But under the cloak of legitimacy the monarchical Powers harboured their own selfish designs.  This Nessus’ cloak of the First Coalition soon galled the limbs of the allies and rendered them incapable of sustained and vigorous action.  Yet they gained signal successes over the raw conscripts of France.  In July, 1799, the Austro-Russian army captured Mantua and Alessandria; and in the following month Suvoroff gained the decisive victory of Novi and drove the remains of the French forces towards Genoa.  The next months were far more favourable to the tricolour flag, for, owing to Austro-Russian jealousies, Massena was able to gain an important victory at Zurich over a Russian army.  In the north the republicans were also in the end successful.  Ten days after Bonaparte’s arrival at Frejus, they compelled an Anglo-Russian force campaigning in Holland to the capitulation of Alkmaar, whereby the Duke of York agreed to withdraw all his troops from that coast.  Disgusted by the conduct of his allies, the Czar Paul withdrew his troops from any active share in the operations by land, thenceforth concentrating his efforts on the acquisition of Corsica, Malta, and posts of vantage in the Adriatic.  These designs, which were well known to the British Government, served to hamper our naval strength in those seas, and to fetter the action of the Austrian arms in Northern Italy.[123]

Yet, though the schisms of the allies finally yielded a victory to the French in the campaigns of 1799, the position of the Republic was precarious.  The danger was rather internal than external.  It arose from embarrassed finances, from the civil war that burst out with new violence in the north-west, and, above all, from a sense of the supreme difficulty of attaining political stability and of reconciling liberty with order.  The struggle between the executive and legislative powers which had been rudely settled by the coup d’etat of Fructidor, had been postponed, not solved.  Public opinion was speedily ruffled by the Jacobinical violence which ensued.  The stifling of liberty of the press and the curtailment of the right of public meeting served only to instill new energy into the party of resistance in the elective Councils, and to undermine a republican government that relied on Venetian methods of rule.  Reviewing the events of those days, Madame de Stael finely remarked that only the free consent of the people could breathe life into political institutions; and that the monstrous system of guaranteeing freedom by despotic means served only to manufacture governments that had to be wound up at intervals lest they should stop dead.[124] Such a sarcasm, coming from the gifted lady who had aided and abetted the stroke of Fructidor, shows how far that event had falsified the hopes of the sincerest friends of the Revolution.  Events were therefore now favourable to a return from the methods of Rousseau to those of Richelieu; and the genius who was skilfully to adapt republicanism to autocracy was now at hand.  Though Bonaparte desired at once to attack the Austrians in Northern Italy, yet a sure instinct impelled him to remain at Paris, for, as he said to Marmont:  “When the house is crumbling, is it the time to busy oneself with the garden?  A change here is indispensable.”