378 Chapter XVI
cumstances, not known in this country, may serve to palliate the apparent cruelty
of the ruling faction.” Like a Jeffersonian republican, Webster remarked that the
French were at war with “a vile league of tyrants.” Personally, he hoped and be-
lieved that they would be victorious.^1
Noah Webster never did understand the French Revolution of 1792, or the rela-
tion of the ensuing violence to “liberty” and the “rights of man.” It is a question
that will always be open to discussion. But he put his finger on part of the answer
when he pointed to the war. In April 1792 France had declared war on the “King
of Hungary and Bohemia,” that is the House of Austria or Hapsburg, which, since
it possessed most of Belgium, was the most important of the powers that adjoined
the French frontiers. By the following summer the French were also at war with
the kingdoms of Prussia and Sardinia, and by 1793 with Great Britain, the Dutch
Republic, and the Bourbon Monarchy of Spain.
The war revolutionized the Revolution, in the words of Professor Marcel Rein-
hard of the Sorbonne, making it more drastic at home and more powerful in its
effects abroad. With the war, a specifically French Revolution was merged into a
more general Revolution of Western Civilization.^2
In an earlier volume I have tried to explain how revolution or serious political
protest had broken out in many countries—in preceding years—at Geneva in
Switzerland in 1768, in the American Revolution in the 1770’s, in the discontents
of Ireland, in the reform movement in Britain, among the Dutch and the Belgians
in the 1780’s, in Poland and to an extent in Hungary between 1788 and 1791, and
not least in France in 1789. It was argued in that volume that except in America
these movements had not succeeded. By the year 1791 the established interests
had triumphantly prevailed in Britain, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, and
Geneva; the Polish revolution was in process of liquidation; and in France the
Constitution of 1791 was by no means generally accepted, nor had the dispos-
sessed interests by any means admitted defeat or even the necessity of compro-
mise. Everywhere a “democratic” revolution had challenged the aristocracies, patri-
ciates, oligarchies, and privileged orders. But nothing was settled. “Only a challenge
had been issued to the old order; the real struggle was yet to come.” With these
closing words of the earlier book the present one may open.^3
The struggle worked itself out in conjunction with the war. The forces that had
opposed democratizing changes in their own countries for twenty years now op-
posed the France of the Revolution. Those who for a generation had hoped to
open up their own societies looked with more favor on developments in France.
The war that began in April 1792, and that lasted essentially, though with inter-
missions and shifts of alliances, until the second exile of Napoleon in 1815, was
not simply a war between “France” and “Europe.” “France” had its friends in all
countries, and “Europe” its well- wishers within the boundaries of France. Despite
occasional appearances, or stated war aims, the war became an ideological conflict
1 Noah Webster, The Revolution in France Considered in Its Progress and Effects (New York, 1794),
3–4, 38, 70.
2 See Jacques Godechot, La grande nation: l ’expansion révolutionnaire de la France, 2 vols. (Paris,
1956).
3 See pages 274–79 and 372, above.