The Powers of Europe and Fall of Sebastopol

by A British officer

At length, on the 20th of April, 1792, oppressed with the solemnity and grandeur of the occasion, the declaration of war against Austria was received by the National Assembly of France in solemn silence. Thus commenced the greatest, the most bloody, and the most interesting war which has agitated mankind since the fall of the Roman Empire. Rising from feeble beginnings, it at length involved the world in its conflagration; rousing the passions of every class, it brought unheard of armies into the field; and it was carried on with a degree of exasperation unknown in modern times. “A revolution in France,” says Napoleon, “is always followed, sooner or later, by a revolution in Europe.” Situated in the centre of modern civilization, it has in every age communicated the impulse of its own changes to the adjoining states Thus, the great changes which had taken place in France had excited all Europe, and spread the utmost alarm in all her monarchies.

Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England were at that period, as now, the great powers of Europe, and they were the principal actors in the desperate struggle which ensued. They were in a situation capable of great exertion; years of repose had fitted them to enter upon a gigantic war. England, although she had lost one empire in the west, had gained another in the east; and the wealth of India began to pour into her bosom. The public funds had risen from 57, at the close of the American War, to 99. Her army consisted of 32,000 men in the British Isles, besides an equal force in the East and West Indies; but these forces were rapidly augmented after the commencement of the war, and before 1796, the regular force amounted to 206,000 men, including 42,000 militia. Yet experience proves that Britain could never collect above 40,000 men upon any one point of the continent of Europe. But her real strength consisted in her great wealth, in the public spirit and energy of her people, and in a fleet of 150 ships of the line, which commanded the seas.

England, like other monarchies, had slumbered on contented and prosperous, and for the most part inglorious, during the eighteenth century. A great writer observed, that while America was doubling her population every twenty-five years, Europe was lumbering on with an increase, which would hardly arrive at the same result in five hundred; and Gibbon lamented that the age of interesting incidents was past, and that the modern historian would never again have to record the moving events, and dismal catastrophes of ancient story. Such were the anticipations of the greatest men on the verge of a period that was to usher in a new Cæsar, and to be illustrated by an Austerlitz and a Trafalgar, a Wellington and a Waterloo; and the human race, mowed down by unparalleled wars, was to spring up again with an elasticity before unknown. William Pitt was the great Prime Minister of England at this time, and modern history cannot exhibit a statesman more fertile in resources, and whose expedients seemed as exhaustless as his great abilities. Fox and Burke, each distinguished by a high order of intellect, filled the British Parliament with their reasoning and eloquence.

The great Austrian empire contained at that time nearly 25,000,000 of inhabitants, with a revenue of 95,000,000 florins, and numbered the richest and most fertile districts of Europe among its provinces. The wealth of Flanders, the riches of Lombardy, and the valor of the Hungarians added to the strength of the Empire. Her armies had acquired immortal renown in the wars of Maria Theresa. At the commencement of the war, her force amounted to 240,000 infantry, 35,000 cavalry, and 100,000 artillery. Her court, the most aristocratic in Europe, was strongly attached to old institutions, and the marriage of Maria Antoinette to Louis XVI. gave the Austrian court a family interest in the affairs which preceded and followed the French Revolution.

The military strength of Prussia, raised to the highest pitch by the genius of Frederic the Great, had rendered her one of the first powers of Europe; her army of 165,000 strong was in the highest state of discipline and equipment, and by a system of organization the whole youth of the kingdom were compelled to serve a limited number of years in the army, so that she had within herself an inexhaustible reserve of men trained to arms. Her cavalry was the finest in Europe.

The majesty and power of Russia was beginning to fill the north with its greatness, and in her struggles and battles from the time of Peter the Great, through her wars with Sweden, with Frederic and with the Turks, she had constantly advanced with gigantic strides towards the Orient and the West. Her immense dominions comprehended nearly the half of Europe and Asia; while she was secure from invasion by her position, and by the severity of her climate. The Empress Catharine, endowed with masculine energy and ambition, had waged a bloody war with Turkey, in which the zeal of a religious crusade was directed by motives of policy and desire for the acquisition of new territory which should pave the way for that future expected conquest of the whole of European Turkey, and which should give Russia the shores of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora as her southern boundary, and should make Constantinople, the seat of her commerce and her power over the Mediterranean and the East, the centre through which she might command the world. The infantry of Russia has long been celebrated for its invincible firmness, and the cavalry, though greatly inferior to its present state of discipline and equipment, was formidable. The artillery, now so splendid, was then only remarkable for its cumbrous carriages and the obstinate valor of its men. Inured to hardship from infancy, the Russian soldier is better able to bear the fatigues of war than any in Europe; he knows no duty so sacred as obedience to his officers. Submissive to his discipline as to his religion, no privation or fatigue makes him forget his obligations. The whole of the energies of the Empire are turned to the army. Commerce, the law, and civil employment are held in no esteem. Immense military schools, in different parts of the Empire, annually send forth the flower of the population to this dazzling career. Precedence depends entirely upon military rank, and the heirs of the greatest families are compelled to enter the army at the lowest grade. Promotion is open equally to all, and the greater part of the officers have risen from inferior stations of society.

The military strength of France, which was destined to oppose and triumph over these immense forces, consisted at the commencement of the struggle of 165,000 infantry, 35,000, cavalry and 10,000 artillery. But her troops had relaxed their discipline during the revolution, and her soldiers had been so accustomed to political discussion, that it had introduced a license unfavorable to discipline. At first they lacked steadiness and organization, but these defects were speedily remedied by the pressure of necessity, and by the talent which emerged from the lower classes of society.

Such was the state of the principal European powers at the commencement of the war. The celebrated 10th of August, 1792, came, and the throne was overturned, the royal family put in captivity, while the massacres of September drenched Paris with blood. The victories of Dumourier rolled back the tide of foreign invasion to the Rhine. War was declared against Sardinia, 15th September, and Savoy and Nice were seized and united to the French Republic.

“The die is thrown, we have rushed into the career; all governments are our enemies, all people are our friends; we must be destroyed or they shall be free,” exclaimed the orator of the convention. Geneva surrendered to the French without a blow, and the Convention declared it would grant its assistance to all people who wished to recover their liberty. Flanders was overrun by the French in a fortnight, and they committed an aggression on the Dutch by opening the Scheldt, and by pursuing the fugitive Austrians into Dutch territory.

While the tide of Austrian and Prussian invasion was rolled back to the Rhine, the great frontier city of Germany was wrested from Austria almost under the eyes of the imperial armies; and although the campaign commenced only in August, under the greatest apparent disadvantage to the French, yet before the close of December all this had been accomplished. The execution of Louis XVI. on the 21st Jan., 1793, completed the destruction of the French monarchy, accelerated the Reign of Terror, and brought the accession of England to the league of the Allied Sovereigns; Chauvelin, the French Ambassador, received orders immediately to quit London; and this was succeeded in a few days by a declaration of war, 1st February, 1793, by France against England, Spain, and Holland. The audacity of the Convention, which thus threw down the gauntlet to nearly all of Europe, excited universal astonishment. The feeling of national honor, in all ages so powerful among the French, was awakened to its highest pitch. Every species of requisition was cheerfully furnished under the pressure of impending calamity; and in the dread of foreign subjugation the loss of fortune and employment was forgotten only one path, that of honor, was open to the brave. The Jacobins, the ruling power in France, were no longer despised but feared by the European powers, and terror prompts more vigorous efforts than contempt. No sooner did the news of the execution of Louis reach St. Petersburg than the Empress Catharine took the most decisive measures, and all Frenchmen who did not renounce the principles of the revolution were ordered to quit her territory; the most intimate relations were established between the courts of London and St. Petersburg; and a treaty between them, which laid the basis of the Grand Alliance, was signed, 25th March, in which they engaged to carry on the war against France, and not to lay down their arms without restitution of all the conquests which France had made from either of them, or such states and allies to whom the benefit of the treaty should extend. Treaties of the same nature were made with Sardinia and Portugal, and thus all Europe was arrayed against France. A congress of the allies assembled at Antwerp, which came to the resolution of totally altering the objects of the war; and it was openly announced there that the object was to provide indemnities and securities for the allied powers by partitioning the frontier territories of France among the invading states. Soon after, when Valenciennes and Condé were taken, the Austrian flag, and not that of the Allies, was hoisted on the walls. The Prussians and Austrians, numbering 100,000, were on the Rhine early in the spring, and the Ring of Prussia crossed in great force. The French army, inferior in numbers and discipline, retreated. Mentz capitulated to the Allies after a long and dreadful siege, and the French continued to retreat in disorder. But the Allies wasted their splendid opportunity. The French retreated to their entrenched camp before Arras, after which there was no place capable of defence on the road to Paris. The Republican authorities took to flight, the utmost consternation prevailed, and a rapid advance of the Allies would have changed the history of Europe. But from this time dissension began among them; and from this period may be dated a series of disasters to them, which went on constantly increasing until the French arms were planted on the Kremlin, and all Europe, from Gibraltar to the North Cape; had yielded to their arms.