French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars picked up one of their names from Napoleon's own mouth. On the 30th of September 1805, days after the Ulm campaign had begun, he addressed his troops in Strasbourg. Soldats, la guerre de la troisième coalition est commencée, he told them. Soldiers, the war of the third coalition has begun. That single sentence hints at a war fought under many different names, not just one. Why does this conflict go by so many different names, each drawing its own line between one war and the next? Why do some major clashes of the era never make the official list of these wars at all? And how many separate wars actually make up this two-decade span between 1792 and 1815? This documentary follows both the fighting and the long argument over what to call it.

• 2. Seven Wars, One Front

  ›

  War of the First Coalition broke out in April 1792 and dragged on until October 1797. No later Coalition War would last as long. The Second Coalition picked up the fight from November 1798 to March 1802. A Third Coalition followed from April 1805 to July 1806. A Fourth Coalition ran from October 1806 to July 1807. The Fifth Coalition was brief, confined to the months between April and October of 1809. Two more coalitions closed out the era. A Sixth ran from March 1813 to May 1814. A Seventh, often called the Hundred Days, lasted from March to July 1815. Not every major clash of the period made this official list. That gap would later fuel arguments over what the whole era should even be called.

• 3. A Name Forged In War

  ›

  In 1803, the French Tribunat received a report. Its title was Résultats des guerres, des négociations et des traités qui ont précédé et suivi la coalition contre la France. In English, that reads Results of the Wars, Negotiations and Treaties that Preceded and Followed the Coalition against France. That report stands among the earliest known uses of the phrase that would become Coalition Wars. It was describing April 1793, when General Dumouriez had just lost the battle of Neerwinden and defected to Austria, throwing France into despair. Les événements de cette époque sont les plus pénibles à décrire de tous ceux qui ont signalé les guerres de la coalition, the report read. The events of that time are the most painful to describe of all those that marked the wars of the coalition.

  In January 1805, the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt newspaper ran a piece titled Das Staatsinteresse von Baiern bei dem dritten Koalitions-Kriege. In English, that reads The National Interest of Bavaria in the Third Coalition War. The Third Coalition had already formed by then, though fighting had not yet broken out. The Austrian paper was weighing whether the neighboring Electorate of Bavaria would side with the French Empire or the Austrian-led Coalition.

  Both examples show the phrase already circulating years before historians agreed on where the French Revolutionary Wars ended and the Napoleonic Wars began.

• 4. Which War Is It Anyway

  ›

  By 1799, the term French Revolutionary Wars had a built-in cutoff. That cutoff was Napoleon's Coup of 18 Brumaire, which fell on the 9th of November 1799. Historians generally mark that coup as the end of the Revolution. The end date is not fixed, though, since the War of the Second Coalition was already underway when Napoleon seized power, and continued on for years afterward. Depending on which peace treaty historians point to, the French Revolutionary Wars end at different moments. Some mark the end in 1799. Others point to the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801. Still others prefer the Treaty of Amiens in 1802.

  The label Napoleonic Wars stretches differently depending on the historian. Some start the clock in 1799, folding in the War of the Second Coalition. Others wait until the War of the Third Coalition, dated to 1803 or 1805 depending on the historian's own periodization. Those historians refuse to call the Second Coalition war Napoleonic at all. Napoleon did not start that war himself; he inherited it from the Revolutionary French Directory, the government he had just overthrown.

  British historians coined the label Great French War for the almost unbroken run of fighting from 1792 to 1815. Some of those historians also folded it into the final stretch of the Anglo-French Second Hundred Years' War, a rivalry traced back to 1689. In 2013, historian Mike Rapport proposed a simpler fix. He suggested calling the whole span from 1792 to 1815 simply the French Wars.

  None of these labels settle which individual campaigns of the era actually counted as part of the fight.

• 5. Wars Off The List

  ›

  The French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 fell between the First and Second Coalitions. It is not counted among the Coalition Wars proper. The Stecklikrieg of 1802, fought between the Second and Third Coalitions, is excluded for the same reason. So is the Peninsular War, which ran from 1807 to 1814 and overlapped several coalitions. The French invasion of Russia in 1812, waged between the Fifth and Sixth Coalitions, is left off the list as well. Each of these conflicts involved France without pitting it against a formal Coalition alliance. That single distinction, formal alliance or not, kept them off the roster no matter how large they loomed.

  That roster of formal Coalitions still had to be built from somewhere. It was a patchwork of great and small powers who did not always stay on the same side twice.

• 6. Who Fought Whom

  ›

  Great Britain stood in every one of the seven Coalitions, the only power to do so. Russia, Austria, and Prussia rounded out the four main powers, though none of them joined every single war. Smaller states drifted in and out of the alliances too. Among them were Spain, Naples, Piedmont-Sardinia, the Dutch Republic, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark-Norway, and assorted German and Italian states.

  Each of the first five Coalitions collapsed the same way. Once France defeated one or more members, those states were forced out of the alliance. Some of them then became French allies themselves. The Sixth and Seventh Coalitions, by contrast, dissolved only after Napoleon was defeated, in 1814 and again in 1815.

  Diplomats from the victorious powers then gathered at the Congress of Vienna to draw a new balance of power across Europe. That settlement would outlast the wars that made it necessary.