780 Chapter XXXII
that this august Christian assemblage hoped devoutly for a prolongation of the
war and an invasion of France by the Russians.^7
It was the British who took the lead in bringing together the Second Coali-
tion, and in setting its aims. In the years 1799 and 1800 they granted subsidies
of almost £3,500,000 to Russia and various German states. The Prussian king
remained obstinately neutral, while the Spanish were still more afraid of England
than of France. Russia came into the war by the decision of the new Tsar Paul,
who was disturbed by the continuing unrest in Russian Poland, the agitation of
Polish émigrés in the French service, and conspiracies of Poles and others in the
Moldavian border zone, as well as by the French invasion of Egypt; and who also,
though not a Catholic, had been elected grand- master of their order by the
Knights of Malta, in the hope that by his influence they might get back their
island from the French. It was the Austrians who gave the British the most con-
cern, for the Hapsburg government lacked enthusiasm for having its territories
crossed by the Russian army, nor, intent on getting the French out of Italy, did it
much care who or what kind of people governed in Paris. The British were
haunted by the thought in 1799 (as in 1813) that Austria and France might make
a separate peace, by which Austria would recognize the French government and
its possessions in return for the destruction of the Italian republics and a hege-
mony of Austria in the peninsula.
Pitt was now convinced, after years of experience, that no lasting peace could be
made with the French Republic. For this view there was indeed some reason, for it
was the peculiarity of the Directory that it could not control its own generals, that
revolutions sprang up, as at Naples, which the Directory itself did not desire; that,
as Carlo Zaghi has said, the Revolution had become a thing quite independent of
the French government, which, seldom actually pressing for revolutions in other
countries, could not repudiate them once they occurred, without playing into the
hands of its own most implacable enemies.^8
To restore the Bourbon monarchy in France was therefore one of the British
aims in the war of 1799. For the rest of the revolutionized region the formula was
much the same. Externally, there might be changes: Belgium and Holland might
be joined under the House of Orange; and the Dutch possessions in Cochin, Cey-
lon, and South Africa were to remain British. Internally, the several old regimes in
these countries were to be revived. For Switzerland, the British offered £30,000 a
month to raise a force of Swiss against the Helvetic Republic, and recommended
the “re- establishment of the ancient order of things in that country” as demanded
by N. F. von Steiger, the former schultheiss of Bern and leader of the most intransi-
gent of the Swiss émigrés.^9 For Belgium, the British considered themselves the
guarantors of the old provincial constitutions, violated not only by the Belgian and
7 Correspondance diplomatique et mémoires inédits du Cardinal Maury, 2 vols. (Lille, 1891), I, 253,
256, 268, 275, 318, 347.
8 See Chapter X XVII above and C. Zaghi, Bonaparte e il Direttorio dopo Campoformio (Naples,
1956), 69, 183–84.
9 See the documents published in the appendix to F. Burckhardt, Die schweitzerische Emigration,
1798–1801 (Basel, 1908), 432–35.