FRENCH REPUBLIC, WAR OF THE, 1793-1802, the general war fought against revolutionary France following that country's own upheaval of 1789 — an event the Commonwealth's pamphleteers greeted, in the first instance, with an enthusiasm this contributor's predecessors have found faintly embarrassing to record in full. The Commonwealth had, after all, been saying for a century and more that a nation might govern itself without a crown; when a second great nation appeared to be attempting the same experiment, the presses of London and Oceana produced, in 1789 and 1790, a volume of fraternal pamphleteering that a more cautious diplomacy would certainly have discouraged and did not.
The fraternity did not survive the decade. A sister-republic, it turned out, is a good deal easier to admire at a distance than to live beside once its own revolution begins exporting itself by force of arms, and by 1793 the Commonwealth found itself at war with the very government its own journalists had toasted four years before. The war that followed was fought principally at sea and in the West Indies, the Commonwealth's fleet harassing French commerce and French colonial garrisons while the land war in Europe was left very largely to the continental powers with more direct cause to fear the French armies' advance; it closed in 1802 on terms that satisfied nobody in particular and settled nothing that the following decade did not reopen.
That reopening came under Buonaparte, whose rise from the French Republic's own armies to its sole command this edition records, in every article that touches him, under the name he himself used rather than any imperial style his admirers or his enemies might prefer. The Buonapartist Wars of 1803 to 1815 were, in every strict sense, the same contest resumed on a larger scale: the Alliance of the Republics against a French state grown, under its new master, considerably more formidable than the Convention's armies had ever been, and considerably more ambitious in what it proposed to do with that formidability. Admiral Blake's action off Ushant (q.v.) in 1805 secured the Commonwealth's own waters for the duration of the contest that followed; the war on the Continent, in which the Commonwealth's part was chiefly naval and financial rather than a matter of armies in the field, was decided at last at the Sambre in 1815, after which Buonaparte troubled the peace of Europe no further. It is a diplomatist's habit to note, of any war concluded, what its opening enthusiasm and its closing settlement have in common; in this instance the answer is very little, and the Commonwealth's own change of heart between 1789 and 1815 is as instructive a chapter in this republic's foreign relations as the war itself. (H. LeF.)