France and the kings
It was in 1795 that Prussia had made peace, that Austria had yielded the Netherlands, and that all immediate danger to France from the north had passed. And it was in the same year that the "whiff of grapeshot" ploughed its furrows through these living masses, and may be said to have ended the French Revolution, properly so-called. From that time forward the story is not of revolution in the heart of France but of France struggling with, and strangling, the kings of Europe. And the struggle and the strangling are all dominated by one man and his amazing personality—Napoleon.
CHAPTER XIII
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
We have seen the Austrians fighting and suffering defeat from France in the Netherlands. There was another battle ground where these two had now to meet, and that was in the beautiful country of Northern Italy where the Austrian Habsburgs and the Bourbons of France and Spain had met many a time. Of all the Allies, Austria had the right to feel most bitterly towards the French, for the queen whom the French had beheaded was daughter of the Austrian Empress.
Napoleon I
As early as 1792 the armies of revolutionary France had swept over Savoy—at that time an independent State with which Sardinia was conjoined. Sardinians were now in the coalition against France, and there was a Sardinian army co-operating with the Austrians in North Italy. In 1796 Napoleon was put in command of the Army of Italy, and at once he gave evidence of those qualities which made him the master mind in war.
