Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

The campaign of 1789 was far from fulfilling the expectations of the Emperor Joseph. His own health had suffered too much from the privations of the previous year to enable him to take the field again in person, but he was well served by his generals. The Grand Vizier determined to adopt the offensive, and crossed the Danube at Rustchuk in March at the head of an army of 90,000 men, with the intention of invading Transylvania. But an unexpected event led to the recall of the most experienced Turkish general. The Sultan Abdul Hamid died at Constantinople on 7th April, and his nephew and successor, Selim III., at once disgraced the Grand Vizier, and replaced him in the command of the western army and the office of Grand Vizier by the Pasha of Widdin. This incompetent commander rashly advanced, and was defeated by the Prince of Coburg and Suvoróv at Foksany on 31st July in an attempt to prevent the junction of the Austrians and Russians. The allies then took the offensive and inflicted a crushing defeat on the main Turkish army on the Rymnik, in which 18,000 Austrians and 7000 Russians routed nearly 100,000 Turks, and took all their baggage and artillery. This great victory was vigorously followed up. Loudon was appointed Commander-in-chief of the Austrian army, and he took Belgrade on 9th October, and after occupying the whole of Servia, laid siege to Orsova. For these services Joseph conferred upon him the title of generalissimo, which had only been borne before by Wallenstein, Montecuculi, and Prince Eugène. Among other results of the victory on the Rymnik, the Prince of Coburg took Bucharest and occupied Moldavia, while the Prince of Hohenlohe-Kirchberg forced his way into Wallachia. In the eastern quarter of the Turkish frontier Prince Potemkin was equally successful. He defeated the Turkish High Admiral, Hassan Pasha, in a pitched battle at Tobac, and conquered Bessarabia, capturing Bender, and laying siege to Ismail.

Revolution in Sweden.

Doubtless Catherine and Joseph would have met with even greater successes, and perhaps they might have driven the Turks out of Europe, had not their attention been diverted directly by the affairs of Sweden and Belgium, and indirectly by the startling events which were taking place in France. The Triple Alliance looked with great disfavour on the alliance between Austria and Russia. Pitt, as has been said, prepared a great fleet, which is known in English naval history as the Russian Armament, and Frederick William II. began to negotiate an alliance with Turkey. But they limited their direct interference to inducing Denmark to make peace with Sweden. Gustavus III. of Sweden had, in 1788, forced his way at the head of 30,000 men into Russian Finland, and the sound of his guns had been heard in Saint Petersburg, which, owing to the absence of the bulk of the Russian troops, was almost defenceless. But the Swedish nobility had great influence over the army; they disliked the war with Russia; and took this opportunity to declare themselves. Under the secret leadership of Prince Charles, Duke of Sudermania, they refused to obey the king’s orders, and hoped in the embarrassment which ensued to regain their former power. At this moment Christian VII., King of Denmark and Norway, at the instance of Catherine, invaded Sweden and prepared to besiege Gothenburg. Gustavus saw the opportunity which this invasion offered to rouse the patriotic feelings of the Swedes. He appealed to the people, and leaving the command of the army in Finland to the Duke of Sudermania, raised a fresh army of volunteers to resist the invaders. In spite of his efforts, Sweden was in great danger of falling before the combined attacks of Russia and Denmark. The Triple Alliance now intervened promptly and decisively, and by threatening to attack Denmark by land and sea, they induced Bernstorff, the Danish minister, to evacuate Sweden and to agree to an armistice. Gustavus III. returned to Stockholm with the reputation of having repulsed the invaders, and summoned the Diet to meet on 2d February 1789. Sure of the support of the Commons he proposed a new Constitution, or rather a new fundamental law for the Swedish monarchy, which is summed up in one of the articles: ‘The king can administer the affairs of the State as seems good to him.’ The nobility opposed a fruitless resistance; Gustavus imprisoned their leaders and completed the work of his former revolution of 1772 by this coup d’état. He then renewed the war with Russia, but the military operations of his campaign in 1789 were not marked by any event of importance.

Affairs in Belgium, 1789.

While Catherine of Russia was being distracted from the vigorous prosecution of the war against Turkey by the invasion of the Swedes, her ally, the Emperor Joseph, was chiefly concerned with the state of affairs in the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium. It seemed at first as if he was to be as successful as Gustavus in changing the old constitution of the country. But there was this difference. Whereas Gustavus III. was enacting the part of a national deliverer, and had the Swedish people on his side in his overthrow of the nobility, Joseph II. was opposed not only by the Belgian nobles, but by the clergy and the people also. The country seemed quiet enough under the government of Count Trautmannsdorf and the military rule of the Captain-General d’Alton. The suppression of the risings at Brussels and Louvain, Malines and Antwerp seemed to have established the Austrian sway most firmly, and the leading opponents of the Emperor’s policy were in exile. The Estates of the different provinces were convoked as usual, and all of them, except those of Hainault and Brabant, voted the customary subsidies. The Estates of Hainault were at once dissolved by a military force, and their constitution abolished on 31st January 1789. By this example the Emperor hoped to overawe the wealthy and populous province of Brabant, and when it did not have the expected effect, he directed Trautmannsdorf to summon a special meeting of the Estates of Brabant, and to require them to increase the number of deputies of the Third Estate or Commons, and to grant a permanent subsidy. He also maintained his attitude towards the Church, and tried to compel Cardinal Frankenberg, the Archbishop of Malines, to withdraw his opposition to the new Imperial Seminary at Brussels, or to resign his see. The Archbishop stoutly refused to comply, and the Estates of Brabant proved equally stubborn. Joseph then decided on a sudden blow, and by his orders Count Trautmannsdorf, on 18th June 1789, declared the ‘Joyeuse Entrée,’ or Constitution of Brabant abolished. The day was the anniversary of the battle of Kolin, in which, at the crisis of the Seven Years’ War, the Austrians had defeated Frederick the Great. D’Alton thought he made a happy comparison in saying: ‘The 18th of June is a happy epoch for the House of Austria; for on that day the glorious victory of Kolin saved the monarchy, and the Emperor became master of the Netherlands.’ But the victory was not to be won so easily. The two parties of opposition, the Van der Nootists, or partisans of Van der Noot, the supporter of the ancient constitutional rights, and the Vonckists, or followers of Vonck, the advocate of popular or democratic ideas, united. The Triple Alliance was as glad to hamper Joseph’s activity in the East by encouraging these Belgian patriots, as it had been to leave Gustavus free to harass Catherine, by stopping the interference of Denmark in the north, and the ministers of England, Holland, and Prussia all entered into relations with Van der Noot. That partisan, encouraged by hopes of active assistance, formed a patriotic committee at Breda, on the Dutch frontier, and raised an army of exiles, which was placed under the command of Colonel Van der Mersch. Joseph was not to be intimidated. D’Alton put down popular riots, which broke out in various towns, notably at Tirlemont, Louvain, Namur, and Brussels, with unrelenting severity. A sweeping decree was issued on 19th October against the exiles or émigrés, declaring that ordinary emigration would be punished by banishment and confiscation of property, and that joining an armed force on the frontier for the purpose of invasion would be punished by death, and that informers against émigrés would receive a reward of 10,000 livres and absolute impunity.[4] But all the Emperor’s measures and decrees were of no effect. The meeting of the States-General in France had been followed by the capture of the Bastille and the bringing of the King of France from Versailles to Paris by a Parisian mob; and the effects of the French Revolution on affairs in Belgium was soon to be perceived.

Revolution in Liège.

In the bishopric of Liège, which, from its situation, always reflected and repeated any political troubles that took place in Belgium, the influence of the French Revolution was immediately felt. The inhabitants of the bishopric had long resented the rule of the prince-bishops, and felt the anomaly of being subject to an ecclesiastical sovereign. Many exiles from the democratic party in Belgium assembled in the bishopric, and on the news of the capture of the Bastille, the people of Liége needed little persuasion to renew their former insurrection. The revolution was carried out without the shedding of blood. On 16th and 17th August 1789 the people of the city of Liége rose in rebellion; on the 18th MM. Chestret and Fabry were chosen burgomasters by popular acclamation, the garrison was disarmed, and the citadel occupied by bourgeois national guards. On the same day the Prince-Bishop, Count Cæsar Constantine Francis de Hoensbroeck, was brought into the city, and he signed a proclamation acknowledging the revolution and abrogating the despotic settlement of 1684. The other towns in the bishopric followed the example of the capital, and in each of them free municipalities were elected and national guards raised and armed. The Prince-Bishop, after accepting the loss of his political power, fled to Trèves, and considered himself fortunate to be allowed to escape.

The Elections to the States-General.

It is now time to examine the course of the events in France, which led to such important developments upon its north-east frontier, and which distracted the attention of all the monarchs and ministers of Europe, except Catherine of Russia, from the wars in the North and East. It was owing to the increasing difficulty of raising money for carrying on the administration of the State and paying the interest on the national debt, and the consequent necessity for revising the system of taxation and reorganising the financial resources of France that Louis XVI., on the advice of his minister, Loménie de Brienne, had vaguely promised in November 1787 to summon the States-General for July 1792, and had definitely convoked the ancient assembly of France on 8th August 1788 to meet at Versailles on 1st May 1789. But the arrangements for the elections were not made by Loménie de Brienne, who retired from office in the same month as the States-General was convoked, but by his successor Necker, who was recalled to office as an expert financier, in view of the fact that the summons of the States-General was looked on as a purely financial expedient. The procedure to be adopted in electing deputies gave rise to much anxious deliberation and heated controversy in the public press, and the Notables of 1787 were again assembled to give their advice. The burning question was as to the representation of the Tiers État, Third Estate or Commons. The ancient representative assembly of France was known to consist of the three orders of the Nobility, the Clergy, and the Tiers État, and the disputed question was as to the proportion of the number of deputies of the Tiers État to that of the two other orders. This and the other electoral questions were finally settled by the Résultat du Conseil published on 27th December 1788. It was decreed that the royal bailliages and royal sénéchaussées, feudal circumscriptions which had long fallen into disuse, should be treated as electoral units, and that they should elect, according to the extent of their population, one or more deputations, each consisting of four members, one chosen by the Nobility, one by the Clergy, and two by the Tiers État. The elections were to be made in two and sometimes in three degrees, and at each stage cahiers or statements of grievances and projects for reform were to be drawn up by the electoral assemblies.[5] In provinces, where there were no royal bailliages or sénéchaussées, and consequently no Grand Baillis or Grand Sénéchals to preside, corresponding circumscriptions were adopted or invented. During the early months of 1789 the French people were fully occupied in the election of the deputies to the States-General. Whatever might be the opinion of the French Court or the French Ministry, the people,—and more especially the educated bourgeois of the towns and the country lawyers,—looked upon the future assembly as something more than a financial expedient; they trusted to it to draw up a new political system for the State, which should admit the representative principle and allow the taxpayer a voice not only in the granting, but in the spending of the national revenue. The working classes, whether in the towns or the rural districts, did not take much active interest in the elections, and their representatives in the secondary electoral assemblies were generally educated bourgeois, but they vaguely built high hopes on the meeting of the States-General, and expected it to give them land or higher wages. Considering the novelty of choosing representatives in France, it is extraordinary that the electoral operations were carried out as peacefully and as efficiently as they were. This was mainly due to the success of a little revolutionary movement in Dauphiné, where an unauthorised and irregular assembly had met in July 1788 to protest against the abolition of the provincial Parlements by Loménie de Brienne. That minister had left office when he was not permitted to put down the assembly in Dauphiné by force, and Necker hoped to save the prestige of the monarchy by summoning a new assembly of the province in its place. But the ruse was quickly perceived; the men who had sat in the illegal assembly were elected to its successor, and in the eyes of France the representatives of the Dauphiné had won a signal victory over the Court. The new assembly in Dauphiné became the court of appeal in every electoral difficulty, and its secretary, Mounier, the leader of the Tiers État of France. Owing to his energy and ability local jealousies of town against town, province against province, class jealousies and personal rivalry, were set at rest, and it was more owing to Mounier than to any one else that the deputies to the States-General were legally and quietly elected, and that the acts of the future assembly could not be stigmatised as the work of a factious or unrepresentative minority of the French nation.

Meeting of the States-General.