The Issues and the Adversaries 387
while the war made other countries more aristocratic in official doctrine, it made
the French Revolution more democratic than intended in 1789. Somewhat the
same, on a smaller scale, had happened in America in 1775 and 1776, when the
members of colonial assemblies, facing war with Britain and needing soldiers, had
extended the suffrage or taken other steps toward “equality,” and introduced into
American political life a habit of praising the virtues of the common man.
If the war became ideological because each party expected its enemy to be
handicapped by internal dissension, and because each made itself agreeable to
those classes within its own borders from which it could expect the most enthusi-
astic support, it became ideological in a third sense also, having to do with revolu-
tionary expansion. Neither France nor Britain or the Coalition entered the war for
the purpose of spreading its own ideas. Such, however, was one of the earliest
consequences. Each belligerent, when in the course of hostilities it found itself in
occupation of enemy territory, like the French in Belgium at the end of 1792, or at
Milan in 1796, or like the Austrians in French Flanders in 1793, or the British in
Corsica in 1794, naturally favored its own supporters among the local population,
and proceeded to organize public authority according to its own principles and
through the medium of its own adherents. The British, with certain Corsicans, set
up a “Kingdom of Corsica” in 1794, supposedly modelled on Great Britain. But
after 1794 the fortunes of war favored the French. The result was a revolution in
political geography signified by the contrast between the two maps on pages 389
and 390. By 1799 there existed a cordon of sister- republics, brought into being by
collaboration between native revolutionaries and the French government or
armies—the Dutch or Batavian Republic of 1795, the Cisalpine and Ligurian Re-
publics set up in Italy in 1796–1797, the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland in
1798, the Roman and Neapolitan Republics in Italy in 1798–1799. There were
Irishmen in France and Ireland who would have been delighted to create a Hiber-
nian Republic, independent of Britain, if the French had been able to land and
maintain themselves in that island.
The Adversaries
It is necessary and possible to generalize on the matter of who favored, and who
opposed, in various countries, a more or less successful preservation of the Revolu-
tion in France. The Revolution itself could be variously understood. There were not
two “sides.” The interests of monarchy, nobility, social classes, churches, religious
minorities, national groups, internal factiousness, inter- state rivalries, boundary
questions, coalition politics, and much else were too conflicting to produce a sim-
ple duality. Yet the war introduced a kind of two- sidedness. It polarized the issues.
Some expected to gain, others to lose, by a French victory. Which were which? In
such matters much depended on personal temperaments, and much on the play of
events and circumstances in which an individual might be caught up. We find no
absolute or one- to- one correlations between sympathy for the French Revolution
and any social or political category of persons. Any kind of person might have “Ja-
cobin” inclinations. Any kind might detest the Revolution and all its works. Prince