Leopold will live for barely two years…
April 1790 CE
The growing revolutionary disorders in France endanger the life of his sister Marie Antoinette of Austria, the queen of Louis XVI, and also threaten his own dominions with the spread of subversive agitation.
His sister sends him passionate appeals for help, and he is pestered by the royalist émigrés, who are intriguing to bring about armed intervention in France.
From the east he is threatened by the aggressive ambition of Catherine II of Russia and by the unscrupulous policy of Prussia.
Catherine would be delighted to see Austria and Prussia embark on a crusade in the cause of kings against the French Revolution.
While they are busy beyond the Rhine, she would annex what remains of Poland and make conquests against the Ottoman Empire.
Leopold II has no difficulty in seeing through the rather transparent cunning of the Russian empress, and he refuses to be misled.
To his sister, he gives good advice and promises of help if she and her husband can escape from Paris.
The émigrés who follow him pertinaciously are refused audience or, when they force themselves on him, are peremptorily denied all help.
Leopold is too purely a politician not to be secretly pleased at the destruction of the power of France and of her influence in Europe by her internal disorders.
Within six weeks of his accession, he displays his contempt for France's weakness by practically tearing up the treaty of alliance made by Maria Theresa in 1756 and opening negotiations with Great Britain to impose a check on Russia and Prussia.