The French Revolutionary War of 1792-1802 had the French Republic on one side, and the First and Second Coalitions formed the other. The First Coalition initially included Austria, Prussia, and parts of the Holy Roman Empire, and by the spring of 1793 Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, the Kingdom of Piedmonto-Sardinia, the Kingdom of Naples, and Portugal had joined. This meant that France would have to fight most of Europe. Surprisingly, the alliance fell apart in October 1797 – the allies were either defeated by france or made peace with it, leaving only the British to refuse to compromise. However, in the summer of 1798, war resumed, and the Second Coalition included the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Great Britain, Austria, Portugal, and Naples. After nearly four years of fierce fighting, both sides were exhausted, and in 1802 Britain and France shook hands and made peace in Amiens, which ended the French Revolutionary War. When the war begins again, it will be the time of Napoleon, not the French Revolution.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, France's opponents were once quite light. The Austrians had assessed that the French were a ragtag bunch. Prussia entered the war on 21 May, and John von Bischoffwald, frederick Wilhelm II's aide-de-camp, assured some officers: "This comedy will not last long." The 'army of lawyers' will soon be defeated and we will be able to go home in the fall." ”
Indeed, the so-called "army of lawyers" was severely undertrained, and many professional Bourbon officers (mostly from the nobility) sided with the revolution. The victory of the Austro-Prussian coalition caused the first major political crisis of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries took a more radical approach to the response. The popular parisian militant "sans-culottes", with the support of the National Guard, overthrew Louis XVI on 10 August 1792, and on 22 September 1792 the republic was proclaimed, and on 21 January 1793, the king was guillotineed. On September 20, 1792, after the French finally won a victory at Valmy, although it was only a small victory tactically, it was of great strategic significance.
Battle of Valmy
The French established resistance positions on both sides of the road, just 150 kilometers from Paris. As the fighting fought in the muddy terrain (sometimes even over the knee), Valmy was primarily a duel between artillerymen – about 20,000 shells were fired by both sides. French artillery, after reforms in the late 18th century, was at the forefront of Europe, and with the support of artillery fire, the ragged French volunteers finally plucked up enough courage to launch a counter-offensive and force the Prussians to retreat. That evening, the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe comforted some Prussian officers: "From this day forward a new page has been opened in the history of the world, and you can all claim to have witnessed its birth." On 6 November, France defeated the Austrians against Jemappes. Encouraged by this, the National Convention, Paris' new republican parliament, issued the Edict of Fraternity on November 9. It declared that the intention of the National Convention was to export the French Revolution, pledging to "care for and help all people who wished to regain their freedom," which meant a radical overthrow of the old European order.
By joining the French Republic and fully implementing the idealistic Fraternity Decree, its foreign wars naturally belong to the wars of liberation of the new era to some extent. However, with the influx of French troops into the Low Countries and the Rhineland, and sweeping through Savoy in the south, the revolutionaries had in effect begun to abandon the principles previously advertised. There are, of course, pragmatic reasons for this: since France is to fight against multiple powers in the anti-French alliance, if it cannot obtain funds and supplies from the occupied lands, but only plays the role of "freedom angel", then the French war machine will soon be unsustainable.
On 15 December, the National Convention abolished the old regime in the territories mentioned above, but ironically, in return, the local population was told to pay for the military for freedom. Thus, the system of feeding the French war with the spoils of conquest was established. In January 1793, Danton publicly declared: "The borders of France are natural, and we will realize them on all sides of the horizon: the Rhine, the sea and the Alps." At the suggestion of the radical Dutch exiles in Paris, territories beyond the aforementioned "natural borders" would be transformed into "sister republics" – satellite states available to France.
There is a fundamental contradiction in the foreign wars of the French revolutionary government: on the one hand, as proclaimed in the Fraternity Decree, it wishes to export the revolution abroad, to change the old system and the old order, to spread the French experience throughout Europe, and to bring liberation and freedom to many "oppressed nations" - this is bound to arouse the fierce opposition of a large number of the old regimes; on the other hand, the revolutionary governments are not lacking in realist considerations, and in order to gain the strength to oppose the large number of old regimes that it has angered, it has to exploit and squeeze the lands and peoples it liberates. This, in turn, could provoke resistance from the latter, leading to the french to see the French as aggressors. These contradictions eventually led to the embarrassment of the French army acting as both liberator and aggressor.
The French conquest led to a spiral of war. The "natural border" meant the annexation of Savoy, the Rhineland and Belgium, as well as a territory in the south of the Netherlands, representing war with the Inter-Provincial Republic, but France's invasion of the Low Countries also strained its relations with Britain to a critical point. Relations between the two countries were already strained by the fall of Louis XVI and the Fraternity Decree, and were strongly opposed by British politicians for fear of "the northward movement of the waters". France restarted shipping on the River Scheldt, which was banned by the 1648 Treaty, posing a direct strategic threat to the British Isles. If France had occupied the Inter-Provincial Republic, had its long North Sea coastline and called itself the "Fourth Largest Fleet in Europe," the pressure on the British Royal Navy to defend its homeland would have increased dramatically. On 1 February, France declared war on Great Britain and the United Provinces. Adding fuel to the fire, they also made public their hostility to Spain on 7 March, which formalized the rupture in relations between the two countries – a rift that already existed: Spain mobilized its army in August 1792, and it strongly condemned louis XVI after his execution (King Charles IV of Spain also belonged to the Bourbon family). The immediate consequence of France's victory in Europe was that it tied the crisis between France and the German regime to another long-standing problem (maritime competition among western European countries) – which completely detonated the powder keg in Europe.
This contradiction is epitomized in Haiti. France's richest colony was ignited in August 1791 by the African slave revolt, and Spanish officials in neighboring Santo Domingo immediately began to support the rebels; while the British chose to support white plantation owners, who promised to submit to British rule once slavery was restored and the rebellion was suppressed. France's response was crucial: the Governor of the Republic in Haiti recognized that the Haitians had been freed and declared the abolition of slavery (a decree adopted by the National Convention in Paris on 4 February 1794 for the entire French Empire). The undersea revolutionaries slowly and cautiously fell to the French side, including one of their most charismatic leaders, Toussaint L'Ouverture. Spain and Britain, which invaded Haiti in September 1793, were repulsed, and the latter withdrew in 1798. However, when Napoleon came to power, he began to regress from his original position. In late 1801, he sent his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, a 7,000-man expedition to destroy the nascent Republic of Haiti. He himself even announced the restoration of slavery in 1802. And this is clearly contrary to the spirit of the Fraternity Act.
The French suppressed Haitian independence
Another classic case is the current Polish national anthem, Mazurek Dąbrowskiego (Poland is not dead). In fact, it was originally called "The Song of the Polish Legions in Italy", and the author Józef Wybicki served in Napoleon's Army of the Southern Republic of the Alps in the 1790s as a member of the Polish exiles. After Poland was divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia, a large number of Polish patriots joined the French Revolutionary Army, which made great contributions to the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars. The lyrics of the Polish national anthem are still preserved today: "We cross the Vistula River, cross the Valta River / Become real Poles / Napoleon has told us / How to win." "As the successor of the Revolution, Napoleon did promise the Poles to restore the country, which is indeed in line with the spirit of the Decree of Fraternity advocating freedom for the oppressed peoples, and undoubtedly has a certain legitimacy. However, Napoleon undoubtedly rebuilt a strong Poland, because this would hinder French hegemony, and he established a Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which was never on par with the historical Kingdom of Poland.
Polish soldier in Napoleon's army
After his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon told his secretary, Emmanuel de Las Cases, "One of my main ideas was to unite and centralize the scattered people with revolution and politics. Lacas later published the Mémorial de Saint-Hélène (Memoirs of St. Helena), one of Napoleon's most popular biographies, in which Napoleon was indeed portrayed as a liberator. Just as the Polish anthem was inextricably linked to the French Revolution, the Red, White and Green Flag, the Italian flag, was originally designed by Bonaparte in 1796 for the Cispadane Republic. At that time, the French revolutionary government and Napoleon had sworn to sketch a beautiful blueprint for the Italians to unify, and Napoleon's "army" also had quite a large number of Italian soldiers. If one looks only at the surface, it is easy to conclude that the French Republic and Napoleon were sincere in their desire to win freedom for the Italians. But the truth of history cannot be based solely on slogans and promises. The French Revolutionary Government was ruthless in extracting resources from the satellite countries it liberated. In 1796, Parma was plundered by the French for 2 million livres, Genoa for 2 million livres, and wealthy Milan for 20 million livres (equivalent to five years of financial revenue). Napoleon established a "Kingdom of Italy" (1805-1814) in Milan, but the king was Napoleon himself, and the governor was Napoleon's stepson Eugène de Boarne (son of Empress Josephine and her ex-husband Viscount Alexandre de Boarne). Italians have never enjoyed true independence.
Flag of the Republic of Cispadana
The government of the French Revolution and the later Napoleonic Empire were a wonderful mixture of idealism and realism, or rather, a cold realist kernel wrapped under the sugarcoat of idealism.