French Revolutionary Wars

At issue: French Revolutionary government attempts to maintain and spread its power

Date: April 20, 1792-May 27, 1802

Location: France, Germany, Italy, the Austrian Netherlands, the United Netherlands, Switzerland, the Middle East, India, the Caribbean

Combatants: French vs. Austrians (Holy Roman Empire), Prussians, Sardinians, British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, Ottomans

Principal commanders:French, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821); British, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson (1758–1805); Russian, Aleksandr V. Suvorov (1729–1800)

Principal battles: Valmy, Jemappes, Hondeshoote, Menin, Wattignies, Siege of Toulon, Tourcoing, Fleurus, Montenotte, Lodi, Castiglione, Arcola, Rivoli, Mantua, Camperdown, Pyramids, Aboukir, Nile, The Trebbia, Zurich, Marengo, Hohenlinden, Heliopolis

Result: No victor; negotiated cease-fire between the Napoleonic regime and its adversaries; treaty provisions were widely ignored and war resumed the following year

Background

After the Fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette of France were compelled to accept a liberal constitution limiting royal power and vesting the real authority in the hands of the elected Legislative Assembly. On the surface at least, the royal family complied. In actuality, the monarchs were in contact with an espionage network that included the queen’s brother, Emperor Leopold II of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, the king of Prussia, and various German princelings. The royal family made an unsuccessful attempt to flee to the German border by leaving Paris by coach in the middle of the night. With their apprehension at the village of Varennes in July of 1791, the plot unraveled and the extent of the foreign-inspired spy network was revealed.

Indignation at the role played by foreign rulers in attempting to undermine the revolutionary government and the desire of the Girondin Party in the assembly to curry popular favor through a speedy, victorious war contributed to the French government’s eventually voting to declare war on Austria and Prussia on April 20, 1792. Those two nations, which had formed an alliance in February in order to take advantage of the situation in France, had begun moving troops toward the French borders.

Action

French troops marched into the Austrian Netherlands, but the untrained French levies were soon pushed out by the experienced imperial forces. France itself was invaded, and the important city of Lille was placed under siege. The Comte de Rochambeau resigned command and was replaced by the marquis de Lafayette. On July 11, 1792, the situation worsened for France as Spain and Sardinia entered the conflict on the side of Austria and Prussia. The alliance of powers against France was termed the First Coalition.

On August 10, 1792, King Louis XVI was driven from the Tuileries Palace by an enraged mob. After he took refuge with the assembly, he was placed under arrest and deposed—and a republic was established. The French commander, the marquis de Lafayette, was relieved of command and surrendered to the Austrians.

Shortly thereafter, Charles William Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick, in command of the 50,000 Austro-Prussian troops in southern Germany, captured the French border garrison of Longwy and advanced toward Metz. However, Brunswick soon bogged down to a crawl, partly because of the mud that had accumulated from unremitting rainfall, outbreaks of dysentery in his camp, and his own cautious temperament. Brunswick compounded his own difficulties by provoking the French with a blood-curdling proclamation, the Brunswick Manifesto, threatening to visit unrestrained retaliation on the civilian population of Paris for the overthrow of King Louis XVI. Brunswick’s delay allowed General Charles François Dumouriez to march from northern France to join forces with Alsatian general Eugene Kellerman in confronting Brunswick’s forces. The Cannonade of Valmy on September 20, 1792, saw little in the way of action apart from an exchange of artillery fire. Though the clash was by no means decisive, Brunswick withdrew his army after ten days, amid lingering speculation that a payoff might have influenced this move more than French resistance. Returning to the Netherlands, Dumouriez engineered a series of marches culminating in a surprise attack on the Austrian position at Jemappes (November, 1792) that totally routed them and led directly to the capture of Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands.

The trial and execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, unleashed a strong international reaction against France and was instrumental in persuading Britain and the United Netherlands to join the coalition on February 1. Later that same month, Dumouriez launched an offensive against the United Netherlands but lost to the skillfully deployed armies of Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg and Archduke Charles of Austria at the Battle of Neerwinden (March 18, 1793). Dumouriez’s retreat became a rout, and he defected to the allies. Saxe-Coburg and Charles drove the French out of the Austrian Netherlands and seized Condé and Valenciennes in Northern France as British forces invested the port of Dunkirk. At this point, the French government issued a call for universal male conscription (levée en masse) and assigned Lazare Carnot (who became known as the “organizer of victory”) to redirect and coordinate all aspects of the military effort.

Jean Nicolas Houchard drove the Austrians back at the Battle of Hondeshoote (September, 1793) and won the Battle of Menin (September, 1793) but failed to remove the Austrians from eastern France. He was removed, executed, and replaced by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan. Jourdan defeated Saxe-Coburg in two days of intense fighting at Wattignies (October, 1793), forcing the Austrians to abandon their Siege of Maubeuge. By the end of 1793, Jourdan had pushed allied forces across the Rhine. In southern France, a British attempt to secure the port of Toulon (September-December, 1793) was frustrated by the skillful artillery tactics of Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte. With the centralized government of the Jacobin Terror supervising operations, the French began advancing toward the United Netherlands. Acting French general Joseph Souham had his moment of victory when he defeated another attempt by Saxe-Coburg and Charles to take Lille, at the Battle of Tourcoing (May, 1794). Jourdan won decisive victories at Charleroi (June 25, 1794) and Fleurus (June 26, 1794) and entered the United Netherlands.

Though the Terrorist government was overthrown (July 27-28, 1794), French successes continued. General Charles Pichegru secured the United Netherlands, which was reconstituted as a French satellite state, the Batavian Republic. Having seized the Dutch colonial possessions of Ceylon and Capetown, Britain virtually withdrew from active participation in the coalition, though British financial assistance continued for a while longer. Through the Treaty of Basel (April 6, 1795), Prussia and most of the smaller Germanic states dropped out of the coalition; Spain withdrew several weeks later (June 22, 1795).

Though the French offensives of late 1795 to early 1796 foundered, Napoleon’s arrival in Italy as commanding general changed the situation. Outmaneuvering the Austrians under Baron Johann Peter Beaulieu at Montenotte (April 14, 1796), the combined forces of Napoleon and General Jaume Mathieu Philibert Serurier ruthlessly attacked the Sardinian army and forced Sardinia’s withdrawal from the coalition (April 28, 1796). Napoleon secured his reputation with a series of well-executed victories over the Austrians: Lodi (May 10, 1796), Castiglione (August 5, 1796), Arcola (November 19, 1796), Rivoli (January 14, 1797), and Mantua (February 2, 1797). Austria signed the Truce of Leoban (April 18, 1797) and the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797), which effectively ended the First Coalition and confirmed the French annexation of the Austrian Netherlands and the establishment of the French satellite republics of Batavian, Ligurian, and Cisalpine.

Britain had remained hostile to France, decisively defeating a Dutch fleet off the coast of Camperdown in October, 1797. On May 19, 1798, Napoleon’s army sailed to Egypt in an attempt to strike at British India. On December 24, 1798, the Second Coalition was formed against France and included Britain, Portugal, Naples, the Ottoman Empire, Austria, and Russia. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign proved disastrous in the long run. Despite victories over the Mamlūks and Turks at the Battles of the Pyramids (July 21, 1798) and Aboukir (July 25, 1799), Napoleon’s fleet was destroyed by the British Royal Navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile (August 2, 1798), and his attempted thrust into the Holy Land was stopped short at Acre by the British under Admiral Sidney Smith. With his forces isolated and his supply lines in jeopardy, Napoleon abandoned his army and returned to France (October 8, 1799), leaving General Jean-Baptiste Kléber to continue the campaign.

Before the extent of his failure in Egypt was widely known, Napoleon had done away with the unpopular Directory government and seized dictatorial powers under the title of first consul (November 9, 1799; the Coup of Brumaire).

In Napoleon’s absence, the Second Coalition had come close to achieving victory in Europe. The Russian army under Count Aleksandr V. Suvorov proved to be the most formidable of those arrayed against the French. With some assistance from the Austrians, Suvorov virtually chased French troops out of northern Italy, inflicting defeats at Magnano, Cassano, The Trebbia, and Novi (April-August, 1799) and capturing Turin.

In Switzerland, the Archduke Charles and Russian general Alexander Mikhailovich Korsakov made, at first, significant headway. Charles routed General André Masséna at the Battle of Zurich (June 7, 1799). However, Masséna was able to stabilize France’s position with a shattering defeat of Korsakov’s army at the Second Battle of Zurich (September 26, 1799). Seeing his countryman in such danger, Suvorov turned about and marched northward into Switzerland to join the remnant of Korsakov’s forces. He was outmaneuvered by the French, and both Russian armies were reduced to wandering in the freezing weather in a state of near-starvation, trying to live off the land. Suvorov surrendered. The failure of Austrian assistance angered the Russian czar Paul. A bungled Anglo-Russian effort at Alkmar (Batavian Republic) and British refusal to relinquish the Island of Malta, which they had seized, also drove Czar Paul to withdraw from the coalition (October 22, 1799).

After a vain attempt at negotiating a settlement with the coalition powers, Napoleon himself opened a spring campaign in Italy (1800), delegating expeditionary command to General Jean Victor Moreau in southern Germany. Napoleon was caught off-guard near the plain of Marengo by Austrian forces under Baron Michael Friedrich von Melas (June 14, 1800) and forced to battle on less favorable ground. On the verge of defeat, Napoleon’s tenacity and deft maneuvering of his troops kept the Austrians at bay until cavalry units under General Louis Charles Desaix arrived on the scene. Desaix’s wild charge—during the course of which he was killed—transformed defeat into victory as the day ended. His army intact, but placed in an untenable position, Melas negotiated a withdrawal from Lombardy.

Moreau in Germany enjoyed even greater success; rapidly crossing into Bavaria to defeat the Austrian archduke John at Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800), then marching swiftly to the city of Linz, which he took and which placed him within one hundred miles of the Austrian capital of Vienna. Austria capitulated, and the Second Coalition was virtually dismembered in the Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801). By the terms of Lunéville, all territory west of the natural frontier of the Rhine River was ceded to France. The French satellite republics—Batavian, Cisalpine, Ligurian, Helvetic, and Parthenopean—were reconfirmed or recognized.

Britain maintained hostilities for another year, although, within Europe itself, British participation was ineffectual. In Egypt, Kléber won the Battle of Heliopolis (March 20, 1800) and captured Cairo, but was assassinated there (June 14, 1800). On March 27, 1802, the British government of Prime Minister Henry Addington signed the Treaty of Amiens with Napoleon. Britain was to keep areas it had seized during the conflict, including Trinidad and Ceylon; and Napoleon was to evacuate Egypt, the Papal States, and Naples.

Aftermath

Amiens proved to be a brief respite; many of its provisions were never carried out, and the failure of the British to return Malta to the Knights of St. John was seized upon as a pretext for renewal of hostilities in 1803.

Bibliography

Blanning, T. C. W. The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802. London: Arnold, 1996.

Broers, Michael. Europe Under Napoleon, 1799–1815. London: Arnold, 1996.

Esdaile, Charles J. The Wars of Napoleon. New York: Longmans, 1997.

Furet, Francois. Revolutionary France, 1770–1880. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Rude, George. Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1815. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.