CHAPTER 1
THE REVOLUTION AND ITS SOLDIERS
ON APRIL 20 1792, THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT DECLARED war on Austria and brought to an end a long period of uneasy coexistence between revolutionary France and the monarchies of Europe. It was to prove a momentous decision, affecting the domestic history of the French Revolution almost as crucially as it affected international relations throughout Europe. However confident contemporaries might be in predicting a speedy and successful outcome, this would not turn out to be a short war, to be won in a single glorious campaigning season. Hostilities were to last, virtually continuously, throughout the remainder of the decade, consuming an increasing part of the effort and resources of revolutionary governments and, in the process, changing the character of the Revolution itself. With the war came economic controls and special taxes, forced loans on the rich, requisitions of food and livestock, extensive recruitment, and finally annual conscription. Winning the war became, unavoidably, the major political priority of the day, with the result that other measures were dropped or distorted in order to provide for the armies. New levels of constraint and compulsion entered everyday life, often justified by military necessity or introduced as emergency expedients that must be endured for the duration of the war. Even political terror could be explained and popularized as an exceptional measure needed to ensure the success of French arms. In the process, the army itself gained new authority and status until, under the Directory, it came to represent an alternative focus of power to the constitutional government of the day and allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to launch his successful challenge on 18 brumaire.
This book is not the place to consider in detail the military history of these years; others have done so, often at very great length. A general picture of the progress of the war is perhaps necessary, however, if only to provide a context for the social and political discussion that follows. The declaration of war in April 1792 was made in an atmosphere of some confusion, after months of saber rattling by both sides and amid bitter political disunity in France. Nor did the early news from the battle zones do anything to dispel that confusion. The first encounters were ominously unsuccessful for the French, deepening the political divisions within the country and increasing the levels of fear and panic that already existed among the population. Military defeats and indecisive campaigning during these early months convinced many that the Revolution was being deliberately undermined, that ministers and generals were betraying the trust placed in them, and that France was being projected on a path that would lead to humiliation and political chaos. A war that had been declared against Austria was extended to include the Prussians by early July; on July 11, the patrie was declared en danger; and during August French territory was invaded from both the North and the East. The revolutionaries who had launched the war with such confidence and bravado just a few months before were fighting for their very survival.
Toward the end of 1792, it is true, the French armies staged a spectacular recovery, chased their enemies out of France, and were everywhere on the offensive—in the South they entered Nice and Savoy, in the East they attacked Mainz and Frankfurt, and in the North they had Brussels and Antwerp at their mercy. Two famous battles marked what many at the time saw as a great turning point in the war. At Valmy on September 19, the forces of Dumouriez and Kellermann used massed artillery to turn back the Prussians; and at Jemmapes on November 6, Dumouriez's army inflicted a further defeat, this time on the Austrians, which showed the quality of French infantry and cavalry in hand-to-hand combat. But these successes were soon eclipsed, and by the spring of 1793 the Revolution was again threatened.
Tormented by serious outbreaks of rural counterrevolution in Brittany and the West, the French were faced with the combined strength of the First Coalition, which included not only the military power of the major land armies of Europe, but also the naval strength of Britain and Spain. In time, this crisis, too, passed. Under the Jacobins the French armies recovered from their early setbacks, turning back Austrian and Prussian advances in the East and pushing the Spaniards across the Pyrenees into Spanish Catalonia. Morale inevitably improved. Whereas early victories like Valmy and Jemmapes could justifiably be regarded as the outcome of a certain good fortune, the armies of 1794 were able to hold their own against the best professional armies of Europe. By June of that year, following victory over the Austrians at Fleurus, the north of France was liberated and the French found themselves once again in a position to attack Belgium. And with both the Prussians and the Austrians seeking peace, the First Coalition was effectively over. The key settlement was the Treaty of Basel, signed with Prussia on April 5, 1795. By its terms Prussia abandoned her allies, recognizing French claims to the left bank of the Rhine if France would agree to the neutralization of North Germany. This in turn allowed the French to impose the Treaty of the Hague on the Dutch on May 16 and to prepare for the permanent annexation of Belgium. Spain made peace two months later. The Republic had been saved, national pride had been restored, and the reputation of the citizen army—the myth of "les soldats de 1'an II"—was born.
The treaty proved, however, to be little more than a short respite from fighting, and again it was the French who opened hostilities, taking advantage of the apparent weakness of their enemies. Austria and Prussia remained disunited, their mutual antagonism fueled by the question of Polish partition. And Britain's ill-fated landing at Carnac in June 1795 to help the royalist rebels in Brittany—the three thousand British and émigré troops were quickly cornered on the Quiberon Peninsula by a French army under Hoche—served only to confirm French suspicions of English perfidy and to harden their own political resolve. But the principal change in the conduct of the war, as Georges Lefebvre noted, was that until Basel France was largely on the defensive, seeking to defend herself against enemies who believed her cause lost. In this second phase of the war, the French government launched itself into conflict in an offensive mood, intent on holding onto gains in Holland and the Rhineland and on taking advantage of divisions and weaknesses among her opponents. Ranged against the French was a renewed coalition, which included many of the north German states but in which only England and Austria could be counted as serious belligerents. This was not a war to protect "la patrie en danger," to defend the French people against invasion and the gains of the Revolution against destruction.
It would be difficult, indeed, to claim that the wars of the...
