Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (54 page)

to be the master of Europe, just as it was the master of Paris.”23 It is also

important to stress once again the disunity prevailing at this time among

France’s natural adversaries. The collapse of the First Coalition, opening

as it did a power vacuum into which French statesmen were tempted to

expand, left the strategic situation much as it had been a century before,

when Louis XIV had been lured down the primrose path of aggression.

Once again, it seems fair to conclude, a powerful confluence of interna-

tional and domestic forces was drawing French forces outward. But this

time, French ambitions would take on a “global” dimension that the Sun

King himself might have found breathtaking.

Even before the
coup d’état
of 18 Fructidor strengthened the hand

of Reubell and his expansion-minded colleagues in the government, the

French war effort had received a dramatic boost from the heroics of

Bonaparte on battlefields in northern Italy. Yet, as one specialist has cor-

rectly noted, the Directory had been projecting French power beyond

the so-called natural boundaries even
before
the Italian campaign of 1796,

converting conquered Holland into a “Batavian Republic” subservient to

French wishes and covetously eyeing lands east of the Rhine. The Directors

“still mouthed, for a time, the natural-boundary theory, it is true, but they

did it out of one side of the mouth while the other side told a different

story.” Bonaparte “introduced a new era only from the point of view of

degree”: the political regime at home was already strongly committed to

expansion.24 What Bonaparte’s Italian triumphs over the Austrians per-

mitted Paris to do was to reiterate its demand for historic gains in western

21 Blanning,
The French Revolution in Germany
, pp. 76–77.

22 Biro,
The German Policy of Revolutionary France
, 1:966.

23 Cited in Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 176.

24 Biro,
The German Policy of Revolutionary France
, 1:958.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

221

Germany even as it carved out a new sphere of influence in Italy. The

purging of Reubell’s opponents from both the executive and the legis-

lature in Fructidor (that is, September 1797) cleared the way for ratifi-

cation of the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797). Under its terms,

Austria acquired Venice, Istria, and Dalmatia from the partitioned Venetian

Republic, as well as a promise of French support for Habsburg annexa-

tion of Salzburg and part of Bavaria. On the other hand, Vienna had to

abandon Belgium and the Left Bank of the Rhine to France and recog-

nize new, French-dominated entities in northern Italy, the “Cisalpine” and

“Ligurian” republics. Moreover, Campo Formio not only legitimized the

new French presence in the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy; it also

presaged the collapse of the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire. It did so

by stipulating that those German princes who lost possessions west of the

Rhine to France could be compensated for those losses at the expense of

the ecclesiastical states of the empire.25 The Habsburgs’ most venerable –

and validating – links with Europe’s mythic past were being jeopardized,

even as Habsburg Austria’s current Great Power status was being reduced,

in the struggle with the regicides at Paris.

These developments, arresting as they were, only whetted the appetite of

the French, who now moved inexorably back into a mode of aggression on

high seas and Continent alike. Desultory talks with the British, under way

at Lille since early in July, were cut off abruptly in the wake of 18 Fructidor;

before the end of October, preparations were on foot for an invasion of

England. At the same time, “if the reluctant acceptance of Campo Formio

meant an end to the war with Austria for the time being, it did not prevent

further expansion on the Continent. In fact, French influence spread further

and faster during the year of ‘peace’ than it had done during wartime.”26

That Paris was developing a larger strategic vision could clearly be

seen from the attention it now began to devote to Swiss affairs: after all,

control of the Swiss Confederation meant control of crucial mountain

passes connecting northern Italy with theaters of action in eastern France,

western Germany, and the Low Countries. In late 1797 and early 1798,

French military intervention helped to secure the foundation of a

“Helvetic Republic,” and Paris would soon annex outright two erstwhile

members of the Confederation, Mulhouse and Geneva. That a Franco-

Swiss pact of 2 August 1798 ceded to the French in perpetuity free access

to the Alpine passes disclosed something of the revolutionaries’ strategic

thinking here. However, truth to tell, events transpiring several hundred

miles to the south had for some time been paralleling the Republic’s moves

against the Swiss. In February 1798, French forces invaded the Papal States,

25 Bruun, “The Balance of Power during the Wars,” pp. 255–56.

26 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 176.

222

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

exiled the pope, and declared a “Roman republic” at Italy’s ancient capital.

Later, a “Parthenopian” or “Neapolitan” republic was established – on

the authority of French bayonets – at the foot of the peninsula. In the

meantime, Paris tightened its control over the strategic northwest Italian

state of Piedmont with a military occupation foreshadowing Piedmont’s

annexation to France and intensified its exploitation of the other “sister

republics” – the Batavian, Cisalpine, and Ligurian republics. The French

now possessed an unbroken belt of territories extending from the North

Sea to the central Mediterranean.27

At the same time, French influence was spilling over irresistably into

Germany. Campo Formio had made French acquisition of the Left Bank of

the Rhine contingent in part upon French diplomatic support for Vienna’s

annexation of Salzburg and a portion of Bavaria. Yet the Republic’s strate-

gists were in fact not at all inclined to abide by the terms of Campo

Formio. They wanted both to claim the Left Bank of the Rhine
and
to

deny Vienna any compensation in Germany.28 When the French negotia-

tors opened talks with their counterparts from the Holy Roman Empire at

a Congress convened at Rastatt, they sensed that the split between Prussia

and Austria, and the willingness of the temporal German princes to dis-

card the empire and swallow up the small ecclesiastical states, might play

directly into their hands. Events bore out their predictions. On 11 March

1798 the Congress agreed to hand the Left Bank over to France; on 4 April

it accepted in principle the idea that the secular princes could be compen-

sated for territorial losses on the Left Bank with laicized ecclesiastical lands.

The Directory seemed to have mastered German affairs as thoroughly as it

had those of Italy.29 And Austria remained thwarted in its own acquisitive

designs.

All these events were sufficiently troubling to advocates of a balance

of power in European affairs: already, France had attained a greatness

on the Continent to which even Louis XIV could not have aspired. But

when the Directory’s soaring ambitions began to extend to areas far to the

east, thereby threatening Russia and Turkey as well as Great Britain and

Austria, the possibilities for renewed coalition warfare increased commen-

surately. The centerpiece of the French thrust to the east was, of course, the

“Egyptian adventure” of 1798–99. The actual decision to authorize an ex-

pedition to conquer Egypt came on 5 March 1798. As far back as July 1797,

however, Talleyrand had presaged such a grandiose initiative in an address

27 Ibid., pp. 176–78. For classic syntheses of the historical literature on France’s “sister republics” in the 1790s, consult R. R. Palmer,
The Age of the Democratic Revolution:
The Response
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964); and Jacques Godechot,
France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century
, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965).

28 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 176–78.

29 Ibid., p. 178.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

223

delivered at the Institute at Paris. Talleyrand, soon to be named foreign

minister, had reminded his auditors of Choiseul’s suggestion after the Seven

Years’ War that France seize Egypt as compensation for colonies lost to

London. And he had continued in this audacious vein: “Nothing is more

important than to establish ourselves on a sound footing in Albania, Greece,

Macedonia and the other provinces of the Turkish Empire in Europe, es-

pecially those with a Mediterranean coastline, and most notably Egypt,

which one day could prove immensely useful for us.”30

But there were also opportunities beckoning to the French in the far

northeast. As the Directors moved toward their decision to invade Egypt,

rumors were rising in Europe about renewed French interest in Poland!

In January 1798, a Russian spy in the French embassy at Berlin sent back

disturbing reports to St. Petersburg about a possible French attempt to

fashion a resurrected Polish state from the Partition spoils of the three

eastern autocracies. That a seven-thousand-man Polish Legion was cur-

rently serving under French colors in the West, and that military units of

Polish exiles were also being formed in the Danubian basin in the Southeast,

appeared to lend credence to these stories.31

The challenge that the French Revolution posed to the equilibrium

of political forces in Europe by 1798 was starkly “modern”: that is, it

looked forward to Napoleon and to the threat presented by Germany in

the two “world wars” of the twentieth century even more than it recalled

the earlier aggrandizement of Charles V and Louis XIV. For the very first

time, a European power was menacing the vital interests of
both
“flanking

powers” (Great Britain and Russia) even as it ran roughshod over the

more traditional battlefields of west-central Europe. Even as the Directory

repeatedly struck at Britain directly through the partially opened “back

door” of Ireland, it called the entire British Empire into question through

an occupation of Egypt that might in turn provide a base for a descent

upon India (via the Red Sea or the “overland route”).32 At the same time,

by challenging the status quo in a Germany frozen for centuries within the

framework of the Holy Roman Empire, by working to undo the massive

changes wrought in the three Polish partitions, and by appearing in force in

the eastern Mediterranean and upon its strategic littoral, the French not

only infuriated the Russians but also reconciled them with their inveterate

foes, the Ottoman Turks. In addition, Paris wanted to block any effort by

Austria to parlay its new Adriatic possessions into a major Mediterranean

presence – and this, naturally, could only reinforce Vienna’s conviction

30 Ibid., p. 180.

31 Ibid., p. 190.

32 On the Irish situation in the 1790s, see Thomas Pakenham,
The Year of Liberty: The Great
Irish Rebellion of 1798
(New York: Random House, 1998). On the threat posed to British India by the French presence in Egypt, see Edward Ingram,
Commitment to Empire:

Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

224

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

that a resumption of coalition warfare against the overbearing French was

imperative.

The revolutionaries, then, did much to prepare the way for a conflict of

even greater international scope than that of 1792–97. And, truth to tell,

the principal members of the Second Coalition – Britain, Russia, Austria,

Turkey – were shocked into a substantial measure of cooperative plan-

ning by the perceived magnitude of the challenge emanating from Paris.

When Pitt invited the new tsar, Paul I, to take the lead in organizing the

Second Coalition, he suggested a program of diplomatic goals strikingly

anticipatory of the settlement later to be hammered out at the Congress

of Vienna. France should be reduced to its prerevolutionary borders, and

renewed French expansionism might be barred by, among other things, the

creation of a Dutch/Belgian state in the Low Countries and the restoration

of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia-Savoy in Italy. The Swiss would

regain their territories and sovereignty; Austria could receive Italian pos-

sessions as compensation for losing Belgium; and Prussia might be lured

into the coalition with the promise of German acquisitions.33 Austria’s

Chancellor Thugut, too, was “seeking a new kind of coalition,” hinting,

at least, “at the concert that would later emerge under Metternich’s aus-

pices in 1814.” Painfully aware that the First Coalition had been hobbled

by “the lack of joint planning among the allies,” Thugut insisted that, this