Chương 153: The End of the First Coalition War and the State of France
Note from Sparkptz: This piece takes us all the way to 1796 and the end of the First Coalition War. After that there'll be a piece on the 1796 - 1806 interbellum period, then a piece or two on the Second Coalition War, and then that'll be it from me.
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Excerpt from "Arise, Children of the Fatherland!: The First Coalition War"
The Belgian Campaign
The area known as "La Belgique" — Belgium in English — largely begins its history as a distinct and particular area of the European political map following the Eighty Years' War in the latter 15th and early 16th centuries. This war concluded in 1548 with the lowlands of the Rhine-Meuse delta being divided in two, with the mostly-Protestant north consolidating into the United Provinces (which would form the First Dutch Republic) and the mostly-Catholic south officially known as the "Royal Provinces". Over the next 240 years, Belgium would see more warfare and more geopolitical shifts, with first the Spanish Habsburgs then the Austrian Habsburgs coming into possession of the territory. On the eve of the Revolution and the First Coalition War, the Austrians were still the very reluctant rulers of the territory, having tried several times to give Belgium away to anyone who would take it.
The people of the Austrian Netherlands, for their part, were less than thrilled about their Habsburg overlords. Contrary to popular belief though, this agitation was often quite conservative in nature; when the liberal reformist Emperor Joseph II tried to introduce his reforms to the provinces, the wealthy elites of the area banded together and conducted a brief revolt against Austrian rule, which they thought was undermining the authority of the Church. However, the so-called Brabant Revolution — then as now — was misinterpreted as an outgrowth of the radical-liberal Revolution that exploded mere months before in neighboring France, and so from the start, the Girondins had an eye towards Belgium for further expansion. This temptation only grew further when Liège, the prince-bishopric which bisected the two regions of the Austrian Netherlands, erupted in revolution — this one very much along French radical-liberal lines — in 1792.
After the Austro-Prussian army had been shattered at Strasbourg, Brissot and the Minister of Defence, Lazare Carnot, began to draw up plans for an invasion of the Austrian Netherlands and incorporation of the mostly French-speaking population into the Republic. As a rule, Lafayette rejected aggressive campaigns, as he did not want France to become an aggressor in the war and he did not want to stretch French supply lines — not to mention French finances — beyond French borders. However, Belgium represented a different case. France both treaty-bound and (just as important to the idealistic Lafayette) honor-bound to liberate and likely incorporate the Republic of Liège into France, and in doing so they would effectively be detaching Belgium from Austrian rule whether they liked it or not.
The dream of a French Republican Belgium, however, would have to wait until the following year. The urgent situation in the south needed every man, woman, gun and cannon France could spare, and many of the supremely confident and battle-hardened battalions that Murat had enjoyed at Strasbourg were given to Jourdan, Masséna or Kléber — who, of course, had themselves been promoted beyond Murat's command to stabilize the situation in le Midi. What Murat had left was not sufficient to conduct Brissot's offensive into Belgium, and indeed Murat had his hands full dealing with the remaining Austrian army in the region — the one that had been sent to pacify Liège — and only did so after a protracted campaign of maneuvering and skirmishing over the winter of 1792-93.
After Villeyrac, however, the threat to southern France receded, and Lafayette was able to build up Murat's army — now renamed the Army of the Ardennes — to two divisions totaling fifty thousand men by summer 1793. With this, at the beginning of September Murat was able to fight the first offensive French actions of the war, crossing the border of the Austrian Netherlands on September the 1st and laid siege to the fortress city Mons the next day. The Austrian army in the area tried to relieve the city, but the attempt was quickly beaten back by the much larger and much better-armed French army, and by October the fortress garrison had surrendered.
Unusually heavy rains turned the area to mud in November and December, bringing any offensive campaigns or military maneuvers to a grinding halt on both sides, but as winter set in and the ground hardened again, Murat undertook the next part of the offensive plan. Rather than marching on Brussels, as the Austrians — likely fooled by French spies planting false information — had been expecting, Murat instead headed east to Charleroi, taking the city in a surprise attack at the beginning of January 1794. It took a fortnight for the Austrians to fully appreciate that Murat's true destination was the very city that had kicked off the expansion of the war into a general European war: Liège. By then, though, it was too late, and by month's end the flags of the Liège Republic and the Corday tricolor were flying over Liège. Even if the Austrians had fully understood Murat's intentions, however, it was unlikely they could have done much about it, as at around the same time a second French army, under the reassigned Dumouriez, had taken the eastern city of Kortrijk in Flanders.
Superficially, this string of success after success may seem difficult to understand, so completely removed was it from the grinding back-and-forth and increasingly stalemated conflict that characterized the main theatres of the south. On paper, this was only exacerbated by the fact that the two sides had virtual numerical parity; both sides had two armies in the general area totaling about a hundred thousand men, now that Brunswick's army had been rebuilt after the disaster at Strasbourg. However, the quality gap between the two sides was large. Murat was the finest commander in France and had experienced army that was only growing; in January he was given two more brigades totaling ten thousand men and women, one commanded by that most famous woman of all, the recalled and promoted Charlotte Corday.
Even more important, however, was the enthusiastic embrace of the French armies by the local populace. Austrian rule had never been popular amongst the common population of the region (not least because the Habsburgs proved distinctly reluctant rulers), but after the Brabant Revolution of 1789 much of that ire had been directed against the nobility of the region as well. It was one thing to resent Austrian rule, it was another if you only really complained about Joseph II lifted some of the most onerous feudal obligations on the peasants and common people of the area. The French, on the other hand, promised — and, for the most part, delivered upon — the full suite of legal reforms, civil rights, the abolition of unjust feudal obligations and taxes, democratic assemblies and true autonomous self-government (Murat, showing a certain level of political acumen if also cynicism, decided not to talk in too much detail about revolutionary feminism in the deeply Catholic region) as free citizens of the French Republic. Land reform was particularly popular; the word that the properties of those conservative nobles who had fled their estates before the advancing French would be declared legally vacant and distributed amongst the local peasantry was hugely effective at generating genuine enthusiasm for French administration of the region.
Militarily, the main upshot of this was that almost immediately, brand-new "Belgian" companies of the National Guard started to be raised in Mons, Charleroi and Liège — although the last of these were technically still under the nominally-independent Republic of Liège. Not only did this relieve the French of the need to divert soldiers for garrison duty, but it meant that far from becoming more vulnerable as supply lines were extended, Murat and Dumouriez actually gained strength as they completed the encirclement of Brussels.
By mid-1794, the Austrian position in Belgium had become virtually indefensible. The brief re-emergence of the Republic of Liège ended on May 17th when the Republican Government, having returned to the city from their exile in Paris, petitioned the French National Assembly to join the French Republic as the Free Department of Liège. On May 20th, the Assembly near-unanimously approved the petition and Liège became the first territorial acquisition of the French Republic. Cut off from the rest of the Empire, the smaller of the two Austrian armies tried to make a stand at Brussels, but Murat's overwhelming dominance in artillery and increasing mastery of the cavalry charge meant they could do little but abandon the city. On June 19, Murat entered the capital of the Austrian Netherlands in an impromptu parade before cheering crowds, and the French tricolor was raised over the city. The integration of La Belgique into the Republic was well underway.
Dumouriez, meanwhile, pushed southwest to try and liberate — or, rather, annex — the remainder of the Austrian provinces in the area. A third army of twenty thousand attempted to invade the Saarland, just across the border from Lorraine, but was rebuffed by the reinvigorated Brunswick at Saarbrucken. However, with the threat of losing all territory west of the Rhine now obvious, the Austrians and Prussians decided to abandon the Belgian provinces — which, it should be recalled, the Austrians had never been exactly thrilled about having anyway — to reconsolidate a defensive line in the hilly Palatine Uplands on the Rhine's left bank. They were not able to prevent Dumouriez from taking the city of Trier, but doing so cost the Republicans twenty thousand casualties; by now the Austrians and Prussians had learned from the errors of 1792 and 1793 and were adopting many of the same defensive tactics used so effectively against the Coalition armies the previous year.
As the autumn rains set in, the fighting thus ground down to the same bloody, indecisive stalemate that was increasingly characterizing the fighting down south. The last major Austrian holdout at Antwerp would not capitulate until 1796, but the end of Austrian rule in the Belgian provinces was effectively complete with the fall of Ghent in late 1794 and by 1795 administrative plans to reorganize La Belgique according to the French departmental system — although with significant local autonomy — were being drawn up in the Assembly. However, the French advances in the north effectively ended here. Murat attacked and took Aachen and attempted to march to the Rhine but falling victim to his own tactics, he was surprisingly defeated — the first true defeat of his career — by a well-entrenched Prussian Army ten miles southwest of the city in early 1795. With the gains of 1794 at risk, Murat's Army of the Ardennes was forced to retreat back to Liege. With Austria and Prussia pouring men into the area to secure Germany from invasion, Murat spent the remainder of the warfighting constantly to hold on to what France had already gained.
The flight of King Louis and the liberation of Marseille
In the south, things were far less straightforward for the French. Montpellier had been secured but Bordeaux had been under siege for weeks by the Spanish when the Day of Defeats had occurred, and although the Republican victory at Villeyrac had secured the central front, Jourdan was in a much more difficult position. He had been pushed out of the city proper in mid-March 1793 in brutal street-to-street fighting and now only held some of the eastern districts on the right bank of the Garonne River. He feared, however, that the Spanish would take some of the forces that had failed at Villeyrac and use it to attack Bordeaux from the west; he would certainly have to withdraw from the city entirely if so.
Therefore, to the great consternation of Masséna and Ney, Lafayette acted on Jourdan's urgings and ordered them to advance southwest towards Narbonne, chasing the very same Coalition army they had just beaten at Villeyrac, rather than east to Marseille to force Louis from the metropole altogether. Marceau, with just twenty-five thousand men remaining of his pre-Villeyrac army of forty thousand, would instead have the task of marching on Marseille from the east. The main thrust of the attack, however, would come from Kléber's Army of the Rhone from the north. Unable to cope with the relentless two-pronged Republican assault, the Coalition and Royalist armies in the region fell all the way back to Marseille, where they resolved to make the French pay for the city in blood.
King Louis, however, did not wait for this outcome. Although few French Republicans would have believed it, he had despaired at the ever-more bloody and bitter turn the war was taking and the death and destruction now rampant throughout the southern parts of what he still considered "his" Kingdom. Although his future experiences would darken his outlook greatly, King Louis XVI was not his brother, and not a fundamentally cruel man or an inflexible ideologue. His great weakness, at its core, was indecision and a propensity to simply follow along with whoever the loudest and most influential voice in the room was. That indecisiveness was had led him to essentially hand over day-to-day decision making over to the arch-reactionary Artois, with dire consequences for all. But, looking back, it was likely that had Louis accepted the demands of the women of Paris back in October 1789 to move the monarchy to Paris, accept the Constitution he had been crafting — the main bulk of which would become the Constitution of 1790 — and become the figurehead monarch atop the constitutional monarchy Lafayette had wanted, then the Civil War and Coalition Wars may never have happened, and France would have become the stable constitutional monarchy [1] that Lafayette had wanted all along.
But it did happen, and by 1793 Louis was reduced to little more than a spectator in Marseille. Neither he nor Artois had any influence amongst the Austrian military commanders, who universally disdained Louis and made quite clear that, in their view, this would not end with status quo ante but significant Austrian, Prussian and Spanish gains from France. Even so, Louis still held out hope that maybe, just maybe, the Republic would crumble, the Revolution would be reversed, and everything could go back to the way it was in 1788. The reality on the ground, however, was deteriorating: the Republic was advancing inexorably on all fronts, the optimism in Coalition ranks in mid-1792 had faded completely.
However, it was not to be. On September 10th, 1793, mere days after the beginning of the French advance into Belgium, Kléber's Army of the Rhone swept past the papal enclave of Avignon — which had seen a pro-French annexationist uprising as Kléber approached — and joined up with Marceau to seize the town of Salon-de-Provence after a fierce but brief battle. The Republic had taken the entirety of the Rhone Valley and a combined army of eighty thousand was now just fifty kilometers from Marseille. With this news, a mad scramble for the docks at Toulon and Marseille began as virtually every noble and wealthy bourgeoisie that had flocked to Marseille when Louis had set up shop boarded the ships of the Royal French Navy and sailed for Corsica. The Kingdom of France, at least in the metropole itself, was at an end.
Corsica would leave a deep mark on Louis. The small island, now under firm Royalist control, would declare its independence from the Republic, an amusing development to many on the mainland – in 1794, but it would claim jurisdiction over France itself. However it was by any standard a total humiliation for the King, reduced to a rump court on a Mediterranean island whilst the war for his Kingdom was waged by Austrians, Prussians, and Spaniards – none of whom were exactly proven friends of the Kingdom of France. Even if he won, he knew that the Kingdom would have to pay an enormous price for his victory and he would likely be reduced to a virtual vassal of the victors, and yet he still viewed it as a superior option to simply giving in to the Republicans. Once again, the influence of the ever-reactionary Artois on his thinking cannot be overstated.
Left behind on the mainland, however, were still tens of thousands of loyal royalists in Marseille, supplemented by fifty thousand mercenaries, Italians, and Austrians. Whilst most of the more unwilling of the levied local troops had deserted by now, many making their way to Republican lines, news — many exaggerated, but not all — of reprisals and atrocities carried out by the ultra-radical National Guard units had reached the ears of Marseille, and those left behind were resolved to hold the city or die fighting; hideous tales of what had happened to some royalists captured by the wrong National Guard unit did wonders to inspire a sense of grim, unyielding determination in the defenders of Marseille.
In truth, such atrocities were becoming more and more commonplace as the war dragged on and became bloodier and more embittered, even as decisive results grew fewer and fewer for either side. Summary prisoner executions, village burnings, and vigilante mob lynchings of 'treasonous' or 'deviant' elements were rife throughout southern France in 1794 and 1795 and carried out by all sides of the war, although the greatest frequency of events would come in those parts of "Royalist France" taken over by Austrian and Spanish troops who were invited to live off the land. The flood of refugees north to the Republic and west across the Atlantic is usually seen in terms of a great Protestant migration — especially given the unique character the Huguenots gave the American state of Ontario — but as the Republicans pushed further and further south, many ordinary French men and women fled north. Lafayette was at pains to ensure that these fellow citizens were housed and cared for, but the social and financial strain they put on many towns and cities in the Republic only added to the problems.
This flood would only be deepened by the bloody slaughter at Marseille. Contrary to expectations the Republican army did not attack the city immediately after taking Salon-de-Provence. Instead, they surrounded the city and entrenched, while a division of twenty thousand marched the eighty kilometers to Toulon and, taking the defenders entirely surprise, snuck into the city at night and took it before the Royal French Navy — long concentrated in the port city — could fully evacuate. Twenty ships were seized, another fifteen burned. Those monarchist nobles and pro-Royalist bourgeoisie who had been too foolish or slow to escape in time were given snap trials for treason and quickly executed. It was a grim foretelling of what would follow in Marseille the following May.
By then, Kléber's army had been reinforced to no fewer than a hundred and fifty, now outnumbering the Coalition-Royalist defenders almost three to two. With the city being constantly resupplied by the still-dominant Royal French Navy, Kléber decided that a prolonged siege would be fruitless; the city would have to be taken by force. On May the 1st, the order to begin the artillery bombardment of the fortifications was given. Over the next three weeks, the streets and alleys of Marseille became a maze of rubble-strewn battlegrounds as the Republicans took the city house-by-house. Neither attacker nor defender gave any quarter; units would often fight to the last man over a house they had occupied. The city was heavily damaged by the fighting; both the Republicans and the Coalition were entirely indiscriminate with their use of massed artillery to clear out entrenched positions. Fires raged uncontrolled and with the infrastructure of the city so badly damaged there was little that could be done to put them out; it is likely that many thousands upon thousands of soldiers from both sides and civilians alike perished in these alone.
However, the outcome of the battle was never truly in doubt. The Republicans simply outnumbered the Coalition defenders by too much, their advantage in firepower was even greater, and in most neighborhoods, they had the local populace on their side. On May 23rd, the last Coalition defenders had either evacuated the city by sea or had been cleared out, and the guns fell silent over Marseille.
No city would suffer as much during the war as the temporary royalist capital. From its pre-Revolutionary population of 120 000, by war's end, perhaps 20 000 people still lived in Marseille. Several thousand had been famously killed during the Purge, but in objective terms, the scale of the tragedy in 1789 was dwarfed by the "Terror of 1794". Best estimates suggest that at least twenty thousand civilians died during the vicious street fighting and uncontrolled urban fires that had raged throughout the battle, and many more were killed from the city in the round of angry reprisals — mostly driven by those looking for vengeance against those who had participated in the Purge or collaborated with the Royalists. The remainder would become refugees, many of whom would leave France altogether for the colder but safer fields of Quebec and Ontario.
Whilst Marseille did recover greatly during the post-war period due to heavy investment, it would take many, many years for the damage and trauma that the First Coalition War inflicted on Marseille to fully heal. The city would never forget and never forgive its "occupation" by the Royalists, particularly as the French royal administrators were displaced more and more by unscrupulous Austrian military "advisors". With the pro-Republican atrocities conveniently erased from memory by the remaining residents of the city, few were surprised when Marseille became the largest hotspot of anti-royalist agitation and unrest after the Treaty of London.
Excerpt from "The Republic of Virtue: France 1790 – 1834"
The Treaty of London
By mid-1795, the shape of the war had solidified and frozen entirely. The French Republic had expelled virtually all Coalition forces from its core territory, save for a few pockets around Bayonne in the extreme southwest. The former Austrian Netherlands, now reorganized into the autonomous Belgian departments, were largely integrated into the Republic and were not going back to Austrian rule. On the flip side, the Coalition had finally wised up to the French tactics and, whilst morale and superior artillery were still on the French side, the National Guard found little more success breaking through well-entrenched Coalition infantry protected by trenches and earthworks than the Coalition had through 1792 and 1793. Frustrated by the stout Prussian defense of the Rhineland, ideas circulated of invading the Netherlands and outflanking the Prussian positions from the north – and setting up a fellow Republic, as liberal interests in the Netherlands wished.
However, these were quickly quashed by Lafayette, as he knew that doing so would likely drag Britain into the war. Despite Austrian urgings, Franco-British relations were still warm in 1795, despite British misgivings about the shift in the continental balance of power. Neutrality served British purposes well; with all their major European rivals occupied they had an entirely free hand in the colonial sphere and were able to repair much of the damage done to British prestige during and after the American Revolutionary War. Moreover, British industry, British weapons, and even British food supplies were critical to supplying the French war effort and Britain was perfectly content to continue making an enormous amount of money selling these goods to the Republic (ironically, often paid for with American gold). Coalition complaints that Britain was outfitting the French armies were met with polite reminders that the Coalition powers were equally welcome to trade with Britain on the same – and sometimes better – terms, never mind that France was far closer and thus easier to trade with than Austria. Reassurances from Lafayette and the French Ambassador Talleyrand that France did not want to go out and, say, conquer all of Western Europe convinced the British that there was no indeed to get involved in the war and harm the ever-more-lucrative trade going back and forth across the channel.
Nevertheless, the British Crown stood firm on its one red line: Britain would not tolerate any interference in the Netherlands that would threaten British hegemony in the United Provinces. Indeed, it would be this issue above all others that would convince Britain to join the Second Coalition War a decade later. Without the flanking option of invading the Netherlands, Brissot's dream of a Republic that stretched all the way to the Rhine was thus clearly not going to come to fruition; the French only made minor gains in Savoy and almost no headway in Germany proper. Any wild schemes of a naval attack on Spanish supply lines were put paid by a defeat just off the coast from Bordeaux in early 1795.
The war may have been static on the map, however, all participants – except maybe Portugal -- were now feeling the effects of years fighting the most brutal war Europe had known in generations. War exhaustion had well and truly taken hold in France, not helped by continued conscription, continued "secularisation" of the Church – which served as a backhanded way of getting around the Decrees of 26 September and using Church property to fund the French state – and ever more pressing food shortages. American aid and British trade became more and more valuable to propping up the Republic, aid that became even more overt when a small military delegation under Col. Nathaniel Bonapart came to "observe" the war. In reality, they were in France to deliver yet another enormous shipment of American gold and demonstrate prototypes of the latest American breechloaders and rifles.
By mid-1795, however, the Republic was looking distinctly wobbly. Pro-peace demonstrations, an unthinkable and indeed near-treasonous idea in 1791 and 1792, became commonplace. Draft-dodging was becoming endemic, conservative interests were finding their voice again through the rapidly rising Orléanists after years of silence and, most worryingly for Lafayette, agents from the Ministry of Information reported with alarm that talk of a royalist uprising in the Vendée was becoming a real concern again. The point was hammered home when a huge pro-peace demonstration broke out in Paris, the burned-out home of the most radical population in the country. He needed to find a way to end the war, and through the British, he began reaching out to the continental powers for a negotiated peace.
Unsurprisingly, the Spanish were the first to respond positively to these overtures. In many ways, despite the war being a principally Austrian and Prussian enterprise, it had been Spain who had done the heavy lifting and had the most success in occupying French territory. By extension it had been they who had shed the most blood for the Coalition cause; many of the most elite regiments of the Spanish Army had been decimated at Villeyrac and Bordeaux. Queen Maria Luisa and Prime Minister Manuel Godoy, by that point the true rulers of Spain, were keenly aware of the unfair burden Spain was carrying, and the perilous state of both the Spanish Army and the treasury. After the liberation of Biarritz, if the French decided to cross the Pyrenees it was questionable whether the remaining Spanish armies could stop them.
Spain, however, had made significant gains in the colonial sphere through the war; they had seized many of France's most lucrative colonies, most notably Saint-Domingue although the devastation wrought by repeated pro-Revolution slave uprisings meant that the once-lucrative colony was nowhere near as productive as it once was. Better get out while they were ahead, the Queen and Godoy decided, rather than risking the territorial integrity of the Kingdom fighting for the inept Austrians and arrogant Prussians (let alone the cowardly Louis, sulking on Corsica).
On July the 15th, therefore, Lafayette and Godoy met in Andorra, an independent centuries-old principality deep in the Pyrenees. Godoy's demands were surprisingly modest: recognition of Spanish dominion over all the colonies it had seized, including Saint-Domingue, in return for withdrawal from France and from the war. Lafayette, who likely had already been informed of the Spanish position in advance, agreed immediately, and just like that the war between France and Spain, which had been undoubtedly the European monarchy that had most threatened the survival of the Republic, was over.
The Spanish withdrawal ended once and for all the prospect of a Coalition victory in the war. Indeed there was a general recognition in Europe by summer 1795 that the war was not long for this world; Sweden had decided to recognize France back in April, America had done so the previous year. Aside from a brief scare after the fall of Ghent to the French in 1794 which had raised the specter of a French invasion or French-inspired revolution in the Netherlands, a red line the British would firmly hold to throughout the First Coalition War and would drag them into the Second, Britain stayed resolutely on the sidelines. It was thus down to France against Austria, Prussia and their Italian allies, and by mid-1795 both sides were so thoroughly ground down that the chance for decisive gains for either side were minimal.
However, the peace negotiations were almost as slow and grueling as the war itself, even as it continued to chew up finances, material and, above all, men and women. The Habsburg Emperor Francis II and the conservative Hohenzollern monarch Frederick William II were of one mind and inflexible: Louis had to be restored at the top of the French state. What happened underneath was less of a concern, but the Austrian and Prussian monarchies were absolutely convinced of the "anti-republican" argument that republicanism meant future war and instability. This conviction would be inherited by their successors, and anti-republicanism would bind the once-hostile Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies closer and closer in the years to come.
This insistence, more than anything else, was what dragged out the war into 1796. Lafayette knew that if there was one thing that could convince the people of France to keep fighting, it was the return of Louis – the butcher of Marseille who had declared war on the French people – to the throne of France. And indeed, when word broke of the Coalition's demands, it spurred one of the last great patriotic fervor of the war as thousands upon thousands rushed to sign up for war bonds, the ever-growing war industries, and the National Guard. It was likely this last great spurt of energy for the French armies that allowed them to complete the clear-out of the Austrian Netherlands by seizing Antwerp, the last significant action of the war.
The deadlocked negotiations were finally broken by a proposal from, of all people, Brissot. In discussion with American and British diplomats, Brissot had come up with a constitutional structure known as the "State of France". This compromise preserved the democratic government and all the reforms achieved during the Revolution whilst also restoring the King as the head of state. The King's divine right to rule would still come from God, a point upon which Louis himself was insistent, but it would come from God through the people, not directly – the democratic institutions the Republic established were thus the instrument through which God expressed his rule, and thus the King's ministers and the governmental apparatus would answer to God through the people. It was a convoluted and somewhat confusing argument, but it did solve the core issue: how to place Louis back on the throne whilst giving him no actual power and cementing the gains of the Revolution. Brissot had managed to thread the needle that had flummoxed some of the finest diplomats in Europe and, at last, the Treaty of London was signed on the 4th of June, 1796.
The First Coalition War, which had started out as the French Civil War in December 1789, was over at last. Exact figures are highly debated, but it is generally agreed that around a two hundred thousand French men and women died on the battlefield across both sides, with an even higher toll on the civilian population due to disease, starvation, atrocities, and being caught in the crossfire. Losses for the Coalition were lower overall, but still grievous by pre-Revolutionary standards. Hundreds of thousands would flee Europe throughout the 1790s, mostly French Protestants looking to escape Royalist persecution and Catholic prejudice. Aside from the ruined capital, the devastation was overwhelmingly concentrated in the southern provinces of the country, with Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux all suffering devastating damage and population loss. Belgium suffered too, though not quite to the same extent.
However, while the human and material cost was enormous, there was no doubt that France had been the victor in the war. Only Spain and Portugal could claim any gains whatsoever by taking control of overseas French colonies, especially in the New World. Austria had fared terribly, losing the Belgian provinces to the French directly and ending the war on the verge of financial ruin. Prussia had fared better, with its armies putting up a much better show in defense of the Rhine than the Austrians could manage, but France's great historic rival, Austria, had been the one to aggressively expand the war and it had lost badly as a result. It is one of the great "what-if"s of history if the reformist and anti-war Joseph II had survived for longer, rather than dying in 1792 and passing the imperial crown down to his reactionary, anti-revolutionary son. The Habsburg Empire would never regain its full 18th-century glory as an independent great power.
France gained in other, less tangible but more significant ways. Beyond the obvious outcome of securing the future of the most egalitarian, liberal and free democracy continental Europe had ever seen – even if under a rickety, unstable constitutional compromise – the Revolution and the victory in the war had imbued in all French citizens, even conservative Catholics, a sense of national pride, honor, and kinship that had never been true under the patchwork collection of feudal domains that comprised the Bourbon ancien régime. France had fought for liberté, égalité et fraternité against the great powers of continental Europe and won, and the resulting self-confidence and self-assuredness would hold France in good stead in the turbulent decades to come.
Moreover, the Revolution had been originally fought over legal, economic, and political reforms that, a republic or not, France desperately needed. Whilst the war understandably takes pride of place in recollections of the Revolution, the Assembly had been hard at work reforming every part of France's economic and legal structure along with the liberal Enlightenment ideals of the French philosophes like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as well as the sterling example taking root across the Atlantic under the stewardship of Kim, Washington, and Jefferson. Despite the devastation wrought by the war, France emerged from 1796 bursting with ideas and energy and ready to dive head-first into the modern era.
However, these longer-term benefits that would play out as the 18th century transitioned to the 19th did not change the fact that much of France lay in ruins in 1796. As the First Republic ended, giving way to the State of France, the First French Revolution had finally come to an end. Now the victorious revolutionaries needed to rebuild their country…
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[1] Of course OTL history clearly demonstrates otherwise [the idea that Louis going back to Paris in October 1789 would have stabilized the constitutional monarchy and avoided what happened next]; the successful women's march on Versailles in October 1789 was one of the great turning points of the Revolution that set in motion all the forces that would push it to ever-increasing radicalization for the next four and half years. Far from making the Revolution worse, the fact that everyone had a clear, well-defined, and obvious enemy to go after helped avoid the paranoia and conspiracy theory which drove the Revolution's worse excesses (paranoia which incidentally I do not believe was principally the fault of the Jacobins). But the author doesn't know that.
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