War and Diplomacy (1792–95)

‘War and Diplomacy’ . . . The first term has had a lot more attention from historians than the second as if the period that begins with the declaration of war on 20 April 1792 and ending with the Peace of Basel in 1795 was fully determined by the implacable nature of the struggle between revolutionary France and monarchist Europe. This bias—making revolutionary diplomacy the ghost of historiography—is itself determined by the idea that ‘the diplomatic game of the revolutionary period is marked as something artificial and ephemeral’ in the words of Jacques Godechot in 1956. If one believes historiography, it is war and not diplomacy which is the dominant reality of the 1792–95 period. Is there even a ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ or a ‘Republican’ one?