The declaration of war against Great Britain was followed, on the part of the National Convention, by an equally formal pronouncement against Spain, on the 7th of March, 1793. Thus was completed the chain of enemies which, except on the mountain frontier of Switzerland, surrounded the French republic by land and sea.

It is necessary to summarize the political and military condition, to take account of the strategic situation at this moment when general hostilities were opening, in order to follow intelligently the historical narrative of their course, and to appreciate critically the action of the nations engaged, both separately and, also,—in the case of the allies,—regarded as a combined whole.

The enemies of France were organized governments, with constitutions of varying strength and efficiency, but all, except that of Great Britain, were part of an order of things that was decaying and ready to vanish away. They belonged to, and throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were hampered by, a past whose traditions of government, of social order, and of military administration, were violently antagonized by the measures into which France had been led by pushing to extremes the philosophical principles of the eighteenth century. But while thus at one in abhorring, as rulers, a movement whose contagion they feared, they were not otherwise in harmony. The two most powerful on the continent, Austria and Prussia, had alternately, in a not remote past, sided with France as her ally; each in turn had sustained open and prolonged hostilities with the other, and they were still jealous rivals for preponderance in Germany.