ABSTRACT
Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare can be seen in eighteenth-century terms in that there was scant novelty in the technology of war and the weaponry of battle. The Emperor Leopold II responded to threats of French action against neighbouring German states that harboured French royalists by threatening military action, and the National Assembly, fired by revolutionary enthusiasm, declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. The campaign of 1792 demonstrated a number of features of European warfare that were to be characteristic of the period up to 1815. Battles were generally more important than sieges. After Valmy, Brunswick retreated, ending the siege of Thionville and abandoning Longwy and Verdun. Britain entered the war with Revolutionary France in 1793 and sent troops to campaign in the Low Countries, but neither then nor subsequently in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars prior to 1815 did they do so there to any effect.
