The Provisionality of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Order

The wars that would make military occupation a recurrent feature of the European experience for over two decades and that overturned the eighteenth-century balance of power were so often justified in terms of competing principles and constitutional orders that principle and competition of constitutions have been seen as the cause of the wars and the factor behind their continuation. From the Declaration of Pillnitz of 27 August 1791, in which Frederick William II of Prussia and Leopold II of Austria declared ‘that they regard the present position of His Majesty the King of France as a matter of common concern to all the sovereigns of Europe’, and the inflammatory speech of Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, of 20 October 1791, invoking the spectre of an anti-revolutionary conspiracy to be met by war, it readily appeared that the eventual declaration of war against Austria by the French Legislative Assembly on 20 April 1792 was an inevitability. By the same token Napoleon has been seen as the heir of the Revolution, or even as a ‘Robespierre on horseback’, whose opponents finally set the seal on the Revolution at the Congress of Vienna, some of them at least creating a Holy Alliance to smother any revolutionary sparks that might ignite a renewed conflagration.

Others have seen more traditional factors of great power rivalry at work, with the French revolutionaries and Napoleon inheriting the goals of the French monarchy, and France's opponents, and sometime allies, continuing their respective traditions. From this perspective the wars amounted not to the violent imposition of the Revolution but its betrayal and both sides were ultimately corrupted by their attempt to deal with the other. As Albert Sorel put it: ‘In order to deal with the French Revolution, old Europe abdicated its principle: in order to deal with the old Europe the French Revolution falsified its own’. More nuanced accounts have tried to integrate both sets of factors, adding the influence of mutual misperception and miscalculation.

Revolutionary ideology and counter-ideologies of the most diverse kind as well as considerations of power, national or dynastic honour, and misperception and miscalculation continued to feed the wars after 1792.