War of the First Coalition

• 1. Introduction

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  The War of the First Coalition began not with a single dramatic shot but with a vote. On the 20th of April 1792, the French Legislative Assembly chose to declare war on Austria, setting in motion a conflict that would draw in nearly every major power in Europe and last until October 1797. The question hanging over the entire war was whether the old monarchies of Europe could strangle the French Revolution in its cradle before it spread to their own people.

  What followed was five years of shifting alliances, catastrophic retreats, and stunning battlefield reversals. The coalition opposing France was never truly unified. Each member wanted a different piece of France if they won, and that fragmentation would prove fatal to their cause. Meanwhile, France faced enemies on every border and civil war at home, and yet survived, expanded, and ultimately reshaped the map of Europe. How a fractured, revolutionary nation beat back a continent's worth of professional armies is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. A Declaration That Backfired

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  Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, had personal reasons to watch France closely. His sister was Marie Antoinette, the French queen whose position grew more precarious by the month as the Revolution radicalized. On the 27th of August 1791, Leopold joined King Frederick William II of Prussia in issuing the Declaration of Pillnitz, drafted in consultation with French nobles who had fled the country. The declaration expressed the concern of Europe's monarchs for the well-being of Louis XVI and his family, and warned of unspecified but serious consequences should anything befall them.

  Leopold calculated that the declaration would let him appear decisive without committing to actual action. The revolutionaries in Paris read it differently. They saw it as a direct threat and their leaders denounced it publicly. Relations between France and its neighbors collapsed rapidly from that moment. When the newly appointed French foreign minister Charles François Dumouriez presented a long list of grievances to the Assembly eight months later, the vote for war against Austria followed. Dumouriez had his own calculation: he thought a war might restore popularity and authority to the king, whose power had been eroding for years.

• 3. The Armies Collide

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  France's first attempt to go on the offensive in the Austrian Netherlands was a disaster. The French army had been shattered by the Revolution itself; officers had emigrated, discipline had collapsed, and the soldiers who remained were neither trained nor confident. When fighting broke out, French troops fled, deserted in large numbers, and in at least one case murdered their own commander, General Théobald Dillon.

  The allied response came from Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, who assembled his force at Koblenz on the Rhine. His army, composed mostly of experienced Prussian veterans, crossed into France on the 19th of August 1792 and swiftly took the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. On the 25th of July 1792, Brunswick had issued a declaration written by the brothers of Louis XVI, threatening to condemn any person or town that resisted him to death under martial law. Rather than intimidating the French, the proclamation enraged them. A crowd stormed the Tuileries Palace almost immediately afterward, overthrowing the king.

  At Valmy on the 20th of September 1792, Brunswick's veterans met a French force under Dumouriez and Kellermann. The French artillery, unusually professional for a revolutionary army, held its ground. The battle ended in a tactical draw, but its consequences were enormous. The Prussians, already facing a campaign more expensive and prolonged than they had anticipated, decided the risk of pushing further into France outweighed any possible gain and turned back. Two days after Valmy, the National Convention proclaimed the French Republic.

• 4. Coalition Forms, France Responds

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  On the 21st of January 1793, the revolutionary government executed Louis XVI. The effect on European diplomacy was immediate. Spain, Naples and Sicily, and the Netherlands joined the war against France. France declared war on Britain and the Netherlands on the 1st of February 1793. By March, Spain had entered as well, and through the year the Holy Roman Empire, the kings of Portugal and Naples, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany all formally declared war. The First Coalition, in the full sense of the term, came into existence.

  France responded with two sweeping domestic measures. The Committee of Public Safety was formed on the 6th of April 1793, centralizing emergency war powers. Four months later, in August 1793, the levée en masse conscripted all men aged 18 to 25 into the army. This was not merely a call-up; it was a reorientation of French society around total war. France would put more men in the field than its opponents could, and those armies would live off conquered territory, taking war supplies from the enemy rather than from French taxpayers.

  The battlefield results in 1793 were mixed but ultimately favorable to France. A defeat at Neerwinden in March gave way to French victories at Wattignies and Wissembourg. British land forces were beaten at Hondschoote in September. Great Britain's real strength lay at sea, and it was there that it tried to make its presence felt, supporting revolts in provincial France and laying siege to Toulon in October 1793.

• 5. Prussia's Costly Gamble

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  Prussia entered the war expecting a quick territorial gain and got neither quick victory nor territorial expansion. The Prussian army had been mobilized and then stood down twice in the two years before the French war: once against Austria in 1790, when 160,000 soldiers were assembled, and once against Russia in 1791. Each mobilization drained the treasury. By the third mobilization against France in 1792, Prussian finances were nearly exhausted before the fighting even started.

  Of the 42,000 Prussian soldiers who entered France in 1792, fewer than 20,000 recrossed the frontier. More than half of those who did return were sick. Disease and desertion had gutted the army on its poorly planned march, even without major battlefield losses. A Prussian soldier who survived that retreat, and who later lived through Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, wrote that the Champagne withdrawal in 1792 was perhaps a more terrible sight than even the wreck of the Grande Armée.

  The situation grew worse as Prussia also had to maintain a military presence in the east, where the Partitions of Poland were ongoing. The Kosciuszko Uprising broke out between the Second and Third Partitions, pulling Prussian attention and resources eastward. Frederick William II recognized by 1794 that his kingdom could not sustain a two-front war, and he ceased major operations against France. The Treaty of Basel, signed on the 17th of May 1795, cost Prussia its territories on the left bank of the Rhine. In exchange, France withdrew from the right bank and recognized Prussian gains in Poland. Prussia left the conflict bankrupt and diplomatically isolated from its former allies.

• 6. Napoleon in Italy

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  While the Rhine campaign of 1796 stalled under Jourdan and Moreau, the newly promoted Napoleon Bonaparte carried out a fundamentally different kind of war in Italy. His opening maneuver, the Montenotte Campaign, separated the armies of Sardinia and Austria from each other. He defeated them in sequence rather than facing them together, forced peace on Sardinia, and then drove deeper into the peninsula. His army captured Milan and began the Siege of Mantua.

  Over the following months, Austria sent three successive relief forces under different commanders. Bonaparte defeated each one: Johann Peter Beaulieu, then Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser, then József Alvinczi. On the 2nd of February 1797, Mantua finally surrendered, with 18,000 Austrian soldiers capitulating. Archduke Charles, who had successfully driven Jourdan back across the Rhine in the 1796 German campaign, could not stop Napoleon from advancing into the Tyrol. Austria's government sued for peace in April 1797.

  The terms finalized in the Treaty of Campo Formio in October were sweeping. Austria ceded Belgium to France and recognized French control of the Rhineland and much of Italy. The ancient Republic of Venice, which had existed independently for centuries, was partitioned between Austria and France. The First Coalition was over, though Britain and France remained at war.

• 7. War at the Edges

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  The main land campaigns were not the whole war. Britain seized Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe in the West Indies in 1794, though France recovered Guadeloupe later the same year by ousting the British from the island. The fight extended across the Atlantic into colonial territory as each side attempted to strip the other of resources and revenue.

  On the 22nd of February 1797, a French invasion force of 1,400 troops from the Légion Noire under the command of Irish American Colonel William Tate landed near Fishguard in Wales. Around 500 British reservists, militia, and sailors assembled quickly under John Campbell, 1st Baron Cawdor. After brief clashes with local civilians and Lord Cawdor's forces on the 23rd of February, Tate surrendered unconditionally the following day. This landing at Fishguard stands as the only battle fought on British soil during the Revolutionary Wars.

  In the west of France, the rebellion in the Vendée, which had drawn French military resources throughout the war, was finally suppressed in 1796 by Louis Lazare Hoche. Hoche then attempted to open a second front by landing an invasion force in Munster to support the United Irishmen, but that expedition failed. The war had always been fought on multiple continents and across multiple internal conflicts within France itself; Hoche's Irish expedition was the last of these peripheral attempts to shift the balance.