From intervention to neutrality: A brief outline of Prussian foreign policy, 1792–1804

All eyes were on eastern Europe in the summer of 1789. It was the anticipated war of the Turkish succession which exercised statesmen in Berlin and throughout Europe, not reports of the breakdown of the ancien régime in France. Yet the expected breach between Prussia, Turkey and Poland on the one hand, and Austria and Russia on the other, did not come to pass. Instead, the two German powers patched up their quarrel and went to war against Revolutionary France. But what started out as an opportunist police action against a supposed revolutionary rabble soon turned into a protracted conflict. In the autumn of 1792, the Prussian army under the Duke of Brunswick lumbered into northern France until checked at Valmy. By the end of the year the revolutionary armies had not only cleared the invaders from French soil, but had flooded into western and southern Germany. The following year brought some successes, including the recapture of Mainz: a temporary respite only, as it proved. By late 1793, the French had surged forward again. Mainz changed hands for the third time, Italy was invaded and by 1794–5 the Netherlands were overrun. In the meantime, Britain had joined the coalition, but although it was able and eager to inflict painful defeats on the French at sea, it was unable or unwilling to redress the military balance in continental Europe.

It was in this context of the diminishing returns of a war with France, that the Prussians broke ranks with the coalition.