Preparations
France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. But Prussia and other powers had allied themselves with Austria in the expectation of conflict, and thus France faced a coalition and not a single power at the moment when the "emigration", the ferment of the Revolution, and want of material and of funds had thoroughly disorganised her army.
The army behaved badly in the first engagements. Near Lille (29 April) the French soldiers fled at sight of the Austrian outposts and murdered their general Théobald Dillon, whom they accused of betraying them. The commanders-in-chief of the armies became political "suspects"; and before a serious action had been fought, the three armies commanded respectively by Rochambeau, Lafayette and Luckner had been reorganized into two commanded by Dumouriez and Kellermann. Thus the disciplined soldiers of the Allies had apparently good reason to consider the campaign would be easy.
On the Rhine, a combined army of Prussians, Austrians, Hessians and émigrés under the Duke of Brunswick was formed for the invasion of France, flanked by two smaller armies on its right and left, all three being under the supreme command of King Frederick William II of Prussia. In the Southern Netherlands, plans called for the Austrians to besiege Lille, and in the south the Piedmontese also took the field.
The first step was the issue (25 July) of the Brunswick Manifesto, a proclamation which, couched in terms in the last degree offensive to the French nation, generated the spirit that was afterwards to find expression in the "armed nation" of 1793–1794, and sealed the fate of King Louis. It was issued against the advice of Brunswick himself, whose signature appeared on it; the duke, a model sovereign in his own principality, sympathised with the constitutional side of the French Revolution, while as a soldier he had no confidence in the success of the enterprise.
Read more about this topic: Campaigns Of 1792 In The French Revolutionary Wars
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