The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  But they were not. They had, in fact, assumed a hugely expanded range of commitments, and gratuitously taken on new enemies, at the very moment when the old ones were recovering the strength to counter-attack. Two days after Louis XVI’s head fell, for example, the Polish question was settled. Rather than fight the Prussians, Catherine of Russia proposed a new partition in which she took the lion’s share of territory and population, but Prussia acquired Gdansk and a vast wedge of territory linking up Silesia and the Baltic provinces. Austria was excluded, much to the fury of the Emperor, who dismissed his leading ministers. The Austro-Prussian alliance against France still held together, however, and could now turn its attention again westwards. The Prussians, indeed, recaptured Frankfurt as early as 2 December 1792, and at the beginning of March 1793 Austrian troops marched once more into the southern Netherlands. On the eighteenth they met Dumouriez at Neerwinden and defeated him decisively. It was the beginning of a disastrous year for the new Republic.

  Even before they formally entered the war, the British had begun to engineer a grand anti-French coalition. In the last days of 1792 they approached Spain for an alliance, knowing that before Valmy the junior branch of the House of Bourbon had already been on the verge of joining the expected Austro-Prussian military promenade to restore Louis XVI to his throne and prerogatives. News of the king’s execution produced widespread expressions of revulsion in Spain, and the French envoy was expelled. On 7 March France retaliated by declaring war, and soon afterwards Spain agreed to co-operate in a British blockade of the French Mediterranean coast. On 25 March the British also persuaded Catherine of Russia to commit herself to the anti-French struggle. A month later, a subsidy was offered to the king of Sardinia, while in July Portugal and Naples were also drawn into the conflict by British diplomacy. Minor German states, meanwhile, were more prepared than ever to hire out troops to paymasters in London. No general treaty bound this coalition together. Nevertheless, within months of Louis XVI’s execution, most of the states of Europe were openly committed to fighting France.

  Nor, by then, did victory seem far off. Neerwinden, when the defeated French troops fled headlong from the field, suggested that after all Valmy and Jemappes had been lucky flukes. Dumouriez made no attempt to regroup. Instead, he asked the Austrians for an armistice, and promised in return to co-operate with the allies by marching what was left of his army on Paris, where he would release the queen and the dauphin from captivity, and proclaim the latter Louis XVII. But when he ordered the march on Paris, his men refused to move, and on 5 April he followed the example of Lafayette and defected to the Austrians. Meanwhile the French had also been driven out of the Rhineland, leaving 20,000 of their men cut off in Mainz; while in France itself armed insurrection had broken out in the Vendée.* In April Danton, the leading voice on foreign policy in the Convention’s newly established Committee of Public Safety, began to use the language of conciliation, deflecting a ferocious motion from Robespierre that anybody advocating negotiation with the enemy should be executed; and persuading the Convention to abandon its open-ended commitment to help anybody calling for French support. He also made a number of clandestine approaches to coalition powers—which only proved to them how close to defeat France was.

  Everything that happened over the summer pointed the same way. By June much of the country was violently rejecting the Convention’s apparent subjection to Paris in the ‘Federalist’ revolt. By July, the French forces had been entirely expelled from Belgium (to great popular jubilation) and the Austrian General Coburg had once more crossed on to French soil, taking the fortress of Condé on the twelfth. A few weeks later, Valenciennes went the same way, and an Anglo-Hanoverian army laid siege to Dunkirk. On the German front, the Mainz garrison capitulated on 23 July, after sustaining 7,000 casualties. In the south, the Spaniards invaded Roussillon and routed its defenders at Mas d’Eu on 18 May. Most humiliating of all, on 27 August rebels at Toulon, the great naval harbour of the Mediterranean coast, turned the port, its arsenal, and fleet over to the British.

  The reversal of the French fortunes was spectacular. It caused much paranoia and contributed to momentous political upheavals in Paris. Many attributed it to treason and collusion with the enemy, an impression that Dumouriez’s defection did nothing to dispel. And after that even the most patriotic generals were reluctant to take the risk of over-bold action, aware that if they failed they were all too likely to end up on the guillotine. Two (Custine and Houchard) certainly did so. But in some ways the defeats of 1793 stemmed directly from the victories of 1792. The French had become over-confident when the armies of their despotic enemies retreated before them, and in fact by the end of the year thousands of volunteers who had enlisted for a single campaign to meet the emergencies of 1792 were returning home, and being allowed to return, in the belief that the job was done. By February there were only about 230,000 men under arms; so that diminishing forces had to confront the explosive growth in the number and resources of the Republic’s enemies, external and internal, during the first half of 1793. It is scarcely surprising that things went so badly.

  Even more surprising, however, is how little relative advantage her enemies took of France’s weakness. Their incursions into French territory never penetrated far beyond the periphery, and there was next to no concerted action by the coalition as a whole, or even groups of its members. Nor did most of them even share common aims. All were notionally committed to the restoration of the French monarchy, but with the king a sickly child in republican hands the project was harder to focus on than when wronged Louis XVI still lived. The British wanted Belgium back in Austrian hands—although they were quite happy to commit troops to seizing France’s troubled Caribbean islands while a state of war gave them the opportunity. The Austrians wanted Belgium back, too, and yet were again toying with an old idea of exchanging it for Bavaria once it was securely theirs again. It had, after all, brought them nothing but trouble since 1786, and as soon as they were re-established they found their Belgian subjects just as awkward to deal with as before, and unwilling to make any extra sacrifices to the war effort. Besides, the new Austrian minister, Thugut, was determined to reserve his strength for intervention in Poland in case of further upheavals there. He did not intend to be excluded from any further share-out. Prussia and Russia too were uncertain that the latest partition would hold, so that Prussian armies on the French front moved sluggishly and were not reinforced, and Russia confined her coalition contribution to harassing such French trade as got to the Baltic past the blockade, which was the first British action in any war with France. When the British declined to pay her a subsidy, Catherine bluntly refused to commit any troops at all to the coalition. Many coalition statesmen clearly expected France to collapse without any special effort on their part. As Pitt wrote: ‘If we distress the enemy on more sides than one, while their internal distraction continues, it seems hardly possible that they can long oppose any effectual resistance.’5

  But resist they did, and with increasing success. Between 6 and 8 September a muddled, indecisive battle at Hondschoote raised the siege of Dunkirk and forced its British besiegers, under the (Grand Old) Duke of York, to withdraw. More spectacularly, at another three-day battle, between 15 and 17 October Jourdan defeated the main Austrian army on French territory at Wattignies, despite inferior numbers, and pursued it across the frontier. Jourdan, a 31-year-old veteran of the American war whose republicanism was far more sincere than that of Dumouriez or Custine, fought the battle under the eye of Lazare Carnot, the member of the Committee of Public Safety now most concerned with military matters. Carnot’s efforts over the subsequent year would earn him enduring fame as the organizer of victory.

  Already on 24 February a levy of 300,000 conscripts had been decreed. It triggered off the Vendée revolt and met with massive resistance throughout the west and parts of Normandy, but by the summer the official number of men under arms had risen to 645,000. And in August the Convention went on to declare a p
rogramme of national mobilization on a scale never before seen anywhere: the levée en masse. Originating among the sansculottes of the Paris sections, the idea of putting the entire resources of the nation at the disposal of the war effort was urged in a series of petitions lodged between 12 and 16 August. Practically Carnot’s first act on joining the Committee of Public Safety was to draft the decree promulgated on the twenty-third, under which, until the moment ‘when enemies have been driven from the Republic’s territory, all the French are permanently requisitioned for the service of the armies’. All unmarried men between 18 and 25 were to present themselves for military service; others were to serve in manufacture, food production, and transport; women were to make clothes and staff hospitals, children make bandages, and even old men should ‘have themselves carried to public places to excite courage in the warriors, hatred of kings, and the unity of the Republic’. All horses and publicly owned buildings were to be drafted into service; a massive expansion of munitions manufacture was proclaimed, and the government generally given powers to do whatever it thought necessary to win the war. These measures produced an army of 1,169,000 by September 1794. It was true that only about 750,000 were fully equipped and trained for battle, but that still made the Republic’s armed forces the largest ever seen in the history of Europe.

  Unprecedented size demanded unprecedented organization, support, and tactics. Throughout 1792 the French armies had consisted of the diminishing remnants of the old line army, National Guard units assigned to the front, and, sometimes overlapping with the latter, battalions of volunteers. Each tended to hold the others in some suspicion and contempt, and they were differently paid, organized, clothed, and equipped. On 21 February the Convention voted to end this situation by introducing the principle of amalgamation (amalgame). The idea was to blend each line battalion into two volunteer units to form a demi-brigade, a principle already tried in the field, with considerable success, by Dumouriez. The new formations were to have identical pay, procedures, uniforms, and equipment. Implementation proved slow, and did not become general until after a new decree in January 1794. Even then it was a two-year process. But the end result was to streamline and simplify the Republic’s military organization, expunge the chaos of its beginnings, and increase the whole army’s sense of being a new, superior force—a citizen army utterly unlike the mixture of mercenaries and reluctant serf conscripts sent against them by the German despots. It was unlike them too in being much harder to equip and supply. For most of the war food and shelter were found by pitiless requisitioning and billeting, and until the Republic’s armies began to operate once more on foreign territory in the latter half of 1794, the burden was mostly borne by France’s own frontier districts. Provision of arms and munitions was expanded by thirty new workshops established between August 1793 and July 1794, and metal supplies were supplemented by melting down railings, church bells, and ornaments. A massive drive was implemented to recover saltpetre from cellars and caves, and thus avoid dependence on imports from the east for the main component of gunpowder. The war effort of 1793–4 was a triumph for ruthless makeshift action, meeting demands, however roughly and readily, never before seen; and showing incidentally how much proper, more formalized organization might achieve later. Equally suggestive of the future were the tactics deployed by the young Republic’s monster armies. There was no possibility of quickly training so many new recruits in the precise and formal drill and manoeuvres of the eighteenth-century battlefield. But weight of numbers, driven on by the patriotic enthusiasm first seen at Valmy and Jemappes, also made that unnecessary. The French could overwhelm their enemies with human waves; and although commanders facing them were at first appalled by their disregard for human life, they soon learned how effective it was. Citizen soldiers felt no restraints, particularly when defending their homeland, as in 1793. They reintroduced into warfare a ferocity and lack of quarter unknown, in western Europe at least, for well over a century.

  Even so it took some time before the full force of these efforts was brought to bear. Much of the autumn of 1793 was absorbed in quelling and mopping up the various centres of revolt within France. The only striking success after Wattignies was partly such an operation. On 19 December Toulon was recaptured and the British fleet driven out, the key role in the expulsion being played by the 25-year-old commander of the artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. His rise began here, and within two months he was a general, planning a march into Italy. But the main front was still in Flanders, and here the coalition hoped to advance along the whole line for the spring campaign of 1794. Emperor Francis II even made the journey from Vienna to inspire his troops and flatter his Belgian subjects, who had never before been visited by their Austrian sovereign. But he did not impress them, nor they him, and he had gone back east, alarmed by news from Poland, when the first major battle occurred. At Tourcoing on 17–18 May the French stopped a numerically superior coalition army from threatening key fortresses. Six weeks later, on 26 June, the Austrians retreated after a bitterly fought confrontation at Fleurus. Even on the sea, against the reputedly invincible British, the French held their own. Over the winter Carnot’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, the ex-Protestant pastor Jeanbon Saint-André, had worked to restore the debilitated and demoralized Brest fleet. In mid-May it put to sea in order to escort a major grain convoy from America into port. In what the British chose to call the ‘Glorious First of June’ the French were seriously mauled, losing 13 ships; but the victors themselves were so exhausted that the convoy eluded them unharmed. Fleurus, however, was much the most important engagement. In fact it marked the turning-point of the whole war. From that moment the French went on to the offensive, and they scarcely looked back until all their continental opponents had been knocked out of the conflict, and even the British were desperate to make peace.

  Thus they began to reap the rewards of a year of desperate, frenzied activity. Yet, as in 1792, not all their success was attributable to their own efforts. Once again the Poles distracted enemies at the crucial moment. Encouraged by the sympathy with which his campaign against the Russians had been viewed in 1792, Kosciuszko made his way to Paris in January 1793 and spent six months trying to interest the new Republic in supporting a renewed Polish insurrection. He received little more than fair words, and in August rejoined his fellow émigrés massing in Leipzig and plotting a rising. Even though the French were offering no tangible help, their enemies were the same, their apparent ability to generate mass enthusiasm was an inspiration, and the language of liberty, national rights, and representative government still had seductive echoes in traditional Polish political rhetoric. Kosciuszko was anxious to avoid a premature rising, but resentment at the Russian occupation within what was left of Poland was growing. In the spring of 1794 his hand was forced by a mutiny within the army, which the Russians were attempting to cut down from the 50,000 to which it had grown during the Four Years Diet, to a mere 15,000. The Russians could not be allowed, in putting the mutiny down, to decimate the force on which the plotters planned to rely. On 24 March, accordingly, Kosciuszko arrived in Cracow and proclaimed an insurrection. A fortnight later he defeated a Russian force sent against him at Raclawice (4 April) and news of this success triggered uprisings against occupying garrisons in Vilno and, above all, Warsaw. Tricolour cockades sprouted everywhere, Polish translations of the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘Ça ira’ appeared, and a ‘Society of Friends of the National Insurrection’, which everyone recognized as a Jacobin club, was established. The Russians withdrew from the capital after losing half their men to popular fury in an episode twice as bloody as the Paris September Massacres of 1792. There were also popular reprisals against those associated with national betrayal in the Targowica confederation. Kosciuszko dreamed of a Polish levée en masse to drive out foreign invaders and, fearing ‘lest the noble ardour of the people grow cold’,6 on 7 May he issued a proclamation granting peasants personal freedom, diminishing the burdens owed to lords, and hinting at furt
her freedoms to come.

  Not all the insurgent leaders, most of whom belonged to Poland’s teeming nobility, thought such promises wise. Certainly they only confirmed the most visceral prejudices of the partitioning monarchs and their advisers. Poland was clearly in the grip of international Jacobinism, and the influence of what Frederick William II called ‘that diabolical sect’ would not be stamped out until the whole of Poland was completely controlled by the forces of order. Determined to take a lead in this, and make further gains into the bargain, the Prussians marched into Poland in May with the encouragement of Catherine II. They did not know that she was also secretly urging the Austrians to intervene in the south. They beat the Austrians to Cracow, and joined forces with the Russians to besiege Warsaw; but in September they were forced to withdraw to deal with a revolt in former Polish territory annexed in 1793. The Austrians now took the opportunity to occupy large stretches of south Poland, while the Russians decided to reduce Warsaw single-handed. To do this they sent general Alexander Suvorov, a veteran campaigner from savage Balkan wars, who, having defeated Kosciuszko at Maciejowice at the beginning of October, advanced on the capital with overwhelming force. On 4 November he stormed Praga, its suburb beyond the Vistula, where the Russian troops took pitiless revenge for their treatment six months previously. Anything between 10,000 and 20,000 Poles died that day, when, as Suvorov proudly reported, ‘The whole of Praga was strewn with dead bodies, blood was flowing in streams’.7 Watching the most destructive one-day massacre in this entire decade of appalling carnage, the inhabitants of Warsaw realized that their only hope was to negotiate surrender. Within days it was agreed. By the end of 1794 the last convulsion of independent Poland was over, and Kosciuszko was a prisoner in St Petersburg. The surrounding powers had decided to partition the country out of existence long before the fighting was over. They spent much of 1795, however, haggling over precisely how the spoils were to be carved up, and for several months in the spring it looked as if Prussia would fight the other two for a larger share. In preparation for this eventuality, she concluded an armistice with France in November 1794 and began to negotiate a definitive peace. In practice she had already played no part in the war in the west for over eighteen months.