The Abortive Crusade
To export the Revolution's benefits across Europe was the early hope of the French - but the unenthusiastic response from the liberated peoples rapidly soured the vision. Tim Blanning chronicles that descent from optimism to realpolitik.
No country has gone to war with such confidence in the justice of its cause as did revolutionary France in 1792. It was to be a new kind of war - a war of popular liberation, a crusade to spread the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. When the French armies invaded Belgium and Germany in the autumn of that year, they announced that they came as liberators not as conquerors. It was a role they hoped to repeat elsewhere: on November 19th, 1792, the National Convention declared in the name of the French nation that it would grant fraternity and assistance to all peoples wishing to regain their liberty. One month later, on December 15th, another decree couched in the same altruistic terms ordered French generals in the field to abolish the old regime in the territories they had liberated and to establish there a new order based on popular sovereignty. Their hostility was to be directed only at the oppressors – the princes, the nobles, the clergy; the ordinary people were to be spared: 'war to the chateaux, peace to the cottages' was to be the revolutionary armies' guiding maxim.
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