The War of Wars by Robert Harvey Read Free Book Online

minister was condemned to death and guillotined, and his successor appointed from among the Girondins: this was Charles Dumouriez.
    Dumouriez was no friend of the Austrians and conceived a highly intelligent strategy of establishing a pact with Britain to keep it neutral. This was based on setting up a constitutional monarchy in France and respect for mutual trading arrangements, while detaching Belgium from Austria and setting it up as an independent state. The Austrians under their new young Emperor were incensed and demanded the return of the French King to the powers he enjoyed before 1789, the return of lands and buildings taken from the church and compensation for the German princes recently expelled by the French from Alsace and Lorraine. This was unacceptable to the French. On 29 April 1792 the French King was forced to declare war against his own brother-in-law, the Emperor, as well as against his two brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, who were leading the sputtering insurrections within France itself.
    No one could have predicted that the subsequent general Europeanwar would last twenty-three years. Who was to blame? Undoubtedly the French had acted badly in expropriating German landowners and the clergy, particularly in the historic city of Avignon, where a bloodbath had taken place. Austrian fury at the treatment of the Queen, the Emperor’s aunt, was also understandable. But up to now the French had not violated other borders or pursued a policy of aggression. Such certainly was the view of the British.
    Nevertheless, as Dumouriez and, before him, Lafayette had seen, there was an advantage to be had out of war – not least in strengthening the hand of the army in domestic politics. They had goaded the Austrians, and the latter and their war-hungry Prussian rivals had been all too happy to respond. However the Austrians still held aloof from any full-scale assault, although they immediately secured victories against the disorganized French army.
    The Duke of Brunswick was appointed to command the joint 365,000 strong Austrian-Prussian forces: after his victories at Maastricht, Liège and Neerwinden in the Low Countries, he was a commander to be feared. However, for reasons which remain obscure, he placed a force of 15,000 French émigré cavalry, which ought to have been the elite of his force, in the rear. There were suspicions that Brunswick was waging a war of aggression: for when he captured Longwy and Verdun he did so in the name of the Emperor of Austria, not the King of France. He had a splendid army of Prussian troops and Austrian dragoons under General Clairfait; but he launched no immediate attack to disperse the raw recruits which Dumouriez, now minister of war, had raised from a levy of men from across provincial France, nor the hesitant regular army, which had lost most of its royalist officers.
    Brunswick’s army was blocked at the fortress of Thionville: he had too few cannon. He then moved into the Champagne region, one of the poorest in Europe, where his men fell upon a profusion of melons and grapes which immediately caused an epidemic of dysentery in the army, killing hundreds. Nevertheless the émigré cavalry scored a notable success in ambushing a column of
carmagnoles
, as the raw republican conscripts were called.
    The Duke himself only took part in one action, the Battle of Valmy,before being rebuffed by Dumouriez’s forces and deciding to order a retreat. This deeply demoralized the émigrés, who had no choice but to obey the orders of their foreign commander, and the Prussians, who had obeyed the call to arms of the Emperor at great expense. The French resistance, however raw, was stiffened by the fear that any restoration of Louis XVI to his absolute powers by the émigrés would inevitably have resulted in years of revenge, bloodletting and the reimposition of feudal rule.
    With the Prussian retreat, the formerly uncertain French army found new hope: they had