The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  It was ironic that, until it was almost over, the French refused to think of helping a Polish uprising that looked to France for inspiration, copied the French revolutionary style and language, was identified by its opponents as plainly Jacobinical, and did so much to take pressure off France while she confronted her internal problems. But fraternity and assistance to foreign sympathizers was a Girondin policy. The Montagnards who held power in 1793 and 1794 were more interested in securing the Revolution in France than exporting it to others. Thus it was not until November 1794, when Warsaw had already fallen (although they did not yet know that), that policy-makers in France began to think seriously about the Poles, and by then the success of the French armies was exporting the Revolution anyway.

  After Fleurus the Austrians abandoned Belgium, and by the end of the summer the French had reoccupied the whole of it. Thugut declared openly that recovering it was not worth the effort. Once more, too, the French moved into the southern provinces of the Dutch Republic, reawakening in the defeated patriots of 1787 all the hopes and expectations so abruptly dashed in 1793. Clubs of patriots, thinly disguised as ‘reading societies’, mushroomed north of the Rhine mouths, and as the Prussians began to negotiate with the French the Stadtholder saw his chief bulwark since 1787 begin to melt away. He remained strong enough in the autumn to destroy a premature pro-French conspiracy, but with the onset of one of the coldest winters of the century the rivers froze and thereby destroyed Holland’s main line of defence. The French poured across, and such were the depredations of what was left of York’s British army retreating before them, that it was not only long-standing Dutch patriots who welcomed them. On 18 January William V embarked for England as groups of patriots ousted his minions from power in town after town across the country. The transfer of power was remarkably bloodless, perhaps because it happened before, rather than after, the invaders actually arrived. The patriots believed, and encouraged others to believe, the sincerity of French promises before the invasion that once that stooge of the British and Prussians, William V, had been dislodged from power, the Dutch would be left free to organize themselves and pursue policies as they wished. In this, however, they deluded themselves. The true French view was trenchantly expressed by one of their generals:

  Holland has done nothing to avoid being classed among the general order of our conquests. It was the ice, the indefatigable courage of our troops and the talents of the generals which delivered her and not any revolution. It follows from this that there can be no reason to treat her any differently from a conquered country. With very few exceptions the patriots of this country are all timid adventurers led by ambitious intriguers, avid speculators who never dared to take up arms in our favour.8

  Throughout the century the French had always believed the Dutch to be fabulously rich, and the temptation to mulct their assets for French purposes was irresistible. So the peace treaty signed at The Hague in May was punitive. The Batavian Republic (as it now officially became) was required to pay a war indemnity of 100 million florins, and lend France 100 million more at concessionary rates of interest. It was compelled to cede various southern territories, including control of the mouth of the Scheldt, and pay for the upkeep of a French occupying army of 25,000 men. Finally it was forced to conclude an alliance with the French Republic whose chief attraction was to place the supposedly formidable Dutch navy in the balance against Great Britain. This, then, was what the fraternity and help of the French Republic actually meant: total subordination to French needs and purposes. It was an awful warning to other French sympathizers elsewhere in Europe—although entirely confirming the expectations of their far more numerous opponents. Nor did the full implications for the Dutch become apparent at once. What was very clear by May 1795, however, was that the coalition of 1793 was rapidly breaking up.

  A month before the Dutch accepted the French terms, Prussia had finally withdrawn. By the treaty of Basle signed on 5 April, she left France a free hand along the entire length of the Rhine’s left bank (including occupation of Prussian territories) in return for a recognition of Prussian hegemony in north Germany and that region’s neutralization. The agreement came too late to free Prussia to pursue all she wanted with her full strength in Poland, but it left the Rhenish princes and electors at the Republic’s mercy. French occupying troops set about systematically exploiting this hitherto prosperous region to fund the French war effort. Then in July peace was also made (again at Basle) with Spain. By the end of 1794 the Spanish forces had been driven out of Roussillon and the French were advancing into Catalonia and the Basque provinces. They met a population far more resolute in its resistance to the Godless invaders than on other fronts, but the court of Madrid was obsessed by fears of pro-French subversion. ‘In the taverns and in the fashionable salons … ’, wrote a Madrid priest, ‘all one hears is battles, revolution, convention, national representation, liberty, equality. Even the whores ask you about Robespierre.’9 In February 1795 plans for a republican uprising were uncovered. The conspirators, a group of teachers and lawyers led by an educational theorist called Picornell, were condemned to death but reprieved on French insistence when peace was concluded. This plot, and rumours of others, had been enough to scare Godoy, the queen’s feckless favourite who dominated the government, into seeking terms. And France, not really threatened by Spain but anxious to transfer troops east for use against the Austrians, was prepared to be magnanimous. In Europe, she demanded nothing more than Spanish good offices in bringing Portugal and minor Italian states to the conference table. Overseas, Spain ceded the eastern part of Saint-Domingue, but with the French west in chaos and the Caribbean dominated by the British, France was in no position to take much immediate advantage of the gain. The real importance of peace with Prussia and Spain was to free French resources for a knock-out blow against what was left of the coalition. By August 1795 that meant Portugal, Sardinia, a number of minor Italian states, and above all Great Britain and Austria.

  Austria looked by far the most vulnerable. Distracted in the east, abandoned even by the grand duke of Tuscany, the Emperor’s own brother, in February, she sustained her war effort only by borrowing from a suspicious Great Britain. She also had her own internal dissidents. Amid a general and increasing war-weariness and a wave of public sympathy for the beleaguered Poles, especially in Hungary, police spies identified a group of ‘Jacobins’ who had sent a peace mission to Paris and who held regular meetings to discuss the overthrow of the government. Between July and September 1794, 25 conspirators were arrested in Vienna and 34 in Hungary. The treasonable activities revealed at the trials of the Viennese amounted to little more than planting a liberty tree and taking rash oaths; but the leader of the Hungarian plotters, the ex-priest Martinovics, had plans for a republic, an attack on the Church, and concessions to the serfs similar to those proclaimed by Kosciuszko in May 1794. These ideas cost Martinovics his life in May 1795, along with six other convicted plotters. All except six of the rest were given long terms of imprisonment after show trials designed to deter further toyings with Jacobinism. But the inspiration of the conspirators had been far more the memory of the reforming emperors Joseph and Leopold than a desire to ape France, and what they most feared—the abandonment of the changes introduced since 1780—now came about much more quickly thanks to the fright they had given Emperor Francis. Aware that, despite thwarting internal enemies, the threat from France was growing ever more serious, he sanctioned discreet peace feelers over the summer of 1795; but on 1 October France showed its disdain for anything short of total victory when it declared once again that occupied Belgium was now French territory. Its former ruler was offered no compensation, and so resolved to fight on. The same uncompromising annexation guaranteed continued commitment to the war on the part of the British.

  Pitt, too, in fact, had been putting out peace overtures after the breakup of the coalition. He continued to hope until the spring of 1796 that a new and uncertain government in France might yet offer conc
essions on Belgium. That would enable him to withdraw honourably from a struggle which was proving more costly, in every sense, than he had ever dreamed. Since the end of 1793 almost everything had gone wrong. Toulon had been lost, York’s army in the Netherlands had performed dismally, and the coalition had come apart. In June 1795 an ambitious amphibious operation to land 3,300 men, mostly émigrés, on the Brittany coast at Quiberon Bay, there to link up with thousands more royalist chouan guerrillas, ended in fiasco.* After that Pitt concentrated British efforts on the West Indies. French planters in Saint-Domingue were desperate for British protection against rebellious blacks, and a small force had been sent there in 1793. When the Spaniards gave up their part of the island to France, the attractions of a more sustained British occupation grew. Imitative slave uprisings swept the British West Indies, too, early in 1795, while republican privateers operated from Guadeloupe. Besides, there were obvious commercial advantages in trying to make the Caribbean a British lake. Thus a huge expedition was sent there in November 1795, and eventually it made the British islands secure and captured others. But it never subdued Guadeloupe or Saint-Domingue, and in 1795, meanwhile, Pitt had to content himself with vaunting consolation prizes, like taking the Cape of Good Hope after the Dutch changed sides, as triumphs.

  It was not even as if all was well at home. The massive surge of loyalism that had helped to carry the country into war lost momentum as the prospects of a swift victory dimmed. By the end of 1793 the corresponding societies, stunned into silence momentarily when their French inspiration became the enemy, had recovered their verve and were campaigning against the war in favour once more of radical parliamentary reform. In Scotland two national conventions of reform societies had been held despite the onset of war, while in Ireland an unprecedented convention of representatives of the majority Catholic population called for full civil and political equality with Protestants. Aware that the Irish Catholics, who knew what had happened to their Church in France, were worth conciliating, Pitt forced a reluctant Irish Parliament to concede them all except seats in the legislature early in 1793. But after that there were no more concessions to reformers. One did not, declared Pitt, try to mend the roof in a hurricane. An overwhelming majority in Parliament agreed with him. Ever since Burke had come out against the Revolution in 1790 the opposition Whigs had been falling apart, and in the summer of 1794, urged on by Burke, a number of leading Whigs joined the administration. Fox and the opponents of the war were left in a helpless minority, protesting in vain as publishers of Painite propaganda were prosecuted for sedition. Scottish judges were soon sending organizers of conventions to Botany Bay, and the Irish Parliament banned them entirely. The very name ‘convention’ now smacked of treason, and in 1794 treason was the charge brought in England against Hardy and other leading British ‘Jacobins’. The move followed the revelation that that spring the French had sent an agent through England to Ireland in order to report on the prospects for a pro-French uprising. Before his arrest in Dublin he had made contact with leaders of the United Irishmen, a non-sectarian group of parliamentary reformers founded in Belfast in 1791 and dedicated to weakening British control over Ireland. The English, on the other hand (he had reported), were not ripe for pro-French rebellion; but Pitt feared otherwise. When, in a triumph for the jury system, all those accused of treason were acquitted (December 1794), he turned to outright alteration of the laws. Habeas Corpus had already been suspended in May 1794, and in November the next year, in the notorious ‘Two Acts’, the scope of treasonable practices was widened, while magistrates were empowered to prevent the monster meetings which the reform societies had come to favour over the summer. An attack on George III’s coach as he drove to open Parliament in October triggered these new measures, whose application those affected soon labelled Pitt’s reign of terror. In Ireland, meanwhile, the United Irishmen had been dissolved and their founder Wolfe Tone, suspected of encouraging French intervention, went into exile rather than face prosecution. He made his way to France, where from the spring of 1796 he began a lonely but persistent campaign to persuade the Directory that a French invasion of Ireland would bring an uprising so serious that Great Britain would be knocked out of the war.

  The Directory’s prime target for 1796, however, was Austria, now facing France without the support of any major continental ally. The plan was to strike through Germany in massive numbers at the Austrian heartland, distracting her meanwhile in the rear by a smaller force sent against her territories in northern Italy. At the last minute Bonaparte, the victor of Toulon and since then remarkably sure-footed in domestic politics, was appointed to command the army of Italy. Compelled to improvise for lack of adequate supplies and equipment, he moved with quite unexpected speed, forced the Austrians to retreat, and during their confusion knocked Sardinia out of the war in a series of lightning battles. This was just a month after he had taken command. In the subsequent peace a few weeks later (15 May) Victor Amadeus III accepted the loss of Savoy and Nice. But by then Bonaparte had descended from the Alps into the Lombard plains and had reached Milan. In all this time the armies in Germany had scarcely advanced at all. The Italian theatre had become the main one, and there was talk of dividing the command. Bonaparte made it clear that he would not tolerate such an affront, and his victorious troops were already so loyal to him personally that the Directors shrank from testing their authority. Yet they failed to reinforce him, too; while the Austrians, holding their own on the Rhine with surprising ease, were able to renew their Italian armies from their reserves. Thus although the French, by a threatening southward march, were able to scare Naples and Parma into abandoning the coalition, they were too weak to take Mantua. Between August and January 1797 the Austrians sent no fewer than four armies down the Alpine passes to relieve it, each repulsed by Bonaparte in brilliant but increasingly desperate manoeuvres. But after the last of these relief columns had been turned back at Rivoli (14 January 1797), Mantua at last surrendered. Soon afterwards the long-promised reinforcements arrived and, unthreatened from the rear, Bonaparte turned north and began to advance towards Vienna.

  His position was not as strong as it looked. His lines of communication were dangerously extended; and there was unrest behind him in Venetian territory where, despite the republic’s neutrality, much of the campaign had been fought and the French forces, as everywhere, were now living off the land. Nevertheless, he was now within a hundred miles of Vienna and there was panic in the imperial capital. Unknown to him, the French forces in Germany had at last crossed the Rhine. So when he offered peace talks, the Austrians were ready to accept almost any terms he might suggest. To their surprise, the preliminaries of Leoben, which they accepted on 18 April, were not as demanding or as damaging as they might have expected. That they were asked to accept the loss of Belgium came as no surprise. They had already written it off three years beforehand in practice. They also willingly recognized whatever French frontiers the laws of the Republic laid down, since whether that meant the left bank of the Rhine remained unclear. And although Bonaparte was not willing to give back Milan, he was prepared to acknowledge that Austria was entitled to some compensation for her losses, and he now proposed that she should take it at the expense of Venice. The revolts in Venetian territory proved the ideal excuse, and so now the ancient republic was carved up like Poland. The city itself, and all its territory east of the Adige, went to Austria, giving her an extensive Adriatic coastline. The French held on to the rest, which Bonaparte incorporated a few months later into a puppet Lombard state, the Cisalpine Republic.

  None of these terms was authorized from Paris. They came to the Directory, and to the generals now at last making progress along the Rhine, as a fait accompli. And in fact they totally contravened the instructions Bonaparte had been given at the start of the Italian campaign, and the clear war aims that the Directors had been pursuing. He had been told to take Austrian territory and hold it as a bargaining counter for ultimate peacemaking. Opinion in the Directory w
as divided about what it should be bargained for: most favoured an Austrian recognition of a French frontier along the Rhine, although others, including Carnot, thought that a formula for endless future conflict. But nobody had foreseen, much less authorized, the carve-up of neutral states, or indeed the creation from French conquests of new ‘sister republics’. Such arrangements left nothing to bargain with, whereas on the matter of the Rhine frontier the Leoben terms were extremely ambiguous. The generals on the Rhine, no less than the Directory, were understandably furious; but the conclusion of peace preliminaries on his own authority was only the culmination of months of independent action by Bonaparte. In December 1796 he had prompted French sympathizers in cities freed by French arms from Modenese and papal rule to form themselves into a Cispadane* Republic, itself absorbed in June 1796 into the equally factitious Cisalpine one. By January the civil commissioners normally attached to commanders in the field to ensure their compliance with government policy had been recalled, leaving him a completely free hand. After the fall of Mantua he had, as the Directors had long hoped, invaded the Papal States and extracted territorial concessions from the Pope. But so far from treating Pius VI as the irreconcilable enemy of the Republic and seeking to dethrone him, in the treaty of Tolentino (19 February) he merely underwrote the secession of the Cispadane cities, assuring the pontiff otherwise that he would find the French Republic, of all places, ‘among the truest friends of Rome’. Successful generals had dreamed of pursuing their own aims and ambitions ever since Dumouriez: but now one of them had won the entire war, and he felt perfectly entitled to dictate the terms of peace as well.