French Revolutionary Wars Explained #2

The Peace of Campo Formio restored peace to continental Europe, but peace between Britain and France remained elusive. In 1797, proponents of a moderate settlement within the Directory and the legislative assemblies were purged during the Coup of Fructidor, leading to the collapse of negotiations between London and Paris. Britain alone, however, could not hope to roll back French gains on the continent. For that, Albion needed allies.

The aggressive policies pursued by the Second Directory would soon provide them.

Russia had stood on the verge of intervention during the War of the First Coalition in 1796. Following the death of Empress Catherine the Great, however, her son and successor, Tsar Paul I, cancelled the departure of a 60,000-man expeditionary force. Despite his deep loathing of the French Revolution, Paul initially extended cautious peace feelers toward the Republic. He soon discovered that the new leaders of France had little interest in accommodating Russian concerns.

One source of tension was Napoleon’s negotiation of the French seizure of the Ionian Islands, a move Paul interpreted as a direct threat to Russian interests in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the French showed little regard for Russian sensitivities during the negotiations that followed Campo Formio. The Directory was determined to annex the west bank of the Rhine and compensate dispossessed German rulers through the secularization of ecclesiastical territories within the Holy Roman Empire.

Why did this matter to Russia? The answer was simple. Since 1779, Russia had been a guarantor of the constitutional order of the Holy Roman Empire by treaty. French plans to redraw the map of Germany therefore challenged interests that St. Petersburg considered its own.

The final blow came with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and the seizure of Malta. The island belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, whose honorary Grand Master was none other than Tsar Paul himself. Following the French invasion of Egypt, the Ottoman Empire also entered the war against France. The following year, the Sultan granted the Russian fleet passage through the Bosphorus, allowing Russian forces to join the struggle and recapture the Ionian Islands from the French.

Russia and the Ottoman Empire alone, however, were not enough to challenge French dominance, their geographic position was simply too peripheral. Austria and Prussia were also needed. Yet the prospect of gaining territory through the ongoing reorganization of the Holy Roman Empire convinced Berlin that there was little reason to risk another war. No matter how hard British diplomacy pressed, the Prussian court remained steadfastly neutral.

Vienna was another matter.

In the aftermath of Campo Formio, French aggrandizement continued unabated. French-backed regimes appeared across Switzerland and Italy. Between January 1798 and March 1799, Piedmont, Switzerland, Tuscany and the Papal States were transformed into sister republics modeled on revolutionary France, extending Paris’s influence ever deeper into central Europe and the Italian peninsula.

The spark that lit up the continent again came from southern Italy.

In November 1798, the Kingdom of Naples invaded the Roman Republic. Initially outmatched, French forces under General Jean-Étienne Championnet withdrew without offering battle, and Rome quickly fell to the invaders.

The Neapolitan ascendancy, however, proved remarkably short-lived.

According to General Roger de Damas, the Neapolitan army was already falling apart by the time it reached Rome:

When the army arrived in Rome, it was in such a state of distress that no general except Mack would have thought it possible to continue the campaign without giving it time to recover. Arms were rusted by the constant rain; shoes were lost; the artillery was scattered over the roads, many of the mules being dead or disabled; the baggage wagons were five days’ march in the rear.

The Neapolitans compounded their difficulties by failing to coordinate their offensive with their future allies. Although Naples was formally aligned with Austria and the Habsburgs were by treaty guarantors of the territorial integrity of Naples, no Austrian assistance would arrive before the spring of 1799.

Championnet seized this opportunity and despite his forces being numerically inferior, he rapidly reorganized his forces and launched a counteroffensive. Within weeks, the French had routed the invaders at Civitavecchia.

After the defeat, the Neapolitan army disintegrated. By December 16, French troops were once again marching victoriously through the streets of Rome. On December 30, the crucial fortress of Gaeta surrendered. Two weeks later, French forces stood at the gates of Naples itself.

Eager to emulate Napoleon’s achievements in northern Italy, Championnet took matters into his own hands and acting without authorization, he began reorganizing the conquered kingdom into yet another French satellite state: the Parthenopean Republic.

With the storm clouds of a new European war already gathering, however, the Parthenopean Republic would prove to be a very short-lived political experiment.