The Wars of the French Revolution

1792–1801

Charles J Esdaile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815386889
• eBook ISBN: 9781351174527
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

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 sudden 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.

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) suggests 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 extension, an important means of legitimising their power at home, where they were frequently 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 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 standing 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 endurance 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 perpetual 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 statesmen 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 system 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 compensation 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 unfavourable 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Wars of the French Revolution
• Title
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• List Of Maps
• Preface
• 1 The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
• 2 The Armies of the Ancien RéGime
• 3 From the Bastille to Valmy
• 4 Saving the Revolution
• 5 Exporting the Revolution
• 6 Sympathy, Admiration and Collaboration
• 7 Resistance and Revolt (1): France
• 8 Resistance and Revolt (2): The French Imperium
• 9 The Reaction of the Ancien RéGime
• 10 The Wider World
• 11 The Road to 18 Brumaire
• 12 The End of the French Revolutionary Wars
• Bibliographical Note
• Index