"First step on the road to Waterloo" Topic

" Marisa Linton explains how Jacques-Pierre Brissot helped to initiate the French revolutionary wars, as he and Robespierre debated whether conflict with Austria should be a ‘crusade for universal liberty'.
There will be many occasions in 2015 to recall the conflict that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo, but it is equally worth remembering how that conflict originated. Waterloo was the final step in a war that dragged on almost continually for more than 23 years and whose origins lay in the turbulent politics of the French Revolution. One man played a key role in unleashing that war: the revolutionary leader, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Few people now know much about Brissot; there has been no full-length biography of him since that by the US historian, Eloise Ellery, a century ago. When Brissot is remembered it is either as a struggling pre-revolutionary political thinker and writer, or as the leader of the ‘moderate' Girondin faction that perished under the Terror in October 1793. Brissot's apologists state that his nemesis was Maximilien Robespierre. Like many historical narratives, accounts of Brissot as the ‘moderate' victim of a ‘bloodthirsty' Robespierre have been simplified: the reality was more complex. Between the winter of 1791 and spring 1792 these two men were locked in a war of words over whether France should go to war with its neighbours. The parts that both men played in this debate were very different from the choices they made once the war had begun…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

It would be well to recall that Robespierre, in addition to a surprising number of other Jacobins, said publicly that because the Revolution was unfinished at home, with a number of significant matters still to be resolved internally, it would be the height of folly to even consider declarations of war against anyone, let alone one's neighbors. But Brissot was a Jacobin at first who later switched his loyalties and his political thought to the Girondins, and that faction was determined to have war, despite the fact that the officer class--mostly all aristos in any event--were gone, and there was no standing army to speak of.

It would take emergency measures by the National Convention on August 1793 to remedy the Girondins' mistakes, most notably by instituting the levee en masse to save the country from that April 20, 1792 declaration of war. While it is true the volunteers and the remnants of the old army, led by republican officers for the most part won at Valmy, it was pretty much downhill from there.

I'm not sure the idea that Brissot was the victim of anything but his outmoded and definitely silly ideas about declaring war, along with other Girondins who apparently failed to see in which direction the Revolution had been moving since the summer of 1793.

Perhaps Dr. Linton will give Brissot a go; she's quite prolific, at least in supplying articles to History Today, but she also has more scholarly books to her credit, and a couple of them considerably above the norm.

Very interesting thread my friend! (smile)
Thanks.

Amicalement
Armand

The sea-green incorruptible was right and the Brissot was wrong. The Girondins were a treat to the Revolution.