ABSTRACT
France’s way into the Revolution after 1787 had not gone unnoticed by the European powers, as the the previous chapter will have made clear. Yet preoccupied, until well mid 1791, with the serious crisis which the Russo-Austrian war against the Turks had unleashed other states viewed France’s elimination from the Pentarchy merely in terms of their own current foreign-political concerns. Austria’s enemies regarded France’s international collapse as a most welcome weakening of Joseph II’s system of alliances. Vienna understandably tried to persuade itself that a paralysed France would rid the Monarchy of a pseudo-ally who, since the 1770s, had been acting more along the lines of the pre-1756 enmity, and give Austria the freedom to conclude a new and more valuable alliance. This left the revolutionary process in France with the necessary elbow-room to gain a firm footing. When in 1791 the Trench nonsense’ (as Kaunitz loved to term the Revolution) was finally discovered to be if not a serious threat to the old order in Europe then at least a nuisance and, increasingly, a provocation, it was too late for a small-scale ‘police action’ to snuff it out, as had been done in the Dutch Republic in 1787–88.
