France Invades Belgium: The Revolutionary Wars Erupt

French revolutionary armies crossed into the Austrian Netherlands on April 28, 1792, eight days after the National Assembly declared war on Austria, beginning two decades of conflict that would redraw the map of Europe. The initial invasion was a fiasco. French troops, poorly trained and poorly led, panicked at their first contact with Austrian forces near Tournai and fled back across the border. General Theobald Dillon was murdered by his own soldiers, who accused him of treason. The Revolutionary Wars had begun with humiliation. The declaration of war on April 20 had been championed by the Girondins, the moderate republican faction in the Assembly, who believed that a foreign war would rally the nation, expose traitors at court, and spread revolutionary principles across Europe. King Louis XVI, still nominally head of state, signed the declaration with private satisfaction, expecting that French defeats would lead to foreign intervention that would restore his absolute authority. Both sides got what they wanted and regretted it. The Girondins were eventually consumed by the radicalism the war unleashed, and Louis was guillotined in January 1793. The early disasters forced a transformation of the French military. The levee en masse of August 1793, which conscripted every able-bodied man into national service, created the largest army Europe had seen since the Roman Empire. Revolutionary generals, many of them promoted from the ranks on merit rather than birth, developed new tactics emphasizing speed, mass, and offensive aggression. By 1794, French forces had conquered the Austrian Netherlands and were advancing into the Rhineland and Italy. Napoleon Bonaparte, a young artillery officer from Corsica, first distinguished himself during the siege of Toulon in December 1793. The wars that began in April 1792 did not end until Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815, a span of twenty-three years during which virtually every European state was drawn into the conflict. The political map of Europe was transformed: the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, dozens of German states were consolidated, the modern nation-states of Italy and Germany were foreshadowed, and the principle that sovereignty belonged to the people rather than to monarchs was permanently established as a competing ideology. A botched invasion of Belgium started all of it.