High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 625
money, supplies, and soldiers to armed forces that remained at the highest levels
under French command. It seemed natural to favor France in commercial policy, as
in the Treaty of 1798 with the Cisalpine; to prevent the importation of British
goods throughout the new republican order, and to promote the sale of French
manufactures in allied states, while refusing to give equal access for Dutch or Ital-
ian products into France.
This clear insistence on putting French interests first, which in some ways
merely continued the habits of the Old Regime, and in others anticipated those of
the Napoleonic empire, was probably unavoidable, and even necessary. The mainte-
nance of revolution in all countries depended entirely on the strength of France.
The Cisalpine, Batavian, and other republics, threatened by their own counter-
revolutionaries and by foreign powers, would rise or fall with the French Republic.
But the French pursuit of their own national interest, carried to a point of actual
exploitation of weaker allies, began very soon to confuse the new republican order.
It divided the revolutionary or progressive forces in Europe. Men who remained
committed to revolutionary changes in their own countries came to disagree on
the extent of collaboration that should be accepted with France; some tried dealing
with conservative forces instead; some rebelled against French interference; some
accepted the French and hoped to make use of them in a way as calculating or
disillusioned as that of the French Directory toward them.
Nevertheless, the surprising and notable fact, at the time of the Directory as
later under Napoleon—a fact which the following nationalistic generations tended
to minimize, and which twentieth- century developments in Europe may make
more acceptable and more visible—is the degree to which many Europeans looked
on the new order with favor.
In a class analysis, as already observed, the international revolutionary and dem-
ocratic republicanism was above all a movement of the middle ranks of society.
Upper- class persons were by no means absent; nobles and prelates were especially
prominent in the revolutions at Rome and Naples, and individual “Jacobins” of
aristocratic birth could be found in all countries. One has the impression that they
were rarest in Germany. The lowest classes outside France, and in France after
1795, were generally apathetic or hostile. Here the great exception was furnished
by Ireland, where the mass of the rural population, led by a good many priests, was
in active revolt against the English and the Anglo- Irish ascendancy, and for that
reason sympathetic to France, the more so since they did not experience the bur-
dens of a French occupation. Elsewhere, and notably in Belgium and Italy, peas-
ants were in a state of insurrection before the year 1798 was over.
Middle- class persons were themselves divided. It has been observed of South
Germany that republican propaganda was most successful among the wohlhabend-
ere Klasse, while the solidly established old burgher families remained largely im-
pervious.^34 Similar divisions existed within the Batavian and Helvetic republics,
where almost everyone of importance was middle- class by general European stan-
dards. Men whose habitual business connections were with English firms, or who
34 K. Obser, “Die revolutionäre Propaganda am Oberrhein in Jahre 1798,” in Zeitschrift für die
Geschichte des Oberrheins, n.s. X XIV (1909), 230.