Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city
did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in
the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of
Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of
France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was
promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber
at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the
scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained
armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793.
It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the
one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.

[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]

At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much
at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger.
Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when
King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of
1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts
against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the
Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it,
the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more
with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France,
where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish
question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg
during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress
Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William,
in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Mollendorf immediately
entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of
this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of
Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two
months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated
by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an
attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory
that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the
Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had
prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power.
The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the
war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to
those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly
from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and
inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French
emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their
cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled
military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have
formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic
antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at
Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794
he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had
speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder
of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents
incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a
statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great
qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It
is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania;
it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of
the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles
which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence
exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained,
together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders,
Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal
Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list
Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought
against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing
abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in
Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at
Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality
but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut
appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the
steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest
resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil.
[33]

[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Woerth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]

Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance
between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a
rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last
serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of
an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his
negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the
breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were
encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied
by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence
recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an
army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the
Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the
Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the
King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after
informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a
subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army,
leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was
in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and
victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist
insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a
portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon
them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the
Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the
old _regime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to
the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru:
Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry
little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a
commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany;
Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a
teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of
artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place
during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants
in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the
Austrian positions at Woerth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian
commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had
abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a
second time back upon the Rhine. [34]

[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]

[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]

[Moellendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]

The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the
French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The
Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian
friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia
with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism
between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the
Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was
willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the
alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with
France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after
Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain
was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by
which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000
Prussian troops, under General Moellendorf, were placed at the disposal of
the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he
subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the
defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an
ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon
the Upper Rhine. Moellendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence
longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of
Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to
place Moellendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt
under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been
overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia
for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from
a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her
vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish
kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to
seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the
Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian
arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged
him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength
into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to
making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon
Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When
the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in
the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the
Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to
do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually
forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Moellendorf spent his
time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury
argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of
the Netherlands: Moellendorf had made up his mind that the army should not
be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the
Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the
north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of
defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of
the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.

[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]

After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian
and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and
defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was
checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by
Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were
exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of
the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other
end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French
victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving
York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became
evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the
Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles,
in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were
repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended,
however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor
had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater
unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless.
Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired
to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example
of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues.
"Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute
anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted
the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000
fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June
the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of
Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before.
Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of
war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat.
It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good
faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the
French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had
fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired
northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and
made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch
frontier. [38]

[England disappointed by the Allies.]

Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two
great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim
of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic
aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now
absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and
revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves
obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of
a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms
to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly
enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought
into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury
declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and
cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the
head quarters of Moellendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I
have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings,
it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it
an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any
impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the
Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness,
the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will
consider that it has been bought and sold." [39]

[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]

[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]

The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian
commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his
successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no
further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign
ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the
Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England
resulted in some useless engagements between Moellendorf's corps in the
Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of
the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to
keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything
south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler
hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born
blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations
conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not,
obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland
welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic.
Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the
conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the
capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the
Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward
through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate
misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the
French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]

[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]

The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe
was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and
Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French
armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the
Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of
country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the
fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st
of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses
which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those
which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French
West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the
Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had
vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity,
in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it
necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in
which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with
France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at
the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive
negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish
half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle
(April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by
providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France,
the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States
north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the
conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the
principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory
lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]

[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the
happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its
conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very
principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a
moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to
make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and,
with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the
example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit
made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark
future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most
keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against
the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to
continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian
offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging
energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance
from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the
Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of
Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained
inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the
Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition
had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might
have produced a decisive result. [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror
had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom
Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than
himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and
without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to
France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to
represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a
simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion.
Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the
lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendee and Brittany, were as
little friendly to the old _regime_ as their executioners. Every class in
France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security,
and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a
monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of
peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791,
not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and
privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant,
with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free
from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children
baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in
his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional
Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of
his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of
Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a
political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and
resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of
property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy
and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown
seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for
France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the
nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention
determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by
constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris
and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy
against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave
to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and
foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the
flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern
Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that
these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks
after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry,
led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this
invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the
money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own
leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to
obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the
peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed
fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien,
in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues,
caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was
engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own
rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution
for France had presented its report. The main object of the new
constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence
of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last
three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote
of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed
the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals
selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a
guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its
enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power
in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was,
in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the
legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five
members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual
impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of
proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the
approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle
life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the
actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative
bodies were to retire every year. [44]

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