This war between France and Austria began its earliest operations on the very first days after the accession of Francis II.  The victory of Jemappes, gained by Dumouriez, was the first great event of the campaign.  The Austrians were on all sides driven out.  Dumouriez made his triumphal entry into Brussels on the 13th of November; and immediately after the occupation of this town the whole of Flanders, Brabant, and Hainault, with the other Belgian provinces, were subjected to France.  Soon afterward several pretended deputies from the Belgian people hastened to Paris, and implored the convention to grant them a share of that liberty and equality which was to confer such inestimable blessings on France.  Various decrees were issued in consequence; and after the mockery of a public choice, hurried on in several of the towns by hired Jacobins and well-paid patriots, the incorporation of the Austrian Netherlands with the French republic was formally pronounced.

The next campaign destroyed this whole fabric of revolution.  Dumouriez, beaten at Nerwinde by the prince of Saxe-Coburg, abandoned not only his last year’s conquest, but fled from his own army to pass the remainder of his life on a foreign soil, and leave his reputation a doubtful legacy to history.  Belgium, once again in the possession of Austria, was placed under the government of the archduke Charles, the emperor’s brother, who was destined to a very brief continuance in this precarious authority.

During this and the succeeding year the war was continued with unbroken perseverance and a constant fluctuation in its results.  In the various battles which were fought, and the sieges which took place, the English army was, as usual, in the foremost ranks, under the Duke of York, second son of George III.  The Prince of Orange, at the head of the Dutch troops, proved his inheritance of the valor which seems inseparable from the name of Nassau.  The archduke Charles laid the foundation of his subsequent high reputation.  The emperor Francis himself fought valiantly at the head of his troops.  But all the coalesced courage of these princes and their armies could not effectually stop the progress of the republican arms.  The battle of Fleurus rendered the French completely masters of Belgium; and the representatives of the city of Brussels once more repaired to the national convention of France, to solicit the reincorporation of the two countries.  This was not, however, finally pronounced till the 1st of October, 1795, by which time the violence of an arbitrary government had given the people a sample of what they were to expect.  The Austrian Netherlands and the province of Liege were divided into nine departments, forming an integral part of the French republic; and this new state of things was consolidated by the preliminaries of peace, signed at Leoben in Styria, between the French general Bonaparte and the archduke Charles, and confirmed by the treaty of Campo-Formio on the 17th of October, 1797.