The War of the Pyrenees was the Pyrenees front of the First Coalition's war against the First French Republic. Also known as Great War, War of Roussillon, or War of the Convention, it pitted Revolutionary France against the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal from March 1793 to July 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars.
The war was fought in the eastern Pyrenees, the western Pyrenees, at the French port of Toulon, and at sea. In 1793, a Spanish army invaded Rousillon in the eastern Pyrenees and maintained itself on French soil through April 1794. The French army drove the Spanish back into Catalonia and inflicted a serious defeat on it in November 1794. After February 1795, the war in the eastern Pyrenees became a stalemate. In the western Pyrenees, the French began to win in 1794. By 1795, the French army controlled a portion of northeast Spain.
The war was brutal in at least two ways. First, the Committee of Public Safety decreed that all French royalist prisoners be executed. Second, French generals who lost battles or otherwise displeased the all-powerful representatives-on-mission were sent to prison or the guillotine with alarming frequency. Army of the Eastern Pyrenees commanders and generals were especially unlucky in this regard.
Famous quotes containing the words war of and/or war:
“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one’s own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)