CHAPTER XXVI
1798: THE HIGH TIDE OF
REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACYBonaparte has not yet left [for the Channel]. I had dinner with him here yesterday.
He is well satisfied with the turn of our affairs. He is delighted with the chain of
Directories which the Batavian, French, Helvetic, Cisalpine and Ligurian Repub-
lics are going to form.
—PETER OCHS AT PARIS TO BURGOMASTER PETER
BURCKHARDT AT BASEL, FEBRUARY 1, 1798
Pray assure the Empress from me that... I shall remain here ready to save the sa-
cred persons of the King and Queen.... “Down, down with the French!” ought to
be placed in the Council- room of every Country in the world.
—ADMIRAL NELSON AT NAPLES TO SIR MORTON EDEN
AT VIENNA, DECEMBER 10, 1798
The period of about a year beginning late in 1797 was the high point of the whole
decade, and indeed of all European history until 1848, in the matter of interna-
tional agitation stirred up by the revolutionary- democratic movement. The pur-
pose of this chapter is to try to recapture this moment of excitement, and to offer
an impression of the movement as a whole before following it again in separate
countries.
Events happened so swiftly, with so little central direction, and yet with so
many immediate repercussions over hundreds and thousands of miles, that no
plan of exposition can do justice to the reality, which is best seen, though elu-
sively, in any number of chain reactions. For example, in March 1798 the French
occupied the Swiss city of Bern and seized its famous “treasure” of some 6,000,000