High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 617
THE GREAT NATION, THE SISTER- REPUBLICS,
AND THE WAVE OF CISALPINIZATIONThe year began with the Fructidor coup d’état and the signing of the treaty of
Campo Formio. By the first, the French Directory for a few months favored the
advanced or democratic republicans in France and elsewhere. By the second, there
was “peace on the Continent,” or at least the hostilities between organized armies
came to a halt; and in effect, if not quite in law, all governments except the British
now recognized not only the French Republic, which had incorporated Belgium
and was in occupation of the Left Bank of the Rhine, but also the Cisalpine Re-
public; the Ligurian Republic, which had come into being at Genoa at about the
same time; and the Batavian Republic, which dated from 1795.
The French, except for continued British resistance, had clearly won the War of
the First Coalition. As one German moderate put it, a war begun to stamp out one
revolutionary republic had now resulted in the establishment of four. The French
began to call themselves the Great Nation, “not without good reason,” as Wolfe
Tone remarked in December 1797.^8 The word “nation” was still charged with
strong revolutionary significance, implying a people that asserted its sovereignty
and its rights against aristocratic, feudal, ecclesiastical, and monarchical adversar-
ies. The term grande Nation became widely current, but there was something
equivocal in it from the start. For the French it took on overtones of a national
self- esteem, from which a contempt for foreigners, including the foreign revolu-
tionaries and republicans, was by no means absent. Republicans outside of France
soon came to look on the Great Nation with mixed feelings, respecting it for its
power and its principles, but often alienated by its practice, and so turning anti-
French while not ceasing to favor the Revolution. For conservatives the expression
was always merely ironic.
The Great Nation had its Sister Republics, as they were sometimes called, and
these were in fact more sisters than daughters, since in no case had the French
government brought them into being by a deliberate or sustained action of revolu-
tionary propagation. The Batavian, Cisalpine, and Ligurian Republics were by-
products of military success, of the weakness of the old regime in their respective
territories, of the agitations of native patriots, the independent programs of French
generals, and the willingness of the French government—the Convention in the
case of the Dutch, the pre- Fructidorian Directory in the case of the Cisalpines,
and the Ligurians—to accept de facto decisions, to recruit allies, or to befriend
ideological sympathizers in time of war.
The signing of peace, with its recognition of a new republican order in Western
Europe, seemed to open the way to a world of the future—hoped for by some,
dreaded by others—in which more such republics might be created in a widening
wave of “Cisalpinization.” This term, though never current, was in fact used by a
counter- revolutionary and émigré writer, the French General Danican, who as a
Vendémiairist had tried to block the establishment of the Directory in 1795. In
8 Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone Written by Himself, 2 vols. (Washington, 1826), II, 455.