The Issues and the Adversaries 383
sume their interrupted efforts in their own countries. As the Prince of Condé
formed a military unit of French émigrés, “Condé’s army,” to serve alongside the
Austrians, so these other émigrés worked to form auxiliary units of their own na-
tionalities to fight alongside the French. Thus arose Belgian, Dutch, and other
“legions,” of which more is said in the next chapter.
Ideological War
The war was an ideological war, but anyone who tried to see it as a straight clash
between Revolution and Counter- Revolution would soon become confused. Parti-
sans of the Revolution differed violently with each other, as did their opponents.
For contemporaries, as for historians, the Revolution might refer to specific events,
like the capture of the Bastille, or to a vast personified force, or to an abstract cause
for which the French or others might be fighting. It could mean taking titles away
from dukes, or giving bread to the poor. It could mean the teachings of Jesus, or of
Voltaire. It could be for constitutional kings or no kings, for nations or for man-
kind. There were not two sides, but a dozen, or a hundred.
“The war of democracy is giving way to the war of intrigue,” reported Maury to
Rome in August.^9 He meant that when the war had begun, in April, the French
had launched it as a crusade, a holy war of liberty against tyrants, in the cause of all
peoples against all kings, but that now that the French were worsted, and initiative
was passing to the two chief Allies, the various interests that hoped to profit from
a French defeat were mainly engrossed in trying to outwit each other. The French
émigrés, led by Artois and Calonne, meant to use the Allies to recover their own
lost position in France, their manorial estates, and their former perquisites of no-
bility. Fersen was genuinely concerned for Marie Antoinette, but the émigrés cared
little for Louis XVI, whom they regarded as a dupe of the Revolution. Louis XVI
had an equally low opinion of the émigrés. Maury hoped to use the Allies to put
the French Catholic Church back on its old foundation, and to regain Avignon for
the Pope, who had lost it when it was merged into France without his consent, by
a plebiscite in 1791. The rulers of Austria and Prussia cared nothing about restor-
ing the French émigrés. If they hoped to assure the personal safety of Louis XVI
and Marie Antoinette, and to uphold the dignity of royalty in a general way, they
had no program for the internal rearrangement of France, and preferred if any-
thing that the French monarchy should remain weakened by insoluble problems.
They cared nothing about the state of the Catholic Church in France—the Prus-
sians were Protestants, and the Austrian government had been anti- Catholic and
anti- papal for a decade. It was of no concern to the Powers whether the Pope got
back his territory of Avignon, except insofar as by the return of Avignon France
might be weakened, and other territorial cessions facilitated. The French émigrés
likewise were not noted for churchly devotion; a few became more seriously reli-
gious in adversity, but as the Abbé Leflon has remarked, a historian at the Catholic
Institute in Paris, the émigrés used religion to beautify their more worldly aims.
9 Mémoires, I, 89.