Austria was now, owing to the intrigues of the duke of Brunswick and the credulity of Frederick William, left unprotected. As early as June, old Marshal Lukner invaded Flanders, but, being arrested on suspicion, was replaced by Dumouriez, who continued the war in the Netherlands and defeated the stadtholder, Albert, duke of Saxon- Tescheu (son-in-law to Maria Theresa, in consideration of which he had been endowed with the principality of Teschen and the stadtholdership at Brussels), at Jemappes, and the whole of the Netherlands fell into the hands of the Jacobins, who, on the 14th of November, entered Brussels, where they proclaimed liberty and equality. A few days later (19th of November) the national convention at Paris proclaimed liberty and equality to all nations, promised their aid to all those who asserted their liberty, and threatened to compel those who chose to remain in slavery to accept of liberty. As a preliminary, however, the Netherlands, after being declared free, were ransacked of every description of movable property, of which Pache, a native of Freiburg in Switzerland, at that time the French minister of war, received a large share. The fluctuations of the war, however, speedily recalled the Jacobins. Another French army under Custines, which had marched to the Upper Rhine, gained time to take a firm footing in Mayence.
[Footnote 1: To the archbishopric of Cologne belonged the bishopric of Strasburg, to the archbishopric of Treves, the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, Verdun, Nancy, St. Diez. Würtemberg, Baden, Darmstadt, Nassau, Pfalz-Zweibrücken, Leiningen, Salm-Salm, Hohenlohe-Bartenstein, Löwenstein, Wertheim, the Teutonic order, the knights of St. John, the immediate nobility of the empire, the bishop of Basel, etc., had, moreover, feudal rights within the French territory. The arch- chancellor, elector of Mayence, made the patriotic proposal to the imperial diet that the empire should, now that France had, by the violation of the conditions of peace, infringed the old and shameful treaties by which Germany had been deprived of her provinces, seize the opportunity also on her part to refuse to recognize those treaties, and to regain what she had lost. This sensible proposal, however, found no one capable of carrying it into effect.]