The émigré armies of
the French Revolutionary Wars were armies raised outside of France by and out
of Royalist émigrés, with the aim of overthrowing the French Revolution,
reconquering France and restoring the monarchy. These were aided by royalist
armies within France itself, such as the Chouans, and by allied countries such
as Great Britain, and fought (for example) at the sieges of Lyon and Toulon.
They were formed from:
* noblemen volunteers, either descendents
of the ancient royal family or not, who had fled France
* troops raised by these nobles through
subsidies from other European monarchies, or through their own means
* units of the French army which had also
emigrated, such as the 4e régiment de hussards
Even Napoleon said of
them "True, they are paid by our enemies, but they were or should have
been bound to the cause of their King. France gave death to their action, and
tears to their courage. All devotion is heroic.
France’s nearest neighbours had made little secret of their
dislike of the Revolution: the Emperor of Austria, in particular, offered
shelter to noble and royalist émigrés from France, who held court in Turin,
Koblenz, and in the various principalities along the Rhine waiting for the day
when they could invade France and restore the King’s and their own authority.
The Declaration of Pillnitz and the Brunswick Manifesto made no secret of the
dreams harboured by monarchical Europe, while rumours circulated of treaties
and secret deals struck between foreign rulers and the French royal family.
Panic spread fast, reaching even the Assembly, where Brissot argued
passionately that the Revolution must either be expansionist or be destroyed.
At a popular level, too, fear of invasion and of a noble backlash contributed
to the anger felt by the Parisian crowd and helped to radicalize opinion in the
capital. On 18 January 1792 the Girondin deputy Vergniaud pronounced war to be
inevitable. ‘Our Revolution’, he declared, ‘has spread the most acute alarm to
all the crowned heads of Europe; it has shown how the despotism which supports
them can be destroyed. The despots hate our Constitution because it makes men
free and because they want to reign over slaves.’ And though Robespierre
himself was among those who warned against premature militarism, many
historians of the period have followed Vergniaud in seeing the war in
ideological terms. The patrie was in danger; the French people had to fight if
they were to survive, and the entire political order depended upon their
efforts. In that sense the Revolutionary Wars were different in kind from
traditional eighteenth-century conflicts between monarch and monarch, since in
the event of victory one side would now seek to destroy the institutions of its
enemy, the French imposing a liberal constitution on the Austrians or
Prussians, and they in turn restoring the Bourbons to the throne of France. And
it was the whole French people who were at war, the nation in arms defending
its liberties and values when they were under attack.
In the process the
Revolution itself became more narrowly nationalistic, shedding its universal
claim to represent free men wherever they might live and claiming that liberty
was the prerogative of the French. This was the view of revolutionary leaders
like Dubois-Crancé, who argued that every citizen was now a soldier and every
soldier a citizen. It was brilliantly propounded by Clausewitz in the
nineteenth century, when he wrote that ‘war had again become an affair of the
people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom
regarded himself as a citizen of the state’.
