Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (41 page)

hundred or so Leftist deputies could only have won over a huge majority

in the 750-man Assembly, and so translated their ideas into state policy,

by vesting their arguments in the splendid raiment of Gallic diplomatic

tradition. It is in this crucial sense that the French reversion to war in 1792,

arguably the most momentous policy decision of the entire Revolution,

was as much a function of
European
affairs as it was a reflex of French

“politicking.”

This conclusion is only reinforced when we recall that, by early 1792

if not sooner, the French were reacting to, and not merely precipitating,

European developments. Although measures adopted by Austria’s gov-

ernment along the path toward war were (in Blanning’s words) “in large

measure responses to events in Paris,”12 this was by no means entirely

the case. As affected as Leopold II and Chancellor Kaunitz were by

Marie-Antoinette’s entreaties for Habsburg intervention in French affairs,

by the related insecurities of Austrians in Belgium, and by the plaints

of German princes dispossessed by the French in Alsace, they had also

(as always) to worry about developments in eastern Europe. As of 9 January

1792, the signing of the Peace of Jassy between Russia and Turkey left

Catherine II free to unleash her victorious troops against the Poles.

10 Patricia Chastain Howe, “Charles-Franc¸ois Dumouriez and the Revolutionizing of French Foreign Affairs in 1792,”
French Historical Studies
14 (1986): 367–90.

11 On the ideological, socioeconomic, and political arguments employed by the Brissotins and others favoring a policy of war, refer again to Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary
Wars
, esp. pp. 116–19, 210–11.

12 Ibid., p. 118.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

167

“The Russians,” as Geoffrey Bruun has accurately commented, “were

unwilling to permit a Polish revival. In 1792 Russian armies assailed the

truncated Polish state and the need to limit the Russian advance became a

matter of urgent concern, not only in Vienna and Berlin, but in London,

Stockholm, and Constantinople.”13 But it was Austria, caught as usual

between worries about French initiatives to the west and fears about

Russian and Prussian machinations to the north, east, and southeast, that

had to worry the most about Catherine’s insatiate ambitions; for those

ambitions threatened the very existence of a sovereign Polish state that

had long helped to insulate Austria against the avaricious Russians and

Prussians. If Catherine should prevail militarily against the authors of the

1791 reforms in Poland, the Prussians would likely follow in the Russian

wake and annex the long-desired regions of Danzig and Thorn. That

Austria faced the prospect of a new degree of strategic isolation in central

Europe was ever more obvious; and this prospect was no less powerful

than the deteriorating situation in the west in pushing Vienna toward a

new alliance with Berlin.14

The Austrian posture toward France, meanwhile, had been stiffen-

ing markedly as early as December 1791. In both public statements and

private correspondence, Leopold II and Kaunitz renewed their condem-

nation of developments within France prejudicial to Louis XVI and

Marie-Antoinette, accused Paris of fomenting disorders in Germany, and

threatened military action should France “aggress” against the Elector of

Trier over his protection of the French émigrés. Then, on 17 January 1792,

the Habsburg Council of State “decided that the concert of European

powers should be formally reactivated and the following demands put

to the French: the armies . . . being formed on the frontiers of the Holy

Roman Empire should be disbanded; all the rights of the German princes

in Alsace should be restored; Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin should

be returned to the Pope; complete security, liberty, and respect should be

granted to the French royal family; the monarchical form of government

should be upheld in France and everything contrary to it should be abol-

ished; [and] all treaties between France and the other powers should be

confirmed.”15 This was followed up by the signatures, on 7 February, to an

Austro-Prussian pact which, albeit “formally a defensive alliance, . . . was

clearly intended to lay the basis for a concert to intervene in France.”

13 Geoffrey Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars, 1793–1814,” in
The New
Cambridge Modern History
,
Vol. 9: War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793–1830

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 250–74.

14 On the Austrian dilemma in 1791–92, see, among other studies, Karl A. Roider, Jr.,
Baron
Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).

15 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 113.

168

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

It is significant that, even before the exchange of declarations of war

between Paris and Vienna in April 1792, old acquisitive instincts were pow-

erfully reinforcing security concerns in
all
quarters. We have already seen this, in considerable detail, for the French. At the same time, Prussian ambitions were extending to Polish lands but also included the principalities of

J ülich and Berg in Germany, acquisition of which would presumably entitle

both the Elector of Bavaria and the Habsburg emperor to compensation

(at French expense) in Alsace and Lorraine! Even at Vienna, where Leopold

and Kaunitz had long resisted the drift toward war, “acquisitive ambition

was beginning to rear its head. In part this was due to the growing as-

sertiveness of a younger generation of ministers. . . . Trained in the abrasive

diplomacy of Joseph II, they put Austria first, and were indifferent to the

interests of the Holy Roman Empire.” Leopold’s sudden death on 1 March

left his youthful and inexperienced successor, Francis II, exposed to the

rising clamor for war from this direction.16 And of course at St. Petersburg

the appetite for aggressive warfare needed even less in the way of encour-

agement. Having scored spectacular gains at the expense of the Turks in the

eastern Balkans and in the northern Caucasus, the Romanov colossus was

now proceeding on toward new annexations in Poland. The growing influ-

ence of Catherine’s Russia reinforced anxieties at Vienna regarding Austrian

security, and this in turn weakened whatever inhibitions there might still

have been at Vienna about “buying off” Berlin with the promised spoils of

an Austro-Prussian campaign against France.

Thus the historic declaration of war that rang through the Legislative

Assembly in the thronged Tuileries Palace on 20 April 1792 was more –

much
more – than a consequence of Brissotin, Fayettiste, and royalist fac-

tions jockeying for power in revolutionary France. It was, first and most

fundamentally, a function of the inevitable clash of Great Power ambi-

tions and insecurities in the late-eighteenth-century arena of continental

geopolitics. Ironically, the two states quickest to take up arms in 1792

would find themselves deceived in many of their early expectations re-

garding the war’s outcome. For France, the conflict would not only prove

to be of an unimagined duration; it would also spell the political doom of

the Brissotins, Fayettistes, and Rightists whose momentarily converging

designs had helped to bring it about. For Austria, the campaign against rev-

olutionary France would not only prove unexpectedly difficult; it would

also proceed against the backdrop of a new partition of hapless Poland ben-

efiting St. Petersburg primarily, Berlin secondarily, and Vienna not at all.

Catherine the Great, ignoring the Habsburgs altogether, “bought Prussian

assistance by offering a share of the spoils. The Second Partition of Poland,

arranged by the two powers in January 1793, left [only] one-third of the

16 Ibid., pp. 114–18.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

169

realm independent.”17 The Austrians from early on had shouldered the

main burden of the campaign in the west; their Prussian confederates,

despite their professed outrage over developments in France, were more

attentive to events in the east, and gained handsomely thereby.

But if, at Paris, the unanticipated difficulties of the war swept aside its

initial sponsors of Left, Center, and Right, and installed in their place rev-

olutionaries determined to marshal all national resources in the pursuit

of victory, the
nature
of the French military commitment remained un-

changed – that is, it was still more one of continental realpolitik than one

of revolutionary idealism. As of late September 1792, both the king and the

Legislative Assembly were irretrievably gone, while the surviving minis-

ters were subordinated tightly to the committees of the popularly elected

Convention. Politically, the next nine months were to be marked – and

marred – by the struggle between the Brissotins or “Girondists” and the

Robespierrist Jacobins; and this struggle will require careful analysis later

on. For the moment, however, we need to stay with the geopolitics of the

Revolution and witness once again, in the
motivation
of France’s statesmen, the triumph of historical continuity over historical discontinuity.

“In two easy stages,” Blanning has written, “the revolutionaries pro-

gressed from a war of prudence to a war of propaganda to a war of imperial

expansion.” On 19 November 1792, the Convention marked the former

transition by enacting a famous decree that, purportedly speaking for the

French nation, promised all needed assistance to those “enslaved” peoples

struggling to liberate themselves. Orders were to be conveyed to generals

on campaign to ensure that those so aided would suffer no retaliation from

their erstwhile oppressors. Yet it was all but inevitable that, over the long

haul, propaganda-as-policy would give way to territorial annexation-as-

policy. Even before one-time foreign minister and now general Dumouriez

stunned the Austrian forces at Jemappes and thus gained easy access to all

of Belgium, he was writing, “the Rhine should be the sole limit to our

country, from Geneva to the sea.” And with this, revealingly, Brissot con-

curred, writing to Dumouriez from Paris on 27 November: “I can tell you

that there is one opinion here which is spreading: namely, that the French

Republic must have the Rhine as its frontier.”18 Already, the Revolution

was taking on an aggressive coloration, a territorial-mindedness reminis-

cent of past eras of Bourbon expansion.

Not surprisingly, the “idealistic” decree of 19 November was followed

by more pragmatic legislation of 15 December spelling out the implica-

tions of French military conquests. This latter decree was (in Blanning’s

words) a “masterly combination of universalist ideology and nationalist

17 Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 253–54.

18 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 136–38.

170

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

raison d’état
.” On the one hand, it condemned the old regime wherever

it might still exist; on the other hand, it enumerated ways in which local

resources were to be used to provision France’s armies. On the one hand,

it insisted that elections be held in “liberated” areas so that the popular

will could freely express itself; on the other hand, it tried to ensure that the

results of such elections would be compatible with French interests.19 As

time went on, the natural workings of European politics would lead to the

triumph of “nationalist
raison d’état
” over “universalist ideology” in the

motives and policies of the revolutionaries.

Indeed, the Convention’s first year saw this process at work on a num-

ber of occasions. On 14 February 1793, for example, Carnot reported

to the Convention on deliberations of the diplomatic committee con-

cerning French annexation of Monaco and certain other territories. The

Convention accepted Carnot’s opinion that France could indeed expand in

this fashion if such expansion did not contravene local people’s desires or

(and this became an increasingly critical “or”) such aggrandizement but-

tressed the greatness and security of the Republic; thus, the gospel in whose

light Paris over these months annexed Savoy, the county of Nice, Belgium,

and well-nigh a hundred communities in the Rhineland.20

By the same token, the decision at Paris to expand the war in the north-

east from Belgium to the United Provinces assumed French readiness to

reengage the old Britannic enemy in combat. Anglophobia reared its griz-

zled head in the Convention. All too predictably, Brissot and his intimates –

as well as others not of his faction – recited the old strictures against the

haughty British and demanded a new indulgence of historic national pride.

Dumouriez went so far as to argue that French seizure of the Dutch navy,