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Initially, European rulers viewed the French Revolution as a domestic issue, but as tensions escalated, they aligned with the French monarchy, leading to the Declaration of Pillnitz and the War of the First Coalition. The French military faced challenges from 1793 to 1795, including purges of loyalists and the creation of a new army from untrained conscripts, resulting in disappointing campaign outcomes. By 1795, the army's behavior and financial issues prompted the French Directory to seek campaigns outside France for budgetary and security reasons.

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12 views1 page

Second

Initially, European rulers viewed the French Revolution as a domestic issue, but as tensions escalated, they aligned with the French monarchy, leading to the Declaration of Pillnitz and the War of the First Coalition. The French military faced challenges from 1793 to 1795, including purges of loyalists and the creation of a new army from untrained conscripts, resulting in disappointing campaign outcomes. By 1795, the army's behavior and financial issues prompted the French Directory to seek campaigns outside France for budgetary and security reasons.

Uploaded by

simmi george
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The rulers of Europe initially viewed the French Revolution as an internal dispute

between the French king Louis XVI and his subjects. As revolutionary rhetoric grew
more strident, the monarchs of Europe declared their interests as one with those of
Louis and his family. The Declaration of Pillnitz (27 August 1791) threatened
ambiguous, but quite serious, consequences if anything should happen to the French
royal family. French émigrés, who had the support of the Habsburgs, the Prussians,
and the British, continued to agitate for a counter-revolution.[1]

Finally, on 20 April 1792, the French National Convention declared war on the
Habsburg monarchy, pushing all of the Holy Roman Empire into war. Consequently, in
this War of the First Coalition (1792–98), France ranged itself against most of the
European states sharing land or water borders with her, plus Great Britain and the
Kingdom of Portugal.[1]

From 1793 to 1795, French successes varied. By 1794, the armies of the French
Republic were in a state of disruption. The most radical of the revolutionaries
purged the military of all men conceivably loyal to the Ancien Régime. The levée en
masse created a new army with thousands of illiterate, untrained men placed under
the command of officers whose principal qualifications may have been their loyalty
to the Revolution instead their military acumen.[2] Traditional military
organization was disrupted by the formation of the new demi-brigade, units created
by the amalgamation of old military units with new revolutionary formations: each
demi-brigade included one unit of the old royalist army and two from the new mass
conscription. The losses of this revolutionized army in the Rhine campaign of 1795
disappointed the French public and the French government.[1]

Furthermore, by 1795, the army had already made itself odious throughout France, by
both rumor and action, through its rapacious dependence upon the countryside for
material support and its general lawlessness and undisciplined behavior. After
April 1796, the military was paid in metallic rather than worthless paper currency,
but pay was still well in arrears. The French Directory believed that war should
pay for itself and did not budget to pay, feed, and equip its troops.[3] Thus, a
campaign that would take the army out of France became increasingly urgent for both
budgetary and internal security reasons.[1]

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