Climax and Dénouement 789
On the other hand, the enemy also had his weaknesses, and if the New Order
survived in France in 1799 (somewhat transmuted) it did so in part, as in 1793,
because its enemies could not agree, and shared no true common purpose against
it. Each of the Coalition powers had its own interests. The British could presum-
ably have assembled more strength against France on the Continent, had they
been less involved in India and in Ireland, and if their overseas and commercial
ambitions had not made both the Dutch and the Spanish fearful for their own
colonial empires. They might have produced wider fissures in the Continental re-
publics if they had had more appeal for the moderates in those countries, if they
had not in 1799, as at Quiberon and Vendémiaire in 1795, become identified with
the ultra- conservatism of intransigent émigrés. In 1799 the Austrians and Rus-
sians could agree neither with each other nor with the British, whom they re-
garded with the air of a lord toward his banker as hardly more than a source of
funds to finance their armies. The Russians, after Suvorov’s conquests in Italy, were
annoyed that the Austrians so soon maneuvered to get them out.
North of the Alps, as in Italy, the Austrian designs were more territorial than
ideological. At the critical moment in the summer of 1799, as the Austro- Russian
campaign was about to open in Switzerland, the Vienna government, instead of
carrying through with this main blow which was to lead to a direct invasion of
central France, ordered its army to move in the direction of Mainz, so that Aus-
trian influence might prevail in a future disposition of the Rhineland, Liège, and
the former Austrian Netherlands. The Russians were left to carry on the Swiss
campaign alone. For this purpose Suvorov moved up from Italy to join Korsakov,
taking his army through the St. Gotthard Pass in a memorable operation, and very
much irritated at the Austrian betrayal of Russia in both Italy and central Europe.
The Austrians, said Lord Grenville, cared nothing about overthrowing the govern-
ment in France, “the real root and origin of its wickedness.” Pitt called Austrian
policy “atrocious and perhaps fatal.”^19
It was among the crags of Switzerland and in the watery lowlands of north
Holland that the Second Coalition came to grief. In Switzerland, after the main
Austrian force had departed, the Russian general Korsakov faced the French
Masséna, whose French army was supported by a few thousand Swiss in the new
demi- brigades of the Helvetic Republic. The expected rising of Swiss against the
French never materialized. The Swiss did not find the “Cossacks” congenial. To
William Wickham, who had said that Switzerland could not be neutral, that it
must be dominated and made over either by France or by the Coalition, the rough
indiscipline of the Russian soldiers was a cause of infinite dismay, since it made
the Swiss more tolerant of the French. The Russians, said Wickham of these
indispensable allies, were “shag all over,” and he quoted Voltaire: ôtez seulement
l ’habit et vous sentirez le poil.^20 Masséna defeated Korsakov in a three- day battle,
on September 25–27, called the Second Battle of Zurich. Suvorov, struggling
19 Dropmore Papers, V, 147, 404.
20 Ibid., 485: “ just remove the clothing and you will feel the hair.” See also, on the Russians in
Holland and Switzerland, ibid., 449, 455–56; but on October 24, 1799, Dundas was still telling Pitt
that “a Russian army as large as can be got, and as large as you can afford to pay, is an essential ingredi-
ent to every purpose,” ibid., 498.