War of the Second Coalition
The Second Coalition nearly destroyed revolutionary France in 1799, and its collapse put Napoleon in power. The alliance of Britain, Austria, Russia, the Ottomans and Naples was assembled while Bonaparte was in Egypt with the best French army and the Mediterranean fleet was at the bottom of Aboukir Bay. The campaign went badly for France from the start. Austrian armies pushed the French out of Germany, and a Russian force under Suvorov — a seventy-year-old field marshal with an extraordinary record — came into Italy and won at Cassano, the Trebbia and Novi, undoing the conquests of 1796 and 1797 within months and restoring the old regimes in the Italian republics. The Directory, already discredited by corruption and by the coups it had used to manage elections, looked finished. Then the coalition came apart. The allies quarrelled over objectives, Suvorov was sent over the Alps into Switzerland to join a force that had already been beaten at Zurich by Masséna, and he extracted his army over the Panixer pass in the snow in an epic retreat that ended Russian participation; the tsar withdrew in disgust. An Anglo-Russian landing in Holland also failed. Bonaparte, reading the newspapers in Egypt, abandoned his army and sailed for France, arriving in October to a country that had recovered militarily and was still in political crisis. The coup of 18 Brumaire followed in November. He then crossed the Alps himself and beat the Austrians at Marengo in June 1800, and the coalition made peace. The year is a reminder that the Napoleonic wars were not a straight line from the Revolution to empire. France came close to losing everything it had won while Bonaparte was absent, and the recovery was made by Masséna, Moreau and Brune before he returned to claim it.
- Year: 1799 CE
- Category: Military
