While the Union was being pushed slowly forward, the struggle abroad was passing through strange vicissitudes. At the opening of 1799 the efforts of the new coalition were crowned with success in every quarter. Though Naples had been turned into a Parthenopean Republic at the close of the previous year, and the French supremacy extended over the whole peninsula, the descent of an Austrian army from the Tyrol at the end of March, and a victory of the Russian and Austrian forces at Cassano, compelled the French army to evacuate Southern Italy and Lombardy, while a fresh defeat at Novi flung it back on the Maritime Alps. A campaign conducted with more varying success drove the armies which advanced into Germany back over the Rhine. In Switzerland however the stubborn energy of Massena enabled his soldiers to hold their ground against the combined attack of Russian and Austrian forces; and the attempt of a united force of Russians and English to wrest Holland from its French masters was successfully repulsed. Twelve of the thirty thousand men who formed this army consisted of English troops; and Sir Ralph Abercromby succeeded in landing at their head, in seizing what remained of the Dutch fleet at the Texel, and in holding General Brune at bay when he advanced with superior forces. But Abercromby was superseded in his command by the Duke of York; and in another month the new leader was glad to conclude a convention by which the safe withdrawal of his troops was secured.
In the East however England was more successful. Even had Buonaparte not been baffled in his plans of a descent on Southern India from the basis of Egypt by the battle of the Nile, they would have been frustrated by the energy of Lord Wellesley. Mysore was invaded, its capital stormed, and Tippoo slain, before a French soldier could have been despatched to its aid. But foiled as were his dreams of Indian conquest the daring genius of the French general plunged into wilder projects. He conceived the design of the conquest of Syria and of the creation of an army among its warlike mountaineers. "With a hundred thousand men on the banks of the Euphrates," he said years afterwards, "I might have gone to Constantinople or India, I might have changed the face of the world." Gaza was taken, Jaffa stormed, and ten thousand French soldiers advanced under their young general on Acre. Acre was the key of Syria, and its reduction was the first step in these immense projects. "Once possessed of Acre," wrote Napoleon, "the army would have gone to Damascus and the Euphrates. The Christians of Syria, the Druses, the Armenians, would have joined us. The provinces of the Ottoman Empire were ready for a change, and were only waiting for a man." But Acre was stubbornly held by the Turks, the French battering train was captured at sea by an English captain, Sir Sidney Smith, whose seamen aided in the defence of the place, and after a loss of three thousand men by sword and plague, the besiegers were forced to fall back upon Egypt.