CHAPTER X - THE INTERNAL HISTORY OF FRANCE DURING THE WARS, 1793–1814

Summary

At Valmy, on 20 September 1792, the first of the many victories of the armies of the Revolution marked for Europe the start of a twenty-year war, only interrupted from 1802 to 1804 by two years of precarious peace. For France, this meant the beginning of a new regime—the Republic. Democratic at first, then middle-class and, later, Consular, it finally turned into a military dictatorship which, from 1804, adopted the name of Empire. This new regime sprang from the big social, economic and administrative changes which had occurred since 1789. The democratic republic, in 1793 and 1794, tried to fulfil the ambitions of the Revolution by combining economic equality with the equality of civic rights that had been secured in 1789. In so doing, it was to give the world an example which would inspire future socialism. But these ideals were to be short-lived. The bourgeois republic, like the military dictatorship, was to be content with consolidating the achievements of 1789, now firmly established even against the reaction of 1814.

No doubt the administrative and social achievement of 1789–92, and the socialist experiments too, would have taken shape differently if France had not been in an almost permanent state of war which dominated internal policy during the next twenty-two years. The war, and the dangers to which France was exposed by repeated defeats during the first five months of the struggle (April to September 1792), developed in the people an exalted patriotism along with the fear of enemy invasion and of seignorial reaction.