After a decade of constant warfare and aggressive diplomacy, France had conquered territories in the Italian Peninsula, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland due to its very large and powerful military, which had been totally mobilized for war against most of Europe with mass conscription of the vast French population.

Austria stationed significant troops on its French border and together with Prussia, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which threatened severe consequences should anything happen to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

The French suffered additional defeats in the remainder of the year and these difficult times allowed the Jacobins to rise to power and impose the Reign of Terror to unify the nation.

In 1794, the situation improved dramatically for the French as huge victories at Fleurus against the Austrians and Dutch and at the Black Mountain against the Spanish signaled the start of a new stage in the wars.

The war began well for the Allies in Europe, where they gradually pushed the French out of Italy and invaded Switzerland – racking up victories at the battles of Magnano, Cassano, and Novi along the way.

[6] Meanwhile, Napoleon's forces won a series of Egyptian and Ottoman armies at the battles of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor, and Abukir, but lost a crucial Siege of Acre 1799 that turned the tide of the campaign.

[7] The key figure in initial foreign reaction to the French Revolution was Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, brother of Queen Marie Antoinette of France.

Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as a non-committal gesture to placate the sentiments of French monarchists and nobles, it was seen in France as a serious threat and was denounced by the revolutionary leaders.

The duke then issued a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto (July 1792), written by the French king's cousin, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, the leader of an émigré corps within the Allied army, which declared the Allies' intent to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.

Britain began military preparations in late 1792 and declared that war was inevitable unless France gave up its conquests, notwithstanding French assurances they would not attack Holland or annex the Low Countries.

By the end of the year, large new armies had turned back foreign invaders, and the Reign of Terror, a fierce policy of repression, had suppressed internal revolts.

At sea, the French Atlantic Fleet succeeded in holding off a British attempt to interdict a vital cereal convoy from the United States on the Glorious First of June, though at the cost of one quarter of its strength.

By 10 July, Spain also decided to make peace, recognizing the revolutionary government and ceding the territory of Santo Domingo, but returning to the pre-war borders in Europe.

Meanwhile, Britain's attempt to reinforce the rebels in the Vendée by landing troops at Quiberon failed, and a conspiracy to overthrow the republican government from within ended when Napoleon Bonaparte's garrison used cannon to fire grapeshot into the attacking mob (which led to the establishment of the Directory).

On the Rhine frontier, General Pichegru, negotiating with the exiled Royalists, betrayed his army and forced the evacuation of Mannheim and the failure of the siege of Mainz by Jourdan.

Satisfied that the Austrians were temporarily inert, Bonaparte harried Michelangelo Colli's Piedmontese at Ceva and San Michele Mondovi before whipping them at the Battle of Mondovì.

André Masséna, commanding the Army of Switzerland, sent a Demi-brigade to secure the Swiss town of Schaffhausen, on the north shore of the Rhine, which guaranteed communications between the two forces.

Division traveling through the Black Forest via Oberkirch, and the Reserve, with most of the artillery and horse, by the valley at Freiburg im Breisgau, where they would find more forage, and then over the mountains past the Titisee to Löffingen and Hüfingen.

[21] The major part of the Imperial army, under command of the Archduke Charles, had wintered immediately east of the Lech, which Jourdan knew, because he had sent agents into Germany with instructions to identify the location and strength of his enemy.

From there, General Jourdan relegated command of the army to his chief of staff, Jean Augustin Ernouf, and traveled to Paris to ask for more and better troops and, ultimately, to request a medical leave.

Following the reorganization and change in command, the Army participated in several skirmishes and actions on the eastern part of the Swiss Plateau, including the Battle of Winterthur.

In late summer, 1799, Charles was ordered to support imperial activities in the middle Rhineland; he withdrew north across the Rhine, and marched toward Mannheim, leaving Zürich and northern Switzerland in the hands of the inexperienced Alexander Korsakov and 25,000 Russian troops.

This left Masséna in control of northern Switzerland, and forced Alexander Suvorov into an arduous three-week march into the Vorarlberg, where his troops arrived, starving and exhausted, in mid-October.

Fighting at nearby Biberach an der Ris ensued on 9 May; action principally consisted of the 25,000-man-strong French "Center", commanded by Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr.

Meanwhile, off Gibraltar, the outnumbered French squadron under Charles-Alexandre Léon Durand Linois repulsed a British attack under Saumarez in the First Battle of Algeciras, destroying .

Eighteenth-century armies – with their rigid protocols, static operational strategy, unenthusiastic soldiers, and aristocratic officer classes – underwent massive remodeling as the French monarchy and nobility gave way to liberal assemblies obsessed with external threats.

The changes also placed a faith on the ordinary soldier that would be completely unacceptable in earlier times; French troops were expected to harass the enemy and remain loyal enough to not desert, a benefit other Ancien Régime armies did not have.

Following the declaration of war in 1792, an imposing array of enemies converging on French borders prompted the government in Paris to adopt radical measures.

By 1797 the French had defeated the First Coalition, occupied the Low Countries, the west bank of the Rhine, and Northern Italy, objectives which had defied the Valois and Bourbon dynasties for centuries.

Clausewitz correctly analyzed the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras to give posterity a thorough and complete theory of war that emphasized struggles between nations occurring everywhere, from the battlefield to the legislative assemblies, and to the very way that people think.