DAVID, [Pierre Drapeyron de].
A History of the Campaigns of General Pichegru, containing the Operations of the Armies of the North, and of the Sambre and the Meuse, from March 1794 to March 1795 … by Citizen David, translated from the French.
London, for G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1796.
8vo, pp. xxiv, 268; with half-title; very light foxing throughout, a few marginal paperflaws (not affecting text), but a good copy; bound in early nineteenth-century British (Scottish?) half-calf with marbled sides; spine perished (exposing the lining of printed waste), boards worn; ink ownership inscription ‘Batten’ to title-page and p. [xvii], another erased inscription to title.
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A History of the Campaigns of General Pichegru, containing the Operations of the Armies of the North, and of the Sambre and the Meuse, from March 1794 to March 1795 … by Citizen David, translated from the French.
First edition in English, printed in the same year as the French original, of this account of General Pichegru’s campaigns during the early French Revolutionary Wars.
Pierre Drapeyron de David’s History recounts the military campaigns of 1794 and ’95 in which he served, documenting successes of the armies of the North, Sambre, and Meuse in capturing territories in Holland and the Austrian Netherlands and detailing the generals’ innovative organisation, strategies, and discipline which have been credited with leading to the French Republic’s victories (Hayworth).
General Jean-Charles Pichegru (1761–1804) remains a compelling and enigmatic figure in the history of the French Revolution, not only for his military career but also for his reversion to Royalism. He would go on to organize an attempted coup in 1797 and, returning from exile in the Americas, led a royalist conspiracy against Napoleon in 1804. Although not explicitly anti-Revolutionary, David is sympathetic to Pichegru and highly critical of the Reign of Terror, describing his own service in the army as a ‘refuge’ from the ‘public delirium’ in France (pp. vi–vii).
Alongside details of General Pichegru’s leadership, the text includes a collection of memoirs of other esteemed generals: Jourdan, Moreau, Macdonald, Souham, Valetau, Devinther, Daendals, Salm, Bonneau, Jatdon, Reunier, and Deverger.
See Hayworth, ‘Evolution or Revolution on the Battlefield? The Army of the Sambre and Meuse in 1794’ in War in History 21, no. 2 (2014), p.189.
