The French Revolutinary Wars Essay Research Paper

The French Revolutinary Wars Essay, Research Paper

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS: 1787-1802

The French Revolutionary Wars: 1787-1802, by T. C. W. Blanning, is a super

Work of historiography. Far more ambitious than its modest title suggests, it is the

history of the French Revolution as well as a military and diplomatic history of

Europe from 1787 to 1802. Blanning enriches our understanding of the

Revolution by placing it in its European context, by showing how it affected and

was affected by France’s neighbors. He is especially well placed to take on this

task. Not only has he written extensively on the French Revolution; he has

written a book on Mainz under the Old Regime and the revolutionary republic,

another on the French occupation of the Rhineland, and two biographies of the

Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. [1] He is one of the few historians who can move

comfortably from France to Germany to the vast Habsburg empire stretching

from Belgium to the Balkans, and he has filled in the remaining gaps with

extraordinarily vast reading. Among the thousand or so footnotes in The French

Revolutionary Wars are references to works in German, Italian, Spanish, and

Russian, as well as French and English. Yet this book is more than a tour de

force of erudition. It is a richly textured, engaging narrative punctuated by cogent,

often brilliant analysis.

Blanning begins by arguing that French defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63)

stimulated reforms in the army which are normally associated with the

Revolution: the breaking up of armies into smaller, more flexible divisions; the

use of columns in addition to lines; an increasing reliance on light troops; and the

use of artillery. More controversial, however, were the reforms introduced in

1787 and 1788, which slashed the number of officers in an army that was, in

Blanning’s words, “absurdly over-officered” (p. 19). These reforms, coinciding

with the revolt of the parliaments, added fuel to the fire of the aristocratic

revolution by alienating many of its leaders, who were not only parlementaires

but army officers. They guaranteed that the army would not serve the king when

he needed it to suppress the insurrection in Paris in July 1789, and indeed pushed

the officers to make common cause with the Third Estate. Thus Blanning

provocatively but convincingly claims, “In part at least, the French Revolution

was a military coup” (p. 28). In addition to the hated military reforms, Blanning

argues that an unpopular alliance with Austria contributed to the discrediting of

the monarchy and that, more directly, the crown lost its legitimacy when it failed,

ostensibly due to bankruptcy, to respond to the Prussian invasion of the United

Provinces and the suppression of the pro-French Dutch Patriots in 1787.

The narrative continues with an account of the first two years of the Revolution,

when Russia, Prussia and Austria were preoccupied with Poland–which they

would soon partition out of existence–and therefore relatively uninterested in

developments in France, despite some occasional counter-revolutionary sabre-

rattling. Yet this period of “deceptive isolation from the European states-system”

(p. 42) ended in the spring of 1792, when an unlikely coalition of Girondins and

monarchists (including the king himself) provoked war against the equally

unlikely coalition of Prussia and Austria, countries that had been at war for

more than fifty years. Blanning tells the dreadful story of war and revolution

from September 1792, when thousands of suspected traitors were butchered in

Parisian prisons, to August 1793, when the revolutionary Convention declared

“total war” against external and internal enemies alike. He describes the terrible

process by which the war escalated both beyond and within French borders:

republican victories in the autumn of 1792 brought Britain and the Dutch

Republic into the war. To fight against this growing coalition, the revolutionary

government was forced to adopt conscription, and conscription, more than any

other single issue, provoked and fuelled the revolt of the Vendee and the civil war

which according to Blanning killed some 400,000 people.

The author goes on to describe the spectacular series of revolutionary victories

from August 1793 to the spring of 1795, by which time France had nearly

reached its “natural frontiers” through the conquest of Belgium, the Dutch

Republic, and most of the left bank of the Rhine. He explains these victories

largely in terms of French numerical superiority, but also emphasizes the

government’s power to requisition vast quantities of arms and to execute

commanders judged insufficiently aggressive on the battlefield. In addition to

indigenous factors, Blanning cites the allies’ infighting and lack of commitment to

the war with France as crucial to French victory. Next Blanning describes the wa

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