The Issues and the Adversaries 385
the lead of the king and his ministers. For the extreme right, those opposed even to
moderate revolution, who had always believed or had come to believe that every-
thing since 1789 was a mistake, a short and sharp war would reveal the chaos and
incompetence of the new government, and after a victory by one or more foreign
powers, which in these circumstances could not be regarded as enemies of France,
the Jacobins and Feuillants and all involved since 1789 in the Revolution would be
swept aside, and the true France, the historic France, would be put back together.
Leopold died in March 1792. During the winter he had become more positively
inclined toward intervention. In any case his son Francis was closer than his father
to those conservative forces in the Hapsburg empire which had opposed the re-
forming spirit of both Leopold and his predecessor Joseph. These were the people
most eager for war with France, which would have the advantage of destroying the
center of Revolution, from which certain citizens of Vienna, and everywhere else,
were getting dangerous ideas.
In Paris, both the Jacobin Club and the Legislative Assembly resounded with
speeches demanding war. Only Robespierre and a handful of others spoke against
it almost to the end. Robespierre, at the Jacobins, scoffed at the rhapsodies of Bris-
sot, who said that war would produce a kind of world revolution, in which the
peoples everywhere would rise against their governments in sympathy for France
and for the cause of freedom. To Robespierre such talk was extravagant (“No one
loves armed missionaries”) and dangerous for the future of liberty in France: “To
want to give liberty to others before conquering it ourselves is to assure our own
enslavement and that of the whole world.”^10
The vote on war came in the Assembly on April 20, with only one recorded
speech against it, by an obscure deputy named Bequet, a political moderate, who
insisted that the war was not inevitable, that Austria did not wish to fight, being
mainly concerned with Poland and more afraid of Russia than of France. Bequet
predicted much of what was to follow, saying that if the French entered Belgium
to fight the Austrians, and if they threatened Holland, the British would come in
and France would face a coalition of all Europe. He was answered by an array of
Jacobin luminaries and spellbinders, Brissot, Condorcet, Vergniaud, Bazire, Gua-
det (the “Girondins” of later historians) who insisted that the war was necessary
and right, that it was not a war of “nation against nation,” and added the theory
(which came to be the “democratic” theory of war) that they had no quarrel with
any people, but only with kings and their henchmen. With seven negative votes,
war was declared on the King of Hungary and Bohemia.
It was not the purpose of the French to revolutionize other countries by the war,
nor of the Allies to bring about counter- revolution in France. It was not in this
sense of war- aims that the war was ideological. It became an ideological war, and
remained so, because the war came upon a world already divided by serious cleav-
ages. These were the cleavages, of varying depth in different countries but found
almost everywhere, described in Volume I.
10 Bouloiseau, Lefebvre, and Soboul, eds., Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, VIII (1953), 81–82,
speech at Jacobin Club, Jan. 2, 1792.