His own talents and tastes were warlike, and his office enabled him to gratify them in this instance.  For the conciliatory tone which De Lessart had employed toward the Imperial Government, he now substituted a language not only imperious, but menacing.  Prince Kaunitz, who still presided over the administration at Vienna, attached though he was to the system of policy which he had inaugurated under Maria Teresa, could not avoid replying in a similar strain, until at last, on the 20th of April, Louis, sorely against his will, was compelled to announce to the Assembly that all his efforts for the preservation of peace had failed, and to propose an instant declaration of war.

The declaration was voted with enthusiasm; but for some time it brought nothing but disaster.  The campaign was opened in the Netherlands, where the Austrians, taken by surprise, were so weak in numbers that it seemed certain that they would be driven from the country without difficulty or delay.  Marshal Beaulieu, their commander-in-chief, had scarcely twenty thousand men, while the Count de Narbonne had left the French army in so good a condition that Degraves, his successor, was able to send a hundred and thirty thousand men against him; and Dumouriez furnished him with a plan for an invasion of the Netherlands, which, if properly carried out, would have made the French masters of the whole country in a few days.  But the largest division of the army, to which the execution of the most important portions of the intended operations was intrusted, had been placed under the command of La Fayette, who proved equally devoid of resolution and of skill.  Some of his regiments showed a disorderly and insubordinate temper.  One battalion first mutinied and murdered some of its officers, and then disgraced itself by cowardice in the field.  Another displayed an almost equal want of courage; and La Fayette, disheartened and perplexed, though the number of his troops still more than doubled those opposed to him, retreated into France, and remained there in a state of complete inactivity.

But, as has been said before, disaster was almost as favorable to the political views of the Girondins as success, while it added to the dangers of the sovereigns by encouraging the Jacobins, who were elated at the failure of a general so hateful to them as La Fayette.  They now adopted a party emblem, a red cap; and the Duc d’Orleans and his son, the Duc de Chartres,[6] assumed it, and with studied insult paraded in it up and down the gardens of the palace, under the queen’s windows; and if the two factions did not formally coalesce, they both proceeded with greater boldness than ever toward their desired object, not greatly differing as to the means by which it was to be attained.