782 Chapter XXXII
was very important. It was not agrarian in reflecting the outlook of rural laborers
or small farmers. Peasants often had ideas of their own for which the philosophy of
conservatism made no more allowance than did democratic republicanism. Peas-
ants complained of poverty, under- employment, lack of land, unfair taxes, unjust
law courts, and much else. To recruit and hold mass rural support against the New
Order it would have been necessary, as Ruffo attempted to do in Naples, to offer
some positive expectations about the future. It was not enough to praise ancient
ways, or inveigh against city people and abstract ideas, or raise alarms about the
state of the Christian religion. But to deal adequately with real agrarian grievances
would have been to propose another kind of revolution, and this was what the
conservative ideology, and the international conservative leadership, could not do.
In the great anti- republican campaign of 1799 the one actual source of popular
anti- republicanism was not used.
The Coalition, therefore, and most notably the British government, in its plans
for fomenting and using discontents within France and its sister- republics, looked
less to the desires of the rural masses than to those of the former aristocracies and
privileged classes. Royalists in France, and old regents or patricians or other disaf-
fected persons in the Helvetic and Batavian Republics, worked busily and secretly
with their respective émigrés and with various British agents, such as the mysteri-
ous Colonel Crauford and the acknowledged envoy, William Wickham. In France
the royalist “agency” in Paris and the secret “philanthropic institutes” in the prov-
inces again became active, as before Fructidor. In southern France the strength of
“Jacobinism” at Toulouse made the royalist reaction in the surrounding area all the
more intense. Almost ten thousand insurgents besieged Toulouse in August 1799;
the republicans of the city with difficulty drove them away. The plan was for such
revolts to coincide with one another, and with the invasion of France by the Coali-
tion. But as underground and conspiratorial movements they could not be coordi-
nated or synchronized. Occurring one by one, they were suppressed in turn; and, as
it happened, the Second Coalition never entered France at all.
The military plan envisaged a far- flung deployment. “From the Zuyder Zee to
the Tiber,” said Mallet du Pan, “Europe is now covered with armies, almost con-
tiguous, embracing one of the most extensive circles ever heard of in the history of
wars ancient or modern.”^13 Indeed, the Coalition reached beyond the Tiber, for
Nelson reigned at Naples, the Russians soon occupied the Ionian Islands, hoping
to do the same at Malta; a force of British and Turks obliged Bonaparte to retreat
from Acre in Palestine, and in India Mornington disposed of Tipu, subjugated his
kingdom, and put an end to French Jacobinism in that country.
On the European continent the armies were in three parts. One Russian force,
under Marshal Suvorov, along with the Austrians, and with Turkish assistance,
operated in Italy. Another Austro- Russian force had Switzerland for its immediate
object. An Anglo- Russian expedition was preparing to land in Holland. The three
were then to converge upon France, with the main blow delivered by the Austro-
Russians from Switzerland, who were to enter by way of Lyon to the acclaim of
the royalists.
13 British Mercury, IV, 117.