French Revolutionary Wars: Campaigns of 1796

Political disagreements and enmity in the National Convention between October 1793 and July 1794 reach unprecedented levels, leading to dozens of Convention members being sentenced to death and guillotined.

Meanwhile, France's external wars in 1794 are prospering, for example in what will become Belgium.

In 1795, the government seems to return to indifference towards the desires and needs of the lower classes concerning freedom of (Catholic) religion and fair distribution of food.

Until 1799, politicians, apart from inventing a new parliamentary system (the 'Directory'), busy themselves with dissuading the people from Catholicism and from royalism.

The French prepare a great advance on three fronts, with Jourdan and Jean Victor Marie Moreau on the Rhine and the newly promoted Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy.

The three armies are to link up in Tyrol and march on Vienna.

In the Rhine Campaign of 1796, Jourdan and Moreau cross the Rhine River and advance into Germany.

Jourdan advances as far as Amberg in late August while Moreau reaches Bavaria and the edge of Tyrol by September.

However, Jourdan is defeated by Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen and both armies are forced to retreat back across the Rhine.

Napoleon, on the other hand, is successful in a daring invasion of Italy.

In the Montenotte Campaign, he separates the armies of Sardinia and Austria, defeating each one in turn, then forces a peace on Sardinia.

Following this, his army captures Milan and starts the Siege of Mantua.

Bonaparte defeats successive Austrian armies sends against him under Johann Peter Beaulieu, Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser and József Alvinczi while continuing the siege.

The rebellion in the Vendée is also crushed in 1796 by Louis Lazare Hoche.

Hoche's subsequent attempt to land a large invasion force in Munster to aid the United Irishmen is unsuccessful.

The revolutionary leaders of the Batavian Republic had at first used the constitutional machinery of the old confederal republic.

They resumed where they had left off after the purge in 1787 of Patriot regents, taking over the offices of the Orangist regents that were now purged in their turn. (For instance, the States of Holland and West Friesland were replaced by having the eighteen cities that formally were represented in those States send representatives to a constituent assembly that formally abolished the States and founded a new body, the Provisional Representatives of the People of Holland, that took over the functions of the States of Holland as long as the States General continued to exist).

Though the political make-up of the States-General had altered appreciably because of this change in personnel, it had retained a number of defenders of the old particularist interests.

The first order of business of the revolutionaries therefore was to strive for the reform of the confederal state, with its discrimination of the Generality Lands, and of particular minorities (Catholics, Jews), in the direction of a unitary state, in which the minorities would be emancipated, and the old entrenched interests superseded by a more democratic political order.

As a first step the representatives of Brabant were admitted to the States-General.

However, a grass-roots democratic movement had begun to form in the summer of 1795, consisting of popular societies (clubs) and wijkvergaderingen (precinct meetings), demanding popular influence on the government.

A kind of parallel government in the form of "general assemblies" had sprung up next to the city governments and the provincial States that repeatedly came into conflict with the established order.

In the autumn of 1795 the States-General started to work on a procedure to peacefully replace itself, "by constitutional means", with a National Assembly that would possess full executive, legislative and constituent powers.

This project at first met with sharp resistance from the conservatives.

In some cases even force was used (as in Friesland and Groningen)  to overcome this opposition.

The first Dutch (and general) elections are held for the National Assembly of the Batavian Republic on January 16, 1796, and the new National Assembly convenes in The Hague on March 1.
 
Like the old revolutionary States-General, the new National Assembly contains radically opposed parties: the unitary democrats, led by Pieter Vreede, Johan Valckenaer and Pieter Paulus, and the federalists, such as Jacob Abraham de Mist and Gerard Willem van Marle, but there is a broad continuum of opinion between these poles.

In this force-field the federalists hold the upper hand after the sudden demise of Paulus (who might otherwise have acted as a unifier).

The conservative federalists are more adept at parliamentary maneuvering (Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck proves himself especially adept at this).

The frustration this engenders among the democrats lead them to appeal to popular opinion and to extra-parliamentary action.

Meanwhile, the Assembly installs a constitutional commission that in November 1796 presents a report that amounts to a continuation of the old federal arrangements.

As this is totally unacceptable to the unitarists, this draft is subsequently amended into its opposite, by a compromise that finally forms a basis for a new Constitution.

The Assembly now starts upon a discussion of other important matters, like the separation between church and state, and the emancipation of minorities.

The organs of the state are to be a bicameral Legislative Corps, to be elected in indirect elections, and a Directoire-like Executive of five members.

The end result looks much like the French Constitution of 1795.

Napoleon, within weeks of his successful defense of the Convention, had become romantically attached to Barras's former mistress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, the widow of a republican general, whom he marries on March 9, 1796 after he had broken off his engagement to Désirée Clary.

Two days after the marriage, Bonaparte leaves Paris to take command of the Army of Italy and leads it on a successful invasion of Italy.

A young General Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived in Nice on March 27, 1796, to take over the Army of Italy, his first army command.

His army included sixty-three thousand troops, but of these, only thirty-seven thousand six hundred men and sixty artillery pieces are capable of being put into the field.

The soldiers are badly fed, months behind in pay, and poorly equipped.

Consequently, morale in many units is low and in a few cases this had led to mutiny.

Bonaparte's Austrian opponent, Feldzeugmeister Johann Peter Beaulieu, is also new to the Italian theater of operations.

Beaulieu directly controls nineteen thousand five hundred Austrians of whom half are still in winter quarters.

Beaulieu's subordinate Eugène Argenteau commands an additional eleven thousand five hundred Austrians who are deployed farther to the west around Acqui Terme.

A Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont army of about twenty thousand men is west of Argenteau's corps.

Bonaparte gains his first victory as an army commander on April 12 in the Battle of Montenotte.

The French had proclaimed the Republic of Alba on the occupied territories on April 26, 1796.

Two days later, King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia signs the Armistice of Cherasco, in the headquarters of Napoleon.

The fortresses of Coni, Tortoni and Alessandria, with all their guns, are given up.

Bonaparte, forming an advanced guard (thirty-five hundred infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry) under General Claude Dallemagne on May 6, sends this force along the south bank of the Po River, to cross it with boats at Piacenza.

In forcing a crossing of the bridge over the Adda River, Bonaparte defeats the Austrian rearguard at the Battle of Lodi on May 20.

The Austrians lose some two thousand men, fourteen guns, and thirty ammunition wagons.

Francis-Noël Babeuf, aiming to an inaugurate an era of universal equality by a final revolution in which a ruthless popular dictatorship will destroy all private property, conspires to overthrow the Directory.

Babeuf's song Mourant de faim, mourant de froid ("Dying of Hunger, Dying of Cold"), set to a popular tune, has began to be sung in the cafés, with immense applause; and reports circulate that the disaffected troops of the French Revolutionary Army in the camp of Grenelle are ready to join an insurrection against the government.

The Directory thinks it time to react; the bureau central has accumulated through its agents, notably the ex-captain Georges Grisel, who had been initiated into Babeuf’s society, complete evidence of a conspiracy (later known as the "Conspiracy of Equals") for an armed rising fixed for Floréal 22, year IV (May 11, 1796), in which Jacobins and socialists are combined.

On May 10, Babeuf, who has taken the alias Tissot, is arrested; many of his associates are gathered by the police on order from Lazare Carnot: among them are Augustin Alexandre Darthé and Philippe Buonarroti, the ex-members of the National Convention, Robert Lindet, Jean-Pierre-André Amar, Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier and Jean-Baptiste Drouet, famous as the postmaster of Saint-Menehould who had arrested Louis XVI during the latter's Flight to Varennes, and now a member of the Directory's Council of Five Hundred.

The government crackdown is extremely successful.

The last number of the Tribun had appeared on April 24, although Lebois in the Ami du peuple tries to incite the soldiers to revolt, and for a while there are rumors of a military rising.

The trial of Babeuf and his accomplices is fixed to take place before the newly constituted high court of justice at Vendôme.

Napoleon's troops take Milan on May 15.