The political earthquake of the French Revolution affected the whole of Europe. Its impact on Eastern Europe can be measured both physically and in ideological terms.
The wars waged by the French Republic against its monarchical enemies began in 1792 and after several different instalments ended in defeat for each of the powers ranged against France.6 The rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte as first consul in 1799 and emperor in 1804 only confirmed this French ascendancy. Even in Eastern Europe there was territorial upheaval. Russia and Prussia took advantage of the war in Western Europe to seize yet more territory from Poland in the Second Partition of 1793; two years later the Habsburg Monarchy joined them in the Third (and final) Partition. At the same time Prussia backed out of the war against the French. In 1797 the Habsburg Monarchy was forced to come to terms with France; by the Treaty of Campo Formio it lost its possessions in the Low Countries and most of northern Italy, and accepted French gains at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire, but was compensated with the territory of the Venetian Republic. Renewed war led to renewed defeat and in 1801 the Habsburgs conceded an even greater French presence within the Holy Roman Empire. The news that Napoleon was set to crown himself emperor of the French prompted Francis II to proclaim himself the first emperor of Austria in 1804.
Far more fateful than these changes in the international balance of power was the French Revolution's ideological challenge to the rulers and peoples of Eastern Europe. In opposing the principles of political rights and popular sovereignty to the established, monarchical order, the Revolution sparked a war of ideologies as well as states. The monarchies of Eastern Europe could not ignore this challenge. Although the number of people in Eastern Europe who responded positively to revolutionary ideas was never very great, the effect of what little agitation there was on their rulers was to confirm in their minds the dangers, rather than the necessity, of further enlightened reform. The process of modernisation, where it had been undertaken at all, was abandoned for many years to come.
Most explosive of all was the force of the French Republic's example as the first explicitly mobilised nation, whose citizen armies rolled irresistibly across Europe, toppling monarchies and making the old regime everywhere tremble. The Republic's conquests set in motion the gradual amalgamation of territories that, in the mid-nineteenth century, was to culminate in Italian and German 'unification', an attractive template for nationalists throughout Eastern Europe. Just as crucial, the language of nationalism was increasingly adopted after 1790, at first by the leaders of noble rebellion against Habsburg absolutism, or noble resistance to partition in Poland—Lithuania, but thereafter, in increasing numbers, by the second generation of nationalists, the cultural awakeners who were finding their voice by the turn of the century. In both the following it attracted and in the reaction it met with among Eastern Europe's rulers, this incipient nationalism was among the most important long-term effects of the revolutionary period.
World History
