ABSTRACT
The year 1795, when the Convention gave way to the Directory in Paris and when many of the Revolution's foreign enemies abandoned hostilities, offers a convenient point from which to survey the changes which had been taking place in Europe. Most obvious, aside from Poland's obliteration as a sovereign state, had been the extension of French control to include a number of neighbouring areas. Belgium, invaded in 1792, evacuated the following year, retaken by Pichegru and Jourdan in 1794, became, under a decree of 1 October 1795, an integral part (nine new departments) of the Republic. To the north, the former United Provinces, after ceding a strip of border territory to French Belgium, had by this time been organized into the first of many revolutionary satellites, the Batavian Republic. The entire left bank of the Rhine, though its two 'central administrations' in Aixla-Chapelle and Kreuznach were largely staffed by obedient Germans, was formally annexed to France. On the Alpine and Mediterranean fronts, the annexation of mountainous Savoy and the former county of Nice, first voted by the Convention in Paris as early as November 1792, would become 'definitive' by virtue of a decree of 1796. The pattern of revolutionary imperialism revealed itself more and more clearly.
