French Revolutionary Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The French Revolutionary Wars began in the spring of 1792 with a declaration of war against Austria and Prussia, and they did not end until 1802. In those ten years, France fought virtually every major power on the European continent and beyond, from the Caribbean to Egypt to the coast of Ireland. What started as a revolution's struggle for survival became something else entirely: a decade-long reshaping of how wars are fought, who fights them, and what they are fought for. How did a country in the middle of violent internal upheaval manage to conquer the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and the Italian peninsula? How did a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte rise from obscure siege-work at Toulon to become First Consul of France? And what does the date the 23rd of August 1793 mean for the history of warfare everywhere?

• 2. A Revolution Under Siege

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  On the 27th of August 1791, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William II of Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz. Together, they declared the monarchs of Europe's interest in the well-being of King Louis XVI and threatened vague but severe consequences if anything should befall him. Leopold privately saw the declaration as a non-committal gesture, a way to soothe the feelings of French emigrant nobles without committing to war. Revolutionary leaders in Paris read it very differently, as a direct threat.

  France issued an ultimatum demanding Leopold withdraw his troops from the French border. His reply was evasive. On the 20th of April 1792, the French Legislative Assembly voted for war against Francis II, Leopold's successor, following a long list of grievances presented by foreign minister Charles Francois Dumouriez. Dumouriez expected the local population of the Austrian Netherlands to rise in support of the invasion, as they had in 1790. He was wrong. The revolution had disorganized the French army so thoroughly that the troops raised for the invasion were insufficient, and following the declaration of war, French soldiers deserted in large numbers. In one case, they murdered their own general, Theobald Dillon.

  Prussia and Austria responded with a coordinated invasion. The Duke of Brunswick assembled a largely Prussian army at Koblenz and issued the Brunswick Manifesto, written by the French king's cousin Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Conde. The manifesto declared the allies' intent to restore Louis XVI to full power and to treat any town resisting them as rebels subject to death by martial law. The effect was the opposite of what was intended. Revolutionary resolve stiffened across France. On the 10th of August 1792, a crowd stormed the Tuileries Palace and seized the king and his family. The Brunswick invasion advanced, taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun, before meeting the French at Valmy on the 20th of September. The battle was a tactical draw, but the professional French artillery distinguished itself. The Prussians, finding the campaign more costly than expected with winter approaching, chose to retreat. The very next day, the 21st of September, the monarchy was formally abolished and the First Republic declared.

• 3. The Nation in Arms

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  Spain and Portugal joined the anti-French coalition in January 1793. Britain expelled the French ambassador following the execution of Louis XVI. On the 1st of February 1793, France declared war on Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, and the war grew into something with no precedent in European history.

  The response from Paris was the decree of the 24th of February 1793 ordering the conscription of 300,000 men. This was followed by an even more sweeping measure: on the 23rd of August 1793, the National Convention called a levee en masse, or mass conscription, for the first time in human history. By the following summer, that conscription had put roughly 500,000 men in the field. Eighteenth-century armies, with their rigid protocols, unenthusiastic soldiers, and aristocratic officer classes, had no answer for this. French troops were expected to harass the enemy and remain loyal enough not to desert, a level of trust that earlier Ancien Regime armies could never have extended to ordinary soldiers.

  Organizing those armies fell to Lazare Carnot, a scientist and prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety, who coordinated the Republic's fourteen armies and earned the nickname the Organizer of the Victory. The 1791 Legislative Assembly had already passed the so-called Drill-Book legislation, implementing new infantry doctrines created in response to French defeats in the Seven Years' War. Those doctrines aimed to exploit the intrinsic bravery of the French soldier and the explosive nationalist energy of the Revolution itself. Combined with the sheer size of the new armies, the tactical and strategic possibilities became, in the words of later scholars, the beginning of modern war.

• 4. Napoleon's Italian Gamble

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  On the 11th of March 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte left Paris for Nice, arriving on the 26th of March to take command of the poorly supplied Army of Italy. He had been advocating a plan for the invasion of Italy for years. The army was already being reorganized when he arrived, and he found the situation improving faster than expected.

  The Montenotte Campaign opened on the 10th of April when Austrian general Johann Beaulieu's forces attacked the extreme French eastern flank near Genoa. Bonaparte countered at the Battle of Montenotte on the 12th of April, crushing the isolated right wing of the allied army. The next day he defeated an Austro-Sardinian force at Millesimo. A victory at the Second Battle of Dego drove the Austrians northeast, away from their Piedmontese allies. Bonaparte then turned on Michelangelo Colli's Piedmontese forces at Ceva and San Michele Mondovi before defeating them at Mondovi. On the 28th of April, the Piedmontese signed the Armistice of Cherasco and withdrew from the fighting. On the 18th of May they signed the Treaty of Paris, ceding Savoy and Nice and allowing the French to use their bases against Austria.

  Bonaparte crossed the Po at Piacenza in a flanking maneuver that nearly cut the Austrian line of retreat. The Austrians escaped but their rear-guard was mauled at Lodi on the 10th of May, after which the French took Milan. By June, Bonaparte had begun the Siege of Mantua, the strongest Austrian base in Italy. Austria sent a fresh army under Dagobert Wurmser in July and August, attacking toward Mantua along two separate routes around Lake Garda. Bonaparte exploited the divided Austrian forces, defeating Quasdanovich at Lonato on the 3rd of August and Wurmser at Castiglione on the 5th of August. When Austria sent yet another army under Jozsef Alvinczi in November, Bonaparte defeated him at the Battle of Arcole, southeast of Verona. By the beginning of 1797, nearly 30,000 Austrians were trapped inside Mantua, their numbers falling steadily from disease, combat, and hunger.

• 5. Collapse of the First Coalition

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  On the 2nd of February 1797, Wurmser surrendered Mantua and 18,000 troops. Napoleon was now free to march on the Austrian heartland itself. He advanced directly toward Vienna over the Julian Alps, sending Barthelemy Joubert to invade the Tyrol, while the armies of Hoche and Moreau recrossed the Rhine in April. Archduke Charles hurried from the German front to defend Austria but was defeated at the Battle of Tagliamento on the 16th of March.

  The Austrians concluded the Peace of Leoben in April, ending active hostilities. They later signed the Treaty of Campo Formio on the 17th of October 1797, ceding the Austrian Netherlands to France and recognizing the French border at the Rhine. Austria and France also partitioned the Republic of Venice between them. In less than a year of fighting in Italy, French armies under Napoleon had destroyed Habsburg power in the peninsula, winning nearly every battle and capturing 150,000 prisoners. By 1797, France had occupied the Low Countries, the west bank of the Rhine, and Northern Italy, objectives that had defied the Valois and Bourbon dynasties for centuries.

• 6. Egypt and the Second Coalition

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  With only Britain left to fight and no navy capable of confronting the Royal Navy directly, Napoleon conceived of an invasion of Egypt in 1798. He sailed from Toulon to Alexandria, taking Malta on the way, and landing in June. He won a great victory at the Battle of the Pyramids. Then the Royal Navy, under Nelson, sank the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, stranding Napoleon's army in Egypt.

  The allies used France's Egyptian commitment to form a Second Coalition, this time including Russia for the first time. In Europe, allied armies gradually pushed the French out of Italy, winning at Magnano, Cassano, and Novi. In Syria, Napoleon captured El Arish and Jaffa but laid siege to Acre on the 17th of March 1799 and could not take it. Ottoman and British forces under Jezzar Pasha and Sir Sidney Smith repulsed every assault. By May, with plague spreading through his army, Napoleon retreated back into Egypt. In July he defeated a British-Turkish seaborne invasion at Abukir, but the broader Egyptian campaign was failing.

  In Switzerland, the Second Battle of Zurich in September 1799 reversed the allied advantage in Europe. The Russian force under Alexander Korsakov was annihilated, and the Austrian general Friedrich Freiherr von Hotze was killed south of Zurich. Russia's commander Alexander Suvorov was forced into an arduous three-week march into the Vorarlberg, where his troops arrived starving and exhausted in mid-October. Russia left the coalition.

  Napoleon returned to France in autumn 1799, sailing through the British blockade. His arrival triggered the Coup of 18 Brumaire, bringing down the French Directory and installing him as First Consul.

• 7. Marengo to Amiens

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  Napoleon reorganized the French army and, in the spring of 1800, launched a crossing of the Alps through the Great St Bernard Pass, still under snow. By the 24th of May, 40,000 troops were in the valley of the Po. Artillery was man-hauled over the pass with considerable effort. Napoleon entered Milan on the 2nd of June.

  The decisive engagement came on the 14th of June at the Battle of Marengo. Napoleon found himself at a serious disadvantage in the early hours of the fighting. The Austrian commander Melas believed he had already won and handed off the final assault to a subordinate. The unexpected return of a detached French force under Desaix and a vigorous counterattack turned the battle into a decisive French victory. The Austrians lost half their army. Desaix was killed in the action. In December, a crushing French victory at Hohenlinden in Bavaria compelled the Austrians to seek peace a second time. By the 9th of February 1801, they signed the Treaty of Luneville.

  With Austria and Russia out of the war, Britain found itself isolated. In 1802, Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens. The peace held for less than a year, but it still represented the longest period of peace between the two countries in the entire span from 1793 to 1815. Clausewitz, writing later, analyzed the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras to argue that war had become a struggle between entire nations, playing out on battlefields, in legislative assemblies, and in the way people think. The levee en masse of the 23rd of August 1793 had started something that could not easily be put back.