Peace efforts and the campaigns of 1795

The prospect of peace with Prussia and with Tuscany was opportune for France, where the abandonment of the Jacobins’ controlled economy after Thermidor had precipitated the worst consequences of inflation. The administration of the army, which lacked equipment and supplies, fell into disorder. This disorder, the course of political events, and the removal of the threat of invasion served to increase the rate of desertions alarmingly.

A peace treaty with Tuscany was signed on February 9, 1795. This was followed by the Convention of La Jaunaye (February 17), whereby an amnesty was accorded to the guerrilla leaders of the Vendée. Then, in the night of April 5–6, the peace of Basel was finally concluded between France and Prussia. To safeguard Prussian neutrality, a line of demarcation was drawn whereby northern Germany, including Hanover, was closed to the belligerents. By a secret clause Frederick William agreed to abandon his support of the exiled stadholder of the Netherlands, William V of Orange. This peace of Basel enabled the French to deliver an ultimatum to the Dutch; by the peace of The Hague (May 16, 1795) the estates-general of the United Provinces ceded the left bank of the Scheldt estuary, Maastricht, and Venlo to the French Republic and allied themselves with it, agreeing also to pay an indemnity of 100,000 florins. It was because of this enforced change of side that the Dutch lost some of their colonies to the British, who occupied Cape Province on September 16 and later seized Dutch Guiana (now Suriname).

The second peace of Basel was concluded between France and Spain on July 22, 1795. The French, who had lost some of the territory won in Catalonia but had advanced farther into the Basque country, undertook to withdraw to their old frontier, while the Spaniards ceded Santo Domingo to France. There was, however, much division of opinion in France over the policy that the Revolution should follow abroad. The matter derived more urgency from the possibility of signing a peace with the Holy Roman Empire—over which Austria had very little real control—since the imperial diet was prepared to make peace with France provided that the integrity of the empire was respected; i.e., if the French would abandon their conquests west of the Rhine. The French annexationist party, however, regained a majority in the government, and the proposal was rejected.

Austria, therefore, together with Sardinia and Great Britain, remained at war with France. Already in January 1795 Austria and Russia had come to an understanding for the Third Partition of Poland, overriding Prussia’s claims. On May 20 a new Austro-British treaty was concluded whereby Great Britain (weak in land forces and committed to operations overseas of decidedly secondary importance) granted Austria a subsidy of £600,000 for the maintenance of 200,000 men in the field. The Austrians, indeed, had considerable success on the Rhine in 1795. The Army of Sambre-et-Meuse under Jourdan, having taken the fortress of Luxembourg (June 25), eventually crossed the Rhine at Dusseldorf and Neuwied in September. Clerfayt’s Austrians were at first driven back southeastward to Main. Pichegru, instead of advancing in strength from Mannheim with the Army of Rhin-et-Moselle to support Jourdan, let himself be repulsed. Pichegru was, in fact, in treasonable collusion with the enemy, and he had been in contact with French émigrés since August 1795. After Clerfayt had won a victory over Jourdan at Hochst (October 10), Wurmser defeated Pichegru’s army outside Mannheim (October 18), took Mannheim (November 23), and crossed to the left bank of the Rhine. Jourdan had to retreat westward as far as the Moselle, and Clerfayt, overrunning the Palatinate, obliged him to accept an armistice on December 19. Pichegru, recoiling toward Alsace, likewise signed an armistice on December 31. In the autumn of 1795 Russia had acceded to the Anglo-Austrian alliance.

The Austro-Sardinian forces, supported by the British fleet, had some success on the southeastern front in the early summer of 1795, but the Franco-Spanish peace of Basel made possible the reinforcement of the Army of Italy. Under Barthélemy Schérer, who took command of that army in October, Pierre-François-Charles Augereau and André Masséna won the battle of Loano (November 23–24), but the immediate opportunity of pushing on to Turin was not taken.

The Directory and the campaigns of 1796–97

On August 22, 1795, the new and notably unrealistic constitution of the year III had been promulgated in Paris. Its greatest internal weakness lay in the tenuous relationship between the Directory and the chambers. Control of the executive lay in the hands of the five directors, to whom the ministers, named by them, were responsible. Political divisions, widespread dissatisfaction with the regime, distress among the nation at large, and increasing pressure from the right obliged the government to curtail the elections for the new chambers in order to ensure majorities in the Council of the 500 and the Council of Ancients. Bonaparte overcame the threat of a royalist coup d’état with the “whiff of grapeshot” of October 5 (13 Vendemiaire year IV). Next, on May 10, 1796, the Directory was again threatened directly, if far less seriously, this time from the left, by the Babeuf conspiracy. The difficulty of establishing a regime of moderate views and policies in a nation riven so recently by the multiple anarchies of the Revolution serves partly to explain the formation of the Directory’s foreign policy. Even so, the decision of the Thermidorians to retain and extend the conquests of the Revolution had impelled France to a career of expansion in which the separate peace treaties imposed on defeated states would be no more than truces in the struggle against the rest of Europe—temporarily divided but collectively superior in economic power and in number. So long as the British maintained the struggle, the French could always foresee renewal of war with one or more of the European powers in alliance with Great Britain. Yet such far-reaching considerations were vouchsafed to only a few French statesmen, and the development of policy was to be controlled very largely by the appreciation of immediate advantages or in response to pressing needs.

The Directory undertook the campaigns of 1796 in the hope of ending the war on the Continent with the advance toward Vienna of the 150,000 men of Jourdan’s Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and Victor Moreau’s Army of Rhin-et-Moselle. The Army of the Alps under Kellermann and that of Italy under Bonaparte, who had received his command on March 2, 1796, were far inferior in numbers and still poorer in supplies. They were intended to play only a secondary role, attempting, if possible, the conquest of Piedmont and Lombardy. In the event, Bonaparte’s Italian campaign, his first as a commander in chief and among the most remarkable in history, was to furnish the Directory with the opportunity of forcing Austria out of the war.

Campaign in Germany

Crossing the Rhine at Dusseldorf at the end of May 1796, Jourdan advanced to Wetzlar on the Lahn River before a counterattack by the Archduke Charles, who had taken Clerfayt’s place, drove him back over the Rhine. Moreau, from Strasbourg, crossed the Rhine on June 24, and the Austrian opposition to him was weakened by the transfer of Wurmser’s forces to the Italian theatre of war. Charles, therefore, who had taken command of all the Austrian forces on the Rhine, now judged it prudent to withdraw from the Palatinate. Jourdan crossed the river yet again at Neuwied and this time advanced into Bavaria, pushing back the lesser Austrian force under Wilhelm Ludwig von Wartensleben and reaching the Naab River. On August 24 Charles attacked Jourdan at Amberg with the bulk of the Austrian army and won a victory. Pursuing Jourdan toward the Main, Charles defeated him again at Würzburg on September 3, after which Jourdan withdrew to the Lahn and finally to the left bank of the Rhine.

Moreau, who had been halted by Charles at Malsch on July 7 but had subsequently pressed on toward Munich with the Army of Rhin-et-Moselle, might have been isolated in Bavaria if Charles had turned promptly southward after defeating Jourdan. Moreau, however, made good his withdrawal to Alsace, and throughout the winter of 1796–97 the Austrians were held at Kehl (opposite Strasbourg) and at Huningue. In the spring of 1797 Hoche, who had succeeded Jourdan in command of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, was on the point of enveloping the Austrians under Franz, Freiherr von Werneck, between the Lahn and the Nidda rivers when the armistice of Leoben suspended hostilities.