384 Chapter XVI
Pope Pius VI, and the best of the French émigré bishops, did not confuse political
or material restitution to the émigrés with the requirements of religion.
The Allies of 1792 were not, by policy or intent, conducting a war for religion or
Christianity or the French émigrés, or Louis XVI, or restoration of the Old Re-
gime. As hostilities proceeded, the Austrians developed certain territorial ambi-
tions, hoping to make gains at French expense in Alsace or along the Belgian
border. The miniature King of Sardinia had entered the war with similar aims. The
Prussians wondered why they were in this queer war at all, since Austria rather
than France had been the chief Prussian enemy for generations. For many of the
King of Prussia’s advisers, and for some in Austria, the whole French adventure
was a diversion if not an error, and the important front lay in Poland, where it was
expedient to make a quick end to the Polish revolution. Either a successful Polish
revival leading to a lasting and independent Polish state, or a collapse in which
Poland should be absorbed or dominated by Russia, would be equally distasteful to
the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The two German powers therefore held many of
their best troops for use on their eastern borders, believing in any case that no full-
scale military effort would be necessary against a France weakened by internal an-
archy. As for the powers still neutral in 1792, they hoped and expected to remain
so. Neither the British nor the Dutch government had any intention of going to
war to effect counter- revolution in France. Catherine II, the Russian tsarina, sent
money to the French émigrés, and urged on the Prussians and Austrians against
the French Jacobins. She refrained from taking part herself. She said that she
would “fight Jacobinism, and beat it in Poland.”
As for the French, though they talked of the guerre universelle of all peoples
against all tyrants, they had really gone to war for less cosmopolitan purposes, less
to liberate humanity than to serve certain purposes of their own domestic politics.
An intense war spirit had arisen in the six months before April 1792. It had been
fomented by threats of foreign intervention. In August 1791, by his Declaration of
Pillnitz, the then Emperor, Leopold II, had announced that under certain condi-
tions the European powers might collectively take military action against the Rev-
olution in France. The Declaration was qualified and Leopold did not yet think
collective intervention likely. He had issued his statement to quiet the importuni-
ties of the French émigrés, and in a vague hope of doing something useful for the
French king and queen. The émigrés seized on the declaration to intimidate the
Revolutionary leaders in Paris. However interpreted, the Declaration naturally
caused alarm and indignation in France.
Various groups in France, as the year 1791 passed into 1792, came to feel that a
short decisive foreign war would advance their own domestic interests. Each hoped
by war to get rid of its adversaries. For the firebrands of the Jacobin Club, a war
would make it possible for traitors to the Revolution to be exposed, it would sort
out the true and the false patriots, and under conditions of military emergency
would allow the use of strong measures by which the Revolution could be carried
further. For the liberal or constitutional monarchists, called the Feuillants, the
moderates of this stage of the Revolution, a war would consolidate opinion
throughout the country, reduce internal dissension, make it possible to suppress
radicalism, add to the stature of the executive, and oblige the Assembly to accept