French Revolutionary Wars

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French Revolutionary wars (1792-1801). It is the deepest irony that the French Revolution, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, led to a quarter-century of bloody war. Although the revolutionaries who formed the constitutional monarchical government of France after the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 regarded war as an aberration of tyrants, it was unlikely that Frederick William of Prussia and Leopold II of Austria would ever reach a modus vivendi with the new regime. In fact on 27 August 1791 they declared common interest in restoring an absolute monarchy in France for the ‘welfare of the French nation’ and threatened the use of force to bring this about. French royalist émigré forces began to gather at the frontiers and on 7 February 1792 Austria and Prussia signed the Treaty of Berlin against France. Exasperated, the French declared war on 20 April, initiating the War of the First Coalition.

Early clashes were uninspiring: French troops often fled, murdering their officers, and the American independence war veteran Rochambeau resigned in disgust. Then, on 25 July, the Duke of Brunswick, commanding an invasion force on the Rhine, issued a manifesto stating that he would invade to put down the anarchy in France and restore Louis XVI to the ‘legitimate authority to which he is entitled’, inviting all right-thinking Frenchmen and women to join the invaders in re-establishing the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and warning that any action against Louis would be met with the sternest retribution. This helped promote further unrest in the already volatile Paris, and, fearing that Louis was in league with the Prussians, the mob stormed the Tuileries palace and shut the king and his family up in the grim prison of the Conciergerie.

The Prussians took the powerful fortress of Longwy with ease and went on to take Verdun. The route to Paris seemed clear, and in the capital there was panic, accompanied by the massacre of over 1, 000 prisoners: priests, aristocrats, Swiss guards, and common criminals. The great revolutionary orator Danton made a stirring speech calling for ‘de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace!’ (boldness, again boldness, and always boldness!), and French soldiers rose to meet the challenge. Two French armies—Dumouriez's Army of the North and Kellermann's Army of the Centre—met Brunswick at Valmy, a confrontation rather than a battle proper, where the steadiness of French troops in the face of artillery fire proved conclusive: Brunswick began a disastrous retreat. The day after Brunswick fell back from Valmy the monarchy was abolished and France was proclaimed a Republic. As Russell Weigley puts it, ‘a series of hesitant, reluctant and misguided Allied efforts … had helped precipitate a seismic shift in France's internal history’.

Europe during the French Revolutionary wars, 1789-1815, and (inset) naval operations in 1805.
(Click to enlarge)

French armies now went on the offensive in Savoy, the Rhine, and the Low Countries. Dumouriez routed the Austrians at Jemappes on 6 November, and Brussels was captured. The National Convention issued the Edict of Fraternity of 19 November 1792, calling on all oppressed peoples to rise up with the promise of French military assistance. Hitherto there had been a measure of schadenfreude in Berlin, London, and Vienna at the collapse of France, but revolt beyond France's borders was not to be countenanced and the Allied powers dug their heels in.

Recognizing that this was now a fight to the death, the French guillotined Louis on 21 January 1793, showing their contempt for the threats of the European monarchs, and declared war on Hanoverian Britain and Bourbon Spain for good measure. Prussia and Austria, however, became involved in partitioning Poland with Russia, which distracted them from affairs in Italy, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland. Nevertheless, the French were roundly defeated at Neerwinden on 18 March, and to add insult to injury Dumouriez, a general whose very real military ability was not matched by his political judgement, fled to the Allies. Once again the borders of France were threatened. The Prussians swiftly took Mainz, Condé, and Valenciennes and the Revolutionary Tribunal responded with an effusion of blood known as the Terror, guillotining many aristocrats and suspected counter-revolutionaries along with those whose only crime was to be unwise, unlucky, or politically exposed.

The British admiral Hood landed in Toulon in support of the Royalists, and in the west of France the royalists of the Vendée rose in armed revolt against Paris. The combination of threats drove France to extreme measures, and decree of the levée en masse was issued by the Convention on 23 August 1793. All citizens were called to the defence of France: young men to the armies, women to make uniforms and muskets, children to turn rags into field dressings, and old men to give rousing speeches in the market places. Fired with new fervour, the Revolutionary armies recaptured Toulon, ejected the British from around Dunkirk, and advanced into the Alps. The organizational genius of Lazare Carnot was brought into play to help turn a revolutionary rabble into a properly equipped fighting force. The new commander in the north, a modest ex-ranker called Jourdan, beat the Austrians in a tough contest at Wattignies on 16 October 1793, and the rebels of the Vendée and Lyons were crushed. The tough and talented Hoche went on the offensive on the Rhine front, defeating the Allies at Frocschwiller and Kaiserslautern in December.

This success could not conceal the fact that the Revolution's real military weakness was at sea. Although the army beat the Austrians and British at Tourcoing in May 1794, it was a different matter at sea where revolutionary fervour was no substitute for professional seamanship. Most naval officers had either fled or been murdered by their mutinous crews. Small wonder, then, that a French fleet was mauled by the British Adm Lord Howe off Ushant on the Glorious First of June, 1794. Although Jourdan swept all before him at Fleurus later that month, taking Brussels, Liège, and Antwerp, the French had no answer to Allied sea power and Corsica was lost on 10 August. French armies stormed to victory in Spain and Savoy, and by the end of 1794, tired of continual war, the Austrians signed an armistice. Prussia, Holland, and Spain made peace in April, May, and June 1795: Prussia was to remain neutral for the next ten years.

The Revolution had ensured its survival purely by force of arms, and this important lesson was not lost on observers inside and outside the Republic. The war with Austria dragged on, despite the fact that Vienna was distracted by events in Poland, which ceased to exist as an independent nation after the bloody suppression of its patriots. Further south, in Italy, the Revolutionary armies under the enterprising young Gen Bonaparte (see Napoleon) began to make startling progress from March 1796. By 28 April he had conquered Nice, Savoy, and Piedmont. From there he went on the offensive into the north Italian plain defeating the Austrians, taking Milan, and besieging the important communications nexus of Mantua in June. On the Rhine front Jourdan was making poorer progress against the redoubtable Archduke Charles and was defeated at Amberg, Wurzburg, and Altenkirchen in August and September. The Austrians then moved to reinforce the Italian front, but were defeated by Bonaparte at Arcola on 15-17 November.

Spain's entry into the war on the side of France gave planners in Paris access to a large and well-equipped navy. The British abandoned Corsica and withdrew from the Mediterranean entirely. Indeed, the British Isles themselves came under threat when Hoche attempted to land an army in Bantry Bay in Ireland, but was foiled by the weather: as the Irish nationalist Wolf Tone put it, England had not had such an escape since the Armada. Although Bonaparte's successes in Italy continued unabated with victory at Rivoli on 14 January 1797 and the capture of Mantua, at sea the Spanish fleet was hammered by Adm Jervis off Cape St Vincent. However, it was not all plain sailing for the Coalition: there was another French landing at Fishguard in Wales (the last invasion of British soil by foreign troops) and British sailors, supposedly infected by Jacobinism but at least as much influenced by more mundane grievances, mutinied at Spithead and the Nore.

The Austrians now began to accept the fait accompli of French presence in Lombardy, and were alarmed by Hoche's renewed and successful offensive on the Rhine front. The French occupied Venice and the Ionian Islands, and established the Cisalpine Republic as a buffer zone. The treaty of Campo Formio, signed on 17 October 1797, gave Austria Venice, Istria, and Dalmatia in return for evacuating the Rhine. France, in a cynical move of realpolitik, recognized Austria's claim to Bavaria and Salzburg. The liberal Republic was now acting like an 18th-century absolutist state.

The British continued truculent. Adm Duncan savaged the Dutch fleet, a French ally, at Camperdown on 11 October 1797, and the French responded by trying to strike at British economic power, beginning to seize British goods on the high seas. The popular and successful Bonaparte was appointed to command an invasion army, but without control of the Channel his task was impossible, and so he cast his eyes toward the east. The British, in any event, had problems of their own: the United Irish, inspired by the ideals of the Revolution mingled with deeply held nationalist beliefs, rose in armed rebellion. Profiting from the confusion Bonaparte left Toulon for Egypt, taking Malta on the way, which only served to enrage the deluded Tsar Paul of Russia, who had appointed himself Grand Master of the Knights of St John.

Bonaparte went on to fight a glittering campaign in Egypt, capturing Alexandria on 2 July 1798, routing the Mameluke army at the Pyramids on 21 July and entering Cairo on the 25th. However, the British Adm Nelson caught up with the French fleet in Aboukir Bay and utterly destroyed it. Bonaparte, so successful on land, was now totally isolated from home. Furthermore, a planned invasion of Ireland had foundered: Gen Humbert landed in Killala Bay, but was surrounded and forced to surrender at Ballinamuck on 8 September.

It was obvious now that France was at a disadvantage, with her best general cut off in Egypt, and the Second Coalition was formed, consisting of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Naples, Portugal, and Turkey. The French responded by swiftly occupying Naples but the Austrian offensive gained ground on the Rhine and in Northern Italy, and the Russians sent an expeditionary force under Suvorov, their ablest and boldest commander. A string of French reverses followed: news of Suvorov's victory at Novi on 15 August encouraged Bonaparte to abandon his army in Egypt and return to France. Moreover, a British and Russian force had landed in Holland, beaten the French at Alkmaar on 19 September, and was now in a position to threaten the northern borders of France.

In Switzerland Masséna held Korsakov's Austro-Russians at Zurich, and the tsar, tired of the war, ordered Suvurov to withdraw over the Alps and back to Russia. Things went better for the French in Holland too: on 2 October the British and Russians had won at Bergen, but been checked at Castricum on the 6th. They agreed to evacuate Holland by the Convention of Alkmaar and Russia withdrew from the Coalition on 22 October. In France the Royalists rose again in Le Mans and Nantes. The French-sponsored Italian republics collapsed as Austria renewed the offensive, and all Bonaparte's conquests were recovered. Such an emergency needed a desperate solution, and Bonaparte led a military coup in Paris on 9 November 1799, declaring himself first Consul shortly afterwards.

Bonaparte immediately set about reversing the unpromising military situation. He descended on Italy by way of the St Gothard pass and defeated the Austrians at Marengo on 14 June 1800, recovering northern Italy and removing the danger of an Austrian invasion of France. Gen Moreau, meanwhile, advanced through Bavaria into Austria, and on 3 December beat the Archduke John at Hohenlinden, only 50 miles (80 km) from Vienna. The Austrians promptly made peace at Lunéville in February 1801, leaving the French on the left bank of the Rhine and acknowledging French satellite republics in Holland, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Bonaparte then set about isolating Britain, and a Russian-led Armed Neutrality was formed to oppose British attacks on neutral shipping. British bombardment of Copenhagen in April and the destruction of a French army in Egypt in August (see Egyptian expedition, French) were setbacks, but in London the ministry led by Pitt and Greville fell and its successor negotiated peace with France, signed at Amiens in March 1802. Bonaparte was swift to grasp the fruits of victory. A plebiscite in May made him consul for life, and only two years later another plebiscite sanctioned the establishment of a hereditary empire. By this stage, however, war between France and Britain had broken out once more, and was to last for twelve long years (see Napoleonic wars).

What had started as a fight for the survival of the fledgling Republic had changed to an attempt to export liberty by 1794 and had been transformed into total war by 1799. The whole apparatus of the state was geared to fighting a national and patriotic war. State-run arms factories multiplied, scientific research was put at the state's disposal, and many new inventions, such as the balloon and submarine, were turned to a military application. Furthermore, the size of armies had taken a quantum leap from the 50, 000 or so that an 18th-century army could put into the field, to the force—briefly perhaps in excess of 1 million men in August 1794—that France mobilized to defend the republic. Although percentage casualties in individual battles were proportionate to those in the Seven Years War, the Revolutionary wars were destructive because the French, sustained by reserves of manpower, were prepared to give battle again and again, aiming not at geographical objectives but at the destruction of enemy armies in the field.

It was not simply that the scale of war had changed. Neither the patchy performance of the Revolutionary armies, nor the harsh injustice of the political commissars who accompanied them (for so many French generals failure was a death sentence), can conceal the fact that there was something distinctive and admirable about the threadbare soldiers of the new France. They were at first less well trained than the white-coated regulars of the old regime, but their zeal and intelligence made them well suited for fluid tactics, and they were repeatedly urged to press on the close quarters with the cold steel: ‘Join action with the bayonet on every occasion, ’ declared Carnot. The foundations of their tactics, which included the large-scale use of skirmishers (the proportion of light infantry in the French army rose from 4 per cent in 1789 to 23 per cent in 1795), had been laid before the Revolution. The fusion of such methods with genuine patriotic fervour produced impressive results, especially once improved training enabled the French to attack with solid shallow columns behind swarms of skirmishers. French artillery had been less damaged by emigration than other arms, and it too built on earlier work to become an arm which formed a major ingredient of Napoleon's victories.

Structural changes also reflected earlier ideas: all-arms divisions were in use by 1795 and the corps system was introduced four years later (see organization, military). The period produced some generals of real ability, many of whom, like Hoche and Jourdan, could not have expected to reach commissioned rank, still less command armies, under the old regime. By 1794 the average age of French generals was 33, and most of Napoleon's marshals won their spurs during this period. Although the French Revolutionary wars seem overshadowed by the Napoleonic wars, they were conflicts of lasting importance and cast their shadow not only into the next century but well beyond it.

Bibliography

• Blanning, T., The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802 (London, 1996).
• Griffith, Paddy, The Art of War of Revolutionary France 1789-1802 (London, 1998).
• Lynn, John, The Bayonets of the Republic (Oxford, 1996).
• Strachan, Hew, European Armies and the Conduct of War (London, 1983).
• Weigley, Russell, The Age of Battles (Bloomington, Ind., 1991)

— Toby McLeod/Richard Holmes

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