Liberation and Annexation 425
territory taken by Catherine II in this “second” partition of Poland, involving
White Russia and the Ukraine, has remained in the Soviet Union.
It is the purpose of this chapter, under the formal parallel of liberation and an-
nexation, to trace the realities which these terms represented in 1792–1793—that
is, to show who was liberated from what, or how and why annexed—and to indi-
cate also the impact of these events on the further radicalizing of the Revolution in
France itself.
The Storm in the Low Countries
The contacts of French and Belgians in the winter of 1792–1793 form a prelude in
which many themes of later years are already sounded. Problems later raised in the
“sister republics” were already prefigured. With allowance for differences, there is
still a distinguishable pattern. Populations greet the arrival of the French with en-
thusiasm, set about introducing liberty and equality, and hope to enjoy an indepen-
dent republic. They want the French to protect them against their own old re-
gimes, but are unwilling or unable to share in the war effort against the Coalition,
and object to French exploitation of their resources for this purpose. They become
disillusioned with the French, who in turn become contemptuous of them. Some
become more dependent on the French, even subservient, than they originally
meant to be. Others of those who originally hailed the invaders, or were at least
willing to accept them, begin to regret the disappearance of the old order, while
still others remain revolutionary in spirit while turning anti- French. There was also
for the French government the problem of control over military command, the
fear that a successful French general in the field, enjoying the prestige of sensa-
tional victory, and building a base for himself in an occupied country, through
keeping control of its resources in his own hands, and directing the loyalties of
local sympathizers to himself, might become independent of the government in
Paris that he was supposed to serve, overshadow his own civilian superiors, and
emerge as a military dictator over the Revolution. This was what General Bonaparte
did in Italy a few years later. It was what General Dumouriez dreamed of doing in
Belgium.
It was only in a rough geographical sense that the French invaded “Belgium.”^1
There was strictly speaking no such country, but only ten provinces belonging to
the Austrian monarchy (of which Brabant, Flanders, Hainault, Namur, and Lux-
1 For the following account of Belgium, and of the views of the French and of Dumouriez with
respect to it, I follow the thoroughly documented and admirably thought out work of Suzanne Tassier
[Mme. G. Charlier], Histoire de la Belgique sous l ’occupation française en 1792 et 1793 (Brussels, 1934).
There are also about a hundred relevant pages in the first volume of [Baron] Paul Verhaegen, La Bel-
gique sous la domination française, 1792–1814, 5 vols. (Brussels, 1922–1935), and other older works.
Verhaegen’s book, actually written before the First World War, has a definite nineteenth- century
tone. That is, it simply assumes that the revolutionaries of the 1790’s were mistaken (Rousseau was a
“dreamer,” etc.), and its author closely identifies himself with the Belgian Statists, in whom he sees the
true embodiment of Belgian character, nationality, and interests. Except upon episodic facts, Tassier
and Verhaegen profoundly disagree, but Miss Tassier’s work is so good, and coincides so fully with all