[2] Despite experiencing early disastrous defeats, the revolutionary armies successfully expelled foreign forces from French soil and then overran many neighboring countries, establishing client republics.

Leading generals included Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, André Masséna, Jean Victor Marie Moreau and Étienne Macdonald.

As the Ancien Régime gave way to a constitutional monarchy, and then to a republic, 1789–92, the entire structure of France was transformed to fall into line with the Revolutionary principles of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity".

Revolutionary fervor was high, and was closely monitored by the Committee of Public Safety, which assigned Representatives on Mission to keep watch on the army generals.

Guibert wrote his epic Essai général de Tactique, Bourcet focused on staff procedures and mountain warfare, and Mesnil-Durand spent his time advocating l'ordre profond, tactics of maneuvering and fighting in heavy columnar formations, placing emphasis on the shock of cold steel over firepower.

It was finally decided to launch a series of experiments to try out the new tactics, and comparing them to the standard Fredrickian linear formation known as l'ordre mince which was universally popular throughout Europe.

Despite these exercises, l'ordre mince had strong and powerful supporters in the French Royal Army, and it was this formation which went into the 1791 Reglement as the standard.

In August 1792, a large Austro-Prussian army commanded by the Duke of Brunswick crossed the frontier and began its march on Paris with the declared intention of restoring full power to Louis XVI.

Successive Revolutionary forces failed to halt Brunswick's advance, and by mid-September it appeared that Paris would fall to the invading monarchists.

At the Battle of Valmy on 20 September 1792, the Revolutionary forces defeated Brunswick's advance guard, causing the invading army to begin a retreat all the way to the border.

Much of the credit for the victory is owed to the French artillery, widely viewed as the best in Europe thanks to the technical improvements of Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval.

Displaying an exceptional talent for organization and for enforcing discipline, Carnot set about rearranging the disheveled Revolutionary Armies.

Realizing that no amount of reforming and discipline was going to offset the massive numerical superiority enjoyed by France's enemies, Carnot ordered (24 February 1793 decree of the national Convention) each département to provide a quota of new recruits, a number totaling around 300,000.

On 23 August 1793, at Carnot's insistence, the Convention issued the following proclamation ordering a levée en masse All unmarried able bodied men aged between 18 and 25 were to report immediately for military service.

Seeing the failure of the 1791 Reglement, several early revolutionary commanders followed de Broglie's example and experimented with the pre-revolutionary ideas, gradually adapting them until they discovered a system that worked.

The final standard used by the early Revolutionary Armies consisted of the following: Following the dissolution of the Ancien régime, the system of named regiments was abandoned.

These new formations, intended to combine the discipline and training of the old army with the enthusiasm of the new volunteers,[10] were proven successful at Valmy in September 1792.

The artillery had suffered least from the exodus of aristocratic officers during the early days of the Revolution, as it was commanded mostly by men drawn from the middle class.

However, unlike the infantry, where all battalions of the old Royal Army were merged with freshly raised volunteers to form new demi-brigades, the cavalry retained their regimental identities throughout the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

[13] On 22 June, the corps received orders to move the balloon to the plain of Fleurus, in front of the Austrian troops at Charleroi.