page_title: Flanders campaign
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Flanders campaign / Background
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Prince Frederick Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1737-1815)
context_page_description: The Flanders Campaign was conducted from 6 November 1792 to 7 June 1795 during the first years of the French Revolutionary Wars. A Coalition of states representing the Ancien Régime in Western Europe – Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Hanover and Hesse-Kassel – mobilised military forces along all the French frontiers, with the intention to invade Revolutionary France and end the French First Republic. The radicalised French revolutionaries, who broke the Catholic Church's power, abolished the monarchy and even executed the deposed king Louis XVI of France, vied to spread the Revolution beyond France's borders, by violent means if necessary.
  A quick French success in the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792 was followed by a major Coalition victory at Neerwinden in March 1793. After this initial stage, the largest of these forces assembled on the Franco-Flemish border. In this theatre a combined army of Anglo-Hanoverian, Dutch, Hessian, Imperial Austrian and, south of the river Sambre, Prussian troops faced the Republican Armée du Nord, and two smaller forces, the Armée des Ardennes and the Armée de la Moselle.
context_section_description: Austria and Prussia had been at war with France since 20 April 1792, although Britain and the Dutch Republic initially maintained a neutral policy towards the revolution in France. Only after the execution of the French king Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 and the declaration of war by the Revolutionary Government did they finally mobilize. British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger pledged to finance the formation of the First Coalition, consisting of Britain, the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Austria and member states of the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia and Spain. Allied armies mobilised along all of the French frontiers, the largest and most important in the Flanders Franco-Belgian border region.
  In the north, the allies' immediate aim was to eject the French from the Dutch Republic (modern The Netherlands) and the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium), then march on Paris to end the chaotic and bloody French version of republican government. Austria and Prussia broadly supported this aim, but both were short of money. Britain agreed to invest a million pounds to finance a large Austrian army in the field plus a smaller Hanoverian corps, and dispatched an expeditionary force that eventually grew to approximately twenty thousand British troops under the command of the king's younger son, the Duke of York. Initially, just fifteen hundred troops landed with York in February 1793.
  Overall Allied command was led by the Austrian commander Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, with a staff of Austrian advisers answering to Emperor Francis II and the Austrian Foreign Minister Johann, Baron Thugut. The Duke of York was obliged to follow objectives set by Pitt's Foreign Minister Henry Dundas. Thus Allied military decisions in the campaign were tempered by political objectives from Vienna and London.
  The defences of the Dutch Republic were in poor condition, its States Army not having fought in a war for 45 years. In the period 1785–1787 opponents of Stadtholder William V, Prince of Orange, the Patriots, had launched the Patriot revolt which only with difficulty had been suppressed after Prussian and British intervention in 1787, after which the leaders of the Patriots fled to France. William's main concern therefore was the preservation of the House of Orange and the authoritarian Stadtholderate regime.
  Opposing the Allies, the armies of the French Republic were in a state of disruption; old soldiers of the Ancien Régime fought side by side with raw volunteers, urged on by revolutionary fervour from the Représentant en mission. Many of the old officer class had emigrated, leaving the cavalry in particular in chaotic condition. Only the artillery arm, less affected by emigration, had survived intact. The problems would become even more acute following the introduction of mass conscription, the Levée en Masse, in 1793. French commanders balanced between maintaining the security of the frontier,  and clamours for victory (which would protect the regime in Paris) on the one hand, and the desperate condition of the army on the other, while they themselves were constantly under suspicion from the representatives. The price of failure or disloyalty was the guillotine.
  The first skirmishes on the northern front took place during the battles of Quiévrain and Marquain (28–30 April 1792), in which ill-prepared French revolutionary armies were easily expelled from the Austrian Netherlands. The revolutionaries were forced on the defensive for months, losing Verdun and barely saving Thionville until the Coalition's unexpected defeat at Valmy (20 September 1792) turned the tables, and opened up a new opportunity for a northward invasion. The fresh momentum emboldened the revolutionaries to definitively abolish the monarchy and proclaim the French First Republic the very next day.
caption: Prince of Saxe-Coburg
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