The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (26 page)

By 1782, it is true, the financial strain of maintaining such a large navy was hitting the French economy and compelling some retrenchment. Naval stores were now more difficult to obtain, and the shortage of sailors was even more serious. In addition, some of the French ministers feared that the war was unduly diverting attention and resources to areas outside Europe, and thus making it impossible to play any role on the continent. This political calculation, and the parallel fear that the British and Americans might soon settle their differences, caused Paris to hope for an early end to hostilities. Economically, their Dutch and Spanish allies were in an equally bad plight. Nevertheless,
Britain’s greater financial stamina, the marked rise in exports from 1782 onward, and the steady improvements in the Royal Navy could not now rescue victory from defeat, nor convince the political factions at home to support the war once America was clearly seen to be lost. Although Britain’s concessions at the 1783 Peace of Versailles (Minorca, Florida, Tobago) were hardly a reversal of the great imperial gains of 1763, the French could proclaim themselves well satisfied at the creation of an independent United States and at the blow dealt to Britain’s world position. From Paris’s perspective, the strategical balance which had been upset by the Seven Years War had now been sensibly restored, albeit at enormous cost.

    In eastern Europe, by contrast, the strategical balances were not greatly distorted by the maneuvers of the three great monarchies during the decades after 1763.
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This was chiefly due to the triangular nature of that relationship: neither Berlin nor Vienna in particular, nor even the more assertive St. Petersburg, wished to provoke the other two into a hostile alliance or to be involved in fighting of the dimensions of the Seven Years War. The brief and ultracautious campaigning in the War of Bavarian Succession (1778–1779), when Prussia opposed Austria’s attempt at expansion, merely confirmed this widespread wish to avoid the costs of a Great Power struggle. Further acquisitions of territory could therefore take place only as a result of diplomatic “deals” at the expense of weaker powers, most notably Poland, which was successively carved up in 1772–1773, 1793, and 1795. By the later stages, Poland’s fate was increasingly influenced by the French Revolution, that is, by Catherine ITs determination to crush the “Jacobins” of Warsaw, and Prussia and Austria’s desire to gain compensation in the east for their failures in the west against France; but even this new concern with the French Revolution did not fundamentally change the policies of mutual antagonism and reluctant compromise which the three eastern monarchies pursued toward one another in these years.

Given the geographical and diplomatic confines of this triangular relationship, it was not surprising that Russia’s position continued to improve, relative to both Austria and Prussia. Despite Russia’s backwardness, it was still far less vulnerable than its western neighbors, both of which strove to placate the formidable Catherine. This fact, and the traditional Russian claims to influence in Poland, ensured that by far the largest portion of that unfortunate state fell to St. Petersburg during the partition. Moreover, Russia possessed an open, “crumbling” frontier to the south, so that during the early 1770s great advances were made at Turkey’s expense; the Crimea was formally annexed in 1783, and a fresh round of gains was secured along the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1792. All this confirmed the decline of Ottoman fighting power, and secretly worried both Austria and Prussia almost
as much as those states (Sweden in 1788, Britain under the younger Pitt in 1791) which more actively sought to blunt this Russian expansionism. But with Vienna and Berlin eager to keep St. Petersburg’s goodwill, and with the western Powers too distracted to play a lasting and effective role in eastern Europe, the growth of the Czarist Empire proceeded apace.

The structure of international relations in the decade or so prior to 1792 therefore gave little sign of the transformation bearing down upon it. For the main part, the occasional quarrels between the major powers had been unconnected regional affairs, and there seemed to exist no threat to the general balance of power. If the future of Poland and the Ottoman Empire preoccupied the great nations of the east, traditional maneuvering over the fate of the Low Countries and over “rival empires of trade” consumed the attention of the western Powers. An Anglo-Spanish clash over Nookta Sound (1790) brought both countries to the brink of war, until Spain reluctantly gave way. While relations between Britain and France were more subdued because of mutual exhaustion after 1783, their commercial rivalry continued apace. Their mutual suspicions also swiftly showed themselves during an internal crisis in the Netherlands in 1787–1788, when the pro-French “Patriot” party was forced out of power by Prussian troops, urged on by the assertive younger Pitt.

Pitt’s much more active diplomacy reflected not merely his own personality, but also the significant general recovery which Britain had made in the ranks of the Powers since the setback of 1783. The loss of America had not damaged the country’s transatlantic trade; indeed, exports to the United States were booming, and both that market and India’s were much more substantial than those in which France had the lead. In the six years 1782–1788 British merchant shipping more than doubled. The Industrial Revolution was under way, fired by consumer demand at home and abroad and facilitated by a spate of new inventions; and the productivity of British agriculture was keeping pace with the food needs of an expanding population. Pitt’s fiscal reforms improved the state’s finances and restored its credit, yet considerable monies were always voted to the navy, which was numerically strong and well administered. On these firm foundations, the British government felt it could play a more active role abroad when national interests demanded it. On the whole, however, political leaders in Whitehall and Westminster did not envisage a Great Power war occurring in Europe in the foreseeable future.
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But the clearest reason why Europe would not be convulsed by a general conflict seemed to lie in the worsening condition of France. For some years after the victory of 1783, its diplomatic position had appeared as strong as ever; the domestic economy, as well as foreign trade with the West Indies and the Levant, was growing rapidly.
Nonetheless, the sheer costs of the 1778–1783 war—totaling more than France’s three previous wars together—and the failure to reform national finances interacted with the growing political discontents, economic distress, and social malaise to discredit the
ancien régime
. From 1787 onward, as the internal crisis worsened, France seemed ever less capable of playing a decisive role in foreign affairs. The diplomatic defeat in the Netherlands was caused primarily by the French government’s recognition that it simply could not afford to finance a war against Britain and Prussia, while the withdrawal of support for Spain in the Nookta Sound controversy was due to the French assembly’s challenge to Louis XVI’s right to declare war. All this hardly suggested that France would soon be seeking to overturn the entire “old order” of Europe.

The conflict which was to absorb the energies of much of the continent for over two decades therefore began slowly and unevenly. The French were concerned only with domestic struggles in the period which followed the fall of the Bastille; and although the increasing radicalization of French politics worried some foreign governments, the resultant turmoil in Paris and the provinces suggested that France was of little account in European power politics. For that reason, Pitt was seeking reductions in British military expenditures as late as February 1792, while in the east the three great monarchies were much more interested in the carving up of Poland. Only with the growing rumors about émigré plots to restore the monarchy and the French revolutionaries’ own move toward a more aggressive policy on the borders did external and internal events produce an escalation into war. The slow and uncertain maneuvers of the allied armies as they moved across the French frontiers showed how ill prepared they were for this contest, which in turn allowed the revolutionaries to claim victory after the desultory encounter at Valmy (September 1792). It was only in the following year, when the successes of the French armies seemed to threaten the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and Italy and the execution of Louis XVI demonstrated the radical republicanism of the new regime in Paris, that the struggle assumed its full strategical and ideological dimensions. Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, the original combatants, were now joined by an enormous array of other states headed by Britain and Russia and including all of France’s neighbors.

Although it is easy in retrospect to see why this First Coalition (1793–1795) against France failed so miserably, the outcome was a surprise and bitter disappointment at the time; after all, the odds were more uneven than in
any
preceding war. In the event, the sheer impetus of the French Revolution led to the adoption of desperate measures—the
levée en masse
and the mobilization of all seizable national resources to fight France’s many foes. Moreover, as many writers have
pointed out, a very important period of reform had occurred in the French army—in matters of organization, staff planning, artillery, and battle tactics—during the two or three decades before 1789; and what the Revolution did was to sweep aside the aristocratic hindrances to these new ideas and to give the reformers the opportunity (and the weight of numbers) to put their concepts into practice when war broke out. The “total war” methods employed on the home front and the newer tactics on the battlefield seemed as much a reflection of the newly released demagogic energies of the French as the cautious, halfhearted maneuvers of the Coalition armies were symbolic of the habits of the old order.
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With an army of about 650,000 (July 1793), fired by enthusiasm and willing to take the risks involved in lengthy marches and aggressive tactics, the French were soon overrunning neighboring territories—which meant that from this time onward, the costs of maintaining such an enormous force fell largely upon the populations
outside
France’s borders, which in its turn permitted a certain recovery of the French economy.

Any power seeking to blunt this heady expansionism would therefore have to devise the proper means for containing such a new and upsetting form of warfare. This was not an impossible task. The French army’s operations under its early leader Dumouriez, and even the much larger and more elaborate campaigns of Napoleon, revealed deficiencies in organization and training and weaknesses in supply and communications, of which a well-trained foe could take great advantage. But where was that well-trained opponent? It was not merely that the elderly generals and slow-moving, baggage-laden troops of the Coalition were tactically inadequate in the face of swarms of skirmishers and hard-hitting columns of the French. The real point was that the necessary political commitment and strategical clarity were also missing among France’s enemies. There was, obviously, no transcendent political ideology to fire the soldiers and citizens of the
ancien régime;
indeed, many of them were attracted to the intoxicating ideas of the Revolution, and only when, much later, Napoleon’s armies turned “liberation” into conquest and plunder could local patriotism be used to blunt the French hegemony.

Furthermore, at this early stage few members of the Coalition took the French threat seriously. There was no overall agreement as to aims and strategy between the various members of the alliance, whose precarious unity manifested itself in their increasing demands for British subsidies but in not much else. Above all, the first years of the Revolutionary War overlapped with, and were overshadowed by, the demise of Poland. Despite her vitriolic denunciations of the French Revolution, Catherine II was more concerned with eliminating Polish independence than in sending troops to the Rhineland. This caused an anxious Prussian government, already disenchanted by the early campaigns
in the west, to switch more and more of its troops from the Rhine to the Vistula, which in turn compelled Austria to keep 60,000 men on its northern frontier in case Russia and Prussia moved against the remaining Polish territories. When the third and final partition did occur, in 1795, it was all too evident that Poland had been a more effective ally to France in its death throes than as a living, functioning state. By that time, Prussia had already sued for peace and abandoned the left bank of the Rhine to the French, leaving Germany in a state of uneasy neutrality and thus permitting France to turn its attention elsewhere; most of the smaller German states had followed this Prussian lead; the Netherlands had been overrun, and converted into the Batavian Republic; and Spain, too, deserting the Coalition, had returned to its early anti-British alignment with France.

This left only Sardinia-Piedmont, which in early 1796 was crushed by Napoleon; the luckless Habsburg Empire, which was driven out of much of Italy and forced into the Peace of Campo Formio (October 1797); and Britain. Despite the younger Pitt’s wish to imitate his father in checking French expansionism, the British government also failed to pursue the war with the necessary determination and strategical clarity.
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The expeditionary force sent to Flanders and Holland under the Duke of York in 1793–1795 had neither the strength nor the expertise to deal with the French army, and its remnants eventually came home via Bremen. Moreover, as so often happened before and since, ministers (such as Dundas and Pitt) preferred the “British way in warfare”—colonial operations, maritime blockade, and raids upon the enemy’s coast—to any large-scale continental operation. Given the overwhelming superiority of the Royal Navy and the disintegration of its French equivalent, this looked like an attractive and easy option. But the British troop losses caused by disease in the West Indies operations of 1793–1796 meant that London paid dearly for these strategical diversions: 40,000 men were killed, another 40,000 rendered unfit for service—more than all the casualties in the Spanish Peninsular War—and the campaigns cost at least £16 million. Yet it is doubtful whether Britain’s steadily augmented domination of the extra-European theaters or its peripheral operations against Dunkirk and Toulon compensated for France’s growing power within Europe. Finally, the subsidies demanded by Prussia and Austria to maintain their armies in the field soared alarmingly, and were impossible to provide. In other words, British strategy had been simultaneously inefficient
and
expensive, and in 1797 the foundations of the entire system were shaken—at least temporarily—by the Bank of England’s suspension of cash payments and by the naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. During that troubled period, the exhausted Austrians sued for peace and joined all the other states which admitted French primacy in western Europe.