on the borders did external and internal events produce an escalation into war. The slow and uncertain manoeuvres of the allied armies as they moved across the French frontiers showed how ill prepared they were for this contest, which in turn allowed the revolutionaries to claim victory after the desultory encounter at Valmy (September 1792). It was only in the following year, when the successes of the French armies seemed to threaten the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and Italy and the execution of Louis XVI demonstrated the radical republicanism of the new regime in Paris, that the struggle assumed its full strategical and ideological dimensions. Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, the original combatants, were now joined by an enormous array of other states headed by Britain and Russia and including all of France’s neighbours.
Although it is easy in retrospect to see why this First Coalition (1793–5) against France failed so miserably, the outcome was a surprise and bitter disappointment at the time; after all, the odds were more uneven than in any preceding war. In the event, the sheer impetus of the French Revolution led to the adoption of desperate measures – the levée en masse and the mobilization of all seizable national resources to fight France’s many foes. Moreover, as many writers have pointed out, a very important period of reform had occurred in the French army – in matters of organization, staff planning, artillery, and battle tactics – during the two or three decades before 1789; and what the Revolution did was to sweep aside the aristocratic hindrances to these new ideas and to give the reformers the opportunity (and the weight of numbers) to put their concepts into practice when war broke out. The ‘total war’ methods employed on the home front and the newer tactics on the battlefield seemed as much a reflection of the newly released demagogic energies of the French as the cautious, half-hearted manoeuvres of the Coalition armies were symbolic of the habits of the old order.74 With an army of about 650,000 (July 1793), fired by enthusiasm and willing to take the risks involved in lengthy marches and aggressive tactics, the French were soon overrunning neighbouring territories – which meant that from this time onward, the costs of maintaining such an enormous force fell largely upon the populations outside France’s borders, which in turn permitted a certain recovery of the French economy.
Any power seeking to blunt this heady expansionism would therefore have to devise the proper means for containing such a new and upsetting form of warfare. This was not an impossible task. The French army’s operations under its early leader Dumouriez, and even the much larger and more elaborate campaigns of Napoleon, revealed deficiencies in organization and training and weaknesses in supply and communications, of which a well-trained foe could take great advantage. But where was that well-trained opponent? It was not merely that the elderly generals and slow-moving, baggage-laden troops of the Coalition were tactically inadequate in the face of swarms of skirmishers and hard-hitting columns of the French. The real point was that the necessary political commitment and strategical clarity were also missing among France’s enemies. There was, obviously, no transcendent political ideology to fire the soldiers and citizens of the ancien régime; indeed, many of them were attracted to the intoxicating ideas of the Revolution, and only when, much later, Napoleon’s armies turned ‘liberation’ into conquest and plunder could local patriotism be used to blunt the French hegemony.
Furthermore, at this early stage few members of the Coalition took the French threat seriously. There was no overall agreement as to aims and strategy between the various members of the alliance, whose precarious unity manifested itself in their increasing demands for British subsidies but in not much else. Above all, the first years of the Revolutionary War overlapped with, and were overshadowed by, the demise of Poland. Despite her vitriolic denunciations of the French Revolution, Catherine II was more concerned with eliminating Polish independence than in sending troops to the Rhineland. This caused an anxious Prussian government, already disenchanted by the early campaigns in the west, to switch more and more of its troops from the Rhine to the Vistula, which in turn compelled Austria to keep 60,000 men on its northern frontier in case Russia and Prussia moved against the remaining Polish territories. When the third and final partition did occur, in 1795, it was all too evident that Poland had been a more effective ally to France in its death throes than as a living, functioning state. By that time, Prussia had already sued for peace and abandoned the left bank of the Rhine to the French, leaving Germany in a state of uneasy neutrality and thus permitting France to turn its attention elsewhere; most of the smaller German states had followed this Prussian lead; the Netherlands had been overrun, and converted into the Batavian Republic; and Spain, too, deserting the Coalition, had returned to its early anti-British alignment with France.
This left only Sardinia-Piedmont, which in early 1796 was crushed by Napoleon; the luckless Habsburg Empire, which was driven out of much of Italy and forced into the Peace of Campo Formio (October 1797); and Britain. Despite the younger Pitt’s wish to imitate his father in checking French expansionism, the British government also failed to pursue the war with the necessary determination and strategical clarity.75 The expeditionary force sent to Flanders and Holland under the Duke of York in 1793–5 had neither the strength nor the expertise to deal with the French army, and its remnants eventually came home via Bremen. Moreover, as so often happened before and since, ministers (such as Dundas and Pitt) preferred the ‘British way in warfare’ – colonial operations, maritime blockade, and raids upon the enemy’s coast – to any large-scale continental operations. Given the overwhelming superiority of the Royal Navy and the disintegration of its French equivalent, this looked like an attractive and easy option. But the British troop losses caused by disease in the West Indies operations of 1793–6 meant that London paid dearly for these strategical diversions: 40,000 men were killed, another 40,000 rendered unfit for service – more than all the casualties in the Spanish Peninsular War – and the campaigns cost at least £16 million. Yet it is doubtful whether Britain’s steadily augmented domination of the extra-European theatres or its peripheral operations against Dunkirk and Toulon compensated for France’s growing power within Europe. Finally, the subsidies demanded by Prussia and Austria to maintain their armies in the field soared alarmingly, and were impossible to provide. In other words, British strategy had been simultaneously inefficient and expensive, and in 1797 the foundations of the entire system were shaken – at least temporarily – by the Bank of England’s suspension of cash payments and by the naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. During that troubled period, the exhausted Austrians sued for peace and joined all the other states which admitted French primacy in western Europe.
If the British could not defeat France, the revolutionary government could not in its turn undermine the enemy’s naval mastery. Early attempts to invade Ireland and to raid the western coasts of England had come to little, although that was due as much to the weather as to local defences. Despite the temporary fright over the 1797 suspension of cash payments, the British credit system held firm. The entry of Spain and the Netherlands into the war on France’s side led to the smashing of the Spanish fleet off Cape St Vincent (February 1797) and to the heavy blows inflicted upon the Dutch at Camperdown (October 1797). France’s new allies also had to endure the progressive loss of their colonies overseas – in the East and West Indies, and at Colombo, Malacca, and the Cape of Good Hope, all of which provided new markets for British commerce and additional bases for its naval squadrons. Unwilling to pay the high price demanded by the French government for peace, Pitt and his fellow ministers resolved to fight on, introducing income tax as well as raising fresh loans to pay for what – with French troops assembling along the Channel coast – had become a struggle as much for national survival as for imperial security.
Here, then, was the fundamental strategical dilemma which faced both France and Britain for the next two decades of war. Like the whale and the elephant, each was by far the largest creature in its own domain. But British control of the sea routes could not by itself destroy the French hegemony in Europe, nor could Napoleon’s military mastery reduce the islanders to surrender. Furthermore, because France’s territorial acquisitions and political browbeating of its neighbours aroused considerable resentment, the government in Paris could never be certain that the other continental powers would permanently accept the French imperium so long as Britain – offering
