14 - French Preponderance and the European System

Summary

The aims of French foreign policy at the end of the Directory and the beginning of the Consulate no longer had much in common with those proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly when war was declared in April 1792. Their ambitions in both territorial and philosophical terms – in the former case securing the natural limits represented by the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, in the latter the application everywhere else of the right of peoples to self-determination¹ – were soon relegated to statements of intent. They were also of course in some respects contradictory: the rights of peoples in regions destined for annexation were by definition denied. Without entirely dismissing these generous, albeit now secondary aims, the revolutionary crusade had metamorphosed into an expansionism that mirrored more traditional economic and strategic interests.