"The military and political progress of the [French] revolutionary armies is narrated and analysed in this ... study, with special attention paid to the legacy of the old regime, the remarkable resilience displayed by the old regime powers, the reasons for the revolutionaries' success on land -- and the reasons for their failure at sea. The revolutionary wars brought France hegemony in Europe but at a terrible cost. Inside the country, the war brought the end of pluralism, the destruction of the monarchy, civil war and the terror, paving the way for military dictatorship and burdening the country with an enduring legacy of political instability. This interaction between events at the front and at home is discussed in full. Special attention is also paid to the devastation inflicted by the revolutionary armies as they rampaged across the continent, together with the nationalist resistance movements they provoked"--Page 4 of cover.

In this work Alan Forrest brings together some of the recent research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model. Forrest places the armies of the Revolution in a broader social and political context by presenting the effects of war and militarization on French society and government in the Revolutionary period. Revolutionary idealists thought of the French soldier as a willing volunteer sacrificing himself for the principles of the Revolution; Forrest examines the convergence of these ideals with the ordinary, and often dreadful, experience of protracted warfare that the soldier endured.