him. At the same time, the Cisalpine government pushed through a series of dramatic
reforms that recalled those of 1789: we see, then, the abolition of feudalism, the dissolution
of the religious orders and the expropriation and sale of the lands of the Church. Yet prom-
ising though this was, all was far from well. From the beginning, the new state was burdened
with a treaty of alliance which committed it to maintaining a French army of 25,000 men as
well as 35,000 troops of its own and this represented a crushing load on territories that had
already been fought over for a full year. At the same time, attempts on the part of the more
radical elements in Milan to give a Jacobin twist to its policies, by, for example, introducing
price controls and helping the rural populace acquire a share in the lands of the Church
were defeated by more moderate elements concerned to protect the interests of the landed
élite, though not without a coup organised by French ambassador in June 1798 that brought
down the original administration, introduced changes in the constitution and marginalised
the giacobini, a group whom the French were everywhere inclined to distrust, the basic
problem being that their patron, Buonarroti, had had close links with the proto-communist
conspirator, Babeuf. As a result (or, at least, so it could be argued: the matter is at the very
least open to doubt), popular support was not forthcoming, the life of the Republic rather
being disrupted by numerous peasant uprisings. Nor was this an end to the problem: as a
unitary state, the Cisalpine Republic could not but be dominated by Milan, this being a
situation that was certain to be resented by cities such as Modena, Reggio, Ferrara and
Bologna. If the government fled in the face of the oncoming Allied armies in 1799, it was
therefore hardly surprising: without the French army to sustain the cause of revolution, it
was, quite clearly, nothing.92
To return to a wider picture of events, the Cisalpine Republic was but the first in a series
of similar creations. In so far as this is concerned, the story begins in Rome. As a result of
the treaty of Tolentino, the Papal States had been forced to accept a French ambassador
in the person of none other than Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s elder brother. At first, all
went well in that the ever-personable Joseph was able to establish friendly relations with
a Vatican administration anxious to insure itself against yet more demands on the part of
Napoleon. However, the commander of the Army of Italy regarded his brother as being too
soft and sent a small military mission headed by a general named Duphot to oversee his
activities. Perhaps inevitably, the presence of Duphot and his fellow officers led to some
excitement and the result was that on 27 December a small crowd of giacobini gathered
outside the French embassy and mounted a demonstration in favour of Rome becoming a
republic. At this, a detachment of Papal troops arrived with orders to clear the street, and
in the resultant skirmish Duphot was accidentally killed. With Napoleon and the Directory
already strongly in favour of taking over the Papal States, this was all the pretext that was
needed and in late January 1798 a large force of French troops commanded by Napoleon’s
future chief-of-staff, Alexandre Berthier, duly set off for Rome. Resistance was non-existent
and on 10 February Berthier marched into the capital and proclaimed the Papal States to be
a republic, Pius VI being placed under arrest and conducted into exile.93
In theory, what followed was metamorphosis: the people were declared to be sovereign;
a constitution introduced along the lines of the current French model; the country divided
into eight departments; feudalism and all restrictions on trade and occupation abolished;
the Jews emancipated; and the old Papal flag replaced by a red, white and black tricolour.
In practice, however, what had occurred was just one more act of conquest. An early arrival
was Paul Thiébault:
When the French troops first reached Rome . . . the military governor . . . [i.e. Berthier]
allowed diamonds, pictures, statues, works of art . . . to be carried off without schedules
or receipts; he gave up to pillage the property of those whom he had arrested or driven
away; he held the fifty richest families in Rome to ransom and levied heavy contribu-
tions on all in the name of the Republic, to the profit, if not of the right parties, at least
to those who had the might.94
Nor was it just a question of rapacity, the French commissioners sent to the city constantly
intervening in political discussion and thereby undermining such attempts as were made to
solve the new state’s many problems, not the least of which was a serious economic crisis.
Whether this lack of independence made much difference is a moot point, however: most
of the measures introduced by the government, such as the sale of the lands of the Church
and the imposition of punitive taxes on the wealthier inhabitants serving only to make
matters worse in one respect or another. Meanwhile, the particularly intense manner in
which Catholicism was embedded in the life of the city of Rome could not but make for a
background of constant friction that ensured that popular support for the republic remained
limited even amongst its most natural constituency. Against all this, the cultural awakening
brought by the departure of the Pope counted for nothing: many pro-republican newspa-
pers appeared, certainly, but their message went unregarded, just as the various political
clubs that came into being in effect did nothing but to preach to the converted. Nor did it
help, meanwhile, that such local leaders as emerged, such as the leading physician Liborio
Angelucci, proved all too vulnerable to the temptations of office. Whilst brave attempts
have been made to argue that the Roman Republic marked an important landmark in the
history of the risorgimento, what we rather observe is a tawdry sham that in the end exercised
little in the way of authority beyond the walls of the Holy City itself, most of the country-
side, as we shall see, soon sinking into a state of wholesale revolt.95
At this point in our narrative, we have temporarily to move away from Italy, for next to
fall to the wave of republicanisation was Switzerland. With the French firmly established
in northern Italy, control of the passes across the Alps became a matter of some military
importance: indeed, in late 1797 concern for the Cisalpine Republic had already led to a
slice of frontier territory – the Valtelline – being stripped away and handed over to Milan.
In early 1798, then, French forces marched across the frontier and took control of all the
main towns and cities. As in Rome, this was a simple act of conquest brought about in
this instance by strategic necessity, but, as in Rome again, it was essential to drape it in
a cloak of liberation. A conference was therefore convened of representatives from all of
the existing confederation’s constituent cantons, and on 12 April Switzerland was duly
reborn as the Helvetic Republic. As everywhere else, the constitution that was adopted was
essentially that of Directorial France, but in the Swiss context this model was even harder
to apply, for the cantons had a long tradition of self-government and had also evolved in
very different ways. This is not to say that there was no support for reform in Switzerland.
On the contrary, government was far too often in the hands of a few patrician families; full
citizenship limited to a very narrow sector of the population; and many parts of the country
denied cantonal status but rather ruled as dependencies of Zurich, Bern or other cities.
Added to all this, meanwhile, was all the inconvenience represented by internal customs
barriers and separate codes of law. As early as the 1770s, then, voices began to be raised
in favour of a reconceptualisation of the state that gave greater prominence to the nation,
while there were always elements that admired the Revolution, as witness, for example, the
formation in 1790 of a club for Swiss exiles in Paris, not to mention disaffected individuals –
such as Frédéric La Harpe, a member of a prominent family from the area of Vaud who had
acted as tutor to the future Alexander I of Russia – who saw French intervention as a means
of advancing their personal interests. In consequence of all this, the advance of the French
armies precipitated a wave of revolt that saw the existing authorities brought down in many
places. Much encouraged, the French commander, General Brune, immediately imposed a
unitary constitution and rebaptised Switzerland as the Helvetic Republic, and that without
the slightest attempt at consultation, but he had taken no account of the fact that discon-
tent with the old order did not necessarily equate to support for changes of so radical a
nature: hence the state of civil war into which the new state was almost immediately to fall
and the consequent inefficacy of many of the reforms introduced within its borders.96
From Switzerland we return to Italy. Last of the satellite states to come into being was
the so-called Parthenopean Republic, this equating to the mainland part of the Kingdom
of Naples. In brief, this owed its origins to the War of the Second Coalition. On 1 July
1798, as we shall see, Napoleon had invaded Egypt, and the result was that a new constella-
tion of opponents began to take shape in the form of Austria, Russia, the Ottoman Empire
and Naples, as well, of course, as Britain. However, seemingly fearing that a French attack
was imminent, the Neapolitans invaded the Roman Republic. The French garrison having
fallen back without a fight, the government promptly took to its heels, and on 29 November
Ferdinand IV entered the capital at the head of his army, much to the delight of the inhabit-
ants, who had risen in revolt in the last days of occupation, killed many French sympathisers
and engaged in wholesale pillage. Success, however, was short-lived in that the French
counter-attacked and routed Ferdinand’s troops, the latter fleeing in complete disorder. As
we shall, see, the response of the king and queen was to take ship for Sicily, and, a desperate
attempt on the part of the populace to defend the city having come to nought amidst great
bloodshed, on 21 January the French commander, Championnet, proclaimed the mainland
to constitute the Parthenopean Republic. As we shall see, the life of the new state was to
be brief in the extreme, whilst it was from the beginning torn apart by a seemingly endless
series of revolts. In the meantime, however, whether in terms of its political arrangements
or its personnel, it was little different from its counterparts elsewhere. Thus, the government
drew upon the usual mix of giacobini, erstwhile functionaries of the previous régime, nobles
eager to hit back against the creeping tide of absolutism and men of letters (indeed, in this
case, even women of letters). There were, then, Giuseppe Abbonimonte, Matteo Galdi,
Saverio Massa and Francesco-Saverio Salfi, all of whom were disciples of Buonarroti who
had acquired positions in the service of the Cisalpine Republic only to be purged on account
of their radical views; Francesco Caracciolo, a senior officer of the Neapolitan navy deeply
disillusioned by the person of Ferdinand IV; Francesco Pagano, a professor of the University
of Naples who had been forced to flee into exile on account of his consistent attempts to
press for reform of the judicial system; Domenico Cirillo, a leading botanist with a Chair in
Natural Medicine; Ettore Caraffa, an army officer from a prominent family of the Neapolitan
aristocracy; and, finally, Leonora Fonseca Pimentel, a well-known essayist who became edi-
tor of the official gazette.97
From the beginning, however, the Parthenopean Republic was a disaster. A provisional
government was immediately established under the leadership of Carlo Lauberg, an army
officer who had established a name for himself as a chemist whilst serving on the staff of
the army’s engineering academy, while Fonseca Pimentel and the Jacobin clubs tried franti-
cally to win the confidence of the masses and devise ingenious ways by which the Republic
could get its message across to them.98 Such good intentions counted for very little, how-
ever. Prior to the French entrance into Naples, the Neapolitan commander had negotiated
an armistice whose conditions included an indemnity of 17,500,000 ducats, and this was
in itself quite sufficient to kill all chance of reaching out to the populace even had many
French troops not continued to behave very badly. Meanwhile, the provisional government
and the legislative committee (an ad hoc national assembly set up by Championnet to draft
a new constitution) were deeply divided between outright giacobini, erstwhile adherents
of Bourbon reformism and nobles out to build an aristocratic republic that would restore
the privileged orders to the status they had enjoyed fifty years before. Very soon, too, the
Republic lost its patron. In brief, Championnet had had no authorisation to establish a
satellite régime in Naples, but had decided to go ahead anyway, not least because he was bit-
terly jealous of Napoleon and also upset that most of such glory as there was in the defeat of
the Neapolitans had accrued not to him but to one of his divisional commanders, namely a
native of Sedan of Scottish ancestry named Etienne Macdonald. In establishing a Republic,
he was therefore clearly hoping to emulate the example of Napoleon in Milan, but he had
neither the record of victory nor the same presence in the press as that general and therefore
immediately came to grief. Attached to his army was a latter-day réprésentant en mission in
the person of Guillaume Faipoult, a Thermidorian who had served from 1794 to 1796 as
Minister of Finance. Outraged by the general’s actions and increasingly perturbed by his
support of the local Jacobins, he therefore took him to task, only to be arrested and threat-
ened with execution. In acting thus, however, Championnet had finally gone too far, and
the Directory promptly stripped him of his command and replaced him with Macdonald, a
figure who was far less sympathetic to the radicals’ cause.99 In the circumstances, more was
achieved than might have been expected – Robertson, indeed, argues that ‘the speed and
vigour of their measures was remarkable’100 – but, in the end, progress was insufficient for
there to be any hope of checking the wave of revolt that was soon gripping the new state,
and that for much the same reasons as one sees everywhere else. As for ability to defend
itself, the Parthenopean Republic was no more able to stand the test than its counterparts
elsewhere, and in some respects even less so: if Milan and Rome at least fell to regular
armies, Naples, as we shall see, went down to a mere horde of peasants. However much
they represent the judgement of an émigré hostile to all things revolutionary, in the end,
the words of Roger de Damas cannot be gainsaid. Thus: ‘It was absurd to call the changes
in Naples a revolution . . . This was simply an invasion which was dignified with the sem-
blance of a revolution in order to strengthen it.’101
However one looks at it, then, the story of the export of the French Revolution is not
one that is particularly flattering. In 1789, certainly, the fall of the Bastille was greeted with
great excitement, but it was not long before that excitement had started to turn to disillu-
sionment. Some of the Revolution’s admirers stayed loyal to their first impressions, true, but
in almost no instance were they able to move from mere conspiracy to revolt, the upheav-
als that we see in Belgium, Poland and Ireland all having their roots in situations that had
no connection with France whatsoever. In practice, then, the Revolution was exported by
French bayonets, the satellite régimes that came into being from the northern tip of Holland
to the southern tip of Italy all being established by dint of conquest, just as Belgium, Savoy
and the Rhineland would never have fallen within the French orbit had it not been for the
victories of the French armies. This does not mean, of course, that it was only the represent-
atives of France that set the agenda in her conquests. On the contrary, wherever the French
went, they found at the very least groups of individuals who were ready to collaborate with
them, some for reasons that were genuinely ideological, some for reasons that were rather
more pragmatic and some for reasons that were wholly opportunistic. The groups concerned,
however, were rarely homogeneous, ranging, as they did, from hardline Jacobins through
representatives of ancien-régime officialdom to nobles intent on turning back the pages of
past, whilst they were all too often marked by naïvety, incompetence, inexperience and, on
occasion, want of probity. Often mistrusted by their French masters, they also enjoyed little
autonomy, whilst, in the one case that they were genuinely left to their own devices – that
of the Batavian Republic – they proved incapable of developing a coherent political agenda.
The Dutch example aside – an exceptional case on account of the old United Provinces’
highly developed levels of literacy and political participation alike – they also proved quite
incapable of securing a hold on the loyalties of the populace, the fact being that, along with
the territories that the French simply took over, they were forever dogged by the spectre of
rebellion and other forms of popular resistance. Nor is this surprising: in the French view,
having been liberated by the force of French arms rather than their own efforts, the people
of Belgium, Holland and the rest could expect to pay for their good fortune. If the annexed
territories and the satellite republics did not quite originate as tools of exploitation, they
therefore soon became so. The result was inevitable: no sooner was French military support
withdrawn than they collapsed in ignominy and confusion.
Notes
1 This is not to deny, of course, that the Revolution caused an immense stir in intellectual circles.
Across Europe large numbers of men of letters were deeply perturbed about the state of soci-
ety and convinced that fundamental change was essential. Doyle, Oxford History of the French
Revolution, pp. 159–61.
2 Material on eighteenth-century Belgium is scarcely superabundant. However, for a useful dis-
cussion see P.J. Illing, ‘Reform, revolution and royalism in Brussels, 1780–1790’, University of
Cambridge PhD thesis, 2007. See also W.W. Davis, Joseph II: An Imperial Reformer for the Austrian
Netherlands (The Hague, 1974); Beales, Joseph II, II, pp. 484–6.
3 Though almost unknown, the revolt in Liège was in many respects more interesting than its
successor in the Austrian Netherlands. Thus, whereas in the latter to object was opposition to
enlightened reform, in the former the issue was the absence of that self-same reform, and the
ideas of the rebel leaders very much those current in France. At the heart of this difference
was the fact that whereas Brabant and Flanders were in large part economic backwaters, Liège
was experiencing the early stages of industrial revolution and, with it, the emergence of a mod-
ern class structure, the prominence of the Church therefore striking an especially jarring note.
Travellers, then, noted it as a place where deference was under threat in a way not to be seen
in most other parts of the Continent. E.g. C.L. Este, A Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders,
Brabant and Germany to Switzerland (London, 1795), pp. 118–19.
4 The only serious fighting of the campaign took place at Turnhout on 27 October 1789 when
2,000 Belgians barricaded themselves in the town, and beat off an attack on the part of 2,500
Austrians. Total casualties were a mere 300 men, but, as the news spread so it grew in the tell-
ing and inspired many towns and cities that had at first stayed neutral to join the revolution. In
France, meanwhile, news of events across the frontier caused much excitement. E.g. B. Coppens
(ed.), Chronique des revolutions belgique et liègoise, 1789–1790: l’integrale des articles du Moniteur
Universel sur les evènements survenus dans les provinces belgiques et le pays de Liège entre le 24
novembre 1789 et le 18 janvier 1791 précédés d’articles extraits de la presse française du 8 aôut au 23
novembre 1789 (Beauvechain, n.d.), p. 29. For a detailed account of the insurrection from an
Austrian point of view, see Beales, Joseph II, II, pp. 610–22.
5 For all this, see J. Polasky, ‘Traditionalists, democrats and Jacobins in Revolutionary Brussels’,
Journal of Modern History, 56, No. 2 (June, 1984), pp. 227–62.
6 J. Polasky, Revolution in Brussels, 1787–1793 (Brussels, 1987), pp. 181–2.
7 For the history of Poland prior to 1770, see W. Reddaway et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Poland: From Augustus II to Pilsudski, 1697–1935 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 49–71; Davies, God’s
Playground, I, pp. 492–510.
8 Reddaway et al., Cambridge History of Poland, pp. 124–32. Inherent in this reform movement
was, of course, the growth of Polish nationalism. For two discussions of this subject, see
A. Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from
Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Notre Dame, IL, 1989); J. Lukowski, ‘Political ideas
among the Polish nobility in the eighteenth century (to 1788)’, Slavonic and East European
Review, 82, No. 1 (January, 1984), pp. 1–26. Meanwhile, for Stanislaw August, see A. Zamoyski,
The Last King of Poland (London, 1997) and R. Butterwick, Poland’s Last King and English
Culture; Stanislaw August Poniatowski, 1732–1798 (Oxford, 1998).
9 R. Frost, ‘Poland’s May days, 1791’, History Today, 41, No. 5 (May, 1991), pp. 11–17.
10 For the debates underpinning the reform movement, see R. Butterwick, ‘Political discourses
of the Polish revolution, 1788–1792’, English Historical Review, 120, No. 487 (June, 2005),
pp. 695–731.
11 R. Nisbet Bain, ‘The second partition of Poland (1793)’, English Historical Review, 6, No. 22
(April, 1891), pp. 331–40; Lukowski, Partitions of Poland, pp. 128–58; Reddaway et al., Cambridge
History of Poland, pp. 137–53.
12 For a relatively recent biography of Kosciuszko, see J.M. Tula, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Purest Son
of Liberty (New York, 1998).
13 See A.M. Rosner, ‘Jewish participation in the Kosciuszko uprising’, Polish Review, 59, no. 3 (July,
2014), pp. 57–71.
14 E.g. M. Müller, ‘Poland’ in O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (eds.), Nationalism in the Age of the French
Revolution (London, 1987), p. 124. For a full account of the military struggle, see Reddaway et al.,
Cambridge History of Poland, pp. 88–111.
15 For all this, see R. Lord, ‘The third partition of Poland’, Slavonic Review, 3, No. 9 (March, 1925),
pp. 481–98.
16 P.S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, WA, 1974), pp. 26–8.
17 For two useful introductions to the eighteenth-century background, see E.M. Johnston, Ireland
in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1974) and I. McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of
Slaves (Dublin, 2009). See also D. Mansergh, Grattan’s Failure: Parliamentary Reform and the
People of Ireland, 1779–1800 (Dublin, 2005).
18 The standard text on Tone is M. Elliott, Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence (London, 1989).
19 N.J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Belfast and Dublin, 1791–98 (Oxford,
1998), p. 13. Also useful on the ideological background is S. Small, Political Thought in Ireland,
1776–1798: Republicanism, Patriotism and Radicalism (Oxford, 2002).
20 For all this, see J. Smyth, ‘The men of “No popery”: the origins of the Orange Order’, History Ireland,
3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 48–53; D.W. Miller, ‘The Armagh troubles, 1784–1795’ in S. Clark
and J.S. Donnelly (eds.), Irish Peasants, Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, WI,
1983), pp. 155–91, and D.W. Miller and L.M. Cullen, ‘Politicisation in Revolutionary Ireland:
the case of the Armagh troubles’, Irish Economic and Social History, 23 (1996), pp. 1–23.
21 For the disturbances that arose from this decision, see I.F. Nelson, ‘“The first chapter of 1798.”
Restoring a military perspective to the Irish militia riots of 1793’, Irish Historical Studies, 33, No.
132 (November, 2003), pp. 369–86, and T. Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish militia
disturbances of 1793’, Past and Present, 99, No. 1 (May, 1983), pp. 41–64.
22 For these negotiations see M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France
(London, 1982). Rather wider in focus is S. Kleinma, ‘Initiating insurgencies abroad: French
plans to “chouannise” Britain and Ireland, 1793–1798’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 25, No. 4
(August, 2014), pp. 784–99.
23 C.H. Teeling, Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London, 1828), pp. 133–4. On the
Yeomanry, see A. Blackstock, An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin,
1998), and, more particularly, A. Blackstock, ‘“A dangerous species of ally”: Orangism and the
Irish Yeomanry’, Irish Historical Studies, 30, No. 119 (May, 1997), pp. 393–405.
24 Teeling, Personal Narrative, pp. 145–6.
25 The literature on the revolt of 1798 is superabundant. Most accessible as a starting point is prob-
ably T. Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The History of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London,
1969). However, there are many more recent treatments such as C. Póitéir (ed.), The Great Irish
Rebellion of 1798 (Dublin, 1998) and T. Bartlett et al. (eds.), 1798: A Bicentennial Perspective
(Dublin, 2003). To general histories, meanwhile can be added many county surveys, good
examples including R. O’Donnell, The Rebellion in Wicklow, 1798 (Dublin, 1998); D. Gahan,
The People’s Rising: Wexford, 1798 (Dublin, 1995); C. Dickson, Revolt in the North: Antrim and
Down in 1798 (Dublin, 1960); C. Dickson, The Wexford Rising in 1798: Its Causes and its Course
(Dublin, 1955); and A.T.Q. Stewart, The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and
Down (Belfast, 1995), As for the French invasion, this is covered by T. Pakenham, ‘Humbert’s
raid on Ireland, 1798’, History Today, 19, No. 10 (October, 1969), pp. 685–95. Finally, on the
vital question of the militia, see I.F. Nelson, Ireland’s Forgotten Army: The Irish Militia, 1793–1802
(Dublin, 2007).
26 Cit. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the
Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), p. 277. For a survey of the abandonment on the part of
German intellectual opinion of its initial support for the Revolution, see G.P. Gooch, ‘Germany
and the French Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 10 (1916), pp. 51–76.
Also helpful, meanwhile, is G. Kurz, The Great Drama: Germany and the French Revolution (Bonn,
1989), pp. 24–32 and T.C.W. Blanning, ‘France during the French Revolution through German
eyes’, in H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds.), The Impact of the French Revolution on European
Consciousness (Gloucester, 1989), pp.133–45. In Germany, then, far from the ideas of the French
Revolution spreading, they rather contracted.
27 S. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (London, 1979),
p. 159.
28 For a biography of Buonarroti, see E. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele
Buonarroti (Cambridge, MA, 1959).
29 For the case of Verri, see C. Capra, ‘The rise of liberal constitutionalism in Italy: Pietro Verri and
the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17, No. 5 (December, 2012), pp. 516–26.
Why Italy should have been as exceptional as it was in its response to the French Revolution is
by no means clear. However, theories include shared memories of a glorious past that there was a
general desire to recreate, a strong awareness of the concept of republicanism, a highly developed
political and juridical life that gave rise to a large official class, the exclusive nature of politics
in many Italian states, a highly developed system of higher education, and the survival of many
fora for debate and discussion. See, for example, R. Grew, ‘Finding social capital: the French
Revolution in Italy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29, No. 3 (Winter, 1999), pp. 407–33;
A.M. Rao, ‘Republicanism in Italy from the eighteenth century to the early risorgimento’, Jornal
of Modern Italian Studies, 17, No. 2 (March, 2012), pp.149–67. Also very important, doubtless
was the fact that the Italian states witnessed a much sharper abandonment of the policies of
enlightened absolutism than was the case elsewhere: in Piedmont, Tuscany, Rome and Naples
alike, worried administrations to a greater or lesser extent imposed tight controls on the press,
backed away from progressive policies, permitted the ecclesiastical authorities to clamp down on
the reformist element of the clergy known as Jansenists, suppressed freemasonry and threw critics
of the system into prison, See Woolf, History of Italy, p. 158.
30 R. Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, NJ, 1958), pp. 327–9.
31 For the Martinovic conspiracy, see P. Adler, ‘The Martinovic conspiracy: revolution and the
Habsburg Slavs’, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings, 19 (1989), i, pp. 472–85;
W. Langsam, ‘Emperor Francis II and the Austrian “Jacobins”, 1792–1796’, American Historical
Review, 50, No. 1 (October, 1944), pp. 471–90; C. Mueller, ‘Jacobins in Styria’, Consortium
on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings, 19 (1989), i, pp. 501–12; E. Wangermann, From Joseph
II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Hapsburg Dominions in the
Period of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1969); K. Benda, ‘Hungary’, in Dann and Dinwiddie,
Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution, pp. 132–4. Material on the Picornell conspiracy
(sometimes known as the ‘conspiracy of San Blas’) and the Vitaliani conspiracy is more lim-
ited, but see M.J. Aguirrezábal and J.L. Comellas, ‘La conspiración de Picornell (1795) en el
contexto de la prerrevolución liberal española’, Revista de historia contemporánea, 1 (1982),
pp. 7–38; A. Elorza, La ideología liberal en la ilustración española (Madrid, 1970), pp. 304–49;
A.M. Rao, ‘Conspiration et constitution: Andrea Vitaliani et la République Napolitaine de
1799’, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, 313, No. 3 (July, 1998), pp. 546–7; and
P. Tommaso, Massoni e giacobini nel Regno di Napoli. Emanuele de Deo e la congiura del 1794
(Naples, 1986).
32 The literature on the British response to the French Revolution is overwhelming, and it is there-
fore recognised that the paragraphs which follow cannot do more than highlight a few of the
debates which it covers. However, for an extremely lucid introduction to the historiography, see
E. Vincent Macleod, ‘British responses to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, 50, No. 3
(September, 2007), pp. 689–709, while the best general primers are C. Emsley, Britain and the
French Revolution (Harlow, 2000) and C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815
(London, 1979).
33 For the response of the Whigs, see F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London,
1967) and J. Derry, ‘The opposition and the Whigs and the French Revolution, 1789–1815’, in
Dickinson, Britain and the French Revolution, pp. 39–60. Also helpful is J.E. Cookson, The Friends
of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, 1982).
34 Burke, Paine and Wollstonecraft are all three the subject of a substantial literature. Useful
starting points include S.E. Ayling, Edmund Burke: His Life and Opinions (London, 1988);
J. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York, 1994); J. Keane, Tom Paine: A
Political Life (London, 1995); T. Griffiths, ‘These are the times’: A life of Thomas Paine (London,
2004); and J. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London, 2000).
35 For a case study on the penetration of one provincial city by radical ideas, see J. Stevenson,
Artisans and Democrats: Sheffield and the French Revolution, 1789–1797 (Sheffield, 1989).
36 For this critique of the war, see S. Andrews, The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution,
1789–1799 (Houndmills, 2000), pp. 42–6.
37 A. Booth, ‘The United Englishmen and radical politics in the industrial north-west of England,
1795–1803’, International Journal of Social History, 31, No. 3 (December, 1986), pp. 271–97;
T.A. Brotherstone, ‘From reformers to Jacobins: the Scottish Association of the Friends of the
People’, in T.M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–1850 (Edinburgh, 1990),
pp. 31–50. Meanwhile, for the Pittite reaction, see F. O’Gorman, ‘Pitt and the “Tory” reaction to the
French Revolution, 1789–1815’, in Dickinson, Britain and the French Revolution, pp. 21–38.
38 For a discussion of Thompson’s views on the role of the French Revolution in the English his-
torical process, see D. Eastwood, ‘E.P. Thompson, Britain and the French Revolution’, History
Workshop Journal, 39 (Spring, 1995), pp. 79–88.
39 M. Jay, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard (London, 2004) is a recent biography.
40 Food riots are discussed in A. Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Georgian England
(Oxford, 2006), pp. 209–39, J. Stevenson, ‘Food riots in England, 1792–1818’ in J. Stevenson
and R. Quinault (eds.), Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History, 1790–1820
(London, 1974), pp. 33–74 and J. Bohstedt, ‘Women in English riots, 1790–1810’, Past and
Present, 120 (August, 1988), pp. 88–122. Meanwhile, for the miseries to which the populace
was subjected, see R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1801 (Gloucester,
1988). Finally also helpful here is C. Emsley, ‘The social impact of the French Wars’ in Dickinson,
Britain and the French Revolution, pp. 211–28.
41 For the troubles in Scotland, see K.J. Logue, ‘The Tranent militia riot of 1797’, Transactions of
the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists’ Society, 14 (1974), pp. 376–61. That members
of the United Scotsmen were involved in these disturbances, there is little doubt, but it is far
from clear that they played a dominant role and absolutely certain that they failed in turning
riot into insurrection.
42 For a staunch presentation of the case for the reality of the revolutionary threat, see R. Wells,
‘English society and revolutionary politics in the 1790s: the case for insurrection’, in M. Philp
(ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 188–226, and
R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983).
43 See D. Andress, The Savage Storm: Britain on the Brink in the Age of Napoleon (London, 2002),
p. 51. For the role the United Irishmen played in the fomentation of revolutionary feeling in
mainland Britain, meanwhile, see A.W. Smith, ‘Irish rebels and English radicals, 1798–1820’,
Past and Present, 7 (April, 1955), pp. 78–85.
44 Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, p. 69.
45 Recent treatments of the mutinies of 1797 include K. Keith, ‘The “floating republics”: political
leadership in the Spithead and Nore mutinies’, in K. Grint, The Art of Leadership (Oxford, 2001),
pp. 73–104; F. Mabee, ‘The Spithead mutiny and urban radicalism in the 1790s’, Romanticism, 13,
No. 2 (November, 2007), pp. 133–44; A.G. Brown, ‘The Nore mutiny: sedition or ship’s biscuits?
A reappraisal’, Mariners’ Mirror, 92, No. 1 (February, 2006), pp. 60–74.
46 One work that can certainly be criticised for being overly complacent in its treatment of the rev-
olutionary threat is I.R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections
on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984). Yet the barrage of criticism that has been
directed at those who would argue that contrary case is telling, and all the more so as much of
it comes from scholars who are specialists in revolutionary politics. To quote Marianne Elliott,
for example, in the work of Roger Wells, there is ‘a determined channelling of information to
fit a preconceived notion’, while Thomas Bartlett is even more damning. Thus: ‘Even prodi-
gies of research will avail little without judgement and a proper critical spirit and it must be
said that these are qualities that Dr Wells signally lacks.’ For these remarks and much more in
the same vein, see Irish Economic and Social History, 11, No. 1 (January, 1984), pp. 153–4; Irish
Historical Studies, 24, No. 94 (November, 1984), pp. 285–87. Also very telling in its demolition of
Wells’ arguments is J. Beckett, ‘Responses to war: Nottingham in the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815’, Midland History, 22, No. 1 (January, 1997), pp. 71–84. For more
moderate discussions, see J. Stevenson, ‘Popular radicalism and popular protest, 1789–1815’, in
Dickinson, Britain and the French Revolution, pp. 61–82, and H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism
and French Revolution (Oxford, 1985).
47 For the attempt to mobilise popular feeling against the Revolution, see H.T. Dickinson, ‘Popular
conservatism and militant loyalism, 1789–1815’, in Dickinson, Britain and the French Revolution,
pp.103–26; R.R. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French
Revolution (Lexington, 1983); M. Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the origins of the loyalist association
movement of 1792’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 943–62. For a case study in Church-and-
King violence, see A. Booth, ‘Popular loyalism and public violence in the north-west of England,
1790–1800’, Social History, 8, No. 3 (October, 1983), pp. 295–313.
48 Setting aside the militia, something of a special case in which conscription was in practice
replaced by voluntary enlistment, the one exception here was the Royal Navy which famously
employed so-called ‘press gangs’ in order to keep its crews up to strength. Yet, whilst the figures
are hard to untangle, it is clear that voluntary enlistment was, if not quite the norm, then cer-
tainly very strong, and that the proportion of men taken by force was relatively small – possibly as
few as 20 per cent and certainly no more than twice that figure. Nor was this surprising: discipline
in the navy was not nearly so savage as the popular view has tended to suggest whilst conditions
were generally better than on merchant ships and the rewards considerable. For all this, see
J.R. Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang: Volunteers, Impressment and the Naval Manpower Problem
in the Late Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2015), and, more impressively, N. Rogers, The Press
Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (New York, 2008).
49 For a discussion of the problems involved in obtaining men for the regular army, see T. McGuffie,
‘Recruiting the ranks of the regular British army during the French Wars’, Journal of the Society
for Army Historical Research, 34, No. 138 (June, 1956), pp. 50–8, and No. 139 (September, 1956),
pp. 123–32.
50 The standard source on mobilisation as a whole is J.E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation,
1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997). On the militia, see I. Beckett, ‘The militia and the king’s enemies,
1793–1815’ in A. Guy (ed.), The Road to Waterloo: The British Army and the Struggle against
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (London, 1990), pp. 32–9; M. McCormack, Embodying the
Militia in Georgian England (Oxford, 2015). On the Volunteers, see J.R. Western, ‘The volunteer
movement as an anti-revolutionary force, 1793–1801’, English Historical Review, 71, No. 281
(October, 1956), pp. 603–14, and J.E. Cookson, ‘The English volunteer movement of the French
Revolutionary Wars, 1793–1815: some contexts’, Historical Journal, 32 , No. 4 (December, 1989),
pp. 867–91.
51 A. Leask, Sword of Scotland: Jocks at War (Barnsley, 1996), pp. 106–7.
52 P. Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington (London, 1996), pp.273–4. It is interesting to note
that, of these fifteen regiments, seven were Scottish and three Irish.
53 Of course, with so many men under arms, the resources of the state had become so mighty as
to render all chance of a successful revolution impossible. See E. Royle, Revolutionary Britannia?
Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2000), p. 10. Meanwhile,
for the social composition of the rank and file of the regular army and militia, see Haythornthwaite,
Armies of Wellington, pp. 43–58; Coss, All for the King’s Shilling, pp. 50–85; Holmes, Redcoat,
pp. 135–56.
54 Riesbeck, Travels through Germany, III, pp. 147–8.
55 Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, pp. 18–58 passim.
56 For an extended discussion of these issues, see T.C.W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz,
1743–1803 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 303–22.
57 For all this, see Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, pp. 277–300 passim. Also useful are
the essays by Gonthier Fink and Thomas Saine in E. Bahr and T. Saine (eds.), The Internalised
Revolutions: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789–1989 (London, 1992). Unlike
Belgium, however, the Rhineland was not immediately annexed to France, not least because
right up until the peace of Campo Formio, the Austrians continued to hold a large pocket of
territory in the centre of the region.
58 The position of the Rhineland in the wake of Campo Formio was extremely complex. In brief,
to the fury of the Directory, Napoleon made no attempt to secure the whole of the region but
only those portions of it which owed direct allegiance to the head of the house of Habsburg
and could therefore be called Austrian as opposed to simply being constituent parts of the Holy
Roman Empire. The other territories, it was stated, would be taken at a later date but only after
their owners (for example, Bavaria), were compensated with territories elsewhere in Germany,
to which end a conference of all the states involved was organised in the town of Rastatt. In the
event this ended without any result – it was suspended on the outbreak of renewed hostilities
with Austria in March 1799 – but, as Napoleon well understood, the very fact of its convocation
sounded the death knell of all the ecclesiastical territories and petty principalities of the Empire
as it would be these that would be drawn upon to make up for losses of Bavaria and the rest. As
to what Napoleon was after, it was essentially the destruction of Austria’s authority over the
empire: increasingly dependent on the support of precisely the territories that were most likely to
go under, she would therefore be stripped of her most loyal allies. For all this, see J.G. Gagliardo,
Reich and Nation. The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington, Indiana,
1980), pp. 188–91.
59 Girault, Mes campagnes, pp. 71–2.
60 Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, pp. 168–206, 255–85 passim. M. Rowe, ‘Resistance, col-
laboration or third way? Responses to Napoleonic rule in Germany’, in C.J. Esdaile (ed.), Popular
Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Land-Pirates (Houndmills, 2005), pp. 67–90.
61 Este, Journey in the Year 1793, pp. 119–20.
62 Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Tercier, p. 79.
63 Morin, Lettres de Pierre Girardon, p. 26.
64 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 63.
65 Vivien, Souvenirs, pp. 45–9.
66 Cit. Picard, Au service de la nation, pp. 141–2.
67 See Duthilt, Campagnes et souvenirs, pp. 38–9.
68 For all this, see M. Rapport, ‘Belgium under French occupation: between collaboration and
resistance, July 1794-October 1795’, French History, 15, No. 1 (March, 2002), pp. 63–4.
69 Polasky, Revolution in Brussels, pp. 118–28.
70 Ibid., pp. 233–8. For an account of events in Brussels in the wake of the first French occupation,
see P. Chaussard, Mémoires historiques et politiques sur la révolution de la Belgique et du pays de Liège
en 1793, etc. (Paris, 1793).
71 Polasky, Revolution in Brussels, pp. 250–2.
72 Ibid., pp. 254–9.
73 Rapport, ‘Belgium under French occupation’, pp. 64–82.
74 S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1992),
pp. 143–63. For the long-term origins of the revolution of 1795, see I.L. Leeb, The Ideological
Origins of the Batavian Revolution: History and Politics in the Dutch Republic, 1747–1800 (The
Hague, 1973).
75 R.R. Palmer, ‘Much in little: the Dutch revolution of 1795’, Journal of Modern History, 26, No. 1,
(March, 1954), pp. 19–20.
76 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 206–7.
77 T. Pfeil, ‘L’hantise de la banqueroute: les finances publiques dans la période franco-batave,
1795–1810’, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, 336 (October, 2001), p. 55.
78 For a summary of the positions of the Federalists and the Democrats, see Kossmann, Low
Countries, pp. 87–90; Palmer, ‘Much in little’, pp. 24–6. One issue that also needs to be con-
sidered here is the question of the social base of the two sides in which respect the Federalists
had the support of all those associated with the old order and, more broadly, the landed classes,
whereas the Democrats were backed by wealthy merchants who felt that the old system had been
prejudicial to their interests, together with the sans culottes of Amsterdam and other cities.
79 For all this, see Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 271–310. Meanwhile, the tensions in the
ranks of the Democrats are discussed in P. Brandon and K. Fatah-Black, ‘“The supreme power
of the people”: local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution, 1795–1798’,
Atlantic Studies, 13, No. 3 (September, 2013), pp. 370–88.
80 Kossmann, Low Countries, p. 91.
81 See Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 311–53.
83 Woronoff, The Thermidorian Régime and the Directory, pp.62–5. Over the previous year or more,
Buonarroti had fashioned a scheme for a revolutionary rising in Piedmont that would be launched
at the same time as a French invasion. However, at the same time, the Italian propagandist had
become involved with the proto-socialist François (or, more commonly, Gracchus) Babeuf. The
latter being arrested and guillotined in May 1796 for preparing a rising, the net result was that
Carnot was able to carry the day amongst his colleagues with respect to the question of whether
Italy should be revolutionised. See Woolf, History of Italy, p. 162.
84 A. Forrest, Napoleon (London, 2011), pp. 86–8; Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 217–68
passim.
85 Something that should be firmly dismissed here is the idea that Napoleon embarked on the Italian
campaign with a view to unifying Italy or even of republicanising the existing states. As Dwyer
has shown, he very much shared in the common French view that the Italians were inferior, or
even degenerate, and therefore gave no support whatsoever to a small group of Piedmontese
conspirators who briefly declared a republic at the town of Alba in response to the campaign of
Montenotte and Dego. At the most, all one sees is a certain pragmatism, a desire, perhaps, at
least to convince the giacobini that the French favoured their cause. Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path
to Power, pp. 278–80.
86 Ibid., pp. 277–81; Broers, Napoleon, pp. 135–6. With regard to Napoleon’s overall position, the
best summary is probably that of Stuart Woolf. Thus: ‘Napoleon saw the freedom of . . . northern
Italy as a means of military defence which would reduce the number of France’s enemies and
protect his flank . . . [However,] to describe Napoleon’s actions in Italy as purely dependent on
his military strategy would be misleading. He had far greater sympathy with the Italian Patriots
than the Directory.’ Woolf, History of Italy, p. 164.
87 A word should probably be put in here in respect of the Ligurian Republic. This, however, was
not a creation of the French so much as a pre-existing state – the Republic of Genoa – that
was remodelled by reformist elements in the wake of French occupation in 1796 and, more par-
ticularly, Napoleon’s overthrow of the existing administration in June 1797. See L. Macaluso,
‘Leadership and the transformation of the Ligurian Republic’, Consortium on Revolutionary
Europe Proceedings, 20 (1990), pp. 120–8.
88 The fate of the territories of the Republic of Venice that were taken over by France is instructive:
though the lands on the Italian mainland went to the Cisalpine Republic, the Ionian Islands
and Venetian Albania were all retained by Napoleon who was, it seems, already dreaming of
adventures in the east.
89 Also a feature of the new state was its national flag, a red, white and green tricolour similar to the
modern-day Italian national flag apart from the fact that it was square rather than rectangular.
90 A. Reinemann, review of V. Giuntella, La religione amica della democrazia i cattolici democratici
del triennio rivoluzionario, 1796–1799 (Rome, 1990), The Catholic Historical Review, 77, No. 4
(October, 1991), p. 702.
91 Vivien, Souvenirs, pp. 59–60.
92 Woolf, History of Italy, pp. 178–82
93 For the events of Joseph Bonaparte’s embassy, see M. Ross, The Reluctant King: Joseph Bonaparte,
King of the Two Sicilies and Spain (London, 1976), pp. 59–67.
94 Thiébault, Memoirs, I, p. 357.
95 For all this, see M. Formica, ‘The protagonists and principal phases of the Roman Republic of
1798–1799’ in D. Burton et al. (eds.), Tosca’s Prism: Three Moments in Western Cultural History
(Boston, 2004), pp. 67–84. However, it is evident from the account of French soldiers who took
part in the occupation that their presence in the city undoubtedly challenged many social norms.
Here, for example, is Thiébault, ‘I soon got introductions to the best houses. My acquaintance
multiplied and became every day more agreeable including such ladies as the Princess Borghese,
Princess Chigi, Duchess Ceva [and] Countess Ottoboni. It was a delightful life and the days
passed quickly. We devoted our mornings to calling on one or other of the charming ladies,
whom in the evening we [found] all together walking in the gardens of the most celebrated villas.’
Thiébault, Memoirs, I, p. 360.
96 On the Helvetic Republic, see M. Lerner, ‘The Helvetic Republic: an ambivalent reception of
French Revolutionary liberty’, French History, 18, No. 1 (March, 2004), pp. 50–75; O. Zimmer,
‘Nation, nationalism and power in Switzerland, 1760–1900’, in L. Scales and O. Zimmer (eds.),
Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 333–53, and W. Oeschli, History
of Switzerland, 1499–1914 (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 302–320.
97 For the formation of the Parthenopean Republic, see J. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy
and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 78–83.
98 E. Noether, ‘Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel and the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799’, Consortium on
Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850: Proceedings 1989, I, pp. 76–88; A.M. Rao, ‘Popular societies in the
Neapolitan republic of 1799’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4, No. 3 (July, 1999), pp. 358–69.
99 For the fall of Championnet, see Sydenham, Third French Republic, p. 190.
100 J. Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and revolution: Naples, 1799’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 10 (2000), p. 18.
101 Rambaud, Memoirs of Count Roger de Damas, pp. 274–5.
7 Resistance and revolt (1)
France
In mental images of the French Revolution, the people are constant protagonists. Over and
over again we think of the crowd, whether it is storming the Bastille in July 1789, drag-
ging Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette back to Paris in October 1789, massacring the Swiss
Guards on the steps of the Tuileries palace in August 1792 or massing to watch the execu-
tion of the king in January 1793. Equally, the merest mention of the French army is enough
to conjure up thoughts of massed ranks of blue-clad soldiers rushing eagerly to overwhelm
their enemies to the strains of the Marseillaise, of ‘people power’, indeed, at its most impos-
ing. All this, meanwhile, is buttressed by a series of comfortable assumptions in which in
one way or another the Revolution made things better for the common people, whether it
was by abolishing feudalism, giving all men the vote, enabling the rural populace to buy the
lands of the Church and the nobility, bringing in a fairer system of taxation, guaranteeing
the poor cheap bread or introducing the right to free health care and universal primary
education. In the past thirty years or more, the notion of the Revolution as a participatory
phenomenon has been further reinforced by a growing interest in how the events of 1789
popularised politics in another sense by reaching out to women and engaging their interest
and energies. To throw out this picture would clearly be completely wrong, and yet there
was always a different France. Move northwards, westwards or southwards from Paris, and
it will become clear that in area after area the lower ranks of society came to hate the
Revolution. With hatred, meanwhile, came something far more serious: in a great crescent
stretching from Normandy to Languedoc, the countryside was gripped by resistance, some
of it so fierce as to burst forth in open insurrection.
From whence did these rebellions stem? Historically, those who sympathise with the
Revolution have always been keen to blame the forces of domestic and foreign counter-
revolution, and it is perfectly true both that elements of the British government, in par-
ticular, came to favour a strategy attacking the Revolution from within and that from
an early date dissident nobles were engaged in attempts to organise revolts, but the story
of resistance to the Revolution begins not with conclaves of foreign statesmen or gath-
erings of disgruntled émigrés, but rather the failure of the French Revolution to satisfy
considerable parts of its domestic constituency, and, above all, the rural populace. In so
far as this last was concerned, the impact of the Revolution varied enormously according
to the area of France that it lived in and the precise situation which it occupied (in this
respect, it should be remembered that the group habitually referred to as the peasantry
ranged from relatively comfortable tenant farmers down to desperate landless labourers).
In some regions, then, 1789, and, more particularly, the subsequent sales of the lands of
the Church and the émigrés, brought a massive improvement in the situation of consider-
able elements of the lower classes. Not only were enormous acreages put on the market,
Resistance and revolt (1): France 181
but peasant buyers were fairly successful – indeed, on occasion, very successful – in gain-
ing access to them. In the department of Côte d’Or, some places saw peasants acquire
73 per cent of what was on offer, while in certain areas of Nièvre the figure was as much
as 62 per cent; equally, municipalities as widely separated as Strasbourg, Laon, Pontfarcy,
Epinal and Tarascon saw the peasants get between 40 and 60 per cent of sales. Yet these
heartening tales of redistribution in themselves mean very little, for much depended on
how much land was actually transferred: in the department of the Nord, peasants got 52 per
cent of the land, and yet at the end of the process their share of the department’s acreage as
a whole had risen only from 32 per cent to 42 per cent. Worse than, that, meanwhile, for
every area where the peasantry did well, there was another where they did badly, with vari-
ous places – amongst them, Toulouse, Mantes and, ironically enough, Versailles – scoring
as low as 14 or15 per cent.1 Worth pointing out, too, is the fact that nothing whatsoever
was done to help the landless – no money, no purchase – and, further, that it often took the
mass intimidation of would-be bourgeois bidders to secure anything at all for the common
people.2 In many, many areas, then, the victors were not the actual tillers of the soil at all,
but the same rich and powerful members of the bourgeoisie who had been buying their way
into the feudal nobility before 1789. Typical enough was Chemillé where, of some 59,475
livres expended on national properties, only 4,275 cannot be tied to nobles or members of
the bourgeoisie, the vast majority of them men from that some locality.3 Nor were things
any different in La Rochelle where fourteen of the eighteen most important purchasers of
Church lands were rich merchants.4 Socially divisive as this situation was, it was also unfor-
tunate in another sense. Prior to the Revolution there had been a growing sense of division
between town and countryside in many areas, and this was now strengthened still further
and with it the growing sense of the seigneurs as a group who were not just privileged but
also wholly alien.5 Significantly, meanwhile, the impact was particularly severe in the west
of France, an area in which it can be argued that the peasant revolution of 1789 ended up
being frustrated at every turn by the very groups against whom it was primarily directed.6
If the sale of the national properties only benefited the rural populace to a limited extent,
much the same was true of the abolition of feudalism and the other reforms for which they
had clamoured in the cahiers des doléances. One can, of course, dicker about the extent to
which the ancien régime really weighed upon the populace, but what one cannot dicker about
is that the populace looked to the Revolution to bring it some relief, and that in short order: it
is, for example, arguable that the grande peur was in part the product of the newly constituted
National Assembly’s dilatory handling of the abolition of feudalism. Yet at almost every turn,
constitutional monarchy proved a sad disappointment. Feudalism was abolished, certainly,
but the seigneurs were only dispossessed if they joined the ranks of the émigrés whilst most of
the feudal dues were deemed to be rents and therefore left in place, yet another bone of con-
tention being that the tithes were not swept away but rather incorporated into the income
of the owners of the lands on which they had been levied.7 At the same time a new system of
taxation was introduced that made far more use of direct imposts than before and therefore
hit producers – the countryside – at the expense of consumers – the towns – the net result
being that the rural populace in no instance experienced a fall in what they had to pay: in
most cases, indeed, quite the reverse was the case, and that despite the fact that one measure
that did unquestionably benefit the countryside was the disappearance of the much-loathed
salt tax. And, last but not least, the new system of local government based on communes
and departments that was introduced in the wake of the Revolution did not only presage
an assault on rural autonomy, but the Constitution of 1791 also handed a monopoly on
power to the propertied classes (in fairness, the electorate was quite substantial, but deputies
182 Resistance and revolt (1): France
were unpaid and elections indirect, whilst it was also stipulated that the former had to have
an income of at least 50,000 livres).8
To add insult to injury, all this took place at a time of immense economic distress, the
dire situation which had in part produced the Revolution having not been alleviated in
the slightest by the events of 1789. On the contrary, the despair of much of the populace
was augmented by a slump in foreign trade that led to massive unemployment in the ports
of the Atlantic coast and with this a widespread recession in the numerous industries that
depended on the colonial trade and luxury market, most of which were carried on not in
factories but in thousands of rural households. Also hit were every variety of artisan – the
economic recession and, increasingly, emigration, combining to deprive them of much of
their market – and the huge numbers of domestic servants, many of whom were turned out
on to the streets by families that were struggling to cut costs or had headed for the greater
security of foreign parts. Accelerating the downturn in the prospects of the artisan and
servant classes, meanwhile, was the rampant inflation caused by the new régime’s ever-
increasing resort to paper money in the form of assignats, these having depreciated by as
much as 40 per cent of their value by the time that war broke out in 1792.9
On all sides, then, poverty threatened to become indigence and indigence famine, but
this was a situation that the Revolution found itself singularly ill-equipped to tackle. Even
before 1789 the means that existed to succour the poor had been utterly insufficient, but
one of the results of the assault on the lands of the Church was that charity and social care
alike suffered very heavily: whilst the various religious orders, both male and female, that
dedicated themselves to the care of the old, the poor and the sick were allowed to survive
the decree that dissolved the bulk of their fellows in November 1790, their revenues were
nonetheless badly disrupted and their ranks thinned by emigration. Nor did it help that the
numerous secular hospitals and institutions of charity were financed by income derived from
feudal dues, income which, once lost, could not be made good by a state whose ability to
realise the tax revenues it was owed was increasingly limited and whose efforts to sustain the
system with grants of public money were in any case undermined by the galloping inflation.10
The consequences of all this are not difficult to imagine. In towns and cities across France,
hit very badly by the rise in bread prices and the collapse in the luxury market, the sans
culottes flocked to political clubs and began to press for a radicalisation of the Revolution: a
good example is Lyons where, deeply at odds with the merchants who bought and marketed
their wares, the silk weavers flocked to the support of Jacobinism, whilst at Etampes (Seine-
et-Oise) the winter of 1791–2 witnessed pro-Jacobin riots.11 And, in the countryside the
growing mood of anger produced what has come to be called the ‘anti-revolution’. From
one end of the country to the other, desperate villagers hit out in an attempt to remedy
their situation. In Flanders, for example, there was a concerted attempt to ensure that the
commons were divided up amongst peasants and landless labourers in small lots rather than
being allowed to fall into the hands of wealthy proprietors.12 More generally, perhaps, the
populace took to violence and intimidation, marching on chateaux to demand that their
owners should surrender their rights to feudal dues that had been converted into rents,
attacking erstwhile seigneurs and their agents, invading hunting parks to slaughter game,
burning crops and laying waste to barns and biers, such developments even being seen in
areas that were later to be much affected by resistance to the Revolution: in the period from
1793 onwards, the area round Rennes was to be a stronghold of the chouans (see below),
and yet in the winter of 1790 it witnessed a veritable jacquerie.13 Such was the anger, indeed,
that it was even shared by men who were ostensibly fiercely loyal to the Revolution. Typical
enough were the views expressed by a senior non-commissioned officer in a battalion of
Volunteers of 1792 in a letter to the municipality of his home town, the issue that caught
his eye in particular being the manner in which the common lands had been distributed
amongst the inhabitants: the authorities had, he claimed, been handing these out only to
the propertied classes and, still worse, ‘cowards who have been cutting a fine figure around
the village’, whilst neglecting ‘families who had given sons to fight for the Fatherland’.14
To reiterate, however, whilst all this amounted to a desire for a different sort of revolu-
tion, it did not amount to counter-revolution. What translated the former into the latter
was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Except in Montauban, the capital of the southern
department of Tarn-et-Garonne, where fears that the local Protestant community were
going to seize control of the electoral process to the constituent assembly provoked a seri-
ous riot on 14 May 1790, outraged Catholicism as such had initially played little part in the
constant disturbances: whilst areas that were deeply devout certainly participated in them,
so did areas where anti-clericalism had been strong. Not quite two months later, however,
all this changed. Thus, passed on 12 July by the National Assembly, the Civil Constitution
of the Clergy threw relations between loyal Catholics and the Revolution into turmoil.
On one level, the document was logical enough: given that the state had agreed to pay
the clergy, the latter were now civil servants, and from this it followed that the state had
a right, first, to some means of ensuring the loyalty of its members; second, to a voice in
who got to be ordained and appointed to benefices (the intention was that this last should
be done by election by all male members of each parish of voting age); and, third, to a
considerable say in the organisation of the French Church (the most famous provision of
the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was the oath of loyalty that it expected from all eccle-
siastics, but it also greatly reduced the number of dioceses, bringing them down from 135
to just 83 – the same number as there were departments). Had the clergy gone along with
this, then all might have been well, but nothing of the sort transpired. Quite the reverse:
whilst there were some priests and even a handful of bishops who, whether out of personal
ambition, a feeling that resistance was futile or an honest belief that the new dispensation
would allow the attainment of long-held dreams of reform, were prepared to take the oath,
at least as many as half as many again were not, and thereby immediately put themselves
at risk of arrest.15 Determined to deal with the problem, the state went into action against
them, only to find that in this instance action and reaction were equal and opposite. Furious
at attempts to enforce the law (some of them very heavy-handed indeed: in the town of
Nîmes, over 200 Catholic demonstrators were killed in cold blood by a force of Protestant
National Guards that had been sent in to restore order), large numbers of devout Catholics
essayed resistance. In many places the disturbances were peaceful – torchlight processions,
for example, were commonplace – or quite small-scale – mere riots indeed16 – but elsewhere
armed gangs temporarily took over entire villages and were only driven out after some
sharp fighting (significantly enough, some of the worst of these disturbances took place in
the area that was soon to be immortalised as the Vendée), whilst in the Gard Catholic ele-
ments of the National Guard in effect organised themselves into a rebel army with a view to
avenging the Montauban massacre and, reinforced by large numbers of recruits garnered in
remote villages of the Cevennes by royalist agents, in July 1792 briefly rose in revolt under
the leadership of an émigré officer named the Count of Saillans, only almost immediately
to be dispersed by the prompt dispatch of a small column of regular troops and volunteers.
Nor was the resistance, peaceful or otherwise, limited to public acts of defiance: many com-
municants boycotted constitutional services, harassed parish priests who had gone along
with the reforms to such an extent that they were forced to flee, and gave food and shelter
to the many non-juring priests like André Fournier – a parish priest from Vienne who was
later canonised for the courage he showed in defying the Republican authorities – who
stayed in their communities and sought to carry on their mission via secret masses and
prayer services.17
Particularly at the lowest level, resistance to the Revolutionary religious settlement was
to continue throughout the 1790s and beyond, and all the more so when the Committee
of Public Safety and the Convention began to move in the direction of outright de-
christianisation. However, with excitement in the Catholic community at its height –
there were numerous reports, for example, of apparitions of Our Lady – in February 1793
the country was struck by a development whose impact eclipsed everything that had gone
before it. This was, of course, the levy of 300,000. Enough has already been said about the
nature of this move, not to mention the long-term low-level resistance to which it gave
rise, to render further discussion of such matters superfluous. What we need to concentrate
on here is rather the more active forms by which an outraged countryside attempted to
defend itself against a measure that was almost universally regarded as not just unwelcome
but unjust. In brief, then, the country was swept by a positive tidal wave of rioting and
other disturbances, the areas affected including Brittany, Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Poitou,
Limousin and Auvergne. In most of the areas affected, the trouble proved short-lived or
at least subsided into the localised small-scale violence represented by the chouannerie of
Brittany and Normandy on the one hand and the royalist brigandage of large parts of the
south and south-west on the other, but in the area immediately south of the River Loire the
situation was very different: within a matter of days of the arrival of the news of the levy,
the entire area – in brief, western parts of Poitou and the southern-most parts of Anjou and
Brittany – had flown to arms and to all intents and purposes eliminated the presence of the
Revolution from its midst, albeit not without shocking scenes of violence that are impor-
tant to bear in mind in view of what happened subsequently. Perhaps the worst atrocity
took place at the village of Machecoul, a small market town in the present-day department
of Loire-Atlantique. In brief, guarded by a party of around a hundred National Guards, the
mayor, the parish priest (a ‘juror’ who had been brought in some time previously) and the
local magistrate set about the task of drawing lots to decide which of the inhabitants should
be drafted into the army, only for the crowd, which had been swelled by large numbers of
people who had come in from the surrounding countryside, to start chanting ‘Pas de milice!
Pas de milice!’ Terrified out of his wits, one of the guardsman fired a shot, whereupon the
entire party was set upon and around twenty people hacked to death on the spot. Dragged
away to imprisonment in the town’s mediaeval castle, as well as a nearby convent, the sur-
vivors were put to death in batches over the next few weeks together with a number of other
inhabitants known to be sympathetic to the Revolution. In all, the number of dead was
probably no more than 150, but the figure was wildly inflated by survivors who had managed
to escape and was very soon being reported in Paris and elsewhere as anything up to 800.
Compared with such hysterics, the Republican officer who led the first troops to enter the
town after the killings was positively moderate, but even so his words were chilling enough.
Thus, ‘It is said . . . that nearly 400 Patriots . . . were slaughtered at Machecoul . . . When
the [surviving] inhabitants saw our brothers in arms, their words of greeting were mixed
with the bitterest tears that we had not come sooner.’18
From the very start, then, the seeds were being sown of a bloody retribution. Why,
though, was the Vendée (the term that, in line with general usage, we shall use hereafter,
even though, strictly speaking, it applies only to the department that was the heartland of
the uprising) affected by revolt in a manner that was so much more extensive than any other
region?19 Largely composed of ill-equipped and semi-trained National Guards, the garrison
was weak, but, with France in the grip of war with virtually the whole of Europe, so it was
in most other places. Judging from the cahiers des doléances, village opinion was certainly
no more satisfied with its status under the ancien régime than it was in many other regions:
on the contrary, indeed, many aspects of the feudal system had been bitterly criticised and
attempts to mute that criticism by elements in the pocket of local seigneurs blocked or at
the very least circumvented, whilst, still more interestingly, subsequent attempts by the
émigré leadership to secure direct control of the revolts by sending in military command-
ers such as Joseph Puisaye, a lieutenant in the regular army who had initially rallied to
the Revolution only to turn his coat following the overthrow of Brissot, were extremely
unpopular.20 Banditry had been common in the area prior to 1789, but banditry had also
been common throughout south-central, central and western France. Though marked, its
religiosity was no greater than that of other areas where the Church did not hold great
estates and for the most part recruited its personnel from the local area. And, finally, if its
terrain – a mixture of marshes, heath, woods and bocage – offered excellent protection, so
did that of Brittany and Normandy, whilst the Auvergne, Alsace and the lands bordering
on Spain, Switzerland and Italy came equipped with mountains as well. Social conflict was
intense – writing half a century ago or more, Charles Tilly argued that the origins of armed
counter-revolution lay in a series of increasingly bitter conflicts between a pro-revolutionary
local élite composed of merchants, professionals, rentiers and prosperous tenant famers and
an increasingly dissatisfied mass of poor tenant farmers and landless labourers that sprang
in turn from pre-revolutionary tensions between town and countryside, tensions that were
beyond doubt strengthened by what Tackett has identified as a tendency on the part of the
urban élites to immerse themselves in the culture of the Enlightenment21 – but precisely the
same sort of pattern can be argued to have pertained elsewhere, just as the fact that it was,
above all, the bourgeoisie and the most prosperous members of the peasantry who did well
from the Revolution in terms of gaining access to the national properties and monopolising
control of local government was hardly something out of the ordinary. There is something
to be said, perhaps, for the belief that, already very poor to start with, the region had been
particularly badly affected by the economic collapse that accompanied the Revolution, but,
if so, why did many weavers and other textile workers – the group perhaps most affected by
the disaster – stay loyal to the Republic? The issue is something of a puzzle, and one is there-
fore inclined to sympathise with the revisionist French historians who have cut the Gordian
knot by claiming that the initial disturbances of March 1793 were deliberately fanned into
a major revolt by the authorities in Paris so as to give them an excuse to pulverise an area
that had come to be seen as a bastion of clerical intransigence.22
All this means that we must look for other reasons why disorder turned into disaster, why
riot turned into revolt. Here the first factor that comes to mind is the influence of the sea.
Navigable for a considerable way inland, the Loire ensured that even communities buried
deep in the bocage enjoyed a link with the Atlantic Ocean, while the plethora of minor
ports along the coast provided ready landing points for the British troops who, at the very
moment that the revolt broke out, suddenly hove into view as potential allies and, indeed,
saviours. Meanwhile, whether one is speaking of men who had sprung from the ranks of the
commonalty such as the carter Jacques Cathelineau and the gamekeeper Jean Stofflet or
the local noblemen François de Charrette and the Marquis of La Rochejacquelin, also on
hand were a clutch of charismatic leaders of a sort that were simply not available elsewhere
and could in many instances draw upon a considerable amount of service in the Bourbon
army: though much lionised by the many chroniclers who from 1793 onwards have sought
to romanticise the war in the Vendée, it cannot be denied that, unlike the incompetent and
pusillanimous Puisaye, the Vendéen commanders generally led from the front as much as any
general of the Revolution, and in many instances – for example, Cathelineau, Bonchamps
and Lescure – fell in battle at the head of their men; at the same time, too, they were also
for the most part very young – in March 1793 La Rochejacquelin was just twenty, Lescure
twenty-six, the Prince of Talmont twenty-eight, Charette twenty-nine, Sapinaud de la Rairie
and Bonchamps thirty-two, Cathelineau thirty-four.23 Some of the stories told about these
men may have been exaggerated while they were often divided by bitter personal hostility.
All that said, however, they possessed a credibility that their opponents could not begin to
match, and fifty years on and more were still being commemorated in song. ‘Monsieur de
Charette has told the men of Ancenis that the king is bringing back the fleur de lys’, ran one
ditty dating from 1853. ‘Get your musket, Grégoire; get a gourd to drink from; get your medal
of the Virgin: our gentlemen are off to hunt the partridges.’24
Whatever the reason why this was the case, very soon an area perhaps measuring 100
miles from east to west and 50 miles from north to south was in the grip of full-scale war.25
In village after village, bands of men came together under the leadership of such figures who
came to hand or emerged from the chaos and marched on the local towns, the garrisons
of which were quickly overwhelmed and in many instances put to the sword, along with
anyone perceived as having benefited from the Revolution (in this respect, Machecoul was
only one incident among many, though the fact that the killings there were prolonged over
a period of some weeks rather than being confined to a few hours of mayhem in the wake of
the defeat of the local bleus makes it particularly unpleasant).26 On occasion, the Vendéen
leaders appear to have attempted to restrain their followers, but it is clear that many of the
latter were bent on little more than pillage or out to satisfy personal vendettas, whilst in
any case much went on beyond the reach of the commanders.27 Here, for example, is the
rebel Marquise de la Rochejacquelin’s account of the aftermath of the battle of Chatillon:
The fury of the battle increased as the battle proceeded, and when the victory was
won [the attackers] refused to give quarter to the enemy. Their chiefs called out to the
Republicans, ‘Surrender! We shall not harm you!’ However, that was a vain hope: the
soldiers took no prisoners. When our men reached the town, the slaughter became
more fearful still . . . M. de Lescure, who commanded the vanguard, had swept through
Chatillon in pursuit of the flying enemy and he had ordered that several hundred of
these should be locked up in the prison. The peasants . . . instead of obeying his orders,
started to cut their throats. M. d’Elbée, and others who had tried to stop them, had
muskets aimed at them.28
That said, if there is much reason to doubt idealised pictures of simple peasants marching
off to do battle for Church and King and none whatsoever not to accept the idea that the
region was deeply divided in respect of the insurrection – it is at least possible that some
of the men who took the field were just as much conscripts as many of their opponents29 –
the rebel forces clearly enjoyed a wide measure of popular support and were at least as
much of a people’s army as anything fielded by the Republic. What is more, they had soon
acquired a record of considerable military success: not only had the heartland of the revolt
very quickly been cleared of representatives of the enemy, but a succession of punitive
expeditions that were sent against them were either ambushed and overwhelmed or simply
forced to retreat. Typical enough in this respect were the scenes witnessed at Saint Pierre de
Chemillé on 11 April 1793. In brief, a division of 4,000 men heading into the heart of the
Vendée commanded by a General Berruyer was confronted by a substantial force of rebels
who had dug themselves in at that village supported by a number of cannon. Splitting into
two columns, the Republicans attacked the village, but the veteran soldiers who headed
the assault, amongst them a number of erstwhile Swiss Guards who had sought safety in
rallying to the Revolution, were not supported by the conscript units following behind and
were eventually forced to flee. A second assault was more successful, but the insurgents
continued to control the church and a number of other buildings, and with night falling
Berruyer decided that discretion was the better part of valour and fell back to his starting
point of Saint Lambert.30 If Berruyer’s men had come out of this action with their honour
intact, two months later, the same troops experienced a much greater reverse at Montreuil
in that they were attacked on the march and completely routed with the loss of over a
hundred men (eager to save face, their commanders claimed that they had been attacked by
40,000 men, but such stories were counter-productive, elevating, as they did, the insurgents
into a threat that bore no resemblance to the reality).31 Most of these punitive expeditions
being composed of scratch forces of National Guards, detachments of the newly created
National Gendarmerie and such formations as the already-noted German Legion , not to
mention commanded by generals who were as over-confident as they were lacking in abil-
ity, this was hardly surprising whilst the rebels also proved both skilled guerrilla fighters
and frightening opponents on the battlefield.32 With bitter disputes breaking out in the
Republican ranks – now a battalion commander, the veteran of the storming of the Bastille
and radical Jacobin Jean Rossignol got himself arrested when he not only led a protest
movement against the commander of the Army of the Coast of La Rochelle, General Biron,
but for good measure accused the equally Jacobin head of the so-called Legion of the North,
François Westermann, of corruption33 – within a very few weeks, there had appeared a veri-
table ‘liberated area’ ruled by a makeshift provisional government.34
Dramatic though these developments were, the threat to the Republic was by no means
as serious as at first appeared. Whilst it did not help that the rebel leadership was split by
numerous disputes and petty rivalries, the Royal and Catholic Army, as their troops became
known, simply did not have the logistical services to allow it to take the field for very long,
and therefore had to be dismissed to its homes after every battle: never organised in any-
thing more sophisticated than parish companies, it was therefore at best but a home-guard
that stood to its arms at the sound of the tocsin. Meanwhile, even had there been sufficient
rations, it is doubtful whether a daily issue of bread and meat would have been enough to
keep the men with the colours: too many of them were interested in plunder as much as
they were in defending their parish priests or resisting conscription. After every battle, then,
the lanes were thick with men returning to their home villages in order to squirrel away the
money and other valuables that had come their way. According to Joseph Clemenceau, a
Republican magistrate from Beaupréau, for example:
In order to place their booty in security, the pillagers deserted to the depths of the
country, with the result that the army was reduced to half the number it had been at
Thouars [a significant Vendéen victory gained on 5 May 1793].35
What all this meant, of course, was that training was in short supply, while many of the
men in any case had no better arms than scythes and pitchforks. Though some material was
captured from the forces they so frequently defeated, to solve this conundrum, Cathelineau,
La Rochejacquelin and the rest had somehow to capture a port, but the most accessible –
Nantes and Les Sables d’Olonne – were strongly held against them, while the way to
others such as La Rochelle was blocked by other Republican bastions such as Luçon and
Fontenay-le-Comte. These, of course, were duly attacked, but peasants who thought of
the war in terms of little more than defending their home villages from attack could only
be persuaded to come out of their fastnesses in the bocage in reduced numbers, and, when
they did, could make no progress against entrenched artillery, all that the Vendéen com-
manders’ repeated assaults served to do being to deprive them of some of their best fighters,
including, not least, the carter Jacques Cathelineau, who fell before the walls of Nantes on
29 June. Almost lost to history in some accounts of the Revolution, the Vendéen defeat
on this occasion was a second Valmy. To quote William Doyle, ‘The worst moment in the
Montagnards’ struggle to keep control of France had passed.’36
In short, the best that the revolt could achieve was stalemate, and even that not for very
long. With not just one but two major rebellions to occupy them, together with military
campaigns on virtually the entire length of their frontiers, neither the Brissotins nor their
Montagnard successors had sufficient troops to do very much with regard to the Vendée,
but by the autumn the crisis had passed, while the repatriation to France of the garrison of
Mainz provided the Committee of Public Safety with a substantial force of regular troops
that it could deploy against the Vendéens and other rebels (according to the terms of the
city’s surrender, they could not serve against the enemies of the Republic for a year, but
this restriction was deemed not to apply in respect of domestic rebellion). The unity of
command that had hitherto been lacking having been remedied by the establishment of a
single Army of the West under the hard-line Rossignol whose admirers in Paris had proved
sufficiently powerful to save him from the consequences of his earlier politicking, very soon
large forces, many of them veterans commanded by the tough and highly experienced Jean-
Baptiste Kléber, were marching into the Vendée from Nantes devastating all in their path:
as one veteran of the siege of Mainz later remarked, ‘The Vendéens called us the Army of
the Devil’.37 One place to feel the wrath of republican vengeance was the town of Montaigu.
As Kléber remembered:
Hardly had the troops arrived than the town was being subjected to the most horrible
sack . . . The most austere of men could not have suppressed a smile at the sight of the
different costumes in which the soldiers decked themselves, the most popular items in
their masquerades being soutanes, surplices and chasubles.38
The Vendéens fought back bravely – on 19 September Kléber was even defeated at Torfou –
but on 17 October this Republican push led to the biggest battle of the war. Having
defeated a Vendéen force at La Tremblaye on 15 October, 26,000 Republican troops,
many of them veterans, occupied the key town of Cholet, thereby threatening to trap the
largest rebel army against the Loire. After bitter argument, the divided Vendéen generals
opted to launch a counter-attack, and, early in the afternoon of 17 October, 40,000 rebel
troops advanced in serried columns on the Republican positions on the heights north of
the town. The result was a disaster. Terrified by the onrushing masses of men bristling
with scythes, pikes and pitchforks, some of the defenders broke and ran, but, as senior
Republican commander on the field, Kléber kept his head and sent some of his reserves to
take the Vendéens in flank. Having already suffered heavy losses in their gallant efforts to
advance, the rebels then fell to pieces and fled in disorder, leaving behind them at least
5,000 killed and wounded and every single one of their cannon, including a much-loved
seventeenth-century culverin that had been adopted by the peasant fighters as some-
thing of a mascot; still worse, amongst the wounded, both of them mortally hurt, were
Bonchamps and D’Elbée, two of the best of the surviving rebel leaders. In a particularly
appalling atrocity, meanwhile, according to no less an authority than Kléber, 400 wounded
Vendéens who were captured in a hospital at nearby Beaupréau were burned alive in the
buildings that housed them in reprisal for a roughly similar number of Republican wounded
who had been slaughtered when the wagons carrying them to safety had been over-run
after an earlier battle at Clisson. Yet it had been no walk-over. As Kléber wrote in his
account of the battle:
Never had [the rebels] put up such stiff resistance or been so well commanded . . . They
fought like tigers . . . Beaupuy had two horses shot from under him . . . Targe
was hit by a ball that went through his arm and lodged in his breast . . . Saint-
Sauveur . . . got a ball in his thigh, and the adjutant-general, Dubreton, one in his
arm . . . Patris . . . lost his life; the four light-infantry commanders were all either
killed or wounded, and the many other senior officers who fell included Ageron, a
commander of a grenadier battalion of forty-one years service.39
Known as the grande virée de la galerne (roughly, ‘the great turning of the wind’), what
followed was perhaps the worst tragedy of the whole of the Revolutionary Wars. Hungry,
exhausted and demoralised, the survivors of the Royal and Catholic Army fell back to the
town of Saint Florent le Vieil on the banks of the River Loire. Watching them was Marin
Boutillier de Saint André, the thirteen-year-old son of a sometime Republican official who
had two brothers fighting in the Republican army:
About four o’clock in the morning the Vendéen commanders took the decision to fall
back . . . A large number of women and children, old men and priests followed them.
How dreadful a sight it was to see an entire population . . . fleeing their homes in terror
never to see them again and trailing in the wake of an army that had no means to help
them and which they only served to slow down and impede.40
Fortunately for the fleeing rebels, in testimony, perhaps, to the heavy losses that themselves
suffered at Cholet, the Republicans did not pursue them and the whole assembly, perhaps
as many as 80,000 men, women and children, were ferried across the river. Striking out
northwards while the going was good, the generals still with the army – La Rochejacquelin,
Stofflet and the Prince of Talmont – at first planned to head for Brittany, but en route a
message reached them from the Count of Artois promising that the British would send
ships to rescue them if they could only reach the sea. Some 12 miles long, having beaten
off a Republican attack at Entrammes, the Vendéen column therefore made for the port of
Granville, only, as so often before, to find themselves unable to overcome troops entrenched
behind fortifications. With no British ships in sight and no means of feeding so many mouths
in one place for more than a very short time, after two days’ desperate fighting, the rebels
retired and decided to head back to the Loire in the hope of reaching the Vendée once
more. Losing ever larger numbers to desertion, hunger and disease along the way, the army
managed to win yet another battle at Dol and made it to Angers, and, with it, its vital bridge
across the river, but yet again the need to take a fortified town frustrated them, and, fearing
the arrival of fresh Republican troops, they turned north again after just one day’s fighting.
This time, however, there was no escape: on 12 December, now reduced to no more than
10,000 combatants and perhaps three times as many stragglers and unarmed civilians, the
Vendéens were attacked by 20,000 Republicans at Le Mans. A desperate attempt to drive
off the enemy having failed, the following day the town was stormed amidst scenes of rape
and massacre that dwarfed anything seen in the campaign thus far. To quote the report writ-
ten in the aftermath of the battle by Bertrand Barère:
The only obstacle which the enemy could oppose to the advance of our troops was
mountains of corpses. The streets . . . the squares, the highways, all of them are strewn
with bodies, and after fifteen hours the massacre was still going on.41
Le Mans was truly a terrible affair, less than half the surviving rebels eventually managing
to escape to the west. All that was left now was to make one last effort to reach the sea, and
on 22 December the last fragments of the Royal and Catholic Army reached the town of
Savenay some miles to the north of the port of Saint Nazaire. Here, however, horror was
heaped on horror. Attacked by 18,000 Republican troops under Kléber and Westermann,
the few thousand men still in a state to fight held out bravely and even temporarily drove
back some of their assailants – according to the account of Kléber’s chief of staff, Louis
Buquet, in several instances officers who attempted to persuade parties of stragglers who had
taken refuge in isolated buildings to surrender were shot at and in some instance killed42 –
but they were soon overwhelmed and very often massacred where they stood. ‘There is
no more Vendée’, boasted Westermann. ‘I have just buried it in the marshes and mud of
Savenay . . . I have crushed children under the feet of horses, massacred women who . . . at
least will engender no more brigands. I have no prisoners with which to reproach myself.’43
If Kléber was rather more restrained, the picture that he draws is no less grim: ‘The carnage
was horrible: on all sides, there was nothing to be seen but piles of corpses . . . We subjected
them to a rolling fire, and they all perished.’44
What followed was if anything still worse. Roped together in long chains, the survivors
were marched to Nantes where many of them were put to death by being loaded on to
barges which were then sunk in the middle of the river: to their misfortune, the chief figure
in the city was Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a fanatical follower of Robespierre who had been sent
to Nantes as répresentant en mission proclaiming that he would turn France into a cemetery
rather than see the Montagnards fail to regenerate her in the fashion that they favoured.
Counting those guillotined or shot by firing squads as well as those drowned, the num-
ber of victims who perished in the terreur nantaise may have risen to as many as 16,000.45
Meanwhile, in an added twist, among the auxiliaries employed by Carrier was a group of
freed slaves. Styled the ‘American Company’, for obvious reasons this set about its work
with particular relish.46 ‘Forty thousand brigands have drawn their last breath’, wrote one
Boissé. ‘If some of these cowardly wretches thought they might save their lives by declaring
themselves to be prisoners, they soon realised their mistake, for, as soon as they fell into our
hands, they were dead and buried.’47
In the course of the grande virée de galerne a minimum of 60,000 men, women and chil-
dren had died in battle, succumbed to starvation, exposure or disease, or been massacred
in cold blood, and the true figure may well be many more. Meanwhile, south of the River
Loire, events had scarcely been behind-hand. On the contrary, with the main Vendéen
army driven across the river, the Republican forces had been free to concentrate on the
heartland of resistance. Their numbers much reduced, those insurgents who had not
crossed the river after the battle of Cholet kept up a guerrilla struggle under such leaders
as Charette, but they were incapable of preventing so-called ‘infernal columns’ from criss-
crossing the region, burning down large numbers of villages, rounding up more prisoners for
execution at Nantes, Angers and elsewhere and engaging in numerous atrocities. Thanks
to such scholars as Reynald Secher, the activities of these forces have been subjected to a
merciless critique and there can be no doubt that the atmosphere was one of great savagery:
there was the fear provoked by the need to operate in the claustrophobic conditions of the
bocage; the fury occasioned by Vendéen atrocities, sadly not all of them exaggerated, still
less invented; the belief that opposition to the Revolution constituted a betrayal of reason,
that of its very nature quite literally de-humanised those guilty of it; and, finally, the gen-
eral ‘othering’ of a population perceived as backward and ignorant. However, whilst many
hundreds of inhabitants – indeed, possibly many thousands – died in the repression, to talk
in terms of genocide is a claim too far: setting aside the fact that the Vendéens cannot be
regarded as an ethnic group, there is no evidence of a settled plan for the elimination of
the inhabitants per se.48 That said, there is no doubt that the Republican forces were deter-
mined to punish the region and at the same time end guerrilla resistance by striking at the
civilian population and devastating the region to such an extent that it would no longer be
able to support war.49 In all this there was no space for mercy. One participant in the work
of the colonnes infernales was the volunteer François-Xavier Joliclerc, a soldier who was so
self-righteous a crusader for the Republic that even when writing to his mother he saw no
need to draw a veil over what was taking place. Thus:
Fourteen columns are about to set out to ravage the departments of Deux-Sèvres and
the Vendée. We are setting out . . . with muskets in one hand and torches in the other.
Men and women, one and all will perish by the sword. Apart from the smallest chil-
dren, it is necessary that each and every one of them should die. These departments
must serve as an example to others that might have notions of rising in revolt. We have
already devastated around seven square leagues of country. Everything being up for
grabs, a number of soldiers have already made a fortune, but thus far I haven’t picked
up so much as a clean shirt: this is a state of affairs that won’t be long in the changing.’50
In all, a minimum of 100,000 and a maximum of 250,000 men, women and children appear
to have perished in the course of the period March 1793–April 1794, and, even if one
assumes that a greater or lesser proportion of that number either fell to Vendéen atrocities
or died in battle fighting the rebels, one is still left with a very dark picture. Still worse, the
use of wholesale terror proved counter-productive, all that it did being to drive more and
more of the inhabitants into the woods and marshes and thereby augment the guerrilla war:
on 27 April 1794 we find the same Joliclerc who had boasted to his mother of the vengeance
he and his comrades were inflicting on the Vendée telling her that his battalion had just lost
fifty-two dead, ‘all of them with their heads smashed in or their bodies pierced by bayonets’,
in an ambush near Cholet.51 With the end of the Terror, then, the generals responsible for
the savagery of the winter of 1793–4 were recalled and the command given to the highly
talented Lazare Hoche, the latter proceeding to embark on a policy of pacification whose
culmination was a peace treaty – the convention of La Jaunaye – whereby the rebel lead-
ers secured extraordinarily generous peace terms including freedom of worship, exemption
from conscription, a general amnesty and even the promise of an indemnity.52 Die-hard
monarchists as they were, a few of the rebel leaders, including Stofflet and Charette, took
up arms again in the autumn of 1795 at the instigation of the émigré princes, but they
had misjudged the mood of a population that had never been either wholly at war with
the Revolution per se nor, still less, united in support of the rebellion, and now wanted
only to rebuild their shattered communities: fighting was small-scale and both Stofflet and
Charette, who in any case hated one another and were quite incapable of acting in concert,
were taken prisoner and shot in the first months of 1796.53
This was by no means the end of the story of resistance in the Vendée, but, for the time
being we must turn to other topics, and, in particular, the low-level violence known as the
chouannerie that affected much of Brittany and also western parts of Maine and Normandy
from about the same time as the outbreak of the revolt of the Vendée right through to
the early years of the Consulate, and has been described as ‘the most extensive, persistent
and durable peasant movement of the Revolution’.54 Like its cousin south of the Loire,
the result of three years of disillusionment at the manner in which the countryside was
first systematically robbed of the benefits it might have expected from the Revolution and
then confronted by the threat of conscription, it was yet a very different style of revolt.55 In
Brittany, then, we do not see hordes of angry peasants, artisans and landless labourers over-
whelming the local garrisons, establishing liberated areas and forming an insurrectionary
army. On the contrary, organisation remained very local, if, indeed, it ever got beyond the
level of the gang, the chouans for the most part remaining in their own homes and sallying
out in small groups to undertake a raid here, an ambush there or a robbery somewhere else.
As such, the insurgents came much closer than the Vendéens ever did to meriting the title
‘brigands’, and in some cases that is exactly what they were, or, at the very least, became,
whilst they were much more insidious as a foe, not least because they rarely presented the
Republican authorities with the sort of target afforded by the Royal and Catholic Army.
That said, particularly as time went on, they were not quite as amorphous a mass as has
sometimes been assumed.56 On the contrary, the areas affected by the revolt were organised
into divisions, each of which was headed by a military commander appointed by the émigré
high command in England: in the case of the division of Dinant, then, it consisted of no
fewer than thirty-four parishes and possessed as its military commander an erstwhile army
officer named Victor Collas de la Baronnais.57 As for the rank and file, these were drawn
from much the same stock as the Vendéen rebels: men of military age from the poorer
sections of society, one list of 296 individuals from the Avranches area containing 133 peas-
ants, 16 day labourers, 23 servants, 19 textile workers, 92 artisans and 13 shopkeepers.58 For
an interesting assessment of a typical band we can cite the words of a British naval officer
named John Wright. Thus:
Their division is better disciplined, and, I think, capable of more rapid advancement
toward the degree of military excellence that would enable them to meet the ‘blues’ [i.e.
the Republican forces] with equal numbers in the open field. Their tactics are at present
confined to hedge work where they lay in ambush near the public roads and intercept
convoys of grain, forage, etc., etc., destined for the Republican troops. The activity of
this small body in arms is, however, so extraordinary as to keep the Republicans on
the qui vive, and give an impression of numbers far above what they really are . . . The
peasantry are in that part of the country determined royalists with the exception of
very few, and those few diminish daily by retiring into towns through fear of falling
sacrifices to their erroneous principles, for the chasseurs du roi spare none whom they
despair of converting . . . Denunciateurs are shot without the least mercy or hesitation,
and the vigilance and numbers of the royalist spies render it nearly impossible for the
Republican informers to escape death.59
There was therefore both enthusiasm and commitment in Brittany and the regions adja-
cent to it, but the chouans could no more hope to win their war against the Republic than
the Vendéens. Once again what counted was outside help, and in the summer of 1795 it
at last seemed that that hope might be about to materialise. After spending the second
half of 1793 fighting with a band of chouans in western Normandy, in 1794 the Joseph de
Puisaye already mentioned had fled to England where he persuaded the British government
to fund an invasion of Brittany. On 27 June 1795, then, several thousand hastily recruited
émigré troops – many of them erstwhile prisoners of war who had only enlisted to escape
the horrors of confinement on the hulks used as improvised prisons – were duly landed on
the Quiberon peninsula under the command of Puisaye himself. Here they were joined by
substantial numbers of chouans, but bitter disputes between the royalist commanders as to
the strategy that should now be adopted cost the expedition valuable time and allowed
Hoche to rush forces to the area. Far too late, the invaders tried to advance along the pen-
insula to the mainland, but were driven back after fierce fighting, whilst efforts to break the
Republican stronghold by landing troops further along the coast and attacking Hoche’s men
in the rear also failed. Finally, after three weeks of stalemate, on the night of 20 July, the
French commander launched an assault of his own. For a time, the action was hard-fought,
but most of the men recruited from the hulks quickly went over to the oncoming enemy,
Puisaye’s forces then dissolving in panic. As for Puisaye himself, abandoning his command
to its fate, he was one of the first to take ship. Fleeing southwards along the peninsula, over
2,000 men, women and children were picked up by rowing boats sent from the British ships
that were still moored off shore, but the rest of the army was forced to surrender the next
day, at least 750 of the 6,332 prisoners later being court-martialled and shot.60
Amongst those who escaped the disaster was Puisaye, who returned to England, and,
astonishingly enough, was given 800 more émigré troops who were landed on the Ile de
Ré accompanied by not just Puisaye but the Count of Artois.61 Yet, if less bloody than
the landing at Quiberon, this fresh disembarkation proved no more successful: both the
prince and his men were evacuated by the British after just a few weeks. Once again, then,
the chouans were on their own, and all the more so once the insurrection of Stofflet and
Charette had been put down in the Vendée. Still worse, the fact that peace had been
declared between France and Spain in July meant that there were plenty of Republican
troops available to march on Brittany, the efficacy of the French response being increased
still further by the fact that all the troops deployed against the chouans were united under
Hoche in a single Army of the West. From the Ile de Ré, Puisaye had travelled on to
Brittany, but, in the wake of Quiberon, he had considerable difficulty imposing his author-
ity, and other figures therefore took the helm including, most notably, Georges Cadoudal
and Louis de Frotté. At the same time, disillusionment and exhaustion were setting in, the
resistance being further sapped by the seemingly more moderate tone that had been set in
Paris by the establishment of the Directory. Sporadic fighting continued for months, but
by June 1796 order had for the most part been restored, Puisaye, Cadoudal and Frotté all
having to seek refuge in England.62
This is not the end of the story, however. The basic problems that had given rise to the
resistance had not been resolved in the slightest, and, if the situation was reasonably quiet,
it was in large part only because conscription was no longer in operation (the Thermidorian
reaction and the Directory alike having seen no reason to continue the experiment).
Reasonably quiet was not completely quiet, however. Across large parts of the south and the
west in particular, brigandage remained a serious problem. Given the economic situation,
this was only to be expected, but many of the gangs concerned were not just criminals. On
the contrary, many of the leaders were open in their declarations of allegiance to the ancien
régime, and in some cases could be regarded as stemming from its ranks, good examples
here including the non-juring priest Jean Solier and Jean Berard, a noble who had prior to
1789 had a position in the gendarmerie known as the maréchaussée. At the same time, too,
they were frequently in touch with other counter-revolutionary elements inside France, not
to mention agents of the émigrés, of which the latter made great efforts to encourage the
formation of fresh bands as well to bring existing ones under their sway.63 Too diffuse and
disorganised to achieve anything like the impact of the chouannerie, they yet kept the cause
of resistance alive by tying down large numbers of troops and engaging in a campaign of rob-
bery, murder and intimidation that on occasion hit the beneficiaries of the Revolution very
hard and provided a frequently sullen and unreconciled populace with a whole pantheon of
folk heroes and, indeed, martyrs.64
In this situation, it only needed a spark to set off a fresh explosion, that spark being pro-
vided by the Loi Jourdan of September 1798 (see Chapter 11). Tensions had already been
increased by the aftermath of the coup of 18 Fructidor with its reconstitution of the political
left, annulment of pro-royalist election results and renewed assault on the Church, but the
prospect of a return to conscription set off a chain reaction. Nor did it help, meanwhile,
that such fervour for the popular Revolution as had been generated under the rule of the
Brissotins and the Committee of Public Safety had increasingly fallen by the wayside:
Much as ever, odes were recited and all sorts of matters subjected to the most earnest
debate, whilst an attempt was even made to change people’s beliefs and establish a new
cult, but, ever disputatious, the French mocked the new sectaries and the whole project
slid into ridicule. As for such things as festivals and banquests, if people continued to
attend them, it was because in doing so they could get to have some fun.65
Across la France réfractaire, then, hundreds of young men ran headlong for the ready-made
refuge of the brigands, while others less swift on their feet who drew an unlucky number in
the ballot deserted from their units and made for the self-same haven at the first possible
opportunity.66 Mobilised with thirty-nine other young men of his home town of Loches in
the department of Indre-et-Loire as, initially at least, part of an anti-chouan patrol armed
with nothing more than shot-guns and fowling pieces, for example, twenty-year-old Elie
Picard took part in a mass break-out, only to be forced to surrender when he and his com-
rades found their way blocked by a battery of artillery that had been drawn up at a crucial
bridge.67 If all this was not quite insurrection, meanwhile, in Brittany and the Vendée revolt
flared up in exactly the same style as before (though in the Vendée there were no mass
armies, merely bands of armed peasants usually no more than a few hundred strong: the big-
gest force to take the field was the 8,000 men fielded by Autichamps at the battle of Aubiers
in October 1799).68 Meanwhile, in the valley of the Garonne, the arrival of the news of the
widespread defeats suffered by the French armies in Italy and Switzerland inspired royal-
ist agents to launch an insurrection which for a brief time could field a force of perhaps
10,000 peasants, artisans and landless labourers, only to be smashed in a terrible defeat at
Montréjeau in which the rebels lost 1,500 dead.69 It was not 1793, perhaps, but it was yet
a sign of the extent to which broad swathes of rural France still required to be brought to
heel, this being a task which both opened the way to the coup of 18 Brumaire and provided
Napoleon with a task that was to occupy him until well into the Consulate. As late as
the summer of 1800, for example, a soldier of the Thirty-First Demi-Brigade posted to the
Vendéen town of Fontenay-le-Comte could write gloomily, ‘The countryside . . . is cut up
in all directions by hedges and stone walls: it is a fine place for the chouans by whom we are
completely surrounded.’70 Equally, travelling to Aix-en-Provence at about the same time to
join his regiment after a period of leave, Jean Vivien found himself unable to proceed any
further than Avignon ‘on account of the gangs – supposedly Royalist – that infest Provence
and the Comtât in all directions, disarming the feeble patrols that are sent out to escort
travellers, laying their hands on the funds raised by the fiscal authorities and levying contri-
butions on this, that or the other family on the pretext of their political opinions.’71 And,
finally, when the forces defeated in Italy in the campaign of 1799 retreated into Provence
in the summer of 1799, they were met with widespread abuse, matters becoming so bad that
the village of Muy saw a serious brawl that left dozens injured.72
In the end, all this was resolved by Napoleon. However, if this was the case, it should
not be thought that the answer to the problem was political. Thus, it is often said that what
ended resistance to the Revolution on the home front was, on the one hand, the resolu-
tion of the religious question by the concordat of 1801, and, on the other, the amnesty
that was proferred to the émigrés. These measures obviously had their place, and, to the
extent that they decapitated popular rebellion, they could even be said to have been of
great importance. Yet to assume that the measures concerned had but to be enacted for all
concerned to put up their swords and rally behind the re-made Republic is to assume that
popular resistance was, above all, a matter of ideology. Quite simply, this was not the case.
For hundreds upon thousands of Frenchmen, the hopes of 1789 had been defrauded by a
régime that offered them very little and, still worse, often acted in a manner inclined to
worsen their position. What resolved the situation, then, was rather, first, the application of
military force and, second, the transformation of the ramshackle gendarmerie inherited from
the Revolution into an efficient police force. Moreover, if rebellion and brigandage became
a thing of the past, passive resistance continued, above all in the area of religion, whilst
displays of war-weariness, at least, were many and varied. At best, then, the war between
much of the French people and the Revolution settled into an uneasy truce, a truce that, as
has been described elsewhere, the campaigns of Napoleon placed under ever greater stress.73
Notes
1 For these figures, see Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution, p. 283. It should be
remembered that they represent the full ten-year period from 1789 to 1799, and that much of the
gains that the more socially disadvantaged end of the spectrum managed to make came in the brief
period of Montagnard rule in 1793–4 when, as we have seen, a variety of measures were introduced
to benefit such elements. Prior to the advent of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety,
the situation was much worse: whilst the initial regulations for the sale of national property offered
some hope to humbler purchasers by speaking in terms of the subdivision of large properties into
smaller lots, modifications to the system introduced as early as 3 November 1790 not only took the
opposite line with respect to subdivision but reduced the number of years available for repayment
from twelve to four and a half. Ibid., pp. 291–2.
2 For evidence of this collective action from southern parts of the department of the Nord, see
D. Hunt, ‘Peasant politics in the French Revolution’, Social History, 9, No. 3 (October, 1994), p. 281,
whilst a more general discussion is afforded by P.M. Jones, ‘The “Agrarian Law”: schemes for land
redistribution during the French Revolution’, Past and Present, 133 (November, 1991), pp. 101–2.
3 C. Tilly, ‘Local conflicts in the Vendée before the rebellion of 1793’, French Historical Studies, 2,
No. 2 (Autumn, 1962), p. 219.
4 Forrest, Revolution in Provincial France, p. 260.
5 Sutherland, French Revolution and Empire, p. 86.
6 T. le Goff and D.M.G. Sutherland, ‘The social origins of counter-revolution in western France’,
Past and Present, 99 (May, 1983), pp. 65–87.
7 Mackrell, Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France, p. 175.
8 Sutherland, French Revolution and Empire, pp. 81–5, 96–8.
9 F. Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation (Cambridge, 1990), p. 109. For
a detailed regional study, see H.C. Johnson, The Midi in Revolution: A Study in Regional Political
Diversity, 1789–1793 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 18–55. One point that comes through very strongly
from this last source is the patchy nature of the crisis with some departments suffering terribly and
others merely stagnating; not surprisingly, meanwhile, it is shown that the incidence of outbreaks
of collective violence corresponds very closely with the extent of the crisis.
10 A. Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford, 1981), pp. 39–41.
11 See D. Longfellow, ‘Silk weavers and the social struggle in Lyon during the French Revolution,
1789–94’, French Historical Studies, 12, No. 1 (January, 1991), pp. 1–40; D. Hunt, ‘The people and
Pierre d’Olivier: popular uprisings in the Seine-et-Oise department, 1791–92’, French Historical
Studies, 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 184–214.
12 Hunt, ‘Peasant politics in the French Revolution’, p. 282. One area particularly hit by the unrest
was the department of the Gard, though in this particular instance the disturbances seem in large
part to have been the work of Protestant peasants who were determined above all to avenge
themselves on the aristocratic Catholic élite who had ruled the roost prior to 1789. For all this,
see Johnson, Midi in Revolution, pp. 168–70; V. Sottocasa, ‘Protestants et catholiques faces à la
Révolution dans les montagnes de Languedoc’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 355
(March, 2009), pp. 114–15.
13 R. Dupuy, La Bretagne sous la Révolution et l’Empire, 1789–1815 (Rennes, 2004), pp. 47–9.
14 Cit. P. Bironneau (ed.), ‘Lettres de J.C. Jannin, sergant-major vaguemestre au 1er Bataillon du
Haute Saône, 1793’, Carnets de la Sabretache, VII (1899), p. 413.
15 For the ‘juring’ section of the Church, see J.F. Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution: Saints and
Renegades in a New Political Era (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2014). With regard to the issue of
resistance, we again see the influence of regional particularity: in much of the centre and east of
France – the areas where juring was at its strongest – the priests tended to be the only habitants
of their presbyteries and surrounded by a flock that had in many instances already turned against
them, whereas in the west the parish clergy generally enjoyed the support of a community of col-
leagues and work-mates and, in addition, knew that they could count on the backing of many of
their parishioners. Yet another issue, meanwhile, was that, in the west, priests still tended to origi-
nate from the peasantry, whereas in the centre and east they were increasingly urban in origin,
and not just that, but the scions of families of some property and education. See Tackett, ‘West in
1789’, pp. 723–5.
16 A good example of such a clash that took place in Perpignan is recorded in the memoirs of
Antoine Noguès. Thus, one night in April 1793 Noguès and a group of fellow volunteers hap-
pened upon a procession of flagellants and ‘gave voice to our horror and disapproval’, only to be
promptly set upon and forced to run for their lives. Maricourt, Mémoires du Général Noguès, p. 59.
17 T. Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical
Oath of 1791 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 159–204. For the clashes between Catholics and
Protestants in the south, see Scott, ‘Problems of law and order during 1790’, pp. 871–6 and
J. Hood, ‘Protestant-Catholic relations and the roots of the first popular counter-revolutionary
movement in France’, Journal of Modern History, 43, No. 2 (June, 1971), pp. 245–75. As for
the situation in Brittany and the Vendée, it is discussed in R. Dupuy, Les chouans (Paris, 1997),
pp. 20–23. Interestingly, if the women of the Paris faubourgs took a leading role in the street
action that year by year advanced the cause of radicalism, in the countryside women were just
as prominent in the defence of Catholic tradition. C. Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender
in Modern France (Ithaca: NY, 2005), pp. 24–6. For the troubles in the Gard, see Sottocasa,
‘Protestants et catholiques’, pp. 109–11, 117–18, and F. de Jouvenel, ‘Les camps de Jales: episodes
contre-révolutionaires?’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, No. 337 (September,
2004), pp. 1–20. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers who repressed the revolt of February 1792
was the future general, François Roguet: ‘The rebels had taken up a position at L’Argentière, a
place near Vans and Saint Ambroix. Put to flight, they lost a flag and suffered a number of dead,
whilst the village of Saint André de Crusières, one of their refuges, was burned and Dusaillant
[sic] taken and shot. As for the troupes nationales, they did not suffer a single casualty.’ F. Roguet,
Mémoires militaires du Lieutenant-Général Comte Roguet: colonel en second de Grenadiers à Pied de
la Vieille Garde, Pair de France, 1789–1812 (Paris, n.d.), p. 23.
18 Cit. Anon., Guerres des vendéens et des chouans contre la République Française ou annales des départ-
ments de l’ouest pendant ces guerres (Paris, 1824), I, p. 106.
19 It was not just the ‘Vendée militaire’, as the wider area affected by the revolt is known, that
experienced serious armed resistance: also prominent, as we shall see, were the guerrilla bands
known as the chouans that appeared in Brittany. That said, however, there is no denying that there
was an extraordinary degree of particularity in the situation. To quote Timothy Tackett, ‘There
were, to be sure, other areas of the country in which significant counter-revolutionary movements
occurred, and the west itself was by no means monolithic in its attitudes. Nevertheless, in no other
sector of France did the rural opposition movement begin in earnest so early, spread so widely
and attain such a degree of violence, intensity and organization.’ Tackett, ‘The West in France in
1789’, p. 715. For a general discussion, see Dupuy, Les chouans, pp. 7–17.
20 E.g. Dupuy, Bretagne sous la Révolution et l’Empire, pp. 26–31. A reference to this resentment
may be found in the memoirs of Claude Tercier, an émigré officer who served under Puisaye at
Quiberon. Thus: ‘It was intended that the cadres raised in England should be used to form the
insurgents of the western provinces into a regular army. No sooner was this plan understood by
the Vendéens and the chouans than it was rejected by them out of hand: they wanted, they said,
no other officers than the ones under whom they had gone to war and were continuing it now.
Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Tercier , pp. 100–1.
21 For a brief statement of Tilly’s views, see Tilly, ‘Local conflicts in the Vendée before the rebellion
of 1793’. Meanwhile, the stress on cultural dissonance comes from Tackett who points to various
factors, notably literacy and the incidence of vocations to the priesthood, as being suggestive of
an urban culture that, not least in the marked anti-clericalism visible in the cahiers des doléances
that emanated from not just Nantes – in relative terms at least, a substantial city – but also smaller
places such as Saumur, Thouars and Fontenay-le-Comte, was at odds with that of the surrounding
campagne and at the very least predisposed to rally to the Revolution. See Tackett, ‘The West in
France in 1789’, pp. 730–4.
22 For an excellent discussion, of the origins of the war in the Vendée, see H. Mitchell, ‘The
Vendée and counter-revolution: a review essay’, French Historical Studies, 5, No. 4 (Autumn,
1968), pp. 405–29. Meanwhile, C. Petitfrère, Blancs et bleus d’Anjou (Paris, 1979) is a detailed
sociological survey of the war in the Vendée based on the records of some 7,000 veterans of the
fighting that very much tends to paint what occurred in terms of a struggle of country versus
town. See also J.C. Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris, 1987), pp. 54–79.
23 For an attractive visual presentation of the main Vendéen leaders together with thumbnail bio-
graphical sketches, see J.C. Martin, Blancs et bleus dans la Vendée déchirées (Paris, 1986), pp. 56–63.
The presence of so many of the local nobility on their estates is in itself very interesting, testifying
as it does to a situation in which the seigneurs felt little fear of their less fortunate neighbours. For
a recent biography of one of the most determined Vendéen leaders, see F. Kermina, Monsieur de
Charette (Paris, 1993). It should be noted, however, that the cult of youth did not rule unchal-
lenged: the insurrection’s commander-in-chief was the sixty-two-year-old Charles de Royrand,
whilst Stofflet was forty and D’Elbée forty-three.
24 Lyrics accessed at <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_de_Charette>, 24 March 2017. At first
mystifying, the mention of partridges is explained by the fact that in the French of the period,
perdrix had a derogatory meaning encompassing inexperience, youth and foolishness alike: a con-
temporary rendition might therefore be ‘turkey’. Interestingly, the term survives as a legacy of the
slavers of the eighteenth century in the patois of the Côte d’Ivoire.
25 The account of the grande guerre that follows is in large part taken from M. Ross, Banners of the
King (London, 1975). For two more recent works in English, see A. Forrest, ‘The insurgency of the
Vendée’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 25, No. 4 (August, 2014), pp. 800–13, and A. Brandt, ‘1793:
lessons of the Vendée’, Quarterly Journal of Military History, 27, No. 3 (Spring, 2015), pp. 47–53. A
recent French collection of essays, albeit one of the most mixed quality, is H. Couteau-Bagarie and
C. Doré-Fraslin (eds.), Histoire militaire des guerres de Vendée (Paris, 2010), whilst A. Darmaing,
L’ouest dans la tormente: la guerre civile française, 1793–1815 (Paris, 1979) is a straight-forward
military history that covers events in both the Vendée and Brittany.
26 To stay with the example of Loire-Atlantique, it was not just Machecoul that witnessed mass
killings, other towns that were similarly affected being Savenay, Clisson and La Roche-Bernard.
Martin, Loire-Atlantique dans la tourmente révolutionnaire, p. 64.
27 How many Republican soldiers and inhabitants of the west of France fell victim to the peasant
rebels of the Vendée and elsewhere is unclear, but one figure that has been suggested is 200,000.
See H. Gough, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary: the French Revolution and the revenge of the
Vendée’, Historical Journal, 30, No. 4 (December, 1987), p. 987. According to figures given by a
dictionary of Revolutionary and Napoleonic battles published in 1998, the number of Republican
troops killed or wounded in action in the grande guerre may have been as many as 50,000.
See D. Smith, The Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book: Actions and Losses in Personnel, Colours,
Standards and Artillery, 1792–1815 (London, 1998), pp. 37–66 passim.
28 Cit. G. Pernoud and S. Flaissier (eds.), The French Revolution (London, 1960), pp. 301–2.
29 ‘It must not be thought’, wrote Jean-Baptiste Kléber, ‘that the entire population of the depart-
ments affected were in arms: many citizens had taken refuge in the larger towns; others stayed
peaceably in their homes, seeking an accommodation with whoever happened to be strongest in
their localities and waiting on events; and still others sought out the Republican forces and even
fought in their ranks.’ R. Nougaret (ed.), Kléber: mémoires politiques et militaires, Vendée 1793–1794
(Paris, 1989), p. 51.
30 For a detailed account of this action, see Anon. (ed.), ‘Le général Rossignol en Vendée: nouveaux
chapitres de ses mémoires’, Journal de la Sabretache, 3, 1895, pp. 363–5.
31 Ibid., pp. 373–4.
32 Here, for example, is General Westermann: ‘The rebels . . . employ their own peculiar tactics which
are admirably adapted to their own position and to local circumstances. Assured of the advantages
derived from their method of attack, they never allow themselves to be surprised: they only fight
when and where they wish . . . When they attack, their onslaught is terrible, sudden and almost
always unforeseen owing to the difficulty in the Vendée of reconnoitring the ground and protecting
oneself against surprises. Their order of battle is in the form of a crescent with the wings – the spear-
heads of their attack – manned by their best marksmen . . . Before you have time to know what has
hit you, you find yourself overwhelmed by a rain of fire . . . They do not wait for the word of com-
mand before firing, and have nothing like volley-firing by battalions, ranks or squads. Nevertheless,
the fire to which they subject their enemy is as heavy, as well sustained and certainly more deadly
than ours. If you can stand up to the violence of their attack, they will seldom dispute the victory
with you, but this will profit you but little because they retreat so swiftly that it is very difficult to
catch them up as the terrain is almost unsuited to the use of cavalry. Their forces disperse, and they
escape through fields, woods and thickets: they know all the paths, by-ways, gullies and ravines,
and all the obstacles capable of impeding their flight and how to avoid them. Meantime, if you are
obliged to give way before their attack, you will find it as difficult to carry out your own retreat as
they find it easy to elude you when you are beaten: when they are winning, they surround you and
cut into your troops everywhere . . . continue firing all the time . . . [and] load their muskets as they
march or even at the double, and their constant movement does not detract from the briskness and
accuracy of their fire.’ Cit. Pernoud and Flaissier, French Revolution, pp. 298–9. Kléber, by contrast,
is both more succinct and more candid. Thus: ‘On the one hand the crassest ineptitude, the most
unpardonnable negligence, and, perhaps, [the most base] cowardice, and, on the other, the most
violent fanaticism, together with the presence of commanders as skilful as they were audacious,
had produced a sort of equality between the two parties, albeit one that tended to give the rebels
considerable superiority.’ Nougaret, Kléber: memoires politiques et militaires, pp. 50–1.
33 Anon., ‘Le general Rossignol en Vendée’, pp. 417–25.
34 S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), p. 704 (Sapinaud de
Verrie was the uncle of the Sapinaud de la Rairie mentioned above). The effectiveness of the
rebel administration, however, is wide open to challenge. As Jean-Clément Martin has written,
for example, ‘Separated from the main forces of the Vendée, sitting in a zone that could easily be
invaded by the Republicans, and composed for the most part of priests and other individuals who
had played no part in the fighting, [the Conseil Superieur] played a limited role. On the ground,
it was the military commanders who reigned supreme.’ Martin, Blanc et bleus, pp. 66–7.
35 Cit. Ross, Banners of the King, p. 123; Clemenceau was the grandfather of the French leader of the
First World War, a figure whose pronounced anti-clericalism owed much to family memories of
1793. For the internal situation and organisation of la Vendée blanche, meanwhile, see Martin, La
Vendée et la France, pp. 92–131.
36 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 243.
37 Gauthier-Villars, Mémoires d’un vétéran, p. 30. The mayennais, as they were known, had been
traumatised by their experiences during the siege and had therefore arrived back on French soil
with a deep hatred of counter-revolution. Accorded the privilege of being transported from the
area of the frontier to the Vendée by wagon on account of their terrible privations, they had also
become averse to all discipline. ‘Every day’, complained Decaen, ‘such was the confusion . . . that
our march resembled that of a broken army.’ Picard and Paulier, Mémoires et journaux du Général
Decaen, I, p. 64.
38 Nougaret, Kléber: memoires politiques et militaires, p. 94.
39 Ibid., pp. 147–9.
40 M. Boutillier de Saint André, Mémoires d’un pere à ses enfants: une famille vendéenne pendant la
Grande Guerre, ed. E. Bossard (Paris, 1896), pp. 191–2.
41 Cit. Martin, Blancs et bleus, pp. 169. Something of the reality of what occurred at Le Mans was
revealed by the discovery in 2009 of series of mass graves: of 159 bodies, at least 61 were women
and children, almost all of whom had been killed by sabres and bayonets. See <www.inrap.fr/
archeologie-de-la-bataille-du-mans-des-12-et-13-decembre-1793-les-corps-temoins-9343>,
accessed 1 May 2018. So brutal were the scenes that took place that even some Republican offi-
cers were horrified and moved to acts of pity: for example, Louis Buquet, a Volunteer of 1791 who
had quickly risen through the ranks to become chief of staff to General Kléber during the siege of
Metz, later claimed to have saved the life of a fifteen-year-old boy by promising to bring him up as
his son and thereby, or so one presumes, republicanise him. See L. Buquet ‘Journal historique de
la cinquieme campagne commencée le 9 prairial l’an IV de la République Française’, Journal de la
Sabretache, 17 (1908), p. 194.
42 Ibid., p. 195.
43 Cit. Schama, Citizens, p. 788.
44 Nougaret, Kléber: memoires politiques et militaires, p. 229.
45 Amongst those who witnessed the so-called noyades de Nantes at first hand was the erstwhile
Volunteer of 1792 Vaxelaire. See Gauthier-Villas, Mémoires d’un vétéran, p. 30.
46 For the events that took place in Nantes under the aegis of Carrier, see Martin, Loire-Atlantique
dans la tourmente révolutionnaire, pp. 86–9.
47 Cit. A. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of Revolution and Empire (London, 2002), p. 129.
48 For Secher’s views, see R. Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée (Notre Dame, IN, 2003).
Secher’s work has been bitterly criticised and rightly so. The product of a school of right-wing
thought hostile to the Revolution itself, it ignores the social explanations for the revolt, makes
numerous unfounded assertions, repeats the wildest atrocity stories in the most uncritical of fash-
ions and, in particular, ignores the contribution of the rebels to the demographic havoc suffered by
the area affected by revolt. For two examples of the general tenor of the criticism, see the reviews
by Howard Brown and Donald Sutherland in Journal of Modern History, 77, No. 3 (January, 2005),
pp. 806–7, and The English Historical Review, 119, No. 480 (February, 2004), pp. 236–7. Moreover,
not all Republicans were as single-minded in their treatment of the Vendée as such figures at
Turreau: in the wake of the battle of Le Mans, for example, General Marceau is reputed to have
saved the lives of a number of prisoners. Martin, Blanc et bleus, p. 81.
49 Very helpful as a means of understanding the cast of mind that underpinned the repression is
A. Forrest, ‘The ubiquitous brigand: the politics and language of repression’, in C.J. Esdaile (ed.),
Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Land Pirates (Houndmills, 2004), pp. 25–44.
50 Cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, p. 155.
51 Cit. ibid., p. 159.
52 For Hoche’s activities, see J. North, ‘General Hoche and counter-insurgency’, Journal of Modern
History, 67, No. 2 (April, 2003), pp. 529–40.
53 Darmaing, L’ouest dans le tormente, pp. 215–32 passim.
54 Sutherland, French Revolution and Empire, p. 244; for a very brief introduction, see R. Dupuy, La
chouannerie (Rennes, 1981). The name chouannerie is traditionally supposed to have been derived
from the local name for the screech-owl or chou, this being bestowed on the revolt on account of the
insurgents’ use of imitations of its call as a means of signalling to one another; more recently, how-
ever, Dupuy has argued that ‘Chouan’ was rather a nom de guerre that had been adopted by a family of
noted smugglers named Cottereau. Dupuy, Bretagne sous la Révolution et l’Empire, pp. 156–7. Whilst
the form that the revolt took was on the whole very different from what was seen in the Vendée,
elsewhere Dupuy is absolutely insistent that the roots of the trouble were one and the same. For
example: ‘Above all, the chouannerie cannot be thought of as being separate from . . . the Vendée.
The civil war involved the whole of the west of France, a region that formed a single geographical
and cultural entity, a single societé bocagiste.’ Dupuy, Les chouans, p. 259.
55 For a detailed discussion of the origins of chouannerie, see D.M.G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The
Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1796 (Oxford, 1992). On
the link with Breton feeling, see A. Forrest, ‘Regionalism and counter-revolution in France’, in
C. Lucas (ed.), Re-Thinking the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 151–82.
56 Dupuy argues that there were at least three separate phases in the chouannerie: an initial period of
spontaneity; a middle period in which émigré agents from outside the region attempted to impose
regular forms of military organisation on the insurgents; and, finally, a third period in which the
deficiencies of the local leaders and growing war-weariness among the populace produced a slide
into brigandage. Dupuy, Les chouans, pp. 81–142.
57 D.K. Broster et al., ‘An English sailor among the chouans’, English Historical Review, 25, No. 97
(January, 1910), p. 130.
58 J. Pouessel, ‘Chouans et chouannerie dans la Manche, 1797–1801’, Annales de la Normandie, 36,
No. 3 (July, 1986), pp. 235–52. Working from alternative sources relating to Mayenne, Dupuy
suggests that 83 per cent of the insurgents were of rural origin and only 13 per cent urban. Dupuy,
Les Chouans, pp. 188–96. In discussions of armed resistance, it is inevitable that men will form
the chief focus of attention. However, just as women played an important role in driving forward
the Revolution in Paris and elsewhere, women also played an important role in the chouannerie,
supplying the bands with food and shelter, harbouring escaped prisoners and passing information
of all sorts to the rebel commanders. They were, said the émigré commander, Claude Tercier, ‘our
confidants and our agents’. Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général Tercier, p. 180.
59 Cit. Broster, ‘An English sailor among the chouans’, pp. 135–6.
60 Darmaing, L’ouest dans le tormente, pp. 203–12; M. Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution:
Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s (Cambridge, 1983), II, pp. 269–323.
For a first-hand account of the disaster, see Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et militaires du Général
Tercier, pp. 99–118.
61 In the wake of the Quiberon disaster, Puisaye was widely, and with considerable justice, held
responsible for what had occurred by his fellow émigrés. One of the few royalist senior officers who
survived being taken captive, for example, lambasted his ‘ignorance and ineptitude’ and referred
to him scornfully as ‘a man of ambition who was full of schemes’. Chanonie, Mémoires politiques et
militaires du Génral Tercier, p. 99.
62 For all this, see Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution, II, 357–60.
63 For an excellent discussion, see J. Devlin, ‘The army, politics and public order in Directorial
Provence, 1795–1800’ The Historical Journal, 22, No. 1 (March 1989), pp. 87–106.
64 Sutherland, French Revolution and Empire, pp. 271–5.
65 Soulié, Carnets de Colonel Bial, p. 108.
66 For a wide-ranging discussion of one region in particular that both reviews the situation prior to
1798 and looks at the consequences of the Loi Jourdan, see G. Lewis, ‘Political brigandage and pop-
ular disaffection in the south-east of France, 1795–1804’, in G. Lewis and C. Lucas (eds.), Beyond
the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 195–231.
67 P. Dubrisay and P. Binet (eds.), Elie Picard (1779–1859): memorial d’un grognard (Chambourg sur
Indre 2017), p. 14.
68 Martin, La Vendée et la France, pp. 333–5; Darmaing, L’ouest dans la tourmente, pp. 237–9.
69 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 373; M. Broers, Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits,
Rebels and their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions (Witney, 2010), pp. 47–8.
70 M.A. Depréaux (ed.), ‘Carnet d’étapes et souvenirs de guerre et de captivité du Sergent-Major
Phillippe Beaudoin de la 31e Demi-Brigade de Ligne’, Carnets de la Sabretache, 7 (1908), p. 715.
71 Vivien, Souvenirs, p. 111.
72 See Ernouf, Mémoires d’un jeune abbaye, pp. 126–7.
73 For the breakdown of Napoleon’s pacification of France, see C.J. Esdaile, Napoleon, France and
Waterloo: The Eagle Rejected (Barnsley, 2015), pp. 80–190 passim.
8 Resistance and revolt (2)
The French imperium
As we have seen, the French Revolution awoke deep-rooted fears on the part of Europe’s
élites. The mood which it encompassed, said Edmund Burke, was a contagion that could
not but infect the entire continent and bring law, order, property and liberty alike crash-
ing to the ground. Much the same fears can be found in the plays and other writings of
Goethe, who, though he recognised that the Revolution was the product of persistent
misgovernment and injustice in France, clearly believed the Revolutionary leaders to be
charlatans bent only on their own advancement who would seduce the ignorant masses
into a lemming-like flight to the front.1 In this, Burke and Goethe alike were proved wrong,
of course – to the extent that French ideas spread at all, they were almost invariably spread
by French bayonets. At the same time, except in Britain and the United Provinces, the
collaborators were limited to a relatively narrow social group that represented a very small
minority. However, it was not just that the people remained indifferent. On the contrary,
the peasants, artisans and labourers of Europe in many instances ignored the demagoguery
so much feared by Burke, a very short experience of Revolutionary rule generally being
enough to convince them that one tyranny had simply been replaced another and, what is
more, that the tyranny of the ancien régime was frequently preferable to the tyranny which
replaced it. Over and over again, freedom was for the most part found to mean little more
than the propertied classes finding new means of flexing their muscles at the expense of the
populace, whilst the latter endured the worst ravages of occupation at the hands of an army
convinced of its cultural superiority over all it beheld, the only saving grace in the situa-
tion being that conscription was at this stage rarely introduced beyond the frontiers of the
France of 1793 (one of the few exceptions, as we shall see, was Belgium, and so violent was
the reaction there that the French could probably count themselves lucky that they did not
attempt such a policy on a general basis).2 Throughout the French sphere of influence, then,
popular resistance to the Revolution was commonplace, even, indeed, the norm. Here and
there were pockets where the imposition of the new order was accompanied by less friction,
but in no region was resentment, and, with it, at the very least passive resistance, entirely
absent from the situation
That said, if popular resistance was very common, it was by no means always armed.
Risings certainly took place – in Lombardy in 1797; in Belgium and Switzerland in 1798;
and in Tuscany, Calabria and many other parts of Italy in 1799 – whilst in certain areas –
the Pyrenees, Piedmont and the Tyrol – French troops found themselves opposed at dif-
ferent times by a variety of peasant militias. Equally, in the Rhineland, Luxembourg and
south-central Germany there were sustained outbreaks of guerrilla warfare.3 That said,
clashes between armed civilians and French soldiers were not something seen everywhere
in Revolutionary Europe. Nor is this surprising: for men to take up arms against regular
troops, they had to have some hope of survival, whether this was centred on inaccessible
202 Resistance and revolt (2): the French imperium
terrain, local traditions of bearing arms, or the hope of foreign aid. Far more common,
then, was passive resistance, this being something that might take many forms ranging from
draft evasion and the non-payment of taxes, through refusal to participate in Republican
ceremonies, to the spreading of rumours and the generation of counter-revolutionary prop-
aganda. To this, meanwhile, should be added the traditional forms of dissidence constituted
by, in the first place, the town or village riot and, in the second, brigandage, though the
extent to which the latter, in particular, can be seen as a political phenomenon is open
to question, for, as Alan Forrest has written, ‘Brigandage . . . was a complex construction
which blended both the anti-revolutionary and the anti-social.’4
Before looking at such questions as guerrilla warfare and armed revolt, let us first look at
the question of non-violent resistance. As just stated, this could take many different forms,
whilst it should also be noted that it was by no means exclusive of taking up arms. Billeted
in Liège on a family of an official of the erstwhile bishopric, for example, Jean-Pierre Bial
found himself being lectured non-stop on the evils of the French cause by the lady of the
house, whilst the same city saw a man named Rotoricat seek to cram the twenty gunners
he was being forced to accommodate into a tiny room that was not only damp and stink-
ing but also far too small for them.5 In Belgium, too, attempts by the French to stamp out
traditional religion were consistently defied by the populace, the latter in many instances
making considerable efforts to preserve traditional religious practices or to hide the chalices
and pattens needed by the clergy to say mass, whilst in the Cisalpine Republic such was
the reluctance to join the armed forces that its rulers had no option but to take into their
service the Polish ‘legion’ formed from Galician prisoners of war by the leader of Poland’s
struggle for independence, Jan Dabrowski.6 Also from the Cisalpine Republic come stories
of inventive local authorities finding all sorts of ways of harassing French troops while yet
staying within the letter of what was expected of them. As Cognet wrote of a particularly
miserable sojourn at Milan in January 1799, for example,
We slept on straw, crowded together in ancient buildings which were barely roofed, let
alone proof against the elements: if we were short of space, we were very well off for
fresh air. Thus it was that we were treated by our good friends, the cisalpins, from the
very first moments that we were in their territory.7
In the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine, meanwhile, the populace engaged in a
campaign of wholesale non-co-operation, displaying flags in the red, yellow and black
already associated with Germany; boycotting the frequent ceremonies run to emphasise
the supposedly widespread nature of support for the new order; refusing to sign the peti-
tions got up in favour, first, of the creation of a Cisrhenan Republic and then of union with
France; denying the authorities the slightest assistance in respect of the apprehension of
the numerous local bandits; being as obstructive as possible with regard to such matters as
billeting; harassing mayors and other officials seen as collaborating with the French; defac-
ing or ripping down French decrees and proclamations; and, finally, engaging in numerous
protests and acts of mass intimidation.8 And in the Batavian Republic there were mutinies
in the militia and, literate society that it was, a widespread resort to petitioning in an effort
to block this or that aspect of government policy, whilst 1798 witnessed community-wide
refusals to pay taxes in the eastern areas of Drenthe and Gelderland, not to mention the
boycott of many banquests and other social events.9
At a loftier level, meanwhile, priests and religious and members of the old adminis-
tration left in place after the tide of French conquest had forced a change of control, if
Resistance and revolt (2): the French imperium 203
not sovereignty, struggled hard to keep old loyalties alive and frustrate the dictates of
the invaders. Of the latter group, typical enough were the local magistrates and other
officials of the numerous petty statelets and other territories of the left bank of the Rhine.
Encouraged to remain in place by both the invaders (on the grounds that they needed
local experts to govern their new acquisitions) and their erstwhile masters (on the rather
different grounds that only thus could the local population be afforded any protection and
unsuitable – overly pro-French – elements excluded from power), they frequently acted as
de facto spies, did whatever they could to frustrate French commands and spread a vari-
ety of disinformation, whilst a considerable number of them resigned from their positions
when the Rhineland was finally formally annexed to France in 1802.10 Meanwhile, if the
survival of pre-occupation administrative systems proved one way forward, the creation of
new political structures proved another: in the Batavian Republic, politicians loyal to the
federative model of the old United Provinces struggled hard to recast it in a new guise and,
when that did not work, opposed the moves that turned the Republic into a hereditary
monarchy in 1806.11 On the other hand, difficult though they sometimes were, at least the
educated classes in Holland were generally prepared to engage with the sort of roles which
it was hoped they would fulfil. In Belgium, by contrast, the situation was very different.
Thus, Belgian participation in the plebiscite that confirmed the outcome of the coup of 18
Brumaire, was pitifully low, while enthusiasm for public office was nonexistent.12
Turning now to armed resistance, in some cases this began the very moment that the
French forces set foot on foreign soil. Here pride of place must go to Spain. In the areas
adjoining the French frontier – the Basque provinces, Navarre and Catalonia – there was a
long tradition of popular mobilisation in times of invasion which by the late eighteenth cen-
tury had, at least on paper, been given regular form in the shape of local homeguards called
out in time of war. Organised in parish companies under the command of local worthies, it
was the task of these forces to engage in guerrilla warfare. Let us here begin with the western
sector of the front. In the Basque provinces and Navarre, bands of armed civilians certainly
turned out against the French when they raided the Pyrenean valleys of the Baztán and the
Roncal in 1793, whilst Clonard talks of a general mobilisation that produced as many as
60,000 combatants.13 This, however, is almost certainly an exaggeration, such details as we
have suggesting that the total amounted to no more 25,000.14
As yet, little research has been conducted into the extent of popular resistance in the
western Pyrenees. Much better documented, by contrast, are the somatenes of Catalonia (the
name, incidentally, comes from the Catalan phrase som atent which means ‘to be alert’; a
translation familiar to American readers would therefore be ‘minutemen’). In so far as the
war of 1793–5 was concerned, the regulations which matter are those contained in an order
of the day dated 6 May 1794, issued in the wake of the Spanish evacuation of Roussillon.
In brief, this laid down the principle of universal military service for all men aged between
fifteen and sixty, but proceeded to alleviate the immense burden which this would have sup-
posed by a series of complicated arrangements which rendered the likelihood of being called
up dependent, first, on age and, second, on the proximity of a man’s place of residence to the
French frontier, whilst also permitting the purchase of substitutes. In theory, then, any inva-
sion of Catalonia would be faced by a very considerable force of irregular combatants: in 1794
the present-day province of Gerona alone should have provided some 16,000 men. Nor was
this an end to it, for Catalonia also had a long tradition of forming regular-style units for the
purposes of home-defence. We come here to the so-called migueletes. Named after the follow-
ers of a sixteenth-century Catalan soldier of fortune named Miquel de Prats, these were not
conscripts but rather men who volunteered in exchange for promises that they would serve
in special units that were raised in Catalonia alone, officered entirely by Catalans and never
employed outside Catalonia, whilst being guaranteed their freedom at the close of hostilities.15
By the end of 1794, then, on paper at least, Catalonia was certainly in a position to
mount a people’s war. That said, there were serious limitations on the extent to which this
potential could be transformed into reality. The much vaunted migueletes never recruited
more than 14,500 men instead of the 30,000 which the authorities hoped for when they
issued the requisite call for volunteers late in 1794, whilst they proved so prone to mutiny,
desertion and pillage that in May 1795 a special code of discipline had to be drawn up to
combat their excesses..16 Also interesting here are the details that we have of the frontier
town of Berga. This produced 245 volunteers for the migueletes, but, of these, something
more than 200 were residents of settlements on the French side of the Pyrenees who had
fled conscription and sought refuge in Spain and now found themselves with no means of
support.17 Nor were the somatenes much better: as well as being extremely ill-disciplined,
they were also notoriously disaffected.18 As to why all this should have been the case, folk
memories were still strong of the terrible events of the War of the Spanish Succession of
1701–14 (in brief, this had seen the Catalan commercial and ecclesiastical élite organise
a rebellion against rule from Madrid and go down to defeat after Barcelona had endured
a devastating thirteen-month siege, the result of this being the suppression of most of
Catalonia’s many special privileges). That the French were aware of this history, there is no
doubt, and Catalonia therefore saw a sustained effort to win their hearts and minds: there
was much talk of the establishment of a Catalan Republic, collaborators amongst the local
notables were welcomed with open arms and the tithes and feudal dues were abolished.19
All this availed them absolutely nothing, however: with convoys of food from France both
insufficient and few and far between, the invaders had no option but to live off the country,
the result being that the populace was driven to take up arms on its own account.20
In the face of the constant menace which the resultant partisan bands represented, the
invaders were forced to garrison every place they took and at the same time expend much
energy in punitive operations that rarely gained them more than a few days’ peace. Typical
enough were the activities of the commander of the garrison of Puigcerda, Etienne Charlet.
Thus, hearing of a large assembly of insurgents at the Tosas pass some miles south-east of the
town, on 23 October 1794 he set off to attack them at the head of a strike force of grena-
diers and chasseurs. Unfortunately for him, however, warning of what was afoot reached the
men concerned, and the majority slipped away to the nearby village of Castellar de Nuch.
Setting off in hot pursuit, Charlet promptly assaulted the village, which was then sacked
and put to the torch, but once again the insurgents got away, the result being that the gar-
rison of Puigcerda was harassed as much as ever. Much tried, on 18 February Charlet struck
west into the valley that housed the headwaters of the River Segre and attacked a number
of villages around Pont de Bar, only to be driven off and forced to withdraw to his base. All
the while, meanwhile, his troops had been increasingly suffering from hunger, and eventu-
ally their morale collapsed, so many men deserting that in the first three months of 1795 his
command had dwindled from over 5,800 men to a mere 3,200.21
According to French reports, at least, meanwhile, this popular resistance was accompa-
nied by the utmost cruelty. For example, Charlet’s predecessor as commander of the French
garrison of Puigcerda was François Doppet:
In proof of the cruelty of . . . the somatenes, I have only to place before the eyes of
the reader various reports . . . that were sent at this time to the Committee of Public
Safety . . . In the first, Citizen Combette, a sergeant major in the . . . First Battalion
of La Montagne, reports that the enemy have burned three men alive; in the second,
Citizen Pontet, an interpreter, certifies that he had come across a man who had been
roasted over a fire between Campredón and Prats de Mollo; in the third, Citizen Brunel,
an officer of engineers, writes that he had seen a soldier who had been mutilated by the
removal of his genitals.22
At the same time that all this was happening in Catalonia, trouble of a rather similar sort
was occurring at the other end of France’s Mediterranean coast line. We come here to the
Maritime Alps. Rugged uplands with little in the way of habitation, cloaked in thick scrub
and pinewood, throughout the eighteenth century these mountains had been hot-beds of
banditry and smuggling, the result being that in few households can there not have been at
least one man who was accustomed to the use of knife, musket or blunderbuss. As for the
arrival of the French, this did not change matters, the many bands that roamed the region
simply continuing to ply their trade as before, the one difference being that the victims now
included many French soldiers. Limited though the threat posed by these barbetti, as these
brigands were known, was, the French responded with unwonted ferocity, and this led to
savage reprisals in which angry villagers, already driven to the brink by the rapacity of the
invaders, murdered isolated Frenchmen and swept down on likely looking mule trains, the
ever-worsening economic situation in the meantime conjuring up fresh insurgents by the day.
The result was inevitable: a bitter low-level conflict interspersed with occasional flare-ups
that raged unchecked until well into the years of the Consulate when it was finally resolved
by the application of more effective methods of policing.23
Still another instance of what may be termed primary resistance to the Revolution
comes from the Tyrol. A highly privileged part of the Habsburgs’ domains, the Tyrol had
of late had an extremely troubled relationship with Vienna, but with the death of Joseph
II the situation had become more tranquil. That said, the peasant population had been but
little attracted by such news as they had received of the Revolution, whilst their suspicions
had been reinforced by vigorous efforts on the part of the local clergy. Meanwhile, with
the French invasion of Lombardy on the one hand and Bavaria on the other, 1796 saw the
populace regaled with all sorts of horror stories brought across the frontier by travellers and
refugees.24 That being the case, there was little opposition when it was decided to mobilise
the local home-guard known as the Schützen which the province was supposed to main-
tain in exchange for freedom from conscription, and so, when the French finally invaded
in March 1797, approximately 10,000 militiamen were ready to do battle. In the event,
their services were not much required, for the French division sent across the frontier lim-
ited itself to chasing out the Austrian troops in the area before turning east to cooperate
with Napoleon’s drive on Vienna. Nevertheless, we are assured that ‘the enthusiasm was
such that old men, children and even women demanded arms and were willing to die in
defence of their habitations.’25 Of such clashes that actually took place we know little, but
after the war a grateful Francis II conferred a special medal on all those who had taken
part in the fighting, while there are stories that a young servant-girl named Catherina Lanz
helped to defend a strategically placed churchyard armed only with a pitchfork.26
To return to matters Italian, enthusiasts for the Revolution, and, indeed, its later apolo-
gists, could dismiss the barbetti as mere brigands, but this term was much harder with respect
to the periodic outbreaks of violence that punctuated the French occupation of Italy. Of
these, the earliest example is the revolt that took place in the Lombard city of Pavia on
23 May 1796. Like every other place through which the French passed, Pavia had been
exposed to all the rigours of occupation, and the last straw came when an ancient statue
in the main square was torn down by the local Jacobins, a number of the invaders and
their sympathisers promptly being hunted down and butchered in response. Eager to avenge
themselves on the French and, at the same time to pillage their more fortunate neighbours,
meanwhile, hundreds of peasants came in from the surrounding districts. Having taken over
the city, however, the insurgents discovered that it was one thing to rise against the French
but quite another to turn a rising into military reality. Through the night and much of the
next day, excited crowds thronged the streets, drinking large quantities of wine and seiz-
ing whatever they felt like from the houses of the wealthy, but leadership and organisation
came there none, and, when a vengeful column of French troops arrived the next day under
Napoleon himself, retribution was not long in coming: ignoring ecclesiastical efforts to
negotiate a peaceful surrender, the invaders first subjected the city to a prolonged bombard-
ment, and then sacked it without mercy, later engaging in a series of executions, the town
council also being fined the substantial sum of 1,000,000 livres.27
The brutal treatment meted out to Pavia solved nothing, the next month seeing ris-
ings in such places as Bologna, Ferrara, Forli and Rimini.28 As the French armies pressed
on to fresh conquests, meanwhile, so the problem moved with them: on 17 April 1797
the populace of Verona rioted and besieged the garrison – a force which had made itself
thoroughly hated on account of its violent anti-clericalism and general arrogance29 – in the
castle, having first massacred a number of French soldiers and civilians unlucky enough to
be caught in the streets of the city.30 Even when overt rebellion was not an issue, violence
remained widespread. To quote a veteran of the campaigns in the Rhineland who had been
transferred to the Army of Italy:
All the time we were pursuing the Austrians through the gorges of the Tyrol, the Italians
were killing stragglers making their way along the highways . . . It was even said that a
number of bakers had been throwing them into the ovens they used to make bread.31
Nor is the spread of such mayhem surprising. Here is a contemporary assessment of the
situation that, if deeply critical of Napoleon, is nonetheless perfectly fair:
If Bonaparte has been so great as a general, he has been far from showing himself to
be so great as a conqueror or as a man . . . The outrages and pillages which he sanc-
tioned by impunity, as well as by his own example, have tarnished the splendour of his
victories, and left him no other claims to the admiration of posterity. The despotism
which he exercised over the countries conquered by his arms, and the extreme rigour
with which he enforced the measures ordered by the French government, have fortu-
nately weakened the great effect of opinion which his victories might have produced
in Italy. Notwithstanding the formation of the Cispadane and Transpadane Republics
[two statelets which were united to form the Cisalpine Republic], and although they
furnished many thousands of auxiliaries to the army of Bonaparte, one cannot doubt
the aversion which the majority of the inhabitants . . . have for the French and for
their political principles. The violent insurrections which broke out whenever the
latter . . . experienced any check afford an unequivocal proof of the sentiments of
hatred and vengeance with which they had inspired them as well as of all the evils
which they had occasioned.32
The fact is that only one thing could have checked the spread of popular resistance, and that
was an occupation policy based on the maintenance of the highest standards of discipline,
the strictest respect for the Catholic Church and the minimisation of the burdens imposed
on the populace. Yet these were aspirations which no French general could deliver, let
alone a general as bent on his own advancement as Napoleon Bonaparte. Lip service was
paid to the need to refrain from looting – indeed, a series of more or less ferocious edicts
were issued against the practice, edicts, of course, that looked splendid from the point of
view of propaganda33 – but the Directory could not sustain its armies from the public purse.
Typical enough of the plight of its soldiers was the situation described by François-Xavier
Joliclerc in a desperate plea for financial assistance which he penned to his mother on
10 February 1796:
Impossible though it is to tell you everything, let me give you some idea of how things
stand. From Easter Day until 15 Thermidor [i.e. 2 August] . . . last year, the only pay we
got was two sols, whilst since the latter date until today all we have received is the same
amount again . . . As far as supplies are concerned, all last summer we were fed each
day, but all we got was a pound of bread of such poor quality that even dogs wouldn’t
eat it, together with a quart of peas and a half-pound of meat that was but fit for carrion.
At the moment, the quality is a little better, but often six days can pass without us see-
ing anything at all . . . And, with regard to our clothing, most of us are semi-naked and
forced to go barefoot: nothing of any sort has been issued in this respect for five months,
and nobody has the faintest idea when fresh supplies will arrive.34
To return to Napoleon, meanwhile, the future ruler of France knew full well that the
loyalty of the Army of Italy could not be guaranteed unless it was allowed to fill its knap-
sacks with loot and indulge its physical needs at the expense of the women of Lombardy:
if straggling was too great, the odd example could be made, but that was all.35 Even if this
was not the case, to move towards a more moderate position required a greater degree of
self-reflection than the Revolution’s adherents could be expected to muster. To a man,
the French armies were heroes who waged war not on the people but on their rulers,
liberators whose every advance spread the benefits of liberty, equality and fraternity,
members of a grande nation whose recent history alone was sufficient to emphasise its
superiority over all others. ‘Calm yourselves’, said Jean-Pierre Dellard (or so he later
claimed) to a terrified group of Belgian villagers he came across who had fled their homes
in the face of the advancing French army and now offered him all the money they had
in the world if he would only spare their lives. ‘Keep your money. The only people we
rob are Austrians, not peaceable country-folk. You should never have left your homes: go
back to your villages, and do not put yourselves at such risk again.’36 Stories of rape and
pillage, then, being just that – mere stories – it followed that, as in the Vendée, resist-
ance was the fruit not of genuine grievance, let alone despair, but rather, first, the base
machinations of a Church desperate to defend its privileges and, second, of a populace
motivated by nothing more altruistic than greed and criminality.37 Underpinning these
views, meanwhile, was the same ‘othering’ as was applied to those elements of the French
population as had opposed the Revolution. Thus, taken prisoner by the Austrians and
held captive for nearly two years at a fortress in Hungary, Dellard remarked that it was
a country filled with ‘nothing but wretched villages inhabited by a populace that is as
lazy as it is dirty; born for nothing other than slavery and devoid of industry’.38 Hungary,
perhaps, was at the more exotic end of the French experience, but in Italy, especially, the
French armies found themselves in regions that also seemed primitive in the extreme.
Here, for example, is Boulart on the Abruzzi:
The soil . . . appears stony and infertile, while the mountains are very high and are
covered with snow for five months of the year: devoid of vegetation and seamed with
crevasses, their summits . . . are very jagged. Meanwhile, the general aspect of the
country is very savage, whilst the rocks which are its chief characteristic give everything
a greyish tint. As for villages, they are rare indeed.39
In defence of Napoleon, it has to be said that he was no different from most other French
generals in that, in just the same way as he did, they either condoned pillage or failed to
keep it in check. Much the same behaviour as that witnessed in the Italian campaign was
on show in the Rhineland. Here French troops first crossed the frontier in September 1792,
and at this early moment in hostilities there was still room for the maintenance of a gener-
ous attitude to the civilian population, the assumption here, however naïve, being that the
inhabitants were essentially Frenchmen who happened to speak the wrong language and
would be swept off their feet by the benefits of liberation. Soon, however, the invaders were
disabused, discovering, indeed, that, far from being seen as liberators, they were thoroughly
hated. At the same time, the troops found that feeding themselves by fair means was an
impossibility. A volunteer from Courcuire, for example, Jean-Claude Jannin was a sergeant
major who had been given the job of baggage-master in the First Battalion of Haute Saône:
You keep telling me that everything is very expensive back home, but do you think
that we eat here for nothing? We have it far worse, I tell you . . . Bread is ten sols
the pound . . . wine four livres the bottle . . . meat twenty sols the pound: in short,
everything is going at outrageous prices.40
The response was inevitable. ‘On 26 [July]’, wrote the same Jannin, ‘we forced all the villages
we occupied to offer up a contribution, and came away with oxen, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs,
barley, hay . . . in short, anything that can be eaten or consumed. What terrible devasta-
tion this means for the inhabitants of this country!’41 From foraging, meanwhile, it was but
a short step to outright plunder. ‘We are currently camped out on a mountain top’, wrote
François-Xavier Joliclerc. ‘The view is the loveliest imaginable, but we have neither tents,
nor cooking pots nor anything to eat. In the village down below . . . there is a bigger wine-
cellar than the ones in Gy and Arbois. Pillage was the order of the day. In fact, having
broken down the doors and . . . stove in the casks, we drank the lot: we were literally up
to our armpits in wine!’42 Temporarily forced to evacuate their conquests in the summer of
1793, the troops embarked on what amounted to a scorched-earth policy. To quote a letter
which Joliclerc wrote to his mother in the wake of the French withdrawal:
The very day I last wrote to you, we were forced to embark on a fighting retreat . . . As
we went, so we took away the country’s every flock and herd, not to mention its every
store of grain. Anything that we could not carry away, we put to the torch. As for the
inhabitants we have left them nothing more than the eyes they need to cry with.43
Much the same sort of idea, meanwhile, may be found in the letters of Pierre Girardon, a
lieutenant in the battalion of Volunteers of the Aube:
I am at this moment stationed in a village close to the Rhine. There is not a bite to
eat for man or beast: the whole country is in ruins . . . Wheat, oats, hay, sugar, coffee,
hides, wine, brandy, oil . . . everything has been carried off.44
Looking back on the situation many years later, the response of one participant in the looting
was simply to shrug his shoulders. As he remarked:
If I was to be asked to judge our conduct today, I would say it was reprehensible. At
the time, however, it was entirely legitimate. We were in enemy country, and believed
that, however abominable and even monstrous it might be, the laws of war made over
to us everything that it contained.45
Even when French soldiers were not engaged in acts of outright violence, they could be
extraordinarily arrogant, if not provocative. Like many of their British counterparts, French
officers were much fascinated by the institution of the convent, and were forever fantasising
about nuns, a group who were seen as being collectively aflame with ruthlessly suppressed
sexual desire, but few went as far as Jean-Perre Bial who actually secured entrance to the
most intimate depths of a convent in Liège on the totally specious grounds that he had
been instructed to subject it to a tour of inspection.46 However, it was not just nuns, most
French officers being just as happy with more normal forms of female companionship: to
ingratiate himself with the families of Liège, then, Bial learned both the flute and the violin
while, stationed in the Rhineland, Boulart set about studying German so that he could get
to know at least some of the local young women.47 Such behaviour, perhaps, was relatively
innocuous, but, as Michael Hughes has shown, the culture of the French army was marked
by an all-pervasive masculinity that persuaded French officers, on the one hand, that they
had only to cross Rhine, Alps or Pyrenees for the women of Europe to fall at their feet and,
on the other, that the conquest of the women of Europe was all but a war aim in itself.48
With such attitudes entrenched in the forces of the Republic, it is hardly surprising to
find the cause of armed insurrection raising its head in other parts of Europe, the year 1798
seeing major episodes of resistance in both Belgium and Switzerland. Trouble had been brew-
ing in Belgium for some considerable time. Setting aside the misbehaviour of the French
troops in the course of the campaign of 1794, accompanied as it was by a contribution de
guerre of 60,000,000 francs, a sum roughly six times the annual tax bill that had been imposed
by Austria, liberation had proved disastrous, many merchants being ruined by the whole-
sale requisitioning of their goods, not to mention the forced introduction of the assignats
and the imposition of a variety of trade restrictions that brought commerce and industry
to a complete standstill, yet another problem being that so many horses and carts had been
seized in the course of the fighting that there was no way of transporting goods to market:
by September 1795, for example, ten of the Namur area’s fifty-nine manufactories had been
forced to close altogether, whilst the nineteen still in operation for which details are avail-
able were only employing 713 people of the 4,484 to whom they had given employment prior
to the arrival of the French; still more graphically, the number of those seeking poor relief
soared, reaching perhaps half the population of Brussels and as much as 60 per cent of that
of smaller places such as Huy and Verviers (while many people sought alms, others turned to
banditry, the more wooded, marshy or hilly areas of the country soon coming to swarm with
brigands, foot-pads and highwaymen). To indigence, meanwhile, particularly in the wake
of the poor harvest of 1794, was added serious food shortages, requisitioning having been so
ferocious that even men who had thrown in their lot with the French had been driven to
protest. However, the invaders proved deaf to reason, and the result was a wave of serious
disturbances in which angry crowds pillaged markets and stormed the magazines housing
the grain and other foodstuffs that had been gathered in for the use of the army: at least fifty
different riots are recorded as having taken place, some of them so severe that troops had to
be called in to restore order; town councils found themselves besieged by menacing crowds
attempting to obtain such concessions as the imposition of price controls and the expropria-
tion of traders deemed to be guilty of profiteering; food convoys were seized by organised
gangs; and fields of potatoes and other crops stripped bare by bands of desperate women
intent on feeding their families by any means available.49
In the end, the trouble died down, not least because the bitter cold of the winter of 1794–5
reduced the populace to a state of near-total inanition. At the same time, the coming of the
Directory seemed to suggest that a more moderate régime might be in the making in Paris.50
As a result, the announcement that Belgium was to be annexed to France passed off without
too much of a stir, it also being widely recognised, as we have seen, that such a course, if not
actually desirable in itself, offered many advantages. Yet for many of the Belgian lower classes,
the situation remained extremely bleak, not least because so many of their social superiors
chose to emigrate, a process which among other things saw large numbers of servants turned
adrift without the slightest means of support.51 Then came the coup of 18 Fructidor, the
impact of which on Belgium could not have been more severe. First to feel the pinch were the
moderate figures elected in the elections which had caused so much alarm to Barras and his
allies: within a matter of months every single one of Belgium’s deputies had been replaced by
the Jacobins they had supplanted, while Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Mons, Tournai,
Charleroi and many other places had been stripped of their town councils and given others
more to the liking of the leaders of the coup, the purge also reaching out to many senior
administrators at the level of the department and commune alike (also hit was the press, the
Belgian publications that were shut down including L’impartial européen, L’impartial belge,
Le journal de débâts and Le belge français). Next to suffer was the Church, this being an insti-
tution that continued to enjoy much loyalty amongst the peasantry. Determined to prove
their political credentials and genuinely scared of counter-revolution, the renascent radicals
launched an attack on not just the clergy but religious practice that was so ferocious as to
presage the extermination of Catholicism altogether. First step on the road here was a decree
calling for all priests to swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic, thereby forcing the clergy
into a situation in which its only choices were compliance or treason, all those who chose the
path of non-jurance – in Belgium a group which represented the vast majority – being ruth-
lessly hunted down and either imprisoned or sent to the so-called ‘dry guillotine’ of Guyana.
As for the limited concessions that had been made to freedom of worship in the wake of the
fall of Robespierre, these were revoked, and many churches shut or turned into so-called
‘temples of theophilanthropy’, this last creed being pushed as hard as possible by many rep-
resentatives of the régime from Révellière-Lepeaux down. Also quick to come under attack
were religious institutions which had hitherto been allowed to survive by the Revolution:
all the seminaries were now shut down, then, whilst even those religious orders whose chief
role had been to minister to the sick were dissolved and their members effectively thrown on
the streets. Finally, as if all this was not objectionable enough, great efforts were also made
to tear down or destroy all symbols of religion in public places; to ensure that the populace
submitted to the Republican calendar and, with it, the loss of Sundays and all other religious
festivals; and to suppress the pilgrimages, processions, field blessings, exorcisms and other
popular traditions that formed a central part of popular culture. Resistance, meanwhile, was
met with uncompromising brutality: at Meerbeek, then, seven villagers were imprisoned for
taking part in a way of the cross, whilst two women from Tervueren shared their fate after
being unwise enough to be caught visiting a shrine at Montaigu.52
De-Christianisation, meanwhile, was not accompanied by any improvement in the
economic situation or the living standards of the populace. Left unpaid and in many
instances unfed, the many French troops in the country resorted to outright pillage, whilst
such supplies as they received from the authorities were only obtained by dint of heavy
requisitioning. Rather than buying up the lands and other possessions of the Church, many
rural communities impoverished themselves by buying such objects as pattens and chal-
ices in an attempt to preserve the wherewithal of religious practice, whilst those peasants
who did attempt to buy land found themselves in competition with figures whom they
could rarely hope to outbid: according to Kossmann, the bourgeoisie obtained between
half and three-quarters of the land on offer, and the peasantry none at all.53 Public services,
meanwhile, declined dramatically: roads, bridges, quays, dykes and drainage schemes all
went unattended whilst those hospitals which survived were starved of funds and person-
nel. Yet poor relief, especially, was much needed: the economy remained as stagnant as
ever, the roads being described as being absolutely bare of commerce and the larger towns
ever emptier on account of the large numbers of inhabitants who had fled into the coun-
tryside or across the frontier. In a few places, the establishment of modern factories by such
entrepreneurs as Bauwens and Cockerill created pockets of employment, but the continued
confiscation of English goods ruined many potential investors, whilst others were paralysed
by the fact that their funds were deposited in Vienna and therefore inaccessible, yet another
problem being the British blockade: not only did this reduce Antwerp and other coastal
ports to a state of complete indigence, but it prevented the import of colonial raw materials
and in consequence led to the ruin of such enterprises as Nivelles’ tobacco factory.54
Tyrannised and impoverished, the inhabitants of Belgium responded with a resurgence
of the resistance seen in 1794–5. From the beginning, a key focal point of this move-
ment was the defence of Catholicism. As we have seen, villagers banded together to save
something from the wreck of their churches, whilst they persisted in such devotions as
the angelus and the rosary, gave much aid and succour to fugitive priests, attended secret
masses in large numbers and on numerous occasions took collective action to protect parish
churches threatened with closure. That said, it was not just in the area of religion that the
battle was waged. From every part of the country came complaints of a tenacious refusal
to cooperate with the invaders, who therefore found themselves forced to rely on French
administrators who were unlikely to be anything other than avid fructidoriens and all too
frequently behaved like the worst type of petty tyrants, the National Guard also remain-
ing in most instances little more than a dead letter, if indeed it existed at all. Attempts to
enforce the celebration of the Décadi – in effect, the Republican Sunday – proved a fiasco:
few inhabitants turned up at the pompous official ceremonies, while those that did openly
treated the proceedings as a joke or deliberately engaged in loud conversations with friends
and neighbours.55 Equally, when theatres were ordered to include certain Revolutionary
songs and anthems, managers responded by refusing to comply – an act of defiance which
led to the closure of more than one establishment.56 Finally, participation in the elections
of April 1798 was laughable: in Brussels just 916 electors voted out of the 14,000 who could
potentially have done so, while there were places where so few showed up that it proved
impossible to proceed with the elections at all.57
With the situation further inflamed by a harsh winter, by the beginning of 1798 much of
Belgium was therefore experiencing a state of deep unrest. More than that, indeed, as many
French soldiers and officials kept warning Paris, there appeared a serious danger of insurrec-
tion, the autumn of 1797 having witnessed the outbreaks of numerous outbursts of rioting,
several of which had only been suppressed at the cost of shedding blood. Nor did the new
year bring a change of mood. On the contrary, as winter was followed by spring and spring
by summer, so many places in Brabant in particular experienced outbreaks of violence, the
tension being fuelled still further by rumours that a British invasion was imminent. Finally,
in the last week of September came the shattering news that, along with the rest of France,
Belgium was to be subjected to conscription. ‘Young citizens’, announced a proclamation
issued by the collaborationist city council that had been put in place at Antwerp. ‘Let
emulation take possession of your souls; let the idea of numbering yourselves among the
defenders of the Fatherland become a bone of contention amongst you; let the people of
France see that you are worthy of sharing in their destinies, and that, loving liberty as much
as they do, you wish to defend it just as fiercely.’58
The response was not long in coming: on 16 October the standard of revolt was raised
at the Flemish village of Overmeer.59 Familiar as we are with the events of the war in
the Vendée, there is no need to spend too long discussing the campaign that followed.
In village after village, the trees of liberty erected by the French were torn down and the
representatives of the invaders chased out and sometimes killed, angry bands of insurgents
then proceeding to loot their homes. Commanded by a range of local leaders, such men
then came together to form parish companies which proceeded to do battle with the small
forces of gendarmes and regular troops who were sent against them or otherwise caught up
in the insurrection. Arms were in short supply, but the revolt was quite extensive: whilst
the area most affected stretched from the environs of Ghent across the northern reaches
of the country as far as the River Meuse, there was also trouble in Flanders, the area south
of Brussels and the Ardennes. Yet all was not well: the insurgents proved resistant to any
attempt to drill them, instead spending all their time drinking, bullying the more reluctant
inhabitants into taking up arms, hunting down collaborators, emptying the jails, burning
such documents as tax registers, and pillaging town halls and other official buildings (in
this respect, it did not help that in at least some instances the ranks of the rebels had been
swelled by bandit gangs intent on little more than exploiting the situation for their personal
gain). Nor, meanwhile, was there any leadership except at the most local of levels: names
that one encounters here include Emanuel Van Gansen, a prosperous tenant farmer from
Westerlo; Albert Meulemans, a surveyor from Tongerlo; Pieter Corbeels, a printer from
Louvain who in 1789 had published many pamphlets in support of the Belgian Revolution;
Jan Elen, a medical student from Schepenheuvel; Louis Heylen, a lawyer from Herentals;
Emanuel Rollier, a merchant from Willebroek who had prior to the uprising seemingly been
in contact with the British; Jean-Baptiste Caeymax, a notary from Berlaar; and Theo Van
Dyck, a clerk from Westmeerbeek; lamentably enough, meanwhile, none of these obscure
figures had any military experience other than the little which it had been possible for them
to gain from the brief campaigns of 1789–90.60
In these circumstances, success was unlikely. At best, groups of combatants set out here
or there to attack neighbouring towns that were still held by the French, but they rarely
won the day, the usual outcome being that the attackers were either driven off imme-
diately or chased away by the arrival of French reinforcements, sometimes with heavy
casualties: an insurgent column that attacked Courtrai, for example, was taken by surprise
at Ingelmunster and routed with the loss of at least 250 men. And, of course, even had
there been more in the way of leadership and a greater will to embrace the demands of a
war effort, there was no organised commissariat and therefore no way of subsisting large
assemblies of insurgents for anything other than a few days. In these circumstances, it
was only a question of time, and all the more so as many of the insurgents quickly began
to drift away to their homes. Taken by surprise by the ferocity of the movement and pos-
sessed of no more than 8,000 men in the whole of Belgium, the French took some days to
organise a response, but very soon they were closing in in strength. By the end of October,
indeed, a further series of skirmishes had sufficed to put an end to the revolt in Flanders.
Here and there, there was some sharp fighting, but the French advance was inexorable. At
length all that was left was the heavily wooded region north of Brussels called the campine
anversoise. Here a small force of perhaps 4,000 men had been got together by Van Gansen
and other leaders under the title of the ‘Catholic Army of Brabant’, and, despite a heavy
defeat at Herentals that cost it at least 500 casualties, this kept the field against the French
for over a month, even gaining a number of small successes such as its repulse of French
columns at Meerhout and Diest on 12 and 13 November. However, with the odds against
the insurgents mounting ever more dramatically, their commanders decided to abandon
the struggle in the campine in favour of a desperate bid to reach the fortress of Maastricht
on the strength of messages that had been received from sympathisers within its walls sug-
gesting that it was ripe for insurrection. In truth, this plan was never more than a faint
hope, but in fact the rebel column got no further than Hasselt before it was cornered by
French troops. Adopting the same tactics that had won the day at Meerhout and Diest,
Van Gansen and his men manned the town’s mediaeval walls and put up a fierce fight, but
they were eventually forced to abandon their positions by the French artillery, whilst an
attempt to evacuate the town turned into a rout when the fleeing rebels were attacked by
French cavalry. Though sporadic disturbances continued for some weeks, to all intents and
purposes, the ‘peasants’ war’, as the Belgians came to refer to it, was over.61
The political climate having moved on a little from the dark days of the Terror, French
retribution was not as savage as it might have been a few years earlier: if 280 rebels, amongst
them Corbeels and Meulemans, were condemned to death by military tribunals, fully two-
thirds of the 1,800 men put on trial were acquitted.62 Nevertheless, the dead amounted to
at least 5,000, while the course of the uprising could be traced via a swathe of towns and
villages devastated by French reprisals and saddled with enormous indemnities. Though
Belgium was to offer little more in the way of trouble, what slight chance there remained
of assimilation with France was lost. Some elements of the urban population had already
thrown in their lot with the Revolution, whilst the advent of Napoleon won over a part of
the élite – hence the fact that by 1814 there were at least twenty-five Belgian generals in the
French army – but rural society for the most part remained sullen and apathetic, not to men-
tion as hostile to conscription as ever: with regard to the Loi Jourdan, only half the initial
quota of 22,000 men was actually obtained, and, of these, at least 4,000 deserted before they
even got to their regiments.63
If the Belgian revolt was a grim affair, the one which took place in Switzerland was in
some respects still worse as it was not just a revolt against foreign occupation but a civil war
in which the Catholic minority came increasingly to confront their Protestant neighbours
over the issue of religious freedom. As we have seen, Switzerland had been occupied by
the French in the face of minimal opposition in the spring of 1798 and a unitary Helvetic
Republic imposed in place of the old confederation of cantons and, with it, religious tol-
eration. In the Catholic parts of Switzerland, in particular, however, feelings against the
Revolution were already running high as a result of years of denunciation on the part of the
clergy, and, not just that, but the fact that all of the Swiss Guards massacred on 10 August
1792 had been Catholics. Nor did it help that, in a particularly foolish move, a crossbow
exhibited at Zurich as the very weapon with which William Tell had supposedly shot the
apple from his son’s head was removed by the French and, or so it was rumoured, destroyed.
As spring wore on into summer, then, the largely Catholic cantons of Uri, Schwyz and
Nidwalden all rose in revolt under the command of Alois von Reding, a professional soldier
who had recently returned to Switzerland after many years’ service in the Swiss regiments
of the Spanish army. After several weeks’ fighting which saw engagements at Wollerau,
Feusisberg and Rothenthurm, the insurgents were forced to lay down their arms and accept
a political settlement which saw the three cantons concerned united into a single entity
called Waldstetten, this move being designed greatly to reduce their voting weight in the
national assembly.64 Yet the cause of resistance was far from dead, and further rebellions fol-
lowed in Nidwalden in September 1798, these being put down amidst scenes of far greater
brutality than those which had characterised the earlier fighting. What happened at the
town of Stanz, for example, is described in graphic detail by Jean Curély of the Seventh
Regiment of Hussars:
The town was surrounded by a sort of earthen rampart garnished with a few guns,
behind which the Swiss had placed all their troops, together with the latter’s women
and children, these last being determined to contribute to the defence of the town in
whatever manner they could. Despite the fire of the cannon and muskets, our soldiers
forced the gates . . . without a moment’s hesitation, and there then followed the most
dreadful scenes of carnage: anyone who was caught on the walls or in the streets was
bayoneted on the spot . . . I have never seen such atrocities: the ramparts, the streets,
the alleyways, the churches, the houses, everywhere was strewn with dead of every age
and sex.65
Fierce though this response was, it did nothing to stabilise the Republic, while the latter was
further disrupted when Switzerland suddenly became the scene of major military operations
in 1799, much of the country being devastated and reduced to near-starvation. The summer
of 1802 witnessing a fresh insurrection known as the ‘war of the cudgels’, Napoleon – by
now, of course, ruler of France – was therefore moved to intervene and set up the far more
decentralised Helvetic Confederation.66
Significant though events in Belgium and Switzerland were, they are eclipsed by those
which took place in Italy. Here the period 1797–8 had scarcely been quiet, the arrival of
the French in Rome having produced a series of rebellions in the more mountainous parts
of the erstwhile Papal States. Amongst the French soldiers caught up in the fighting that
resulted was Paul Thiébault:
The insurrection of Lake Trasimene was due to the same causes as those which had
preceded it: the composition of the new authorities; the choice of persons with very bad
reputations as agents; the forced contributions levied on the villages for the so-called
patriotic festivals . . . the tyranny and extortion of the collectors; the billeting of soldiers
upon private families . . . and the law which forbade members of religious orders to beg
and priests to give alms. Things happened pretty much as they did everywhere. On 22
April, about five in the evening, when the inhabitants of several villages were assembled
in the church of Castel Rigone, a certain Guerriero Guerrieri turned up with a decree
relating to the expenses of a new civic festival . . . One Egidio Vicente then read out
the decree, but in such terms and with such comments as were well adapted to make it
food for revolution . . . All present armed themselves, and Vicente . . . dispatched orders
to all parish clergy to replace the trees of liberty with crosses, to send in all men fit to
fight, to sound the alarm bell, and to have the country scoured by friars and laymen
preaching the revolt. At first only the peasants responded to the appeal, but the num-
bers were soon swelled by . . . all the vagabonds with whom Italy swarms . . . There was
no difficulty about arms: anything that would kill was acceptable, and most of the old
castles contained armouries . . . Their organisation . . . meeting with no resistance, the
insurgent leaders . . . grew enterprising and went about with bands of 400 to 800
men . . . [cutting] down all the trees of liberty still standing, [tearing] the tricolour cock-
ades off all whom they caught still wearing them and [making] forced levies of men and
money to the cry of ‘For Christ, the Pope and the emperor!’67
Like all the other risings that best the Roman Republic, the revolt described by Thiébault
was in the end put down with the usual severity. However, if this was the case, 1799 saw
the isolation of the republican experiment revealed beyond all doubt. So exercised were the
population of the city of Naples by the prospect of the arrival of French troops, for example,
that they did not even wait for their appearance before giving voice to their opinion and
that in the most violent of fashions. In November 1798, as we shall see in Chapter 11, the
Neapolitan government had after much hesitation decided to join the Second Coalition
and sent an army northwards to fight the army of General Championnet, only for the cam-
paign to end in disaster and humiliation. Terrified out of its wits, the royal family fled to
the safety of Palermo, while the viceroy they had left behind in the person of the Marquis
of Strongoli was left to sign an armistice with the oncoming French. Amongst the eye-
witnesses to the situation was a Horatio Nelson fresh from his famous conquest of Lady
Hamilton. Having based himself at Naples in the wake of the Battle of the Nile, the British
admiral had been a leading voice in the war party that had led the Neapolitan government
to join the Second Coalition, and now he could only watch in astonishment and dismay.
As he wrote to the British commander in Menorca, Sir John Stewart:
Although I could not think the Neapolitans to be a nation of warriors, yet it was
not possible to believe that a kingdom with 50,000 troops and good-looking young
men could have been over-run by 12,000 men without anything which could be
called a battle . . . I do not flatter myself that all that remains are good men and
true . . . The nobles . . . are endeavouring to negotiate . . . peace with the French,
and [have] offered . . . to form a republic under French protection . . . How it will
end, God only knows!68
Almost immediately, however, there took place a dramatic transformation in the situation.
Hitherto, the war had been deeply unpopular with the Neapolitan people: already suffer-
ing from the effects of years of economic disruption, not to mention the régime’s ruthless
search for the finance needed to confront France, an outraged populace had suddenly been
confronted with demands for sufficient conscripts to raise the army to a strength of 60,000
men, and, not just this, but the wholesale mobilisation of the home-guard known as the
masse.69 Nor, meanwhile, were the Bourbons remotely popular with the common people:
when Calabria was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1783, for example, the govern-
ment had responded by suppressing a number of major monasteries, but the stated aim of
redistributing their lands amongst the poor had gone unfulfilled, the estates concerned
rather being bought up by members of the propertied classes who, to make matters worse,
then proceeded to drive many of the peasants who had actually farmed the properties
concerned from their smallholdings, whilst the negligence displayed by the authorities
during the terrible famine of 1767 in which at least 200,000 people had starved to death
was still a bitter memory.70 At the same time, in Naples as much as Spain, the populace
had found itself confronted by a régime that was seemingly bent on the destruction of
popular culture. Ironically enough, the very considerable reform efforts associated with the
Bourbon administration in the period from 1770 were aimed at helping the poor rather
than oppressing them still further – indeed, its policies were in many respects astonish-
ingly enlightened – but progress was slow, with the result that all the populace were aware
of was the loss of traditional sources of charity inherent in attacks on the religious orders,
the elimination of many popular religious practices as so much superstition and the ever-
stricter policing of society in an effort to suppress banditry and inculcate a new work ethic
amongst a populace that was supposedly incorrigibly lazy and thoroughly given over to
vice (in this respect it was all too symptomatic that the great new poorhouse that was
planned for Naples in the wake of the famine known as the Royal Hospice for the Poor
had still not been completed by the time that the French arrived in 1799).71 In the circum-
stances, then, marches on Rome or anywhere else could not but prove deeply unpopular:
in the town of Teramo, a local chronicler recorded that the call-up occasioned a mood
of widespread despair, while in Chieti the magistrates were reduced to trying to fill the
ranks by drafting criminals who were currently held in their jails, a move that the men
concerned immediately seized upon as a wonderful opportunity to take to their heels.72
Now, however, the situation was different: in brief, it was one thing to have the French
in Rome, quite another to surrender the kingdom to their control; still worse, the crowd felt
abandoned. To quote Roger de Damas:
Prince Pignatelli [i.e. the Marquess of Strongoli] was appointed lieutenant-general of

the kingdom. But the death of order always means the death of authority: he had no
control over the people. A very brief time sufficed to decide the fate of Naples.73
In this process, meanwhile, the French played a major role, their soldiers behaving with
such abandon that even Marc Jullien, the erstwhile journalist and sometime editor of the
Bonapartist publicity sheet entitled the Courier de l’Armée d’Italie, whom Championnet
appointed to be the secretary-general of the provisional government of the Parthenopean
Republic, could not conceal his dismay. Thus:
Although the officer corps and rank and file of the French army is . . . worthy of admi-
ration for its heroic exploits . . . its general staffs and administrative bodies are rotten
and gangrened . . . In enemy country and occupied territory alike, it is believed that
anything goes. Robbery takes place on all sides in the most shameless fashion and with
the most scandalous impunity. The unfortunate inhabitants are oppressed, insulted,
outraged and stripped of their possessions at the very same time that we assume the
ostentatious title of their liberators. Can we really call what we are bringing them lib-
erty if we inflict upon them nothing but turmoil, brigandage and crime of every sort?74
Hardly had the armistice been signed on 12 January 1799, then, than the lower classes of the
capital rose in revolt, though even now devotion to the Bourbons was scarcely visible. As an
early historian of the events that followed wrote, the crowd ‘ran to provide themselves with
arms from the castles and the arsenals, and came back in order of battle, vociferating that
they were defending their nation and their religion, but hardly one among all the multitude
was heard even to name the king.’75 For some ten days there followed scenes of the utmost
chaos as bands of lazzaroni raged through the streets, pillaging the houses of the rich and
killing noblemen and other leading inhabitants suspected of supporting the armistice (an
important point to note here is that, notwithstanding French assumptions that the Church
was behind all resistance to the Revolution, the ecclesiastical authorities used every device
in their power to calm the situation, whilst at least one monastery was sacked and put to the
torch). So furious was the populace at what they perceived as their betrayal by the monar-
chy, meanwhile, that they even sacked the royal palace. Not until Championnet actually
marched into the city on 22 January was order restored, and even then it was not without
sharp fighting.76
Nor was resistance solely confined to Naples. As the French marched southwards, so the
masse suddenly discovered something to fight for and started harassing their columns and
picking off stragglers and foraging parties. Here and there, meanwhile, including, not least
Teramo, the same town where the mobilisation of the masse had caused such panic, there
were insurrections against the committees of sympathisers, whether committed or simply
calculating, whom the French had set up to govern the areas they had occupied, these being
suppressed at the cost of considerable bloodshed. With the fall of the capital, meanwhile,
the situation grew still worse. In brief, around the country, the news of the proclamation
of a republic led to wholesale popular unrest which the local authorities in many towns
had felt no option but to take control of through the establishment of pro-Bourbon juntas.
Meanwhile, other towns that had initially declared for the Republic changed sides when the
new régime’s radical nature became clear. As for the military situation, Championnet and
the government of the Parthenopean Republic scarcely controlled more than the ground
their forces occupied, not least because the masse had been reinforced by a variety of armed
men including a young soldier named Michele Pezza who had been forcibly enlisted in the
army after being convicted of murder but now emerged as an irregular leader of considerable
daring as well as a folk-hero whose feats of daring-do, whether real or imaginary, became a
further spur to resistance.77 One French soldier who found himself caught up in the violence
was the future General Boulart. Sent to take command of the garrison of the small moun-
tain town of Aquila, he encountered a situation that was deeply polarised. Thus:
The population of the town, even down to the clergy, was not hostile to us. The upper
classes and all those who possessed any degree of education, indeed, shared our princi-
ples: amongst them I found good will, enlightenment and a warm welcome. However,
the spirit of the inhabitants of the countryside was completely different. Poor, supersti-
tious, inclined to robbery and brigandage . . . they hunted the French like wild beasts
and behaved towards them with the most unheard of cruelty.78
Utterly overawed, Boulart and his men eventually abandoned all pretence of patrolling the
countryside and shut themselves up in the town and for a little while were left in peace. One
morning in March, however, large numbers of insurgents burst in, drove the French into
the castle that acted as their headquarters, and laid siege to the garrison, Boulart only being
saved from catastrophe by the fortuitous arrival of a relief column.79
As always, however, it would be naïve to imagine that this wave of revolt was purely
ideological or even ideological at all. Throughout, the Church remained ambivalent, if not
deeply divided, while, driven by economic necessity and loathing of the privileged orders
as much as they were by hatred of the French, the rank and file were, as their opponents
always alleged, little short of brigands. As for the various local élites who had seized control
of the revolts, while some were genuinely horrified by the prospect of Jacobin revolution,
others were rather motivated by long-standing communal, familial or personal rivalries.
Thus, a republican administration had only to be established in Montesano under the lead-
ership of a prominent local notable named Nicola Cestari for the latter’s long-term enemy,
one Emerico Gerbasio, to start plotting insurrection, whilst Bari, Monteleone, Cosenza
and Catanzaro found that their declarations of loyalty to the new order simply served as
a pretext for the satellite villages that were subject to their authority to throw off their
rule on account of a devotion to the throne that was wholly new; equally, in the Abruzzi,
growing friction between arable and pastoral farming led peasant communities to plump
for one side for no better reason than the neighbouring shepherd village had plumped for
the other. In the extreme south and south-east, meanwhile, the mix was complicated still
further by ethnic tension in that Italian villages turned upon neighbouring representatives
of the numerous Albanian communities that had dotted the coastal regions ever since
the arrival of wave after wave of refugees desperate to escape the horrors of the Ottoman
conquest of their homelands in the sixteenth century (and, alas, vice versa). This is not to
say, however, that the Albanian villages were all on the same side: far from it – whilst there
appears to have been a strong tendency amongst them to support the Republic (a reflec-
tion, perhaps, of their circumstances, which tended to be particularly poverty-stricken), a
minority favoured the monarchy. As John Davis writes, then, ‘The counter-revolution of
1799 was never quite what the later myths described.’80
True though all this was, to expect the French to understand such nuances is completely
unrealistic. For Championnet and his subordinate commanders, the local committees were
counter-revolutionaries through and through and the insurgents mere bandits. Spurred on
by horrific tales of violence that were beyond doubt exaggerated and yet at the same time
possessed of all too much in the way of foundation – in village after village one hears of men
who had made the mistake of declaring their support for the Republic (and sometimes their
wives and children as well) being decapitated, beaten to death or hacked to pieces – they
hit back with the utmost ruthlessness. In Naples, the Republican pamphleteer Eleonora de
Fonseca Pimentel wrote article after article arguing that the mass of the rebels were simple
men who were at worst misguided and could yet be won over to the cause of liberty, but
her words were everywhere ignored. Far more typical of the attitude of the régime was the
description penned of the insurgents by the hero of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820,
Guglielmo Pepe:
The . . . provinces were infested by a set of ruffians, the residue of the galleys who had
previously sought a refuge in Sicily and by others sprung from the very dregs of the
populace. These wretches, more or less loaded with crimes, and signalised by their
brutal ferocity, caused themselves to be acknowledged as the chiefs of numerous bands,
the first knot of which was formed by the baronial men-at-arms, and by the Dalmatian
troops who had been dismissed from the army where they served until it was disbanded,
and had since then wandered about in desperate gangs, living upon the produce of
the alms which they demanded. The others were composed of the numerous criminals
delivered from the prisons.81
Now commanded not by the showy and vainglorious Championnet but rather the highly
competent Etienne Macdonald, the occupying forces set about the task of repression with
great vigour. ‘Today, at dawn’, a resident of Barletta named Camillo Elefante confided to
his journal, ‘the French took Andria by assault . . . It was put to the sack and the people
massacred and the town burnt . . . The French troops . . . committed the most vile atroci-
ties . . . not sparing the honour of the nuns, not even the oldest ones. Then they sold on a
lot of their loot in Corato, Terlizzi, Bisceglie and surrounding areas.’82
Yet fire and the sword could only achieve so much. As he admitted in his memoirs, then,
Macdonald faced an uphill fight. Thus:
Our successes against the insurgents were universal, but no sooner was the insurrection
crushed at one point than it broke out at another. Communication with Rome had
been frequently interrupted. Large escorts, and even cannon, were necessary . . . to
ensure a safe journey . . . but sometimes impatient travellers would start alone or with
slender escorts, and then fall victim to the banditti and brigands, who inflicted upon
them the most abominable cruelties.83
Given time, Macdonald might have won his war: after all, the fresh revolt that broke out in
Calabria in 1806 was eventually suppressed, albeit at the cost of four years of bitter fighting.
Unfortunately for the future marshal, however, time was not on his side. With the coming of
spring, the Austrians and Russians, as we shall see, launched a great offensive in the north of
Italy, the French forces immediately being recalled to defend the far more vital theatre of the
Po valley. All that was left to defend the Republic was the newly formed National Guard, but
this force existed more on paper than in reality, whilst the countryside was as much up in arms
as ever: when Boulart and his men finally pulled out of Aquila, they found that their march
was harassed virtually every step of the way.84 To make matters worse, meanwhile, in February
1799 a new element had entered the fray in the person of Cardinal Fabrizzio Ruffo. Born in
1744 to an impoverished family of the Calabrian gentry, Ruffo had entered the service of the
Papal States and risen to an important role in their governance, eventually becoming de facto
Minister of War. Dismissed from his post in 1791 on account of having incurred the hostility
of the Roman aristocracy in consequence of his opposition to feudalism, he was yet rewarded
with the title ‘cardinal’ (a position that has never entailed any necessity of being ordained a
priest). Thus recommended, he offered his services to his native Naples and became steward of
the estates attached to the royal palace at Caserta. Having fled to Sicily along with the royal
family, in February 1799 he was appointed Vicar-General – in effect, viceroy – of the mainland
provinces and sent back across the Straits of Messina with orders to take charge of the resist-
ance. At first progress was slow: unable to obtain more than a handful of recruits for what he
termed the ‘Army of the Holy Faith’, Ruffo at first had to content himself with securing the
remote province of Calabria.85 However, the retreat of the French transformed the situation
and, with his ranks stiffened by the disembarkation of detachments of Russian and Turkish
troops, in May 1799 Ruffo set off for the capital. Completely unopposed as he was, in less than
a month he was at the gates of the capital, but to think either that the cardinal deserved much
credit for liberating Naples, let alone that the Army of the Holy Faith was to the last man com-
posed of ardent religious crusaders is to stretch credulity to the utmost. ‘When . . . the gazettes
reported that Cardinal Ruffo had reconquered the kingdom with the Calabrian masses’, wrote
a sceptical Roger de Damas, ‘no sensible person, surely, accepted the story as anything but
a newspaper tale. He began his expedition at a time when there was no enemy to oppose
him . . . Two poor villages accused a rich one of Jacobinism, whereupon the cardinal prom-
ised that the two should combine to pillage the third. Without seeing a single Frenchman
he advanced from province to province . . . till he reached Naples . . . [and] handed over the
capital to be devastated by his acolytes.’86 For a personal account of what happened when the
sanfedisti came to town, meanwhile, we have only to turn to Camillo Elefante:
Some 150 Calabrian soldiers passed through, having caused much disturbance to the
country around, causing all kinds of harm and taking reprisals, with the usual excuse
that the people were Jacobins or supported the Jacobins. And today they were thieving
and plundering and punishing and despoiling even whilst they were calling themselves
[soldiers] of the Holy Faith. Well, they are an army of the Holy Faith in name only.87
If it is from the activities of such men that the English language gained the word ‘ruffian’, it
should be pointed out that neither devastation nor murder were part of Ruffo’s plan. On the
contrary, throughout his campaign the cardinal sought to spare the lives of his opponents
and avoid popular reprisals. This, however, was easier said than done. As it marched north,
the Army of the Holy Faith was joined by Michele Pezza and various other irregular leaders,
and these were not disposed to curb the blood-lust of followers habituated to violence and
rapine by dozens of brutal village massacres.88 That being the case, completely unopposed
though it was, the occupation of the capital on 14 June was accompanied by large numbers
of killings as well as wholesale pillage, the number of those who perished being estimated at
around 1,000.89 Helpless to prevent what was going on, the unfortunate Ruffo could do no
more than set up a special tribunal which he hoped might at least save a few prisoners by
sentencing them to terms of imprisonment. That said, the fact that the fortress of Sant’Elmo
and two minor forts were still holding out meant that there was a chance of saving at least
the many Jacobins who had taken refuge within their walls, and so he opened negotiations
in the hope that he could persuade the garrisons to surrender in exchange for a promise of
evacuation to Toulon. In this, however, he was frustrated. Such a convention was indeed
signed, but, hardly had the defenders and their civilian allies been embarked on the flotilla of
vessels that Ruffo had prepared for them, than Lord Nelson appeared off the city at the head
of a powerful British squadron. A man possessed by an all-consuming hatred of the French
Revolution, Nelson anulled the terms of the surrender document and declared the evacuees
to be his prisoners, whilst for good measure having Francesco Caracciolo, the commander
of such few vessels as had been left to the Parthenopean Republic and had just been con-
veyed to him by a Ruffo apparently convinced that the best way of saving the admiral’s
life was to place him in British custody, immediately court-martialled and hung from the
yard-arm. Nor was this an end to it, the tribunal set up by Ruffo betraying his hopes of mod-
eration and embarking on a thorough purge of all those associated with the Republic, the
names of the hundred or more which it sentenced to death including the jurist Francesco
Conforti, the Hellenist Pasquale Baffi, the doctor Domenico Cirillo and the pamphleteer
Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, as well as Luisa de San Felice, a young woman whose only
crime had been inadvertently to betray an early royalist conspiracy to the government.90
The tide of rebellion did not reach its high watermark at Naples. On the contrary, the
combination of news that an Austro-Russian army was pouring into Lombardy, together,
in many instances, with a sudden absence of French troops, was causing chaos in the rest
of Italy, revolts breaking out in almost every region occupied by the French, the specific
places involved including many towns and villages that had hitherto seen no trouble what-
soever. Insurrection, then, was widespread, but in this chapter we shall concentrate on
the events that took place in Tuscany. A grand duchy ruled by a Hapsburg ruler – at this
moment Ferdinand III – Tuscany had initially escaped occupation when the French armies
had embarked on their invasion of central and southern Italy in 1798, not least because to
attack it would have assuredly provoked an Austria yet to commit herself to the Second
Coalition to go to war. However, once Vienna chose the path of renewed war, the fate
of Ferdinand III was sealed: on 24 March, French forces crossed the frontier from several
directions, the grand duke proceeding to abdicate and go into exile. No sooner had he
done so than a quasi-republican administration took power formed, in part, by bureaucrats
who had played an important role in the reformist ministries of the preceding decades
and, in part, by the usual sympathisers with the ideals of Jacobinism, the chief role in all
this being played by the French ambassador, Charles Reinhard. Meanwhile, in the streets
and squares (many of them now renamed) liberty trees sprang up on all sides whilst, in
churches, palaces and libraries, works of art, rare manuscripts and precious items of all sorts
were snatched up with equal speed by a host of French commissioners. In the country-
side, perhaps, all this had little relevance, but the French troops behaved with their usual
obstreperousness, whilst granaries were emptied and fields stripped of cattle, sheep and
horses, the new government also being told that it was going to have to honour the agree-
ment negotiated by the régime of Ferdinand III to pay over a forced loan of 800,000 scudi.
With prices high and food short, the result was inevitable, the French having been in the
country for scarcely a month before news of the Austro-Russian advances in the Po valley
sparked off a series of village risings which within a matter of days coalesced to become a
single wave of insurrection known from the battle-cry of the insurgents as the ‘Viva Maria!’
rebellion. Initially, the French governor Paul Gaultier succeeded in hanging on to the main
towns, but the end of the first week of June saw almost all his 6,000 men pulled out to join
the fight against the Austrians and Russians. Like their collaborators in the Parthenopean
Republic before them, then, the collaborators were on their own, and on 28 June the rebels
marched into Siena, where they engaged in numerous atrocities. Protected by a handful of
national guards, Florence held out a little longer, but no sooner had a column of Austrian
troops turned up than it hastened to surrender. In less than two months, then, the cause of
counter-revolution had triumphed.91
To conclude, what is to be learned from this catalogue of resistance to the French beyond
the frontiers of the France of 1789? In the first place, that, while passive resistance could
flourish everywhere and was an urban phenomenon as much as it was a rural one, armed
resistance was a different matter and one governed by social, geographical and political
circumstance. Overwhelmingly rural, it required a widespread habituation to arms; coun-
tryside of a sort that negated French military superiority; the assistance, either direct or
indirect, of regular armies; and French garrisons that were smaller rather than larger. Where
these conditions were not fully present as in Piedmont and Belgium, rebellion was crushed,
while where they were not present at all, as in Holland, there was hardly a single uprising
or episode of guerrilla warfare to be seen; worth adding here, of course, is the codicil that in
the end armed popular resistance was shown to be a flimsy weapon that was only likely to
be successful in the absence of substantial forces of French troops. Meanwhile, as in France,
resistance was rarely truly counter-revolutionary in an ideological sense: the rebels may
have objected to the French and their sympathisers, but that did not mean that they neces-
sarily supported the previous state of affairs in either its social or its political aspects, while
they were viewed by the Church with considerable ambivalence, if not open hostility. In
short, when the French and their supporters referred to the peasant bands of the Pyrenees,
Piedmont, Brabant, Calabria and Tuscany as ‘brigands’, they were probably not far short of
the truth if brigandage is understood as a form of social protest, what motivated the insur-
gents and home guards of Catalonia, Belgium, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Italy being a
poverty and despair that France’s ‘armed missionaries’ did nothing to assuage and, in many
cases, made a great deal worse.
Notes
1 See H. Reiss, ‘Goethe and the French Revolution’, in Mason and Doyle, Impact of the French
Revolution on European Consciousness, pp. 146–59.
2 The economic impact of French occupation was bad enough, but insult was added to injury
by incidents typified by one remembered by Paul Thiébault as having taken place in Rome in
1798: ‘I remember . . . a farewell dinner . . . at which I happened to be present. In the course of
it the glasses, decanters, bottles, plates and dishes were thrown out of the window or smashed
where they were . . . On hearing of this destruction the landlord came up., and . . . begged that
[the guests] would at least spare . . . some pile of plates handsomer than the rest. His pitiful air,
however, did but hasten what he feared . . . One of the guests proved to him, with the utmost seri-
ousness, that what he asked was impossible, and then, talking to him all the while, took up some
plates . . . and broke half-a-dozen of them over his head as he gesticulated with them.’ Thiébault,
Memoirs, I, pp. 360–1.
3 Even in areas that were generally quiet, there could still lurk an undercurrent of violence in that
tavern brawls or particular acts of provocation could easily result in the death of French soldiers.
Herewith, for example, is an account of an incident that took place near Nijmegan in May: ‘Two
grenadiers of the first battalion went off to have themselves some fun at a village near Grave.
Whilst they were there, they encountered some peasants, who killed one of them . . . Without
doubt it was the adoption of a military manner (a term that I employ to avoid using the word
‘insolent’, though it is in fact one and the same thing) that brought the latter to blows with our
men.’ Cit. Anon. ‘Lettres de campagne du Sergent-Major Dumey’, p. 658.
4 A. Forrest, ‘The ubiquitous brigand: the politics and language of repression’ in Esdaile, Popular
Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Land-Pirates, p. 31. Archetypal example of the
complication referred to by Forrest is the much-renowned Rhineland bandit, Johannes Bückler.
Better known by his nickname of Schinderhannes, Bückler was in reality nothing more than a
petty criminal who made his living from theft and extortion, some of it accompanied by consider-
able violence. Had he been born ten years earlier or ten years later, the chances are that he would
still have followed exactly the same career path – his family background was desperately poor, not
to say wholly marginalised – but, as it happened, he came of age in the midst of the French occu-
pation, so the circumstances were anything but normal and afforded him particular opportunities
which he was not slow to make use of. Thus, to have simply ravaged his own community would
have been to expose him to instant denunciation to the authorities, if not violent retribution at
the hands of some village posse. That being the case, in so far as possible, he therefore directed
his life of crime against those who had few friends in the village communities in which he oper-
ated, namely the French and the Jews (a group who were numerous, highly visible, traditionally
regarded with much loathing and perceived to be both allies of the occupying forces and enemies
of the occupation). In consequence, if not actively engaged in resistance himself, he quickly
became a symbol of that same resistance, and went to his execution at the hands of the French in
1802 as a folk-hero. Blanning, French Revolution and Germany, pp. 292–300.
5 Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 55; Bricard and Bricard, Journal du cannonier Bricard. According
to his own account, Bial responded to this domestic assault with such charm that the woman, a
Madame Lenne, was won over to the extent that he was able to make the acquaintance of a num-
ber of city’s leading families through her good offices and even to engage in a flirtation (or possibly
even more) with a Mademoiselle de Clermond. Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, pp. 56–7.
6 The problem of finding indigenous volunteers was not just confined to Italy: for example, an
attempt to raise a 5,600-strong ‘North Frankish Legion’ in the Rhineland in 1798 obtained no
more than 2,000 recruits, and many even of them were desperate fugitives from the Belgian revolt
of the previous year who had no other means of keeping body and soul together. Rowe, From Reich
to State, pp. 163–5.
7 Ernouf, Souvenirs militaires d’un jeune abbé, p. 79.
8 Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, pp. 300–13; for a long account of a skirmish that took
place in respect of a small group of soldiers who were billeted on a householder in Coblenz, see
F. Dumey to his mother, 16 November 1798, ‘Lettres de campagne du Sergent-Major Dumey’,
pp. 661–7.
9 Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 281, 289, 336; Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 114. Such
incidents were limited in their significance, it being worth noting that, despite growing poverty
and economic disruption, the Dutch populace never turned its back on the Batavian Republic.
Thus, when the British and the Russians invaded the country in 1799, contrary to British expec-
tations, the Dutch troops who always composed the majority of the defending forces stood firm,
while an attempt at an Orangist rising near Arnhem proved a fiasco. Here and there, there were
demonstrations of loyalty to the old order, and a certain baroness was even shot for conspiracy, but
the survival of pre-1795 arrangements for poor relief and a far greater sense of participation and
ownership ensured that the wholesale rebellion seen in Italy in 1799 was avoided. Ibid., pp. 391–8.
10 See M. Rowe, ‘Divided loyalties: sovereignty, politics and public service in the Rhineland under
French occupation, 1792–1801’, European Review of History, 5, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 151–68.
11 See M. van der Burg, ‘Transforming the Dutch Republic into the Kingdom of Holland: the
Netherlands between republicanism and monarchy, 1795’, European Review of History, 17, No. 2
(May, 2010), pp. 151–70.
12 E.H. Kossmann, The Low Countries, 1780–1940 (Oxford, 1978), p. 77.
13 Conde de Clonard, Historia orgánica de las armas de infantería y caballería españolas (Madrid,
1851–62), V, p. 405.
14 J.R. Aymes, La guerra de España contra la Revolución Francesa, 1793–95 (Alicante, 1991),
pp. 310–42 passim.
15 For all these details, cf. J. Fabregas Roig, La guerra gran, 1793–1795: el protagonisme de Girona i la
mobilització dels miquelets (Lérida, 2000), pp. 78–85.
16 Ibid., pp. 94–105 passim.
17 P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA, 1989), p. 180.
18 Aymes, Guerra de España contra la Revolución Francesa, 1793–95, pp. 362–4.
19 See W.B. Kennedy, ‘Revolutionary France and royalist Spain at war in the Pyrenees, 1793–95’,
Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings, 20 (1990), pp, 571–8; Doppet, Mémoires politiques
et militaires, p. 264.
20 E.g. Doppet, Mémoires politiques et militaires, p. 278.
21 J.N. Fervel, Campagnes de la Révolution Française dans les Pyrénées orientales, 1793–1794–1795
(Paris, 1851), I, pp. 316–19.
22 Doppet, Mémoires politiques et militaires, pp. 316–17. It is just possible that the Citizen Brunel
referred to here was a connection of the famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the latter’s father,
Marc Brunel, being a French naval officer who fled to Britain in 1794.
23 M. Boycott-Brown, ‘Guerrilla warfare avant la lettre: northern Italy, 1792–1797’, in Esdaile,
Popular Resistance in the French Wars, pp. 46–51. It is worth noting that the months after the
Piedmontese withdrawal from the War of the First Coalition in May 1796 were marked by a series
of peasant risings occasioned by the impoverishment and economic disruption caused by the war.
That being the case, to assume that the barbetti were motivated by devotion to the ancien régime
pure and simple is clearly naïve. See M. Broers, ‘Revolution as vendetta: patriotism in Piedmont,
1794–1824’, Historical Journal, 33, No. 3 (September, 1990), pp. 583–84.
24 L. Cole, ‘Nation, anti-enlightenment and religious revival in Austria: Tyrol in the 1790s’,
Historical Journal, 44, No. 2 (June, 2000), pp. 482–8.
25 Anon., The History of the Campaigns of 1796, 1797, 1798 and 1799 in Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
etc. (London, 1812), I, pp. 372–3.
26 For a romantic rendition of this story, see E. Wayne, The Maid of Spinges: A Tale of Napoleon’s
Invasion of the Tyrol (London, 1913).
27 For discussions of the revolt of Pavia, see Boycott-Brown, ‘Guerrilla warfare avant la lettre’, pp. 56–8;
Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 230–2.
28 Boycott-Brown, ‘Guerrilla warfare avant la lettre’, p. 59.
29 The misdeeds of the invaders are recorded in ironic vein in the diary of a taverner named
Valentino Alberti. Day after day, then, we read of parties of French soldiers descending on his
establishment and eating and drinking their fill, only to wish him a cheerful goodbye and leave
without paying (and that if he was lucky: on other occasions, he did not get even the cheerful
goodbye). See R. Scattolini, ‘Verona, 1796–97: a case of popular rejection through the pages of
Valentino Alberti’, <www.napoleon-series.org/research/miscellaneous/c_Verona1796–97.html>,
accessed 5 April 2017.
30 Known as the ‘Veronese Easter’ as it broke out on Easter Sunday, this rising was an extremely com-
plex affair. A city belonging to the Venetian Republic, Verona had been occupied by troops of the
Army of Italy the previous autumn as they followed up the retreating Austrians, but Venice itself
was neutral and its government desperate to keep out of trouble. Unbeknown to the Doge and his
advisers, however, Napoleon was bent on seizing much of the Republic and therefore launched a
series of revolutions in towns such as Brescia and Bergamo in an attempt to show popular support
for a French take-over. Incensed at this development, the local populace took up arms against the
new administrations that resulted from the so-called revolutions, and the result was a bitter civil
war in which French troops quickly intervened to support their heavily outnumbered partisans.
Verona, however, remained quiet, but this did not suit the invaders, and they therefore deliber-
ately provoked a revolt so as to give themselves a pretext to install a Jacobin city council. At this
point, however, they got more than they had bargained for, the rioters who turned out to oppose
them gaining the support not just of the Venetian troops stationed in the city but large numbers
of Austrian prisoners of war whom they freed from the city’s jails. For a modern account, see
F. Bonafini, Verona 1797: il furore de una citta (Verona, 1997).
31 Gauthier-Villars, Mémoires d’un veteran, p. 46.
32 Anon., History of the Campaigns of 1796, 1797, 1798 and 1799, I, pp. 372–3.
33 For a good example, one might cite that issued by General Kléber prior to his invasion of Germany
in May 1797. Thus: ‘The French soldier treats as brothers all those who do not take up arms
against him . . . By such conduct, my comrades, you will inspire the greatest confidence amongst
the inhabitants . . . whereas, if you instil terror in anyone other than the enemy army, you will find
yourself in a desert devoid of resources and thereby exposed to all the horrors of famine. Your own
interests, then, make observing the most exact discipline your duty. If I have to proceed against
anyone who ignores this fact, I . . . swear that I shall do so without restraint.’ Cit. Buquet, ‘Journal
Historique’, part 1, p. 206.
34 Cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, pp. 241–3. A particular problem was the ever-increasing depreciation of
the assignats. ‘The assignats have absolutely no value in this country’, complained an infantryman
stationed in Spire in 1795. ‘We offer thirty livres for a three-pound loaf, but there are no takers. A
louis d’or goes for 500 livres and an écu worth six livres, 100 in assignats. Our situation could not be
more unfortunate: we have no bread and have been waiting for some to turn up for the past two
days.’ Cit. Picard, Au service de la nation, p. 83.
35 One problem that many units faced as the wars dragged on was shortage of officers, and, with this,
a tendency for power to fall into the hands of tough and brutal non-commissioned officers who
were disposed to exploit their positions for all they were worth. For example, returning to his unit
from a spell in hospital, one sergeant major discovered that, in the absence, for various reasons, of
all its senior officers, it had been taken over by ‘a rogue by the name of Rémy, a sometime sutler
who has become a sergeant’ and had ‘seized the moment to suborn the company by letting it go
a-pillaging . . . at will’. Cit. Bironneau, ‘Lettres de J.C. Jannin’, p. 468.
37 For an important discussion of French perceptions of brigandage and the threat that it posed, see
Forrest, ‘The ubiquitous brigand’. For a typical view of the behaviour of the clergy, we might cite
Jean-Pierre Bial: ‘The region of Liège was certainly one of the areas of Europe where advances in
civilization had done most to prepare public opinion for the régime of liberty. The only group that
appeared to hesitate was the clergy, inspired, as they were, by fear for their influence and their
interests. The suppression of the religious orders, then, threw every last one of them into confu-
sion. What increased their fear still further was the large number of émigrés who had sought refuge
at Liège. It is simply impossible to obtain a good idea of the lies and other absurdities which this
element spread in respect of what was happening in France. Never had there been so many mar-
tyrs at any one time, whilst every last one of them had only escaped a similar fate by the greatest
good fortune.’ Soulié, Carnets du Colonel Bial, p. 63.
39 Boulart, Mémoires militaires, p. 42.
40 Cit. Bironneau (ed.), ‘Lettres de J.C. Jannin’, Carnets de la Sabretache, 7 (1899), p. 412.
41 Cit. ibid., p. 453.
42 F.X. Joliclerc to M.P. Defrasne, 23 July 1793, cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, pp. 104–5.
43 F.X. Joliclerc to M.P. Defrasne, 17 August 1793, cit. Jolicler, Joliclerc, p. 111.
44 P. Girardon to C. Girardon, 19 January 1794, cit. Morin, Lettres de Pierre Girardon, p. 41.
45 Boulart, Mémoires militaires, p. 11. An important issue in the Rhineland was the fact that the
populace included many elements that soldiers from the depths of la France profonde found it hard
to cope with. As a sergeant major of a volunteer battalion from the Puy-de-Dôme named Eloy
Leclerc complained to his brother in a letter written from Strasbourg on 10 June 1794, ‘The air
of the Departments of Upper and Lower Rhine is infected by the presence of persons of different
sects such as Jews, Lutherans, Protestants and others. People of this sort have yet to do anything
to earn their liberty, and particularly not the Jews. Not revolutionary in the slightest, these last
are guided by nothing other their appetite for gain and thirst for gold . . . Vile speculators who live
only for scrimping and other such pettinesses and put their . . . personal interests before the public
good, the well-being of the Fatherland demands that they should all be deported to places at least
twenty leagues from the frontier and placed under the appropriate surveillance.’ Cit. Picard, Au
service de la nation, p. 48.
46 Soulié, Les carnets du Colonel Bial, pp. 61–2; Boulart, Mémoires militaires, pp. 12–13.
47 Ibid., p. 59; Boulart, Mémoires militaires, pp. 12–13.
48 M.J. Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture and Masculinity in the
French Army, 1800–1808 (New York University Press, 2012), pp. 108–36.
49 P. Verhaegen, La Belgique sous la domination française, 1792–1814 (Brussels, 1922), II, pp. 481–537
passim, and A. Thys, Les conscrits belges en 1798 et 1799 (Antwerp, 1885), pp. 7–11. It did not
help, meanwhile, that two years of bitter fighting had reduced many towns and villages to ruins.
In the words of Charles Este, ‘Had all the amateurs of war been present, there was enough of
the sublime . . . to have satisfied the most sanguine of them all . . . Through many a long mile
there was the cry of havoc still . . . Almost every house was pierced through and through: in each
poor clay wall there remained the hideous stigma of . . . cannon shot. Of many houses, battered
and burned, there was no one stone left upon another . . . Every face was in sadness; every heart
seemed faint.’ Este, Journey in the Year 1793, p. 106.
50 In one respect at least the Directory was completely unbending. Thus, from the very beginning
it set out to eradicate the Flemish language, the use of this last being prohibited in schools, law
courts and official correspondence alike. See H. Hasquin (ed.), La Belgique française, 1792–1815
(Brussels, 1993), pp. 424–8.
51 Verhaegen, La Belgique sous la domination française, II, p. 523.
52 Ibid., III, pp. 205–29 passim.
54 Verhaegen, La Belgique sous la domination française, III, p. 79–93.
55 Ibid., pp. 146–65.
56 Ibid., p. 171.
57 Ibid., p. 186.
58 Cit. Thys, Conscrits belges, p. 19.
59 Ibid., pp. 335–49. The issue of the extent to which the revolt was pre-planned has been much
debated. Unwilling to recognise the deficiencies of liberation, sympathisers with the Revolution
have been very much inclined to allege that it was the work of British agents, but there is little
evidence that this was actually the case. That said, it is clear that, in part founded on links dat-
ing from the revolution of 1789, by the summer of 1798 a veritable network of conspiratorial
groups had emerged that were increasingly dedicated to the organisation of an uprising. Ibid.,
pp. 325–7.
60 Ibid., pp. 346–64; For details of the rebel leadership, see J. Goris (ed.), La Guerre des Paysans,
1798: catalogue de l’exposition au Musée Royale de l’Armée et d’Histoire Militaire du 19 de novembre
1998 au 15 janvier 1999 (Brussels, 1998), p. 6. As for the rank and file, the majority were the usual
mix of peasants and artisans. The fact that support for the insurrection was particularly strong in
Flanders and Brabant has led to some suggestion that the movement was above all a Flemish one.
This, however, is to go too far: if revolt was stronger in the north of the country than it was in the
south, it may simply be because the proximity of the coast conjured up hopes of British aid.
61 For a good introduction to the events of the uprising, see Hasquin, La Belgique française, pp. 152–64.
62 H.G. Brown, ‘The origins of the Napoleonic system of repression’, in M. Broers et al. (eds.), The
Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Houndmills, 2012), p. 43.
63 Verhaegen, Belgique sous la domination française, III, pp. 518–82 passim. Meanwhile, for a detailed
study of the difficulties which the authorities encountered in imposing conscription, see Thys,
Conscrits belges, pp. 234–48. Finally, a revealing insight into the depth of popular alienation
may be found in B. Wilkin and R. Wilkin (eds.), Fighting for Napoleon: French Soldiers’ Letters,
1799–1815 (Barnsley, 2015), a work based on various collections of correspondence housed in the
archives of Liège, the men it focuses on therefore being wholly Belgian, and, what is more, both
French-speaking and representative of a region where admiration for the Revolution had initially
been very strong..
64 Oeschli, History of Switzerland, pp. 320–3. For the incident concerning William Tell’s crossbow,
see J. Sansom, Travels from Paris through Switzerland and Italy in 1801 and 1802 with Sketches of the
Manners and Characters of the Respective Inhabitants (London, 1808), p. 12.
65 Thoumas, Le général Curély, pp. 124–5.
66 Oeschli, History of Switzerland, pp. 343–9.
67 Thiébault, Memoirs, I, pp. 368–70.
68 H. Nelson to J. Stuart, 7 January 1799, cit. N. Harris (ed.), The Dispatches and Letters of Admiral
Lord Nelson, (London, 1845), III, pp. 227–8.
69 Amongst the rank and file of the masse, there was much anger at the offensive nature of the
war. To quote an anonymous pamphlet written at the time of the revolution of 1820, ‘Offensive
war and conquest were attempted with troops into whom [the régime] had already infused the
principle . . . that they should not be called upon to fight except in defence of their homes.
When, therefore, they were required to pass the frontiers, they replied to their officers, “Did
you not tell us that the king was not at war with the French?”’. Anon., ‘An account of the
Revolution of Naples during the years 1798 [and] 1799’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary
Journal, 1 (January 1821), p. 41.
70 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, pp. 61–2; C.F. Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (London,
2001), pp. 211–12.
71 M.S. Anderson, ‘The Italian reformers’ in H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and
Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Houndmills, 1990), p. 71.
72 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p. 109.
73 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, p. 272.
74 M. Jullien, ‘Rapport sur la foundation de la République Napolitain’, 15 ventôse, an VII, cit.
A.R.C. de Saint-Albin, Championnet, général des armées de la République Française ou les campagnes
d’Hollande, de Rome et de Naples (Paris, 1861), p. 348.
75 Anon., ‘Account of the Revolution of Naples’, p. 47.
76 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, pp. 272–4; Davis, Naples and Napoleon,
pp. 79–80.
77 C.D. Giglioli, Naples in 1799: An Account of the Revolution of 1799 and of the Rise and Fall of the
Parthenopean Republic (London, 1903), p. 134; Davis, Naples and Napoleon, pp. 88–9; Broers,
Napoleon’s Other War, pp. 67–8. At the time, Pezza was generally referred to by his childhood
nickname of Fra Diavolo or ‘Brother Devil’.
78 Boulart, Mémoires militaires, p. 42.
79 Ibid., pp. 44–50.
80 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p. 107; Giglioli, Naples in 1799, pp. 148–9.
81 G. Pepe, Memoirs of General Pepe, 1783–1815 (London, 1846), p. 40.
82 J. North (ed.), ‘Camillo Elefante’s diary detailing events in Barletta in 1799’, <www.jpnorth.
co.uk/research/nelson-at-naples-in-1799/camillo-elefantes-diary-detailing-events-in-barletta-
in-1799/>, accessed 10 February 2017.
83 Rousset, Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, I, pp. 216–17.
84 Boulart, Mémoires militaires, p. 51. Established by a law of 17 February 1799, the National Guard
supposedly consisted of a sedentary home-guard in which every male citizen was enrolled and a
twelve-regiment strong field force composed entirely of volunteers. However, very few recruits
were obtained for the latter, whilst such men as came forward quickly proved to be highly prone
to desertion. See E. Acerbi, ‘The 1799 Campaign in Italy: Macdonald’s wars in central Italy and
what he left behind April-June 1799’, <www.napoleon-series.org/military/battles/1799/c_1799z.
html>, accessed 10 February 2017.
85 Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p, 117.
86 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, pp. 400–1.
87 North (ed.), ‘Camillo Elefante’s diary detailing events in Barletta in 1799’.
88 Of the various capi, as they were known, perhaps the worst was Gaetano Mammone. Some of
the stories told of him are difficult to take at face value, but it is entirely probable that such men
enforced their authority by surrounding themselves with a mystique of violence, whilst the specific
accusation that he and his followers were personally responsible for the murder of some 700 men,
women and children rings all too true. For all this see G. Orlov, Mémoires historiques, politiques et
literaires sur le royaume de Naples (Paris, 1819), pp. 374–5.
89 Giglioli, Naples in 1799, pp. 252–74.
90 The role of Lord Nelson in the repression has for obvious reasons been bitterly debated. All that
will be said here on the matter is that the arguments of his defenders are far from convincing. See
A. Lambert, Nelson: Britannia’s God of War (London, 2004), pp. 156–9; E. Vincent, Nelson: Love
and War (Newhaven, CT, 2003), pp. 327–34. That said, the ferocity with which the rebels were
treated has been much exaggerated: the vast majority of those put on trial were acquitted, while
stories that the lazzaroni and their liberators queued up to eat the livers and other body parts of
those executed say more about the prejudices of the propertied classes than they do about the
behaviour of the crowd.
91 R. Long, ‘The French in Tuscany, 1799: the origins of the “Viva Maria”’, Consortium on Revolutionary
Europe Proceedings, 12 (1992), pp. 589–603; for details of the equally fierce revolt that broke out in
equally occupied Piedmont, see Broers, ‘Revolution as vendetta’, pp. 586–9.
9 The reaction of the ancien régime
Contrary to what still seems a common impression, the French Revolution burst upon a
Europe that was anything but a mediaeval fossil. On the contrary, from one end of the con-
tinent to the other, rulers of states large and small had been engaged in a more or less bitter
struggle with the privileged corporations inherited from the Middle Ages – the Church,
the nobility, the provinces, the cities, the universities, the guilds – to construct a new order
based on the concept of the unitary state subject to a single code of law and governed by
a professional bureaucracy, whilst at the same time struggling by every means available to
foment trade and industry, promote scientific enquiry, improve education, tackle the prob-
lem of poverty and civilise the mass of the people, the end result being known as the age
of enlightened absolutism. According to many older accounts, the outbreak of revolution
in France put paid to this earlier period of reform, as monarch after monarch reined in the
reformist bureaucrats with whom they had one and all surrounded themselves for fear that
the antipathy which the latter’s activities were already promoting among the privileged
orders might produce a French-style ‘revolt of the aristocracy’, and thence a wholesale dis-
integration of society on the lines of that seen in France. According to this model, then,
revolution in Paris killed enlightened reform in every other European capital, the ancien
régime thereby sliding ever deeper into a bottomless pit of reaction that could not but inten-
sify its opposition to political change. As we shall see, at least in domestic terms, there is some
truth in this notion, but it is not one that should be pushed too far. On the contrary, whilst
social and political reform were often abandoned, the demands of the war against France
meant that military reform remained very much part of the agenda for a number of European
states, this being something that in more than one case forced them into perpetuating the
wider policies of absolutism. Progress was not always very great and resistance often fierce,
but to claim that enlightened absolutism was dead would clearly be an exaggeration. Indeed,
at the onset of the French Revolutionary Wars, there were even those who believed that war
would give an added impetus to reform. As the future Prussian chief minister, Heinrich vom
Stein, wrote to a friend, fighting France would ‘quench many a prejudice . . . hasten many a
good thing . . . restore activity and courage, [and] give a new charm to activity’.1
In the event, these hopes were to be disappointed, but let us begin with the issue of reac-
tion. To deny that the French Revolution gave pause to the practitioners of enlightened
reform would be foolish, and there is no intention of pushing such an agenda here. On the
contrary, in a number of countries, the events of 1789 led to periods of repression that at the
very least induced a mood of caution, if they did not put an end to reform altogether. That
said, it is possible to push the idea too hard. In this respect, the place to start is the Russia of
Catherine the Great. Catherine, beyond doubt, was genuinely horrified by the establishment
of a national assembly in France, let alone the developments that followed.2 With the great
The reaction of the ancien régime 229
Pugachev revolt only a few years in the past, she could not look upon the fall of the Bastille
without suppressing a shudder, whilst her concerns could not but be inflamed by the heavy
demands that the current wars against Sweden and Turkey were placing on Russian society:
for the third successive year, it had been necessary to conscript one man in every 100 instead
of the more customary one man in every 500.3 As this last shows, Catherine was far from
incapable of reflection, and it is quite clear that she blamed much of the trouble on the fail-
ures of Louis XVI. In consequence, she initially made no attempt to stop Russia’s tiny handful
of newspapers from publishing news of the Revolution, but, as the months went by, so her
concerns grew every greater, the publication of a travelogue describing a journey from Saint
Petersburg to Moscow that effectively constituted a wholesale denunciation of Russian society
leading to the author, a young court-educated nobleman named Alexander Radischev, being
banished to Siberia for ten years.4 Meanwhile, Catherine being convinced that Radischev had
been in league with the French ambassador, Edmond Genet, the latter was barred from court
and all French citizens placed under surveillance.5
It was not just the French who Catherine was scared of, however. On the contrary, at
least as important in her eyes were the freemasons. Introduced into Russia in the 1750s by
foreign travellers, in line with the situation elsewhere, masonry had quickly become popular
among the educated classes.6 Friend of the Enlightenment though she was, Catherine was
no fan of this development, regarding freemasonry’s secret nature as little short of an invita-
tion to conspiracy. As if this was not enough, there was also the question of the link with
Nikita Panin. An erstwhile confidant of the empress and enthusiastic mason, Panin had
fallen from favour in 1781 and died two years later, but he had gathered a sizeable clientele
around himself, and Catherine feared that the men concerned might be out for revenge. To
complicate matters, Panin had been in charge of the upbringing of Catherine’s son, Paul,
and the empress therefore became convinced that a conspiracy was afoot to launch a coup
similar to the one that had brought Catherine to power in 1762. In the circumstances, then,
it seemed advisable to make a point, and in April 1792 the prominent mason and man of
letters Nikolai Novikov was arrested on trumped-up charges of sedition, subjected to a bru-
tal interrogation and sentenced to fifteen years’ fortress imprisonment, three of his leading
associates being banished to the provinces.7
Over the next four years – as things turned out, the last of Catherine’s reign – there
followed further periodic clamp-downs and occasional trials, as in 1794, when an émigré
serving in the naval squadron stationed in the Black Sea was banished to Siberia after
being accused of being a French agent. Yet there was no general persecution, whilst the
elimination of the Polish problem in 1794 appears significantly to have lightened the
atmosphere. As in Russia, meanwhile, so in Spain. When 1789 dawned, the Bourbon
régime was in the midst of a severe subsistence crisis that had produced serious riots in
Barcelona. Given the clear links between popular distress and political unrest in France,
the chief minister, the Count of Floridablanca, responded by imposing a strict ban on
any mention of events beyond the Pyrenees in the only two newspapers authorised to
cover foreign news. There remained, however, the problem of pamphlets and newspapers
published in France, and it was not long before these started making their way across the
frontier. In September 1789, then, a prohibition was issued in respect of all such mate-
rial and the Inquisition mobilised to root it out, Floridablanca’s worries being intensified
by a major peasant rising in Galicia in the winter of 1790. In consequence, it was not
long before troops were being deployed to form a cordon sanitaire along the frontier, dire
threats issued to the effect that anyone caught with seditious material would be tried for
treason, the circulation of French works banned unless they had first been approved by
the authorities, and the substantial French community in Spain made to choose between
naturalisation (a process that automatically stripped those concerned of any protection
conferred by the status of being a foreign national) and expulsion. However, unbending
though this response to the Revolution was, it did not last very long – not least because of
concerns that his rigour was jeopardising the security of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette,
in April 1792 Floridablanca was dismissed and replaced by the equally reformist Count of
Aranda – whilst it only extended to the cultural world in general rather patchily, the most
that can be said being that, by the closing months of Floridablanca’s rule, the limits within
which debate could be conducted had temporarily been significantly constricted.8
Finally, there is the case of Britain. Once it had become clear that 1789 was not 1688
reprised, alarm spread rapidly across much of the political and social élite. Even before war
had broken out, 1792 saw the issue of two royal proclamations against ‘seditious writings
and publications’, whilst from 1793 onwards a series of Acts of Parliament and other pieces
of legislation bit deeply into Britain’s traditional liberties. Thus, in 1794 there came the
suspension of habeas corpus; in 1795 the infamous ‘two Acts’ rendered the organisation of
political meetings dependent on obtaining the sanction of a magistrate and defined treason
in terms so loose that it could be applied to even the mildest opposition to the government
or criticism of the political system; in 1797 the Illegal Oaths Act sharply curtailed the prin-
ciple of freedom of association; and, finally, in 1799 the Combination Act in theory struck
a heavy blow against the organisation of trade unions. All this was serious enough, but only
in Ireland did the situation deteriorate into a wholesale onslaught: in metropolitan Britain
the business of Parliament continued as normal; elections were held at the usual intervals;
organisations such as the London Corresponding Society were harassed and kept under sur-
veillance but not shut down; prosecutions for sedition were limited to around 200; and the
Combination Act was not only amended in a number of ways favourable to the workers in
1800 but very rarely used, let alone used with any success. Nor, meanwhile, was the cause of
reform completely abandoned, the Catholic Relief Acts of 1791 and 1793 marking a major
advance in respect of the principle of religious toleration. To quote Eric Evans, then, ‘Pitt’s
government can hardly be convicted of instituting a régime of terror – certainly nothing
to compare with the activities of the revolutionary régime in France in the years 1792–4.’9
From one end of Europe to the other the picture was the same. Thus, particular cases
of real or suspected conspiracy were dealt with harshly, surveillance stepped up and armed
rebellion put down without mercy, but there was little here that had not been seen earlier
in the century – the treatment meted out to Ireland in 1798 had been foreshadowed by
the treatment meted out to the Highlands of Scotland in 1746, whilst the fate suffered by
the leading members of the highly aristocratic Tavora family – in brief, torture and public
execution – when they were accused of instigating an attempt to assassinate Joseph I of
Portugal in September 1758, was as least as bad as that suffered by Martinovic and his
fellow conspirators in Austria.10 In Spain, 1775 brought the case of Pablo de Olavide, a
leading writer and administrator who was tried by the Inquisition and thrown in prison
after clashing with the Church over his opposition to the establishment of a new monastery
in a town in his jurisdiction.11 In Bavaria, 1785 had seen the complete suppression of the
secret society known as the Illuminati, a sect with strong links to German freemasonry that
believed that society should be placed under the rule of scientists, philosophers and men of
letters.12 And, finally, even in Prussia, otherwise a bastion of the Enlightenment, although
the issues involved are rather more complex than the bare facts of the case might sug-
gest, July 1788 had seen the promulgation of an edict that in effect placed the teaching of
religion, whether via sermons or catechesis, in a very tight straitjacket that was seemingly
designed to eliminate free-thinking of any sort.13
In short, the French Revolution did not in and of itself produce a dramatic change in the
intensity of political repression, and from this it follows that it is difficult to argue that it also
foreshortened the space for innovation and debate.14 Much more important here, in fact,
is a theme which is deeply entangled with the history of enlightened absolutism. Across
eighteenth-century Europe, one of the aspirations of its rulers had been to break the power
of the nobility by stripping it of its manorial jurisdiction, ending its numerous corporate
privileges, tapping its resources for the benefit of the state, breaking the link between title
and territory and abolishing feudalism. In achieving these objectives, the ‘military revolu-
tion’ of the seventeenth century had been a valuable ally in that it had effectively given
the crown a monopoly of armed force while at the same time making the price of military
service, which remained the pre-eminent hall-mark of the nobleman, incorporation into an
institution that overtly asserted the primacy of the monarch. The extent to which this pro-
gramme was pushed varied from state to state, but in most of Europe it was a source of great
tension, many nobles being ever more unhappy with what was widely known as ‘ministerial
despotism’: if the Tavora family was not guilty of attempted regicide, they were certainly
guilty of opposing the influence of Joseph I’s chief minister, the Marqués de Pombal. By
1789, such recalcitrance, and, with it, its power to derail ministerial reform, was widely
recognised, not least because of the role played by the so-called ‘revolt of the aristocracy’
in the convocation of the Estates General, but in 1792 the monarchs of Europe received a
fresh object lesson in the lengths to which noble ire could go. We come here to the murder
of Gustavus III of Sweden. A typical enlightened absolutist, since coming to power in 1772,
Gustavus had patronised the arts, greatly interested himself in the development of trade and
industry, introduced a degree of religious liberty, reformed the code of criminal justice and,
perhaps above all, abolished most of the privileges of the nobility. This last, however, had
been greatly resented by the nobles, and the net result was the assassination of the king by
a guards officer on 29 March 1792.15
If the fate of Gustavus III was a salutary lesson in the fate of monarchs who pushed the
nobility too far, the events that took place in the domains of Joseph II of Austria were
equally worrying. Particularly with respect to modern-day Belgium, these have already been
touched upon, but in brief, Joseph II aspired not just to social and economic modernisation,
but also the reconstruction of the Habsburg monarchy as a centralised German-speaking
state administered by a professional bureaucracy recruited entirely on merit and financed by
a common system of taxation.16 In pushing these policies, he could not but run into furious
opposition and in 1789 this exploded into life, not just in the Austrian Netherlands but also
in the Tyrol and Hungary, Joseph’s position being further undermined by a brusque, not to
say arrogant, disposition that led him to eschew all calls for moderation and alienate even
those who wanted to collaborate with his reforms.17
Setting aside Belgium, the chief focus of the unrest was Hungary, whose separate sta-
tus Joseph had very publicly refused to recognise by declining to be crowned as her king,
saw riots in which many government decrees were ritually burned by the local hangman,
together with a de facto tax strike, not to mention loud demands for the convocation of
the diet and even a plot to break away from Austrian rule altogether.18 As one English
traveller recalled:
National hatred of the Germans, with patriotism, arose more violent than ever.
Everything German was despised and [Germans] were liable to be insulted if not protected
by . . . Hungarian dress . . . The more violent were for carrying things with so high a hand
as to consider, as Joseph never was crowned, the Austrian succession to be at an end. Many
called for a new . . . bill of rights, and it is certain one was really drawn up in which the
sovereign was to be deprived of the right of nominating to the public offices and
all the charges . . . were to be given to the nobility: the sovereign was not even to
appoint the officers of the army or to fix their pay; he was to be compelled to reside in
Hungary and the government of the kingdom was to be entirely separate from [that
of] the other part of the Austrian dominions; he was to have no veto in the legislation
and the states [i.e. estates] were to have the privilege of assembling without his order.
Taxing the land was not even to be thought of; the estates were to be allowed to form
treaties of commerce without the consent of the king; and coining was not to be the
prerogative of the Crown. Peace and war were not to depend on the king, nor was he to
form treaties without the consent of the states . . . But the moderates were content that
affairs should be put in the state in which they were in on the Emperor Joseph’s acces-
sion to the throne, and these, fortunately both for sovereign and people, prevailed.19
So much for Hungary. If events in the highly privileged Tyrol did not go nearly as far, there
was sufficient discontent for the governor of the region, Wenzel von Sauer, to warn Vienna
that, although by no means an imminent prospect, revolt was very likely unless the régime
moderated its position.20 The result was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history
of European monarchy in the eighteenth century: exhausted and ill, Joseph capitulated on
every front and most of his reforms were either frozen or put into reverse. By then, however,
the damage had been done. As another visitor to Austria noted, the ability of the state to
engage in reform of any sort was deeply compromised, whilst Hungary, especially, remained
very disaffected. Thus:
It was a favourite plan of the Emperor Joseph II to blend all the subjects of his heredi-
tary dominions into one indiscriminate mass and to govern them by a uniform sys-
tem of laws . . . The mutual antipathy of the Hungarians towards the Austrians has
certainly not been diminished by the . . . failure of this scheme. It was evident that
the views of Joseph were relinquished, not from the conviction of error, but from the
hopelessness of success.21
Absolutism, then, had its limits, and this was something of which no European monarch
could be unaware. Meanwhile, in the circumstances of the moment, to risk doing anything
that threatened the stability of government and society alike seemed doubly unwise, and,
where possible, states were therefore inclined to forego reforms that might otherwise have
been regarded as being highly desirable. This was particularly the case with Prussia. Thanks
to its limited participation in the fighting, the Prussian army had not been much tested as
a fighting force and had therefore emerged from the war with its reputation intact, while it
could in any case feel that such reforms as the introduction of fusilier battalions in 1787 had
gone a long way towards enhancing its fighting capacities in the areas where reform could
be deemed to be necessary. As Carl von Clausewitz complained of one General von Rüchel,
then, he ‘was convinced that . . . determined Prussian troops, employing Frederician tactics,
could overrun everything that had emerged from the unsoldierly French Revolution’.22 On
the home front, too, all could be deemed to be well, the promulgation of a new code of
law entitled the Allgemeines Staatsrecht in 1794 having brought, if not equality before the
law, then at the very least a considerable advance in the administration of justice, whilst
Frederick William had in a variety of ways reduced the tax burden on the populace; even
under Frederick the Great, meanwhile, Prussia had enjoyed de facto freedom of speech and
seen legal reforms that limited manorial jurisdiction to civil cases only, forced the nobility
to staff their tribunals with qualified judges and gave the peasantry a right of appeal to the
royal courts.23 But, above all, diplomacy had provided a useful substitute for reform: by
withdrawing into a neutrality that was seemingly guaranteed by France, Prussia was able
to avoid internal conflicts that would have proved all but impossible to contain. To quote
Christopher Clark, then, ‘There was more . . . to neutrality than simply the avoidance of
war with France.’24
In all this, the complacency of Frederick William II, a ruler who prided himself on his
enlightened views, played a considerable role, but even the accession to the throne of the well-
meaning and thoroughly humanitarian Frederick William III in 1797 brought little change
to the situation: extremely cautious, not to say timid, the new monarch made some effort to
ameliorate the position of the serfs by, for example, allowing them to substitute cash payments
for the labour services required of them by their masters, but further than that he would not
go. As Napoleon later remarked,
As a private citizen, the King of Prussia is a loyal, good and honest man, but in his
political capacity, he is a man by nature governed by necessity who is at the mercy of
anyone who is possessed of force and is prepared to raise his hand.25
This does not mean that there was no interest in reform whatsoever. On the contrary,
enlightened officials such as Heinrich vom Stein became ever more concerned at the form
taken by the governance of the state. In this respect, Prussia was particularly backward.
Executive power was in the hands of the eight ministers who made up the General Directory
of War and Domain, but the tasks of these men were apportioned in a most confusing fash-
ion with some dealing with all matters of state as they affected individual provinces and
others dealing with one particular matter as it affected the whole kingdom. For historical
reasons, meanwhile, the important province of Silesia had its own administration, whilst
the army was almost entirely independent (although the latter was theoretically covered by
a department of the General Directory, in practice, this last had almost no power, respon-
sibility for matters pertaining to the military being shared by the entirely separate supreme
council of war, and the king’s own military advisers).26 At the head of the whole edifice
was the king and his personal suite, the kabinett, the ministers who made up the General
Directory having no authority of their own. As the state council that was supposed to draw
all the threads of the system together rarely met, all this made for immense confusion, and
all the more so as Frederick William combined a refusal to delegate authority with inordi-
nate procrastination – as even his semi-official hagiographer, the court chaplain, Rulemann
Eylert, had to admit, ‘It is not to be denied that his diffidence and reserve made him appear
distrustful of himself and his tender scruples . . . anxious and uneasy.’27
In fairness to the Prussian élites, there were plenty of observers who were increasingly
concerned that, should a clash with France come – something of whose inevitability they
were completely convinced – Prussia would find herself to be completely outclassed. In the
civilian world, one such was Heinrich vom Stein. Appointed Minister of Trade in 1804,
he was deeply critical of what he found, remarking that ‘a necessary consequence of the
incompleteness of the arrangement and the choice of persons is the dissatisfaction of the
inhabitants of this country with the government, the decline of the sovereign’s reputation
in public opinion and the necessity of an alteration’.28 In the army, too, there was much
concern that all was not well, the leading voice here being an officer in the Hanoverian
army named Gerhard von Scharnhorst, who had become convinced of the importance of
the principle of the nation-in-arms. Transferring to Prussian service in 1801, Scharnhorst
immediately submitted a sheaf of proposals for reform to Frederick William and helped form
the so-called ‘Military Society’, a group of like-minded officers who met on a weekly basis
to discuss new currents in military affairs. Aside from Scharnhorst, those involved included
Carl von Clausewitz, Ludwig von Boyen, August von Gneisenau and Carl von Grolman,
all four of whom were to go on to play a prominent part in Prussia’s eventual war of libera-
tion against Napoleon. Needless to say, the general theme was the subjection of the army
to scathing criticism, much emphasis being placed on the need for more flexible tactics
and a greater proportion of light infantry – indeed, preferably, a ‘universal’ infantry whose
every unit could fight as skirmishers or in close order as required – the logical corollary of
such demands being better treatment of the common soldier and, indeed, the creation of a
soldiery imbued with patriotic enthusiasm. From here, of course, it was but a short step to
rallying behind the standard of the nation-in-arms, the reformers also putting forward plans
for universal conscription and the formation of a citizen’s militia, Scharnhorst, in particu-
lar, arguing that only thus could Prussia ensure her security. However, this was not an end
to it, for, if the population as a whole was going to be expected to fight, it followed that it
would have to be given something to fight for. Implicit in such ideas was therefore a whole-
sale programme of political and social reform encompassing compulsory primary education,
religious emancipation, political representation, the abolition of serfdom, the opening of
the officer corps – hitherto almost entirely a preserve of the junker – to all classes of society
and an end to all restrictions on occupation and the ownership of property.29
Progress, however, was extremely limited. Still a junior figure and something of an
outsider – like Scharnhorst, he was not a native of Prussia – Stein was unable to obtain a
hearing at all, while in the military world things were not much better. At best, the Military
Society never had more than 200 members, while many officers reacted to the ideas of the
reformers with alarm and hostility. As for Frederick William, whilst not unaware of the need
for change, he was suspicious of anything that might subvert the social order or undermine the
state. As a result, little was done, whilst even that little – the decision to train the third rank
of each infantry battalion as skirmishers, the formation of a militia composed of time-expired
soldiers, the creation of both permanent divisions and an embryonic general staff –
was not undertaken until the very eve of the clash with France which Stein, Scharnhorst
and the other reformers had always been convinced would come. In Prussia, then, tempo-
rarily at least, diplomacy produced the luxury of inaction. Other states, by contrast were
in a very different position, but, even then, the extent to which they were prepared to
engage with reform varied according to circumstance. In Austria, too, then, little progress
was achieved. Here consideration must first be given to the character of Francis II. No
tyrant, genuinely humane, by no means unintelligent, simple in his personal tastes and style,
assiduous in his attention to his duties, sympathetic to many of the aims of Joseph II, deeply
paternalistic and very much concerned to give his subjects good governance, the upheavals
of the period 1788–90 and the coming of the French Revolutionary Wars had yet left him
in no doubt of the need to preserve internal stability. Meanwhile, he was infinitely more
cautious than Joseph, being much inclined to put off difficult decisions and to listen to men
who were themselves circumspect in their disposition, a prime example being his erstwhile
tutor, Prince Colloredo, who was until 1805 secretary of his personal kabinett. Distrusting
the consequences even of Josephinianism, he was therefore hardly the man to preside over
a fundamental recasting of the institutions of the Habsburg state.30
Under Francis II, therefore, political and social development was extremely inhib-
ited, if not actually frozen. With regard to Hungary, the compromise worked out under
Leopold II in 1791 was respected, whilst further concessions were made when Francis was
crowned King of Hungary in 1792. And with regard to the rest of the Habsburg domains,
the provincial diets were reinstated and the administrative changes made by Joseph II set
aside. More generally, if the law granting toleration to the Protestants and Jews was left
in place, the nobility’s position in the state was recognised, the threat to their privileges
lifted, their economic interests conciliated – they were, for example, allowed to aug-
ment the amount of labour service demanded of the peasantry – and their claim to give
the law to their estates left untouched. As for the intellectual atmosphere, the empire
became marked by rigid censorship, police surveillance and clerical indoctrination. With
many men of letters themselves hastily backing away from support for reform, there thus
perished the vibrant intellectual movement that had underpinned Viennese absolutism
before 1792 and might now have been crucial in pushing through further reform. As one
princess lamented, ‘It is as if everyone has been struck dumb.’31
Yet, for all that, it was not long before it had become clear that abandoning Josephinianism
could not be reconciled with Austria’s needs as a great power. In this respect, three prob-
lems presented themselves. First of all, Vienna did not possess the finances necessary to
sustain a major conflict. In 1790 the national debt already amounted to 399,000,000 guil-
ders, and yet the land tax that was the chief source of revenue did not draw adequately upon
the resources of the nobility, especially in Hungary. In consequence, Vienna had no option
but to rely on a mixture of foreign and domestic loans, of which the latter involved the issue
of large quantities of paper money or bankozettel. The result was all too predictable. Despite
a slightly less intransigent attitude on the part of Hungary and appeals for voluntary dona-
tions, between 1792 and 1801 the national debt rose by 57 per cent, matters being made
still worse by galloping inflation (by 1803 prices in Vienna were 300–400 per cent higher
than their 1790 level). As a result of these factors, misery was widespread and the Habsburg
forces reduced to a most pitiable state.32
The second issue was manpower. Volunteers were accepted for all branches of the army,
and units recruited in areas which were exempted from conscription altogether (i.e. the
Tyrol and Lombardy) relied on them completely.33 However, in Galicia and most of the
hereditary Austrian lands – the recruiting areas of the so-called ‘German’ regiments – all
males were theoretically subject to conscription by ballot, though in fact there were the
usual exemptions on the grounds of status and occupation. Meanwhile, in Hungary, men
were drafted in accordance with a generally very limited figure agreed by the diet; in the
Military Frontier every male inhabitant was liable to serve in the so-called Croat units –
light-infantry regiments only called out in time of war; and, last but not least, in time of
invasion, the Tyrol was expected to mobilise its traditional home guard. Yet in practice
none of this was sufficient. Because service was for life, the army could never gain sufficient
volunteers, whilst conscription was hated by rich and poor alike. Joseph II had struggled to
tighten up the system in the German lands, end the exemption of such areas as the Tyrol
and force the Hungarians at the very least to increase the size of their contribution, but to
no avail, having been forced to back down by massive resistance. Meanwhile, the demands
of the Military Frontier had been stirring up ever deeper resentment among its inhabitants,
only 13,000 men out of a theoretical total of 57,000 appearing for service in 1792.34 Much
reliance therefore had to be placed on attracting recruits in the minor states of the Holy
Roman Empire, at least one-half of the manpower of the ‘German’ units coming from this
source. Even with this assistance, the army had been badly understrength in 1792, muster-
ing only 225,000 men out of a theoretical total of 300,000.35 As the wars went on, matters
grew still more difficult. Popular resistance to conscription increased sharply with at least
27,000 conscripts fleeing their homes to avoid being drafted, and recruitment fell away in
Germany. Casualties, too, were enormous: taking the Italian campaign of 1796 alone, this
cost a minimum of 50,000 in terms of dead, wounded and prisoners of war, to which must
be added the heavy toll imposed by disease. In the face of this situation, minor increases in
the Hungarian quota and the formation in Vienna of a few battalions of patriotic volunteers
when the city was threatened with attack in 1797 made little difference, the army never
succeeding in attaining its theoretical peace-time strength, let alone building up the sort
of numbers which it really required. So difficult was the situation facing the Austrians by
1799 that the special envoy who had been dispatched to Vienna, Lord Minto, came to the
conclusion that the want of aggression that the Austrians had shown in Switzerland after
the first battle of Zurich was the direct result of want of manpower. As he wrote to William
Wickham on 14 September:
I will freely confess what I believe to have been the real and operating motive in
Thugut’s mind for the calamitous . . . fault he committed in arresting the progress of
the Archduke since the first occupation of Zurich. The reason he gives appears to me
so bad that I think he would not avow it so distinctly as he does if it were not true. His
grand policy . . . is to spare his army . . . He argues very openly on that point and tells
you of the difficulties he had to encounter in forming [it], of the 80,000 recruits he must
now provide . . . of this being Austria’s seventh campaign of the war . . . This is, I am
persuaded, the real account of the matter.36
Added to the issues of money and manpower, there was also that of the empire’s extremely
cumbersome system of governance. At the top of the system was the purely advisory or coun-
cil of state. Immediately below this, as the only three bodies other than the council of state
whose writ ran to every territory of the monarchy, were the Court and State Chancellery,
which dealt with foreign policy; the Commerce Directory, which regulated foreign trade;
and the Hofkriegsrat, or Palace War Council, which managed the army, presided over the
system of military justice, and administered the Military Frontier. Below these again were
the Bohemian-and-Austrian Court Chancellery, which presided over the administration
of Galicia, the Czech lands – Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia – modern-day Slovenia (then
divided between the Duchy of Carniola and the counties of Istria and Gorizia) and the
various archduchies, duchies and counties that (with the exception of Salzburg, then an
independent bishopric), constitute modern-day Austria, namely Inner Austria, Carinthia,
Styria, the Tyrol and Vorarlberg; the separate Chancelleries of Hungary and Transylvania;
and the Hofkammer, or Palace Treasury, which collected the revenue from all the crown
lands of the empire. At a lower level, each province had a council of administration known
as a gubernium, and a diet, with one or two exceptions, recruited entirely from the nobil-
ity, which had no legislative power as such but could petition the throne for the redress of
grievances and also had the right to sanction taxation and recruitment to the army.37 On
the surface, this system does not seem so inappropriate – most areas of the empire, after
all, were subject to, first, a chancellery and then a gubernium – but, in practice, it did not
function effectively, not the least of the problems being the fact that, as the various chan-
celleries handled every aspect of government business other than foreign affairs, defence
and finance, they became desperately overburdened. Nor was the matter ended even then,
for all decisions had to be referred to Francis II for his personal endorsement, this being
a matter that was of some concern given the emperor’s habits of spending several days a
week doing nothing but receiving an endless string of petitioners. As can be imagined,
the result was constant delay: when the Archduke Charles became War Minister in 1801
(see below), he discovered that there were 187,000 documents awaiting attention in the
Hofkriegsrat alone, not to mention another 2,000 that required signature by Francis II.
Indeed, the whole system was weighed down by paperwork, Leopold II complaining bitterly
of its ‘many useless, superfluous and burdensome reports, returns and accounts’ and Thugut
that it was ‘overburdened with details and military pedantries’.38
Compared with these problems, the various deficiencies of the army itself –inadequate
military education, noble predominance in the officer corps, ageing commanders and
outdated field guns – were relatively insignificant: after all, the Austrians won repeated
victories in Germany and all but defeated Napoleon himself at Marengo in 1800. Yet,
although they were hardly the heart of the matter, it was at first only in such terms that
reform was discussed. In the mid-1790s, for example, we therefore find such officers as
Baron Mack and the Archduke Charles advocating more flexible tactics (though even
then continuing to stress the pre-eminence of the line) and the adoption of a corps system.
However, no thought was given to the wider aspects of reform, Austria’s defeats customar-
ily being attributed to the failings of the various generals involved. The idea that the army
should be composed of anything but a force of long-term professional soldiers attracted
particular hostility. In the words of the Archduke Charles, for example, ‘Popular risings,
arming the people, rapidly gathering volunteers and such, can never provide reliable
troops.’39 When Francis established a special reform commission in 1798, then, the only
result was the formation of a few new regiments.40
Yet, as witness the crushing defeats of 1800, this was not enough, Francis in conse-
quence appointing the Archduke Charles president of the Hofkriegsrat and ordering him
to formulate a detailed and comprehensive plan of reform. In taking on this task, however,
Charles was immediately confronted by an insoluble impasse in that raising the extra men
and money that Austria needed necessarily implied a return to the very Josephinianism
that had caused such chaos scarcely ten years before. Such a move being unacceptable
even to himself, let alone his elder brother – in March 1804 he told Joseph that French-
style universal conscription would ‘ruin industry and prosperity and disrupt the established
order’41 – in so far as the army was concerned, he therefore contented himself with minor
measures designed to alleviate the pressing need for more men and more money. On the
one hand, then, the Hungarian diet was approached with a request that it increase the
number of men it maintained in the ranks from 56,000 to 64,000 men, introduce con-
scription and vote through an immediate one-off cash contribution of 2,000,000 guilders.
And, on the other, in order to encourage voluntary enlistment and reduce hostility to
conscription, the term of service was reduced from life to between ten and fourteen years
depending on the arm of service, these changes being accompanied by a number of meas-
ures designed to improve the lot of the rank and file, of which the most important was a
certain relaxation in the system of discipline.42
Whether Charles recognised it or not, even had these measures been implemented in full
(something that did not happen, the response of the Hungarian diet being at best extremely
grudging), they were utterly insufficient to meet the needs of the situation. In fairness to
the Archduke, however, they did not represent the limit of his thinking. Just as prominent
in his mind was the issue of administrative efficiency. As we have seen, the structures that
governed the army were extremely cumbersome, and under Charles’ influence a real effort
was made to tackle this problem and at the same time remedy some of the wider issues
that bedevilled the Habsburg administration. Starting at the summit of the régime, the
old Staatsrat was abolished and replaced by a new Staats und Konferenz Ministerium that,
through regular meetings of the various ministers, was supposed to coordinate the whole
work of government. Subordinate to this body were three ministries – those of Foreign
Affairs, War and Navy, and the Interior – each of which was headed by a responsible min-
ister (in the case of the Ministry of War and Navy, Charles himself) and possessed of a writ
which extended to the entire empire (the number of ministries was later increased to four
with the creation of a Ministry of Finance). As for the Hofskriegsrat, this was reduced to
the role of an executive arm of the War and Navy Ministries and placed on a simpler foot-
ing (the most important change here was the transfer of its responsibility for the planning
of military campaigns to a permanent general staff), Charles also pressing for a purge of the
bureaucracy in general.43
Make for less cost and more efficiency though all this did, even here Charles was
defeated. The Archduke was not alone in his support for reform – on the contrary, the
Foreign Ministry, in particular, showed a keen interest in the issue44 – whilst all those who
met him were struck by his dedication:
[The Archduke] . . . enjoys the office of commander-in-chief and is extremely active

in the discharge of his duties. Many of the misfortunes which the Austrian army expe-
rienced in the last war are supposed to have been occasioned by the opposition and
intrigues of the military council at Vienna. Should the emperor again be involved in
war, no such danger is to be apprehended as the Archduke Charles is known to reign
supreme, not only in that department, but in the other concerns of government. His
life is simple, frugal and devoted to business; he is said to possess talents fitted both for
the cabinet and the field; and I hear that in the administration of the emperor there is
no man of higher quality. Considering the high reputation which he enjoys in Europe
and his great services he has rendered to his country . . . it is almost superfluous to say
that he is revered by all classes and descriptions of persons in this empire . . . When
the Archduke Charles, after . . . signing a treaty of peace [i.e. Campo Formio] which
relieved the fears of the capital, returned to this city, all the inhabitants flocked out to
meet him and hailed him as their benefactor . . . He labours by every possible method
to promote the happiness and glory of his sovereign, but he does so without ostenta-
tion . . . No man appears in public less frequently than he, and, when he does so, it is
in a plain carriage, or on horseback, attended by a single servant.45
So far, so impressive, but inherent in this admiring portrait are the reasons for Charles’
downfall. Like many men of mediocre abilities, Francis was both jealous and suspicious
of those of great intellect, but in this particular instance he was rendered doubly uncom-
fortable. Thus, playing on his mind was the historical precedent of Wallenstein, the great
Habsburg general of the Thirty Years War who had achieved such a position of power that
he ultimately became a law unto himself, not to mention a growing belief that the exist-
ence of the Staats und Konferenz Ministerium threatened his control of the administration.
Charles having alienated many powerful figures in the court by his brusque and imperi-
ous manner and made a number of appointments that were highly unpopular, not to say
unwise, a number of hostile voices began to exploit these prejudices to turn Francis against
him. With Francis predisposed to do just this, Charles was soon outmanoeuvred: in January
1805 the Hofkriegsrat was removed from the control of the War and Navy Ministry and his
choice as Chief of the General Staff sacked in favour of the same Baron Mack who had led
the Neapolitan invasion of Rome in 1798. For the time being, Charles stayed on as War
and Navy Minister, but he now found that he was devoid of any real power. Reform did not
come to an end – on the very brink of war, Mack introduced a number of changes in tactics
and organisation – but his efforts did nothing to address the real issues, the campaign of
1805 therefore seeing the army go down to catastrophic defeat.46
In Austria, then, the need for reform was far more recognised than it was in Prussia,
but the circumstances in which she was placed made significant progress very unlikely. In
Spain, by contrast, there was at least as much need for reform, but far fewer constraints
with regard to its implementation. Having secured Spain’s escape from the War of the First
Coalition, the royal favourite and chief minister, Manuel de Godoy, found himself facing a
very difficult strategic dilemma. As the campaigns of 1793–5 had shown, Spain clearly did
not have the strength to confront a hostile France alone and could not count on Britain to
come to her aid. More than that, indeed, it was all too clear that Britain remained a hostile
power desirous of penetrating the valuable market constituted by the Spanish empire in
South America. Yet this threat was not something that Spain could confront on her own
either. For almost a century prior to 1789, an answer had been found to British superiority
at sea in a perpetual alliance with Bourbon France, and it was therefore clear that in the
current circumstances the only thing to be done was to reconstitute that self-same alliance.
The Directory being by no means averse to Godoy’s approaches, the result was the signature
on 19 August 1796 of the Treaty of San Ildefonso.47 Spain was now at war with Britain, but
this did not mean that Godoy was under any illusions. On the contrary, a far more perspica-
cious figure than most accounts have given him credit for, Godoy knew full well that France
was in no way to be trusted and believed that sooner or later a fresh clash was inevitable.
Under cover of the treaty with France and what was hoped would be a strictly limited com-
mitment to the war against Britain, Spain would revitalise her armed forces and eventually
attain such a strength that she would be able to throw over the alliance with France and
pursue a course of armed neutrality. Almost from the moment that peace was signed, then,
Godoy was urging the importance of military reform, and, paying heed to his arguments, in
April 1796 Charles IV duly established a special commission charged with the elaboration
of a comprehensive programme of renovation.48
Of this development Godoy had high hopes, his goals including a new system of recruit-
ment, modern tactics and better training for officers and men alike. Far-reaching though
its purview was, however, even those of its members who were genuinely committed to
the cause of change soon showed that they had little interest in a fundamental renova-
tion of the sort desired by the favourite. Whilst the members of the commission displayed
some hostility to such privileged formations as the overblown royal guard and expressed
the belief that the geographical exemptions that had hitherto saved so many men from
conscription should be set aside, in line with conventional eighteenth-century thinking
they argued that citizen armies were militarily ineffective. Far from looking to the French
model, they therefore suggested that Spain should retain the old selective ballot with all
its exemptions, whilst adopting the Prussian system whereby conscripts spent the bulk of
the year in their own homes, the hope being that this would render military service less
obnoxious. However, modest though these proposals were, they were still radical enough
to demonstrate the obstacles faced by reform. Not only was Godoy regarded as an upstart
by large parts of the military establishment, but his plans also offended powerful vested
interests, and thus it was that they were for the most part blocked and Godoy himself forced
to resign as Secretary of State in 1798. As for results, these were at this stage minimal, all
that had really been achieved being to extend recruitment of the provincial militia to the
hitherto-exempt province of Valencia.49
In other respects, meanwhile, Godoy had been more successful. In every work on Spain
in the Revolutionary period, much is made of the fact that, in large part, Spain financed
the war with France by means of government borrowing via the sale of bonds known as
vales reales. That this policy had many unfortunate effects there can be no doubt, not the
least of the issues being that it led to spiralling inflation, but, setting aside the fact that,
in the absence of British loans or subsidies, there were few alternatives, far less is heard
of the measures which accompanied it. Thus, in an attempt, however fruitless, to ensure
that the government would be able to back the bonds, Godoy introduced a series of meas-
ures designed to tap the resources of the privileged orders to an extent that had never
been attempted before, amongst them a 4 per cent tax on the salaries of all government
officials earning over 8,000 reales, a series of levies on the Church of which the first one
alone amounted to 30,000,000 reales, new taxes on income derived from the lease of prop-
erty, the sequestration of the revenues attached to vacant benefices and other ecclesiastical
appointments, the imposition of a 15 per cent tax on the establishment of any new may-
orazgos and the abolition of a variety of exemptions respecting the payment of the tithe,
around half of which went to the state rather than the Church. By contrast, meanwhile,
the authorities were everywhere enjoined to ensure that they did all they could to restrict
the burdens endured by the populace and encourage the distribution of the large amounts
of land belonging to the municipalities amongst landless labourers possessed of the where-
withal to farm them effectively, whilst in 1796 a particularly onerous tax that was paid only
by the peasantry of Old and New Castile was abolished.50
If Godoy fell in 1798, then, it was in part because he represented a clear threat to the
powerful oligarchy that dominated Spanish society, the fact that this was so being rendered
still more obvious by the very public support which he gave to the publication of Gaspar de
Jovellanos’ Informe sobre la Ley Agraria, a highly controversial work commissioned by the
régime of Charles III which condemned the institution of the mayorazgo as an obstacle to
economic development and called for the prohibition of the creation of any further exam-
ples. However, notwithstanding the fall of the favourite, reform continued and, indeed,
intensified. Not least was this the case because the measures favoured by Godoy were not
just favoured by him alone. As Spanish scholars have shown, for example, the whole reign
of Charles IV was marked by a determined effort to push on with the social policies put in
place in the previous reign with a view to forcing the populace to conform to the norms of
the so-called ‘polite society’. Of these, the most well-known is the attempt to prohibit the
men of the lower classes from affecting the sinister mantles and broad-brimmed hats that
produced the air of menace that many foreign travellers noted as characterising the streets
of Madrid and other cities. However, the target of the campaign was much broader, extend-
ing, as it did, to a wide range of habits and customs, the aim being to socialise the Spanish
crowd and render it orderly, peaceable and law-abiding, and the government took it seri-
ously enough even to go so far as, in 1803, to prohibit the bull-fight as a focus for public
disorder and a public advertisement of Spanish backwardness and savagery.51
The fall of Godoy, then, was not accompanied by any significant change in the direction
of affairs. Over the winter of 1797–8, the favourite had been packing his administration with
prominent reformers including Jovellanos, Francisco de Saavedra, Juan Meléndez Valdés
and Mariano Luis de Urquijo, and, having taken over the reins of government, this group
now initiated a policy which Godoy had favoured but not dared to embark upon himself. In
brief, then, a start was made on disamortising the lands of the Church, or, in other words,
expropriating them and putting them up for sale. By far the most radical move undertaken
by any of the governments of the ancien régime in response to the challenge of the French
Revolution, the new policy was implemented with considerable vigour. Needless to say,
the response of much of the Church was one of absolute fury, and opponents of the move
hit back by exploiting the known support of Jovellanos and Urquijo for Jansenism – an
intellectual current within the Catholic Church which was highly critical of the religious
orders and anxious for a reduction in the power of the papacy – so as to denounce them
to the Inquisition. Such was the backlash that Charles IV crumbled before the storm and
in 1800 dismissed Urquijo (who had replaced Godoy as Secretary of State) and his fellow
ministers.52 If there followed a period of repression which saw the imprisonment of Jovellanos
and Saavedra at the instigation of the Inquisition, the policies which they had initiated sur-
vived, by 1808 no less than one-sixth of the lands of the Church having been removed from
its control.53 Nor was Godoy excluded from the political scene: appointed generalísimo of the
army in the wake of the War of the Oranges, from 1801 until 1808 he strove manfully to
push many of the same improvements that he had backed in his years as premier, although,
once again, such was the weight of opposition that he faced that in the end he achieved little
other than to halve the royal guard in size, this being a move for which he was to pay dearly
in March 1808 when that self-same royal guard overthrew not only him but also his master,
Charles IV, in a military coup known as the motín de Aranjuez.54
The history of the motín de Aranjuez and the events which surrounded it is long and
complicated and has in any case been recounted at length by the current author in another
context.55 That being the case, there is no need to discuss it further here. Nevertheless, it
is worth pointing out that the forces behind it – elements of the Church and, especially,
the aristocracy – were precisely the same as those which had lined up against Joseph II in
Belgium and Hungary.56 That reformist monarchs and their ministers were right to be wary
of such forces had been demonstrated still more graphically by events which had taken
place in Russia in March 1801. We come here to the case of Paul I of Russia. Ruler of
Russia since the death of Catherine the Great in November 1796, Paul was an extremely
volatile figure who was notorious for his outbursts of uncontrollable rage and fascination
from boyhood for all things military – after his marriage, his palace at Gatschina became
the base of a 2,000-strong private army organised, disciplined and dressed entirely on the
Prussian model. ‘The palace’, wrote the future foreign minister, Prince Czartoryski, ‘was
converted into a guardhouse: everywhere you heard the heavy tramp of officers’ boots and
the clink of spurs’.57 Ever since the time of Paul’s reign, there has been prolonged debate
about the state of his mental health, and many opinions can be found to the effect that he
was, if not actually insane, then at the very least seriously disturbed. At this distance, it is,
of course, impossible to offer a diagnosis of Paul’s problems with any certainty, but the most
likely explanation is that he was afflicted by a very severe form of what is today known as
‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’: hence the violent rages precipitated by trifling incidents
recorded by contemporaries.58
Whether Paul deserves to be regarded as a reformer is something that has been much
disputed by historians, the case advanced to support this claim by Roger McGrew having
been fiercely challenged.59 Yet McGrew’s conclusions do not seem unreasonable. Paul was
certainly neither a sympathetic figure nor a man of the Enlightenment (or, at least, not in
most respects: with regard to Russia’s religious minorities, including, not least, the Jews, he
was extremely tolerant), but he was convinced that a great deal of laxity had crept into the
Russia system of government. In this he was by no means wrong – the collection of taxes,
for example, was badly in arrears – and the steps that he took to put things right – the
imposition of tighter discipline in the civil service, the rigid centralisation of authority,
the re-organisation of the senate (a cross between a legislative body and a supreme court),
the establishment of new schools of government and medicine, the simplification of the
system of local government, the first moves in the direction of modern ministries, and the
resurrection of the council of state (an institution set up by his mother, but over the years
allowed to slide into disuse) as a powerful executive – were hardly foreign to the actions and
methods of the enlightened absolutists of other states. What mattered, then, was discipline
and efficiency, and there is no doubt that, brusque as Paul’s approach was, it produced both
significant improvements in the speed with which government business was handled and
considerable savings with regard to government expenditure. Mixed in with all this was a
measure of the absurd – always terrified of revolution, Paul believed that any relaxation in
the norms expected of a gentleman would undermine respect for their betters among the
populace and, in consequence, issued precise instructions as to how men of any rank should
appear in public (in brief, breeches, stockings and tricorne hats were ‘in’, and trousers and
round hats ‘out’) – but, in Waliszewski’s words, such a record testifies to ‘an activity which
accomplished greater things than the organization of a military household’.60
All this said, it is with regard to the army that Paul is chiefly remembered. As will be
recalled, under Catherine the Great, Russia’s soldiers had been allowed to adopt a relatively
comfortable style of dress, whilst Suvorov, especially, had favoured the use of columnar tactics
designed to overwhelm the enemy by the speed and ferocity of attack which they permitted.
In so far as the new tsar was concerned, however, this was completely unacceptable, his mind
rather being fixated by the tight uniforms and rigid linear formations favoured by Frederick
the Great.61 Virtually overnight, then, the whole aspect of the army was transformed, whilst
Paul further emphasised his disdain for the fluid tactics associated with Suvorov by reducing
the number of light-cavalry regiments (i.e. hussars and carabineers) in favour of having a
greater number of heavy ones (i.e. dragoons and cuirassiers). Whether this extremely con-
servative approach to the battlefield would ever have borne fruit is unclear for, having been
appointed to the command of the army sent to assist the Austrians, Suvorov ignored Paul’s
strictures and fought his battles much as he always had (not that the extremely constricted
terrain in which much of the fighting in the Alps took place left him with much choice),
whilst the other Russian army involved in the campaign was both badly outnumbered and
possessed of many troops – the remnants of Condé’s émigrés – of very poor quality. That
said, whilst it is true that Paul also paid much attention to the army’s artillery and was
keen to ensure that the infantry got better support, it is impossible not to suspect that his
attempt to turn back the clock would have led to disaster, however well drilled the Russian
forces were (an aspect of military training with which Paul was obsessed, so much so, indeed,
that he would often spend the entire morning drilling whichever regiment he had decided
to inspect that day). All this may sound the worst sort of military pedantry, but Paul was
genuinely concerned to improve military efficiency and, rightly enough, saw the standard of
a regiment’s drill as a good indication of the quality of its officers. Furthermore, in so far as
these last were concerned, he had no mercy: officers who displeased him in even the small-
est way could expect to be treated to tirades of abuse and even lashed with his cane, whilst
they were expected to serve with their regiments at all times rather than going on leave for
long periods and subjected to very tight regulations designed to eliminate the wholesale cor-
ruption to which the army had fallen prey; not surprisingly, then, the result was a purge of
the officer corps of a sort not seen anywhere else in Europe, some 6,000 officers either being
cashiered or deciding to resign their commissions. If Paul terrorised the officer corps, mean-
while, he also sought to stimulate their pride: whereas it had been customary for civilian
officials and retired officers to wear uniforms, this practice was now banned, whilst the deci-
sion to call regiments after their colonels in place of the traditional practice of naming them
after the cities or provinces with which they were originally associated was as good a way
as any of ensuring that said colonels made certain that their men made a suitable showing.
And, finally, present too was genuine care for the common soldier: keeping the officer corps
under constant invigilation made it harder for brutes and bullies to overstep the bounds of
the code of discipline when dealing with their men.62
Paul, then, probably deserves better of history than has often been allowed, whilst his
efforts to build a more efficient state and army alike were by no means an irrational response
to Russia’s situation. Whether they were ever likely to succeed is another matter, but nobody
can deny either his determination or his energy. Yet Paul was playing a dangerous game, for
too many vested interests had been offended. In view of the precedent constituted by Peter
III, the result was, if not inevitable, then, at the very least, hardly surprising. By the begin-
ning of 1801, almost 500 army officers had become involved in a plot to overthrow Paul,
and on 11 March a large group of them forced their way into the special fortress-cum-palace
which Paul, ever fearful of assassination, had ordered to be constructed for his personal use
in Saint Petersburg and put him to death in the most brutal of circumstances.63
In Prussia, Austria, Spain and Russia alike, then, the cause of reform ran into obstacles
that were all but insuperable, obstacles that were so great, indeed, that in Prussia the need
was effectively ducked; in Austria very little was attempted; in Spain very little was achieved;
and in Russia such progress as was made was quickly snuffed out amidst scenes that were
positively gothic in their horror. Only in Britain was the situation any different, the fact
that this was the case being anything but a surprise. Thus, in Britain, the old order, such as
it was, was not remotely comparable to its counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Feudalism had
died out in the fifteenth century; the Catholic Church stripped of its lands and not just that
but Anglicanised in the sixteenth; and the monarchy disabused of any lingering absolut-
ist pretensions in the seventeenth. Meanwhile, if extremely unrepresentative, Parliament
was thriving, there was de facto freedom of the press, and property had long since come
to supplant nobility as the chief definition of status in society. The implications of all this
were manifold, but, in brief, it meant that problems could be recognised and discussed more
openly and a more flexible approach adopted when it came to arriving at solutions. This
is not to say that Britain did not experience serious challenges in the course of the French
Revolutionary Wars – on the contrary, in fact – but she was therefore more than able to
rise to the occasion, the result being that by 1801 a series of reforms had been enacted that
meant that Britain was well placed to meet the demands of the even greater struggle that
broke out following the collapse of the Peace of Amiens. As Roger Knight points out, in
earlier decades of the eighteenth century, nearly ten years of continuous warfare would have
so exhausted Britain that she would have had no option but abandon military operations for
a considerable period, but in 1803 she was able to go back to war after scarcely a year and,
what is more, to wage it on a scale much increased from that of the 1790s.64
At the heart of this achievement was, beyond doubt, the figure of William Pitt the
Younger. Just as France was lucky to have the services of Napoleon, so Britain was lucky
to have the services of Pitt, not the least of whose many qualities was a lack of interest in
tradition that rendered him extremely pragmatic in his conservatism and ready to reach
out beyond the traditional bounds of the political establishment: if he was brought down
in 1800, it was because of his conversion to the cause of Catholic emancipation, while
it is doubtful whether the substantial element of the Whigs represented by the Duke of
Portland and his followers would have thrown in their lot so completely with any other
Tory leader.65 Nor was Pitt just an eminently practical politician who knew not just what
battles needed to be fought but also those which were best avoided (a good example here is
the issue of patronage: Pitt was all too aware of the many disadvantages of patronage when
it came to filling administrative appointments, but he knew full well that he did not have
the power to abolish it altogether). Thus, in him were united many qualities: eloquence,
trust, dedication, honesty, dynamism, intelligence, excellent judgement in respect of char-
acter and intellect and a recognition of the importance of rationalism and efficiency in all
matters pertaining to administration and government.66 Continually Prime Minister from
1783 onwards, by the time that the French Revolutionary Wars broke out, he had already
pushed through a wide range of reforms concerning such matters as the postal service, rev-
enue collection, official emoluments and the administration of the royal dockyards – in this
respect Roger Knight goes so far as to say that ‘what Pitt’s government managed to achieve
before war broke out in 1793 is the key to understanding how Britain survived to come
through to eventual victory in 1815’67 – and, as the struggle with France gathered pace, so
he threw himself into a campaign against waste, inefficiency and mismanagement of every
sort. Thus, from the start, Pitt applied himself to ensuring that, wherever possible, young
men of genuine promise were appointed to vacant posts at the expense of mere protégés of
prominent worthies and then encouraged in their careers, whilst he established a number
of important new agencies such as the Transport Office, streamlined many existing arrange-
ments such as those relating to the Board of Ordnance, clamped down on the payment of
fees in exchange for the good offices of government officials, improved the arrangements for
financial accountability and, most famously, in 1798, got rid of the old ‘land tax’ in favour
of a new ‘income tax’, this move being designed to tap the wealth of the emergent industrial
and commercial bourgeoisie – a group which had hitherto escaped comparatively lightly –
as well as that of the landed gentry.68
Meanwhile, reform was not just seen in the ‘corridors of power’. The Duke of York may
not have been the greatest general in history, but he was a talented administrator possessed
of extremely progressive views, and his appointment as commander-in-chief of the British
army – a post that had no connotations in terms of the command of troops in the field, but
was rather analogous to the post of generalísimo that was conferred on Godoy in 1801 – in
1795 was therefore followed by a series of reforms of considerable importance that greatly
improved the quality of the British army and, beyond the slightest doubt, paved the way
for the successes that it later obtained in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. Thus, the grant of
commissions to boys younger than sixteen years of age was prohibited; the purchase system
restricted by the imposition of rules laying down a minimum period that had to be served
in each rank before proceeding to the next; a new military academy set up for young men
who wanted a career in the infantry or cavalry that eventually became the present-day
Royal Military Academy; the army provided with the first of the rifle units that were to
make such a name for themselves in the Napoleonic Wars; the officer corps forced to adopt
a more professional approach to its duties; the army’s hospitals and other medical services
reformed; and the conditions of the rank and file greatly improved, whether through the
reform of the system of discipline, an 80 per cent increase in the pay of private soldiers, the
abolition of the hated pigtail, and the provision of greatcoats to every soldier. With much
of all this, of course, Paul I would have been in approval, but there was a crucial difference
in that, whereas the tsar bullied and tyrannised, the duke was ever-solicitous, ever-jovial
and ever-encouraging: not only were the desired results obtained much more easily, but, had
it been York that was assassinated in 1801, it can be safely assumed that the entire British
army would have been plunged into mourning.69
Finally, it has to be said that British society was capable of adjusting to the crisis of the
war years with a flexibility seen in few other places. If the 1790s saw the passage of, say, the
Combination Acts, they also gave much of Britain the so-called ‘Speenhamland system’, a
remarkably sophisticated method of poor relief first introduced in the area of the Berkshire
town of Newbury whereby wages were topped up by the local authorities on the basis of a
sliding scale tied to family size and the price of bread, which played an important part in
helping the labouring poor to survive the terrible sufferings inflicted on them by the vagar-
ies of economy and climate and is sometimes argued to have been the key factor in averting
a British revolution.70
To conclude, then, it would be wrong-headed to argue that 1789 inaugurated an era
of domestic reaction. That said, the powers of Europe cannot be said to have rushed to
modify their social and political structures on being confronted by the nation-in-arms: on
the contrary, even in Britain there was never any question of, say, an extension of the
franchise, whilst in Austria, Prussia, Russia and Spain alike the sort of military and institu-
tional reform that could be construed as a natural extension of the enlightened absolutism
of the years prior to 1789 was curtailed by the latent strength of the old order. Only in the
very different conditions offered by Britain was a genuinely successful programme of reform
implemented, and even then it did not make fundamental changes: officers might no longer
be able to leapfrog their way up the ranks in the style of the future Duke of Wellington,
but there was never any suggestion that they should be anything other than gentlemen. In
the 1790s, the effects of the caution shown by the eastern powers in particular were not
completely disastrous: the armies of the ancien régime were defeated more often than they
won, certainly, but defeat the French they still could and that, in turn, meant that peace
settlements remained based on a degree of compromise and negotiation and, further, that
the challenge to the status quo ante was for the most part kept to a minimum. Only after
Europe entered a new phase of conflict that placed Napoleon at the heart of every single
one of the French army’s campaigns did matters change, and even then they certainly did
not change to the extent that has sometimes been suggested. To coin a phrase, however,
that is another story.
Notes
1 Cit. J.R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age (Cambridge,
1878), I, p. 108.
2 E.g. I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981), p. 421.
3 Alexander, Catherine the Great, pp. 276–9.
4 Ibid., p. 283.
5 Ibid., pp. 296–7.
6 D. Smith, ‘Freemasonry and the public in eighteenth-century Russia’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
29, No. 1 (Fall, 1995), pp. 25–44. For a wider discussion, see the same author’s Working the Rough
Stone: Freemasonry in Eighteenth-Century Russia (De Kalb, IL, 1999).
7 Alexander, Catherine the Great, pp. 299–300. On Novikov himself, see G.H. McArthur, ‘Freedom
and enlightenment in Russia: the views of N.I. Novikov’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 14,
No. 3 (Fall, 1990), pp. 361–75, and R. Faggionato, A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century
Russia: The Masonic Circle of N.I. Novikov (Dordrecht, 1997).
8 Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, pp. 239–65. Note that with the fall of Floridablanca,
the policy of the Spanish government went into reverse: even during the war with France, the
Spanish press published numerous articles extolling one or other aspect of Enlightenment thought,
whilst the Societies of Friends of the Country, a network of learned societies that had sprung up
in the course of the reign of Charles III with a view to promoting education, modernisation and
economic development were allowed to function completely unmolested. Ibid., pp. 350–9.
9 E.J. Evans, William Pitt the Younger (London, 1999), p. 59.
10 K. Maxwell, ‘Pombal: the paradox of enlightenment and despotism’, in Scott, Enlightened
Absolutism, p. 76.
11 Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, pp. 209–10.
12 N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968), p. 89.
13 M.J. Sauter, Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and the Politics of the Public
Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Leiden, 2009). In December of the same year, a new censor-
ship law was introduced that was intended to extend the same principles to the publishing world.
14 The one area of the Continent where it really is possible to see a retreat from reform is Italy. In
Naples, the efforts of the Marquis de Tanucci to restrict the power of the nobility were abandoned,
while in Tuscany enlightened reform had been so unpopular amongst the mass of the population
that the departure of the Grand-Duke Leopold to Vienna to succeed to the throne of his brother,
Joseph II, was followed by a series of popular insurrections that forced the regency he had left
behind to rescind many of the measures which Leopold had introduced. M.S. Anderson, ‘The
Italian reformers’, in Scott, Enlightened Absolutism, pp. 71–4.
15 For the assassination of Gustavus III, see R. Nisbet Bain, ‘The assassination of Gustavus III of
Sweden’, English Historical Review, 2, No. 7 (July, 1887), pp. 543–52.
16 For a useful introduction to the reforms of Joseph II, see T.C.W. Blanning, Joseph II and Enlightened
Despotism (London, 1970). For more detailed accounts of various aspects of Joseph’s policies, see
P.G.M. Dickson, ‘Monarchy and bureaucracy in late eighteenth-century Austria’, English Historical
Review, CX, No. 436 (April, 1995), pp. 323–67; P.G.M. Dickson, ‘Joseph II’s Hungarian land
survey’, English Historical Review, 106, No. 104 (July, 1990), pp. 611–34; P.G.M. Dickson, ‘Joseph
II’s reshaping of the Austrian Church’, Historical Journal, 36, No. 1 (March, 1993), pp. 89–114;
E.H. Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: an Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism
(Budapest, 1997), pp. 196–213.
17 Prominent amongst the opposition everywhere was the nobility. However, the drive for
Germanisation also irritated the wider educated élite, while the régime’s attempts to police society
and purify popular religion of practices which were deemed to be superstitious ensured that there
was also much popular unrest. For the language issue, in particular, see R.H.W. Evans, ‘Joseph II
and nationality in the Habsburg lands’, in R.J.W. Evans (ed.), Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs,
1683–1867 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 134–46.
18 S.K. Padover, The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph the Second, 1741–1790 (London, 1934), pp. 371–3.
The unrest in Hungary was deliberately fomented by the Prussian government, this going so far as
to mount a campaign to persuade the Magyars that the chief object of the Turks in the current war
was none other than to liberate Hungary from Austrian rule.
19 R. Townson, Travels in Hungary with a Short Account of Vienna in the Year 1793 (London, 1797),
pp. 152–3; for a discussion of the rise of opposition in Hungary, see Balázs, Hungary and the
Habsburgs, pp. 261–89 passim. Townson’s gloss on Hungarian resistance to Joseph I was extremely
favourable, but other visitors were more critical. Here, for example, is Wiliam Hunter: ‘In
Hungary . . . those in whom the prerogative rests of raising money for the public service are
excused from furnishing any part of the supplies. They exempt themselves and throw the whole
burden on the subordinate classes. The nobles, who are the proprietors of nearly the whole wealth
of the country, contribute nothing to its support, while the burghers and peasants who are
scarcely removed from without the verge of slavish vassalage . . . are obliged to defray all the
ordinary expenses of the government. The operation of this principle alone must inevitably
oppose an insurmountable obstacle to the progress of improvement, and, without enquiring fur-
ther, furnishes a sufficiently obvious reason for the unpolished and impoverished state of the
country.’ W. Hunter, Travels through France, Turkey and Hungary to Vienna to Which Are Added
Several Tours in Hungary in 1799 and 1800 (London, 1803), II, pp. 470–1.
20 Cole, ‘Nation, anti-enlightenment and religious revival in Austria’, pp. 477–80. In both the
Tyrol and Hungary the situation was exacerbated by economic crisis: across the whole of Austria’s
domains, the harvest of 1788 had been very poor, while the Tyrol had also been hit by tariff
reforms that greatly reduced the profits to be made from the transit of goods from Germany to
Italy and vice versa, not to mention serious flooding in the winter of 1789–90. Finally, southern
Hungary, especially, was struggling with the huge logistical demands of the war against Turkey. For
all this, see Beales, Joseph II, II, pp. 624–8.
21 Hunter, Travels through France, Turkey and Hungary, II, pp. 479–81.
22 Cit. C.E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin,
1801–1805 (New York, 1989), p. 75.
23 T.C.W. Blanning, ‘Frederick the Great and enlightened absolutism’, Scott, Enlightened Absolutism,
pp. 281–4; K. Friedrich, Brandenburg Prussia, 1466–1806: The Rise of a Composite State (Houndmills,
2012), pp. 95–113. Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that there was no attempt to clamp down
on the expression of opinion: unlike in Spain, the press was allowed to report events in France
with almost total freedom and, indeed, to publish analyses of the various political positions that
were remarkably objective and free of bias. Clark, Iron Kingdom, pp. 203–4.
24 Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. 293.
25 E. las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, ed. G. Walter (Paris, 1956), I, p. 415.
26 For the situation in the army in particular, see G. Craig. The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945
(Oxford, 1955), pp. 29–30.
27 R.F. Eylert, Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III (London, 1840), p. 34
28 Cit. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, I, p. 271.
29 For all this, see Craig, Politics of the Prussian Army, pp. 27–8; Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms,
pp. 61–5.
30 Foreign visitors to Vienna invariably painted a very sympathetic portrait of Francis II, and there is
no doubt that as a human being he was infinitely superior to, for example, the waspish Frederick
the Great. E.g. J.G. Lemaistre, Travels after the Peace of Amiens through Parts of France, Italy,
Switzerland and Germany (London, 1803), II, pp. 306–9; C.G. Küttner, Travels through Denmark,
Sweden, Austria and Part of Italy in 1798 and 1799 (London, 1805), pp. 142–3. However, placed as
she was, it cannot but be felt that what Austria needed was the latter rather than the former. For
an acerbic picture typical of modern analysis, see R.A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire,
1526–1918 (Berkeley, CA, 1974), p. 210.
31 Cit. Beales, Joseph II, II, p. 690.
32 Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918, pp.178–80.
33 The manner in which troops were recruited in Hungary is more than somewhat opaque. In prin-
ciple, the diet agreed to provide sufficient recruits to maintain the Hungarian regiments of the
army at a certain overall strength, the counties (in this sense, local government districts) into
which the kingdom was divided each being assigned an annual quota which they had to satisfy.
How this was done, however, is unclear: as the populace were serfs they were not free to volunteer,
and men may therefore simply have been assigned to the army by their masters.
34 Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, p. 23.
35 Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 172–3.
36 Cit. Countess of Minto (ed.), Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliott, First Earl of Minto, from 1751 to
1806 (London, 1874), III, pp. 81–2.
37 Macartney, Habsburg Empire, pp. 13–39; Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, pp. 174–8.
38 Cit. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, p. 159; K.A. Roider, Baron Thugut and Austria’s
Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1987), p. 27.
39 Cit. G. Rothenberg, ‘The Archduke Charles and the question of popular participation in war’,
Consortium on Revolutionary Europe Proceedings, 12 (1982), p. 219.
40 Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, pp. 50–1.
41 Cit. J.A. Vann, ‘Habsburg policy and the Austrian war of 1809’, Central European History, 7,
No. 4 (December, 1974), p. 298. Bound up with Charles’ thinking here was not just fear of
causing renewed upheavals by abrogating the privileges of the different components of the
monarchy. On the contrary, he also realised that maintaining their separate status also had
much potential in political terms as the Germans could be set on the Czechs, the Czechs on
the Germans, and the Czechs, Germans, Serbs and Croats alike on the Magyars, this being pre-
cisely the tactic that overcame the various revolutions that gripped the monarchy in 1848. See
Rothenberg, ‘The Archduke Charles and the question of popular participation in war’, p. 220.
43 Ibid., pp. 66–9.
44 K.A. Roider, ‘The Habsburg Foreign Ministry and political reform, 1801–1805’, Central European
History, 22, No. 2 (June, 1989), pp. 160–82.
45 Lemaistre, Travels after the Peace of Amiens, II, pp. 339–41.
47 For a detailed analysis of the alliance with France, see La Parra López, La alianza de Godoy con los
revolucionarios.
48 C.J. Esdaile, The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War (Manchester, 1988), pp. 40–1. In fairness to
Godoy, it should be stressed that he was not just interested in military reform. On the contrary,
knowing full well that military strength was a reflection of economic prosperity, he also strove to
popularise the new methods of cultivation and husbandry that were becoming ever more common
in England, France and Germany. See E. Larriba and G, Dufour (eds.), ‘El Semanario de Agricultura
y Artes dirigido a los Pároccos’, 1797–1808 (Valladolid, 1997). Meanwhile, it should be noted that
Spanish scholarship has increasingly acquitted Godoy from the traditional charges that he was at
best an adventurer and, at worst, a corrupt and libidinous incompetent. E.g. E. La Parra López,
Manuel de Godoy: la aventura del poder (Barcelona, 2002), pp. 167–74 passim.
49 Esdaile, Spanish Army in the Peninsular War, pp. 41–6. For a portrait of the Spanish army as it stood
in the wake of Godoy’s stewardship of affairs, see C.J. Esdaile and A. Perry, Godoy’s Army: Spanish
Regiments and Uniforms from the Estado Militar of 1800 (Solihull, 2017).
50 Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, pp. 384–96. The mayorazgo is a concept which defies
easy explanation. In brief, a mayorazgo was a piece or property, usually land but sometimes a
building or buildings, which was placed in entail, or, in other words, set aside so that it could not
be sold or mortgaged (hence the other term for the practice, namely to place such properties in
the control of manos muertas or ‘dead hands’). Originally designed to protect the property of the
nobility and the Church, the economic impact of the system was substantial, and by 1800 it had
become clear that it was failing to protect the interests even of its supposed beneficiaries.
51 For two discussions of this effort to reform Spanish society, see C. Crowley, ‘Luces and hispanidad:
nationalism and modernization in eighteenth-century Spain’, in M. Palumbo and W. Shanahan
(eds.) Nationalism: Essays in Honour of Louis L. Snyder (Westport, CT, 1981), pp. 106–32, and A.J.
Calvo Maturana, ‘Aquel que manda las consciencias’: iglesia y adoctrinamiento político en la monarquía
hispánica preconstitucional, 1780–1808 (Cádiz, 2011).
52 Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, pp. 398–400.
53 J. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 415–17.
54 For a detailed study of the motín de Aranjuez, see F. Marti Gilabert, El motín de Aranjuez (Pamplona,
1972). Meanwhile, the second phase of Godoy’s attempt to reform the army is discussed in Esdaile,
Spanish Army, pp. 47–56. As for the term generalísimo, this should not be rendered ‘commander-
in-chief’, a role which pertained to the figure, however unmilitary, of Charles IV. Rather, the role
gave Godoy complete control of the army’s organisation and, with this, the power to make any
changes he felt fit.
55 E.g. C.J. Esdaile, The Peninsular War: A New History (London, 2002), pp. 7–36.
56 It is also worth pointing out that 29 May 1807 had seen the Ottoman counterparts of the forces
of reaction that overthrew the régime of Charles IV and Godoy – the janissaries and the Muslim
religious authorities – bring down Selim III and replace him with his cousin, Mustafa IV.
57 Cit. Waliszewski, Paul I of Russia, p. 81.
58 For an interesting discussion of Paul’s mental state, see H. Ragsdale, Tsar Paul and the Question of
Madness: An Essay in History and Psychology (Westport, CT, 1988).
59 For McGrew’s view of Paul, see McGrew, Paul I, pp. 192–204.
60 Waliszewski, Paul I, p. 185.
61 It is easy to criticise this move, but, in view of the fact that, since the Seven Years War, the
Russians had only fought such opponents as Poles, Turks and Persians – none of whom possessed
anything like the same military capability as the French – it does not appear quite so foolish.
62 For all this, see McGrew, Paul I, pp. 229–31; J.M. Hartley, ‘The Russian army’, in Schneid,
European Armies of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 86–96; B.W. Menning, ‘Paul I and Catherine II’s
military legacy, 1762–1801’, in Kagan and Higham, Military History of Tsarist Russia, pp.78–85.
63 McGrew, Paul I, pp. 331–53.
64 R. Knight, Britain against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793–1815 (London, 2013), p. 94.
65 See A.D. Harvey, Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, 1793–1945 (London, 1992),
pp. 168–9.
66 Evans, William Pitt, pp. 79–87.
67 Knight, Britain against Napoleon, p. 21.
68 Ibid., pp. 96–121. To praise the efforts made by Pitt to improve the governance of Britain in the
face of the French challenge is not to argue that he was a great war-leader: on the contrary, as
Evans and others have argued, his conduct of the struggle against France can be argued to have
been seriously flawed. E.g. Evans, William Pitt, pp. 51–3.
69 Winterbottom, Grand Old Duke of York, pp. 76–8.
70 For an introduction to the Speehamland system, see M. Neumann, The Speenhamland County:
Poverty and the Poor Laws in Berkshire, 1792–1834 (New York, 1982).
10 The wider world
Thus far we have essentially discussed the French Revolutionary Wars as a European
phenomenon. In essence, of course, this is exactly what they were, but that does not mean
that they were confined to Europe. On the contrary, just as had been the case with every
other conflict involving Britain and France since the beginning of the eighteenth century,
they burst the bounds of the old continent and found fresh theatres of war to contest. In
West and East alike, then, European armies found themselves battling forces based on
very different models of military organisation, and at the same time coping with terrain
and climactic conditions that could scarcely be more dissimilar from those which they
encountered in Flanders, Germany or Italy. In this chapter, we shall review these extra-
European campaigns and endeavour at the same time to establish what, if anything, was
the concrete impact of the French Revolution on the wider world.
Let us first deal with an area that might at first sight seem ripe for a positive response
to the ideas emanating from France. We come here to the Latin-American empires of
Spain and Portugal. In these enormous realms, the situation was at least potentially very
tense, for under Charles III (1759–88) the criollo community of the former – a community
whose élites were as well versed in the ideas of the Enlightenment as any of their European
counterparts – had been assailed by a determined attempt on the part of the Spanish state
to consolidate its authority over its transatlantic dominions that among other problems
gave rise to considerable deindustrialisation, an increase in taxation and a strong prefer-
ence, if not an insistence, on the appointment of metropolitan Spaniards to all positions of
authority, none of this being ameliorated by any significant relaxation of the exclusion of
American ships from trade with Spain. As if all this was not enough, it was not just the eco-
nomic interests of the criollos that were at stake, a number of measures having been put in
place that threatened a great improvement in the status of the various mixed-race commu-
nities. Meanwhile, of course, the American War of Independence could not but constitute a
powerful inspiration, and all the more so given the fact that the Madrid government showed
no sign of slackening off its push for reform: 1789, indeed, witnessed the issue of new regu-
lations designed to improve the treatment of the slaves in the plantations of Cuba, Santo
Domingo and Central America. Yet, revolt though many of the Spanish possessions did in
1810, this cannot be seen as some sort of transatlantic reflection of the French Revolution.
As in Europe, the growing violence, the virulent anti-clericalism and the assault on the
throne repelled the propertied classes whilst the latter were perpetually in thrall to their
fears of the black, mixed-race and Indian masses: it was, after all, scarcely ten years since
modern-day Peru had been hit by the revolt of Tupac Amaru. In consequence, whilst we
see much resistance to different aspects of Bourbon policy and even the first stirrings of
modern nationalism, the idea of challenging the system as such remained unattractive, such
250 The wider world
isolated cases as can be found of self-styled Jacobins expressing support for the Republic
clearly being little more than youthful braggadocchio. As for the well-known figure of the
Venezuelan Francisco Miranda, an erstwhile officer of the Spanish army who had fled into
exile in 1783 in the wake of a series of scandals and since then wandered the United States
and Europe alike, if he offered his services to the French, the chief factors in his decision
were beyond doubt ambition on the one hand and desire for employment on the other. In
practice, then, support for the latter was restricted to the peoples of mixed race and the
blacks, and conspire and rebel through these groups certainly did, they were in no position
to match the achievements of their counterparts in some of the islands in the Caribbean.1
If we wish to find a significant response to the French Revolution in the western hemi-
sphere, then, it is precisely to these islands that we must turn. From the sixteenth century
onwards, a number of European powers had competed with one another to control the
Caribbean, and by the middle of the eighteenth century all the territories of the West
Indies had been divided up among the powers and transformed into colonies. Thus, not
counting a handful of possessions held by the United Provinces, Denmark and Sweden,
the British had Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas and a variety of islands in the Windward
and Leeward archipelagos including Grenada, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Dominica;
the French the western third of the island of Hispaniola (the colony of Saint Domingue),
Martinique, Guadeloupe, Santa Lucia and Tobago; and the Spaniards, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola (the colony of Santo Domingo) and Trinidad. Possessed
of a fertile soil and a climate favourable to a wide range of crops that had either long been
regarded as luxuries in Europe (for example, sugar, ginger and coffee) or from the middle of
the eighteenth century onwards become indispensable as the raw material for the burgeon-
ing textile industries that formed the basis for the Industrial Revolution (for example, indigo and
cotton), not to mention massive reserves of such valuable woods as teak, the islands were
also favoured by a particularly useful combination of wind and current that made for good
links with the metropolis. As to how all this was exploited, meanwhile, the answer lay in the
establishment of a slave trade with Africa which over the past hundred years had seen at least
6,000,000 black Africans transported across the Atlantic and consigned to a life of servitude
in the plantation economy that developed in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Guyanas, modern-day
Venezuela and Colombia and the southern parts of Britain’s American colonies.2
For Britain and France, especially, the imperial edifice which emerged in this fashion
played a role which simply cannot be underestimated. The produce which flowed into such
ports as Bristol, Liverpool, Bordeaux and Nantes was of huge intrinsic value, certainly, but the
slave trade also brought great profits and all the more so as these were augmented by the large
quantities of goods that had to be transported to Africa to pay the local rulers for the captives
whom they sold into bondage, many of the items concerned – a good example is bar iron –
being extremely cheap by comparison with the unfortunates for whom they were exchanged.
On top of this, meanwhile, there was the issue of the boost which the trade gave to shipping,
to agriculture, to industry and even to construction (not only did the absentee owners whom
many of the more successful planters became want to construct mansions in which to enjoy
their wealth, but they also invested huge sums in the beautification and development of the
port cities on which they depended). And, last but not least, there was also the link between
a burgeoning merchant marine and naval power, the thousands of sailors required to keep the
whole construct moving in effect constituting a highly trained reserve that could easily be
channelled into new roles in time of war.3
On one level, then, the West Indian colonies were a gold mine, but on another they were
a veritable powder keg. At the heart of the whole system was ruthless racial exploitation.
The wider world 251
Transported across the Atlantic in appalling conditions, and then plunged into an economic
system characterised by the most savage cruelty and brutality, the slaves experienced the
utmost material deprivation whilst also being denied the comfort of stable family lives: at
any time, slaves could be sold from one plantation to another or even shipped off to other
colonies. In general, then, the slaves formed a mass of hatred and resentment, and all the
more so as very few of them could ever hope for manumission, whilst the isolation which
they generally experienced on their arrival from Africa – the product, not least, of the many
different languages spoken by the slaves – was gradually broken down by the forging of new
relationships, the development of new forms of communication and, finally, the emergence
of a new religion and, indeed, culture, in the form of voodoo. What made all this particu-
larly worrying, meanwhile, was that the imbalance between the races was so great: in the
whole of the British West Indies, for example, there were only 50,000 Europeans compared
to 465,000 black or mulatto slaves. Nor were the slaves the only group to feel aggrieved:
existing on the margins of society were the small minority represented by blacks and mulat-
tos who had either been born free or received their manumission, of whom there were
around 10,500 in the British colonies. Seeing themselves, for obvious reasons, as a cut above
the slaves, with decent treatment they might have been useful allies in a fight to defend
white rule – even as it was, they formed the backbone of the militias established to defend
the various colonies – but in practice they were subjected to systematic prejudice and therefore
rather pushed towards resistance.4
So much for the general situation. In this chapter, for obvious reasons, we must first be
concerned with the French colonies. For reasons of both space and the available litera-
ture, however, this topic will primarily be addressed through the lens of Saint Domingue,
namely the territory about the size of Wales that represented France’s share of the island
of Hispaniola. Though much smaller than both Cuba and Jamaica, Saint Domingue was
by far the richest of the many European possessions in the region. Thus, possessed in 1789
of no fewer than 4,699 separate plantations, it was the largest producer of both sugar and
coffee in the world, whilst it also provided France with substantial amounts of indigo and
cotton, the value of its total annual production of all commodities having been reckoned
at something like twice as much as that of all Britain’s West Indian colonies put together.
Substantial tracts were given over to cattle-ranching while its forests supplied large quanti-
ties of timber. Direct imports from its plantations and distilleries (rum was an important
product), the entrepôt trade and, last but not least, the provender and manufactured goods
sent back to it in return, together accounting for approximately 40 per cent of all France’s
foreign trade, it was the mainstay of her merchant marine, of the wide range of ancilliary
industries associated with ocean-going activity and of the prosperity of ports such as Nantes
and Bordeaux. At the same time, of course, Saint Domingue was also a society founded on
slavery: in 1789 it housed at least 500,000 slaves, all of them blacks or mulattos, as opposed
to only 40,000 whites and about the same number of gens de couleur libres, whilst the great
prosperity enjoyed by the colony in the decade before the Revolution ensured that the
enslaved population was growing at a vertiginous rate, so much so, indeed, that by 1789 its
monetary value represented some three-quarters of the total wealth of the planters. Truly,
then, as Graham Nessler has remarked, ‘Saint Domingue stood at the centre of the French
Atlantic economy . . . [and] not only created fabulous wealth for a handful of planters, but
also under-wrote much of the economic and political power of eighteenth-century France.’5
Curiously, however, it is not with the slaves that an analysis of the impact of the French
Revolution on the colony should begin: whilst the slaves were scarcely happy, throughout
the eighteenth century they had shown far less inclination to engage in violence than their
252 The wider world
counterparts in, say, Jamaica, not least because the division of the island of which Saint
Domingue formed the western-most fringe into two separate colonies, the one French and
the other Spanish, meant that flight was a much better option: nowhere was the frontier
of Santo Domingo very far away, whilst the Spaniards were on the whole happy to wel-
come fugitives willing to settle down and help colonise the more remote parts of their far
larger and less well exploited territory (this is not to say, of course, that resistance was non-
existent: on the one hand it was precisely at this time that voodoo began to emerge as a
force in the black community, whilst on the other there were occasional conspiracies and
countless individual acts of defiance: it was, for example, very common for slaves to slip away
from their plantations for days on end, whilst suicide, infanticide and abortion – all of them
actions that of their very nature struck at white property rights – were daily occurrences).
Friction, then, was concentrated much more among the free sections of the community.
Beginning at the apex of society, we first come to the planters. Extremely wealthy, the
handful of families concerned had gradually been forging a society and, indeed, identity of
their own, while they had an increasing number of grievances against the French adminis-
tration in Paris, whether these concerned the arrogance and incompetence of the governors
and other officials appointed by the metropolis, the failure of the French navy to protect
their economic interests during the American War of Independence, the high prices of
basic foodstuffs and other goods that resulted from the heavy duties levied on all imports,
the extremely limited influence of such representative bodies as Saint Domingue possessed,
or the sporadic efforts made by the Bourbon government to ameliorate the situation of the
slaves. Next, we have the many whites (the vast majority in fact) who were not planters, a
group known as the petits blancs who ranged all the way from wealthy merchants, slave-trad-
ers and professional men to tavern keepers, artisans and sailors. Sharing in at least some of
the grievances of the grands blancs though they did, they also had plenty of other complaints
ranging from the social and political exclusivity of the planters to fear and resentment of the
free blacks. And, finally, there were the free blacks, this last constituting a group that was
not at all the marginalised community seen in, say, the Carolinas or Georgia. On the con-
trary, thanks to a variety of factors, including not least the fact that French law gave them
the same rights as any other inhabitant of France’s colonies, they had been able to acquire
much property, a number even owning slaves themselves; indeed, by 1789 they owned
one-third of Saint Domingue’s plantations, one-fifth of its slaves and one-quarter of its
landed property. Of course, not all gens de couleur libres had prospered to the same extent –
many were rather artisans or petty traders – but they had nonetheless come to occupy an
important position in the colony and, still more so, the ranks of the militia, service in whose
ranks represented not the burden that it did to white society but rather an opportunity (by
1789 approximately one-quarter of the colonial militia was composed of free blacks and
mulattos). As such, they might in theory have come to represent a relatively stable element
in colonial society, but nothing could be further from the truth: constantly exposed to the
prejudice of the poor and middling whites, with whom they were in direct competition,
they were also made the subject of a series of discriminatory regulations, some of which
were just petty, but others far more burdensome.6 Whether Saint Domingue would have
risen in revolt without the Revolution is a moot point that can never be settled one way or
the other, but what is certainly the case is that 1789 found it something of a powder keg.7
Trouble, indeed, began straight away. Prominent elements of white society had been
petitioning Paris for reform since 1788, and early in 1789 a deputation had been dis-
patched to France to press the case for drastic change. However, the right of the men
concerned to speak for the island was soon called into question in that news of the fall
The wider world 253
of the Bastille produced a wave of rioting and insurrection among the poorer whites that
produced popular assemblies in all three of the provinces into which Saint Domingue was
divided, not to mention the eventual formation of Jacobin clubs in most of the main towns
and even an abortive rising led by a wealthy planter named Vincent Ogé.8 Meanwhile, in
so far as what going on within the ranks of that community was concerned, the National
Assembly in Paris having agreed to the principle of self-government and, with it, the
creation of an assembly in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the middling and lower elements
of white society had been able to cement the control of the situation they had won in
the summer of 1789, and that despite the fact that the franchise had remained quite lim-
ited. Flushed by success, however, they now proceeded to overplay their hand, adopting
a constitution that in effect opened the way to full independence from France, an object
in which they had the full support of the wealthy planters. The obvious way to deal with
this threat being to appeal to the gens de couleur libres, the National Assembly responded
by a decree of May 1791 granting full citizenship to all those who could prove they were
children of free parents, thereby not only restating its right to regulate the internal affairs
of Saint Domingue, but also threatening to swamp the colonists.9
In the end, this dispute was resolved by means of a compromise whereby the extension
of political rights to the free black population was withdrawn in exchange for the continued
acceptance of French rule, and, in particular, metropolitan control of the terms of trade,
but in the very midst of these discussions the northern coast of Saint Domingue – an area
of lush plains almost entirely given over to sugar plantations – was gripped by a massive
slave insurrection. The greatest slave revolt in the history of the Americas, exactly why this
should suddenly have burst into life at this point is unclear, but one factor was certainly the
slaves’ perception that the white community was deeply divided and another food short-
ages resulting from a combination of the arrival of large numbers of new slaves and a severe
drought that had reduced the supply of such staples as maize, manioc and yams. Also a
strong possibility, meanwhile, is the circulation of rumours to the effect that Louis XVI had
been planning dramatic changes in the situation of the slaves only for these to be frustrated
by the schemes of the plantocracy whilst it may be, too, that a number of officers loyal to
the king had been privately urging revolt or at least dropping hints in the presence of servile
domestics and the like that the garrison would not resist rebellion, in the hope that this
would derail events in France. Of note, too, there are what might be deemed environmen-
tal issues in that the loss of much brush and forest in the interior to new plantations was
rendering marronage – the establishment of fugitive communities dependent on banditry,
hunting and subsistence farming – ever more difficult. And, finally, there is, beyond doubt,
the influence of the French Revolution: from the very first moment of the arrival of news of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, blacks and mulattos alike had started
to wear tricolour cockades – had frequently demanded the right to do so, in fact – while
across the French Caribbean from 1789 onwards many plantations witnessed disturbances
in which references to events in France played a central role.10
In the end, then, all we have here is surmise, whilst we know little more about how the
revolt was organised, though there seems to be general agreement that the final decision
was taken at a great feast held on the night of 14 August that brought together representa-
tives of many different local properties (this is sometimes referred to as the Bois Caiman
ceremony, but this last appears to have been a quite separate event in which a band of slaves
involved in the conspiracy engaged in an act of ritual sacrifice in the hope of invoking
divine intervention).11 The initial leader, meanwhile, was one Dutty Boukman, a coach-
man who appears to have doubled as a prominent voodoo holy man, other names that figure
254 The wider world
in the story being Georges Biassou, Jeannot Billot and Jean-Francois Papillon, of whom this
last was also a coachman although he appears to have been a fugitive at the time of the
insurrection. Importantly, meanwhile, all four had been born and bred on Saint Domingue
rather that being brought over from Africa, whilst they also appear in each case to have
held responsible positions of one sort or another which either gave them opportunities to
travel or imbued them with a certain status in their communities. As for the impact of the
insurrection, meanwhile, this was certainly dramatic, the 30,000 slaves involved in the
initial rising laying waste to over 1,000 plantations and massacring some 2,000 whites,
many of whom were put to death in the most horrific of manners, whilst the insurgents were
soon joined by many gens de couleur libres including, not least, André Rigaud, the French-
educated son of a wealthy planter, and one Toussaint l’Ouverture, a forty-eighty-year-old
black creole currently employed as a coachman who had been freed in 1776.12
Dramatic though these events were, it is important that they are not over romanticised.
Thus, aware though the slaves were of the French Revolution, they scarcely needed its
example to be called to arms, while the idea of general emancipation, let alone a black
republic, was notable by its absence, such demands as the rebel leadership voiced being
for most part concerned with limited improvements to working conditions. Thus, very
soon the rising lost its first impetus: not only did many of the slaves give themselves over
to pillage, but a variety of tensions emerged among their leaders, not to mention between
blacks on the one hand and mulattos on the other, whilst, driven on though many of them
were by voodoo-inspired beliefs that they were protected by the spirits known as loa, the
undisciplined and ill-armed slave armies were unable to overcome the garrisons of the
coastal towns. Nor was participation in the uprising anything like total, with some slaves
refusing to take part in the revolt altogether, others seeking safety in flight and still others
doing no more than withdrawing their labour.13 Nevertheless, the rebel armies remained a
terrifying foe, for, as John Thornton has pointed out, setting aside the fact that thousands
of blacks and mulattos had served at one point or another in the militia, the colonial
security forces or one or other of the auxiliary units that had been raised to fight in the
American War of Independence, huge numbers of the many recent arrivals from Africa
owed their bondage to the fact that they had been taken prisoner fighting in in the bitter
internecine warfare that ravaged many parts of western Africa in the period immediately
prior to the French Revolution.14
Needless to say, the rising had an immediate impact on the white community. Glad to
receive the support of 6,000 troops sent from Paris with a view to restoring order, it also
backed away from notions of independence and bowed to the authority of a three-man
government commission headed by one Léger Sonthonax, a wealthy opponent of slavery
who had rallied to the Brissotins, and that despite the fact that Sonthonax sought a solu-
tion to the crisis by, on the one hand, attempting to negotiate a peace with the insurgents
and, on the other, insisting that the rights of the gens de couleur libres should be recognised
in full. With Sonthonax even going so far as to hint at the prospect of emancipation and
many of the surviving insurgent leaders seemingly weary of the fight, by the summer of 1792
the majority of the rebels had therefore laid down their arms and either gone into hiding or
returned to their homes.15 For a few months, then, the situation was relatively quiet other
than for sporadic riots on the part of petits blancs aggrieved at the concessions which had
been made to the gens de couleur libres. Very soon, however, the outbreak of war with Britain
and Spain completely changed the situation. On the one hand, fresh life was breathed into
the cause of insurrection by news that the governor of Santo Domingo, Joaquin García, was
planning to invade Saint Domingue and promising to send aid to Toussaint l’Ouverture
The wider world 255
and the other rebel leaders still holding out in the mountains of the interior, whilst, on
the other, heartened by the hope of British support, much of the white community aban-
doned its conciliatory stance and declared in favour of independence, this being a stance, of
course, that could not but terrify blacks and mulattos alike.16
In hoping for British support, the colonists were not to be disappointed. That the French
colonies in the Caribbean would figure in Britain’s war effort was always very likely, for,
not only were Saint Domingue and its fellows valuable prizes whose loss would be a terrible
blow to Paris, but they also constituted bases from which attacks could be launched on
British territory and shipping, not to mention the one theatre of war in which the British
armed forces could make a significant contribution to the struggle in their own right.17 At
the same time, with regard to Saint Domingue in particular, there was also the issue of slave
revolt, the government of William Pitt being understandably terrified that the example of
the insurrection of 1791 would sooner or later spread to Jamaica.18 Not surprisingly, then,
although Tobago, Santa Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe were all quickly occupied as
well, it was Saint Domingue that was the chief focus of operations: following the arrival of a
division of 7,000 men under Sir Charles Grey, the winter of 1793–4 therefore saw substan-
tial forces of British troops take over the southern third of the colony, the only resistance
that was encountered coming from the free blacks of André Rigaud.19
At this point, however, Grey began to run into difficulties. Already at full stretch, his
forces were simply too weak to advance any further in Saint Domingue, while, as 1794
wore on, meanwhile, so the dreaded ‘sickly season’ struck home, the result being that, by
the beginning of June, around one-third of his command was listed as being out of action
due to illness. And, finally, as if all this was not enough, a series of dramatic develop-
ments completely transformed the situation in Saint Domingue. Here the erstwhile slaves
of Toussaint l’Ouverture – now universally acknowledged as the leader of the revolt – had
hitherto been fighting the French. At this point, however, L’Ouverture suddenly changed
sides. To understand what had occurred, we need to return to the delegation that had been
dispatched from Paris. Sonthonax having now come to the conclusion that the only way to
save Saint Domingue was to offer freedom to the slaves, in December 1793 he dispatched
three representatives of the island – one black, one white and one mulatto – to argue the
case for emancipation. In brief, this move proved a great success. Not only were the plant-
ers plutocrats who could not but grate on the Convention, but many of those who lived in
France had fled abroad, just as most of the grands blancs still in the Caribbean had rallied to
the British. On 4 February 1794, then, the Convention voted to emancipate every single
one of France’s 800,000 slaves: hence L’Ouverture’s volte-face, the news from Paris con-
vincing him that he was fighting on the wrong side.20
As if this was not bad enough from the British point of view, throughout the Caribbean
the situation now went into reverse. In brief, having decided to abolish slavery, the
Convention resolved on launching an offensive of its own. Shortly after abolition was pro-
claimed, then, a small expeditionary force was dispatched to the Caribbean under Victor
Hugues, a prominent Montagnard from La Rochelle with family links to Saint Domingue.
Possessed of little more than 1,000 men and just three small warships, Hugues nonetheless
had no sooner arrived in the Caribbean than he invaded Guadeloupe and over the next few
months waged a fierce campaign against the British garrison with the aid of a large army of
freed slaves, the governor eventually being left with no option but to lay down his arms,
whereupon the 800 French auxiliaries fighting with his forces were all promptly guillotined
or shot by firing squad. Nor was this triumph an end to Hugues’ contribution to the French
war effort: on the contrary, agents were dispatched to whip up revolt in Jamaica and other
256 The wider world
British colonies, together with some of French possessions seized by the British earlier in the
war (with considerable effect: apart from Jamaica, the islands hit included Saint Vincent,
Santa Lucia, Saint Kitts, Grenada and Desiderade), whilst Hugues also fitted out a fleet of
privateers that wrought havoc across the Caribbean (not that this was entirely in the French
interest: so many American ships were taken that the United States became involved in an
undeclared naval war with France). Finally, as de facto dictator of Guadeloupe, Hugues also
proved a capable and enlightened administrator, extirpating all traces of royalism by means
of a veritable reign of terror but at the same eliminating all racial discrimination and com-
missioning many erstwhile slaves as officers in his armed forces (that said, Hugues was no
liberator: on the contrary, in his eyes, Guadeloupe remained a colonial possession that was
to be exploited to the full, the black population therefore being confined to its plantations
and subjected to a brutal system of labour discipline).21
In Saint Domingue, by contrast, the British for the time being succeeded in holding their
own. Aided though they were by a large number of local auxiliaries, some of them French
royalists and others black or mulatto, for the British army it was a miserable episode. With
the interior of the colony a tangled mass of mountains and ravines swarming with desper-
ate bands of escaped slaves who were becoming ever more skilled at guerrilla warfare, the
British troops found themselves confined to the notoriously unhealthy coastal towns, many
of which had been devastated in earlier fighting and were already crowded with refugees.
Very quickly, then, officers and men alike began to go down with a range of diseases to
which they greatly increased their vulnerability by engaging in the whoring and heavy
drinking that were the only leisure activities to which the rank and file, at least, had any
access. With the consequent mortality enormous, the garrison sank still deeper into depres-
sion and alcoholism, and this both reduced its capacity for combat and worsened the death
rate, thereby creating a vicious circle. Very soon it became clear that the campaign was
hopeless, and yet the withdrawal that was the obvious solution was ruled out as being likely
to spark off revolts from one end of the British West Indies to the other. Instead, more and
more troops were poured into the Caribbean in general and Saint Domingue in particular.
Elsewhere, some success was obtained, particularly by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, who, having
arrived at the head of a large expedition in the autumn of 1795, restored order in Grenada,
Santa Lucia and Saint Vincent and conquered Spanish Trinidad (Spain, of course, was
at war with Britain from May 1796, one of the many reasons why this was the case being
the manner in which British intervention in Saint Domingue had in effect put paid to
Spanish hopes of being to seize the colony for themselves).22 However, in Saint Domingue
it was a different story. In brief, progress was all but non-existent, while the campaign was
both beginning to jeopardise the war effort by discouraging enlistment to the regular army
and threatening to undermine the entire plantation system, the British government having
been forced to authorise the formation of no fewer than twelve regiments of black infantry
by means of the purchase of suitable males from the thousands of slaves who continued to
arrive from Africa (to ensure that they were subject to military jurisdiction rather than the
rule of the civilian courts, all of the men had to be set free). Meanwhile, to return to Saint
Domingue, as economic life of any sort came to a standstill, so more and more slaves flocked
to the standard of rebellion, and the result was that at long last the stalemate was broken.
With L’Ouverture’s forces mounting ever more ferocious attacks on his positions typified
by an action at the town of L’Arcahaie in January 1798, the latest British commander,
Sir Thomas Maitland, realised that his situation was hopeless and negotiated a conven-
tion whereby he agreed to pull out his forces in exchange for a guarantee that no attempt
would be made to molest Jamaica. In consequence, Saint Domingue was left in the hands of
The wider world 257
L’Ouverture, who was now a general in the French army and, not just that, but commander-
in-chief of all the Republican forces in the colony.23
Following the departure of the British, Saint Domingue was given a new French governor
in the person of Joseph Hédouville, an experienced military commander who had played
a major role in the final pacification of the Vendée. Yet, not least because there were no
French troops on the island, the real ruler of the island was Toussaint l’Ouverture. Thus, his
humble origins notwithstanding, the black general had over the past seven years displayed
a combination of ruthlessness and political acumen that had enabled him to suppress every
potential rival amongst the erstwhile slaves and gens de couleur libres. With the coming of
peace, then, it was his policies that prevailed. Though at no time displaying any inclina-
tion to push for independence, he nonetheless ignored the hapless Hédouville and followed
his own ideas, whether these consisted of restoring the plantation economy or encourag-
ing émigrés to return to Saint Domingue, whilst at the same time refusing point-blank to
demobilise any of his forces. Nor, meanwhile, was he prepared to brook any challenge to
his rule: at first prepared to tolerate Hédouville’s presence, when the latter became too
pressing in his demands, he engineered a revolt that left the governor with no option but
to flee into exile. With Hédouville out of the way, L’Ouverture replaced him with his own
man, namely a French diplomat named Roume resident in Santo Domingo, to whom it
was made very plain that he need have no thought of challenging the general. Very soon,
meanwhile, he was pursuing what amounted to his own foreign policy, in that, desperate
to restore the export trade, he effectively signed a local peace agreement with the British
whereby he promised to end all privateering operations and refrain from stirring up revolt
in Jamaica and other British colonies, a move that was rendered all the more sensible by the
fact that in the summer of 1799 the de facto leader of the gens de couleur libres, Rigaud, rose
in revolt, the result being a brutal civil war that took many months to suppress. In the end,
victory was obtained, albeit at the cost of untold bloodshed, but in November 1799 came
the coup of 18 Brumaire and with it rumours that the new régime that it had brought to
France was hinting that it might restore slavery. Though Napoleon confirmed L’Ouverture
in his position, in the face of this threat L’Ouverture resolved that the only way forward was
for his forces to unify the entire island by taking over the Spanish zone for fear that it could
otherwise be used as a bridgehead for a French invasion. In January 1801, then, L’Ouverture
invaded Santo Domingo at the head of a large army, whilst a constituent assembly held
in Port-au-Prince in March of the same year to all intents and purposes established Saint
Domingue as an independent state.24
By the summer of 1801, then, Saint Domingue had effectively broken away from France.
On one level, this reflected the determination of Toussaint l’Ouverture to confine slavery
to history, but on another what we see is something that is far less attractive. Thus, the
slave leader had long since become something very different from the coachman who had
joined the forces of Dutty Boukman. In effect, declared ruler of the new state for life with
the power to nominate his own successor, L’Ouverture had become a miles gloriosus, the
very epitome avant la lettre, indeed, of the military commanders who over the course of the
next twenty-five years were to liberate South and Central America from Spanish rule. His
headquarters was transformed into a court peopled by extravagantly dressed generals, minis-
ters, courtesans and flunkeys; his movements were accompanied by a gorgeously uniformed
personal bodyguard; he was now the owner of vast estates worked by hundreds of ex-slaves;
and his word had quite literally become law, all those who sought to challenge him being
ruthlessly put to death. In his personal dress, especially, he remained a modest figure, and
yet even this was an affectation designed to make him stand out amongst the popinjays who
258 The wider world
characterised his suite. If his rule was infinitely bloodier than that of the French commander
whose career his own had come to parallel and who, by this stage, he was clearly deliber-
ately trying to emulate, truly he merited the description of ‘the black Napoleon’. Whether
he deserved this title in military terms, however, was another matter and one that was very
likely to be tested out very shortly. To quote Beaubrun Ardouin, a nineteenth-century
historian of Saint Domingue, ‘The misuse of his authority . . . was so contrary to the sov-
ereignty of France as to attract to his head the thunder hurled by the consular government
when circumstances were favourable.’25
The story of that retribution does not really belong here – suffice to say that, notwith-
standing the fact that L’Ouverture himself was taken prisoner and packed off to a miserable
death in France, it was a failure, yellow fever ravaging the French forces eventually sent to
retake Saint Domingue just as effectively as it had their British predecessors – but it is worth
pausing to consider what the effect had been of twelve years of turmoil, revolution and civil
war. On Haiti, as Saint Domingue was renamed in 1804, the impact was devastating, and
it is arguable that the new state never recovered from the experience. Thus, setting aside
the short-term devastation visited on the population and the economy alike, the nascent
bourgeoisie contained within the gens de couleur libres was all but wiped out and the people
of Haiti reduced to a rural proletariat. Still worse, perhaps, the wars of the 1790s resulted
in the emergence of a group of generals not dissimilar from those flung up on the other side
of the Atlantic. Typified by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, such men were
little more than warlords, and have little to commend them. Thus, appointed governor-
general in the absence of L’Ouverture, whom he certainly played a part in betraying to the
French, in 1804 Dessalines took the title of Emperor Jacques I and immediately ordered
the massacre of the 4,000 whites still left in the country. Deeply jealous of Dessalines,
meanwhile, Christophe, deliberately failed to warn him of a plot against his life that was
underway under the direction of André Pétion, a general sprung from the forces of the
mulatto leader André Rigaud and, on his subsequent assassination on 17 October 1806,
seized the throne as King Henri I. As for Pétion, angered by the continued tendency of
the revolutionary leadership to discriminate against the mulattos, he set up a rival state
in the south of the country which survived until 1820. True though it is that Dessalines,
Christophe and Pétion all faced serious problems, including, most notably a prolonged trade
embargo on the part of the United States, the story is scarcely an edifying one, and yet it
cannot be denied that the revolt of 1791 was ever afterwards an iconic moment for anti-
colonial liberation movements. More immediately, the repercussions of the Revolution in
Saint Domingue and France’s other colonies received a copious echo elsewhere: from Cuba
to Brazil, the 1790s were marked by a widespread upsurge in slave resistance and revolt,
good examples including the revolt led by the free mulatto José Chirino and the Congolese
slave José Caridad González in Venezuela in May 1795 and the rising that took place in the
Aguadilla area of Puerto Rico in October of the same year.26 Yet in the end, only in Saint
Domingue was there any chance of success, and even then one cannot but feel that the lat-
ter’s ultimate guarantor was neither black genius nor black heroism nor black organisation
but rather white weakness and white division. And, to white weakness, of course, can be
added yellow fever, the British and French troops sent to the Caribbean dying by the thou-
sand, and that in many instances without having had a chance to fire even a single shot at
their adversaries.27
Before concluding this discussion of events in the Caribbean in favour of developments
elsewhere, it is worth saying a little about how extra-European conflict worked out in other
The wider world 259
areas of the world, the fact being that the footprint of France, Spain and the Batavian
Republic was not restricted to the western hemisphere. On the contrary, French possessions
included the Indian-Ocean islands of Ile-de-France and Ile Bourbon (present-day Mauritius
and Réunion) as well as the Indian town of Pondicherry (Puducherry); those of the Dutch
the Cape, the coastal areas of Ceylon and a number of outposts in present-day Malaysia and
Indonesia, especially on the island of Java; and those of the Spaniards the Philippines and a
scattering of islands in the Pacific. On top of all this, meanwhile, the coasts of west Africa
were dotted with the forts through which the slave trade was channelled. Constituting,
as these did, bases from which privateers could harass British shipping and, in the case
of the Cape Colony, a vital stopping place on the route to India, the outbreak of war was
unlikely to see them left in peace. Given the powerful British military presence in India,
Pondicherry was attacked straightaway, surrendering on terms after a three-week siege in
August 1793. Meanwhile, hardly had the United Provinces become the Batavian Republic
and changed sides, than the British sent an expedition to overcome the 3,000-strong gar-
rison of Cape Town, the governor laying down his arms after a brief attempt at resistance
on 15 September 1795. Also quick to fall were the Dutch possessions in Malaya and Ceylon,
the last of the posts concerned – Colombo – surrendering without firing a shot on 14
February 1796 after the most important part of the garrison, a regiment of Swiss merce-
naries, was suborned into changing sides by the British.28 Yet all this was for nothing: by
the time that peace talks finally got under way with France in 1801, London was not in a
strong enough position to hold on to its territorial acquisitions, and the Treaty of Amiens
therefore saw them all handed back to their original owners with the exception of Trinidad
and Ceylon. To say that the French Revolutionary Wars witnessed a shift in the balance
of power in the wider world would therefore be an exaggeration, what brought that about
rather being Napoleon.29
From the Americas and the West Indies, we now travel in a completely different direc-
tion and, what is more, engage with a different style of warfare. In the western hemisphere,
the French Revolution had sparked off on the one hand a fresh period of colonial strife
between the powers and, on the other, an upsurge in resistance, sometimes very dramatic,
amongst the subject populations, whether free or servile. In the east, however, we see some-
thing very different, namely an attempt on the part of France to launch an assault on the
Ottoman Empire in the hope of carving out a new empire in Egypt in place of the one that
was so clearly coming to grief in the Caribbean. To understand how this occurred we need
to turn once more to the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. In brief, Napoleon had emerged
from the Italian campaign as a veritable power in the land. In France, he had, as we have
seen, been careful to burnish his public image by every means available, and, when he finally
reappeared in Paris in the wake of the coup of Fructidor, an affair for which he naturally
claimed all the credit, he was therefore greeted as a hero. Let us here quote Laure Junot:
However great the vanity of Bonaparte, it cannot but have been satisfied by the man-
ner in which people of every class gathered . . . to greet his return to the fatherland.
The populace cried, ‘Long live Bonaparte! Long live the victor of Italy! Long live the
peace-maker of Campo Formio!’ The bourgeoisie exclaimed, ‘God keep him! May he
save us from the maximum and the directors!’ And the upper classes . . . flocked with
enthusiasm to the young man who in one year had gone from the battle of Montenotte
to the treaty of Leoben. Faults . . . he may well have committed, but at that moment he
was a colossus of glory as great as it was pure!30
260 The wider world
Also interesting here is Germaine de Staël, who was a witness to the great reception which
the Directory arranged for Napoleon in the Luxembourg Palace:
No room would have been big enough to accommodate the crowds that turned up:
there were spectators at every window and on every roof. Dressed in Roman costume,
the five directors were placed on a dais at one end of the courtyard, and nearby the
members of the two councils, the high courts and the institute. If this spectacle had
taken place before the national assembly had bowed the knee to military despotism on
18 Fructidor, it might have been thought very grand: a fine band was playing patriotic
airs, and flags recalling our great victories draped the dais of the Directory. Bonaparte
arrived dressed very simply and followed by his aides-de-camp: all of them were taller
than the general, but such was the humility of their demeanour that they seemed to
be dwarfed by him. As for the élite of France there present, they deluged him with
applause: republicans, royalists and everyone alike saw their present and future in terms
of the support of his powerful hand.31
Predictably enough, all this did little to assuage Napoleon’s personal ambition and con-
tempt for civilian politicians. On the contrary, as Louis Gohier (one of the three directors
ousted in the coup of 18 Brumaire) noted:
Far from being satisfied with the solemn reception which he was accorded on his return
from Italy . . . Bonaparte saw in the pomp in which it was couched nothing more than
the desire of the Directory to parade itself in all its glory . . . To satisfy his vanity, it
would have been necessary to allow him to present himself to the people all alone in a
triumphal chariot.32
At all events, having returned to Paris, Napoleon lost no time in sounding out a variety
of contacts with regard to realising his ambitions (a process he had in fact embarked upon
before he had even left Italy), his initial plan being to get himself elected to the Directory
and then seize power in conjunction with one or more of its members prior to rewriting the
constitution so as to give much greater weight to the executive power (and with it, needless
to say, himself). But in this he was unsuccessful. No one who mattered was willing to ready to
throw themselves on his mercy at this point, whilst some of those to whom he turned as old
allies, such as Barras, were now increasingly fearful of him. For the time being, then, there
was nothing to do but embark on a search for still more glory. Action, in fact, was essential,
for, as he remarked, ‘In Paris nothing is remembered for long. If I remain doing nothing . . . I
am lost.’33 As to where he might do something, at some point during the Italian campaign
the French commander’s eyes had turned east. Egypt certainly crossed his mind as his next
objective – he raised the idea several times in letters to the Directory – and it was undoubt-
edly to this end that he also proposed that France should seize Malta and made the Ionian
islands – the most notable are Corfu, Xante and Cephalonia – France’s share in the rape of
Venice: affording useful harbours one and all, these last were also useful pawns that might be
used either as a base from which to foment rebellion in mainland Greece or a gift that could
be offered to Constantinople as a quid pro quo for the surrender of Egypt.34
Very soon vague schemes were translated into reality. Ordered to take command of
preparations for the invasion of Britain favoured by the Directory as its next move, early in
1798 Napoleon took one look at the scheme’s prospects and refused point-blank to have
anything to do with it, there being no way that he would either risk seeing his reputation
The wider world 261
lost in some watery grave in the English Channel or, perhaps more importantly, cool his
heels in Calais or Boulogne for the long months that would pass before an invasion could
even be attempted. Eager for some sphere of action, at this point he promptly revived the
scheme for the invasion of Egypt which he had mentioned the previous summer. As he
wrote, ‘An expedition could be made into the Levant which would threaten the commerce
of India.’35 In acting in this fashion, Napoleon was in part, beyond doubt, responding to
some romantic ‘lure of the east’, this being something that was certainly noted by contem-
poraries. As his close companion, Bourrienne, noted, for example: ‘The east presented a
field of conquest and glory on which his imagination delighted to brood. “Europe”, said he,
“is but a molehill – all the great reputations have come from Asia.”’36 At the same time, in
his early years especially, he is known to have immersed himself in the story of Alexander
the Great, not to mention a considerable corpus of travel literature which already existed
in France in respect of Egypt. In the words of Edward Said:
Napoleon had been attracted to the Orient since his adolescence; his youthful manu-
scripts for example, contain a summary he made of Marigny’s Histoire des Arabes, and
it is evident from all of his writing and conversation that he was steeped . . . in the
memories and glories that were attached to Alexander’s Orient generally and to Egypt
in particular.37
However, whilst nobody would deny this influence, a careful reading of one of the chief
passages that is made use of for this purpose suggests something rather different. Thus:
The seductions of an oriental conquest turned me aside from thoughts of Europe more
than I would have believed . . . In Egypt I found myself freed from the obstacles of an
irksome civilisation. I was full of dreams . . . I saw myself founding a religion, marching
into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand the new Koran that
I would have composed to suit my needs.38
In short, if dreams of becoming a new Alexander the Great had always occupied a part of
Napoleon’s imagination, they only came to the forefront of his mind after he had arrived in
Egypt and not before. What mattered in the first weeks of 1798 were rather more mundane
considerations. Let us, for example, turn to Germaine de Staël:
Bonaparte was always looking for means of engaging men’s imagination, and, so far as
this was concerned, he knew exactly how they may be governed when one is not born
to a throne. An invasion of Africa, a war waged in a country that was almost fabulous,
as was the case with Egypt, could not but work on every spirit. Meanwhile, it would be
easy to persuade the French that they would derive great benefit from a Mediterranean
colony, and that one day it would offer them some means of attacking the establish-
ments of the English in India. As for the project, it was laden with glory, and would
add further lustre to the name of Bonaparte. If he had stayed in France, by contrast, the
Directory would have hurled . . . calumnies without number at him and tarnished his
reputation . . . In consequence, he had good reason to want to make himself the stuff of
poetry rather than leave himself exposed to Jacobin tittle-tattle.39
On top of all this, Napoleon was desperate for action for its own sake. ‘This city of Paris,’
he complained, ‘weighs down on me as if I was covered by a lead blanket.’40 In short, as he
262 The wider world
later told Clare du Rémusat, ‘I do not know what would have become of me had I not had
the happy idea of going to Egypt.’41
But was going to Egypt really a ‘happy idea’? If the country really could have been run by
France for her own benefit as some sort of dependency, then the gains would doubtless have
been enormous: hence the interest in such a project that had been circulating since at least
the 1770s and, for that matter, the various attempts that had been recently made to interest
Napoleon in Egypt by a number of commercial interests.42 Equally, choosing Egypt as his
goal was a clever stroke on Napoleon’s part, for an interest in the country’s ancient past had
recently become fashionable in France, whilst it allowed the French commander to draft
the services of some 500 intellectuals whose task it would be to give this fresh adventure a
veneer of scientific, historical and archaeological respectability. However, that was not the
point. Merely getting a large army from one end of the Mediterranean to the other would
be bad enough: the British might not actually have had any ships in the Mediterranean at
the beginning of 1798 (they had withdrawn their squadron from the theatre in 1796), but
they were present in strength at Gibraltar and could get a powerful fleet to the area around
Malta and Sicily within a few days. Supposing the French reached Egypt, meanwhile,
what then? Should the British choose to do so, they could easily cut the invaders off from
France: the French record at sea was less than spectacular, and there was no reason to sup-
pose that the Toulon fleet’s thirteen ships of the line would be able to fight off a substantial
British attack (several of the ships were in poor condition whilst there was also a serious
shortage of trained crewmen). But, if this was so, how could Egypt be exploited as a source
of cotton and other colonial produce? Setting this aside, the country would in any case first
have to be conquered. Yet even this would not be easy. Thus, the troops would be operating
in a climate to which they were utterly unaccustomed and would also be exposed to the rav-
ages of disease of every sort. At the same time, Egypt was an enormous country composed in
large part of barren deserts and mountains, whilst its defenders, however pitifully armed and
organised by European standards, possessed the advantages, first, of numbers, and, second,
of the fact that their supply arrangements would be much simpler than those of Napoleon’s
forces. Alexandria and Cairo could be taken easily enough, certainly, but what about Upper
Egypt or the Red-Sea coast? At risk, in short, was a long and costly campaign in which the
French could expect little in the way of reinforcements. Let us say, however, that conquest
was achieved. What then? As Egypt was of no importance to Britain in commercial terms,
the mere fact of seizing her was not much of a blow to her trade. What mattered was clearly
rather India, but this simply raised fresh problems. A march on India in the style of that of
Alexander the Great was clearly hopelessly impractical, but even other schemes made little
better sense. A maritime invasion, for example, would have required the construction of a
fleet of warships and transports on the other side of Egypt on a coast that lacked adequate
port facilities and in a sea whose only exit could easily be blockaded by the Royal Navy (it
is pointless here to talk of the Suez Canal avant la lettre that was spoken of by Napoleon’s
instructions: even if the country was pacified overnight, such a project would have required
years to complete). Then there was the possibility of commerce raiding. However, in this
respect, too, the prospects were hardly glowing. A few privateers might somehow have been
fitted out from local shipping, and Suez or Qusseir established as a new base for the French
raiders already operating in the Indian Ocean, but the Red Sea was, as we have just seen,
an inconvenient spot from which to operate, and it is hard to see how the cost of invading
Egypt would have justified the marginal gains in operating capacity that would have been
added to the possibilities already offered by the French island of Ile-de-France. And, finally,
if the gains were likely to be marginal, there was also the issue of international relations.
The wider world 263
The Turks, it was supposed, would not fight – though nominally subject to Turkish suzereignty,
Egypt was in practice self-governing and not only brought in very little in the way of profit
to Constantinople but since 1770 had been in a state of near permanent revolt43 – whilst,
even if they did so, they were not much of a threat. But it was not just a question of
the Turks, for invading the eastern Mediterranean would almost certainly bring in Russia:
indeed, alarmed at the growing signs of French interest in the eastern Mediterranean, Paul I
had just given notice of his intention to take a stand by declaring himself to be the protector
of its rulers, the Knights of Saint John.44
Invading Egypt, then, was rank madness, for success was dependent on the near impossi-
bility of Britain declining to take substantial action in response to the French move. Indeed,
in the end, only one strategy would have made it worthwhile: were the Royal Navy to
be seriously distracted by the stab at Egypt – in other words, were the Cabinet to panic
in the face of the lobbying that could be expected from the East India Company – it is
just possible that an invasion army might have been rushed across the Channel. Yet on
Napoleon’s own account, this would not have been possible for many months and even
then it would at best have been a hazardous enterprise, the mystery therefore thickening
still further. All that can be said in favour of the French commander was that, in the end,
he was not responsible for giving the scheme the go-ahead. In this respect, the chief culprit
was Talleyrand, the erstwhile bishop who had become Foreign Minister in July 1797, who,
in two memoranda that can only be described as quite bizarre in their optimism, strongly
advised the Directory to accept the plan. The British, the Austrians and the Russians would
not intervene; the Turks would not fight; the feudal rulers of Egypt – the strange Circassian
caste known as the Mamelukes – would be crushed; and France would gain a great new
colony and go on to eject the British from India. In so far as this last area of the world
was concerned, meanwhile, there was certainly reason for the French to take action. In
the wake of the Seven Years War, never strong, the French presence in India had been
reduced to a handful of trading posts, of which the most important was the south-eastern
town of Pondicherry (Puducherry). However, despite the defeat of such potentates as Siraj-
ad-Dowla, the Indian prince vanquished by Clive at the battle of Plassey, there were still
rulers hostile to the growth of British power who were willing to put themselves forward as
French allies in the hope that this would gain them powerful support. Chief among these
by the time of the Revolution was the ruler of the southern state of Mysore (Mysuru),
Tipu Sahib, an ambitious and sophisticated figure who possessed a powerful Western-style
army equipped with modern muskets and artillery, not to mention an impressive array of
rocket batteries, and who in 1782 had even inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British in
the Second Mysore War. However, following defeat in a long struggle with the powerful
Mahratha Confederation, in 1789 Tipu attacked Travancore, a neighbouring state allied to
the British, and suffered a serious defeat in the resultant Third Mysore War (1789–92), this
costing him half his territory. The loss of such an ally was not to be borne, and the French
therefore sought to rebuild his forces by means of the dispatch of a number of military advis-
ers who amongst other things established a Jacobin club.45
Succouring ‘Citizen Tipu’, as the prince now called himself, was clearly good strategy,
but the fact that it was good strategy did not mean that it was strategy that could be imple-
mented, and, since Talleyrand was no more of a fool than Napoleon, there is no reason
to believe that he was serious in talk of doing so (that said, he certainly appears to have
convinced the Directory, the orders communicated to Napoleon clearly directing him not
just to occupy Egypt but prepare for an expedition to India). As for the rest of his vision,
this was but a hopeful fantasy. What, then, was going on? Unless the invasion is to be put
264 The wider world
down to some ‘vertigo of glory’ which led two of the most calculating figures in the history of
modern Europe to believe in miracles, only one scenario is possible. In brief, in Napoleon’s
eyes, the plan was as follows: get his army to Egypt, send the French fleet back to safety in
Corfu, secure some immediate victories and then either journey to Constantinople to nego-
tiate a suitable settlement or slip back to France in a fast frigate so as to exploit the fruits
of his apparent triumph (for only afterwards would it transpire that the conquest of Egypt
would both take some time and, in the absence of a general peace, prove a mere sham).46
Meanwhile, Talleyrand was playing an even subtler game. Desperate to secure international
acceptance of the new France, it seems probable that his aim was to draw Austria and
Russia into a de facto alliance by initiating the partition of the Ottoman Empire, thereby
leaving Britain completely isolated whilst at the same time putting an end to wild talk
of revolutionising Europe. As for the problem of Napoleon, Talleyrand’s thinking is clear
enough. Whilst he had originally seen the former as a potential ally in his campaign to
restore order and international respectability to France, this belief had been badly shaken
by the conquest of Italy, and, despite attempts to argue otherwise, the inference is therefore
that he was betting that the general would not be able to get back to France in the short
term or, still better, go down to ruinous defeat.47 Yet perhaps all this is too Machiavellian:
of the expedition, Schroeder, for example, remarks that it was ‘fundamentally an aggressive
impulse followed . . . without serious calculation of its feasibility and likely results’.48
Underpinning the plan for the invasion of Egypt was scorn for the forces of the Ottoman
Empire. These had, of course, been heavily defeated in conflicts with Russia in 1768–74 and
1787–92, and, in so far as their traditional components were concerned, there was, indeed,
much to criticise. Thus, as had been the case since the fifteenth century, the heart of the
standing army consisted of janissaries, a large force of regular infantry originally raised by
conscription from amongst the children of the empire’s Christian minorities but, for the last
century or more, in practice drawn from the children of men serving in the force. Until the
middle of the seventeenth century extremely impressive, training and discipline had been
allowed to decline, and by the time of the French Revolution the corps, still officially 196
regiments strong, each of them composed of 2,000–3,000 men, was so degenerate as to have
become militarily useless: far from living in barracks as had once been the case, its members
now possessed their own homes and spent their time working at a variety of trades, selling
their services as scribes or serving as minor officials, all the while continuing to draw sub-
stantial salaries and in many instances failing to respond to the call to arms issued in time
of war. Supplementing these troops, meanwhile, were corps of regular artillery (a force that
would have been more impressive had most of its weapons not been clumsy culverins dating
from the seventeenth century), engineers, miners and waggoners, and a horde of irregulars
called out in time of war ranging from the sipahis – armoured cavalry who can be compared
to the feudal knights of the Middle Ages in that they were effectively nobles who held their
land in return for military service – through a host of mercenaries, many of them drawn from
the Balkans, down to lightly armed peasant levies armed with little more than spears and
scimitars. Thus composed and organised, the Ottoman armies had indeed been no match
for the armies of Catherine the Great, but, on coming to the throne in 1789, the current
sultan, Selim III, a monarch of great ability and dynamism, had thrown himself into the
reform of that army and navy alike, establishing a new corps of Western-style regular infan-
try called the Nizâm-i-Çedid, equipping the artillery with large numbers of modern cannon
and building a battle fleet composed of twenty-two ships of the line.49 These reforms, to
be sure, had a long way to go in 1798 – with just two regiments, the Nizâm-i-Çedid were
still few in numbers and the transport corps notorious as a sink of corruption, whilst both
The wider world 265
the janissaries and the sipahis resisted all attempts at reform50 – but, even so, much progress
had been made, and there was therefore far less reason to suppose that Constantinople
would cave in than Napoleon and Talleyrand seemed to think.51 According to Juan Cole,
meanwhile, much the same was true of Egypt: prior to the invasion, from Talleyrand and
Napoleon downwards, there was a fixed conviction that the country had been both ruth-
lessly exploited and allowed to go to wrack and ruin by the Ottoman administration, the
result being that the French could expect to be welcomed as liberators, whereas in fact,
whilst poverty was the norm in Egyptian society and the late eighteenth century troubled
by repeated famines and epidemics of plague, there had yet been a steady rise in population,
this suggesting at the very least that life had not been completely insupportable.52
Whatever the thinking behind it may have been, on 19 May 1798 the great expedi-
tion sailed for Egypt. At first, meanwhile, all went well. Having quickly captured Malta,
Napoleon dodged Nelson’s fleet and reached Egypt safely. What followed was all too pre-
dictable, the defenders of Egypt having unfortunately for them been but little touched by
Selim’s reforms. Thus, while seven regiments of janissaries were stationed in Cairo, the
mainstay of the Ottoman forces consisted of the so-called Mamelukes, originally, like the
janissaries, a force of slave-soldiers recruited from the Christians of Circassia which had
evolved into a land-holding class similar to the sipahis of the rest of the empire, the rest of
the troops consisting of peasant levies, some of whom, at least, were armed with nothing
more than cudgels.53 In consequence of this situation, the first weeks of the campaign were
something of a triumphal progress. Particularly in the case of those troops ordered to take
the direct route from the French bridgehead at Abukir to the River Nile preparatory to
marching on Cairo, the invaders suffered terribly from heat and thirst, but there was little
the Mamelukes could do to stop their march. On 13 July a force of 4,000 cavalry backed by
a flotilla of gunboats and 10,000 peasant irregulars confronted Napoleon at the village of
Shubra Khit, but, in a display of great tactical virtuosity, each of the five divisions which
made up his army formed themselves into gigantic squares that were easily able to beat off
the undisciplined enemy cavalry, the only bright spot for the Ottomans being that their gun-
boats inflicted heavy damage on the improvised flotilla that was accompanying the French
army. Just over a week later, meanwhile, a much larger Ottoman force consisting of 15,000
infantry and 6,000 cavalry commanded by one of the two principal Mameluke leaders,
Murad Bey, took up a position athwart the French line of march within sight of the pyra-
mids of Gizeh at Embabeh. Once again, however, the invaders did not flinch. Advancing
on the Ottoman positions in divisional squares arrayed in a chequer-board formation so that
they could afford one another mutual support, they provoked the enemy horse into a series
of desperate charges that were mown down by artillery fire and musketry and then went on
to storm Embabeh, many of whose defenders tried to escape by flinging themselves into the
Nile, only to drown by the hundreds. French losses came to fewer than 300, including just
twenty-nine dead, whilst those of the Ottomans numbered many thousands. As a state-
ment of the superiority of European forces in favourable terrain – the battle was fought in
open desert which might have allowed the Mameluke horse to manoeuvre and charge at
will, but also gave the French a clear field of fire and enabled to them to advance in hollow
squares, cumbersome formations that were exactly what was required in the circumstances,
but could never have been made use of in more broken ground – nothing could have been
more eloquent.54
Following the Battle of the Pyramids, as the events of 21 July became known, Napoleon
entered Cairo and established himself in a sumptuous palace overlooking the Nile. Having
taken over the city, he immediately set about creating a carbon copy of the French
266 The wider world
administrative system, dividing the country up into de facto departments, each of them
presided over by a council of administration and provided with a chief of police and an
intendant, and establishing a national council in Cairo, the new bodies and administrative
positions being manned by French merchant families resident in Alexandria, representa-
tives of the many religious minorities treated as second-class citizens by the Ottoman
régime, especially Greek, Syrian and Coptic Christians and, last but not least, a tiny handful
of Muslims. In so far as this last group is concerned, their presence merits some slight com-
ment. Thus in later years Napoleon boasted that he turned Muslim to win Egypt over, but
there is no serious evidence that he even contemplated any such move. That said, he clearly
adopted an approach that was more conciliatory than normal; no sooner had be landed,
then, than he gathered together as many imams and muftis as he could, whilst 23 August
saw him organise lavish celebrations to mark the anniversary of the birth of Mohammed).
In the end, though, what counted was the culture of the West. Thus, a sustained effort was
made to instil Egypt with Republican values whether it was through the establishment of
two newspapers, the co-option of the local intellectual élite into a new ‘Institute of Egypt’,
or the organisation of civic festivals to mark events such as the seventh anniversary of the
proclamation of the Republic, Cairo also being given its first system of street lighting.55
As symbolised by another of the measures that he took, namely the issue of orders
directing every householder to keep the stretch of street fronting their dwelling clean of
excrement, offal and other detritus, in all this Napoleon was embarking on a ‘civilising
mission’, and in doing so he succeeded in securing a degree of local collaboration from
those groups with reason to welcome the arrival of the French: not only did many local
Christians serve in the new administration, but there appeared both Greek and Coptic
auxiliary legions. Yet, beyond the ranks of such groups, hostility towards the French was
building in much the same way as was the case in, say, the satellite republics in Italy. Thus,
amongst Muslims in particular there was much anger at the manner in which the colour
green figured in some French uniforms, the way in which the quarantine regulations that
had been introduced to combat the onset of plague interfered with many norms of Muslim
life, and the protection and support offered to the Christian community, while Muslims
and Christians alike were united in anger at the manner in which many French soldiers
embarked on relationships with local women, not to mention the increase in taxation
that proved part and parcel of French occupation, the brutal police measures adopted by
the invaders to overawe the populace and control disease, and the boorish and arrogant
behaviour indulged in by many French soldiers (if Napoleon himself had urged respect
for the local inhabitants and their cultures, it is evident that most of his troops could not
find it in themselves to heed his words, and all the more so given the shocking poverty,
dirt and disease which they encountered wherever they went, the only possible explana-
tion for such conditions, in their eyes, being backwardness on the part of the population).
Acts of violence towards isolated individuals or small parties of French soldiers therefore
became ever more frequent, and the savagery of the response served only to widen the
rift still further. With tension raised still further by the Ottoman declaration of war, an
action accompanied by a proclamation enjoining all Muslims to engage in jihad against
the French that was publicly read out in all the mosques of the empire, including those
of Egypt, on 21 October the inevitable happened in the form of an outbreak of rioting in
Cairo. Within a matter of hours, riot had become insurrection and, over the next two days,
the city was gripped by ferocious fighting that culminated in a terrible massacre in the
great Al-Aqsa mosque, the latter being thoroughly desecrated in the process By the time
that order had been restored, some 300 Frenchmen lay dead, but the number of Cirenes
The wider world 267
who died was probably ten times that many, while arrests and executions continued for
many weeks afterwards.56 Yet if the capital could be restored to order, this was not the case
with the countryside, let alone the desert: any Frenchmen who strayed too far beyond the
walls of their garrisons were liable to attack from gangs of angry villagers or, still worse (as
being more skilled in the arts of irregular warfare), Bedouin raiders.57
Whilst all this was taking place, the occupying forces had continued to fan out across the
country, a column under Louis Desaix eventually reaching the Red Sea at Suez. However,
Mameluke forces remained active in the south under Murad Bey, while in the evening of
1 August a British fleet commanded by Horatio Nelson destroyed the squadron that had
brought Napoleon to Egypt at its anchorage in the bay of Abukir, thereby depriving Napoleon
of any hope of substantial reinforcements.58 To make matters worse, plague was now ravaging
the French forces; the rank and file and even many of the officers were becoming ever more
mutinous and disaffected; and two Ottoman armies were gathering to attack the French, the
one in Syria under Djezzar Pasha and the other in Rhodes under Mustafa Pasha. Faced by
this situation, Napoleon went on to the offensive, in February 1799 striking east across the
Sinai desert and invading Palestine. Here, however, he at last met his match. No more than
13,000 men could be spared for the expedition, and by the time that it came to grips with the
enemy, hundreds of men had fallen victim to the plague in their turn. Ottoman garrisons were
overcome at El Arish and Jaffa (modern-day Tel Aviv), this last episode being accompanied
by the execution of the entire garrison in cold blood, while, pushing still further north, on
19 March Napoleon reached the ancient city of Acre. Thus far, however, but no further: the
defenders of Acre included the first regiment of Nizâm-i-Çedid ever to see action, while the
city was on the coast and could therefore be supplied and reinforced from the sea as well as
supported by the broadsides of British men-of-war moored off the coast. Nor, meanwhile,
did the French initially have the artillery they needed to breach the walls, the siege train
ordered up by Napoleon having been captured by the British squadron of Sir Sidney Smith
(why the French commander believed that it could possibly be transported successfully by sea
is unclear, but the decision does not speak well of his sense of realism). An Ottoman relief
force was heavily defeated at Mount Tabor while the arrival of a fresh siege train that had
been brought up overland eventually allowed the French to effect a breach. But, whilst this
was duly stormed, it was discovered that the garrison had constructed a second wall behind
the first. This was the end: unable to fight on, Napoleon ordered his men to raise the siege,
and by the end of June the entire force was back in Egypt, the whole episode having been a
disaster which cost the hard-pressed French 1,800 dead from enemy action or the plague and
about the same number wounded. At well over 10,000, Turkish losses had been much higher,
while untold misery had been inflicted on the peoples of Palestine, not least because of the
scorched-earth policy implemented by the French as they fell back, but in the end all that had
been achieved was a breathing space: it would be nearly a year before Djezzar Pasha was able
to march on Cairo. As for Napoleon himself, the affair had forever tarnished his reputation:
as if the massacre of the garrison of Jaffa had not been enough, in the course of the retreat an
unknown number of the French sick and wounded had been given poison to end their lives,
these actions being used by foreign propagandists such as the Englishman Sir Robert Wilson
to make the French commander out to be a monster of cruelty and depravity.59
With the failure of the campaign in Palestine, the story of the Egyptian adventure can
be concluded very briefly. Demoralised and short of numbers though they were, the French
were always able to hold their position against the Turks. Thus, when the army of Mustapha
Pasha finally landed, it was wiped out almost to the last man at Abukir on 25 July, 10,000
men being drowned after being driven into the sea and the remaining 8,000 killed or cap-
268 The wider world
tured, while, having finally marched across the desert from Palestine, Djezzar Pasha’s army
was routed at Heliopolis on 25 March 1800 by Jean-Baptiste Kléber, the general who had
replaced Napoleon in command of the invaders (see below). Yet, at best, French control of
Egypt remained precarious – thanks to the spread of rumours that the Ottomans had won
the battle, Heliopolis sparked off a second revolt in Cairo that took a week to suppress and
cost the lives of thousands of Copts, whilst on 14 June Kléber was assassinated by a Kurdish
student named Soleyman el-Halabi – and the following year a British invasion commanded
by the same Sir Ralph Abercrombie who had figured in the campaigns in the West Indies
had no difficulty in putting an end to the French presence altogether, thoroughly defeat-
ing a French force outside Alexandria, which city was then besieged, and going on to
capture Cairo, the fighting finally coming to an end with the surrender of Alexandria on
2 September.60 However, if it took a British army to wrest Egypt from France’s hands, the
overriding lesson that comes through from a consideration of the events of 1798–1801
is the limitations on Western power beyond the boundaries of Europe (indeed, even
Abercromby’s men did not have an easy time, the long voyage to Egypt being accompanied
by terrible privations). In the open field, Western armies were infinitely superior to the
forces of Africa and the Orient alike, but, confronted with fortresses such as Acre (Akko),
their technical advantages evaporated. Nor was it just a case of being checked by city walls:
requiring as they did the presence of a large number of men in a small space for a substantial
length of time, sieges could not but dramatically multiply the logistical problems involved
in operating in areas such as Egypt and the Middle East. Even with conditions at their best,
these were considerable, for food and forage were in short supply, the climate merciless and
disease a constant menace.61 Yet, given the sheer expanse of territory that needed to be
held down in Egypt, not to mention the latter’s vulnerability to invasion from at least two
different directions, only a very large army would have sufficed to maintain control. As for
hopes that the populace might rally to the invaders, these proved illusory: some success,
true, was achieved with the Christian minorities, including, most notably, merchants and
the clerks and notaries who had formed the backbone of the Mameluke administration, but
such was the preponderance of Islam that this was of little account, whilst every effort of
the French to engage with the very different culture which the Muslim population repre-
sented was repelled; still worse, indeed, far from rallying to the invaders as the oppressed
under-class – the guise in which pre-1798 French writing on Egypt had invariably portrayed
them – the Arab tribes of the desert fringes joined the jihad proclaimed by Constantinople.
So utterly adrift was the Army of the Orient from living up to its liberationist ideals that
in 1800 it was forced to offer the erstwhile Mameluke potentate Murad Bey an amnesty
and treaty of alliance if he would but turn his coat and govern Upper Egypt as a species
of viceroy. Not even the dramatic gesture of Jacques Menou, the general appointed to
the command of the Army of the Orient following Kléber’s assassination, in converting
to Islam could save the situation: not only did the Muslim population put his conversion
down to mere political expediency, but Menou alienated Muslim opinion still further by
engaging in such dramatic acts of reform as the suppression of the Muslim courts and their
replacement by Western-style creations manned by Copts. In short, as could have been
predicted right from the beginning, the attempt to capture Egypt proved a disaster, and
Napoleon was very fortunate that, responding to events in Europe which we shall examine
in the next chapter, he was able to escape to France in October 1799.62
The scramble for Africa, then, was clearly going to have to wait for such innovations as
steam transport, modern medicines and a further expansion in the gulf between the weap-
ons technology of East and West.63 This does not mean, however, that the occupation of
The wider world 269
Egypt was an episode that had no impact. On the contrary, thanks to Napoleon’s decision
to legitimise his foray into colonial conquest by the inclusion in his forces of a contingent
of geographers, scientists and archaeologists, Europe acquired a more detailed knowledge of
Ancient Egypt than anything which it had possessed before. Thus numerous sites of great
significance were explored or rediscovered and an enormous treasure trove of artefacts put
together and eventually taken back to France and, in some instances, London, as was the
case with the famous ‘Rosetta Stone’, a block of granodiorite inscribed with the text of a
decree that provided the key to deciphering hieroglyphics. Published in France in a series
of lavishly illustrated volumes which appeared throughout the Napoleonic era and beyond,
the findings of the expedition sparked off a wave of interest in orientalism that paralleled
and extended the vogue for all matters Chinese that had characterised the latter part of the
eighteenth century.64
To all this, however, there was a darker side. In brief, many French cultural stereotypes
had been confirmed in that Egypt had been shown to be stricken by poverty and disease
and possessed of armed forces of the most backward kind, forces indeed that had no chance
of competing with Western firepower. Here, for example, is Joseph Moiret on the Battle of
the Pyramids:
In the last battle we mourned only nine or ten men killed and a hundred wounded.
The enemy lost at least 1,600 men. Justice must be done here to the bravery of the
Mamelukes. If their . . . tactics had matched their courage, they would have made us
pay dearly for their victory, but their inexperience guaranteed our success.65
Having helped see off the defending forces at the Pyramids, Moiret next found himself
marching into Cairo, only to find himself agape with disgust:
Cairo . . . is as large as Paris and has as many people, but what people! It is inhabited by
filthy men, as black as our chimney-sweeps of Savoy, lazy as the scum of Naples . . . The
streets are narrow and winding and the air is unwholesome: there is no paving and
there are no lights at night. Most of the buildings are only miserable hovels . . . When
they tumble in ruins, they are not restored, but are abandoned and others built else-
where. Those belonging to the rich are heavy masses of stone or brick . . . scarcely
lit by a few narrow windows covered with grills and placed high in the walls . . . The
dwellings of the extremely rich individuals in this country cannot be compared with
those of the greatest in Paris either in taste, elegance or comfort . . . Their finest dishes
have nothing to please the refined European; moreover, they lack that which would
most delight a French guest, I mean, of course, wine, which is forbidden by their bar-
barous laws . . . As for the pleasures of gallantry, we found none of the opportunities
which Milan, Padua, [Livorno], Rome, Verona, Graz, etc., had afforded. It was neither
possible nor prudent to meet the women-folk of the rich, who were always kept locked
up and in the power of jealous tyrants. There were, however, brothels, but the hideous-
ness, the squalor and the chattering of the courtesans were enough to sicken and revolt
the boldest libertine.66
Although they were hardly new, the lessons of this experience were not forgotten: they
were, indeed, a part of what took France to Algeria in 1830; indeed, if the commander of
the troops sent there, Jean-Marie Savary, behaved with great savagery towards the unfortu-
nate inhabitants, he did but apply the lessons he had learned as a young cavalry lieutenant
270 The wider world
in the Army of the Orient. At the same time, however briefly, on show had been a new
phase in Europe’s relationship with Africa. To quote Zachary Lockman, ‘The French inva-
sion of Egypt inaugurated a new era in which . . . Africa would be increasingly subject to
European economic and political encroachment and, finally, to European colonial rule.’67
However, it was in Egypt itself that Napoleon’s intervention had the greatest impact. In
the wake of the French evacuation, savage fighting erupted between the Ottoman forces
and those of the Mamelukes, and from the turmoil there emerged the figure of Muhamed
(sometimes Mehmed) Ali Pasha. Originally the commander of a unit of Albanian merce-
naries sent to Egypt in 1801, Ali was appointed as the de facto viceroy of Egypt in 1805
and, by 1811, succeeded in breaking the back of Mameluke resistance. This done, he then
set about transforming Egypt into a modern state, revitalising the revenue system; build-
ing a Western-style army and administration; encouraging the production of cash crops,
especially cotton; founding armament, shipbuilding and textile industries; instituting a new
code of law; sending students to study in western Europe; and setting up many schools,
universities and hospitals. Muhamed Ali being convinced that the Ottoman Empire was
doomed, the aim of all this, of course, was to establish Egypt as a powerful independent state
that could fend off further Western intervention. In this he failed – in 1885 Egypt was again
conquered by a Western army, albeit this time one dressed in red rather than blue – but
such was his success that he did manage to ensure de facto Egyptian autonomy. If Toussaint
l’Ouverture was a black Napoleon, Muhamed Ali was, therefore, very much a brown one,
the comparison being rendered still more apt by the series of campaigns that he waged to
add the Sudan, Crete and Syria to his domains in the period up until 1840.68
As with Saint Domingue, the question that arises with Egypt is whether a state in the
style of that organised by Muhamed Ali could have arisen without the French Revolution,
and, again, as with Haiti, the answer is ‘probably not’. In the wider Ottoman Empire, Selim III
was defeated by the forces of reaction – indeed, was overthrown by them in 1807 – and it
was only the shattering blow dealt to the Mamelukes and the local representatives of the
janisseries that rendered wholesale reform possible. Meanwhile, as in the western hemi-
sphere too, it was not the ideas of the French Revolution that mattered: just as the blacks
and mulattos of Saint Domingue did not need ideas emanating from Paris to grasp the ideas
of freedom and equality, so Muhamed Ali (and, for that matter, Selim III) did not need the
French Revolution to elaborate programmes of reform. Elsewhere, too, whether it was in
Latin America or the Balkans, it is hard to see how events in France had any real role in
later independence movements. In short, if the French Revolution was a world event, it was
more a world event in retrospect than it was at the time of its occurrence.
Notes
1 For all this, see J. Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York, 1973), pp. 1–36,
and F.X. Guerra, ‘L’Amérique Latine face à la Révolution Française’, Caravelle: Cahiers du Monde
Hispanique et Luso-Bresilien, 54 (January, 1990), pp. 7–20. Francisco de Miranda, meanwhile, is
an extremely complex figure who it is hard to assess with any certainty. In the eyes of the cur-
rent author, he was little more than adventurer, but his admirers have always claimed that the
accusations that caused him to flee into exile were the fruit of long-standing feuds and personal
vendettas and even, most recently, that he was persecuted because he was suspected of having
Jewish antecedents. For all this, see K. Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in an Age
of Revolution (Wilmington, DE, 2003), pp. 25–30 and J. Chacron Cohen, La identidad secreta de
Francisco de Miranda (Caracas, 2011).
2 For a general introduction to the rise of the European empires in the Caribbean, see F. Moya Pons,
History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade and War in the Atlantic World (Princeton, NJ, 2007).
The wider world 271
3 For the economic importance of the West Indian colonies to Britain in particular, see J.R. Ward,
‘The British West Indies in the age of abolition, 1748–1815’, in P.J. Marshall and A. Low (eds.),
The Oxford History of the British Empire, II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 416–39.
4 For two surveys of society in the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century, see
A.L. Stinchcombe, Sugar-Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the
Caribbean World (Princeton, NJ, 1995), and M. Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in
the Caribbean (Oxford, 1997), pp. 149–84.
5 G.T. Nessler, An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation and Reenslavement in
Hispaniola, 1789–1809 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016), p. 8. For a near contemporary assessment of
Saint Domingue’s wealth at the time of the French Revolution, see J.R. Beard, The Life of Toussaint
l’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti [sic], Comprising an Account of the Struggle for Liberty in the
Island and a Sketch of its History in the Present Period (London, 1853; facsimile edition, Chapel Hill,
NC, 2012), pp. 24–6.
6 One issue that has caused much confusion here is the racial nature of the free-black community.
Thus, there is a strong tendency to refer to it as if it was entirely mulatto, but this is misleading:
many free blacks were indeed mulattos, but mulattos could just as easily be slaves, just as many
men and women with no European ancestry whatsoever could be free. That said, most slaves
were certainly of pure-blood African descent, even if they had not actually been born in Africa:
in Guadeloupe just 14 per cent of the slave population were mulattos while in Saint Domingue,
the same figure was a full 10 per cent lower. L. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), p. 75. For a detailed
discussion of the mulattos of one particular colony, see J. Garrigus, A Struggle for Respect: The Free
Coloreds of Saint Domingue (Baltimore, MD, 1988), whilst the issue of the militia is covered by
F. Régent, ‘Armement des hommes de couleur et liberté dans les Antilles: le cas de Guadeloupe
pendant l’ancien régime et la Révolution’, Annales historiques de la Révolution Française, 348
(April, 2007), pp. 42–3.
7 For a discussion of the position of Saint Domingue in 1789, see D.P. Geggus, Slavery, War and
Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–98 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 8–32; and D.P
Geggus, ‘Saint Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution’, in D.P. Geggus and N. Fiering
(eds.), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, Indiana, 2009), pp. 3–20. Finally, for a
useful general discussion, see R. Blackburn, ‘Anti-slavery and the French Revolution’, History
Today, 41, No. 11 (November, 1991), pp. 19–25.
8 In Martinique events went still further, a revolt on the part of elements in favour of outright inde-
pendence leading to a full-scale civil war that raged from June 1790 till March 1791. Meanwhile,
similar insurrections were witnessed in Tobago and Guadeloupe. For the spread of Jacobinism,
meanwhile, see A. Pérotin-Dumon, ‘Les jacobins d’Antilles ou l’espirit de liberté dans les iles du
Vent’, Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine, 35, No. 2 (April, 1988), pp. 275–304. It should
not be thought, however, that the plantocracy was solidly Royalist: for example, the General
Dugommier who was killed in battle at the head of the forces that had invaded Catalonia in 1794
was a creole with substantial plantations in Guadeloupe.
9 For all this, see J.D. Popkin, ‘The French Revolution’s other island’, in Geggus and Fiering, World
of the Haitian Revolution, pp. 199–204.
10 For all this, see D.P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002), pp. 55–80.
On marronage, see J. Daniels, Marronage in Saint Domingue: Approaching the Revolution, 1770–1791
(Gainesville, FL, 2008). Finally, on the spread of Revolutionary ideology, see Dubois, Colony of
Citizens, pp. 105–7, and A. Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The emergence of politics amoing free-coloureds and
slaves in Revolutionary Guadeloupe’, Journal of Caribbean History, 25, Nos. 1–2 (January, 1991),
pp. 100–35.
11 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, pp. 81–92. D.P. Geggus, ‘The Bois-Caiman ceremony’,
Journal of Caribbean History, 25, Nos. 1–2 (January, 1991), pp. 58–80.
12 General histories of the Haitian insurrection include C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
l’Ouverture and the San Domingo [sic] Revolution (second edition, revised; New York, 1963) and
J.D. Popkin, “You are all free”: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge,
2010). For more detailed discussions, see C.E. Fick: ‘The Saint-Domingue slave insurrection of
1791: a socio-political and cultural analysis’, Journal of Caribbean History, 25, Nos. 1–2 (January,
1991), pp. 1–40, and Y. Benôt, ‘The insurgents of 1791, their leaders and the concept of inde-
pendence’, in Geggus and Fiering, World of the Haitian Revolution, pp. 99–110. Last but not least,
272 The wider world
biographies of Toussaint l’Ouverture include P. Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture: un révolutionnaire
noir d’ancien regime (Paris, 1989); C. Forsdick and C. Høgsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture: A Black
Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (London, 2016); and P. Girard, Toussaint Louverture: A
Revolutionary Life (New York, 2016).
13 Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, p. 42–3.
14 J.K. Thornton, ‘African soldiers in the Haitian revolution’, Journal of Caribbean History, 25,
Nos. 1–2 (January, 1991), pp. 58–80.
15 Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, pp. 43–5. On the key figure of Sonthonax, see R.L. Stein,
Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the Lost Sentinel of the Republic (Rutherford, NJ, 1985).
16 Nessler, Islandwide Struggle, pp. 42–3; Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution, pp. 55–64.
17 M. Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against
Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987), pp. 5–25.
18 T. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804 (Nashville, TN, 1973), p. 76. For a detailed discus-
sion of the reasons for British intervention in Saint Domingue, see D.P. Geggus, ‘The British
government and the Saint Domingue slave revolt, 1791’, English Historical Review, 96, No. 379
(April, 1981), pp. 283–305. One of the oddities of the situation is that, in the event, rebellion did
not spread to Jamaica. That Pitt was right to fear such an event cannot be doubted: with Saint
Domingue so close by, news of the revolt spread rapidly, while, as in Saint Domingue, the situ-
ation had been destabilised by the arrival of large numbers of new captives from Africa. Yet, in
part because the authorities in Jamaica made a number of concessions and in part, too, because
the increase in the garrison improvements in the militia brought by the war made success seem
extremely unlikely, the island initially remained quiet. See D.P. Geggus, ‘Jamaica and the Saint
Domingue slave revolt, 1791–1793’, The Americas, 38, No. 2 (October,1981), pp. 219–33.
19 Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, pp. 72–95. The operations by which Grey captured Martinique
and Santa Lucia were typical of the many similar campaigns which followed. In brief, the French
would withdraw to the various forts that invariably protected the capital of whichever island the
British were attacking, whereupon their assailants would land troops and artillery and mount a
formal siege. On the whole such actions cost the British few casualties, but the process was often
a lengthy one that gravely increased the exposure of the troops to disease.
20 The reasons for L’Ouverture’s decision to change sides have been much discussed. Certainly,
the decree of 4 February cannot be dismissed, but less altruistic factors have been mentioned,
including, not least, rivalry with his fellow leaders, Biassou and Papillon, of whom the former
had recently attempted to have him murdered. See, for example, M. Ros, Night of Fire: The Black
Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti (New York, 1994), pp. 68–71. To quote Ott, ‘Often historians
have looked only at Toussaint the humanitarian, advocate of black liberty, but Toussaint the
Machiavellian was just as important.’ Ott, Haitian Revolution, p. 83.
21 For the activities of Victor Hugues, see H.J.K. Jenkins, ‘“The colonial Robespierre”: Victor Hugues
on Guadeloupe’, History Today, 27, No. 11 (November, 1977), pp. 734–40, and L. Dubois, ‘“The
price of liberty”: Victor Hugues and the administration of freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798’,
The William and Mary Quarterly, 56, No. 2 (April, 1999), pp. 363–92. For a useful case study of
one of the revolts provoked (or, at least, sustained) by Hugues, see D.B. Gaspar, ‘La guerre des
bois: revolution, war and slavery in Saint Lucia, 1793–1838’, in Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent
Time, pp. 102–30.
22 Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, pp. 217–40.
23 For all this see D.P. Geggus, ‘The British army and the slave revolt: Saint Domingue in the 1790s’,
History Today, 32, No.7 (July, 1982), pp. 35–9; R. Chartrand and P. Chappell, British Forces in the
West Indies, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 9–19; and R. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: the British
West-India Regiments, 1795–1815 (London, 1979).
24 For a clear account of the political history of the Revolution in Saint Domingue in the wake of
the British evacuation, see T.L. Stoddard, The French Revolution in San [sic] Domingo (Boston,
MA, 1914), pp. 270–87. For a detailed discussion of the Constitution of 1801, meanwhile, see
E. Nabajoth, ‘Toussaint Louverture et la constitution de 1801: une perspective indépendantiste
dans la cadre d’un regime autoritaire’, in A. Yacou (ed.), Saint Domingue espagnol et la révolution
nègre d’Haiti (Paris, 2007), pp. 259–78.
25 Cit. G.F. Tyson, Toussaint L’Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), p. 111.
26 See D.P. Geggus, ‘The French and Haitian Revolutions and resistance to slavery in the Americas:
an overview’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 76, Nos. 1–2, pp. 107–24. For a case study of
The wider world 273
two examples drawn from the Spanish empire, see D.P. Geggus, ‘Slave resistance in the Spanish
Caribbean in the mid-1790s’, in Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time, pp. 130–55, whilst for Cuba
in particular see A. Yacou, ‘Les résonances à Cuba de la Révolution de Saint Domingue des rébel-
lions des libres de couleur et des esclaves’, in Yacou, Saint-Domingue espagnol et la révolution nègre
de Haiti, pp. 221–30. Finally, for the revolt in Venezuela, see F. Brito Figueroa, ‘Venezuela colonial:
las rebeliones de esclavos y la Revolución Francesa’, Caravelle: Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et
Luso-Bresilien, 54 (January, 1990), pp.263–89, and for Puerto Rico G.A. Brandt, Slave Revolts in
Puerto Rico (Princeton, NJ, 2007), p. 7.
27 In all, around 40,000 of the 89,000 British troops sent to the Caribbean between 1793 and 1801
died of disease, while another 14,000 had to be discharged as medically unfit. For a detailed study,
see Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, pp. 326–67.
28 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, pp. 435–6.
29 For a brief discussion of this issue, see J. Black, From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great
Power (London, 1999), pp. 395–6.
30 Junot, Mémoires, II, pp. 95–6.
31 G. de Staël, Considérations sur les principales évènements de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1819), II,
pp. 202–3.
32 L.J. Gohier, Mémoires de Louis-Jérome Gohier, Président du Directoire au 18 Brumaire (Paris, 1824),
p. 26.
33 Cit. Markham, Napoleon, p. 58.
34 Initially organised into three French-style departments, the Ionian islands became an important
channel for the transmission of the ideas of the French Revolution to the Balkans in general and
Greece in particular and have been regarded as one the cradles of modern Greek nationalism. E.g.
S. Macecich, ‘The French Revolution, Napoleon and the Balkan Enlightenment’, East European
Quarterly, 9, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), pp. 455–70.
35 Cit. J.E. Howard (ed.), Letters and Documents of Napoleon (London, 1961), I, p. 226.
36 F.L. Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, ed. E. Sanderson (London, 1903),
p. 68.
37 E. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p. 82.
38 C. de Rémusat, Mémoires de Madame de Rémusat, 1802–1808, ed. P. de Rémusat (Paris, 1884), I,
p. 274.
39 Staël, Considérations sur les principales évènements de la Révolution Française, I, pp. 207–8.
40 Cit. L. Junot, Mémoires de la Duchesse d’Abrantes, ed. G. Girard (Paris, 1928), II, p. 138.
41 Rémusat, Mémoires de Madame de Rémusat, I, p. 273.
42 The most recent proponent of the establishment of a French colony in Egypt was François de Tott,
a French cavalry officer who had acted as a military adviser to the Ottoman government in the
war of 1768–74 and afterwards published a widely read memoir in which he painted a picture of
an empire on the point of collapse. The idea of establishing a colony in Egypt having long been
of interest to successive French governments, in 1777 he was dispatched on a secret mission to
Cairo to examine the feasibility of such a move and wrote a series of reports in which he urged
invasion, something that was hardly surprising given that he arrived in the midst of a bloody civil
war between two of the local satraps constantly vying for control of the province. F. Toth, ‘Un
hongrois en Egypte avant Napoléon: la mission secrète du Baron de Tott’, Revue Historique des
Armées, 13, No. 270 (January, 2013), pp. 14–22.
43 V.H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1770–1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow, 2007), pp. 231–5;
J. Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle-East (Houndmills, 2007), pp. 93–100. Setting aside
the long-term problems the Ottomans faced in Europe, in the summer of 1798, in particular,
Constantinople’s ability to cope with a major challenge from France was weakened by the fact
that it was currently engaged in suppressing a serious rebellion that had broken out in present-day
Bulgaria four years before under the leadership of the local potentate, Osman Pasvanoglu. Ibid.,
pp. 220–1.
44 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 180–1.
45 For an introduction to Tipu Sahib, see Z. Masani, ‘The Tiger of Mysore’, History Today, 66, No. 12
(December, 2016), pp. 11–16. I. Habib (ed.), Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization
under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (London, 2002) is a useful collection of essays. If Tipu made
greater progress in this area than most other rulers, the modernisation of the armies of the Indian
states along Western lines in the latter half of the eighteenth century was a common theme. See,
274 The wider world
for example, S.I.A. Zaidi, ‘European mercenaries in Indian armies, 1750–1803’, Studies in History,
27, No. 1 (February, 2011), pp. 55–83; K. Roy, ‘Military synthesis in south Asia: armies, warfare
and Indian society, c.1740–1849’, Journal of Military History, 69, No. 3 (July, 2005), pp. 651–90.
46 This scenario does not seem wholly implausible. Yet perhaps it is rather the writing of Napoleon’s
close companion Auguste Viesse de Marmont that contains the real truth. Thus: ‘Finding oppor-
tunities to keep his name in the spotlight and aggrandise his name in public opinion was the limit
of his thought.’ Viesse de Marmont, Memoires, I, p. 355.
47 Such, at least, is the version of Talleyrand’s thinking that emerges from J.F. Bernard, Talleyrand:
A Biography (London, 1973), pp. 201–3. As an alternative position, we might cite D. Cooper,
Talleyrand, (London, 1932), pp. 102–3, Cooper’s argument being that the French foreign minister
believed that Napoleon could win sufficient short-term glory to fit him for the role of installing a
conservative régime that would end the Revolution.
48 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 179. For a strong argument in favour of miscalcu-
lation, see Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 179–83.
49 For a general introduction to the reign of Selim III, see S. Shaw, Between Old and New: The
Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge, MA, 1971). On the Turkish navy,
meanwhile, see T. Zorlu, Innovation and Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the Modernisation of
the Ottoman Navy (London, 2008).
50 For the limitations in Ottoman military reform, see M. Uyar and E.J. Erickson, A Military History
of the Ottomans from Osman to Ataturk (Santa Barbara, CA, 2009), pp. 121–3.
51 For excellent introductions to the armies of Selim III, see D. Nicolle and A. McBride, Armies of
the Ottoman Empire, 1775–1820 (London, 1998), and V. Aksan, ‘The Ottoman army’ in Schneid,
European Armies of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 245–72. Military reform, meanwhile, is
covered by a substantial literature, viz. V. Aksan, ‘Breaking the spell of the Baron de Tott: refram-
ing the question of military reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830’, International History
Review, 24, No. 2 (June, 2002), pp. 253–77; A. Levy, ‘Military reform and the problem of central-
ization in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century’, Middle-East Studies, 18, No. 3 (July,
1982), pp. 227–49; S. Shaw, ‘The origins of Ottoman military reform: the Nizam-i-Cedid army of
Sultan Selim III’, Journal of Modern History, 37, No. 3 (September, 1965), pp. 290–305; S. Shaw,
‘The Nizam-i-Cedid army of Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807’, Oriens, 18/19 (1965/66), pp. 168–84;
C. Tuck, ‘“All innovation leads to hellfire”: military reform and the Ottoman Empire in the eigh-
teenth century’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31, No. 3 (September, 2008), pp. 467–502.
52 Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, p. 73. For an interesting discussion of the most recent of these episodes,
see A. Mikhail, ‘The nature of plague in late eighteenth-century Egypt’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 82, No. 2 (Summer, 2008), pp. 249–75.
53 Aksan, Ottoman Wars, p. 232.
54 For the battles of Shubra Khit and the Pyramids, see Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 221–5.
55 Coller, ‘Egypt in the French Revolution’, pp. 127–8; Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 379–80;
J.C. Herold, Napoleon in Egypt (London, 1963), pp. 136–55 passim; Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, pp. 101–5.
56 Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, pp. 391–4, 401–4.
57 Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, pp. 116–22.
58 For the battle of Abukir Bay, see B. Lavery, Nelson and the Nile: The Naval War against Bonaparte,
1798 (London, 1998).
59 For the campaign in Palestine, see N. Schur, Napoleon in the Holy Land (London, 1998). In both
instances, Napoleon’s actions are at least susceptible of justification. Thus the prisoners at Jaffa
not only included men who had been released on parole after they had been captured at El Arish,
but could neither be fed by the French nor turned loose to join the forces of Djezzar Pasha, while
it was arguably kinder to administer poison to men who were too ill to be moved than to let them
fall into the hands of the enemy. Needless to say, however, such nuances did not deter Wilson
from engaging in the most ferocious diatribe. R.W. Wilson, History of the British Expedition to Egypt
to Which is Subjoined a Sketch of the Present State of that Country and its Means of Defence (London,
1803), p. xiii.
60 For the British liberation of Egypt, see P. Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt, 1801: The End of
Napoleon’s Conquest (Abingdon, 1995).
61 It should be noted that the indigenous population was also ravaged by the plague, a scientific
study having shown that at least 5,000 people, the vast majority of them civilian inhabitants, died
in Cairo in 1801 alone. See X. Didelot et al., ‘Model-based analysis of an outbreak of the plague in
The wider world 275
Cairo in 1801’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, accessed at <http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.
org.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/content/14/131/20170160.full>, 18 January 2018.
62 According to Egyptian scholar, Zeinab Abul-Magd, a key role in the French failure in Egypt, and
one that made it inevitable, was the mismatch between the accounts of French visitors to Egypt
prior to 1789 and the reality. See Z. Abul-Magd, ‘A crisis of images: the French, jihad and plague
in Upper Egypt, 1799–1801’, Journal of World History, 23, No. 2 (June, 2012), pp. 315–44. For
the history of French rule in Egypt following the departure of Napoleon, see Herold, Napoleon in
Egypt, pp. 341–74.
63 That said, the scramble for India was intensified. Although there was, in fact, little chance of
French help reaching Tipu Sahib, the mere threat of such a prospect was sufficient to put an end to
his rule. At the beginning of 1799, then, 60,000 troops invaded Mysore, a handful of them British,
but the vast majority either East-India-Company sepoys or forces provided by the neighbouring
state of Hyderabad. Amongst the British commanders was Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke
of Wellington. Converging on the capital, Seringapatam (Srirangaptna), the invaders subjected
it to a two-month siege, and on 4 May they assaulted the walls, Tipu Sultan being killed fighting
sword-in-hand in the bitter street-fighting that followed. J. Weller, Wellington in India (London,
1972), pp. 33–82.
64 For a bitter critique of the manner in which Napoleon harnessed science and archaeology to the
service of imperialism, see Said, Orientalism, pp. 80–8.
65 J.M. Moiret, Memoirs of Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition, 1798–1801, ed. R. Brindle (London,
2001), p. 55.
66 Ibid., pp. 56–8.
67 Z. Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism
(Cambridge, 2010), p. 71. The fact that the French were able to establish a presence in Algeria
may seem to contradict what has been said above about the ‘scramble for Africa’. However, in the
first place, the international context was completely different in that the invaders were not hav-
ing to cope with a British naval blockade, and, in the second, until the middle of the nineteenth
century French control only extended to a strip of territory along the coast.
68 For Muhamed Ali, see K. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of
Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1997).
11 The road to 18 Brumaire
The history of the French Revolutionary Wars divides neatly into two distinct phases. From
1792 to 1797 France battled the First Coalition, eventually succeeding in forcing all its
members to make peace with the exception of Britain and Portugal. Following a brief lull in
hostilities, from 1798 till 1801 she then had to fight a new constellation of enemies brought
into being by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Known as the Second Coalition, in the absence
of l’italique or, as his soldiers referred to him, le petit caporal, this initially scored considerable
success – proof positive, perhaps, of the importance of Napoleon’s personal genius to the
growth in the Republic’s military power prior to 1797 – but its forces were at length checked
on every front. Notwithstanding the claims of Napoleon’s propaganda, it therefore did not
take his talents to save the Republic. That said, not least by creating a fresh crisis in France,
the War of the Second Coalition paved the way for the Corsican general to seize power, a
development that in turn enabled the French Revolutionary Wars to be brought to an end.
As yet, however, Napoleon was still in Egypt, and we must therefore first deal with the
military and diplomatic disasters into which France was plunged on account of his oriental
adventure. According to the Napoleonic legend, the new coalition was, like all the others
that France faced, the work of ‘Pitt’s gold’, but this was at best an exaggeration: consid-
erable subsidies were available for those powers that would adhere to the plan that the
Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, was currently touting for a binding treaty of alliance that
would unite all the powers against France, but Austria was an exception here – an initial
proposal to grant her £1,000,000 was cancelled on account of the belief that, unlike Prussia
and Russia, Austria had no option but to fight – whilst the promise of generous financial
support did not secure success for the repeated attempts to persuade Prussia to abandon
her neutrality.1 Only in the case of Russia, then, was the matter of any importance –
in May 1797, the British ambassador, Whitworth, was told that Russia would only go to
war in exchange for generous subsidies, while December 1798 saw the signature of a treaty
of subsidy which netted Paul I an initial £225,000 plus £75,000 for every month that the
45,000 men the tsar promised to mobilise were engaged in operations outside Russia – but
even then it is far from impossible that the tsar would have gone to war anyway.2 At the
heart of the resurgence of opposition to France were developments in France herself. In
the course of 1797, there had been the chance of a compromise peace with Britain, but the
coup of Fructidor had shattered all chance of this, and this at least ensured that no conti-
nental power that went to war against France would have to do so entirely alone.3 However,
whilst Britain could defend herself and, sometimes at least, mount successful offensives in
the wider world, she could not hope to make head alone on the Continent. As ever, what
mattered here were Austria, Russia and Prussia, of which, by far the most important was
Russia: militarily the strongest of the three, her geographical position was such that she
The road to 18 Brumaire 277
could exert far more leverage in diplomatic terms than either of the others, by, for example,
threatening Prussia with military action if she made to go to war against Austria. Yet, as late
as 1797, there seemed little chance of Russia taking up arms in any real sense. Catherine
the Great, certainly, had joined the First Coalition in 1793. However, in practice, this was
meaningless., the only Russian action of any sort being the dispatch of a naval squadron
to the North Sea where it did nothing but engage in joint exercises with the Royal Navy
(more concretely, Catherine did give much succour to the émigrés, but this was more a
gesture than a serious act of policy). Not brought to an end till 1792, the long and brutal
war with Turkey had left Saint Petersburg in some need of rest, whilst the Polish crisis –
something which Catherine was delighted to make use of as proof that she was playing her
part in the struggle against Jacobinism – in any case, kept Russia fully occupied until 1795.
Only once the Polish issue was settled did Catherine turn her eyes to France, but even then
her involvement was minimal: agreement that an army of 60,000 men would march west
under Suvorov but only in the highly unlikely event of a similar force being mobilised by
Prussia (there was also a requirement for a large British subsidy, but this, at least, would
probably have been forthcoming). As for why this was so, meanwhile, the answer is clear
enough: whilst Catherine hated the Revolution, she did not hate it nearly enough to cast
aside either the dictates of common-sense – the fact, in this instance, that France had
nothing Russia wanted in geographic terms – or the designs that she continued to harbour
on the Ottoman Empire and, more immediately, central Asia (where Catherine had got
involved in a war against Persia in 1795).4
Now aged seventy-seven, however, Catherine was clearly coming to the end of her long
reign, and on 6 November 1796 she died of a stroke. As her successor, Paul I was no more
enamoured of the Revolution than she had been, whilst it is probable that it constituted
an even greater affront to him than it had to his mother, the obsessive-compulsive per-
sonality disorder of which he was a victim rendering events in France doubly offensive.
Thus, threaten the principle of monarchy though they did, still more important for Paul
was the fact that they precipitated debate, disorder and uncertainty and interfered with the
workings of state and society in a manner that presaged anarchy, perhaps, but, still more
certainly, undermined his very universe. In consequence, in the immediate aftermath of
1789, he had been even more intense in his fulminations against events in France than
Catherine. Unlike her, indeed, he had, from the first, been disposed to take military action
and, by the same token, was deeply disgusted when Russia in the end did nothing. Yet in
the event he proved even less inclined to get involved than Catherine and immediately
halted the mobilisation of Suvorov’s army and recalled the Russian squadron operating
in the North Sea. For these actions, various reasons have been suggested including Paul’s
detestation of his mother; a sudden upsurge in the incidence of uprisings among the serfs;
the ever-increasing size of Russia’s national debt; distrust of Britain and Austria alike; and,
finally, a desire to keep France and, at the very least, Austria, in a situation of permanent
strife that would grant Russia complete freedom of manoeuvre in the east. In the light of
recent investigations, though, what seems most likely is the influence of pragmatism: now
agreed to have been a far more rational statesman than he has often been painted, Paul was
clearly unwilling to go to war without very good reason; hence, too, then, the manner in
which, recognising that it was unlikely to be productive of much in the way of result, he
quickly shut down Catherine’s war with Persia.5 At all events, the new tsar’s first moves
were distinctly pacific in that he tried repeatedly to engage France in negotiations that
might lead to a general peace and, by keeping the Rhineland out of France’s hands, save the
Holy Roman Empire (of which Russia was a guarantor) from the upheaval with which it
was increasingly threatened, the aim being to persuade Britain and Austria to offer France
peace in exchange for a promise on her part to confine her territorial ambitions to Belgium.6
As the months wore on, however, it became all too clear that the talks were unlikely to be
productive of any result, whilst, like those with Britain, the coup of Fructidor caused them to
be broken off altogether. On top of Fructidor, meanwhile came the Treaty of Campo Formio
and with it the unwelcome news that the French had annexed the Ionian islands, thereby
staking a claim to the eastern Mediterranean. This being most unwelcome to Russia, Paul
responded by declaring himself protector of the Knights of Malta, signing a treaty of alliance
with Turkey and sending ships back into the North Sea in the hope that all this would deter
France from any further aggression in what he regarded as a Russian sphere of influence,
but in this he was confounded by Napoleon’s conquest of Malta and subsequent invasion
of Egypt.7 Ironically enough, just at this moment the pendulum of French politics once
more swing back in the direction of moderation in that 11 May 1798 had seen yet another
upheaval in Paris: in brief, believing that the move towards Jacobinism had gone too far,
moderate elements in the Directory and the assembly used a variety of mechanisms to vet
the deputies who had secured seats in the annual round of partial elections that had just
taken place, no fewer than 163 seats out of the 347 that were due to be filled being either
left vacant or given to candidates who had not secured election in place of men regarded as
being too radical.8 This move was accompanied by a clamp-down on both the press and the
Jacobin clubs, but the departure of Napoleon for Egypt just eight days later meant that it was
too late.9 Left with no choice – it was that or see Russia completely humiliated – early in
September, Paul sent his Black-Sea fleet into the Mediterranean with orders to initiate the
liquidation of any French presence in the Ionian islands, this being a task that was finally
completed in March 1799 (the sequel was particularly interesting, namely the establish-
ment of a Russian protectorate known as the Republic of the Seven Isles: self-governing and
possessed of a constitution, this may be regarded as the first Greek state).10
With the Russians still a long way out of the fight, the main campaigns began in a
somewhat unlikely quarter, namely the Kingdom of Naples. A minor participant in the
War of the First Coalition – she had assisted in the defence of Toulon, joined the British
in the blockade of the Mediterranean coast in the period from 1794 onwards, and sent
a brigade of cavalry to help the Austrians following the collapse of Piedmont – the fall
of Milan to Napoleon had persuaded her to sue for peace, an armistice signed at Brescia
on 5 June 1796 allowing her to withdraw from the war on terms that were not unreason-
able in the circumstances.11 In Paris the hope was that Naples would henceforth adopt
the same compliant attitude as that which now ruled in Prussia, but the queen, Maria-
Carolina of Austria, continued to hate the Revolution with a passion – it did not help that
Marie-Antoinette had been her sister – while the position of power which the French had
achieved in Italy could not but unsettle the Neapolitan régime. Very soon, then, there
were fresh thoughts of war. To quote a letter written by Maria-Carolina in October 1797:
War would ruin us, but . . . neutrality . . . is a chimera. Under this name, Bonaparte
will make mealy-mouthed demands for all sorts of supplies . . . and, if we refuse (as we
ought to, cost what it may), he will . . . try to revolutionise Naples . . . Our shortage of
currency . . . the new spirit, the general unrest . . . all this will make it easy for him to
stir up trouble.12
Into this swirling atmosphere of fear and rumour, on 22 September 1798 there sailed none
other than the victor of the Battle of the Nile, Horatio Nelson. Fresh from his destruction of
the French Mediterranean fleet, Nelson was intent on securing Naples as a base for British
ships, while, as a diehard anti-Jacobin, he also hoped to persuade the Neapolitans to enter
the war and, with them, the Austrians, who were by treaty a guarantor of Naples’ frontiers
(this was, in fact, the crucial point: while he professed himself to be much impressed with
Ferdinand IV’s army, he was not so foolish as to believe it could fight the French single-
handed). As for the king and queen, meanwhile, they were desperate for British protection,
and a promise on the part of Nelson to keep a man of war on permanent watch in the Bay
of Naples determined them to take action.13 Thus, on 23 November 1798 some 40,000
Neapolitan troops under the Austrian, Baron von Mack, whose services had been requested
from Vienna, advanced across the frontier of the erstwhile Papal States while still other
Neapolitan forces landed further north at Orbitello and Livorno. Hopelessly outnumbered,
Championnet had no option but to retreat, the result being, as we have seen, the immediate
collapse of the Roman Republic. Typically, however, Ferdinand and his generals had acted
without making the slightest attempt to co-ordinate their operations with anyone else,
and, to their horror, they now discovered that, despite a treaty of alliance signed only a few
months before, no help would be forthcoming from Austria in the immediate future (see
below). Having fled to Umbria, Championnet was therefore able to gather sufficient troops
to make a stand. Given the fact that the Neapolitan army had the reputation of being one
of the worst in Europe and was full of miserable levies who had, as we have seen, only just
recently been routed out of their villages, the result was only too predictable. All the more
was this the case as the mere advance on Rome had been enough to throw the Neapolitans
into complete confusion. As Roger de Damas complained:
When the army arrived in Rome, it was in such a state of distress that no general except
Mack would have thought it possible to continue the campaign without giving it time
to recover. Arms were rusted by the constant rain; shoes were lost; the artillery was
scattered over the roads, many of the mules being dead or disabled; the baggage wagons
were five days march in the rear.14
If Macdonald’s account of what occurred when the Neapolitans encountered their French
opponents at Civitavecchia is exaggerated and self-serving, it does, alas, convey the basic
facts of what occurred. Thus:
General Mack . . . came to attack me with over 40,000 men; I had, at most, 5,000 or
6,000 to oppose to him . . . The shock was violent, but the Neapolitans . . . retreated.
We pursued them as far as their camp . . . Our gains were considerable: a large number
of prisoners, artillery, arms, baggage . . . the military chest, etc.15
For the Neapolitans, Civitavecchia came as a thunderclap. Mack having dispersed his
troops across the face of the Papal States, they were incapable of serious resistance, and
within a few days the whole army was fleeing southwards in disorder. Here and there there
were attempts at a stand, but an entire division of 7,000 men was surrounded and forced
to surrender at Calvi, while on 16 December the French marched back into Rome after an
absence of just seventeen days. Nor was Championnet inclined to rest on his laurels. Eager
for fresh glory, he pursued the fleeing Neapolitans across the frontier. On 30 December the
major fortress of Gaeta capitulated without a fight, and by 12 January the Army of Rome
was at the gates of Naples. As the consequences of this brief campaign – namely, the forma-
tion of the Parthenopean Republic – have already been discussed, all that needs to be said
here is that, escape to Sicily though the royal family did, Naples was out of the fight. As a
grief-stricken Maria-Carolina wrote:
Unless the Emperor hastens to act . . . within four months we shall have been driven
from Sicily . . . Let us offer these vultures all the jewels, liveries, gold lace, everything,
and may they let us return to live and die in peace . . . I have lived too long and grief is
killing me. In short, I feel desperate.16
The destruction of the Neapolitan threat did nothing to check the slide into a wider war, for,
several months after her participation might have given succour to Ferdinand IV and Maria-
Carolina, Austria finally joined the fray. That she should have done so is hardly surprising:
despite the territorial gains it offered her, Campo Formio was regarded as a very bad bargain
in Vienna (in brief, not only did almost twice as many people live in Belgium and Lombardy
as in the lands Austria had acquired in Venetia, but Salzburg had not been France’s to give
away and could not be secured without the use of armed force), whilst Francis II’s chancellor,
Johann von Thugut, was committed as few other European statesmen were to the concept of
an ideological conflict to which there could be no end until order was restored in France, in
his eyes ‘a nation which has not only become utterly fanatical, but which tries to drag along
with it other peoples’.17 Yet there was scarcely a rush to war. Anxious to secure a revision of
the Venetian frontier in Austria’s favour, Thugut made repeated attempts to persuade the
French to abandon their designs on the Rhineland and hand over more territory in Italy, but
these came to nothing, and it increasingly became clear that if Austria wanted to obtain any
fresh territory, she was going to have to fight for it.18 Still worse, French behaviour both in
the months that intervened between the original armistice at Leoben and the signature of
the treaty itself and in the short period of peace that had followed had suggested, first, that
that there was no intention of acting in good faith towards Vienna and, second, that the
Revolution would continue its onward march. Before the French had handed over Venetia,
for example, they had stripped it of many resources and artistic treasures and inflicted much
damage on the fabric of the capital, whilst the creation of republics in Genoa, Rome and
Switzerland; the expulsion of the King of Piedmont; the occupation of Tuscany; and the sud-
den expansion of French demands with regard to the left bank of the Rhine to include the
territory of not just Austria but everyone else as well, convinced Thugut that the goal was
indeed a universal upheaval. As he wrote to the Foreign Minister, Colloredo:
Peace! Peace! But where is it? I do not see it in the treaty, at least if a rapid reading has
not misled me. I find no security for us, and the execution of it will perhaps be only a
second volume of the preliminaries.19
Nor was the behaviour of the ambassador whom France now sent to Vienna much better: a
notoriously vain, unpleasant and ambitious man of a strongly Jacobin persuasion, General
Bernadotte adopted an air that was as swaggering as it was insolent, amongst other things
provoking a major riot by flying a tricolour flag from the balcony of the French embassy.20
With the Russians by now on the verge of going to war, Thugut opened talks aimed at
agreeing a joint plan of campaign that would see an Austro-Russian army seize Switzerland,
an area, quite rightly, regarded as the most crucial bastion in the French defensive line. For
all that, however, there was no desire to see any break with France until the Russian army,
now wending its way westwards under Suvorov, was in a position to join a war on Austria’s
western frontiers. Even then action was delayed – apparently, the ever pacific Francis II was
hoping that with Napoleon’s army marooned in Egypt and threats to the French imperium
multiplying from the northern tip of Holland to the southern tip of Greece, the Directory
might give way even now – but in the end war could be put off no longer, not least because
in January 1799 an ultimatum was received from France calling for the immediate expulsion
of Suvorov’s army.21
Contained in all this can be seen more than one hint that all was not well. As Lord
Hawkesbury (later, Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister) recognised, there were deep differences
within the coalition. These will be explored in more detail below, but for the time being his
résumé will serve as a helpful introduction. Thus:
Our connections with foreign powers are still subject to great uncertainty and embar-
rassment. Though the Emperor of Russia is cordially connected with Great Britain in
all that relates to the war, he does not agree, nor can he be made to agree, with . . . the
Emperor of Germany. The Emperor of Russia pursues the war on the simple principle
of restoring . . . all ancient governments. The court of Vienna will look to nothing else
but the aggrandisement of . . . the house of Austria, and will not adopt any ancient
principle, or support any former system, except so far as it does not interfere with their
ambitious views.22
These doubts aside, by the first months of 1799, then, the Directory was facing a new coa-
lition. This, however, was not something that it was in a position to undertake with any
ease. Facing enemy forces that could amount to as many as 300,000 men, there were five
French field armies including the 25,000-strong Army of the North under Guillaume Brune,
10,000 of them more or less unenthusiastic Dutch auxiliaries; the 46,000-strong Army of
Observation (later the Danube) under Jourdan; the 30,000-strong Army of Helvetia under
Masséna; the 80,000-strong Army of Italy under Schérer; and, finally, the 32,000-strong
Army of Rome under Macdonald. From the beginning, then, the French were outnum-
bered, but, in reality, the situation was even worse than the bare figures suggested. In Rome,
for example, Macdonald had no more than 8,000 effectives whilst his infantry had only fif-
teen rounds per man. Indeed, the strategic situation of the French in Italy was grim indeed.
As a near-contemporary account put it:
Nearly 80,000 French soldiers and nearly 50,000 Poles, Swiss, Piedmontese, Genoese
[and] Romans . . . strove [to decide] who should devour most greedily this new prey
of the rights of man. Their conduct recalled to mind that of the Vandals which they
surpassed . . . Officers and soldiers all thought of nothing but plunder, not for the
Republic but for themselves. The Army of Italy . . . occupied the Modenese . . . Genoa,
Piedmont, the Milanese, the Valtelline and the countries of Brescia, Bergamo and
Padua. This dispersion of force rendered necessary by the hatred in which the French
were held reduced to about 50,000 the number of men whom they could employ in
active operations . . . The French and their auxiliaries were scattered over the surface
of Italy from the foot of the Alps to the gulfs of Naples and Manfredonia, had con-
stantly to keep in subjection . . . a population of above ten millions of souls and were
obliged to guard the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic upon which hostile
troops might at any time be landed by the English, Russian and Turkish fleets.23
To compare the occupying forces with the barbarians of the fifth century is a little extreme,
but the general point holds good: left all but unsupported by the Directory, the French
armies could not but live off the country. Yet the hand-to-mouth existence to which
this led produced wholesale privation, many soldiers being reduced to a state of constant
hunger.24 Whether in Holland, Germany, Italy or Spain, meanwhile, morale was extremely
low, the state of mind to which many of the troops had been reduced being suggested all too
vividly by François Dumey, a peasant from the village of Verlinghem near Lille who had been
conscripted into a volunteer battalion in September 1793. Whether a keen supporter of the
Revolution or simply resigned to his fate, Dumey appears to have made a good soldier, for by
1796 he had become a sergeant major in the demi-brigade into which his original battalion
had been incorporated. Yet, even as early as that date, there are signs that he was anxious
for hostilities to end as soon as possible. To quote a letter that he wrote to his mother on
14 September from Gorsel:
We are breaking camp tomorrow and have a long march to undertake . . . We are all
happy to take our leave, even though this cannot but end up with us being sent to the
theatre of war. After all, we shall be lending a shoulder to the wheels of the machine
and giving it a shove in the direction of its final destination: the war has already gone
on quite long enough. In any case, how could we regret an encampment where drill
and a thousand other things caused us to be more fed up than we could possibly be even
with the enemy at our throats . . . In short, we are sallying forth with great joy from a
state of lethargy to run the risk of danger and thereby assure ourselves of a real rest.25
As the war went on, however, it was clear that the hopes with which Dumey had gone to
war in 1796 had soon been dissipated. Thus:
In the month of Floréal alone, desertion has stripped the demi-brigade of some fifty
men. Plenty of others went during Germinal, while the same sort of thing has been
going on since the start of this month as well. What to do? The problem is that far too
many volunteers [a category that in Dumey’s lexicon clearly included many conscripts]
who are dull to the beautiful word ‘liberty’, who regard it, indeed, with derision, have
been kept on for far too long. For such men even the slightest yoke is insupportable.26
What was wanted, he concluded, was peace, and that at any price. As he wrote in a letter
of 16 June 1798:
The soldiers are getting more and more disgruntled . . . There is a rhyme going
around: ‘In the days of servitude, at least I had my liberty; liberated by my courage, I
now find myself in captivity.’ The best soldiers and the worst soldiers alike, then, all
ask themselves the same question at one time or another ‘Is it brave or cowardly to
desert? Is it brave or cowardly to hang on till the end of the war?’ The one thing on
which there is general agreement is that everyone has had enough . . . I recall reading
in Plutarch that the Roman soldiers . . . were called ‘Marius’ mules. Well, if this war
goes on forever, won’t we become victims in just the same way? Whether actively or
passively, we shall just end up being devoured by the ‘Great Nation’. We have heard
that, before he set sail with his expedition, Bonaparte made a speech in which he
promised his men some reward on their return. As the horizon has darkened, how-
ever, so the soldiers have come up with another rhyme: ‘It is not six furlongs of land,
Directors, that we ask for: by your hands is raised the firebrand, when what you should
do is end the war.’27
Dumey was serving in Germany, but similar feelings were on view in Italy. In October 1797 a
serious mutiny took place at Mantua in protest at the garrison’s want of pay.28 Equally, when
the French entered Rome, a combination of factors including anger at the failure to make
good the army’s pay arrears from the resources of the city in the manner which had been prom-
ised, concern that the overthrow of the pope would jeopardise the hard-won peace settlement
obtained at Campo Formio and stir up popular resistance, and suspicions that the generals
were enriching themselves while the lower ranks got nothing, led a large number of junior
officers to form what Thiébault calls ‘a deliberative assembly’.29 As Bricard remembered:
The troops were very fed up at not being able to return home. In this opinion I very
much shared: I was burning to see my family once more, especially my mother. On top
of everything else, a number of men in my company had fallen sick with malignant
fevers . . . We had suffered at least twenty dead on this account in the course of the
past year . . . and this out of a total strength of sixty-three. The country being extremely
pernicious to the health of foreigners, the number of French soldiers who died in Italy
is impossible to fathom . . . For this reason alone, I hated the place.30
All too clearly, then, the army was in no state to fight a war. To quote the infantry officer,
François Roguet:
In every unit one witnessed the most regrettable disorders . . . Without administration
there is no discipline, but without discipline an army becomes a negative force, even
a ruinous one . . . Doubtless there are exceptional circumstances in which a state, or
those who command its armies, have, despite themselves, to have recourse to means
that threaten as much danger as they produce benefit, but such a state of affairs should
only be transitory . . . However, to manage civil and military affairs in such a fashion in
every circumstance . . . is to raise the banner of crime in the presence of the soldiery,
the result being that, ever more daring, they group together in bands whose conduct
knows no limits, leaving the army unable to defend itself . . . As for the armies as a
whole, meanwhile, they were from every point of view far weaker than they appeared
to the naked eye. Indeed, their moral force – the reciprocal confidence that should exist
between commanders and their men – had completely disappeared.31
In fairness to the Directory, it was anything but unaware of the weakness of its military
position. From the time of Fructidor onwards, the Minister of Finance, Jacques Ramel, had
striven by a variety of means to reduce the enormous national debt and reform the tax sys-
tem in such a way as to draw more heavily on the resources of the propertied classes.32 And
on 5 September 1798, the War Minister, General Jourdan, promulgated the law, of which
we have already heard, that for the first time made conscription a permanent feature of
French society, the idea being that every year, in times of war and peace alike, every depart-
ment and commune in the country would be allocated a certain quota of recruits which
would then be filled by a public ballot of all men satisfying the basic physical requirements
who had reached the age of twenty in the previous twelve months. The system effectively
being back-dated to 1793 by means of the provision that all men aged from twenty to
twenty-five would be liable for service, there were in principle five year-groups – ‘classes’,
as they were known – who could be called up, but in the first instance it was decided that
only the youngest would be drawn upon. In all, this should have produced 203,000 men,
but no such figure was ever achieved. Setting aside the various outbreaks of revolt discussed
in Chapter 7, there was widespread rioting and draft evasion, whilst in February 1799 the
régime contrived to fuel the flames by authorising the practice of substitution, thereby
awarding the propertied classes a guaranteed means of escaping their obligations. In con-
sequence, then, all that was obtained was a meagre 71,000 men, a number that was soon
reduced still further by large numbers of desertions: indeed, in the end, no more than 57,000
men reached the armies.33 In the same way, meanwhile, money remained just as short as
before, the fact being that many of Ramel’s measures had proved counter-productive in the
short term (for example, in order cut the amount of interest paid by the government on
the national debt, the assignats had effectively been liquidated, thereby biting deeply into
the incomes of many notables, generating considerable discontent, depressing tax revenues
and cutting the investment needed to revive the French economy which now entered a
period of sustained deflation; still worse, perhaps, the populace suffered very badly: with
wheat prices falling, peasants saw a substantial reduction in their purchasing power, while
many enterprises cut down on their work forces or were forced to close altogether). Indeed,
desperate for more money, the Directory decided upon fresh acts of aggression even though
all these did was to spread its outnumbered armies out over an area that was still greater,
November 1798 seeing French troops seize control of Piedmont, whilst in March 1799 it
was the turn of Tuscany.34
All this meant that the income derived from the satellite states and occupied territories
was absolutely vital, but this was now to take a massive hit. Setting aside the fighting in the
Papal States and Naples, the new war began with French offensives in Germany, Switzerland
and Italy alike, but in no case did these go well: in Germany, Jourdan crossed the Rhine at
Basel and pushed into Baden, only to be heavily defeated first at Ostrach on 21 March and
then at Stockach on 25 March and forced to return to his starting point; in Switzerland,
Masséna marched on Austria but was beaten at Feldkirch and driven back to Zurich; and in
Italy, Schérer launched an invasion of Venetia, only to be crushed at Magnano and Cassano
and forced to evacuate not just the Cisalpine Republic but also Piedmont, about the only
bright spot in this catalogue of disaster being that on 4 June Masséna managed to inflict a
bloody nose on his pursuers in the First Battle of Zurich, not that this was enough to dissuade
him from abandoning the city and retiring even further west.35
Bad as all this was, the situation might yet have been rescued: garrisons had been
left in a number of major fortresses, including not least Mantua, while Macdonald was
heading north at the head of the Army of Rome. At this point, however, ambition and
overconfidence very much tipped the scales away from the French. Supposed to head for
Genoa, Macdonald rather struck north in the hope of catching the Austrians in the rear.
Unbeknownst to the French commander, however, the latter had now been joined by the
Suvorov’s Russians, and on 17 June he duly came to grief when an Austrian division man-
aged to check him for long enough for Suvorov and his Austrian counter-part, Melas, to
fall on him in strength. Known as the battle of the River Trebbia, the two-day battle that
followed saw the complete defeat of Macdonald with the loss of over 15,000 men and 27
guns, and that despite the fact that the Austrians and Russians only outnumbered him by
2,000.36 The pursuit being less vigorous than it might have been, Macdonald got away to
Genoa with perhaps 20,000 men, but it was still a significant defeat and one which lost
the French all of Italy apart from the Ligurian Republic, all the fortresses still holding
out in Piedmont and the Cisalpine Republic now being forced to capitulate. Meanwhile,
from one end of Italy to another, the whole country was in a state of insurrection, every
movement of the French army being dogged by swarms of armed peasants. As Thiébault
wrote of Macdonald’s evacuation of Naples:
The division proceeded to Arce, the advance guard being under fire all the way and
leaving several dead. The baggage guard was harassed in the same way, several persons
being wounded near the carriages, one of which, that of Count Scheel, had a bullet
through it. To show what was the exasperation and fury of the fanatics towards whom
we were advancing, one of them came out upon the high road in spite of certain death,
and fired a pistol . . . point blank at General Wathier.37
Even now, all was not lost: ensconced in the Maritime Alps, the forces of Moreau (vice
Schérer, who had just been sacked) and Macdonald were strong enough to check any
advance on Genoa, while their continued presence was sufficient to deter an enemy march
on either Switzerland or Rome. However, at this point, events in Paris took a hand, the
repeated defeats having given rise to yet another political upheaval. Known as the coup
of 30 Prairial, this was the work of a concerted effort on the part of the more radical ele-
ments in the lower chamber of the assembly – the so-called Council of the 500 – to steer
the Revolution back towards a more Montagnard orientation, and, at the same time, assert
greater control of the Directory, which was simultaneously purged of its two most moder-
ate members.38 In order to bring in the revenue required to maintain the army, on 27 June
General Jourdan, who had now been recalled from the Rhine and once again made War
Minister, proposed a forced loan of 100,000,000 francs payable by all those who paid at least
300 francs per annum in land tax. Complementing these measures, meanwhile, was what
looked very like a return to the days of the Terror: on 12 July a so-called Law of Hostages
was proposed that permitted the imprisonment without trial of the relatives of émigrés,
draft evaders and those deemed to be in a state of rebellion against the government, other
moves that seemed to presage a return to the days of 1793–4 being a lifting of the current
prohibition of the Jacobin clubs and loud rhetoric to the effect that everything would come
to nought unless the revolutionary spirit was not revived forthwith. However, the result was
not the one that was hoped for. On the one hand, the prosperous minority affected by the
forced loan were bitterly opposed to what they perceived as little more than an exercise in
pillage and did all that they could to withhold payment, the result being that only about a
third of the money required came in. And, on the other, the retrenchment already gripping
France was intensified, thereby inflicting still more hardship on the populace. Than this
nothing could have been more inopportune, for Jourdan was now calling for the mobilisa-
tion of every single man of the five classes of conscripts liable to conscription. The result,
needless to say, was simply to arouse still more popular resistance, whilst the propertied
classes who, as ever, manned the departmental and communal administrations, had been so
alienated by the forced loan, that they frequently showed little energy in hunting down the
thousands who refused to answer the call of duty.39
To cement its authority, the remodelled Directory desperately needed a military victory,
and in an attempt to achieve this, it now replaced the somewhat lacklustre Moreau with
a new man in the person of Barthélemy Joubert, an erstwhile gunner who had enlisted in
the Volunteers of 1791 and thereafter gone from strength to strength. Victory, however,
was not to be, not the least of the problems being that Joubert had never before exercised
the command of a whole army. Thus, arriving at Genoa with orders to launch an immedi-
ate counter-offensive, he made no attempt to coordinate his movements with those of the
20,000 French troops who were manning the frontiers of Savoy under a Championnet reha-
bilitated by the resurgent radicals and simply marched on Turin. Still worse, having reached
the town of Novi, he appears to have experienced a major crisis of confidence which left
his 37,000 men scattered across the countryside without orders only a few miles from the
Allied outposts. Now in command of the Austrian and Russian forces alike, Suvorov was
not the sort of general to let such an opportunity slip, and, in the small hours of 15 August,
he launched a surprise attack. Rushing to rally his shaken troops, many of whom had not
eaten for days, Joubert was shot dead by an Austrian infantryman, and the desperate efforts
of his subordinates, including, not least, the future marshals, Saint Cyr and Perignon, to
cobble together some sort of defence proved unavailing: heavily outnumbered as it was, by
the end of the day, the Army of Italy had lost some 11,000 casualties and 37 guns. At over
8,000 men, Austro-Russian losses had been heavy, and the French were therefore able to
escape to Genoa in good order, but the fact was that the Army of Italy was to all intents
and purposes out of the campaign: indeed, it was the considered opinion of François Roguet,
then a brigade commander, that Suvorov had only to advance for the French to be driven
from Italy altogether.40
Suvorov, however, did not advance, at least not in the direction of Genoa. On the
contrary, the Allied army split with Melas remaining on the defensive in Piedmont, while
Suvorov led his much-battered Russian forces northwards into Switzerland, thereby allow-
ing most of the Austrian forces there to move northwards into Germany. To put it mildly,
this was a massive stroke of good fortune for the French: setting aside the danger to Genoa,
a vigorous thrust across the mountains into Savoy could well have routed Championnet and
revived the cause of insurrection in France. As to why the decision was taken, the blame is
usually put on the Austrians who are accused of wanting, first, to make Alsace the scene of
any attack on France in the hope that they could secure that region for themselves in any
subsequent peace settlement and, second, to get the Russians out of Italy for fear that they
would interfere with Thugut’s designs on Lombardy and Piedmont. Confronted by the pros-
pect of leading his remaining 20,000 men into one of the most rugged and poverty-stricken
in the whole of Europe, Suvorov was most unhappy, but his hand was forced by news that
the Austrians had already begun to pull their forces out of Switzerland, thereby exposing
a second Russian army of 20,000 men that had just arrived at Zurich under Alexander
Rimski-Korsakov, and on 8 September the Russian general duly set off for the Alps.41
The result, predictably enough, was complete disaster. No sooner was he aware of
Suvarov’s advance, than Masséna fell on Rimski-Korsakov and routed him at the Second
Battle of Zurich, the Russian general’s chances not being improved by the fact that its ranks
included the last elements of the rag-tag Army of Condé. Driving his men on in the midst of
appalling autumn weather, Suvorov got his men across the Saint Gotthard Pass and headed
north into central Switzerland, fighting various actions along the way, only to discover that
he was in effect heading straight into a trap. Turning east, he therefore retired through the
heart of the Alps, and eventually reached safety in Vorarlberg, though not before he had
lost 10,000 of his men and much of his baggage.42 One point that is worth making in respect
of the fighting in Switzerland is its extreme savagery. In reality, most of the Russian soldiers
who fought in Italy and Switzerland were regulars, uniformed, trained and equipped in
much the same manner as the soldiers of Germany and Austria, but the French envisaged
them one and all as Cossacks or, in other words, murderous barbarians from the steppes
who were but one step removed from the hordes of Genghiz Khan and Attila the Hun. As
the Russians trudged through Switzerland, meanwhile, so stories spread among Masséna’s
troops of French prisoners being put to death in the most horrible circumstances and the
bodies mutilated without pity. As a result, whenever Suvorov’s men fell into the hands of
their pursuers, they paid a terrible price, Duthilt, for example, describing how he and his
men massacred 300 Russians whom they had trapped inside a large courtyard farm, and that
despite the fact that they evidently knew that they were not Cossacks. Thus:
Balls, bayonets . . . and sabres, one and all flayed the ranks of those unfortunate Russians,
officers and men alike, and made a horrible slaughter of it. Every room of the place was
thoroughly searched and all those who had tried to hide in them were put to death
in exactly the same fashion. Having become just as furious and without pity as the
Cossacks had been before them, our soldiers avenged the latter’s barbarous behaviour
on the miserable infantrymen whom they had just caught, neither the copper crosses
which they all wore nor their pleas to Saint Nicholas for help being enough to save
even a single one of them.43
Whilst Suvorov and his army were making their way to safety in western Austria, an entirely
separate campaign was taking place far to the north. In brief, for obvious reasons, the British
government was always interested in the erstwhile United Provinces as a potential object
of strategy, while intelligence received in the first months of 1799 suggested that its suc-
cessor was not just riven by unrest but ready to rise in revolt. Fastening upon these reports
with indecent haste, Grenville therefore approached the Prussians and the Russians with a
view to persuading them to join with Britain in an attack on the Batavian Republic. True
to their determination to remain neutral, the Prussians would have nothing to do with this
scheme – setting aside everything else, there was widespread unrest in the countryside due
to a combination of economic stagnation, serious price inflation and attempts on the part
of many junker to increase the amount of wheat produced on their estates by constantly
increasing the amount of labour service expected of their serfs44 – but eventually it was
agreed that a joint Anglo-Russian expeditionary force would be put ashore with the aim of
advancing on Amsterdam. However, so many problems were encountered in putting the
expedition together that the first troops did not go ashore until the last week of August,
the spot finally chosen for the invasion being the northern peninsula of Den Helder. Rapid
action might have secured good results – even as it was, the sixteen men-of-war, five frig-
ates, three corvettes and a brig stationed in the anchorage off the nearby island of Texel
surrendered without firing a shot – but the commander of the first contingent to land was
the cautious and methodical Sir Ralph Abercrombie, all that he did other than driving
away the few Dutch troops in the area therefore being to establish a bridgehead and sit
down to wait for reinforcements. These duly arrived but so did large numbers of French and
Dutch troops as well, and the Anglo-Russian force, now commanded by the Duke of York,
found itself penned up in the narrow strip of land between the North Sea and the Zuider
Zee. As for the hoped-for insurrection, this proved a complete chimera: there were a num-
ber of minor disturbances at Arnhem and other places, but that was all. On 18 September
a major assault on the increasingly well-fortified Franco-Dutch positions was beaten off,
the result being a welter of mutual recriminations with the British and the Russians alike
blaming one another for the failure. Rather more success was obtained on 2 October in the
Battle of Alkmaar, but the defenders simply pulled back to a fresh line of defensive positions
from where they four days later launched a large-scale counter-attack that drove the Allies
back to their starting point. This was the end: with the troops camping in the open, sickness
on the increase, local food supplies non-existent and the coast battered by ever more seri-
ous storms, it was pointless to continue, and a council of war decided to sue for peace, the
Anglo-Russian eventually being allowed to depart unmolested in exchange for the release
of the 8,000 Dutch prisoners currently being held in Britain.45
As an end to the year, this was scarcely encouraging, not least because it confirmed Paul
I in a feeling that had been growing upon him ever since the Swiss campaign. To quote the
later reflections of Henry Bunbury, a British officer who participated in the campaign:
Paul never seems to have doubted the superiority of his rude soldiers over those of
western Europe. He expected his Russians to conquer if they found the opportu-
nity to fight as a matter of course. And the wonderful success of his first four and
twenty thousand men, who descended into Italy under Suvorov, served to confirm
and exaggerate this expectation. In a mind ill-poised by nature, and, thus excited by
an over-weening confidence, the disasters which subsequently fell upon the Russian
armies were likely to produce, and did produce, a fearful revulsion. The utter defeat
of Korsakov, the consequent distresses of Suvorov, and the disappointments and dis-
contents of the army which joined the English in North Holland, ﬁxed in the mind of
Paul the . . . persuasion that he was betrayed, insulted, and ill-treated by his allies.46
Needless to say, it was not just Paul I who felt aggrieved. With consummate injustice –
it had, after all, been him who played the major role in the attempt to concentrate the
Russian forces in Switzerland – Grenville was also keen to place blame anywhere other than
on British shoulders. As he wrote to his brother in a private letter, ‘This and every other
evil we now experience, and every check, misfortune or difficulty that we have experienced
since the beginning of the war, are all owing to the conduct of Austria.’47 Meeting with
Suvorov after the campaign, meanwhile, Lord Minto professed himself to be shocked with
what he found:
I am here to see Suvorov on business and am not sorry for the opportunity of seeing
one of whom one has heard so much and such extraordinary things. Indeed, it is impos-
sible to say how extraordinary he is. There is but one word that can really express it. I
must not be quoted, but he is the most perfect bedlamite that ever was allowed to be
at large. I never saw anything so stark mad and, as it appears to me, so contemptible in
every respect . . . His head wanders so much that it is with the greatest difficulty that
he recollects himself through two sentences . . . With all this, he is the most ignorant
and incapable officer in the world . . . and has owed his entire success in Italy to the
excellent Austrian officers serving under him.48
Nor was anger and jealousy confined to the statesmen of Europe. On the contrary, even
at the level of the street, there were many tensions. In Palermo, for example, the popu-
lace were driven to fury by the manner in which sailors on shore-leave from the various
Turkish warships that put into the harbour openly consorted with local prostitutes, and
on 28 August a major riot broke out when a Turk who had just been robbed by a cut-purse
drew a pistol and shot the man dead: absolutely outraged by news of this event, the crowd
rounded on every Turk they could find and chased the unfortunate men concerned through
the streets, pelting them with stones and other missiles. Also present, however, were many
Russian sailors. Tired of being fleeced by local card-sharps, cheated by local traders and
robbed by local criminals, they proceeded to wade into the fray on the side of the Turks, the
result being a pitched battle in which a number of individuals on both sides were killed and
many houses sacked.49
Such recriminations were unfortunate, however, for in the summer, momentous events
had been set in train on the coast of Egypt. Thus, in the wake of the second battle of Abukir
(25 July 1799), the British admiral, Sir Sidney Smith had handed Napoleon a packet of
European newspapers with the apparent aim of so demoralising the French commander that
he would surrender. Suggest, as they all did, that France was on the brink of complete defeat,
their impact could only be dramatic, but matters did not transpire in the manner in which
Smith intended. Thus, far from entering into negotiations, Napoleon realised that a great
opportunity lay at his feet, and less than a month later he secretly took ship for France,
accompanied only by a small group of trusted cronies.50 With Egypt seemingly securely in
the hands of the French and a string of fresh victories under his belt, there were just enough
grounds for him to be able to affect the role of conquering hero once again. Bolstered by the
arrival just prior to his surprise re-appearance of a series of official dispatches that glossed
over the failure in the Holy Land, painted the French position in the most roseate of hues
and exaggerated the scale of his battlefield triumphs, Napoleon was greeted with great excite-
ment. Hence the scenes witnessed when Napoleon made landfall at Fréjus on 9 October:
An officer rowed to the beach in a boat. We could see him quite clearly. Some men
came to meet him, but scarcely had a few seconds passed than we perceived a great
commotion: people were running towards the town, and soon the beach was covered
by a huge crowd. Boats were loaded with passengers, and . . . a horde of people quickly
climbed through the portholes into the ship . . . Soon there was no possibility of the
general being mistaken as to the feelings of the entire population. ‘You only can save
France,’ they cried to him on all sides. ‘Without you she perishes. You are sent by
Heaven: take up the reins of government!’51
Nor did things change thereafter. ‘Our journey from Fréjus to Paris’, wrote Eugène de
Beauharnais, ‘was a triumphal progress. One single sentiment animated the entire French
people and indicated to Napoleon what he should do. At Lyon, especially, the joy of the
inhabitants reached the pitch of delirium.’52 As for the capital, here, too, spirits were high.
To quote one of the future emperor’s most enthusiastic collaborators:
On his arrival Bonaparte took up his residence at the little house that he had bought
in the Rue Chantereine . . . This was soon thronged with all the leading personalities
of the government, the legislature, the army and the Institute, together with all those
who exercised some degree of personal influence . . . Every heart was so overflowing
with joy, admiration and love at the return of the hero that, whilst nobody actually
acknowledged the fact that he possessed supreme power, everybody recognised this to
be the case.53
The reasons for this excitement are understandable. For men of property, the domestic situ-
ation had become increasingly intolerable. The economy was in ruins; law and order had in
many rural areas almost completely broken down due to the immense numbers of men who
had been forced into brigandage by poverty and conscription; there had been a resumption
of revolt in the Vendée and further trouble in Belgium and Gascony; and the great military
crisis of 1799 had led to the régime once more resorting to measures that recalled the Terror
of 1793. To deal with these problems, it was felt that France needed a greatly reinforced
executive power, the Directory having proved not just corrupt but incapable of imposing
the required degree of authority. Meanwhile, for a much wider spectrum of society, what
mattered was peace and, along with it, cheap bread and an end to compulsory military
service. And for rich and poor alike there was the further need for victory, and with it the
consolidation of such gains as they could feel that they had made since 1789. The result was
inevitable. As Chaptal wrote:
In this state of affairs, it was announced that General Bonaparte had disembarked at
Fréjus. The news spread with the speed of light. Hope was reborn in every heart. All the
parties rallied to him. The remembrance of his brilliant campaign in Italy, the memo-
rable achievements of his armies in Egypt, did not permit any other choice. He was
carried in triumph from Fréjus to Paris, and some days later proclaimed First Consul.54
This summary of the events which led to the coup of 18 Brumaire, of course, is much too
simplistic. As modern scholars recognise, France’s condition was by no means as dark as it
was painted by Napoleon’s later apologists and collaborators. In reality, the Directory had
introduced a variety of salutary reforms that in principle gave the Republic both a much
stronger army and a more effective fiscal system. Meanwhile, albeit at the cost of hitting the
pockets of the notables, a series of good harvests had reduced food prices very considerably,
whilst the twin menace of rebellion and military defeat had been overcome. At the same
time, one should neither be too deterministic about the consulate nor forget that the plot
that brought Napoleon to power was the work, not of l’italique but of a group of civilian
politicians.55 And, last but not least, it is also worth noting that circumstance also played
its part: Napoleon was not the first or even the second choice of the conspirators when it
came to acquiring a ‘sword’ that could execute their will – had he not fallen at Novi, the
general in command would probably have been Joubert, whilst Sièyes was supposedly actu-
ally engaged in the task of persuading Moreau to accept the role when he received the news
that Napoleon had landed. All this, however, is by the by. All that matters is that a situa-
tion had arisen that allowed the thirty-year old general to rise to the top and, further, that
he had come back to France with the firm intention of establishing himself in power. It was
a decisive moment. As Germaine de Staël remembered:
It was the first time since the Revolution that one heard one name in every mouth.
Until then it had always been ‘the constituent assembly, the people, the convention’.
Now, however, nobody spoke of anyone except the man who was going to take the
place of everyone else and render the human race anonymous.56
Given what we have seen of the evolution of Napoleon’s character, there can be no doubt
what all this portended. For all the claims of his apologists, a critical review of the new
French ruler’s early years produces a picture of a man who was very far from being the hero
and liberator of legend. So far as Napoleon was concerned, by 1799, ideology was something
that he had jettisoned long since. Moreover, even when it had been a genuine part of his life,
it seems clear that it was never there for its own sake. Let us take, for example, Napoleon’s
Corsican nationalism. Fierce though this was, in the end, we can see that it was at heart
an affectation. In his schoolboy years a means of asserting his personality, it very quickly
became merely a vehicle for his family interests and vaunting personal ambition and was
jettisoned as soon as it became clear that the Bonaparte clan had lost the battle to secure
control of its native island. Much the same applies, meanwhile, to Napoleon’s Jacobinism.
Privately disgusted by the excesses of the Revolution, he very quickly became convinced
that the radical politicians who egged on such scenes were no more than self-seeking
demagogues. Yet, recognising the power of their ideas and, above all, their importance in
the army, which remained the element in French society most devoted to the radicalism
of 1792–3, he made use of them to establish an unassailable power base in its ranks. But
throughout, it was clear that ideology was in the end a matter of secondary importance to
him. In northern Italy he defied government policy to set up the Cisalpine Republic, but
this overtly liberationist behaviour was countered by, first, his refusal to impose a peace on
the Papal States that would have shattered the temporal power of the papacy, and, second,
his cession of much of Venice to the Habsburgs. In Egypt, too, the same cavalier attitude was
apparent. Napoleon was, personally speaking, deeply irreligious, and yet in Cairo he flirted
with Islam and proclaimed his intention of governing in accordance with the Koran in the
vain hope that this would win the cooperation of the local élite and stave off the threat of
Turkish intervention, just as in Italy he had flattered the local bishops and pretended that
he was a friend of the Catholic Church. As he famously remarked in August 1800, indeed:
It was by declaring myself to be Catholic that I finished the war in the Vendée, by
declaring myself to be Muslim that I established myself in Egypt, in declaring myself
to be ultramontane that I won over the hearts of the Italians. If I governed a nation of
Jews, I would re-establish the Temple of Solomon.57
According to Napoleon’s apologists, all this meant was that he wanted to govern all men
as they wished to be governed and to treat all religions with equal respect. Such arguments,
however, are at best disingenuous. In so far as both French politics and the conduct of
international relations are concerned, the reality is impossible to disguise. For Napoleon
all that really mattered was the pursuit of power and his own glorification. Whilst he
sought to bind these in with the definition of the national interest and the defence of the
Revolution, they were in the end simply to be enjoyed for their own sake. In the words of
one embittered politician, ‘Bonaparte has never known anything but absolute power . . . It
is so gratifying to find oneself surrounded, solicited, flattered; to be able distribute ben-
efits amongst one’s family and friends; to conquer ever more opulence and grandeur.’58
What, however, did this mean for international relations? In later years, Napoleon always
attempted to minimise the impact of his activities from 1796 to 1799. The Directory, he
argued, needed war, and, in consequence, he had simply been its instrument. However,
whilst war brought much plunder to France, it also caused such difficulties on the home
front that peace became a prerequisite of political and social stability. But for Napoleon,
it seems quite clear that such a peace might have been obtained in 1797, for Austria was
defeated militarily and Britain sufficiently humbled to consider coming to terms. Equally,
although he was not the only actor in the drama, but for Napoleon there seems little doubt
that there would have been no breach with Russia in 1798 nor, still less, any resumption
of hostilities with Austria and Naples. Involved in this, moreover, was what seemed at
the time to be a revolution in international politics: having single-handedly committed
France to a major change of policy in Italy, Napoleon embarked on a unilateral partition
of the Ottoman Empire which had the extraordinary result of uniting Saint Petersburg and
Constantinople. This is not, of course, to say that traditional foreign policy interests did
not survive, any more than it is true that they had been overturned by the Revolution: if
Russia fought alongside the Ottoman Empire in 1798, for example, it was in part to keep it
safe for partition on her own terms at a later date. Nonetheless a disturbing new element –
a personal ambition so great that it could not be constrained within the boundaries of the
European states-system – had entered international relations.
Notes
1 Grenville’s policy is discussed in J.M. Sherwig, ‘Lord Grenville’s plan for a concert of Europe,
1797–1799’, Journal of Modern History, 34, No. 3 (September, 1962), pp. 284–93.
2 For a discussion of the role played by British subsidies in the formation of the Second Coalition,
see J.M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793–1815
(Cambridge, MA, 1969), pp. 97–115.
3 For a detailed study of these peace negotiations, see P. Jupp, Lord Grenville, 1759–1834 (Oxford,
1985), pp. 197–208.
4 For the foreign policy of Catherine the Great in respect of France, see Alexander, Catherine the
Great, pp. 276–324; Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 185–7. Schroeder,
meanwhile, is probably right to argue that Catherine was not motivated by cynicism alone when
she claimed that crushing the Poles was a blow against Jacobinism: in her eyes, a revolutionary
was a revolutionary wherever they happened to be located. Schroeder, Transformation of European
Politics, p. 123.
5 For Paul’s policy in respect of central Asia, see M. Atkin, ‘The pragmatic diplomacy of Paul I:
Russia’s relations with Asia, 1796–1801’, Slavic Review, 38, No. 1 (March, 1979), pp. 60–74.
6 Waliszewski, Paul the First, pp. 214–31; McGrew, Paul I, pp. 282–6; Blanning, Origins of the French
Revolutionary Wars, pp. 187–9.
7 McGrew, Paul I of Russia, pp. 287–9; Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 189–91
8 Sydenham, Third French Republic, pp. 170–4.
9 In fairness, the messages coming out of France in the wake of what became known as the coup
of 22 Floréal were bewildering. Thus, if the Jacobins had been curbed, the Directory continued
to persecute overt or closet royalists, harass the Church and make such gestures as the ever more
rigid imposition of the new calendar. Nor did it do its credibility as a force for greater moderation
any good when the hard-line anticlerical Jean-Baptiste Treilhard was elected to its ranks in place
of the relatively moderate François de Neufchateau. Ibid., pp. 180–1.
10 For the Russo-Turkish conquest of the Ionian islands, see N.E. Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean,
1787–1797 (Chicago, 1970), pp. 87–97. K. Sakul, ‘What happened to Pouqueville’s Frenchmen?
Ottoman treatment of French prisoners during the War of the Second Coalition, 1798–1802’,
Turkish Historical Review, 3, No. 2 (June, 2012), pp. 168–95.
11 H. Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734–1835 (London, 1954), pp. 280–88.
12 Cit. ibid., pp. 295–6.
13 Ibid., pp. 304–11; Lambert, Nelson, pp. 304–9.
14 Rambaud, Memoirs of Count Roger de Damas, pp. 257–8.
15 Rousset, Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, I, pp. 198–99. In reality, Macdonald had a full 10,000
men and Mack only 26,000, whilst no more than one division of the latter’s forces got into action.
If anything, meanwhile, Damas is even more scornful of what occurred than Macdonald. Thus:
‘Nepi, the enemy’s position on the right, was not seized before the ground that lay beyond it was
occupied . . . and therefore [hearing] a sharp fire . . . behind them, [our troops] thought their flank
was turned. They all lost their heads on the spot and took instant flight . . . Of 11,000 men I could
only recover 3,000.’ Rambaud, Memoirs of Count Roger de Damas, p. 262.
16 Cit. Acton, Bourbons of Naples, p. 320.
17 Cit. Roider, Baron Thugut, p. 129.
18 Ibid., pp. 270–80.
19 Cit. ibid., p. 261. The chaos wrought by the French in Venice is testified to by a Danish visitor
who arrived in the city in the summer of 1799. Thus: ‘The arsenal bears the most conspicuous
marks of the devastations committed by the modern Franks . . . Besides five good and service-
able ships of war, they carried off the whole of the vast stores of the materials for equipping
a fleet . . . The former government had . . . on the stocks . . . a certain number of ships of the
line . . . which were useless to the French as they could not stay . . . long enough to complete
them. These they destroyed as much as they could and the shortness of time permitted . . . From
some they took away the stocks by which they were supported, by which they fell and became
unserviceable . . . some they cut entirely to pieces and others they sank . . . In all these devasta-
tions and ravages the French had, however, a certain object, and, excepting the injustice of the
thing, not much can be said against their proceedings. But they destroyed a great many other
things merely out of childish petulance and that arrogance which so peculiarly distinguishes the
modern French [who are] not only desirous to overturn every government that differs from their
own, but even [wish] to annihilate all traces of former constitutions. Thus the lions and figures
of the doges of this city were the object of their inveterate persecution.’ Küttner, Travels through
Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Part of Italy, pp. 166–7.
20 A. Palmer, Bernadotte: Napoleon’s Marshal, Sweden’s King (London, 1990), pp. 64–9.
21 Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 191–6. The character of Francis II is worth
highlighting here. An advocate of war in 1792, what he had seen of the fighting had left him
utterly horrified and he thereafter longed for peace and, whether in 1798, 1805, 1809 or 1813, was
most unwilling to resume hostilities, only doing so as a matter of last resort. Macartney, Habsburg
Empire, pp. 147–8.
22 Cit. Earl of Rosebery (ed.), The Wellesley Papers: The Life and Correspondence of Richard Colley
Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, 1760–1842 (London, 1914), I, p. 123.
23 Anon., The History of the Campaign of 1799 in Italy (London, 1800), pp. 2–4.
24 Not the least of the problems here was that, following the Treaty of Campo Formio, the military
budget had been slashed in a desperate attempt to save money. Sydenham, First French Republic,
p. 183.
25 Cit. Anon (ed.), ‘Lettres de campagne de Sergent-Major Dumey de la Huitieme Demi-Brigade et
lettres qui lui furent addressées’, Carnets du Sabretache, 11 (1913), p. 657.
26 Cit. ibid., p. 658.
27 Cit. ibid., pp. 659–60. An alternative explanation for the growing cynicism and disillusionment is
provided by John Lynn who claims that the result of the retreat from the radicalism and intense
politicisation of 1793–4 was that an army motivated by concern for the general good – what he terms
‘an army of virtue’ – was transformed into one motivated by concern for its own status and well-
being – what he terms as ‘army of honour’. J. Lynn, ‘Toward an army of honour: the moral evolution
of the French army, 1789–1815’, French Historical Studies, 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 152–82. This
argument would be more convincing if the evidence that ideology was the predominant influence in
the army of the Terror was as incontrovertible as Lynn would like it to be.
28 Bricard, Journal, pp. 287–8.
29 Thiébault, Memoirs, I. pp. 345–7.
30 Bricard, Journal, p. 290.
31 Roguet, Mémoires militaires, pp. 168–70
33 Lefebvre, The Directory, pp. 172–3; Sydenham, First French Republic, pp. 186–7; Forrest, Conscripts
and Deserters, pp. 34–8. Under the provisions of the law, service was for five years or, should France
be at war at the time of enlistment, the duration of the current conflict, whilst it was expected that
conscripts serving in the army when a war broke out would not be released until the end of hostili-
ties: not the least of the problems associated with the new measure, then, was a sense that service
could, in theory, be for life. About the best that can be said of the new recruits, meanwhile, was
that they were not all unwilling recalcitrants: a stable-boy from the Department of the Yonne who
had run away from home to escape his step-mother’s cruelty, Jean-Roch Coignet, later professed
himself to have been overwhelmed with excitement by the fresh turn in his life. J. Fortescue (ed.),
The Notebooks of Captain Coignet, Soldier of the Empire, 1799–1816 (London, 1985), pp. 51–3.
34 Sydenham, First French Republic, pp. 185–6; M. Lyons, France under the Directory (Cambridge,
1975), pp. 181–2; Woronoff, Thermidorean Régime and the Directory, pp. 92–7.
35 For a brief summary of these operations, see A.B. Roger, The War of the Second Coalition: A Strategic
Commentary (Oxford, 1964), pp. 158–62. Very helpful on the thinking of the French, meanwhile,
is S.T. Ross, ‘The military strategy of the Directory: the campaigns of 1799’, French Historical
Studies, 5, No. 2 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 170–87.
36 For a detailed account of the battleo the River Trebbia, see Phipps, Armies of the First French
Republic, V, pp. 285–96.
37 Thiébault, Memoirs, I, pp. 481–2.
38 Sydenham, Third French Republic, pp. 194–7.
39 For the attempt to revive the French war effort in the summer of 1799, see Lefebvre, The Directory,
pp. 181–8.
40 Roguet, Mémoires militaires, p. 194. For an account of the battle, see Phipps, Armies of the First
French Reubic, V, pp. 318–29.
41 Roger, War of the Second Coalition, pp. 165–6; Longworth, Art of Victory, pp. 266–9; Jupp, Lord
Grenville, pp. 224–5; Schroeder, Baron Thugut, pp. 309–21. In fairness, it ought to be pointed out
that the British also favoured the plan to concentrate the Russian armies in Switzerland, albeit for
reasons that were entirely different.
42 For the campaign in Switzerland, see Longworth, Art of Victory, pp. 270–89. The role of Suvorov in
the campaign of 1799 has been the subject of much debate, opinion being split between those who
applaud even the march through Switzerland as a triumph and those who profess themselves to be
mystified by the respect with which Suvorov has generally been recorded and are inclined to see his
performance as having been at best disappointing. In this respect, it is worth quoting the words of
an anonymous analyst of the period. Thus: ‘If it would be unreasonable to allot him a place by the
side of Hannibal, Caesar, Turenne or Frederick, still . . . [Suvorov] has always shown some qualities
which belong only to generals of the highest class: boldness and decision [in making] plans, vigour
and rapidity in their execution, obstinacy in contending for victory, [and], above all, the art of
conducting and employing the troops of his nation according to their particular genius. It is by con-
sidering him in the latter point of view that his true rank can best be estimated . . . Whatever the
cause may be, the effect is not equivocal: it is certain that Suvorov exercised over the minds of the
Russian soldiers an empire of a stronger nature than merely that of authority; that they had a degree
of admiration, of respect and of esteem for him almost religious; that they considered themselves
as being invincible under him, and that . . . nothing seemed impossible when Suvorov thought it
possible.’ Anon., The History of the Campaigns in the Years 1796, 1797, 1798 and 1799 in Germany,
Italy, Switzerland, etc. (second edition; London, 1812), IV, pp. 260–3.
43 Dutthilt, Mes campagnes, p. 137.
44 The importance of these domestic considerations cannot be denied, but Frederick William III
was even more committed to neutrality than his predecessor. In the words of Philip Dwyer,
‘The neutrality that had been a means to an end under Frederick William II . . . became under
Frederick William III an end in itself . . . As Frederick William II’s chaotic search for aggrandise-
ment was linked in part to his character, so, too, neutrality seemed to suit Frederick William
III . . . Put simply, Frederick William III had an ingrained dislike of what he called the raub und
plündersystem (the system of robbery and plunder) of the great powers.’ P. Dwyer, ‘Prussia dur-
ing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1786–1815’, in P. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia,
1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000), p. 247.
45 Jupp, Lord Grenville, pp. 225–35; A.B. Piechowiak, ‘The Anglo-Russian expedition to North
Holland, 1799’, Slavonic and East European Review, 41, No. 96 (December, 1962), pp. 182–95. It
is also fair to say that most of the British troops who saw action in Holland seem to have fought
very well.
46 H. Bunbury, A Narrative of the Campaign in North Holland, 1799 (London, 1849), pp. 33–4
47 Cit. Jupp, Grenville, p. 237.
48 Cit. Minto, Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliott, III, pp. 107–9.
49 J. Moessner (ed.), The Diaries of Hërman Ludwig von Löwenstern, 1793 to 1803 and 1806 to 1815
(New York, 2014).
50 No sooner had he been appointed to the Italian command, than Napoleon surrounded himself
with a band of officers who could be relied on as trusted henchmen and were now favoured with
transport back to France. Amongst these men were Jean-Andoche Junot and Auguste Marmont,
who had both met Napoleon at Toulon and later shared the lean months of 1795 with him; another
Toulon veteran named Charles Leclerc, who was in June 1797 picked out as a suitable husband for
Napoleon’s sister, Pauline; Guillaume Brune, a brigade commander who had distinguished himself
in the Vendémiaire affair; Jean-Baptiste Bessières, a Gascon cavalryman recommended to him by
Joachim Murat; and lastly Murat himself, the officer responsible for bringing up the guns that had
actually fired the ‘whiff of grapeshot’.
51 Saint Chamans, Life of Count Lavallette, p.223.
52 A. du Casse (ed.), Mémoires et correspondance politique et militaire du Prince Eugène (Paris, 1858), I,
p. 75.
53 P.L. Roederer, Mémoires sur la Révolution, le Consulat et l’Empire, ed. O. Aubry (Paris, 1942), p. 103.
54 J.A. Chaptal, Mes Souvenirs sur Napoléon, ed. A. Chaptal (Paris, 1893). For a straightforward nar-
rative of the events that brought Napoleon to power, see D.J. Goodspeed, Bayonets at Saint Cloud:
The Story of the Eighteenth Brumaire (London, 1965).
55 For an analysis of Brumaire that stresses the responsibility and involvement of the political
élite, see L. Hunt et al., ‘The failure of the liberal republic in France, 1795–1799: the road to
Brumaire’, Journal of Modern History, 51, No. 4 (December 1979), pp. 734–59. Also helpful in
this respect is M. Crook, Napoleon comes to Power: Democracy and Dictatorship in Revolutionary
France, 1795–1804 (Cardiff, 1998).
56 Staël, Considérations sur les principales évènements de la Révolution Française, II, p. 234.
57 Cit. Roederer, Mémoires, p. 131.
58 Cit. Gohier, Mémoires, I, pp. 353–4.
12 The end of the French Revolutionary Wars
By late November 1799, then, Napoleon had made himself ruler of France. Escaping from
Egypt, he had returned to a country assailed by war-weariness, political intrigue, internal
unrest and economic crisis, and had skilfully exploited the consequent turmoil to become
de facto ruler of France, his official title being First Consul. In so far as the international
history of Europe is concerned, a number of questions immediately come to mind. How
was Napoleon perceived by the states that made up the Second Coalition? To what extent
did perceptions of the new French ruler affect foreign attitudes towards France? And, most
importantly of all, what did the First Consul himself intend to do with the power that he
had won at Brumaire? All this, meanwhile, gives rise to further reflections. Was Europe at
a turning point in her history – a moment when the destinies of an entire continent were
transformed by a single adventurer? Or was the international situation rather essentially
unchanged, the factors that condemned Europe to a long period of conflict having already
been set in stone? Before these questions can be answered, however, we must once again
turn to the man who came to power in 1799 and, more particularly, his relationship with
the French state.
Let us begin with the issue of Napoleon’s personal power. Very soon this was as great as
that of any monarch. Thus, the negotiations that produced the new constitution from which
Napoleon formally derived his authority as First Consul were concluded by the middle of
December 1799, whilst they bore the stamp of decisive victory. The civilian conspirators
who had precipitated the fall of the Directory had needed a ‘sword’, but the one they had
settled upon proved impossible to sheathe. At the heart of their councils was Emmanuel
Sieyès. Like his fellow conspirators, what the veteran revolutionary leader wanted was a sys-
tem that would safeguard the interests of the propertied élite that dominated the Republic
against Jacobins and Royalists alike. To achieve this, he planned to establish a complicated
system of checks and balances whose end result would be to guarantee stable and effec-
tive government whilst at the same time ensuring that no political faction could seize the
machinery of state for its own ends. As a part of this arrangement, the power of the execu-
tive was to be strengthened and that of the legislative reduced, but in no way was France
to become a dictatorship: whilst a ceremonial ‘grand elector’ acted as head of state (a role
which Sieyès saw as the perfect means of getting Napoleon out of the way), responsibility for
home and foreign affairs would be split and each of these areas assigned to an independent
‘consul’. With none of this would Sieyès’ sword have any truck, however. Indeed, no sooner
had discussions begun on the new constitution presaged by Brumaire than the ‘oracle’, as
he was known, found himself hopelessly outclassed. As he reputedly observed, ‘Gentlemen,
you have a master! This man knows everything, wants everything and can do anything!’1
Within a few days, then, Sieyès’ plans lay in ruins. Napoleon was happy to accept the
powerless shape that was put forward for the legislative, whilst he was also quite content to
see the principle of universal manhood suffrage rendered null and void by making elections
not only indirect but presentational (i.e. the electorate did not choose deputies per se, but
rather lists of potential deputies from which the executive made its own selection via a
‘conservative senate’ appointed from above). But he refused point-blank to become Grand
Elector and insisted that the executive should be united. Let France, then, suggested Sieyès,
be ruled by a three-man consulate whose members would share power with one another on
an equal basis. Yet this, too, was unacceptable: as far as Napoleon was concerned, one man
alone should rule. However, to reach so high at this point was scarcely prudent even for
him, and he duly agreed that such a body should be formed on the basis of himself, Sieyes
and the distinctly colourless figure of Roger Ducos, a sometime president of the Council
of the 500 and member of the Directory overthrown in 1799. This done, the conqueror of
Italy and, so it was believed, Egypt, played his hand with consummate skill. Thus, taking
care always to dress in civilian clothes, he affected an air of reason and moderation and took
great care to pander to the sensibilities of his fellow consuls, whilst at the same time engag-
ing in the discussions respecting the definitive form of the new administration in such depth
as literally to weary his opponents into giving way. That said, there was much to be said
for what he was proposing – in brief, if the Directory had not worked, why should anything
better be expected from a three-man carbon copy? – whilst he was still very much the man
of the moment, and thus it was that the consulate took on a form very different from the
one Sieyès had envisaged for it: there would be three consuls, certainly, but one of them
would be ‘first’. Nor did this mean primus inter pares. In control would be the First Consul –
Napoleon, of course – for, whilst the Second and Third Consuls had the right to be con-
sulted, they had no power of veto, and for good measure were appointed for shorter periods
than the ten years allotted to Napoleon. As for Sieyès and Ducos, meanwhile, they were
bought off with the presidency and vice-presidency of the senate (the new upper house of
the assembly), the positions which they had occupied going to Jean Cambacéres and Pierre
Lebrun, of whom the former was a notorious trimmer dedicated to keeping on good terms
with whatever faction happened to be in power and the latter an obscure moderate who had
narrowly escaped death in the Terror and was all but a closet royalist.2
This being neither a biography of Napoleon nor a history of Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France, there is no need to expatiate here upon the many means of exercising
his personal power which the Constitution of 1800 offered Napoleon. That said, it is worth
pointing out that the aftermath of the coup saw an immediate retreat from radicalism: for
example, the press was ruthlessly curtailed; any émigré who returned to France and swore
an oath of allegiance was offered an immediate amnesty; the forced loan of the previous
summer was rescinded in favour of an increase in the régime’s normal methods of taxation;
the Law of Hostages was repealed; the figure of the prefect was introduced as a means of
cementing the centre’s control of department and commune alike; the churches were re-
opened and the celebration of Mass once more permitted; and the clergy were left in peace
other than in those cases where they were clearly engaged in subversive activity (more
than that, indeed, many were released from captivity).3 The fact of the matter was quite
simple, then: much though many of these measures were welcomed by Sieyès and his fellow
conspirators, la grande nation was Napoleon’s to do with as he wished. And what he would
do with it ought to have been all too obvious. At home, although repression was employed
where necessary – in the west, for example, the insurgents still active in the Vendée and
Brittany soon found themselves under intense military pressure4 – reconciliation was the
chief object of the régime (if the radicals’ policies were dropped and men of property pla-
cated, the radicals themselves were mostly allowed to remain free and in many instances
The end of the French Revolutionary Wars 297
incorporated into the structure of government). But, however alluring it might seem, for
Napoleon the national unity and social peace soon to be rendered concrete by such meas-
ures as the Concordat were but a means to an end. To quote Chaptal, ‘Only military glory
had brought him to supreme power. That same glory was all that associated him with hope
and enthusiasm. And it would be that same glory that sustained him to the end.’5
From the beginning, then, it was war and military glory that were placed at the centre
of the régime. Thus, Napoleon’s formal entry into the Tuileries on 17 February 1800 was
in large measure a celebration of conquest, as witness the description left us by Bourrienne:
At one o’clock precisely, Bonaparte left the Luxembourg . . . Three thousand picked
men . . . were assembled for the occasion. All marched in the finest order with their bands
playing . . . The troops being drawn up in the [Place du Carrousel], the First Consul,
alighting from his carriage . . . leaped on his horse, and reviewed the troops . . . The First
Consul prolonged the review for some time, passed between the lines, addressing flatter-
ing expressions to the commanders . . . He then placed himself near the entrance to the
Tuileries, having Murat on his right, Lannes on his left and behind him a numerous staff
of young warriors, whose faces were browned by the suns of Egypt and of Italy . . . When
he saw pass before him the colours of the Ninety-Sixth, the Forty-Third and the
Thirtieth Demi-Brigades, as these standards presented only a bare pole surmounted by
some tatters perforated by balls and blackened with gunpowder, he took off his hat and
bowed to them in token of respect. This homage of a great captain . . . was hailed by a
thousand acclamations, and, the troops having defiled, the First Consul, with a bold
step, entered the Tuileries.6
Nor did the days that followed make very much difference. Let us quote, for example, the
well-placed Antoine Thibaudeau:
The First Consul in his early days resembled rather a general than a civil magis-
trate . . . Day by day on horse or on foot the First Consul passed through the files of
his troops, getting to know familiarly the officers and men, and being sure that they
became acquainted with him. He entered into the most minute details of their equip-
ment, arms and drill, and inquired carefully into their wants and wishes. Acting in his
double capacity of general and magistrate he distributed, in the name of the nation,
praise and blame, promotion and rewards. In this way also he aroused emulation among
the different corps, and made the army the finest spectacle to be seen in Paris by visi-
tors from the country or abroad. It was easy to see how completely at home the First
Consul felt among his soldiers: he took genuine pleasure in remaining for hours in their
midst . . . All this gave the First Consul splendid opportunities of exhibiting to the
world his indefatigable energy and mastery of the art of war.7
What we see here, perhaps, is merely the response of a parvenu ruler to a situation in which
he had overnight to gain acceptance by the crowned heads of Europe, in which respect it
may also be worthwhile noting certain other remarks in Thibaudeau’s recollections of the
first days of the Consulate. For example:
Every code of etiquette was ransacked, every old courtier or valet was consulted. How
was this done? How was that managed? The orders of the day in the interior of the
palace were to return to the usages and customs of the good old times.8
As such, the military pomp that surrounded the new administration may be interpreted as
simply one more attempt to emulate the practices of the ancien régime, and even, perhaps,
as part of the commitment to peace which, or so his apologists have claimed, was the
watchword of his foreign policy. The trouble with this point of view, however, is that it
begs the question. In the first place, war had been at the centre of the ancien régime: mili-
tary success had been closely linked to the fortunes of the state; equally, military power
had been bound up with the very concept of monarchy. In consequence, to argue that
Napoleon was merely trying to secure the recognition of the rulers of Austria, Prussia and
Russia does not acquit him of the charge of being addicted to war. For the First Consul,
glory was doubly important. Victory on the battlefield had brought him to power, and,
as he well knew, victory on the battlefield was in the end what would keep him there.
Commenting on the possibility of Napoleon making peace in 1800, for example, Madame
de Staël remarked:
Nothing was more contrary to his nature . . . He could only live in agitation, and . . .
only breathe freely in a volcanic atmosphere. Any man who becomes the sole head of
a great country by means other than heredity can only maintain himself in power if he
gives the nation either liberty or military glory – if he makes himself, in short, either a
Washington or a conqueror. But it would have been hard for Bonaparte to be more dif-
ferent from Washington than was actually the case, and so it was impossible for him to
establish . . . an absolute power except by bemusing reason [and] by every three months
presenting the French people with some new spectacle.9
Surrounded though he was by soldiers – according to Hortense de Beauharnais, his personal

suite had ‘the air of a general staff’10 – Napoleon came to power as a peace maker. Virtually
all shades of French opinion were heartily sick of war by 1799, the new First Consul’s great
advantage being that he seemed to be able to combine peace with the protection of the
Revolutionary settlement. As he rode into Paris immediately following the coup, his way
was therefore lined by cheering crowds, his response being to proclaim, ‘Frenchmen! You
want peace; your government wants it even more than you!’11 Virtually the first action
of Consular diplomacy was therefore the dispatch of peace-notes to both George III of
England and Francis II of Austria. These, however, were hardly serious. On one level, they
were a useful means of gaining time: at the beginning of 1800, Napoleon was preoccu-
pied with the need to suppress the ever troublesome Vendée. And, as Talleyrand, who was
now once again France’s Foreign Minister, wrote, they ‘had a happy effect upon the inter-
nal peace of the country’.12 But, as Napoleon well knew, the Second Coalition was hardly
likely to accept them. On the contrary, at this time, it still had strong hopes of victory:
there had been failures in Holland and Switzerland, true, but the French had been driven
from Naples, the Cisalpine Republic and Piedmont and repulsed in Germany; Britain was
supreme at sea, and the garrison of Egypt was completely isolated. On top of all this, there
was always the hope that if Napoleon proved the tyrant predicted ten years before by Burke,
the people would rise en masse in favour of restoring the monarchy. As the future Foreign
Secretary, George Canning, exulted:
I like the tone of everything I hear today better than I ever did before . . . I am per-
suaded that the whole game is in our hands now, and that it wants little more than
patience to play it well to the end.13
In reality, of course, the Allied position was far less strong than all this suggested. Not
surprisingly, the response to Napoleon’s overtures was fiercely hostile, but this was exactly
what the First Consul wanted. As he later wrote:
If France had made peace at that time under existing circumstances, she would have
made it after a campaign of disasters; indeed, she would have drawn back in conse-
quence of a single campaign. This would have been dishonourable, and would only
have encouraged princes to form new coalitions against her. All the chances of the
campaign of 1800 were in her favour: the Russian armies were leaving the theatre of
war; the pacification of the Vendée placed a new army at the disposal of the Republic;
in the interior, factions were over-ruled and the chief magistrate possessed the entire
confidence of the nation. It behoved the Republic not to make peace until after
restoring the equilibrium of Italy; she could not, without abandoning her destiny,
consent to a peace less advantageous than . . . Campo Formio. At this period peace
would have ruined the Republic: war was necessary to it for the maintenance of
energy and union in the state, which was ill-organised, whilst the people would have
demanded a great reduction in taxes and the disbanding of the army; in consequence,
after a peace of two years, France would have taken the field again under great dis-
advantages. War was necessary to me. The campaigns of Italy, the peace of Campo
Formio, the campaigns of Egypt, the transactions of 18 Brumaire, the unanimous
voices of the people for raising me to the supreme magistracy, had undoubtedly placed
me very high, but a treaty of peace derogatory to that of Campo Formio . . . would
have destroyed my influence over the imaginations of the people and deprived me
of the means of putting an end to the anarchy of the Revolution by establishing a
definitive and permanent system.14
Napoleon, then, was not acting in good faith. Having thrown the responsibility for continu-
ing the war upon his enemies, he could now seek further victories that would augment his
glory and allow him to dictate peace on his own terms. To put it another way, in the words of
a proclamation he had addressed to the army on 18 Brumaire, ‘Liberty, victory and peace will
reinstate the French Republic in the rank which she held in Europe.’15 Was there, however,
any alternative? Amongst admirers of Napoleon, it is axiomatic that the picture that he faced
at the beginning of 1800 was one of universal foreign hostility, and, further, that the pow-
ers of Europe were determined to restore the Bourbons and, with them, absolute monarchy.
This view is misleading in the extreme. Let us begin with the view from London. Getting
the Bourbons back on the throne was certainly favoured by some British statesmen, but it
was not the centrepiece of Britain’s war aims for the simple reason that the territorial and
maritime security on which they were centred could always be achieved by other means and
probably better ones at that. Thus, Britain had gone to war in 1793 to prevent France from
simply riding roughshod over treaties and frontiers as she thought fit, and, more particularly,
taking over the whole of the Channel coast (a worry that in 1795 was greatly reinforced by
the Republic’s conquest of Holland). To quote Eric Evans:
Britain did not go to war to stamp out the evils of a French Revolution which threat-
ened to destroy the old political world . . . Had the main cause of war been ideological,
then Britain would have become involved earlier, probably in the spring or summer of
1792 . . . Britain entered the war mainly for strategic and commercial reasons.16
The Pitt administration had made use of French royalism, certainly: supporting the various
insurgents and conspirators associated with the Bourbons was a useful diversion that on
occasion both tied down large numbers of troops and caused considerable disruption. At
the same time, many British politicians supported Pitt’s clamp-down on domestic radical-
ism and were happy to make much use of anti-revolutionary propaganda. But making a
Bourbon restoration the centrepiece of British strategy was quite another matter. Whilst
some politicians and statesmen – most notably, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, and
his acolyte, William Windham – continued to believe in a ‘strategy of overthrow’ whereby
peace would be restored and Jacobinism stamped out by the liberation of France, others dis-
trusted such visionary schemes, the chief example here being the Secretary of State for War
and the Colonies, Henry Dundas. Whilst Grenville argued for a march on Paris, what the
latter favoured was a colonial and economic struggle that would allow the British simply to
outlast the French. Inherent in this strategy was the possibility of a compromise peace based
on the restoration of the frontiers of 1792, and this in turn was strengthened by growing
disillusionment with French royalism as a military and political force (and, for that matter,
with its chief supporters: arrogant and overbearing, Grenville was not good at carrying opin-
ion with him, whilst Windham was notorious for his lack of realism and poor judgement).
Meanwhile, even the most hard-line members of the Grenville faction were not fighting
a war for feudalism: on the contrary, in their view, some sort of constitutional monarchy
was perfectly acceptable, whilst even this limited goal was in most quarters qualified by the
recognition that any solution reached in France would have to be the work not of foreign
arms but of her own politicians.17
By the beginning of 1800, then, there had emerged the basis of a more moderate posi-
tion than the one encompassed by the Grenvillites. If France could be hedged about in
such a way that she could not export the Revolution, she could be safely be left to her
own devices, the implication being that there need be no change of régime. Whatever
use was made of royalism, then, Britain’s aim in the Second Coalition was centred on a
plan that was, in practice, to form the keystone of her European policy until the end of
the Napoleonic Wars. In brief, France was to be confined to the frontiers of 1792 and
shut in by a series of buffer states backed up by a quadruple alliance of the great powers.
Thus far there was no difference from Grenville: indeed, the scheme was in origin his.
But, whereas for the Foreign Secretary the great cordon sanitaire would set the seal on
total victory, for his opponents it was a substitute for this end. If the régime in France
proved unable to sustain itself, all well and good, but its overthrow was no longer a
necessity. With the advent of Napoleon, meanwhile, a further complication emerged.
On the one hand, his record suggested that he was an adventurer who was no more to be
trusted than his predecessors, and yet, on the other, he was aping the forms of the mon-
archy and had sponsored a moderate constitution that protected men of property. Whilst
Grenville claimed that Brumaire made no difference, Pitt took a more flexible line than
is often allowed. For the time being, Britain must be cautious: with France in control
of Belgium, for example, there could be no question of peace negotiations. But the pos-
sibility of a treaty was not ruled out, and a Corsican secret agent was dispatched to Paris
with the explicit brief of finding out more about what the Consulate stood for. As for
the Bourbons, they could not be allowed to stand in the way of British national interest:
nothing should be done that would bar Britain from considering whether continuing the
war was more damaging to her situation than negotiating a peace settlement, and to this
end Pitt stressed that it was vital that no commitment should be made to the restoration
of Louis XVIII per se.18
Although the rejection of Napoleon’s peace overtures was accompanied by much
ferocious rhetoric – in a Commons’ debate held to debate the issue on 3 February 1800,
indeed, Pitt not only savaged the whole course of French policy since 1792, but accused
the First Consul of being ‘now the sole organ of all that was formerly dangerous and
pestiferous in the Revolution’19 – Britain was therefore by no means committed to a war
to the death. And, if this was true of Britain, it was also true of Austria. As we have seen,
Thugut loathed the French Revolution. That said, like Pitt, Thugut realised that, whilst
the Revolution had to be contained, it need not actually be destroyed, that it would be
enough, indeed, for France to be sealed off by a cordon sanitaire whose basis would be mas-
sive territorial changes that would not just deal with the problem of the Revolution but
also secure compensation for the disaster represented by the destruction of Poland.20 Even
if the Austrian army did eventually have to appear before the Tuileries, meanwhile, it
would not be with the intention of opening the gates to a Bourbon who had, in the old
phrase, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, for to do so would simply be to run the risk
of a second 1789. Of this, indeed, Lord Minto was absolutely certain. Thus:
Baron Thugut . . . expresses on all occasions a great distrust of the royal party in France.
It is easy to perceive that he has a strong prejudice against the King of France and the
French princes, whom he considers as personally obnoxious to the French nation and
whose personal want of popularity he sees [as] an obstacle to any system of which their
restoration is a part. He expresses also a strong disinclination to concur in an explicit
declaration in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, and hints at a preference for
more general and indefinite terms.21
Thugut, then, was simply not willing to fight to the end for Louis XVIII if there were other
means on offer of securing his goals. Meanwhile, he was also realistic enough to know that
his grand designs for territorial change would in practice have to be watered down, the fact
being that the ‘greater Austria’ they envisaged would never be accepted either by Prussia or
Russia and could only be achieved with the aid of one or the other, if not both. Meanwhile,
there were serious worries about the situation in which Austria found herself: Prussia could
not be trusted not to stab Austria in the back at the first opportunity; Britain had just been
shown to be incapable of offering serious support in a land war; and there were ever-growing
question marks over the intentions of a Paul I furious at the events of the campaign in
Switzerland. Given the merest hint of compromise on the part of Napoleon, Thugut might
well have been amenable to negotiations, the chances of this being all the greater as he saw
the First Consul as, at the very least, someone who might just have the strength to make a
peace settlement – that Napoleon, in short, was a man with whom he could do business.22
The impression that Napoleon could have bought off Austria in 1800 is strengthened
by a consideration of the views and character of the Emperor Francis and his brother, the
Archduke Charles. For the former, dislike of the French Revolution was as axiomatic as
it was for Thugut, and he had therefore shown no mercy to the half-baked ‘Jacobin’ con-
spiracies of 1794. In the same vein, his rule was associated with ever-tighter censorship,
the exploitation of the Church as an instrument of counter-revolutionary propaganda, the
establishment of a powerful secret police and the widespread use of spies and informers. And
in 1792 he had certainly been keener on war with France than his predecessor, Leopold II.
That said, however, he had always considered the conflict with France to be a defensive
struggle and was not at all inclined to sanction a march on Paris. Moreover, as already
noted, he genuinely hated war and, as a man who was both deeply cautious and habitually
pessimistic, was much opposed to foreign adventures. The ‘war baron’, Thugut, then, could
never wholly count on his support, whilst by 1800 the emperor was uncertain that carry-
ing on the war against France was anything other than futile anyway. As for his younger
brother, the Archduke Charles, the latter may have been Austria’s finest general, but he
harboured a deep personal hatred for Thugut and, in both 1797 and 1798, had been a lead-
ing member of the substantial peace party that emerged in the Austrian court. To quote
Gunther Rothenberg:
Always sensitive and suspicious . . . Charles entered the war in a depressed and nerv-
ous state. His temper was not improved when . . . Thugut, with the emperor’s backing,
decided that all major strategic decisions were to be handled by the Hofkriegsrat.23
Nor was this the end of the problem. Prostrated by nervous exhaustion in the wake of his
victories at Stockach and Ostrach, Charles had retired to his estates to recuperate for a few
weeks only to discover on his return that Thugut had been scheming to have him replaced
by his younger brother, the Archduke Joseph.24
Yet, in the end, no more than Pitt would Thugut budge. Like the British he was con-
vinced that the French could be beaten, whilst only through war would Austria have any
hope of improving the territorial compensation she had received at Campo Formio. Yet
even as he replied to Napoleon, the ground was shifting under his feet. We come here to
the Russia of Paul I. As we have seen, Paul may have been a militarist – the very model
of a modern major general, indeed – not to mention a bitter opponent of the French
Revolution, but he had only gone to war with France as a last resort. Moreover, thanks to
Austrian scheming and British blundering, the war had turned into a disaster in which the
Russian armies had suffered heavy losses and only narrowly escaped annihilation, insult
being added to injury by the scornful manner in which the British and Austrians alike were
inclined to describe the performance of their Russian allies. In short, just as Paul had feared
in 1796, war had proved a futile expedient: Austria and Britain were not to be relied on as
partners, whilst Russia was unable to fight a war in western Europe by herself and could in
the attempt do no more than waste men and money alike.25 By the end of 1799, then, an
angry and disappointed Paul had broken off military cooperation with Austria and Britain.
Formally speaking, Russia was still in the war, but Paul was resolved that, if his forces fought
at all, they would now fight on their own.26
With Russia once more the non-belligerent belligerent of 1793–8, Napoleon could face
the campaign of 1800 with the utmost confidence. That said, however, it did not begin well.
Seizing the initiative, the Austrians attacked in Italy with 97,000 men, drove back the out-
numbered French – who were currently being ravaged by an epidemic of typhus which cost
them at least a third of their strength, as well as much harassed by popular insurrection –
and besieged their adversaries in Genoa.27 Despite the fact that he had been taken by sur-
prise, Napoleon’s response was dramatic: whilst Moreau crossed the Rhine and defeated the
Austrians at Stockach on 3 May, the First Consul led the newly created Army of Reserve
across the Alps via the Saint Bernard pass and descended on the Austrian rear. Though too
late to save Genoa, which was starved into surrender on 4 June, he yet managed to win a
very narrow victory at Marengo ten days later. As even the French ruler’s admirers admit,
this was not his finest hour. The strategy of crossing the Alps was sound – brilliant even –
but, having reached Milan, Napoleon badly misjudged his Austrian opponent, Melas.
Believing that the latter would simply fall back on newly conquered Genoa, he dispersed
his forces in a cordon designed to trap the whitecoats. Melas, however, had more fight
in him than Napoleon suspected, and suddenly rounded on the forces accompanying the
First Consul himself with odds of over two to one. In a battle which saw the French driven
back five miles, their new ruler was all but beaten, but in the nick of time General Desaix
appeared with fresh troops and launched a counterattack that caught the weary and over-
extended Austrians off balance and drove them back in rout (though not before Desaix had
been killed in the moment of victory).28
The campaign of Marengo, then, was badly bungled by Napoleon’s standards. Indeed, it
had been a desperate battle. Amongst the beleaguered French infantry who sustained the
brunt of the fighting was Jean-Roch Coignet. At the start of the battle, he was sent forward
to fight in a skirmish line:
At four o’clock there was firing on our right. Our drums beat to arms all along the line,
and the aides de camp came and ordered us to form our lines of battle. We were made to
fall back a little behind a fine field of wheat which was on a on a slightly rising ground
and concealed us, and there we waited a little while . . . A little general came up . . . He
immediately took charge of the company of grenadiers of who I was one, and led us to
the attack in one rank. We opened fire . . . and he hastened to rejoin his division. He
had scarcely returned to his post when a column of Austrians . . . deployed in front of us,
fired by battalions, and riddled us with . . . shot. Our little general answered, and there
we were between two fires, sacrificed. I ran behind a big willow tree and fired into the
column, but . . . the balls came from every direction, and I was obliged to lie down . . . on
the ground . . . They were making the twigs fall all over me: I was covered with
them . . . Fortunately our whole division now advanced by battalions. I got up and found
myself in a [fusilier] company, [and] continued in it all the rest of the day, for not more
than fourteen of our 170 grenadiers remained; the rest were killed or wounded . . . Our
colonel ran up and down the line, inspiring us with his presence . . . We could not see
one another in the smoke. The guns set the wheat field on fire, and this caused a general
commotion in the ranks. Some cartridge-boxes exploded: we were obliged to fall back
and form again as quickly as possible . . . The situation was restored by the intrepidity
of our chiefs, who looked out for everything . . . Nevertheless, their numerous artillery
overwhelmed us and we could hold out no longer. Our ranks were thinned visibly: all
about us there were only wounded men to be seen, and the soldiers who bore them away
did not return to the ranks: this weakened us very much. We had to yield ground . . . Our
musket barrels were so hot it became impossible to load for fear of igniting the cartridges.
There was nothing for it but to piss into the barrel and then to dry them by pouring
powder into the barrel and setting it alight unrammed.29
By the end of the day, Napoleon had lost perhaps 5,600 men killed, wounded or taken pris-
oner. Nevertheless, given that his losses were over twice that number, Melas immediately
requested an armistice. The cost of the cessation of arms was the evacuation of Austria’s
Italian conquests and the retreat of all the Austrian forces in Germany to the River Inn
(all that is, apart form the garrisons of three beleaguered fortress who were in effect seized
by the French as hostages), but the peace terms on offer proved not ungenerous: in brief,
Austria was offered the same terms as she had been at Campo Formio. Nor is this surpris-
ing, Napoleon being desperate for a rapid settlement with Austria that would allow him to
turn all his strength against Britain, force her to make peace and thereby rescue France’s
control of Malta and Egypt, of which the former had been invaded by the British and the
latter was wide open to attack. Reflecting the doubts felt by many observers in Vienna,
the Austrian envoy St Julien duly agreed to Napoleon’s terms, but, stiffened by a treaty of
subsidy whereby Britain agreed to pay Austria an interest-free loan of £2,000,000, Thugut
succeeded in persuading Francis to reject the agreement. Thugut having floated the coun-
ter-proposal of a general peace conference, the French ruler now attempted to attain his
primary goal by suggesting that the armistice be extended to Britain as well. When the Pitt
administration jibbed at this demand on the grounds that, whilst Britain was happy to take
part in the congress proposed by Thugut, an armistice with France meant above all a cessa-
tion of hostilities at sea and, by extension, French access to Egypt, Napoleon responded by
threats of an immediate resumption of hostilities. Realising that Austria had little chance
of withstanding the French, this elicited compromise proposals that would have seen a
suspension of the British blockade in respect of merchant shipping and permission for the
dispatch of sufficient food to Egypt for the garrison to live on a hand-to-mouth basis only,
the object, of course, being to ensure that, should Britain ever feel compelled by the needs
of the situation to cut off the shipments, the invaders would be faced at the very least by
severe supply difficulties, if not actual famine. This, too, was unacceptable to Napoleon,
however, and the result was fresh terms that increased the pressure still further: in order to
save the Austrian armistice, the Allies would now have to permit a strong frigate squadron
to sail for Egypt and surrender the German fortresses mentioned above. Desperate to buy
even a few more days’ respite, Francis II ordered his garrisons to surrender, but the British
suspected – quite rightly – that the frigates would be crammed not just with food but with
considerable troop reinforcements, whilst they knew full well that the ships themselves
would be used to defend the Egyptian coast. Refusing to give way, they therefore broke off
negotiations, the Austrians being left with no option but to follow suit.30
Was Napoleon sincere in his pursuit of peace in the wake of Marengo? This is certainly
the view of the French ruler’s admirers. ‘It was not for any want of effort by Bonaparte that
peace continued to elude his grasp’, says David Chandler, for example.31 So charitable a
view is hard to sustain, however, the fact being that since the turn of the year Napoleon
been engaged in a series of manoeuvres designed to undermine his opponents still further.
At this point, we must once again turn to Russia. As we have seen, at the close of 1799
Paul I had effectively withdrawn from the Second Coalition, but in the first few months
of 1800 a series of quarrels with Britain over such matters as the treatment accorded the
Russian forces evacuated from Holland, the subsidy which Russia had been promised in
exchange for joining in the attack on France, the rights of neutral shipping and, finally,
the future of Malta had alienated the tsar still further.32 At the same time, too, there was
also the changed perception of France brought about by the advent of Napoleon. Thus,
for Paul, Brumaire transformed matters completely. Championing Louis XVIII when he
had been the only possible figurehead of the cause of legitimism – the only representative
of peace and order, indeed – in France had been all very well, but now there was a much
more dynamic and attractive alternative. In short, Napoleon’s pursuit of the trappings of
monarchy had worked: in the new French ruler, Paul saw a Corsican upstart, certainly, but
a Corsican upstart who would respect the proprieties and put France to rights. All the more
was this the case as friendly intimations were soon being received from Paris to the effect
that France was prepared to make peace on reasonable terms, recognise Russia’s interests
in Germany and the Mediterranean, restore Malta to the Knights of Saint John and sign
a treaty of alliance whereby Russia and France would between them despoil the Ottoman
Empire of Egypt, Greece, Constantinople, the Balkans and the Greek islands. On offer,
too, was a new Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland composed of the lands seized by Austria
and Prussia, though implicit in this was the need to compensate Prussia with fresh lands in
Germany, to which end for some little time efforts had been under way to secure an alliance
with Frederick William III. Meanwhile, a variety of elements in the Russian court, includ-
ing, most importantly, the chancellor, Rostopchin, had in turn come to the conclusion that
such an alliance would in fact suit Russia very well. On 29 December 1800, then, we find
Paul writing to Napoleon in the friendliest terms and proposing a Franco-Russian alliance
that would result in a general peace. To back this letter up, meanwhile, a Russian emissary
was dispatched to Paris, a démarche accompanied by the dismissal of the pro-British deputy
chancellor, Nikita Panin, and the expulsion of Louis XVIII and all his followers.33
It is important to note that this Franco-Russian rapprochement was deeply flawed. For
Napoleon, Paul I was a mere tool, a weapon that he could deploy against Britain and
Austria. Thus, in 1800 what he was particularly interested in was the Russian navy and also
the possibility that Paul might be enveigled into launching an overland attack on India. For
the tsar, however, the aim was simply to ensure peace in the west, while he resolved certain
issues that had arisen on the southern frontiers of his empire. Despite leaving the war, the
tsar still enjoyed good relations with the Turks, but in central Asia there remained the prob-
lem of Persia. The flashpoint here was the trans-caucasian state of Georgia. Until 1795 the
latter had been an independent Christian kingdom, but in that year it had been invaded by
the then shah, Aga Mohamed, and forced to accept his suzereignty. In response, Catherine
had gone to war with the Persians, but, as noted, Paul had abandoned the conflict because
of the more pressing concerns elsewhere. With those concerns now out of the way, he sent
a large army into Georgia, drove out the Persian forces, and in January 1801 he decreed its
annexation. Linked with this episode was a decision that has caused much confusion. Thus,
Paul is commonly supposed to have ordered a force of Don Cossacks to march on India. In
reality, however, this scheme seems to have been at best a demonstration: an advance into
the Khanate of Bokhara – the territory that straddled the route to India – was a useful device
for putting pressure on Britain, but the Cossacks did not advance very far, and the real
object of their presence was rather Persia. Meanwhile, even in Europe, checking Britain was
not Paul’s only aim, one issue that concerned him very deeply at this time being the future
of Germany. Setting aside the fact that Paul had always envisaged himself as the protector
of the small states of Europe, close links existed between the Romanov dynasty and many of
the ruling families of such states as Baden. With a major reorganisation of the Holy Roman
Empire clearly imminent, obtaining a friendly ear in Paris was essential, it being all too clear
that the only way of obtaining Napoleon’s favour was an alliance.34
To return to the military narrative, the First Consul was anything but unwilling to
embark on a further continental campaign that beckoned in the wake of the collapse of the
peace negotiations. Thus, suitably written up – within hours of the guns falling silent on
the battlefield, Napoleon started to concoct a version of events that covered up the near-
defeat of his forces in the first stages of the battle and made out that the last-minute arrival
of Desaix was all part of a great master plan35 – Marengo had already shown him the value
of dramatic military victories. To quote Bourrienne:
The First Consul . . . continued a few days longer at Milan to settle the affairs of Italy,
and then set out on his return to Paris . . . I shall say but little of the manifestations of
joy and admiration with which Bonaparte met throughout his journey . . . On arriving
at Lyons we alighted at the Hotel des Celestins, where the acclamations of the people
were so great and the multitude so numerous . . . that Bonaparte was obliged to show
himself at the balcony . . . We left Lyons in the evening, and continued our journey by
Dijon, and there the joy of the inhabitants amounted to frenzy.36
At the same time, if the events of 14 June 1800 did not in themselves bring the First Consul
any extra power in France, they did shatter all chance that the various politicians who had
found themselves outmanoeuvred in the aftermath of Brumaire might put the Napoleonic
jack back in its box. Of this, there was at least some possibility: whilst Napoleon had been
away on campaign, Sieyès had been conspiring with Fouché and others to overthrow his
ally. With command of the Army of the Interior in the hands of Bernadotte – an almost
equally ambitious figure who married jealousy of Napoleon with, on the surface at least,
pronounced Jacobinism – defeat at Marengo would, beyond doubt, have sealed Napoleon’s
fate. In the aftermath of victory, however, the situation was very different. Not only did a
variety of malcontents rally to Napoleon’s standard, but Sieyès sank into obscurity, whilst
it was in the aftermath of Marengo that talk first began of making Napoleon First Consul
for Life. As he remarked to Bourrienne, indeed, ‘Well, a few more events like this campaign
and I may perhaps go down to posterity.’37 Nor did one have to be in a member of his inti-
mate circle to observe the fresh development in his ambitions. In the words of Bertrand
Barère – an erstwhile member of the Convention who was numbered among the first batch
of proscripted Jacobins to be amnestied by Napoleon:
The tyrannical consul was not forgotten in the victorious general, especially as he
now displayed a haughty selfishness, utterly incompatible with devotion to his coun-
try, and . . . had removed the gilded bronze letters which were placed over the princi-
pal entrance of the palace of the Tuileries. When it was seen that the words ‘French
Republic’ were an eyesore to the First Consul, the more than royal ambition of the
Corsican, and the destruction of the Republic, could no longer be doubted.38
What made the idea of fresh victories against Austria still more attractive was the fact that,
as First Consul, Napoleon had access to far greater means of propaganda than had ever been
the case before. Hide though the French ruler did behind the fact that it coincided with the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, his return to Paris was celebrated with great pomp and
ceremony, whilst the campaign had already been marked by the creation of an entirely false
image of Napoleon as romantic hero doing personal battle with the forces of nature. As a bul-
letin of 24 May proclaimed, ‘The First Consul descended from the top of the Saint Bernard by
sliding on the snow . . . and leaping over precipices.’39 In reality, Napoleon made the crossing
in much more prosaic fashion mounted on a mule, just as his troops trudged along not precipi-
tous goat-tracks but a reasonably serviceable highway. Yet such details did not stop him from
embellishing his alpine adventure still further. Thus, in one of a series of paintings commis-
sioned after Marengo, the First Consul is depicted by David in the act of waving on his troops
whilst mounted on a mettlesome charger. Carved on the rocks in the foreground, meanwhile,
appear three names: Bonaparte, Hannibal and Carolus Magnus (i.e. Charlemagne), whilst,
symbolised by the vicious wind that is whipping Napoleon’s voluminous cloak from around
his body, the forces of nature are battling valiantly to impede his progress. Implicit in this
image are a variety of claims: in brief, we see Napoleon equating himself to one of the greatest
generals of the ancient world, laying claim to not just Italy but the Holy Roman Empire, and
proclaiming his invincibility.40 Less well known but just as interesting is the painting that was
produced of Marengo by Lejeune: Desaix is present in the picture – indeed, he is shown in
the act of falling dead at the head of his victorious troops – but he is portrayed as a tiny figure
deep in the middle-distance, whereas the chief focus of the picture is rather Napoleon, who is
pictured riding forward with his staff and directing operations, the impression being that it is
he who is riding to the rescue of his subordinate rather than the other way about.41
For all his bombast, however, Napoleon was still at the mercy of events. As in the
campaign of Marengo, then, the script did not run entirely as planned. Still in Paris when
hostilities broke out on 22 November, Napoleon seems to have intended to head for
Italy and take control of the 90,000 French troops concentrated on the River Mincio
under General Brune. But in the event, there was to be no third Italian campaign, for
the Austrians again seized the initiative and thereby precipitated a chain of events that
left the First Consul out in the cold. This time, however, the onslaught came in Bavaria
where the forces of the Archduke John turned Moreau’s left flank and launched a drive
on Munich. In theory, the plan was a good one, for the French might have been trapped
against the Bavarian Alps, but John was an inexperienced commander, whilst the French
had the advantage of interior lines. The result was disaster for the Allied cause. Pouncing
on the Austrians at the village of Hohenlinden on 3 December, Moreau shattered John’s
army beyond repair, before breaking through to the Danube and marching deep into
Austria.42 With Hohenlinden in some respects a greater victory than Marengo – in the
former action the Austrians lost thirty-three guns whereas at Hohenlinden they lost fifty –
Napoleon was furious at being deprived of his share of the glory, and all the more so as
Moreau was a staunch Republican as well as a long-term rival. Years afterwards, indeed,
he was still inclined to run down the general’s achievement. Thus:
[Hohenlinden] was one of those great battles that are born of chance and won with-
out any planning. Moreau did not show enough decision: that was why he chose to
remain on the defensive. In the end it was a mere scuffle: the enemy was struck in the
very midst of his operations and defeated by troops they had cut off and should have
destroyed. All the merit belonged to the ordinary soldiers and to the commanders of
the divisions which found themselves in most danger, all of whom fought like heroes.43
Yet, however irritated the First Consul may have been, Hohenlinden secured his strategic
objectives. Demoralised and exhausted, having promptly dismissed the unfortunate Thugut,
Francis II sued for peace, and on 8 February 1801 his representatives duly signed the treaty
of Lunéville, by which Austria was again forced once again to accept France’s annexation of
Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine and to recognise the independence of the Ligurian,
Cisalpine, Helvetic and Batavian Republics. But now there were also further provisions.
Thus, Austria had to agree to slight a number of fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine
and to accept French control of the Habsburg-ruled duchies of Parma and Tuscany, together
with some of the territory she had acquired in 1797 (of these territories, Modena and the
Venetian lands went to the Cisalpine Republic, whilst, in a gesture intended to conciliate
Spain, Tuscany was given to the son of the Duke of Parma – a son-in-law of Charles IV – as
the Kingdom of Etruria, in return for which it was stipulated that Spain should use her good
offices to prevail upon the Duke to cede Parma to France). As if all this was not bad enough,
meanwhile, if they were now given the right to Salzburg for themselves, the Austrians were
also made to agree that the Duke of Tuscany should receive compensation in Germany,
from which it followed that the ecclesiastical states that made up Vienna’s chief power
base in the Holy Roman Empire should be put up for ‘secularisation’, or, to put it in plain
language, annexation.44 In principle, Austria had already agreed to this process at Campo
Formio in that she had accepted that the rulers of the territories lost in France’s annexa-
tion of the left bank of the Rhine should also be compensated from within the empire and,
indeed, that the Duke of Tuscany should be given Salzburg. But what Lunéville meant was
that the reorganisation of Germany was now likely to be wholesale rather than partial, for
such was Austria’s need for compensation that the Prussians must necessarily be drawn in
too. Add to this the fact that Vienna had failed to impose any clause in the treaty to the
effect that the emperor – i.e. Francis II – should have a controlling interest in the settle-
ment of the new frontiers, nor still less that foreign powers should be excluded, and it will be
seen that Austria had suffered a shattering blow. As Metternich later lamented, ‘With the
conclusion of the Peace of Lunéville, the weakness and vacillation of the Austrian cabinet
reached their height . . . The German empire visibly approached its dissolution.’45 And, in
effect, gone too was Austrian influence south of the Alps. In the words of the commander
of the Neapolitan army that had invaded central Italy in the wake of the overthrow of the
Parthenopaen Republic, Roger de Damas:
The Queen . . . was in Vienna. The moment that the question arose of an armistice
between the Austrian and the French armies she secured an official promise in writing
that the ministry would consent to no treaty that did not include her army and her
states. The emperor owed this return to the King of Naples after the active support
that the latter had given him. However . . . before the ink was dry [he] put his name
to an armistice that entirely ignored us. M. de Bellegarde wrote to me, ‘I have just
concluded an armistice in which you do not appear [and could] only obtain a promise
that you should not be attacked. You know how these people keep their promises:
take precautions.’46
This warning could not have been more timely. Damas was duly defeated at Siena on
14 January 1801, and Ferdinand IV was left with no option but to sue for peace. Dictated
by Damas’ French counterpart, Joachim Murat, the terms of the resultant Treaty of
Florence were predictably harsh: Naples had to cede Elba, the territory of Piombino and
several small enclaves of territory that she held in Tuscany to the Kingdom of Etruria;
to pay an indemnity of 120,000 ducats within three months; to close her ports to all her
British ships; to amnesty and restore the property of all those who had been involved in
the short-lived Parthenopaean Republic of 1798; to allow the occupation of the Adriatic
coast for the duration of the war with Britain by a French army that would be paid and
supplied by the Neapolitans themselves; and to surrender, again till peace was signed with
London, three frigates to the French navy. Only narrowly, meanwhile, did Ferdinand IV
manage to retain the services of his chief minister, Baron Acton, an English soldier of
fortune who had secured the favour of the Neapolitan court in the 1770s and ever since
then played a leading role in its politics (the French, of course, regarded him as a British
agent and in consequence were determined to get rid of him). All that could be said of
the arrangement was that it might have been worse. Indeed, as Damas admitted, the
peace terms ‘were by no means as bad in proportion as the terms to which Austria was
obliged to submit’.47
This insouciance, however, was not shared in Naples, where Acton had gone to great
lengths to avoid personal responsibility for the negotiations: indeed, the diplomat who had
actually been sent to Florence was publicly disgraced and banished from the court for three
years. The whole affair, in fact, had a deep impact on Queen Maria-Carolina, the Austrian
princess who was the de facto ruler of the country given the lack of interest in public affairs
evinced by her slow-witted husband, Ferdinand IV. A violent opponent of the French
Revolution, she had ever been a supporter of military action. Yet with regard to Napoleon,
as she herself admitted, she was strangely ambivalent. Thus:
Personally I abhor the part that Bonaparte serves and plays. He is the Attila, the
scourge, of Italy, but I have a genuine esteem and deep admiration for him. He is the
greatest man several centuries have produced. His force, constancy, activity and talent
have won my admiration . . . My sole regret is that he serves so detestable a cause. I
should like the fall of the Republic, but the preservation of Bonaparte . . . I hope that
his plans will miscarry and his enterprises fail [but] at the same time I wish for his per-
sonal happiness and glory so long as it is not at our expense . . . If he dies they should
reduce him to powder and give a dose of it to each ruling sovereign, and two to each of
their ministers, [and] then things would go better.48
For Maria-Carolina, then, at root Napoleon could sit in the Tuileries as long as he wished,
so long as he left Naples alone. Her hatred of France, meanwhile, was further dissipated by
the campaign of 1800. It was not just that Austria had let Naples down in the aftermath of
Hohenlinden. Caught by Napoleon’s passage of the Alps at Livorno en route to Vienna,
whither she was bound in an attempt personally to secure Naples’ interests in central Italy
against Thugut’s determination to secure territorial compensation for Austria, she was able
to observe defeat at close quarters. To quote a letter that she wrote to the Neapolitan
ambassador in Vienna on 28 June:
The fugitives of the Austrian army arrive here in a pitiful state. You see them dying in the
streets without clothes or shirts, and they no longer look human. The ill will of the generals
and admirals is as incredible as their talk. They all want peace and repose. If all the emperor’s
troops are like those I see, I advise him to make peace and never again think of war.49
On 2 July, meanwhile, she put her views even more clearly:
I swear that once the peace is settled it will be an expert in cunning who can catch me
again except in the case of aggression against our country . . . The rest of Europe may be
on fire, Thugut emperor and Fox King of England, but even so I would not be drawn from
a permanent system of neutrality, or, to be more precise, of nullity. I only aspire to repose.50
Despair at Austria’s war-making capacity, meanwhile, was presently joined by irritation

at Britain’s actions in the Mediterranean, the bone of contention here being the island of
Malta. After a long siege in which the Neapolitan armed forces were heavily involved, the
French garrison of Valetta was forced to surrender on 5 September 1800. All well and good
as this was, there was great irritation in Palermo at the manner in which the Neapolitans
had been excluded from the peace negotiations. With relations already a little strained by
the manner in which the notoriously complacent Sir William Hamilton had been replaced
as ambassador by the much more forceful Arthur Paget, the queen was much distressed:
The French are driven out and that is all to the good, but . . . we were keenly mortified
to have had no part in the capitulation considering our troops, munitions [and] artil-
lery, and our positive rights to the island . . . It is all the more painful to be so com-
pletely duped and receive an injury from a friend. We are such fast friends of England
that we are delighted that this great ally should keep a fortress which dominates Sicily,
but her method of procedure, this contemptuous treatment after all our care, cordiality,
assistance and enormous expense – these are galling indeed.51
The fruits of this dissatisfaction were to be revealed at a later point. In the meantime,
only the Ottoman Empire and Britain remained for Napoleon to deal with. Of these, the
Turks were impossible to knock out of the war as such, although Napoleon did his best to
lure them into peace negotiations. However, nor were they much of a threat: not only
were they preoccupied with a series of internal disorders, but on 20 March 1800 an attempt
on their part to reconquer Egypt by land had been heavily defeated at Heliopolis. With
the Turks effectively out of the battle, the French were free to concentrate on Britain. In
order to ensure that Egypt hung on as long as possible – although Napoleon had hinted to
the Turks that he might evacuate the province, in reality he hoped to keep it – the Army
of the Orient was encouraged to fight to the death. Meanwhile, the pressure on London
was increased by getting Spain to launch an attack on Portugal – Britain’s last ally in
Europe – in May 1801. This conflict – the so-called War of the Oranges – was less than
satisfactory from Napoleon’s point of view. Thus, according to the original plan, large
areas of Portugal were to have been occupied and held as bargaining counters that could be
exchanged for Malta and the various colonial territories and other possessions that Britain
had seized from France, Spain and Holland. To be involved in the fighting were 15,000
French troops, who were sent across the Pyrenees and by early May had got as far as the
border fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo. And, finally, Portugal’s ports were to be closed to British
shipping (a major blow, for Lisbon was a vital port-of-call for the Royal Navy and Portugal
an important trading partner for British merchants).52
In the event, these plans were foiled. Much concerned at the prospect of a strong French
presence in the Iberian Peninsula, Charles IV and Godoy joined with the Portuguese in secur-
ing a rapid end to the war before Napoleon’s plans could be put into practice. After some token
skirmishes, then, Lisbon agreed to cede a small slice of Extremadura to Spain, pay an indem-
nity to France and close her ports to Britain, but in exchange the Spaniards withdrew from
Portugal and eschewed any further threat to her territorial integrity.53 For reasons of his own,
the First Consul’s personal representative, Lucien Bonaparte, went along with this arrange-
ment, but Napoleon was much enraged. Determined to secure his original goals, he refused to
recognise the resultant Treaty of Badajoz and ordered a resumption of hostilities, but Godoy
refused point-blank to give way and even went so far as to threaten a separate peace with
Britain. Utterly furious, Napoleon demanded whether the Bourbons had tired of reigning, but
in the end that question was postponed to another day and the affair allowed to blow over.54
Before looking at the fresh situation that now pertained, it is perhaps worth considering
what we know of Napoleon’s war aims at this point. If one thing is clear, it is that these
were not just limited to retaining control of Belgium, Holland, the Rhineland, Switzerland
and northern Italy. On the contrary, implicit in the First Consul’s activities is the assump-
tion not just that Egypt could be held until a general peace settlement was reached but also
that it could be retained thereafter. Nor was France simply to enjoy an oriental empire.
On the contrary, Napoleon was also looking to the western hemisphere. In so far as this
was concerned, peace with England was quite clearly expected to restore to France her
‘sugar islands’ in the West Indies. However, beyond that there was also the question of the
vast territory of Louisiana. Ceded to Spain in 1762 at the close of the Seven Years War,
this stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the present-day Canadian frontier and from the
River Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Though largely unexplored, and colonised by
Europeans only in the extreme south, where New Orleans was a major port and the centre
of a plantation economy centred on rice, sugar and cotton, it was quite clear that this vast
region was potentially of immense importance. Thus, a valuable source of colonial produce
even as it was, it was also a convenient source of food and raw materials for France’s colonies
in the West Indies. As for the interior, meanwhile, it was impossible to say what wonders it
concealed, but Napoleon was undoubtedly much impressed by the gold and silver brought
to Spain by her older territories in the New World. And, last but not least, there was the
issue of global strategy, for a base in the American west would allow Napoleon both to put
pressure on the British in Canada and to threaten the United States.55
In fairness to Napoleon, it should be noted that, as was the case with Egypt, he was
not the only Frenchman to look to Louisiana. In 1795 the peace negotiations with Spain
that produced the Treaty of Basel had seen an attempt to get hold of the territory, whilst
in 1796–7 the Directory had repeatedly sought to persuade Godoy to consider the idea, of
which Talleyrand was a prominent supporter (in exile from France during the Robespierrist
dictatorship, he had travelled to the United States and made several adventurous journeys on
the frontier). On top of this, the 1790s had shown that the United States was not the friend
and ally of France that might have been supposed. Despite the Franco-American treaty of
amity of 1778, George Washington had responded to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1793
with an immediate declaration of neutrality and refused point-blank to tolerate the attempts
of the French ambassador to use the United States as a base for privateering or, still more
dramatically, the conquest of Louisiana (then still ruled by Spain) by a privately-recruited
army of frontier toughs. When the British began to impound American ships trading with
France and her colonies, Washington responded not by declaring war but by negotiating
a treaty that effectively accepted Britain’s right to block all trade with France in exchange
for the payment of compensation in respect of any United-States ships or cargoes seized by
the British. In retaliation, the French responded by, first, declaring that they would treat all
American ships as fair game themselves and, second, imposing a code of practice that was
even more stringent than that operated by the British. With losses mounting, the French
privateers behaving little better than pirates, no compensation forthcoming whatsoever
and Talleyrand refusing even to negotiate unless he was first offered substantial bribes –
an episode that caused particular outrage in the United States – in 1798 President Adams
broke off diplomatic relations and, to all intents and purposes, declared war on France. ‘As
to the French’, he proclaimed, ‘I know of no government, ancient or modern that ever
betrayed so universal and decided a contempt for the people of all nations.’56
Known both at the time and since as the ‘quasi-war’, the struggle that followed was both
limited and relatively bloodless, but it was nevertheless serious enough. Plans were mooted
for the loan of British warships and an attack on Louisiana, Florida and France’s remain-
ing islands in the Caribbean, whilst a small navy was fitted out and sent out to do battle
against the Directory’s warships and privateers. Greatly alarmed at the threat to Louisiana
(now friendly territory of course), within a year the French were backing away from further
conflict. Conciliatory messages were sent to Adams, whilst Napoleon had scarcely come to
power before he had repudiated the decrees that had wrought such havoc with American
shipping. Thanks to a variety of political circumstances in the United States, including,
not least, the manner in which the war was tending to strengthen the position of Adams’
enemies, the Federalists, these moves proved sufficient to achieve the desired effect. A
new ambassador was appointed to Paris and under his leadership a peace settlement was
elaborated that effectively annulled the alliance of 1778 – thereby cementing the principle
of American neutrality – in exchange for the rejection of Britain’s claims with regard to
neutral shipping and the de facto surrender of United-States claims for compensation for
the losses inflicted on her shipping since 1793.57
For the time being, then, the United States was quiescent, but such were the contradic-
tions between the French and American positions that it was clear that trouble was likely
to erupt once again in the future. In short, the strategic imperative for the acquisition of
Louisiana remained. At the very time, then, that negotiations were in train with regard to
the agreement of 30 September 1800 – the Treaty of Mortefontaine – parallel talks were
being held with Spain in Madrid with regard to Louisiana. In obtaining the retrocession
there was little difficulty: the Spanish government regarded Louisiana as more trouble than
it was worth, whilst it also recognised that giving France what she wanted in the western
hemisphere was a necessary quid pro quo for the establishment of the Kingdom of Etruria
in Italy. On 1 October 1800, then, the Treaty of San Ildefonso handed Louisiana back to
France, though for the time being the new arrangement remained secret, the actual transfer
of power not taking effect until 15 October 1802.58
In the circumstances, this was just as well. Had Napoleon’s American schemes been
revealed, it is almost certain that Britain would never have made peace, whilst in all prob-
ability he would also have faced war with the United States.59 As it was, however, British
commitment to the war was rapidly beginning to fall away. Britain was supreme at sea,
certainly: Malta, as we have seen, was seized from the French; the Spaniards were defeated
in a number of skirmishes; and the Danes were beaten at Copenhagen (see below). And, of
course, since nothing could break the dominance of the Royal Navy, only rarely could the
British be stopped from seizing the colonial territories of her opponents: by 1800 Britain’s
prizes included Tobago, St Pierre-et-Miquelon, Pondicherry (Puducherry), Martinique,
Santa Lucia, the Saints, Mariegalante, Deseada, the Cape Colony, Trincomalee, Colombo,
Malacca, Demerara, Essequibo, Berbice, Trinidad, Surinam, Gorée and Curaçao; also
to be mentioned in this context, meanwhile, are the occupation of both Menorca and
Corsica (although the latter had only been held from 1793 to 1796). Meanwhile, that same
seapower was still in play: it was, of course, British control of the Mediterranean that had
first brought Sir Ralph Abercrombie’s army to Egypt and then prevented Napoleon from
reinforcing his beleaguered garrison, the surrender of which was thereafter little more than
a matter of time, just as it was British control of the English Channel that was keeping the
flame of resistance alive in Brittany by supplying the chouans with arms and ammunition,
and British control of the Atlantic that was preventing the French from doing anything
other than acquiescing in the actions of Toussaint l’Ouverture.60
With the French presence in Egypt all but overcome, there were plenty of voices press-
ing for a continuation of the war. One such was that of Lord Malmesbury, the experienced
diplomat who had been charged with the peace negotiations of 1797. As he confided to his
diary in March 1801:
I fear Ministers have shown too much eagerness for negotiation. Bonaparte will avail
himself of it either to be insolent (if he feels strong in his seat) or to betray them into
a bad peace by an affected complaisance (if he is insecure in it). There is reason to
suppose the distant French armies are not disposed to be very obedient, and that those
who command them consider themselves as possessing as good claims to govern France
as the First Consul. He dare not, therefore, bring them back into France, and is by no
means sure that they will keep the countries they are now in possession of for him and
his purposes. I dread a naval armistice: if we accede to it, it will be like the foremost
jockey giving time for the others to come up with him while the race is running. But
this, and concessions as to the claims of the neutral nations, and probably some boon
or act of complaisance to Paul will, I apprehend, be proposed to us, and my best hope
is that Bonaparte, giddy with success and vanity and reckoning too much on our easy
compliance, will convey these proposals in such overbearing and insolent language as
even the present pacific enduring Ministers will be offended at.61
Yet, whilst this was all very well, Britain’s prospects were limited. Trust in Britain as an ally
was non-existent; as Minto complained in a dispatch to Lord Grenville, for example:
It is necessary to remind or apprise Your Lordship of the universal jealousy, envy and
indisposition which pervade Europe . . . towards the supposed monopoly of trade and
specie enjoyed by Britain. We are represented as waging war, and inciting all Europe to
join it, merely for its profits.62
Troops were in short supply – Abercromby’s army was only assembled at the cost of aban-
doning all hope of defending Portugal – whilst there was little prospect of using an army
successfully in Europe. Despite the most inflated claims by its supporters in London, French
royalism showed no signs of generating the sort of armed rising that might have justified a
landing in France, whilst attacks on naval bases such as Cádiz, Ferrol and Brest proved uni-
formly unsuccessful. By means of seapower, something might be attempted against Spain’s
possessions in the Americas – there was, in particular, much talk of the conquest of Cuba –
but in the short term it was hard to see how such operations could make much difference
in Europe, nor still less how the Royal Navy alone could reverse French dominance or pre-
vent the French from closing more and more ports to British trade. And, last but not least,
France was clearly making considerable strides in terms of the organisation and power of
the state. Whereas in the ‘Jacobin’ France of the 1790s, chaos had seemed to be the norm,
brigandage was gradually being extinguished, conscription rendered more productive and
stability restored to the administration. Not surprisingly, then, there was plenty of gloom to
set alongside the optimism of the diehards. To quote a letter written by Lord Auckland to
Lord Wellesley, who was then Governor-General of India:
We can no longer conceal from ourselves that the war is likely to end without any
settlement of the independence of Europe, and with great accessions to the colonial
dominion of France. I do not even think that the sudden disappearance of Bonaparte
from the scene of action would give any essential turn to affairs. He would probably be
succeeded by Berthier, Moreau or Masséna, or some other dux . . . In short . . . I must
confess, we see nothing within the line of fair calculation and probability that tends to
enable us either to push the war with effect, or to make a peace with safety.63
Meanwhile, at home there was a growing economic crisis, this producing widespread popu-
lar unrest. In brief, what happened was that, much to the detriment of the price of bread,
the harvests of 1799 and 1800 both failed. In consequence, domestic demand for consumer
products fell at the very moment that French success on the Continent was reducing the
number of outlets for British exports. At this, many textile businesses, in particular, went
bankrupt, whilst attempts to ease the problem by importing extra grain from Prussia –
already the source of half the annual supply of this commodity – were blocked by that
state’s decision to join the League of Armed Neutrality (see below). Also cut off, thanks
to the new development, were Britain’s chief sources of naval supplies, whilst trade was
also hit very badly by Prussia’s decision not only to close her own ports to British trade
but to occupy Hanover (which controlled the Rivers Elbe and Weser). Not surprisingly,
then, there was ever more evidence of domestic unrest with near-constant reports of riots,
seditious meetings and acts of defiance and intimidation, not to mention the widespread
circulation of hostile stories, songs and handbills.64 Despite the defeat of the rising of 1798,
Ireland, too, remained restive, Pitt’s attempts to conciliate her through Catholic emanci-
pation leading only to a clash with King George III that culminated in his resignation.65
That, at least, is the textbook version of what occurred. In fact, however, Pitt was weary
and despondent. A sick man much undermined by heavy drinking, he despaired of victory
in the war against France and yet, at the same time, knew that, such was his demonisation
across the Channel, Paris would be unlikely to engage in serious talks whilst he was in
office. Openly to step down over the war effort, however, would be to invite French intran-
sigence at the peace table, and so some alternative pretext had to be manufactured for his
departure, in which respect Catholic emancipation offered a most useful smokescreen.66 If
this account of Pitt’s resignation is correct – and the evidence is not wholly conclusive –
then it is certainly strengthened by the fact that the outgoing Prime Minister recom-
mended the Speaker of the House of Commons, Henry Addington, as his successor. Thus,
Addington was far weaker than Pitt. Aside from anything else a poor orator and a man
much given to personal vanity, he was looked down upon on account of his relatively lowly
social origins. In consequence, he seemed unlikely to be able to carry the country with him
in further sacrifices, whilst it did not help that he was seen by Pittite loyalists as a traitor
who had betrayed a great British hero. More to the point, perhaps, as Pitt knew full well, he
was absolutely committed to an early peace, the very first act of the new Cabinet therefore
being to announce that it was ready to come to terms.67
In keeping with his image of the reluctant warrior, Napoleon was content to entertain
these overtures. With the French garrison clearly doomed, a peace treaty was the only means
of salvaging anything from the Egyptian fiasco. Meanwhile, Napoleon had also recently suf-
fered a severe blow in the diplomatic field. In the course of 1800, as we have seen, there had
been a growing rapprochement between the tsar and the First Consul, the same year also
having witnessed the former set about organising an alliance of Russia, Sweden, Prussia and
Denmark – the so-called League of Armed Neutrality – the aim of this combination being
to force London to grant its members the freedom of the seas. For Napoleon these events
were highly promising – acting together, Russia and the Baltic states could boast consider-
able naval resources, whilst Prussia turned the screw on Britain still further by occupying
Hanover – but on 23 March 1801 Paul was murdered in a palace coup, and on 2 April a
British fleet defeated the Danes at Copenhagen.68
Taken together, these two events dealt Napoleon a heavy blow. Though the Prussians
remained in occupation of Hanover, there was now no hope of persuading them to engage
in active operations against the British, the death of Paul in the meantime ensuing that
Russia had become an unknown quantity. In consequence, there was simply no point in
the First Consul taking hostilities any further, especially as France remained as war-weary
as ever, whilst the British seemed likely to accept whatever terms that they were offered (to
ensure that they did so, Napoleon made a great show of preparing an invasion fleet). At
the same time, peace offered further advantages, for the French navy could be rebuilt and
Germany brought further under France’s sway. In short, it was very much in France’s inter-
ests to offer terms, the result being, first, the Preliminaries of London of 1 October 1801,
and then the Treaty of Amiens of 25 March 1802. As both Turkey and Portugal had signed
separate peaces on 9 October 1801 (an event which in the case of Portugal lost her a strip of
territory on the northern frontier of Brazil to French Guyana), for the first time since April
1792 the whole of Europe was at peace.69
What, though, were the terms of the peace settlement? In brief, to obtain peace, Britain
had to offer terms that were extremely generous. France’s natural frontiers were recognised,
along with the various satellite republics, and her colonial losses restored, together with
the Dutch possessions of the Cape, Surinam, Curaçao and Malacca, Britain retaining only
Spanish Trinidad and such territory as the Dutch had held in Ceylon. At the same time,
Menorca was returned to Spain and Malta to the Knights of Saint John, guarantees also being
given that the British army would be called home from Egypt. As for France, all she had to do
was to agree to withdraw all her forces from her surviving satellites, which were henceforth
to be treated as independent states. Strictly speaking, it ought to be noted at this point that
Napoleon also agreed to give up Egypt, but, in the circumstances, this was no concession at
all, for France’s dreams of a new colonial empire on the Nile had over the last few months
been completely overcome, whilst evacuation was made contingent on Britain’s surrender of
Malta. Only on two small points was there much consolation, indeed, and neither even of
these was the fruit of direct negotiations with France: thus, when Napoleon finally formally
made peace with Russia on 8 October 1801 he had been forced to abandon his claim to the
Ionian archipelago and recognise the new political organisation which had been given it in
the form of the ‘Republic of the Seven Islands’, whilst on 6 November Frederick William III
ordered the evacuation of Hanover on the grounds that to keep it would entail complica-
tions with Britain of a sort that could only be sustained if she was at war with France.70
Other than peace itself, Britain had therefore gained almost nothing, and the treaty
was greeted in some quarters with alarm and disquiet. According to William Windham,
for example, ‘The country has received its death blow.’71 For Grenville, it was a ‘much-to-
be-lamented business’ and ‘an act of weakness and humiliation’.72 And, for Canning, it was
‘most disgraceful and calamitous’.73 Many lesser figures, too, voiced their disquiet, as in the
case of Thomas Ritchie, the author of a history of the War of the Second Coalition that
appeared in 1802. Thus:
By the conditions of the definitive treaty, Bonaparte achieved more than four years of
successful war could have given him . . . The court of London wished to get rid of the
war at any price and the First Consul, remarking this favourable ardour, was too saga-
cious not to turn it to his advantage.74
Such comments have often been used as evidence that Britain – or, at least, the British
establishment – was never serious in its acceptance of the peace settlement and only wanted
a breathing space. But Windham and the rest were all either ‘ultras’ who saw the war in
terms of a clash of ideologies or men who had personal reasons of various sorts for hating
Addington. In fact, all the evidence suggests that they were very much in a minority in
their wholesale rejection of the treaty. There was a degree of wariness, certainly, but from
George III downwards a range of figures could be found who were prepared to give peace a
try, whilst, predictably enough, the Whigs positively welcomed it: according to a pamphlet
penned by the Whig commentator, William Belsham, for example, Napoleon was a hero
whom Britain had no cause to fight whatsoever. Thus:
Previous to the revolution of Brumaire, two furious and inveterate factions, the
Jacobins and the ancient monarchists, had combined against, and nearly overturned,
the Directorial constitution, which was supported by the assumption of powers most
abhorrent to freedom. The . . . efforts of those who aspired to establish a regular and
rational form of government were unavailingly exerted or abandoned in despair; the
country was a prey to every species of disorder . . . exposed to the most formidable
attacks from the enemy without; and presented the most frightful picture of animosity
and anarchy . . . From this state of deep distress, with ruin only in view, Bonaparte
seized, with a daring, indeed, but not a sacrilegious hand, the reins of government and
France was saved – saved from her foes and saved from herself. Never did a nation
pass so rapidly from adversity to prosperity, from despondency to hope . . . And should
the man who wrought this mighty and almost miraculous change . . . be summoned,
as it were, to the bar . . . to answer for his delinquency in not having done more for
his country?75
As for those who opposed the settlement, the fact that William Pitt supported it as the best
arrangement that Addington could have obtained completely undermined their position:
to have gone against the treaty and sought to overthrow the government on a ticket of
renewed war would have, in effect, been to cast aside their great hero whilst, at the same
time, running in the face of a public opinion that greatly welcomed an end to hostilities
and, in some instances, was possessed of a degree of sympathy with the ideas of the French
Revolution. To quote Lord Malmesbury once again:
On the twelfth [of October, 1801] a Frenchman called Lauriston, occasional aide-
de-camp to Bonaparte, brought over the ratification. A Jacobin saddler in Oxford
Road saw him pass . . . He assembled the mob, persuaded them he was Bonaparte’s
brother, and Lauriston was drawn about by them in a hackney coach to all his visits.
Government . . . treated it very lightly, yet it was a most disgraceful circumstance and
a sad precedent.76
Could, then, peace have lasted in 1802? Given that neither Britain nor France had relin-
quished their essential war aims, at first sight, the answer must be ‘no’, for French hegemony
in western Europe was simply not compatible with British security. But to read the situa-
tion in this fashion is almost certainly too deterministic. In and of itself, Britain was most
unlikely to renew the war in the immediate future: not only was the majority of political
opinion against such a move, but those forces which did wish to fight on were hopelessly
undermined by the contradictions of their position; moreover, given that Napoleon was
already showing signs of undermining the arrangements decided on in the Preliminaries of
London even before the definitive peace was signed at Amiens, it is hard not to conclude
that even in the corridors of power there was no will to assert the so-called ‘continen-
tal commitment’. And, if French hegemony in western Europe was not under threat from
London, it was not under threat from anywhere else: the new emperor of Russia was, as
we shall see, at this time very much leaning towards Napoleon; Prussia content with its
dominance of northern Germany; and Austria anxious to avoid a fight and even groping
towards disengagement from Germany and Italy in favour of an advance in the Balkans. On
top of that, French success had been quite extraordinary: Louis XIV himself could not have
asked for more, the ‘natural frontiers’ and the rest having not even been achieved at the
cost of France’s colonial empire. As Georges Lefebvre has observed, then, if anything was
Napoleon’s crowning achievement, it was surely Amiens.77
Nor was the settlement itself so very bad as a basis for an end to the ‘age of war’ that
had characterised the eighteenth century. As Schroeder points out, the settlement reached
in the period 1801–2 was in fact remarkably realistic in global terms. Britain, France and
Russia were effectively recognised as the three leading powers of Europe, and each of them
were accorded dominance in one particular sphere. Britain, then, was allowed to retain
her supremacy at sea: even Napoleon did not demand the dismantling of the Royal Navy,
and this, in effect, meant that France’s colonial presence was one that existed on sufferance
and could always be closed down. France stood supreme in western Europe and was bolstered
by much enlarged frontiers and an unassailable sphere of influence in Holland, Switzerland
and Italy. And finally, Russia was assured that the Ottoman Empire would be her exclusive
preserve and that she would have a major voice in the reorganisation that now loomed. As
for Austria and Prussia, whilst clearly less well favoured than Britain, France and Russia,
they too might hope for compensation in Germany and had, in any case, come through the
cataclysm of the 1790s with their frontiers significantly augmented. And if it was theoreti-
cally the case that no one power would be allowed to dominate Germany – one possible
bone of contention amongst the powers – a similar situation was reached with regard to the
Mediterranean: France had her base at Toulon, Britain hers at Gibraltar, and Russia hers –
at least potentially – in the Ionian islands, whilst Malta was denied to everybody. In short,
what we see is a compromise settlement that was certainly no more unstable than earlier
general European peace treaties.78 Why, then, should the end of the French Revolutionary
Wars in 1802 have been followed by what was, in effect, a mere truce? The answer is devas-
tatingly simple. Britain, had made peace with France on the basis that what she was agreeing
to was the European status quo as it existed in 1802. Amiens was – just – an arrangement
with which most sensible observers in London could live, but for Napoleon such an arrange-
ment was unthinkable, for it implied the acceptance of limitations on his freedom of action.
From the very beginning, then, the First Consul acted as if no such limitations existed, and
thus it was that what could have been a durable peace settlement ended up as nothing more
than a parenthesis. As even the great French historian, Georges Lefebvre admitted:
All would not have been lost had Bonaparte stopped harassing England on the seas
and in her colonies, agreed to re-open the French market to English trade, and con-
sented to exercise in neighbouring countries [only] that legitimate amount of influence
which . . . the security of France’s frontiers required. Even before the Peace of Amiens
had been concluded, however, Napoleon had given proof that this was not the way he
understood matters to be.79
What, though, should we make of the war that had just terminated? In brief, the situa-
tion was quite clear. Whilst there were limits to her power, particularly at sea, France was
so strong in the wake of the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte that there was no way that
she could be contained except by a general alliance. Britain, then, would have to fight in
Europe; Austria and Prussia to set aside their endless rivalry over Germany; and Russia to
lift her eyes from Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Put more generally, the point was that
the powers would have to evolve a new approach to international relations that was based
on common interest rather than mutual rivalry. In 1802, however, this development was
still far away, whilst so entrenched were the obstacles opposed to it that only the most
cataclysmic of forces could have swept them aside. But what did Napoleon Bonaparte with
all his genius, his dynamism, his daring and his ruthlessness represent but just such a force?
Embedded in the very triumph of Marengo and Hohenlinden, Lunéville and Amiens, in
short, were the seeds of France’s downfall. In the pithy words of Tim Blanning:
If France were ever to be returned to her old frontiers what was needed was a sharp
lesson to the old régimes that the world had changed and that they needed to adapt.
Fortunately for them, Bonaparte was positively eager to administer it.80
In terms of international relations, then, the situation looked bleak for France. In the wake of
the French Revolutionary Wars, there were also many reasons to suspect that the fresh con-
quests which the rule of Napoleon clearly presaged were unlikely to rest on secure foundations.
Quite simply, the Europe that emerged from the conflicts of 1792–1802 was one that had
suffered far more devastation than it had renewal, far more exploitation than it had oppor-
tunity. To take just one example, as witness the recollections of Christian Küttner, Venice
was a city in crisis:
That great poverty prevails at Venice, and that the city swarms with mendicants is
well-known, but both have recently increased in an extraordinary degree. The square
of Saint Mark and all the churches are infested with beggars that are inconceivably
troubling to strangers . . . But there is another class of pauper whose appearance and
history must move even the most unfeeling. On the day of our arrival I saw on the
steps of the Rialto a woman dressed in black silk before whom . . . lay a little child. The
woman knelt on the hard stone having a fan in her right hand which she used to drive
away the flies from her child while her left was silently extended to receive charity. On
another bridge a well-dressed man was kneeling and silently holding his right hand
before him . . . There are families which have been ruined by the revolution . . . there
were always some among them who were very poor, but, as long as the aristocratic
government continued, they . . . obtained some little place or other . . . Consider only
what a number of nobili were sent over the whole country in the quality of podesta, lugar-
tenenti, etc., so that there was scarcely the smallest place whose chief magistrate was
not from the body of the sovereignty. This rich source of emolument has now ceased,
for, when the Austrian government appoints a native to an official situation, he is
appointed from the place itself and not from among the ancient nobility of Venice. All
business was formerly transacted in that metropolis, but now each province has its own
regency . . . From these and other circumstances Venice is a ruined city. Only consider
the number of inhabitants of the provinces who were obliged on so many occasions
to visit the metropolis, how many persons derived a subsistence from that source, and
how much it contributed to the general prosperity of the inhabitants . . . This source
of profit no longer exists as well as that which the city derived from the many foreign
ambassadors who expended annually considerable sums.81
And, as in Venice, so in Naples, Rome and many other places, the new administrations
which the French had established having but rarely succeeded in effecting substantial
improvement in the situation of their populations. Indeed, it was the judgement of many
observers that their impact had been at best ephemeral. In the words of one visitor to Rome,
for example:
I have not been able to collect many details relating to . . . the Roman Republic . . . I
expected to hear from everybody anecdotes connected with the important events
which they have witnessed. I have been much disappointed. These events are already
confined to the page of history and are not oftener mentioned . . . than those which
occurred two centuries ago. I have, indeed, been told that Mr ______, the grocer,
was one of the consuls, that the abbé ______, the language-master, a tribune, and the
Prince of ______, the commander-in-chief of the National Guards. Most of these
individuals . . . have quietly returned to their respective stations, and . . . seem almost
to have forgotten that for a time they enjoyed the pomp and pageantry of office.82
Having, wherever they trod, spread ruin and misery, the French armies had left a memory
that was more vivid. On his way to Venice from Vienna, for example, the same Küttner
passed through the town of Leoben, the scene in 1797 of the signature of the armistice
which brought Austria’s participation in the War of the First Coalition to a close. Thus:
The post-master of Leoben, of whom I asked several questions concerning the French,
complained bitterly of them and calculated the loss which they had occasioned him in
nineteen days in horses, hay, oats, etc., at 4,000 gulden. Three females died at the hands
of their brutal ravishers . . . I never heard of so much of this species of atrocity as at this
place. I was told of a woman who escaped with her life though she was abused by thirty
men, a violence which human nature could scarcely be thought capable of supporting.83
Tall tales, perhaps, and tales, too, that grew in the telling, but the trouble for Napoleon
was that it was precisely through such tall tales that grew in the telling that the experi-
ence of the French Revolution was remembered almost everywhere that it penetrated. Nor
was it appreciated even when the events surrounding the survival of the French were less
traumatic. As Lemaistre wrote of Geneva (a city that witnessed little in the way of violence
and, despite being annexed to France, was initially spared from conscription), ‘Though the
French government has attempted . . . to conciliate the citizens of Geneva, the attempt
has proved unsuccessful, and nothing but the force of arms secures their allegiance.’84 Truly
it was a painful legacy, and one which neither la grande nation nor its ruler were ever able
to shake off. Yet the ancien régime was scarcely any better off. If the French challenge was
not quite as overwhelming as is sometimes portrayed, it yet was serious enough and would
certainly require a major military effort to overcome. How, though, was such an effort to be
achieved? From Britain there came reports of strikes and bread riots and from Russia stories
of serious disorders among the serfs, while, in other places, society appeared to be on the
verge of breaking down altogether. As Paget wrote of Naples, for example:
The provinces are in general in a very unpleasant state of insubordination, particularly

in Calabria, where the people live in a state of licentiousness and anarchy which it
will require time and considerable vigour to suppress. The cause of this mischief may
be attributed to Cardinal Ruffo who in his march through these countries promised
an exemption of taxes and other immunities for some years to all those who would
advance in support of the royalist cause.85
The population may not have rallied to the French Revolution, then – may even, in fact,
have fought against it – but they were in no mood to submit to levies, whether human or
financial, that were just as pressing as those of the French, nor, for that matter, to toler-
ate the pillage and rapine engaged in by friendly troops just as much as it was by enemy
ones. As Wickham wrote of the Russian evacuation of Zurich in a letter to Lord Grenville
dated 2 October 1799, for example, ‘The Russians . . . committed several disorders in the
town before they retired and pillaged the villages through which they passed on the road.’86
The same tale of woe was repeated in a further letter of 11 October that was written from
Feldkirch, but this time Wickham was prophesying disaster. Thus:
Though I only arrived here this morning, I have already been waited on by a deputation
of the town to represent the dreadful state of the country, and to entreat my interfer-
ence with the generals that some consideration may be paid to the peasants, many of
whom have lost the whole of their winter provisions . . . I learned from Lieutenant-
Colonel Clinton that the evil was nearly as great in Italy though the army was supplied
with rations from the Austrian magazines . . . It is the common language of the people
that the French mode of laying contributions . . . was mercy when compared with the
conduct of the Russians . . . I have not yet had the honour of seeing Marshal Suvorov,
but . . . I trust I shall be able to make him sensible of the danger . . . of his present sys-
tem if he is to remain with his army in this part of Europe where such things are quite
unknown and will certainly not be tolerated.87
With matters in such a state, rolling back the tide of French conquest, let alone suppress-
ing the Revolution at source, would be a Herculean task, and it is, then, something of a
wonder that more states had not long taken the Prussian option and something of a won-
der, too, that the reform efforts seen in states such as Austria had proved so limited. Only
with the conquest of Europe unleashed by Napoleon from 1805 onwards would things
change, but that is another story.
Notes
1 Cit. Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, I, p. 168.
2 For four contrasting versions of the elaboration of the Consitution of 1800, see Broers, Napoleon,
Soldier of Destiny, pp. 230–5; Forrest, Napoleon, pp. 124–8; Sydenham, First French Republic,
pp. 222–4.
3 P. Dwyer, Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power, 1799–1815 (London, 2013), pp. 6–7.
4 For the repression of the insurgents, see ibid., pp. 22–3.
5 Chaptal, Souvenirs, p. 224.
6 Bourrienne, Memoirs, pp. 132–3.
7 A. Thibaudeau, Bonaparte and the Consulate, ed. G. Fortescue (London, 1908), pp. 5–6.
8 Ibid., p. 6.
9 Staël, Considérations sur les principales évènements de la Révolution Française, II, p. 267.
10 J. Hanoteau (ed.), Mémoires de la Reine Hortense (Paris, 1927), I, p. 90.
11 Cit. Cronin, Napoleon, p. 278.
12 Cit. Bernard, Talleyrand, p. 229.
13 Cit. P. Mackesy, War without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802 (Oxford, 1984), p. 43.
Someone else who was pressing these views was the British secret agent, William Wickham. As
he wrote to the British ambassador in Vienna, Lord Minto, on 28 November 1799, ‘Another
campaign in the opinion of all well-judging and well-informed people will (to say nothing more)
place Austria in a position to dictate terms of peace.’ Cit. W. Wickham (ed.), The Correspondence
of the Right Honourable William Wickham from the Year 1794 (London, 1870), II, p. 338.
14 Cit. S. de Chair, Napoleon on Napoleon: An Autobiography of the Emperor (London, 1992), pp. 173–4.
15 Cit. ibid, p. 148.
16 Evans, William Pitt, pp. 44–5.
17 Grenville’s views are best addressed via Jupp, Lord Grenville, pp. 240–50; for a more general discus-
sion, meanwhile, see Mackesy, War without Victory, pp. 3–47 passim.
18 J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (Stanford, California, 1969–96), III, pp. 334–45.
19 Cit. J.H. Rose, William Pitt and the Great War (London, 1911), p. 385.
20 What was envisaged here was the transfer to Austria of Bavaria, Piedmont and the rest of Venetia,
together with the restoration of Habsburg rule in Lombardy, the Wittelsbachs in the meantime
being given the Austrian Netherlands. For Thugut’s thinking in respect of all these points, see
Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 128–36 passim.
21 Cit. Minto (ed.), Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliott, III, pp. 91–2.
22 Roider, Baron Thugut, p. 334.
23 Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, p. 56.
24 Ibid., p. 57.
25 McGrew, Paul I, pp. 305–7.
26 Ibid., p. 312.
27 The sufferings of the Army of Italy in the winter of 1799 were grim indeed. For example, ‘The
army . . . was reduced to 25,000 [men] and, of these . . . not above a half were fit for active duty.
The horror excited by the hospitals was such that not a few of the sick soldiers remained in their
quarters and chose to die there rather than suffer themselves to be carried to such a doleful and
dreadful mansion. There were others who, no longer able to support themselves under multiple
and continued privation, threw themselves into the streets from their windows. The losses were
not less that arose from desertion. Numbers of officers were to be seen in small bodies remaining
at their posts and abandoned by their men.’ Annual Register, 42 (1800), p. 180. As for the siege
of Genoa, this was an appalling episode. Supplies were low even before the siege began, while
the Royal Navy’s control of the sea ensured that no more food could get in and also that the city
had to endure heavy bombardment from a direction from which it was completely unprotected.
If the situation was desperate for the soldiery, for the civilian population it was even worse. As
the same source continued, ‘The populace, particularly the women, running about the streets,
set up frightful cries for peace . . . A great number of old people, women and children, reduced
to eating herbs, roots or impure animals, died of inanition. This melancholy picture was often
revealed by the rising sun. Mothers were often found dead with hunger, and children at the breast
also dead or dying.’ Ibid., pp. 187–8. For a particularly harrowing account of the siege of Genoa,
see A.J. Butler (ed.). The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, late Lieutenant-General in the French Armies
(London, 1892), I, pp. 70–84.
28 For a detailed account of Marengo, see Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 270–98.
29 Fortescue, Notebooks of Captain Coignet, pp. 74–6.
30 Roider, Baron Thugut, pp. 340–57; Ehrman, Younger Pitt, III, pp. 381–6.
31 Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, p. 302.
32 Ibid., pp. 312–14.
33 Waliszewski, Paul I, pp. 335–74. A nephew of the latter, the Nikita Panin mentioned here is not
to be confused with the Nikita Panin who played such a key role in the reign of Catherine II:
34 This account of Paul’s foreign policy in the last months of his reign should be regarded as an
attempt to bring order out of chaos. So violent and unpredictable had the tsar become that it is
difficult to assess his actions. However, the basic lines of Russian policy are clear enough, namely
friendship with Prussia, enmity towards Britain and Austria, a veto on certain actions in respect
of the Holy Roman Empire, and renewed interest in expansion in central Asia.
35 D. Chandler, ‘Adjusting the record: Napoleon and Marengo’, in D. Chandler (ed.), On the
Napoleonic Wars: Collected Essays (London, 1994), pp. 82–98.
36 Bourrienne, Memoirs, p. 176.
37 Ibid.
38 H. Carnot (ed.), Memoirs of Bertrand Barère, Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety during the
Revolution (London, 1896), III, p. 93.
39 Cit. Howard, Letters and Documents of Napoleon, I, p. 437.
40 For a brief analysis, see Dwyer, Citizen Emperor, pp. 38–40.
41 Lejeune was present at Marengo as an aide-de-camp to General Berthier. An anonymous memo-
randum in the files of the Bibliothèque Nationale is glowing in its praise; ‘In the exhibition of Year
IX (1801) the painting never ceased to attract the attention of one and all, and won the approval
of every group with an interest in the subject: artists recognised the distinguished talent of its
progenitor; soldiers who had been glorious eyewitness of the scenes thus recreated before their
very eyes bore witness to the perfect accuracy of their depiction and . . . the scrupulous fidelity of
the painter as a historian; and, for their part, men of letters in general paid tribute to Monsieur
Lejeune . . . for having been respectful enough of his art not to have let it get in the way of the
truth.’ Accessed at <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10527725s/f2.image>, 10 January 2017.
42 For an account of Hohenlinden, see J.R. Arnold, Marengo and Hohenlinden: Napoleon’s Rise to
Power (Barnsley, 2005), pp. 217–51.
43 Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, I, p. 839.
44 For the Treaty of Lunéville, see Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 212–14.
45 M. de Klinkowstrom (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1733–1815 (London, 1880), pp. 31, 38.
46 Rambaud, Memoirs of the Comte Roger de Damas, p. 295.
47 Ibid., p. 298.
48 Cit. Acton, Bourbons of Naples, p. 296.
49 Cit. ibid., p. 437–8.
50 Cit. ibid., pp. 438–9.
51 Cit. ibid., pp. 441–2. It almost goes without saying that the British were no more pleased with the
Neapolitans than the Neapolitans were pleased with the British. Sir Arthur Paget, indeed could
hardly have been more scathing. As he wrote to Lord Grenville on 13 May 1800, ‘In reviewing
the present situation of the kingdom, it presents in my mind a most alarming subject for reflection.
Every department in the state, ecclesiastical, civil and military, has assumed the most untoward
appearance. Instead of religion, there is an excess of bigotry; corruption has succeeded to justice;
and the fact of calling the assistance of foreign troops in itself proves what the state of the army
must be . . . The king . . . is timid and bigoted and, as is often the case in the same disposition,
cruel and revengeful; he has no natural turn for [business], nor do his habits allow him to attend
to [it] . . . The queen’s character . . . is too well known to Your Lordship to require any comment
upon it from me . . . The country is governed solely by General Acton . . . notwithstanding the
opposition he meets with from the queen and her party, whose unceasing activity does not fail to
cramp his style.’ A. Paget to Lord Grenville, 13 May 1800, cit. A. Paget (ed.), The Paget Papers:
Diplomatic and Other Correspondence of the Right Hon. Sir Arthur Paget, GCB, 1794–1807 (London,
1896), I, pp. 213–14.
52 Dwyer, Citizen Emperor, p. 68; C. Seco Serrano, Godoy: el hombre y el político (Madrid, 1978),
pp. 136–9.
53 For a study of the campaign, see M. Amaral, Olivença, 1801: Portugal em Guerra do Guadiana ao Paraguai
(Lisbon, 2004). For various reasons, the conflict is often referred to as the ‘War of the Oranges’.
54 Seco Serrano, Godoy, el hombre y el político, pp. 139–41.
55 For all this, see P. Fregosi, Dreams of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War, 1792–1815
(London, 1989), pp. 289–92.
56 Cit. S.G. Kurz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1797–1800 (Philadelphia,
1957), p. 301. For the origins of the crisis, meanwhile, see A. DeConde, The Quasi-War: The Politics
and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York, 1966), pp. 74–98. Strictly
speaking, much though Adams favoured such a move (a Federalist, he rightly saw that whipping
up war fever against France was an excellent way of damaging the fortunes of the political opposi-
tion, the Republicans having consistently been ardent admirers of the French Revolution), war
was not declared, not least because the President feared that he would not be able to get such a
measure through Congress. However, the distinction was little more than a legal fiction and at the
outset there was general conviction the full-scale hostilities were inevitable, a wide range of steps
being taken to provide against French descents on the coast.
57 For the naval war between the United States and France, see D.R.Hickey, ‘The quasi-war:
America’s first limited conflict, 1798–1801’, Northern Mariner, 18, Nos. 3–4 (July–October, 2008),
pp. 67–77; P. Tierney, ‘A navy reborn: the quasi-war with France and the USS Constellation’,
Journal of America’s Military Past, 38, No. 3 (Fall, 2013), pp. 5–13.
58 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 223.
59 For American reaction to Napoleon’s acquisition of Louisiana, see M.P. Adams, ‘Jefferson’s reac-
tion to the Treaty of San Ildefonso’, Journal of Southern History, 21, No. 2 (May, 1955), pp. 173–88.
60 For the campaign in Egypt, see Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt.
61 Cit. Third Earl of Malmesbury (ed.), Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of
Malmesbury (London, 1844), IV, pp. 52–3.
62 Cit. Minto, Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliott, III, p. 145.
63 Cit. Rosebery, The Wellesley Papers, I, p. 143.
64 For the crisis of 1799–1801, see Andress, The Savage Storm, pp. 70–5; Emsley, British Society and the
French Wars, pp. 83–9.
65 For the crisis over Catholic emancipation, see C.J. Fedorak, ‘Catholic emancipation and the
resignation of William Pitt in 1801’, Albion, 24, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 49–64.
66 An authoritative discussion of these issues may be found in Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, III,
pp. 514–19.
67 P. Ziegler, Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, 1965),
pp. 96–118.
68 For the League of Armed Neutrality, see O. Feldbaek, Denmark and the Armed Neutrality, 1800–1801:
Small-Power Policy in a World War (Copenhagen, 1980); P. Dwyer, ‘Prussia and the Armed Neutrality: the
invasion of Hanover in 1801’, International History Review, 15, No. 4 (November, 1993), pp. 661–87.
69 For Napoleon’s thinking on the idea of making peace, see Broers, Napoleon, pp. 246–7; Mackesy,
Peace without Victory, pp. 218–19.
70 On the Treaty of Amiens, see Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 226–7.
71 Cit. Mackesy, War without Victor, p. 209.
72 Cit. Jupp, Lord Grenville, p. 313; Ehrman, Younger Pitt, III, p. 558.
73 Cit. Ziegler, Addington, p. 125.
74 T.E. Ritchie, Political and Military Memoirs of Europe from the Renewal of the War on the Continent
in 1798 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802 with an Introductory View of the Treaty of Campo Formio and
Proceedings of the Congress at Rastädt (Edinburgh, 1802), III, pp. 510–13.
75 W. Belsham, Remarks on the Late Definitive Treaty of Peace signed at Amiens on 25th March 1802
(London, 1802), pp. 34–5.
76 Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence, IV, p. 61.
77 G. Lefebvre, Napoleon: from 18 Brumaire to Tilsit (London, 1969), p. 115.
78 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 228–9.
79 Lefebvre, Napoleon: from Brumaire to Tilsit, p. 115. In Lefebvre’s eyes, what made the settle-
ment still more unstable was the peace terms which were eventually reached with Russia. Thus:
‘Bonaparte conceded to Alexander nearly all that he had wrangled out of Paul, and that without
obtaining in exchange anything more than a peace treaty. For Napoleon it was a resounding
failure.’ Ibid., p. 111.
80 Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, p. 273.
81 Küttner, Travels through Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Part of Italy, pp. 168–9.
82 Lemaistre, Travels after the Peace of Amiens, II, p. 149. The reticence spoken of by Lemaistre can,
of course, be ascribed to fear. At the same time, he did venture the view that ‘the Roman people,
without becoming republicans, and without contracting any prejudices in favour of the form of
government which their conquerors recommended, have to a certain degree lost their respect for
the papal jurisdiction’. Ibid., p. 150.
83 Küttner, Travels through Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Part of Italy, p. 149. Another traveller who
passed through the Tyrol and northern Italy at this time was the British diplomat Arthur Paget. As
he wrote to his mother from Mantua on 3 March 1800, ‘In my life I never saw so dreadful a race of
people. But this should not make one less shocked at the innumerable vestiges of rapine, pillage,
fire, etc., with which the eye is at every instant assailed . . . It is not to be told what enormities
which that horrible and sacrilegious nation, the French, have committed. I have not the patience
to enter into any details, nor, if I did, would your heart support the perusal of them.’ Cit. Paget,
Paget Papers, I, p. 183.
84 Lemaistre, Travels after the Peace of Amiens, I, p. 29.
85 Cit. Paget, Paget Papers, I, p. 216.
86 Cit. Wickham, Correspondence of the Right Honourable William Wickham, II, p. 249.
87 Cit. ibid., pp. 258–9.
Bibliographical note
So many books, articles and conference papers have been made use of for this work that to
list them all would require the equivalent of another chapter. For reasons of space, what is
offered here is essentially a guide to further reading aimed at undergraduate students.
Let us begin with some general texts which place the French Revolutionary Wars in
their wider context. Of these by far the most interesting, not to say provocative, is D. Bell,
The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston,
2007), though those looking for a simpler approach might find G. Rudé, Revolutionary
Europe (London, 1967); C.J. Esdaile, The French Wars (London, 1999) and O. Connelly,
The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792–1815 (London, 2006) to be of more
assistance. For the milieu from which the French Revolution sprang, meanwhile, readers
are referred to J. Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1700–1789 (Houndmills, 1990) and
H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century
Europe (Houndmills, 1990).
Moving on, we come to France and her Revolution. For major surveys, the obvious
places to go are W. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989) and
S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), but short texts
include T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash? (Houndmills,
1998); G. Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London, 1993); P.M. Jones,
The French Revolution, 1787–1804 (Abingdon, 2017); P. McPhee, The French Revolution,
1789–1799 (Oxford, 2002) and B. Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-
Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2002). On the army, meanwhile, see J.P. Bertaud, The
Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power (Princeton, NJ,
1988); A. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the French
Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1988); A. Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham,
NC, 1989) and J. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Armies
of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Urbana, IL, 1984). Finally, on Napoleon, a recent study
that covers the Revolutionary period alone is P. Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power,
1769–1799 (London, 2007).
On specifically military matters, the reader should begin with T.C.W. Blanning, The
French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996), whilst this may be supplemented
with P.G. Griffith, The Art of War in Revolutionary France, 1789–1802 (London, 1998) and
F.C. Schneid (ed.), European Armies of the French Revolution, 1789–1802 (Norman, OK,
2015). Helpful introductions to the eighteenth-century background, meanwhile, include
J. Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (London, 1994); M.S. Anderson, War and Society in
Europe of the Old Régime, 1618–1789 (London, 1988); J. Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe,
1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982); A. Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789
Bibliographical note 325
(Bloomington, IN, 1979) and C. Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London,
1987). Finally, the techniques of battle are examined in G. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare
in the Age of Napoleon (London, 1977) and B. Nosworthy, With Musket, Cannon and Sword:
Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies (New York, 1996).
Cover a much wider period though it does, the essential text in so far as international
relations are concerned is P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848
(Oxford, 1994), whilst T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Harlow,
1986) offers similar arguments in a format that is rather more convenient. Meanwhile, helpful
general surveys include J. Black, European International Relations, 1648–1815 (Houndmills,
2002) and H.M. Scott, The Birth of a Great-Power System, 1740–1815 (London, 2006).
On Britain, a useful general history is constituted by D. Andress, The Savage Storm:
Britain on the Brink in the Age of Napoleon (London, 2012), while C. Emsley, Britain and
the French Revolution (Harlow, 2000) and C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars,
1793–1815 (London, 1979) are helpful analyses of the home front and H.T. Dickinson
(ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Houndmills, 1989) a comprehensive
collection of essays. Finally, on Ireland, T. Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The Bloody Story
of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London, 1969) is a lively introduction, but it is now
rather dated and should therefore be supplemented with such works as M. Elliott, Partners
in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (London, 1982) and M. Elliott, Wolfe Tone,
Prophet of Irish Independence (London, 1989).
On all of the eastern powers (i.e. Austria, Russia and Prussia), there is a serious want
of material, though some information can be derived from such works as J.T. Alexander,
Catherine the Great (London, 1989); R. McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801 (Oxford,
1992) and T.C.W. Blanning, Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (London, 1970). On
Turkey, meanwhile, there is S. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan
Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge, MA, 1971). Beyond such works, there are, of course,
plenty of general histories, good examples including C. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy,
1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994); R. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918
(Berkeley, California, 1974); J.G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford,
1973); I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981); C. Cross,
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006); P. Dwyer (ed.),
The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000) and Lynch, J., Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808
(Oxford, 1989). For matters specifically military, meanwhile, see G. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s
Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (London, 1982);
M. Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (Harlow, 2003); F.W. Kagan and
R. Higham (eds.), The Military History of Tsarist Russia (Houndmills, 2002); W. Shanahan,
Prussian Military Reforms, 1786–1813 (New York, 1945) and V.H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars,
177–1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow, 2007). Finally, for a particularly difficult issue con-
fronting the rulers of Austria, see E.H. Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: An
Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (Budapest, 1997).
Regional surveys are not much thicker on the ground. That said, T.C.W. Blanning,
The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802
(Oxford, 1983) and T.C.W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803
(Cambridge, 1974) offer detailed coverage of the Rhineland as does S. Schama, Patriots and
Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1977) in respect of Holland.
All three are models of the genre and it can only be hoped that works of a similar qual-
ity will one day be published in respect of Belgium, Switzerland and the Italian states.
In fairness, however, Belgium may be approached via J. Polasky, Revolution in Brussels,
326 Bibliographical note
1787–1793 (Brussels, 1987) and Naples via H. Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734–1835
(London, 1954) and, more especially, J. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the
European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006). On Italy, in general, meanwhile, see
S. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (London,
1979) and on Germany J.G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation. The Holy Roman Empire as Idea
and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington, IN, 1980) and E. Bahr and T. Saine (eds.), The
Internalised Revolutions: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789–1989 (London,
1992). Finally, such is the importance of Poland in the history of Revolutionary Europe
that it is deeply frustrating that there is no general history of the revolution of 1791–4,
although R. Butterwick, The Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788–1792 (Oxford,
2011) is certainly a helpful addition to the literature; that said, however, the progressive
destruction of the Polish state is covered by Lukowski, J., The Partitions of Poland, 1772,
1793, 1795 (London, 1999).
If the absence of a general study of the Polish Revolution is a major gap in the histo-
riography, another is the equally glaring absence of a general study of popular resistance.
There is, of course, much material on the Vendée and some coverage of the many revolts
that took place in Italy, but otherwise, excellent start though it is, one can only turn to
M. Broers, M., Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and their Pursuers in the Age of
Revolutions (Witney, 2010).
Last but far from least, there is the wider world. Here the literature is at one and the same
time frustrating and copious. Thus, the only work that has ever tried to cover the whole range
of extra-European conflict in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period is P. Fregosi, Dreams
of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War, 1792–1815 (London, 1989). This being anything
but academic in its approach, one can only hope that the subject will be revisited by some other
scholar. Until then, readers can only try to draw together the threads offered by the many regional
surveys and monographs, though they can at least be reassured that these offer a wealth of mate-
rial, the single French colony of Saint Domingue, for example, having had more ink spent on it
than almost any part of Europe other than France herself. Let us begin, then, with the Caribbean.
For a general introduction, see D.B. Gaspar and D.P. Geggus (eds.), A Turbulent Time: The
French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997); for a British perspective,
see M. Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War
against Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987); R. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West-
India Regiments, 1795–1815 (London, 1979) and D.P. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution:
The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–98 (Oxford, 1982); and, finally, for the story
of the birth of Haiti, see D.P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002);
D.P. Geggus and N. Fiering (eds.), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN,
2009); C. Forsdick and C. Hogsbjerg, Toussaint l’Ouverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of
Revolutions (London, 2016); P. Girard, Toussaint l’Ouverture: A Revolutionary Life (New York,
2016) and J. Garrigus, A Struggle for Respect: The Free Coloreds of Saint Domingue (Baltimore,
MD, 1988). Moving east, we come to Egypt, the invasion of which can be examined via
J.C. Herold, Napoleon in Egypt (London, 1963) and, more especially, J. Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt:
Invading the Middle East (Houndmills, 2007). And, finally, moving east again, there is India,
where a start may be made via J. Weller, Wellington in India (London, 1972).
Index
Abarca de Bolea, Pedro, Count of 230 Andria 218

Abbonimonte, Giuseppe 171 Angelucci, Liborio 169
Abercrombie, Sir Ralph 256, 268, 287, 312 Angers 190; battle of 189
Abruzzi 207–8, 218 Anglo-French commercial treaty 1786 15
Abukir 265; bay of 267; first battle of 26; second Anjou 184
battle of 288, 312 Anne, Queen of England 36
Acre (Akko), siege of 267 Antigua 250
Acton, Sir John, sixth Baronet Acton 308 Antwerp 85, 94, 210, 211, 212
Adams, John 311 Aquila 217, 219
Adda, river 130 Aquitaine 72
Addington, Henry 314, 316 Aranda, Count of see Abarca de Bolea, Pedro,
Adige, river 136, 139 Count of
Africa 250, 251, 254, 256, 259, 261, 268, 270 Aranjuez, motín de 241
Aga Mohamed of Persia 305 Arbois 208
Aix-en-Provence 21, 194 Arce 285
Ajaccio 128 Archduke Charles see Charles of Habsburg,
Albert of Saxe-Teschen-Gotha, Duke 83, 85 Archduke
Alexander I of Russia 170 Arcola, battle of 136
Alexander the Great 131, 261, 262 Ardennes 212
Alexandria 262, 266, 312; siege of 268 Ardouin, Beaubrun 258
Algeria 269 aristocracy see nobility
Alkmaar, battle of 288 army, Austrian 3, 35, 53, 56; Croats 37;
Alps 20, 85, 104, 109, 138, 166, 169, 209, desertion 51; discipline 53; engineers 39;
242, 281, 286, 302, 308, 309; Bavarian 307; officer corps 48, 49, 237; quality 42–3,
Maritime 123, 127, 205, 285 50–1, 132, 237; recruitment 50–1, 52, 235–6;
Alsace 21, 25, 109, 113, 185 reforms 237, 238–9; tactics 47
Alvinczy von Borberek, Josef 135, 136, 137, army, British 36, 37, 39, 41, 53, 55, 56; engineers
140, 141 39; expansion 158; foreign troops 158;
Amberg, battle of 133, 134 Highland regiments 37, 168; motivation 55;
America (central) 249, 257 officer corps 49; quality 41; recruitment 53, 157;
America (north) 37, 159 reforms of Duke of York 244; Royal Military
America (south) 257 Academy 244; West-Indian regiments 256
American Revolution see American War of army, French 26, 71, 120; anti-clericalism 142;
Independence amalgame 1793 121; amalgame 1796 128;
American War of Independence 4, 6, 11, 26, 37, artillery 65, 83, 109; Bourbon 141; desertion
41, 44, 47, 74, 108, 130, 151, 152, 155, 249, 66, 93, 282; discipline 93, 207–9, 283, 216;
252, 254 divisional system 122–3; emigration 20, 67;
Ami du Peuple 16 foreign troops 27, 51, 77, 202; foreign troops,
Amiens, peace of 156, 243, 259, 314, 316, 317 Belgian volunteers 162; foreign troops, Swiss
Amity, Franco-American treaty of 311 regiments 17, 51; general staff 45; generals
Amsterdam 7, 96, 287 123, 141–2; infantry 65, 128; light infantry 37,
Ancenis 186 128; militia 40, 873; morale 282; motivation
Anderson, Matthew S. 56 141, 142; mutinies 283; officer corps 17, 49,
328 Index
67–8, 123; quality 106–7, 121; recruitment Auckland, Lord see Eden, George, first Earl of
40, 51, 69; reforms 1789–92 69; reforms after Auckland
Seven Years’ War 7, 37; and the Revolution Augereau, Pierre 51, 129, 136, 142
17, 20, 66, 68, 69, 142; Royal Guard 17; Augsberg 133, 134
strength 66, 93, 106, 140; supply problems 93, Austria 3, 4, 5, 6, 21, 22, 25, 26, 36, 37, 49, 82,
207; tactics 84, 85, 113, 121–2, 14 92, 99, 100, 127, 138, 140, 150, 151, 161, 170,
army, Hessian 43–4 209, 264, 275, 276, 277, 278, 309, 316, 317;
army, Ottoman: artillery 264; irregulars 264; army see army, Austrian; bankozettel 235;
janissaries 264, 265; Nizâm-i-Çedid 264, 267; Church 301; failure of reform 243; foreign
sipahis 264, 265 policy 4, 22, 23, 26, 27; Martinovic conspiracy
army, Portuguese 40–1 155, 230; Military Frontier 235, 236; national
army, Prussian 3, 5, 35, 56, 63, 232; desertion debt 235; reforms under Francis II 234–9, 243,
51, 55; fusiliers 37, 232; general staff 44; horse 245; resistance to conscription 235; secret
artillery 39; infantry 37, 41–2; motivation 54–5; police 301; system of government 236, 237–8;
officer corps 48; quality 41–2; recruitment 51, unrest under Joseph II 5, 52, 148–9, 231–2;
52, 53; reforms 234 war with Ottoman Empire 1787–89 5, 22; war
army, Russian 3, 35, 37, 43, 46–7, 48, 51, 53, of the Second Coalition 279–91, 298, 301–8
56; desertion 51; reforms of Paul I 242–3; Austrian Netherlands 4, 5, 21, 148, 163
tactics 46 Autichamps, Count of see Beaumont, Charles
army, Saxon 44 de, Count of Autichamps
army, Spanish 37, 40, 41, 214; artillery academy Auvergne, the 69, 184, 185
at Segovia 49; condition in 1792 95; officer Avignon 21, 25, 138, 195
corps 49; recruitment 51–2; reforms under Avranches 192
Godoy 239–40; Royal Guard 40, 241; Swiss
regiments 213 Babeuf, François 16, 168
army of the Alps 109 Badajoz, treaty of 310
army of the Centre 81 Baden 284, 305
army of the Coast of La Rochelle 187 Baffi, Pasquale 220
army of Condé 158, 286 Bahamas 250
army of the Eastern Pyrenees 95, 107, 123 Balkans 3, 21, 47, 264, 270, 305, 316
army of Helvetia 281 Ballinamuck 154
army of the Holy Faith 219, 220 Baltic 21
army of the Interior 128, 303, 306 Bamberg 132, 133
army of Italy 26, 123, 127, 128, 129, 142, 167, bandits/brigands 9, 185, 194–5, 202,
169, 206, 207, 281, 286 206, 221
army of the Moselle 93, 109, 124 Barbados 250
army of the North 74, 81, 107, 124, 125, 162, 281 Barbary Corsairs 36, 37
army of Observation/the Danube 281 Barcelona 51, 204, 229
army of the Orient 268, 270, 281, 310 Barère, Bertrand 103, 189
army of Reserve 302 Bari 217
army of the Rhine 109, 113 Barletta 218
army of the Rhine-and-Moselle 127, 131, 132, Barnave, Antoine 19
134, 139 Barras, Paul de 128, 210, 260
army of Rome 219, 279, 281, 284 Bar-sur-Aube 96
army of the Sambre-and-Meuse 124, 131, 132, Barthélemy, François 139
134, 139 Basel 284; treaty of 311
army of the West 188, 193 Basque provinces 203
Arnhem 287 Bassano, battle of 135
Arouet, François 9, 49 Bassett, Richard 142
Arras 103 Bastille, fall of the 1, 18, 67, 149, 172, 187, 306
Artois 113 Batavian Republic: Anglo-Russian invasion
Artois, Count of 20, 21, 189, 193 1799 166, 287, 288; British blockade 164;
Asia 261; Central 277, 305 collaboration 203; constituent assembly
Ath 93 165; constitutions 165, 166; debt 164;
Atlantic Ocean 41, 136, 137, 185, 186, 250, establishment 164; internal divisions 165–6;
251, 258 navy 153; popular support 16; relative success
Aubiers, battle of 194 172; resistance 202
Index 329
battlefield tactics 45–7, 84, 85, 113, 121–2 Blaufarb, Rafe 68, 110
Bauwens, Lieven 211 Blenheim, battle of 38
Bavaria 4, 22, 132, 134, 205, 230, 307 Blérancourt 71
Bavarian exchange 4, 26, 113 Bohemia 132, 132, 236
Baztán, valley 202 Bokhara, Khanate of 305
Beauce 9 Bologna 135, 167, 168, 206
Beauharnais, Hortense de 298 Bonaparte, Joseph 168
Beaulieu, Jean-Pierre de 129, 130, 131 Bonaparte, Lucien 310
Beaumont, Charles de, Count of Autichamps 194 Bonaparte, Napoleon 1, 26, 49–50, 54, 68, 123,
Beaupréau 187 142, 171, 208, 213, 234, 237, 243, 268, 276,
Beccaria, Cesare 9 278, 300, 301; ambition 291; assessment
Belfort 73 of Frederick William III 233; campaign
Belgium 26, 27, 85, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 113, in Holy Land 267; campaign of Marengo
120, 125, 126, 127, 150, 154, 166, 172, 231, 302–4, 305–6; character 129, 142; conquest
241, 278, 280, 300, 307, 310; annexation by of Europe post 1805 320; conquest of Malta
France 163; Church 162, 210; collaboration 27; contribution to French military success
163; constitution of 1789 149; convention, 245; Corsican nationalism 128, 291; and coup
Belgian 163; experience of French occupation of 18 Fructidor 139; drive on Vienna 205;
209–11; National Guard 211; nobility early life 128; and Egyptology 269; escape
162; press 210; provisional assembly 163; from Egypt 268, 288–9; First Consul 194–5,
revolution 1789 148–9; resistance 201, 295–8; foreign assessments 309, 312, 314–15;
289; resistance, passive 202, 203, 210, 211; and Helvetic Confederation 214; invasion
resistance, rising of 1798 201, 212–13, 22; of Egypt 170, 259–67; invasion of Egypt,
under French occupation 160–3 impact of 270; Italian campaign 127, 128–32,
Bell, David A. 64 134–9, 140, 206–7; Italian policy 166–8;
Bellegarde 95, 124 jealousy of Moreau 307; opportunism 290–1;
Bellegarde, Heinrich de 308 overthrow of Directory 289–90; and Peace
Belliard, Agustin 83 of Amiens 314–15, 316–17; peace overtures
Belot, Denis 73, 77, 78, 81 1800 298–9, 304–5; and Saint Domingue 257;
Belsham, William 315 siege of Toulon 109, 128, 142; typical military
Berard, Jean 193 manoeuvres 130
Berbice 312 Bonchamps, Charles, Marquis of 186, 188
Berga 204 Bordeaux 8, 102, 250, 251
Bergzabern, battle of 109 Borghetto, battle of 131
Berkshire 244 Boukman, Dutty 253, 257
Berlaar 212 Boulart, Jean 83, 207, 209, 217, 219
Berlin 7, 42 Boulogne 261
Bern 170 Boulou, battle of 123
Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste 68, 133, 280, 306 Bourbon, Louis de, Prince of Condé 67, 79, 125,
Berruyer, Jean 186 157, 159
Bertaud, Jean-Paul 76, 140, 142 Bourrienne, Louis see Fauvelet de Bourrienne,
Berthier, Alexandre 71, 130, 169, 313 Louis
Beruges 94 Boyen, Ludwig von 234
Best, Geoffrey 65 Brabant 211, 220
Bial, Pierre 19, 68, 71, 78, 161, 202, 209 Brazil 250, 258, 214, 314
Biassou, Georges 254 Breda 96
Biesingen, battle of 109 Bremen 127
Billaud-Varennes, Jacques 103 Brest 85, 136, 313
Billot, Jeannot 254 Bricard, Louis 82, 96, 283
Biron, Duke of see Gontaut de Biron, Armand, Brie 73
Duke of Biron Brissot, Jacques 16, 24, 25, 27, 78, 85, 185
Bisceglie 218 Brissotins 24, 26, 82, 85, 94, 99. 100, 101, 105,
Bitsche 94, 109 148, 188, 194, 254
Black, Jeremy 4, 7 Bristol 250
Black Sea 22, 229 Britain 4, 7, 21, 22, 85, 92, 94, 127, 136, 201,
Blanning, Tim 1, 15, 28, 65, 70, 164, 217, 317 245, 264, 281, 287, 291, 298, 301, 302,
Blau, Felix 160 303, 305, 308; American colonies 2, 3,
330 Index
4; Anglican Church 156; army see army, Campo Formio, treaty of 139, 148, 160, 259,
British; Board of Ordnance 244; Catholic 268, 278, 280, 283, 299, 302, 303, 307
Relief Act 230; Channel Fleet 157; Church- Campredón 205
and-King loyalism 157; Combination Act Canada 9, 311
230, 244; fears of revolution 156, 230; Canning, George 298
fencibles 157; foreign policy 26, 276, 300–4; Cape Colony 259, 312, 314
and French Revolutionary Wars 26, 104–28, Cape Town 259
124–7, 139–40, 155–8, 276–8, 287, 291, 298, Caraffa, Ettore 171
304, 309–14; Glorious Revolution 21; House Caribbean Sea 250, 253, 255, 256, 258, 311
of Commons 314; impact of Irish rebellion Caridad González, José 258
157; Methodism 156; militia 53, 157; naval Carinthia 236
blockade 137; naval mutinies 1797 157; Caritat, Nicolas de, Marquis of Condorcet 24
nobility 48; parliament 155, 244; and Peace Carmagnoles see Volunteers of 1792
of Amiens 315–17; Royal Navy 21, 127, 136, Carniola 236
154, 157, 262, 310; Royal Navy recruitment Carnot, Lazare 28, 103, 104, 111, 120, 121, 128,
157; response to French Revolution 230; 137, 139, 166
revolutionary feeling 156–7; Scottish militia Carvalho e Melo, Sebastão de, Marquis of
riots 156; Speenhamland System 244; Pombal 231
Tories 155; Transport Office 244; Whigs Carraciolo, Francesco 171
155, 243, 315; Volunteers 157–8; West Carrier, Jean-Baptiste 190
Indian colonies 250, 251; working class 156; Carteaux, Jean 113
yeomanry 157–8 Cartwright, John 155
Brittany 14, 69, 72, 189, 192, 296; resistance 94, Caserta 219
184, 185, 193, 195, 298 Cassano, battle of 284
Bro, Louis 131 Castel Rigone 214
Bruges 210 Castelar de Nuch 204
Brune, Guillaume 170, 281, 307 Castiglione, battle of 135
Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel, Charles, Duke of Castile, New 240
63, 79, 81, 113 Castile, Old 240
Brussels 125, 161, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213; Castlebar, battle of 154
Jacobin Club 162 Catalonia 95, 124, 126, 162; popular resistance
Bug, river 22 203–5, 221
Bukovina 5 Catanzaro 218
Bunbury, Henry 287 Cathelineau, Jacques 185, 186, 187, 188
Buonarroti, Filippo 154, 166, 168, 171 Catherine II of Russia 21, 22, 23, 43, 49,
Burgoyne, John 54 113, 152, 243, 264, 305; death 241, 277;
Burgundy 72 participation in First Coalition 277; reaction
Burke, Edmund 155, 201, 205, 298 to French Revolution 228–9
Byzantine empire 5 Catherine the Great see Catherine II
Catholic Army of Brabant 213
Ça ira 64, 65 Cavendish-Bentinck, William, third Duke of
Cádiz 313 Portland 243
Cadoudal, Georges 193 Cephalonia 260
Caen 102 Cestari, Nicola 217
Caeymax, Jean-Baptiste 212 Ceva, battle of 129
cahiers de doléances 12, 181, 185 Cevennes 183
Cahors 76 Ceylon 7, 259, 314
Caiani, Ambrogio 20 Chalons 81; Desmarets Institute 83
Cairo 262, 265, 267, 269, 270, 291, 312; revolts Chamans, Antoine, Count of La Valette 80, 82
265–6, 268 Champagne 72, 82
Calabria 319; revolt 201, 215, 219, 221, 219, 319 Championnet, Jean 170, 171, 215, 216, 217,
Calais 261 218, 279, 285, 286
Caldiero, battle of 136 Champs de Mars 24
Calonne, Charles de 11, 12, 20 Chandler, David 304
Calvi 279 Chanson de l’Oignon 70
Cambacéres, Jean 296 Chant du Départ 70
Camperdown (Kemperduin), battle of 153 Chaptal, Jean 289, 297
Index 331
Chapuis de Tourville, Charles 97 Cockerill, William 211
Charette de la Contrie, François de 185, 186, Cognazzo, Jacopo de 50
190, 191, 193 Coignet, Jean-Roch 303
Charlemagne 306 Cole, Juan 265
Charleroi 123, 125, 210 Collas de la Baronais, Victor 192
Charles I of England 2 Colley, Linda 55
Charles III of Spain 41, 95 Colli, Michelangelo 123
Charles IV of Spain 21. 126, 239, 240, 241, Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie 103
307, 310 Colombia 250
Charles Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar 63 Colombo 258
Charles of Habsburg, Archduke 131, 132, 133, Communailles 108
138, 139, 140, 236, 237, 238, 301, 302 Compiègne 67
Charlet, Etienne 204 Condé 104, 113
Chartres 16 Condé, Prince of see Bourbon, Louis de, Prince
Chartres, Duke of see D’Orléans, Louis-Philippe, of Condé
Duke of Chartres/Orléans Condorcet, Marquis of see Caritat, Nicolas de,
Chasseneuil 94 Marquis of Condorcet
Chastenet, Amand de, Marquis of Puységur 45 Conforti, Francesco 220
Chatillon, battle of 186 conscription 51–2, 94–5
Chauffeurs d’Orgères 9 Constantinople 5, 264, 304
Chemillé 181 Copenhagen, battle of 312, 314
Cherbourg 4, 8, 136 Copts 268
Chesapeake Bay 7 Corato 218
Chester 98 Corbeels, Pieter 212, 213
Chieti 216 Cordeliers club 20, 24, 81
Childs, John 56 Corfu 260, 264
Chiriño, José 258 Cornwall 137
Cholet 191; battle of 109, 188, 189, 190 Cornwallis, Charles, Marquis of 55
Chouans 182, 192–4 Corsica 128, 312
Christophe, Henri 258 Corvisier, André 51, 56, 69
Church, Roman Catholic 9–10, 47, 207, 228, 291 Cosenza 217
Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough 37, 54, 55 Cossacks 38, 286, 287; Don 305
Cirillo, Domenico 171, 220 Cotta, Friedrich 160
Cisalpine Republic 167–8, 171, 202, 206, 284. Courier de l’Armée d’Italie 216
290, 298, 307 Courtrai: battle of 108; rebel attack 212
Cispadane Republic 167, 206 Couthon, Georges 103
Cisrhenan Republic 160 Coxe, William 35
Ciudad Rodrigo 310 Creasy, Edward 65
Civitavecchia, battle of 279 Creveld 159
Clark, Christopher 233 Crimea, Khanate of 5
Clausewitz, Carl von 232, 234 Croats 37
Clavière, Etienne 102 Croix, François de, Count of Clerfayt 63, 108,
Clemenceau, Joseph 187 124, 125
Clerfayt, Count of see Croix, François de, Count Cuba 249, 250, 251, 258, 313
of Clerfayt Cuneo 123
clergy 10 Curaçao 312, 314
Clisson, battle of 189 Curély, Jean 214
Clive, Robert 263 Curtin, Nancy 152
Clonard, Count of see Soto, Serafín de, Count Custine, Adam, Count of 85, 93, 100, 101, 107,
of Clonard 108, 113, 141
Clootz, Anarcharsis 77 Czartoryski, Adam 241
Coalition, First 95, 139, 164, 239, 276, 277;
disunity 113, 120, 140; war of the 278, 319 D’Alembert see Le Rond d’Alembert, Jean
Coalition, Second 215, 220, 276, 295, 298, 300, D’Elbée, Maurice 186, 188
304; disunity 287–8; war of the 170, 315 D’Harville, General see Ursins d’Harville,
Coblenz 134 Louis des,
Cochin China 4 D’Holbach, Paul Thiry, Baron 9
332 Index
D’Orléans, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Chartres/ Dundas, Henry, first Viscount Melville 300
Orléans 64, 83 Dundas, Sir David 41
Dabrowski, Jan 202 Dundee 155
Daendels, Hermann 163, 166 Dunkirk 104, 107, 108, 113
Dagobert de Fontenille, Luc 107, 113 Duphot, Léonard 169
Dalmatia 139 Düsseldorf 131, 134
Damas, Roger de 43, 172, 216, 219, 279, 308 Duthilt, Pierre 162, 286
Danton, Georges 81, 101, 104, 112 Duvernois, Nicolas 69
Danube, river 132, 133, 307
Danzig (Gdansk) 22 East India Company 52, 263
David, Jacques 306 Eden, George, first Earl of Auckland 313
Davidovic, Paul 136 Edinburgh 155
Davis, John 218 Egalité, Louis see D’Orléans, Louis, Duke of
Davout, Nicolas 71 Orléans
Decaen, Charles 76, 131 Egypt 4, 276, 281, 288, 289, 290, 291, 295, 296,
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the 297, 298, 299, 303, 315; invasion of 170,
Citizen 1789 19, 253 259–70, 278, 304, 310, 311; reconquest by
Declaration of the Rights of Man 1793 104 the British 268, 312; under French rule 265;
Defenders 152–3 under Muhamed Ali 268
Dego, battle of 129 Ehrtal, Friedrich von, Elector of Mainz 43
Delacroix, Charles 165 eighteenth-century armies 2, 3, 35–56, 109,
Dellard, Jean-Pierre 76, 95, 97, 112 140; baggage trains 47; cavalry 37–8, 40;
Demerara 312 conscription 51–2; desertion 51; discipline
Den Helder peninsula 287 53–4; engineers 39–40; Freikorps 37, 77;
Denmark 5, 250, 314 general staff 44–5; infantry 51; light infantry
Desaix, Louis 267, 303, 305, 306 37; military academies 40, 49; militia 40, 53,
Deseada 312 73; motivation 54–5; officer corps 47–50;
Désiderade 256 organization 44–5; recruitment 50–3; Royal
Desmoulins, Camille 16, 17, 24, 112 Guards 40; uniforms 36
Despard, Edward 156 eighteenth-century bureaucracies 3, 48
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 258 eighteenth-century cultural life 9–10
Diderot, Denis 9, 10 eighteenth-century fiscal systems 3
Diest 213 eighteenth-century international relations 1, 2, 3
Dijon 305 eighteenth-century monarchies 1, 3
Dill, battle of 132 eighteenth-century, national feeling 55
Dillon, Théobald 74, 75, 79 eighteenth-century navies 2
Dinant 192 eighteenth-century nobility 5, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19,
Dissais 94 22, 35, 40, 43, 47–9, 55, 68, 112, 128, 148,
Djezzar Pasha 267 149, 150, 162, 168, 180, 181, 228, 231, 232,
Dniester, river 22 233, 235, 241, 243, 268, 318
Dol, battle of 189 eighteenth-century public opinion 2
Dominica 250 eighteenth-century warfare 3, 36, 37, 45–6, 53–4
Donassin de la Rochejacquelin, Marie-Louise, eighteenth-century wars 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 35, 39, 40,
Marquise of La Rochejacquelin 186 46, 51, 77, 84, 109, 140, 204
Doppet, François 77, 205 El Arish 267
Dorsch, Anton 160 El-Halabi, Suleiman 268
Down 154 Elba 308
Doyle, William 6, 10, 65, 100, 188 Elefante, Camilo 218, 219
Drenthe 202 Elen, Jan 212
Drouot de Lamarche, François 95 Elliot, Sir Gilbert, first Earl of Minto 236, 288,
Dublin 154 301, 313
Ducos, Roger 296 Ellis, Geoffrey 72
Dugommier, Jacques 123, 124, 126 Embabeh, battle of 165, 269
Dumey, François 282 emigrés 26, 81, 83, 180, 181, 194, 195, 242, 257,
Dumouriez, Charles 26, 40, 63, 65, 70, 78, 81, 277, 285; lands 180
83, 84, 85, 95, 97, 100, 101, 113, 141, 149, Emsley, Clive 157
162, 163 England 2
Index 333
English Channel 136, 261, 263 topographical bureau 121, 128; conscription
English Civil War 98 94, 105–6, 111, 184, 194, 213, 283–4, 295;
enlightened absolutism 2, 40, 167, 228, 231, 245, conscription, resistance 94–5, 106, 184,
Enlightenment 9–10, 49, 150, 167, 185, 239, 194–5, 284, 285; Consulate 192; Constitution
230, 241, 249 of 1791 25, 82, 181; Constitution of 1793
Entrammes, battle of 189 105; Constitution of 1795 13; Constitution
Epinal 67, 181 of 1800 296; Convention 92, 94, 96, 99, 101,
Essequibo 312 102, 103, 104, 111, 120, 126, 128, 151, 163,
Este, Charles 161 164, 184, 255; Council of the 500, 296; Cult
Etampes 182 of Reason 110; Cult of the Supreme Being
Etruria, Kingdom of 307, 308, 312 112; cultural life 10–11; dechristianization
Extremadura 310 110, 111; Directory 27, 127, 137, 140, 153,
Eylert, Rulemann 233 165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 193, 207, 210, 239,
260, 261, 263, 278, 281, 283, 284, 285, 289,
Faipoult, Guillaume 171 290, 291, 295, 296, 311; economy 8, 15, 79,
Famars, battle of 97, 113 100, 127, 182, 289; Edict of Fraternity 85;
Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Louis 261, 297, 305, 306 enragés 100, 105; Estates General 12, 13, 16;
Feldkirch 319; battle of 284 fédérés 79; feudalism 13–14, 19, 20, 180, 181;
Ferdinand III of Tuscany 126, 220, 221 foreign legions 27, 77, 120; foreign policy
Ferdinand IV of Naples 170, 171, 279, 280, 308 85, 166; General Subsistence Committee
Ferrara 135, 167, 168, 206 111; industry 15; industry, silk 103; industry,
Ferrol 313 war 111; international situation 6–7, 100;
feudalism 21, 48; France 13–14, 19, 20; Poland 150 judiciary 10; Law of Hostages 285, 296; Law
Feuillant club 24, 25, 26, 69, 102 of the Maximum 101, 104, 105, 127; Law
Feusisberg 214 of Suspects 105; local government 70, 296;
Figueras, battle of 126 maréchaussée 9, 194; military academies
Flanders 14, 107, 108, 113, 182, 212, 213, 249 128; mobilization of popular support for
Fleurus, battle of 124, 126, 161 war effort 110; monarchy 70, 99; National
Florence 221; treaty of 308 Assembly 18, 19, 21, 26, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
Florida 311 80, 152, 181, 183, 253; National Gendarmery
Floridablanca, Count of see Moniño, José, 187; National Guard 18, 19, 24, 66, 70, 71,
Count of Floridablanca 72, 73, 74, 79, 99, 101, 104, 106, 123, 183,
Flour War 9 184, 187; National Guard of Calvados 76;
Folard, Jean de 45, 46, 47 National Guard of Paris 79; natural frontiers
Fonseca Pimentel, Eleonora de 171, 218, 220 27, 85, 142, 163, 314, 316; navy 7, 17, 20,
Fontenay le Comte 188, 194 136, 308; navy, Mediterranean fleet 137, 279;
Forli 206 nobility 8, 12, 16, 17, 112, 180; parlements
Forrest, Alan 71, 72, 74, 169, 202 10; peasantry see rural populace; political
Forster, Georg 160, 163 clubs 12, 20, 24, 25, 26, 69, 81, 70, 100, 102,
Fouché, Joseph 306 106, 110, 111, 182, 285; police committees
Fournier, Saint André 183 101; poor relief 9, 182; population growth 8,
France 1, 6, 10, 21, 22, 25, 27, 44, 76, 92, 12; poverty 9, 13, 14, 15, 182; press 12, 16,
98, 99, 110, 114, 120, 127, 128, 156, 164; 296; propaganda 110; religious orders 182;
administration 10; ancien régime 13, 128, représentatives en mission 101, 112; Republic
185; armées révolutionnaires 105; army see 85, 92, 95, 104, 106, 113, 141; Revolutionary
army, French; art confiscations 138; artisans Tribunal 101; royalism 139; rural populace
14, 100; assignats 79, 100, 111, 127, 162, 13, 19, 180–3; sans culottes 79, 80, 99, 100,
182, 209, 284; Atlantic coast 182; banditry/ 101, 127, 142, 182; strategic situation 96, 120;
brigandage 9, 185, 194–5, 289; bourgeoisie taxation 14, 181, 296; Thermidorian regime
8, 181; Church 11, 12, 16, 19, 110, 111, 27; Third Estate 13, 15, 16; Third Estate
112, 180, 183, 194, 296; Church lands 180, composition 15; under Louis XVI 4, 6–15;
181, 182, 185; Civil Constitution of the unrest 1789–93 182–3; unrest under Bourbons
Clergy 19, 25, 183; Civil Constitution of the 8; Vendémiaire uprising 128; war aims 27
Clergy, resistance 183–4; colonies 4, 8, 127, Franche-Comté 18
250–9, 310; Committee of Public Safety 27, Francis II of Austria 25, 26, 209, 234, 236, 237,
103, 104, 106, 111, 120, 121, 126, 137, 154, 280, 298, 304, 307, 308
184, 188, 194; Committee of Public Safety, François, Charles 64
334 Index
Frankfurt 85, 98, 132 the Tuileries 79–80, 99, 100, 154; Terror
Frederick II of Prussia 3, 5, 21, 22, 38, 39, 41, 105, 112, 126, 213, 289, 296; Thermidorian
42, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 54, 55, 140, 150 reaction 126, 194; Volunteers of 1791 24,
Frederick Augustus III of Saxony 23 27, 71, 73–5, 77; Volunteers of 1792 27, 65,
Frederick the Great see Frederick II 75–6, 77, 79, 93, 120, 182
Frederick William I of Prussia 48 French Revolutionary Wars 38, 122, 128, 243,
Frederick William II of Prussia 5, 21, 22, 23, 63, 244, 249, 259, 276, 317; campaigns 60–5, 74–5,
82, 126, 233 77, 81–5, 95–9, 104, 107–10, 120, 123–39,
Frederick William III of Prussia 233, 234, 305, 315 186–90, 193, 255–9, 265, 267–8, 284–7,
freemasonry 229, 230 302–3, 307, 312; nature 1, 27–8; origins 23–6;
Fréjus 289, 290 outbreak 26; reasons for French survival 1793
French departments: Côte d’Or 181; Deux 112–13; reasons for French triumph 1794–97
Sevres 191; Gard 183; Haute Garonne 110; 140–2; size of armies 140
Haute Vienne 94; Indre-et-Loire 194; Loire- Freytag, Wilhelm von 107
Atlantique 184; Lot 76; Nièvre 181; Nord Friends of the People 155
181; Pas-de-Calais 93; Seine-et-Marne 73, Froidefontaine 73
77; Seine-et-Oise 182; Tarn-et-Garonne 183; Frotté, Louis de la 193
Vendée 184, 191 Furet, François 12
French field armies: The Alps 109; The Centre
81; The Coast of La Rochelle 187; The Gaeta 279
Eastern Pyrenees 95, 107, 123; Helvetia 281; Galicia (Austrian province) 235, 236
The Interior 128, 303; Italy 26, 123, 127, 128, Galicia (Spanish province) 229
129, 142, 167, 169, 206, 207, 281, 286; The Galdi, Matteo 171
Moselle 93, 108, 124; The North 74, 81, 109, García, Joaquín 254
124, 125, 162, 281; observation/the Danube Garda, Lake 131
281; The Orient 268, 270, 281, 310; reserve Gardanne, Gaspard 136
302; The Rhine 109, 113; The Rhine-and- Garonne, river 194
Moselle 127, 131, 132, 134, 139; Rome 219, Gascony 18, 69, 72, 289
279, 281, 284; The Sambre-and-Meuse 124, Gelderland 202
131, 132, 134, 139; The West 188, 193 Genet, Edmond 229
French Revolution 1, 4, 7, 13, 23, 26, 35, 38, Geneva 319
42, 47, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 85, 92, Genoa 148, 280, 281, 284, 285, 286; siege of 302
99, 100, 104, 111, 113, 120, 122, 140, 141, George III of Britain 22, 156, 298, 313, 315
149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 201, Georgia 305
220, 238, 231, 232, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, Gerbasio, Emerico 217
259, 264, 270, 299, 301, 302, 308, 316, 319; Germany 5, 26, 45, 98, 113, 120, 127, 134, 135,
abolition of slavery 25; coup of 18 Brumaire 138, 142, 159, 166, 200, 202, 236, 237, 249,
290, 299, 306, 315; coup of 18 Fructidor 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 298, 303, 304, 305,
139, 165, 166, 194, 210, 259, 260, 276, 278, 307, 314, 316, 317
283; coup of 30 Prairial 285; elections 19, Gerona, province of 203
82, 139; emigration 20, 67; events of July Ghent 210, 212
1789 17–18, 67, 149; execution of Louis Gibbon, David 9
XVI 85, 92; failure to satisfy rural populace Gibraltar 262, 312, 317
180–3; feast of the federation of the National Gioia, Melchiore 168
Guard 79; federalist revolt 102–5, 128; fêtes Girardon, Pierre 95, 108, 161, 208
révolutionnaires 66; flight to Varennes 20, Girault, Philippe 64, 69, 93, 98, 160
67; France declared republic 82; Grande Peur Gizeh, pyramids of 165
18–19, 181; impact on France 180–3; impact Glorious First of June, battle of the 136, 137
on international relations 21; initiation by Gneisenau, August von 234
Third Estate 16; insurrection in Paris, April Godart, Roch 93, 134
1796 127; invasion of Tuleries 20 June 1792 Godoy, Manuel de, Prince of the Peace 239,
79; Levée-en-masse 105–6, 140; march on 240, 241, 244, 310, 311
Versailles 20, 180; massacre of Champ de Goethe, Johann 63, 98, 201
Mars 24, 26; military innovations 35, 69, 140; Gogel, Isaac 166
overthrow of Brissotins 101–2; overthrow Gohier, Louis 260
of Montagnards 126; resistance 180–95; Gontaut de Biron, Armand, Duke of Biron 74, 187
September massacres 81, 154; storming of Good Hope, Cape of 7
Index 335
Gorizia 236 Highlands of Scotland 230
Gorsel 282 Hispaniola 251
Gouge, Olympe de 111 Hoche, Lazare 109, 113, 121, 137, 141, 153,
Gouvernet, Count of see Tour du Pin, Jean de 191, 193
la, Count of Gouvernet Hoensbroeck César de 149
Gouvion de Saint Cyr, Laurent de 286 Hoffmann, Josef 160
Gorée 312 Hohenlinden, battle of 307, 309, 317
Graham, Sir Thomas 130 Holland see Batavian Republic/United
Grattan, Henry 152 Provinces
Graz 269 Holy Land see Palestine
Greece 260 Holy Roman Empire 5, 235, 277, 305, 306, 307;
Grenada 250, 256 diet 149
Grenville, Lord see Grenville, William, first Hondschoote, battle of 107
Baron Grenville, Hood, Sir Samuel 103
Grenville, William, first Baron Grenville 276, Houchard, Jean 107, 108, 113, 141
287, 288, 300, 313, 315, 319 Howe, Richard, Earl 136
Grey, Sir Charles 255 Hughes, Michael 209
Gribeauval artillery system 7, 39 Hugues 255, 256
Griffith, Paddy 65, 120 Humbert, Jean 154
Grolman, Carl von 234 Hume, David 9
Guadeloupe 7, 250, 255, 256 Hungary 21, 38, 52, 155, 207, 231, 232, 234,
Guerrieri, Guillermo 214 235, 236, 241; diet 237
Guibert, Jacques, Count of 42, 45, 47, 83 Huningue 134
Guignard, François, Count of Saint Priest 45 Huy 201
Guise 106
Gustavus III of Sweden 5, 21, 23, 231 Ile-Bourbon 259
Gustavus Adolphus 39 Ile-de-France 259, 262
Guyana 127, 139, 210, 314 Ile de Rhé 193
Guyanas, the 250 India 4, 259, 261, 262, 263, 305, 313
Guyenne 69 Indian Ocean 262
Gy 208 Indonesia 259
Industrial Revolution 250
Habsburg dynasty 37 Informe sobre la ley agraria 140
Habsburg Empire see Austria Ingelmunster 212
Haddick, Joseph von 125 Ingoldstädt 134
Hadrian 52 Inn, river 303
Hamilton, Emma, Lady 215 Inner Austria 236
Hamilton, Sir William 309 Ionian Islands 277, 315; see also Cephalonia;
Hampson, Norman 10 Corfu; Republic of the Seven Islands; Xante
Hannibal 306 Ireland 27, 156, 157, 172, 230, 313; Catholics
Hanover 314, 315 151, 152; Church 153; expedition to
Harcourt, William 127 Bantry Bay 136–7, 153; inclusion in county
Harris, James, first Earl of Malmesbury 312, 316 militia 53; penal laws 151; Protestants 151,
Hasselt, battle of 213 153; Protestants, Presbyterians 152, 153;
Hawkesbury, Lord see Jenkinson, Robert, second recruitment to British army 53, 15; revolt
Earl of Liverpool, of 1798 148, 151, 153–4; sectarian tension
Hébert, Jacques 16, 112 152–3; Ulster 152, 153; unrest, pre-1789
Hédouville, Joseph 257 151–2; yeomanry 153
Helldorff, J.M. von 44 Istria 139, 236
Heliopolis, battle of 268 Italy 120, 127, 129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138,
Helvetic Confederation 214 142, 154, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 184,
Helvetic Republic 169, 213, 307 194, 195, 201, 205, 206, 207, 214, 219, 220,
Hérault de Séchelles, Marie-Jean 103 221, 249, 259, 260, 264, 266, 278, 280, 281,
Herentals 212 282, 283, 284, 286, 288, 290, 291, 296, 297,
Herzberg, Ewald von 22 299, 302, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312,
Hesdin 67 316, 317, 319; Church 168; nobility 268;
Heylen, Louis 212 popular resistance 202, 206, 214–21, 385
336 Index
Jacobin club 20, 24, 99, 100, 102, 106, 110 La Tremblaye, battle of 188
Jacobinism 139, 163, 182, 219, 220, 277, 278, La Unión, Count of see Fermín de Carvajal,
290, 300, 306 Luis, Count of La Unión
Jaffa (Tel Aviv) 267 La Valette, Count of see Chamans, Antoine,
Jamaica 250, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257 Count of La Valette
Jannin, Jean-Claude 208 Laborde, François de 50
Java 259 Lafayette, Marquis of see Motier, Marie-Joseph
Jemappes, battle of 83–5, 108 de, Marquis of Lafayette
Jenkinson, Robert, second Earl of Liverpool 281 Lambert, Henri 134
Jeumont 124 Lambusart, battle of 125
Jews 53, 151, 168, 169, 235, 241, 291 Lamoral, Charles, Prince of Ligne
John of Habsburg, Archduke 307 Landau 109
Joliclerc, François-Xavier 73, 191, 207, 208 Landrecies 124
Jomini, Antoine 109 Languedoc 180
Joseph I of Portugal 230 Lannes, Jean 73, 297
Joseph II of Austria 4, 21, 43, 148; domestic Lanz, Catherina 205
policy 4, 52, 148; foreign policy 4, 5 Laon 181
Joseph of Habsburg, Archduke 302 Larévellière-Lépeaux, Louis see Révellière-
Josias, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld 94, 104, Lépeaux, Louis de la
108, 113, 124, 125, 161 Latrille de Lorençez, Guillaume 73, 95, 123
Joubert, Barthélemy 137, 285, 286, 290 Lauberg, Carlo 171
Jourdan, Jean-Baptiste 108, 113, 123, 124, 125, Laukhard, Friedrich 63
126, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 141, 281, 283, Lauriston, Jacques 316
284, 285 Lauzun, Duke of see Gontaut de Biron, Armand,
Jovellanos, Gaspar de 240, 241 Duke of Biron
Jullien, Marc 216 Le Mans, battle of 189–90
Le Quesnoy 104, 108, 113
Kaiserslautern 131; battle of 109 Le Rond d’Alembert, Jean 9, 10
Kalckreuth, Friedrich von 98 League of Armed Neutrality 313, 314
Kant, Immanuel 9 Lebrun, Charles 102
Kehl 131, 134 Lebrun, Pierre 296
Kellermann, François de 64, 65, 81, 109 Leeward Islands 250
Kléber, Jean-Baptiste 188, 189, 190, 268 Lefebvre, François 71, 132
Knight, Roger 243, 244 Lefebvre, Georges 14, 16, 316, 317
Knights of Malta see Knights of Saint John Lejeune, Louis 306
Knights of Saint John 278, 304, 315 Lemaistre, Joseph 319
Kolin, battle of 65 Leoben 139, 319; preliminaries of 139, 148
Kollontaj, Hugo 150 León, Pauline 111
Koran 261, 291 Leopold II of Austria 6, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 150
Kosciuszko, Tadeusz 151 Les Sables d’Olonne 187
Kossmann, Ernst 166, 211 Lescure, Marquis of see Salgues, Louis de,
Kunersdorf, battle of 65 Marquis of Lescure
Kutchuk-Kainarje, treaty of 5 Leuthen, battle of 54
Küttner, Christian 318 Lewis, Gwynne 15, 16
Liège, Archbishopric of 163; city 161;
L’Arcahaie, battle of 256 revolution 148–9
L’Ouverture, Toussaint 254, 255, 256, 257, 270 Ligne, Prince of see Lamoral, Charles,
La Harpe, Fréderic 170 Prince of Ligne
La Jaunaye, convention of 191 Ligugé 94
La Junquera, battle of 124 Ligurian Republic 284, 307
La Montagne 205 Lisbon 310
La Rochejacquelin, Marquis of see Vergier, Lille 67, 74, 75
Henri de, Marquis of La Rochejacquelin Limoges 108
La Rochejacquelin, Marquise of see Donassin de Limousin 19, 184
la Rochejacquelin, Marie-Louise, Marquise of Lindet, Robert 103, 111
La Rochejacquelin Liverpool 250
La Rochelle 8, 85, 136, 181, 187, 285 Livorno 269, 279
Index 337
Loano, battle of 127, 128 Malmesbury, Lord see Harris, James, first Earl of
Loches 194 Malmesbury 312
Locke, John 152 Malplaquet, battle of 38
Lockman, Zachary 270 Malta 262, 265, 278, 302, 304, 309, 310, 312,
Lodi, battle of 130, 131 315, 317
Loire, river 94, 109, 184, 185, 188, 189, Mamelukes 263, 265, 269, 270
190, 192 Mannheim 126, 127
Louisiana 310, 311, 312 Mantes 181
Lombardy 139, 148, 167, 201, 205, 207, 220, Mantua 131, 135, 137, 138, 141, 283, 284
235, 280, 286 Marat, Jean 16, 81, 101
Lomenie de Brienne, Etienne de 7, 11, 12 Marengo, battle of 237, 302, 304, 306, 317;
Lonato, first and second battles of 135 campaign of 305, 307
London 16, 27 Marescot, Armand de 74
London Corresponding Society 155, 156, 230 Maria-Theresa of Austria 50, 150
London, preliminaries of 314 Marianborn 98
Longwy 67, 81 Maria-Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples
Lons-le-Saulnier 106 278, 280, 309
Lorraine 109 Marie-Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France
Louis XIV of France 6, 7, 11, 27 6, 8, 10, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 79, 80, 105,
Louis XV of France 11 180, 230, 278
Louis XVI of France 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, Mariegalante 312
19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 67, 79, 80, 85, 92, 99, 100, Marlborough, Duke of see Churchill, John, Duke
180, 229, 230, 253 of Marlborough
Louis XVIII of France 27, 300, 301, 304, 305 Marmont, Marshal see Viesse de Marmont,
Louvain 212; University of 138 Auguste
Low Countries 26 Marronage 253
Luçon 187 Marseillaise 64, 70, 180
Lunéville, treaty of 307, 308, 317 Marseilles 19, 102, 103
Luxembourg 148 Martinique 250, 312
Lynn, John 65, 75, 76, 84 Martinovic conspiracy 155
Lyons 14, 19, 111; Hôtel des Celestins 305; Martinovic, Ignacs 155, 230
participation in federalist revolt 102, 103, Mas Deu, battle of 95, 129
104, 105, 109, 305; silk-weavers’ support for Massa, Saverio 171
Jacobinism 182 Masséna, André 73, 129, 130, 136, 142, 281,
284, 286, 313
Maastricht 96, 213 Maubeuge 104, 108
Macdonald, Etienne 68, 83, 171, 218, 219, 281, Maupeou, René de 6
284, 285 Mauritius see Ile-de-France
Machecoul 184, 186 McGrew, Roger 241
Mack, Karl von, Baron 49, 237, 238, 279 McPhee, Peter 9
Madrid 204, 240, 312 Meath 154
Magnano, battle of 284 Mediterranean Sea 136, 137, 139, 163, 262,
Mahratha Confederation 263 263, 278, 281, 304, 309, 312, 317
Main, river 133, 134 Meerhout 213
Maine 184, 192 Melas, Michael, Baron von 284, 302
Mainz 131, 132, 159; garrison of 105, 18; Meléndez Valdés, Juan 240
Jacobin club see Society of Friends of Liberty Menin 108
and Equality; Rhenish-German National Menorca 158, 215, 312, 314
Convention 160; siege of 1793 98, 105, Menou, Jacques de 268
188; siege of 1795–6 126, 127; Society of Messina, Straits of 219
Friends of Liberty and Equality 160; surrender Metz 67
104, 160; under French occupation 160; Meulemans, Albert 211, 212
University 160 Meuse, river 97, 212
Mainz, Elector of see Ehrtal, Friedrich von Mexico, Gulf of 310
Maitland, Sir Thomas 256 Mezeau 94
Malacca 312, 314 Middle Ages 228
Malaysia 259 Mignovillard 108
338 Index
Migueletes 203–4 Naples 170, 171, 215, 269, 279, 291; falls to
Milan 127, 130, 138, 167, 168, 170, 171, 202, Cardinal Ruffo 220; revolt of January 1799
269, 278, 302, 305 216–17; Royal Hospice for the Poor 216;
Mincio, river 131 University of 171
Minto, Lord see Elliot, Sir Gilbert, first Earl of Naples, bay of 279
Minto Naples, gulf of 281
Mirabeau, Count of see Riqueti, Honoré, Count Naples, Kingdom of 92, 139, 154, 170, 308,
of Mirabeau 309; see also Parthenopean Republic army
Miranda, Francisco de 95, 250 279; Calabria 201, 215, 219, 221, 219, 319;
Mississipi, river 310 Church 216, 21; famine 1767 215; French
Mockendorf 133 occupation 170, 216; Jacobinism 155; navy
Modena 168 171; participation in war of the first coalition
Modena, Duchy of 167 278; participation in war of the Second
Mohamed 166 Coalition 278–80, 308; popular resistance
Moiret, Joseph 269 216–20; popular unrest 215–16
Mondovi, battle of 129, 134 Napoleon see Bonaparte, Napoleon
Moncey, Bon-Adrien de 73, 124 Napoleonic Wars 38
Moniño, José, Count of Floridablanca Navarre 124, 203
229, 230 Necker, Jacques 10, 12, 17, 18
Mons 74, 83, 210 Neerwinden, battle of 97, 113
Montagnards 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 126, Nelson, Horatio 215, 220, 267, 278, 279
141, 190 Neresheim 134; battle of 133, 134
Montauban 183 Nessler, David 251
Monteleone 217 Neumarkt 133
Montenotte, battle of 129, 130, 134 Nevis 250
Montesano 217 New Orleans 310
Montesquiou, Baron de see Secondat, Baron de Newbury 2
la Brède et de Montesquieu, Charles Ney, Michel. 68, 133, 142
Montesquiou-Fézensac, Anne-Pierre, Nice 85, 104, 109, 148
Marquis of 85 Nidwalden 213, 214
Montgolfier brothers 125 Nile, battle of the 215, 267
Montpellier 102 Nile, river 265, 315
Montréjeau, battle of 194 Nîmes 183
Montreuil, battle of 187 nobility 35, 47–9, 55, 228, 231; Austrian 235
Moorsele 162 (see also Belgian, Hungrian); Belgian 148,
Moravia 236 162; British 48, 243; Corsican 128; French 8,
Moreau, Jean 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 285, 12, 16, 17, 19, 68, 112, 180, 181; German 43;
290, 302, 307, 313 Hungarian 232, 235; Italian 168, 268; Polish 5,
Mortefontaine, treaty of 312 22, 149, 150; Portuguese 40, 231; Prussian 233;
Moscati, Pietro 167 Russian 48, 49; Spanish 241; Venetian 318
Moscow 229 Noguès, Antoine 73, 77, 93, 95
Motier, Marie-Joseph de, Marquis of Lafayette Noot, Hendrik van der 142, 162
24, 25, 70, 81 Nore, anchorage 157
Mount Tabor, battle of 267 Normandy 180, 184, 185, 192, 193
Mouscron, battle of 124 North Sea 277, 287
Munich 307 Norway 2
Murad Bey 265, 267 Novi, battle of 295–6
Murat, Joachim 297, 308 Novikov, Nicolai 229
Mustafa Pasha 267 Nozeroy 108
Muy 195 Nuns 11
Mysore (Mysuru) 263; Second Mysore War 263; Nuremberg 132
Third Mysore War 263
Ogé, Vincent 253
Naab, river 133 Olavide, Pablo de 230
Namur 125, 161; area of 209 Oneglia 123, 154
Nancy 67, 71 Orange, house of 164, 165
Nantes 8, 187, 190, 250, 251; Vendéen defeat 188 Oranges, War of the 241, 310
Index 339
Orbitello 279 Peace, Prince of the see Godoy, Manuel de,
Osorio y Vigil, Alvaro, Marquis of Santa Cruz Prince of the Peace
de Marcenado 45 Peep-o’Day Boys 152
Ostrach, battle of 284, 302 Pellenberg, battle of 97
Ottoman Empire 2, 4, 5, 7, 21, 22, 23, 36, 113, Pelleport, Charles de 110
150, 170, 229, 259, 264, 270, 291, 304, 310, Peninsula, Iberian 310
314, 317; armed forces 264; navy 264; Porte 22; Pepe, Guglielmo 218
Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) 5, 264; Russo- Perignon, Cathérine-Dominique de 286
Turkish War (1787–92) 5, 22, 150, 264, 277 Perpignan 67, 95, 104, 107, 111, 113
Oudenarde, battle of 38 Perrin, Claude 73
Oudinot, Nicolas 73 Persia 4, 277, 305
Overmeer 212 Peru 249
Ozu Kusatmasi (Ochakiv), siege of 45 Peter I of Russia 48, 152
Peter III of Russia 43
Pacific Ocean 259 Peter the Great see Peter I of Russia
Padua 269; circular of 23, 25 Petiet, Claude 140
Pagano, Francesco 171 Pétion, André 258
Paget, Arthur 309, 319 Pétion, Jerome 79
Paine, Thomas 152, 155 Petit Trianon 8
Palatinate 159 Peyrestortes, battle of 107
Palermo 215, 288, 309 Pezza, Michele 217, 220
Palestine 267 Pfeil, Tom 164
Panin, Nikita 229, 305 Phillipines 259
Paoli, Pasquale 128 philosophes 10, 103
Papal States 51, 134, 137, 148 Phipps, Ramsey 73
Pape, Friedrich 160 Piacenza 130
Papillon, Jean-François 254 Piave, river 138
Paradisi, Giovanni 167 Picard, Elie 194
Paris 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, Picardy 64, 113
45, 65, 67, 72, 79, 81, 82, 85, 92, 97, 98, 99, Pichegru, Jean 109, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131,
100, 102, 103, 104, 112, 128, 131, 132, 149, 139, 141, 142
153, 154, 158, 161, 162, 163, 167, 170, 180, Picornell conspiracy 155
185, 188, 193, 210, 211, 228, 252, 253, 254, Piedmont 92, 129, 148, 201, 221, 278, 280, 281,
255, 259, 260, 261, 269, 270, 278, 285, 289, 284, 286, 298
290, 297, 298, 300, 301, 304, 305, 306, 307, Pignatelli, Francesco, Prince of Strongoli 216
311, 314; armée révolutionnaire 105; Barrière Pillnitz, declaration of 23, 25
Neuve de Saint Martin 82; Commune 80, 99, Pion de Loche, Antoine 94, 106
103, 126, 127; Carrousel, Place du 79; Hôtel Pionsat 82
de Ville 126; Invalides, Les 18; Louvre, palace Pirmasens 43; first battle of 109
of the 1238; Notre Dame, cathedral of 110; Pitt, William 22, 127, 243–4, 301, 302, 316;
Notre Dame des Feuillants, convent of 24; resignation 313–14
Palais Royale 17; Place-Royale section 106; Pitt, William, government 13, 244; campaigns
Rue Chantereine 289; Rue Saint Antoine 80; in West Indies 255; peace talks 300,
Rue Saint Honoré 24; Rue Saint Martin 82; 304; policy in respect of French royalism
sections 99, 111, 127; Temple prison 80; war 300; repressive domestic policy 156, 230,
industry 111 300; subsidies 276; withdraws fleet from
Parlement de Paris 12 Mediterranean 139
Parma, Duchy of 69 Pius VI, Pope 25, 135, 138, 169
Parthenopean Republic 170–2, 284, 298, 308, Plassey, battle of 263
318; popular resistance 217–19; revolt of Po, river 130, 138
Cardinal Ruffo 219–20 Poitiers 94
Pau 73 Poitou 71, 184
Paul I of Russia 229, 244, 263, 276, 287, 288, Poland 2, 5, 7, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 38, 126,
312, 314; assassination 243; personality 154, 172, 301, 304, 317; anti-semitism 151;
241; reformism 241–3; and war of Second army 150, 151; conspiracies post-1795 151;
Coalition 277–8, 287–8, 301–5 constitution of 1791 22, 150; eighteenth-
Pavia 131, 205, 206 century 150; feudalism 150; Great Sejm 150;
340 Index
Henrician articles 149; Jews 151; monarchy regiments and other military units, Austrian:
149, 150; liberum veto 5, 149; nobility 5, 22, legion of Michaellowitz 161
150; partitions 1772 4, 5, 6, 52, 150; partitions regiments and other military units, British:
1792 113, 150; partitions 1795 151; revolution Black Watch (i.e. Forty-Second Regiment of
1, 21, 22, 23, 148, 149–51; Sejm 149, 150 Foot) 37; Connaught Rangers (i.e. Eighty-
Polaniec, proclamation of 151 Eighth Regiment of Foot) 158; Queen’s
Polish Revolution see Poland, Revolution Germans (i.e. Ninety-Seventh Regiment of
Pombal, Marquis of see Carvalho e Melo, Foot) 158; Sixtieth Regiment of Foot 158
Sebastião, Marquis of Pombal Regiments and other military units, French:
Pondicherry (Puducherry) 259, 263, 312 Allobrogian Legion 77; American Company
Pont de Bar 204 190; Batavian Legion 163; Brie 69; Colonel-
Pontfarcy 181 General 68; Dillon 68; Eleventh Chasseurs à
Port-au-Prince 253, 256, 257 Cheval 78; French Guards 17, 71, 109; Forty-
Portland, Duke of see Cavendish-Bentinck, Third Line 297; Fourth Hussars 108; German
William, third Duke of Portland Legion 77, 187; La Perche 64; Legion of
Portugal 2, 92, 276, 314; army 40–1; Franco- Montesquiou see Allobrogian Legion; Médoc
Spanish invasion 1762 40; nobility 40; war 68; Orléans 93; Polish Auxiliary Legion 202;
with Spain 1801 241, 310 Royal 73; Royal Italian 73; Royal Maritime
Potemkin, Grigory 5 68; Seventh Hussars 214; Soissonais 71; Swiss
Potocki, Stanislas 150 Guards 77, 80, 180, 187, 213; Thirtieth Line
Potsdam 27, 45, 53 297; Thirty-First Line 194; Thirty-Second
Prats, Miquel de 203 Line 136; Thirty-Seventh Line 106; Ninety-
Prats de Mollo 205 Sixth Line 297; Volunteers of the Aube 208;
Price, Richard 155 Volunteers of the Ardêche 73; Volunteers of
Prieur, Pierre 103 Basse-Pyrenées 73; Volunteers of the Drôme
Prieur-Duvernois 103, 104 73; Volunteers of the Gers 73; Volunteers
Pro Aris et Focis 149 of Haut Rhin 73; Volunteers of Haute
Provence 194, 195 Pyrenées 73; Volunteers of Haute Saône
Provera, Giovanni, Marquis of 137 208; Volunteers of the Jura 73; Volunteers
Prussia 3, 5, 6, 7, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 37, 42, 92, of Loiret 76; Volunteers of the Meuse 73;
100, 150, 151, 276, 277, 278, 298, 301, 304, Volunteers of the Var 73
313, 314, 316, 317; army see army, Prussian; Reims 83
domestic affairs 21, 232–3; failure of reform Reinemann, Alan 168
243; foreign policy 5, 22, 26, 233; Military Reinhard, Charles 220
Society 234; system of government 233 Rémusat, Clare de 262
Puerto Rico 250; Aguadilla uprising 258 Rennes 182
Pugachev revolt 229 Republic of the Seven Islands 278, 315
Puigcerda 304 Reubell, Jean 27, 166, 167
Puisaye, Joseph 185, 186, 193 Réunion see Ile-Bourbon
Puységur, Marquis of see Chastenet, Amand de, Révellière-Lépeaux, Louis de la 27, 166, 167, 210
Marquis of Puységur Reveillon, Jean-Baptiste 15
Pyramids, battle of the see Embabeh, battle of 165 Rhine, river 20, 27, 85, 98, 125, 131, 134, 139,
Pyrenees 20, 73, 85, 95, 124, 201, 203, 204, 209, 159, 164, 202, 203, 208, 209, 280, 284, 285,
221, 230, 310 302, 307
Rhineland 26, 27, 67, 85, 92, 95, 98, 100, 104,
Quasdanovic, Peter von 135 109, 113, 120, 126, 127, 131, 139, 148, 163,
Quebec 45 166, 172, 206, 277, 280, 310; collaboration
Qusseir 262 160, 161; experience of French occupation
Quiberon, invasion 193 162, 208–9; pre-1792 159; resistance to
French rule 201, 203, 221
Radischev, Alexander 229 Rhodes 267
Ramillies, battle of 38 Ricardos, Antonio 95, 107, 123
Rebmann, Georg 154 Riel, Pierre 93
Red Sea 262, 267 Riesbeck, Johann 43, 54, 159
Reding, Alois von 213 Rigaud, André 254, 255, 257, 258
Reflections on the Revolution in France 155 Rights of Man 152
Reggio 168 Rimini 206
Index 341
Rimski-Korsakov, Alexamder 286, 288 258; Bois Caiman ceremony 253; British
Riom 82 invasion 255–6; history post-independence
riots 9, 15, 51, 94, 100, 156, 182, 183, 209, 211, 258; impact of Revolution on white society
229, 288, 231, 313, 254, 319 252–3; impact of war with Britain and
Riqueti, Honoré, Count of Mirabeau 19, 21 Spain 254–5; pre-1789 251–2; slave revolt
Rivoli, battle of 137, 140 253–4; Sonthonax mission 254; under
Robertson, John 170 L’Ouverture 257–8
Robespierre, Maximilien 79, 85, 100, 103–4, Saint Florent la Vieil 189
111, 112, 126, 190, 210 Saint Gotthard pass 286
Rochambeau, Count of see Vimeur, Jean- Saint Julien, Count François 304
Baptiste de, Count of Rochambeau Saint Just, Louis de 71, 103, 104, 112, 113,
Rocky Mountains 310 125, 126
Roguet, François 129, 136, 283 Saint Kitts 250, 256
Roland, Jean-Marie 24 Saint Lambert 187
Rollier, Emanuel 212 Saint Nazaire 190
Romagna 138 Saint Petersburg 7, 229, 243
Roman Republic 169, 170, 215, 279, 318 Saint Pierre de Chemillé, battle of 186–7
Romanov dynasty 37 Saint Pierre et Miquelon 4, 312
Rome 134, 139, 168, 170, 171, 214, 216, 219, Saint Priest, Count of see Guignard, François,
238, 269, 279, 280, 281, 283, 285, 318; Count of Saint Priest
French occupation 169 Saint Servin 67
Roncal, valley 202 Saint Vincent 256
Rossbach, battle of 42 Sainte Menehould 63, 81
Rossignol, Jean 187, 188 Saints, battle of the 7
Rostopchin, Fyodor 305 Saints, the 312
Rothenberg, Gunther 43, 123 Salamanca, university of 155
Rothenthurm 214 Salas, Ramón 155
Rouen 14 Salfi, Francesco-Saverio 171
Roume, Philippe 257 Salgues, Louis de, Marquis of Lescure
Rousbrugge 161 Salzburg, bishopric of 139, 236, 280, 307
Rousseau, Joseph 106 Sambre, river 108, 124, 125
Roussillon 93, 95, 104, 107 San Felice, Luisa de 220
Roux, Jacques 99, 105 San Fernando, citadel of 126
Rovereto, battle of 135 San Ildefonso, treaty of (1796) 239
Royal and Catholic Army 187, 189, 190, 192 San Ildefonso, treaty of (1800) 312
Rüchel, Ernst von 232 San Lorenzo de la Muga, battle of 124
Rudé, George 1 Santa Cruz de Marcenado, Marquis of see Osorio
Ruffo, Fabrizio 219–20, 319 y Vigil, Alvaro, Marquis of Santa Cruz de
Russia 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 21, 22, 36, 37, 92, 150, Marcenado
151, 170, 228, 229, 245, 263, 264, 276, 277, Santa Lucia 250, 255, 256, 312
278, 281, 291, 298, 301, 302, 304, 314, 315, Santerre, Antoine 99, 123
316, 317; army see army, Russian; Black-Sea Santo Domingo 249, 250, 252, 254, 257
fleet 278; bureaucracy 48; foreign policy Saorgio 123
26; Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) 5, 264; Sapinaud de la Rairie, Charles 186
Russo-Turkish War (1787–92) 5, 22, 150, Sardinia 254
264, 277 Satellite republics 17; see also Batavian
Republic; Cisalpine Republic; Helvetic
Saarlouis 67 Republic; Parthenopean Republic
Saavedra, Francisco de 240 Savary, Jean-Marie 269
Said, Edward 261 Savenay, battle of 190
Saillans, Count of 183 Savoy 85, 104, 109, 131, 148, 162, 172, 285, 286
Saint André, Jean-Bon de 103, 137 Saxe, Maurice de 45
Saint Bernard pass 302, 306 Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Prince of see Josias,
Saint Cloud, palace of 20 Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
Saint Cyr see Gouvion de Saint Cyr, Laurent de Saxe-Weimar, Duke of see Charles Augustus,
Saint Domingue 7, 8, 79, 100, 250, 270; Duke of Saxe-Weimar
attempt at re-conquest under Napoleon Schama, Simon 79
342 Index
Scharnhorst, Gerhard von 233, 234 Church 240, 241; colonies 2, 249–50, 254,
Schaumberg-Lippe, Prince Wilhelm of 45 256, 259, 311, 312, 313; inquisition 229, 230,
Scheldt, river 85 241; Jacobinism 155; navy 95; nobility 241;
Schepenheuvel 212 overthrow of Godoy 241; popular resistance
Schérer, Barthélemy 127, 128, 281, 284, 285 to French invasion 203–5; reaction to French
Schroeder, Paul 21, 28, 140, 141, 264, 316 Revolution 229–30; retrocession of Louisiana
Schützen 205 312; sale of the lands of the Church 239–40;
Schwyz 213 survival of enlightened absolutism 240–1; Vales
Scott, Samuel 69 reales 240; war with Portugal 1801 241, 310
Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Spithead, anchorage 157
Charles 9 Staël, Germaine de 260, 261, 290, 298
Segovia 49 Stanislas Augustus of Poland 150
Segre, river 204 Stanz 214
Selim III of the Ottoman Empire 264, 270 Statists 149, 162, 163
Senegal 4 Stein, Heinrich vom 228, 233, 234
Sérurier, Philibert 68, 129, 130, 137 Stenay 67
Servan, Joseph 84 Stewart, Sir John 215
Seven Years’ War 3, 4, 7, 9, 21, 39, 40, 43, 46, Stockach: first battle of 284, 302; second battle
51, 77, 84, 140, 263, 310 of 302
Seycher, Reynald 190 Stofflet, Jean 185, 189, 191, 193
Sheppard, E.W. 135, 137 Stone, Bailey 7
Shubra-Kit, battle of 265 Strasbourg 181
Sibelet, Jean 78 Styria 236
Siberia 229 Suchet, Louis 73
Sicily 2, 170, 218, 219, 262, 280, 309 Suez 262, 267
Siena 221; battle of 308 Suez Canal 262
Sièyes, Emanuel 15, 290, 295, 296, 306 Surinam 312, 314
Silesia 3, 233, 236, 239 Suvorov, Alexander 46, 47, 242, 277, 280, 284,
Siraj-ad-Dowla 263 286, 287, 288, 320
slave trade/slavery 8, 250–9; voodoo 251; see also Sweden 2, 5, 7, 21, 229, 249, 314
Marronage Switzerland 51, 139, 185, 194, 280, 298, 301, 310,
Slovaks 155 316; campaign of 1799 236, 284–8; French
Slovenia 138, 236 intervention 169–70, 213–14; republicanised
Smarves 94 170, 213; resistance 201, 209, 213–14, 221
Smith, Adam 9 Syria 267
Smith, Sir Sidney 288, 289
Society for Constitutional Information 155 Tackett, Timothy 185
Society of Friends of the Constitution see Talleyrand, Charles de see Talleyrand-Périgord,
Feuillant club Charles de
Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles de 263, 264,
(Brussels) 162, 163 298, 311
Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality Talmont, Prince of see Trémoille, Antoine de
(Mainz) 160 la, Prince of Talmont 186
Society of Friends of the People 155 Tarascon 181
Society of United Irishmen 151, 152, 153; Targowica, Confederation of 150, 151
emissaries in mainland Britain 156–7 Tartars 38
Soignies, forest of 161 Tavora family 230, 231
Soler, Jean 193 Tech, river 107
Somatenes 203, 204 Tell, William 213
Sonthonax, Léger 254, 255 Tennis-Court Oath 16
Soto, Serafín de, Count of Clonard 203 Teramo 216, 217
Souham, Joseph 124 Tercier, Claude 125, 161
Soult, Jean de Dieu 73, 95, 131, 133, 134, 142 Terlizzi 218
Spain 7, 21, 26, 37, 92, 95, 137, 140, 185, 193, Texel 287
203, 204, 215, 230, 243, 245, 249, 254, 256, Texler, Joseph 41
259, 282, 307, 310, 311, 315; alliance with Thiébault, Paul 71, 73, 78, 81, 82, 96, 113, 130,
France 126, 239; army see army, Spanish; 169, 209, 214, 283, 284
Index 343
Thirty Years’ War 2, 37, 39 United Scotsmen 156
Thompson, E.P. 156 United States of America 4, 136, 149, 250, 256,
Thorn (Torun) 22 258, 311, 312; federalists 311; quasi-war 311
Thornton, John 254 United States of Belgium 149
Thouars, battle of 187 Urquijo, Mariano Luis de 240, 241
Thugut, Johann von 280, 301, 302, 304, 309 Ursins d’Harville, Louis des 83
Tilly, Charles 185
Tipu Sahib 263 Valence 73
Tirlemont 97 Valencia 240
Tobago 4, 250, 255, 312 Valenciennes 82, 104, 113
Tolentino, treaty of 138 Valetta 309
Tone, Theobald Wolfe 152, 153, 154 Valmy, battle of 40, 63–5, 68, 70, 78, 83, 84,
Tongerlo 212 97, 140
Torfou, battle of 188 Valtelline 170
Tosas 204 Van Dyck, Theo 212
total war 92, 110 Van Gansen, Emanuel 212, 213
Toulon 102, 103, 111, 137, 220, 278, 317; siege Vandamme, Dominique 69
of 105, 109, 123, 128 Varennes 20, 67
Toulouse 181; Place du Capitole 110 Varlet, Jean 99, 105
Tour du Pin, Henriette de la 67 Vaud 170
Tour du Pin, Jean de la, Count of Gouvernet 67 Velbruck, François 149
Tourcoing, battle of 124 Venaissin, County of 21, 25, 138
Tournai 74, 75, 210 Vendée rebellion 77, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105,
Transpadane Republic 206 109, 113, 123, 212; course 186–90; death-
Trasimene, Lake 214 toll 191; grande virée de la galerne 189–90;
Travancore 263 leadership 185–6; origins 184–6; outbreak
Trebbia, river, battle of the 284 184; repression 112, 190–1
Trémoille, Antoine de la, Prince de Talmont Vendée (región) 127; pacification under
186, 189 Napoleon 296, 298, 299; resistance, post-
Trent (Trento) 135 1793 191–2, 193, 194, 289
Tribun du Peuple 16 Venetia 142, 154, 280, 284
Triers 93 Venezuela 96, 250, 258
Trincomalee 312 Venice: city of 139, 318; republic of 138, 139,
Trinidad 250, 256, 259, 312, 314 160, 291, 307
Trouillas, battle of 107, 113 Verdun 81
Tuileries, palace of the 20, 24, 73, 297, 301, 306, Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Comte de 4
309; storming of 79–80, 99, 100, 154, 180 Vergier, Henri de, Marquis of La
Tupac Amaru 249 Rochejacquelin 185, 186, 189
Turgot, Anne-Marie 6, 10 Vergniaud, Pierre 24, 102
Turin 285 Verlinghem 28
Turkey see Ottoman Empire Verona 131, 206, 269
Tuscany, Duchy of 135, 154, 202, 280, 284, 307, Verri, Pietro 154
308; ‘Viva Maria!’ uprising 220–1 Versailles 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 181
Tyrol 52, 127, 135, 138, 201, 206, 231, 232, Verviers 209
235, 236; popular resistance 205 Vicente, Egidio 214
Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont 129
Ulm, battle of 49 Vienna 49, 138, 205, 211, 235, 236, 238, 280,
Ulster 152, 153 281, 303, 308, 309, 318
Umbria 279 Vienne 183
United Englishmen 156 Viesse de Marmont, Auguste 69, 135
United Irishmen see Society of United Irishmen Villaret de Joyeuse 136
United Provinces 7, 22, 27, 85, 92, 96, 120, 125, Villedieu 94
126, 127, 142, 148, 149, 164, 172, 201, 203, Vimeur, Jean-Baptiste de, Count of
259, 287; colonies 7, 250; conquest 126–7; Rochambeau 74, 81
patriots 164; renamed Batavian Republic 164; Vinegar Hill, battle of 154
Revolution of 1785–87 4, 163; treaty of The Vitaliani conspiracy 155
Hague 164 ‘Viva Maria!’ uprising 220–1
344 Index
Vivien, Jean 76, 168, 198 Whitworth, Lord see Whitworth, Charles, first
Volunteers of 1791 24, 27, 71, 73–5, 77 Earl Whitworth
Volunteers of 1792 27, 65, 75–6, 77, 79, 93, 182 Whitworth, Charles, first Earl Whitworth 276
Volta, Alessandro 167 Wickham, William 236, 319
Voltaire see Arouet, François Willebroek 212
Vonck, Jan-Franck 149 William V of the United Provinces 164
Vonckists 149, 162 Windham, William 300, 315
Vorarlberg 236 Windward Islands 250
Wissembourg: first battle of 109; lines 109;
Waal, river 126 second battle of 109, 123
Waldstetten 214 Wittelsbach dynasty 4
Wales 251 Wolfe, James 45, 55
Waliszewski, Kazimierz 241 Wollerau 214
Wallenstein, Albrecht von 238 Wollstonecroft, Mary 155
Walloons 149 women: French attitudes towards 209;
War of the Austrian Succession 51 involvement in the French Revolution
War of the Bavarian Succession 3, 5 20, 113; involvement in resistance 205;
War of the Spanish Succession 3, 35, 84, involvement in riots 9, 209
109, 204 Wordsworth 113
Warsaw 150, 151; Praga suburb 151 Wraxall, Sir Nicholas 52
Washington, George 130, 298, 310, 311 Wright, John 192
Waterloo 125, 161, 245 Wurmser, Dagobert von 108, 113, 121, 131,
Wathier, Pierre 285 135, 137, 140, 142
Wattignies, battle of 108, 113; campaign 120 Württemberg 132
Wellesley, Lord see Wellesley, Richard, Marquis of Wurzberg 132; battle of 134
Wellesley, Richard, Marquis of 313
Wellesley, Sir Arthur 49, 245 Xante 160
Wellington, Duke of see Wellesley, Sir Arthur
West Indies 127, 137, 140, 250, 251, 259, 268, York, Duke of see York and Albany, Frederick,
310, 311; British 256 Duke of
Westerlo 212 York and Albany, Frederick, Duke of 55, 97, 104,
Westermann, François 187, 190 107, 108, 113, 124, 125, 126, 127, 244, 287
Westmeerbeek 212
Wexford 154 Zuider Zee 287
Whig tradition 152 Zurich 170, 211, 236, 284, 286, 319; first battle
White Boys 152 of 236, 284; second battle of 286

The Wars of The French Revolution 1792-1801

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The Wars of The French Revolution 1792-1801

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The Wars of the French Revolution

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The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War

1 The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars 1

Bibliographical note 324

1 Europe in 1789 xiv

Charles Esdaile, 18 January 2018

Map 1 Europe in 1789

18. Ionian Islands (to France)

Map 2 Europe in 1799

The Portuguese army is in a tolerable state of discipline: it marches and manoeuvres

If this was so, meanwhile, it was because of rigorous training. Thus:

In the historiography, it is a common-place to maintain that somehow the Prussian army

We should not allow ourselves to be blinded by ‘love of country’ or ‘inclination towards

General Kellermann galloped up, and ordered us to extend in line. ‘Comrades!’ he

Next, we have Paddy Griffith:

However, whether these men constituted much of a reinforcement is another matter,

Meanwhile, notwithstanding secret efforts on the part of Dumouriez to negotiate a conven-

If we have a change of clothes . . . to put on, we consider ourselves to be very happy:

Himself blinded by ambition nearly as overweening as the overconfidence of the

Beaten again on 23 March at Pellenberg, the French commander negotiated a convention

In reality, of course, boosted though it was by a frenetic campaign of propaganda, such

On 11 March, meanwhile, the same observer reported a further improvement:

Another future marshal caught up in the chaos was Jean-de-Dieu Soult:

Prince Pignatelli [i.e. the Marquess of Strongoli] was appointed lieutenant-general of

[The Archduke] . . . enjoys the office of commander-in-chief and is extremely active

Surrounded though he was by soldiers – according to Hortense de Beauharnais, his personal

On 2 July, meanwhile, she put her views even more clearly:

Despair at Austria’s war-making capacity, meanwhile, was presently joined by irritation

The provinces are in general in a very unpleasant state of insubordination, particularly

Abarca de Bolea, Pedro, Count of 230 Andria 218

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