The major part of this book has been concerned only with the events of a few years. Even if the half-century or so which preceded the outbreak of the revolutionary wars was given brief consideration, the approach has been necessarily microscopic, when set against the whole sweep of human history. Consequently, the macroscopic theories discussed in Chapter 1 have been of little or no assistance. Whether wholly timeless, like those of the psychologists, or with a '10 million year' sweep like those of the ethologists, or even with the more modest time-span of the anthropologists, those theories cannot accommodate the sudden shifts from peace to war and from war to peace. If human nature drove the Austrians and Prussians to make war in 1792, it also kept them at peace in 1791. If the evolutionary process had given the French revolutionaries the aggressive instinct and sense of territory which drove them to war in 1792 and 1793, it had also given them the ability to calculate that kept them at peace in 1790 and 1798. If the British elites did use propaganda to carry their subjects into war in 1793, they had remained at peace in 1791. If the primacy of the domestic policy in the shape of serf unrest kept the Russians at peace for most of the 1790s. it did not prevent them going to war in 1798. The inexorable forward march of the forces of production may have ranged all the major European powers against each other at some stage in the 1790s, but they equally kept them at peace for part of the time too.
In short, the theories of non-historical disciplines may be able to explain war per se, but they cannot explain individual conflicts. To seek a more precise explanatory theory is to risk the charge of superficiality: that one's head gets pressed so close to the score that only individual notes, or at best bars, can be encompassed, so that the overall structure and meaning of the music cannot be understood. A tempting reply to that persuasive analogy is that a conductor whose interpretation of the score cannot be reconciled with the notes as actually written and which therefore produces only disjointed rhythms and discordant sounds, ought to be booed off the podium. Yet that 'Viennese' reaction is unnecessarily intolerant. There ought to be room for all kinds of approaches, although to suppose that they can all be accommodated in the course of a single performance is visionary.
At the risk of prolonging this musical metaphor beyond the point of endurance, I shall concede that the reading of the origins of the French revolutionary wars offered in the main part of this book has been very much that of a Kapellmeister rather than that of a Maestro, I shall deny, however, that the interpretation was selected first and the music composed last. It was not until the research (if the reading of printed sources and secondary works can be dignified by such a term) was complete that I turned to the theoretical literature. I have indicated in Chapter 1 which parts of it I found most helpful and why. The works of von Clausewitz, Blainey and Howard, in particular, confirmed some conclusions - both general and specific, modified or rejected others, and pointed the way to still more.
Their most illuminating service was to clarify the distinction between reasons for hostility and reasons for war. Relations between states in regular contact with each other, whether as nominal allies or as nominal enemies, are naturally characterised by dissension. As they pursue the same sort of political and economic interests they cannot help but disagree. Even during the most self-conscious periods of cosmopolitanism and free trade, arguments abound. Indeed, the rancorous recriminations which enliven the summit conferences of the Common Market suggest that actual hostility may stand in inverse ratio to nominal amity. Yet it seems improbable that Great Britain will go to war with the rest of the Community to secure a reduction in its financial contribution. Similarly, in the 1790s, of all the great powers, Russia was the most vocally hostile to revolutionary France but was also the last to go to war with it.
This distinction also helps to put ideology in its place. Ideological differences create hostility but they do not necessarily lead to war. In ideological terms, the USA and the USSR are as opposed as it is possible to conceive, yet they have never gone to war against each other. Similarly, in the 1790s revolutionary ideology did not prevent the French from seeking an alliance with Prussia, securing an alliance with Spain or sending military advisers to the Ottoman Turks. Dislike of revolutionary principles and fear of revolutionary contagion certainly played a part in creating such improbable coalitions as that of Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and Spain or that of Austria, Russia, Great Britain and Turkey, but it was not the only, nor indeed the most important adhesive.
During the early stages it was French weakness, not revolutionary subversion which attracted the bellicose attention of the German powers. The Prussians, who had less to fear from unrest at home than anyone else, were the most forward because they were the most greedy. It was the prospect of obtaining Jülich and Berg, or another slice of Poland, which excited their interest. When they discovered that the Revolution would not fall over at the first push and then found another way to acquire territory (in the Second Partition of Poland), they made peace and reverted to their old Austrophobe foreign policy. For their part, the Austrians were bound to be more sensitive to the French Revolution qua revolution, given the vulnerability of their Belgian provinces and their dynastic links with the French royal family. Yet they too were not so much counter-revolutionary as anti-French. What Leopold II and Kaunitz wanted in France least was a revitalised old-regime monarchy ready to cause mayhem in the style of Louis XIV. What they wanted most was a France too weak to challenge Austrian control of the Low Countries, Germany and Italy, but stable enough not to be a source of instability. In short, they wanted to see the new France as a sort of Poland-in-the-west - but with Austria playing the role of Russia. That eminently desirable state of affairs seemed to have been achieved when Louis XVI 'accepted' the new constitution of September 1791. It was when Brissotin pressure threatened to destroy it that a new Austrian initiative was launched which helped to bring war (see p. 102).
Similarly, it was not the wave of revolutionary ideology in the autumn of 1792 which prompted Great Britain to move from neutrality to hostility, it was the expansion of revolutionary power, into the Low Countries. The 'fraternal decree' of 19 November certainly persuaded the British that the French were launching a determined attempt to subvert all established regimes, but by the end of the year it had become clear that any danger of domestic insurrection had passed. Indeed it was the very soundness of public opinion which encouraged Pitt and his colleagues to choose war as the best means of resolving their differences with the French (see p. 149). The same sort of considerations brought Russia into the war in 1798. By that time revolutionary ideology had been a bone of contention for almost a decade without provoking more than long-term snarling. It was only when French power expanded in such a way as to threaten Russian interests in eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean that the cold war could become hot.
In short, once it became clear that revolutionary France was a power to be reckoned with, the old European alignments reasserted themselves in a manner that would not have seemed strange to Europe before 1756: France allied to Spain versus Great Britain and Austria plus, occasionally, Russia. The old firms were back in business again. So, however much change the Revolution may have brought to the domestic structures of France, in international terms a better description than revolution would be 'revival': the revival of French power after three-quarters of a century of feeble leadership, misconceived policies and demoralising failure. From this perspective, the really exceptional period in the history of the European states-system was not 1789-1815 but 1756-89, occasioned by the temporary decline of France and the equally temporary rise of Prussia.
The sense that the Revolution marked a return to normality is strengthened by the continuity of attitudes. Certainly the universal principles of national sovereignty, self-determination and international liberation seemed to mark a sharp break with the past. Yet the practice of revolutionary diplomacy was not so different. Within just a year or so of the beginning of the war, the revolutionaries had adopted a policy of raison d'état just as narrowly selfish as that of any old regime powers.1 By 1797 they had left the heady universalist days of 1792 so far behind that they were prepared to partition the independent republic of Venice with — the Habsburgs of all people! Moreover, all along they had shown the traditional attitudes of Austrophobia, Anglophobia and Prussophilia which went back to the opposition to the 'diplomatic revolution' of 1756 and were certainly not created by the Revolution (see p. 120).
Ideology did play an important part in encouraging the powers to resort to warfare in resolving their differences, but it did so, not by creating hostility, but by creating misunderstanding. The French revolutionaries' conviction of the universal validity and absolute superiority of their principles led naturally to a sense of invincibility. If history were on their side and the future beckoned, what human force could withstand for long their inexorable march to victory? This supreme confidence sharpened their vision but narrowed its focus: some things they saw with prophetic clarity, others they overlooked altogether. It enabled them to see beyond the apparent chaos engendered by the Revolution to the real power of a liberated people and, more especially, to the real power of a liberated state. But it also blinded them to the equally real power of their potential enemies. What they thought was the terminal decline of the Habsburg monarchy, for example, turned out to be temporary embarrassment. Revolutionary tunnel-vision magnified old-regime Europe's disabilities but passed by those great reserves of stamina which were to lead to final victory. It was the French Republic that was to prove ephemeral and the ramshackle empires of the east that were to last another century and more. Blissfully unaware that both they and their regime were destined to die young, the Brissotin orators swept the National Assembly to war in a surge of optimistic belief that it would be short and easy.
Ideology performed the same dual function tor the other powers of Europe, albeit in reverse order. For these monarchs and their ministers, the power of a state depended on political stability, social order, economic prosperity, sound finances and religious harmony. What they thought they saw in France was civil war, anarchy, pauperisation, bankruptcy and a new religious war. In large measure this selective myopia was due to the creation by their ideology of a set of criteria which were just not applicable to revolutionary France. So, for example, they knew all about the emigration of officers and the mutinies of the rank and file, which apparently had immobilised the French army, but were wholly ignorant of the sources of patriotic enthusiasm and unprecedented numerical strength which the Revolution could tap. Their conservative, aristocratic and hierarchic notions about society in general and warfare in particular made it impossible for them even to conceive that a 'citizen army' could resist, let alone defeat an army of professionals. The ease with which the Prussians and the Austrians had dealt with the Dutch and Belgian insurgents in 1787 and 1790 respectively provided apparently conclusive confirmation of this assumption.
This kind of mutual miscalculation is notoriously common during periods of ideological turmoil, for a conservative's idea of strength is a radical's idea of weakness, and vice versa. It is also common when reliable information is hard to obtain. That is one very important difference which — mercifully — distinguishes the ideological conflict of the late eighteenth century from that of the late twentieth century. It is just because modern intelligence-gathering techniques have become so advanced that the USA and the USSR have been able to assess more or less correctly their power relationship and hence to remain at peace. It was miscalculation based on woefully inadequate intelligence which took the former into a major war in Vietnam and the latter into a minor war in Afghanistan. In the 1790s both sides were groping in the dark, although neither was aware of the fact. The 'Coppelia effect' (see p. 73) convinced each of them that they were seeing one thing when in fact they were seeing quite another. The old regime governments believed much of what their own agents and the French emigres told them about the imminent collapse of the Revolution, not only because that was what they expected and wanted to hear but also because they could know no better. For the same reasons, the French revolutionaries believed most of what their own agents and foreign refugees told them about the imminent collapse of the old regimes. If only Kaunitz had known — say — that the Feuillants had been isolated and discredited by the end of 1791, he might never have launched his intimidatory exercise with such counter-productive results (see p. 102). If only Brissot and his supporters had known — say — the true state of public opinion in Germany and the Habsburg dominions, they might have adopted a much less bellicose and provocative tone when dealing with Vienna (see p. 110).
While the Austrians hoped and believed that they could attain their objectives without resorting to actual fighting, the dominant party in the French Legislative Assembly was intent on - desperate for — war. Yet the Brissotins could not have carried the majority, let alone the virtual unanimity, of their fellow-deputies along with them, if Kaunitz had not given them such powerful and timely assistance (see p. 116).2 The origins of the war of 1792 provide the best possible illustration of the obvious but often-ignored fact that a state cannot go to war all by itself, that it 'takes two to tango'. Nor could they have succeeded without the misguided belief of the court that war would bring counterrevolution.
The task of presenting the clumsy Austrian initiative in its worst possible light and of exposing the treason of the King and Queen was facilitated greatly by the nature of the forum in which they were accomplished. The sheer size of the manège, in which the sessions of the Legislative Assembly were held, allowed it to become a permanent political rally, rather than a debating chamber (see p. 112). That, in turn, allowed the Brissotin orators to deploy their superb skills to maximum effect. By tapping such powerful emotions as Austro-phobia, nationalism, hatred of the émigrés, fear of counter-revolution and (above all) nihilism, they whipped up a frenzy of paranoid aggression among both deputies and spectators. Above all, by creating the conviction that their enemies were terminally decadent but they themselves were invincibly strong, they also created the illusion that victory was certain.
It was in the Legislative Assembly that the crucial decisions were taken. It was there that the final campaign against the Feuillant ministry was launched, which terrorised Louis XVI into appointing ministers eager to take the final steps to war. Yet the Legislative Assembly was not operating in a vacuum. Even more — much more —than the British Parliament, it was subject to all kinds of outside pressures, from Paris especially but also from the French provinces. But this remains one of the great unresearched areas of French revolutionary history. It is just possible that the Brissotins and the Fayettistes acted as they did because they were under pressure from opinion 'out of doors'. Until that hypothesis can be substantiated, however, the reverse relationship remains the more probable. Of course the Brissotins thought they knew — probably correctly — what was best calculated to arouse the revolutionary masses. Yet the evidence suggests that it was they who took the initiative, impelled not by the force of public opinion but by their ambition to seize power and complete the Revolution.
Analysing motives is a notoriously imprecise and hazardous business. Even the individuals or groups of individuals concerned are often unaware of why they are really pursuing a certain course of action. Not only is the human capacity for self-deception eternal but politicians, in particular, appear to possess a special talent for believing their own rhetoric. With specific reference to the Brissotins, it is certainly possible that they launched their campaign for war to divert the social radicalism of the revolutionary crowd, to restore monetary stability or to promote more generally the interests of the French bourgeoisie (see p. 71). They certainly did argue that war would promote stability and prosperity. Yet there is nothing in the evidence unearthed so far to suggest that one or other of these socio-economic motives was paramount. Rather it suggests that they were conceived as secondary benefits, welcome but subsidiary to the basic drive for power.
The same observations could be made about the material interests of the other participants. The class character of their policies can certainly be detected. Fear that the example of the Revolution and the force of its principles endangered their social structures did play a part in provoking their hostility to the new regime in France. Yet. as was argued earlier, between an attitude of hostility and a decision to resort to war a great gulf remains. The road to war in 1792, 1793 or 1798 was no linear and inevitable progression, but a meandering, even aimless dawdle, punctuated by diversions and about-turns. Moreover, it is unlikely that it was economic interests which constructed the final bridge. Of course the acquisition of territory would have — and in the case of Prussia and Great Britain actually did — enhance economic resources, but it was power per se that was the fundamental concern. Economic interest is certainly one essential component of power, but it does not constitute the totality.
In this concluding chapter I have tried to bring together some of the general observations about the origins of wars in general and of the French revolutionary wars in particular which were developed in the main part of the book. If they, or even some of them, are valid, it may be wondered whether this volume is out of place as the first in a series on the origins of modern wars. Yet the French revolutionary wars did constitute the first modern war, not because it represented a conflict between two diametrically opposed ideologies, but because of what it became. By liberating their state in the course of 1792-94, by casting off all inhibitions and maximising their resources, the French revolutionaries waged total war of unprecedented intensity and on an unprecedented scale. Not only did it 'revolutionise the Revolution', it also forced the other European states into emulation, however delayed and partial. After almost a quarter of a century of devastation, exploitation and over-exertion, no part of Europe was untouched: politically, economically, socially, intellectually or culturally. It was not the French Revolution which created the modern world, it was the French revolutionary wars.
References and Notes
1. For a more extended discussion of this process of degeneration, see ch. 2 of T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany (Oxford 1983).
2. The same observation applies, albeit in more muted form, to the tone and substance of Lord Grenville's communications of December 1792 and January 1793-see p. 157.