The signatories were Joseph Bonaparte and Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, the Austrian foreign minister.

On 13 August, Duroc was denied a passport and given a letter from Austrian Foreign Minister Johann Amadeus von Thugut, the architect of the Anglo-Austrian alliance, to Talleyrand.

It is thought that his report on the state of the Austrian forces, based on his stay at General Paul Kray's headquarters, influenced Napoleon's decision to launch a new offensive in September.

[5] Shortly after Duroc had delivered the Austrian response, Saint-Julien was imprisoned and accused of signing a treaty without authorisation.

[5] After the Saint-Julien fiasco, Thugut expressed a desire for Austria and Britain to negotiate together, but Napoleon rejected the idea of a peace conference.

[6] On 7 September, British Foreign Minister, Lord Grenville dispatched a counterproject to Paris, which contained a proposed naval armistice.

[7] As a result, by the Convention of Hohenlinden of 20 September 1800, Austria ceded the fortresses of Ulm, Philippsburg and Ingolstadt to France in exchange for a one-month extension to the armistice.

[9] The emperor originally nominated Ludwig Conrad von Lehrbach as his plenipotentiary for the peace talks in Lunéville.

[10][11] The peace conference was supposed to open in Lunéville on 7 October, but Cobenzl did not arrive for over two weeks, and Lord Grenville never appeared.

[13] Joseph proposed that a secret treaty could be negotiated, with the British being invited to a public conference for appearance's sake only after negotiations had been effectively complete and the treaty publicly signed and all earlier copies burnt, only in March 1801, after the expiration of the Anglo-Austrian alliance.

[14] The British, meanwhile, had by 23 November suspended payment of the second installment of the subsidy that they had agreed to pay Austria on 20 June.

[20] On 27 December, Francis II informed King George III of the United Kingdom of being unable to meet his obligations as an ally.

[22] The terms of Campo Formio were accepted by Austria for Germany, and only the nature and the methods of compensation for imperial princes losing territory had to be decided.

[25] On 1 February, France accepted an Austrian request to allow a representative of Naples and Sicily to take part in the negotiations although that did not happen.

[23] The Treaty of Lunéville declared that "there shall be, henceforth and forever, peace, amity, and good understanding" among the parties.

This was to be accomplished largely thought a programme of secularization of ecclesiastical principalities as laid out at the Congress of Rastatt.

The Recess did far more than simply satisfy the need to compensate the princes, but it fundamentally restructured the Empire by secularising all ecclesiastical states except for the Electorate of Mainz.