As settlers pour in to the frontier…

Charles Dumouriez prepares an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expects the local population to rise against Austrian rule, as they had earlier in 1790.

However, the revolution has thoroughly disorganized the army, and the forces raised are insufficient for the invasion.

Following the declaration of war, French soldiers desert en masse and, in one case, murder their general, Théobald Dillon, after losing skirmish with Austrian forces outside the city of Lille.

The troops apparently believed that their defeat by the Austrians was the result of a conspiracy on the part of Dillon, whom they called a "traitor and aristocrat."

The theory of biogenesis had accumulated so much evidential support, due to the work of Pasteur and others, that the alternative theory of spontaneous generation had been effectively disproven by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Lazzaro Spallanzani had demonstrated that microbes were present in the air, and could be killed by boiling, in 1768.

In 1861, Louis Pasteur had performed a series of experiments that demonstrated that organisms such as bacteria and fungi do not spontaneously appear in sterile, nutrient-rich media, but only invade them from outside.

Pasteur himself remarks, after a definitive finding in 1864, "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." (Oparin, Aleksandr I. (1953). Origin of Life. Dover Publications, New York. p. 196.)

Two parasitic diseases called pébrine and flacherie are killing great numbers of silkworms at Alais (now Alès) in 1865.

Louis Pasteur will work several years proving it is a microbe attacking silkworm eggs which causes the disease, and eliminating this microbe within silkworm nurseries would eradicate the disease.

Pasteur also discovers anaerobiosis, whereby some micro-organisms can develop and live without air or oxygen, called the Pasteur effect.

Pasteur's research also has shown that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk.

With this established, he had invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to kill most bacteria and molds already present within them.

He and Claude Bernard had completed the first test on April 20, 1862.

This process was soon afterwards known as pasteurization.

Beverage contamination had led Pasteur to the idea that microorganisms infecting animals and humans cause disease.

He proposed preventing the entry of microorganisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.