The states of Europe at the commencement of the year 1789 were ranked diplomatically in two important groups, the one dominated by the connection between France, Austria, Spain, and Russia; the other by the alliance between England, Prussia, and Holland. The great transformation which had been effected by the treaty between France and Austria in 1756 in the relationship between the powers of Europe was the crowning diplomatic event of the eighteenth century. The arrangements then entered into and the alliances tested in the Seven Years’ War still subsisted in 1789. But the spirit which lay at the root of the Austro-French alliance was sensibly modified. The Treaty of 1756 had never been really popular in either country. In France, Marie Antoinette, whose marriage with Louis XVI. had set the seal on the Austrian alliance, was detested as the living symbol of the hated treaty, as _l’Autrichienne_, the Austrian woman, and the most accredited political thinkers and writers were always dwelling on the traditional policy of France, and on the system of Henri IV., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., which held the House of Hapsburg to be the hereditary and the inevitable enemy of the House of Bourbon and of the French nation. The dislike of the alliance was felt with equal intensity in Austria by the wealthy and the educated classes. The Austrian generals resented the inefficacy of the French intervention during the Seven Years’ War, and the Austrian people attributed its reverses in that war to it with as much acrimony as if France had acted as an enemy instead of as an ally. The same sentiment actuated even the Imperial House. ‘Our natural enemies, travestied as allies, who do more harm than if they were open enemies;’[1] such is the language in which Leopold of Tuscany, brother of Marie Antoinette, characterised the French in a letter written in December 1784 to his brother, the Emperor Joseph II. The Emperor Joseph was himself of the same opinion. He preferred his Russian ally, the Empress Catherine, to his brother-in-law, Louis XVI., King of France, and the tendency of his foreign policy was to strengthen his friendship with Russia, even at the expense of sacrificing his alliance with France. Russia, whose expansion under the great Empress had been enormous since the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, cared but little for either of the allies, and pursued independently its course of steady development. Catherine had, indeed, during most of the later years of Frederick the Great, remained in alliance with Prussia, and to some extent had been on friendly terms with England. But her natural tendency was to distrust England. In 1780 she had placed herself at the head of the ‘Armed Neutrality,’ which opposed the naval pretensions of England, and in 1788 she had formally proposed a close quadruple alliance between Russia, Austria, France, and Spain. [Sidenote: Prussia, England, and Holland.]